Middle East Peace

I’ve been beating up something awful on the Used Car Salesman in Chief, but sometimes even Wild Bill has to step back and offer a tip of the cap to the man. I thought President George W. Bush’s policy toward Israel and the Palestinians was, for virtually his entire presidency, a disaster. I am convinced that I was wrong in that assessment.

An acolyte of Samuel Huntington, I was of the view that it was up to the U.S. to rein in its client state, Israel, and, on the other hand, to defend it against its enemies. I was a victim of stodgy thinking on the part of previous presidents. (In his defense, Wild Bill like so many others is never wrong except when he has been victimized.)

From Truman to Clinton and with virtually every other president in between, our policy has been to walk the line between being protector of Israel and an honest broker with her Arab neighbors. It’s gotten us, Israel, and the Palestinians nowhere.

President Bush, like many a parent of fighting children, decided that both sides in this issue were too bellicose and too sure of both the backing of their friends and that the U.S. would never let them fight it out to exhaustion. They and Wild Bill were wrong. All that shuttle diplomacy over fifty years, all those walks in the woods at Camp David, all that hand wringing by American presidents, all of the foreign aid, none of it gained peace for the combatants.

George W. Bush’s policy of hands off benign neglect has worked. Of all the things Wild Bill has ever said about this president from calling him wrong in Iraq to ridiculous on Social Security it’s been a long time since he hasn’t regarded George Bush as a lot smarter than the Democrats and the media have ever given him credit. And in this case, Mr. Bush was brilliant.

A high percentage of Israelis and Jews around the world came to the conclusion that the long time policy of Israel toward the Palestinians had a fatal flaw. That no matter how many settlements were seeded on the West bank and Gaza, demography would inevitably make it impossible for Israel to sustain its long held views toward these outposts. But it was not going to be an American president who was going to impress this upon the Israelis or their government. It would be done by home boys or nobody.

Obviously, a goodly number of Israelis have understood this for years, but as it took a Richard Nixon, the great anti communist, to cut the Gordian knot of establishing relations with Red China so it would take a powerhouse from Likud to show the way in Israel. Ariel Sharon is that man. Only a leader with a life long record of toughness on the question could have performed this great task.

So, after four years of both sides throwing everything they had into the fray, they have concluded that peace may be the only or at least the best option. Wild Bill, not being anywhere near an expert on the nuances of the issues separating the sides, will wind down here. The pain of the pullback from Gaza will be intense. The same goes for what lies ahead for many of the settlements on the West Bank.

The Palestinians have had four years to examine their policy and it too is laden with pain. But after all the suffering, an independent Palestine that includes recovery of much of its pre 1967 land and some reasonable access to Jerusalem looks mighty good. The almost impossible decision on the right of return for Palestinians has not been settled publicly, still nobody’s screaming, “Stop!”

Two men are to be given credit for the journey and the twists and turns that got us here, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon. Wild Bill on this Presidents Day Holiday takes a respite from his job of beating up the president on his flawed policies in Iraq and on the Domestic scene, and, as Herblock of the Washington Post did for Richard Nixon, and give him a clean shave and a pat on the back. He’s right!