Palestinians Lose Faith in U.S. as a Force for Peace

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat often plays the contrarian in Middle East peace efforts--glum, even after signing a hard-fought agreement on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron, and generally apt to see a gray lining in a silver cloud.

Now, however, Erekat is in tune with the rest of the Palestinian leadership as he sounds increasingly ominous warnings about the collapse of the peace process and the Palestinians’ lack of faith in the United States as peace broker.

This gloom is pervasive too in the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Palestinian support for the 4-year-old peace process is dropping and the possibility of armed conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is openly discussed.

Erekat, after a recent meeting with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Washington, said he has become convinced of two things: that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to do away with the 1993 Oslo peace accords the previous, Labor government signed with the Palestinians and that the United States will protect him while he does it.

“I think Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to get his tanks rolling into the Palestinian areas,” Erekat said. “This man considers the Oslo accords to be a poison dagger in his heart. He must pull it out. I don’t think the Americans will stop him. They will intervene with crisis management or damage control to save Israel from the repercussions.”

Palestinian Higher Education Minister Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, who met separately with Albright, concurred in a telephone interview from her home in Ramallah. “This is the conclusion we all have reached,” Ashrawi said.

Erekat said the Palestinians do not expect the United States to end its strategic alliance with Israel. “That’s not realistic,” he said. But anger edged into his voice as he addressed what he called American “impotence” in failing to prevent Netanyahu from building a new Jewish neighborhood in historically Arab East Jerusalem.

“We had an agreement that was witnessed and signed by President Clinton. The question is: ‘Did you, Mr. Clinton, sign this agreement as a photo op? Or was your signature there to guarantee the precise and accurate implementation of this agreement?’ ”

The Israeli government says it has the right to build anywhere in Jerusalem.

But Palestinians view the 6,500-unit housing development in East Jerusalem as Israel’s attempt to create “facts on the ground” and preempt negotiations on the status of the holy city. The peace agreements say the fates of Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in the West Bank are to be decided in a final phase of talks, along with the future of Palestinian refugees, borders and the possibility of Palestinian statehood.

Foreign diplomats say Palestinian disillusionment with the U.S. mediation role has been growing since the United States vetoed two U.N. Security Council resolutions last month criticizing the Israeli construction on a hill called Har Homa in Hebrew and Jabal Abu Ghneim in Arabic. The Palestinians expected the United States to wrest concessions from the Israelis after the vetoes but have not seen any.

A sense of betrayal has been apparent among Palestinian demonstrators who in recent weeks have burned mock U.S. flags with the word “veto” scrawled across them. Protesters complained that the U.S. would not rein in Israel and was blocking efforts by Arab and European countries to intervene.

A recent poll by the Nablus-based Center for Palestine Research and Studies found that Palestinian support for the peace process has fallen by 13 percentage points in the month since Israel began cutting down trees and carving roads for the housing project in East Jerusalem.

The interviews with 1,334 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip revealed that support for peace negotiations dropped to 60% from 73% the month before--the lowest level since February 1994, when Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire at the Ibrahim mosque in Hebron, killing about 30 praying Muslims.

At the same time, support for suicide bombings, such as the March 21 attack in a Tel Aviv cafe that killed three Israelis, rose to 44% in the Gaza Strip from 17% there after the wave of attacks in February and March 1996; the support for such actions was 38% in the West Bank compared with 24% last year.

The predominant American view of Palestinian disillusionment is that it is cyclical, rising and falling with the ups and downs of the problematic peace negotiations.

Peace talks have been frozen since the housing project construction began and the bomber struck the Tel Aviv cafe. Moreover, Netanyahu has made it clear that he does not intend to cede any ground in Jerusalem or to recognize a Palestinian state.

“The problem has always been that the Palestinians feel beleaguered because they don’t have the leverage with Israel that sovereign governments do, so they look to third parties,” said a U.S. official. “Part of their negotiating tactic and strategy is to play on Americans’ sense of guilt and fair play. They would like us to act more forcefully.”

In the face of Netanyahu’s hard-line policies, he added, the Palestinians “are transferring their expectations to the United States and Egypt to push their agenda.”

But Palestinians, and some American and European diplomats speaking privately, say confidence in U.S. peace brokering has reached new depths. Before the American’s visit to the region a week ago, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat was refusing to take telephone calls from U.S. peace envoy Dennis B. Ross.

Edward Abington Jr., the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem and the American liaison to the Palestinians, has conceded he is less welcome in Arafat’s office than he has been in the past few years.

Arafat did meet with Ross, who is expected to return to the region within the next two weeks, and U.S. officials expect the two to meet again. “Because there is the possibility of a U.S. initiative in place, [Arafat] is talking to us more actively,” said the official.

Clinton is largely regarded by the Palestinians as the best friend Israel has ever had in an American president. Some Palestinians had hoped that Clinton, in his second term, would be willing to press Netanyahu. But now they see Clinton as campaigning for a 2000 presidential bid by Vice President Al Gore and say the president will not risk offending American Jews who support Netanyahu’s hard-line policies.

Erekat said the Clinton administration is behaving as U.S. governments have in the past, failing to recognize the Palestinians’ evolution from combatants to elected officials and peace negotiators. He says the Americans are standing by Israel “irrespective of the fact that there was an Israel that wanted peace and an Israel today that is headed by a man who does not want peace.”

Palestinians say they do not believe that Americans realize the depth of the crisis. The implication is that the peace process could disintegrate into combat between the Israeli army and an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 armed Palestinians--a conflict the Israelis no doubt would win, but with tremendous casualties and political costs.

“I think we’re in deep, deep trouble. I think we have a major and serious crisis as far as the peace process is concerned,” Erekat said. “To be honest with you, I think the worst is coming.”