Much more is riding on this week’s Israeli-Palestinian negotiations than whether the two sides can salvage the teetering peace process.
For if the Israelis and Palestinians cannot keep the Oslo Accords afloat, said New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, “the whole structure of the peace between Israel and the Arab states is going to crumble.”
In San Francisco last week, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who covered the Middle East for the Times from 1982 to 1988, echoed the same warning that he said Jordan’s King Hussein delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during their Washington summit:
Hussein “sternly lectured Netanyahu that he was on a track that would lead to trouble,” Friedman said. “King Hussein, in an impassioned speech, told the parties that he cannot support the peace process if it breaks down.”
This week’s negotiations are taking place at a dangerous juncture, Friedman added. They are being held in an “environment of rapidly eroding trust and confidence,” at a time when Israel’s closest Arab ally is threatening to forsake the Oslo Accords. Egypt refused to even attend the Washington summit.
Friedman, who addressed a fund-raising dinner at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel for the American Associates of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Wednesday night of last week, also discussed the peace process with the Bulletin earlier in the day.
The veteran Times staffer and author of “From Beirut to Jerusalem” is not entirely hopeful that the Mideast can avert even worse violence than the Israeli-Palestinian clashes that erupted two weeks ago. As readers of his op-ed pieces know, Friedman is not convinced Netanyahu wants to uphold the Oslo Accords.
“The prime minister is trying to prove all the myths he has propagated in the opposition all these years as a junior player,” he said.
“I think reality is going to prove him wrong,” Friedman said of Netanyahu. “But it is going to be a very painful learning curve for a lot of people. Either he will have to blow up his [right-wing] coalition and face reality, or he will blow up reality.”
For Israel and the Palestinians, reality means a peace process designed by Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Arafat — and “there is only one process,” Friedman said.
What happened two weeks ago was a “little blowup” of that reality. When Arafat and Peres (and earlier Rabin) tried to push the Oslo Accords forward, they did not let disputes such as the Western Wall tunnel stop them.
“Because they agreed on the big things at the top, the little things at the bottom never derailed the peace process,” Friedman said. But now, with the Arabs less confident that the Israeli government intends to fulfill the Oslo agreements, “each little thing takes on strategic importance.”
The peace process created another reality that Friedman insists Netanyahu cannot avoid. The real story of the Oslo Accords, and of Rabin’s handshake with Arafat, was the reaction by a “silent majority” of Israelis and Palestinians, Friedman said.
“The vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians accepted that handshake and wanted to see it go forward and nurtured.”
Both Israeli and Palestinian radicals heard that silence, and realized that to kill the peace would require “unspeakable” acts that would “turn these two silent majorities back against one another,” Friedman added.
So Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched their suicide martyrs to “create the equation in the mind of Israelis that peace equals death.” And Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein aimed his bullets at Arabs as they prayed. Then came Yigal Amir.
Amir “understood that you didn’t stop this [peace] train by killing Arabs — you had to kill the conductor,” Friedman said. “You had to break that handshake from the head down.”
Netanyahu may have exposed the “weaknesses” in the Oslo Accords, and thereby won the election, Friedman said. But the “great failure” belonged to Peres, who did not ask his opponent how he would guarantee the peace.
Now Netanyahu must move the accords forward, and Arafat must realize that he can only “play that Palestinian police intifada card one time.”
For a battle between Arafat’s forces and Israeli soldiers “isn’t the fringe against the center; it’s the center against the center,” Friedman said. And if that violence flares again, “the Israeli left and right will join together against the peace process.”
Friedman hopes Netanyahu and Arafat have seen how fast the peace process can sink and that they will save it.
Both sides “have stared the last two weeks into the abyss,” he said, “and it’s called Bosnia-Herzegovina. I hope they said, `I cannot go down that road.'”