Come, let us reason together

Benjamin Netanyahu and Yassir Arafat have so far delivered only a `war process' to the peoples of Israel and Palestine, says Patrick Cockburn. Can Madeline Albright return the combatants to their `common destiny in peace-making'?

Israeli air force planes regularly fly low over Jerusalem creating a sonic boom which makes people glance up nervously. The way to tell this sound from that of an exploding bomb is to listen for the distant but distinct roar of aircraft engines after the initial bang.

In mid-afternoon last Thursday there was the sound of a boom in central Jerusalem. People waited in vain to hear the hum of aircraft engines, but it never came. Instead there were two more bangs. In the space of a minute three suicide bombers had blown themselves up among the pavement cafes in Ben Yehuda street, killing themselves and five Israelis.

Nor was this the end of the bad news. The following morning the cafes and shops on Ben Yehuda, having spent the night undergoing repairs, reopened defiantly. But within a few hours most had turned up their radios to full volume so their customers could hear a statement from army command that 12 Israeli soldiers had been killed overnight by Hizbollah, the Islamic guerrillas, in Israel's worst defeat in Lebanon since 1985.

No wonder that the first visit of Madeleine Albright to Israel and the Middle East as US Secretary of State, which starts today, eight months after her appointment, has been preceded by a barrage of briefings by the State Department aimed at lowering expectations. A senior US official said the aim was "to persuade Israelis and Palestinians that they had a common destiny in peace-making". Going by this gloomy prognosis anything other than the outbreak of immediate war will be portrayed as a diplomatic victory.

Why has the US been so inactive for so long? The most obvious reason is that it has not known what to do since Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel in May last year. The US had devoted immense but unavailing efforts to keeping Labour in power. It even organised a sort of pre-election solidarity meeting of world leaders for Shimon Peres, the previous Israeli prime minister, at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt after four devastating suicide bombs.

Of American presidents this century, President Clinton is probably the most dependent on the support of the Jewish community in the US. The six million American Jews have always been one of the main supports of the Democratic Party. No less than 78 per cent voted for Mr Clinton when he first won the presidency in 1992. They provide between a quarter and half of Democratic party campaign funds, according to Jewish Power by JJ Goldberg, the definitive work on Jewish politics in the US. This does not give Mr Clinton or Vice-President Al Gore, who wants to succeed him in the White House, much incentive to put pressure on Israel.

Their room for manoeuvre is constrained by a more recent development. While a majority of American Jews have always favoured the Oslo accords and negotiations with the Palestinians, the Jewish lobbying organisations have moved sharply to the right. Militant supporters of Israel are increasingly religious and Republican. The same is true of the immensely influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In the Republican-controlled Congress, Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House, and Trent Lott, the leader of the Senate, are unrelentingly hostile to Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and supportive of Mr Netanyahu.

But there is another, probably more significant reason why President Clinton did not put more effort into restraining Mr Netanyahu from abandoning the land-for-peace formula that has been the basis for Israeli-Palestinian talks since the Madrid conference in 1991. At that time, the US wanted to consolidate its dominance in the Arab Middle East after the Gulf war. It needed to show the Arab states, who had joined the alliance against Iraq, that Washington could resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and that it was not deaf to the demand of the Palestinians for self-determination.

This need is now largely a memory. The influence of the Arab states in the world is probably at a lower point than at any time since the end of the Second World War. The economic and political siege of Iraq has been sustained for seven years without difficulty. The election of Mr Netanyahu created rumblings in the Arab world but no real reaction. Mr Arafat met with President Mubarak of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan in Cairo last week, but neither is powerful enough to deviate far from his alliance with the US.

Mr Netanyahu therefore appears to be in a strong position. He has full support from the US. Opinion polls show that most Americans blame the Palestinians for the breakdown of Oslo. He has powerful allies in Congress. At home, Israel remains as divided as it was during the last election. Political differences over how to deal with the Palestinians are reinforced by the divide between secular and religious Jews, and the ethnic difference between Jews from Europe and the Middle East.

In Israel, as in the US, the activists and militants are on the right. After the assassination, in 1995, of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir, a religious nationalist associated with the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, the Israeli supporters of Oslo seemed to suffer a collective failure of will. Had Mr Peres called an immediate election he would have won it and the history of the Middle East might have been very different. In fact he waited until the impact of the assassination had died away, suicide bombers had returned and he lost the election for prime minister by a few thousand votes.

Ever since he took office Mr Netanyahu has done everything to weaken the Palestinian proto-state which was developing in Gaza and the West Bank. The number of Jewish settlers has increased. Palestinians born and bred in Jerusalem have found their local ID cards removed because "their centre of life" was not in the city. The number of house demolitions has soared. The Israeli leader spoke of withdrawing from 40 per cent of the West Bank rather than the 90 per cent Mr Arafat expected.

Mr Netanyahu was strengthened by another development. The weakness of the Palestinian quasi-state was largely the result of Israeli insistence that its powers be limited. But some of its wounds were self-inflicted. Mr Arafat runs it in the same authoritarian way as he had the Palestinian- controlled areas in Lebanon before the Israeli invasion of 1982. He delegates power to some 11 security services. He disregards the fledgling Palestinian judiciary and legislature and tolerates high levels of corruption.

In the impoverished enclave of Gaza, local Palestinians notice that Mohammed Dahlan, the head of the Preventive Security police agency, is building himself a fine mansion overlooking the sea. Dr Fathi Subuh, a professor at al-Azhar university, is still in jail after setting an exam paper for his students which asked them about corruption in Mr Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Even the exam papers were confiscated by Preventive Security agents.

The corruption and brutality have important political consequences. The election of Mr Netanyahu, and of an Israeli parliament opposed to Oslo, probably made a renewed confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians inevitable. The Palestinians had too little authority to consolidate and what they had was being nibbled away at the edges by Mr Netanyahu. But confrontation did not necessarily mean that there would be a return of the suicide bomber. On the contrary it would have been much in the Palestinian interest to mount confrontations with settlers and the Israeli army in every village and settlement along the lines of the Intifada of 1987-92. If there was to be killing they could have let it come from the other side

This did not happen because Mr Arafat's organisation, although ramshackle, is jealous of anybody acting without orders. Disillusionment with the Palestinian Authority was too great to allow popular mobilisation. Much of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fought out at the level of an information war. Mr Arafat has always been peculiarly inept at waging this. His administration is like a medieval court, with all decisions and appointments dependent on his whim. His spokesmen are arrogant, ignorant and incompetent.

Israelis and Palestinians alike make great efforts to portray themselves as victims. Mr Netanyahu says the Palestinians are trying to throw the Israelis into the sea. The Palestinians retort that the Israelis have been rather more successful in throwing them into the desert. But the failure of the PA to launch a more politically sophisticated confrontation with Mr Netanyahu earlier in the year opened a political vacuum that is now being filled by suicide bombers from Hamas.

There is no doubt that the bombing is supported by a large section of the 2.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The latest opinion poll shows that 28 per cent of Palestinians back the suicide bombers. They see them as making the brutal point that if Mr Netanyahu abandons the land-for-peace formula then Israeli security will suffer. But it also makes it possible for the Israeli leader to renege on the promise to end the occupation of most of the West Bank as promised in the interim Oslo Agreement signed by the previous government in 1995.

It is just possible that Mrs Albright might get somewhere in the long term. Key aspects of the Oslo Agreement are difficult to uproot. Because its signing on the White House lawn in 1993 provoked an outpouring of shmaltz it is easy to overlook that it represented a real balance of power between Israelis and Palestinians. The Intifada of 1987 showed that the Israeli occupation would be resisted. Despite all the talk of Oslo being dead in recent days it is unlikely that Mr Netanyahu will decisively reverse it by invading the Palestinian enclaves.

But the peace process has gradually become a war process. Two peoples who detest each other will contest control of the West Bank. By building bypass roads, carrying out demolitions and establishing checkpoints and settlements Mr Netanyahu will try to marginalise the Palestinians of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Going by the history of the last 30 years he will not succeed. But while he tries, people in Jerusalem will listen intently for the comforting sound of an aircraft engine whenever they hear the sound of a boom reverberating through their city.