BACKGROUND

HELEN DAVIS

Foreign Correspondent

p

resident Bush said it.
President Mitterrand
said it. Even British
Foreign Secretary Douglas
Hurd said it.
Within the space of just
one week, officials of the
three leading Western states
involved in the war coalition
against Saddam Hussein's
Iraq chose high-profile occa-
sions to call for concerted
efforts to resolve the Pales-
tinian issue and the wider
Israeli-Arab dispute after
Kuwait has been evacuated.
To the assorted journalists,
analysts, commentators and
other Middle East experts
who are scraping the bottom
of the barrel in their increas-
ingly unrewarding guessing
game over the future course
of the Gulf crisis, the profu-
sion of pronouncements by
Messrs. Bush, Mitterrand
and Hurd certainly gave the
subject a new spin.
And in the absence of
anything else, the hard-
pressed media merchants
fell on their utterrances like
a pack of hungry wolves.
Were the Western leaders,
they asked, signalling to
Saddam that they are will-
ing to link Iraq's withdrawal
from Kuwait with a resolu-
tion of the 42-year-old Arab-
Israel dispute?
Were they offering to
break Israel's intransigence
in exchange for Iraqi conces-
sions?
Were they providing
Saddam with a face-saving
way down from the very
high tree he has climbed,
telling him in effect that his
"sitzfleisch" policy may,
after all, pay off?
There may have been a
lingering hope in the minds
of some Western politicians
that Saddam would pick up
the proposal and use it as an
excuse to extricate himself
from Kuwait, but they must
also have known that the
chance hardly merited seri-
ous consideration.
Whether or not the Iraqi
leader chose to interpret the
statements as a sign of the
West's weakening will —
and all indications are that
he did not — the media seiz-
ed the opportunity to sug-

Artwork by Ed Freaks. Copyright 1988, Ed Fraska. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

The Middle East's
Loose Cannon

Despite all the rhetoric, most nations must be
aware that the creation of a Palestinian state
cannot fail to be dangerous to everyone.

gest that just such a offer
was on the table.
Few would challenge the
need to explore all possible
avenues to resolve the Arab-
Israel conflict, but there is a
legitimate question to be
asked: Why the intense con-
centration on this long- run-
ning, intractable issue now?
The clearest explanation
so far has come from the
British foreign secretary,
who set the agenda and the
tone for his visit to
Jerusalem this week with a
furious attack on Israel's
"misguided" policies toward
the Palestinians and an
urgent call to resolve "this
poisonous dispute."
Despite Mr. Hurd's in-
sistence to the Diplomatic

and Commonwealth
Writers' Association in Lon-
don late last week that there
was "no hope" of resolving
the Arab-Israel dispute as
long as Iraqi forces remained
in Kuwait, he was besieged
by journalists after the
speech.
Why, they asked, was he
raising the subject at
precisely this time if not to
establish a link between the
Israeli-Arab dispute and the
Gulf crisis?
"The reason is not that,"
protested Mr. Hurd. "The
reason is to prevent Saddam
Hussein from posturing as
the only friend of the Pales-
tinians, claiming nobody
else is interested in tackling
the problem. We are strong-

ly interested in tackling the
problem and I hope that once
Saddam Hussein is removed
from Kuwait, by whatever
means, it will be possible."
The message was not
directed at Saddam at all, he
added, but rather at the
moderate Arab leaders. It
was a message designed to
"keep them rallied to the
flag."
Whatever differences exist
among Western states over
matters of style and
substance (see box), there
does appear to be a consen-
sus that the Arab-Israel
dispute in general, and the
Palestine issue in particular,
must somehow be addressed
as soon as possible after the
Gulf crisis is resolved.

The recent diplomatic
flurry over this issue,
however, has less to do with
coaxing Saddam to
capitulate than with the
need to demonstrate to the
Arab world, specifically
those states which have sent
troops to the Gulf, that their
efforts will be rewarded.
If that is the intended
strategy of the Western
leaders, they are likely to be
disappointed. More seri-
ously, they are likely to
heighten and frustrate ex-
pectations among the Arab
masses that an Israeli
withdrawal is imminent.
The truly fascinating, but
much-ignored, aspect of
those insistent demands for
Israel to evacuate the oc-
cupied territories in order to
allow the emergence of a Pa-
lestinian state is that they
represent little more than a
grand hypocritical charade.
Beyond the high-flown
rhetoric, it is not in the in-
terest of either the Western
or the conservative Arab
leaders to oversee the
emergence of a radical Pa-
lestinian state which, on the
basis of past and present Pa-
lestinian conduct, would be
no friend of the West and a
constant source of regional
instability.
Such a state would indeed
pose a security threat to
Israel, but it would present a
far greater danger to the
vulnerable leaders of the
conservative Arab world, a
fact that has been brutally
underlined by the Gulf
crisis.
But the Arab leaders have
a dilemma: while they have
much. cause to fear a Pales-
tinian state, survival impels
them to maintain, and even
intensify, both their expres-
sions of support for the Pa-
lestinians and their strident
anti-Israel diatribe.
They know that it is
relatively safe to hate Israel,
which is, diplomatically at
least, a "soft target." They
know, too, that low-risk ver-
bal attacks on Israel are a
means of deflecting the at-
tention of their most radical
domestic critics, both na-
tionalist and religious,
whose passions have been
ignited by a defiant Saddam
Hussein standing up to the
West.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

41

