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Foreign Affairs is making available a selection of new and previously published articles on the interests, goals, and political dynamics on all sides, as well as the history of the two parties' recent interactions and American involvement in the region. The Palestinian H-Bomb: Terror's Winning Strategy Gal Luft (July/August 2002) Suicide bombing, once the tool of religious fanatics, has won widespread acceptance among Palestinians as a legitimate weapon. Only deploying Palestinian hopes of independence can reverse this destructive course. "Israel finds itself, therefore, at a crucial turning point in its history, but one from which no path seems particularly attractive. It must find some way of defending itself against an enemy so eager to inflict pain that it is willing to bring suffering and death on itself in the process. Retaliation is unlikely to work, but retreat is likely only to bring more of the same. If there is any way out of this dilemma, it may lie in convincing the Palestinian public that its constructive goals can be achieved only by relinquishing its destructive strategy. Israel should therefore embark on a policy that rewards the Palestinians for genuinely fighting terrorism and avoid any policy that feeds the perception that terrorism works." Read Preview The Last Negotiation Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (May/June 2002) Conventional wisdom says the best approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to strive for a ceasefire followed by a return to painstaking step-by-step negotiations. In fact, the incremental approach is doomed to failure, and peace will only come through outside intervention based on a clear plan to end the conflict once and for all. "Violence is a byproduct of the political relationship between Israelis and Palestinians and cannot be divorced from it … It would be a historical anomaly for a conflict between two fundamentally unequal antagonists to be resolved without violence. In that sense, violence is latent in the interim approach as much as it contradicts it. Unless the two parties reached an accord, in other words, Oslo all but ensured that their perceptions and expectations would clash, and from that point on the cycle was bound to become ever more vicious. Israel believes it cannot negotiate under fire, and the Palestinians fear that, absent fire, the Israelis will have no incentive to negotiate. The violence so inconsistent with the spirit of Oslo thus became its natural successor." Read Preview The Last of the Patriarchs Aluf Benn (May/June 2002) What does Ariel Sharon want? Not to make peace or push the Palestinians out of the territories, but rather to freeze the status quo and put off final-status negotiations for years. "One key to understanding Sharon's approach as prime minister lies in his history. Unlike his predecessors, Sharon came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the shadow of David Ben Gurion-Israel's founder and first prime minister … In fact, his current policy of hitting PA installations to retaliate for terror attacks on Israelis developed in the 1950s, when Ben Gurion would send him to attack police stations in the West Bank … Retaliation is not the only strategy Sharon has borrowed from his old boss. His domestic policies sound like old Zionist propaganda pledges. He hopes to import a million Jewish immigrants in the next decade, from Argentina and elsewhere, and to use them to settle the Negev Desert. Such goals may be noble, but the Israeli public today cares more about its own prosperity than about the Zionist dream, and it has demanded immediate solutions for pressing economic and social problems--solutions that Sharon has not been able to offer." Read Preview Palestinians Divided Khalil Shikaki (January/February 2002) Yasir Arafat will be able to fend off internal leadership challenges only if he can deliver a substantial settlement with the Israelis or give his own people better and more open government. Neither is likely, and what follows Arafat may be even worse. "The intifada that began in late September 2000 has been a response by a "young guard" in the Palestinian nationalist movement not only to Sharon's visit and the stalled peace process, but also to the failure of the "old guard" in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to deliver Palestinian independence and good governance. The young guard has turned to violence to get Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip unilaterally (as it withdrew from South Lebanon in May 2000) and simultaneously to weaken the Palestinian old guard and eventually displace it. More than a year into the intifada, the young guard's commitment to both goals is unshakable, and with some reason." Read Preview Back to the Bazaar Martin Indyk (January/February 2002) After its victory in Afghanistan, the United States has an opportunity to strike a new bargain with its major Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It should indeed press for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also challenge authoritarianism, anti-Americanism, and the lack of Arab support for Middle East peace. "If the United States is to "dry up the swamp" that generated the al Qaeda terrorist phenomenon, it is going to have to confront the dilemma of political change in the Arab world … But insisting on political reform in Cairo and Riyadh could help bin Laden achieve his ultimate objective: toppling these regimes even after he has gone. That outcome would be the ultimate irony. Whatever the shortcomings of these regimes, fundamentalist alternatives are bound to be worse for the Egyptian and Saudi people, as they were for Iran and Afghanistan. And revolution in Saudi Arabia and Egypt could have a devastating impact on vital U.S. interests in the Middle East. Yet if they do not change their ways, over time these regimes could fall anyway, and in the meantime their failings may continue to generate unacceptable threats to U.S. national security." Read Preview The Sentry's Solitude Fouad Ajami (November/December 2001) Arafat wants the "Arab street" to rise up in rebellion and force the United States to accept his claims. Better the fire of an insurrection, he reasons, than the risks of reconciling his people to a peace he has not prepared them for. "For all the fury of this second intifada, a supreme irony hangs over Palestinian history. In the early 1990s, the Palestinians had nothing to lose. Pariahs in the Arab councils of power, they made their best historical decision-the peace of Oslo-only when they broke with the maximalism of their political tradition. It was then that they crossed from Arab politics into internal Israeli politics and, courtesy of Israel, into the orbit of Pax Americana. Their recent return into inter-Arab politics was the resumption of an old, failed history." Read Preview Middle East Peace Through Partition David Makovsky (March/April 2001) Why did the peace process begun at Oslo fall apart? Because of what the Palestinians and Israelis failed to do, because of what the Palestinian Authority became, and because there was no clear strategy for an endgame. Now disengagement is the only route to stability. "Above all, the Bush team must understand that it cannot walk away from this volcanic situation. The stakes for Washington are high, and benign neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will occur at America's peril. More than at any other time in the last three decades, tensions in the region now have the potential to escalate. The situation could quickly change from a nationalist conflict to an absolutist religious struggle or from an isolated fight to a regional conflagration… Any American Middle East strategy should therefore include other countries in the region. Apart from Israel, the United States must also consult with its Arab allies, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Although almost no Arab leader wants a war with Israel, one could still break out." Read Preview Israel After Heroism Eliot A. Cohen (November/December 1998) On its fiftieth birthday, Israel looked on the verge of a new and less epic phase of its history. With survival no longer in question, the country could turn to the less stressful, if less edifying, challenges of identity and normal life. That was then. "For a century, neatly divided by Israel's birth in 1948, Zionists undertook and believed in two epic struggles: creating a defensible state for a stateless people and gathering in communities of Jews sundered by distance but united by faith and destiny. At 50-middle age for a human being, and in this case, a state too-Israelis see these epic tasks largely accomplished and the epic dreams correspondingly faded. The country now oscillates between self-assertion and self-criticism. The way in which Israel completed the tasks set by Zionism in the first half of the century has bred new and perplexing challenges for the future-challenges not amenable to the energetic ingenuity that has brought Israelis so much success thus far." Read Preview |
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