In 1969, the United States decided it was going to “comprehensively solve” the Middle East. Ever since, American officials have dreamed that they might be able to find the solution of all solutions, the key to amity in and around the world’s holy sites, and a ticket to Norway for the Nobel ceremonies. At times, it is difficult to know which of the three vanities expressed in this dream of Middle East concord is the worst: the intellectual, the sentimental, or the glory-hungry. For the desire to “solve” the Middle East always ends up meaning this: making demands on Israel. And that in turn means that every time Israel lifts a pinky in pursuit of its own interests, or the Israeli government tries to satisfy the wishes of its own electorate, Israel is accused of threatening the “peace process” (and jeopardizing that Norway trip) .
The Clinton administration has so far been relatively free of this particular kind of Israel-bashing — in part because for most of its time in Washington, the administration was dealing with a Labor party government in Jerusalem with its own special thirst for Norway. No longer. Now, Bill Clinton has stood man to man with Yasser Arafat and taken the opportunity publicly to criticize the nation of Israel for building some apartments in Jerusalem.
The president’s words were a mistake, and we don’t mean merely because we disagree with the president on the specifics of the Har Homa construction. The criticism he offered emboldened world opinion to indulge in the kind of free-for-all that greeted almost every Israeli action in the 1970s. The 6,500 Har Homa apartments have been the subject of a U.N. Security Council resolution the United States then had to veto. The king of Jordan, whose love of peace in the Middle East is so great that he backed Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, wrote a strong private letter to the prime minister of Israel that somehow made it onto the front pages of the world’s newspapers.
All this does nobody any good but Arafat, who has seized this opportunity to put pressure on Israel from outside the Oslo accords, by which the Jewish state is abiding with admirable gravity.
Let us be clear why the president was so unjust to Israel. In the last few months, the Likud government in Israel fulfilled its treaty obligations by redeploying its troops in and around the West Bank city of Hebron. Subsequently, it has agreed to triple the amount of West Bank land under Palestinian control. The Likud government did both these things even though it did not want to, even though it did not believe it was compelled to, given the questionable intentions and behavior of its negotiating partner, the Palestinian Authority. The Likud government did both these things even though it won an election, fair and square, based on the precept that the previous government had been imprudent in its rush to accommodate the Palestinians. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has incurred the wrath of his own electoral base because he has been responsible enough to accept the hand he was dealt by his predecessors.
But this, it seems, avails Netanyahu nothing when it comes to building some apartments in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu does not believe that, in the future, East Jerusalem should be Judenrein, free of Jews. Does the United States? Surely not.
For surely even dreamers understand that there can be no “comprehensive solution” to the Middle East with a redivided Jerusalem.
