Despite the “Peace Agreement,” It’s Too Soon to Count On Peace

By Rachelle Marshall

“We’ve made significant progress on the path to peace and I think we could finish it in mid-October,” President Bill Clinton said on Sept. 28. At the time, his statement sounded at least half right. When Secretary of State Madeline Albright in her role as super nanny succeeded in persuading Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to meet at the Wye Plantation in Maryland on Oct. 15, it seemed certain that the two men would reach an agreement on an Israeli troop withdrawal from the West Bank. Whether that agreement would lead to peace was far less certain. It is still not certain.

Four days after the meetings began they were at the point of breaking up in failure, with both sides more hostile toward each other than before. Two days later, thanks to the Palestinians’ combination of firmness and patience, and a marathon effort by Clinton and his aides, plus nudges from Jordan’s King Hussein, events took a 180-degree turn. After meeting for 20 straight hours, in the early dawn of Oct. 23 the negotiators came up with a document acceptable to both sides, and a few hours later a justifiably delighted Clinton presided over a White House signing ceremony.

At times during the six days the sessions had resembled an old-fashioned Saturday Afternoon cliffhanger, as Netanyahu repeatedly laid down ultimatums and threatened to walk out if his demands were not met, meanwhile making calls to American Jewish leaders to drum up their support in case of a confrontation with Clinton. At the last possible moment Netanyahu delayed the final signing by demanding the immediate release of Jonathan Pollard, a former Naval intelligence analyst convicted of extensive spying for Israel. Publicly, Clinton only said he would review the case.

Netanyahu’s use of the tantrum as a negotiating ploy may have been inspired by Ariel Sharon, whom the prime minister had appointed chief negotiator only a few days before coming to Maryland. As Israeli defense minister in 1982 Sharon launched an invasion of Lebanon in order to crush the PLO and silence Palestinian claims to the West Bank and Gaza. As minister of infrastructure since 1996 he has relentlessly expanded settlements in the West Bank and Golan, and carved up the West Bank with a road network that has blocked off Palestinian communities and turned them into isolated enclaves. He has sworn never to shake Arafat’s hand, a vow to which he conspicuously adhered throughout the Wye negotiations.

It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that the final document is more favorable to the Palestinians than most Middle East observers expected. It calls for Israel to withdraw from an additional 13 percent of the West Bank, with 3 percent of that territory remaining as undeveloped scrubland. The Palestinians will gain full control over an additional 1 percent plus 14 percent of the area that is now under joint Israeli-Palestinian control. They will therefore have complete control over 18 percent of the West Bank instead of the 3 percent they currently have. In another 21 percent Israel will be responsible for security while the Palestinians oversee garbage collection and similar activities.

Israel also promises to release 750 of the 3,000 Palestinians now in Israeli prisons, ensure safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, and allow a Gaza airport and seaport to be opened. In return, Arafat will ask the Palestine Central Committee to delete anti-Israel portions of the PLO Charter, something the Palestine National Council did two years ago, as Eugene Bird pointed out the in the October/November Washington Report.

At the urging of the Palestinians and Americans, Netanyahu agreed to let the CIA act as mediator in security operations involving the Palestinian Authority. Although the agency’s exact functions have not been spelled out, Palestinian law enforcement official Jibril Rajoub said the CIA will be “a needed witness to balance Israel’s claims of noncompliance by Palestinians.” This role could prove significant if Israel continues to insist that Arafat stop all “anti-Israel incitement.” Since this would mean censoring the press and radio along with speech, Arafat might refuse rather than impose police state tactics on the Palestinians in order to protect Israel’s security.

Despite the small gains offered the Palestinians by the new agreement, it is still only a piece of paper that Netanyahu can ignore just as he has ignored the Oslo accords. The provision for a third Israeli withdrawal is vague—a joint Israeli-Palestinian committee will discuss it at a later date. Even the 13 percent withdrawal is far from being a certainty. It is scheduled to take place gradually, over 12 weeks, but at any point during that period an act of violence by a single Palestinian could be an excuse for the Israelis to halt the process.

The withdrawal would also be delayed if right-wing Knesset members force an election as they have threatened to do. The Labor Party will back Netanyahu on the Wye agreement, but will not support him on domestic issues, such as the budget. Defeat of the budget is the same as a no-confidence vote and therefore would require a new election.

Finally, at the White House signing ceremony Clinton said that once again the Palestinians and Israelis are “partners for peace.” They are nothing of the sort. The conflict between the two sides is not taking place on a level playing field. Israel will remain in full control of more than 60 percent of the West Bank and in de facto control of another 22 percent, free to seize Palestinian land, expand settlements, and impose curfews and crippling travel restrictions. With the power to seal borders (despite the “free passage” provision), Israel still has effective control over Palestinian employment and trade. By claiming that security is its chief concern, Israel can continue to prevent the free flow of Palestinian goods and thus keep down competition.

Fulfillment of an agreement requires the willingness of the stronger party to abide by it, especially when there is no outide authority to enforce it. Netanyahu has already given ample evidence that he is in no mood for reconciliation. As he and Arafat drew closer to an agreement last September the government cracked down even harder on the Palestinians. Three days after Clinton’s announcement of “significant progress” toward peace, Israel closed down the borders of the West Bank and Gaza, giving as its reason a suspected terrorist attack. A partial closure, with several Palestinian communities under curfew, had been in effect since Sept. 10, when Israeli forces broke into a house near Hebron and shot to death two members of Hamas. The killing took place just as U.S. envoy Dennis Ross arrived in Israel to try to bring the two sides together, which led some to believe it was timed to undercut Ross’s mission. The waves of protests and stone-throwing that followed the assassinations, and the response by Israeli forces, resembled low-level warfare. Israeli forces using rubber-coated steel bullets injured scores of Palestinians and killed a Jordanian man. On Sept. 30, an unidentified Palestinian threw three hand grenades at an army truck, wounding 13 Israeli soldiers. Soldiers who opened fire in response wounded 10 Palestinian passersby but failed to stop the assailant.

Almost simultaneously, the government provoked angry demonstrations by Arabs in Israel. On Sept. 27 Israeli police raided a protest tent in Um al-Fahm that local residents had set up earlier in the month after the army announced plans to confiscate hundreds of acres of Arab-owned farm land near the town for use as a firing range. Since 1948 Umm al-Fahm has lost tens of thousands of acres to the Israelis and faces a severe shortage of land for agriculture and housing. Inhabitants of the area, which is just south of Haifa, were already angered by Israel’s seizure of land from seven nearby Arab villages last July. The protests at Umm al-Fahm were peaceful until Israeli police and soldiers attacked demonstrators with batons. When protestors responded by throwing stones, the Israelis fired live ammunition and rubber-coated bullets, wounding more than a hundred people, including the mayor. On the same day, Israeli police stood by passively as Israelis in northern border towns burned tires and closed roads in protest against the possible cancellation of their special tax privileges.

After Secretary Albright met with Netanyahu and Arafat in early October she declared herself “more than satisfied” with the results. But as she and the two leaders were meeting, the people of Gaza and the West Bank remained locked behind sealed borders for the fourth week, with tens of thousands of Palestinians in Hebron still under curfew. Netanyahu flew directly from the luncheon to Ariel, a West Bank settlement of 17,000 Israelis, where he defied U.S. requests for a freeze on settlement expansion by assuring a cheering crowd, “We are building and we will continue to build.” Another Israeli official announced that 3,000 new housing units would be built at Ariel, doubling the number of residents.

The question still to be answered is whether the Wye agreement will have any effect on the day-to-day lives of the Palestinians. Amnesty International’s report for 1998 described the occupied territories today as “a land of barriers, mostly erected by Israeli security forces, between town and town, village and village. It is at such barriers,” the report says, “that many arrests, beatings, and shootings have taken place.” Amnesty points out that although most Palestinians are under the PA’s administrative jurisdiction, all but a few are subject to Israeli security control. Consequently, throughout most of the West Bank Israeli forces “act freely…to impose curfews, search houses, arrest and detain.”

According to Amnesty, “There continues to be almost total impunity for unlawful killings of Palestinians by the Israeli security forces.” The report also sharply criticizes the Palestinian Authority for conducting mass arrests, detaining prisoners without evidence, and torturing suspects, human rights violations that are bound to continue because of the insistence by Israel and the United States that the PA take more action against militants.

Just before the meetings in Maryland, Secretary Albright referred to security issues as the “sine qua non” of any agreement. She meant Israel’s security, but in fact fewer Israelis have been victims of Palestinian violence during the past two years than in any similar period since 1987.

Figures recently released by the Israeli government and the human rights organization B’Tselem show that it is the Palestinians who are in need of protection. Since 1993, 315 Palestinians and 279 Israelis have been killed.

Since that report was issued Iyad Karabseh, a 17-year-old school boy, was shot to death and two companions were wounded near the village of Beitunia on Sept. 16 when an Israeli settler named Avshalom Lidan opened fire from his parked car. Lidani, who claims the boys threw stones at his car, was briefly placed under house arrest and then released.

During the same week, Israeli police near Jerusalem shot and killed Kamleh Mohammed al-Nazer, a 41-year-old mother of four. The police chief said she had been shot “by mistake.” On Oct. 8, 21-year old Amjad al-Natshe was killed and a news photographer for Agence France Presse suffered a fractured skull when police in Hebron fired rubber-coated bullets at them during a protest demonstration.

Not included in the tabulations of deliberate killings are the deaths that take place among Palestinians as a result of extended curfews. Most recently a 41-year-old mother who was hemorrhaging after giving birth bled to death when her ambulance was stopped at a roadblock and was unable to reach a hospital in Hebron. After two babies died last August when their parents were stopped at a checkpoint, the Israeli magazine Challenge asked editorially, “How would Israelis react if a Jewish settler lost her baby at a Palestinian checkpoint?”

Roadblocks, curfews, and continuous border closings not only deprive Palestinians of their livelihoods and sometimes their lives, but deny them the right to an education. Because Israel has refused until now to allow safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza, as called for in the Oslo accords, the approximately 1,500 Gaza residents enrolled in West Bank universities need three separate permits to get to their schools. Permits are difficult to obtain and are frequently cancelled after being issued. Israel gave out no permits at all between the spring of 1996 and January 1998, and then granted six-month permits to only 80 students. These have now expired and have not been renewed.

Unless safe passage is guaranteed, students who try to cross the border without permits face arrests, beatings, and deportation if they are caught. Even worse, having committed the crime of seeking an education they stand no chance of securing a permit for years to come.

The fact that all Gazans have been barred from West Bank universities for two years, including those who pass all security checks, led B’Tselem to conclude that the restrictions “are not based on security concerns but are intended as a punitive measure.” In fact, Israel uses the denial of education as one of its most potent weapons against the Palestinians. During the intifada the government shut down six West Bank universities for nearly four years, and closed elementary and secondary schools for months at a time. Even arrangements to hold first and second grade classes in private homes were declared illegal.

In 1996 students at Cambridge University responded to the plight of Gaza students by organizing the Gaza Students Campaign (GSC), which collected over 10,000 signatures from students in dozens of countries calling on Israel to guarantee freedom of passage to students and faculty between Gaza and the West Bank.

When the GSC presented the petitions to Israel’s London embassy they were told that Gaza students were “a dangerous group” and the policy would not be changed. The Campaign is renewing its efforts by scheduling a Gaza Students Action Day for Nov. 19, when they hope students all over the world will send messages to their country’s Israeli embassy and organize other events aimed at bringing international pressure to bear on Israel. (See box)

Clinton, Arafat, and Netanyahu had compelling reasons for wanting an agreement at this time. For Clinton and Arafat it is a way of restoring their tarnished images, and Netanyahu hopes to run in the next election as a statesman who negotiated an agreement with the Palestinians while assuring Israel’s security.

But if the document they produced does not enable Gaza students to receive an education, assure Palestinians an end to the seizure of their land and the demolition of their homes, or allow the people of the West Bank and Gaza freedom to get to their jobs and conduct their affairs, the recent negotiations were a fruitless exercise. As Stephen Cohen of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation warned Clinton, “A fairy-tale agreement about too little will not solve the problems.”

For more information about Gaza Students Action Day contact the Gaza Students Campaign, c/o Human Rights Action Project, Birzeit University, P.O. Box 14, Birzeit, West Bank, Palestine, e-mail GSC@Admin.Birseit.Edu. or Gaza-Students@USA.NET.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.