14 - 20 June 2001
Issue No.538
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 June 2001 Issue No.538 |
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The American connection
Yasser Arafat has accepted a US brokered cease-fire agreement. Now he will have to accept the judgement of his people, writes Graham Usher from Jerusalem
After five days of pressured diplomacy -- and a near abandonment of the task -- at around midnight on Tuesday CIA Director George Tenet finally got what he came for. "President Yasser Arafat and George Tenet arrived at an agreement on the US proposal [for a cease-fire] on the basis of recommendations from the Mitchell report," announced Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu-Rudeineh after the Palestinian leader's last meeting with Tenet in Ramallah.
It is not yet clear what forced Arafat to accept a proposal all are aware runs counter to everything the Palestinians' eight-month Intifada was supposedly about. But it appears to boil down to the age-old Arab fear of losing the American connection.
The Palestinians had three main objections to Tenet's cease-fire plan. The first was the demand for an absolute cessation of "violence" prior to any movement by Israel to lift its blockades on the occupied territories or withdraw its forces to positions occupied before the outbreak of the uprising on 28 September.
The second was preservation of the so-called "security zones" Israel has created during the Intifada to separate Palestinians communities and Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. Third -- and most controversially -- the insistence that the PA "immediately" arrests some 20 Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists from a list supplied by Israel.
"These are Israeli demands," commented one PA official, but it was Tenet who refused to budge from them. This became clear to the Palestinians after the collapse of an acrimonious meeting between Israeli and PA security officials in Jerusalem on Monday.
From that moment on, enormous pressure was exerted by the US, the European Union and several Arab states to impress on Arafat that Tenet's proposal was a take-it-or-leave-it document, with the consequences of leaving it too dire to contemplate. Arafat's room for manoeuvre narrowed further on Tuesday when an "unenthusiastic" Ariel Sharon "accepted [Tenet's] plan to see whether it can lead to a reduction of violence."
But the last nail came on Tuesday when Tenet reportedly threatened to leave the region amid a torrent of Israeli press leaks that he held Arafat responsible for the failure of his mission. Faced with this abandonment, Arafat hauled Tenet back to the meeting in Ramallah and agreed to Tenet's proposal "with reservations". The US responded with all the grace of a colonial governor. "The US is pleased a work-plan [for the cease-fire] has been agreed by both sides," said a State Department official yesterday.
The nuts and bolts of the "work-plan" were hammered together yesterday in a security meeting between Israel and the PA. This will be followed by visits to Israel and the occupied territories by EU policy representative Javier Solana and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who on Tuesday vowed to "seize this fleeting opportunity" for peace.
Arafat is also hoping the two men "who had exerted pressure on him to declare the cease-fire will exert the same pressure on Israel to remove the causes of the violence or at least respect in practice the other parts of the Mitchell report," said Palestinian political analyst Ghassan Khatib.
But Arafat's real problem is how to sell the cease-fire to his people. The measure of this task was demonstrated not only by the 1,000 or so Palestinians -- from all factions -- who surrounded his Ramallah headquarters on Tuesday night under the banner of "Yes to the Intifada, No to the cease-fire". The difficulties were further underlined by veiled threats from Hamas leaders that should the PA arrest their men under the CIA's dictate they would "again leave Arafat and strike Israel".
Perhaps the greatest challenge is Palestinian public opinion, the current temper of which was starkly revealed in a poll released on 12 June by Birzeit University. The poll found 78 per cent support continuing the Intifada, 71 per cent are against any ending of the uprising in return for Mitchell's recommendation that Israel freeze all settlement construction and 74 per cent support suicide operations.
It also found that Arafat's Fatah movement had slumped to a popularity rating of 23 per cent while the combined popularity of Hamas and Islamic Jihad had grown to 24 per cent.
Arafat's sole succour was that his own standing in Palestinian eyes had increased, registering a 58 per cent positive rating for his performance in the Intifada. He will need every ounce of that popularity to explain how the terms of a CIA cease-fire square with the national aspirations of his people and the death, in eight months of resistance, of nearly 500 of them.
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