TITLE: Withdrawal is the Precondition for Peace

AUTHOR: Henry Siegman

PUB: Le Monde diplomatique

DATE: February 16, 2001

On 7 January, before the inauguration of the new Republican administration, President Bill Clinton made a speech before a pro-peace Jewish audience in New York. Safe from electoral retribution, he stated a number of simple but painful truths that went considerably further than United States Middle East policy until now. These simple truths go to the heart of the conflict as nothing that any American president, including Clinton, had said in the past. Clinton asserted that the Palestinians were entitled to "a sovereign and viable" state, not only because it is in Israel's own long-term interest that such a state exist, but also as a matter of right - because, as he put it, Israel's "land is also their [the Palestinians'] land". It is a formulation that breaks new ground for US policy. Israel's willingness to accept a Palestinian state was implicit in the Oslo agreement of 1993, and was made explicit in the proposals that then prime minister Ehud Barak put forward at Camp David last July. However, Israel has never recognised a Palestinian right to sovereignty. This is for fear of what the recognition of such a right might imply for the limitations Israel seeks to impose, for reasons of security, on any such sovereignty President Clinton stressed the validity of Israel's security concerns, and reconfirmed the US commitment to assure Israel's military edge over all its neighbours. But he also stressed that Israel's security "need not and should not come at the expense of Palestinian sovereignty, or interfere with Palestinian territorial integrity." The "should not" in that sentence is the necessary consequence of Clinton's affirmation that Palestine "is also their land." These two points bring US policy more in line with long-standing European views. These views are bound to have some impact on the thinking of President George W Bush's new Middle East team. The new administration is in no hurry to engage itself with the paralysed Middle East peace process, and will be happy to keep it on the shelf as long as possible. But if the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians deteriorates seriously, as it very well may after Ariel Sharon's election as prime minister on 6 February, the Bush administration will have no choice but to engage - at least for purposes of crisis management - even if longer-range policy objectives will not be formulated until the end of this year. With Sharon at the head of Israel's new government, the only prospect is for continued deterioration in the current situation. This will be the case even if Sharon succeeds in forming a unity government with some Labour participation. The outbreak of war, triggered perhaps by Hizbollah activity on the border with Lebanon, cannot be ruled out. The reason for this grim prospect is not necessarily some reckless action by Sharon. He is expected to continue to cultivate the image of a wiser and more restrained leader that he sought to shape so assiduously during the election campaign. It is not what Sharon may do, but who he is - at least in the perception of the Arab world - that will do irreparable damage to prospects for peace. The Arabs see Sharon as the incarnation of evil, the object of the darkest Arab fantasies about the "real" objectives of the Jewish state. The war in Lebanon that he initiated in order to establish a Christian satrapy in Lebanon, Sabra and Shatila, his provocative visit to the Temple Mount on 28 September last year - not to mention his pronouncements over the years that showed his disdain for Arabs - all confirm for the Arabs a demonology in which Israel's objective is hegemony over the entire region, and the destruction of al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock at the Haram al-Sharif, to be replaced by a restored Jewish Temple. This vision must affect even moderate Arab leaders who do not share this paranoia. For contact with Sharon would put their political survival at risk. A resumption of the peace process in these circumstances is out of the question. The best that can be hoped for is that Sharon's government will be short-lived; and given the unchanged composition of Israel's Knesset, that is a distinct possibility. Sharon's response to continuing Palestinian violence is predictable. Barak set the precedent of massive retaliation, which has resulted in over 300 Palestinian fatalities. One can easily imagine the outrage of the left had these deaths occurred if the right had been in power. A Likud government will undoubtedly point to the fact that Barak sanctioned settlement expansion and the proliferation of highway construction throughout the West Bank, as well as new Jewish housing in Jerusalem, at a rate exceeding that under the previous regime of Binyamin Netanyahu. A Likud-led government could hardly be expected to lag behind the standard set by a Labour government. That does not mean that, had Barak won the election, his efforts to renew a formal peace agreement with the Palestinians would have been any more productive than they were before the election. What prevented an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians before the election - the inability of either party to accept their adversary's sovereignty of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount and to compromise on the Palestinian refugees' right of return - will continue to prevent a formal agreement. And if either side is pressured or intimidated into compromising their position on these issues in a formal peace agreement, the likelihood is that the agreement will not hold. Point of despair But there is a far more fundamental reason why the parties have been frustrated in their efforts to move the peace process forward. It is their failure to distinguish between two quite separate phenomena: the inability of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to resolve the permanent-status issues, and violence in the territories directed at Israel's occupation. It is widely believed that the latest intifada is the result of what Palestinians consider to be shortcomings in the proposals Barak put forward at Camp David. The intifada, whether spontaneous or instigated by Yasser Arafat, is therefore seen as an expression of popular Palestinian anger over Israel's unwillingness to agree to what Palestinians believe are minimally just terms. It is also assumed that once Israel agrees to fair terms, the violence will end. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The latest violence in the West Bank and Gaza did not break out in order to provide support for Arafat's negotiating position, even if that is how Arafat sought to use the uprising. Rather, the intifada erupted (even if it was instigated by Arafat, as Israel insists) because Palestinians reached a point of despair, no longer believing that the peace process would improve their wretched condition or bring about an end to a despised and bitterly resented Israeli occupation. It is the daily restrictions and humiliations of the occupation, and the relentless Israeli encroachments on Palestinian lands and lives that are the cause of Palestinian rage, not shortcomings in proposals made by Barak to Arafat. Most Palestinians know little about the content of these proposals, and couldn't care less. For they have long ago stopped believing that formal agreements between their leaders and Israel's government will bring any improvement to their lives. A new agreement that contains new promises of withdrawal will have no impact on the Palestinian street. Seven years of Oslo promises have yielded only greater poverty, greater loss of Palestinian lands and greater Israeli control over the movement of people and goods. Disillusionment and distrust cannot be dispelled by new promises. What will end Palestinian violence is nothing less than the actual removal of Israel's occupation and the end to the stranglehold that Israel continues to exercise over every aspect of their existence. There is, therefore, one way out: a unilateral Israeli withdrawal to the lines proposed by Barak at Camp David last July, clearing the way for a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza vacated by Israel. While unilateral Israeli and Palestinian measures such as these do not require a formal peace agreement that resolves all outstanding issues, they do require informal but precise understandings and coordination through a third party - i.e. the US, in cooperation with the European Union and United Nations. Negotiations would continue on all the outstanding issues - but this time between two sovereign states, not between an occupying power and its subject population. They would include the setting of final borders, security arrangements (e.g. demilitarisation of the Palestinian state, Israeli control of Palestinian air space, etc), division of water resources, joint infrastructure, sovereignty arrangements in Jerusalem, and refugees. During the talks the parties would have to agree not to take any further unilateral measures. This means no further Israeli confiscation of Palestinian lands for the expansion of settlements. It means no unilateral changes in the demographic status quo of East Jerusalem, no new Jewish housing in Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem, and no new initiatives to assert sovereignty - either Israeli or Palestinian - in any part of Jerusalem without the other party's agreement. Until questions of formal sovereignty are resolved, Israel would have to agree to grant functional autonomy to the Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem. At the same time, it means total Palestinian security cooperation with Israel. If the parties are capable of reaching such far-reaching understandings, why did they fail to do so at Camp David? The short answer is that nothing is possible before Israel gets out - physically and psychologically - of the lives and the emotional space of the Palestinians. Once Israel leaves the territories, everything will become possible. A fuller answer requires an elaboration of why Arafat rejected Barak's proposals at Camp David. These proposals were far-reaching indeed, and had Barak not committed a series of egregious blunders during his nearly two years on the way to Camp David, his proposals would most likely have served as a sound basis for an agreement with Arafat. Barak's blunders When Barak assumed office in May 1999, he immediately put Oslo on the back burner and concentrated on negotiations with the Syrians. That was his first big mistake. Then he informed Arafat that he would not implement the redeployments from the West Bank that even the Netanyahu government had committed Israel to in the Wye accords. On two different occasions he announced the imminent transfer of three Palestinian villages adjoining Jerusalem to complete Palestinian control, and both times he reneged on his promise. And he showed a deference to the settler community and its ideologues entirely inconsistent with his stated objectives. Barak continued the enlargement of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and construction of Jewish housing in Jerusalem at a pace greater than under Netanyahu. He also intensified construction of major highways in the West Bank, ostensibly to enable settlers to bypass Palestinian towns and villages. In fact, these highways, as envisioned by Sharon in the 1970s, were intended to carve up a future Palestinian state into isolated entities more easily controlled by Israel. All this eroded Palestinian trust in Israeli intentions. Indeed, throughout this period, Israeli intelligence issued warning after warning that the Palestinian street was on the verge of explosion. When Barak put his surprisingly far-reaching proposal to Arafat at Camp David, he did so without first consulting Arafat. He put the proposal on the table on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. And added insult to injury by proposing, as part of the package, the construction of a synagogue on the Haram al-Sharif next to al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock! With Israel out of the territories and Palestinians with a state of their own, agreement on the remaining issues would become far less complicated. Both Palestinians and Israelis can live with delays in dealing with differences that now seem insoluble if Palestinians have their state and Israel has Palestinian security collaboration. As far as Jerusalem is concerned, neither of the parties can yield sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount to the other. But both can tolerate a continuation of the existing arrangement that gives Palestinians control of the Haram, provided there is a commitment by Israel not to take any unilateral initiatives to assert formal sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and a Palestinian commitment not to undertake excavations below the Haram (so as not to disturb remains of the Temple). Such an arrangement leaves open the possibility of a future deal that trades formal Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram for Palestinian agreement to drop the issue of the refugees' right of return. In the meantime, the immediate establishment of an international fund for the rehabilitation and resettlement of the refugees who wish to take advantage of this option could significantly reduce the dimensions of the problem and make its resolution far less complicated. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians requires the inversion of the paradigm that, until now, has been the basis of the peace process. Israel, backed by the US, has long believed that there must be a formal peace agreement with the Palestinians if Israel is to withdraw from the territories. But the lesson to be learned from recent events is the reverse: withdrawal from the territories is the essential precondition for peacemaking. * Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York. These views are his own. END top