NEWS ANALYSIS : Peace Depends on Israeli Safety, Better Arab Life

The dynamics of peacemaking in the Middle East changed dramatically Wednesday when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the agreement on Palestinian self-rule.

Peace now depends less on bold moves by courageous leaders like Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and far more on the ability of tens of thousands of people to make the agreement work, day in and day out, so that coexistence and cooperation replace confrontation and conflict.

If Palestinians get from autonomy the sense that life is improving, they will become believers in the efficacy of negotiations and seek a political solution to their statelessness and impoverishment. If they do not, they will return to the gun to achieve what this agreement failed to bring.

If Israelis feel safe, if not safer, as a result of the accord, they will be ready to yield more territory for peace--in the West Bank, the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon. And if Israelis find their security diminished, they will oppose even the extension of Palestinian autonomy.

That is the broad logic underlying the agreement.

Rabin put it plainly: “Without security for Israel and new hope for the Palestinians, the objectives of the agreement won’t be achieved.”

But the relationship is as complex as it is direct.

The Palestinians’ focus has been and remains on the future--the independent state they hope will come after five years of autonomy, if not sooner. The Israeli focus is on the operational, the here and now.

“Peace should never become so prosaic that it will be reduced to municipal chores like street repairs and trash collection,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, a prominent Palestinian political scientist. “But we will be measured and tested by our ability to give our children an education, to improve health care, to create jobs. . . . Political power is always to be used for betterment.”

But the PLO has always given primacy to Palestinian dignity in asserting its people’s right to self-determination and independence. On Wednesday, Rabin hammered the PLO hard for its lack of preparedness for assuming control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Jericho; he asserted that the PLO is interested more in stamps, flags and other symbols than in real governance.

“The main question now--a big, big if --is whether the Palestinians can control the area, whether they can provide the education, the health care, the jobs, what Gaza needs,” commented Ori Orr, chairman of the influential foreign affairs and defense committee of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. “This agreement succeeds or falls on this. If the Gaza refugees don’t see some kind of light ahead, an improvement in their miserable lives, they will pick up the knife, the gun again. . . . The main problem before us is the PLO’s ability to rule.”

Sufyan abu Zaideh, a long-imprisoned leader of Arafat’s Fatah movement in Gaza, acknowledged that the PLO is not prepared to govern there--that three weeks will be needed to deploy the new Palestine police in the region and at least three months to establish a governmental structure. “This is not because you are Jews and we are Arabs,” he told an Israel Television reporter, “but because you’re a state and we’re an organization scattered among many countries.”

Palestinian leaders in Gaza and the West Bank are acutely aware of the need to deliver--and worried by what failure would mean.

“Popular support for the PLO is tied to progress, not just progress in the peace process but to changes in daily life,” Tawfik Mabhouh, a leader of the pro-Communist Palestine People’s Party, said in Gaza City. “There is no real conviction here in favor of this settlement, but there is a hope of change--a hope that we can do a better job than the Israelis did for 27 years.”

Palestinian task forces have been planning the PLO assumption of power for more than two years. There are detailed programs for education, health care, agriculture, industrial development, even an electrical grid. Thousands of potential officials, many with impressive professional qualifications and some with years of experience abroad, have been identified.

Yet there is total uncertainty about tomorrow.

Although the agreement signed Wednesday morning by Arafat and Rabin laid down a timetable for the Israeli withdrawal and the Palestinian assumption of power, neither side could say Wednesday evening what, in fact, will happen this week or next--when Israeli forces will pull out of Gaza, when the Palestine police will arrive, who precisely will assume responsibility for water, hospitals or schools.

At the end of the negotiations in Cairo in the small hours of Wednesday morning, Rabin took Arafat aside and talked to him seriously about all these problems. At the end of that very private talk, a tired Arafat was heard promising Rabin to “do my best.”

Much depends on Arafat’s success. Israelis see the Gaza-Jericho agreement very much as a test not only for the Palestinians but for their other Arab neighbors. Speaking after signing the agreement, Rabin again told Arafat, “The people of Israel hope you will not disappoint us.”

Most Israelis, whether they approved or not, recognized the agreement signed Wednesday as a major step toward a Palestinian state; the question for them was what this will mean for Israel’s security. A hostile Palestine would not threaten the existence of Israel, but it could make life hell.

“A large majority of Palestinians does not accept the existence of the Jewish state and wants to destroy the Jewish state,” Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University said. “The question is whether through this agreement we will channel this conflict . . . into more diplomatic ways that are easier for us to live with.”

From the outset, Rabin has been clear about his goal of extricating Israel from the pain of occupation and the ultimately unwinnable conflict that the Palestinians intensified with their intifada, the rebellion begun in 1987 after 20 years of Israeli rule.

There was a major strategic factor as well--securing a comprehensive peace in the Middle East that would turn now-hostile Arab neighbors into a buffer zone against the advance of militant Islam.

But all depends on the workability of the Gaza-Jericho agreement, with its effort to give Palestinians sufficient incentives in the future--principally their own state throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip--so they realize the medium-term goals of what amounts to a form of collective security with Israel, as well as economic cooperation.