A Tainted Peace

The Dome of the Rock has seasons, unlike other monuments. In the fall, this oldest extant Muslim house of worship, which has come to symbolize Palestinian claims to Jerusalem, begins to lose its golden sheen. This is the time of dust storms and desert winds, and the Dome, which shines like a second sun in spring, after the rainy season comes to an end, looks as if the desert is beginning to cover it over.

The dome is dirty and, indeed, everything seems tainted in Israel and the territories now, after the talks at Wye Plantation, where the Israelis, Palestinians and Americans met last week to build a ladder to peace, rung by rung. All the dramatis personae seemed corrupted.

How about former liberation meister Yasser Arafat? He wheeled around on his bike at Wye, agreeing that, if it were ever proffered, he would shake the hand of Israel’s new foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, a key figure in the 1982 massacres of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon. Or King Hussein, ferried in by helicopter from chemotherapy in Minnesota, a literal deus ex machina, to break the deadlock. The Jordanian monarch has compromised with Israel so often that he has alienated his country’s large Palestinian population, and he also managed to anger the Americans when he sided with Iraq during the Gulf War. What could he have possibly told Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu that these two foxes didn’t already know? And then, among the tainted, there is Bill Clinton, of course.

Why, you can’t even find an untainted terrorist anymore! A pious father of five, the young Hamas militant who tossed two grenades into a crowd of Israeli soldiers at the Beersheba bus station last week turns out to have been recruited two months earlier as an informer for Israeli intelligence--not that this means he ever actually worked for them.

Just to see this particular and peculiar group of people sitting around a basket of roses in their plush mauve chairs at the Wye Plantation was enough to create serious cognitive dissonance in anyone who has been watching the peace process since Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel in 1996.

Netanyahu has never behaved as if it were in his political interest to make a just peace with the Palestinians. The prime minister can only have been forced into his awkward position at Wye by the coercive power of the U.S. government and U.S. dollars, and by Arafat’s masterful threats to make a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state if he did not get an agreement and get it soon.

Still, tainted is what any negotiation among polarized parties must be. For his right-wing backers, Netanyahu is tainted by the mere act of meeting, much less talking, with Arafat. For a good number of his people, Arafat is tainted by continuing to negotiate with an Israeli leader who is intransigent on almost every issue, or at least a leader who must appear to be so, to appease his own right wing. Poor Netanyahu had to throw his baggage out on the lawn at Wye and threaten to walk out every time he conceded one tiny thing.

Each side realized that this was an endgame, that the last minute had arrived, that they were approaching a finish to Oslo, and if they did not come out of Wye with something, anything, then a historic moment--a moment whose value is questionable, but a historic moment nonetheless--would have been lost. What would come after? That was the scary thing. It’s hard to imagine life without Oslo to hope for, without peace to hope for--like life in the old days of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

But no matter what piece of paper Wye’s guys produce, what remains disturbing for those interested in a lasting peace is the utter lack of good faith on both desperate sides. As they walked through the Wye woods like a coven of wizards, these adversaries were stirring up a macedoine of disaster, an inside-out state, a nonsovereign state.

Everyone at Wye seemed prepared to accept a Palestinian state in which the Palestinian security forces act as extensions of Israeli security, and where access to one part of the new state from another is controlled, or at least closely monitored, by Israel’s military. The Wye agreement also states that the CIA will judge whether the Palestinian security and justice apparatus is keeping convicted terrorists in prison. Think of it: The Palestine Liberation Organization accepting the Central Intelligence Agency as the arbiter of internal Palestinian justice.

If all this remains true, and if Israel also continues to expand settlements inside Palestinian territory, the peace the two sides are stuttering toward will be one in which people like the Beersheba bomber feel little compunction about throwing a little TNT into the mix.

It would be nice for Jonathan Jay Pollard, the convicted spy for Israel imprisoned by the United States since 1985, to be released into Israeli hands. But his freedom would just be pap for Netanyahu’s public and have nothing to do with the substance of the talks. It will not ease Palestinians-Israeli tensions.

At Wye, what the negotiators were discussing--and creating--was not a sovereign state. Arafat, who used to be a venerated figure among his people, has agreed to be a party to this and to continue with it down the line. Why? How can he watch his revolutionary, heroic status among Palestinians dissipate and allow himself to become almost a figure of fun to them? Possibly, he is willing to sacrifice his standing because he is a statesman and can see the big picture above and beyond petty temporal concerns. On the other hand, he could be making a political judgment, recognizing that not only his place in history but his future as Palestinian president rests upon the extension of Oslo.

Or perhaps the eternally pragmatic Arafat simply realized that the independent state he said he would declare without a signed agreement with Israel would suffer from the same diseases of dependence and domination as the one created by a hard-won accord. Arafat, for example, unilaterally declared an independent state in Algiers on Nov. 15, 1988, a day that has been celebrated by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for years as Independence Day, in spite of the occupation. Reality and fantasy are a heady brew here in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

Another twofer: The Palestinian Covenant has already been modified to exclude its anti-Israel provisions, yet, Netanyahu used as a bargaining chip a renewed demand that Arafat ask the Palestinian National Council to reconvene and reject these clauses again.

All along, it has been commonplace to declare that peace is “inevitable.” But what peace? A peace that looks like occupation is no peace. A Gazan professional told me last week that every time he needs to drive from Rafa, on Gaza’s Egyptian border, up to Gaza City, passing by Israeli army watchtowers that guard the Nitzarim settlement, he is reminded that an Israeli occupation is still in force inside Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Every time he must renew his pass out of Palestinian-controlled Gaza and go to Israeli authorities for permission to get to the Palestinian-controlled West Bank, he is reminded of the occupation’s existence. The talks at Wye, designed, at least in theory, to bring the two separate pieces of Palestinian territory into some kind of conjunction, will almost “inevitably” not end this situation for Gazans and West Bankers, will not stop Israeli authorities from interfering in all sorts of Palestinian affairs.

Having watched Wye and the preceding 18 months of Netanyahu’s attempts not to negotiate, it’s impossible, in spite of the Wye agreement, to conceive of the current Israeli government entering into “good faith” talks on such painful final-status issues as refugees, Jerusalem, statehood, water, borders or settlements. Netanyahu acts as if the new Palestinian state is a pariah state, and all Palestinians pariahs. The only positive sign from him has been that he has never explicitly and absolutely rejected Oslo.

In the end, if the Palestinians and Israelis ever arrive at the final-status table, Jerusalem--the “united” city, according to Israel--will be the greatest test of their desire for peace. Will the tarnish of these unhappy earlier talks ever be scrubbed from the inevitable peace?

As we know from the past, a handshake doesn’t always mean a deal.*