Negotiating Middle East peace: can the past be a guide to the future? (Symposium).

Walker, Edward S., Jr. ; Jahshan, Khalil E. ; Shain, Yossi 等

The following is an edited transcript of the twenty-sixth in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was hem on September 20, 2001, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., moderating.

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

Last week's atrocities (September 11) have once again focused attention in the United States on the Middle East. And the administration, if reports can be believed, is moving vigorously to press both Israel and the Palestinians to talk. Clearly, many people in the United States are convinced that it is more important than ever to U.S. interests to find a path to peace in that troubled land.

There is a common assumption that at some point, under some circumstance, perhaps after the parties have exhausted themselves in frightfulness to each other, they will come back to the table and pick up where they left off. We're here to examine that assumption. It is possible, given all of the changes over the past year since the peace process broke down, that that assumption is not correct and that the past is no longer a guide to the future.

The past year has seen, for one reason or another, severe strain in U.S. relations with countries in the region, Arab countries in particular. It's seen the steady escalation of violence by Israel and the Palestinians. There are numerous dead on both sides. The casualty figures for the Palestinians are absolutely appalling: I think almost 600 dead and almost 20,000 wounded. And while the figures are smaller on the Israeli side, they're no less horrifying. The resort to frightfulness on both sides has clearly hardened attitudes; it has not promoted compromise. And those who thought that the use of force would bring the other party to its knees have been disappointed.

In this context we have to ask whether the will exists for compromise; whether the compromise can, as has long been envisaged, consist of the exchange of territory for peace; whether any settlements -- some of which were apparently almost agreed to be retained in the last gasp of the peace process -- are acceptable to Palestinians now, given all that has happened; whether the border adjustments that were contemplated have any validity at all. What will be done about the issue of Jerusalem, where there was progress but no agreement? Are the U.N. resolutions on which the peace process ultimately rests still valid and a decent guide to action? Is it possible, given all that has happened, that Arab countries can normalize relations with Israel, or that Israelis still want to normalize relations with Arabs?

All of this raises questions about the role of the United States, an issue much debated since the new administration came into office with a different approach than its predecessor, and whether the United States can, as in the past, hold a monopoly, be the sole broker of peace, when it doesn't have the credibility with either side that it once had.

EDWARD S. WALKER, JR., former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs; president, Middle East Institute

I don't think you can deal with the peace process in a vacuum now. We have a totally new situation in the region. We have had a war thrust upon us, a war that in my view cannot be won by military means, although there may be a military component to it.

But this is a war that's going to be fought out in the trenches of men's minds, particularly in terms of the support that we can gather throughout the world to fight the scourge of terrorism. The organizations that are involved in terrorism are scattered throughout the world in small cells. They are not tightly bound together. They tend to get cooperation from one another, but there is no real headquarters, no head to these many tentacles. It would be very satisfying to see the end of Osama bin Laden, but the fact is that it wouldn't answer the problem. The problem is much deeper, and it's going to take a much more concerted effort over a long period of time. It will probably be the hardest war we have fought, with the possible exception of the war on drugs, to which it bears some similarities.

In order to win this war, we have to have the support of the countries in the region. This is where you start getting into questions that have very little to do with Osama bin Laden, but a lot to do with the attitudes of people in the region. Osama bin Laden and the people that are around him appear intent on destroying America for a host of reasons, in order primarily to recover the holy land of Saudi Arabia from the corrupt puppet government that the United States supports.

That has very little to do with what the rest of the region is thinking and feeling. The rest of the region is deeply concerned with the Palestinian problem, and with the plight of the Iraqi people. Those concerns haven't gone away with this attack. They are compounded every time al-Jazeera television goes on the air or CNN does a report. Pictures of Palestinians being shot and the suffering of people come across the airwaves, and the Arab public is enraged.

This is a whole new era: the information age, when people have access to independent lines of communication, to the Internet and so on. This is not something that is stimulated by governments. It's something that the people are pushing on the governments, and so the governments will react. Accordingly, if we want to have the support of these governments, we have to help them in their own relationships with their people in order to reduce the pressure on them. And that has a lot to do with the peace process.

The United States is a long-time friend and a very close ally of Israel. Arabs don't mind that because it has always been clear to at least most of my Arab friends that the United States is part of the solution. This is the basic tenet that Sadat put out when he first talked about going to Jerusalem, and it has been held ever since by the bulk of the Arab governments and by many of the Arab people.

As long as we are part of the solution, we can be well received, we can cooperate, we can get the kind of support that we're going to need. If, however, we turn our backs on the peace process, if we decide that we are totally focused on this war on terrorism, then I fear that we are going to see considerable pressure build up in the region. That pressure is going to encourage governments in the area to put some distance between us.

For them to stand shoulder to shoulder is going to be easy over the next few weeks because the emotion is out there. People understand our pain, our anguish, and they will cooperate. But a month from now, two months from now, as the TV pictures come on and we start seeing more violence in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, that support will erode. That, I'm afraid, will be the death knell of our war on terrorism, because this is going to be protracted, it's going to take years rather than weeks or months, and we're going to have to hold the coalition together.

That's easy to say, but it's not very easy to do. One of the reasons that the administration felt it should not engage in the peace process immediately -- and I was of this mind myself -- was that the parties need to come to grips with their own problems and with each other and come to some conclusions about what their objectives are. That process has not happened. I have come around to believing that it never will happen as long as they are forced into each other, as long as they are locked with one another in this violence and constant bloodshed and pain. They need to have somebody come between them, somebody that can help them understand that there is a potential for a solution out there, and that negotiation and a reduction in violence is not a futile path.

One of the problems of the Israeli departure from Lebanon was that it encouraged a great many people in the Arab world to believe that violence will win political concessions and that Hizballah was successful in forcing Israel out because it attacked the Israeli army. There is very little appreciation of the internal workings of the Israeli government or politics that led to that decision.

That viewpoint, I believe, gave Arafat the sense that there was a choice. He didn't have to go to Camp David under pressure to make an agreement. He had the option of walking away from the final push and resorting to violence as a means of bringing further pressure on the government of Israel in order to get further concessions. For a while it seemed to work; indeed, as they moved towards Taba, Barak continued to negotiate, and there was continuing concession on both sides.

But the lesson learned was a very bad one. It is with us still today, and it is a guide for our own behavior in this particular situation. We can't start this process unless we're prepared to see it through and see a victory on our side. Otherwise we will encourage a scourge of terrorism in the world such as you've never seen. It will be damaging to our relations in virtually every country in the region, and it may even cause the instability of some of our friends.

I can't overemphasize the fact that this is something we have to go into with our eyes open. We have to know what we're doing. We have to be clear that all of the issues that face us in that part of the world are going to be linked together, not by us and not by any government there, but by al-Jazeera and by CNN. We have to deal with all of the issues. We have to be broad in our approach in order to support our efforts with our allies to eliminate the scourge of terrorism.

I think we can do it if we're smart and if we avoid the trap of appearing to be anti-Islamic and anti-Arab. The worst thing that people in this country can do today is to vent any kind of anger on our Arab-American friends, citizens or on the issue of Islam. We have to separate this out from those two subjects. It is not an Arab problem. It is not an Islamic problem. It is a terrorist problem. If we don't do that, we're going to fall into the trap that Bin Laden has set, and we'll be the ones who lose.

AMB. FREEMAN: I just want to make one comment in response to something Ned said. If you read The Wall Street Journal this morning, you will find the noted Arabist and Islamic scholar Norman Podhoretz analyzing the Arab psyche and Islam in great detail. I think this is exactly what we do not need. I do not look to the editors of the newspapers in the Arab world for insight into the Jewish psyche, Judaism or the politics of Israel. And we need to be very careful not to engage in foolish, counter-productive, indeed, deeply offensive and ultimately dangerous attribution of our fantasies to other people.

KHALIL E. JAHSHAN, vice-president, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

The question that is raised here, "Negotiating Middle East Peace: Can the Past be a Guide to the Future?" is apt. Few other conflicts around the world or in history have been so embedded in the past, to the point where there is no way to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestine question or even to contemplate a political solution for that conflict without understanding its past.

Clearly both the Israelis and the Palestinians have their own versions of history. Therefore they also have developed their own version of what constitutes a comprehensive, just, fair, lasting, secure peace, from their own perspectives. These narratives have often been depicted as irreconcilable, occasionally even mutually exclusive, making it very difficult to deal with negotiating this conflict in a detached manner.

In spite of more than six decades of conflict and at least 76 or 77 attempts at resolving the conflict since 1937, the first Partition Plan, the parties remain captives to their past. Israel, for example, at the age of 53 remains unable to redefine its identity in modern terms that are reconcilable with its environment or even reconcilable with its own internal demographic realities. The Palestinians, like all Arabs, remain unable to break the barrier separating tradition and modernity by liberating themselves from the heavy burden of a long and complex history, and charting a new course for a modern nation adjusted to today's reality.

Every time they try, they seem to hit a brick wall, or, a better comparison, a thick, bullet-proof glass like the ones you see in the inner city fried-chicken places, where you can't get to the cashier. You can't see what's on the other side of a brick wall. The frustration of that thick glass is that you see what's on the other side but you can't taste it, smell it or touch it. That's the reason for the frustration we keep witnessing every day in different expressions of violence in the Middle East.

There is a rich past in the region, not just in terms of conflict, but also in terms of conflict resolution. I mentioned 1937. Usually people tell you the strife started in `48 with the establishment of Israel, but it was an emerging conflict. People saw it coming and began to propose ways to try to defuse it. Since then we have seen tons of these resolutions. There are books listing these 77 attempts at peacemaking in the Middle East, going back to the Dulles Plan, the Eden Proposal, the Moshe Sharett Proposal, the Canadian Proposal, the Australian Proposal, Dag Hammarskjold's proposal, the Joseph E. Johnson Proposal, Bourguiba's proposals, Eshkol's proposal, et cetera, up to the recent period starting in 1991 with the Bush and Baker ideas.

When you look at this record, what do you do with all that history of peacemaking in the Middle East when you come back to the negotiating table? The main thing we could do, as a favor to ourselves, is to avoid the mistakes of the past. There are two questions that have contributed to the huge burial ground of peace proposals in the Middle East. I remember people like Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller and Dan Kurtzer, way back in `91 and `92 used to say that we have to overcome them if we are to succeed. They are very short, very simple: who and what? Who represents the Palestinians and what is this peace process all about? The magic of the Bush-Baker plan at its earliest phase was the fact that it addressed these questions. For the first time, even though it was haphazard and not quite direct, it allowed the Palestinians to participate in choosing delegates of their own to participate in the process.

As to the second question, the collapse of the Oslo process has left this issue very confused today. And since right now there is no alternative as far as we're concerned to the United States, we have no plan but "Mitchell." I like George Mitchell. He's a fellow Arab-American, and he's done a good job out there. But let's assume that the cease-fire that was recently announced holds and we get into Phase Two, trust-building measures and what have you; confidence-building measures.

What happens in Phase Three? The Mitchell Plan is not a peace plan; it is a ceasefire proposal, an attempt to get people to stop shooting one another. What are we going to do at Phase Three? That's where the question before this panel becomes very important. What is still valid from previous negotiations, and what is not? We have one party saying, we need to pick up from where we left off, and you have one party saying, whatever was done in the past is obsolete. We're not going to honor anything so we have to start from scratch. We're not talking about 80 percent or 90 percent or 60 percent. And, you know, when you hear Mr. Sharon, it looks like he was on vacation from this universe over the past 11 years. And so to get him at the table with Yasser Arafat would be a great achievement, and I hope they will do that. But what are they going to talk about? And that's where I think, from a policy perspective, we have a serious element missing here in Washington.

I was delighted to sit down with William Bums this week and others at the White House, the president's advisers, talking about the silver lining in this crisis. We hate to admit it, but we can't develop this coalition that Ned talked about simply based on a negative concept. We are against terrorism, but the administration is convinced that there has to be an affirmative aspect to this coalition. The coalition has to stand for something. It would help give a measure of credibility to whatever we are trying to do. But that requires preparation. Goodwill cannot produce a Middle East peace process. It needs preparation. In spite of the fact that there are good intentions of taking advantage of the current crisis to revisit the Arab-Israeli conflict, there has been absolutely no preparation.

We are faced with the same situation as at Camp David. We brought the parties to Camp David with very little preparation to ensure success. We are faced with a situation, in a way, that is promising. We're delighted that the administration is projecting ahead and envisioning a kind of new deal coming out of the rabble of the terrorist attacks, but that is not enough. We have been asking this administration from day one, as Ambassador Freeman said, either to get involved proactively on its own terms, or negative events in the Middle East will dictate the terms of involvement there. As we cope with the political, social, economic and psychological fallout of September 11, a credible, proactive policy aimed at achieving a real, comprehensive, just and lasting peace would be the best counter-terrorism policy that the country could pursue at this time.

YOSSI SHAIN, visiting professor of government, Georgetown University

When one thinks about the possibilities of renewing peace negotiations in the Middle East, one must remember that there are a lot of new elements on the table that must be taken into account. And since America has declared war, everything that happens in the Middle East and between Israelis and Palestinians will be circumscribed by this war. Even though the elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remain separate from the larger war, the conflict itself is likely to be entangled in the American response to recent events.

I have been asked by the Council to discuss some issues from an "Israeli perspective," but I can only provide my own reading of those issues -- there is no unitary Israeli understanding. Just one year ago there was a broad understanding in Israel that the Middle East conflict would be solved soon within the state system, between Israel and its Arab neighbors and between Israel and the Palestinians. There was a general hope that the Palestinians would establish secure boundaries for themselves alongside Israel in a deal that was supposed to be accomplished at Camp David, and that Israel would arrive at a peace deal with Syria after withdrawing from Lebanon.

With the collapse of Oslo and the ensuing Palestinian violence, there has been a tremendous shift in belief in the viability of a state solution. Israelis at large -- the government, the people -- felt that as Barak was moving forward in negotiations even after Camp David, the result was increasing violence and insecurity (perhaps inspired by Hizballah and the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon). The Israeli psyche changed dramatically. It became clear to Israelis that this is a conflict of "us versus them" in the broader sense of radical Arab/Islamic sentiment versus the Jews, with no moderate Arab voices being heard. The explosion, which included a violent clash with Arab Israelis, was unprecedented.

One of the main questions that will be discussed in the next few years in this country and around the globe is to what extent Islam has been hijacked; to what extent only radical Islamists are raising their voices. Indeed, Arafat himself was perceived in Israel as someone who was appropriating Hamas's line and moving with it. As he came out of Camp David he said, "It is not for me to negotiate over Jerusalem; I cannot represent one billion Muslims." When Arafat released Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists from jail, the parameters of the conflict shifted dramatically in the minds of Israelis and their government. This led to a watershed in the perceptions within Israeli society regarding the prospects for peace. There has been a complete overhaul of the Israeli political system as a result of the second intifada, with the Labor party today basically indistinguishable from the Likud or, perhaps even worse, without any serious vision and leadership.

The very basic notion that Arafat should have a monopoly over the means of violence -- what a state is all about -- has, de facto, completely collapsed as a result of the terror. Israelis have felt that with the increasing violence and with terrorism being advocated on television and in sermons by religious leaders and PA officials, by Egypt and by the Arab-Muslim world at large -- which has become virulently antisemitic -- the conflict has changed dramatically. This legacy will be with us for a long time to come.

We are now facing an attempt to bring about a cease-fire, and I hope it will hold, yet I am very skeptical. Ararat is no longer a partner for peace in the minds of decision makers, as I read them, even of left-leaning decision makers. He may be a partner for negotiating some cease-fire agreements, but that's also an open question. In fact, until September 11, he was not even a partner for negotiating cease-fires.

These new developments are very important for understanding who will be the next partner for the Israelis. Israelis do not trust Arafat. Barak, who dealt with him, called him a "thug." Shlomo Ben-Ami, who dealt with Arafat, considers him an unreliable partner for negotiations. Even Yossi Beilin, who is running back and forth to meet with Arafat, doesn't, I think, consider him a genuine partner anymore. Thus, the question of returning to the table and negotiating a solution is very problematic indeed. One has to consider, as we move along with this new war over the next few years, what has happened in the Arab world as well. There are two central issues here. One is the nature of the Arab states next to Israel, and to what extent there is an alternative ideology to the current stagnation of Arab states, aside from radical Islamism. For decades, we were moving within the state ideology of Arab nationalism. To some extent, this ideology collapsed under authoritarian Arab regimes and allowed Islamism to be the only game in town.

Regardless of these realities, Israeli governments, even Netanyahu's, have always said, "We don't negotiate with states based on the way they conduct their domestic affairs. We take a realist approach. States are responsible for agreements." It will be very interesting to examine the new situation in light of the fact that some states will be under increasing strain, possibly on the brink of failing. There is the case of Lebanon that will have to be addressed. To what extent will Hizballah be part of the community of terrorists, as the Americans define it? To what extent will Syria be part of the anti-terror coalition? These are very difficult questions.

As America is building a new coalition, Israel is asking to what extent it will be compromised by it. Will Israel be pushed, as people are now perceiving, along the Madrid path or perhaps the Oslo-Madrid path?

These questions are not likely to be answered soon, though patience in the Middle East is a scarce resource, and people are likely to draw hasty conclusions from every development. The last year has witnessed a new realignment within the Israeli public and within the Jewish public. It has been a long time since Jewish unity was as strong as it has been lately, with the diaspora becoming more and more involved and even being called upon by the government of Israel to be more engaged in Israel's security deliberations. There's been a complete shift in terms of questions of identity. The whole posture of what people call post-Zionism has almost disappeared with the introduction of a new Zionist approach and purpose, as a result of the new threat to Jewish existence. Alongside despair at the violence and at peace's failure, there is growing sense of patriotism in Israel and an understanding, which I have never seen in recent years, that this is now a struggle over the basics, no longer a struggle at the margins. These are quite remarkable changes from just one year ago.

Finally, there is the very big question of the Arab Israelis or the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, citizens of Israeli society. There are new calls for the total empowerment of Arab Israelis, on the one hand, and for total responsibility on the other. There have been colossal failures of leadership in the Middle East, from Barak to Ararat and the Arab leaders themselves. Within Israeli society we have had a lot of questions recently regarding members of the Israeli parliament calling in public for armed struggle against Israel alongside Hizballah leader Nasrallah and Sheikh Yassin, the leader of Hamas. The issue of domestic Arab Israelis will take center stage more and more in the Israeli polity. If indeed, as I hope, a new social contract can one day be established, this will be one of the more important issues to be discussed.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think you've raised a number of very interesting and difficult questions and painted a rather grim picture. If it is indeed tree that the Israelis and perhaps the Jewish diaspora are united in regarding the Palestinians' leader as a thug, probably Palestinians and Arabs are now united in regarding the prime minister of Israel as a mass murderer, which doesn't speak very well for the prospect of dialogue we have been discussing.

You raise another issue that perhaps we can come back to later. I feel, as you do, a sense that the Jewish diaspora and the Israelis do have a sort of new unity coming out of this. But I wonder whether part of the consequence of this is a breakdown in open dialogue between Jews and non-Jews. I hear more and more people outside the Jewish community expressing grave concern about some of the directions of Israeli policy: the political assassinations, the use of force on a mass level. Yet the view in the Jewish community is completely at odds with these discussions and probably more united than ever before. This is a bit disturbing because it suggests to me that we are importing into our own society some of the divisions that have troubled the Middle East, and that we've done very well to avoid here.

I now would like to call on Ivan Eland, who can be counted upon always for a stimulating and interesting perspective. To point out how very prescient he is, he's just published a book called Putting Defense Back Into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security Policy in the Post-Cold War World.

IVAN ELAND, director of defense policy studies, Cato Institute

I appreciate the opportunity to give my views today. Chas. described them as "always stimulating and interesting." That's a euphemism for politically incorrect [laughter], doubly incorrect for an audience that is interested in the Middle East, because people who are interested in the topic usually tend to advocate activism, exactly what I'm not advocating. When we have a cataclysmic event, as we did last week, it is a good time to reassess policy. We need to step back and look at this from the wider perspective of U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. role in the Middle East.

The terrorist attack is now putting pressure on Bush to do something in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations so he can build the coalition to fight this broad war on terrorism. There's an exchange of interests here. Bush is saying, I'm not going to get more involved in the peace process, and we really need your help in supporting our strikes and our wider war. I think getting support for international strikes is good, but of course we do have a right to retaliate, and I think most countries are going to support us in the short term anyway. In the long term, I sided with the initial Bush reluctance to get involved, and I think we've also been too aligned with Israel in the past. So I don't mind getting involved in a more neutral, mediating role. But I think Bush should avoid getting sucked back into a more active role in a process that he had the good instincts to keep himself out of, or at least keep a low profile.

Neither side is ready to solve this conflict. But in the long term, I think we need to take a wider look at our deep involvement in the Middle East. Why are we there? Two main reasons that we are there: oil and Israel. Bin Laden is very clear in why he does these attacks: because of the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia -- oil -- and because of what he sees as our excessive support for Israel. That's why he is attacking us.

So we have to ask the question, is the Middle East strategic? To everyone in Washington the answer is, yes, oil is strategic. Some would say also that our relationship with Israel is strategic. I say no to both of those questions. If you look at the underlying economics of this, during the Cold War we were afraid the USSR would somehow get control of the oil, and we regarded Israel as helpful to any U.S. military action that might need to be taken in that area, and also as a strategic outpost in the effort to contain communism.

Well, the Cold War is long over, but we haven't changed our policy. It's on autopilot. First of all, we really don't need to defend oil. The problem is that economists don't talk to national security types or the national security types don't listen. Before the Gulf War, both Milton Friedman on the right and James Tobin on the left -- both Nobel laureates -- wrote op-ed pieces saying, you can go to war against Saddam Hussein if you want, but don't do it for the oil. The oil is going to flow anyway. The countries need to sell it more than we need to buy it. They are heavily dependent on exports of this commodity for foreign exchange. There was an economic study done that showed that if Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the price increases that he would have been able to impose would have cost the United States 1/2 of 1 percent of its economy.

We never talk about going to war for semiconductors, yet we are dependent on east Asia for 80 percent of our semiconductors, and we spend 35 percent more on semiconductors than we do on oil, and we have a heavier dependence on one region for that key item. Sheikh Yamani, one of the architects of the 1973 oil embargo, recently said that the era of oil is over. He was referring to hybrid cars, fuel-cell cars, et cetera. We're dependent on a lot of products in a globalized economy, and I don't think oil is any more strategic than any other.

The second thing that we need to look at is whether Israel's existence is now threatened. I say it isn't. It is at peace with the most powerful Arab state and with Jordan. Syria, Israel's only major contiguous enemy, hasn't modernized its military because it lost its Soviet benefactor. Israel is now a wealthy country with a vibrant high-tech sector. Of course, it would be even wealthier if it regained the foreign investment it has lost since the peace process went sour, but nonetheless it still is a very prosperous state.

Israel, of course, should solve the Palestinian problem, but it does not threaten its existence. Iraq is not contiguous with Israel, and you can argue that the Gulf War actually reduced Israeli security because they didn't get hit with missiles until the U.S. intervened. Israel needs a missile defense and is now building one. But we have to ask ourselves whether we should disengage from the Middle East, and whether we should pay parties to do what is in their own interest. That's a very hard-line attitude, but that's what happened with the Camp David peace accords. At least that was during the Cold War. Now I think we should question whether we want to do that any more.

I don't mind our being a mediator when the parties are ready to come to the table, but our interventionist policy in the Middle East has been one of the main factors leading to the recent attack. I think we need to question U.S. interventionist foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.

Is that appeasing terrorists? No. I'm for a very strong military strike, but I think we ought to keep it narrow because I think we're going to fall into Bin Laden's trap. It's a common practice for guerrilla movements and terrorist organizations to attack and then try to induce a massive retaliation, which then galvanizes their own forces and brings about external support for their cause. The KLA did this in Kosovo, and I think that's the trap that's been laid here. We need to be very careful about a wider war, attacking other countries. Are we going to include Hizballah, Syria -- all these countries that we're now trying to get to support us that also support terrorist groups?

After the dust settles, we do need to ask these tough questions. Are we bringing on these attacks by being overly interventionist in a region which I don't regard as strategic? We can be a negotiating mediator, but the parties really have to want to solve the conflict, and they're not there yet. Is it really worth taking on mass casualties in our own homeland, particularly if the terrorists get biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, which could make last week's attack look puny in comparison?

In our concern for security in other regions -- we learned this during the Cold War, when we were fighting a worldwide enemy, which which is no longer there -- we tend to overdo it, and I think that's now endangering the homeland. The cost-benefit ratio of intervention has dramatically changed. We're always fighting the last war. During the Cold War, the benefits of intervention were far greater. We had to combat the Soviet Union, and the costs were manageable because we learned how to only be in conflict with the Soviets in peripheral areas. We never challenged each other's main areas, Eastern Europe or North America.

But now that has changed. The benefits of the intervention are far lower since we don't have a global enemy, and I think you see the costs of U.S. intervention in the Middle East last week. Khalil said that solving the peace process is the best counterterrorism program that you could have, and I would agree with that if there was any likelihood that the problem would be solved, and if it would take care of all the problems. But of course the oil problem is still there and our presence in Saudi Arabia would still be there. Khalil also mentioned that we've tried 77 times to broker peace in the Middle East. We ought to learn something: let the parties get ready to negotiate. Then we can help them do that.

National-security policy should increase security and not decrease it. The first goal of any security policy should be to safeguard U.S. territory and the people in it. We've got to start there and build outward. But we now have this extended defense perimeter which is actually making our homeland vulnerable. We really need to reassess security in view of the September 11 incident. It is a watershed event that should make us think about what we're doing, our role in the world, in the Middle East, and in the negotiating of Middle East peace.

AMB. FREEMAN: Many panelists addressed the question of the formation of some sort of grand coalition against terrorism, which is the current focus of American diplomatic activity. It's clear that there are a number of things that could destroy that effort. They include the absence of evidence that is persuasive about who the perpetrators were, and indiscriminate attacks, attacks that are not focused on those who carded out these atrocities last Tuesday and who may be prepared to carry out further reprisals following whatever action we take against them; one has to imagine that they have already planned ahead for this cycle of violence. Or the United States could act unilaterally. That would also destroy any possibility of international cooperation. It has been suggested to one degree or another by every speaker that the subject we have been discussing is either the principal factor or a contributory factor bearing on this question of terrorism. In one way or another, all of the speakers alluded to connections between the terrible problems that Israelis and Palestinians have made for each other and our problems.

So Khalil may be right: the most effective anti-terrorism program might be to try to solve this issue or to have it solved. I was rather hoping, since this is the Jewish New Year, that we would have some good news, and I didn't hear any.

Q&A

Q: Is there, even in the new situation, a role for Europe, not only in the specific Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also in getting all sides to tone down what has become horrendous invective?

MR. JAHSHAN: The answer is a definite yes. The failure of the Oslo process and subsequent developments clearly illustrate that U.S. hegemony over negotiations or peacemaking or Middle East policy in general cannot continue. The U.S. purposeful, conscious bias toward Israel has contributed to the collapse of the peace process. We downplayed it over the years here internally in the States, but it came back to haunt us, and it did contribute to the failure of the process.

Now the question is what role for Europe. In the first few months the administration did not want to get involved heavily, so it delegated, if you will, to Europe. They gave Europe the role of carrying the broom and the dust pan to clean up after us. Is Europe willing to play just that limited role? Does it have more of an ambitious role in mind? And will we, if we begin to see a growing role for Europe, allow it? I think, no. Washington still does not want Europe to replace it in the Middle East. At the same time, it doesn't want to play the role itself.

DR. ELAND: I agree with Khalil completely on this point. The role for Europe should be increased. Our rich, European allies should do more in regard to security and defense, and certainly in the Middle East peace process.

AMB. WALKER: I don't know that we're going to have a lot of choice. If we want to have strong European cooperation in this effort to bring terrorism under control, I think they are also going to be very interested in insuring that we're engaged in the peace process. They will see connections, whether they are there or not. So I think that the Europeans will probably want to see a more actively engaged administration. There will be a trade-off in that regard.

In terms of the more general question, I have always thought that we should have a more open approach to peace negotiations and include not just the European states but the regional states like Egypt and others. This wasn't done prior to Camp David, and that was one of the real problems. At the last minute, when the president got on the phone to talk to Mubarak about talking some sense into Arafat, Mubarak had no idea what he was talking about and did not feel that he could engage at that point. So we have to bring along a rather broad coalition on the peace process as well as on the question of terrorism.

DR. SHAIN: I think Europe will have very little role to play in the Middle East in the future, though it will try to play such a role. That is due to the nature of the European Union and its decision-making process. While we have been hearing statements here and there from Joschka Fischer, from Tere Larsen, from Tony Blair, sometimes from the French, Europe is incapable of doing anything in the Middle East in a joint concentrated manner without American leadership. Javier Solana can run back and forth, but this is irrelevant to the Middle East in terms of basic arrangements. I have very little doubt that the Europeans will not play a crucial role. After the collapse of the intifada, Shlomo Ben-Ami advocated growing European involvement. Nothing materialized because of division within Europe itself and because uncertainties on the ground do not make such intervention likely. Europeans will play a role in the coalition, but they will not be very important in the final analysis in defining America's goals. It will be the United States that builds the coalition ideologically and identifies targets as we move into what is likely to be a very long struggle. The United States will be acting in some ways unilaterally -- in some instances drawing European support, at other times drawing European criticism. That will not be a deterrent to American foreign policy, nor will it be relevant, in the long run, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which I think is separate from the plan that Americans will put forward for fighting terrorism, even though it will be injected into it by the Arabs and even by Osama bin Laden himself.

Q: In regard to the importance of petroleum, I am struck by the willingness of leaders in many of these countries to impoverish their citizens so long as their own lifestyle doesn't change, so I question whether or not the oil would continue to flow under these circumstances. I'm struck by how inelastic the demand for oil appears to be in this country and the howls of complaint whenever prices rise as a result of reduced availability.

DR. ELAND: These governments may not distribute the profits of the oil, but for their national coffers they would like to keep foreign exchange coming. I have no doubt that they'll sell the oil because they don't have much else to sell. Oil is inelastic in demand, but we always have these oil-price scares during the summer. The economists at my institute said, if you let the market work, the price will go back down, and it did. In 1973, that's what led to this national trauma. If you go back and look at the economic data, it was U.S. monetary policy -- they turned on the monetary spigots that caused a lot of the stagflation. The increasing price of one commodity does not lead to inflation, which is a general price increase. If you have a fixed budget, people spend a lot less on other commodities or goods and those prices go down. So we have to separate the price of one commodity's increasing from the general phenomenon of inflation. When you look at the `73 crisis, there's an economist named Doug Bohey who factored out all the other factors -- monetary policy, et cetera -- and found that oil had about 0.35-percent effect on the U.S. GDP. There were a lot of other factors. Of course, that has never percolated to the media, so every time the price of oil rises, we get a scare like we had this summer. A lot of it is media hype.

AMB. FREEMAN: When the price of oil is extraordinarily low and our friends in the Gulf are hurting, there is very little discussion of those consequences or indeed any sympathy at all for the producers. The only time we're interested in this is when our own pocketbooks are gouged.

Q: I'm not quite sure what victory in the war against terrorism means. Against a nationstate, you occupy the country, remove the government, destroy the army. But terrorism is much more amorphous and diverse.

Suppose Bin Laden leaves Afghanistan and goes to another country. Then all this military preparation would have to be focused on that country. If he goes to still another country, the focus has to be on the third country. There's not only bin Laden, there are Basque terrorists, Corsican terrorists, the IRA, terrorists in Indonesia. When is there a final victory over terrorism?

AMB. WALKER: I didn't choose the framework here. It was chosen by the attack on the two towers and by the president and his response. The war terminology is an inept description for what we are engaged in. This is not a war against a specific location. This is a war against ideas, against people's minds. It has to be engaged in virtually every country. It's not just a question of the Middle East. You have cells in Germany, you have cells in Latin America, you have cells in this country. It is going to be a long, intensive effort to try to eliminate the financing, increase the intelligence cooperation, engage in legal actions. At the same time, keep in mind that we have to take, at some point, a hard look at what it is that creates this problem in the first place. So there are definitely some issues that we have to deal with in terms of why terrorism exists.

But the war against terrorism, as I have suggested, is something that's going to be years long. And victory is described by the general acceptance in the world that terrorism is not a politically viable lever in international affairs; that it does not lead to benefits or results -- something this country has stood for for a long time. You don't negotiate with terrorists. You don't give in to terrorist demands. That's a principle that many countries in the world still haven't accepted.

Q: What's the point of the big military buildup?

AMB. WALKER: I don't think this is a victory that can be won by military means. Perhaps in the short run, for the American psyche and the commitment that has been made, we may have to engage in military action, but I don't think that that's going to solve anything. Even if we manage to kill Osama bin Laden, the roots of this thing are much stronger.

AMB. FREEMAN: I was abroad when the atrocity occurred, and it was very interesting to observe reactions to the sudden introduction of military overflights of Washington and New York and the deployment of aircraft carriers off New York. The predominant reaction by thinking people was that these moves were a demonstration of our confusion and impotence rather than our capacity to deal with the problem because this is not a problem that can be dealt with from 15,000 feet.

I take the war rhetoric as having a different significance. I think the phrase "act of war" has a resonance for Americans in two senses. First, it is a legal term, and it says that the normal peace-time constraints on our behavior no longer apply; second, it is a call to mobilization and to national unity. It evokes memories of Fort Sumter, of the Lusitania, of Pearl Harbor, and it is a valid political term in that context. But like you and like Ned, I have a hard time seeing what the relevance of B-2 bombers to people in caves in Afghanistan might be. I would like to be wrong and that all of this military might, in fact, will contribute to some kind of answer in the sense that Ned gave it; that is, that the ruthless use of cruel violence against innocent civilians will be punished with sufficient severity that it will no longer be an attractive option for those who are passionately aggrieved against the United States or anyone else. But I have my doubts.

DR. SHAIN: I consider this war a total war, as President Bush has described it, and when you have a total war, all means, as the president said, are available to you. This means, among other things, that the war has to be resolved within the state system. Each state will have to contribute its share, lest it compromise its own standing. This means that Osama bin Laden will not be able to move quickly across frontiers. States that will be available for terrorism will be severely punished. I think that the solution is more simple than people assume, although it will be a complex operation in terms of goals and stages. The issue of global terrorism is solvable within the nation-state system, which respects international norms. Bear in mind that nation-states have eradicated terrorism in their midst many times. In Europe, it was within a democratic framework. In the Middle East, authoritarian regimes will have to give their own answers.

Islamist terrorism has not been adequately addressed in this country or on the European continent, since many have been reluctant to accept the notion of an Islamist threat and have been hiding behind the pernicious idea that only the West has been the source of grievances. This idea has been nourished in universities and has made headway in the State Department as well. Ideologically, at least, this war is certainly comparable to the total war against Japan and Nazi Germany. There can be no compromise with Islamist ideology. Just as the Axis powers were brought to their knees because they were also acting in a certain manner, so too must proponents of jihad against the West be fully defeated by the West or by the Arab and Muslim states in which they dwell. Once targets are identified, and states are called upon to assume responsibility or bear the consequences, I think there will be results. America has been attacked in the most devastating fashion, and people will not forget that. As a result, I believe that America will respond with determination and might.

Bush is calling on Arafat to be with us; he will call on the Syrian president; he will call on the Egyptian president, and I assume that they will heed the call, but that they will be Janus-faced in their actions, as they always have been in these sorts of circumstances. Egypt, which will be under increasing scrutiny on Washington's radar screen, is more likely to take action against Islamist terrorism. Ararat is a different story. My assumption is that American forces will respond not only in Afghanistan but in other places as well. So I don't see that terrorists can move so quickly. If there is an infrastructure, it can be fought against. Historically there are many examples of this.

AMB FREEMAN: There is an irony here which Ivan may wish to address. That the United States, until now, has been unique in that our defense department has not had a defense function. It has been charged with supporting intervention in areas remote from our shores and not with homeland defense. The reactions to this and the incomprehension with which employees at the Pentagon greeted the attack on the Pentagon -- not to mention the horrors in New York -- are emblematic of that mental lapse. We've had two oceans to protect us, and we have assumed that we can act with impunity throughout the world. We can do things to other people, and they can do nothing to us. That world is gone, and therefore, whatever else is going to happen, we are going to be focused now not just on events abroad, but also on the defense of our own shores.

DR. ELAND: I agree with that statement, and I think this war is ill-advised, as I mentioned in my presentation, because I think it's what Bin Laden wants. It's like a recruiting poster for more terrorists if we indiscriminately flail around. We need to make our military response focused and designed to retaliate against this bombing.

But whenever the government declares war on something, you'd better get your pocketbook ready and get ready for ineffectual results. We've had the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and now we have the War on Terrorism. I remember Clinton declared a war on terrorism and it never came to anything. So we'll see what happens here.

It's very difficult to wage a war like this with conventional military means. Bombing from 20,000 feet is not going to do much good. You have to have special-forces commando teams to go in and either capture or kill the terrorists. We haven't had good luck in finding Bin Laden or we probably would have captured and killed him to start with. If you're guarding the homeland against biological or chemical or nuclear weapons smuggled in, we have a lot of borders. We only get 5 to 15 percent of the drugs, and those are in bigger quantities than any sort of unconventional warfare device. There are some technical aspects to making these devices that terrorists may not be able to do yet, but Bin Laden is certainly working on it. They discovered a chemical and biological lab in eastern Afghanistan with satellites the other day.

To paraphrase the IRA, they once said to the British, you have to be lucky all the time; we only have to be lucky once. And they've already gotten lucky once with conventional means. If they use some superweapon next time, the casualties could be worse.

One other thing: are we sure we want to be on a constant war footing? We're an open society. We have troops on the streets of downtown Washington, and to me that is like a country in the developing world, not the world's superpower. I think that's another indication that foreigners might see us as threatened.

We really need to consider whether we want to do a total war on terrorism or whether we want to, in the short term, take narrow military action and then re-think our policy in the long term.

AMB. FREEMAN: One thing to reflect upon is that other countries have not had oceans around them and have felt that their defense rested in part on diplomacy and political action and not just on military force.

MR. JAHSHAN: There is a lot of exaggerated talk about this total war. I do not envy the president. He is declaring war on a concept, a practice, a behavior, and we don't even have faces most of the time for all of this. But the matter is the military component of this campaign is only a very small part of it. This type of "war" against terrorism is going to be mostly financial, mostly security-related, mostly restrictions-related.

Q: Mr. Jahshan, do you think that if Israel withdrew from all the occupied territories, that would end the Arab-Israeli conflict?

MR. JAHSHAN: With regard to the question on the Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, I've been asked that question over the years by many people with different motives. There are some people, for example, in Israel who ask whether we will ever have total peace because a few people might still be whining. Some people will, of course, remain unhappy. But most will be satisfied if Israel withdraws from the occupied territories in the context of the establishment of a peace agreement that produces a sovereign, independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, solving the settlement issue, solving the refugee issue adequately to the satisfaction of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. I would have been more definitive ten months ago in my answer. Yossi was very clear about the changes that took place in Israel. There is a mirror image of these same changes on the Palestinian side. Yossi Belin and the rest who feel that Yasser Arafat is no longer a credible partner, if they want to wait for Shaikh Yassin to negotiate with, they're welcome. I'm not sure they're going to get a lot more cooperation from some Bin Laden who emerges on the Palestinian side. But most Palestinians and a majority of the Arabs would be delighted if an agreement in the context that I mentioned emerges. Most of them would be willing to endorse an end-of-conflict resolution with the state of Israel within its `67 boundaries if a legitimate, credible Palestinian state emerges from that agreement.

Q: You said that you want the United States to disengage from the Middle East. Would that involve withdrawing funding for Israel and Egypt? I'm not a specialist on Middle East peace negotiations, but it seems that the Palestinian people want basic economic rights like the right to dig a well, the right to get an education, the right to go to hospitals. To what extent do these basic rights play into negotiations between the two sides?

DR. ELAND: I think that we should reduce and eventually eliminate aid to both Egypt and Israel, but I'm not big on foreign aid to any country. I think that it actually has negative effects. Israel's a very wealthy country now, and it's embarrassing to give money to a wealthy country. Their military is more effective than ours in many ways. They learn how to improvise. We buy high-tech equipment and use it every so often. The stakes are higher for them, so their military is very effective.

We don't have to yank the rug out from under these countries. I think we could draw down aid to Israel and Egypt and the rest. But if you look at the countries that we give foreign aid to, it's groups that have constituencies in the United States: Armenians, et cetera. People are under the assumption that most of this aid goes to humanitarian purposes, but we traditionally use foreign aid to pay for military bases, and we've used it to buy peace in the Middle East -- or at least partial peace in the Camp David accords. Not necessarily in Israel, but foreign aid usually goes into the wrong pockets, and they have no incentive to reform their system. The small amount of foreign aid is dwarfed by the amount of private foreign investment they could get if they reformed their systems. In the case of Israel, they would be better off if they were less dependent on us.

AMB. WALKER: You have to distinguish between foreign economic assistance and foreign military assistance. They are two totally different subjects, and the reasons for having those programs are totally different. I would agree that economic assistance often can be distorting to the economy, and it can dissuade countries from undertaking important reforms. I would disagree that the money that is being spent is going into the pockets of leaders, at least not as it is used by USAID. It goes into project assistance, seldom cash transfer under any circumstances. But I think that the kinds of threats that we're going to be facing in the future -- possibilities of missile attack, weapons of mass destruction -- are going to require enormous expenditures, which are beyond even the wealthy Israelis. And we have an obligation and responsibility to help in that regard.

AMB. FREEMAN: I think it's fair to say that both individual Israelis and Palestinians want personal security and the ability to manage their own lives in an efficient and productive manner. And when negotiations have taken place, leaders on both sides of the divide have tried to address those requirements of their constituencies. Unfortunately, neither side has succeeded in producing these very valuable benefits for its own population.

MR. JAHSHAN: The basket of issues you refer to, the humanitarian issues, since the beginning of the peace process, unfortunately, have not been put on top of the agenda. They were used as a bargaining chip all along. They continue to be used as a bargaining chip today, in spite of legal documents and binding documents.

I'm looking here at the letter of assurances that the U.S. government gave to the Palestinians back on October 18, 1991, telling them that if they accept the invitation to come to the table, "We believe Palestinians should gain control over political, economic and other decisions that affect their lives and fate." The Palestinians, from the beginning, focused on this improvement at the personal level. And here we are, 11 years later, and whatever little gain was achieved has been rolled back again and again. This has been a key cause for the frustration on the Palestinian side. It was never taken seriously throughout the process.

AMB. FREEMAN: And, at least on the personal-security level, a vital matter of frustration to the Israelis as well.

Q: Why will the Israelis not accept some sort of peacekeeping force? If they don't want it from the United Nations, would they accept it from another quarter? You're creating more terrorists. You have to educate a generation to think positively about how to develop a state.

DR. SHAIN: The idea of peacekeeping forces in the Middle East certainly has value, but also a bad history. The very role of the United Nations has been compromised many times in the Middle East. One should not forget that before the Six-day War, the separation forces of [U.N. Secretary-General] U. Thant moved very quickly out of the region. There is a lot of mistrust among Israelis of the United Nations. We saw the anti-semitic charade in Durban. We saw what has happened now with the abduction of Israeli soldiers and civilians in Southern Lebanon, when the U.N. video cassette disappeared. Israelis have no trust in the United Nations as an arbiter, and I don't think that the forces themselves have any genuine authority on the ground. We have seen U.N. forces in Hebron, where they have been completely ineffective in stopping violent incidents. So I think the idea of an international force in such heavily populated areas is a non-starter in the context of the Middle East today.

The last year has changed many, many minds in Israel about the conflict. Israelis in the now shattered peace camp are no longer looking only at how Israel itself has "wronged" the Palestinians and at how it ought to compromise. Israelis will look at all of that again, but now there is another matter that has to take precedence: Palestinian control over violence and Arab/Muslim control of anti-Semitic incitement. Such control begins with state control, the very notion that there is a reliable authority. An authority must be responsible for asserting its sovereign power. That's how Israelis look at it.

In addition, there are all the other problems with regard both to the Palestinians and the Israelis in order to bring them one day together. The last year did not contribute to healing, but rather, in an incredible fashion, made Arik Sharon the favorite among the Israeli center, while he has often been chastised recently by the Israeli right.

AMB. FREEMAN: We need not belabor the point that what has taken place is a serious further polarization of attitudes, a hardening of views on both sides. I believe there has been a terrible moral corrosion on both sides of this conflict. It has been enormously damaging to the prospect for the idealists on either side to realize their dreams of a decent society. There's no intervention from the international community of the sort that occurred in Bosnia that would impose a peacekeeping force. It would have to be invited by both of the parties, and Professor Shain has very faithfully recounted all of the doubts that Israelis have about not only the United Nations but outside peacekeeping forces generally. The Palestinians have called for such forces, but the prospects are not good.

AMB. WALKER: You've got two different kinds of operations, one is peacekeeping and one is peacemaking. You've got to have peace before you can keep it. It requires an agreement and honest goodwill on both sides. An interposition force can be a help, such as the Sinai Force. It gives everybody an excuse not to do things that they don't really want to do anyway. That's peacekeeping. That's not possible under the current circumstances. The alternative is a Chapter 7 operation such as we had in Bosnia. That's when you send in heavily armed forces to actually impose peace on the parties. That's a non-starter. I can't conceive of the Security Council ever agreeing to such a force going into the Middle East. They'd have to shoot their way in. I doubt seriously that we have the stomach for it, or anyone else for that matter.

Q: Are negotiations possible between two parties that are so drastically unequal in strength, where the stronger party can dictate the terms? Shouldn't that be influencing U.S. policy in acting as an arbiter? U.S. prestige reached a zenith during the `50s when we intervened to stop the invasion of the Suez Canal by our allies.

AMB. WALKER: The forces aren't quite as unequal as you suggest, because it is not just a negotiation between the Palestinians and the Israelis. There are components that involve virtually the rest of the Arab world, particularly countries like Egypt. The original agreement at the first Camp David had a major portion of it related specifically to the Palestinians. The Egyptians were given the mantle of negotiating for the Palestinians in the autonomy talks. They have had that mantle all along, so it's not quite the equation that you suggest. The Palestinians rather consistently seek the support and advice of the Egyptians, and they've been helpful at times -- maybe not so helpful at others.

The other balancing factor is the United States. We do have a place in this equation. Our commitment to a vision of peace, somewhere inside the parameters of where we were going at Camp David, is an important guarantee for the Palestinians and the Israelis in the long run.

Ma. JAHSHAN: The lack of symmetry is one of the inherent characteristics that from the very beginning contributed to the failure of many of these peace processes and continues to influence the results today. Does that mean they shouldn't sit down together and negotiate? I don't think so. Most Palestinians still believe that it's worthwhile, considering the fact that there are very few people on the planet that Israel is willing to trust. You need to have a party that will give Israel the psychological ease to be able to move forward. There's the United States, maybe Germany, but very few others.

That places a burden on the mediating party, and the United States has not done a good job. The Oslo process was the equivalent of two people, the accused and the plaintiff, coming before a judge, who says to one, hey, I like you, you step over here. You, I don't like; sit down. State your case.

This has been our behavior. In spite of some improvement under Clinton in attempting to understand the Palestinian side, there has never been a sense of symmetry in managing peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

DR. SHAIN: I've recently read in an article by a Knesset member, Amnon Rubenstein, of the left-leaning Meretz party, in Ha'aretz: "We are the David and they are the Goliath. Don't ever let them mislead us." (I am not quoting verbatim here.) The perception in Israel, where terrorist attacks are taking place on a daily basis, is completely different than the way you think, in terms of where the Israelis are standing.

I also think that the idea that Israel does not trust the world is misleading in many ways. Israel signed a peace agreement with Egypt. Israel was on the verge of signing a peace agreement with Syria that would have entailed the return of the entire Golan Heights. Israel signed a peace agreement with Jordan and withdrew from Lebanon. Israel was on the verge of signing a peace agreement with Arafat. There was a whole new Middle East that was supposed to be established. Not only that, Shimon Peres called upon Israelis to forget about their boundaries and to think about a new Middle East. Israelis' mindsets have changed dramatically. More than 70 percent of Israelis last year supported the initial compromises made by Barak at Camp David, including compromises on Jerusalem.

Israel has a very good reason to be insecure. The last year has changed Israelis' lives dramatically. It changed the lives of the Palestinians as well; one cannot dispute that. But the question in politics is not always where is the blame, but what is the solution? Is there a state-to-state solution? Israel brought the Palestinian Authority into the West Bank and Gaza, with tens of thousands of armed soldiers and police. This was a sign of tremendous trust on Israel's part, a total rethinking about where we are. To go back and say that this is a failure of the Americans is also misleading. The Americans made huge strides on behalf of the Palestinians. No other nation in the world would have given the Palestinians what the Americans could deliver. The Americans delivered the Israelis to the Palestinians on many occasions.

Of course, the Palestinians are in bad shape. But Arafat's own judgment of this conflict is at fault here. He was unable to provide the leadership at the critical moment and preferred to play the "Islamic card" on the issue of Jerusalem in order to avoid responsibility. The sense that Israel was on the run took over the Palestinian street, and Israelis and Jews were faced with what I call the old Jewish-security dilemma. In the next issue of Orbis, I talk about this new mindset and its implications to Israel-diaspora relations. Indeed, when the Palestinians and the Arabs, in general, enlarged the conflict to attack Judaism itself and denounce Zionism as an illegitimate concept, they basically reiterated the old message that there is no right of Jews to have a state of their own. The Palestinians have a right, everybody has a right, but the Jews don't have a right. This is a totally different ball game, and it has caused an earthquake in Israeli public opinion, including the left, and, no less significantly, in the minds of Jews the world over. I think the parameters have to be defined correctly and according to the events.

Q: For the last 10 months the Bush administration has said they cannot pursue the peace negotiations. Isn't it amazing that the Bush administration now has intervened to get the two partners to come to truce talks? Are we partially responsible for this crisis?

DR. SHAIN: I think not. If Arafat can call for halting the violence, he could have done so throughout the year. Many times he was called upon to halt the violence, and there was a big question of whether he's in control. He is the Palestinian Authority. He cannot play a double game. Now, when it became clear to him that he may be associated with the terrorists, he jumped on the bandwagon, exactly as he did after the Gulf War. He was saved by the bell again, with Joschka Fisher's visit after the suicide bombing killed scores of teenagers in Tel-Aviv. Arafat thought that the intifada would internationalize the conflict, bring disunity among the Israelis, bring the United Nations to impose sanctions at Durban, etc. He misread the whole thing, I think.

AMB. FREEMAN: In any event, it's very clear that the context has changed. The stakes went up for Israel, for the Palestinian Authority, and so the leverage of the United States went up. And if you doubt this, look at the editorial in The Washington Post a few days ago attacking Ariel Sharon's refusal to cooperate with President Bush. I think Mr. Sharon got a certain message from that, and Mr. Arafat got a certain message, and they responded to the pressure. Whether either of them is sincere remains to be seen. I have my doubts.

MR. JAHSHAN: The balance of power has shifted as a result of the attack in New York and Washington. What prompted Arafat to be more courageous, more aggressive and more credible than in the past is not that Arafat changed. What has changed is Arafat's challenge. What prevented him from making those steps before and making them stick changed. The Islamic opposition and the radical opposition within his own circle of Fatah are afraid they're going to be targeted now by this international coalition. That emboldened Arafat to take the more convincing and more aggressive stand that he took this week.

His opposition has weakened. It has no legitimacy fight now, and he took advantage. This is classic Arafat. Like a phoenix, he rises from the ashes. He always benefits from crises. He immediately noticed that there was a silver lining in this dark cloud. His opposition is right now in disarray. They cannot challenge him now the way they could have done two weeks, ago. He was on the run because Israel had weakened him with the bombing of the past 11 months, undermining his own security forces. The same security forces that have been formed, armed and continue to be asked today to protect Israel's security are under fire from the Israeli army, yet they are being told it's their responsibility to protect Israel.

Where did these weapons come from, the 50,000 weapons that are in Palestinian hands? They came from Israeli and American sources. So as long as he was doing the job for Israel, it was okay. Now that he's standing up for himself, it's not okay. But you cannot undermine Palestinian authority and expect Palestinian security agencies to protect Israel's interest. The people that are being assassinated are in charge of different security apparatuses, particularly the ones close to Arafat, the Fatah ones. But objective changes that have taken place internationally and in the region allowed for Arafat's decision to be made.

AMB. FREEMAN: It's far too early to know how far these changes are going to go or what further shifts in the context will happen. I thought Professor Shain, in his presentation, in linking this situation so directly to the global context, was making that point and I agree with him.

Q: I have to take exception with the notion that the Arab political debate has somehow been hijacked by Islamic radicalism. I think this misperception stems from the penchant in Israel to interpret criticism in the Arab world against Israeli policies as a manifestation of radical politics, whether Islamic, Arab or any other type. In the Arab press, that debate encompasses a very wide range of views. There is a minority view that has been expressed in Islamic terms. But I think if you look at the mainstream view, you will find that it has focused on very serious objections to Israeli policies, number one being the settlements, number two being the penchant on the part of Israel to renegotiate compromises over and over again. That type of criticism is not so much a criticism of the peace process itself, but of Israeli policies that undermine the possibility of peace. That is why criticism has been more and more vocal. There is a mirror image on the Arab side that sees Israeli politics being hijacked by radicals, many of whom are now in the government.

DR. SHAIN: The idea that Islam was hijacked is a quote that was given to me by Khalil Jahshan himself. When I interviewed Khalil, I was doing some work on Arabs and Muslims in America in `94-`95. It was evident at the time that mainstream organizations were losing stature to growing radical Islamism in America.

There is no doubt in anyone's mind that what is happening is not Islam. But what is Islam? This must be articulated not only by radicals. Anyone will tell you that the word "crusade" is ridiculous. Everyone knows that we live alongside the Muslims. We have tremendous respect for everyone's religion. Otherwise it's a completely terrible scenario of civilization clashes. I don't believe that a clash of civilizations is inevitable. Nevertheless, if you look at last year's sermons in mosques, on Arab television, including Egyptian and Palestinian TV, inflammatory language was used. It created different reactions among radicals within Israel itself. I think that has to be stopped. There was a very important role for Egypt to play, and I think it was misplayed. There was a sense that Mubarak considered the peace process more important than peace itself. Mubarak was sheltering Arafat. Mubarak himself made it clear that he was not coming to visit Israel throughout the peace process, perhaps because of internal pressures on him. We will need something different now.

This dilemma can be solved without any love or affection. It can be solved even with some innate rivalries. People will be upset, but boundaries will nevertheless be established. Israel had that for 30 years with Hafiz Asad. The question of Hizballah is different, but there are levels of reconciliation that can be taken into account. I think the political one is the most critical. I agree that once you lower the rhetoric from one of a civilizational conflict, it will help all sides at the state level.

AMB. FREEMAN: I'm actually very surprised by the tenor of some of the discussion here. I, frankly, expected more controversy on the fundamental issue of whether there's been a paradigm shift, a break with the past. But I find all of you, in one way or another, basically saying that things have changed. The continuities that one might have hoped for are not there, and some sort of fresh answer will have to be formulated.