(photo: AP)

Netanyahu's gain

News Analysis by Graham Usher

It was always likely the marathon negotiations last week at Wye Mills in Maryland would result in some sort of agreement to break the 19-month impasse in the Oslo peace process. Given the amount of political capital President Clinton had invested in a successful outcome -- and the extent to which the Palestinian leadership had hitched all on the limited powers of his ailing administration to haul Binyamin Netanyahu into line -- it was also predictable that any deal would serve Israeli interests far more than it would Palestinian.

Yet now the dust has settled on the theatrical walk-outs, the last minute brinkmanship to extract the release of Jonathan Pollard and Azzam Azzam and the razzmatazz of the signing ceremony (which doubled as a congressional campaign rally for the Democratic Party), Palestinian and Israeli commentators can peruse the text of the agreement and weigh what has been gained and what lost.

For elements of the settler movement in the occupied territories what has been forfeited is nothing less than their biblical claim to the "Jewish homeland" of Judea and Samaria. The cries of "treason" and settler protests mounted throughout the West Bank on 25 October were at once felt and orchestrated. But their ability to thwart the agreement should not be exaggerated. Backed by his negotiating team of Nathan Sharansky, Yitzak Mordechai and, above all, Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu will probably be able to steer the agreement past any opponents in his cabinet. Given the support of the Labour-led opposition -- together with an approval rating of 75 percent among Israelis -- the endorsement by the Knesset was a foregone conclusion.

This is because Netanyahu has not only skillfully placed himself at the head of the Israeli political consensus on Oslo (and probably won himself a second mandate at the next Israeli elections). Even more remarkably, at Wye he gained American, European and Palestinian covenant for that consensus. Whatever the eventual outcome of Oslo's final status negotiations, their basic perimeters are likely to be those adumbrated by Netanyahu at Wye.

Netanyahu's principle political achievement has been to replace the Madrid formula of "land for peace" with the exclusively Israeli notion of "land for (Israel's) security", including the personal security of the 350,000 Jewish settlers that reside in the occupied territories. This notion can be seen in the genealogy of both the location and the amount of territory Israel agreed to "yield" at Wye.

In November 1997, Sharon and Mordechai drew up maps based on Israel's "vital national and security interests" which presaged an eventual territorial dispensation that would leave around 60 per cent of the West Bank under Israel's perpetual control. Over the next year, Netanyahu worked assiduously to whittle down the territorial extent of any further redeployments to fit the contours of those maps.

In April this year -- via the "American initiative" -- he won Arafat's acceptance of a first and second redeployment of 13 percent. In September, this transfer was further diminished via the ingenious ruse of turning three percent of this into a "nature reserve", where the Israeli army will stay put but where Palestinian construction will be prohibited. In Washington, Netanyahu won Palestinian approval not only for this formula but also that "discussions" on the putative third redeployment be devolved to a joint committee to run concurrently with the final status talks.

The result is that the Palestinian Authority (PA) will enter these negotiations with around 18 percent of the West Bank under its full control and around 20 percent under its "civilian" control but with no timetable for the implementation of the third redeployment. If there is to be one, it will now almost certainly be symbolic or collapsed into Oslo's final status talks on borders.

Netanyahu's second achievement has been to install "reciprocity" as the very motor of the Oslo process. In the agreement, Israel's redeployment will have three phases spread over 12 weeks, but with each phase conditioned on the PA undertaking "concrete and verifiable" security measures. Authored and monitored by the CIA, these include tangible actions such as the arrest and imprisonment of 30 Palestinians wanted by the Israelis and wholly intangible stipulations such as "preventing (anti-Israeli) incitement". Should the PA not perform these duties to Netanyahu's satisfaction, Israel is not only empowered by the agreement to halt the redeployment; it has Arafat's signature permitting it to do so.

Yet if the Israeli driven notions of Israel's security and reciprocity govern the redeployments, Netanyahu's other gains are revealed on matters where the agreement is largely silent. In April 1997, the PA suspended the negotiations in protest at Israel's decision to build the Har Homa settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. The Wye agreement says nothing about Har Homa, and next to nothing about the 8,000 settlement units currently under construction not just in Jerusalem but also in the West Bank and Gaza.

On the contrary, at the signing ceremony President Clinton confirmed that he would request Congress to authorise some $500 million to Israel to offset the "costs" of the further redeployments. This money will be used to accelerate the building of some 33 by-pass roads whose purpose has been to integrate the settlements into Israel proper and to separate the north and south West Bank from each other and both from Jerusalem. The fact that the PA has apparently won Netanyahu's agreement to open an airport and two "safe passage" corridors between Gaza and the West Bank is a small price to pay for such massive American investment in Israel's settlement programme.

Israel's final achievement was intimated by Clinton at the agreement's signing ceremony in Washington. "The forces of hate," he warned, "will now seek to extract a price from both sides." Together with Arafat's vow that the Palestinians will never again resort to "violence and confrontation", this essentially means that the conflict as viewed today is no longer between Israel and Palestinians over the land Israel occupied in 1967, but between the PA and those other Palestinians who believe resistance is legitimate so long as the occupation is in place, chief among them, the Islamist movement, Hamas.

While details of the CIA-PA "security plan" remain murky (and are likely to stay that way), there are real fears that its object is to eliminate Hamas not only as an underground militia, but also as a social and political movement within Palestinian society at large. If so, Hamas will have an almost existential interest in wrecking the plan and the evolving security alliance of Israel, the PA and the CIA that underwrites it. The surest way to do this would be to hit Israeli targets, not just in the occupied territories, but probably also in the heart of Israel's cities. Even if Hamas shows restraint, the social impact of the plan will be to strengthen the PA's militarist rule at the general expense of Palestinians civil, political and human rights.

The alternative to such bleak scenarios is for Palestinians to renew their national struggle against the surrenderist solutions proffered by the Wye agreement. Given the realities of Oslo and the PA, however, the only means to do this (short of pitching Palestinian society into full-scale internecine strife) is by waging a democratic struggle against a leadership that have given such solutions their blessing. For Palestinian politicians like MK (member of the Knesset) Azmi Bishara, the two struggles have long since ceased to be distinct. Speaking before the Wye agreement was signed, his prognosis takes on an even greater urgency now it is signed:

"I still believe the primary struggle is the national struggle against Israel, especially over settlements but also over Jerusalem, the prisoners, the refugees, land and water -- the national issues. But if this struggle is to really pressure Israel and mobilise Palestinian opinion behind it, it must be realised through democratic institutions. Democratic institutions are not only ends in themselves; they are vital and pragmatic means to reactivate Palestinian nationalism. Ours is one of the few national struggles in the third world where sovereignty is not the condition for democracy, but democracy is the condition for sovereignty. And, because Palestinians do not have sovereignty over the land, the only way we can express our sovereignty is through our national institutions. We have to find some way of again expressing the people's will to the outside world, and the best way to do this is to institutionalise democracy."