Part 3: Israel’s Share
For domestic American reasons another peace conference of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization took place in and near Washington: President Clinton and the U.S. State Department had (and still have) a strong interest in its success. They sincerely believe that success is indeed possible if enough persuasion and persistance are applied. Time will show how mistaken they are.
The purpose of the conferencee was to get the stalled Oslo peace agreement between the P.L.O. and Israel back on track. It was conceived and initiated in 1993 by Israel’s foreign minister at the time Shimon Peres, and his deputy Dr. Yossi Beilin. Negotiated in secrecy in a neutral country with the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) and signed at the White House with public pomp, President Clinton blessing the promising Israeli brainchild and its adoption by P.L.O. chairman Yasser Arafat. The main issues the agreement was meant to solve were the recognition of Israel’s legitimacy by the P.L.O., and the revocation by its Supreme Council of its constitutional vow to make an end of Israel as a sovereign state. This in return for being granted autonomy for the Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip and gradually in the Arab populated West-Jordan areas. The basic principle of the agreement - as the Israeli negotiators conceived it - was the exchange of “territory for peace” as a transition to a “New Middle East”. Details of implementation in stages, referred to as “the peace process” were left for further negotiations in a frame of hope and goodwill on both sides.
When the news was published, conflicting shock waves swept over Israel’s public and the political parties and split them into two camps. The Labor Parties and Liberals (lumped together by the media as “the Left”), welcomed the Oslo agreement as the dawn of “a new era” and ending “a century of conflict”. When doubts, anguish and angry objections among the public e gained momentum, prime minister Rabin stated that his government had a clear mandate for concluding a peace treaty and a majority of the electorate and the Knesset (parliament) backed him.
But Knesset members of the opposition (“the Right”) and a vocal section of the public regarded (and still regard) eventual autonomy of the mainly Arab populated area at one point as close as about ten miles from Israel’s Mediterranean coast a threat to Israel’s security. The religious Jewish minority, about 20 per cent of the electorate, vehemently denounces the withdrawal from any West Jordan territory as no less than “a sacrilegious and intolerable surrender of Eretz Israel”, the hallowed homeland of Ancient Israel.
The dispute became shrill and passionate. Prime Minister Rabin, as a former chief-of-staff well aware of the security risks, had been converted by his foreign minister Peres to what was called a “political solution” as the only viable option for peace. Peres is to this day convinced that trading “land for peace” and granting the Arabs almost unrestricted autonomy will end the protracted conflict. It would usher in a new era of peaceful coexistence with the nearby Arabs not only in Israel, eventually also with all the neighbouring Arab states in the Middle East, and the prospect of fast economic growth.
But the agitation in Israel persisted. Mass demonstrations and counter-demonstrations were held by both sides. The supporters of the Oslo agreement – the “Peace Camp” – called the conscientious objectors “enemies of peace”. These requited by comparing the supporters “irresponsible appeasers” and compared them to the British and French prime ministers in Munich in 1938. The objectors also pointed out that the Rabin government could get Knesset approval for Oslo only with the vote of the Arab parties and that it had no Jewish majority and hence no “clear mandate”, as Rabin asserted. In 1994 and 1995 Rabin and Peres , undismayed by strong opposition at home, agreed with Arafat on successive stages of autonomy and self-administration in Gaza and the West Bank. In December 1994, all three were awarded for their accomplishment the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. More agreements on implementation were signed in 1995, giving the Arabs what was promised to them. But terrorism by Muslim fanatics continued intermittently and claimed many Jewish victims. After a public mass rally of the peace
camp in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995, prime minister Rabin, poorly guarded when he was leaving after addressing the crowd, was murdered by a Jewish religious fanatic. To this day the shock is gnawing at the country’s conscience and left fear that the broken taboo on political murder would beget more domestic violence. The assassin was sentenced to a life in prison.
Shimon Peres served as prime minister until the end of the parliamentary term and energetically pursued the controversial peace process. In the next elections in May 29, Peres and the Labour Party he headed were found to have misjudged the public mood and were outvoted by the Likud Party. Binyamin Netanyahu became prime minister and formed a right-wing coalition government. It was faced at once by a conflict between what it perceived as the Oslo agreement’s legal validity inherited from the previous government, and its own disapproval of it. “With a heavy heart” Netanyahu accepted the principle of international law regarding the continuity of legal obligations, as binding on successor governments and agreed to go on with the “peace process”, despite the fact that the continuity principle applies only to agreements between sovereign states, not with a non-governmental organization like the P.L.O. which did not have international recognition.
The Wye Plantation agreement is the latest stage of that process. Lasting peace by negotiated agrement is a wide-spread hope among all the Jews of Israel. Middle East Desk is not alone in declaring that hope an illusion – for several reasons. The concepts of “contract, agreement, treaty” etc. are not the same in the West and East. In the West the ancient Roman principle of “pacta sunt observanda” has become the accepted norm and tradition of inter-national relations. True, it was flouted in the West too – for instance by the governments of Germany in Word Wars I and II when its armies invaded Holland and Belgium whose neutrality they had undertaken to respect. But these deviations from the norm were exceptional and in the end did not achieve their ends.
The Western norm and tradition are alien to the East – from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Treaties are observed in Asia as long as they serve the interests of the signatories, or as long as one side can enforce them. When conditions change, when one side believes it to its advantage to flout it without having to fear retribution, the treaty is simply scrapped. Does that mean that Oriental potentates are cheats and liars? MED does not think so. The Oriental expects other negotiators with him to take into account his mental reservations and beware of them as he himself does with regard to them. If the Westerners’ concept of a treaty is different, their false assumption and misinterpretation are at their expense, and no prior warning about this cultural lag is due to them. It is like haggling in an Oriental bazaar over a Persian carpet for which the dealer starts by asking for an outrageously high price. The experienced buyer counters by making a very low offer. Both sides know and perhaps even enjoy the game as a social ritual until they tire and agree somewhere in the middle.
Most of the Israeli policy-makers, intelligent and educated people, are firmly rooted in Western culture, speak Western languages and are familiar with European history and culture. Considering that the Arabs are their closest neighbours and the overwhelming majority in the Middle East, it is astonishing how few of them are familiar with their language, history, religion and literature. If a poll were held among the Jews of Israel on how many of them read the Koran in Arabic or in translation, the count would surprise them. If they would take the trouble of reading it, one of the most influential in history, they would learn how little there is little in it to encourage a non-Muslim’s hope for lasting peace with a Muslim majority, for religious tolerance and equality before the law for all regardless of faith and gender.
Yet foreign minister Shimon Peres, said to be Franco-phil and to speak French, rushed into the Oslo agreement and towards “a new Middle East” with haste, hope and uninformed passion. When Talleyrand retired in old age after a long and brilliant career as France’s foreign minister young diplomats asked him for the secret of his success, he answered: “Avant tout, pas trop de zèle”, he answered (“not too much zeal”). If that applies to the West, how much more to the East where haste is said to be “of Satan”. Again, Netanyahu, hamstrung too by a Western outlook so misplaced in an Oriental context, gave in to the principle of legal continuity. His main achievement at Wye Plantation was to stipulate that the new agreement called for P.L.O. compliance with those conditions which so far it had failed to fulfil, a neglect Peres had largely condoned. Had Netanyahu scrapped all previous agreements, from Oslo in 1993 on and insisted on starting from scratch, Arafat could hardly have faulted him on account of his own record of non-compliance. He has already announced he wants to proclaim a sovereign state of Palestine next May. Autonomy was not enough, he said. Even now it is unlikely that the P.L.O. will live up
to its legal obligations. It is simply not in the Eastern tradition. The question of how much land should be ceded to the Palestinians in return for how much peace which is so fiercely debated in Israel, is altogether outlandish in the East. The Arabs want no part of Israel among them, even if the drive to that target is long. But a State of Palestine next year is for them a wayside and temporary rest station on the long road to removing the “Zionist blemish” from their territory.
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