Clinton Blamed for Peace Talks Failure
NewsMax.com
Thursday, July 27, 2000
In an obvious effort to curry favor with New York’s large Jewish community, which could hold the key to his wife’s election as a U.S. senator, President Clinton is blaming Palestinian President Arafat, but a top foreign policy expert says the fault was all Clinton’s.
"The Middle East peace talks at Camp David have apparently failed. The reason is President Clinton's lack of leadership," says Stephen Zunes, associate professor of politics and chair of the Peace and Justice Studies program at the University of San Francisco. "He proved to be a less capable broker than President Carter was at Camp David back in 1978 when Israel and Egypt made peace.”
Writing in yesterday’s Houston Chronicle, Zunes said that Carter was willing to pressure the Israelis to withdraw from all the Egyptian territory they won in the 1967 war, but Clinton "has never supported total Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian lands" taken by Israel in the 1967 conflict, although that flies in the face of U.N. resolutions on the subject.
Instead, Clinton has a record of pressuring the Palestinians to permit Israel to keep control "of large amounts of their land, including Arab east Jerusalem – the historic capital of Palestine."
This, he wrote, "proved to be the issue that seems to have scuttled the talks.
"The Israeli refusal to share the city with the Palestinians and the Clinton administration's inability to push the Israelis to compromise made a successful conclusion to the negotiations impossible. Administration officials hoped that the corrupt and autocratic Palestinian regime of Yasser Arafat would yield to combined U.S. and Israeli pressure.
"They were wrong."
Zunes noted that Clinton's refusal to pressure Israel on this point is a total reversal of the traditional U.S. policy followed by all U.S. presidents from Johnson to Bush. That policy recognized that Jerusalem is part of the Israeli occupation that is subject to U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 which, in return for security guarantees from neighboring Arab states, call upon Israel to withdraw from the Arab lands taken in the 1967 war.
"Clinton has reversed that stance," according to Zunes. "His administration has made a series of statements tacitly accepting Israel's annexation of greater east Jerusalem, which the U.N. Security Council, with the Carter administration's support, had labeled "null and void." The Clinton administration has even opposed U.N. resolutions that recognized greater east Jerusalem as occupied territory."
Zunes notes that Clinton also failed to urge such "creative solutions" to the Jerusalem problem as declaring Jerusalem to be an international city "(as originally called for by the United Nations in 1947)," or creating a joint Israeli-Palestinian administration, or re-partitioning the city along its original dividing line while according full access to the Israeli and Palestinian sides by residents and visitors.
According to Zunes, many Israelis and Palestinians – "including the Palestinian Authority" – back such proposals, "yet the Israeli government and the Clinton administration have rejected them out of hand," he wrote.
In Israel, he says, there is a group that supports sharing Jerusalem. There is also a right-wing faction that supports retaining Palestinian lands. "The majority of Israelis are in between, leaning toward the right if they think Israel can get away with holding on to more territory but leaning in a more moderate direction if they believe U.S.-Israeli relations will be harmed.
As a result of Clinton’s refusal to take the initiative and demand that Israel abide by the U.N. resolution and withdraw from Palestinian lands, thereby strengthening Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s hand, Barak was left with hardly any room to maneuver to counter the powerful right-wing opposition at home.
"While the United States should maintain its commitment to legitimate Israeli security needs, it should also assert the kind of leadership required to force Israel to live up to its international obligations for the sake of peace," Zunes concluded. "The failure of the talks shows that Clinton is not willing to assert such leadership."
Other observers say that in the end, Barak and Arafat, both under enormous pressure at home to avoid giving in on key issues such as Jerusalem, were not willing to risk their political careers, or even their lives, to reach an ultimately unworkable concord merely to help Clinton in his insatiable quest for a legacy. |
