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“In the Mideast Peace
Process, Another Deadline Is About to Be Missed,”
Summary: 11 February 2000—When Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—along with their main peace mentor, the United States—fail to reach a 13 February 2000 framework for “permanent status,” they will have missed yet another deadline in the so-called Oslo peace process, a process that began in September 1993. In the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum, signed on 4 September 1999, the two parties agreed to “make a determined effort to conclude a Framework Agreement on all Permanent Status issues” by February 13. Disappointment about the missed deadline cuts deep for the Palestinians. It has reduced even further the already slender chances of reaching, on time, the ultimate goal articulated in the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum: signature of a final, detailed, binding, and comprehensive peace agreement by 13 September 2000, a deadline already pushed back by earlier failures to conclude a final agreement. Indeed, the Interim (Oslo II) Agreement of September 1995 specified that the final status negotiations were to have concluded by October 1999. Both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s government see as bleak the prospects of achieving an accord before mid-September 2000 on such basic issues as the status of Jerusalem, borders, water, Israeli settlements, and Palestinian refugees. The Palestinians, as a result, may soon act on PA president Yasser Arafat’s oft-repeated, equally oft-postponed, pledge to proclaim an independent Palestinian state, whether there is a peace agreement or not. Peace prospects have been affected by political turbulence in Israel and in the Palestinian community in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as by pressures and counter-pressures abroad. Some of these pressures include the negative impact of the stalled, nearly frozen, Israeli-Syrian peace talks, and the still non-existent Lebanese-Israeli ones. Other factors include the approaching U.S. presidential and congressional elections of November 2000, with their corresponding rise in political lobbying in the U.S.; “rejectionist” activities ranging from rhetoric and diplomacy to violence and terrorism practiced by such states as Iran; and dissent by extremist Palestinian and Israeli groups with special axes to grind.
Jerusalem as a Sticking Point: Saeb Erekat, the PA minister of local government and a senior Palestinian negotiator, sketched dimensions of the Jerusalem problem in a speech on 19 January 2000 at the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine. Comprehensive peace, he said, must include “Israeli withdrawal from [Arab] East Jerusalem.” This would include acknowledging joint Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem, which, said Erekat, would prove that Israel seeks “historical reconciliation,” not just a compromise “political settlement.” According to many on the Arab side, only such an approach would allow Arafat and his mainstream Palestinian constituency to justly claim that their intended Palestinian state has East Jerusalem as its capital. The opposing Israeli view is that the whole city of Jerusalem is, and must remain, Israel’s “eternal undivided capital,” even though the 1967 conquest of the eastern sector from Jordan and its subsequent annexation have never been recognized by the international community. In the immediate run-up to the missed February 13 deadline for the framework accord, Barak discussed with his military commanders the possibility of pulling Israeli troops out of Abu Dis, an Arab area just outside East Jerusalem. Such a pullback-regarded by senior Israeli military officers as a threat to Jewish control of the whole city-was originally conceived as part of the third and final redeployment (FRD) of troops required, in the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum, by 20 January 2000. To date, Israel has implemented only two FRDs under that agreement. The PA has considered proclaiming Abu Dis as both part of Jerusalem and as the Palestinian capital. The issue of Jerusalem’s status meshes with the problem of determining the territories to be controlled by the PA and final borders. The failure to meet the February 13 deadline is directly connected to Israel’s failure to redeploy its troops from a further 6.1 percent of the West Bank, as required by the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum. Palestinian officials have charged that Israel unilaterally drew up the draft FRD maps without consulting the PA, and omitted populated Arab areas outside Jerusalem. A February 3 summit between Arafat and Barak broke up in disagreement over this and other issues. The next day, a meeting of PA cabinet members, the Palestinian Legislative Council, and the executive committee of the PLO concluded that international intervention, especially that of the U.S. as co-sponsor of the entire Middle East peace process, was needed to “act immediately” to prevent “imminent collapse.” The same Palestinian statement strongly condemned continuation of settlement building, charging that “the Barak government has built more settlements and confiscated much more land, in particular in East Jerusalem and around the autonomous West Bank town of Bethlehem” than the previous Netanyahu government. The Barak government, “despite all our meetings, has not given up one iota of its policy of building settlements.”
Last-Minute Efforts: Israel reacted nervously to President Bill Clinton’s decision to dispatch Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis Ross over the February 4 weekend. Ross, a veteran of such mediation efforts, met with Palestinian chief negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo and his Israeli counterpart, Oded Eran. Their meeting was an evidently vain attempt to draft, by February 13, a document that could be called a “framework agreement.” Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy, upon hearing of the new Ross mission, accused the Palestinians of doing what they were indeed anxious to do: spark greater Clinton administration intervention in the talks; something Israel opposes. In any case, with less than a year remaining in office, Clinton suffers from weakened political muscle in the Middle East, as do other “lame-duck” U.S. politicians dependent on election campaign funds and subject to Israeli lobbying pressures.
Psychological Factors: There are many causes and possible effects of the failure to meet the February 13 deadline. One example among many illustrates the apprehension generated when a once seemingly healthy peace process falters. On 12 March 2000, the Arab League Council in Cairo is scheduled to consider a Palestinian and Saudi request to address reported Israeli plans to rebuild Solomon’s Temple and a new settlement beside the Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem. The Arab League has contacted UNESCO and the Organization of the Islamic Conference about the reports, which neither Israel nor the Palestinians have commented on officially or publicly. Whatever their truth, such reports—fed by the chiliastic language of Jewish militants who repeatedly demand the construction of the “third temple” on the Al-Aqsa site—are among the many propaganda factors working to retard peace negotiations. Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem and once the planner of an idealized, “united” Jerusalem, commented in Ha’aretz (27 January 2000) on the psychological aspects of what he sees as Barak’s “peace offensive.” Although this is supported by “a broad coalition of army officers, academics, ethicists, and economic entrepreneurs,” Benvenisti sees it as “being contained effectively by a counter-coalition of settlers, security experts and commentators on Arab mentality.” Pessimistically, Benvenisti concludes that neither Israeli nor Arab societies are mentally or morally ready for true peace and reconciliation. Formal written agreements, even when successfully arrived at, will not remedy this. “[P]eace agreements,” he writes, “can lead to peace only if Israeli society undergoes a substantive change, which will be no less intense than the change the Arabs have to undergo … [in both cases] a readiness to withdraw from anachronistic attitudes … sanctified by the passions of the century-old conflict.”
John K. Cooley is a correspondent for ABC based in Greece. The above text may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the author and to the Palestine Center. This Information Brief does not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine or The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development. This information first appeared in Information Brief No. 23, 11 February 2000. |
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