WHAT STATE PALESTINE?
Zureik, Elia
For many, the century-old conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis seemed finally to have come to an end when in September the two sides signed at the White House lawn the Declaration of...
...What flows from this is that should there be a bloodbath in the Palestinian camp, Israel would be justified in remaining "neutral...
...Only in referring to the June 1993 elections for the Autonomy Council does the DOP pay lip service to "democratic principles, direct, free and general political elections...
...26 • DISSENT...
...Fourth, the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc weakened the maneuverability of the PLO in the international arena...
...In the Gaza strip around 75 percent of the Palestinians are refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars, and in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, refugees and displaced persons from the two wars constitute 39 percent of the population...
...Third, there was no guarantee that Israeli settlement activities in the Occupied Territories would stop under international pressure or because Labor had replaced Likud as the governing coalition in Israel...
...This concerns the tacit meanings involved in it...
...This much was revealed by Rabin himself in an interview with the Israeli evening daily Yediot Ahronot (September 7, 1993), in which he said he preferred to let the Palestinians "cope with the problem of enforcing order in Gaza...
...Witness the examples of Egypt and other Arab countries that followed policies of so-called economic openness, yet continue to labor under poverty, authoritarianism, and economic dependency...
...They will rule there with their own methods, freeing the Israeli army soldiers to do what they have to do...
...This is because of the dispersal of the more than six million Palestinians worldwide—from those living in fifty-nine UN refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, to those living outside the camps in the Occupied Territories, in neighboring Arab countries, and elsewhere...
...What happens then to the agreement and transfer of authority...
...For skeptics among the Palestinians, the agreement leaves many issues unresolved, indeed ignored...
...Having said all this we must not diminish the achievements of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement, even though they may not appear to have practical quality...
...What Israel had to give up on the diplomatic and ideological front in the shape of Greater Israel, it will compensate for on the economic front...
...First, on the Palestinian side: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which ultimately accepted some form of autonomy, or at best vague "self-governing authority" over less than 25 percent of the area of historical Palestine, found its legitimacy eroding in the face of increasing challenges mounted by the WINTER • 1994 • 23 Politics Abroad militant Hamas movement...
...Second, Israeli assessment of the region's politics led it to conclude that a Yugoslaviatype scenario is not a far-fetched possibility should the militant Islamic current in the Arab world and Iran gain in ascendancy...
...It is interesting to note that for the Likud opposition in Israel, the agreement means what the Palestinians say it means, with one significant addition: that it will usher in the beginning of the end for Israel as a Jewish state...
...Finally, Israel's new "frontier" will be the markets of the Arab world with its more than one hundred million potential customers...
...The rationale for this pragmatic policy on the part of Rabin is quite simple...
...There is an irony in seeing Rabin scrambling to neutralize militant Islamists, whereas as defense minister from 1984 to 1990 he encouraged the emergence of sectarian Hamas as an antidote to the more secular and nationalist PLO...
...After all, this is "their," that is, Palestinian, business...
...They must insist on free and democratic elections in accordance with the DOP as the minimum requirement for ensuring accountability in governance...
...To understand why the agreement was signed now, even though it did not address directly the fundamental issues of sovereignty, statehood, or the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, one has to bear in mind the context of recent developments...
...A second, more likely, scenario is for the Israelis to continue to work more closely with the PLO, cooperate with them in sharing intelligence information (as seems to be happening, according to several reports in the Israeli press), divesting more authority to it and agreeing to put in place a non-elected, administrative body that would be PLOappointed and would act as a caretaker until the political climate permits the holding of elections...
...On the Israeli side, the agreement came in response to several developments...
...Peace with Egypt has not enabled Israel to penetrate the Arab world...
...Thus the regime in the territories will not be an elected autonomy but a PLO-appointed administration...
...Palestinians must undertake the task of nation-building by concentrating on the development of democratic and accountable institutions that are capable of accommodating, and even encouraging, diversity of opinion...
...Second, the financial fortunes of the PLO suffered drastically as a result of the Gulf War and the cutting off of aid from oil-rich Arab Gulf states...
...Not once are human rights mentioned, either directly or indirectly...
...It is significant that reiteration of the need for a so-called "strong" police force is evident in four separate passages in the DOP...
...Altogether, it is estimated that close to three-quarters of the Palestinians have either refugee or displaced status...
...There is more of the Israeli hand in its drafting than the Palestinian one...
...Fourth, on the domestic front, Rabin knew that peace from a position of strength would be acceptable to a populace that is tired of endless wars with the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular...
...Indeed, Palestinian sources sought the secret Oslo channel to deal directly with Israel in order to overcome the White House's standing policy of "peace without the PLO," as articulated by Martin Indyk, the former AIPAC analyst who had Prime Minister Shamir's ear, and who is currently in charge of Middle East policy on the National Security Council...
...This projected economic partnership is hardly one between equals...
...This is something that the left in Israel 24 • DISSENT Politics Abroad understood all along, and that now Labor is beginning to appreciate...
...First, Israel continues to be by far the stronger party in the dispute and as such could dictate its own terms...
...It is possible to find in the signed document something for everyone...
...There are indications that the agreement is based on the assumption that it will never be carried into effect...
...Only peace with the Palestinians, aimed at settling the core of the conflict in the Middle East, will allow it to do so...
...For example, what is the future status of the 1948 refugees...
...It was the apparent continuation of the settlement program under the Rabin government that finally prompted the American administration to withhold close to half a billion dollars in loan guarantees...
...It is estimated that Israel's per capita Gross Domestic Product is seven times the level of the West Bank and fourteen times that of Gaza...
...Indeed, even with regard to the 1967 refugees, as the New York Times (September 13, 1993) noted, the DOP provides for a "discussion" of the refugees, "but does not guarantee their return...
...Without sound political planning, the economic solutions that are being proposed with the advice of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other free marketeers are not likely to yield the right solutions...
...Third, the Intifada, well into its sixth year, does not seem to be going away...
...Twenty percent of the DOP text is devoted to economic "cooperation" of one form or another...
...Little work or no work at all has been carried out in this direction...
...With the proximity of the territories to Israel and the presence of Israeli settlers in the occupied areas, it is doubtful that the United Nations would be welcomed by Israel...
...This would be the greatest tragedy of the century-old struggle of the Palestinian people for genuine independence...
...The Palestinians will be better at it than we were because they will allow no appeals to the [Israeli] Supreme Court and will prevent the [Israeli] Association for Civil Rights from criticizing the conditions there by denying it access to the area...
...Overnight, the status of the Palestinians, in the media at least, appeared to have undergone a total transformation, from that of the perennial terrorist and spoiler to one who is entitled to a place under the sun...
...An unlikely scenario is for the Israelis to resume their role as direct rulers and occupiers of the territories at all cost, under the pretext that the Palestinians have failed to deliver on their undertaking to manage the territories free of violence...
...For the Israeli government, the DOP is neither the launching pad for a future Palestinian state and the total withdrawal of Israeli forces nor a formula for relinquishing Israeli control over any part of Jerusalem and the settlements in the Occupied Territories...
...High on the Palestinian agenda must be placed a political and not mainly an economic list of priorities, as seems to be the case with the DOP...
...A fourth, unlikely, scenario is to invite UN troops to act as a buffer between various Palestinian factions...
...Above all, the DOP is the first agreement between "the state of Israel and the Palestinian team representing the Palestinian people...
...September 5, 1993) This may sound too pessimistic, if not outright cynical, but the warning has a kernel of truth...
...Here Rabin's interests and those of the PLO converged...
...Critics of the agreement, Palestinian and otherwise, contend that in agreeing to deploy such a force, the Palestinians may be doing Israel's dirty work by suppressing through brute force dissent in their own midst...
...Only then will the Palestinians be able to exploit fully the few openings presented to them in the DOP and make a go of their political independence project...
...And Israel's Gross National Product on a per capita basis is close to $11,000, while the West Bank's is $2,000 and the Gaza Strip's is $1,300...
...The Israeli government has acknowledged the "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements...
...Using the PLO as a proxy for dealing with common opposition in the territories is a move over which the Israeli left and those in the centrist Labor party in Israel agree wholeheartedly...
...Attempts at deferring or canceling elections, for what may appear to be pragmatic reasons, must be seriously questioned and if necessary resisted...
...Israel has a history of rejecting the presence of any UN troops on its soil or soil controlled by it...
...As long as it can contain the situation, the absence of democracy in the Occupied Territories is not such a bitter pill for Israel to swallow, since its main concern is not the Politics Abroad well-being of the Palestinian body politic but the safety of its citizens and the success of its economic plans in the surrounding Arab markets...
...The heavy emphasis in the DOP on internal security and a "strong" Palestinian police force is likely to compromise the human rights of the Palestinian population as long as Israel continues to reject the applicability of the Geneva Convention to the Occupied Territories and the PLO cannot be a signatory to the convention because of its non-state status...
...Should such an autonomy, which is based on political appointments and nepotism rather than free elections and competence, evolve as the likely form of rule in the territories, for all intents and purposes the Palestinians will have established a regime in the West Bank and Gaza that is not dissimilar from regimes in the rest of the Arab World...
...The more immediate issue to consider is this: suppose that there is no agreement over Jerusalem during the transition period, the settlements remain a stumbling block, and the Palestinians plunge into fracticide...
...Equally important is the explicit reference to the fact that the authority of the elected Palestinian Council, including the police force, will not cover during the transition period either the settlements, Israelis traveling in the Occupied Territories, Jerusalem, or the military...
...By agreeing to be "partners" in economic, technical, and political arrangements with Israel, as explicitly spelled out in several places in the DOP, the Palestinians have entered a web of economic and political entrapment that could leave them under the thumb of a more powerful, politically mature and technologically advanced Israel...
...Uzi Ben Ziman, a correspondent for haAretz, an independent daily in Israel, cast an even greater shadow on the likely success of the agreement: There is something in the peace of 1993 which disturbs those who support it entirely...
...The PLO cannot by itself request the UN presence or that of any other state, because nowhere in the DOP is it accorded a sovereign status...
...Even now, before the agreement was signed, it is clear to its initiators (at least to the Israeli side) that the likelihood of establishing the Autonomy Council, to be elected by the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip within nine months, is very small...
...Will they be dealt with in any way other than resettlement in their countries of refuge...
...There is no way of knowing for sure what the average Palestinian thinks of this agreement...
...Interestingly enough, Rabin's government had its own reasons for wanting the PLO to participate in the Middle East peace talks...
...For the Palestinians, the agreement means eventual and total Israeli withdrawal, and a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital...
...Public opinion surveys, which must be interpreted carefully in the best of times, let alone in war-like situations, speak of around 60 percent support for the agreement among Israelis as well as Palestinians in the territories...
...However, it is not clear what sort of place this is whose contours were secretly crafted behind the scenes in Oslo, Norway, and away from the glare and publicity of Washington...
...Fifth, an agreement that does not commit Israel to allow the return of the refugees, a Palestinian state, withdrawal from East Jerusalem, or a dismantling of the settlements would be further proof that it was negotiating from a position of strength...
...In failing to subdue an increasingly violent Intifada, Rabin needed a partner to extricate himself from a no-win situation...
...For many, the century-old conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis seemed finally to have come to an end when in September the two sides signed at the White House lawn the Declaration of Principles (DOP) regarding the establishment of a "Palestinian Interim SelfGovernment Authority" in the Occupied Territories...
...Even today all knowledgeable persons in Jerusalem talk about a system of rule in which the interim settlement will be based on enlargement of the authority that the PLO will be granted in Gaza and Jericho to one over the entire West Bank, not as a result of any elections but by an Israeli grant...
...A third, equally possible scenario is for the Israelis to fall back on the so-called WINTER • 1994 • 25 Jordanian option by bringing in Jordanian security forces to work jointly with them and the Palestinian police to contain opposition to the agreement...
...With staggering unemployment rates hovering around 30 percent in the West Bank and close to 60 percent in Gaza, the talk about "economic cooperation" sounds more like a cruel joke than a sound recipe for curing economic ills...
...Indeed, the drafting of the DOP seems to have been carried out with this in mind...
...Finally, and most important, the Clinton administration, with many of its key policy advisers on the Middle East recruited from the pro-Israel lobby, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), gave unambiguous signs of tilting in favor of the Israeli government...
...If anything, the more militant Palestinian groups appear to be gaining the upper hand...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
