In recent weeks, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his spokespeople have issued daily pronouncements about the "narrowing gap" between Israel's position and the US administration's initiative calling for an Israeli redeployment of 13.1 per cent in the West Bank. Far from heralding an imminent agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, these pronouncements are intended as a cover for the inevitable formal collapse of the Oslo peace process that began with such high expectations nearly five years ago.
While the US administration wasted two years deluding itself about Prime Minister Netanyahu's "real intentions", relying on his alleged pragmatism and commitment to the implementation of Israel's undertakings under the Oslo Accords, Netanyahu waged a relentless and effective war against those accords with the goal of killing the peace process. He has been brilliantly successful in wearing everyone down -- Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians and, finally, the Americans as well -- until they are all weary and sick of the process. It is "a success" for which the US, but above all Israelis themselves, will unfortunately pay dearly.
Prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement will not be improved in the slightest even if Netanyahu were to agree at the last moment to accept the American proposal. He is a past master of preventing the implementation of agreements that hold any promise of accommodation with Palestinian demands while shifting the blame onto the Palestinians themselves. He has already fully laid the ground for such obstruction by announcing that almost everything is in place for Israel to accept the American idea -- all that is lacking is Palestinian reciprocity.
It is a tactic Netanyahu has resorted to repeatedly these past two years to camouflage his own government's violations of reciprocity, which include Israel's failure to allow the opening of an airport and seaport in Gaza and safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, the failure to release Palestinian prisoners as promised, and -- above all -- unilateral actions by Israel in Jerusalem and the West Bank, such as housing projects, the enlargement of settlements and the construction of major roadways, to pre-empt issues that were to have been discussed at the final status negotiations.
Even if the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu were to redeploy the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in accordance with the American proposal, the prospect for progress on the final status issues (borders, Jerusalem, refugees and water) is nil. The deadline of May 1999, which under Oslo marks the end of the negotiations, could not possibly now be met, even if there were an abundance of good will between the parties. (If such good will existed, however, the deadline for reaching an agreement could have been extended.) In the present circumstances, which are marked by profound mistrust and hostility and a continuing determination by this Israeli government to treat Palestinians not as partners in a peace process but as closet terrorists, May 1999 could well trigger a sudden downward spiral that will return the region to the conflict and violence that characterised it for nearly half a century.
The possibility, if not the likelihood, of such disastrous consequences is attested to by Israel's own army intelligence. While last summer the IDF intelligence service concluded that the likelihood of war in 1998 was low and that they did not expect serious clashes with the Syrians or the Palestinians, they now say that the probability of war in 1999 has risen dramatically. They conclude that if the political impasse continues, there could be a large scale flare up with the Palestinians and also with the Syrians in 1999. And in those circumstances, there is no reason to believe that Israel's peace agreement with Egypt and with Jordan will hold.
Earlier this year, Ha'aretz, one of Israel's leading dailies, warned that Israel's situation today is chillingly similar to the period preceding the 1973 War, "a disaster brought on by a diplomatic freeze, boastful self-confidence, contempt for the Arab adversary and a nation which followed its leaders into destructive apathy. It takes no great imagination to see how today's march of folly is returning Israel to the bloodshed of previous national blindness."
More determined US diplomacy could have made a difference; unfortunately, it is no longer on the cards. The damage that a return to violence will do to major US interests in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region will make a mockery of the foolish assertion of the administration that "the US cannot want peace more than the parties themselves do."
Given the imminent proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction, the damage that could be done to Israel following a collapse of the peace process may be incalculable. And if what lies ahead is the scenario described by the IDF's intelligence, Israelis will have no one to blame but themselves. The Arab countries are always being lectured by Israelis on the fact that, unlike its neighbours, Israel is a democracy. And so it is. What distinguishes a democracy is that its citizens have the possibility of repudiating leaders whose policies they reject, especially in parliamentary systems such as the Israeli one, whose Knesset can oust the prime minister.
They have not done so, and will therefore have few claims on others in dealing with their failure's consequences. You cannot repudiate US diplomatic efforts in the name of Israeli democracy, and then demand that the US intervene in the conflict triggered by that repudiation in order to save the Middle East's "only democracy".
*Henry Siegman is a senior fellow at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. These views are his own.
In recent weeks, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his spokespeople have issued daily pronouncements about the "narrowing gap" between Israel's position and the US administration's initiative calling for an Israeli redeployment of 13.1 per cent in the West Bank. Far from heralding an imminent agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, these pronouncements are intended as a cover for the inevitable formal collapse of the Oslo peace process that began with such high expectations nearly five years ago.