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Whoï¿½s Preventing Normalization?
David Horovitz

SAUDI ARABIAï¿½S "NORMALIZ-ation"

initiative is being directed at the wrong party. The Saudis are calling on Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders as a precondition for normalized relations with the Arab world. But former prime minister Ehud Barak, in negotiations infinitely more detailed than the lacuna-filled Saudi vision, sought an accord with Yasser Arafat effectively based on such a withdrawal, and was answered with a terrorist uprising that has now lasted for almost 18 months.

Even if the Saudis had spoken out before or during the Camp David 2000 peace effort, their proposal would have been useful only if one subscribes to an improbable notion: that Arafat was deterred from signing a permanent peace accord solely by the absence of wider Arab support. Issued today, and directed at Israel, the dramatic call for coexistence clearly stems in large part from Riyadhï¿½s need for rehabilitation in the United States post-September 11 -- an event of unprecedented terrorism carried out mainly by Saudi nationals.

Its proponents have made plain they are not willing to come to Israel, nor even to host Israeli leaders, to try and further their initiative. Indeed, for now, it is unclear whether this vaguest of proposals is even intended to serve as a serious opening position for substantive debate, or is merely a rigid, take-it-or-leave-it demand that, especially in the current circumstances, Israel would reject.

Nonetheless, it is commendable and sensible that Israel, with President Moshe Katsav proving particularly astute, has responded with wary interest. But the test here is less for Israel than for Arafat, for whom the initiative may represent an unexpected final lifeline.

Grimly, though, he shows no sign of wanting to seize it as a pathway out of the intifada, and to bring an end to the shootings, bombings and cynical encouragement of violent anti-Israel hostility. And in this vicious climate, it would be no surprise, sooner rather than later, were we to see him depart this planet. His exit may appear entirely unremarkable, a frail senior citizen overcome by old age and disease. But it may be worth remembering that the Bush-Sharon understandings, under which Israel agreed not to target Arafat, stem from administration concerns about exacerbating tension in the Arab world ahead of the looming U.S. mission to bring down Saddam.

Once that mission is accomplished, if it is accomplished, such considerations will no longer apply. Mindful of president Clintonï¿½s humiliating failure to sell Israelï¿½s unsurpassable peace offer to Arafat, and having concluded that it would attract similar humiliation were it to pursue the same lost cause, the Bush administration would shed no tears were Arafat to shuffle off this mortal coil, so long as Israel provided no overt assistance.

When Arafat does go, critics of Israeli government policy, at the U.N., EU and elsewhere, will doubtless bewail the expiration of the last narrow sliver of opportunity for peace, and tell Israel it will have only itself to blame if the relentless bloodletting gathers still more pace. They will argue that Arafat was genuinely committed to reconciliation -- this despite his repeated exhortations for the march of a million "martyrs" on Jeru-salem; his attempts to acquire arms and explosives; the increasingly dominant terrorist role of his own Fatah faction; his partnerships-of-convenience with Ha-mas; the standing orders to his security personnel to pursue the "collaborators" who help Israel prevent suicide bombings, rather than pursue the bombers themselves; a negotiating position that stopped short of acknowledging Israelï¿½s right to exist as a Jewish state, and his relentless delegitimization of every Jewish historical link to this region. Those critics have long asserted that there is no other Palestinian leader with the authority and credibility to implement any lasting agreement with Israel -- which is debatable, and more importantly irrelevant, since he chose to avoid such an accord.

There will be voices from Israel, too, post-Arafat, insisting in defiance of all evidence that had the government preempted the Saudis and initiated a withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, intifada violence would have halted. A recent temporary shift in the focus of the bombers and the gunmen, who briefly concentrated on killing soldiers and settlers in the territories rather than civilians inside sovereign Israel, prompted a clamor for a unilateral military retreat. March 2ï¿½s suicide bombing in Jerusalemï¿½s Beit Yisrael neighborhood constitutes a horrific reminder that any such shifts in the terroristsï¿½ focus are merely tactical. Indeed, it is only because the aggressors are so blindingly committed to an assault on all of Israel that it took them 17 months to figure out the obvious -- that when they concentrate their attacks on disputed territory, they fare far better in the court of world opinion and widen the schisms in Israeli society.

Israelï¿½s national psyche is under mounting threat, so much so that the Maï¿½ariv daily can muse for an entire supplement on whether we have "a future here." But the illusory attractions of capitulation at one extreme, or massive military reoccupation at the other, must be resisted. Prime Minister Sharonï¿½s March 4 talk of the need to inflict "heavy losses" on the Palestinians was particularly disquieting, given that misdirected army fire had killed five children and a doctor in the West Bank only hours earlier. Only a responsible, temperate government, supported by a resilient and unified populace (a populace that both recognizes the need for compromise and the fact that there has been no compromise large enough to accommodate Arafat) can help yield successors to Arafat who see no alternative to honest reconciliation and a strategic war on terrorism. With a Palestinian leadership like that in place, a Saudi commitment to foster wider regional normalization would be a genuine, uncomplicated pleasure.