Vicious Circle Read Free Page B

She seemed as much impressed by the tone of the book as its contents. As she told me the first time we met, she didn't come
     across many Middle East mavens, her husband included, who were as detached as I was
.
    Along with my reputation for deadpan detachment, I brought to the job the hard-nosed heresy that the way out was to raise
     the stakes. Even before the European leaders drove the point home with their Delphic chant, the political climate was ripe
     for heresy. The rash of terrorist attacks on Israeli cities and Israel’s tit-for-tat retaliatory raids on the Palestinian
     territories were still fresh in everyone’s memory. When another terrorist attack struck the continental United States a month
     after the new President was sworn in—I’m talking about that crop-dusting plane that attempted to spray Indianapolis with anthrax
     spores; deaths would have been in the thousands instead of the dozens if the winds hadn’t carried off most of the anthrax—anti-Israel
     sentiment, never far beneath the surface, turned up in the public discourse. We all heard it—on the TV talk shows, at cocktail
     parties, in elevators. The sentence usually began with some variant of the phrase, “If it weren’t for the Jews …” Taking advantage
     of the fact that the general public was fed up with America getting blamed for the Israeli problem, Congress passed and the
     President signed into law—despite intense opposition from the Jewish lobby and its allies on the evangelical Christian right—a
     measure doing away with tax deductions for contributions to organizations that distributed money to foreign governments or
     entities. Overnight donations to the United Jewish Appeal dried up. When the Israelis orchestrated a not-very-subtle campaign
     against the sitting President, the other shoe dropped: acting on my advice, the United States suspended the delivery of arms
     to the two leading recipients of foreign aid, Israel and Egypt
.
    You remember what happened as well as I do. The move, which would have been unthinkable only a few months before, caused a
     Richter-scale quake in Middle East politics. The Israeli Air Force flies American jets. Without spare parts, they would have
     to begin cannibalizing planes in order to keep others in the air. The Israeli government spumed for several days and then
     imploded, elections were held and a coalition of the more moderate secular and religious parties cobbled together a slim majority
     in the Knesset. Which is when I began shuttling
between Jerusalem and Cairo and Riyadh and what was left of the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah after repeated
     Israeli air strikes. Brandishing the usual carrots and sticks, I persuaded the two sides to grudgingly agree to cease fire.
     The Palestinian Authority, under intense pressure from the Egyptians and the Saudis, who were under intense pressure from
     European capitals, finally got serious about jailing Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Fatah and Al Aksa activists and shutting
     down the suicide bombings; Israel, fearful of losing American support for the first time since the creation of the Jewish
     state, pulled its Army out of the Palestinian cities on the West Bank it had occupied, ordered its soldiers to stop shooting
     rubber bullets at children throwing stones and gradually opened the borders to Palestinians who held permits to work in Israel;
     within weeks twenty thousand Palestinians were crossing into Israel daily, and returning home at night with pay envelopes
     in their pockets. When the cease fire held, the belligerents were dragged—kicking and screaming, according to the
Washington Post
—to the negotiating table at the Mt. Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, the scene of the Bretton Woods Conference after World
     War II
.
    Which pretty much brings us to where we're at this morning. If the cease fire holds long enough for us to get this damned
     treaty signed, the hope is that the silent majorities on both sides