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Ha'aretz, February 4, 1999
Burying the Diplomatic Accord
Ha'aretz Editorial
This week saw the expiration of the carefully
calibrated timetable for implementation of the Wye
accord. According to the schedule stipulated in
the agreement, the Palestinians were supposed to
have been given control of 13.1 percent of the
West Bank and discussions on a final settlement
were supposed to have produced initial proposals
on how to proceed. In practice, next to nothing
has been done. True, Israel did evacuate 2 percent
of the territory under its control, but then it
decided to suspend the process on the grounds that
the Palestinians had not fulfilled their side of
the agreement.
According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
the Palestinians have not yet collected the
illegal arms held by the population under their
control, their war on terrorism is inadequate, and
they have unilaterally declared their intention to
proclaim an independent state this May 4, upon the
conclusion of the interim agreement within the
framework of the Oslo process. The Palestinians,
for their part, cite a list of Israeli violations,
including postponement of the implementation of
the "safe passage" routes between the West Bank
and Gaza, the ongoing refusal to approve the
building of a seaport in Gaza, continued building
in the settlements, a delay in the release of
prisoners and the freeze on the agreed West Bank
pullbacks.
In the light of this array of mutual complaints,
it is safe to state that the Wye accord, which was
supposed to have extricated the process from its
18-month impasse, has instead thrown up new
barriers to progress. On the Israeli side, the
prime minister has proved that he did not affix
his signature to the agreement in good faith, but
did so in order to allay public criticism of his
policy and deflect U.S. pressure. However, when he
discovered that his continued implementation of
the accord might topple his government, he
reversed himself and effectively shelved the
document. His backtracking, though, was to no
avail, as the government fell anyway. The public
will have to decide in another three months
whether it is willing to risk continued stalemate
and concomitant further erosion, on a substantial
scale, in Israel's international standing,
particularly in the United States.
At the same time, the freeze in the process has
played into the hands of Palestinian Authority
Chairman Yasser Arafat. For the first time in the
history of the Palestinian struggle, he has been
invited to pay a state visit to Washington, where
he will be the recipient of generous U.S. aid. The
idea of the establishment of a Palestinian state
is no longer perceived as a regional threat, even
by the United States, and tomorrow Arafat is
scheduled to meet with President Bill Clinton
again.
Israel's constantly declining status, and its
security fears, should have prompted the
government to resuscitate the peace process even
during an election campaign. But in place of
policy, the prime minister is - as usual -
offering election tactics designed to placate the
right-wing extremists. The heavy pressure Israel's
friends exerted in the United States in the hope
of scuttling the Clinton-Arafat meeting and the
fact that Israel's ambassador to Washington
absented himself from a dinner held in Arafat's
honor are striking demonstrations of Israel's
unrelenting effort to undermine relations with the
Palestinians.
More than five years after the signing of the Oslo
accord, Netanyahu has turned Israeli-Palestinian
relations and the entire peace process back into a
zero-sum game. He cannot prove his claim that the
Wye accord is better than the Oslo accord because
he is not implementing it, nor can he attribute
the current quiet to an unimplemented agreement.
It is not yet too late to carry out the agreement,
but there is no reason to expect that the prime
minister will respect even his own signature.
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