If and when Israelis and Palestinians sit down in Washington to resume the stalled Middle East peace negotiations, both sides will be confronted with a number of dramatic developments on the ground that have taken place during the four-month hiatus in the talks.
The peace talks appeared poised to resume next week, possibly on April 27, assuming that the Palestinian and Arab parties do not announce another last-minute delay.
On paper, perhaps, the negotiators will take up where they left off in Washington in mid-December. But in the field — on the disputed land that is the substance of the peace process–the past four months have seen radical changes.
The developments, ranging from Israel’s expulsion in December of 415 Moslem extremists to the ongoing closure of the administered territories initiated earlier this month, could provide a new context and impetus for the conflicting sides to make real progress.
Israel’s deportation of the fundamentalists to Lebanon and all the subsequent fallout have affected political thinking in the region in several ways — many of them clearly not anticipated by either Israel or the deportees.
Among other issues, the deportations highlighted the dangers of fundamentalism and the fears generated by this powerful force in the region.
A new strategic axis of disparate and unlikely partners, sharing a common fear of fundamentalism and committed to fighting it, appears to be evolving in the region and even beyond.
The fact, on the other hand, that the deportations failed in their goal to check the wave of terror attacks on Israelis is another development that will be factored into the resumed peace talks in different, and possibly, contradictory ways.
The parties to the peace talks all share an unspoken interest in making progress in the peace talks before the fundamentalist forces, which reject all political solutions to the conflict, become too strong to be overwhelmed just by the successful conclusion of a peace accord.
TERRITORIES NOW SEEN AS BURDEN
Perhaps the most significant of developments is the continuing closure of the territories.
Although imposed by Israel to stem the bloody wave of attacks that terrorized Israel last month, the closure has simultaneously caused serious political and psychological fallout, as well as economic and social consequences, that will affect the peace negotiations as they go forward.
The closure has led many Israelis to think of the territories as a dangerous burden and to envision their country without these lands.
Those voices in Israel urging that the temporary closure be seen as the harbinger of an eventual reshaping of Israel approximately as it was before capturing the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 are not now on the margins of political life.
In fact, some of those voices are in the political mainstream and in the ruling coalition.
Some former military leaders have also lauded Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s decision to seal off the territories and its consequences.
“The state was reborn, and we have returned to the roots of the pre-Six-Day War days,” said reserve Maj. Gen. Avigdor (Yanush) Ben-Gal, former Israel Defense Force commander of the northern front.
“The state looks cleaner and calmer and its residents less neurotic,” Ben-Gal said in an interview with the Ma’ariv newspaper.
On the Palestinian side, leaders who have attacked the closure as a form of collective punishment, heaping hardship on workers left without jobs in Israel, also acknowledge that the closure is molding Israeli public opinion in a direction the Palestinians want.
It is Israel’s political right that has found itself in a bit of a quandary. When the closure was imposed and terror attacks carried out by Palestinians from the territories came to a halt, a collective sigh of relief and approval went up — not only from Meretz and the left, but from across the political spectrum.
But the opposition Likud and its rightist allies, after decades of preaching the doctrine of “Greater Israel,” find themselves in danger of losing their sympathetic audience.
The vast bulk of the people — to the extent that their temper can be measured by polls and press — are showing themselves to be content living in a smaller Israel, without the trauma of daily knifings.
NO QUICK SETTLEMENT WITH SYRIA
As the peace negotiations in Washington are set to resume, policy-makers and pundits from all the parties concerned are straining to interpret these changes, to fathom what impact they will have on the talks.
One effect is fairly certain: The Israeli-Palestinian dimension of the peace process has taken center-stage again. Thoughts of coming to a quick Israeli-Syrian settlement on the Golan Heights have all but evaporated.
The Palestinians have shown during these past hectic days of diplomatic wrangling that they are the key factor. Without their consent to attend, none of the other Arab parties was prepared to resume the talks.
Israeli sources say this lesson has been learned well in top policy-making circles here. Rabin, they say, has come full circle.
When he took office last year, the prime minister said he was seeking a speedy deal with the Palestinians on autonomy and implied that Syria was “on a back burner.”
Later, with the Palestinian talks dragging and President Hafez Assad sending encouraging signals from Damascus, Rabin was felt to have swung around to favoring a separate deal with Syria.
The Labor Party leader seemed ready to implement the “land-for-peace” equation he has endorsed in principle.
Now Rabin is focusing on the Palestinians once again — and is understood to have resigned himself to the notion that there is no separate deal to be cut with any single Arab protagonist.
In the first year since the peace process began in Madrid, the parties failed to make any substantive breakthroughs toward peace.
The question that will need to be answered fairly quickly, once the talks get under way again, is whether Israelis and Palestinians will have the political sagacity to “cash in” on the dramatic, and in many respects propitious, developments on the ground.
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