War Proves Easier Than Peace for Longtime Mideast Enemies

WASHINGTON —  In one sense, Israel’s attack on the headquarters of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat on Friday was a widely expected retaliation for a series of increasingly grisly suicide bombings.

But to many U.S. officials and other analysts, the incursion provided a vivid illustration of the central problem behind the shattered Arab-Israeli peace process: Neither Arafat nor Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, they argued, is a strong enough leader to make peace.

“In 1993 [when Israel and the Palestinians signed a peace treaty at the White House], we were dealing with [Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak Rabin. Now we’re dealing with Ariel Sharon. Big difference,” a Bush administration official said emphatically.

U.S. officials express little or no sympathy for Arafat. In private, they describe the Palestinian leader as indecisive, evasive and exasperating.

But they also blame Sharon for operating--in their view--with no apparent strategy beyond lashing out against terrorists and fending off internal political challenges.

“We haven’t a clue where Sharon is trying to go,” said Patrick L. Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank that has been largely sympathetic to Israel. “His government doesn’t appear to know where it wants to go, much less how it wants to get there.”

The combination of Arafat and Sharon is a major reason the Bush administration actively avoided intervening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during its first months in office, a decision that has since been widely criticized.

“We didn’t have much to work with,” a U.S. official said with a shrug.

Now, with the peace process in ruins, the administration has little choice. Bush’s special envoy, retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, is staying in Israel to try to patch together a cease-fire, however unpromising the landscape.

In the short run, at least, “unpromising” may be an understatement. U.S. officials and nongovernmental analysts said Sharon’s attack on Arafat’s headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah seemed likely to lead to more violence, not less.

Moreover, they said, it isn’t clear that removing Arafat from his leadership role--even if only temporarily, by cutting off his ability to communicate--will make it easier for Israel to end the Palestinian uprising by cracking down on terrorist cells.

Arafat, who won his primacy among Palestinians not through military victories but through defiance amid a long string of defeats, appears entirely comfortable in the role of hostage.

“He’ll just make himself a symbol of Palestinian resistance,” warned Geoffrey Kemp, who was a Middle East advisor to President Reagan. “The irony of this situation is that as long as the Israelis hold him prisoner, he’s the headline--which is exactly what he wants to be.”

Meanwhile, if Israel seeks to destroy Arafat’s nascent government bureaucracy, the Palestinian Authority, it risks strengthening the main political alternative in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: the militant Islamic movement Hamas.

It was Hamas that mounted the worst of this week’s terrorist attacks, the suicide bombing of a Passover dinner in a seaside hotel Wednesday, which killed 22 people, including the bomber.

“That was the most sinister action possible, because it damaged everyone,” Kemp said. “It was a shot at the fundamental right of Jews to live in Israel, but it was also a shot against Arafat in the Palestinians’ internal war of succession, a shot against Zinni and his negotiations, and a shot against the Arab leaders who were about to hold a summit in Beirut.

“The horrible dilemma is that the extremists are in the saddle,” he said. “In the center, where the opportunity to make peace should be, there’s a vacuum.”

At first glance, this week’s summit meeting of Arab leaders in Beirut appeared to be a ray of hope. For the first time, a resolution calling for a peace deal with Israel was approved by every Arab country, including longtime hard-line states such as Syria, Iraq and Libya.

But the resolution had no apparent effect on either side in the Israeli-Palestinian war. U.S. officials said they considered it a positive development, but more symbolism than substance.

“Where’s the step forward?” asked Clawson. “If you go back to the peace process in the early 1990s, Arab countries were talking then about real peace with Israel, including trade and investment and travel.

“The only reason it’s gone as far as it has is that it was proposed by Saudi Arabia. Nobody wants to annoy the Saudis,” he said. “It was nice that someone made a stab at a peace plan, but there wasn’t much there.”

Indeed, the main threat to peace in the Middle East is no longer a conventional war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, as was the case in 1967 and 1973. Instead, it’s the continuing war of attrition between Israeli security forces and Palestinian militants--an “asymmetrical war” in which each side seeks to inflict crippling pain.

And despite the terrible violence of the last week, neither side appears ready to give up.

Palestinian figures across the political spectrum in the West Bank and Gaza have issued calls to support Arafat as a symbol of resistance.

Inside Israel, the main political pressure on Sharon is to be tougher on the Palestinians, to not ease up.

“There is strong support for what he is doing today, but confidence in his government--confidence in general, but also [in] security and the economy--are all sliding downward,” said Stan Greenberg, an American pollster who has advised Israel’s opposition Labor Party.

“There is anger at the Palestinians and a belief that there is nobody to negotiate with . . . “ he said. “So the entire peace camp [and] peace process have no legitimacy” in the eyes of Israeli voters.

Noted Kemp: “There’s legitimate fury on the Israeli side. But it is important, while understanding the Israelis’ fury, to recognize that the fury is just as intense on the Palestinian side.

“The biggest change that’s occurred over the past several years is this: What is gone now, on both sides, is empathy. Neither side feels any empathy for the other.”