http://www.salam.org/palestine/wye_bother_summit.html
The Wye Bother Summit
By Phyllis Bennis
10/25/1998
It's hard not to wonder whether it
really matters. Yes the stakes are high. Peace in the Middle
East, after all, or the threat of new violence or war. But still.
It's hard not to wonder whether, despite the intense and personal
involvement of President Clinton, King Hussein, Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, CIA director George Tenet and others,
the Wye summit ever really held any potential to move the parties
closer to peace in the
region.
Why? The basis for pessimism rests
squarely in the significance, or lack thereof, of the main
negotiating items on the table. For the Palestinians, a
fiercely-resisted 13% redeployment of Israeli troops. For Israel,
a so-far unobtainable Palestinian commitment to security. There
are a host of secondary items, but those are the key issues. The
problem is that even the most comprehensive agreement on those
fundamental issues simply won't provide a serious foundation for
the so-called final status talks that are to follow, and are
supposed to shape a permanent, comprehensive and lasting peace.
For months, press accounts have been
filled with breathless will-they/won't-they accounts of the 13%
Israeli redeployment. Over and over we have heard reporters and
columnists remind us that with that additional 13%, the
Palestinians would have "full or partial" control of
40% of the West Bank. That's not bad for an interim period, one
might think. The problem is, it's not true. As of today, the
Palestinians have full authority in just 3% of their land. On
another 27%, yes, they share "partial" control with
Israel, but what does that really look like on the ground? The
Palestinian Authority, in that 27% (called Area B) is allowed to
run the schools, pick up the garbage, deliver the mail. But
Israel retains control of security, which means Israeli troops
remain on patrol on the roads, surround the scattered pockets of
Palestinian-run land with military checkpoints, impose closures,
prevent the movement of Palestinians within or between towns.
The now-famous 13% will come out of the
70% of West Bank land (Area C) still fully under Israeli
occupation. But only 1% will move to the category of full
Palestinian control. The other 12% will be shifted to the
"shared" Area B. So the few Palestinians living there
(very few - the area is largely empty) will have the new right to
their own garbage collection and post office, but Israeli control
of the roads and checkpoints will remain unchanged. And the land
under real Palestinian authority will grow only from the current
3% to a whopping 4%. Yasir Arafat's acceptance of the
U.S.-initiated 13% proposal is hardly something most Palestinians
will see as a significant move towards ending Israeli occupation.
As to Israel's demand for Palestinian
security guarantees, what is astonishing is Israel's success in
redefining security. Traditional diplomatic agreements deal with
national security, involving respecting borders, preventing
invasion or military assault. In its early years those were
exactly Israel's security concerns. But now, as the only nuclear
state and the most powerful military and economic country in the
region, Israel has changed its tune. Over the last several years,
Israel has redefined the security it demands from the
Palestinians to mean absolute personal safety for every
individual Israeli. No government, of course, no matter how
powerful, can provide such a guarantee. Israel itself was unable
to prevent all individual attacks or acts of terrorism within its
borders or in the Palestinian territories when its occupation was
absolute. Even the U.S. could not make such a guarantee to the
residents of Oklahoma City. So how realistic is it to expect the
Palestinian Authority, with its limited, derivative jurisdiction,
to be able to prevent every act of terror by desperate, hopeless
individuals?
In fact it isn't realistic at all.
Certainly there are specific things that can be negotiated,
certain commitments the Palestinians can make. But they cannot
provide a personal safety shield to every Israeli. And the
specific pledges being asked of them threaten to further erode
the PA's already shaky commitment to democracy. Israel demands,
for example, that the PA do what Israel's military occupation
forces have done for years, and continue to do in most of the
West Bank and much of Gaza: arrest hundreds or thousands of
Palestinians solely based on their claimed association with the
Islamist organization Hamas, regardless of any involvement in
military or terrorist attacks. In the United States, our federal
courts have ruled for almost 50 years that exactly this kind of
arrest based on political association is unconstitutional.
And bringing in the CIA to work with the
Palestinian security agencies in determining who should be
arrested, who released from prison, is no answer. Given the
Agency's own no-longer-secret history of aiding, or at least
looking the other way, while CIA-backed authorities massively and
violently shred the human rights of civilian populations from
Chile to the Shah's Iran, we can hardly have confidence that
Tenet's spooks will encourage stronger respect for democracy in
their junior counterparts.
Israel also calls on the Palestinian
Authority to dismantle the entire political apparatus of Hamas.
The problem is that aside from its separate military wing, which
has indeed carried out horrifying terrorist attacks but which
remains deeply hidden underground, Hamas provides a significant
part of the already-insufficient social welfare system available
to Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Israel won't, the PA can't,
and even the under-funded United Nations no longer can provide
schools, clinics, hospitals, even food supplements for the
impoverished Palestinian population. That leaves only Hamas,
unfortunately, to fill a large part of the void. Do Israeli
leaders really believe that closing mosque-run schools, thereby
throwing thousands of angry young people out onto the streets
with nothing to do, will improve their own security?
President Clinton, one White House
official told reporters, thinks that "you've got capital,
you've got to use it." But in this case using capital means
exerting pressure -real pressure- on Israel, the overwhelmingly
dominant side of the Israel-Palestinian equation. Israel is
Washington's closest ally, and the largest recipient in the world
of U.S. aid (close to $4 billion each year). Unfortunately,
however, the weakened and electorally-driven Clinton
administration has chosen not to use its enormous capital -either
financial or political- to exert any serious pressure on Israel.
Without that pressure, the claimed potential of the Oslo process
to bring a lasting peace to the region will not happen.
The Wye talks created an air of urgency.
But unfortunately it reflects the desperation of a photo-op
driven presidency, not the urgency of knowing that the key to
real and lasting peace might well be at hand. The stakes are high
-- but the potential of this summit never matched those stakes.
Wye bother, unfortunately, sounds like the right answer.
Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow
specializing in Middle East issues at the Institute for Policy
Studies. This article first appeared in the Baltimore Sun,
25 October 1998.
