By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
One of the things he finds most surprising about the changing situation in the Middle East conflict, said Steve Rosen, director of Foreign Policy Issues Department for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is that George W. Bush has adopted essentially the same conclusions about the eventual outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the Clinton administration did.
He told a Mercer Island audience last week the current U.S. position supports democratization of the Palestinian Authority, economic development and the creation of an independent judiciary, leading to eventual settlement terms clear to all sides — a two-state solution and Israeli withdrawal from at least almost all of the West Bank and Gaza. The details, he cautioned, will likely not be the same as the near-agreement from the Taba meetings just before Ariel Sharon became prime minister.
Before George Bush came into office, Rosen told the audience that he sat in a meeting with Yasser Arafat in which advisors told the Palestinian Authority leader to expect the incoming administration to be more pro-Arab, and particularly more attuned to the attitudes of Saudi Arabia. The reasoning, which Rosen said he was skeptical of himself, was that their Texas and oil business backgrounds would incline the Bush team to think in terms of energy issues, first and foremost.
“When President Bush assumed office,” said Rosen, “there was such a roundhouse dismissal of the Clinton approach, anything that was associated with it and, indeed anyone who was associated with it was hardly treated with respect.”
Rosen spoke Wednesday evening, Aug. 14, to a nearly full house at Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation on Mercer Island. The talk, co-sponsored by AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, The American Jewish Committee, Hadassah, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, and Herzl-Ner Tamid, was an opportunity for members of the Seattle area Jewish community to hear an insider’s view of the state of Mid-East diplomacy today.
Rosen has served as a resource to journalists and policymakers. Before joining AIPAC in 1982, he coordinated Middle East research for the U.S. Air Force at the Rand Corporation. He holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Syracuse University and has been on the faculties of Brandeis University, the Australian National University, and the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in international relations of the Middle East.
From the beginning, he said, some of Bush’s senior advisors felt the only approach that would work was a military solution, while others, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, wanted to try applying what became known as “smart sanctions” first.
“The central issue that the administration was interested in, from the outset, was the question of Iraq,” Rosen said. “The question of Iraq formed for this administration, not only an important point of continuity between 40 and 42 — Bush the first’s administration and Bush the second’s administration — that is the father and the son, but represented an important point of ideological and strategic commitment for key elements of the administration.”
From the first efforts to communicate with America’s Arab allies, “there was a dialogue that has ever since had the following structure: that the United States wanted to talk to the Arabs about Iraq and the Arabs who wanted to talk to the United States about the Palestinian-Israeli problem.” Both sides assumed that the other side would be willing to show some flexibility on the other’s positions if they were flexible on theirs.
He said the one aspect of the Clinton Mid-East endeavors the Bush administration was willing to keep going was the Mitchell Commission, headed by former Sen. George Mitchell, looking into what had gone wrong in the diplomatic process and what could be done to get negotiations back on track. But once the report came out, the violent attacks on Israel were ratcheted up and the situation changed fundamentally.
“What had happened was that on the Palestinian side, Hamas and Islamic Jihad became afraid that, through the Mitchell Report,” he said, “the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, would find some way to begin winding down the intifada in order to reach an agreement with the new administration and, by implication, with Israel as well.”
In response to a question about who Israel could find to make peace with, and what would happen with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, he said there were two different answers, based on the nature of the two groups. Islamic Jihad, he said, which is more purely a military-terrorist organization “will not stop until they are stopped, and that stopping,” he added, “will be a bloody stopping.”
“Hamas faces a different problem because it doesn’t want to alienate itself from its constituents,” said Rosen. “If you get closer to a moment when Fatah has made a decision to stop terrorism and meet the Israeli and American demands about violence, and the Israeli and American response is such that it looks to Palestinians in the street that something may be moving for them … the situation for Hamas becomes more complicated, and if all goes well, Hamas will start to crumble — but it’s unlikely that all will go well.”
Finally, Rosen addressed the situation he sees facing American Jews and what we as a people need to do.
“I think this is our time in history,” he said. “I feel that American Jews are at the crossroads of this crisis that Israel is facing and the crisis that America is facing. Both of them crises with the Arab World, with Islam and with the Palestinians. American Jews have a big responsibility to the United States and a big responsibility to Israel to be part of the solution, and not simply to be in the audience as a kind of booster.
“We need an approach that deals with the short run, that deals with the military effort and with the political effort — that tries to split the opposition by having both military and a political effort. At the same time, we have to be working on the long run, which is the war of ideas.
“To have Israel be integrated into the Arab world has to be the primary purpose of American foreign policy, and we can make that happen,” said Rosen. “The second thing we need to do is to start building our own institutional capability to be at the forefront of that war of ideas because the new anti-Semitism, which exists in parts of the Arab world and in parts of Europe … sees Jews and the United States and Israel as being a misfortune,” he went on.
“We’re not fighting that war. We’re not trying the find the allies who would fight with us against those terrible ideas which are in the world, and in the Arab world, the Islamic world and the Palestinian world. We are not helping those who are the same side as us in these fights, and I believe that American Jewry has to be fighting hard on all of these fronts.”