Middle Eastern politics is like the undulating waves of its deserts. There are no discernible immutable patterns in which the currents and crosscurrents shift like grains of sand. Unpredictability, uncertainty, underestimation, paired with mistakes, misjudgment, miscalculation, appear over and over in attempts to analyze and understand events in the politics of the region. To understand the three dominant events in the region at the present time, the stalling of the peace process, the current Palestinian and Israeli Arab uprising, and the resignation of the current Israeli government, I will focus on the interplay between the particular dynamic of Palestinian society and Israeli society as to how they have affected all three events. 

Yasser Arafat, the most recognizable figure in the Palestinian independence movement, has been an enigma to some, a chameleon like caricature to others. Engineer, guerrilla leader, president, peacemaker, terrorist, statesman, provocateur. This is the man who became sincere friends with Leah Rabin, widow of the man who was once his most severe enemy. This is the same Yasser Arafat who visited the families of Israeli children killed by a Jordanian soldier run amok, while encouraging his own Palestinian youth to battle Israeli police in the front line of combat while paying their families for the death of each of their children? This only underscores how much we think we know him and yet………..and yet you fill in the rest. Yasser, a nickname for his given name Mohammed, means "easy" in Arabic. Yet the passage of time reveals a man who is anything but easy to characterize.

Perhaps Yasser Arafat represents the many contradictions of the Palestinian culture and people from which he emerged. The Palestinians who have lived in Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan are among the most educated Arabs in the Middle East. They have largely been a population of small landowners, farmers, and shopkeepers. Overall, they have been a conservative group. But then again, their children who have a university education but have been unable to rise significantly in the economic ladder or achieve independent political power together with those Palestinian refugees in camps of other Arab countries who have languished in poverty and illiteracy, have been the mainstay of Palestinian radicalism.

Arafat and his political associates and cronies have tasted a degree of political independence in their partial autonomy status since the Oslo Agreements. In their hunger for statehood, Arafat extracted almost all the concessions from Ehud Barak that he sought—the settlement of a few thousand Palestinian refugees in Israel under family reunion plans while getting enormous amounts of international funds for a resettlement and compensation program for millions of Palestinians refugees living in squalor throughout the middle east. Parts of Arab suburbs of Jerusalem would house Palestinian government offices, which could declare Jerusalem as their capital of an independent Palestinian state. And of course Ehud Barak agreed to recognize Palestinian sovereignty of over more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In addition, around 50 Jewish settlements on the West Bank would be transferred to Palestinian rule. A peace settlement was so close at hand and yet Yasser Arafat blinked, and talks promptly stalled when he insisted on more control over Jerusalem, particularly the Temple Mount. Or were they so close? Was this just an illusion reminiscent of the every changing shift of the sands of the Middle Eastern quagmire?

Yasser Arafat was trying to balance the interests of his many different constituencies. His political allies desire the full independent power of statehood while they maintain a strongly felt perceived right to a place, a land called Jerusalem. This is reality in spite of the fact that there was no strong independence movement during the colonial period before Jewish statehood. His more radicalized factions led by Hamas and Hesballah who have become political revolutionaries as well as Moslem reactionaries who see as their raison d’être to throw out the westernized Jewish infidels who they view as oppressing their people through colonial domination. Jerusalem is the rallying cry for all his people.

If nothing else time has proven Yasser Arafat to be a survivor overcoming the threat from the Lebanese Christian Phalangists, the Syrians, the more radical terrorist factions competing with his own Fatah political base, or the more conservative intellectuals in his Palestinian Authority like Hanan Ashrawi who have called for an end to corruption, dictatorial behavior, and respect for historical claims. It is highly likely that Arafat in his attempt to juggle all these competing factions felt he could not pull the trigger and sign a peace accord at this time and still maintain his position of authority. Hence why not revert to the tactic of violence and disruption—the one thing that would temporarily unite all his factions and perhaps strengthen his hand within his own camp in future negotiations? This would also divide the Israelis resulting in forceful reaction and encourage an eventual national debate and hand wringing as casualty’s mount in a protraction of the conflict. This is exactly what occurred during the prolonged Israeli occupation of the West Bank during the Intifada.

Israeli society represents a plethora of contradictions itself. As a modernizing society in the forefront of the global technological revolution, it is experiencing an economic boom. Yet it is an economy that is resting on a house of cards. The cyber economy is not labor intensive. Most in society must have several jobs to keep afloat and live more off of credit than many Americans. In this economic boom hundreds of thousands of expatriates have lived in Western countries for many years, forever proclaiming their desire to return to Eretz Yisrael. And the economic disparity between the "haves" and "have-nots" can be compared to our own country.

The people of the book have their own conflicts fueled by prejudice. The diminished but continuing Ashkenazi maligning of Sephardim has been joined by the more subtle inattention of the needs of the black Ethiopian Jews in the development towns while proportionately greater resources are being expended on the Russian population. The pervasive Russian influence on Israeli culture is forever changing the Israeli social landscape. And of course, there is the clash of the movement for Israeli religious pluralism and the resentment of secular Israelis with the increasing politicization of right wing orthodoxy and their special and often advantageous status in Israeli society.

There are three sources in Israeli society which have a strong stake in maintaining a "Greater Israel" even at the cost of peace and accommodation with its Arab neighbors. These include religious orthodoxy, the settler movement comprising both urban yuppies looking for cheaper housing and religious zealots who claim the land as part of their biblical birthright. Add to these groups the largely secular generations who have known mostly war and react to the threats surrounding them with a pervading sense of isolation and hostility toward the rest of the world. This manifests itself with the view of the necessity to maintain dominant strategic strength to the point of overkill. Their negotiating stance is one of having and maintaining overwhelming power and deligitimizing the needs of their opponents. This characterizes the Sharon and Netanyahu camp.

There are those associated with the peace movement and those sympathetic with it that represent the more liberal elements of Israeli society. They represent many of the remnants or successors to a collectivist socialistic society dedicated to human rights and the greater good of society. These people characterize the much diminished but still lingering tensions with the entrenched bureaucracy, intellectual elites, and the more open market individualism that has dominated Israeli society since the days of Menachem Begin.

The continual warfare with its Arab neighbors or threat of terrorist violence within its borders for 52 years have shaped the Israeli psyche from a siege mentality, isolated by a world still hostile to Jews, to one of a superior dominating occupier. The former has resulted is large mass migrations to more open breathable western countries. The latter has resulted in preoccupation with the uneasiness as an occupier, changing their historic role of victim to dominator. In the last twenty-five years pressure has been mounting to become part of the larger world, to end the tensions of a constant state of conflict, to be part of a more "normal" community of nations in the world. And of course there has been a strong desire to be able to devote attention to the vast social problems that have been festering if not ignored. These include having a society with world leading biomedical research institutions yet it provides less than top-notch medical care to the average Israeli citizen. The irony is that Israel has the best medical facilities in the region. The people of the book provide mediocre public education and a large portion of their youth do not go to college.

Ehud Barak, the most decorated war hero in Israeli history, became prime minister well aware that these forces in Israeli society compelled him to attempt to beat his well-traveled sword into a plowshare and achieve a negotiated peace with substance. Well aware that the road toward peace was strewn with failed careers and represented a minefield of contradictory forces in Israeli society, a confidant and some would say an overconfident Barak became the ultimate risktaker.

A man whose career was dedicated to the defense of Israel was accused of being willing to sacrifice the security of the country. He was willing to cede most of the territories including the Arab suburbs of Jerusalem to a new largely demilitarized Palestinian state. He was ready to cede a demilitarized Golan Heights to Syria. Ultimately he failed. Was it his own hubris? Did Arafat do him in? Did he fail to adequately prepare the Israeli public for the inevitable sacrifice of their sense of security of the last twenty-five years as the unquestioned power in the region? Did his inability to negotiate the secular-religious minefield undermine his negotiating position?

Finally is Barak a figure waiting to recede in Israeli history or will his bold risk taking ultimately end in a permanent negotiated peace settlement?

It is far from a foregone conclusion that Israel is ready for a change in direction in the peace process. Can a more right wing prime minister end violence in the region both from within and outside of Israeli society? I doubt it. On the other hand, can a right wing hawk like a Benjamin Netanyahu or an Ariel Sharon be the one to pull an unlikely coup like Richard Nixon did in establishing relations with his avowed enemy Communist China or a Menachem Begin negotiating peace with Egypt? Will the Israeli public be able to tolerate a continual conflict in its own backyard, with its own casualties mounting and the use of its own superior force inflicting increasing casualties on the Palestinians? Don’t forget the Israeli public grew weary of its use of force as a dominating occupier during the first Intifada. And more recently, the Israeli public grew anxious with the mounting losses of the Israeli Defense Forces in the Lebanese buffer zone, which ultimately led to their withdrawal.

And finally, the ultimate wild card in this situation is what would the prospects of the resolution of the conflict be if for any reason an increasingly aging and ill Yasser Arafat should leave the scene? Who would have the moral and political authority to balance the competing Palestinian interests in making the necessary hard decisions leading to a peaceful settlement? And even if a peaceful settlement were eventually reached, would the inevitable successor to Arafat in a Palestinian state be able to fulfill their commitments?

I have raised many more questions than those that I answered. But then again, anyone who claims with certainty to have the answers to how these dilemmas I raised will play out might just as well forecast how many grains of sand exists in the Negev desert. One thing seems to be certain. It is in the interests of some to have peace, and in the interests of others on both sides to maintain a state of war. The ultimate question for both the Israelis and the Palestinians and those of us who are concerned about the issue is which side will dominate the debate and the direction of the conflict?