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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 March - 5 April 2000 Issue No. 475 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 March - 5 April 2000 Issue No. 475
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Why September is the last chance
By John Whitbeck *The Wye II memorandum signed in Sharm Al-Sheikh last September set a new deadline for the achievement of a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace -- 13 September 2000, the seventh anniversary of the day on which the Declaration of Principles was so optimistically signed on the White House lawn.
Even on a road to peace massively potholed by Yitzhak Rabin's principle that "no dates are sacred," this date is of critical importance. President Arafat repeatedly promised his people that the state of Palestine, proclaimed in November 1988, would exist on Palestinian soil on 4 May 1999, the date on which, pursuant to the Oslo accords, the "interim period" ended and the PA, the state's Trojan Horse, ceased to have any legal basis for existence. Binyamin Netanyahu's manipulation of the Israeli electoral calendar and intense American pressure forced him to swallow his solemn words, however, and that long-awaited and potentially historic day passed like any other.
While the Palestinian people are famously long-suffering, their patience is not infinite. President Arafat is now promising his people statehood on Palestinian soil no later than 13 September, and the Israeli prime minister whose election he sought to ensure by not rocking the boat last May is now in power. Furthermore, all of the permanent status issues have been analysed exhaustively, and all ways of dealing with them that could be mutually acceptable are well known to both sides.
If, in these circumstances, a permanent peace agreement cannot be reached within the one-year period fixed by this new deadline, there will be no reason for even the most peace-oriented Palestinians (and other Arabs) to hope that peace can ever be achieved. The alternative to a permanent agreement this September is not likely to be a perpetual "peace process," as the Israeli leadership, with its talk of further "long-term interim accords," seems to assume. It is far more likely to be explosive.
Fortunately, any permanent peace agreement will be vastly shorter and simpler than the horrifically complicated interim agreements produced by the Oslo process, which have been based on the Israeli-imposed principle that any authority not explicitly transferred to the Palestinians was retained by the occupying power. This principle has required mind-numbing detail to regulate an unprecedented and thoroughly unnatural relationship and has generated leopard-spot maps of Areas A, B and C, a proliferation of roadblocks and an intensification of the inconveniences and humiliations inflicted on Palestinians seeking to travel beyond their home towns.
Any permanent peace agreement will necessarily take the form of a treaty between two sovereign states, equal in rights and dignity, with clearly demarcated and internationally recognised borders, each of which will enjoy all of the sovereign rights customarily enjoyed by sovereign states in international law except to the extent that any such sovereign rights may be explicitly limited or pooled pursuant to the treaty.
Documenting a limited number of exceptions to the general rule of a natural relationship between states at peace, and doing so after the final destination of the peace process has been agreed upon, will be far simpler than documenting every aspect of an unnatural relationship between hostile peoples while negotiators on both sides worry about the precedents any interim provision might set for future permanent status negotiations.
What has been lacking until now in the search for a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace is not time or technical ingenuity, but rather political will and statesmanlike vision. If those qualities manifest themselves simultaneously in both leaderships at any point prior to September, there will still be time to achieve peace.
According to the Declaration of Principles, the issues to be covered during permanent status negotiations are "Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations with other neighbours, and other issues of common interest." Economic relations, water rights, citizenship, residence and voting rights, compensation and reparations, archaeological issues, prisoner releases, repatriation of human remains, immunities from prosecution for war crimes, dispute settlement mechanisms and third-state guarantees of treaty obligations are likely to be among the "other issues of common interest."
There are, however, only four key permanent status issues with the potential to be deal-breakers -- Jerusalem, refugees, borders and settlements. If agreements can be reached on all these, peace is unlikely to stumble at any other hurdle. Yet there will never be a permanent peace without agreement on all four of these issues, and the gaps in the publicly expressed positions of both sides on all of them remain massive and seemingly unbridgeable.
The Palestinian positions on all these key issues are clear and simple. They rely steadfastly on "international legitimacy," international law and UN resolutions -- Security Council Resolution 242 with respect to Jerusalem and borders, General Assembly Resolution 194 with respect to refugees and the Fourth Geneva Convention with respect to settlements. If honoured, international law and the relevant UN resolutions would require Israel's withdrawal to its pre-June 1967 borders, the return of all Palestinian refugees and displaced persons to their homes and property (or compensation if they choose not to return), the dismantling of all settlements on Palestinian land occupied in 1967 and the departure of all settlers.
With an exceptionally weak hand to play in terms of military strength and power politics, Palestinians have long drawn comfort from their certainty that international law is on their side -- and it is on their side, overwhelmingly so. The decisions to enter into the Declaration of Principles and its various follow-up agreements reflect a mature acceptance of the brutal truth: that a strong position under international law does not alone ensure even the slightest measure of justice. No one, however, should assume that the extreme flexibility the Palestinian leadership has demonstrated in interim status negotiations means that it will relinquish any of the Palestinian people's fundamental human rights or rights under international law in permanent status negotiations.
The Israeli positions on all these key issues are less clear. Whatever the prime minister's name, successive sets of "red lines" have laid down markers as to what Israel would not accept, but any affirmative vision of what these leaders might wish permanent status to actually look like has been decidedly murky. Fragile coalition politics may make flexibility difficult even if Prime Minister Barak has the requisite political will and statesmanlike vision, but the promise of a referendum on any Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement opens an opportunity for courageous leadership.
While, strictly speaking, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, bridging the massive gaps on each of these key issues could be made easier by reaching prior, tentative agreements on one or more of the others, and the order of addressing and resolving such issues could itself be important in reaching a resolution of all of them.
Settlements would be a good place to start. The entire atmosphere of negotiations would be transformed if the Palestinian leadership were to announce that, in the context of Israel's acceptance as its permanent borders of its internationally recognised borders as they existed prior to 1967, Palestine could accept that all settlers currently living in Palestine, as well as their descendants, would have a right of permanent residence in Palestine, that no settlers would be compelled to move, that no settler homes would be demolished and that no settlements would be dismantled. Those settlers choosing to remain in Palestine would be legal residents of a foreign state, subject to Palestinian laws, not discriminated against in any way but with no special preferential rights arising out of their race, religion or citizenship and with no foreign army of occupation on Palestinian soil. The model for their status would be the status of citizens of one European Union state resident in another European Union state.
The problem of settlers and settlements will not be resolved by a mixture of annexations, forced expulsions and bulldozers but by a legal, psychological and semantic transformation of the facts on the ground. Settlers and settlements would cease to exist, to be replaced by foreign residents of Palestine; towns and residential compounds which would initially be all-Jewish could become mixed or predominantly Arab over time. Significantly, decisions to stay or to leave would be up to each individual's personal choice, with obvious benefits on both the moral and the political levels, as well as on the level of the compensation (if any) which might be payable to those choosing, of their own free will, to leave.
Conceptually, Palestinians should not have a problem with Jews living in the state of Palestine, or even being citizens of Palestine should they so wish. A million Palestinians live in and are citizens of Israel. Their problem should be with the special, discriminatory, extraterritorial rights which settlers currently enjoy and with the foreign army of occupation on Palestinian soil. In the context of the warm and open peace of which such a solution to the settlement issue would constitute an essential component, neither would be necessary.
On a purely practical level, it should be difficult for Palestinians to believe that more current settlers would ever leave Palestinian soil by being expelled or dragged away by the Israeli army than would leave of their own free will if granted the right to stay in circumstances which many would deem less attractive than other alternatives.
The border issue is linked to the settlement issue; security arrangements and economic relations will interact significantly with both. Since it would be clearly in the interests of both states, it should be possible to agree that Palestine would be fully and permanently demilitarized, with no persons other than Palestinian police permitted to bear arms on its territory, and that Israel and Palestine would constitute a single economic unit, with the free, non-discriminatory movement of people and products between and within them being a fundamental principle, and with the economic relations between the member states of the European Union serving as the model for the economic relations between Israel and Palestine.
If settlements, security arrangements and economic relations were dealt with in such an open and non-threatening way, then the precise placement of borders would no longer be such a contentious issue, and the pre-1967 borders -- subject only to truly minor and reciprocal adjustments and special arrangements for Jerusalem -- might well be acceptable to most Israelis. Certainly, both the rational and the emotional foundations for Israel to insist on annexing significant portions of the meager 22 per cent of historic Palestine not transformed into Israel in 1948 would be greatly weakened.
With these issues resolved, the moment might be ripe to confront the second most difficult issue -- refugees. By then, Israel should no longer dispute the right of all Palestinian citizens, including all refugees and displaced persons, to live in the state of Palestine. The essential next step would be for Israel to comprehend and accept the enormous moral significance, for Palestinians, of Israel accepting the right of refugees to return to their homes or receive compensation, enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and serving as the refugees' sustaining source of hope for half a century.
The modalities, including numbers and timing, of the exercise of this right of return with respect to what is now Israel would have to be negotiated, and the numbers admitted each year might be modest, but the principle would have to be accepted by Israel with no limitation on the time period during which such right of return would be applicable. Even if the hopes and dreams of all refugees cannot in the end be realised, the human dignity of all refugees would be confirmed and those hopes and dreams would at least be kept alive.
At the end of the road lies the core conundrum in the search for Middle East peace -- the status of Jerusalem, the issue so intractable, and with such a tight grip on hearts and minds, that it is widely assumed that no solution to it can ever be found. However, polls have shown far greater flexibility among the Israeli and Palestinian publics than among their respective politicians, and solutions do exist.
In seeking a solution to the status of Jerusalem, it is essential to distinguish between sovereignty and municipal administration. Sovereignty is an intensely emotional issue. Municipal administration is not. (Few Israelis are enthusiastic about administering Palestinians, either in Jerusalem or elsewhere.) It would therefore be most productive for negotiators to focus initially on agreeing upon administrative structures for a physically undivided, fully demilitarised city. This would entail delineating a certain number of local districts, both Jewish and Arab, to whose elected district councils as many aspects of municipal governance as possible would be devolved, and reserving for coordination by an umbrella municipal council those major matters which could only be dealt with efficiently at a city-wide level.
The fundamental principle would be that, to the maximum degree possible, Israeli citizens in Jerusalem should be under Israeli administration and Palestinian citizens in Jerusalem should be under Palestinian administration. Since there are currently no integrated neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, delineating the districts should present no practical problems, and apportioning authorities between the district councils and the umbrella municipal council should be relatively non-contentious.
If agreement on the administrative aspects of the future of Jerusalem could be reached, Israelis might then recognise that the aspects of the Jerusalem issue with a direct effect on people's lives have been resolved to the satisfaction of both sides and that "sovereignty" (essentially the state-level equivalent of title or ownership) is fundamentally a symbolic and psychological problem that should not be permitted, alone, to prevent peace.
The final act in achieving the "historic reconciliation" that is the stated goal of the Declaration of Principles could then open with a Palestinian offer to Israel along the following lines: "We seek a warm and open peace and a physically open Jerusalem with free and secure access to the entire city for all Israelis and all Palestinians. In this context, Palestine could accept either to divide sovereignty over the city, with each state possessing sovereignty in its own municipal districts, or to share sovereignty over a united Jerusalem as a 'condominium' which would be the one and indivisible capital of our two sovereign states. We invite Israel to choose, knowing that neither Palestinians nor the Arab and Muslim worlds could ever accept exclusive Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and that the Holy City, like the Holy Land, can and must be shared."
All who sincerely seek peace in the Middle East must hope that such a moment will be reached by September and that, if it is, Israel will choose wisely. By doing so, it will make possible a just and durable peace of genuine reconciliation, cooperation and friendship.
* The writer is an international lawyer who writes frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
