Was there anything we could have done?

After America failed to prevent the Middle East's latest holy war, it's time to rethink the peace process.

On Mon., Sept. 13, 1993, all was well in the world of Clintonian foreign policy. On the White House lawn, a jolly, jingoistic U.S. President soaked up the sun and blinked into cameras while presiding over a handshake between two sworn enemies, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Thanks to some genius, moral rectitude, and perhaps a little luck, another two warring parties successfully saw the light of America's beam. Sigh.

Now that Israelis and Palestinians have resumed trading bullets in the land of milk and honey, one would think that that the thin veil of the "peace process" has been shrugged off for good—or at least in its previous incarnation, with a smiling Clinton, LAW '73, acting as master of ceremonies. Despite telling failures since talks began in Munich in 1991, Clinton gave U.S.-brokered peace another chance, dragging Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Arafat to the table once more. Late night negotiations produced a cease-fire the next day, but does anyone truly expect it to last? Even as Clinton paraded the antagonists in for another photo- op, the violence continued.

Underneath the disbelief Israelis and Palestinians feel at the recent violence, both must recognize hints of foreboding, starting with the nature of the peace process itself. Over the past eight years, Clinton has lavished more attention on Arafat than on any other world leader. Hoping to secure peace in the Middle East as his crowning foreign policy legacy, Clinton treated Arafat to long extra-help sessions on the nature of good government and lasting democracy. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright invited Arafat to her Georgetown home for earnest chats and tea. Clearly, Palestinians and Israelis could learn—America just needed to put in a little more effort.

Throughout both the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the Middle East peace talks, Clinton has demonstrated a disquieting tendency to concern himself not with his actions, but with how history will judge them. Clinton's most recent attempt to broker peace in Egypt continues on an all-too-familiar path, not intending to solve the region's basic problems but hoping to play Superman before leaving office. Barak and Arafat have made their mutual distrust and reluctance to replay a U.S.-orchestrated peace process quite clear. Clinton's condescending approach to the region's problems glosses over a history of conflict that won't get better after American ideals are imposed.

Moreover, Arafat himself has reemerged consistently as a barrier to peace, and Clinton still falls short of understanding the Palestinian leader's nuanced personality and complicated goals. Peace-makers seemed to forget that, before Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, he waged rutheless guerilla war against Israel for nearly 30 years. He refused to acknowledge Israel's existence—in fact, the Palestine Liberation Organization constitution still calls for Israel's destruction.

Since affecting a partial about-face and gaining control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1994, Arafat has struggled with the transition from guerilla to governor, and his recent actions show his frustration. Although Barak brought greater compromises to the July Camp David summit than Israel ever offered, Arafat refused to meet him in the middle. Most recently, Arafat stormed out of peace talks, causing an embarrassed Albright to run after him. Clinton pushed Arafat prematurely to secure an agreement on his presidential watch, wanting to believe that Arafat had changed his tune. As we know now, this was all but meaningless.

The recent events in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank show how quickly Clinton's superficial peace loses out to a raw ethnic tension. Since Israeli rightist Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Islamic and Jewish holy site, Al-Haram al-Sharif mosque and Temple Mount, respectively, Arabs and Jews have reverted to the religious tensions that the peace process seemed to mysteriously replace with diplomatic niceties. All of a sudden, the political subtleties that shaded right and left on both sides have disappeared, returning to the familiar Jew versus Muslim.

In Israel, Barak and the doves are contemplating a merger with hawkish Sharon in a national emergency government. Likewise, in the other camp, the Arab community has broken precedent by uniting behind Arafat—from Rabat in Morocco to the Hezbollah guerillas in Lebanon, the Muslim world is backing pan-Arabism for the first time since Arafat's divisive decision to support Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. This speedy regression illustrates the faulty logic that informed the peace-making process from the start, the idea that Israelis and Palestinians could come to view each other person to person, nation to nation instead of Jew to Muslim—that everyone, everywhere shares America's basic political secularism.

How long will it take for America to learn that world power status and an impressive Gross Domestic Product don't—or shouldn't—mean anything anymore? History is long and unforgiving in the Middle East, but through the bloodshed it teaches a powerful lesson: Israelis and Palestinians need to work their problems out on their own terms, even if that means the situation worsens before it improves. I hate to say "I told you so," but history speaks for itself.

Avery Johnson is a senior in Jonathan Edwards.

By Kate Mason

It is a miracle that Bill Clinton, LAW '73, ever managed to get Palestinian and Israeli leaders into the same room. It is further a miracle that he managed to get any of them to utter the word "peace." For the Israelis, "peace" meant getting partially kicked out of a place they had finally won. For the Palestinians, "peace" meant another indefinite period of second-class status. For both, it meant parting with ideals that they held, quite literally, as sacred. For the conflict in the Middle East is more than just a conflict over land, or even over ethnicity—it is a conflict over God. And when it comes to God, a war for independence or a war for preservation becomes a holy war. Throw in hundreds of years of Jewish persecution and Palestinian subordination, plus thousands of angry Jews and Muslims from around the world who hold up Israel as their own spiritual homeland, and what you have is a great big bloody mess that God Himself probably couldn't clean up.

The fundamental problem with this great big mess is that both sides have a very emotional and very legitimate claim to the status of Horribly Mistreated Victim. The Jews, on the one hand, are tired of being run out of town: expelled from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal soon after, kicked out of Russian villages by violent pogroms and eliminated from most of Europe by Hitler. History has consistently taught the Jewish people one thing: wherever they go, they are not wanted. And, like anyone who is finally victorious after having been pushed down, beat up, and kicked out his entire life, the Jewish people understandably have few qualms about pushing down, beating up, and kicking out anyone who tries to interfere with that victory. Finally, in the form of Israel, the Jewish people have their own place, under their own control. Now the Palestinians are trying to take that away. They're trying to push them down, beat them up, and run them out of town—and damned if the Jews are going to sit by and let that happen all over again.

The Palestinians, meanwhile, are tired of living as a colonized people. Ruled by the Ottoman Empire since 1516, the Palestinians had been contemplating a run for independence in the late 1800s when Jewish Zionists began moving in, looking to establish a homeland centered around the Jewish holy site of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, this site happened not only to be right in the Palestinians' backyard, but was also an Islamic holy site. From the Palestinian point of view, the Israelis were vicious conquerors. With their strong military presence and harsh restrictions, they seemed to be enforcing a system of apartheid. This time the Palestinians had been taken over, kicked out, and then treated as second-class citizens in their own home—and damned if they were going to sit by and let that happen.

Any successful attempt to forge a sort of peace would thus require both sides to let that happen again after all—or at least sort of happen. But that "sort of" concession would require the ability to see in shades of gray, and the problem with a holy war is that there are no shades of gray—there is only God's way and the wrong way. And given that both sides had been forced to submit to what they see as the wrong way for most of their existence, God's way certainly seems like a cause worth fighting for. Left to their own devices, then, the Palestinians and Israelis would likely stone, shoot, beat, and maim each other to death until someone's God won. And that could take a very long time. The Israelis may have a superior military, but the Palestinians have three continents worth of Islamic sympathizers waiting in the wings.

This is where America comes in. America's job is to see those shades of gray to which those more deeply involved are blind. Clinton managed to do it, at least briefly, during seven years of peace efforts, when he convinced each side to consider a "sort of" version. But the minute one rightist politician decided that "sort of" wasn't good enough, the holy war was back with a vengeance. What isn't helping this situation is the fact that over the last few weeks, the U.S.'s vision has become increasingly myopic. In short, the U.S. is rapidly losing its credibility as an objective third party. In the past, Clinton managed to convince Arafat that the Palestinians, as well as the Israelis, were his friends. But now America's insistence on villifying Arafat and defending Barak has ignited wild Arab anti-American sentiment and mistrust. Both Israelis and Palestinians understandably see this newest conflict as nothing less than another episode in the sordid history starring themselves as the Horribly Mistreated Victims, and the Palestinians do not appreciate being blamed for being the Victims. It will thus be up to the next U.S. President to find a way to appreciate both views of history. If he doesn't, it is difficult to see how Arafat will ever again convince his people to trust shades of gray coming from a country that sees their culpability as so black and white.

Kate Mason, is a Herald columnist.

Graphic by Hyura Choi.

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