A Retired U.S. Foreign Service “Arabist”

With Goodwill on Both Sides, a Bad Agreement Can Become a Good One

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Few (Israeli) soldiers feel comfortable standing aside as settlers go on rampages, an expected outcome of official Army policy. One general complained that 'only the settlers are active' in beating and threatening elderly Palestinians, throwing stones, smashing car windows, and spraying insecticides on fruits and vegetables in the Arab market. This stood in sharp contrast to the Palestinians who were 'quiet,' but regularly punished with arrests, bullets and curfews."

—Eyal Press, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, June 15, 1994

The peace talks weren't supposed to work out this way. When Israelis began both open and secret meetings with their various Arab protagonists, Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad was supposed to panic and agree to a deal giving him full Israeli withdrawal from Syrian territory and lots of U.S. economic and military aid in return for full Syrian recognition of Israel and, if possible, some sharing of Syrian water.

This would have cleared the way for separate follow-up Israeli agreements with Lebanon and Jordan. Such separate peace agreements, like the U.S.-subsidized separate peace between Israel and Egypt, would have left the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to cope with the Israelis all alone. It would also have left Israel free to play Jordan and Saudi Arabia against each other until one or the other signed off as custodian of the Haram Al-Sharif, third holiest site for the world's Muslims.

Then Israel could have announced that since Muslim claims were satisfied, and it had unilaterally annexed the rest of Jerusalem, it was dismissing any remaining Palestinian claims on the city. And, if the West Bank Palestinians didn't like their status as a stateless community permanently deprived of human rights, they could shove off for other parts of the Arab world.

Instead of Hafez Al-Assad, however, it was PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat who panicked. He signed in Oslo essentially the same terms his people could have had at the time of the Camp David negotiations with Egypt. But small wonder. In 1979, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was ostracized by the rest of the Arab world for recognizing Israel, and Yasser Arafat's Beirut-based PLO was receiving generous funding from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states with which it purchased arms from the Soviet Union.

Thirteen years later, by the time Yasser Arafat shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin last Sept. 13 on the South Lawn of the White House, there was no Soviet Union; the PLO had been cut off for more than two years from all Gulf funding as punishment for not joining Arab League members who condemned Saddam Hussain's grab for Kuwait; and Arafat's two top lieutenants had been assassinated in their Tunis headquarters in separate actions by the hit squads of Israel and its witting or unwitting ally, Abu Nidal.

The Oslo agreement split Palestinians down the middle. Most of those living abroad saw it as Arafat's renunciation of their claim to 78 percent of the Mandate of Palestine, and abandonment of the cherished if unrealistic "right of return" to Haifa, Jaffa, Nazareth and all of the other Palestinian towns inside the 1948 cease-fire line that became the pre-1967 "Green Line" border of Israel.

On the other hand, most Palestinians living on the other side of the Green Line in the West Bank and Gaza saw it as blessed relief from an occupation that had become almost unbearable, and vindication for the intifada they had mounted with stones and their bare hands when it became obvious that nothing being done from outside would reclaim an inch of Palestinian land alone.

The agreement also split the Israelis so badly that it may lead to the killing of Jews by Jews if Israel is serious about making the accords work. The Likud, which achieved the separate peace with Egypt in 1979, but so antagonized the Bush administration that in 1991 it almost lost the crucial loan guarantees that now provide the principal foreign currency flow into Israel, portrays the agreement as a giveaway of the West Bank (Israelis don't care about Gaza) and the opening wedge of a peace based upon giving back the Golan Heights to Syria and dividing Jerusalem. Only a bitter four-way split among Likud leaders Benyamin Netanyahu, David Levy, Ariel Sharon and Benyamin Begin keeps the Likud from taking advantage of declining public support for the agreement to bring down the Labor government.

The Labor Party suffers from a split of its own. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and activist Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin actually have a vision of reaching a peace with the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors that will pave the way for Israeli economic integration into the Middle East, and "normalization" of Israel's relations with the rest of the world, including the American Jewish community. Peres' long-term rival, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, doesn't share the vision, but he would like to go down in history as the man who made peace in the Middle East, rather than go down in Israel's 1996 elections, as he will if he hasn't made a favorable peace by then.

Palestinian-born Prof. Hisham Sharabi says he returned from a June visit to the occupied territories "not as optimistic as in October on my first visit after the Declaration of Principles. We did not really think carefully enough of the legal, binding commitments made in Oslo and later in Taba and Cairo."

The Georgetown University professor explains: "More and more we see the text of the Oslo agreements as written by the Israeli experts, and in which the contributions of the Palestinians were minimal at best." Sharabi warns that "unless something happens to change the way the structure is put together, it would be a replica of the bizarre chaos we have experienced in Amman, Beirut and Tunis, which in every case ended in a catastrophe for the Palestinians."

Street Smarts

However, according to Dr. Sharabi, the "Palestinian street" knows exactly what it must do to avoid a repetition of past mistakes. "All agree that elections should take place, if not on July 13, then August 13. If not then, on September 13. Talk of delaying these elections, or replacing them with municipal elections, or postponing them indefinitely will not wash ... These elections will be honest. No tampering with ballot boxes, and everyone will have the right to vote. It doesn't matter who is elected. What is important is that they show the world that this critical act has taken place and that the Palestinian authority is grounded in political legitimacy, and that it is the will of the people, the voice of the people."

If this Palestinian-American intellectual is correct in believing that the Palestinians will settle for nothing less than immediate free elections, and will unite behind and support the winners, the Palestinians could gain back in further negotiations much of what they seem to have lost by letting the Israelis dictate the rules.

Will Israel's Labor government, in whose hands the Israeli-drafted declaration of principles has placed all the cards, be guided by the belated but apparently sincere vision of the once "flexible" (meaning tricky) Peres? Or will the visionless but "steady" Rabin seek peace at no price by unrealistically insisting that the Palestinians preside over the repression of their own people while Israel thwarts their nationalistic aspirations?

Whether it's to be vision or trickery soon will be made clear by when and how Israel deals with the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. The present situation is impossible. The Palestinians are being asked to accept a split that gives 78 percent of the Mandate of Palestine to the Israelis, and 22 percent to the Palestinians. But Israeli government-subsidized Jewish "settlers" have seized and are holding, illegally under the Fourth Geneva Convention, 40 percent of the remaining Palestinian land.

Just how unworkable this has become was illustrated as Jericho awaited the arrival of Yasser Arafat. Jewish settlers, many of whom Are religious fanatic clones of mass murderer Dr. Baruch Goldstein, were carrying automatic weapons as they entered and left Jericho at will, and the Israeli police were enforcing their right to carry those arms under the Oslo and subsequent agreements.

Yet one of the settlers' religious mentors, former chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Shlomo Goren, had announced, pubicly and repeatedly, that it is a religiously sanctioned requirement that a Jew assassinate Yasser Arafat. Hanan Porat, a member of the Israeli Knesset from the National Religious Party, said that Arafat "deserves a bullet in the head."

The Council of Jewish Settlers in the West Bank and Gaza sought but was refused permission to publish a newspaper advertisement describing Arafat as "head of the terrorists responsible for the murder of hundreds of Jews and wounding of thousands in Israel and abroad" and offering that "anyone who brings him to arrest, dead or alive, will receive a monetary prize of 100,000 Israeli shekels ($33,000)."

How can the leader of the Palestine National Authority, who is under threat from Arab rejectionists as well, function in Jericho if he is surrounded by armed Jewish religious fanatics enjoined to kill him, and whose right to carry the weapons to do so is protected by Israeli police?

Contrary to assertions in the mainstream American press, the Declaration of Principles does not mandate deferral for at least two years of the settlements issue. It mandates the contrary—that the issue be taken up no later than two years after the agreement goes into effect. If the Labor government moves promptly to deal with this major impediment to peace, it will be an indication that the visionaries are in charge. If it does not, it means the Israeli government wants the experiment in Palestinian self-government to fail. In that case, it probably will, and horribly, as Israeli settlers continue to provoke the Arab inhabitants, and start to gun down Palestinian police who seek to restore order.

Implementation of the peace agreements must start with disposition of the settlers and then move to the question of Jerusalem, both as soon as possible. Sincere Israeli pursuit of that agenda will empower the Palestinians to carry out their experiment in genuine democracy successfully. That, in turn, will lead to security for the Israelis and sovereignty for the Palestinians. If that timetable is ignored, however, there will be no peace in the Middle East in our lifetimes, and no Israel in the Middle East in the lifetimes of our children.

Richard H. Curtiss, a retired U.S. foreign service officer is the executive editor of the Washington Report.