This Week
Another Peace Effort
American team faces historic failures
in bringing Israelis, Palestinians to peace.
Near Eastern Affairs William Burns.
In the most serious attack, two
Palestinian gunmen from the West Bank
city of Jenin entered Israel just hours after
Israeli troops withdrew from Jenin in
response to American pressure. The gun-
men opened fire on civilians in the north-
ern Israeli city of Afula, killing two Israelis
and wounding dozens.
Later in the day, an Israeli woman was
killed in a Palestinian shooting attack on a
Gaza road. Israeli soldiers at a nearby post
shot and killed the Palestinian gunman,
who had opened fire on passing vehicles,
wounding two other Israelis.
In other violence Monday, Palestinian gun-
Demonstrators in Jerusalem protest the visit of U.S. envoys
men wounded a foreign worker in an Israeli
Anthony Zinni and William Burns.
car in the West Bank and fired at workers on
the Trans-Israel Highway, which is located
MITCHELL DANOW
inside Israel but near Palestinian-controlled areas.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon received news of the
Afula attack while he was meeting with Zinni. One
New York
of the gunmen was from Palestinian Authority
he terror attacks that greeted the new
leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
U.S. peace team in the Middle
Sharon told Zinni that Arafat had estab-
East this week pose the ques-
lished "a coalition of terror" with Hamas,
tion: Can these envoys succeed
Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Palestine
where their predecessors failed?
Liberation Organization, the Palestinian militias and
A burst of Palestinian terror accompanied the first
the Force 17 presidential guard.
full day of work for former U.S. Marine Corps Gen.
Following the deadly attacks, Arafat had to engage
Anthony Zinni and Assistant Secretary of State for
in damage control Wednesday, when he met with
T
ANAL YSIS
Zinni in the West Bank city of Ramallah. While no
details of the meeting were immediately available,
Arafat reportedly renewed his calls for international
observers.
After meeting with Arafat, Zinni called for an end
to the violence, saying "both sides have suffered far too
much." Even before the Palestinian uprising began in
September 2000, there had been no shortage of
envoys — most notably from the United States, but
also from the European Union, Russia and elsewhere
— who sought to prod Israel and the Palestinian
Authority into some semblance of peaceful relations.
Failed Missions
Earlier this year, a U.S.-led international panel, the
Mitchell Commission, set out a series of confidence-
building measures to help end Israeli-Palestinian vio-
lence. Israeli and Palestinian officials welcomed the
initiative, then returned to the bloodletting.
Several weeks later, the director of the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, arrived
with a blueprint for a cease-fire. Officials from both
sides agreed to the truce Tenet drew up, but the
words were not followed with meaningful imple-
mentation.
Now come Zinni and Burns, accompanied by
U.S. diplomat Aaron Miller, a veteran member of
U.S. Mideast peace efforts.
Zinni, who took a helicopter tour of the West
Bank with Sharon, told the Israeli premier that he
will stay as long as necessary to achieve his task. He
hopes to get Israel and the Palestinians to implement
the cease-fire steps spelled out by Tenet and the rec-
ommendations of the Mitchell Commission.
Sharon's office said on Monday that "Israel attach-
es supreme importance to achieving a cease-fire." Yet
even Sharon's dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres,
did not get carried away by the envoys' arrival.
Arab Think Tank
`Use Israeli Arabs to undermine Israel;
SIMON CARROLL
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
London
IV
ith the Palestinian intifada (uprising)
sputtering, a leading Arab think tank
is backing an old strategy — to defeat
Israel from within by encouraging the
growth of its Arab population.
The prime proponent of the conquest-by-demog-
raphy theory is Wahid Abdel Maguid, chief editor of
the Arab Strategic Report, the publication of Egypt's
premier think-tank, the Al-Ahram Institute. The
institute is part of the group that runs Egypt's semi-
official newspaper of record, Al-Ahram.
"We are capable of increasing the demographic
threat against Israel, if we demonstrate the necessary
determination," Maguid declared in a recent interview
11/30
2001
32
with the London-based Al-Hayat Arabic newspaper.
Israel's Arab population is estimated at 1.2 mil-
lion, compared with 5 million Israeli Jews. However,
the Arabs' birthrate is far higher, and Maguid esti-
mates that Israel's Arab population will equal the
Jewish population in 34 years.
Israeli surveys also warn of the dangers the Arab
birthrate poses to a Jewish state, and Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon stresses the need to bring as many
Jewish immigrants to Israel as possible.
Arab Strategy
Maguid outlines a five-pronged strategy for making
sure the Arab "population bomb" can be accelerated:
• Limit or reverse immigration of Jews from the former
Soviet Union. In fact, levels of immigration have fallen
sharply from their highs in the early- to mid-1990s.
The idea of using demography as a strategy to overpower
Israel is being resurrected by a leading Arab think tank.
• Bring Arabs living inside Israel's pre-1967 bor-
ders into close alignment with Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, encourage them to spurn
their identity as Israeli citizens and give them deci-
sion-making roles in the anti-Israel campaign.
This development, which began with the Oslo peace
process and has been encouraged by the Palestinian
Authority, saw its fullest expression in the Israeli Arab
riots that accompanied the outbreak of the Palestinian