Fourth Pillar
To the Editor:
I am honored that Norman Podhoretz has used one of my posts on “Power Line” as a foil for his argument that the Fourth Pillar of the Bush doctrine—namely, that before negotiations about the creation of a Palestinian state could take place, the Palestinians would have to undertake a sustained fight against terrorist groups and infrastructure—remains intact [“Israel and the Palestinians: Has Bush Reneged?,” April]. I also take some comfort in Mr. Podhoretz’s guarded optimism on this score. But in the end, I am not persuaded.
As Mr. Podhoretz sees it, the present arrangement is that negotiations about a Palestinian state will go forward in advance of any sustained fight by the Palestinians against terrorism. Indeed, negotiations can proceed to the point of forging a permanent-status agreement on borders, Jerusalem, refugees, and settlements. However, President Bush promises, the fruits of these negotiations will not be implemented until the Palestinian Authority (PA) has taken the steps that originally were supposed to precede negotiations.
But this is not the original Fourth Pillar, and something of value has been lost. The PA now gets a seat at the table, plus the opportunity to negotiate for everything it desires, without having to take any steps to curb terrorism. We have forfeited whatever prod there might have been to the Palestinians by their being left out in the cold in the absence of meaningful action.
Moreover, Mr. Podhoretz does not dispute the prevailing assumption that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is the author of this revision. He does say that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert jumped on the idea “quickly and enthusiastically,” and he speculates that if Olmert had objected, Bush might have yielded to him. But if we were talking about a standing doctrinal pillar of American policy, it should not have been left to Olmert to save Bush from his Secretary of State (or not, as turned out to be the case).
Mr. Podhoretz is probably correct that serious harm will result only if the final negotiated settlement is implemented without the Palestinians having been made to do their part. Time will tell on this count, but there are legitimate reasons for concern. Once a final deal has been hammered out, the momentum for implementing it will likely be quite powerful, perhaps powerful enough to override a past utterance of an unpopular ex-President.
Moreover, Bush’s (former) precondition can also be subjected to quite a bit of interpretation. If the parties have succeeded in negotiating a final deal, and the Palestinians have made a few anti-terror gestures and arrested some of the usual suspects, who will be so churlish as to deem such actions insufficient? Not, in all likelihood, Barack Obama. Perhaps not even John McCain.
Paul Mirengoff
Washington, D.C.
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz’s valuable article recognizes that George W. Bush’s statements of June 24, 2002, April 14, 2004, and January 10, 2008 about the Israel-Palestinian conflict constitute a commitment by the U.S. to Israel that the latter has acted upon and that should bind subsequent American administrations as well.
That is particularly true of Bush’s 2004 statement, which was issued as part of a deal governing Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. Pursuant to that deal, Israel dismantled 25 settlements in Gaza and the West Bank—giving the Palestinians the chance to demonstrate their readiness to live “side by side in peace and security”—in exchange for certain assurances that were negotiated at the highest levels of the American and Israeli governments. The letter was given additional force by the fact that Congress expressly endorsed its principles in a resolution. Israel, for its part, included the letter in its official Disengagement Plan.
Israel fulfilled its end of the bargain, and had every right to expect that the U.S. would (in Bush’s words) “do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan” than the three-phase Road Map. An essential part of that plan, as Mr. Podhoretz recognized in his April 2005 COMMENTARY article on the disengagement (“Bush, Sharon, My Daughter, and Me”), was that there could be no provisional Palestinian state (Phase II), nor any commencement of final-status negotiations (Phase III), unless the Palestinians first met their obligation of “sustained, targeted, and effective operations to . . . dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructure” (Phase I).
When the Iraq Study Group later recommended “unconditional” meetings between Israel and the Palestinians “as soon as possible” in order to “negotiate peace as was done at the Madrid Conference in 1991,” it flatly contradicted the conditions of the Road Map. Nevertheless, the Bush administration made the recommendation one of its principal foreign-policy objectives, and sent its Secretary of State on trip after trip to pursue an immediate final-status agreement.
Mr. Podhoretz asserts that Bush has reaffirmed “in unmistakable terms” that the Phase III agreement—which he wishes to complete before leaving office—is “subject to implementation of the Road Map.” But if the U.S. can skip Phase I of the Road Map after having promised to prevent “any” attempt by “anyone” to impose “any” other plan, it can also, down the road, support the creation of a Palestinian state without insisting on the dismantling of terrorist infrastructure.
The reasons that undoubtedly will be given at that time will be that (1) the Palestinians cannot practically dismantle terrorism until they actually have a state, and that (2) because a state has been agreed upon, delay in founding it would only allow terrorism to continue. Alternatively, “dismantlement” will be redefined: terrorist groups will be incorporated into the Palestinian “security forces,” and—voilà—they will have been “dismantled.” Those groups will later take over the state, either by election or by coup. It has happened before.
Rick Richman
Jewish Current Issues
Los Angeles, California
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Norman Podhoretz writes:
Paul Mirengoff and Rick Richman both make compelling criticisms of my argument, but anything I might say in response would only restate what I said in my article. So I hope they will forgive me if I rest my case without a final summation.
Except for this: the more I think about the Palestinians, the more I become convinced that perhaps the most famous thing ever said about them—Abba Eban’s crack that they “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”—is mistaken. The assumption Eban was making, of course, and that the whole world shares, is that the Palestinians really do want a state of their own. But if so, why have they violently repudiated—not just “missed” but rejected with all their might—the three excellent chances they have been given to get one (by the UN in 1947, by Ehud Barak in 2000, and now by George W. Bush and the Israeli government itself)?
The explanation I find increasingly persuasive is that they prefer a situation in which they can blame all their troubles on Israel and America instead of at long last beginning to take responsibility for themselves. If that is indeed the case, then even if the Fourth Pillar should fall, no Palestinian state will arise out of the rubble in any foreseeable future. Where that leaves Israel is another question, and one to which I do not begin to have an answer.
