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Perspective

Six days and 40 years

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published June 10, 2007

Exactly 40 years ago today - June 10, 1967 - Israel won a war against Jordan, Egypt and Syria. For the Israelis, it was a military tour de force - in just six days they had routed the Arab armies and captured the West Bank, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and part of Jerusalem. Virtually overnight, Israel controlled three times as much land as it did before, and had proved to the Arab world it was a formidable power here to stay. But in many ways it was a hollow victory. Four decades later, a comprehensive Mideast peace remains as elusive as ever and Palestinians have yet to live in a state of their own. Arabs "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" Israeli diplomat Abba Ebban famously said, but both sides have made numerous missteps on the road to peace. Among them:

Israeli misstep: not planning ahead

Israel's capture of the Arab territories made it responsible for the general welfare of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who have one of the world's highest birth rates. Today, there are 4-million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank - by 2020 there could be more Arabs than Jews between Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Israel's tight control over Palestinian movement has fueled violent resistance since the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, began in 1987.

"In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was on the one hand an understanding among the Israeli political leadership that these (captured) territories would be traded away in exchange for peace treaties with their Arab neighbors, " says Tamara Wittes, a Mideast expert at the Brookings Institution.

"But on the other hand, there was no particular sense of urgency. There was sort of an assumption it would be possible for Israel to administer these territories indefinitely and that was blown apart by the first intifada. It was a real error in judgment."

Arab misstep: not getting it in writing

The 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty - negotiated at Camp David during the Carter administration - was of huge importance to Israel because it protected the Jewish state from the biggest, most powerful Arab nation. But to Arabs, the treaty was disappointing because it failed to quickly produce talks on statehood for the Palestinians, many of whom lived in the Gaza Strip next to Egypt.

Israel had "no intention of really engaging Palestinians in any kind of serious way after the Camp David Accords were signed, " says Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "In part, it was the fault of (Egyptian President) Anwar Sadat, who left the details for afterward. In one sense that's why the peace with Egypt is a 'cold peace.' Egyptians feel it was a disgrace to sign without a commitment from Israel to do something on the Palestinians issue."

Israeli (and Arab) misstep:

too much faith in Oslo

It took another 14 years after the treaty with Egypt for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to reach an agreement giving the Palestinians five years of self-rule. By the end of that time, the two sides were supposed to reach "final status" agreement on such thorny issues as permanent borders, Palestinian refugees and Jewish settlements.

With Arafat's triumphant return to Gaza in 1994, the PLO was essentially reconstituted as the Palestinian National Authority - and soon developed a reputation for corruption and incompetence that fueled the rise of Hamas and other radical religious groups in the Palestinian territories.

"I supported Oslo but now I think it could have been a mistake because it revived the PLO, " says Abraham Diskin, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "The PLO was almost dead - it had lost the support of rich Arab nations because it supported Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. Israel revived it with the hope it was going to change its nature, but it was a means to bring about extreme Muslim fundamentalism."

Arab misstep:

rejecting a pretty good deal

At a Camp David summit in July 2000, Arafat was offered what President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak considered extremely generous concessions. Israel would withdraw from more than 90 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip, paving the way for a Palestinian state. The Palestinians would get other land in exchange for any remaining Jewish settlements and would also have partial control of East Jerusalem, including most of the Old City.

Warned by Arab rulers not to compromise on Jerusalem, Arafat rejected the deal, and a second, far more violent Palestinian uprising erupted that September.

"There were Palestinian mistakes and larger Arab mistakes, " Wittes says of the doomed summit. "The Arab states really failed to step up and give their blessing to a final status agreement. On Arafat's part, he thought time was on his side, and if he kept holding out he could get a better deal yet. Of course events swept over him with the outbreak of the second intifada and at that point negotiations became moot."

Arab misstep: talking peace and wreaking havoc

At an Arab League meeting in 2002, Saudi Arabia floated a proposal under which all Arab nations would make peace with Israel if it withdrew to the 1967 pre-war borders. On the very same day, a Hamas suicide bomber killed 30 people at an Israeli hotel in the midst of the Passover holiday.

"By most objective analyses, this was a very forward-leading proposal from the Saudis, " says Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations. "But the leaders of the Arab world who were all gathered in Beirut didn't say one word to condemn the attack. That was a huge misstep - the bombing precipitated the Israeli invasion of the West Bank" and the Arab silence helped turned even moderate Israelis into hawks.

Israeli misstep:

fighting a war it didn't win

After the militant Islamic group Hezbollah kidnapped two Jewish soldiers last July, Israel troops stormed into southern Lebanon - the area from which they had withdrawn in 2000 after a devastating 18-year occupation. The soldiers are still missing, and the six-week war severely weakened the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert while strengthening Hezbollah's image throughout the Muslim world.

"Israel lost much of its deterrence, and deterrence is something that prevents war, " says Diskin of Hebrew University. "It may encourage people to try to initiate all kinds of violent attacks on Israel, and those who pay the price are not only Israelis but poor Arabs and Palestinians and Syrians. The result was very unfortunate and it really shows someone didn't calculate his options correctly."

If there's an overriding theme to the missed opportunities of the past 40 years, it's that the Israelis could have done more early on to resolve the Palestinian issue - key to peace with the wider Arab world - when they were dealing with a much smaller and less radicalized population.

The Palestinians, meanwhile, could have done a far better job of showing they were capable of good self-governance. And other Arab nations could have done more to help the Palestinians.

That they didn't left the United States with much of the burden for pushing the peace process along, with some notable successes like the Israeli-Egyptian treaty. Yet it can and should do more, the experts agree.

From the Carter years to now, U.S. administrations have tended to "follow the lead of the parties themselves, " Cook says. "If the Egyptians were willing to take this deal, why should the U.S. stand in the way? If Israelis really want to live with some sort of Palestinian corruption that would provide them with security, that was fine. We haven't wanted to get out ahead of them. There's a mantra that you can't want peace more than the parties themselves, but we also need to be more proactive."

Or as Wittes put it:

"The United States remains indispensable to Arab-Israeli peace because of its close relations to Israel and long involvement. There are things that other international actors can do to help - including the Arab states and the Europeans - but both sides want America at the table."

Susan Taylor Martin can be reached at susan@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 9, 2007, 19:52:12]