Warren Christopher's prominent cheeks apparently invite diplomatic slaps. Having been humiliated in April by the Syrian president, Hafiz al-Asad, the U.S. secretary of state brushed himself off, screwed his patrician's face back on, and flew to Israel in June to be humiliated by the new Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
It has been a bad three months for the United States in the Middle East. After the successful U.S.-inspired extravaganza at Sharm al-Shaykh in March, things went downhill for the Clinton administration in April and May. U.S. officials openly defended Israel's Grapes of Wrath operation in Lebanon, and watched as it turned into a resounding and bloody military failure. By the time Mr. Christopher arrived in the region to negotiate an end to the crisis in late April, he had been out-maneuvered by his French counterpart, Hervé de Charette. President Asad refused to discuss a U.S. proposal to resolve the crisis, and informed Mr. Christopher that he was too busy to see him. The secretary of state, seething, ended up negotiating Mr. de Charette's proposal. He courageously tried to sell this as an American success.
Then came the victory of Binyamin Netanyahu. The Clinton administration found that it had backed the wrong horse in the Israeli elections. What made matters worse for Mr. Christopher was that him and his team find the newly-elected prime minister insufferable. The secretary subsequently flew to Israel anyway. There he was told by a predictably unfriendly Mr. Netanyahu that Israel had no intention of revealing its position in the peace negotiations to the U.S. before the prime minister's meeting with Bill Clinton in Washington in July. Mr. Netanyahu's message to Mr. Christopher was all too clear: he would only deal seriously with the man at the top. Mr. Christopher, meanwhile, may have become damaged goods in the Middle East.
It would be too much to say that Mr. Netanyahu's election victory brought the Middle East peace negotiations to an end. Rather, the negotiating process has reached the end of another phase. The first phase, in the wake of the Madrid conference, was characterized by simultaneous bilateral negotiations between the different Arab parties and Israel, in Washington. The Madrid framework collapsed, however, after the conclusion of the Oslo agreement. The secretly negotiated accord ushered in a new period in which the Arab parties dealt with Israel separately, without coordinating between themselves, in the process throwing Arab unity to the wind. The major advances in this phase were the Jordanian-Israeli peace agreement of October 1994, and the expanding normalization between Israel and several Gulf Arab and North African states.
Mr. Netanyahu's election ended this second stage in the Arab-Israeli talks. By publicly rejecting the fundamental principles of the negotiations, including the `land for peace' condition which had been in the letters of invitation to the Madrid conference, Mr. Netanyahu sought to force a new approach to the talks. Israel's priority in the future will be to try to improve relations with Arab states, while skirting territorial issues closer to home. This means that Israel will try improving ties with Jordan and peripheral Arab states, avoid negotiating with Syria and Lebanon, and expand the Israeli presence in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.
The flaw in Mr. Netanyahu's calculations is, as always when the Likud becomes ambitious, the Palestinians. Sooner or later, the Israeli government may come to recognize that, while it can ignore Syria and Lebanon for a time, it cannot the hundreds of thousands of unhappy Arabs it aims to surround by a network of settlements and military outposts. Palestinian dissatisfaction could well spark a new intifadah, which would harm Mr. Netanyahu immensely after the relative calm in the occupied territories under the Rabin-Peres mandate. It would take the prime minister more than cracking a few Palestinian heads to persuade Israeli voters that the new government can deliver "peace through security."
The weak links in this regional realignment appear to be Syria and Lebanon. Even before the Israeli elections, the U.S. and Israeli attitude towards Syria had changed. A disgruntled Mr. Christopher, who lost much credibility pursuing a sterile dialogue with Syria, expressed public doubts as to President Asad's commitment to peace. The Israelis, in turn, have long considered Mr. Asad an emperor without clothes. Indeed, there was no guarantee that had Mr. Peres won, he would have swiftly resumed talks with Syria. President Asad, despite reaffirming that peace is a "strategic option" for Syria, may have played his hand too late. Peace with Syria and Lebanon is, for the moment, no longer a U.S. and Israeli priority. Nor can Syria rely on Arab solidarity to save it from its growing regional isolation.
What will still unite Arab ranks, however, is the fate of the Palestinians. In trying to redefine relations with them, Mr. Netanyahu may find that his government has also come in too late.