WASHINGTON — Read enough newspapers, watch enough television and listen to enough advocates — official and otherwise — and the solution to the violence in the Middle East becomes crystal clear, even if it proceeds from starkly different analyses.
For most Americans, for instance, the solution is not merely simple but also virtually a matter of consensus. All it takes is for the Palestinians to be given autonomy over a homeland — most likely the West Bank and Gaza — and for them to grant Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.
Details would have to be worked out, of course, but here is a solution — call it Solution A — that would serve the interests of Israel, the Palestinians, the United States, Europe and the Arab world. The only catch is that the principals, the Israelis and the Palestinians, can neither fight nor negotiate their way to where they both know they ought to be. Somehow, this perfectly sane solution will have to be forced on them.
For Palestinian sympathizers, the solution is for Israel to stop its aggression, tear down the West Bank settlements that are a finger in the eye of the Palestinian Authority and cease the daily humiliation of the Palestinians. Then the Palestinians could begin good-faith negotiations that would lead to Solution A. The problem is Israel won’t stop its aggression — even with the strong insistence by an exasperated President Bush that it do so.
The flip side of this solution is for the Palestinians and their allies to recognize that Israel is a fact — no matter its absence from the maps in the schoolbooks that Arab kids study. The Palestinians must give up their dream of "liberating" Palestine — modern Israel — and settle for the Palestine of Solution A. The problem is Yasser Arafat either doesn’t want or can’t deliver peace on such a basis and for that reason must be removed.
Here’s Solution B. The United States, in concert with its right-thinking allies, must get rid of the region’s chief troublemaker and Arafat’s chief sponsor, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
You probably hadn’t thought of this approach to solving the Middle East crisis, and I confess I hadn’t either until former Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, here on a mission for his successor Ariel Sharon, made it explicit at a meeting at The Washington Post last week.
Iraq and Iran, you see, are the real menaces to world peace, and both need to be stopped before they succeed in developing and deploying weapons of mass destruction, including missile-delivered nuclear bombs. The good news, according to Netanyahu, is that if we take out Iraq, Iran will quickly implode. But we can’t do Iraq as long as we and the world are distracted by the fighting in the West Bank.
It would, therefore, be in the interest of world peace for the United States to call Colin Powell home and just shut up while Israel roots out the whole infrastructure of Palestinian terrorism and removes the treacherous Arafat from the equation.
"Pressure on Israel to restrain itself," said Netanyahu, who seemed determined to make himself so radical that Sharon looks moderate by comparison, "only has the effect of drawing this thing out. If you don’t go to Iraq, Arafat is safe, and he knows it."
The problem with Netanyahu’s sometimes hard-to-follow approach is that the more the United States acquiesces in Israel’s military "incursions" into Palestinian territory, the more difficulty it will have building the necessary coalition to go after Saddam. And of course, the more pressure we put on Sharon to spare Arafat, the longer it will be before we can go to Iraq.
In the near term, says Netanyahu, bringing sense to the Middle East involves three steps: Dismantling the Arafat regime, cleaning up the resultant mess and then putting up a fence between Palestinians and Israelis (the fence to be secured, of course, by Israelis). Then negotiations for a permanent Palestinian homeland could proceed.
Netanyahu’s interim fence and permanent Palestine start to sound a good deal like Solution A. Which means that even this implacable politician seems to be joining commentators from the left and center, from pro-Palestinian to pro-Israeli, in concluding that the only way to achieve peace in the region is to separate the warring parties and establish an autonomous Palestine.
One hitch remains. The advocates are unanimous that the combatants can’t get there by themselves, there being insufficient trust between them, so someone else has to fashion and impose the obvious solution. In every scenario I’ve heard, that someone else is the United States — which, last time I looked, had a president who really didn’t want to get involved, certainly not in nation-building.
William Raspberry can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or willrasp@washpost.com.
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