JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995, Pages 9, 10, 70

The Declaration of Principles of Peace

With U.S. Consent, Rabin Is Reneging On Oslo Agreement With Arafat

by Richard H. Curtiss

"There's no going back. To accept the status quo would only allow those extremists to prevail and would miss an historic opportunity to achieve peace and security—an opportunity not likely to come again. Indeed, the status quo...will only invite more terror." —Warren Christopher, Jerusalem, Dec. 6, 1994.

When U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher voiced the warning quoted above, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin already had imposed impossible conditions on the Palestinian elections promised in the Declaration of Principles of Peace he had signed with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat on Sept. 13, 1993. Further, Rabin's cabinet was considering three options: continuing to implement the Oslo agreement, delaying its implemention by two years, or reneging on it entirely.

Christopher's timely words, however, were not directed at Israel but at Syria, and they were irrelevant to what ails the peace process. The Syrians have offered Israel "total peace for total withdrawal" from the Golan Heights. The Israelis have spurned the offer. Therefore there is no Syrian-Israeli agreement to "go back" from.

There are, however, the Oslo agreement and the Cairo agreement for its implementation between Israel and Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. But the Israelis now are "going back" from both. One reason is what Christopher said to the Israelis on the same visit to Jerusalem: "The fundamental bedrock of these agreements... is security for the parties, and without that security, it's clear to me that the agreements cannot properly go forward."

As Los Angeles Times staff writer Norman Kempster put it, "Christopher's comments seemed to be intended as an endorsement of whatever course the Israelis might choose. Washington has exhorted Israel and the PLO to adhere to the agreement signed on the White House lawn. But Christopher made it clear the United States will not attempt to pressure Israel to withdraw its troops until it is ready to do so."

That could be never. Which means that if Israel is allowed to follow its present course, all the pomp and ceremony on the White House South Lawn, all the subsequent handshakes between Israelis and Arab leaders from Morocco to the Arabian Gulf, and all the embraces between Arab and Jewish Americans will be consigned to the ash heaps of history with the "endorsement" of the administration of President Bill Clinton.

You don't have to go back very far to see why the "process" has not produced "peace." President George Bush made it clear when he was elected in 1988 that he planned to bring an Israeli-Palestinian settlement to a head well before the lead-up to U.S. national elections in 1992.

Saddam Hussain's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait delayed things for eight months, but created remarkably promising conditions for serious negotiations on both sides. It refuted Israel's claim to be a "strategic asset" to the United States. It also fractured the Arab and Muslim worlds, ending 45 years of empty oratorical competition as to who could be the most "steadfast." More important, Yasser Arafat lost all of his financial backing from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, which was virtually all the financial backing he had. He was not just ripe, but desperate, to make a deal.

Linking Aid to Peace

Then, for the first time in history, Bush linked U.S. aid to Israel to the peace process by vowing to withhold his signature from loan guarantees for Israel until Israel halted Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. When challenged by Israel's powerful U.S. lobby, Bush "went public" with a direct televised appeal that, according to the only poll taken at the time, won him the support of 86 percent of the American public. The action went virtually unnoticed by the Arabs, still in shock after the Gulf war, but rocked Israel to the core of its fractured society.

In June 1992, Israeli voters turned out intransigent Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and brought back Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with a mandate to restore the fraying financial lifeline from the United States. Within days of his election, Rabin was in Washington, mending fences. Facing elections himself by then, Bush was only too happy to promise Rabin a first $2 billion installment of loan guarantees in exchange for Rabin's vow to freeze Israeli government support to Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

Nevertheless, the leaders of America's five-million-strong Jewish community mobilized to defeat Bush. They directed large campaign donations to candidate Bill Clinton's election campaign and inspired unprecedented media partisanship against Bush. Exit polls showed 85 percent of American Jews voted for Clinton in the 1992 general election.

Some three million Arab Americans, perhaps two-thirds Christian and one-third Muslim, who as a community are believed to split their votes 60 percent for Republicans and 40 percent for Democrats, remained traumatized by the Gulf war. Many supported Ross Perot. Few supported Bush.

Some five million non-Arab American Muslims, who are extremely supportive of the Palestinians and generous in sending financial donations to Palestinian causes seemed, as a group, to make no connection between those strong sentiments and their growing potential to support them at the polls. In fact, some Muslim leaders advised their followers to stay home rather than participate at all in a "corrupt" electoral system. Bush lost, and not just because he underestimated the power of the media forces mobilized against him and the "spoiler" role of Ross Perot.

After his victory, Clinton knew to whom he was indebted. He resisted strong pressure to make his abrasive campaign director, long-term pro-Israel activist Mickey Kantor, his secretary of state. But he made it clear to his choice for the job, Warren Christopher, the head of his transition team, that America's Jewish community was to be consulted at every step of Middle East policy-making.

Predictably, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was one of President-elect Clinton's early visitors. But this time his mission was not further to increase aid to Israel, which with the $2 billion in annual U.S. loan guarantees now surpasses $6 billion annually. Remembering his competition with American Jewish leaders for the president's ear when he was Israeli ambassador to the U.S. after the 1967 war, Rabin asked that he, not Israel's self-appointed American representatives, be Clinton's channel to the Middle East.

Clinton promised to maintain aid to Israel at the current level, come what may, and instructed Christopher to keep both Israel and American Jewish leaders happy. Those are the only two "givens" in U.S. Middle East policy, but they have saddled the secretary of state of the world's only remaining superpower with a heavy burden. The trip in which he made the remarks quoted above was Christopher's ninth to Israel and the Middle East in 1994 alone. His appearances before American Jewish groups are beyond counting.

Meanwhile, what had begun in 1992 with meetings between Israeli and Palestinian academics totally outside the Bush-initiated Middle East peace talks revealed an astonishing flexibility emanating from an increasingly desperate Yasser Arafat. Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin was dispatched to Oslo to participate. He returned convinced that a major breakthrough could be had. After meeting briefly with some of the Palestinian participants to ascertain whether they really spoke for Yasser Arafat, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres took the subject to his life-long political rival within the Labor party, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The notoriously flexible Peres knew he could not sell the Israeli public on any agreement with Arafat. The cautious Rabin knew he could, but was not sure whether he wanted to. Israel was well on the way to de facto annexation of Jerusalem, and to turning West Bank Palestinian towns into separate Bantustans via a network of settlements and highways separating them. The program had been initiated by Labor's Likud rivals to clear the West Bank of its 1.2 million Palestinians by making life so unattractive that most would leave voluntarily and the rest eventually could be "expelled."

Both parties, however, had written off the Gaza Strip as hopeless, with 800,000 Palestinians crammed into one of the most densely populated places on earth. Therefore Rabin saw the Oslo agreement as worth trying.

Without endangering its U.S. aid, Israel could postpone discussion of Jerusalem for at least another three years while continuing the settlement activity that would make Jews a solid majority there. He would be rid of ungovernable Gaza, where too many Israeli soldiers were dying or becoming disillusioned about Israel's permanent subjugation of its Palestinian "underclass." And, if he negotiated shrewdly enough, eventually, the West Bank population centers would be turned over to an unviable "autonomous" Palestinian authority that would have to merge with Jordan, which had occupied the West Bank for 19 years between 1948 and 1967 without creating serious problems for Israel.

Meanwhile, by entering into this kind of peace, Rabin might be able to establish economic and even diplomatic relations with some Arab countries and reap the reward in Israel's 1996 elections. Later, if things didn't work out, he could blame Arafat.

Rabin's Remaining Problem

Arafat, in fact, is Rabin's only remaining problem. He insists on free elections that either will give him legitimacy, or will anoint someone else to finish the negotiations. This is the only way for any Palestinian leader or party to win the full support of the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank.

Arafat also will insist on negotiating for an eventual sovereign Palestinian state, able to confederate on an equal basis with Jordan, rather than the present vaguely constituted "Palestinian Authority." And he or any other elected Palestinian leader will be adamant about sharing Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and of Palestine.

Arafat might have a chance of getting all of those things, and the world might have a chance for a stable Middle East, if it were not for Rabin's gradual realization that he now can abandon all of his own concessions in the Oslo agreement without severing Israel's lifeline to the United States.

From all the signs, he is succumbing to that temptation. Israel's powerful clout with the media is paying off in a campaign to discredit the vulnerable Arafat every bit as intense as was the campaign to discredit Bush. Palestinian "intellectuals," long denied access to the mainstream U.S. media, suddenly can have their "op-ed" articles or letters to the editor published, so long as they confine the blame for problems in the peace process to Arafat.

The result is a flood of articles depicting him as an incompetent administrator and an egomaniacal autocrat. In fact, he had virtually nothing to administer until December, when the Israelis reluctantly turned over to the Palestinian Authority the Palestinian tax rolls and the authority to collect taxes in Gaza and Jericho. Nor could Arafat exercise any autocratic tendencies except in his dual role as mayor of impoverished Gaza and minuscule Jericho.

Meanwhile, Israel's clout with the U.S. government has been exercised through Dennis Ross, the State Department's politically appointed "czar" of Middle East policy and a former volunteer in AIPAC-backed political campaigns. Ross has the power to pour financial assistance into providing jobs and an infrastructure in Gaza, which had been totally neglected first by Egyptians and then by Israelis for 46 years of military occupation.

Instead Ross has allowed bureaucrats to impose "bookkeeping" requirements on Arafat's Palestinian Authority before fulfilling major pledges of aid by the U.S. government, the international monetary institutions in which the U.S. has significant influence, and even by most of America's European allies. However, the U.S. levies no such "bookkeeping" requirements on annual U.S. aid to Israel, which is more than double all of the $2.4 billion pledged by the entire world to the Palestinian Authority for the next five years.

As the catastrophic effects of this invisible embargo on aid to Gaza became evident, the World Bank and the "donor nations" which haven't yet donated produced another flurry of promises to provide $100 million by March 31, 1995 to balance the Palestinian budget. First, however, Arafat again will be asked to agree to "accounting reforms."

As for the free elections Arafat so desperately needs to gain the credibility to rein in his Islamist rivals and impose order in turbulent Gaza, they'll have to be run by Rabin's rules. Rabin will bar any party that does not accept the existence of Israel and the Declaration of Principles. That would bar Hamas and leave Yasser Arafat to enter the only slate of candidates—and be called an egomaniacal autocrat.

The absurdity of the Rabin edict is illustrated by the totally different standard for Israeli elections. Benyamin Netanyahu, leader of the principal opposition party, Likud, does not accept the existence of any kind of Palestinian entity and has vowed, if elected in 1996, to abrogate the DOP, despite the fact that it has been signed by Israel and witnessed by the United States.

Perhaps most unfair of all is Rabin's ostensible reason for delaying the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank which, under the agreements, must precede the Palestinian election. Rabin charges that the Oct. 19 suicide bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv, which left 22 Israelis dead, and the kidnapping and killing of Israeli Corporal Nahshon Wachsman, demonstrate that Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority cannot protect the Israeli settlers who would be left behind after an Israeli withdrawal.

Yet the perpetrators of both tragedies came neither from Gaza nor Jericho, but from the West Bank. In fact, the homes of the families of all of the participants, dead or alive, have been destroyed or sealed by the Israel Defense Forces. However, the IDF has left intact the home in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, whose Feb. 25 machine gun attack on Palestinian worshippers in Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque left at least 29 Palestinians dead.

Palestinians who dared to trust the Israelis are aghast. "We have been told it takes the Israelis a long time to come to an agreement; but once they come to an agreement they stick to it," lamented Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath as he resumed negotiations with an Israeli delegation in Cairo on Dec. 6. "Everything that stops the peace process worries me very much and this peace process is very clear. It has a time schedule and anybody who wants to change that will be violating the agreement."

With the help of a sympathetic U.S. government and American media establishment, however, Rabin can obscure from Americans that it was he, not Arafat, who welshed on the solemn pledges which President Clinton signed as a witness. But the facts aren't so easily hidden in the Middle East. Hamas hard-liners and their sympathizers will say, "We told you so." So will the Arab countries that have opposed or been skeptical about the "peace process."

Angriest, and most jeopardized of all, will be the Palestinian moderates—and the Arab regimes that opened diplomatic or economic relations with Israel, welcomed Israeli diplomats and journalists to international meetings, and expressed willingness to participate in an overall Arab-Israeli settlement. They never will be allowed to forget an Israeli betrayal "endorsed" by a U.S. secretary of state.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.