Israeli Veto of Free Palestinian Elections May Shatter Oslo Accord

By Richard H. Curtiss

As U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher resumed his peace shuttle between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad in October, the Israeli government was communicating a sense of great urgency based upon its own national election cycle. Although only 13,000 Jewish settlers live in Syria's Golan Heights, and no Israelis will be displaced in a settlement with Jordan, Israeli government officials indicate the necessary concessions to Syria and Jordan will be too politically painful to carry out after mid-1995, when the countdown to Israel's 1996 election begins.

These stated Israeli reasons for urgency don't entirely make sense. On the contrary, as it dawns on a skeptical Israeli public that comprehensive peace and the end to their long isolation in the Middle East may really be at hand, Israeli polls indicate it will increase both support for land-for-peace settlements and for keeping the Israeli Labor Party in power to finish the job (see "Public Opinion," p. 30).

This leads to the suspicion that for at least some members of the Israeli government, including Rabin, the principal reason for the urgency is to stampede the Syrian and Jordanian governments into signing final peace treaties with Israel before the interim Israeli-Palestinian agreements start to unravel. It is a final agreement with the Palestinians which eventually must involve politically unpopular compromises on Jerusalem and removal of some 100,000 Jewish settlers from the West Bank and Gaza.

Rabin's insistence on dealing with Jerusalem last is just one troubling bit of evidence that he may not really intend to deal with it at all. So is his determination not to make any concession implying real Palestinian sovereignty, like allowing the Palestinian Authority to print its own currency for use after the Israeli withdrawal.

Some Israeli Labor Party leaders, like Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, understand that no Palestinian leader can sign a final peace treaty with Israel that does not produce a sovereign Palestinian state and a shared Jerusalem. So does Likud leader Benyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, which is why he has vowed that if his party wins the 1996 elections, he will scrap the Declaration of Principles solemnly signed by Rabin and Yasser Arafat in Washington.

Assuming Rabin understands what both his political allies and enemies understand, there are only two possible explanations for what the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace newsletter The Other Israel calls "delaying tactics [that] progressively break down implementation of the Oslo Agreement—itself an interim agreement—into many smaller interim stages, each of which requires a separate, intricate set of negotiations before Rabin consents to implementation."

Two Explanations

One explanation for Rabin's obstructionism is that he is sincere but fears making concessions too rapidly for the Israeli public to accept. The other possible explanation is that he hopes to lock the other Arabs into peace agreements from which there is no backing out, before backing out himself, or forcing the Palestinians to back out, on the keystone Palestinian agreement, using his country's considerable influence in the international media to blame the Palestinians for the agreement's failure.

Whatever his goal, the tactics were successful in a September meeting with donor nations in Paris. There, Rabin refused to approve a plan to fund $160 million in projects for the present and future Palestinian autonomous areas because $4 million of the total were to be spent in East Jerusalem. At a second meeting in Oslo a few days later, Yasser Arafat was forced to withdraw the Jerusalem funding, not because of pressure from the international donors, but because of the impatience of his own followers, desperate for the cash flow all of the other infrastructure-building, job-producing projects would provide. However, if this was intended by the Rabin government to set a precedent of Israeli withholding and Palestinian folding in subsequent implementation negotiations, it may be a short-lived one.

Rabin already has violated the Oslo agreement, which precluded further changes on the ground which might impact on the final peace settlement. In August he quietly authorized adding more than 1,000 housing units to the West Bank Alfei Menashe settlement, more than doubling its size. The apparent reason was to strengthen Israel's case for a border change in the area where Israel's pre-1967 coastal strip was the narrowest.

The next impasse was over Palestinian elections. Here the issue is one upon which PNA President Yasser Arafat cannot compromise without losing all credibility. Israelis boast that the Palestinians living in Israel and in the occupied areas want to emulate the democratic freedoms enjoyed by Israelis. It's true, although Palestinians would say that they are determined to be the first totally free Arab democracy, not just the newest Arab autocracy.

Rabin already has violated the Oslo agreement.

The strength of the Palestinian man in the street's commitment to democratic freedoms already has been demonstrated. On July 28, Arafat, almost offhandedly, banned two pro-Jordanian Jerusalem newspapers as a gesture of disapproval of King Hussein's claim to custodial rights over Jerusalem religious monuments. The resulting uproar, involving journalists from his own Fatah camp and even his own minister of culture, Yasser Abed Rabbo, quickly forced Arafat to back down.

Now the Palestinians are pressing the Israelis to withdraw from the remainder of the occupied territories, as specified in the Sept. 13, 1993 agreement, so that the elections scheduled to follow the withdrawal can be held as quickly as possible. The Israelis refuse to withdraw until they have approved all of the ground rules for the Palestinian elections. This time sovereignty is only one of the issues, with the Palestinians seeking to elect at least 100 delegates to what would in effect be a Palestinian parliament, and the Israelis limiting the electorate to choosing 20 seats on an executive body that would function like a county board of supervisors or a city council. If that were the only issue, the Palestinians might have to compromise again. What they cannot accept, however, is Israeli insistence on approving which Palestinian parties can participate in the election.

"We told them our condition is that anyone who calls for the destruction of the state of Israel will not be able to participate in such elections," Israeli negotiator Danny Rothschild said at an Oct. 6 news conference, referring to groups like the Islamic Hamas party and the leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. "Secondly, we said that anyone with racism propaganda will not participate, and thirdly that anyone who puts as a condition that if he is elected [he will work] in the council to cancel the Declaration of Principles will not participate."

The irony of the Israeli argument was not lost on anyone familiar with the contemporary politics of Israel. There the Labor government's principal opponent in the 1996 election will be the Likud party, which violates all three conditions. It vows never to permit a Palestinian state, some Likud candidates call for expulsion of all Arabs, and there is Netanyahu's vow to cancel the Declaration of Principles.

Saeb Erekat, head of the Palestinian delegation, accused Israel of seeking to destroy Palestinian democracy. "Democracy means pluralism, and pluralism means different ideologies, opinions," he said. "Therefore, it is forbidden to discuss the exclusion or barring of any Palestinian citizen in taking part in these elections."

It's an issue on which no Palestinian can back down and retain credibility as a leader empowered to sign any final agreement with Israel. It's also an issue on which the other Arab countries, no matter how they may feel about Arafat personally, cannot afford to leave him to twist in the wind, as they have time after time in recent years. If Arafat stands firm, as he tried to in Paris over the Jerusalem projects, the flow of foreign aid, which promises desperately needed jobs for his people, may stop.

He therefore needs assurances that if he takes a stand on principle, some financial help will arrive promptly from the Arab and Muslim states. Ironically, if it does not and he is forced to surrender again, the very states withholding the aid may be the first to criticize him.

Regardless of what happens in the Arab camp, however, it is what Rabin does next that will reveal whether Israel really is moving toward peace with all of the Arabs. If he seeks to force a decision that will destroy Arafat as a leader and the Palestinian National Authority as a democracy, it will reveal the fraudulence of his handshake and signature in Washington. If, on the other hand, he instructs his negotiators to back down from the double standards they are trying to set for Israeli and Palestinian elections, it may reassure Syria and Jordan that their agreements with Israel are not being reached at Palestinian expense.

Answers to these questions surely are worth waiting for by both King Hussein of Jordan and President Hafez Al-Assad of Syria.