Israel Debates Its Future

...Similarly, when recently-installed President Ezer Weizman urged giving autonomy a chance in his first Rosh Hashanah address to the nation, no one was allowed to forget that he was the celebrated Deputy Chief of Staff who prepared the Israeli Air Force for the stunning destruction of the Egyptian Air Force before it could get off the ground...

...When elected, he had promised this "within nine months," and a year afterward peace did not seem any nearer...

...Moreover, he is the head of a newly whitewashed heterogeneous grouping and the extent of his control has yet to be tested...

...intelligence reports indicated an upsurge of Hamas influence in the disputed territories...

...Indicative of the war for the minds of the Israelis are the public relations campaigns that have been waged in full-page newspaper ads and on thousands of roadside billboards...

...What gnaws at a very broad spectrum of Israelis is the contrast between the circumstances surrounding the 1978 Camp David negotiations and the Madrid process that ultimately led to the latest breakthrough...

...But Yitzchak Rabin, although he entered the picture somewhat later, was no less a figure in bringing about the breakthrough...

...He could play the Syrian card first, as originally intended, at the cost of complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights, including the removal of the Israeli settlements there...

...along their vulnerable narrow coastal strip...

...Rabin now had to make a choice...

...Nothing about Arafat's bearing or past performance leads one to have confidence in him...

...Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's dramatic first trip to Jerusalem in 1977 was marked by his going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, where he laid a wreath at the Eternal Flame honoring the 6 million Jews the Nazis murdered...

...A cautious man, Rabin decided to gamble cautiously...

...It was based on Rabin's conclusions after analyzing three reports...

...Now, the borders of the projected autonomous Palestinian entity remain to be decided...

...Comparisons with the Egyptian peace agreement aside, several technical but crucial open questions are especially vexing...

...Nobody here of sound mind claimed the Sinai was part of "the Land of Israel...

...He swallowed hard, shook hands with Yasir Arafat, and was visibly relieved that he was not hugged in return...

...Therefore, they feel, striking a deal with a weakened PLO before it is removed from the scene is less dangerous than letting the open sores of enmity fester...

...Supporters of the agreement further note that not everybody on the Right opposes negotiating with the PLO...

...Now, however, a significant number of Israelis??not all of them religious fanatics??believe the West Bank is part of their Biblical patrimony...

...Personal ambition may have played a role...

...Now, over 100,000 Israelis reside on the West Bank, and in five years they may have to choose between moving out or staying under Palestinian authority...

...The credibility of their warning has been seriously undermined, though, by the public's remembering that former Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir and his associates said exactly the same thing about withdrawing from the Sinai in exchange for peace with Egypt, and later about pulling out of South Lebanon...

...Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and the moderates contend that the present settlement-in-stages enables Israel to stop the march toward full Palestinian autonomy long before 1998??when the final fate of the West Bank is to be decided??if the Palestinians do not stick to their part of the bargain...

...Thus it has not gone unnoticed here that despite the documents signed in Washington, Arafat has still avoided a clear, unequivocal call to end all forms of terrorism in the commonly understood sense of the word...

...After all the decades of fighting and mutual distrust, Israelis and Palestinians are deeply suspicious of one another's true intentions...

...But the secretly hammered out "Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self-Government" signed in Washington last September 13, by Israel's Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) foreign policy representative Mahmoud Abbas, has turned the theoretical into the concrete...

...the documents signed contain the barest principles of a future deal...

...There is no doubt, some of his acquaintances say, that he wants to go down in history not as the man who unblocked Israel's gridlocked highways (improvement of the country's infrastructure, neglected by Likud, is a proud achievement of the Labor government), but as the man who opened up the road to a comprehensive peace with the Arabs...

...The older generation recalls that the Right even refused to accept the 1947 United Nations resolution establishing the State of Israel in a small portion of mandated Palestine, and demanded an all-or-nothing response to the UN...

...Nervous Israelis admit that manpower on this scale might be required to stop the Muslim fundamentalists from upsetting the Palestinian-Israeli arrangement...

...It was the wide public faith he enjoys that enabled the Labor Party to win a narrow yet clear victory in last year's elections...

...Indeed, comparing the making of peace with Egypt and the initial steps toward reconciliation with the Palestinians is instructive as well as sobering...

...In the case of the return of Sinai, the location of the Israeli-Egyptian border (except for the arbitrated small Taba pocket) was clear...

...The third said that Arafat's position was getting precarious inside the Palestinian camp, and consequently he had become more amenable to a compromise than ever before...

...Three additional independent factors have given the edge to proponents of the agreement with the PLO...

...The second factor is that the overwhelming majority of Israelis, including some Likud leaders, want to get out of the hell hole of Gaza, with its hundreds of thousands of desperate Palestinians...

...the Washington peace negotiations appeared deadlocked...

...How, people ask, can his promises about Jerusalem or about the Golan Heights be trusted...

...Another listed over 200 retired generals, full colonels and ex-heads of the police and security services, including two former chiefs of staff...

...The first found that an agreement with Syria was possible, but only if Israel agreed right away to hand back the entire Golan Heights...

...and Army experts continued to warn, as they had warned Shamir, that military means alone could not put an end to Palestinian violence...

...Accordingly, the debate here has become more focused, reflecting deep-seated concerns and fervent hopes??plus a dash of political opportunism...

...Far more important, other friends say, was an assessment of the situation that Rabin made either at the end of March or in early April: Terrorist violence had reached a new peak, with 15 Israelis killed in a single month...

...Palestinians speak of an outfit that would be bigger than Israel's police force...

...No substantial issues were unresolved when the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Sadat went to the White House in March 1979 to sign the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty...

...For example, what size should the Palestinian police force be...

...Without the perseverance of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, there probably would not be an agreement now...

...On the opposite side, groups of reserve officers have been publishing open letters in support of Rabin, putting the full weight of their military past behind their stand...

...The first, and perhaps strongest of all, is that most Israelis are today genuinely fed up with living under a constant threat of violence, and they believe most of the Palestinians are too...

...Or he could play the PLO-autonomy card, requiring gradual (and, in principle, reversible) withdrawal from the West Bank...

...On the other hand, it has to be kept small enough to prevent its becoming the nucleus of a Palestinian army...

...Nevertheless, given some of his preceding pronouncements, his embracing the outcome of the secret Israeli-PLO talks in Norway has raised eyebrows...

...With Rabin's knowledge if not full approval, Peres, who shared the Army's view from the outset, had been in touch with PLO representatives in Scandinavia and Western Europe...

...Men of this stripe, advocates of the Declaration of Principles reasoned, know what they are talking about and would not play dice with Israel's security...

...The second advised that the local Palestinian leadership negotiating in Washington had neither the will to sign an autonomy agreement nor the power to implement one in the face of rejectionist opposition...

...Having repeatedly demonstrated his genuine loyalty to Rabin despite their longtime political rivalry, he managed to allay the Prime Minister's suspicions of his personal motives...

...Only a couple of thousand Jewish settlers lived in all of Sinai...

...Sharp differences obtain straight down the line: ? Sadat, a victim finally of Muslim militants, was a visionary statesman whose Pharaonic manners, rhetorical and sartorial elegance, and sense of humor inspired trust...

...It was reported that the Chabad organization, sponsored by the Lubavitcher movement in Brooklyn, has channeled $6 million of tax-exempt money into the anti-agreement battle...

...Peace with Cairo left the entire Sinai Peninsula as a huge buffer zone between Egypt and Israel...

...More to the point, he subsequently said he would not negotiate with the PLO directly...

...particularly since its ranks will be drawn from ex-PLO military units...

...he has yet to dissociate himself from that interpretation...

...Israel Debates Its Future by eliahu salpeter Tel Aviv Israelis did not need a historic ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House to set them arguing the pros and cons of a possible peace agreement involving the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...

...PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat's first direct move, just before the outdoor event, was an attempt to sneak changes into the text of the agreement that had already been initialed by both sides...

...Lastly, many Israelis seem convinced that the fundamentalist Hamas movement, which still rejects Israel's right to exist, has been getting more influential every day in the West Bank and may already have won the hearts of the multitude in the Gaza strip at the expense of the PLO...

...There has been much speculation as to why Rabin changed his mind again and again so quickly...

...Likud's refusal, they say, is not motivated solely by a genuine concern for security or by old prejudices, but also by practical electoral considerations: Signs of success with the Palestinians would greatly diminish Likud's chances to defeat Labor in the next elections...

...For years he said that the Palestinians were not engaged in terrorism but in a "legitimate war of national liberation...

...In fact, the critical issue in this context is whether the PLO has the will to use every means necessary against those who continue to carry out terrorist acts in Israel...

...One such full-page ad with 200 signatories contained the names of 94 reserve generals, 38 retired ambassadors, scores of university professors??and six rabbis...

...Only weeks ago, for instance, Rabin stated his conviction that Syria held the key to progress toward peace...

...Meanwhile, the government has been reminding people that Yitzchak Rabin was the Chief of Staff who commanded the Israeli Army in the Six Day War that ended with Israel in possession of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights...

...The most important argument made by opponents of the agreement with the Palestinians is, of course, that it will endanger Israel's security...

...The final decision to act reportedly was made sometime between mid-July and mid-August...

...ranean Sea...

...Sometime in June, Rabin gave Peres the green light to explore the possibilities for an interim deal with the PLO...

...Even the geographic limits of Gaza and Jericho, the two areas that are to achieve self-rule first, have not been delineated...

...Then, just 48 hours prior to the White House handshake, he declared that he had no intention of meeting Arafat face-to-face...

...And while Rabin, for better and for worse, is hardly a Labor edition of the Herut Party's Menachem Begin, if he were not the Prime Minister at this time it is highly unlikely that a majority of Israelis would take the risks a compromise with the PLO entails...

...Now, Israelis can expect that in roughly two years the Palestinian autonomous territory will probably reach within 15 miles of the MediterEliahu Salpeter, a regular NL contributor, is a correspondent for Ha aretz...

...It needs to be large enough to hold Hamas terrorists in check, if not wipe them out altogether...

...He also headed the most prominent Arab country and there wasn't any doubt that he could deliver what he undertook...