The News Behind The News
January 3, 2001
Of War and Peace and Money
by IASPS StaffA front page headline story in the January 2, 2001, edition of The New York Times held out hope for a last-ditch effort at a Middle East peace agreement before President Clinton leaves office in a few weeks. Arafat arrived in Washington, D.C., at 9:00 a.m. on January 2 to ask the president to clarify certain aspects of his peace plan. His departure for the U.S. was marked by two Palestinian car bombs, one in the high-tech, upscale suburb of Netanya north of Tel Aviv that wounded dozens, the other in the Gaza Strip that killed one Israeli and wounded another.
Recent car bombings have found their way inside the Green Line, the 1967 borders that defined Israel’s geographical existence. Israeli casualties are mounting faster. Shimon Peres used to say that Israeli lives and injuries were evidence that the peace process was working, meaning that extremists were using violence and blood to derail the peace process. These days he is less outspoken about the “price” of peace.
The current language in high political circles is different. Prime Minister Ehud Barak talks of separation and building a 47 mile-long fence along part of the Green Line. The most dovish leftist of all, Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, says “we must find a way to separate because this mixture of peoples creates a situation of violent friction that we must reduce.” Whatever happened to the vision of a borderless world of multicultural harmony and trade so popular in leftist circles?
Mr. Ben-Ami and other government officials are preparing a public relations blitz in Moscow and Western European capitals. If Arafat doesn’t agree to Clinton’s plan, these officials will try to blame Arafat for the failure to reach a peace agreement.
But what if Arafat agrees, and Barak concurs? You guessed it. Here are Ben-Ami’s exact words as cited in the Times: “If there is an affirmative answer for an agreement, then we need economic and international support that is entailed by this agreement.”
Israel (and Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority) need money if there is no agreement. Israel (and all parties) need money if there is an agreement, only more. To agree or not to agree seems to be less the question than how to get money that all parties need. What Ben-Ami means is that without economic support, there can be no agreement, and that with economic support there has been no agreement. One is led to wonder how things might work out if no international money was involved.
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