Why were they celebrating? From their perspective as rejectionists of Israel’s right to exist, the encampment represented a political and public-relations coup. By kidnapping, then murdering, an Israeli policeman last week, the Islamic militant group Hamas forced both the Israeli government and the rival Palestine Liberation Organization into untenable positions. Israel’s predictably harsh reprisal-the largest such transfer since 1967-stirred up the inevitable storm of international criticism, threw the future of the faltering Middle East peace talks into question and added another item to President-elect Bill Clinton’s growing list of foreign-policy headaches. Like those stuck in the snowy no man’s land, the main players working for a negotiated peace in the region now are trapped. For the fundamentalists, it was an ominously easy achievement.
Hamas could be sure that the kidnapping would produce a massive Israeli response. And Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was fully aware of the heat Israel would take. After taking office in July, he bowed to a United Nations demand that he cancel 12 deportation orders left over from the hard-line Likud government. But Rabin also needs to protect his right flank, and he’s a hard-liner on security. The deportations, his cabinet allies argued last week, were more humane than the main alternative: freeing occupation troops to use greater force against protesters. Rabin was so quick to take “immediate steps” against the “animals” who killed Border Police Sgt. Maj. Nissim Toledano that the buses were already headed for the border when defense attorneys rushed to the Supreme Court. The court ruled 5-2 that authorities had upheld the law by declaring the expulsions temporary and offering the Palestinians a chance to appeal from exile. “It’s a dark day for the rule of law in Israel,” charged defense attorney Avigdor Feldman. But a poll showed that 91 percent of Israeli Jews supported Rabin’s action.
The PLO’s response undoubtedly played just as well to the masses. In Tunis, its leaders announced that the year-old peace talks in Washington would not resume until all the deportees were returned to their homes. And the Palestinian delegation refused to attend the final session of talks last week; no new session is scheduled. The deportations, said spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, are “pure vindictiveness” that delivered “a fatal blow to the peace process.”
But it is Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) that has vowed to wreck those talks. Once encouraged by Israeli authorities who hoped it would weaken the PLO, it now thrives on Kuwaiti and Saudi subsidies denied Yasir Arafat since the gulf war. PLO officials worry that the secretive group is gaining popularity through recent ambushes, which killed four Israeli soldiers just days before the slaying of Nissim Toledano. Even so, the PLO evidently felt compelled to show solidarity for those deported-mostly Hamas theoreticians, fund raisers and clerics, not gunmen-by hitting back at Israel. So it called for massive protest, promising to make the occupied West Bank and Gaza a “volcano.” On Saturday, Israeli troops shot dead at least six Palestinians in Gaza clashes.
Without firm intervention from outside, a new eruption of the five-year-old intifada uprising in the occupied territories could indeed torch the peace talks. Both sides are so locked into the old politics that unconventional moves-like the proposal by some of Rabin’s allies that he balance the Hamas expulsions by meeting with the PLO-don’t stand a chance. The Bush administration condemned both the bloodshed and Rabin’s reprisal, and supported a toughly worded U.N. Security Council resolution declaring the deportations a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It falls to Clinton to apply the muscle needed to bring compromises that can keep the peace process alive.
The president-elect gave no hint last week about whether he’s ready to twist arms in the Middle East. At a news conference, he said he shared Israel’s “outrage” over the troopers’ murder but was “concerned” that the deportations might imperil the peace talks. That was designed to walk a fine line between Bush’s harder line on Israeli “collective punishment” and any suggestion that Clinton is blind to the human-rights issues involved. Restarting the talks wont be so easily finessed. Clinton may have to persuade Israel to back down on many of the deportees-and persuade Lebanon and Jordan to accept the others. In the meantime, the impasse can only encourage the peace-wreckers.
