Rabin’s Concessions to Palestinians Are Assailed by Likud in the Knesset

With the peace talks under way again in Washington, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is coming under sharp attack from the opposition Likud party for making too many concessions to the Palestinians in return for nothing.

Rabin is defending his policies but vowing at the same time that the government will not compromise on issues of security.

The clash between the two views came to a head during a special session of the Knesset on Wednesday, when Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu led an assault against the government.

“We’re calling for a change of policy,” Netanyahu said. “We think the government’s concept of negotiation is like the joke about collective bargaining: We bargain and the Arabs collect.”

Members of the hawkish opposition are against the government’s plan to let some 30 Palestinians deported between 1967 and 1987 return to the territories.

The opposition also objects to the idea of granting broad powers to the Palestinian administrative council proposed for the territories during the envisioned interim phase of Palestinian autonomy.

“If they begin the negotiations this way, offering just about everything, we know that very rapidly we’ll reach a point where Israel will return to the 67 boundaries” that existed before Israel captured the territories in the Six-Day War, Netanyahu said.

“We’ll have a Palestinian-Hamas-Arafat state at the outskirts of Tel Aviv, and we’ll have the Syrian army peering down at us from the Golan. This is not a prescription for peace,” he said, referring to the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat.

It is time, the opposition leader said, to “either change the policy” or “change the government.”

FOCUS ON CURE, NOT SYMPTOMS

But Rabin argued this week that too much focus is being placed on confidence-building concessions to the Palestinians, such as allowing some of those deported prior to the start of the intifada to return to the territories.

“This is not the issue,” the prime minister told reporters covering a United Jewish Appeal function Tuesday. The issue, he said, is how to “move by two phases to a permanent solution” with the Palestinians.

But Rabin made clear that while Israel is “ready to make compromises on a mutual basis,” it will not compromise on the issue of security. “We want peace in its real meaning and security in its real meaning,” he said.

Rabin said the coming year is a “crossroads” that will “decide in what direction the Middle East turns, toward peace or toward stalemate.”

At the core of the autonomy plan Israel is offering to the Palestinians, he said, is the willingness to “transfer almost all the duties of the civil administration which are related to the life of the Palestinians.”

Rabin said the autonomy plan would aim to abolish the so-called civil administration, which is the military-run system of government in the territories.

The prime minister emphasized that Israel will remain responsible for overall security in the territories during the interim autonomy period and will continue to be responsible for the lives of the Israeli settlers in the settlements there.

Rabin urged the Palestinians to shift their focus from the “symptoms of the disease,” such as the deportation of extremists, to curing the “disease” and working toward a political settlement.

But in the Knesset on Wednesday, Netanyahu argued that the Palestinians have not demonstrated their sincerity about reaching a peace settlement with Israel.

The Likud leader said he is not opposed in principle to Israeli confidence-building measures, but he said they should not be one-sided.

“How about confidence-building measures on the part of the Palestinians toward Israel, for example, stopping the terror?” he said. “How about confidence-building measures on the part of the Syrians toward Israel, such as stopping the tremendous wave of killing from Hezbollah, which is Syrian-controlled?”

Netanyahu said Israel should begin to demand and not only to offer. And it should “make it clear that a return to the 67 boundaries or anything like it is out of the question.”