AUTONOMY?
Heller, Mark
During the negotiations that led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, many Israelis doubted the advisability of the fundamental exchange Israel was required to make: withdrawal from the Sinai in...
...The agriculture department would somehow function without authority over land and water, whose disposition would be left to Israeli discretion...
...The inescapable conclusion was reached in 1937 by the Palestine Royal Commission (Peel Commission) and endorsed 10 years later by both the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) and the mainstream of the Zionist movement: that the only plausible solution to the Palestine problem is partition of the country between its Jewish and Arab populations...
...Copyright • 1979 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...
...They may decide that the emotional satisfaction of keeping the territories is worth the burden of a perpetual state of war...
...Moreover, the continuing energy and economic problems of the industrialized countries have added urgency to their concern for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...But it is only with respect to the acceptability of the partition of western Eretz Yisrael that some distinction may be made between moderates and radicals, If the definition of Palestinian moderation is to be acquiescence in permanent Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza, then there are no moderates anywhere in the Arab world—inside or outside the territories, inside or outside the PLO...
...The fact that it is Begin who authored the autonomy plan has robbed it of what should be its greatest political value—its transitory character...
...In an infinitely malleable world, the resurrection of classical Ottoman governing principles might be a desirable thing, and there is certainly no dearth of advocates for the modern counterpart of Ottomanism—a federal solution to the problem...
...Since Begin's original formulation in December 1977, autonomy has been continually refined by Israeli committees and advisers, and its substantive content has been significantly eroded...
...The government of Quebec province espouses the cause of so-called sovereignty-association with the rest of Canada...
...Such threats to internal security are now dealt with by the army, and security offenders are prosecuted in military courts...
...As long as the Palestinians and their Arab supporters have the diplomatic, military, and economic capacity to deny Israel peace, no moral, legal, religious, or historical argument will reconcile them to the loss of every part of the land they feel is theirs, just as no Palestinian appeal to some abstraction of right or justice will induce Israel to renounce its claim to independent existence...
...finance...
...But the most plausible may be a growing perception in Egypt that the costs of President Sadat's peace policy—political, economic, and cultural isolation in the Arab world—were pointlessly incurred or needlessly prolonged by Israeli policies toward the Palestinians...
...Since 1973, Labor and Likud governments alike have viewed autonomy as an alternative to dealing with either Jordan or the PLO, and thus as a way to avoid decisions about the final disposition of—and Israeli withdrawal from—the West Bank...
...And the Camp David autonomy agreement is clearly intended to encourage such development...
...The purist Zionist interpretation still regards the entire original mandate as "Eretz Yisrael...
...Because of situational asymmetries, Palestinian good faith cannot be equally tangible...
...they might be replaced by others...
...This so-called transitional arrangement bears no resemblance whatsoever to transitional arrangements for the Sinai, where a final settlement is envisaged and laid out...
...The policies of the Palestinians who made peace with Israel might later change...
...Mark Heller is a senior research associate at the Center for Strategic Studies...
...Indeed, the recurring rumors of a revival of Hussein's confederation proposal of 1972, together with the recent Jordanian— PLO rapprochement, indicate that Jordan may still play some role in the future disposition of the West Bank...
...A Jordanian Solution Jordan, rather than an independent Palestinian entity, has often been suggested as the most logical partner for an arrangement of this kind...
...Thus, the military government will remain in existence— temporarily inoperative perhaps, but nevertheless available to be reactivated should the Arab administrative council overstep its authority...
...To the Palestinians in particular, their previous experience with autonomy-type schemes, the stated intentions of the present Israeli government, and the substance of the current plan all indicate that self-rule promises virtually nothing as a vehicle for the political expression of their national identity...
...construction...
...Thus, even if it entailed complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, such a solution might quickly undermine the government upon whose continued existence its viability depends...
...Yet until 1977 it was Begin who, as a member of the Grand Coalition government and then as leader of the opposition, objected most strenuously to the slightest hint of autonomy, home rule, or self-government...
...Tel A vi'v University, and assistant professor of political science (on leave) at Boston College...
...A policy that attempts to resolve the Palestinian problem by using the West Bank and Gaza to political advantage promises Israel that possibility...
...Begin and others have repeatedly insisted that there is to be no political separation of the West Bank from Israel, no termination of Israeli control there, and no border, in Begin's words, in "western Eretz Yisrael...
...Spain and France...
...Since then, however, statements and actions initiated or tolerated by the Prime Minister suggest that this recognition never went beyond lip service to the Palestinian issue as an international cliche...
...1979S0...
...Nevertheless, the interim solution, as a matter of both definition and logic, had to be a stage in a process leading to some end point...
...But as autonomy became a subject of actual negotiation, Israel reversed its position and insisted, over Egyptian and American objections, that the military government would not be abolished, but merely withdrawn...
...agriculture...
...The only practical result, therefore, will be a slightly lower Israeli profile in the occupied territories...
...Israel must therefore recognize that peace and the retention of these territories are mutually exclusive...
...Moreover, it must come from the only organization capable in the present circumstances of legitimating a reversal of the historical Palestinian refusal...
...the delegations of Egypt and Jordan may include Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza or other Palestinians as mutually agreed...
...it hardly begins to address the fundamental political question...
...Responsibility for internal security is reserved to the (withdrawn) military government...
...Nevertheless, the Jordanian solution has some very serious drawbacks...
...In contrast, a Palestinian entity, regardless of its relations with Israel, would almost certainly hesitate to invite foreign Arab armies, including Jordan's, onto its territory...
...The lives of most Arabs will scarcely be affected...
...Some point to the tendency in Palestinian politics for moderates to be driven out by radicals...
...Despite repeated blandishments from outside and a few cosmetic policy reformulations from within, the PLO has thus far resisted any unambiguous abandonment of these objectives...
...In other words, the PLO must formally abrogate those sections of its constitution, the Palestine National Covenant, that call for the elimination of Israel and the negation of partition (especially Articles 1,2, IS, 19, 20, 21, and 22...
...But if Israelis do come to the opposite conclusion—that withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza is preferable to perpetual confrontation under increasingly unfavorable economic, diplomatic, demographic and military conditions—then they must quickly begin to address the crucial questions: the conditions and modalities of withdrawal and postwithdrawal security arrangements...
...For as long as there is no "resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects" (as it is called in the treaty), or at least some progress toward such a resolution, permanent instability and danger of renewed war will continue to plague the Middle East...
...The commerce, industry and tourism department would have no authority -over East Jerusalem, the West Bank's economic center and tourist lodestar...
...Implementation of this proposal, even with the best of guarantees, would entail serious risks for Israel...
...But in a broader sense, the fundamental defect of the Jordanian solution would be its failure to address the political dimension of the Palestinian problem...
...Reprinted, with permission, from Foreign Policy, §37 (Winter...
...These considerations, combined with the long-standing economic and family ties between the East and West banks, provide a compelling rationale for an Israeli-Jordanian deal...
...Nothing has happened in the past 32 years to invalidate that conclusion...
...The military government alone will interpret the acceptability of the council's actions...
...they are unlikely to accept it any more enthusiastically in the person of Ali...
...But the immediate alternatives are not clear because the current scheme is not very different in substance from military rule as it already exists...
...the United States must make it clear to the PLO, and the PLO must concede, that there is no other road...
...The recognition that Israel must act to resolve the Palestinian problem stems from neither moral prescription nor an Olympian judgment of contested rights...
...The temporal end point is actually specified in the agreements: five years after the self-governing authority is established and inaugurated...
...And lest any Palestinians hope, as many Israelis fear, that the self-governing authority will somehow develop into an independent entity, Begin has threatened to reimpose military rule and to arrest any members of the administrative council who might proclaim Palestinian statehood or otherwise transgress the limits of their authority, as understood by Israel...
...Next could be transportation, labor and commerce, then agriculture— including land and water—and finance, and then internal security...
...Instead of territorial withdrawal in stages, however, the transition would involve functional withdrawal in stages...
...And the current autonomy plan in fact concedes that some territorial demarcation line, as opposed to a communitarian one, is necessary...
...Their implicit model is the multinational empire of the past and, more specifically, the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, in which the various religious and ethnic communities were granted a considerable measure of self-regulation in matters of personal status, education, welfare, and the financing and administration of communal institutions...
...The current version, drawn up by a committee under the direction of Eliahu Ben-Elissar, Director-General of the Prime Minister's office, so circumscribes the authority of the proposed administrative council that one Knesset member, Yossi Sarid, has openly labeled it a fraud...
...The current failure to enlist local cooperation for such schemes is ironic in light of the pre-1973 eagerness of some local dignitaries to explore ideas on new political arrangements despite Jordanian and PLO hostility...
...In general, then, the administrative council envisaged by Israel might well be described as a supramunicipal government responsible for maintaining antiquities and cleaning the streets...
...efforts to produce a new, even more diluted formula that will elicit some PLO response sufficiently ambiguous to permit the resumption of appeals to Israel to be more accommodating...
...Since Israeli policy now explicitly rejects relinquishing any part of western Eretz Yisrael, and since the current autonomy scheme precludes this possibility in practice, there is nothing partial about the accommodation and no reason to expect its internal dynamics to generate future changes...
...His last appearance in moment was in April 1978 ("Voices from the West Bank...
...It is this political reality that obliges Israel to act...
...MARK HELLER the eventual annexation, of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel...
...It must also renounce the strategy of "phased struggle," according to which the creation of a state in the West Bank and Gaza is merely a tactical measure to facilitate the continuing offensive against Israel's existence...
...Hence, a few Arab civil servants may receive promotions and pay raises (as Fahd Kawasma, mayor of Hebron, explained, "Ali will replace Shmuel as head of the education department"), but the ultimate power to decide policy will continue to reside in the military government and, by extension, in the Israeli cabinet...
...None of these ideas could overcome Israel's refusal to countenance a territory-wide political framework...
...The other condition is a Palestinian acceptance of Israel...
...If it is clear that withdrawal is a prerequisite for peace, it is also clear that withdrawal poses enormous security risks for Israel...
...In the end, the overall benefits of the exchange appeared to outweigh its risks, and Israel agreed to withdraw...
...They would have to include demilitarization and the means for its enforcement, as well as limitations on external alignments, especially defense alignments...
...Israel's acceptance of partition would mean transmission to a Palestinian authority of territory now under Israeli control...
...Furthermore, the Israeli position is that the military government itself is the source of authority for the administrative council...
...At the same time, it would relieve the Palestinians of the necessity to abandon their maximalist claims, to accept Israel's legitimacy, and to enter into peaceful relations with it...
...The mood of rejectionism among Palestinians on the West Bank stands in sharp contrast to the ongoing normalization of Israeli-Egyptian relations...
...Even in a conventional military sense, it might prove less conducive to the elimination of the West Bank as a potential staging ground against Israel...
...Israel's determination to retain an effective counter-terrorist capacity in the West Bank and Gaza— to prevent infiltration, sabotage, the planting of bombs, or other forms of violence—is unalterable and understandable...
...The point is not simply that the system of military justice may be flawed or that local Arabs may have little confidence in its integrity...
...Israeli proposals for some sort of home rule in the West Bank and Gaza are not a product of Sadat's initiative...
...It is therefore less surprising that they have refused to negotiate its modalities than that Israelis and others should continue to expect them to do so...
...Here, Israel proposes autonomy for the people—the Arab residents of die West Bank and Gaza—but not for the territory...
...There are many possible reasons for the nascent relationship between Israel and Egypt to deteriorate in the future...
...Finally, the Hashemite regime has traditionally been associated with those loosely defined, moderate, pro-Western forces in the Middle East and is presumed to be more resistant to internal disruption or Soviet encroachment than would be a Palestinian—especially a PLO—entity...
...Whatever the legalistic arguments, there is therefore a formidable political linkage between the two Camp David agreements of September 1978—one laying the groundwork for the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty signed in March 1979, and the other establishing the guidelines for the current negotiations over the West Bank and Gaza...
...The limits on self-government are evident from Israel's conception of the source, extent, and scope of the administrative council's authority...
...Many of the threats to Israel are mitigated or eliminated by control of the West Bank, and it is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that Israel will forgo this advantage without some practical guarantees, beyond those implied by normal, peaceful relations...
...Metaphysical attempts to divorce their political fate from the fate of the place where they live are an exercise in futility...
...Those policies may make a wider peace, and eventual Egyptian-Arab reconciliation, impossible...
...Israel has hardened its position on the source of authority since December 1977...
...But by then Palestinians viewed the idea as a transparent effort to promote a more pliant alternative to the resurgent PLO...
...Since it was impossible for Israel and any Arab interlocutor to agree beforehand on a final settlement of the West Bank and Gaza problem, the parties at Camp David attempted to draft an interim solution that would sustain progress without either pre-determining or foreclosing any future options...
...The final stage would then be the formalization of the de facto Palestinian state and of the de facto peace between Israelis and Palestinians...
...health...
...This perception has been reinforced by undeniable diplomatic successes in the Third World, in various international organizations, and even, most recently, in Europe...
...The regime consciously attempted to minimize its presence in the area by maintaining intact Jordanian law and legal institutions, the administrative structure, and the civil list that existed before 1967...
...It stated that the United States would not recognize or negotiate with the PLO until that organization recognized Israel's right to exist and accepted Security Council resolutions 242 and 338...
...But that very fact means that the changes envisaged in the current autonomy plan are without real substance...
...After all, some such arrangement short of fully independent statehood is a widespread aspiration among other ethno-national groups around the world...
...Hence, minimizing the potential security threats to Israel would inevitably mean some diminution of the sovereign rights, as they are understood in the abstract, of whichever Arab regime might be constituted in the territories...
...In almost all of these areas, however, the council's capacity to act would be undermined either by another provision in the original plan or by the substantive refinements of the Ben-Elissar committee...
...This response.can be attributed to three main factors: previous experience with autonomy-type schemes, the declared policy of the present Israeli government, and the substance of the current plan...
...The second factor—and a second irony—concerns the authorship of the autonomy scheme now under consideration...
...These skeptics, hard-liners on the questions of Israel's security, were reluctant to trade tangible assets for intangible compensations, because the intangibles could be easily revoked by Egypt if ever the peace process collapsed...
...The third constraint on the administrative council concerns the scope of its authority...
...And it becomes less so with each Israeli revision...
...Basques and Bretons have sought, often violently, some loosening of central government control in 'Although the West Bank area is actually to the east of what most of the world now recognizes as the state of Israel, it is in the western part of the original Palestine mandate, which originally included what is now Jordan (broken off by the British in a first partition in 1922...
...that is, with the conditions of about one-third of the territories' workers, who commute to jobs in Israel...
...Israelis and others rest their preference for a Jordanian option on the assumption that Jordan could more easily accommodate Israel's security needs on the West Bank, since these would entail only partial demilitarization of the state...
...Finally, the department of justice and local police forces would have no authority over Jewish settlers or visitors, or over internal security in general...
...The transportation department would work under Israeli supervision "to prevent a sudden closure of roads leading to Israeli settlements...
...The logical rulers of home rule were no longer interested...
...It is therefore in Israel's vital interest to try to reach a peace agreement with its most implacable adversaries, the Palestinians themselves: to engage them directly in the strong and enforceable security guarantees that will permit an Israeli withdrawal and to commit them, practically as well as declaratively, to recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the remaining part of Palestine-?refr Yisrael...
...For Arabs, what matters still is where they are, not who they are...
...The education department, for example, would be authorized to register pupils and train teachers, but present censorship rules would remain in force...
...In other words, Jewish settlers or visitors will still not be subject to the administrative council's jurisdiction, because autonomy is for the Arab residents of the territories, not the territories themselves...
...The refugee department would participate in establishing the rules and numbers for (Arab) immigration to the territories through council membership on a joint committee with representatives of Israel and Jordan, whose decisions must be unanimous...
...commerce, industry and tourism...
...Otherwise, it would extend autonomy to all the Arabs of Eretz Yisrael, not just to those in the West Bank and Gaza...
...The obvious purpose is to obscure the political salience of the pre-1967 borders...
...In practice, however, repeated PLO refusals to take these steps have only produced more unofficial U.S.-PLO contacts, more forthcoming American statements on the Palestinian problem, and more U.S...
...It would also be responsible for the rehabilitation of refugees and the administration of justice, including supervision of local police forces...
...During the negotiations that led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, many Israelis doubted the advisability of the fundamental exchange Israel was required to make: withdrawal from the Sinai in return for political recognition and normal relations with Egypt...
...Devolution" is a popular, if not quite majority, demand in Scotland...
...In an imperfect world, the only perpetual peace is the peace of the grave...
...This set of negotiations has just begun, and the precise limits on the council's authority cannot yet be known...
...What is significant is that the police and judicial powers now exercised by the military government will not revert to civilian authorities but will continue to be exercised by the military government after it is "withdrawn" under Palestinian self-rule...
...Prime Minister Menachem Begin himself seemed to recognize this reality when he first proposed his autonomy scheme in the aftermath of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem...
...On this issue, Sadat, King Hussein and Freij are as radical as Hafez Al Assad, Muammur Quaddafi and Yasir Arafat...
...Decision makers must therefore search for a policy that offers the greatest possibility of minimizing risk, through creative diplomacy and strategy...
...In view of the West Bank's proximity to Israeli population centers, industry, and communications, security guarantees would have to go beyond those provided for in the Egyptian-Israeli agreement on the Sinai...
...The second limit on full autonomy concerns the extent of the administrative council's authority...
...Yet everything in the ideological background of Begin and his coalition partners from the National Religious party, every restriction on the authority of the self-governing authority, and every statement and action of the Israeli government clearly shows that Begin does not have the slightest intention of allowing autonomy to evolve into anything more after five years...
...Arabs are not endeared to Israeli rule as embodied in Shmuel...
...It would certainly not exclude Arab residents of Jerusalem...
...Israelis may nevertheless conclude that the risks of withdrawal this time do outweigh the precarious benefits of a political accommodation...
...According to Begin's original plan, the council would staff and administer the departments of education...
...But currently prevailing norms of political identity and collective self-expression, especially the norm of self-determination that inextricably links nationalism to territorial autonomy, makes such a solution anachronistic...
...The formal position of the United States was outlined in the September 1975 memorandum of agreement with Israel in connection with the second Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement...
...it must therefore be even more dramatic, on the order of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem...
...Begin first presented his ideas on autonomy to Carter and Sadat in December 1977...
...After all, there is nothing enigmatic about the observation made, in another context, that "military justice is to justice as military music is to music...
...If a peaceful solution is to be achieved, Israel must make it clear to the Palestinians that the road to partition is open...
...On the one hand, it would expose Jordan to charges of betrayal, which Palestinians and other Arab actors could exploit to destabilize the Hashemite regime...
...it would be tangible evidence of Israel's good faith...
...Even other Arabs obviously believe that autonomy is a significant matter since they demand it for themselves in Iran and aeny it to the Kurds in Iraq...
...But the Israeli authorities have tended to include under the "security" rubric all types of under sirable political activity—meetings, demonstrations, and the like—and all disruptions of law and order, particularly confrontations between local Arabs and Jewish activists, such as Gush Emunim settlers...
...But the greatest encouragement has come from the most important foreign quarter—Washington—in the form of recurring indications that official American policy toward the PLO is not really serious...
...In a clash between those armies and Israel's, Palestinian independence might well be the first casualty, whatever the final outcome...
...In other words, it is the military government, not some political abstraction like the "consent of the governed," that will determine the ongoing legitimacy of the council...
...Furthermore, the Jordanian solution appears more stable to some because Jordan, unlike the Palestinian national movement, harbors no additional irredentist claims against Israel...
...What is already clear, however, is Israel's determination to circumscribe drastically the competence of the council and to eliminate from its purview anything that might be remotely construed as national politics...
...The failure would be doubly dangerous for Israel...
...And the hope that so-called full autonomy will defuse the opposition of the moderates is totally unfounded...
...If the current scheme really entailed full autonomy, then continuation of the status quo might appear to West Bank and Gaza Arabs much less tolerable...
...In short, such a solution might be easier to achieve, but the peace achieved would be more vulnerable and precarious than one reached with authoritative Palestinian interlocutors...
...A Jordanian government might, for many reasons, feel impelled at some point to renounce its contractual obligations, reassert its sovereign rights, and station Jordanian military forces on the West Bank...
...Some observers, including a few who sympathize with Palestinian aspirations, explain this refusal by referring to the long-standing Palestinian lack of faith in partial accommodations or in the dynamics of political evolution...
...It was only after the 1973 war that Israel displayed some interest in home rule...
...They are even more bleak if Begin capitulates to the Israeli extremists and allows vigilante behavior and provocative settlements by Gush Emunim millenarians to poison further the political atmosphere on the West Bank...
...In fact, the plan proposes communal self-rule in all of Palestine only for Jews...
...Ordinarily, this capacity would not subsume all civilian judicial and police functions...
...Once the obstacle of rejectionism is overcome, the overall contours of a settlement—recognition, normaliza-' tion, and the renunciation of all further claims in exchange for full withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza—can be formulated, and an autonomy plan can provide the process by which this settlement is implemented...
...and social welfare...
...This may be called full autonomy, but it is almost inconceivable that the verbal pyrotechnics have fooled anyone—the Americans, Sadat, other Arabs, the Palestinians, or Begin himself—into believing that it is a true basis for productive negotiations...
...These factors may explain other Palestinian refusals, including the critical refusal to accept partition, but they are not relevant to the current refusal—to renounce the West Bank and Gaza...
...The labor and social welfare department would be barred from interfering with "freedom of movement and freedom of economic activity" between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza...
...But they cannot afford the luxury of deluding themselves that peace and the territories can both be had, that autonomy in its present form constitutes a way to avoid a hard choice, or that the Sinai solution is not a precedent...
...Palestinian claims to the West Bank and Gaza are no more unequivocal than Israel's, and those who continually demand that Israel withdraw from these territories—the Americans, the Soviets, other Arabs, the knee jerk pro-Arab voters in the United Nations—do so purely to serve their own interests...
...transport and commerce...
...But once attention shifted to the political future of the West Bank and Gaza, those very same skeptics, along with other doctrinaire elements in the Israeli political system, began trying to force the country into a posture that is virtually certain to stalemate and then reverse the progress achieved thus far...
...The basic obstacle that must first be overcome is ideological rejectionism— the rejection on principle of a Jewish state by Arabs or of a Palestinian state by Israelis...
...The finance department would be empowered to impose direct taxes, but not to collect or alter customs duties and other indirect taxes or to issue currency...
...After all, at least until the Likud government took power, the basic thrust of the military occupation was one of noninterference...
...The removal of a military compound from city center to suburbs may diminish its psychological nuisance value...
...In this way, the Israelis hope somehow to reconcile the Arab demand for self-government with their own desire to retain ultimate control over the whole of Palestine under the British Mandate ("western Eretz Yisrael...
...Stripped of the possibility of further change, by either process or agreement, the five-year transitional autonomy has predictably failed to elicit much enthusiasm among Palestinians...
...But why should autonomy itself be so unacceptable to the Palestinians, even if it does not promise to evolve into something different...
...Yet Arab residents will remain under the jurisdiction of the Israeli military government for any action that can be remotely construed as a security offense...
...religious affairs...
...For Israel, beyond its interest in consolidating the peace with Egypt, is now confronted with widespread and increasing sympathy for Palestinian aspirations and with a growing tendency, even among its traditional friends and strongest supporters, to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO...
...As a result, the prospects for a settlement remain inauspicious even if the Israeli government decides to pursue its current policy in a civilized manner...
...One reason for this is simply the PLO's perception that it can progress toward its immediate objective—wider recognition, involvement in the negotiating process, third-party pressure on Israel to withdraw— without any reciprocal commitment on its part...
...If they succeed in frustrating any Arab-Israeli agreement on this issue, their fears will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...And while other similar causes are ignored, Palestinian self-determination has been thrust to the top of the international agenda by Arab oil and Arab money...
...A policy aimed at keeping the territories promises, at best, perpetual confrontation under increasingly intolerable conditions, and, at worst, disaster...
...Indeed, most of the champions of Palestinian rights are guilty of a clear double standard: They urge Israel to grant the Palestinians rights of the sort they consistently deny their own minorities or political adversaries...
...the opportunity costs of refusing and waiting for history to unfold might be unacceptably high...
...Indeed, it is on the issue of internal security that the impotence of the administrative council is most clearly highlighted...
...This approach, which began to undermine America's PLO policy almost as soon as it was enunciated, seems to have rewarded PLO rejectionism, rather than discouraging it...
...But the choice for Israeli decision makers is not between a risky settlement of the Palestinian question and a risk-free continuation of the status quo...
...At specified intervals, contingent upon the continued performance of its self-imposed obligations, the Palestinian self-governing authority could assume responsibility over issue-areas of progressively greater controversy or risk to Israel...
...This is to be determined, according to the Camp David agreement incorporated in the peace treaty, in negotiations among Israel, Egypt, and, if it agrees to participate, Jordan...
...Rather, they are part of a larger effort to retain control of the occupied territories while somehow disarming American and Arab opposition to such control...
...In the original plan, the very first provision read: "The administration of the military government in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district will be abolished...
...This transition might begin with the immediate transfer of authority over education, health and religious affairs...
...That mood is exacerbated by Israeli land expropriation and settlement policies, but it is fundamentally a product of the Palestinians' widespread suspicion that the provisions for autonomy in the treaty are intended to legitimate the continued occupation, and perhaps even AUTONOMY...
Vol. 5 • April 1980 • No. 4
