Ehud Ya'ari is Middle East correspondent for Israel TV. This is a summary of an address last month to the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council in Melbourne.The latest Jerusalem attack, only five weeks after the previous suicide bombing in Jerusalem, is yet another demonstration of what is happening to the peace process. First you have peace and then you have a ceasefire. And then the ceasefire collapses and you will have some form of American intervention in order to re-establish the ceasefire for a while, and then again this process repeats itself. We are not in a situation in which the peace process has really produced an atmosphere of peace and stability. Rather the contrary is true.
The main question is whether Mr Arafat is to blame. Most Israelis will tell you that either Mr Arafat does not want to deliver or cannot deliver security. In both cases our conclusion as Israelis will be the same.
The other question is whether Mr Netanyahu is to blame? And if so, to what extent? I believe most Israelis will agree that we have a Prime Minister who hasn't demonstrated a remarkable degree of competence and political wisdom; a very bad sense of timing and a good dose of arrogance too! But it is very difficult to put the blame for the deterioration of the process at Netanyahu's door. Whatever he has done, he did not change something that we had been already witnessing under Labour, under late Prime Minister Rabin and Prime Minister Peres, in which Mr Arafat was trying to sell us a mixture of peace and something else. Peace with violence.
And if the peace process does not lead to the termination of the conflict, then what are we doing? This is the question that Israelis are asking themselves and they do not have any easy answer.
I am not sure to what extent the present American administration is willing to invest prestige and energy in trying to move the Middle East peace process seriously forward. Vice President Gore met with the Chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, who was trying to impress him with the need to exercise pressure on the Israeli government. During the private session Gore said to him: "No American politician in his right mind is going to exert pressure on the Israeli government knowing that tomorrow morning, or the day after tomorrow you will have bombs blowing up in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or somewhere else." So I would say that the American input now is aimed at trying for damage control, rather than really to get the peace process back in full swing.
Relations between Israel and Egypt have soured from what used to be a "cold peace" to something which resembles much more a "cold war". The quality of the relationship has dramatically transformed over the past decade or so. We have the Egyptian Chief of Staff, a man of very few words, who publicly states that any move against the Palestinians in the territories by Israel will constitute a direct threat to Egypt's own national security. This is contradictory to the Egyptian/Israeli peace treaty but just a brief illustration of the mood. That is Egypt - the number one player (still) in the Middle East.
Two Prime Ministers of Israel have offered Syria, through the American President, total withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Syria has rejected whatever security arrangements the Israelis and the Americans were insisting upon, and the situation with Syria now is that we have moved from what appeared to be the verge of concluding a peace treaty to a situation which at times, seems to be on the brink of new hostilities, with the new deployment of the Syrian army north of our border, and again, very warlike rhetoric emanating constantly out of Damascus.
Israel offered to withdraw from the security zone that we are maintaining in Lebanon in return for some guarantees that there will not be shelling of Israel proper once the Israeli army moves behind the international border. The Syrians opposed this offer for unilateral withdrawal and the Lebanese government was forced to toe the line. Instead, what we have now is a situation in which the Hezbollah has acquired from Iran and with Syrian consent, a new type of long-range Katyusha which can hit the suburbs of our third largest city, Haifa. And in that region, a Katyusha is a strategic weapon if it can hit one of your major urban centres. This has created a whole new strategic situation.
The main issue is the Palestinians. I believe that the Oslo peace process is dead. There will not be a funeral because the parties cannot agree on what to write on the tombstone. But Oslo is dead. For almost two years, Oslo has not been implemented; none of the clauses of Oslo are being implemented now by either party. It cannot be implemented.
I will take a very minor issue. The Palestinians are allowed, according to the Oslo accords, to have a sea port in Gaza provided that Israel is in control over security. What we are talking about is a system in which Israel can check the containers on the ships as they come into port. The Palestinians are saying "No. You are not going to.." No Israeli government can accept a situation in which the Palestinians will be able to move weapons, anti-tank weapons, mortars, probably more, into the territories. The same with the Palestinian airport.
We have a clause in the Oslo protocols allowing for convoys of Palestinians to be able to move between the Gaza strip and the West Bank. Acceptable. Sure, they need to have a link between the two regions. But Mr Arafat is saying he will accept no Israeli jurisdiction over those people. It is a 40 kilometre road. No government in the world will allow other countries' policemen, army, military to cross its territory without having the right to inspect and see what is happening. There is a redeployment, basically withdrawal, from the West Bank. But can Israel now give up more territory when Arafat won't deliver on security? Oslo has reached the point where the question is not how to restart or re-ignite but how to redesign it. And here, I will make briefly two points. Why Oslo has turned into what I call OSNO.
The notion that we can go with the Palestinians into an open ended process without defining from the outset what is the end game has been proven absolutely wrong. People would not accept the idea that you keep going without knowing exactly where you are heading. The Israelis do not accept it because we suspect Mr Arafat does not mean to terminate the conflict. And many Palestinians are suspicious that Mr Netanyahu does not intend to give them enough territory and sovereignty once we come to final status. Clearly the idea that we can go on with an open-ended process has collapsed. So has the notion of an incremental approach, which was borrowed from a different situation in the 1970s devised by Kissinger. Kissinger himself is saying now that this is not the right way. I believe he is right.
The other consequence of Oslo was, to put it very bluntly, that the Palestinian police will do our job. We will lead them towards independence, but they will do our job; they will fight terrorism. Again, this is not the case. What we see is the Chief of the Palestinian intelligence services recently announcing that he feels he can identify with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Can we do without Arafat? My answer briefly is - no! We are stuck in a situation in which he is the only possible partner, an unwilling one, but the only possible partner. And therefore we have to make peace with Arafat, in spite of Mr Arafat. Not very easy, Mr Arafat is really one of the great grand masters, one of the most skilful players of Middle East politics.
>From an Israeli point of view, our imperatives are security. We cannot deal if we have these scenes on the streets of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv every few months. We have to offer a package which is attractive enough to the Palestinians to obtain a commitment that the drive and momentum of the Palestinian national movement for even more is arrested. We may have to make a concession on East Jerusalem - some of the Arab parts of the city-in return for Palestinian consent to maintain an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley to prevent destabilisation of Jordan and have a system of containment.
Preferably - and this every single Prime Minister in Israel wants and has so far failed to achieve - we need to sit with Syria and come to an agreement before we sit down for the final round with Mr Arafat. This will be the mother of all cold peace, with Syria.
Many have said that it is none of our business whether Mr Arafat establishes a democracy or some sort of a Middle Eastern dictatorship in the territories, which he did. The assumption was that we don't really care whether the Palestinians will have a decent, acceptable economic system or a thoroughly corrupt system from the outset. I believe that Israelis are now coming to the conclusion that that was wrong. We cannot afford to see next door to us, half a mile from my home in Jerusalem, the emergence of a dictatorial entity with business practices and economic policies which are threatening to spill over into our territory. So part of the deal on final status, will also have to do with what are going to be the features and the characteristics of this new neighbourhood of ours and this may very well prove to be one of the more interesting aspects of these negotiations.
Copyright © 1997 J.O.I.N.