How Bad Is the Israeli Palestinian Peace Accord?

By Richard H. Curtiss

Are the agreements being reached by Israel's Labor government and Palestine's mainstream Al Fatah really as bad as their critics in the United States maintain?

From the left, Columbia University Professor Edward Said, Palestine's most prominent intellectual and one of Yasser Arafat's severist critics, warns that the former guerrilla fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization don't realize they are dealing with "a nation of Talmudists," preparing traps and deceits for the unwary in every line and comma. Meanwhile, at home and from Arafat's right, bearded fanatics who claim to speak for God assail the agreement as a blasphemous surrender to the non-Islamic "house of war" of land won 1,300 years ago for Islam's "house of peace.

In Israel, the Likud party's fast-talking, U.S.educated Benyamin Netanyahu denounces Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for unimaginatively jeopardizing Jerusalem and ceding strategic mountaintops and key aquifers vital to "Greater Israel" just when his country's U.S. lobby has vanquished the last White House resistance to this final act of 20th century colonialism. And, from still further to Rabin's right, bearded M16-toting fanatics worshipping a tribal God according to a 2,000 year-old code of vendetta ethics also assail the agreement as blasphemy.

Much of this opposition is articulated, funded, or both, by American Jews and Palestinian Americans who, however sincere they may be, are living very comfortably in the United States while their coreligionists or compatriots are living dangerously, fearfully and in many cases without hope in Israel/Palestine. But as these rhetorical storms rage around Israel's and Palestine's two almost anachronistic leaders, both in their twilight of power, the technocrats, led by the PLO's smiling, unflappable Nabil Shaath and Labor's flexible and pragmatic Shimon Peres labor to dot the i's and cross the t's before new outrages on the ground foreclose the possibility of implementing the agreements.

All the critics are right. Dangerous agreements are being reached in unseemly haste. The Israelis were under no immediate pressure to legitimize any Palestinian government, or give back an inch of land for peace. There will be no objection from the United States to any Israeli action, no matter how outrageous or inhumane, at least until the end of Bill Clinton's current term. So why give up anything now, just when Israel's long battle from pariah status seems almost won?

Nor does any Palestinian leader have to sign away any of the land so unjustly and outrageously wrenched from its Palestinian Christian and Muslim inhabitants by Europeanized Jews in an era when all other Western colonial powers and ideologies already have abandoned their empires or are in full retreat. If no Palestinian leaders considered settling for the 47 percent of their land offered by the United Nations in 1947, how can it be moral for any Palestinian leader to settle now for 22 percent, half of it encumbered with Jewish settlers holding Israeli citizenship?

There are answers, but neither the Israeli nor Palestinian leaders laboring to turn paper agreements into reality can provide them and survive politically. An honest Israeli leader would have to answer yes, we could hold all the land for as long as we also hold a blank check from the American treasury. But what would happen if we lost it? And, if we don't make peace, from where are the Jews to come to fill all that land?

Most of the Jews coming from Russia are old. The young stay there, or go to countries where they do not have to serve in an army at war and send their children and grandchildren to future wars still undeclared. North America, the only other pool of Jews remaining, does not send emigrants to Israel but instead attracts immigrants from it. And here they disappear through intermarriage. If Israel is ever to attract more Jews, or even hold those it has, it must have peace and develop commerce with its Arab neighbors. Only an agreement such as this could make that possible.

An honest Palestinian leader would have to agree that the peace is unfair, and worse than whatever might have been negotiated in 1948. Given crippling divisions among the Arabs and the Muslims, however, at least it's a foot in the door. If the Palestinians can unify and elect popular leaders democratically, they can eventually secure total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, a Palestinian state, equal access with Israel to Jerusalem, and the rapid disappearance of any Jewish settlers unwilling to live as Palestinians in a Palestinian state, just as Arab Muslims and Christians on the other side of the national boundary must live as Israelis in an Israeli state.

There is only one difference between Israeli supporters of the agreement, who believe a Jewish state in the Middle East must make peace with its neighbors to survive and Palestinian supporters of the agreement, who believe their sacrifices have won the foothold they need, and that further sacrifices will yield nothing more.

The difference is that the fate of the Israelis is not in their own hands. Just as their existence as a nation up to now has depended upon the political acumen of their coreligionists in America, future survival of a Jewish state in the Middle East will depend upon its acceptance by Islamic neighbors. By contrast, the Palestinians, who have had virtually nothing to say about their affairs for the past 50 years, have a chance to take charge of their own destiny now.

Up to now, Palestinian demagogues have succeeded only in tarring all Palestinians with the "terrorist" brush, alienating their natural supporters among secular liberals in the West and among religious conservatives in the East. Now, with a nationality of their own, and a chance to elect representative leaders of their own rather than endure ideologues imposed by outside powers, the Palestinians can change their image to match their reality. The challenge of enduring the past half century has turned them into a highly educated and entrepreneurial people living on the cutting edge of change in the Middle East, Europe and the United States. They are equipped, as no other people on earth, to act as a bridge and a catalyst for trade, scientific application and economic advancement among all three regions.

If the "new world order" of the 21st century evolves into a "modem" world of multiethnic states on the pattern of the United States, a United States of Europe, and similar national aggregates in the Middle East, Far East and Africa, all of the people of Israel/Palestine will evolve into citizens of a democratic, secular state embracing Muslims, Jews and Christians.

If, instead, the world reverts in the 21st century into tiny national entities held together solely by special privileges attached to a designated national language or a designated national religion, the religious militants of one side may have their way and those of the other side may go. Regional trends, not paper agreements between two of the smallest nationalities on earth, will be the determinant.

Whatever the future holds for the world and the region, today's much reviled agreement can stop the hemorrhage, and get both Israelis and Palestinians from an unbearable here and now to an unknowable there and then with less bloodshed than otherwise seems certain.

The principles of this peace may be bad ideas. But so was Zionism. It enabled secularists to drape the most anachronistic aspects of a particular religion with the trappings of 20th century fascism. It will not be dismantled painlessly any more than Italian, German, Spanish, Argentine, Lebanese Maronite or Arab Ba'thi fascism.

Similarly, the religious state has proven disastrous where people of different religions must mingle. Whether or not it is right for the few remaining areas of the world where people of a single religious persuasion can live in isolation is arguable. In the United States, Western Europe, India and along the fault lines between world religions the idea is unworkable. The countries immediately affected by the Israeli-Palestinian accords are on such fault lines.

It is far better for both Israelis and Palestinians that their present and future leaders are debating the consequences of import tariffs, withholding taxes, family reunification rules and the wording on passports and currency than expending all of their energies on the mutually exclusive territorial claims that have wasted the lives of two generations, and could so quickly devastate another.

It's not contentious to point out that talking is better than shooting. Nor is it controversial to maintain that problems within borders are more likely to be settled peacefully than problems across borders. Soon Israelis will have to assume responsibility for the behavior of other Israelis who choose to harass Palestinians, and Palestinians will have to exercise the same discipline in their areas of control. So long as there are provocateurs, there will be tragedies, but in bringing these to a halt, both nations will gain strength and maturity.

Although the United States, where so many of the problems among both peoples originate, could, with some domestic political discipline of its own, play a constructive role in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, experience does not inspire optimism. At least, however, Americans who identify as individuals with one party or another can begin to strengthen the forces of moderation within the community they favor. If such an effort seems limited, it reflects the accords themselves far short of perfection, but better than what has gone before.