As U.S. Moves the Goal Posts, Jerusalem Main Obstacle to Peace

By Richard H. Curtiss

''It would be nice to believe the United States had no part in the Palestinian turmoil . . . But the U. S. did have a part. The main disagreements and internal pressures are directly traceable to the June 30 paper presented by the Americans to the Palestinians at the end of the 10th round of talks. In the paper the U.S. backed away from its original letter of assurance and diluted the principles of sovereignty, and for the first time would not clearly state its commitment to crucial U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338. At the same time the Israelis attempted to take a discussion of East Jerusalem off the table. . . Why did the Americans change the rules ? What did officials in the Clinton administration think would happen ?''

—Christian Science Monitor editorial, Aug. 11, 1993

If the Palestinians withdraw from the peace talks, the Israelis will proclaim, with help from sympathizers in the U.S. media, that "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace." In fact, however, whatever "opportunity" there was vanished with the change of U.S. administrations.

With White House Middle East adviser and former lobbyist for Israel Martin Indyk and like-minded State Department peace talks coordinator Dennis Ross firmly in his camp, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is going to tough it out. He will make no serious land-for-peace offer because President Bill Clinton has assured him there will be no U.S. financial pressure on Israel to do so.

Whereas Israel's Likud government made no secret of its determination to create a "Greater Israel" from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River by not giving up "one inch" of land for peace, Rabin is staking his claim to "Greater Jerusalem," whose boundaries the Israelis expanded to the borders of the Palestinian towns of Ramallah and E1 Bireh to the north and to Bethlehem and Beit Sahour in the south when they occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.

"The government is firm in its resolve that Jerusalem will not be open to negotiation," Rabin has said. "The coming years will also be marked by the extension of construction in Greater Jerusalem." That's a masterpiece of understatement.

Present-day "greater Jerusalem" is connected to 16 Jewish settlements grouped under the name Gush Etzion in the south, which Rabin has exempted from restrictions on expansion of settlements. In the east, Israel is connecting Jerusalem to the settlement of Maale Adumin with a system of highway bridges and tunnels. That will extend the Jerusalem connection halfway to the Jordan river and cut the West Bank in half.

Maale Adumin is not a few houses on an isolated hilltop. With 20,000 residents already, it has 31 square miles to grow into, making it half again as large as the island of Manhattan. As present Israeli plans go forward, virtually the only land that might even be left to exchange for peace would be Gaza and such major Palestinian Arab population centers as Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron and Jericho.

While the Palestinians are left to contemplate what they would do if Rabin deigns to make such a politically impossible offer, his government has sealed off the entire occupied West Bank and Gaza from access either to Israel or to East Jerusalem. This cuts Palestinians off from jobs that might bring money into the occupied territories. In the territories themselves, Israeli authorities have made it impossible to develop a viable economy by refusing permits to build factories, open marketplaces, expand farms, deepen wells or export or import except through Israel.

An Increasingly Intolerable Life

With job opportunities in the Arab world, Europe and the U.S. beckoning Palestinians from outside, and life inside increasingly intolerable, Israel's Labor government is betting it can accomplish the same kind of "ethnic cleansing" of the occupied territories that its Likud bloc rivals vow to do at gunpoint. Rabin also is betting that his subtler methods will not unite and mobilize the Muslim world to impose the serious economic measures that would jeopardize Israel by hurting badly any country that supports it. If he loses his bet, the United States will be the country that pays the price.

How did the "peace process" deteriorate so rapidly? A year ago most Palestinians and their Arab backers believed they were only months from an agreement that would lead within five years to full self-determination for the Palestinians, and settlement of all of Israel's border problems with Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

Those prospects vanished with the Clinton administration's striking reversal, just before round 10 of the peace talks in June, of the Bush administration's "Letter of Assurance" of October 1991 that had brought the Arabs to Madrid and the negotiations that followed. In that letter, written after eight personal trips to the Middle East, then-Secretary of State James Baker III told the Palestinians that the U.S. did not recognize Israel's unilateral 1967 "annexation" of East Jerusalem, and that the city's final status was subject to negotiation.

The U.S. also assured all of the Arab participants that the "peace process" would be based upon U.N. Resolution 242, which specifies "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict," meaning the 1967 war, in return for Arab acknowledgement of Israel's "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries, free from threats or acts of force."

Fully aware that Israel would, in the negotiations, call for territorial adjustments to make their boundaries more "secure," the Arabs also were aware that Resolution 242 specifically restated the basic premise of the United Nations Charter and of international law "emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war." On this basis, the Palestinians entered the negotiations, prodded by assurances from Arab moderates that there would be financial incentives for accepting a settlement involving only 22 percent of Palestine and the knowledge that if they did not negotiate, the support they were receiving would be reduced. It was understood that the U.S. would play the same role with Israel, giving or withholding financial support based upon Israel's performance at the peace table.

As for the irreconcilable Israeli insistence that Jerusalem must "never again be divided," and the Arab insistence on Israeli withdrawal from areas of East Jerusalem seized in 1967, the Arab and U.S. participants believed this could be solved by imposition of some form of international control that would assure equal rights and access to all Israelis and Palestinians living within the city as citizens of their two separate states.

In submitting a new "declaration of principles" for the talks, the Clinton administration has backed off from its commitment to the principles of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, although all six of President Clinton's predecessors since 1967 have made it the keystone of U.S. Middle East policy. When the U.S. change became clear, Palestinian delegates to the talks prepared to break them off if the U.S. did not return to its October 1991 assurances.

This led to their disagreement with Yasser Arafat in Tunis, over his seeming willingness to agree to deal with the problem of Jerusalem later in the "transition period. "

Delegates to the talks fear that while they wait, the Israelis are extending East Jerusalem's boundaries and building Jewish settlements within them in order to create a clear Jewish majority within their definition of East Jerusalem. Within their "Greater Jerusalem" as a whole, the Israelis already have created a ratio of 72 percent Jews to 28 percent Arabs.

As the peace talks have dragged on through 10 rounds over 20 months, growing numbers of Palestinians have been attracted to the Islamic radicals of Hamas and the leftist radicals of George Habash's PFLP and Nayef Hawatmeh's DFLP. This further suits Israeli plans for encouraging Palestinian extremists who alienate sympathizers both within the Arab world and in the West. But even among the great majority of Palestinians who still support Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah and the West Bank peace talk delegates who have carried out its instructions, there are problems.

The Palestinians living under occupation are suffering intensely. They attribute some of this to the continuing alienation of the oil-rich Arabs, and the Palestinians who work in the oil-producing countries, from Yasser Arafat, whose tacit acceptance of Saddam Hussain's invasion of Kuwait has not been forgotten. A collective PLO leadership, Gaza delegation leader Dr. Haider Abdul Shafi believes, would take better account of the problems of Palestinians under occupation, and at the same time would attract renewed financial support for Palestinian institutions.

They suspect that Yasser Arafat, whose successful pursuit of diplomatic recognition around the world has not alleviated occupation conditions, will be tempted by the vague "Gaze first" or "early empowerment" options being dangled by the Israelis. While having Palestinians administering any part of the occupied territories might seem a partial vindication of the PLO's long efforts, it will not affect the day-to-day problems of earning a living in the vastly larger and more important areas coveted by the Israelis.

"Important New Developments"

Meanwhile, the new Clinton team is assuring journalists, activists and even Arab diplomats that "important new developments" in the peace talks lie just ahead. The year began with an Israeli attempt to split the Arab camp by asking Syria what it would be prepared to offer in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal from a demilitarized Golan Heights. Syrian President Hafez Assad has responded that Syria would offer "full peace for full withdrawal," but only after Palestinian territorial claims also have been addressed.

The Israelis then preceded Round 10 of the peace talks with hints of a separate peace with Jordan. King Hussein made it clear that Israel-Jordanian disputes could easily be settled, but only after Palestinian claims are met. U.S. hints now refer only to yet another attempt to broker a separate Syrian-Israeli peace, with the possible side effect that such an attempt will panic Yasser Arafat into offering to defer indefinitely a settlement on Jerusalem in return for Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza.

It's a bet Israel, and its unrestrained U.S. partisans in the Clinton administration, will lose. Making a separate peace and thereby giving up support for Arab claims to Jerusalem is just as politically impossible for any Arab state as redividing Jerusalem would be for any Israeli government.

So, while regional talks on refugees are scheduled Oct. 12-14 in Tunisia, on water resources Oct. 26-28 in Beijing, security and disarmament Nov. 2-4 in Moscow, economic development Nov. 8-9 in Copenhagen, and environment Nov. 15-16 in Cairo, the U.S. has let it be known that if there is no progress in the political talks, the Clinton administration's patience "might not last beyond the end of the year. "

Arab patience may not last that long. Brought in on the premise that "acquisition of territory by war" is "inadmissible," they read in the Christian Science Monitor of July 6 a U.S. official quoted as saying: "But international law, as we know, is meaningless unless there are powers who are ready to enforce it." He may have meant it as a warning, but if the Arab states, like the West Bank Palestinians, give up on the peace talks, they may take the new U.S. position as a challenge.

If they do, Americans should prepare for the worst. The "oil weapon" is sheathed, perhaps for good, and no one knows it better than the Arabs, who are faced with increasing over-production as oil from Iran, and eventually Iraq, comes onto the market.

Americans would be ill-advised, however, to force Arab and Islamic nations to choose between their present economic and security arrangements, which are so beneficial to the United States, and helping the Palestinians resist an unfair settlement being imposed by the United States. Those choices could be very hard ones, and not just for the Arabs.