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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 January 2000 Issue No. 465 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 January 2000 Issue No. 465
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Intertwining tracks
By Graham UsherFor a man who has vowed that he has no desire to play off one track of the peace process against another, Ehud Barak made a pretty poor showing this week. For no sooner had US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright informed him on Monday that Syria would not be attending the third round of talks scheduled for this week in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, than did the Israeli leader rush to a late-night meeting with Yasser Arafat.
And just to make sure that everyone -- but especially the Syrians -- got the message, one of Israel's leading political commentators, Shimon Schiffer, suddenly remembered a comment Barak had "recently" made to him.
"I intend to run full speed ahead on the Palestinian track," Schiffer quoted the prime minister as saying in Yediot Aharonot on Tuesday, "if I see that [Syria's President Hafez] Assad is not capable of making the necessary decisions".
Not that Barak has any intention of running "full speed" on any track, and least of all the Palestinian. On the contrary, the whole point of his soiree with Arafat was to put the Palestinian negotiations on the lowest of back-burners. Following his unilateral decision to delay by three weeks the third phase of Israel's latest West Bank redeployment (see p.4), Barak reportedly spent much of Monday's meeting urging the Palestinian leader to delay by two months the deadline for drafting a Framework Agreement on Oslo's final status issues of Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders and water. Arafat apparently refused, arguing instead for accelerated talks on the agreement to meet the deadline of 15 February as set down by the September 1999 Wye Agreement. Arafat is expected to make a similar plea when he meets today with President Clinton in Washington.
Tactically, Arafat is probably right to reject this latest instance of Israel's unholy attitude to "sacred dates". For Barak's desire to delay both the redeployment and the Framework Agreement has less to do with the slow pace of negotiations with the Palestinians than with the appraisal that -- rhetoric to the contrary -- it is going to be difficult, if not impossible, to make simultaneous progress on both the Syrian and the Palestinian tracks. This was brought home to the Israeli leader when a Syrian official announced on Tuesday that there would be no resumption of talks in the US or anywhere else without "a written Israeli commitment for a full withdrawal from the Golan [Heights] to 4 June 1967 lines". Israel, predictably, "refused to respond to the report from Damascus".
But Barak is surely aware that sooner or later he will have to respond. The Syrians insist that they only agreed to resume negotiations "from the point they had stopped" after receiving a letter from Clinton in December that Barak had agreed that the future border would be based on 4 June 1967 lines. If the Syrians were prepared to forego a public Israeli statement to this effect when the talks opened in Washington on 15 December, they certainly expected one during the first substantive rounds held at Shepherdstown earlier this month. What they got instead was endless procedural wrangles from the Israelis that negotiations on security arrangements and normalisation should precede any discussion or decision on borders.
Syrian anger was compounded by the almost certainly government-inspired leak to Israel's Haaretz newspaper on 13 January of the "working paper" the Americans had presented to the two sides in Shepherdstown. Presented as a "draft peace treaty", the paper outlines the Syrian position that the future "boundary" will be "based on the 4 June 1967 line" and the Israeli position that it must take into account the "security and other vital interests" as well as "legal considerations of both sides".
The Syrians may have accepted the paper in closed session as a "tool" to move the negotiations forward. But its publication in the Israeli press was clearly intended to imply -- at least to the Israeli electorate -- that the future border was still up for negotiation. And all are aware that the 4 June 1967 line has long been non-negotiable as far as Damascus is concerned. On the contrary, Israel's commitment to this border is what enables the negotiations on security, normalisation and water to take place.
Since he has not ruled out a withdrawal to 1967 lines, it must be assumed that Barak is aware of this. There are also faint signs that he has finally begun to prepare Israeli public opinion for the "painful territorial price" that will accrue from any peace treaty with Syria and Lebanon. Prior to the present impasse he told his cabinet that he "intended to give the Syrians more [in the next round of talks] than they received" in the last round, though it was still unclear whether this meant a clear commitment to the 1967 lines. Perhaps more significantly, Haaretz reported on Tuesday that Barak had instructed Israel's various military chiefs to draw up maps for the negotiations based on 4 June 1967 lines.
In other words, the time is fast approaching for Barak to address publicly the critical question on which a peace deal with Syria and Lebanon hinges. And if -- as most Israeli analysts believe -- his answer is going to be 'yes' to Israel's full withdrawal from the Golan Heights, the last thing Barak would want distracting his people is a "Framework Agreement" addressing those other "painful" questions that are, or at least should be, non-negotiable as far as the Palestinians are concerned -- such as the demand that Jerusalem (and not Abu Dis) will be the future capital of the Palestinian state and that any solution to the plight of Palestinian refugees must be grounded on the international legality of their right to return to their homes in what was Mandate Palestine but is now Israel.
