Oslo is dead
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
Oslo Is Dead The Peace Process Is Over—Time to Save the Peace By Charles Krauthammer Young Palestinians throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Israelis responding with tear gas and rubber bullets....
...The reckoning is here...
...With final status negotiations, Israel will finally stop giving and the Palestinians and the Arabs will finally, upon signing, have to stop demanding...
...Like the Har Homa area in East Jerusalem, an entirely barren hill between two Jewish neighborhoods...
...These Palestinians throwing stones and hurling firebombs are not living under occupation...
...Arafat made that number up out of thin air...
...Not quite...
...And 90 added to what he already has now would give him practically all of the West Bank and Gaza before negotiations over such sensitive issues as Jerusalem even begin...
...And in return Israel got nothing...
...Ten years ago, the world experienced an outpouring of sympathy and support for these stone-throwing youths because they were living under occupation...
...Terrorist bombs going off in Tel Aviv...
...Three-and-a-half years after Oslo, it is clear that what Rabin and Peres thought they had obtained for their withdrawal was nothing but air...
...Nonetheless, Arafat sent his stone-throwers into the street because he says Israel should have given him not 9, but 30 percent...
...For the American "peace team" in the State Department, however, the process seems to have become life itself, a kind of permanent transition to an ever-receding final settlement, an endless state of negotiation whose permanence is not just necessary, owing to the complexity of the issues, but useful because it puts off the final reckoning...
...They want to throw the Jews into the sea...
...Yes, said the critics, we want to be relieved of the occupation...
...Yitzhak Rabin never did...
...This was as contemptuous and dismissive a way as he could find to say: "Don't bother me with such trivialities...
...The only way that the peace process can be saved is to skip the remaining interim steps and begin final status negotiations now...
...There are many peoples on the planet for whom occupier is a welcome, indeed coveted, vocation...
...These paltry gestures had been made in calibrated response to Israel's withdrawals from West Bank territory and its grants of power to the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat...
...Consider Har Homa, routinely cited as a violation of Oslo...
...The second reason for leaving was to resolve Israel's great dilemma—the contradiction between the democratic and the Jewish nature of Israel posed by the forced incorporation of 2.3 million reluctant, recalcitrant Palestinians...
...And for the Western press to echo this absurd claim is the height of ignorance...
...III From the Israeli point of view the process has proved to be a cruel hoax...
...Jordan's King Hussein, who is nothing if not a realist, is open to the idea of jumping to final status negotiations...
...But to claim that Israel's refusal to do so is a violation of Oslo is the height of chutzpah...
...Worse, the West not only accepts, it echoes this Alice-in-Wonderland it-means-what-I-say-it-means Oslo...
...This is territory and power that Israel will never be able to reclaim...
...And the promise of abolishing the Palestinian means of violence is mocked in the streets every day...
...IV The farce that is Oslo was most dramatically exposed at the Arab League meeting in Cairo, March 30-31, in which the Arabs voted to reinstate their economic boycott on Israel because of Israel's alleged violation of Oslo...
...The Cairo summit illuminated an even odder asymmetry at the heart of the Middle East peace process...
...Israel, like Britain, has an unwritten constitution...
...Otherwise, it is their Palestinian state, sovereign over the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem...
...No Israeli government would ever have acceded to that...
...The argument against the unilateralists was quite obvious: How could you give up such a big prize for nothing...
...Under Oslo, Jerusalem is clearly excluded from whatever restrictions exist on Israeli action in the West Bank and Gaza...
...Unilateral withdrawal, with nothing in return...
...Either they had to be disenfranchised, in which case Israel would cease to be democratic...
...Even Shimon Peres has declared that "there are no limits on building in the Jerusalem area...
...Sometimes, when their guard is down, they show the one with Israel wiped off...
...This is apparently not preemption, merely the presentation of a bargaining position...
...The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has entered a historic, final stage...
...II After the start of the intifada in the late 1980s, but before the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993, there was a curious faction in the raging Israeli debate over the occupied territories...
...These were the unilateralists...
...They are also protesting Israel's latest territorial concession...
...But if the retreat even pauses, all hell breaks loose...
...The Jews have their own state...
...There was a great debate whether or not to grant the Palestinians the essentials of sovereignty over the places they inhabit...
...And that is why he was able to command a majority, if a slim and skeptical majority, for carrying out Oslo...
...Of course, that is what Arafat cannot abide...
...government actions in, say, Los Angeles...
...Their aim is to attack Israeli soldiers and civilians on the Israeli side of the line as a way of protesting Israeli policies elsewhere...
...The Palestinians are frustrated because they want more and faster...
...The better analogy is Mexicans storming the border crossings at Tijuana, attacking American police and civilians with stones and firebombs to protest U.S...
...Which is the origin and meaning of the peace process undertaken in the 1993 Oslo agreements...
...But the retreat is eventually going to stop at a certain point...
...V Oslo is a process in which Israel is rewarded with temporary gifts for its process of retreat...
...The real Oslo, the written Oslo, is dead, as dead as the famous Cairo accords Arafat once signed with the Lebanese government (when Arafat ruled Beirut and the Lebanese were desperate for peace...
...That was the great bargain of Oslo...
...The Left won...
...The very idea of final status negotiations means an end to this endless process...
...As for violence, the last 14 days have shown that all of Arafat's promises about violence were merely provisional...
...It pledged to recognize Israel and change its charter to abolish all references to the destruction of Israel...
...Ten years ago, there was a great debate among Israelis whether or not to hold on, brave the intifada, and rule the Palestinians...
...Why, then, when Netanyahu states his position regarding Israel's ultimate objectives, is this "preemption...
...Yet astonishingly, in most of the Western press and in practically all the chancelleries, the destruction of Oslo is being laid at the feet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...
...Oslo is beyond saving, but peace still has a chance...
...That is why he is resisting final status negotiations so fiercely...
...Free these people and let them rule themselves...
...If Arafat gets 30 percent in each of the three withdrawals, that would give him 90 percent...
...Cairo was not worth the paper it was written on...
...Well, they no longer are...
...Firebombs thrown at Israeli vehicles...
...The only way to save the "peace process" now is to short-circuit it...
...But after all, the Palestinians don't just want to be free and independent...
...Why...
...Well, the future is now...
...The economic normalization that is now being withdrawn—a trade office in Qatar here, a mission to Tunisia there—had been painstakingly granted by the Arabs over the last three and a half years of Oslo...
...Not surprisingly, in the subsequent two weeks, Palestinians have launched three terrorist attacks, leaving dead and dismembered Israelis in Tel Aviv, and dead Palestinians in Gaza, site of two bungled attacks on a schoolbus carrying Jewish children...
...There is one large difference, hardly noticed and hardly mentioned...
...Arafat was never granted veto over where Jews may live in Jerusalem...
...It must...
...The peace process that was supposed to have built confidence between the two sides has instead bred distrust...
...As these scenes of murder and mayhem are endlessly replayed, we are told in solemn voiceover that the Middle East is back to the days of the intifada...
...The alternative to final status negotiations now is not Oslo, but war...
...Exhibit B is the withdrawal that Netanyahu offered on March 7 under the Hebron accords, but that Arafat has rejected as inadequate...
...What kind of double standard is this...
...The State Department, which was deeply involved in drafting the withdrawal protocol as part of the Hebron agreement, quite definitively declared the 9-percent plan fully compliant with Israeli obligations...
...Before Oslo, the PLO had a very clear end and very clear means...
...He permitted Jewish housing to be built in East Jerusalem...
...After a hundred years of war, the major political questions have been settled...
...It is the work of an already freed people trying to storm demarcation lines solemnly established by their own leadership to separate their territory from Israel's...
...Were the Israeli soldiers not to fire back with tear gas and rubber bullets, these mobs would overrun the Israeli areas—in Hebron, for exam-ple—and no doubt kill and expel their Jewish inhabitants...
...That is what the rock-throwing, the firebombing, and the terrorist attacks are about...
...Exhibit A is Har Homa...
...If you want to see what is left of Oslo, look at the rioters in the streets of Ramallah and the dead in the cafes of Tel Aviv...
...And the means were "armed struggle," meaning violence and terrorism against Israel...
...Such a process has no future...
...The end, spelled out repeatedly in the Palestinian National Charter, was the destruction of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian state...
...There was a great debate whether or not to annex the land the Palestinians lived on and create a Greater Israel...
...The single most misunderstood fact about the Middle East today is that of the 2,300,000 Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, 2,250,000 live under the rule of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority...
...The only remaining argument between Israel and the Palestinians is over territory that is largely uwinhabit-ed...
...After three-and-a-half years, Arafat has not changed his charter...
...Those debates are over...
...Otherwise, one cannot understand what the current turmoil is all about...
...Greater Israel is dead...
...The Israelis are shocked to discover that with intifada and terrorism all around, the vaunted peace deal turns out to be nothing more than unilateral retreat...
...So long as it continues to travel toward the Arab position, so long as it continues to give, week by week, month by month, more and more territory and more and more power to the Palestinians, the Arabs will tolerate a few trade missions and Israeli tourists...
...In the eyes of the world, however, when Netanyahu is not actually violating Oslo, he is constantly "preempting" it...
...But as soon as he found that he was not getting what he wanted at the pace he wanted, he was ready to turn the violence back on...
...The battle for the Jordan Valley, the Judean desert, and Jerusalem has begun...
...They freed 98 percent of the Palestinian population and put them under the rule of Yasser Arafat...
...It is a fait accompli,' says Mr...
...Israel is rewarded, in other words, not for the distance it has traveled—it gets no credit for having given—but for the velocity at which it is traveling...
...How to cut the Gordian knot...
...State called it "a serious expansion of Palestinian authority" and "a demonstration of Israel's commitment to the peace process...
...Yet Arafat repeatedly declares that he demands all of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem...
...But when Israel shows its map— Netanyahu's, for example, shows Israel retaining the Jordan Valley as a security buffer—this is called a negation of negotiations...
...But there is nothing in Oslo that says anything about 30 percent—or any percent, for that matter...
...But let Israel pause along the path of giving—or, as Netanyahu has done, begin to outline those things, such as Jerusalem, that Israel will not give up—and the credit Israel thought it had built with the Arabs for the concessions they have already pocketed vanishes...
...Indeed, of all the reasons Israel did finally leave Gaza and the inhabited parts of the West Bank, this was perhaps the most powerful: Israelis could not stand the role of occupier...
...Saeb] Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator...
...Why exactly are these young men throwing stones and firebombs...
...Of the Palestinians who were formerly under Israeli rule, 98 percent now live under Palestinian rule...
...And it pledged solemnly to abandon all violence or threats of violence as a means to achieve its ends...
...Less subtly, as soon as Israel started building around Har Homa in Jerusalem, Arafat began meeting with Hamas leaders and releasing from prison well-known terrorists...
...The question is whether the Clinton administration can give up its cherished peace process—a process that insulated it from having to grapple with the final issues of Jerusalem and bor-ders—and sign on too...
...We know what the other means are...
...Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres decided to take the fateful step of giving up the occupation and establishing the seeds of what would undoubtedly be a Palestinian state in return for the Palestinians' giving up their war against the Jews...
...Similarly, consider this in the Financial Times (Julie Dempsey, March 22-23): "What particularly frustrates the Palestinians is that Mr...
...He thrives in a situation in which Israel is required to be in a constant state of retreat...
...The essence of the Oslo agreements was PLO renunciation of both these ends and these means...
...That was what Rabin offered that the unilateralists never could...
...The promise to change the Palestinian end of destroying Israel is not even on the agenda...
...Nonetheless, the Western sympathy they enjoyed seems not to have abated...
...Specifically, they are protesting Israel's building Jewish housing in East Jerusalem...
...No negotiation can continue on this basis...
...He has made clear in speech after speech that Oslo is just a means to a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, and that if Oslo doesn't get him to what he wants, then he has other means...
...This was a far more serious argument for Israelis than most people have understood...
...Or they would be enfranchised, in which case a demographically overwhelmed Israel would cease to be Jewish...
...All that is unsettled is the size and boundaries of the two entities...
...The moment of truth for all parties, including the American side, is at hand...
...Indeed, when last asked about changing it, he replied that he would do it when Israel adopts a constitution...
...In normal negotiations, you give A and the other fellow gives B. In the Middle East peace process, however, Israel gives A and the Arabs give B—subject to the withdrawal of B if Israel does not proceed to give C, D, and E. Israel receives a quid pro quo not for the actual things it cedes but for the process of ceding...
...Or consider Exhibit B, Netanyahu's announced withdrawal from 9 percent of West Bank territory...
...First, it would relieve the strain on Israel's nerves and the stain on Israel's conscience of occupying a people who obviously did not want to be ruled by Jews...
...Israel gave up Gaza, Qalqilya, Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho, and 80 percent of Hebron...
...Thus the violence you see on your TV screen is not the work of an unjustly occupied people wanting to be free...
...Netanyahu ...has drawn up his own maps and territorial boundaries for the final settlement...
...Yes, unilateral withdrawal solves the democratic vs...
...The Economist, for example, reflecting a view typical of the Western press, charges that "preempting negotiations . . . Netanyahu has declared that he sees the Palestinians as getting no more than half the West Bank...
...They have long ago had their wild ceremonies celebrating their liberation from Israeli occupation...
...state gave them only 9 percent of the relatively empty land remaining in the West Bank rather than the 30 percent Yasser Arafat says he is entitled to...
...Rarely has the peace process been exposed so clearly as a transaction in which what one side gives is real, while the other side gives ephemera...
...But now that there is a halt in the peace process, the normalization of relations that had been granted Israel is to be withdrawn...
...So long as Israel was withdrawing at the correct pace, he was willing to call off his dogs...
...The Palestinians rule themselves...
...It is important to understand that Palestinian violence is coming from a self-governing people...
...Neither is Oslo...
...Now, Arafat would obviously like Israel to disarm itself preemptively before final status negotiations...
...But they ended up being so...
...Why not offer them a deal: Offer them the former want as an inducement for giving up the latter...
...Jewish state problem...
...We are now entering the final battle for the disposition of the largely uninhabited lands between them...
...The conceit of the Israelis and the Americans at the beginning of Oslo was that because Jerusalem and final borders were such difficult issues, they would be kicked into the future...
...These Israelis argued that Israel should simply get up from Gaza and the major cities of the West Bank and leave...
...Why, his own aides have admitted that Arafat's Fatah faction has been organizing the anti-Israel rioting of the last two weeks...
...Rabin and Peres did not set out to be unilateralists...
...Like the so-called Areas B and C, the relatively empty areas that Israel has promised in the Hebron agreement to turn over in part to Palestinian rule in three phased withdrawals...
...A unilateral approach would solve two problems...
...Answer: Because they are unhappy with what is happening outside their liberated zones...
...Not for Jews...
...The Jewish Contributing editor Charles Krauthammer has won the Pulitzer Prize for his weekly newspaper column...
...The Palestinians flaunt their map of Palestine all the time...
...These are not Gandhi's Indians rising up against the Raj...
...This is not a negotiation...
...This is obviously an intolerable situation...
...His intentions have been quite open...
...The location of that point had best be decided now...
...And the Palestinians have their own quasi-state that is destined, as no one doubts, to be sovereign Palestine...
...This is why the Oslo peace process is dying: It has ceased to have any meaning except what Arafat says it means on a given day...
...So long as the retreat is in progress, everyone is happy...
...The endless process of Israel's giving while Arafat collects, complains, demands more, and waves the gun, is now at an end...
...Because Israel pledged to make three withdrawals before the beginning of so-called "final status negotiations" over Jerusalem and borders...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 30
