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Jonathan Friendly is the national editor of , which owns the weekly Jewish newspapers in Detroit and Atlanta. He is a former journalism professor at the University of Michigan and a former reporter and editor at The New York Times.
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By Jonathan Friendly
March 13, 2002
Let's be plain about it: U.S. President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon blinked.
Faced with the incessant vicious terrorists attacks on Israeli civilians, both the President and the Prime Minister backed down. Bush agreed to send his envoy Anthony Zinni back to the Mideast without any real assurance the trip can produce results, and Sharon agreed to let talks happen before the violence ceases.
We cannot know whether their about-faces will open a welcome door to a lessening of violence or merely embolden the Palestinians to use more terrorism instead of diplomacy. History says that, under Yasser Arafat, they have always chosen to play the terror card, but this may prove to be the exception. Arafat and the Palestinians have a lot to lose if they don't fulfill their part of the implicit agreement to stand down from warfare now, as even the Arab states are showing some signs of being willing to acknowledge that the Jewish state has a right to exist and of being tired by the Palestinians mindless, reflexive rejectionism.
We can hardly condemn Bush or Sharon, for neither seemed to have much choice. Both were running out of effective options for calming what is an increasingly lethal situation that is now as close to all-out war as it can be short of a formal declaration of war.
So far Israel has been carefully restrained in its retaliations for the atrocities that the Palestinian terror makers have wrought on civilians. It has rocketed the empty buildings that are symbols of the Palestinian Authority but not the militiamen who will be needed if Arafat finally gives orders to round up the terrorist cadres. And its incursions into the refugee camps of the West Bank and Gaza have produced many of the desired arrests with relatively few deaths or injuries.
That is why Secretary of State Colin Powell was wrong to say publicly that Israel had gone too far. The alternative for Israel was to do nothing, which Palestinians would have taken as a green light for even more slaughter of innocents. Powell would have been better advised to continue a public support of the administration's backing for what Israel needs to do while perhaps quietly working with Sharon to accomplish the reality of pulling the IDF back a step.
The most disheartening Bush action was ordering Zinni back to the area before Arafat had made any public commitment to implement the first step of the plan worked out by former CIA director George Tenet for curbing the terrorist networks. Better would have been a declaration that Zinni would return when Arafat took some steps as specific as the one he did take with the arrest of the last top suspect in the October murder of Tourism Minister Rechavam Ze'evi.
In any event, we have the reality of what Sharon and Bush have already conceded. So the next question has to be what Israel and the U.S. need from the negotiations with Arafat and whether their interests will converge or diverge. Bush wants the Arab states to welcome Vice President Dick Cheney and whatever messages he may be carrying about a new campaign to get rid of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Sharon, on the other hand, needs to win a real reduction in the suicide bombings and the attacks on settlements. We can be sure that Arafat will capitalize on any daylight he sees between Washington and Jerusalem.
Having folded on this hand, Bush and Sharon better be sure they can't be bluffed when the next deal goes down.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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