America's Thankless Commitment to Peace

It's been some week in Gaza — the Palestinian Arab civil war has become an all-out action movie.

Hamas fighters lob mortars at the compound where the Palestinian Arab president, Mahmoud Abbas, hides. Egypt sends freshly armed Fatah fighters across its borders to kill other Palestinians. The interior minister of the Palestinian Authority resigns, saying he has no authority. Meanwhile, most of Gaza's 1 million residents are holed up in their homes as men with black ski masks stake out positions on rooftops and derelict streets.

The escalation coincided with the 59th commemoration of what the Palestinian Arabs call "Al Naqba," on Tuesday. The word means "catastrophe" in Arabic, a reference to the creation of Israel in 1948. At the moment, however, the phrase Al Naqba more accurately portrays the current Palestinian conditions.

Yet amazingly, the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, along with the president of Egypt, felt this was the right moment to warn a visiting Vice President Cheney that unless America helps put out the Palestinian Arab fires, it cannot begin to stabilize Iraq, win the war on terror, or halt Iran's race for a nuclear bomb.

This formulaic Arab request is shorthand for asking America to "force" Israel to give up the West Bank and the Golan Heights and to deliver an independent Palestinian Arab state that could take in millions of Palestinian refugees. For special effect, the Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah, added that time was "running out" for America to get its act together on Arab-Israeli issues.

If this sounds like a broken record mixed with a touch of blackmail and delusion, it is. Never mind that, even as Gaza burns, in the territories all around Abdullah's kingdom, Shiites and Sunnis are butchering each other in Iraq, jihadists are challenging the current governments, and Iran is looming ever larger.

All drama aside, America has undertaken all the peacemaking opportunities available and done so at a huge cost in both treasury and good will. In the 1970s and '80s, America accomplished two Herculean tasks, landing peace treaties between Israel and Jordan, and between Israel and Egypt. The bill came in at more than $140 billion — and counting — and garnered few thank-you notes.

When compared to what it did for Europe after World War II, the breadth of America's commitment to the Middle East is breathtaking. According to a president of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Albert Beveridge III, postwar expenditures "to reduce hunger, homelessness, sickness, unemployment, and political restlessness" for 270 million Europeans living in 16 nations totaled a modest $13.3 billion — about $88.2 billion in today's dollars. The Marshall Plan aid lasted just four years.

By contrast, America has been actively working on peace in the Middle East for 28 years, during which it has paid Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Arabs more than $150 billion to kiss and make up. America's aid funding in the region is so head and shoulders above that in Africa, the former Soviet republics, and other truly poor countries of the world, it is absurd.

And what has been the result? Since the Israel-Jordan peace treaty was penned on October 26, 1994, American taxpayers have supported Jordan's 6 million people — half of whom are Palestinian Arabs — to the tune of $350 million a year, a total of $4.5 billion to date. Still, Jordanian public opinion is fiercely hostile to America.

Since Egypt and Israel signed on the dotted line on March 26, 1979, Israel has received some $80 billion, and Egypt has collected $60 billion, according to congressional statistics. If American spending on Egypt is far from over, so are the insults heaped on it daily in the Egyptian press.

Even the quarrelsome Palestinian Arabs who routinely burn American flags have received well over $20 billion in food and humanitarian aid from Uncle Sam.

Whether it is money well spent is arguable. What is certain is that America, while Europe and the Arab countries watched, has done more than its share as a Middle East peacemaker. Now, with the problems of Iraq, the rise of Islamist terror, China's growing might, and a rising Russian challenge, America has other fish to fry.

The status quo in the Middle East does not require American baby-sitting. Israel is too strong, and Arab countries are mired by internal challenges. So what America's attitude should be, to use a version of James Baker's joke, is this: When anyone feels the need to sign a peace treaty, they know the number.