As Peace Process Dies, The Blame Game Begins

By Richard H. Curtiss

"The time has come to think and say that maybe the Palestinian people are not ripe for the peace process."

— Israeli Chief Rabbi Meir Lau, The Washington Post, Jan. 31, 1995

Whatever his intentions when Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin persuaded him that a favorable peace with a pliable PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was possible, it's clear that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's present plans no longer include peace with the Palestinians. In June 1992, right after he won his election, he promised U.S. President George Bush to "freeze" Israeli settlements in the occupied territories in exchange for $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.

Bush said the occupied territories included East Jerusalem and Rabin said they didn't. That never was resolved since only five months later Bush lost his election—with a lot of help from Rabin's friends in the media. Then came the Declaration of Principles agreed upon by Rabin and Arafat.

The DOP is explicitly grounded on the land-for-peace principle of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, and implicitly based on the Israeli government's promise to the U.S. government to "freeze" the settlements. But the settlements haven't been frozen. Instead, the Israeli government has admitted, after leaked Israeli documents appeared in the U.S. press, that Rabin's government is not just "completing" houses that already were underway at the time of his pledge to Bush. It's also issuing permits for thousands of new "private" settlement housing in the West Bank and is using Israeli government funds to build totally new residential areas in East Jerusalem and in portions of the West Bank "annexed" to Jerusalem to assure that Jews outnumber Muslims and Christians in all parts of that city. Rabin also is using Israeli government funds to build new Jewish settlements in West Bank areas close to the narrowest part of Israel proper.

The intent clearly is to preclude the possibilities of dividing or sharing Jerusalem before the fall of 1996, by which time final status negotiations are to begin, and also to create "facts on the ground" throughout the West Bank that will make an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, as envisioned in the land-for-peace resolution, impracticable.

In short, Yitzhak Rabin has betrayed the Palestinians—and the United States.

Because none of the settlement "thickening" and expansion can be attributed to the "terror" being carried out by Palestinian opponents of Yasser Arafat and of peace, Rabin has shifted the debate away from this core issue by violating the DOP in many other ways and then blaming those violations on "terrorism." Under the DOP the Palestinian Authority was to set up in Gaza and Jericho in November 1993, but the Israelis delayed it until April 1994. The Israelis were to withdraw from the rest of the West Bank by July 1994 so that the Palestinians could have elections the same month, but the Israelis have neither moved nor set a date for withdrawal—or for Palestinian elections. The Israelis also were to release some 10,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli jails, many of them without charges, but so far only about half have been freed—generally when their original sentences expired. And whereas Israel and the elected Palestinian authorities were to open "final stage" negotiations on Jerusalem and on the form of Palestinian self-government by September 1996, and complete them by September 1998, it is virtually certain that there will be no final stage negotiations at all. Rabin is delaying the final stage by not allowing the Palestinians to choose their negotiators through the promised elections. And, by creating "facts on the ground," he is leaving little to negotiate about.

The Israeli excuse for this gross betrayal, that effectively is killing the peace talks, is "terror." Between the signing of the DOP on Sept. 13, 1993 and Feb. 1 of this year, some 110 Israelis died at the hands of Arafat's political opponents—Iran-funded Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the right and the Syrian-based PFLP, PFLP-GC, and DFLP on the left. During the same period, some 195 Palestinians were killed, largely by Israeli soldiers and the Israeli government-armed and -subsidized settlers. In the less than six years between the Dec. 7, 1987 outbreak of the intifada and the signing of the DOP, 1,137 Palestinians were killed, and some 121,246 were injured according to the Palestine Human Rights Information Center in Jerusalem.

All of this indisputably is terror, but there are two points of difference. The deaths of more than 1,000 and wounding of more than 100,000 Palestinians at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers in the six years prior to the Oslo agreement didn't keep Yasser Arafat from signing it and doing his best to live up to its provisions, including personally declaring "null and void" the portions of the Palestine National Charter calling for the destruction of Israel. But the Israelis are not even trying to comply with the agreement. That weakens Arafat and strengthens the opponents of peace, and Rabin knows it. It also creates the hatred and sense of victimization that makes it possible for Arafat's opponents to recruit the suicide bombers upon whom their efforts depend.

From the beginning, Arafat's Palestinian opponents believed Rabin had no intention of carrying out Israel's obligations under the DOP. Instead, Palestinian skeptics believed, Rabin counted on Arafat and his opponents to comport themselves so badly that the Palestinians could be blamed for the failure of the peace process. Whether or not that was Rabin's original intention, it clearly is now.

In the absence of pressure from the United States, he has made it clear to the Palestinians that so long as the "terror" persists, there will be no withdrawal and no elections. By his actions he also has made it clear to Israeli voters that so long as he is prime minister of Israel there will be no sharing of Jerusalem, no Palestinian sovereignty, and that he will leave the settlers alone. Although his public approval has dipped well below that of Likud leader Benyamin Netanyahu, Rabin hopes it will rebound when voters decide that he has cleverly tricked the Palestinians—and the Americans.

Resolution 242 and the DOP based upon it envisions the Palestinians settling for the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, 22 percent of the mandate of Palestine. Yasser Arafat formally has accepted Resolution 242. Now the settlers have received from the Israeli government title to 65 percent of even that 22 percent of Palestine. The Palestinians were two-thirds of the population at the time the U.N. partitioned Palestine in 1947 so that 53 percent was to be a state for the Jews, and 47 percent was to be a state for the Muslim and Christian Palestinians. What Rabin now is offering Yasser Arafat for his people is less than 10 percent of that original mandate of Palestine west of the Jordan River.

The proposition is absurd on the face of it, and Rabin is counting on Arafat to say so and break off the negotiations. Instead, Arafat has conducted himself with dignity. He has refused to break off the talks despite the insurmountable obstacles being placed before him by the Israeli government, with the acquiescence, at every step, of Clinton administration Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

At present, there are few Americans who do not understand that settlements, and settler terrorism, not Palestinian terrorism, killed the peace process. Some of Israel's, and Rabin's, strongest supporters have spoken out clearly on the subject, including most recently Henry Siegman, former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, in an article in the Jan. 26 New York Times.

But Yitzhak Rabin is counting on continued silence from the Clinton administration, which already is deeply flawed from the top down. If it hasn't done so already, Israel's government undoubtedly can threaten to bring to light other unsavory truths to ensure the Clinton administration's continued acquiescence in whatever Israel chooses to do. Therefore, during the two years remaining to this impotent U.S. administration, Rabin is depending on Israel's media supporters in the United States, loyal not to the tenets of their profession but only to any elected government of Israel, to expunge the record of who killed the peace process. It will be their job to see that history places the blame for the death of the Middle East peace process on "Palestinian terrorism" rather than Israeli expansionism, where it belongs.

"Friends of Israel" in Congress may also seek to play the role of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, speeding up the death of the peace process by pushing through a resolution mandating that the American Embassy be moved immediately from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Chief White House Middle East adviser Martin Indyk, Clinton's nominee for U.S. ambassador to Israel, assured Congress on Feb. 2 that moving the embassy immediately would "blow up" the peace process, a comment that was echoed by former House Foreign Affairs Chairman Lee Hamilton. That may be one way for Israel to shift the blame for the murder to the negative reaction by the Arabs—and to the United States Congress—since the Rabin government has avoided asking Congress to adopt any such resolution.

As the "moderate" Arab states sense the onrushing death of the peace process which they have tried to assist, there is a rush to reposition themselves without letting Israel pin the blame on them for its demise. Egypt will refuse to sign on again to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty unless Israel signs up for the first time. Other Arab countries will follow suit. If that makes Egypt's "cold peace" with Israel so cold that it resembles clinical death, it will remove the club with which Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's critics hit him most often.

If it also costs Egypt its annual $2 billion in U.S. aid for keeping the peace with Israel, it's no longer much of a loss. Mubarak knows the Republican Congress is dying to take it away from Egypt anyway in 1996. The Gulf Cooperation Council countries, which have stopped observing the "secondary" and "tertiary" Arab League boycott of companies that do business with Israel, will leave it at that. Those are the aspects of the boycott that inconvenience them more than they hurt Israel. Israel's chances of getting any Arab country other than Egypt and Jordan to lift the primary boycott are nil after the peace process dies.

As for Jordan, Israelis were saying only weeks ago that its peace treaty with Israel leaves Syria's Hafez Al-Assad as odd man out among Arab states bordering Israel. If the Israelis carry through their betrayal of the Palestinians, however, the odd man out becomes King Hussein. As the Middle East's longest-reigning monarch and consumate survivor, it's a position he won't choose to occupy for long.

Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's fox, has taken advantage of a disorganized and inexperienced American president who obviously is susceptible to media and perhaps even cruder blackmail. By doing so, Rabin believes he also has tricked the Palestinians into giving his government enough time to consolidate the complete takeover of their land. What he is overlooking, however, is that in the interest of his own re-election he also has tricked his fellow Israelis into giving up their last chance, almost certainly forever, to live in peace—and survive—in an increasingly well-armed, hostile and outraged Middle East.