What’s Important Is Concessions Not Made at Wye

By Richard H. Curtiss

“If May 4 isn’t on the agenda at this week’s meeting—and I have no indication it is—then the meetings will be a joke.”—Israeli Labor Party Knesset member Yossi Beilin, October 1998.

If President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright harbored any illusions about Zionism and Israel’s current leadership, the nine-day Wye Plantation negotiations, which were mostly a confrontation between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and American leaders, must have shattered them for good. The end was a triumph for Clinton, as it was supposed to be, just a week and a half before America’s mid-term national elections.

It can also be called a triumph for Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. He ignored every Israeli attempt to humiliate or infuriate him. And he retained his last bargaining chip, the declaration of a Palestinian state on May 4 if the Oslo accords final status talks have not been completed, as scheduled, by that date.

Since everything under discussion at Wye was essentially implementation of agreements solemnly signed at the White House in September of 1993 and 1995, and the Hebron agreement of January 1997 (all of which had already been paid for with U.S. aid to Israel), it might also be described as a triumph for Binyamin Netanyahu, who presented demands for new U.S. aid commitments in return for Israel’s agreement, again, to do some of the things his predecessors, Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, had previously promised to do.

However, the year-old American plan, which formed the basis of the Wye agreement, forced Netanyahu personally to agree to the kind of land-for-peace commitments against which he had railed in his successful 1996 Israeli election campaign.

It appeared that even after his arrival at Wye Plantation, Netanyahu hoped to halt the negotiations if Yasser Arafat’s hard-line Islamist political opponents, Hamas or Islamic Jihad, succeeded in mounting a suicide bombing or other major attack. In fact, the Palestinian Authority has collected some evidence that Israeli authorities may themselves have encouraged the Oct. 19 grenade attack in which 67 Israelis were wounded at a Beersheba bus stop, and over which Netanyahu threatened to halt negotiations. The attacker, who was captured alive, is 29-year-old Salem Sarsour, a Palestinian employed as an informer by Israeli security authorities.

Whatever Netanyahu’s intention, however, the agreement which he signed committed him to increasing the West Bank area under complete Palestinian control (Area A) from about 3 percent to almost 18 percent of the West Bank. The area under joint Israeli-Palestinian control (area B), which was 27 percent, will be about 25 percent, of which 3 percent will be a “nature reserve” which can be used by neither side.

At Wye the Palestinians also got authority to open their own airport in Gaza, a seeming Israeli commitment to create an industrial zone on the Israeli-Palestinian border that will create jobs for Palestinians, and to create two routes providing “safe passage” for Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza, and an Israeli commitment for release of 750 of the more than 3,000 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails.

The Israelis in turn got Palestinian commitments to arrest and try 29 of 30 Palestinians the Israelis accuse of attacking Israeli citizens, to reduce the various Palestinian military and police forces and to confiscate excess arms in Palestinian-controlled areas, and to convene a meeting to rescind clauses in the Palestinian National Covenant calling for the destruction of Israel.

In fact, Yasser Arafat previously has declared all such clauses null and void, listing them in a memo for American authorities, and the Palestinian parliament had affirmed this decision. Both Israel’s previous government and the U.S. government had pronounced themselves satisfied with this declaration, knowing that Arafat would be unable to assemble and persuade the entire Palestinian National Council (which includes many diaspora Palestinians opposed to the Oslo accords) to rewrite the covenant.

In any case, President Clinton agreed to address the meeting Arafat assembles, marking the first time an American president will have entered territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Clinton also agreed that the CIA will function not only to facilitate intelligence cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli authorities, as it has been doing, but also would undertake to verify that Palestinian authorities are carrying out the security commitments they have made. It was the Palestinians who wanted CIA involvement as verifiers, and the Israelis who were reluctant, since in the past they have used unverified charges that the Palestinians were not carrying out security commitments as an excuse for not carrying out their own withdrawal commitments.

Equally important were concessions not made at Wye. The Israelis refused to commit to the size of the third withdrawal called for in the Oslo accords prior to the beginning of final status talks. Prior to the Wye meeting, Netanyahu had said such a third withdrawal would involve no more than 1 percent of the occupied territories and Arafat had said it must involve no less than 30 percent. The issue remains unresolved. Nor did the Israelis offer maps showing where the second withdrawal transfers agreed at Wye of 13 percent of land from Israeli-controlled Area C to B (12 percent) and A (1 percent) and the additional 14.2 percent of land from Area B to Area A would take place. Nor did Netanyahu agree to accept the creation of a Palestinian state, or to freeze settlement expansion.

For the long run, the most important result at Wye may have been Yasser Arafat’s refusal to be pressured into postponing his vow to declare unilaterally on May 4 the existence of a Palestinian state if the Oslo accord final status talks have not been completed within the five-year period originally agreed upon. Netanyahu tried to make the entire Wye negotiation turn upon this issue, but to their credit the American negotiators refused to let this happen. This threat is Arafat’s only weapon in the unequal Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Although in effect he already has declared the existence of a Palestinian state in accepting a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a renewed declaration in May will have two probable results. It will elicit full diplomatic recognition of the Palestinian state from virtually all of the 185 members of the United Nations, and it will re-establish the borders of that state at the June 5, 1967 lines, meaning all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. This will render all of the Israeli settlement activity and the creeping annexations around Jerusalem by both Labor and Likud governments meaningless in terms of international recognition.

Arafat also refused heavy Israeli (but not American) pressure to extradite Palestinians accused of attacks on Israelis for trial in Israel. He made it clear that this would be impossible unless the Israeli government was ready similarly to extradite Israelis accused of attacks on Palestinians for trial in Palestinian courts.

Since the Wye agreement was based upon a U.S. blueprint that had been largely negotiated with both sides in months of shuttling by U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross and, more recently, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the U.S. concentrated upon creating an ambiance that would make it difficult for either side to back out of its previous commitments. The model was the Camp David negotiations of 1978, in which Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin were kept largely isolated from their own journalists for 13 days while President Jimmy Carter shuttled between them.

Camp David itself was ruled out as the site of the 1998 negotiations, however, because to Arabs it represents the first of a series of defeats in which Arabs signed in good faith agreements which, they feel, the Israelis never fully honored. The ground rules were essentially the same, however, with the press kept far away from the participants except for a daily press pool which was allowed to come and go for formal briefings. However, the existence of cellular phones made it impossible to isolate the negotiators from the press of their own countries, and the Israelis began reporting to their own press events which hadn’t happened and concessions which hadn’t been made, prompting at one point a complaint by American briefer Jamie Rubin about such activities by “one of the delegations.”

Such artful manipulation of the press at home at deadline time resulted in Israeli morning newspapers erroneously reporting at one time that the Israelis had broken off the talks and were coming home and, on the last day of the conference, that Netanyahu would be returning with Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. Navy counter-intelligence analyst sentenced to life imprisonment for turning over thousands of secret U.S. documents to Israel.

The last-minute flap over Pollard illustrated the contrasting negotiating techniques by the different delegations throughout the talks. The Palestinians had made their concessions before they arrived. Their only task was to avoid being pressured into making more. They were said to be riding around the spacious grounds in golf carts and on bicycles while most of the hard bargaining went on between the Americans and Israelis.

Meanwhile, on the final day, the Israelis claimed that Clinton had agreed to free Pollard and then reneged after U.S. intelligence officials threatened to resign if he did. When Clinton claimed that no such deal had been reached, Netanyahu said that unless Pollard was freed, Israel would not free the 750 Palestinian prisoners it had agreed to release. Arafat said if the prisoners were not released as previously agreed, he would not sign off on the agreement.

Whether this was a long-shot Israeli attempt to free Pollard, an unsuccessful Israeli attempt to torpedo the agreement while blaming the Palestinians for its failure, or the facts were as the Israelis presented them is a question for historians.

Meanwhile, whether the Wye conference really has put the peace process back on track after a 20-month hiatus, or whether it was just another Israeli exercise in keeping U.S. military, political and economic aid coming while sabotaging the U.S.-instituted Middle East peace process depends entirely upon the Israeli prime minister’s actions upon returning home.

Hopefully the parallels with the Egyptian agreement at Camp David will stop with the Wye agreement’s signing. Even before he returned to Israel, Menachem Begin had largely renounced a key item in the Camp David agreement, a freeze on Israeli settlement building until a similar agreement had been reached between Israelis and Palestinians. The bitter aftermath was an unresolved dispute in which President Carter insisted Begin had made such a pledge, and Begin insisted he had promised to freeze settlements for only five months.

Netanyahu’s affirmation, for the first time, of land-for-peace arrangements is being bitterly criticized by his hard-line supporters including some Likud members, settlers and Orthodox Jews, who oppose giving any part of Palestine back to the Palestinians. But Netanyahu has the strength to win cabinet approval of the agreement, and his Labor Party opponents have promised to support his concessions in a confidence vote in the Knesset.

If he really plans to carry out the withdrawals to which he agreed at Wye, however, he may choose to move forward the date of national elections, which must be held in 1999 anyway, and try to improve his razor-thin Knesset margin over Israel’s Labor Party. Palestinians may interpret this as a tactic to hold up implementation of the withdrawals and other steps toward peace. Previous Israeli governments have done the same thing, successfully buying time to continue to expand and thicken the Israeli West Bank settlements whose purpose is to make enforcement of a land-for-peace agreement impossible.

In any case, if Netanyahu does not make the promised withdrawals, he will seek to blame real or imagined Palestinian violations of their commitments for the delay. For that reason it is good that the CIA will be on hand to certify whether or not such allegations are fact or fiction.

With all these impediments to carrying out the commitments made at Wye before the beginning of final status talks, it is hard to imagine that the talks themselves will solve the much more difficult problems of sharing Jerusalem, the final borders and status of the Palestinian state, and sharing a water supply that is inadequate for both countries.

It’s important, however, that the Palestinians hold up their end of the bargain at Wye in order not to be saddled with blame for the likely failure of the whole peace process. It’s equally important that Yasser Arafat retain the option to declare unilaterally a Palestinian state next May. That, at least, will internationalize the problem so that all the world can see who kept, and who broke, the series of agreements that culminated at Wye Plantation.

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