Secretary of State Warren Christopher may be making a big mistake by traveling to the Middle East next week, according to the man who served as George Bush’s top adviser on the Middle East.
Richard Haass, who until last month served as director of Near Eastern and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council, also said he believes it is now up to the Palestinians to make a concession to help resolve the controversy over Israel’s expulsion of 415 Moslem fundamentalists to Lebanon.
Haass made the comments about the deportation issue and the timing of the Christopher trip in a wide-ranging interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in which he assessed the current Middle East situation and reflected on the often-turbulent years he spent as Bush’s White House adviser on the region.
Christopher is scheduled to visit the Middle East from Feb. 17 to 24 to push for some movement in the stalled Middle East peace negotiations.
But according to Haass, “the jury is out” on whether the trip will result in progress.
“The danger in going now,” Haass said, “is that almost the entire trip could be consumed” with trying to resolve the controversy over the Palestinian deportees, who were expelled from the administered territories in December.
Haass considers the issue peripheral to the more important question of advancing the peace process.
“I’m not sure in a sense it’s the best use of the secretary’s first trip to the region,” he said in an interview at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he is now a senior associate.
Going to the Middle East now, with the deportation issue still a major concern in the region, could result in the Palestinians and possibly other Arabs urging Christopher to continue to pressure Israel on the issue, Haass said. And that is not a situation that Christopher “wants to put himself in.”
He added that “rushing out” to the Middle East “reinforces the notion that all the answers lie in Washington.” It would be more productive, he said, for the United States to stress that the answers lie in the region.
Haass, who served four years on the National Security Council staff, said he feels the next move to resolve the impasse over the deportees should come from the Palestinians and other Arab participants in the peace talks, because Israel has already made a major concession.
Israel, in a deal worked out with the United States, has agreed to take back 100 of the deportees almost immediately and shorten the terms of exile of the 300 or so others.
The Palestinians have rejected this offer, saying that they will not return to the peace table with Israel until all of the deportees are allowed to return to the territories.
But Haass believes Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has now “gone about as far as he can go or should go,” given Israel’s domestic political situation. “It’s up to the Arab side to meet him half way,” he said.
“It’s really up to the Palestinians and the Arab side whether they want to work with the Israelis in finessing this so that everybody can get back to the table, or not,” he said. Haass, who taught at Harvard before joining the White House staff, said it is important that when the talks resume, they be serious and that the people involved “address the issues.”
“And this particularly applies to the Palestinians,” he said, “who have spent, I think, an inordinate amount of time trying to get ground rules changed and, in a sense, discussing the shape of the table, rather than the real issues.”
‘A FRUSTRATION WITH THE STATUS QUO’
“One should not simply let the process string out,” he said, observing that time is not on the side of the Palestinian moderates.
Haass pointed to the emergence of Hamas and other Islamic fundamentalist groups, to which many of the deportees belong, as “symptomatic of a larger trend in the region” and “a frustration with the status quo.”
The group is opposed to the peace talks and seeks Israel’s destruction.
But if Haass is gloomy about rising fundamentalism, he is optimistic about the “potential for real progress” in the negotiations between Israel and Syria.
Syria is in a better position to negotiate than are the Palestinians, he said, because of Syria’s “political leadership and structure.”
“Without putting anybody up for sainthood” in Syria, Haass said, he sees an evolution in Syrian policy over the past few years in what he called a constructive direction.
The differences between Syria and Israel are not “theological,” but about “security, territory and peace,” he said, and “it ought to be in the realm of the possible to concoct a formula that will take all of that into account.”
Haass said he did not know of any rumored secret negotiations between Israel and Syria over a possible settlement. But he did say the official Israeli-Syrian negotiations “compare favorably to some of the others.”
Haass is clearly proud of the record the Bush administration amassed on Middle East issues. “I defy anyone to find a period of four years when the United States and Israel accomplished more together that benefited Israel,” he said.
But along with the administration’s accomplishments came controversies, most notably the upheaval in U.S.-Israeli relations over the issue of $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to help resettle immigrants in Israel.
The loan guarantees, which the Bush administration attempted to link to an Israeli freeze on settlements in the territories, caused friction between Washington and the Shamir government in Jerusalem. And it frayed relations between the Bush administration and American Jews, many of whom felt the United States was being too hard on Israel.
EXPERIENCE WAS ‘FRUSTRATING’
Haass, who is Jewish, found the experience “frustrating,” on a personal and political level.
“I felt that people were focusing too much on the mood and on certain statements,” he said, “and not nearly enough on the substance.”
“I’m not claiming that we were perfect,” he conceded. “We weren’t. Indeed, in some cases, by what we said, or how we said it, I think we created unnecessary problems for ourselves.”
“I think the record of accomplishment deserved” a better reception within the American Jewish community, he said, adding that he thinks most Israelis, by contrast, “know just how much the Bush administration accomplished.”
“I just don’t think the Bush administration got a fair shake” from the American Jewish community, he said.
Haass said that dealing with the Shamir government on issues like the loan guarantees was “more difficult” than with the Labor government of current Israeli Prime Minister Rabin.
But he said that the difficulties with Shamir did not stem as much from personalities, a factor he said was given “exaggerated” importance, but from a “difference in ideology.”
With the Rabin government, Haass said, the “differences largely went away.” Following the loan guarantee fight, “the bitterness diminished between the U.S. and Israel,” he said. “There was a sea change.”
In addition, the “temperature cooled, in the good sense,” between the American Jewish community and the U.S. administration, he said.
Haass said that while he may have some regrets over the “public packaging” of some of the Bush Middle East policies, the policies themselves were “exactly right. I do not have regrets or second thoughts” about policy matters.
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