Stratfor on Middle East

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Oct 16 07:40:23 PDT 2000


Stratfor.com's Weekly Analysis - 15 October 2000

Treaties and Nightmares: Camp David, the Third Temple and The Summit

Less than a year ago, we marveled at how the Middle East had become a geopolitical backwater. Action shifted northward toward the Balkans and the Caucasus, toward the strife of Yugoslavia and the war in Chechnya.

Things were as quiet as things ever got in the region. Israelis worried more about IPOs than infantry patrols. The Palestinians were clawing out of their economic and political abyss. Then, as if from nowhere, the region exploded.

It has not merely exploded, but entered a period of danger more substantial than any since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. People worry openly that the peace process is in trouble. Far worse, the situation has undoubtedly stirred Israeli military thinkers to worry that a nightmare scenario may unfold, inside Israel and on its borders.

These worries place enormous pressure on Monday's summit and on the Egyptian government, now the key to resolution. Signs indicate the summit may succeed. But the price of failure is escalation. Unlike previous crises, no superpower can simply turn this crisis off. And no longer is peace between Israel and the Palestinians at stake; lasting peace between Israel and its largest Arab neighbor now hangs in the balance. ______________________________________________________________

For comprehensive analysis on the situation in the Middle East, including the attack on USS Cole, be sure to see our Middle East Hot Spot. http://www.stratfor.com/hotspots/israel_palestine/default.htm

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Camp David: The Cause

A casual observer might think the explosion came from nowhere. Others might think this is simply another inevitable round in the interminable violence between Jews and Arabs. Neither view is correct.

The violence was neither inevitable nor unpredictable. Instead, it flowed directly from a poorly conceived U.S. diplomatic initiative last July, when President Bill Clinton invited Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat to Camp David. The goal was to move toward a final, formal settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. But the outcome was disaster.

On July 10, 2000, in an analysis entitled Camp David, Good Intentions and the Road to Hell, we wrote, the administration risks hurting both Barak and Arafat, causing them severe if not fatal political harm at home. The president's search for his legacy and the reality of Israeli-Palestinian relations are on a collision course. Both will likely be damaged at Camp David. We also wrote, Clinton's good intentions may set the stage for a substantial deterioration of the situation.

We knew it would be bad. But even we did not calculate fully how bad the situation would become. By the time Barak arrived in Washington, his government was barely hanging on to office, battered inside and outside the coalition by those who were afraid the Americans would force Barak to cede too much on too many core issues. Arafat, with more room for maneuver, understood he could not leave the meeting -- having made fundamental concessions -- and survive. A prisoner of the politics of survival within the Palestinian community, Arafat was intransigent. The Camp David meetings never got off the ground.

But the meetings did succeed in stirring up the worst fears in both camps about their respective leaderships. To move to a final, formal settlement, they had to address core issues. Opponents of the peace process in Israel were certain the creation of a Palestinian state and a settlement on Jerusalem would lead to a Palestinian army threatening the national security of Israel and the partition of Jerusalem. They feared that Barak, under U.S. pressure, would capitulate. For the Palestinians, the conviction was that a formal peace would concede the loss of their homeland in perpetuity and create an Israeli puppet state and permanent domination.

The breakpoint occurred when the Barak government began floating creative solutions to the Jerusalem question. This was the tripwire that sent Israeli and Palestinian rejectionists to the wall. Sharon's Temple Mount visit was the signal. But the underlying reality was that Barak and the peace party in Israel lost legitimacy as soon as they entertained the notion of a final settlement, while Arafat retained legitimacy only by succumbing to his own rejectionists.

Clinton's Camp David insisted on Jews and Arabs confronting, once and for all, their incompatible fears and aspirations. Rather than allowing quiet, informal arrangements on the ground to govern the evolution on the relationship, Clinton tried to engineer a comprehensive, formal, top-down solution. The result was that both sides faced the abyss of peace and, in effect, chose war as the lesser evil and safer course.

Had Camp David not occurred, the situation probably would not have deteriorated this badly, if at all.

The Third Temple Scenario

Now, we are in what might be a nightmare scenario. The deepest Israeli fear is that the Third Temple will fall and another holocaust will ensue.

More than just a fear, the Israeli military has long feared such a scenario and planned much of its doctrine around it. The scenario, which dates back more than 25 years, goes like this. First, a massive uprising occurs on the West Bank and the Gaza. Second, this rising spreads to Arab citizens of Israel. Strained to its limits by internal threats, the Israeli military may be unable to deal with an external threat.

What makes events of the past few weeks fundamentally different from anything that has happened before is the substantial violence within Israel proper, involving the country's Arab citizenry. This did not happen during the Intifada of the 1980s; in fact it has not occurred on any similar scale since the 1948 war for independence. Distributed throughout the country, Israeli Arabs live next to major Israeli cities like Haifa while others reside in coastal villages and in Galilee. An outright uprising of Israeli Arabs would pose a nightmarish security concern like nothing in the West Bank or Gaza.

This would only be the beginning. An uprising inside Israel would make the movement of troops and supplies difficult and perhaps impossible. It would immeasurably complicate mobilization and movement toward the frontier. The difficulty of defending Israel would rise by orders of magnitude. If bordering Arab states choose to attack during such a rising, Israel could face defeat.

But here is the important caveat: The Arab states cannot defeat Israel without the help of Egypt's military. In this crisis, Egypt has emerged at the eye of the storm, with entreaties by all parties for help. Egypt is the center of gravity of the Arab world. And luckily for Israel, Egypt has a peace treaty with Jerusalem.

But a treaty is ultimately an expression of political will and the nightmare in the Israeli military right now is that President Hosni Mubarak -- heir to Anwar Sadat, the architect of the treaty -- might fall in a popular, anti-Israeli uprising or coup. Alternatively, Mubarak, fearing such an evolution, might decide to abrogate the treaty. If that happens, the geopolitics of the region would revert to the same conditions as 1973.

Even while the Barak government attempts diplomacy, the Israeli military problem is this: If Egypt shifts course for any reason, Israeli forces would be in an impossible situation. Any attempt to move troops into the Sinai's Mitla and Gidda passes, coupled with an insurrection in Israel, poses an insurmountable problem, from a standard conventional standpoint.

Therefore, Israeli doctrine holds that, under the nightmare scenario, Israeli forces must move first to secure the passes. Indeed, the full preemptive scenario would include a reoccupation of Sinai up to the passes along with preemptive air strikes on Arab air forces and, above all, missile capabilities.

Right now, the uprisings in Israel are not sufficient to constitute the worst-case threat. But from the Israeli point of view, waiting until things reach the worst case is unacceptable.

Egypt: The Key

For this reason the United States has done everything it can to hold the Barak-Arafat summit in Egypt, at Sharm el-Sheikh, with Egyptian participation.

First, the United States wants Mubarak to buy into the peace process as a means of locking him into place. The fact he has agreed to host the meeting serves as a confidence-building measure; the Israelis can see that the nightmare scenario is not underway.

Second, this effort puts pressure on Barak to be flexible. Terrified by the nightmare scenario, Barak is likely to behave in a way that placates the Egyptians, who are observing events, and calms the waters. Finally, by its deep involvement, the United States is trying to show both sides limits are finally being placed on their behavior.

One of the most dangerous elements of the current situation is the lack of limits decidedly different from previous crises in the Middle East. During the Cold War, Arabs and Israelis faced each other as clients of the superpowers. The superpowers used the Arab- Israeli conflict to their own ends, while not letting that conflict degenerate into global war. Therefore, the two superpowers would intervene to contain the conflict. The 1973 war effectively drew to an end when National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger met Premier Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. The superpowers increased the safety factor in confrontations.

Today, there is only one superpower, and it has shown a casualness with regional risks. At this summit, the United States will attempt to demonstrate it can contain the conflict just as effectively as it could with Soviet involvement. This will not be easy. The foundation of the Palestinian National Authority is its armed police force. Israel's ability to tolerate, let alone cooperate with them is gone. Palestinian quiescence over the past years assumed the PNA was going to evolve into a state, and if not a state, an entity that would protect Palestinians from Israelis. That is now gone too. Much of the hard work pre-dating Oslo has been swept away. Reconstructing it will be difficult.

In the meantime, forces on both sides are working hard -- to prevent reconciliation. The decision to attack the USS Cole in Yemen was not taken casually. Men willing to die in suicide bombings are rare, wasting assets. The bombers used them up and have exposed their network to counterattack. They are trying to force the United States into a retaliation that will show the Arab world that Americans and Israelis are the same. Hezbollah's capture of three Israelis on an odd patrol similarly suggests a desire to confront the Israelis. Finally, indications are that the Iraqis are repositioning to, at the very least, divert U.S. forces or, at most, to resume the 1991 conflict.

On the Israeli side, the apparent offer to bring Ariel Sharon into the cabinet indicates the weakness of the Barak government. Sharon triggered the Arab riots by his Temple Mount visit. He was hoping for that response and he got it. For him, it proved his contention that Oslo was a mistake. Now, whether he joins the cabinet is up to him. He may decline, on the expectation that the Barak government will fall anyway and he will join a Likud-dominated cabinet.

If The Summit Fails

Having shattered the Humpty Dumpty of the peace process, the United States will now try to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Working in favor of this is that Barak and Arafat want to step back from the brink.

The problem is that Barak isn't strong enough anymore, while Arafat's strength derives from the fact he has become the willing ally of opponents of reconciliation. Both want to step back; it is unclear that either can.

If no resolution tomorrow, eyes should be on two questions. First, will Arab unrest inside Israel subside or intensify? Second, will events in Israel topple the Mubarak government or force him to alter his course? If the unrest in Israel spreads and if Mubarak wavers in any serious way, pressure inside Israel for fairly extreme measures would grow dramatically.

Everyone argues whether the Oslo accords are dead or can be revived. Embedded in this situation is a much bleaker question: Can the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt survive current pressures? We are in a different place now, an extraordinarily new, unfamiliar and dangerous place that we should not take at all lightly.

(c) 2000 Stratfor, Inc.



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