This week’s Washington summit meeting of Middle East leaders, following on the heels of other high-level meetings, seemed to restore a modicum of hope for the flagging Mideast peace process.
The summit, which brought the foreign ministers from Israel, Jordan and Egypt together with a top Palestinian official, was significant not for any specific decision made, but because of the high profile taken by the U.S. administration.
Despite the current difficulties in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, both President Clinton and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher stressed in their official remarks Sunday that the United States is determined to work with redoubled vigor to move the peace process forward.
Yet for all the determination being displayed by both U.S. officials and the parties themselves, nagging question remain: What if the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority grind to a complete halt?
What if ongoing terrorism or other developments make it politically impossible for the Israeli government, or indeed the Palestinians, to make any further advances in these talks?
Sunday’s summit concluded on a hopeful note with the issuing of a joint communique that pledged a “strong commitment to honoring those agreements already concluded” and “to accelerate negotiations on all tracks.”
Another optimistic note emerged the following day, when Israeli and Palestinian negotiators meeting in the West Bank Jericho enclave reached an agreement to hold two separate Palestinian elections — one for the president of the autonomy council and one for the council itself.
Although negotiations of Palestinian elections have been stalled for months over a number of issues — including how large the council will be and whether supporters of rejectionist groups will be allowed to vote — Monday’s agreement boded well for future progress.
Another hopeful note was reportedly sounded Tuesday, when Palestinian officials suggested they might accept a staged redeployment of Israeli troops from West Bank towns.
Despite the reported progress in negotiations, however, another Israeli was murdered on Monday in a stabbing attack that took place on a highway north of Jerusalem.
Police officials suspect the murder of the taxi driver, Rafi Cohen, was the work of terrorists, giving further weight to those who believe that achieving any peace with the Palestinians may be impossible.
On Sunday, reflecting their determination to do all they can to prevent future terror attacks, the Israeli Cabinet decided to continue the closure of the territories that had been imposed in the aftermath of the Jan. 22 double suicide bombings near Netanya that claimed the lives of 21 Israelis.
While Israeli officials are aware of the devastating economic impact the closures have on Palestinian economy, they nonetheless see it as one of the few weapons available to them to counter terrorism.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Knesset’s key Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the Palestinian Authority has taken a number of first steps to curb terrorism, but still has not done enough.
Rabin said Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat understands that he must crack down on terror in order for the peace process to move ahead. This was the same message Rabin delivered to Arafat at a meeting last week in Gaza. Another meeting Rabin-Arafat was scheduled for Thursday.
Similarly, in Washington on Sunday, Israeli officials attempted to make it clear that continued terror attacks against Israelis could bring the peace process to the breaking point.
Israelis continue to worry whether Arafat will confront supporters of militant fundamentalist groups in a way that will have significant bearing on the group’s ability to launch terrorist attacks. Will he go beyond the routine detentions of suspected militants, who are freed within days of their arrest? Will he attempt to disarm Palestinian civilians, a move he has to date resisted?
Against this backdrop of a few steps forward, several back, Sunday’s summit was significant in that it reflected a deliberately public reinvestment of commitment and prestige by Clinton and his top aides in the peace process.
Given the current perilous state of the process — with terrorism paralyzing the Israeli-Palestinian track, and the Israeli-Syrian track long deadlocked – – the Clinton administration is reportedly under advice from some of its professional experts to deftly disengage from the peace process.
After all, these experts reason, continued commitment to a process that is gaining steadily in unpopularity among the protagonists themselves can easily be depicted by experts as poor politics.
Yet Clinton and Christopher’s decision to stay on course means, in the view of well-placed Israeli observers, that Washington is not prepared to join the chorus of media commentators in the Middle East and across the Atlantic who are already eulogizing the peace process.
But what if Washington’s efforts cannot bring about a resuscitation?
informed observers in Israel say a complete breakdown of the present talks could lead to one of two contradictory scenarios.
According to one scenario, the peace process will crumble under the weight of terrorism and the Rabin government will be replaced by the hard-liners of the Likud bloc.
Under the second scenario, Israel and the Palestinians, rather than see the gains made so far dissolve in the face of terrorism, will accelerate the pace of negotiations to tackle a number of so-called “final status” issues that were originally intended to be postponed until May 1996.
The first scenario assumes an integral, causal link between a breakdown of the talks and the fall of the Rabin government — whether before its term officially ends or in the elections that must be held by November 1996.
This scenario also envisages a rightist-religious coalition coming to power in Israel in place of the present Labor-led regime.
One diplomatic assessment reaching Jerusalem recently had Syrian President Hafez Assad actually awaiting a Likud takeover in the belief that the Rabin government has exhausted its potential and that Likud, still wedded to possessing the West Bank, would be more likely to make a deal on the Golan Heights.
Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, in a peace plan published last week, seems to envisage pockets of Palestinian autonomy on the West Bank that will be crisscrossed by Jewish settlements deliberately situated to break up the Palestinians’ territorial continuity and thereby prevent the evolution of a sovereign state.
Significantly, despite Rabin’s poor showing in current polls and the growing doubts over his peace policy, fully 80 percent of those asked in a weekend poll regarded Netanyahu’s plan as a non-starter — presumably on the grounds that no Palestinian leader would ever accept it.
The Israeli media and public have, moreover, reacted with skepticism, even derision, to Netanyahu’s claim that he has serious, though still secret contact among West Bank Palestinians.
Would a Likud government abrogate the Declaration of Principles and all subsequent agreements between Israel and the Palestinians?
Netanyahu and other Likud figures say a formal abrogation would be unnecessary since the Palestinians have already failed to live up to their part of the bargain and have therefore rendered all the peace accords inoperative.
International opinion, and especially international legal opinion, is unlikely to endorse that stance, which would likely continue to be a matter of deep controversy inside Israel.
At the same time, only the ultra-right still seriously contemplates Israel’s return to the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu and Likud advocate that Israel should have a free hand in policing terror three, but not a full reoccupation.
The second scenario involves an intensive acceleration of the peace process that would bypass the interim phases of the negotiations and attempt to reach a permanent-status agreement on Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin he been advocating this approach for months. As the interim agreement proves ever more elusive, more and more coalition party politicians are joining him.
But Beilin’s radicalism may itself be overtaken by a seemingly more pragmatic line now being adopted by the Rabin Cabinet in the wake of seemingly unceasing waves of terror attacks.
The prime minister himself terms this approach “separation,” denoting a physical partition between the West Bank and Israel proper.
Since he first suggested the idea, immediately following the Jan. 22 suicide bombings, two high-level committees have been working at translating the idea into detailed proposals.
The polls, again, tell a politically significant story: Separation is enthusiastically endorsed by a solid majority of the Israeli population.
There is little appetite among Israelis for holding onto the West Bank out of historic, religious or nationalist motives.
Personal security is most Israelis’ main criterion by which they judge present events and plans for the future, and the separation concept seems to hold out the best promise of greater security.
The slow pace of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy is producing fresh thinking and possibly new alignments within Israeli politics. The constant changing makes it difficult to predict which course Israel is likely to pursue.
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