Palestinians Take a Giant Step

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Our political declaration contains moderation, flexibility and realism, which the West has been urging us to show. We feel now that the ball is in the American court. '—PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Nov. 15, 1988.

The Palestinians took a giant step toward peace at the November 12-15' meeting of the Palestine National Council (PNC) in Algiers. Reduced to its essentials, the meeting accomplished three nearly irreconcilable goals.

In endorsing UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for negotiations, the PNC accepted a "two-state" solution to the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, whereby Palestinian Arabs would govern themselves in their own separate political and geographical entity, side by side and at peace with the state of Israel. In doing so, the Palestinians abandoned a long-standing PLO commitment to one "democratic secular state" for all of Palestine which would have granted equal citizenship rights to Christians, Muslims, and Jews. This was an obvious concession to US insistence on a clear Palestinian acceptance of 242's land-for-peace formula.

In issuing a Palestinian "Declaration of Independence," the leadership of the Palestinian diaspora provided a political program to underpin the year-old uprising in Israeli-occupied territories. This kept faith with the 1.7 million Palestinians doing the bleeding and dying there. By limiting the claim to those territories occupied by Israel in 1967, the PNC demonstrated to the Israelis that there is an alternative to endless warfare that does not threaten the existence of Israel itself.

Finally, the PNC accomplished this public reversal of positions espoused by its own and other Arab leaders for more than 40 years without fragmenting the mainstream Palestinian national movement or losing the support of a constituency of five million Palestinians living in Israel, the occupied territories, other Arab states, and non-Arab countries around the globe.

For two generations the Palestinians have stated their case in hard-line generalities which unified that far-flung constituency, but did little to support the Palestinian cause in the court of world opinion, or challenge the Israelis to state their own case in reasonable terms. To maintain his position as leader of all the Palestinians, Yasser Arafat conciliated among divergent Palestinian viewpoints, stuck to the lowest common denominator, and persistently evaded requests from Western states and even his fellow Arabs for more specificity in stating his demands.

The Gaza and West Bank uprising, the intifadah, provided the catalyst for the new Palestinian diplomacy. It evoked a stunningly brutal Israeli response, studied indifference by Israel's American mentor, and unwillingness by other Western powers to brave US displeasure by following up on expressions of sympathy for the Palestinians with sanctions against the Israelis. NII this forced the rebelling Palestinians involved to fall back on an economic, social and educational infrastructure laid down over the years in the occupied territories by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

As they did so, it became increasingly clear to the victims that the Israeli Defense Forces were seeking to destroy, through assassinations, deportations, and mass detention without charges, the secular leadership identified with Arafat's mainstream PLO. Islamic fundamentalist protesters, who are particularly strong in Gaza, suffered little systematic Israeli harassment. The lesson was not lost on the Palestinians in the occupied territories. They closed ranks behind a newly-unified leadership. As a side benefit of this unprecedented Palestinian unity, they were able to extirpate a network of informers and collaborators through which Israeli authorities had exerted effective control over every facet of their existence.

The example of unity and disciplined refusal to provoke even more brutal repression and mass expulsion by using firearms against Israeli forces became a challenge by Palestinians under occupation to their leaders abroad. For years Palestinian-American members and supporters of the PNC have insisted that Israel will make no compromises except under US pressure. There can be no peace between Palestinians and Israelis, they maintain, until there is some rapprochement between the US government and the PLO.

Radical Palestinian groups vigorously opposed this counsel. Israel, they said, follows the orders of the US, which is hopelessly in thrall to an overwhelmingly powerful Jewish establishment and closely allied to corrupt Arab rulers. To redeem Palestine, these radicals maintained, virtually all of the existing Arab regimes would have to be overthrown and the US would have to be made to suffer—if necessary through international terrorism and the kidnapping and murder of US citizens.

Yasser Arafat was never identified with this view. As its proponents diminished, his mainstream Al Fatah and the PLO it dominated strengthened. By the beginning of 1988, only three Arab states, Syria, Libya, and South Yemen, still harbored Palestinian terrorist spoiler groups such as the notorious Abu Nidal and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The example of unity and disciplined refusal to provoke even more brutal repression and mass expulsion by using firearms against Israeli forces became a challenge by Palestinians under occupation to their leaders abroad.

General Command, both identified with murder and kidnapping of Americans. All of the other 18 Arab states have publicly and privately put their support behind Arafat's PLO as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people."

An additional 1988 development has been the newly constructive role played by the Soviet Union. It has for a generation been involved with two large and hard-line Damascus-based groups. One, Nayef Hawatmeh's Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, takes its orders directly from Moscow. The other and older group, George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, certainly looks to the Soviet Union for funding. These groups publicly left the PLO to protest the 1983 rapprochement between Yasser Arafat and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Their absence made Arafat's PLO considerably more flexible and effective in the West. Their subsequent return threatened to plunge the PLO back into the mists of political ambiguity which have for so long obscured Western understanding of the Palestinian cause.

This year, however, Soviet representatives counseled moderation. Although Habash, Hawatmeh, and their supporters vigorously opposed concessions in Algiers, they did not walk out when the Palestine National Council's statement reversed what the world has seen for 40 years as Palestinian negativism. The result was a statement passed by a huge majority in what by any measuring stick is the parliament of all, the Palestinians. What did the PNC statement accomplish? It brought the PLO farther than its most optimistic supporters had dared to hope toward meeting the condition for direct contacts with the US imposed in 1975 by Henry Kissinger—recognition of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which boil down to land for Palestinians and peace for Israelis.

Until now, Yasser Arafat has said that he cannot recognize those resolutions except in the context of recognizing all relevant UN resolutions because neither 242 nor 338 makes any provision for self-determination, the basic Palestinian demand. The Israelis respond that Arafat's insistence on dragging in other "relevant UN resolutions" is an attempt to lay claim to the all of the territory originally contemplated for the Palestinian state under UN resolution 181, which called for the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state.

The wording of the PNC declaration from Algiers disposes of this Israeli charge. It makes clear that the Palestinians are using 181 solely as the basis for creation of a Palestinian Arab state, just as the Israelis used 181 as the basis for creation of their Jewish state. Palestinian territorial claims will be limited to the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

The US Congress recently imposed renunciation of terrorism as an additional condition for US negotiations with the PLO. The Reagan administration rejected this as an unwarranted intrusion of the legislative branch into the affairs of the executive branch, but subsequently this phrase has crept into pronouncements by the State Department.

In fact, in the Cairo Declaration of 1985 Arafat had already renounced what he called "armed struggle" outside Israel and the occupied territories. Again, in Algiers, the PNC statement rejects "terrorism in all of its forms," meaning Israeli as well as Palestinian action against civilians. It makes no mention of armed struggle.

The Israelis and their US supporters will profess to be dissatisfied with the wording, since it does not renounce resistance by the Palestinians against Israeli military occupation. The leadership of the intifadah, however, has directed its followers not to use firearms, even in self-defense. To ask more at this time is unreasonable as well as unrealistic, and American public opinion will recognize this.

"We have taken a tremendous step forward," Columbia University Professor Edward Said, an influential member of the Palestine National Council, told newsmen when he emerged from the debate. He is one of the many Americans who argued that a Palestinian declaration of independence, unaccompanied by acceptance of a two-state solution, would be meaningless in terms of influencing US or world opinion.

It will be argued that the PNC statement provides only implicit rather than explicit recognition of Israel. Those who advance this as an excuse for restricting formal US contacts with the PLO, however, represent the same special interest that opposes US political, military and economic relations with any Arab state. Their concern is to make Israel's claim to be America's "only reliable Middle East ally" come true—by alienating the US from every Arab state.

... the Palestinians are using 181 solely as the basis for creation of a Palestinian Arab state, just as the Israelis used 181 as the basis for creation of their Jewish state.

Arab states, Islamic states, all of our NATO allies, and Japan as well will point out that in taking such a tack with the Palestinians, the US would be imposing a blatant double standard in the Middle East. The Israeli Government recognizes neither the PLO, the Palestinian state, nor the right of such a state to exist, implicitly or explicitly. Nor has any Israeli Government renounced terrorism, whether by rockets fired from Israeli aircraft into Palestinian refugee camps, or reprisals and collective punishments carried out against Arabs within Israeli borders and abroad. The Israeli Government has not even moved to prevent terrorism in the name of Israel by Jewish Americans against Arab Americans. American Arab AntiDiscrimination Committee official Alex Odeh was killed in California by a former Jewish Defense League member who today lives openly in a West Bank Jewish settlement and whom the Israeli Government refuses to extradite to face murder charges in an American court.

Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, has reacted to the PNC statement with characteristic negativism. It is as if the Israelis and Palestinians have reversed the roles they played 41 years ago when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine.

At that time, leaders of the surrounding Arab states and the nascent Palestinian movement reacted to the plan to give 54 percent of the land to the Jewish one third of its inhabitants with a resounding no. For six months they did nothing, however, to reverse the situation on the ground. David Ben Gurion, soon to be Israel's first prime minister, publicly accepted the plan. Privately he assured supporters his move was purely tactical and would not preclude acquisition of more territory. Within a year Israel had succeeded in seizing by military means some 70 percent of the 'land. It is this 70 percent that the PNC statement cedes to Israel, in the expectation that the remaining 30 percent, occupied by Israel in 1967, will become the new Palestinian entity.

Meanwhile, pressed in 1948 by the Western powers and even his own representative at the United Nations to define Israel's boundaries, David Ben Gurion refused. His successors have continued their refusal to define Israel's borders to this day. Their inflexibility has remained unchallenged for two generations by the same Western diplomats and journalists for whom each Palestinian concession has simply become an excuse to demand another.

Sixty percent of Israelis now tell pollsters they would trade land for peace. Fifty-eight percent of the Israeli electorate voted for parties espousing land for peace in their 1988 election platforms. Yet, even though the Israeli public is psychologically prepared to concede land for peace, no Israeli government resulting from the 1988 elections will feel constrained to make even a gesture to match Palestinian flexibility unless challenged to do so by the United States.

Its implacable repression of a stubbornly unyielding rebellion has transformed Israel into a true economic basket case. The government's budget exceeds the nation's gross national product. Israel is utterly dependent upon its annual $3 billion subsidy from the US taxpayer, plus nearly an additional billion in tax-exempt donations from the American Jewish community. It is using US government guarantees to refinance old debts.

It is gross hypocrisy for American officials to pretend that they cannot cajole Israel to the peace table. If any US president told the Israelis that they must at least talk land for peace with the Palestinians or face a cut in American aid equivalent to the amount Israel is spending on Jewish settlements and military repression in the occupied territories, the Israelis would look to the American Jewish community to protest. Whether it did or didn't, if the US president persisted, the Israelis would have no choice but to negotiate.

Nor can either Israel or the United States look abroad for new excuses to procrastinate. Yasser Arafat has gone his 50 percent of the way. He is solidly supported by his people, and every Arab state of importance to the United States. They have the public opinion support of most of the rest of the civilized world, specifically including all of America's NATO allies and Japan. The Soviet Union has played a constructive role, neutralizing its client Palestinians and effectively isolating the Syrian and Libya spoiler camp. Clearly it wants successful peace negotiations in the Middle East as a prelude to further US-USSR arms reductions.

At this moment discussions are underway in the State Department, the White House, and among incoming supporters of President-Elect George Bush. One camp believes the Palestinians have provided the Bush administration with a birthday present that should be moved to the top of the new administration's agenda. They would risk the domestic political criticism which Israel's American lobby would touch off in the media and Congress to prevent a serious US Middle East peace initiative. They urge that mainstream US public opinion will overwhelmingly support an initiative by the US, in cooperation with its NATO allies and the newly accommodating Soviet Union, in support of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

The other alternative being urged on Bush is to ask Arafat for more concessions.

The other alternative being urged on Bush is to ask Arafat for more concessions. No Palestinian leader can concede more, so the problem would effectively be shelved until a second term. In those four years, however, an Israeli. government, at Likud bloc urging, might attempt a genocidal expulsion of Palestinians from the occupied territories. War would break out between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Missiles and possibly nuclear weapons would be deployed on both sides. To stop it, on their own terms, both the Soviets and the US would step in and find themselves fact to face in the Middle East again. This time, the USSR would be identified in world opinion with the prevention of genocide, and the US with abetting it.

George Bush's presidency, like Ronald Reagan's, would then go down in the history books as, at best, a perilous period of US reaction to outbreaks of Middle East bloodshed, rather than a period of setting and pursuing a coherent political agenda for the Middle East.

Though foreign policy and domestic policy advisers may differ on which course the incoming administration should follow, one thing is clear. After the giant Palestinian step in Algiers, the ball is in the Bush administration's court.

Richard Curtiss, a retired Foreign Service information officer, is chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and author of A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute.