Political Pilgrims Find Israeli-Palestinian Peace Prospects Elusive

by Eugene Bird

The rock came at us as our bus with yellow Israeli plates accelerated out of Hebron. It was a bull's-eye and almost came through the windshield. We were a party of five Americans, including a documentary filmmaker, just departing Hebron after spending two-and-a-half hours with Palestinian Mayor Mustafa Natshe.

Elected and then fired by Israeli authorities during the occupation, he returned to power two years ago as a result of the peace process. He briefed us with a map of Hebron showing the location of the community of Jewish settlers that for several years has blocked off a key boulevard in the city. It was two days before the long-planned Palestinian election, and the Israelis refused to let Palestinian police guard the polling places.

The rock that shattered the expensive curved windshield was a token of the continuing tensions in the last major Palestinian city still under Israeli occupation, where American-born Jewish settler Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim men and boys at prayer before being killed himself less than two years earlier. His family still lives in a house that remains neither sealed nor bulldozed in nearby Kiryat Arba, where Goldstein's grave has become a shrine for Israeli settlers and their American Jewish supporters.

At the time of our visit, Israeli forces were scheduled to evacuate most of Hebron on March 24, leaving only a small detachment behind to protect the Israeli settlers in their Greek-columned main building flanked by apartments and trailers. They proclaim that they are dug in to stay, regardless of what the Israeli government decides to do.

Nothing could symbolize better what is likely to go wrong in the final-status talks, presently scheduled to begin in May, than this continued confrontation in Hebron. Two years ago, members of then-Foreign Minister Peres' staff said that of course the settlers would be on their own if the IDF were redeployed out of Hebron. That clearly is not going to happen now.

Instead, despite their provocative behavior, which includes shooting at Arab residents of Hebron, the settlers are going to be maintained in the style to which they have become accustomed, with three Israeli soldier guards, based just outside of town, for each of the 400 Jewish settlers living behind the high spite fence designed to separate them from Hebron's Palestinian inhabitants. It is an easy prediction that they will continue to provoke serious trouble between the Palestinians and Israel.

Hebron, with its 200,000 Palestinian residents according to Mayor Natshe (instead of the 125,000 Palestinians the Israelis claim live there), may be the first of the hard-core problems facing the final-status discussions. Meanwhile Nablus, with 150,000 Palestinian citizens surrounded by good agricultural land and a long history as a center for Muslim Palestinians, may become the focus of both political and economic life for the Palestinian National Authority, at least until it can set up its capital in Jerusalem.

Our group of political pilgrims was privileged to witness during the Jan. 20 Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza a model demonstration of restraint by the voters and the Palestinian police. No really serious incident took place, despite the visible menace of wide-ranging Israeli troops, heavily armed, with an attitude problem toward any Arab who happened along.

We all witnessed an unexplained beating of one young Palestinian in the Old City of Jerusalem right outside the polling place at Jaffa Gate. He was dragged away after being punched, kicked and overwhelmed by a wave of blue-jumpered municipal police armed with automatic weapons. (See account of the same incident by Democratic Congressman James Moran of Virginia in "Letters to the Editor," p. 3 of this issue.)

Five minutes later, a second disturbance took place. A settler began shouting against the Palestinians voting in his city of Jerusalem. With international observers present, he was quickly led away, still shouting,and released within a block.

Different strokes for different folks is the rule in Israeli-occupied Palestine. If you are Israeli and create a disturbance you may be persuaded to leave. If you are Palestinian, you may be beaten up and arrested and placed in the "Moskabiyya," the old Russian compound now used almost exclusively for warehousing and interrogating arrested Palestinians.

Our political pilgrims came to the conclusion that as long as the occupation philosophy prevails in the Israel Defense Forces,which are a law unto themselves, no Israeli politician will be able to make an effective peace.

You can see it in the actions and even in the eyes of the young IDF soldiers at the mushrooming checkpoints. (There now are about twice as many checkpoints as during the intifada.) The young Israeli draftees have little or no concern for keeping up appearances around Western visitors and the treatment, sometimes bored, always derisive, given to young Palestinian men is almost beyond belief.

Is this peace? Decidedly not! And three more years of negotiations lie ahead with major items to be discussed in this poisonous atmosphere of hate and derision. Opposition leader Benyamin Netanyahu already has promised Israelis who will be voting on May 29 that if they elect him he will refuse as Israeli prime minister to meet with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

Such an eventuality looked unlikely at the time of our February visit. But that was before the explosion, after a six-month moratorium, of four suicide bombs, allegedly as a response to the October assassination by Israeli agents of Fathi Shiqaqi of Islamic Jihad and Yahya Ayyash of Hamas on Jan. 5. Now the real possibility of a Likud victory dispels much of the joy remaining from the resounding Palestinian electoral endorsement of President Yasser Arafat and his peace process.

At this point, even if the Labor Party wins, campaign promises being made by Shimon Peres may deadlock final-status negotiations for years while the Jewish settlements remain in place, and growing.

"We are still living in a prison," said one PLO official in Gaza. "Nothing has really changed. It's just a larger prison."

Of course things have changed. Palestinian businessmen from America and from Jordan are busy planning to open new banks and to renew the lives of the Palestinian mountain people, which are so different from the lives of the Palestinians in Jaffa, Haifa, and the Galilee, and in Gaza.

The Palestinians aim initially at breaking out of their Israeli cocoon by gaining access to the world outside through the new port in Gaza. So far their plan to create a joint Palestinian-Egyptian international airport in Gaza, placed on the international border and giving the Palestinians access to international markets, has been opposed, successfully, by Israel. Only if Israel maintains full security control and controls all passports will Israel allow the airport to be built. As long as Israelis are maintaining control of the Palestinian economy and of the entrance and exit of all Palestinians, there is little the Palestinian Authority and Arafat can do except acquiesce. And Washington stands by and does not argue for greater access to international markets for Palestinian goods and persons. President Clinton calculates that it's too politically risky at home to oppose Israel on this.

The United States offers little support even to the Palestinian plea for at least genuine autonomy. Real sovereignty seems beyond the willingness of Clinton or Peres even to consider. One has to ask, why? The Palestinians have shown great restraint and control despite unceasing provocations by Israeli government negotiators and Israeli military forces,not to mention the unspeakably provocative Israeli settlers.

Under international scrutiny, the pre-election Israeli pull-out from the agreed six Palestinian cities took place on time and in good order for the most part. At unobserved local levels, however, Israeli military commanders routinely ignore timetables and even solemn agreements. There, if a Jew, no matter how radical, provocative or crazy, is threatened or prevented from walking down a street with his gun, the IDF will act harshly and seemingly without any restraint.

Israeli military commanders routinely ignore timetables and even solemn agreements.

We talked at length on election day with the leading Palestinian polling specialist, Dr. Khalil Shiqaqi. His brother had been assassinated by the Israelis, with impunity, in Malta only three months earlier. The Israeli press had reported that Fathi Shiqaqi was the head of Islamic Jihad, a group said to be responsible for at least two of the bus bombings that had taken place since Oslo. But the accusations were never proved and Fathi Shiqaqi was described by some Palestinians as a relative moderate.

Khalil Shiqaqi now works with American and Israeli academics on a wide range of political and strategic subjects and his USAID-supported polling group in Nablus provides Arafat and other Palestinian leaders as well as the international community with the best monthly snapshot available of what the Palestinians are thinking.

"Everyone is looking forward to peace," he told us. "Real peace." He said that most Palestinians are tired of having Israeli troops in their faces and want only to get on with a new life. But he added that if peace implementation gets stuck at only half way through the process,with no further Israeli withdrawals and no Palestinian control over land and water and at least a portion of Jerusalem,it is hard to say where public opinion will go. Denied a real life, he intimated, Palestinians probably would have to return to outright opposition, armed or otherwise.

He was doing election day exit polls while we were there, having agreed with the election commission not to release any figures from his polls until after the election results were announced.

We talked with three key Israeli Arab politicians and, besides admitting their antipathy to each other, they saw the successful Palestinian West Bank and Gaza elections as the beginning of new opportunities for political power for the Arabs within Israel. At present there are only five Arab members and two Druze members in the Knesset. They are in no sense a real Arab bloc. However these Israeli Arab leaders now believe that participation by Arabs in the May 28 elections will be much heavier than before and that perhaps fewer Arab votes will be "wasted" on parties that have no chance of obtaining the minimum 45,000 votes required to place two members in the Knesset.

In the last Israeli election in 1992, the Arabs had a 70 percent turnout, about evenly split between men and women and not too different from the 70 percent turnout outside Jerusalem and Hebron during the Palestinian National Authority elections of Jan. 20. However, the Israeli Arabs wasted at least 70,000 votes in the last election on parties that failed to gain representation.

Attempts to forge a single large Arab party, being sought by Dr. Ahmad Tibia, who is billed as a long-term Israeli Arab adviser to Yasser Arafat, so far have foundered on the issues of personalities and ideology. No strong Israeli Arab leader has arisen to replace the shrewd Labor wheelhorse, Abdullah Darawshe, whose Arab Democratic Party has had three members in the Knesset. Darawshe organized the Arab deputies into a bloc on one issue,the Israeli threat to confiscate 153 dunums of Arab land in North Jerusalem. By threatening to topple the Labor government on that issue, a first-time effort by Israeli Arabs according to journalists, he succeeded in making the government back down. When we queried him about the possibility of carrying out the same tactic to prevent the huge new Har Homa project between Bethlehem and Jerusalem from going forward, he demurred. The Arab Knesset members would not do that, he said, "at least not before the elections."

In fact, on Feb. 12, it was announced by the minister of interior that Har Homa was to be "frozen" for the indefinite future. Did Darawshe and/or other Arab members of the Knesset make a new threat? Apparently not, but the potential capability of Israeli Arabs to topple a sitting Israeli government is there. It is likely that any new government, including a Labor coalition put together this summer, no longer can ignore the political power of the Arab members of the Knesset. If the Israeli Arabs vote shrewdly enough to double their representation in the Knesset, Israel in fact would no longer be a Jewish state.