By Gershom Gorenberg
Gershom Gorenberg, an associate editor of the Jerusalem Report, is the author of "The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount."
July 9, 2003
'We won," declared Israel's top general last week. Or so a headline in the mass-circulation daily Yediot Ahronot quoted him as saying. Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon has a reputation for clumsy political pontificating, and his latest remark about Palestinian agreement to a cease-fire seemed like the usual hubris.
Until, that is, one read the full text of his interview in the paper. "I imagine that the Palestinian story will describe this period as heroic, just as the Egyptians celebrate the Yom Kippur War," Ya'alon said. "So in their story they won, and in our story we won. Right now we need ... to declare we won and move on." That's actually an admission that any triumph is empty. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 was claimed as a victory by both Israel and Egypt, but both sides knew they'd lost and couldn't afford another confrontation. Along with six years of U.S. diplomatic effort, the result was a peace treaty.
Today, too, Mideast diplomacy can be described as a game of loser's poker. Israel, the Palestinians and, for that matter, the United States are claiming military triumphs as they return to negotiations. Yet diplomacy stands a chance only if the leaders on all three sides remember that they're bluffing and that their strategies for political gains through war have failed.
It's been nearly three years since the peace negotiations collapsed and Palestinians returned to armed struggle. Today most of their cities - freed of Israeli troops during the Oslo process - are reoccupied. More than 2,000 Palestinians have died, and the living are hungry. Key Palestinian demands enshrined in the internationally backed "road map" to peace come down to a return to the September 2000 status-quo ante: A pullback of the Israeli army to the lines it held then; dismantling of settlements established since. A new generation of Palestinians has acquired its own myth of standing up to occupation - but has accomplished nothing.
Yet Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's effort to stop Palestinian terror through military means has also failed. Dozens of leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Brigades have been assassinated - and quickly replaced. After all of Israel's offensives, a suicide bomber blew up in downtown Jerusalem last month, adding 17 people to the hundreds of Israeli victims of this conflict. And Israel's army is weaker, because the country's economic collapse has forced cuts in defense spending. Sharon insisted he wouldn't begin diplomacy while terror continued. Yet to gain a cease-fire, he had to agree to the road map, with its list of Israeli concessions.
George W. Bush had his own hopes of ending the Mideast terror through war. The United States easily conquered Iraq - and a new Arab myth of armed resistance to Western imperialists is being created before our eyes in Baghdad and Fallujah. To stabilize a strategic region, and to give himself a foreign policy accomplishment, Bush has turned to intensive Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy - the Clinton strategy he so disdained.
But loser's poker is a game no one plays with gusto. Ariel Sharon has made weak gestures at dismantling the tiny settlement "outposts" that cover the West Bank, and agreed to release less than 10 percent of Palestinian prisoners. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas roped terror groups into a cease-fire - but has nothing yet to collect their guns, missiles and explosives. And so far, tight U.S. supervision is a weak promise, far short of a credible threat. No one seems ready to take the politically risky steps needed to build a cease-fire into peace.
One key reason: The leaders are surrounded by ideologues who haven't absorbed failure. Sharon, hardly excited about the road map himself, can barely muster a majority in his own cabinet for the minimal effort he's making. Abbas acknowledges the intifada has been disastrous, but he's a lonely voice in the Palestinian leadership.
In Washington, hawks still reign. The common Israelis who have to ride buses to work, daily braving the bombers, don't sit at the conference tables, nor do the common Palestinians who have lost their livelihoods and who must brave humiliation at roadblocks to reach the next town. If they did, many would tell the leader what they tiredly say to each other: For heaven's sake, compromise, so we can go back to living.
So it's all too easy for the leaders to grab the first excuse to drop the road map. An incident like Monday night's suicide bombing that killed an Israeli woman in an Israeli village could set off spiraling Israeli and Palestinian reprisals - and provoke Washington to say, "See, we tried," and give up. This kind of crisis will repeat. Sharon, Bush, Abbas and those around them will get through it and continue with peace efforts only if they constantly keep in mind that war got them nowhere.
Human beings are strange creatures. They'll try peace, it seems, only after they've tried everything else. In the Mideast, that's what has happened. Loser's poker is the only game left.
