Mideast peace deal not a panacea

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "Clinton needs the (signing) ceremony like oxygen," wrote Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea early this month. But why, after 20 months of deadlock, did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat give the beleaguered U.S. president what he wanted?

It's obvious why Clinton invested 78 hours in direct contacts with the two leaders over the past nine days. He badly needed a high-profile foreign policy success to counter-balance his domestic humiliations and restore some dignity to his office.

It's also easy to understand why Arafat signed on. Things have gone steadily downhill for him since the 1995 assassination of the man he thought would be his negotiating partner under the Oslo accords, Yitzhak Rabin. Since Netahyahu won the 1996 election, the only progress on the original Oslo timetable was the (much delayed) Israeli pull-out from Hebron, and there was no evidence that the Israeli leader wanted to move even one step further.

Netanyahu, after all, won office with the support of settlers and religious extremists who oppose any 'land-for-peace' deal with the Palestinians. And rhetorically, at least, Netanyahu shares their obsession with hanging onto the West Bank: "To part with one square inch of this land is agonizing to us. Every stone, every hill, every valley resonates with our forefathers' footsteps."

And with those of the Palestinians' forefathers, too, but Arafat has got nothing out of Netanyahu for almost two years. So his authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is steadily leaking away into the hands of the Islamic militants of Hamas, who reject any peace with Israel and revile him as a dupe and a traitor.

If Arafat couldn't get some kind of deal soon, he faced the likelihood of a revolt within the ranks of the PLO, or overthrow by Hamas. Besides, he is obviously a sick man (sometimes he sits on his hands to hide their trembling), and his closest ally in the region, King Hussein of Jordan, is dying of cancer.

Arafat was desperate enough to settle for very little, but until recently Netanyahu wasn't willing to give even that. So why has Netanyahu now changed his mind?

One reason is that President Clinton, who had always avoided putting pressure on Netanyahu, finally had a political motive to turn the screws on him (albeit an ignoble one) that outweighed his fear of the powerful Jewish lobby in Washington. (Clinton believes -- probably correctly -- that it was George Bush's arm- twisting of Israel at the Madrid summit in 1991 that swung Jewish support decisively behind the Democrats and won him the 1992 election.)

But Clinton, the lamest of lame ducks, hasn't got much power to twist arms any more: the last time Netanyahu visited Washington, he was openly contemptuous of him. Something else had to be in the deal to induce the Israeli leader to sign it.

Well, of course. It is a deal so sweet, from the Israeli point of view, that even Netanyahu could not help but be tempted by it.

Stand back for a moment, and consider the evolution of the Arab-Israeli struggle. In the first 25 years after Israel's independence in 1948, it fought four wars with the Arabs. In the last 25 years, no Arab state has dared to attack it, and the only war was Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Israel has complete military dominance over all the states on its borders, and over 200 (unacknowledged) nuclear weapons up its sleeve. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it. And Israel has the United States, the sole remaining superpower, and Turkey, the largest local military power, as its allies.

Israel hasn't done badly on the internal front either. Granted half of the British mandate of Palestine by the UN, Israel emerged from the 1948 war with four-fifths of it -- conveniently without its Palestinian population, who were 'encouraged' to flee. It then conquered the remaining fifth of Palestine -- the West Bank and the Gaza Strip -- in 1967, and has since ruled over the Palestinians (now 2.9 million) who are jammed into those occupied territories.

The Oslo accords in 1993 envisaged Israeli withdrawal from most of those lands (and implicitly, a Palestinian state on them) in return for a permanent peace settlement -- but the Wye Mill deal is much better than that. An Arab critic recently called Arafat 'the incredible shrinking man', and it is true.

Arafat originally made the Oslo deal because he was so weak: his main sources of money in the Gulf had cut him off for backing Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990-1991. But he is even weaker now, and the deal he has signed up for will only give him around 40 percent of the West Bank in a final settlement.

You can see how that might tempt even the most hawkish of Israelis. In effect, it means that all the Israeli settlers -- now around 200,000 in the vicinity of Jerusalem, and at least 170,000 elsewhere in the West Bank -- can stay where they are.

What's more, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency will 'oversee' the work of Arafat's brutal and corrupt secret police. This is a ghastly blunder for the U.S., but it's ideal for Israel: 'Palestine' effectively becomes an American protectorate.

So Netanyahu has signed up too -- but it is a two-way bet. If Arafat can commit the Palestinians to this historic surrender of most of their aspirations, then fine. But if Arafat can't deliver (or if the hard-liners in Netanyahu's coalition mount a revolt that really threatens his power), then he can cancel it at any time.

As Netanyahu surely knows, Hamas will now try to wreck the deal by sending in the suicide bombers. Arafat cannot stop them, and it's very unlikely that the Israelis can either.

But those bombs, and the outrage they cause, will give Netanyahu a perfect excuse to freeze the final status talks, or even cancel this interim agreement, if he needs one. And if he hasn't entertained that thought, then he's stupider than he looks.