Screen
O'Brien, Tom
PLAYING FOR TINE IN THE MIDDLE EAST SHAMIR WANTS TO WAIT SOME MORE J.J. GOLDBERG edieval Jewish legend tells of a magical river, somewhere far away, known as Sambatyon. On its shores the Ten Lost...
...The simple equation has kept the Likud in power, but it is wearing thin...
...But during the 1950s and 1960s, the Polish-born Begin became the charismatic voice of Israel's growing Sephardic Jewish underclass, and his influence grew with them...
...Rabin's intelligence told him the intifada had created a new leadership in the territories, strongly local but firmly tied to the PLO's Tunis leadership...
...With the adoption of the two-stage plan, the Democratic Front was transformed from a fringe group into a junior partner in the PLO leadership...
...Both Labor leaders have repeatedly met in secret with Hussein to discuss a trade...
...The Jewish state was a fact...
...Within three years the new Labor had bungled its way out of voter favor...
...To hardliners in the PLO, though, the change was clear...
...After a lifelong commitment to Greater Israel ideology, in this view, Shamir sees Palestinian statehood along the Amirav-Husseini model as unavoidable, and he knows he must move it forward...
...The four-point plan caused an explosion on Shamir's right flank...
...but on that day the devout exiles are forbidden to travel...
...Arafat approved it, he says, but Shamir rejected it...
...And so on...
...For years, Hussein replied that in order to survive Arab anger over a peace treaty, should he sign one, he had to get back every inch of the West Bank, especially East Jerusalem...
...The PLO says the Palestinian uprising, now in its twenty-sixth month, has proven the Palestinians' readiness for coexistence...
...Finally, Shamir buckled...
...Four months later, the intifada erupted...
...But the plan quickly took on a life of its own...
...Seeking a formula for coexistence, the two men came up with a document that reportedly called for the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, linked by confederation to King Hussein's Jordan...
...But as 1989 opened, his government faced intense pressure to respond to the new constellation...
...Good will is in short supply in the Middle East...
...Israel won't talk to the PLO, viewing it as a terrorist band bent on Israel's destruction...
...Terrorism continued...
...Cairo 1974 represented our first breakthrough," says one longtime Front activist...
...Point one called for Palestinian elections, negotiations with the electees for a five-year autonomy period, and final peace talks after that...
...Polls show that most Israelis don't believe the PLO was sincere, but a slim majority wouldn't mind sitting down to talk about it...
...Founded in 1949 by Menachem Begin, it sees the Greater Land of Israel as indivisible and Israel's by birthright...
...Just over a year ago, in November 1988, the PLO voted in Algiers to accept Israel's right to exist...
...Today he heads a council of 300 senior reserve officers and defense experts who believe Israel should trade land for peace...
...Mubarak proposed inviting an Israeli team to Cairo to meet with a handpicked Palestinian delegation and flesh out the mechanics...
...The Middle East has come of late to resemble the land of Sambatyon...
...At Arens's urging, he met with Rabin and agreed to put the territorial elections plan in gear...
...In reply, the United States announced that it was opening a "dialogue" with the PLO...
...Moreover, Shamir and Arens repeated, Israel was not ready to discuss long-range plans-only the elections...
...Israel was now truly alone...
...Even Egypt, working closely with the PLO, called it "positive...
...The PLO had simply replaced a one-stage plan for their liquidation with a two-stage plan...
...But there is a third view, which holds that Shamir now believes peace is taking shape along lines he cannot personally accept...
...But two weeks after the Israeli elections, everything changed...
...State Department: the PLO "recognizes Israel's right to exist" and "renounces terrorism...
...But if he can drag it out-four points, ten points, five points, six points-he can delay a decision until 1992, when he is due to retire...
...Herut was once a marginal phenomenon on Israel's far right...
...Now Secretary of State James Baker weighed in, offering a five-point elucidation of Mubarak's ten-point proposal...
...Israel could then negotiate with "PLO-territories" and ignore "PLO-Tunis...
...Israelis say it looks like just another round of violence...
...I know the Arabs have dreams of Haifa and Jaffa, and they know that I have dreams of Hebron and Nablus...
...Why is it seen as evasive, dodging, fickle, and double-dealing...
...It contains the seeds of a PLO state...
...throughout his career he said he would share power with "anyone but Herut and the Communists...
...As new Israeli elections approached that fall, Rabin and Peres wrote their territorial-elections plan into the Labor party platform...
...Fierce international pressure now was placed on Arafat, from Washington, Europe, and left-wing American Jews linked to Labor, to make it explicit On December 13, Arafat rose before the UN General Assembly in Geneva and declared that the PLO had decided to seek "possible rather than absolute justice," and accepted the 1947 resolution that "provides for the establishment of two states in Palestine, one Palestinian Arab and one Jewish...
...but their goal is to meet the other side halfway...
...The proposed "outsiders" on the Palestinian team sounded suspiciously like a back-door entree to the PLO...
...Israel would retain substantial security prerogatives in the new statelet, such as electronic listening posts throughout its territory, troops along the Jordan River to monitor arms movement, and the right of hot pursuit across the border...
...We are not prepared to work according to the clock, nor do we stand holding a stopwatch...
...Four Arabs were killed by a careless Jewish driver in the Gaza Strip...
...For a full month after Algiers, Israelis continued to insist there was nothing new, noting that the PLO decision made no explicit mention of Israel's rights...
...Herut, leading the Likud bloc of rightist parties, has dominated Israeli life ever since...
...Then there are hawk-doves who will do anything it takes to get their way...
...Two years ago, Amirav held a series of secret meetings with Faisal Husseini, the acknowledged leader of West Bank Arab nationalism...
...But Shamir held fast...
...He proposed inviting the Palestinians to elect their own leadership...
...This has not been easy...
...A judicial commission of inquiry, probing Israel's close call in the Yom Kippur War of the previous October, charged Golda Meir's Labor government with falling asleep on the job...
...It is their right to put their claim against ours...
...It's all so convoluted, people are beginning to lose interest...
...When the time comes we shall present our claim, and they will present theirs, and we shall negotiate until we shall reach a settlement...
...The problem is that no one seems to know how to get there...
...After running the idea past the Americans, the Soviets, and Arafat, Peres and Hussein met in a British hotel in April 1985 and initialed what has since been called the London Agreement: international conference, treaty, Israeli withdrawal, return of Jordanian rule to the territories with tacit PLO blessings...
...There was a good deal of doubt in Israel and around the world whether Shamir was reaching out or merely buying time...
...Thus it was that as Shamir arrived in Washington last fall, "you had five points on ten points on four points on agreeing to agree to talk to somebody about talking to somebody about maybe, someday, doing something," in the words of one Capitol Hill aide...
...The PLO offered seven points of its own...
...The Palestinians announced they were "shaking off' their occupiers...
...Much of Israel's leadership accepts that the Arabs in the occupied territories must eventually have some substantial form of self-rule...
...The only solution is a political settlement that will respond to the national aspirations of the Palestinians...
...We shall not be pushed or pressured...
...They cannot cross over because the river spews rocks into the air in a constant, deadly hail...
...The real change began in April 1974...
...He proposed that the talks range as well over ideas for a long-range territorial solution...
...Arafat had abandoned two key articles of the covenant, the indivisibility of Palestine and the exclusivity of armed struggle...
...Rabin ordered his troops to crack down hard on the unrest...
...For the first time, the Palestinians had formally accepted the UN decision to create Israel...
...On its shores the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel wait in exile for the day of messianic redemption...
...On May 15, the cabinet adopted the four-point Shamir-Rabin initiative...
...Party leaders denounced him as a traitor...
...An international conference, he said, would gang up on Israel and force the Jewish state to accept its own dismantlement...
...We must proceed patiently, knowing that we cannot achieve peace in a single step, or by one stroke of the pen," he told a Jewish rally in Brooklyn after his White House meetings in November...
...itzhak Rabin is Israel's best-known hawk-dove...
...The Likud platform countered with its traditional stance of no withdrawal, no talks with the PLO, plus a promise to crush the intifada...
...In May 1977, Menachem Begin entered the prime minister's office...
...he PLO was founded in Cairo in 1964, announcing itself to the world in a Palestine National Covenant that declared: "Palestine is indivisible...
...An amendment in 1968, the year Yasir Arafat's Fatah guerrilla group took control, declared that "armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine...
...What we are facing is a popular national uprising, and bullets cannot put it down...
...The crackdown, flashed by television cameras to audiences around the world, has done incalculable damage to Israel's image...
...We have a three-thousand-year claim to them...
...The change, in truth, was meaningless to Israelis...
...Arafat named a series of aides to reach out to Israelis, and each was gunned down...
...Finally, in August 1987, Hussein announced he was cutting all his remaining ties to the occupied territories...
...The Palestinian team, he said, would include Arabs from both inside and outside the territories, giving a symbolic presence to the Palestinian diaspora...
...The West Bank and Gaza, Shamir told his Brooklyn rally, "are part of Eretz Israel...
...Labor's founding generation retired, giving way to a colorless succession under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres...
...Israel reacted with alarm to the Mubarak paper...
...At the same time, though, Rabin the Laborite has infuriated his Likud coalition partners by insisting there is "no military solution to the intifada...
...Housing Minister David Levy, nominally the number-two man in the Likud, told an interviewer in May that he had "accepted the plan when it looked like a way to keep the Americans quiet...
...This allowed Shamir to maintain that elections in the territories were merely a restatement of the stalled Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, which had called in 1979 for the two nations to negotiate a period of autonomy for the territories...
...That, in fact, may be just what Shamir has in mind...
...Washington hailed it as an important step forward...
...As defense minister, it is his job to maintain order in the occupied territories, an overwhelming task in the last two years...
...After his speech, Arafat called a press conference and read a brief formula dictated to him by the U.S...
...Ironically, the Democratic Front is also one of the bloodiest terror factions under the PLO umbrella, responsible for some of the most horrific acts of PLO carnage...
...Fifty-four percent of Israeli Jews now want a dialogue with the PLO," the left-wing Knesset member Yossi Sarid said a few months after the Algiers vote...
...Even Shamir's closest advisers seem to be divided over whether he actually believes long-term Palestinian autonomy can ever fly, or whether he is just playing for time...
...Amirav says the document was sent to Shamir and Yasir Arafat...
...Henceforth, the PLO would seek to establish Palestinian sovereignty on any piece of land "liberated" from Zionism, and use that as a staging ground for complete liberation...
...The intifada, Arabic for "shaking off," began with a traffic accident...
...Labor's Rabin returned to the Defense Ministry, but Peres was forced to give up the Foreign Ministry...
...Labor did manage, however, to have its territorial elections written into the coalition agreement-after a fashion...
...The Likud has countered with an equation to show that land-for-peace is a slippery slope...
...Palestinians under occupation won't even discuss their fate with Israel, insisting it talk to the Tunis-based Palestine Liberation Organization...
...That June, Arafat convened his governing Palestine National Council in Cario and pushed through a new program...
...The deaths touched off rioting, which quickly spread throughout the territories...
...Shamir denounced the London Agreement as a "suicide pact...
...In August, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak sent Washington a ten-point paper with ideas for implementing the Shamir plan...
...Egypt waited silently...
...Israelis came to view the PLO with utter revulsion...
...In 1984, while Peres was prime minister in a Labor-Likud unity coalition, he and Hussein cooked up a new twist: Hussein could accept a less-than-total Israeli withdrawal, if the settlement were sponsored by the world community under the "umbrella" of a UN-sponsored international conference on Middle East peace...
...The organization developed a unique approach to "armed struggle," launching actions against uninvolved civilians, air travelers, Olympic athletes, babies...
...Underground schools, social services, and clinics were formed...
...Begin and Anwar Sadat had never been able to agree on the meaning of "autonomy," and the Camp David process had broken down over it Shamir expected this deadlock to continue, ensuring that nothing would change...
...Just last November, Shamir told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that he could not "comprehend why the dialogue with the PLO terrorists continues...
...The PLO must search its soul...
...In February, Foreign Minister Moshe Arens, Shamir's closest Likud ally, pointedly told a Knesset committee that Israeli policy would "have to account for the aspirations of the Palestinian people...
...Last December 7 marked the second anniversary of the Palestinian uprising...
...A settlement to the bloody, century-old Israel-Palestine conflict is slowly coming into hazy focus...
...For good measure, he added that "the future relationship between the State of Palestine and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan will be built on confederal foundations...
...You have to understand 1974 to understand 1988...
...decision to talk to the PLO has deeply wounded Shamir's Israel...
...Shamir's cabinet decided to delay accepting the American five points until after a November visit by Shamir to Washington...
...The U.S...
...Baker stonewalled both sides...
...Point three foresaw an international effort to resettle the Palestinian refugees in camps throughout the Middle East...
...There are dove-hawks who abhor violence, preferring gentler means to their goals...
...In any case, once the Amirav-Husseini meetings became public Amirav was expelled from the Herut governing body...
...The catalyst again was the lesson of the Yom Kippur War: even with everything going for them, the Arabs could not defeat Israel...
...Actually, Shamir was convinced for the first few weeks after the dialogue began that nothing had changed...
...But it represented a strategic victory for one small PLO faction, Nayef Hawatmeh's Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which since 1970 had called for recognition of Israeli national rights...
...Point four was no talks with the PLO, ever...
...The pact made no mention of when or how the elections would be held...
...but they set goals that all but ensure endless conflict...
...This the Laborites could never promise...
...And so they wait in the land beyond the Sambatyon, able to see their salvation across the river, but unable to reach it...
...The Palestinians would be free to raise broader issues, but Israel would not have to listen...
...Israel replied to Baker with six "points of concern...
...But as the crowd chanted, "Not one inch," the seventy-three-year-old Shamir continued: "The Arabs say they have a claim on them too...
...The question, still, is whether Shamir really wants to proceed at all...
...As the legal occupying authority, he said, it was Israel's duty to maintain order...
...A secret Unified Command of the Uprising, led by PLO activists, set about creating an "alternative Palestinian society...
...Only on the Sabbath does the river relent...
...Most Israelis believe Arafat's acceptance of the two-stage plan was purely tactical...
...Both sides are desperately tired of Israel's twenty-two-year military rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...
...We don't trust each other," says Moshe Amirav, director the Tel Aviv-based Council for Peace and Security...
...He is a former member of the central committee of the irredentist Herut movement, the dominant wing of Yitzhak Shamir's hardline Likud party...
...Let it happen on someone else's watch...
...Within a week the riots settled into a routine of mass demonstrations, strikes, stone-throwing, Molotov cocktails...
...Amirav, however, is convinced there are changes brewing below the party's surface...
...Rabin is a firm believer in his party's land-for-peace formula, although, like his fellow Laborite, Shimon Peres, he would like to entrust the territories to the steady hand of Jordan's Hussein...
...But it is also true that 90 percent of Jews in Israel do not trust the PLO...
...But now that everyone is adopting it, I reject it...
...Soon afterward he quit the party...
...The council also voted to launch diplomatic efforts alongside the "armed struggle...
...Point two demanded peace talks with the Arab states...
...The Palestinians' top leaders admit that, given Israel's deep-rooted insecurity, their sovereignty will be a good deal less than complete...
...The only party that refused to sign on was Shamir's Likud...
...The Palestine National Council, meeting in Algiers November 15, declared an "independent Palestinian state" in the occupied territories, based on the original United Nations partition plan of 1947...
...Shamir's aides deny he ever saw it...
...The change in the PLO, like the rise of the Likud, dates back to early 1974...
...Peres tried for two years to push the pact through the cabinet, but failed...
...Repeated opinion polls show that a plurality of Israelis would not mind trading the territories for peace, as Labor advocates...
...It goes like this: Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would lead to the formation of a Palestinian state, which would be dominated by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is committed to Israel's destruction...
...Its emblem is a map of historic Palestine (including what is now Jordan) superimposed with a rifle in a clenched fist and the slogan, "Only thus...
...In the spring of 1988, Rabin and Peres adopted a new tack...
...That is what negotiations are for...
...Baker invited the Egyptian and Israeli foreign ministers to Washington to draw up the list of Palestinians...
...From now on, he said, he would defer to the PLO as the Palestinians' "legitimate representative...
...One Fatah activist, Sabri al-Banna, seceded from the PLO and declared war on Arafat under the code name Abu Nidal...
...Amirav should know...
...The vote was a dead heat, forcing the two parties back into their deadlocked unity coalition...
...It led directly to Algiers 1988...
...The late David Ben-Gurion of Labor, Israel's first prime minister, viewed Herut as just short of fascist...
...Israel would come to Cairo to meet with the Palestinians, but "only after a satisfactory list of Palestinians has been worked out...
...The organization's goal was "to liberate all of Palestine" and "purge the Zionist presence...
...With enough good will, a middle ground could be found...
...In the Middle East, "dove" and "hawk" are slippery concepts...
...Under Begin and then Shamir, it has pursued a single-minded policy to preserve Israeli control over the biblical Judea and Samaria...
...Nor was the covenant amended...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 1
