THE MIDDLE EAST IN CRISIS in 2001 WHAT DOES THE FUTURE H

At no time since Israel was proclaimed a sovereign and independent state more than half-a-century ago has the future of the Middle East looked so bleak and deadly. Since new violence erupted last October between Israel on the one hand and the Palestinians on the other, a new intifada has evolved on a sustained basis. Thus, crisis management has replaced conflict resolution as the prevailing approach for dealing with trouble in this chronic hot spot (Simon, 2001, p. 31).

An underlying problem is the Palestinian unwillingness or inability to "abandon � its founding claim � that Palestinians displaced by Israel in 1948 be allowed to return home" (Zakaria 2001 2). Of course, Israel similarly has steadfastly refused to recognize the right of return for Palestinians - about one million of them, in all - following their own latter-day diaspora. The inescapable irony, of course, is that the Jews who founded Israel led the longstanding battle to right the wrong of their diaspora by the ancient Romans nearly two thousand years ago (Zakaria, 2001, p. 3).

Mounting tensions between Israel and the Palestinians of adjacent Gaza and the West Bank led to the first Arab uprising, or intifada, of 1987. It reportedly "caught [PLO leader Yasser] Arafat off guard," and may have sparked his long-postponed decision to start serious negotiations, which led to the Oslo accords of 1993-95 (Zakaria, 2001, p. 3). Arafat has had a choice ever since between sticking to the demand for return as op

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ittle dream (Halkin, 1999, p. 17). In addition, in light of more recent statements, Israeli officials also doubt Arafat's 1996 disavowal of the PLO charter's call for an armed jihad against their country. Muddying the waters further since the start of 2001 has been the U.S. government's dramatic policy reversal - from former President Clinton's almost grandfatherly approach of continuous hand-holding to the policy of the new administration of George W. Bush, which has been perceived as "hands off." Arab and Palestinian leaders, in particular, have become increasingly alarmed by the new approach. In particular, more recently they have become convinced "that Israel will never sit down to serious negotiations without U.S. persuasion" (Slackman, 2001, p. A4). (In fact, as many commentators noted, the prevailing belief among Arab leaders that Israel and the U.S. are, in effect, joined at the hip, may have helped fuel the terrorist attacks upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.) In response, the administration appears to be softening its leave-them-alone approach. In May, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that Israel's campaign of military toughness wasn't working and that negotiations should be moved to the t

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