Toughest Phase of Mideast Peace Talks Underway

With a self-imposed one-year deadline for ending decades of conflict, Israel and the Palestinian Authority on Monday opened negotiations on the last and most difficult issues blocking a definitive peace.

In a nighttime ceremony at a forlorn crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip, senior Israeli and Palestinian officials clasped hands and staked out diametrically opposed positions on their core differences: final borders, who will get Jerusalem and what will happen to more than 3 million Palestinian refugees.

U.S. and European envoys looked on as Foreign Minister David Levy, head of the Israeli delegation, and the senior Palestinian negotiator, Mahmoud Abbas, pledged to use every opportunity to reach a settlement.

“We are now entering the last phase,” Levy said after meeting with Abbas. “This agreement, with God’s help, will end the 100-year conflict that has caused so much pain for the two peoples.”

Monday’s formalities were timed to occur six years to the day after the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, ratifying the landmark Oslo accord that launched Israel and the Palestinians on the tortuous pursuit of peace.

The talks that began Monday night with the new Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Barak represent a quantum leap in those efforts. Until now, negotiations have concentrated on piecemeal and interim agreements, on limited land transfers and prisoner releases, postponing indefinitely the excruciating matters that go to the heart of whether the two societies can coexist peacefully.

“We have reached the moment of truth,” said Abbas, also known as Abu Maazen. “If the past’s slogan was the denial of rights, the future’s slogan should be the recognition of these rights. . . . It is time for historical reconciliation.”

Yet it was immediately clear that the Israelis and Palestinians remain light years apart on the most intractable issues facing them.

In the ceremony at the Erez crossing point, Levy and Abbas stated their governments’ mutually exclusive bottom-line positions.

The Palestinians, seeking to establish an independent state, want Israel to return to borders that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War. They want the land Israel captured from Jordan and Egypt--the West Bank and Gaza Strip--with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. Israel says it will never pull back to the 1967 borders and will not entertain relinquishing its hold on all of Jerusalem--its “eternal and undivided capital.”

Israel also insists that the future Palestinian entity not field an army. The Palestinians demand an end to Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel wants to annex part of the West Bank to retain sovereignty over most of more than 180,000 Jewish settlers.

The Palestinians are also seeking the repatriation of more than 3 million Palestinian refugees scattered in Arab countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and throughout the world, a demand that Arafat reiterated Saturday at a meeting of the Arab League in Cairo. Barak has ruled out the right of return.

Water rights in this drought-plagued region are also at stake.

Acknowledging the distances, Levy said painful compromise and “direct dialogue” are the only answer.

“We should be prepared for the possibility that, at times, the differences between our positions will seem abysmal and unbridgeable,” Levy said. “At such moments, we should all, peoples and leaders, continue to focus on the goal of ending the conflict.”

Despite the odds, the senior American official in attendance, Middle East envoy Dennis B. Ross, said Monday’s meeting signaled that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is back on track “in a good spirit” after years of chilly stalemate.

“I don’t minimize the differences,” Ross said. “I have no illusions about how difficult this will be. [But] no matter what the differences, everything is possible.”

Two previous attempts to begin negotiations on these outstanding so-called final-status issues went nowhere, in part because of the ascension to power in May 1996 of hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu lost an election in May to Barak, a career army commander who nevertheless said he was committed to resolving conflicts with Arabs once and for all. The election of Barak’s new government and the declining health of the 70-year-old Arafat make striking a deal at least feasible.

Under an agreement signed nine days ago, the two sides will attempt to reach a framework accord--an outline for how each problem will be solved--by February. The comprehensive agreement would be drafted by September 2000.

“If we don’t reach a framework accord within five months, we won’t reach a final agreement in five years,” Barak told Israeli army radio late last week.

Israeli analysts remained skeptical about how quickly even a reinvigorated peace process can move toward settling such explosive issues.

“The two sides are not tired enough to make further compromises,” said Efraim Inbar, a political scientist with Bar Ilan University’s Center for Strategic Studies. “There are still a lot of energies left in both societies, and both are still ready to fight for certain things. They’ll have to shed more blood.”

If there is doubt among Israelis, many Palestinians are downright glum.

An opinion poll released this week and conducted by the Nablus, West Bank-based Center for Palestine Research and Studies found that despite overwhelming support for the peace process, more than half of those polled--55.2%--believed a solution “acceptable to both parties” cannot be found.

More than two-thirds said they did not trust Barak’s government.

In Gaza City over the weekend, just a few miles from where Monday’s ceremony took place, Palestinians said they were convinced their people would get the short end of the stick.

“This is a peace where the strong one imposes his will on the weak one,” said Khaled Abdullah, 30, one of several men sitting outside an auto repair factory on Salahadin Street. “It is a handicapped peace.”

Mohammed Zidan, a car dealer with seven children, agreed.

“After seven years of intifada, and five years of delay, delay, delay, there is no place for optimism,” he said. The intifada was the 1987-93 Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.

Eyad Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist and human rights activist, said Palestinians are increasingly depressed, and prone to violence, over what they see as a dead-end peace process. He predicted rioting and upheaval if Palestinians don’t see concrete progress.

“Pragmatic steps are very important,” Sarraj said in his Gaza clinic, “but the Palestinian people have to have a vision. We are in between being patient and waiting to erupt.”

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‘Final-Status’ Issues

Israel and Palestinians formally opened “final-status” talks Monday aimed at drafting a lasting peace settlement within 12 months. Here are some of the major issues confronting negotiators:

* Jerusalem: Israel captured traditionally Arab East Jerusalem from Jordan along with the rest of the West Bank in the June 1967 Six-Day War. It regards all of Jerusalem as its “united and eternal capital” and says it will not relinquish control. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem, including the walled Old City with its major Muslim, Jewish and Christian shrines, as the capital of a state. The international community does not recognize Israel’s claim to sovereignty. The United States and interim peace deals say both parties must resolve the city’s status in their talks.

* Jewish settlements: More than 180,000 Jews live in settlements on land that Israel continues to occupy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has said he intends to keep large settlement blocs under Israeli sovereignty. The Palestinians, who estimate the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank at 3 million, say all settlements must go. Most of the international community regards Jewish settlements as illegal under the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. calls them “obstacles to peace.”

* Borders and security arrangements: The Palestinians want to establish an independent Palestine with sovereign powers in all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. They say the borders should be set at the line with Israel before June 4, 1967, when the West Bank was under Jordanian control and the Gaza Strip was administered by Egypt. So far, interim peace deals have given the Palestinians self-rule in more than 60% of the Gaza Strip and about 36% of the West Bank. Israel has not set down percentage figures for how much more land it is ready to give up. It says it will not return to the 1967 borders.

* Palestinian refugees: There are 3.6 million U.N.-registered refugees in the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. They are the original refugees, and their descendants, from the 1948 war when Israel was created and from 1967. As the official representative of all the Palestinian people, the Palestinians take the position that refugees have a right of return. Israel has said throughout almost its entire history that Palestinians who left in 1948 cannot come back.

* Water rights: Water allocation was an interim issue, but Israel and the Palestinians agreed in 1995 to put off detailed debate on the subject to final-status talks. Israel wants to retain full control of water resources. The Palestinians, who suffer shortages as a result, say all underground water in the West Bank and Gaza should be under their control.

Source: Reuters