When Yasser Arafat greeted Israeli television viewers Saturday night with the Hebrew words “Shanah Tovah,” it was clear that the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, interminably drawn out and studded with crises, were finally drawing to their successful conclusions.
And sure enough, the next day – after just one more minicrisis for good measure and as the last hours of the Jewish year 5755 ebbed away – Israeli and Palestinian officials affixed their initials to the 400-page Interim Agreement.
Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres looked on, beaming.
The two had worked, fought, screamed, and wheeled and dealed at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Taba for some 80 hours during eight straight days and nights of negotiations, putting what were euphemistically called “the finishing touches” to the mammoth document that has been evolving in quiet backroom negotiations for the best part of a year.
Once implemented, the Interim Agreement will extend Palestinian self-rule to most of the people and much of the territory of the West Bank.
The agreement will indeed “constitute,” in the words of the Israeli government, “a new and important stage in the transition from conflict to reconciliation.”
For Israelis – and not only those opposed to the peace process on political or religious grounds – Arafat’s “Shanah Tovah” elicited distinctly mixed feelings.
After all, this is the man who not that long ago was personally issuing orders that spelled death and maiming for innocent men, women and children, in Israel and abroad.
Arafat has been under attack in Israeli opinion, and especially in the halls of the U.S. Congress, for his warlike pronouncements to Palestinian audiences in recent speeches.
But the PLO chairman was plainly at pains during the talks to project a newly conciliatory image to Israelis and Diaspora Jews, while at the same time fighting hard right up to the bell to secure the best deal he could for his people.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, aware of the heart-searching hesitations that assail even the most ardent enthusiasts of the peace process among his electorate, says a “key test” for the long-term future will be the Palestinians’ compliance with a provision in the accord that requires them to revoke those articles in the Palestinian Covenant that call for the destruction of Israel.
The subject of similar Palestinian promises in the past, the revocation of the offending clauses is to take place within two months of the election of a new 82-member Palestinian Council, expected to take place in April, another key feature of the accord.
Reading between the lines, the new agreement advances the prospect of an eventful Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Formally, the Israeli government still opposes that scenario.
But Rabin, in an important statement timed to coincide with the new agreement this week, said he opposes Palestinian statehood “now – and I stress the word `now.'”
“In the future,” he added pointedly, “many options can be examined.”
As the two sides move toward that vague future, more crises and moments of anguish and recrimination doubtless lie ahead.
The Interim Agreement – arrived at more than a year behind the original schedule set out in the 1993 Declaration of Principles – induces yet more delays in the peace process.
The initial Israel Defense Force redeployments, to be completed within six months, cover only about a quarter of the area of the West Bank.
But the agreement prescribes “further redeployments” that will take place in a protracted schedule during the following eighteen months.
Before the “finishing touches” marathon at Taba, it had been hoped that the initial IDF redeployment from major Palestinian towns could be completed by year’s end – a move that would allow Palestinian elections to be held by January at the latest.
But that scenario was built upon the premise that Hebron would be the sole West Bank population center where the IDF would not redeploy, because of the Jewish settlement presence in the town’s center.
But as one result of the Taba negotiations, security for Hebron will be handed over to the Palestinian Authority, with the IDF retaining direct control only of that area that connects Kiryat Arba, the large Jewish settlement just outside Hebron, to the enclaves of Jewish settlement inside the town.
Rabin and Peres, in an effort to provide security for the area’s settlers, decided to construct a major bypass road to enable the Jewish population in Hebron and Kiryat Arba to drive to Jerusalem without passing through built-up Palestinian areas.
Construction of the road is expected to take six months – and that six-month period is now the new, delayed time frame during which the Interim Agreement will be implemented.
As a result, Israel’s redeployment from the major Palestinian population centers in the West Bank will not be completed until March.
The Palestinian elections, therefore, will not take place until late April – or, as the agreement stipulates, 22 days after the redeployment is completed.
And before those elections are held, the winter months loom ahead, gray and threatening, fraught with the menace of violence.
Hebron is home to some of the most fanatical Palestinian rejectionists.
Islamic Jihad activists labeled the agreement an act of shame. And they branded the city’s mayor, Mustafa Natshe, a traitor for going along with it.
Hebron and Kiryat Arba also contain some of the most hardline Jewish opponents to the accord.
Some of their spokesmen talk of opening fire, even if unprovoked, when Palestinian police enter the city under the terms of the agreement to take over security in those areas assigned to the Palestinian Authority.
Settler violence, along with acts of terrorism inside Israel by Palestinian extremists, could destroy the agreement at any stage of its extended period of implementation.
The series of suicide bombings that shock Israel during the past year all but toppled the Rabin government, and they severely eroded Israeli support for the peace process.
The threat of violence, moreover, will not recede even after the initial Israeli redeployment and the holding of Palestinian elections.
The process of further redeployments in other, less-populated sections of the West Bank will take place at six-month intervals after the election of the Palestinian Council.
And then there are the permanent-status negotiations, slated to start in May 1996, when Palestinian and Israeli officials will square off on the most contentious issues of all – Jerusalem, the final borders, the settlements, the return of Palestinian refugees from the 1967 Six-Day War.
Those negotiations, along with the protracted schedule of IDF redeployments, could well be punctuated by further violence.
The precariousness of Rabin’s position was graphically illustrated this week by his evident reluctance to submit the agreement to the Knesset for approval before he departed for the signing ceremony Thursday in Washington.
Granted, there was no strict legal requirement that he do so – as the Likud-led opposition had demanded.
Granted, too, the start of Rosh Hashanah and the timing of the signing ceremony made a Knesset debate prior to the signing difficult to organize.
But along with these considerations, there was, no doubt, the very real specter of the Rabin government failing to come up with the required votes to support the agreement.
With two renegade members of the Labor Party already pledging to vote against the agreement and some other potential sources of support uncertain, one senior minister said privately that the fate of the agreement lies, in effect, in the hands of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual mentor of the fervently religious – and highly pivotal – Shas Party.
Rabin apparently calculated, probably with good reason, that Yosef would not deal him the massive indignity of rejecting the agreement after it had been signed at the White House.
Although this may be a solid tactical gambit that is likely to succeed in the context of Israel’s fragile parliamentary situation, it can hardly offer Rabin and Peres encouragement regarding the future.
“There will be serious implementation problems,” Palestinian negotiators Nabil Sha’ath said this week. “But we shall have to over come them.”
It was a succinct and precise prognosis, one that well depicts the complex period that lies ahead for both sides.
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