Bush and Sharon's Agreement

For all the roaring condemnations the Palestinian Authority directed towards George Bush’s recent declarations on the Palestinian right of return and Israel’s settlements, they still sounded very much like squeaks of protest from a mouse that had enjoyed masquerading as a lion before being abruptly put back in its place. There was nothing in George Bush’s letter to Ariel Sharon, in which he declared a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it had conquered in 1967 as “unrealistic” (1), and that the Palestinian refugees cannot return to the lands they were expelled from in present day Israel, that had not been tacitly, and occasionally unequivocally, accepted by the Palestinian Authority since the launching of the Oslo Accords in 1993. The reason behind all these condemnations from the Palestinian Authority, as well as from other parties that! long for the sunny days of Bill Clinton, is that George Bush, in his singularly inartful way, held up a mirror to the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process”, both in its current “roadmap” incarnation and the Oslo negotiations in the 1990’s.

The right of return

First, the Palestinian right of return. It has become an article of faith among supporters of the Israeli government that the Palestinian Authority’s insistence on this right, which is sanctioned by UN resolutions, led to the demise of the June 2000 Camp David Accord and the subsequent Taba negotiations in January 2001. This is contradicted by the factual record. Perhaps the most accurate account of the Camp David negotiations can be found in an exchange published in the New York Review of Books between Robert Malley and Hussein Agha on the one hand, and Benny Morris, Ehud Barak and Dennis Ross on the other. Malley and Agha write: “While insisting on the Palestinian refugees' right to return to homes lost in 1948, [the Palestinian negotiators] were prepared to tie this right to a mechanism of implementation providing alterna! tive choices for the refugees while limiting the numbers returning to Israel proper.” Malley and Agha correctly attribute this symbolic insistence to the fear of alienating the Palestinian refugee constituency. They cite Arafat’s plea to Bill Clinton to "give [him] a reasonable deal [on the refugee question] and then see how to present it as not betraying the right of return."(2) The PA’s approach to the refugees—the insistence in principal on recognizing the refugee’s right of return and allowing a symbolic number, perhaps 40,000 to return-- was also evinced during the Taba negotiations, an account of which has been available for some time after the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published European Union envoy Miguel Moritano’s record of the negotiations.

Of equal significance is the Geneva Accord, drafted by Yassir Arafat’s confidante Yassir Abd Rabbo and Yossi Beilin, former Israeli Justice Minister and negotiator during the Taba talks. The proposal allows for the repatriation of Palestinian refugees in Israel subject to the “sovereign discretion of Israel and […] in accordance with a number that Israel will submit to the International Commission”(3), which would be set up to implement compensation for the refugees and their resettling in the Palestinian “state” and other “host” countries. Yassir Arafat is notorious for the extent to which he centralizes decision making in the Palestinian Authority; as Abd Rabbo told Edward Said: “everything must be approved by [Arafat], from a request for vacation by a Commerce Ministry employee, to whether one of his cars should have its mufflers repaired, to whether X and Y should attend the next meeting with the Israelis…that’s the way he stays on top: everything has to pass through him”(4). Said had visited Abd Rabbo in the mid-nineties, when the Oslo negotiations were in full-swing, but the efforts Ariel Sharon and George Bush have invested in sidelining Yassir Arafat—and the ensuing theatrics with the appointment of Mahmoud Abbas as PA Prime Minister and his angry resignation—over the past few years are a testament to the control Arafat still exerts within the Palestinian Authority, although it may not extend much further than that. Abd Rabbo had announced that: "the Palestinian Authority supports our [Geneva] Accord,” which "completes negotiations that were conducted at Taba after the eruption of the intifada…”(5), a statement that is substantiated by the records of the Camp David and Taba negotiations.

The PA’s willingness to forego the right of return, which, at any rate, is not theirs’ to barter away, is clear, despite its prevarications on this issue because of the almost sacrosanct nature of this particular ‘red line.’ But their indignation over George Bush’s declaration that the US is “strongly committed to Israel's security and well-being as a Jewish state”, which means that the Palestinian refugees should be resettled in the Palestinian “state”, is farcical at best, even by the PA’s dismal standard. After all, George Bush practically plagiarized Yassir Arafat, who had called for “creative solutions to the plight of the refugees while respecting Israel's demographic concerns”(6) in an opinion piece published by the New York Times. The settlements: “new realities on the ground” When the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Israeli government under Yitzhak Rabin was engaged in an flurry of construction within the West Bank that was meant precisely to create “new realities on the ground” when it came to a final status negotiation with the Palestinians. The process of ‘rounding out Israel’s borders’—which have yet to be declared—did not come to an end with the June 1949 armistice. There was nothing in Declaration of Principles (1993) signed by the PLO and Israel that guaranteed Israel would stop constructing and expanding Jewish only colonies on occupied Palestinian lands, in contravention to the Fourth Geneva Convention. Oslo II, signed in 1995, states with its characteristic vagueness that “neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”(7) This left enough leeway for the Israeli government to initiate the most rapid expansion of the settlements’ population in the history of the occupation, along with the some of the more preposterous apologetics—providing Palestinians with future homes being one of them—it has engaged in on the rare occasions it was called upon do so. The gasps elicited by George Bush’s statement as a turning point in US policy on the settlements is belied by Clinton’s characterizing of the occupied territories as “disputed” lands, on which the construction of settlements cannot really be construed as illegal. It was under the “peace process” that the settlements’ population doubled to almost four hundred thousand settlers, more than half of them living in the “Greater Jerusalem” settlements, Ma’ale Adumim, and the Gush Etzion bloc, which Sharon has pledged to hold on to. Again, the PA’s indignation over the idea that these “new realities” will be fall under Israeli sovereignty borders on the comical. Starting with the Camp David negotiations, this seems to have been acceptable to the PA. According to Malley and Agha: “despite [the PA’s] insistence [on Israel's withdrawal from all lands occupied in 1967, they were open to a division of East Jerusalem granting Israel sovereignty over its Jewish areas (the Jewish Quarter, the Wailing Wall, and the Jewish neighborhoods [i.e. the “Greater Jerusalem” settlements]) in clear contravention of this principle.”(8) In Taba, the PA had accepted the principal of annexing these settlements to Israel; the issue of contention was the ratio of land the Palestinian “state” would receive in return for the West Bank lands annexed to Israel, whether these lands would be contiguous with the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel’s insistence on annexing lands between the settlement blocs. The PA position in the Geneva Accord did not greatly depart from this, anymore than it departs from George Bush’s statement.

Considering this record, what explains the PA’s reaction to George Bush’s letter to Ariel Sharon and his statements during Sharon’s visit to Washington? For one thing, it provided a very discomforting, and inopportune reminder—Israel had just picked off the chief of the Islamist opposition to the PA and its strategy of negotiations with Israel—of the utter bankruptcy of the US/Israeli framework of negotiations for “settlement” of the Palestine question, the parameters of which roughly correspond to the Israeli Labour party’s plans for the West Bank. This has not changed since the 1967 Yigal Allon plan, which proposed the annexation of the areas around Jerusalem and a “buffer zone” running up the Jordan valley with ‘autonomy’ for the Palestinian demographic areas.

The Oslo Accords merely granted this plan for annexation of Palestinian lands and ultimate control over the West Bank and Gaza’s inhabitants-- facilitated by the good offices of a Palestinian ‘leader’-- the legitimacy that could only have been engendered by Yassir Arafat and the PLO, which had over the previous decades won recognition as the representative of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian uprising that erupted in the West Bank and Gaza in December 1987 brought home to the Israeli government the inevitability of making a gesture to the demands of the Palestinian uprising, and, after Jordan formally severed its ties from the West Bank in 1988, the “Jordanian option” was no longer practicable.

The negotiations worked to not only provide respectability to what Shlomo Ben Ami—Israel’s chief negotiator at Camp David—described as a “peace process” founded on a “neo-colonial basis”(10), but also became the primary point of reference in Palestinian officialdom’s talk of “national liberation”, replacing “historic rights” and then “international law”. The ‘peace process’ has become self referential, an authority by which all disputes can be judged by, therefore the ridiculous objections raised by Sa’eb Erakat and other PA spokespeople that George Bush and Ariel Sharon “have no right to change the roadmap”, as if the roadmap were blueprint that had fallen like manna from the sky, rather than drawn up by the US government with ample Israeli input.

The significance of George Bush’s letter to Ariel Sharon lies in its faithfulness to, rather than its departure from, the contour of the parameters I have described—a ‘deluxe’ Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, covered by the fig leaf of Palestinian “statehood.” The only departure of note in his letter is his disregard for how the imposition of such a solution on the Palestinian people and the millions of Palestinian refugees can occur while taking into account the PA’s need to appear as some sort of liberationist vanguard while facilitating the robbery of Palestinian lands and freedoms.

Samer Elatrash (elatrush@hotmail.com) is a member of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights in Montreal)

Notes:

1) George Bush’s letter to Ariel Sharon is available at www.haaretzdaily.com.

2) Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors” (New York Review of Books Volume 48, Number 13 August 9 2001) and “Camp David and After: An Exchange” (Volume 49 Number 10, June 13 2002).

3) Article 7.4.

4) Edward Said, “On Visiting Wadie” (London Review of Books, September 5 1996).

5) Haaretz English Internet Edition, October 14 2003.

6) Yassir Arafat, “The Palestinian Vision of Peace”, New York Times February 3 2002.

7)Article 31.7.

8) Malley and Agha, August 9 2001.

10) Shlomo Ben-Ami, "A Place Place for All" (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1998), p. 106 of the Hebrew version, cited in Efraim Davidi's "Globalization and Economy in the Middle East", Palestine-Israel Journal Vol VII 2000.