Hassan-Peres Talks: Short, Sour and Successful

By Richard Curtiss

Although the climate for peace has improved markedly, some major obstacles still stand in the way of direct negotiations. The toughest of all is the question of who shall represent the Palestinians in negotiations. Both Israel and Jordan agree ... that the Palestinians who take part must be respected, credible representatives of their community, since they will be called on to make compromises that must be part of any realistic settlement. —Richard W. Murphy, Asst. Sec. of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, in an article written for USA Today, July 1, 1986.

In order to have the Palestinian problem properly addressed, you have to deal with someone who represents the Palestinians. —Soviet official quoted by Jack Reddin, UPI, in the Washington Times, July 11, 1986.

As the world now knows, King Hassan II and Shimon Peres had met before. Nor was Peres the first Israeli Prime Minister to meet the Moroccan King. It should have come as no surprise, therefore, that when it suited their mutual purposes, they would meet publicly. Nor is it a surprise that in their brief meeting each achieved his goal. The Moroccan Monarch demonstrated that face-to-face an Arab chief of state can expose the intransigence in the present Israeli position without compromising his own position. Peres demonstrated that when enough Israelis finally realize how badly they need a genuine peace, he can get it for them.

The agenda for the meeting has been on the table since 1981. At that time King Hassan convened an Arab League summit conference in Morocco to discuss eight principles for an Israeli-Palestinian peace submitted by then Crown Prince, and now King, Fahd of Saudi Arabia. After only a few hours of discussion, in which Syria fiercely criticized any concessions for peace, King Hassan abruptly adjourned the meeting before the Fahd Plan could be brought to a vote. Arab rejectionists, Israeli extremists, and pro-Israel American media called the meeting a failure.

Just one year later, in September, 1982, despite a boycott by Syria, King Hassan again convened an Arab summit meeting which unanimously endorsed the Saudi principles. The resulting Fez declaration became the Arab peace plan to which, by pre-agreement, the 1986 Moroccan-Israeli discussion was limited.

Like the Reagan Plan of September, 1982, which constituted the first and, unfortunately, last Middle East accomplishment in six years of Reagan Administration diplomacy, the Fez Plan derives from UN Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula which has been the basis of every U.S. Administration's Middle East policy since November, 1967. Resolution 242 stipulates Israeli withdrawal from Arab lands seized in June, 1967, in return for Arab acknowledgement of Israel's right to "live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries."

The problem is that the Israelis say this means only some of the lands seized, the Arabs say it means all of them, and the Palestinians object that Resolution 242 treats them as refugees and contains no guarantee of their right to self-determination within the lands from which Israel withdraws. Such a right was certainly implicit in the 1947 UN Resolution that partitioned Palestine between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants and called for international control over Jerusalem.

The Fez Plan, therefore, was designed to go beyond Resolution 242 and its implementing Resolution 338 by again recognizing the Palestinian right to self-determination and an independent state. On this same subject the Reagan Plan specifies that the Palestinian entity must be in confederation with Jordan. If it seems presumptuous for Americans to tell Jordanians and Palestinians that they must confederate, Secretary of State Shultz's motive was to make the plan acceptable to Israel and its influential American Jewish supporters by providing that the Palestinian entity could not decide unilaterally to arm itself heavily or become a Soviet client state.

Shultz's conciliatory strategy was only partially successful. The Arabs said the Reagan Plan was "not incompatible" with their own Fez Plan. But then Prime Minister Menachem Begin rejected the Reagan Plan the day after it was announced. In his speech of rejection he proclaimed the establishment of 10 new Jewish settlements on the West Bank and for many months thereafter Israel continued an ambitious West Bank Jewish colonization scheme of "creating facts" to thwart the Reagan Plan. In the process Israel nearly went bankrupt. Since George Shultz made no public move or statement to stop the Israeli scheme, Congress went right on appropriating ever-increasing military and economic aid for Israel. The Reagan Plan gradually lost its credibility with the Arabs.

It was at this stage that the moderate Arabs took over, in an attempt to force Israel to start negotiating a West Bank withdrawal. Since the new Labor-Likud Coalition government of Israel refused under any circumstances to negotiate with the PLO, King Hussein of Jordan and Chairman Yasser Arafat of the PLO agreed in February, 1985, that PLO-approved Palestinians would join a Jordanian delegation to negotiate with the Israelis on the basis of Resolution 242.

Few Arabs thought that Israel was prepared to give back much, but Arab moderates believed that the act of sitting down to negotiate, in an international forum where the whole world would be watching, would demonstrate that the real issue blocking peace was not Israel's right to exist, but rather Israel's desire to keep some or all of the Arab lands seized in 1967. Such a clarification, they hoped, would begin to wean the U.S. away from unquestioning support of Israel. Arafat, however, couldn't get the support of his own PLO executive council and didn't return to Amman to ratify his agreement. Once again Syria, Israel and the pro-Israel U.S. press called it failure.

This time both King Hussein and Yasser Arafat went back to work just as had King Hassan between 1981 and 1982. In return for Egypt's support, Arafat pledged in Cairo to prevent his followers from engaging in any act of international terrorism, while preserving the option to pursue military action in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel itself as a form of pressure upon Israel to negotiate. And he went right on nominating Palestinians for a Jordanian delegation. Two, editor Hanna Seniora of the Jerusalem daily Al Fajr and Gaza lawyer Fayez Abu Rahme, were quietly okayed by Israeli Prime Minister Peres.

After U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy had visited both Israel and Jordan repeatedly, Arafat met again with King Hussein. Then, in February, 1986, King Hussein recorded a televised speech to his own people, more than 50 percent of whom are of Palestinian origin, saying that once again Arafat had refused to accept Resolution 242, the sine qua non for all subsequent peace negotiations.

What went wrong? Arafat said the problem was unwillingness by the U.S. to pledge its support for Palestinian self-determination in return for PLO acceptance of Resolution 242.

Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D-IN) of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East commendably has introduced into the Congressional Record for June 5, 1986, three alternative proposals which were submitted by Yasser Arafat and rejected by King Hussein, along with a letter commenting on them by James W. Dwyer, State Department Acting Assistant Secretary for Legislative and Governmental Affairs. The entire Hamilton submission (reprinted on pp. 16-17 of this issue) makes clear that Arafat agreed "to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian problem on the basis of the pertinent United Nations resolutions including Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338." Arafat wanted "a pledge from the United States of America to support the right of self-determination as provided for in the Jordanian-Palestinian Accord," and he declared that PLO "rejection and denunciation of terrorism had been assured in the Cairo Declaration of November, 1985."

It was King Hussein who rejected these proposals but Dwyer's response implies that the U.S. would have too because "Resolutions 242 and 338 must be accepted upon their own, without reference to other UN resolutions ... selective renunciation of violence is inadequate...the term 'selfdetermination' has in the Middle East context come to connote the establishment of a Palestinian state" and "therefore such a reference is not consistent with U.S. policy."

Taking all of these statements at face value, therefore, it appears that if Arafat accepts Resolutions 242 and 338 unconditionally and renounces any military action so long as there is movement toward negotiations, and in turn the U.S. concedes the Palestinian right to self-determination and leaves it up to Arafat and Hussein to work out a mutually-acceptable link between their two peoples, the U.S. and the PLO can start speaking to each other and get on to the main event which is a Palestinian-Israeli direct negotiation under UN or other international auspices. That doesn't sound impossible if the will is there, on our part as well as the PLO's.

Arafat has treated the rift with Hussein as a temporary break, but the Jordanian monarch set about alternately wooing and harassing West Bank Palestinian leaders and simultaneously turning over PLO offices and funds in Jordan to Atallah Atallah, a Palestinian who had served as a Jordanian Army officer and who later, as Abu Zaim, had become director of intelligence in Arafat's Al Fatah, the major component of the PLO.

Some years earlier Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad tried the same thing. First he broke with Arafat, and then turned over Al Fatah offices and equipment in Syria to a former Arafat officer, Abu Musa. Although Assad used the Syrian Army to chase Arafat loyalists out of both Syria and Lebanon, the Palestinian rank and file left behind have generally rallied around Arafat.

The same thing seems to be happening to Hussein's effort. What Abu Zaim says about making peace makes sense, particularly to Westerners who believe that if the Palestinians don't settle for a West Bank state, there may soon be no Palestinians left there. Nevertheless, the Palestinians in both Jordan and the West Bank are risking financial retaliation by the Jordanian Government and expulsion by the Israeli Army to demonstrate their continuing loyalty to Arafat, the leader they believe has no foreign master and nothing on his agenda but self-determination for the Palestinians themselves.

It was clear some time ago that Arafat, whose principal funding comes from moderate Arab oil-producing states and the Palestinians who live in them, had emerged from his break with Assad strengthened. The Soviet and Libyan funded Palestinian extremist leaders who, along with Syrian-directed militias, had given the Palestinians a reputation as ruthless terrorists, ended up in Damascus calling for Arafat's assassination. It left Arafat much more political flexibility since he no longer had to try to conciliate leftist and rejectionist ideologues while pursuing his own relatively moderate and non-ideological policies. The anti-concession role formerly played on Arafat's left by Abu Musa may now be mirrored on Arafat's right by the pro-concession Abu Zaim, who argues that time is running out for the Arabs to make concessions in order to force the Israeli concessions Resolution 242 also entails.

King Hassan's Moroccan initiative should further the process of putting Arafat squarely in the middle of the Arab camp. Earlier this year, in discussions with Moroccan journalists and an interview with a French newspaper, Hassan called upon the Arab states to choose one leader to speak for all to force the Israelis to reveal what concessions, if any, they are willing to make for peace. His subsequent abrupt action, as Chairman of the Arab League, in meeting with Peres himself is typical of Hassan's penchant to act decisively upon his own words.

While Arab countries have talked to death the problem of what to do about Jewish citizens who left their Arab homelands to settle in Israel and now want to return, King Hassan announced that any of the half million Moroccan Jews, who currently make up one of the largest ethnic blocs in Israel, are welcome to rejoin the 15,000 Jews who never left Morocco. Probably only a few Moroccans have returned permanently from Israel, but many have returned for visits, as have even more of the 100,000 Moroccan Jews who have become useful voices for Morocco in the U.S., Canada, France and other Western countries where they have settled.

Predictably, rejectionist Syria led the chorus of criticism, first for King Hassan's courtship of Moroccan Jews and now for his meeting with Peres. Syrian and Libyan appeals to Arab unity, however, are increasingly irrelevant. They are the same two countries which have broken Arab ranks to support non-Arab Iran's war with Iraq, a war which increasingly looks like an attempt by Iran to take and hold a slice of southern Iraq in order to set up an Iran-directed Shia fundamentalist Arab state which could endanger the stability of several other oil-producing Arab states in the Gulf.

Hassan's talks with Peres demonstrated that in meeting personally with an Israeli leader, an Arab head of state does not have to compromise his own position, but instead can hold the uncompromising Israeli position up to world scrutiny. When Peres refused to agree to talk to the PLO and to commit Israel to giving back all of the Arab lands seized in 1967, Hassan adjourned the talks.

Will there be a "same time next year" for either Hassan—Peres or Hussein—Arafat? Probably for both. There are overwhelmingly strong incentives to continue the peace process in an area where, history shows, a loss of momentum toward peace is inevitably followed by a drift toward war.

Peres has established that the Labor Alignment may be able to bring Israel the peace that its hard-line Likud bloc denies it needs. That's an issue upon which Peres can bring down the government, either before or after his scheduled handover to a Likud Prime Minister in October. With more Jews now leaving Israel than are coming in, and with more Arabs than Jews now being born, Jews will be a minority in the Jewish state and the territories it occupies just before or shortly after the end of this century.

There are only two ways to avoid this. Either the Labor Alignment or a future coalition of Israeli labor and peace parties hands back Gaza, the West Bank and Golan in exchange for peace, or the Likud follows plans openly avowed by Meir Kahane and implicitly pursued by Ariel Sharon: To drive at gunpoint two million Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories into Jordan. Even a Ronald Reagan or a George Shultz probably won't stand for that, however, since Reagan didn't stand for Sharon's effort to push all of the Palestinians out of Lebanon and into Jordan. And without U.S. financial support there would soon be no Israel.

The Sharon and Kahane programs do put severe pressure on King Hussein, however. Kahane would simply "cleanse" Israeli-occupied land of Arabs. He doesn't care where they go. The Sharon plan, however, is to flood Jordan with a new wave of Palestinian refugees and, if necessary, use Israeli overt or covert military force to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy and then proclaim the new Palestine on the East Bank of the Jordan. To avoid giving the Likud any excuse to put this plan into action after it assumes power in October is the leitmotif of Hussein's policy. If he decides his attempt to unseat Arafat has failed, the very real Israeli threat will drive him back into negotiations with Arafat, the only Palestinian individual with the credibility to make peace on behalf of all of the Palestinians.

Since both the U.S. and the Soviets are agreed that only a "credible" Palestinian can negotiate, Arafat's next problem is with his own constituency. Most Palestinians believe that, in the long run, the Palestinian birthrate and Israel's economic, military and even moral disarray will make it impossible for Israel to exist indefinitely as a Jewish state. They believe the Jews who do not join the growing number leaving Israel for greener pastures in the West will someday be happy to be accepted as citizens of the PLO's projected "democratic, secular state" in Palestine where Christians, Jews and Muslims will all be free to practice their own religions unmolested, and vote as they please.

Few actually living in the area would disagree with this long-term projection. But those who understand the nature of the U.S. psychological commitment to Israel realize that such a development will not come about soon. And those who know Israel understand that Sharon is deadly serious in his determination that in the not-too-distant future only Jews will live west of the Jordan, and those who live east of it will be called Palestinians, not Jordanians.

Why, they ask, must the peoples occupying Palestine—Muslim and Christian Arabs on the one hand and Jews on the other—live in endless fratricide rather than find a formula to live together in harmony as two adjacent states west of the Jordan awaiting the day when they, along with the people east of the Jordan, all become citizens of one peaceful, secular state?

The answer is summarized, perhaps unconsciously and perhaps not, in the State Department letter to Lee Hamilton cited above: "In the end the issue is not whether this or that ingenious text can be crafted; it is one of political will and intent."

Richard Curtiss, who retired after 31 years in the Foreign Service, is Chief Editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.