Did Yasser Arafat Give Away the Store, or “Make Peace Irreversible”?

By Richard H. Curtiss

The three presidents, one king and one prime minister who shared the dais in the White House East Room to sign the Oslo II agreement Sept. 28 had very parochial reasons for being there. So, in the end, high drama disappeared in the details.

The night before, White House staff members feared that President Bill Clinton would, characteristically, fall behind schedule and the start of the noon proceedings would be delayed. If they were, and the networks switched to live coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial sometime before 1 p.m. (10 a.m. in Los Angeles), the opportunity for Americans to see their president presiding with grace and dignity over a rare, major foreign policy triumph would be lost.

In fact, the ceremonies began 20 minutes late, but through no fault of Clinton's. At 11:30 a.m. he had convened King Hussein of Jordan, Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian National Authority, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel in the White House Oval Office for a preliminary meeting. They were talking about Bosnia when special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross entered the room and whispered into the president's ear that a last-minute impasse had arisen over the timing of the Israeli redeployment in Hebron.

Clinton asked Rabin and Arafat to step into an adjoining room with him, where the negotiators for both sides were huddled. He pleaded with them to reach a quick agreement so that the ceremonies, which were to be telecast live over the entire planet, could proceed. Since Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres normally does the tough negotiating with Arafat, Clinton bit his lip nervously and returned to the Oval Office and his other guests.

Eight minutes later Arafat and Rabin reappeared in the Oval Office. Then, while their aides used pen and ink to write in changes in the documents to be signed, the president and his guests strolled sedately out of the Oval Office, across an outdoor area, and at 12:20 p.m. into the East Room, where 200 delegation officials, spouses and diplomats were sweltering under television lights as the temperature rose astronomically.

The speeches were brief, but pauses for translation made them long. In addition to those of the principals, there were remarks by representatives of the European Union, the Asian nations, and Russia, which co-sponsored the beginning of the current peace process when it still was the Soviet Union. Afterward came the payoffs to the heads of state. Most had professed dismay that in order to increase Clinton's re-election prospects they had to travel across the Atlantic to Washington to witness the formal signing of a 400-plus-page agreement accompanied by 26 still-secret maps that already had been initialed four days earlier in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Taba by Arafat and Peres.

However, there were private significant benefits for all. Clinton, who had been compelled by law to deduct $300 million from Israel's annual $2 billion in loan guarantees because Israel spent at least that much on illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, indicated he would restore to Israel $240 million of the deduction. Even more important, when Rabin offers the Oslo II agreement to the Israeli Knesset, where it faces noisy opposition, he can rightfully point out that failure by Israel's Knesset to approve an agreement he signed at the White House would jeopardize the dollar pipeline from the U.S.

Arafat's presence reminded the U.S., European and other donor nations who promised him $2.4 billion over five years after he signed the original Oslo agreement that he is in compliance with his promises, but that they have been slow in redeeming theirs. King Hussein, who had expected in return for signing a Jordan-Israel peace agreement to get far more than just a cancellation of his debts to the U.S., strengthened his case. So did Mubarak, whose country remains the second largest recipient, after Israel, of U.S. aid in the world. When the U.S. picks up the final tab for Oslo II, it could elevate the total cost to U.S. taxpayers of aid to Israel and its Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian neighbors to about two-thirds of total U.S. world-wide foreign assistance grants and loans.

Real Costs and Benefits

What about the real cost and benefits to the people of each of the countries involved? Jordanians have been on a dangerous economic roller coaster ride. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait resulted in an initial economic upsurge. Iraq became totally dependent upon imports through Jordan. Also, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from Kuwait, Iraq and some other Arab states of the Gulf brought their savings with them and invested them in homes and businesses in Jordan.

But with Iraq's ignominious defeat, the U.N. sanctions imposed on it, and Jordan's estrangement from the oil-producing states because of King Hussein's support for Saddam Hussain, Jordan became a pariah state in the Middle East. Its treaty with Israel has increased tourism significantly, but that has not been the bonanza Jordanians hoped for. If the final-stage Israeli-Palestinian negotiations go well, King Hussein will emerge a major beneficiary. If they do not, he will remain estranged from the other Arab states and largely dependent upon the U.S., but without the powerful lobby that keeps American aid flowing to Israel.

Egypt, with its $2.2 billion in annual aid from the U.S., is in a similar situation, but on a vastly larger scale. With a population of 60 million people, it is by far the largest Arab nation. However, as the first Arab state to make peace with Israel, its political stock is not high in other Arab countries, where hundreds of thousands of Egyptians are employed. A final, satisfactory settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute will make Egypt the pioneer of a successful policy. Failure will greatly strengthen not only Islamist opposition to the Mubarak regime, but secular opposition as well.

Syria, whose absence from the signing ceremony was noted pointedly by both the U.S. and Israel, in fact had little choice. Contrary to a calculated Israeli propaganda campaign abroad, Rabin has not offered Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad full Israeli withdrawal from Syria's Golan Heights in return for full peace. To date Rabin has offered in exchange for full peace now only later withdrawal "in stages," and even that subject to as-yet-undefined water agreements and approval by Israeli voters in a popular referendum—an unlikely eventuality.

Instead of concessions, the Rabin government offers quotes from its Likud opposition that, after it returns to power, there will be no withdrawal at all from Golan. Syria's president sees the Israeli tactics as a trap to rush him into granting Israel peace and recognition before he receives more than token withdrawals. Given Israel's prior record, it is hard to find a different explanation.

Lebanon, a hostage to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute for the past 47 years, remains so. Until Syria and Israel, both of which occupy parts of Lebanon, reach an agreement, there will be no Lebanese-Israeli agreement. Worse, neither Syria nor Israel seems anxious for such an agreement to be concluded.

At present, Syria controls Lebanon's economy as well as its government, and draws much more from Lebanon than its occupation costs. For its part, Israel has access to Lebanese water, which it has coveted ever since it came into existence. Israel's Labor government also is reluctant to see Beirut resume its role as the commercial hub of the Middle East, a role Israel sees itself assuming as the chief benefit of settling its disputes with all of its Arab neighbors. Such a regional role is Israel's only potential replacement for the loss of American aid, which inevitably would follow such a settlement.

Perhaps more than any of the other countries involved, Lebanon needs a lobby in the United States. Ironically, the million and a half Lebanese Americans are just as divided as the Lebanese themselves were during their country's fratricidal 15-year civil war, and they will remain so until the Palestinian-Israeli dispute is settled.

The Palestinians themselves are more puzzled than divided over the Oslo agreement sealed with a White House handshake on Sept. 13, 1993. It has been followed by the Cairo agreement of May 1994 that preceded Yasser Arafat's return to Gaza and Jericho, and now the Oslo II agreement. The latter specifies Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank's cities, towns and villages in the six months between Oct. 1 and March 30. It also calls for Palestinian elections after the withdrawal, which Rabin has promised to complete in December. Palestinians from East Jerusalem can vote in the elections or stand for office if they can prove that they also have a West Bank address.

It seems a foregone conclusion that Yasser Arafat will be elected chief of state. By contrast, it appears that campaigning for seats in what will amount to a Palestinian parliament, and whose members will be added to the Palestine National Council which also represents the Palestinian diaspora, will be open. Whether the Islamist Hamas opposition participates will be up to its leaders, but some left-wing parties opposed to the agreements may participate if they feel they have enough strength to make a showing, as may some independents such as influential Gaza leader Dr. Haider Abdel Shafi. Based upon public opinion polls in Gaza, Jericho and the areas from which the Israelis are to withdraw, Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah likely will emerge with a majority or the potential to form a ruling coalition, even if the elections are free and fair and all opposition groups participate.

Diaspora Palestinians

Conventional wisdom has it that diaspora Palestinians are more skeptical about the agreements than Palestinians who have been living under Israeli occupation. One reason is that the 1948 refugees and their descendents see the Oslo agreement as Yasser Arafat's legitimization of the loss of their homes and lands inside Israel's Green Line borders. Still, very generous compensation arrangements in the final status negotiations could ameliorate this problem. They could provide the extremely large concentrations of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria enough money either to integrate into Lebanese and Syrian society if they are permitted to do so, or to buy land and build homes in Jordan or the West Bank if they are not. Few of the Palestinians in the U.S. and Europe are expected to consider leaving the countries in which their children have been born and into which they have thoroughly integrated.

Polls show the conflicting emotions among Palestinians who have lived under Israeli occupation. Most feel the Oslo agreement, which they say Yasser Arafat signed in desperation even before any Palestinian lawyers had examined it, was a bad one, with too little spelled out in writing and too much left to the goodwill and fair-mindedness of the Israelis. History, both before and after the Oslo agreement, has shown a conspicuous absence of either of these qualities in Israeli dealings with non-Jewish populations. Israelis in Gaza and Jericho also are alarmed at authoritarian tendencies exhibited by Arafat and, particularly, those who returned with him from exile.

Soldiers trained to kill, as were virtually all of the men who returned from Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria to join his security forces, must be retrained for police work. Those living in the formerly occupied areas are deeply concerned that they will create just another autocratic Arab government, instead of the free and democratic media, academic and administrative institutions of which Palestinians inside and outside the occupied lands have dreamed for a generation.

The Problem of Collaborators

In fairness, the returns are not yet in. Arafat knows that if the Islamist and leftist extremists who are working to undermine the peace with their suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem are not curbed immediately, they will give Israel's own extremists an excuse to call off the peace negotiations and blame the Palestinians. He also is faced with the problem of collaborators with Israel, who range from drug addicts and prostitutes to heavily armed Mafia-type gangsters who have helped Israel rule villages and towns in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Israeli government bars Palestinian authorities from trying these collaborators in Palestinian courts. Nor does it want to admit them into Israel. Yet there is no possibility of their being permitted to live unscathed among liberated Palestinians whose fathers, brothers and sons they have betrayed and killed. If the Israeli government does not grant them sanctuary, they will be executed extrajudicially by their neighbors as the Israeli forces withdraw.

Friends of Israel in America will seek to turn such incidents into excuses for Israel to take back the occupied lands. But they are identical to the events that followed the liberation, by Americans, of every Nazi-occupied country in Europe and Japanese-occupied country in Asia after World War II. The only way to prevent such killings is for Israel to create sanctuaries for its collaborators, not in Israeli-guarded villages in the formerly occupied territories as the Israelis have tried to do, but within Israel itself. Failure to do so will be damning evidence of Israeli racism, and indifference to the fate of its non-Jewish supporters.

An example is the death in Palestinian mukhabarat custody in Jericho of a 52-year-old American citizen, Azzam Mohammed Rahim Mosleh, who owned a grocery store in Dallas and a walled, fenced and fortified stone mansion in Ein Yabroud, a West Bank village near Ramallah. He had been arrested two years ago by Israeli police investigating the murder of two Palestinians, and then released. His detention by Palestinian police was in connection with the same murders. If nothing else, his death should serve as a warning to those who may be considered Israeli collaborators by their Palestinian neighbors not to wait for the Israeli troops to withdraw before they make themselves scarce.

To evaluate the inevitable settling of scores, Americans also must realize that many Palestinian citizens of Israel and some Palestinians in the occupied territories—particularly those who travel abroad—have had to make their own deals with Israeli security authorities. The price of permission to leave home for study abroad may have been betrayal of friends they left behind. Now these debts, real or imagined, will have to be paid. The procedure would be much more orderly, and fairer, if the Israelis would grant permission to the Palestinian National Authority to settle such matters in courts of law. Until such permission is granted, they will be settled on the streets.

On the positive side, except for collaborators there cannot be a single Palestinian who is not happy to see the Israeli flag replaced by the Palestinian flag in his or her town or village. Nor can there be anyone who would not choose protection by unseasoned Palestinian police rather than face a continuation of the purposeful harassment Palestinians have suffered for years at the hands of an army that enforces apartheid by random cruelty and humiliation and legally applied torture.

Even Palestinians who believed that Arafat signed away their birthright to make himself mayor of Gaza must acknowledge that in contrast to the vague terms of Oslo I, hard bargaining went into drafting the Oslo II agreement by 100-person Palestinian and Israeli teams who lived and worked together in the same Taba hotel for nearly two months.

Has Yasser Arafat sold the store, or has he made necessary compromises to make possible, in his words at the White House ceremony, "this historic interim step that demonstrates the irreversibility of the peace process"? The answer, unfortunately, lies neither with the Palestinian people nor their leader, but rather with Israel's prime minister, his people, and their American mentors.

The 140,000 Jewish settlers moved into the West Bank and Gaza to "create facts on the ground," in the words of their one-time leader, Menachem Begin, or to become "obstacles to peace," in the words of every recent American president except Bill Clinton. Now they threaten full-scale armed insurrection against any Israeli authorities who try to remove them. Yet, if they do not go, the 22 percent of pre-1947 Palestine that Yasser Arafat has agreed to settle for shrinks to an unacceptable less-than-nine percent.

The dramatic confrontations that are said to be tearing at the soul of Israel, and dividing its soldiers between those who will follow orders to remove the settlers and those who won't, make good television. Strangely, though, not a single settler or soldier has been killed or even seriously injured in months of skirmishing. Yet Palestinians living in and around the "battlefield" are killed by the "stray bullets" of settlers or soldiers almost daily. Does the dramatic television footage of "Israel's cultural war" reflect reality, or just theater?

And is Prime Minister Rabin and his Labor-led government really "forsaking Israel" as Likud opposition leader Benyamin Netanyahu charges? Pro-Labor and independent Hebrew-language newspapers present a dramatically different picture. Likud Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, they point out, talked expansively of creating a "greater Israel." As a result, when they expanded settlements to do so, President George Bush threatened to link further aid to Israel to its performance at the peace table.

By contrast, in his speeches and press conferences Rabin dismisses "greater Israel." In practice, however, he and his government have built far more West Bank settler housing and roads connecting the settlements to Israel proper than did his predecessors—and have vastly increased the annual American subsidy that is making a greater Israel possible.

The fact is that only Rabin knows what he really is doing. If he is publicly embracing land for peace but privately foreclosing that option, only the United States can stop him. But he won't stop before Israel's 1996 elections, because his re-election depends upon the perception by Israeli voters that they can keep the West Bank and U.S. aid with Rabin, but will have to forego one or the other with Netanyahu. Nor will the U.S. pressure Israel before its own 1996 elections.

What remains to be negotiated in the Oslo agreement's final stage, between the spring of 1996 and the spring of 1999, are Jerusalem, borders, settlements, refugees, the nature of the Palestinian entity, and now water. What Israel is willing to concede will determine whether it remains a country permanently surrounded by unfriendly neighbors, or one that eventually will be "normalized" and accepted economically into the neighborhood.

Most of all, what Israel concedes will depend upon who occupies the White House after 1996. Whatever their intentions, neither Rabin nor Netanyahu will be able politically to make the necessary concessions on those most difficult issues except under strong U.S. pressure. The fate not only of the Israelis but of all of the Middle East countries represented on the dais in the White House East Room on Sept. 28 depends upon how much pressure a U.S. president is willing to apply in the face of strong opposition from Congress, the U.S. media and the powerful American Jewish community.

Although peace in the Middle East may depend ultimately upon an alert American public, the beginning was not promising. In the White House East Room, as the speeches droned on, a Palestinian delegate, nearly anesthesized by the suffocating heat, dropped into a deep sleep. Rabin fought to keep his eyes open, and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher almost rolled off his chair, while other heads jerked uncontrollably throughout the room.

Even more frustrated, however, were 20 foreign diplomats who arrived too late to be crammed into the East Room. They were herded into a side room to watch on television as first President Clinton and then Prime Minister Rabin gave their speeches. Then, to the consternation of the group of diplomats, network coverage of the ceremony suddenly halted and they were transported to a Los Angeles courtroom. For them, and for television audiences throughout most of the rest of the United States, live televised coverage of the signing of Oslo II was pre-empted by the trial of O.J. Simpson.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.