The consensus among thousands of journalists and hundreds of diplomats who attended the Middle East peace conference here is that the Palestinians stole the show.
Although camouflaged within a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, the 14 official Palestinian representatives came off by far the best in terms of public image and international sympathy.
In contrast to the boorish behavior of the Syrians, the Palestinians were paragons of states-manship.
“They’ve established themselves,” said David Kimche, a former director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, now a member of the Israeli delegation in the bilateral talks with Lebanon.
“The Palestinian leadership is on the world map. There can be no going back on that now,” said Kimche, a seasoned diplomat.
He was reflecting the widespread admiration of the representatives from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, led by Dr. Haider Abdel-Shafi, a physician from Gaza.
The delegation was in fact a cross-section of Palestinian professionals and intellectuals from the territories.
For decades, Israelis have coupled their absolute aversion to any contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization with expressions of hope that some day an “authentic, indigenous” Palestinian leadership would evolve from within the West Bank and Gaza Strip population with whom they could talk.
That finally happened in Madrid. Almost overnight, a credible Palestinian leadership appeared. Unless rejectionist assassins cut short the careers of Abdel-Shafi, Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi, that leadership will increasingly over-shadow the PLO as the peace process unfolds.
WILLING TO CONSIDER CONFEDERATION
Husseini and Ashrawi are not part of the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation but of a six- member panel that went to Madrid to advise it.
Their advice apparently was well considered.
The Palestinians in Madrid were praised first for the relative moderation of their speeches at the three-day opening round.
Their statements were moderate compared to the tirade verging on anti-Semitism unleashed by the Syrian foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, and even compared to the unyielding rhetoric of Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir.
Most significant in this respect was Abdel-Shafi’s unequivocal, unambiguous commitment to a Palestinian state confederated with Jordan — very different from Yasir Arafat’s deliberately vague pronouncements on the subject.
That is a position with which a majority of world governments relate sympathetically. It was straightforward enough to be encapsulated in eye catching media headlines, which likely earned the Palestinians the support of large bodies of world opinion during the dramatic days of the conference plenary.
Equally praiseworthy, in the view of the assembled world media, was the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation’s civilized behavior during the two lengthy sessions of bilateral negotiations Sunday with an Israeli team, headed by Cabinet Secretary Elyakim Rubinstein.
Entirely absent was the theatrical posturing, the calculated rudeness and outright hatred that characterized Syria’s appearances at the conference plenary and at the direct talks with Israel.
HANDSHAKES AND BANTER
Instead, Abdel-Shafi and the Jordanian delegation head, Abdel Salam al-Majali, a close aide to King Hussein, willingly shook hands with the senior Israeli official while the cameras clicked and rolled.
Their exchange of banter with the unfailingly humorous Rubinstein was a welcome leitmotif that quickly broke the ice.
Nothing of substance or procedure was agreed upon. But that did not seem to cast a cloud over the huge success of having met and talked as equals in what both sides termed, in their unexpected joint communique, a “business like atmosphere.”
In the view of leading Israeli Arab affairs commentator Danny Rubinstein of Ha’aretz, the encounter, “the first in a hundred years between representatives of the Jews and representatives of the Arabs in Eretz Israel,” was the truly historic event in Madrid — more so, even than the first-ever face-to-face negotations between Israel and its most implacable neighbor, Syria.
The Palestinians’ dignified appearance at the bilateral talks seemed to hold out the prospect of a process of genuine conciliation between them and Israel.
But the really important reason why that prospect has become suddenly realistic, in the wake of Madrid, lies neither in the moderation of the Palestinians’ public statements nor in their mature conduct inside the negotiating chamber.
Rather, the revolutionary development in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is the willingness of the new leadership to proceed with the “two-track, two-phase” pattern of peacemaking.
That scenario underlies the Israeli peace initiative of May 1989, the subsequent American plan and, in fact, every realistic diplomatic initiative in the Middle East since Camp David.
In 1978, the Palestinians contemptuously spurned the Framework for Peace worked out for them by Israel, Egypt and Jimmy Carter at the American presidential retreat.
It provided for a five-year period of autonomy, with negotiations to begin during the third year on the “final status” of the territories.
Those second-stage negotiations were to be conducted in concert with talks between Israel and Jordan on a peace treaty between them.
Almost a decade and a half later, the formula remains basically unchanged: still two stages, still autonomy to be followed three years later by the start of negotiations on “permanent status.”
CHANGED GLOBAL CIRCUMSTANCES
What has changed is that now Egypt’s dramatic quest for peace with the Jewish state is no longer viewed in the Arab world as an act of betrayal, but as a policy of pragmatism and foresight that even intransigent Syria reluctantly has agreed to follow.
Of course, the changed global circumstances, rather than any change of heart toward Israel, is the chief cause of the Arab change of strategy.
But for most of the Arabs, the long wait has cost little. The United States, especially since the Persian Gulf War, is ready to welcome them into its sphere of political and economic influence.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, have suffered hardship in the administered territories and bloodshed in Lebanon.
For the Palestinians too, though, the decline of the Soviet Union as the foremost power supporting radical politics in the world must be seen as the catalyst of their belated acceptance of the peace program, which in 1978 they rejected.
Privately they no longer balk at the long-standing contention, advanced by many of their friends in the United States, that had they accepted what was offered at Camp David, they would today have been far further down the road toward achieving their political aspirations.
The changed Palestinian attitude bodes well for the success of the first-stage negotiations, over the terms and modalities of autonomy in the territories.
The Palestinians may even prove more flexible over autonomy than were the Egyptians when they negotiated on their behalf between 1979 and 1982. Those talks expired, unable to resolve the legalistic differences between the parties.
This time, weakened strategically in global terms, but strong politically as a result of their performance at Madrid, the Palestinians may settle for inferior conditions, in return for their speedy implementation and the start of the three year countdown to “final status” negotiations.
The Palestinians’ goal remains not autonomy but self-determination. They appreciate now, however, that their only realistic way of advancing toward that end, and of hoping to convince Israel and international opinion, is to start out on the two-phase course prescribed at Camp David, and now, at last, embarked upon at Madrid.
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