Why Bush Should Shun Clinton's Mideast Hot Potato

Bill Clinton still doesn't get it: The power to make peace in the Middle East is not among those of a U.S. president. Having on Thursday finally conceded what most observers have known since the end of last summer — that a final Israeli-Palestinian peace accord is unlikely during his tenure — Clinton went on to say that it'll be up to the Bush administration to keep the process going.

President-elect Bush would be forgiven for taking issue with that interpretation. The incoming administration is more likely to see maintaining the peace process as primarily the responsibility of the Israelis and Palestinians themselves.

It's not for want of a good facilitator and mediator that a final peace agreement remains elusive. The conflict is based fundamentally on territory, and the two sides' mutually exclusive claims on it — hills, fields, orchards, an olive tree here, a stream there, homes, roads and shrines that individuals and groups on each side claim as their own, and are prepared to fight and die to retain or reclaim, as the case may be.

Although they were pushed by historical and geopolitical factors to attempt a resolution of that conflict during the '90s, neither side is prepared — or able — to concede enough to make the other side do the same. And changing the political climate among both Israelis and Palestinians is way beyond the capability of even the world's only superpower. There's nothing a Bush administration can do right now to seal a peace deal that a Clinton administration hasn't already flogged to death.

They'll keep talking

That's the bad news. Despite the absence of an agreement, though, Israeli and Palestinian leaders will continue to talk, because they can't afford not to. While Israel's electorate looks set to stampede to the right behind Ariel Sharon on February 6, they're choosing the old warhorse because they believe he'll drive a harder peace bargain, not because they want to return to war. Everything from international and domestic public opinion to the demographics of the region demands that Israel remain engaged in some sort of peace process. And on the Palestinian side, while public opinion has swung against the peace process, Arafat and the men around him know that letting go of the peace process altogether is an admission of defeat, which would inevitably see the mantle of Palestinian leadership wrenched from them by younger and more radical forces.

But just as much as both sides need to keep the process going, neither side can afford to bring it to a conclusion any time soon. The denouement scripted by Washington in these final weeks has failed to tempt either Arafat or Barak to commit to their roles because its basic propositions contained the seeds of domestic political doom for both men. And that appears to be the reality President Clinton has failed to grasp in his attempt to pass the peacemaker baton to President-elect Bush. Right now, both sides can commit to an open-ended process that helps them manage their conflict — to a process, in other words, without an endpoint.