Palestinian statehood delay favors Netanyahu

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu will win the coming election in Israel, if not in the first round on May 17 then certainly in the run-off on June 1. This has reduced Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to despair, since Netanyahu has blocked almost all progress on the Oslo peace accords since he first won office in 1996.

U.S. President Bill Clinton is fed up with Netanyahu too. A recent and spectacular demonstration of Netanyahu's contempt for U.S. concerns was the way he signed the painfully negotiated Wye Accord last October, and then proceeded to ignore it completely.

Yet Clinton, like Arafat, finds himself forced to help Netanyahu's reelection campaign.

The Dry Bones cartoon in the Jerusalem Post said it all: "Clinton freed Saddam from weapons inspections, bombed the Serbs into total support for Milosevic, and now, by making promises to Arafat...he just won the Israeli elections for Bibi Netanyahu."

Clinton didn't actually make any promises to Arafat. His letter urged both Israel and the Palestinians to try to reach a final peace settlement "within one year" after the Israeli elections, but it set no deadline. It gave no support to a Palestinian state, and made no criticism of the Israeli government's policy of expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Yet on the basis of that empty letter, Arafat abandoned his threat to declare a sovereign Palestinian state on May 4, the date when the five year negotiating process set out by the Oslo peace accords was due to expire. Why? Are the Palestinians really that weak? Is Netanyahu really so strong?

Yes, and yes again. By postponing a declaration of independence indefinitely, Arafat greatly helped Netanyahu's re- election campaign, since it lets him claim once again that he is the only Israeli leader tough enough to contain Palestinian demands. But declaring independence would have played even more strongly into Netanyahu's hands, by giving him a confrontation with the Palestinians as a means of stirring up voters' fears.

"We know exactly how Netanyahu would respond," said one of Arafat's advisers. "He would use the declaration not only to boost his election chances, but also as an excuse not to give us more land. We will not fall into that trap." But the trap they have fallen into instead is hardly less deep. Deprived of the Oslo deadline, Arafat has almost no leverage left.

How did Clinton and Arafat find themselves so utterly in thrall to Netanyahu? For Clinton, the answer is simply that he believes the Democratic Party must never alienate its American Jewish supporters, who reject U.S. pressure on Israel regardless of their personal views about Netanyahu.

Arafat is the sadder case, playing out a bad hand while knowing that he is probably doomed. The "peace of the brave" that he thought he was building when he and then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo accords in 1994 really died with Rabin's assassination by an Israeli fanatic in 1996.

Palestinian radicals who opposed Arafat's "land for peace" deal saw their opportunity, and launched a campaign of terrorist bombing in Israel that facilitated the election (by only 29,000 votes) of Benjamin Netanyahu. They rightly calculated that Netanyahu would have to build a coalition that depended on parties deeply opposed to the Rabin-Arafat deal.

Yet Arafat was already too deeply compromised to be able to walk away from the Oslo accords. Reduced to supplicant status, he has spent the past three years being ruthlessly jerked around by Netanyahu while the United States pretended not to notice. And it is not going to get any better for the Palestinian leader after the Israeli elections, because he will still be dealing with the same man.

There are two reasons that Netanyahu will be reelected prime minister despite a 9 percent unemployment rate in Israel, and a first term in which his cabinet was continually shaken by disputes, defections, and charges of fraud.

One is simply demography. The right wing's traditional constituency is growing much faster than the left's because of high immigration from the former Soviet Union and high birth rates among the ultra-Orthodox.

The other reason is that Israelis, like most people, would prefer to eat their cake and have it, too. Netanyahu skillfully peddles the illusion that the Palestinians can be corralled and pacified permanently without any need for painful concessions and compromises.

In the short term, Netanyahu has shown impressive results in "lowering Palestinian expectations," and will be rewarded for them by the voters. In the longer run, he is cutting the ground out from under the feet of all those Arabs who have made peace with Israel, or might do so in the future. One suspects that he doesn't much care.

The difference between Netanyahu and the Israeli leaders who have tried to achieve a lasting peace with their Arab neighbors is not a difference between right and left. Twenty years ago it was a right-wing leader, Menachem Begin, who signed the peace with Egypt, while it was center-left prime minister Yitzhak Rabin who signed the Oslo accords and the peace treaty with Jordan.

The real difference is between leaders who take a long-term view, and those who rarely think past the next cabinet crisis.

Netanyahu is an excellent tactician who shares former British prime minister Harold Wilson's view that "a week is a long time in politics."

On that reckoning, Netanyahu will be with us yet for several eternities.