Treaties and Nightmares: Camp David, the Third Temple and The
Summit

Less than a year ago, we marveled at how the Middle East had become
a geopolitical backwater. Action shifted northward toward the
Balkans and the Caucasus, toward the strife of Yugoslavia and the
war in Chechnya.

Things were as quiet as things ever got in the region. Israelis
worried more about IPOs than infantry patrols. The Palestinians
were clawing out of their economic and political abyss. Then, as
if from nowhere, the region exploded.

It has not merely exploded, but entered a period of danger more
substantial than any since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. People worry
openly that the peace process is in trouble. Far worse, the
situation has undoubtedly stirred Israeli military thinkers to
worry that a nightmare scenario may unfold, inside Israel and on
its borders.

These worries place enormous pressure on Monday's summit and on the
Egyptian government, now the key to resolution. Signs indicate the
summit may succeed. But the price of failure is escalation. Unlike
previous crises, no superpower can simply turn this crisis off. And
no longer is peace between Israel and the Palestinians at stake;
lasting peace between Israel and its largest Arab neighbor now
hangs in the balance.
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including the attack on USS Cole, be sure to see our Middle East
Hot Spot.
http://www.stratfor.com/hotspots/israel_palestine/default.htm

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Camp David: The Cause

A casual observer might think the explosion came from nowhere.
Others might think this is simply another inevitable round in the
interminable violence between Jews and Arabs. Neither view is
correct.

The violence was neither inevitable nor unpredictable. Instead, it
flowed directly from a poorly conceived U.S. diplomatic initiative
last July, when President Bill Clinton invited Ehud Barak and Yasir
Arafat to Camp David. The goal was to move toward a final, formal
settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. But the
outcome was disaster.

On July 10, 2000, in an analysis entitled Camp David, Good
Intentions and the Road to Hell, we wrote, the administration risks
hurting both Barak and Arafat, causing them severe if not fatal
political harm at home. The president's search for his legacy and
the reality of Israeli-Palestinian relations are on a collision
course. Both will likely be damaged at Camp David. We also wrote,
Clinton's good intentions may set the stage for a substantial
deterioration of the situation.

We knew it would be bad. But even we did not calculate fully how
bad the situation would become. By the time Barak arrived in
Washington, his government was barely hanging on to office,
battered inside and outside the coalition by those who were afraid
the Americans would force Barak to cede too much on too many core
issues. Arafat, with more room for maneuver, understood he could
not leave the meeting -- having made fundamental concessions -- and
survive. A prisoner of the politics of survival within the
Palestinian community, Arafat was intransigent. The Camp David
meetings never got off the ground.

But the meetings did succeed in stirring up the worst fears in both
camps about their respective leaderships. To move to a final,
formal settlement, they had to address core issues. Opponents of
the peace process in Israel were certain the creation of a
Palestinian state and a settlement on Jerusalem would lead to a
Palestinian army threatening the national security of Israel and
the partition of Jerusalem. They feared that Barak, under U.S.
pressure, would capitulate. For the Palestinians, the conviction
was that a formal peace would concede the loss of their homeland in
perpetuity and create an Israeli puppet state and permanent
domination.

The breakpoint occurred when the Barak government began floating
creative solutions to the Jerusalem question. This was the tripwire
that sent Israeli and Palestinian rejectionists to the wall.
Sharon's Temple Mount visit was the signal. But the underlying
reality was that Barak and the peace party in Israel lost
legitimacy as soon as they entertained the notion of a final
settlement, while Arafat retained legitimacy only by succumbing to
his own rejectionists.

Clinton's Camp David insisted on Jews and Arabs confronting, once
and for all, their incompatible fears and aspirations. Rather than
allowing quiet, informal arrangements on the ground to govern the
evolution on the relationship, Clinton tried to engineer a
comprehensive, formal, top-down solution. The result was that both
sides faced the abyss of peace and, in effect, chose war as the
lesser evil and safer course.

Had Camp David not occurred, the situation probably would not have
deteriorated this badly, if at all.

The Third Temple Scenario

Now, we are in what might be a nightmare scenario. The deepest
Israeli fear is that the Third Temple will fall and another
holocaust will ensue.

More than just a fear, the Israeli military has long feared such a
scenario and planned much of its doctrine around it. The scenario,
which dates back more than 25 years, goes like this. First, a
massive uprising occurs on the West Bank and the Gaza. Second,
this rising spreads to Arab citizens of Israel. Strained to its
limits by internal threats, the Israeli military may be unable to
deal with an external threat.

What makes events of the past few weeks fundamentally different
from anything that has happened before is the substantial violence
within Israel proper, involving the country's Arab citizenry. This
did not happen during the Intifada of the 1980s; in fact it has not
occurred on any similar scale since the 1948 war for independence.
Distributed throughout the country, Israeli Arabs live next to
major Israeli cities like Haifa while others reside in coastal
villages and in Galilee. An outright uprising of Israeli Arabs
would pose a nightmarish security concern like nothing in the West
Bank or Gaza.

This would only be the beginning. An uprising inside Israel would
make the movement of troops and supplies difficult and perhaps
impossible. It would immeasurably complicate mobilization and
movement toward the frontier. The difficulty of defending Israel
would rise by orders of magnitude. If bordering Arab states choose
to attack during such a rising, Israel could face defeat.

But here is the important caveat: The Arab states cannot defeat
Israel without the help of Egypt's military. In this crisis, Egypt
has emerged at the eye of the storm, with entreaties by all parties
for help. Egypt is the center of gravity of the Arab world. And
luckily for Israel, Egypt has a peace treaty with Jerusalem.

But a treaty is ultimately an expression of political will and the
nightmare in the Israeli military right now is that President Hosni
Mubarak -- heir to Anwar Sadat, the architect of the treaty --
might fall in a popular, anti-Israeli uprising or coup.
Alternatively, Mubarak, fearing such an evolution, might decide to
abrogate the treaty. If that happens, the geopolitics of the region
would revert to the same conditions as 1973.

Even while the Barak government attempts diplomacy, the Israeli
military problem is this: If Egypt shifts course for any reason,
Israeli forces would be in an impossible situation. Any attempt to
move troops into the Sinai's Mitla and Gidda passes, coupled with
an insurrection in Israel, poses an insurmountable problem, from a
standard conventional standpoint.

Therefore, Israeli doctrine holds that, under the nightmare
scenario, Israeli forces must move first to secure the passes.
Indeed, the full preemptive scenario would include a reoccupation
of Sinai up to the passes along with preemptive air strikes on Arab
air forces and, above all, missile capabilities.

Right now, the uprisings in Israel are not sufficient to constitute
the worst-case threat. But from the Israeli point of view, waiting
until things reach the worst case is unacceptable.

Egypt: The Key

For this reason the United States has done everything it can to
hold the Barak-Arafat summit in Egypt, at Sharm el-Sheikh, with
Egyptian participation.

First, the United States wants Mubarak to buy into the peace
process as a means of locking him into place. The fact he has
agreed to host the meeting serves as a confidence-building measure;
the Israelis can see that the nightmare scenario is not underway.

Second, this effort puts pressure on Barak to be flexible.
Terrified by the nightmare scenario, Barak is likely to behave in a
way that placates the Egyptians, who are observing events, and
calms the waters. Finally, by its deep involvement, the United
States is trying to show both sides limits are finally being placed
on their behavior.

One of the most dangerous elements of the current situation is the
lack of limits decidedly different from previous crises in the
Middle East. During the Cold War, Arabs and Israelis faced each
other as clients of the superpowers. The superpowers used the Arab-
Israeli conflict to their own ends, while not letting that conflict
degenerate into global war. Therefore, the two superpowers would
intervene to contain the conflict. The 1973 war effectively drew to
an end when National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger met Premier
Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. The superpowers increased the safety
factor in confrontations.

Today, there is only one superpower, and it has shown a casualness
with regional risks. At this summit, the United States will attempt
to demonstrate it can contain the conflict just as effectively as
it could with Soviet involvement. This will not be easy. The
foundation of the Palestinian National Authority is its armed
police force. Israel's ability to tolerate, let alone cooperate
with them is gone. Palestinian quiescence over the past years
assumed the PNA was going to evolve into a state, and if not a
state, an entity that would protect Palestinians from Israelis.
That is now gone too. Much of the hard work pre-dating Oslo has
been swept away. Reconstructing it will be difficult.

In the meantime, forces on both sides are working hard -- to
prevent reconciliation. The decision to attack the USS Cole in
Yemen was not taken casually. Men willing to die in suicide
bombings are rare, wasting assets. The bombers used them up and
have exposed their network to counterattack. They are trying to
force the United States into a retaliation that will show the Arab
world that Americans and Israelis are the same. Hezbollah's
capture of three Israelis on an odd patrol similarly suggests a
desire to confront the Israelis. Finally, indications are that the
Iraqis are repositioning to, at the very least, divert U.S. forces
or, at most, to resume the 1991 conflict.

On the Israeli side, the apparent offer to bring Ariel Sharon into
the cabinet indicates the weakness of the Barak government. Sharon
triggered the Arab riots by his Temple Mount visit. He was hoping
for that response and he got it. For him, it proved his contention
that Oslo was a mistake. Now, whether he joins the cabinet is up to
him. He may decline, on the expectation that the Barak government
will fall anyway and he will join a Likud-dominated cabinet.

If The Summit Fails

Having shattered the Humpty Dumpty of the peace process, the United
States will now try to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Working in
favor of this is that Barak and Arafat want to step back from the
brink.

The problem is that Barak isn't strong enough anymore, while
Arafat's strength derives from the fact he has become the willing
ally of opponents of reconciliation. Both want to step back; it is
unclear that either can.

If no resolution tomorrow, eyes should be on two questions. First,
will Arab unrest inside Israel subside or intensify? Second, will
events in Israel topple the Mubarak government or force him to
alter his course? If the unrest in Israel spreads and if Mubarak
wavers in any serious way, pressure inside Israel for fairly
extreme measures would grow dramatically.

Everyone argues whether the Oslo accords are dead or can be
revived. Embedded in this situation is a much bleaker question:
Can the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt survive current
pressures? We are in a different place now, an extraordinarily new,
unfamiliar and dangerous place that we should not take at all
lightly.

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For more on the Middle East and Africa, see:
http://www.stratfor.com/MEAF/default.htm
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(c) 2000 Stratfor, Inc.
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