As the Clinton administration reaches the end of its final term, it has pushed for a final Syrian-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli peace deal. Hosting a series of dramatic summits, Washington has promised historic results. Yet, as time wears on, despite the administration's urgency--which even its officials quietly acknowledge is because President Clinton is eager to make this issue (and a possible Nobel Prize) his "legacy"--there is no peace. This even though the current Israeli administration has promised it will do everything to try to reach a deal with both Syria and the PLO by this summer.

The episode caps a decade-long, intense effort to reach peace. This effort has produced some agreements and substantial Israeli withdrawals from territories, but with the exception of the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, it has not impelled those involved to place the conflict behind them.

Still, Israeli society appears to be undergoing rapid change. Palestinian society is wracked by sharp internal divisions and internal corruption, while the Syrian regime has entered a succession crisis. This begs a question: Is the elusiveness of real peace between Israel and the PLO and the Baathist-controlled Syrian regime a result of their internal conditions?

Inside Israel

Israel's elite and political system are largely still as they have been since the creation of the state. Yet, as a nation beyond its elite, Israel is changing. The agricultural, generally poor, small, largely Polish- and Russian-run socialist system of the early days has yielded to a high-tech, impressively wealthy, research and development--oriented economy with a bewildering number of highly engaged ethnic communities, including a new crop of Russian immigrants, a majority Oriental Jewish population, and a large Ethiopian community. A southern African tribe and a community from India, both with verifiable claims to be remnants of the lost tribes of Israel, are beginning to immigrate. Israel also is home to hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal foreign workers--mostly from the Caribbean and West Africa--who amount to about 15 percent of the population. The vibrance of the society and economy has severed the elite and political system from developments in society at large. As they seek to resolve this disconnect, Israelis will become increasingly impatient with external distractions, absorbed, and introverted.

The last election, in 1999, was the first sign of introversion. In a campaign run as much on social as security and foreign policy questions, the voters preferred a consensus-based approach to the "peace" process. They rejected the dramatic, bold, and divisive approach of the Labor government from 1992 to 1996, which led to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In particular, the issue of religion in society and a demand for decisive government action on this matter defined the last election. In short, Israel is a divided society but far more on social issues than peace and war.

Israelis have lost their self-confidence, which allowed them to stand alone against global disapprobation--as they did when Iraq's Osirak reactor was bombed in 1981. The willingness of the last two U.S. administrations to link relations with Israel to commitment to the "peace" process, as well as the Clinton administration's efforts to forsake a special relationship with Israel for a special relationship to the "peace" process, which implied a balanced relationship between Israel and the PLO, has left Israelis feeling diplomatically isolated. It also leaves them feeling vulnerable. The shakiness of the U.S.- Israel relationship, as revealed by the Clinton administration's overt hostility toward Benjamin Netanyahu's government, especially affects Israel's confidence, as its dependence on U.S. military and strategic assistance has increased greatly in the past decade. No Israeli government, even when its vital interests are involved, feels it can flout the will of the United States.

Moreover, historically, every Israeli government has demonstrated that it feels it would politically strengthen itself by achieving a real peace. All parties that controlled government have consistently withdrawn from territory to achieve peace. Even Likud has withdrawn from the entire Sinai, withdrawn from Hebron--the second-holiest place in Judaism--and offered twice, once under Menachem Begin and again under Netanyahu, to withdraw from the Golan Heights. No major political movement, not even any movement represented in parliament other than the Israeli Communist Party, includes a call for strife or conflict as even a minor element of its political platform.

The widely accepted concept of Israeli "intransigence" has obscured a key point: The parameters of debate in Israel range from those who wish to maintain the current territorial extent of their shrinking state to those who wish to reduce it yet further. No party or movement--even the much-maligned settler movement--seeks to expand Israel's territory.

At the same time, Israel has developed a sense of skepticism over the long-term intentions of its interlocutors, the PLO and Syria. Periodic waves of terror emanating from Palestinian territories, anti-Semitic statements by the highest Palestinian officials, an unrelenting stream of warnings and threats of renewed conflict from Palestinian negotiators, years of wrenching internal divides in society, and a failure to achieve any meaningful diplomatic, security, or financial advantages by making concessions have dulled the euphoria Israelis felt in 1993 after the first Oslo agreement. Syria's behavior in recent negotiations, the violence it fomented by proxy against Israel in Lebanon, and the price Damascus demands up front for unspecific concessions have left even peace-hungry Israelis questioning the continued value of negotiations with the Baathist-controlled state.

That skepticism has not translated into policy, however. Israel's Right is defeated and seems incapable of capitalizing on this attitude. Its current leadership lacks energy and freshness. Over the last five years, it has been demoralized by Rabin's assassination and the subsequent embrace of the "peace" process by the ostensibly right-wing Netanyahu.

Thus, Israeli society is marked by two trends. There is a skepticism toward peace that is balanced by a general level of both introversion and exhaustion with war. A great act of leadership by the Right might reverse the exhaustion, but none is visible at the moment. Nor can it overcome the nation's natural desire, even need, for introversion.

As such, even if the Right emerges reinvigorated, it would probably argue only that the "peace" process is draining and divisive and should be slowed or stopped. It would not, however, find fertile ground for advocating a more active foreign policy.

At the same time, a gesture toward peace by either Syria or the PLO might neutralize the skepticism produced by an unproductive, and often very bloody, decade of peacemaking. It would not resurrect the euphoria seen earlier over the process. For these reasons, any apparently genuine deal for peace, and even some insincere deals, offered by either Syria or the PLO stands a good chance of being accepted, but only grudgingly, by most Israelis.

Inside the PLO and Israel

In contrast, all major movements within the PLO leadership or Syria's government openly demand that their irredentist claims be fully satisfied. Moreover, the parameters of debate among the PLO's main factions range from those who might settle for a substantial increase of Palestinian territory to those who still cannot fathom accepting Israel's existence at any size. The PLO, in all its agreements, has never acknowledged Israel's legitimacy, offered a real "peace treaty," or committed itself to surrendering the option of violent struggle. So far they all have been interim agreements without any permanent commitments. The only demand that the PLO could not avoid granting--a commitment to change its charter calling for Israel's destruction--was never implemented, despite the numerous administration theatrics staged to suggest otherwise. The PLO has never even hinted that it would make peace if Israel withdrew fully to the June 4, 1967, lines, including from Jerusalem.

Indeed, all public statements indicate that the real parameters of Palestinian debate are between those who would accept Israel within the 1947 partition lines--which only a few officials have suggested might suffice--and those who still seek to eliminate Israel. The situation with Syria is even clearer--and more depressing. The current regime has stated that it will never accept Israel as a legitimate entity. Despite Syria's current weakness, its senior officials have said they might accept a nonbelligerency agreement in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 line, but only if that pact serves to weaken the Jewish state and renders it more vulnerable in the next "phase" of the strategic plan.

The glorification of strife and struggle, the pursuit of which is rejected by all parties in Israel, remains the foundation of the Syrian government and all PLO movements, even after the Oslo accords. The language of violence, struggle, revolution, and war is enshrined in the standard political vocabulary of their defining documents; it is the cornerstone of most major speeches of the civilian and military leaderships. In the Palestinian Authority and Syria, society is in a state of constant mobilization and preparation for war. In both, the normal functioning of society and government is suspended, political discourse and debate are forbidden, and the market-based distribution of wealth, resources, and investment is distorted by regimes whose ideologies are anchored to concepts of perpetual violence and war-- against Israel and the United States.

Both the PLO and Syria are products of a tide of revolutionary anger and enchantment with social experimentation that swept the Arab world in the 1950s and '60s. These regimes are marked by an assault on political humility, a qualification demanded of those who claim good governance. Instead of accepting the importance of restraint in exerting power into areas into which politicians should never venture and understanding the limits of what they have a right to play with in society, Yasser Arafat and Hafez al-Assad hold their own people in contempt, using the populations to pursue their personal, factional, and ideological ambitions. Whenever they could, they expanded state power and leveled barriers to unrestrained power. Surrendering to arrogance and wild ambition, they distorted the proper relationship between a ruler and those ruled. The last two decades have witnessed the mass murder of cities under Assad's tyranny and the impoverishment of Palestinians under Arafat's corruption.

That core objective of waging revolution and war is the foundation of the perpetual state of emergency that "legitimizes" suspended societal activity, forbidden political discourse, and distorted economic activity. Despite the devastation, these governments have been shielded from the misery they caused by the Arab-Israeli dispute. Seeing Zionist conspiracies behind every event allowed rulers to shift blame for the painful effects of their failures to unseen outsiders. The war on Israel and the attendant military mobilization of society became a legitimate vehicle allowing Assad and Arafat to limit political freedoms and subjugate unwieldy citizens.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, neither Syria nor the PLO could afford real war; they had been profoundly weakened by their misguided geostrategic choices and disastrous internal behavior. At the same time, neither could afford to make real peace. The reliance on strife cannot be removed from the ideological edifice of the Palestinian or Syrian regime. It is the central pillar of the entire ruling structure. Once jettisoned, the current ruling elites would crumble. The institutions they created would collapse, since the regimes would lack the means to shift blame for the continued failure of governance to external forces.

To resolve this contradiction, both Assad and Arafat embraced the Arab- Israeli "peace" process to avoid ultimate defeat at Israel's hands. But it was not the same as peace; in fact, it was, as Syria's foreign minister has bluntly asserted, a form of conflict under revised terms. The "peace" process even allowed them to maintain conflict as a centrally defining feature but keep it at a manageable level of violence, thus obstructing Israel's meaningful or threatening responses. It also helped Syria and the PLO secure significant regional strategic advantages. To avoid endangering continued engagement in the "peace" process, Israel and even the United States were willing to downplay the strategic utility of Turkey, ignore Syrian rapprochement with Saddam Hussein, and overlook the PLO's creeping encroachment in Jordan. The "pro-peace" stance cast the survival of the PLO and the Syrian regime as a major objective of the United States--in effect granting them a legitimacy through superpower imprimatur that neither could have obtained through their own devices. It also helped them maintain a state of internal emergency. At times both the PLO and Syria have cracked down on political opponents with the feigned excuse that Israel and the United States forced them to check the "enemies of peace."

The "peace" process has also helped financially. Claiming that endemic poverty undermines support for the process, the PLO appealed to the West and even Israel for financial assistance to replace oil and Soviet support. The West, eager to push the process along, indulged the PLO and rallied the demanded aid.

But neither the lease on life nor the infusion of funds has been used to pursue or fund development. Instead, the PLO and Syria continue to fund the corruption, military buildup, and repressive apparatus that made them weak. Both Assad and Arafat continue to evade responsibility for their nations' internal affairs, blaming Israel and the United States for the ill effects of bad governance and then demanding that these countries help extract them from the mess their own policies create. In short, the "peace" process is a device to shun accountability and maintain dictatorial control.

Such a situation is not, however, infinitely sustainable. Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese will tire of suspending t heir aspirations for a better life to pursue another uncertain foreign adventure. Nor will providing money help them move away from the current economic distortions; indeed, it helps fund continuation of those distortions. As such, foreign aid will only postpone the reckoning.

The Interaction

How do these internal conditions affect Israel's interactions with the PLO and Syria? Israel's foundations are strong, but the country needs new leadership. If it arises, then Israel will emerge--through a process of regeneration that is as inevitable as it is inexplicable, which free, democratic nations seem always to experience--as the region's eclipsing power, cultural, economic, and military. This will happen whether there is peace or not. Ironically, while its entire political spectrum advocates concessions for peace in some shape or form, Israel doesn't really need that peace.

The picture is opposite for the PLO and Syria. Events can now push in two ways. Neither is peace, but neither will change the long-range dynamic. The PLO and Syria might for some time manage to avoid the consequences of their abysmal failures of governance. But they will not be able to do so eternally; both face an eventual implosion.

On the one side, there might emerge a prolonged state of neither real peace nor real war, a continued "peace" process accompanied by controlled conflict. Still, Israel faces neighboring societies in deep crisis. For their own reasons, they too are drawn toward introversion-- an impulse that would eventually prove fatal. These regimes increasingly find themselves in a deadly position of their own creation: They must continue to divert attention from their failed administration toward struggle with Israel and the West, while their societies increasingly cannot afford that very struggle. The longer this dance continues, the more they will rely on external conflict to survive and the less they will be able to afford doing so. No amount or longevity of external conflict can permanently shield these two regimes from eventual accountability. Both will face implosion.

Another scenario is possible. Ironically, Israel's behavior as it seeks peace and sorts out its internal upheaval actually increases the chances of a real war. The Palestinians and Syria see Israel's internal chaos, apparent exhaustion, introversion, and peace offerings as signs of weakness and collapse--reminiscent of signs of the Crusaders' collapse, the first of which appeared 60 years after the Crusader kingdom was established in Palestine. At the same time, as the failure of governance becomes more acute, the PLO and Syria might imagine they can safely risk ever-higher levels of conflict to divert attention from their failure. This might lead to a terrible miscalculation, a war that will result in an impressive Israeli military victory and a devastating loss for its opponents.

Either way, the twentieth century ended much like the previous did: a Western nation, in this case Israel, rapidly eclipsing all others in the region in power and development, facing an Arab world asking itself why it is so backward and what makes the Western nation so advanced. The PLO and Syria cannot afford to have their people ask these questions, which is why they cannot afford real peace.