Netanyahu Tactics Forcing Arafat Into Making Another Dangerous Concession to Israel

By Richard H. Curtiss

“By insisting that he can withdraw from only 9 per cent of the occupied West Bank, and not the 13 percent the Americans want, [Netanyahu] has been able to sell the flawed U.S. plan to Mr. Arafat, whose spokesmen say they accept it in principle. This amazing feat of Mr. Netanyahu has been accomplished on the back of America’s sole superpower status, the Jewish state’s vise-like grip on U.S. policy in the Middle East and the Likud leader’s exploitation of the fact that Israelis are divided down the middle.” —Editorial in the Khaleej Times, Dubai, UAE, April 8, 1998.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Bill Clinton and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat all face important decisions in coming weeks in connection with the moribund “Middle East peace process.” But no matter how they choose, the Palestinians seem about to lose another important round in their battle to regain a part of their country, while the Israelis seem to be taking another step toward keeping it all.

Netanyahu must choose between accepting or rejecting an American plan for an Israeli withdrawal from 13.1 percent of the West Bank. If he accepts it, he breaks his pledge to his coalition partners to give up no land to the Palestinians. If he rejects it, he risks an open break with the Clinton administration, whose economic support is important and whose military-political support is essential to Israel.

In fact, however, there’s no essential difference between the U.S. plan and the 9 percent withdrawal Netanyahu already has offered. Members of Netanyahu’s coalition who would resign over the 13.1 percent probably would over the 9 percent as well. In any case, he can replace them. So why risk a break with the U.S. now?

The U.S. calls for the withdrawal to be made in stages over a 12-week period, bringing the total amount of the West Bank under Palestinian control to 40 percent of the land and more than 90 percent of the people. If it agrees, Israel will insist on accelerated final status negotiations without any further advance withdrawals. The problem with that is that it leaves most of the Palestinian towns and villages cut off from each other and from the surrounding land they need to build even a barely economically viable state.

Whatever Netanyahu chooses to do, a politically weakened Clinton seems to have made his own choices. If Netanyahu accepts the 13.1 percent withdrawal, the U.S. will praise him for his cooperation, even though it means Israel will go into “final status” negotiations having withdrawn from only 40 percent of the West Bank and 60 percent of the Gaza Strip instead of the more than 90 percent of both that the Palestinians said they must have in hand by that time.

On the other hand, if Netanyahu rejects the American “compromise” proposal, the U.S. may announce that it is “disengaging” from its “direct catalytic role,” in the words of State Department spokesman James Rubin. The gesture will be meaningless, however, unless the U.S. also withdraws, or at least greatly reduces, its military and economic aid to Israel—which is more than one-third of U.S. bilateral foreign aid worldwide. However, given his fear of the Israel Lobby’s power in Congress and the Israeli government’s support in the U.S. media, Clinton won’t tie U.S. aid to Israel to Israeli observance of its commitments to the Oslo accords.

So for Netanyahu it’s a “win-win” decision, while for a disgraced Clinton it’s also a no-brainer. If he hails Netanyahu’s decision, it gets the pro-Israel columnists in The New York Times and The Washington Post off his back. And if he “disengages” the U.S. from further participation in the peace process, the Lobby will leave him alone so long as U.S. aid flows undiminished to the Jewish state.

It really is only Yasser Arafat, therefore, who should be facing an agonizing decision of whether to accept the trifling additional Israeli withdrawal as justification for going into final status negotiations, or reject it and thus give both the stiff-necked Israeli government and the spineless American one excuses to denounce him and abandon Oslo entirely.

It’s a lose-lose decision for Arafat but, characteristically, he’s already made it by seemingly accepting the U.S. offer.

Arafat’s agreement in advance to the 13.1 percent withdrawal might mean that instead of getting back from Israel most of the West Bank and Gaza (which together are only 22 percent of the original Mandate of Palestine) he will find himself forced into a peace in which he ends up with only about half of the former occupied territories—totaling some 11 percent of Palestine.

The statistics illustrate how dramatically unfair all this is to the Palestinians. In 1917, when the British issued the Balfour Declaration, Jews were less than 9.2 percent of the population of Palestine. Yet the British offered Jews “a national home” there so long as it did not “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” In American terms that would be as ridiculous as offering the United States to Mexico so long as the transaction didn’t “prejudice the civil and religious rights” of the more than 90 percent of Americans whose ancestors didn’t come from Mexico.

In 1947 when Palestine was partitioned by the United Nations, Jews were one-third of the population. Today, despite the forcible exile of more than half of the Arab residents in 1948, the total of Muslim and Christian Arabs remaining in the former Mandate of Palestine (Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel proper) may already equal the Jews in numbers. There is no way to verify this since Israeli authorities undercount Arab Palestinians and count as still present between half a million and a million Jews who long since have left Israel for greener pastures in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe. Yet, under the Israeli-Palestinian peace that’s shaping up, the growing Christian and Muslim half of the population would get only 11 percent of the land, and the declining Jewish half would get all the rest.

To comprehend how the Palestinian leader got his people into a position where to live under their own flag their representatives have to sign away nearly 90 percent of their original country, one must understand what has happened in the eight years that have passed since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.

U.S. President George Bush, after a pep talk from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who happened to be visiting the U.S. when Iraqi President Saddam Hussain’s forces poured over the Kuwait border, announced that the U.S. would not only stop further Iraqi aggression, but also force the Iraqis to withdraw from Kuwait, by armed force if necessary.

Arafat’s Fatal Blunder

It was at that time that Arafat made the initial, fatal, blunder that set in motion a “peace process” that may abort, at least for a generation or two, Palestinian hopes of living in a viable state in their own land. Over the strenuous objections of all of his inner circle of advisers, Arafat refused to line up with the U.S.-and Saudi-led international coalition, which included most Arab governments, that drove Saddam Hussain’s forces out of Kuwait.

The reason remains a matter of speculation. Arafat had both military equipment and military personnel in Iraq that he apparently feared losing if he sided with the coalition. On the other hand, Arafat’s principal financial supporters throughout his leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization had been Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Many people in the Middle East believe that Saddam Hussain had secretly promised to turn over conquered Kuwait to the Palestinians. That the Iraqi dictator would make such a promise is credible. That Arafat would believe it, however, stretches credulity.

In any case, Arafat’s rash action lost his Palestine Liberation Organization virtually all of the petrodollars from the Arab states of the Gulf that supported his government-in-exile in Tunisia, PLO payments to Palestinian widows and orphans throughout the Middle East, and the maintenance of his armed forces scattered from Yemen to Tunisia.

It was the desperation of his financial plight that induced Arafat to sign the loosely worded Oslo accords without even allowing a Palestinian lawyer to evaluate them. In fact they depended totally upon Israeli goodwill, and enforcement by an American “honest broker.”

With such goodwill and objective U.S. intervention, it might have been reasonable for Arafat to anticipate that before the beginning of “final status negotiations” Israel would have withdrawn from more than 90 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. Oslo, after all, was premised upon U.N. Security Council Resolution 242’s demand for Israeli withdrawal “from lands seized in the recent [1967] conflict” in return for Arab acknowledgment of Israel’s “right to exist within secure and recognized boundaries.” In fact, however, the accords leave it to the Israelis to determine the exact amount of the withdrawals. Nor do the accords specifically mention providing the Palestinians with enough contiguous land to establish an economically and politically viable Palestinian state.

As for Israeli “goodwill,” if there was any at all in the time of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, it vanished with the election of Netanyahu. And if the U.S. was prepared to act as an “honest broker” in the time of George Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker, it has not been prepared to do so since the election of Bill Clinton.

Now, rightfully concerned with thwarting Netanyahu’s plan to torpedo the Oslo accords and blame the Palestinians for failure of the peace process, Arafat seems mistakenly to have decided to accept the U.S. plan even before Netanyahu makes up his mind.

The resulting grave danger for the Palestinians is that in fact Netanyahu will accept it, too. In the final status negotiations he could then treat resulting tiny, unconnected Palestinian Bantustans as the final territorial basis for whatever political entity the Palestinians eventually create. Since such a state would not be economically viable, inevitably it would become politically unstable. Netanyahu and his Likud followers would only have to wait for it to become ungovernable to close it down and reoccupy its territory. They might also seize the opportunity to carry out Likud’s long-term plan for physical “transfer,” by economic pressure if possible, at gunpoint if necessary, or by both to move as many Palestinians as possible into other countries of the Middle East.

If Netanyahu agrees to the American plan, and then will not agree to additional withdrawals during final status negotiations, Yasser Arafat could best serve his people by signing resignation papers rather than a treaty to legalize such an unjust settlement of the just claims of the Palestinians. But if Netanyahu does not agree to the American plan, all Palestinians should breathe a sigh of relief.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.