On May 4 Palestinians Can Turn Oslo Accord Lemons Into Lemonade

By Richard H. Curtiss

“The five years have passed and the Palestinians are not a jot closer to independence, or even the trappings of independence. They have little control over their land, and none over their borders, water resources, trade, customs, population mobility, and the rest of it. In fact, Israeli authorities have continued to treat the Palestinians like a conquered people rather than, as one would have assumed after the Oslo accords were signed at the White House lawn, as peace partner.”

—Palestinian-American writer Fawaz Turki, Oct. 8, 1998.

Last May I participated in a three-day United Nations-sponsored forum in Santiago, Chile on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. In my talk I said that after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu froze implementation of the Oslo accords following his election in 1996, the Arab-Israeli “peace process” died. Since I had been writing this for some time, I was startled when the Israeli speaker on my panel, Knesset Member Yossi Sarid, head of the dovish Meretz Party, challenged my statement.

“The peace process is not dead because in the end Netanyahu will make a deal,” he said flatly. “There will be a deal!”

During a lengthy question period each of us maintained the positions we had staked out, and since then I’ve never seen anything to change my mind. But the fact that a respected Israeli political leader felt so strongly that I was mistaken has caused me to weigh very carefully every subsequent Netanyahu statement and action.

However, the issue now is no longer whether the peace process will yield a last-minute deal, but what the Palestinians should do on May 4, the date on the Oslo timetable by which the final status talks must be completed. Those talks, to which were deferred the most difficult issues—final borders, refugees, water sharing, settlements and Jerusalem—haven’t even begun!

I’m sure, however, that U.S. diplomats are telling Palestinian President Yasser Arafat that to declare the existence of a Palestinian state just before the Israelis start their two-stage May 17 and June 1 elections will only play into the hands of Israeli extremists, get Netanyahu re-elected, and thus cost Arafat the chance of getting any Israeli peace offer he can accept.

I expect U.S. diplomats also are warning Arafat that if he proclaims a Palestinian state in May, Congress may cut off even the limited funding the U.S. government has offered him. And I’m sure that when they meet in February or March in Washington, Clinton will beg Arafat to postpone his declaration, at least until next December, to avert what the U.S. president already has called a “catastrophe.”

The American diplomats may be right, but the truth is that whatever he does Arafat is not going to get any Israeli offer he can, or should, accept. Experience shows that while the Palestinians keep accepting new delays, incumbent Israeli governments, whether from the Labor or Likud parties, continue building more Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—all designed to make a two-state Israeli-Palestinian settlement impossible.

In fact, ever since U.S. President George Bush, by threatening to withhold U.S. loan guarantees, forced a reluctant Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to start participating in the peace process at Madrid in the fall of 1991, the Israelis have slowed, stalled, sidetracked and sabotaged that process every step of the way.

Israel initially refused to meet with Yasser Arafat and instead sought, through the U.S., to handpick the Palestinian delegates with whom it would be negotiating. That failed when the Palestinian delegates, who included Dr. Haider Abdul Shafi from Gaza, Faisal Husseini from East Jerusalem, and Hanan Ashrawi from the West Bank, scrupulously secured Arafat’s approval for every concession. Meanwhile the Israeli government was clandestinely encouraging the buildup of extremist opposition to Arafat by making sure that foreign funding got through to Hamas activists in Gaza and the West Bank, while funding for Arafat from the Arab oil-producing states had been halted because of Arafat’s unwillingness during the Gulf war to denounce the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.

Even while Bush’s threat to link U.S. funding to Israel to Israel’s performance at the peace table brought down Shamir and resulted in the election of a Labor government in Israel headed by Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, the noose was tightening further around Arafat. He feared that the Israelis were going to offer a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights in return for a separate peace with Syria, leaving the Palestinians isolated to fight a battle they could not win alone.

Beset by his desperate financial situation and tormented by his suspicions, Arafat accepted the Oslo accords without a single Palestinian lawyer examining them before they were signed at the White House in September 1993 in the presence of newly elected President Bill Clinton. This U.S. role, which involved a second White House signing in September 1995, and other agreements involving Americans in Cairo and Taba in Egypt and, most recently, at Wye Plantation in Maryland, culminated in a third White House signing ceremony in October 1998.

History will record that Oslo was “premised” upon U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 of Nov. 22, 1967, which called for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” in return for “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” In all other respects, however, the accords were lemons for the Palestinians. Because of their loose wording, how they were implemented depended solely upon Israeli goodwill and generosity.

Unfortunately, history cannot record how much of either would have been manifested had Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin not been assassinated by a Jewish religious-nationalist fanatic, and Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, not been defeated by Netanyahu at the polls.

A good case can be made that Peres might have been generous to the Palestinians in the interest of winning peaceful acceptance of Israel as a legitimate regional power by the other Arab states. If one listens to Rabin’s widow, Leah, despite her husband’s hard-line record he, too, had finally accepted Peres’s pragmatic vision of a genuine land-for-peace settlement with the Palestinians and Syria.

However, all that remains unproven. But history already is clear about what followed. Combined, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza are 22 percent of the original Mandate of Palestine. But Netanyahu’s personal vision was no compromise at all on Jerusalem, and Israeli withdrawals only from isolated and economically unviable “Bantustans” totaling no more than 40 percent of the West Bank, along with 60 percent of Gaza. All told, Netanyahu’s “deal” might have been 11 percent of the original Palestinian mandate. Such limited concessions would have been insufficient for a real Palestinian state encompassing much more than the Gaza Strip.

But even that was too much for the Likud hard-liners and the other right-wing parties upon which Netanyahu had to depend to build his coalition. Their plan is no West Bank territorial concessions and, eventually, “transfer” at gunpoint, by economic pressures, or both, of all of the Palestinian Muslims and Christians out of both the West Bank and Israel proper.

So there was no deal. But even if Netanyahu had offered one, it is hard to believe that Yasser Arafat could have accepted it. On the other hand, suspicious opponents in the Palestinian diaspora recall that from his headquarters in Tunis, long before the Madrid process began, Arafat had told visitors he would accept as the nucleus of his future state any territory large enough upon which to plant the Palestinian flag.

On Nov. 15, 1988 Arafat first proclaimed the existence of a Palestinian state, which to date has been recognized by some 140 nations, an overwhelming majority of the 185-member United Nations. The U.N. itself has granted Palestine “enhanced observer status.” Equally important, those nations, along with the people if not the government of the United States, have seen enough of the long public unraveling of the “peace process” to know that whatever Israelis may claim in the future, it is the Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu, not the Palestinian government of Yasser Arafat, that destroyed the peace process.

On May 4, therefore, Yasser Arafat has only to re-proclaim an independent Palestinian state, with borders including East Jerusalem and all of the West Bank and Gaza in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, to keep the recognition of the majority and make the case for recognition by the remaining members of the United Nations.

If whatever Israeli government is elected in June maintains its occupation or even re-occupies what little territory is presently controlled by the Palestinians, the Palestinians will have little left to lose. On the contrary, they will have restated their well-founded claim to the 1967 borders, while maintaining the recognition of most of the nations of the world. Even in countries like the United States that may not yet recognize the Palestinian state, the public will finally understand that Israel is conducting an illegal military occupation of a sovereign nation.

In the future, with a rapidly growing Palestinian population, the static Israeli Jewish population will be on record as having rejected a two-state solution when it was made possible by Arafat’s acceptance of the Oslo accord. Now time will be on the side of the Palestinians, who may feel free to call for a single “bi-national” state which will be a return to the original PLO program of a modern, democratic state guaranteeing equal rights for all residents, whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian.

The Oslo agreement provided nothing but lemons for the Palestinians. On May 4 they can turn those lemons into lemonade. It’s an opportunity Palestinian leaders cannot afford to miss.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.