Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1998, Pages 9-10

Special Report

In His Dealings With Arafat and Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Ensures There Will Be No Peace

By Rachelle Marshall

Like ancient armies that salted over the earth after destroying an enemy city, the government of Israel has systematically laid waste to the peace process. In violating its solemn agreements and demonstrating contempt for Palestinian concerns, Israel has destroyed the trust that must underlie any serious peace effort and is instead sowing bitterness and frustration. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu demands that the Palestinians take steps to guarantee Israel's security, but as long as the present situation lasts, it is the Palestinians whose lives are in danger.

A report published by the Israeli organization B'Tselem last December shows that in the past 10 years 1,641 Palestinians, including 267 children, were killed by Israeli soldiers and civilians or by Israeli undercover agents posing as Arabs. Palestinians killed 256 Israelis. During the same period thousands of Palestinians were arrested, detained without trial, and subjected to torture during interrogation. Hundreds of families were made homeless: between 1987 and 1997 Israeli authorities demolished 2,530 Palestinian houses, either as a punitive measure or because their owners lacked building permits—permits that are almost impossible to obtain.

As Israel stalls on implementing the Oslo agreement, these numbers are rising. Since Netanyahu took office in May 1996, Israel has destroyed 245 Palestinian homes, with more than three thousand scheduled to be demolished in 1998, according to the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem. Palestinian casualties also continue to increase. Hardly a week goes by without a report in the Arab press of the shooting or beating of a Palestinian by an Israeli soldier or settler.

Typical of such arbitrary killings was the fatal shooting of 36-year-old Jimmy Kanawati by an Israeli border policeman on Nov. 22. Kanawati was returning home late at night from dinner in Jerusalem when he slowed down at the Bethlehem checkpoint. According to his companion Jimmy A'ma, when Kanawati failed to stop quickly enough one of the Israeli guards shot him in the head. He was left lying in the road for three hours until an Israeli ambulance took him away.

His killer is not likely to be punished. Two soldiers who shot to death 65-year-old Muhammad Abu Khalil in front of his neighbors in January 1996 were given only a "verbal reprimand" by an Israeli army court, which said the soldiers had "behaved inappropriately" when one of them sat on Abu Khalil's chest while he bled to death. In December, Israeli settler Avraham Korman was set free after spending only a few months in prison for having beaten to death with his gun butt 10-year-old Hilmi Abu Shushah in October 1996. In November, the Israeli High Court released Shlomo Malol after he had served two years of a four-year sentence for killing 18-year-old Raed Sha'aban. The Court also absolved Malol of his commitment to pay damages to the Sha'aban family.

Commemoration Via Clemency

Last October, Israeli President Ezer Weizman commemorated the Jewish New Year by granting clemency to six convicted Israeli murderers who had spent only brief periods in prison. One had killed a pregnant Palestinian woman, and two of the others had thrown hand grenades into an East Jerusalem market, killing a 70-year-old Palestinian man and wounding 10 others.

Israeli civilians driven by hatred and soldiers trained to regard Arabs as inferior already are aware that Israeli authorities put little value on Palestinian lives. Now the government is about to underscore that message. A bill that has already passed two readings in the Knesset bars future lawsuits against Israeli soldiers and police in the West Bank and Gaza and wipes out more than 4,000 Palestinian claims for damages that are now in the courts. The measure grants immunity to Israeli security forces for actions they take on occupation duty that are in any way related to "combating or preventing terrorism"—a phrase that Israeli army courts can interpret broadly.

Amnesty International has urged Knesset members to vote down the bill, asserting that it "is nothing but an attempt by Israel to evade its international obligations to pay compensation to victims of human rights violations." As Amnesty's statement points out, the law will make violence against Palestinians virtually cost-free. The government has made no equivalent move to reduce the stiff taxes it attaches to the cost of wheelchairs, a tax paid by several thousand severely injured Palestinians. Many of the permanently handicapped are youths who were wounded during the intifada or children who accidentally touched off landmines laid by Israeli soldiers during Israeli training exercises.

An even more provocative action by the Netanyahu government is its ongoing effort to cordon off East Jerusalem from the West Bank and to replace the Arab population with Jews. In addition to encircling East Jerusalem with massive Jewish settlements, Israel prohibits almost all West Bank Palestinians from entering the city and has confiscated the identity cards of more than a thousand Jerusalemites. In mid-December the government abruptly barred Palestinians from conducting a long-scheduled census in East Jerusalem intended to supply data needed to set economic and social priorities. One day before the count was to begin the Knesset, in a rarely used procedure, passed all three required readings of a bill prohibiting all political activity by Palestinians in Jerusalem "or any similar activity that does not conform with respecting Israeli sovereignty." A Palestinian who attempted to begin the head count was promptly arrested.

A statement issued from Netanyahu's office in support of the measure effectively scrapped a provision of the Oslo agreement calling for the future of Jerusalem to be determined in the final stage of negotiations. "Jerusalem is Israel's capital," the statement said, and the prime minister "will not allow any foreign activity in the city." Netanyahu's reference to a Palestinian census in East Jerusalem as "foreign activity" recalls the time when his former boss and predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir, called West Bank Palestinians "aliens in the land of Israel."

As Jerome Segal, president of the Jewish Peace Lobby, pointed out in the Washington Jewish Week last November, the 170,000 Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem are hardly foreigners. From the 7th century until the end of World War I the city was almost continuously under Muslim rule. Because Muslims believe Muhammad was transported from Jerusalem on a night journey to heaven, it is their third most sacred city, as well as the center of Palestinian social and cultural life.

As if Yitzhak Rabin had never agreed to negotiate the future of the occupied territories, Netanyahu declared on Dec. 21 that the West Bank is "part of Israel proper...This is the land of our forefathers and we claim it to the same degree that the other side claims it." Two weeks later, while U.S. envoy Dennis Ross was in Israel trying to restart peace talks, the government ignored the Clinton administration's plea for a timeout on settlement building and defiantly announced that it would double the number of Jewish settlers by the year 2010. The cabinet had earlier allocated $285 million—20 percent more than last year—for settlement expansion in 1998. According to a January report by Peace Now, 4, 714 housing units are currently under construction in the West Bank despite a 12 percent vacancy rate.

Palestinian Minister of Higher Education Hanan Ashrawi called the new units "gravestones of peace," an apt phrase since the accelerated building program not only preempts future negotiations on settlements and the return of West Bank territory, but repudiates the Oslo peace process itself. As an expression of Israeli leaders' contempt for international covenants and for Palestinian sensibilities, the new units are another landmine on the road to peace.

Israel's continuing provocations and the hard-line convictions that fuel them assured that the talks scheduled for late January between Netanyahu, Yasser Arafat, and President Clinton would be a fruitless exercise. After relatively moderate Foreign Minister David Levy resigned from the government earlier in the month, there was speculation that Netanyahu would now be more dependent on right-wing members and therefore even more intransigent. But this view assumed that without pressure from the right he could be persuaded to come up with a proposal the Palestinians could accept. The evidence is all to the contrary. If Netanyahu is "dependent" on right-wing Israelis it is for their support in carrying out his own long-held policies. He has shown no sign of wavering in his conviction that the West Bank from the Green Line to the Jordan River belongs entirely to Israel.

A Deceptive Willingness

Even his stated willingness to withdraw from an additional 10 to 12 percent of West Bank territory, as the U.S. is urging, is deceptive. Netanyahu would delay the withdrawal for at least five months until the Palestinians fulfilled some 50 Israeli demands ranging from reducing the police force to rewriting the Palestine National Covenant. At that point the cabinet would vote on whether to approve the pullback. On Jan. 14 the cabinet adopted sweeping guidelines stipulating that Israel must retain broad security zones west of Jerusalem and along the border with Jordan, all Jewish settlements, military bases, roads, water, electricity, transportation, and "historic sites." The Palestinians would be left with only scattered and isolated remnants of territory. Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai withdrew from government deliberations after the cabinet rejected his proposal to keep only 50 percent of the West Bank.

Netanyahu also insists that instead of the three troop withdrawals called for by Oslo, he will make only one, after which the two sides must move directly to the final stage of negotiations. Since Netanyahu knows the Palestinians will never accept the conditions set down by his government, offers he made in Washington were only a ploy to keep himself in office and to postpone once again—and perhaps forever—any significant troop withdrawal.

Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright urged Israel to return a "significant" amount of land to the Palestinians, but their leverage is limited. The Clinton administration is reluctant to risk losing Jewish support for Al Gore in the next presidential election, and any pressure they do exert will be noisily condemned by Netanyahu's cheering section in Congress and by the powerful pro-lsrael lobby that keeps Congress under control. At one point some Israelis even speculated that Netanyahu might try to delay his meeting with Clinton for a week until Congress had returned from its recess.

But even if Netanyahu had not hedged his withdrawal offer (said to have been less than 10 percent) with impossible conditions, Israel's return of 10 to 12 percent of West Bank territory, which the U.S. was willing to settle for, would not be enough to satisfy Palestinian negotiators. They are aware, as most Americans are not, that after four years of peace negotiations they have achieved full control over only 3 percent of the West Bank. Israel retains ultimate responsibility for security in all the rest, including areas administered by the Palestinian Authority. If a similar arrangement held true in the territory Israel would be willing to return, the Palestinians would have gained almost nothing, since Israeli authorities would still be able to impose curfews and travel restrictions, conduct house-to-house raids, and hunt down suspects, all in the name of security.

Although Netanyahu insisted that security was his chief concern when he came to Washington, his actions belied this claim. He refused even to consider a longstanding proposal by Palestinian leaders, which Arafat repeated last December, to station international peacekeeping forces between Israel and the West Bank. In January Netanyahu vetoed a security agreement that had been painstakingly negotiated by Israeli and Palestinian security experts, the CIA, and Israel's top generals. Netanyahu objected that it wasn't specific enough. He obviously was far less interested in preventing violence, however, than in retaining Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank.

If Clinton wanted to do more than mark time on the Middle East issue, he could have insisted that Israel abide by the Oslo agreement and its subsequent protocols. Instead of continuing to go along with Netanyahu's attempt to nullify or evade his commitments, the U.S. should fulfill its role as signatory to that agreement. This means specifying that Israel must carry out two additional troop withdrawals from the West Bank without delay, leaving a contiguous area under Palestinian rule that encompasses all but the Jewish settlements and Jerusalem. As defined by the Oslo agreement, these are final status issues to be negotiated after Israel has completed the withdrawals and fulfilled its obligation to provide safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, allow completion of the Gaza airport, and free underage and elderly Palestinian prisoners. Only after most of the West Bank is liberated from Israeli occupation will the Palestinians have the leverage they need to deal with the crucial issues of Jerusalem and the settlements.

Clinton could have occupied high ground during the peace negotiations by stressing the importance of mutual trust in dealings between nations and forcing the Israeli government to answer for the betrayal of its own solemn commitments. Although achieving a peace settlement may be impossible as long as Netanyahu remains in office, at least the U.S. would no longer be regarded as a nation that preaches high principles to the rest of the world but abandons them when it comes to Israel.