The Coming Middle East Crisis

When Joe Biden predicted that the new president would face a grave international crisis within six months, he didn't specify where it might come from. He presumptuously said it would be President Obama and was duly criticized. But he was right about the coming crisis. The new president will soon face a momentous challenge in the Middle East, which has gone from bad to worse to horrible.

The critical factor is that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has lost the capacity to deliver anything—and his term as president of the Palestinian Authority is up around the day our new president takes the oath. Abbas's predecessor, Yassir Arafat, was capable of acting against the will of the more radical Hamas. He had the charisma Abbas lacks—along with leadership skills, ruthlessness, and a killer instinct. But Arafat blew the best chance ever for a Middle East settlement, gravely misjudging Israel's will by launching a second intifada. Meanwhile, in a Gaza free of Israeli occupation, the Palestinians chose to rain rockets on Israel, never even attempting to build a new state.

Hamas has emerged as the stronger faction, perhaps strong enough to undermine any agreement Abbas could negotiate. It now controls Gaza. In the West Bank, Hamas has established a vast network of social welfare organizations and has been slowly building up a kind of shadow regime by infiltrating the government bureaus. The former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who represents the Quartet negotiators (United States, Russia, European Union, and United Nations), recognized the situation on the ground when he said recently, Europeans don't understand that, "if Israel got out of the West Bank tomorrow, Hamas would take over."

Promoting hate. Abbas has weakened his own ability to maneuver by tolerating the promotion of hate and incitement of violence against Israel and Jews in general, from virtually every public platform in the West Bank. The Palestinian suicide bomber comes directly out of an ethos that says, "Blessed is the suicide bomber for he is a national hero." This hatred, with its calls for terrorism and jihad, is inculcated in the Palestinians' education system and in their public media. Rejectionism remains at the core of Palestinian politics and has contributed to the defeat of every partition plan proposed from the dawn of Zionism to the present day.

That is why, when Abbas speaks in Arabic to his own people, he speaks in much more radical terms than what we hear in the West. Witness the recent Palestinian cartoon that depicted the Palestinian state as covering all of the territories from the West Bank to the Mediterranean—including pre-1967 Israel—totally wrapped in a Palestinian flag draped over a rifle. The ends and the means of this message could not be clearer.

The West has sought to strengthen Abbas economically and with weapons in the hopes that he could create a viable and responsible state. Perversely, the billions of aid dollars from around the world have contributed to a corrupt Fatah elite that has alienated more Palestinians than the loss of any modest improvement these funds could have contributed to their basic living conditions.

That is why Fatah lost the elections in the West Bank and Gaza in 2006 to Hamas and why Fatah security forces were routed in Gaza in 2006 in a matter of a few days. The Fatah security forces were so weak that the leadership left Gaza without even fighting, many of them retreating to their grand villas in Cairo, all witnessed on Palestinian television—yet another humiliation for Fatah.

In Jenin, one can see what good leadership can yield. There, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad established a unified security service. Now, instead of the anarchy of armed gangs dominating the streets, there is a sense of an overwhelming presence of the Palestinian security forces restoring law and order. The Israeli military cooperated by providing amnesty to members of the militias and gangs for past crimes if they laid down their weapons and renounced violence. Palestinian security forces have replaced the Israeli security forces, which are symbols of an occupation. The hope is that Jenin will be a model for other cities, given the widespread lawlessness in the West Bank. The problem is that the militias biding their time have an estimated 120,000 weapons under the floorboards. As a former military governor of Jenin and Bethlehem pointed out, "Fatah may have the weapons but Hamas has the people behind it...the great fear of the Fatah forces is that, in a showdown, the Palestinian public will side with Hamas." Even Abbas can't move around freely in the West Bank outside his headquarters in Ramallah because his people are not in control.

What happens in January? If Abbas ducks the challenge and unilaterally extends his term until 2010, Hamas will oppose his government, creating another challenge to his ability to make decisions and compromises. But if Abbas holds an election, Hamas might well gain the presidency. That would create an insurmountable hurdle to any peaceful settlement. A Fatah-Hamas reconciliation is now being discussed by both parties in Cairo, with the idea of forming a national unity government. But this, too, would jeopardize the hopes for any peace process.

Abbas continues the history of Palestinian politicians of conducting negotiations but not being willing, or perhaps able, to make decisions to bring negotiations to a conclusion. The dialogue is the price they pay for huge international financial contributions. The safest approach for a lengthy political life for a Palestinian leader is to make no decisions, for decisions could mean either political death or, sometimes, literal death. And since Arafat rejected President Clinton's conciliatory efforts, the gap between the sides has grown and conditions on the ground have deteriorated, further dimming the prospects for peace.

Importantly, the military and security threat to Israel has increased since 2000. The country is in a vise. Hezbollah controls Israel's northern border with Lebanon, while Hamas controls the southern one. Israel now faces more than 50,000 rockets, antitank missiles, and advanced antiaircraft missiles that could overfly any demilitarized zone—a vast increase in vulnerability over the last eight years. These mortal enemies of Israel—Hamas and Hezbollah—are each backed by Iran with money, training, and weaponry, not to mention that Iran's nuclear weapons program could trump the strategic superiority of the Israeli defense forces and provide cover for terrorist attacks and groups.

Growing instability. The security concerns have also increased because of developments in the broader Middle East. What if Iraq evolves into a radical Shiite state that is dependent on Iran and hostile to Israel? What if Palestinians and Islamic extremists in the West Bank try to take advantage of the fact that two thirds of the Jordanian population is Palestinian and, through them, seek to overthrow the Hashemite Kingdom? This would pose a supremely dangerous national security threat because Jordan is a stable buffer between Syria, Iraq, and any Palestinian state. That is why some Israeli control of the border between a Palestinian state and Jordan would be essential, not just to block Palestinian irredentism that might threaten the king but also to stop terrorists importing rockets into the West Bank, as they did into Gaza. Then, they could fire rockets and mortars from the hills, dominating Ben-Gurion Airport. Just one mortar shell per week would be enough to end air transportation completely.

The likelihood is that the West Bank security fence built by Israel will become the de facto border with major Israeli population centers inside the fence in exchange for some kind of swap of land in the Negev. But the fence is limited to neutralizing the threat of infiltration by suicide bombers and cannot cope with the higher trajectory "curved fire" weaponry that can fly over any fence. The 2006 Lebanese war illustrated how difficult it is to prevent such rocket attacks without controlling the ground. It also illustrated how unreliable the United Nations or other international forces are to neutralize terrorists or block the infiltration of weapons. If anything, they are assisting Hezbollah in Lebanon.

On what basis, then, is it possible to believe that what failed eight years ago in optimal circumstances could possibly have a different outcome today ? The conventional two-state solution between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has not proved attractive enough for either side to resolve their differences, so what can?

Clearly, the benefits must be modified if we are to have any hope of an enduring settlement. An alternative to the two-state settlement is a regional approach historically opposed by Arab states but recently floated by Bahrain's foreign minister, Al Khalifa. He said it was time for the Middle East to develop "new regional frameworks to overcome our long-standing challenges." And he explicitly used words that implied Israeli inclusion.

Mutually attractive political, economic, and security terms would be required for both sides to move to an agreement. One economic benefit would be the inclusion of substantial financial support from the Arab Sunni oil-producing countries. That could make a dramatic difference in the Palestinian standard of living. If it were forthcoming, it would also provide political cover for the concessions the Palestinians (as well as the Israelis) will have to make. Alas, the destruction of trillions of dollars worldwide in the current financial crunch makes it harder for the international community to cover the costs of new early warning systems for Israel to compensate for deep withdrawals from the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, as well as to help Palestinian refugees establish permanent communities in the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon.

Ironically, it is the leadership of the Palestinians that is now more necessary to a settlement than the Israeli leadership, which has long accepted a two-state solution. The new administration in Washington will undoubtedly bring fresh thinking to this problem. It will be more than welcome.