With the "process" dead, what are the prospects for peace?

Lang, W. Patrick ; Telhami, Shibley ; Ross, Christopher 等

The following is an edited transcript of the twenty-fourth in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held on March 8, 2001, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., moderating.

CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR., president, Middle East Policy Council

Now that the peace process is dead, admittedly in a region where it is said that from time to time what has died may yet be resurrected, is it possible for us to find a path to peace? It is clear that many things have changed and that, if there is a renewed American-led effort, as Secretary Powell has said, the United States will not allow itself to be in the position of being more eager for peace than the parties themselves. We will not again open ourselves to manipulation by parties who are not prepared to make peace but will use our eagerness to their advantage. Our Lone Ranger role, begun during the time of Henry Kissinger, may not survive into the next phase. And we will have to take account of greatly diminished credibility in the Arab world for the United States.

I have just come back from the Arab Gulf, where the hospitals are full of wounded children from the occupied territories. Most people have focused on the number of deaths there: 350 Palestinian dead and 12,000 wounded, and 60 Israelis dead and 200 wounded, over the last five months. This -- plus the widespread availability of real-time television coverage of atrocities by both sides in this struggle -- has taken a toll on attitudes throughout the region.

It is fashionable in some quarters to deride the peace process as having been a substitute for peace rather than a path to it. Yet it is clear that that process registered a great deal of progress. Not only those things that are obvious -- the Camp David establishment of an official relationship between Egypt and Israel and the resolution of border problems between those two countries; the subsequent normalization of relations between Jordan and Israel -- but the erosion of the Arab boycott, the erosion of the barriers to trade and investment, which have brought major benefits to many in the region. It has become normal, no longer extraordinary, for Palestinians and Israelis to sit down and talk with each other and even for Israelis to appear in international gatherings with others from the region. All of these things are now in jeopardy. None can be taken for granted.

In many respects, fear has replaced hope. Israelis now feel as insecure as Palestinians have long felt. Both sides seem imbued with a grim determination to inflict pain rather than to negotiate with each other. It appears that Mr. Arafat has lost his mandate to negotiate. It was withdrawn from him at the end of the summer in the aftermath of the ill-timed and ill-prepared Camp David meetings in July. The Palestinians are not in a mood to negotiate. And it is clear that the Israeli electoral process withdrew Mr. Barak's mandate to negotiate. It is obvious that both sides are now led, if not by hardliners, by the spirit of the hard line. There is the serious prospect of a further escalation of violence between the two sides. There is already the risk that the use of assassination as a tool of political control by the Israeli government will lead to counter-assassinations.

What can be done about this by us, as opposed to the parties themselves? What should be done by the United States? Where do our interests lie in this situation? How can Americans preserve and advance those interests? That's what we're here to talk about. I deeply regret that an airline strike in Tel Aviv prevented Israeli scholar Yossi Shain from being here, but he has agreed to write a comment on these proceedings later.

W. PATRICK LANG, formerly the defense intelligence officer for the Middle East

I've been out of the government for six years now, but a combination of business and personal interest has taken me to Palestine and Israel at least three times a year for the last three or four years. I just came back 10 days ago, and I'm afraid there is very little good news.

I was also there in December with a board group from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). We visited with a lot of the people who actually make a difference on both sides in this mess. We were at the point, when we visited the Labor party people, that they divided up into two groups: the defeated and the semi-defeated. In the defeated group there were prominent names, some of whom have recently rejoined the government, who clearly believed in the possibility of a negotiated peace with the Palestinians and were willing to make what to other Israelis seemed like enormous concessions to get to that point. Those people, in mid-December, were in a deep funk. They had lost all confidence in what they'd been trying to do. They didn't understand why they had lost. They couldn't grasp why Arafat and his people had not been able to accept what they thought was an exceptionally forthcoming deal at Camp David. And they had no idea what to do. They were prostrate emotionally and psychologically.

The semi-defeated in the Labor party were people who were rather like me. They were retired military or other kinds of security-connected officers, tending more to the right. They were still hopeful that a negotiation could be carded on with the Palestinian Authority. But they had come to the conclusion that they couldn't do anything substantive until they managed to convince the Palestinians that the al-Aqsa intifada was an unprofitable line of effort. They were convinced that this was a centrally directed and operated campaign, that it hadn't been set off by Sharon's trip to the Temple Mount or anything like that. When you added these two groups together, what you had was a kind of feeling of hopelessness, of stasis.

On my recent trip, I talked to some of the same people, including some who are the monied interests behind the Labor party. It shouldn't be any great surprise that Labor, even though it has a socialist agenda, includes a lot of very rich Israelis. They're the people who pay for political campaigns and foreign consultants and daily polling, etc. -- the people who put Barak in office. This was the week before the Labor party voted to go into the coalition. They were determined to have a coalition but without Barak, in whom they had lost all confidence. But they wanted to be in the coalition because they had received signals, they told me, from Sharon that he wanted their presence because he didn't want to follow a course of action dictated entirely by Likud and Shas.

So I asked them, "What's your program if things work out this way?" They said that sufficient pressure would have to be put on the Palestinian insurgency to restrain it within certain geographical bounds that they would find acceptable, and then they would start to treat that area in which the Palestinians were confined as if it were foreign territory, and would expect Arafat to administer that properly and to keep the lid on there. I said to them, "A lot of you went to the best staff colleges, and you read Clausewitz. What about the part describing war as a process of opposing wills? You don't seem to have taken their will into consideration." They said, "No, no, we can handle this. We'll manage it. Don't worry about this."

On the same trip, I went down to Gaza with this CFR group to see Chairman Arafat. He, too, seemed to be in a rather prostrate emotional condition. He has not been to the West Bank in months, and I understand he's only now been back once. My impression is, from sources on both sides of the conflict, that he has essentially lost control of the West Bank. The inherent conflict between the former outside leadership and the former inside leadership in the Tanzim and Fatah organizations has gotten to be so great that there is a real issue as to whether he can ever reestablish control in the West Bank, and whether or not he could do it without Israeli assistance.

I decided to visit some of the villages around Bethlehem that had been badly shot up. I went around with the director of the Catholic Middle East Welfare Association office in Jerusalem. He and I and a colleague went to Beit Sahour, Beit Jalla and Bethlehem and other places nearby, went into the houses of people who had literally had their houses blown to pieces by the Israelis. It was a nasty day in February, snowing and raining, and there were five-foot holes in the walls of people's houses. The inside of their rooms were torn apart by high-explosive tank ammunition. There were bits of furniture all over the place, smashed appliances, women and kids standing out in the rain getting wet and cold.

From the point of view of the villagers, at least in this area where the villages are still predominantly cushioned, what is occurring is that people they don't know come into their neighborhoods at night and fire at Israeli positions or Israeli towns, provoking return tire. And instead of shooting with rifles, as the snipers do from the Palestinian side, the Israelis return fire with main tank guns, 40-millimeter anti-aircraft fire, and on occasion TOW missiles, which do a real job on these houses. It's miraculous that more people have not been killed.

On the Israeli side, the government and the Ministry of Defense have given field commanders, mostly rather junior officers, instructions to retaliate. These guys have taken it far beyond what the instructions were. They're not just retaliating at night against specific fire, they are shooting at houses during the day with tank guns, apparently because they're bored or they think they need target practice. I think that cannot be excused. It's evidence of the fact that the Israeli army continues to be rather poorly disciplined. This has been my experience in the past, contrary to their legend. They're exceeding their instructions.

In any event, it seems to me from talking to many people on the ground that the Palestinians have got themselves into a state in which they have become madly self-sacrificial. People are talking about their willingness to sacrifice their grandchildren to the cause, that if it takes that in order to get the Israelis to give up and go away, they're prepared. This is crazy talk. I did my best to explain that to people, but they're not listening. Several people, including one very senior prelate, told me that the suicide bombing in Netanya was the beginning of a long campaign, maybe a year long.

SHIBLEY TELHAMI, Anwar Sadat chair for peace and development, University of Maryland

You've heard the situation is bad. I think it's worse than you have heard. Obviously, we have a collapsed peace process, a lot of violence, tragedy, fear, insecurity. We've seen this before in cycles of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is not highly unusual in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But it's worse in the following way. I think we're on the verge of a major transformation in the nature of the conflict, that may not allow it to be resolved in the foreseeable future.

If you look at the history of the conflict in the past 20 years, to the extent that there has been a major breakthrough, especially on the Palestinian-Israeli front, it has been a breakthrough in the evolution of the conflict from an ethnic one that seemed to have no solution, where the game between the Palestinians and Israelis seemed zero-sum, where the claims were maximalist, into a nationalist conflict. It became two national movements that had mutual recognition, as expressed in the Oslo agreements, essentially a reconciliation based on the establishment of two states, one Palestinian and one Jewish, side by side in historic Palestine. That kind of framing of the conflict as a nationalist conflict, not ethnic, not religious, created room for compromise and provided the basis of the negotiations that have been ongoing for the past seven or eight years. To the extent that there was hope, it was hope that, although there would be differences on borders and on the nature of security, the basic outlines of an agreement were defined as the basis for historical reconciliation.

What we have seen in the past few months, especially since the collapse of the Camp David negotiations, is the beginning of the transformation of that conflict from a nationalist conflict into an ethno-religious conflict. If this transformation is allowed to be completed, we will be back to 1948, from which point it might take another generation to fully resolve this conflict.

We can argue as to what was responsible for the beginning of this transformation. The issue of Jerusalem and the way it was framed in negotiations has begun the transformation of the conflict into a religious one. There's no question that in the Middle East, the issue of Jerusalem is bigger than the issue of Palestine. We have seen the widening of the conflict from a Palestinian-Israeli conflict to an Arab-Israeli conflict and even to a Muslim-Jewish conflict. It's an issue that plays into the hands of opposition movements in the region, most of which are Islamist. And it even plays on differences within Israel itself, among Arab and Jewish citizens. We have seen more confrontation in that arena, which has evoked the ethnic aspects of the conflict.

This danger increases every single day that you don't have a peace process. And the danger is exacerbated in the short term by the possible collapse of the Palestinian Authority. The PA clearly has provided a secular, nationalist framing of the Palestinian movement. The PLO emerged as a nationalist movement intended to fulfill the aspirations of the Palestinians as a people who had the right to self-determination in a state of their own. If that project collapses, it would very quickly accelerate the transformation into a religious-ethnic conflict, which would set us back for many years to come.

There are two sets of immediate dangers that the Authority faces. The first is a very severe financial threat. The Authority is heavily dependent on outside aid, on tax revenues of its own, which it would collect from Israel. All of these sources are under threat, and the PA cannot begin to fulfill the needs of its constituency. The numbers tell a very grim story: GNP has declined by 50 percent just since September. In some sectors, the decline has been closer to 80 percent, particularly in trade and construction. But even the PA bureaucracy -- security services, the ability to pay salaries, to keep people supported -- is decreasing by the day.

The second crisis is political. Since the Oslo accords, the Palestinian Authority has never had what might be called a military option: it has had only a political option. It can only deliver an agreement; it cannot field an army. The minute it employs its police force as a conventional army, Israeli deterrence starts kicking in because Israel has a much higher capacity. The only militant component that Palestinians have today is decentralized and can only be implemented by those who are not directly under the Palestinian Authority. As a consequence, who's going to fill the gap other than their opponents, especially Hamas? I think that's the one way to understand the rising influence and apparent independence of the Fatah faction of Marwan Barghouti. Arafat needs that as a way to protect his flank from Hamas. He has to have some credibility with the public regarding the military option.

There is a third component. There is a sense of anger in the Palestinian areas because of the losses, but there's also a sense of empowerment that the intifada brings. The Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza became frustrated with the Oslo accord. It took away that sense of empowerment that came with the earlier intifada. They felt helpless, not only in their relations with the outside world, like the United States and Israel, but also in facing the Palestinian Authority. The sense of empowerment that comes with the intifada makes it harder for people to want to give it up. People thought that they paid a high price by engaging in the Oslo accords, and it's going to be harder for them to want to give it up in the short term in exchange for negotiations that they don't trust. They have not trusted the process, so it's hard to imagine what could be put on the table that would persuade them that they have to engage in protracted negotiations that are not going to pay off in the immediate future.

On the Israeli side, there is clearly also a sense of despair. It's a function of two things. On the one hand, the Israeli public's perception of what happened after Camp David is that their prime minister offered more than he should have, and the Palestinians rejected it. There is also a sense of psychological insecurity. Israelis are today more powerful than at any time in history in conventional and non-conventional terms, vis-a-vis the Arab states. But there is a genuine sense of public insecurity that is, in part, a function of what happened with the intifada, which they don't know how to control, and in part a sense that the Arabs will never accept them because of their interpretation of what happened after the collapse of Camp David. In part because they believe that Arabs don't take them seriously anymore, there is a sense that their deterrence doesn't work. This is tied not only to the intifada, but also to their unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. As a consequence, there is a sense that Israel has to assert itself in a way that would remind people that it's still powerful. These two tendencies drive a cycle of mistrust and violence.

Is there an opportunity to move forward? Sure. Sharon could surprise everyone and turn out to be a de Gaulle. He does have the opportunity. He's a hawk; he's got a national-unity government. If he wants to, he could. Can Arafat extend a hand suddenly in a way that he has not done before? Of course he can. As a political scientist, judging from the past, I would have to predict that those are not likely to happen.

The United States is going to have to wait for the parties before it engages in negotiations. The biggest mistake that Barak made was to rely on Clinton too much. They had to make a deal on their own; there had to be bilateral negotiations. This is an existential issue for both parties. They needed to resolve it. On the other hand, the United States can be instrumental in breaking the stalemate in the short term, particularly by creating conditions for the two to come back to meaningful negotiations. They need an interlocutor. The United States cannot stay out; they need somebody to mediate. But if you have an escalation, which is a likely outcome, it's going to impact U.S. interests in the region very rapidly, and the United States will not be able to sit on the sidelines.

AMB. FREEMAN: There are an enormous number of people in this country who care very deeply about the deplorable situation that we have just heard described: six million American Jews, eight million American Muslims and many of us who are neither. So there is a very high cost in humanitarian terms. But there are other costs: the reduced credibility and acceptability of the United States elsewhere in the region, the accelerating unacceptability of the United States as a partner, whether in political, military or commercial terms, because of our perceived complicity in the situation that has been described. We have gone well past the point when we can deny that there is a connection between what happens in the Holy Land and what happens in the broader region, but what is the nature of that connection, and how seriously should we take it? Perhaps we can get into this when we turn to an open discussion.

CHRISTOPHER Ross, formerly U.S. ambassador to Syria

I have no silver lining to offer. It is a very difficult, tragic situation in the region today, and Chas. is quite right to ask what we, as concerned members of the international community, can do in this phase. In some respects, the immediate task has changed. For the almost 10 years since Madrid, we have been engaged in a process of building peace, of making peace and what's happened between Palestinians and Israelis has taken us several steps backward.

About two weeks ago, the organization that I've been working for, Search for Common Ground, held a meeting in Prague that brought together Israelis, Palestinians, other Arabs, Turks and Iranians, ostensibly to look at the regional implications of what was going on between Israelis and Palestinians. What happened, of course, was that the entire first day was spent in venting. The situation was such that the Palestinians couldn't even come to Prague, so they were there by speakerphone. As the two sides spoke, it became very clear that they are operating from completely different realities. Each sees what is going on in a diametrically opposed way: We are right, they are wrong. And there has been retreat by both sides back to the grossest kinds of stereotypes.

It's not very fruitful at this point to try to get people together to talk and negotiate. We need to do something before that. What is that thing? In the meeting in Prague, the one thing that everyone could agree on was that there had to be a mutual reduction and, if possible, cessation of violence. And the operable word there was "mutual." It would do no good for us, as an outside party, to call on one party or the other to reduce or end the violence. If it is not done in a balanced, mutual way, violence is going to continue and, indeed, escalate. There was a sense at this meeting that the way things are going, the risk of what one person called "full-scale war" was growing. Every party at the table decried that; nobody wants war. Yet people said to each other, "Nobody wants war, but leaders aren't prepared to take the kinds of decisions that will turn us away from that eventuality." It was a very discouraging meeting, which illustrated that there is a lot of preparatory work to be done before we can even conceive of a resumption of negotiations.

Since I was ambassador to Syria for a number of years, let me address briefly what comes out only once in a while in the press: Is there some other option here to continuing the peace process? Is there a Syrian and Lebanese option, given that the Palestinian track is in such difficulty? The straight answer is no, there isn't. The Syrians are in a wait-and-see mode. They are prepared to talk about peace, but it's on the same terms now that Asad the son is in power as when his father was in power: full peace for full withdrawal to the line of June 4, 1967. That has not changed.

But one thing has changed. The peace process began with the Arab parties at least nominally committed to mutual coordination. After Oslo, President Asad decided that since the Palestinians had gone their own way, Syria would go its own way in pursuing international objectives. In a recent statement, son Bashar has reestablished the linkage between the tracks, and the formulation now is that there can never be peace between Syria and Israel as long as the Palestinian problem remains in crisis. So the Arab linkage is reestablished. That's inevitable, given the prominence that the crisis on the Palestinian track has acquired in both the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Chas. touched on the loss of credibility that we have suffered. I think it's genuine and, over time, very corrosive to the full range of our interests in the countries concerned. But first, a determined effort to get both sides to scale down and hopefully end the violence would be a salutary step, one that would begin the process of restoring our credibility. There is one condition: the appeal has to be balanced, so that we are not seen as somehow condoning one side's resort to violence while condemning that of the other.

AMB. FREEMAN: Ambassador Ross very sagely argued for a mutual reduction of violence. How realistic is this, given a mindset on the Israeli side that the Palestinians must be thoroughly punished and cowed into renewed submission, and on the Palestinian side that the fighting will continue until the settlers withdraw. The administration's position has been very tempered. Colin Powell did not call for a cessation of violence; he seemed to recognize that violence is inherent in the situation. He called for a reduction in violence. How realistic is this?

It's an article of faith, as Pat Lang mentioned, among many in Israel and some here, that somehow all of this is manipulated by Yasser Arafat. Others in the Arab world see Mr. Arafat as running around to the head of the parade in order to appear to lead it. Is there anyone with whom you could negotiate such a reduction of violence on the Palestinian side at present? Is Mr. Arafat in charge? And if he is not, how do you negotiate with an anarchic group of very angry people?

DR. TELHAMI: The current intifada is an expression of Palestinian empowerment. Therefore it's hard to imagine that anybody could persuade every segment of the Palestinian public to put it down, unless they actually had something concrete, like real withdrawal or real agreement. They won't do it in exchange for a process that has no certainty of succeeding. They've tried that many times before, and they felt that the Oslo accords really neutralized their power. Palestinians' strategic interpretation of Israel's ultimately entering into an agreement with them at Oslo was that it was caused by the power of the intifada. The Israelis were essentially saying, "We cannot control the West Bank and Gaza."

The Israelis have the exact opposite situation. They believe that they cannot be manipulated by force into an agreement. This has been an axiom of Israeli strategic thinking in the region - that they will never sign an agreement under duress, that they will wait until power favors them, and they will sign it only on their terms. Therefore, it's very hard to see how the Israelis are going to just suddenly accept, at least in the short term, Palestinian demands under what may be seen as duress. They are going to send a message that they can inflict even higher pain than the Palestinians have accepted so far.

Concerning Arafat, the major issue is whether he himself is in control. I believe that much of the intifada was spontaneous, despite what one of his assistants said recently. For one thing, look at what happened in the Arab world. Several hundred thousand people demonstrated in Morocco, thousands of people demonstrated in Yemen, Oman, Cairo or within Israel itself, where Arabs went into the streets, some of whom got killed in confrontations with the police. Clearly, these situations were not manipulated by Arafat directly. So you can imagine that the people who care most deeply about these issues in the West Bank and Gaza are going to revolt on their own. That's not to say that Arafat himself has not seen the violence as tactically useful in the negotiations and has manipulated it on occasions. But those people who are dying, like the teenagers who are being killed, are not dying for him. In fact, many of them don't like him, and some may be even willing to do a lot more about it. They're not direct soldiers of his cause; they're doing it on their own.

What can he do to control the violence? He can certainly stop attacks by the Tanzim. My interpretation is that Marwan Barghouti is not independent. Arafat has the capacity to question him tomorrow if he wants to. I think Arafat needs him for credibility. If he doesn't have him, he's going to lose to Hamas tomorrow, as long as there are no negotiations. He needs to allude to the fact that there is a Palestinian option separate from the negotiations, and only Barghouti can provide it. Arafat himself cannot. This is the strategic calculus. In order for Arafat to crack down he would have to pay a very heavy price. And the next time around, it'll be harder for him to crack down. He's not going to do it unless he has something concrete to offer to the Palestinian people, and it would have to be a lot more than "let's start the negotiations."

AMB. ROSS: I'm afraid that violence is fated to continue, for the reasons that Pat and Shibley have elucidated. Nonetheless, for the future, I think it's important for the United States to take a position against violence on a balanced basis. One of these days, something is going to happen that permits a resumption of negotiations. At that time, I think it will be important for us to be seen as a true honest broker and mediator. Inevitably violence continues. The short-term issue is how to make sure it does not erupt into full-scale war, either by miscalculation or provocation, and here southern Lebanon, among other things, is a case in point. But the fact that violence isn't going to stop doesn't mean that we shouldn't be calling for it to be reduced or stopped.

As to whether there is somebody to negotiate an end to violence with on the Palestinian side, the issue is not so much one of negotiating. Much of the Palestinian violence is the result of the daily conditions of life - the blockades, the closures, the shellings, et cetera. One thing that would make violence much less likely would be an improvement in those conditions. This would also feed into the political process that the Palestinian leadership must consider.

JEROME SEGAL, University of Maryland: Let's take it as a given that the violence is going to continue and accelerate. There's a tremendous difference between two possible contexts in which that would occur. One would involve a clear sense, especially among Israelis, that there is a Palestinian desire to end the conflict. This would be a situation in which there exists a Palestinian proposal for an acceptable settlement. The second context is one in which there is no offer clearly out there. Right now we have the second context. What this means is that on the Israeli side, as the dynamic of the violence starts to accelerate, there's going to be more unification. Even from a Palestinian point of view -- trying to teach the Israelis and Sharon that there is no right-wing alternative - this only makes sense if there is also a perception that there's some alternative to conflict.

Although I oppose the violence, if it turns out that the Palestinians are prepared to pay a higher price than the Israelis, that strategy could work. Israelis could bring back a leftwing government, but only if there's a perception on the Israeli side that there really is a Palestinian offer out there.

There have been two tremendous setbacks. One has to do with American policy. The Clinton administration took its proposals off the table. Those proposals were a great step forward, and the Bush administration has disowned them. In terms of American policy, we should reinstate the American plan for ending the conflict. It would then be out there for people to react to. Secondly, the Palestinians have undermined the belief that they truly seek to end the conflict. Anybody talking to the Palestinians - whether it's Peres or Beilin outside the government or people in Prague through speakerphone - should be giving them the message that what we need right now, whether from Arafat or a group of intellectuals, is a Palestinian proposal with all the details, all the provisos that they want. This would enable the Israelis on the left to say, "There is an alternative."

AMB. FREEMAN: It is entirely natural for Israelis to interpret the conflict as open-ended if there is no proposition put to them about how to end it. I'd like to ask all of the panel to comment on that and maybe comment on whether the same doesn't apply the other way, in terms of persuading those who feel empowered by the intifada to end it, that there needs to be some sort of vision out there that is remotely acceptable to Palestinians.

DR. TELHAMI: The Palestinian public's interpretation of what happened at Camp David is very different from the Israeli public's interpretation. Neither side believes there was a clear offer. There is also confusion among analysts here in the United States about what happened in the past year. You would have to say there's been more progress than in 50 years of Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The gaps were narrowed on all of the important issues. Taboos were broken; debates began. The differences on some of the issues were relatively small. The parties continued negotiating until a week before the Israeli elections -- at Taba, bilaterally, without American mediation. Why should we have to break it off? Why are we saying it's over?

Is this a take-it-or-leave-it deal by one side or the other, or is it strictly a function of the changed Israeli politics? Why are we interpreting the negotiations to have collapsed? In a normal negotiation, you would say neither side is going to impose a solution on the other. This is an existential issue for Israelis and Palestinians. They've made progress, so why dump it and say it's take-it-or-leave-it or let's start over? That's a very strange negotiation.

I don't think it's a question of putting forth a Palestinian plan. The Palestinians actually presented a counteroffer to the Israelis at Taba and at Camp David. There were counteroffers about percentages. The one issue on which the Palestinians have not yet come forth is the right of return. They're going to have to put a proposal on the table that's compatible with Israel's core interest. They would have to do this in the context of a comprehensive deal.

As for a U.S. proposal, I'm not sure the time is ripe for that. I believe the administration should take a position or set of positions on the parameters for settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, including, for example, reiterating some of the important principles the United States has been committed to historically, including U.N. resolutions and perhaps progress made to this point. The administration is going to be on the defensive. If they don't have their own positions, they're going to be defending one side or the other, or they're going to be reflecting a congressional position on it. They really need to stake out a position that they can defend as an American position, both domestically and abroad, so that they will not be seen to be taking sides.

AMB. ROSS: What strikes me about the proposals of the various sides is how little authoritative information we have about precisely what was said by whom to whom in these various summits and other meetings. All of us are reacting on the basis of partial and, in some cases, managed information. It's hard to judge the veracity of what's said. I take a great deal of what is said about these exchanges behind closed doors with a grain of salt.

As for a U.S. plan, it is too early for anything elaborate. At a minimum, though, we could go back and reiterate the foundations upon which we and others collaborated in building this peace process: the principles that underlay the Madrid conference.

MR. LANG: In December, we talked to the rulers of five Arab countries, and then to the Israelis and to Chairman Arafat. From each of them we heard, "here are the terms of the putative deal," and they would run through their terms. They were all the same, everywhere. That should have made me deeply suspicious in itself. Recently, in traveling around in Palestine I talked, in Arabic, to lots of ordinary Palestinians. One of the questions I always asked them along the way was, "What is it that you would actually settle for? What is your deal for the ultimate settlement?" They didn't have the list of points that the leaders had. They had a very hard time formulating what it is they would settle for. But there's an inchoate desire to no longer feel wounded in their national psyche. This is under the impact of the transformation of the conflict into the ethno-religious struggle we were talking about. This is generating larger and larger ambitions.

I think there's a basic division here between the leaders, who in all the years after Madrid and Oslo, came to know each other, working on a deal that they could have made, and the ordinary people of Palestine and the Arab world as a whole, who have an entirely different sense of what would be a satisfactory outcome. That disconnection is probably accelerating and dragging the leaders with it. It is a recipe for many more years of what we're seeing right now.

AMB. FREEMAN: Why should Israelis believe that there is anything that can appease Palestinian anger and hatred now? What is it that Palestinians might say that would address that very real problem? And why should Israelis believe that any spokesperson for the Palestinians has the moral and legal authority to bind all Palestinians to whatever deal is being proposed?

DR. TELHAMI: There are two problems that have raised concerns in the Israeli public about the way Barak was handling negotiations. The beginning of the intifada and the violence created a sense that the Palestinians are still intent on using force. The insistence on the right of return seemed to go against the idea of a two-state solution, one of which would have to be Jewish. That card was not played and the Palestinians did not make any serious compromise on it until the last minute. Those two things raised concerns that the Palestinians intended this more as a tactical end to a broader objective.

I think that Arafat has a chance, in the same way that Ariel Sharon does, to now unleash a diplomatic initiative, to say the right things about historic reconciliations, to reiterate the acceptance of a two-state solution, and restate the willingness of the Palestinians to live side by side with a peaceful Israel, based on the U.N. resolutions. In private, he probably also ought to say something about the right of return as an issue that will have to be resolved in a way that's compatible with Israel's core interest. These are things that are within his capacity. I would advise him to launch a diplomatic initiative of this sort, but I don't know that he's capable of it.

Q: What about the regionalization of the problem? The price at the pump is the most important reason for America's involvement in the Middle East, along with concern for the existence of the state of Israel.

AMB. ROSS: It's clear that this particular Palestinian-Israeli crisis, unlike previous ones, is very directly felt throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and we all know why: satellite television, live coverage of events. This phenomenon has made it possible for wide publics, from Morocco to Indonesia and beyond, to follow things in an immediate way. This has heightened the dilemma in which governments find themselves. In the old days, governments could take whatever position suited their narrow definition of their interests and get away with it. Now, because of the direct impact of the media, governments are having to answer to a much larger constituency. But in all of this there is a growing anti-American sentiment because of the way in which we are perceived as favoring one side over the other. This is a real dilemma and one that needs to be addressed directly.

AMB. FREEMAN: I would say it's more than that. I think we are about to experience some very serious policy dilemmas we've been able to avoid. When we have a government to whom we are supplying weapons openly proclaiming that it is using those weapons for political assassinations, this causes some real problems in terms of American law and practice. The fact that so far no one has raised this politically is testimony to the great strength of U.S.-Israeli affection, but that affection is not boundless, and it cannot avoid these questions ultimately being raised.

MR. LANG: I think that's right. In all these wrecked houses I visited, people kept bringing me bits and pieces of expended ordnance. It was all made in the United States, every bit of it. Most of it had lot numbers and model numbers on it. I brought a lot of it back with me to see exactly what it was for. But one of the flaws in our approach to the situation in the region is the illusion that these various Arab countries are like European nation-states and that issues can be detached one from the other. For example, there seems to be a belief that what we do in Iraq has no effect in places like Palestine, and that's not true. If you talk to people on the ground, you'll find that they are emotionally stirred by the other aspects of our policy. And even though in a lot of places, like Egypt, ordinary folks may not care about the Palestinian people personally at all, the collective wrong inflicted on Islam and the Arab world by the action of the Israelis, and us as their sponsors, is resented deeply.

The issue of Jerusalem cannot be overemphasized. You hear people sometimes say, "Well, after all, this is a symbolic thing." But someone once said that not by bread alone do men live. It is particularly true in this case. People feel very deeply the fact that the Haram is not in Islamic hands. They're willing to settle for its being in Palestinian hands, but they're not willing to settle for its being in Israeli hands. I've raised this in Riyadh, among very rich people who you'd think wouldn't care about it at all. There was a virtual explosion when I suggested that maybe Saudis didn't really care about what happened to the Haram. It is not true. These things are all linked.

DR. TELHAMI: In the past seven or eight years, although there have been mixed feelings about the United States, there has been an assessment that Pax Americana is working in the Middle East, that there's an order in place, a process that's going to end in peace and that people are just going to have to reconcile themselves to it. They're going to have to, therefore, try to be friendly to the United States, to position themselves for post-peace, to reap some of the benefits of that. That psychology has balanced a lot of frustrations that people had and put a lot of the hardliners on the defensive and moderates at the forefront. Right now this has collapsed. Pax Americana itself is collapsing, with the peace process, and people are preparing themselves for conflict. As the psychology changes, the calculations change, assessments of interest change, and the relationship with the United States will change.

My second point is that in the past decade American foreign policy has been largely based on employing power as the main instrument of policy, with minimal regard to public opinion. The assessment has been that (1) Arab governments are authoritarian, (2) we have a lot of incentives and threats that we can employ to get them to behave as we would like, and (3) public opinion is important on the margins but ultimately can be brought along. Sometimes that policy can work; however, you don't build any goodwill whatever for times of crisis. So between the United States and even friendly countries like Egypt, there's very little goodwill. There is a public assessment of Egypt that is different from the official relationship and a public assessment in Egypt that's very different from government-to-government relations. That ill-will and lack of trust becomes, at a time of crisis, a very important issue.

AMB. FREEMAN: This is not a hypothetical consideration or an abstraction. At present, we have a crisis in the form of a policy that has come to a dead end vis-a-vis Iraq, and a policy toward Iran that has no support anywhere internationally. The administration, to its credit, has put very high on the list of its priorities an effort to find a viable basis for a refocused policy in the Gulf. The complication introduced by the sort of public animosity to which all of the panelists have referred is considerable.

Q: Do you have any preliminary thoughts on Israel's 27-minister national-unity government in terms of what constraints it will place on Sharon's decision making?

MR. LING: The impression I had from the Labor party people was that they believed that if Sharon could not broaden his cabinet beyond the Shas-Likud base, it would last six or eight months and then collapse, probably due to the stupidity of their actions, and there would be new elections. Conversely, they said that if people thought that a wide coalition would be more stable and less extreme, it might last two and a half to three years or even longer. Some of these characters are just occupying posts. They're not going to have a great deal of authority. As you know, the Israeli government functions on the basis of the big cabinet and the inner cabinet, which is the one that really makes a difference.

It's interesting to notice who's in this government and who is not. For example, Ephraim Sneh, deputy minister of defense in the last government and the one who was effectively running the show, is in this one the transportation minister. He is no expert on transportation matters, but as a member of the right side of the Labor party, he was wanted there. The man who is not there is Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, former chief of staff. He was the one Arafat and the other senior people in the PA liked to negotiate with, and he negotiated with them continuously throughout the bad times of this intifada. He's not there, and that probably says something about the general cast of things.

DR. TELHAMI: The most important feature of this government is that it really gives Sharon a lot of leeway. If he wants to be a de Gaulle, he can. If he wants to crack down harder, he can. The first possibility would certainly have Labor support, and he can bring in a lot of his own Likud support for any possible initiative. The military side will be driven mostly by the military establishment. The fact that the defense ministry went to Labor is not a coincidence. If you look at Barak's reaction to the intifida, it's been driven by military, not political calculations, because of the way Israelis view the issue of security and deterrence. If there is an escalation on the Palestinian side, there will be an escalation on the Israeli side. Labor is going to have to take the fall for it and it will justify whatever Sharon is doing.

AMB. ROSS: On the Arab side, there is obviously the hope that this government will be led by someone who turns out to be like de Gaulle. The Syrians were always fascinated with Prime Minister Begin, who was strong enough to make peace with Egypt, to bring the evacuation of the Yamit settlement, etc. They imagine that someday a similar strong leader from the right might reproduce that kind of agreement on other fronts.

Q: We've read reports of young people boycotting Burger King and McDonald's. When does the Arab street start to affect Arab government purchasing decisions, particularly in the area of technology? That's a market that's now at about $35 billion a year. Arab governments are almost inelastically demanding close to $10 billion a year in telecommunications technology. When does this start to hurt American business's competitive position? Lebanon spent the last year studying the partial privatization of their telecommunications industry. Saudi Arabia is looking for strategic partners.

DR. TELHAMI: Arab governments should not be ignored, but one shouldn't go to the other extreme. People have exaggerated the weaknesses of Arab governments in the past. Arab governments have proven robust under very difficult circumstances. They've survived the Gulf War and have managed to, in some instances, repress, in some instances bypass, in some instances affect public opinion. So one should not conclude from what has happened in the past six months that revolution is about to happen in much of the Arab world.

However, it does have an effect on policies. It's certainly not going to push Egypt into war with Israel. The Egyptian elites in the government understand that short of an attack on Egypt, the Egyptian army will not go to war with Israel, no matter what happens with Syria and the Palestinian areas. That's over. However, short of that, there are a lot of things that they are willing to do because of mounting pressure. They've recalled their ambassador from Israel. If there is an escalation, there will be public pressure on them to take some other step, and commerce will be one of those areas that will be affected very quickly.

MR. LANG: My impression is that, although the governments are affected by mass public opinion and are somewhat apprehensive about it and are conciliating it, the likelihood of anything happening very soon in the area of large-scale business is not very great. Although Arabs probably prefer Italian suits, they also prefer American aircraft. There is a disconnect between luxury goods on the one hand and things of basic usefulness such as capital goods. In the case of most of those things, in the Gulf and in a lot of other places, people would rather buy American goods. It'll be quite a while before there would be a large-scale effect on American business.

AMB. FREEMAN: Having just been in the Gulf region, it is my sense that there is a draw-down in progress in the American business presence, in response to attitudinal change at the consumer level. Retail operations with a strong American identification are suffering. I also believe that Arab leaders in the region will find it difficult to see the prospect of a photo op with an American leader in connection with a large transaction as politically enticing. So, while people in the region will continue to behave in many ways as rational economic decision makers and to buy the best products - which are, by definition, American - they will also be affected over time if, as everyone seems to expect, this tragic situation continues to unfold in the bloody way that you have predicted.

AMB. ROSS: The first effects of the situation on us are political, and we see it in the lack of support for certain other policies that we want to pursue in the region. But on the economic and commercial front, a great deal depends on the alternatives that are available, especially with the big-ticket items like aircraft, telecommunications, et cetera. Over time, where there is a European or Japanese alternative, whatever that means in this day of the multinational corporation, things will likely move away from us. But I wouldn't go so far as to predict the old '73 scenario of an oil embargo. It would not work at this point.

Q: There seems to be an underlying assumption here that only the United States could serve as an interlocutor. No one has mentioned either the European Union or the United Nations. Did not the EU mediator play a useful role in opening up the Syrian track?

AMB. ROSS: He says he did. But from my experience in Damascus and reading the cable traffic at the time from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the critical question was always the standing of any given potential mediator with the parties. The European Union, Russia and the United Nations, despite their efforts, did not have enough standing, particularly with the Israelis, to play the essential mediating role that we took on. For the Arabs, they recognized that we had very close relations with Israel, but they recognized that that made us potentially useful as the only party with significant influence with the Israeli government. So the way the world is structured today, there is no alternative mediator.

AMB. FREEMAN: That remains to be seen in the new era. Certainly it's an accurate description of the way things have been. But enough has changed that I'm not so confident that the American monopoly is either workable or sustainable.

MR. LANG: About four or five years ago, the Council on Foreign Relations Middle East Project started a process in which people from the American government and people from the EU and the various European governments would get together once a year in various parts of the world to discuss what role there might be for the EU or European governments. This is doomed to go nowhere because the Israelis simply will not accept any other mediator than the United States. If one of the two interested parties will not accept the mediation of a third party, then there are not going to be mediators. And it's very clear to me that the U.S. government is also not particularly interested in having other major players in this thing. The general idea is that what the Europeans should contribute to this process is very simple: money to support the institutions of the emerging Palestinian state.

DR. TELHAMI: At this stage, the breakthrough is not going to come through a third party, it's going to have to come through the parties themselves. The third party is going to be a facilitator. Europeans are very well-placed to be facilitators because they would not have to wield the heavy influence of the United States to get them to conclude an agreement. Secondly, the options for the United States are not limited to intervening actively in the negotiations and sitting out completely. The United States has its own interests in the region. It has to take positions to protect them.

AMB. FREEMAN: I yield to no one in my pessimism about the capacity of the European Union to act decisively or on a sustained basis on any issue - still less, one as difficult as this. But I think the point about facilitation needs to be amended. If mediation as such is not what we are going to be doing, but rather facilitating direct deals between the parties, then the Europeans emerge as a viable guarantor, along with the United States, of the outcome. More than money might be involved. A second point is that we have yet to see how low the credibility of the United States among Arabs can fall. It may very well be that we will end up acceptable as a conciliator to the Israelis but not to the Arabs, in which case we may need a partner. So I have a somewhat more open mind about this than those who have correctly characterized the situation to date and given very good reasons for our not welcoming the Europeans in the past. We may find ourselves in the future reconsidering.

DR. SEGAL: Let me pick up the debate about the two proposals that I was putting forward. First, what we need is a very detailed Palestinian proposal to end the conflict that touches on all the issues. Second, we should focus attention on the U.S. government and try to get the Bush administration to reinstate as U.S. policy the Clinton proposals. Why do we say that the peace process is over? What ended it? I think it was the Israeli elections. Yossi Beilin said that they needed a few more weeks, given what was happening at Taba, and they would have reached an agreement. Surely, if Barak had won, the process would be going on right now. It was closed down by the Israeli public because there developed too large a gap in perception as to what was possible between the Barak government and the Israeli public. The Israeli public believed that they were being taken for suckers because they were making concessions and the Palestinians really weren't interested in ending the conflict.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think that is also a very good description of the Palestinian view of the process. There was a mirror image involved here, both thinking they were being taken for a ride to nowhere.

DR. SEGAL: There won't be any future peace process until there is a new government in Israel. It's fantasy to believe that the kinds of issues that have to be engaged and the concessions that have to be made will ever be made by Ariel Sharon. It's completely antithetical to his view of what his whole life and the Zionist project are about. The real question is, how do you change the government? The key is to reestablish the belief that potentially the conflict can be ended. Barak was quite right; it's only in exchange for seriously, permanently ending the conflict that the Israeli public is prepared to make those concessions. It's true there were Palestinian counterproposals; everything was not dead in the water. The issue is the public perception that there really was no Palestinian offer to end the conflict. The lack of credibility has gone so far that about the only thing that would speak to it would be a detailed Palestinian proposal that could be signed by Yossi Beilin and others who stayed out of the Sharon government.

Related to that is the issue of the U.S. proposal. The critical thing about the U.S. proposal is that it spoke to the Israeli public, saying, "The emperor has no clothes," on issues like Jerusalem, territorial withdrawal and even going beyond Barak on the Temple Mount. The progress that was made by the Clinton administration in terms of the American position on issues is staggering. If it hadn't happened, no one would believe that it could have happened. It essentially said to the Israeli people, "These are the specifics that constitute the reality on these issues. If you really want peace, this is the price that you're going to have to pay."

By saying afterward that this can come off the table, Clinton undermined what he was trying to do, linking it superficially to tactics of negotiation rather than casting it as a permanent feature of the reality. Barak, in his pique at Arafat, said to Sharon and the Israelis, "Yes, this comes off the table," reinforcing this confusion. The Bush administration, by changing it from American policy to merely Clinton's preference, reinforced the idea that you can have peace without establishing these terms. The United States needs to assume its role as a great power and speak truth again to those who need to hear it.

DR. TELHAMI: I'm sympathetic with a lot of what Jerry has said, though there are several points on which I disagree. One is what the outcome of the Israeli election means. I do not believe it was a rejection of the peace process or even the concessions that Barak put forth. I think it was a rejection of Barak personally. He managed to alienate everyone from left to right. First, throughout the entire election campaign, 70 percent of the Israelis continued to support the peace process, even as they were rejecting Barak in large numbers. Second, when Peres was pitted against Sharon in the polls, he was even. He had a good shot at winning, and he's not to the right of Barak on the question of peacemaking. Third, the result of the Israeli election stemmed in part from the Israeli Arabs' boycotting the election. Less than 20 percent of them voted; 95 percent of them had voted for Barak in the previous election. Their sitting out, despite the Palestinian Authority's asking them to support Mr. Barak, was not a function of their rejection of the concessions that Barak made. And they constitute 12.5 percent of the electorate.

As to Palestinian incentives in the short run, if you begin with the assumption that Sharon will never make peace, then certain things follow. First, you don't want to hand him peace in terms of absence of violence, because if his argument holds that his toughness stopped the violence, then he'll be reelected. Therefore, your incentive is to escalate. Therefore he's going to escalate. Forget about what you say or don't say in public, because everything you say is irrelevant. The reality on the ground is going to create a psychology that will nullify anything you put on the table.

In terms of putting a detailed proposal on the table. I have never seen anyone in the history of negotiations start with a complete outline of a position that's acceptable to the other side. It just doesn't happen. The breakthrough at Camp David I was psychological. Sadat went to Jerusalem. He was a gutsy guy who managed to break taboos and get the Israelis to accept him. If you read his speech at the Knesset, it was the same position that Egypt had had the day before he announced he was going. He didn't change it one little bit. When they negotiated, there was a different outcome.

When Barak came to Camp David II, he never ever put a proposal on the table that was written. It was the strangest negotiation anyone had ever seen. That's one reason why we don't know what happened. There were no documents: no American proposal, no Israeli proposal, no Palestinian proposal. When the Israeli proposal was conveyed to Arafat, it was through Clinton orally, and it was hard to tell whether it was a Clinton idea or a Barak idea. So we have a sense that there was a proposal on the table, but we don't know quite what it was.

MR. LANG: There's not going to be a detailed Palestinian proposal. The Palestinian polity is disintegrating steadily into more and more factions and competing forces. The possibility of putting together something that detailed concessions, which are necessary in any negotiating process, would be beyond any player's ability to withstand the risk. And we have more and more players all the time. Hizballah is now active politically and organizing various nefarious deeds in central Palestine as well as in the Galilee. The more players there are, the less likely it is that there will be such a proposal.

Q: Sharon has said that Jordan is the only thing between Israel and Iraq. He has also said that Jordan is Palestine. What is the viability of the peace treaty with Israel? Is King Abdullah stable?

MR. LANG: I've long been an associate of the Jordanian government, army and monarchy. I've been listening for 35 years to Israelis predicting that King Hussein would die at any time and the whole thing would disintegrate into the mish-mash of tribes and dispossessed Palestinians that it really is. But this never seems to happen. Jordanians are poor, but they handle their poverty extremely well. I've seen the young king twice in the last three or four months, and he seems to me to be very cognizant of the issues and to be working on them. He's very progressive in his thinking. I know a lot of people in the military there and I've talked to them. It appears to me that his father's decision to make him his heir instead of Prince Hassan was an extremely sound decision, in that it ensured the loyalty of the military.

AMB. ROSS: There is an element of deja vu in the current situation in Jordan. At the same time, there are growing stresses and strains. The anti-normalization movement has picked up steam; there are now formal lists of the normalizers. The list, I'm told, has just gone regional. It's being widened to exclude all kinds of normalizers with Israel all around the Arab world. There is a continuing strain between Jordanians of Palestinian origin and Jordanians of trans-Jordanian origin, and many Palestinians in Jordan will tell you that the palace is circling the wagons against them. These things won't play out immediately, but they're strains.

DR. TELHAMI: The crisis in Jordan is not just political but economic, compounding the difficulty. I also would not be surprised if some voices within Israel, if there's escalation, began calling for a rethinking of the Jordanian option.

Ephraim Enbar of Bat-Ilan University has just written a piece in which he said chaos may be good in the West Bank and Gaza because it would prove to the people the Palestinian Authority is untrustworthy. The West Bankers might start saying, "We'll go back to Jordan," and the Gazans saying, "We'll go back to Egypt." That is far-fetched, but the fact that some people in the academy are thinking about it is quite remarkable.

JOHN DUKE ANTHONY, president & CEO, National Council on

U.S.-Arab Relations: Because of the strategic aim of the Arab countries to have good standing in the World Trade Organization (Saudi Arabia, of course, is not in it yet) there's hardly a way that Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Egypt could publicly come out for a boycott without taking a significant hit in its bilateral relationship with the United States. So there's a constraint there. On the other hand, anti-U.S. sentiment is in the schools and the mosques on a weekly basis to a far more massive and pervasive degree than was ever the case previously, and this is having an impact that the previous intifada and boycotts did not. In terms of the consumer aspect, places like Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Baskin Robbins, Toys R Us and four or five others, are massively hurt. In Kuwait perhaps it is less strong than elsewhere, nor is it massive in Bahrain, but in Saudi Arabia it is quite persuasively serious. I've seen it on a day-to-day basis in the last five months, living in five of these countries. Whether it can be orchestrated and choreographed remains to be seen, when the government cannot get behind it, as in 1973-74.

Q: I'd like to invite the panel to speculate about some very difficult outcomes. Sharon is identified with sending divisions across the border into Lebanon all the way to Beirut; sending divisions across the Canal into Egypt, and building settlements on a massive scale. In all of these things, he acted despite injunctions of his government, on his own, and with the use of overwhelming military power. It was not just to punish enemies but to create a new frame of reference for negotiations. Might he think to use Israeli strength to displace population, strike Syrian WMD facilities, move the border, occupy Jerusalem? There is an overwhelming power now in Israel that many Israelis feel is not being put to good use. Is there a military option of this sort for Israel?

AMB. FREEMAN: The classic answer to your question would be ethnic cleansing.

MR. LANG: Jerusalem is occupied by the Israelis, and he is very unlikely to give that up. The fact that there is a large Arab population in the walled city and some of the other neighborhoods does not change the fact that Jerusalem is under Israeli occupation. Their authority and power there are absolute. Everybody I have talked to in Israel has indicated to me that, when they get through consolidating their position, they will have changed the borders, not with regard to the international situation, but with regard to what the Palestinians have had in their grasp up to now. Launching a major operation against a neighboring Arab state I think is probably unlikely, unless there is a severe provocation in the northern Galilee. There are a lot of people around him who are going to try to keep him from doing that kind of thing. But with regard to the Palestinians, there'll be a lot of pressure, a lot of the use of force. He doesn't shrink from that in the least; he relishes it.

DR. TELHAMI; One cannot underestimate the extent to which the Israeli psychology now is that Arabs think Israel is weak. Therefore, the Israeli military establishment believes that Israeli deterrence is no longer effective and wants to remind people that Israel remains powerful. I can imagine two scenarios where that might be heavily consequential. If there is an attack across the Lebanese border, by Hizballah or from radical Palestinian groups, you can imagine Syrian forces in Lebanon being held responsible and attacked [which occured on April 15 - Ed.]. The Syrians will not be looking for a war with Israel, but no one can tell how it might escalate. One could also imagine a Hamas bombing campaign that would create a psychology in Israel that would require major retaliation. And Sharon wants to differentiate himself from Barak in some way. The stated policy that is emerging is to retaliate against those who give orders, against groups' headquarters, not collective punishment, a very different policy from Barak's. I can imagine this ultimately accelerating the demise of the Palestinian Authority. Without a real negotiation going on, chaos could open completely new options that are now closed by virtue of the fact that Israel does have someone to negotiate with.

Q: A couple of weeks ago there was an op-ed in the The New York Times by Bassam Eid in which he suggested that perhaps there was a readiness growing among the Palestinians for the exercise of nonviolence or at least an active resistance movement. Last week the World Council of Churches discussed this in a meeting at The Hague in light of their experience in working with the South African nonviolent movement, which did not take place in an absence of violence. I'd be interested in whether the panel feels there is any ground on which an alternative movement of active resistance might be built among the Palestinian people.

DR. TELHAMI: During the first intifida, there were people like Mubarak Awad who went back and tried to build a resistance movement of that sort. In fact, one can argue that the first intifada was not militarized. There were stones, but the use of arms was minimal in the early days. Later, when Hamas got involved, it became much more militarized. I think the use of force undermines the Palestinians' moral position as a people under occupation whose situation is horrible. They not only command a great deal of international support for that moral position, but they also command support from Israel. Some Israelis feel it goes against their sense of identity or self when that happens. Having an acknowledged moral position increases your will to continue to resist for an indefinite period of time. The minute you start using violence, especially against civilians, you lose the moral high ground and it weakens you. The question is whether it's possible, whether the dynamics would allow it to happen. I was on al-Jezeera TV recently from Washington, along with two others: a representative of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and a representative of Hamas from Gaza. One of the questioners asked how international public opinion, particularly American public opinion, is affected by the intifada. Is it more sympathetic or less? I gave a nuanced answer, part of which was, "When Americans see tanks leveling neighborhoods in Ramallah, the Palestinians gain support. When the American public or the international community sees bombs blowing up civilians in Tel Aviv, they turn against the Palestinians." The Hamas person jumped in very quickly. He said, "Are you suggesting that we should allow our kids to get killed without killing some of theirs?" You have a lot of momentum of that sort on the ground. The funerals and pain that go on day after day generate that kind of reaction from some people, especially as there is no political option, at least in the short term.

AMB. ROSS: Non-violence is a noble objective. The existence of that option is known and understood among Palestinians, but, by and large, it's rejected as a sign of weakness, a gratuitous concession to an occupier who is being extremely nasty. Therefore, I don't think the ground is at all well-prepared for pursuing it.

AMB. FREEMAN: It is very hard to argue with the thesis that what is happening in the Holy Land now will take its toll not only on the American position more widely in the Middle East but also on Israel's image and the willingness of Americans to stand by it. But I would not underestimate the capacity of the American public to stand with Israel, and I don't believe that the U.S. tie with Israel will likely be questioned by anyone in American politics at any serious level, almost regardless of what happens. Whether that is good or bad I leave to each of you to judge.