Official PNA Editorial

After four months of a vain and criminal attempt to force an unjust solution upon the Palestinian leadership by waging war against its people, and on the eve of elections where the chances of the outgoing Israeli Prime minister to regain power look very dim to all observers, the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have come out of Taba with an as yet undefined form of agreement.

It is indeed not a treaty, nor a full-fledged agreement; it is not a framework agreement, nor a declaration of principles, even though it looks more or less like one; it is not a new interim agreement, nor is it a final status accord.

It embodies general guidelines for further negotiations, if and whenever they resume, and bears witness to the achievements of the negotiators until now, while delineating the remaining gaps between the parties about the core issues of the conflict. For it is not only time that is lacking to achieve a full agreement. The fragile legitimacy of an Israeli government whose ! days are so tightly numbered and the imminent prime ministerial elections have also weighed heavily on the chances of success.

But, and in spite of significant advances on several issues, we are still facing the evergoing attempt, on the part of the Israeli government, to depart from the referential character of International Law and move into the realm of subjective needs backed by the military imbalance of power. Vague formulations do not always mean "constructive ambiguity". Some ambiguities, have we have learnt from more than seven years of unimplemented agreements, can be quite destructive. The will to pursue negotiations, however, is a positive sign, and the narrowing of the gap inherited from the Camp David talks of last summer shows that progress is possible. There is, however, no certainty that this will be enough for Israeli voters to give the Taba negotiators a new mandate, and the whole exercise may very well move abruptly from the sphere of live diplomacy to that of past history, if a confused and de-stabilized electorate decides to lend an ear to the sirens of war.

The Palestinian leadership, which is committed to peace as a basic strategic option, will of course negotiate with whatever Israeli government is elected, as it has done in the past, particularly in Wye River. But Palestinians hear the electoral discourse, the speeches and the debate in Israel, and cannot be detached, neutral or uninterested in the outcome, which may shape the coming months, and maybe years, and determine whether we can preserve the hope of moving towards a just possible peace, with all the difficulties and hardship on the way or whether we are heading towards another chapter of bloodshed and suffering. For let there be no misunderstanding: the Palestinian popular upheaval provoked by Barak's misguided belief in the virtue of force will not stop if Sharon comes, and it will only escalate if he tries to carry out the military threats he aired during his election campaign.

One of the surprising features of the last Taba talks, however, has been the low profile of the new US administration. Hardly an impetus. No mediator, no moderator. While an official spokesman clarified that it was not involved in the promotion of former US President Clinton's proposals, the validity of which had vanished with the formal end of his mandate, it was clear that the new residents of the White House had decided to wait and see the results of next week’s elections before moving. But it was also clear that the style of Presidential involvement was undergoing a drastic change.

And given that Clinton’s proposals are no longer on the table, now that their alleged author is out of the White House, it is legitimate to wonder what is it, then, that kept both sides running, at such a late hour? For the Israeli side, there has certainly been a will to appear, both in front of the Israeli "left" and the Arab electorate of Israel, as well as at the eyes of Western countries, as peace-searchers and peace-lovers.

The hope to achieve some agreement of principle that could transform the imminent Israeli elections into a referendum for Peace. The will to create conditions allowing for a significant decrease in the quantity and intensity of violent clashes. For the PLO and the PNA, the attempt to reach some form of common stand, even in vague terms, reflects the need to prevent a total regression of the negotiating process into an open-ended process of renegotiations of all the principles affirmed in the Interim agreements. It is also an attempt to draft the agreed upon bases on which all future negotiations will start again, once the sound and fury of Sharon's military threat fall back. It is in this context that Palestinian media and personalities have recently engaged in retrospective assessments of the Clinton years in regards to the Middle-East conflict, and it has now become fashionable to blame Clinton for the failure of the Peace-Process, the so-called "failure of Oslo", which is in fact the failure to implement the "Oslo" and subsequent interim agreements.

This simplified version of events does not only injustice to the former President's personal involvement and dedication, which went all the way to intensive group therapy, Wye-River or Camp David style, sleepless nights and relentless harassment of the parties. It also overlooks some of the unfortunate, but constant parameters of US policy. After all, the US "peace team" Dennis Ross and Co., was an inheritance of the old Bush-Baker administration. Let us also not forget that it is the Republican majority in Congress which passed the infamous resolution to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and the ! Clinton administration which set up the postponing mechanism today utilized by the new administration.

True enough, Clinton was not capable to raise over the climate of overbidding which always characterizes US elections, and in the aftermath of the Camp David talks of last summer, did not hesitate to violate his own commitments and lay the blame squarely on the PLO for the failure to reach an agreement, and this support to Barak probably encouraged him in his military miscalculations.

True enough, there must have been some measure of cultural short-sightedness in Clinton's failure to grasp the Arabic and Islamic connection to Jerusalem in general and to the Haram El Sharif in particular, and in his na•ve belief, constructed by his ill-advised advisors, that once cornered between himself and the Israeli Prime minister, Yasser Arafat could not but accept whatever flawed deal he would be offered. No doubt that this biased perception did a lot to encourage Barak and his staff to engage in the test of force and coercion which started with Sharon's provocation on September 28th, lighting the fuse of the current confrontation.

But this in no way sums up Clinton's performance over the eight years of his legislature. He is, after all, the one who established the status of the PLO in US and world politics, and he is, above all, the one who introduced the Palestinian State in American official discourse. Many of us still vividly remember his appearance in Gaza, before Palestinian legislators, and the strengths and conviction of his empathy with Palestinian national aspirations.

For all this, we are grateful and admirative, even though it is obvious that all these efforts were ultimately not crowned by success. Behind those misperceptions, there are gross distortions and myths as to the nature of Israeli-US relations.

One consists in believing that US policy is decided in Tel-Aviv (as though it was the tail that waved the dog) while the other consists in imagining that the White House has an unlimited power to tell Israel what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Reality, of course, is as usual more complex. Not that one should underestimate the effective weight of the "lobby" in the shaping of US Middle-East policies, or of the prevalent climate in US mass-media. But one must also face the fact that the "lobby" concept has for a long time functioned as an alibi, convenient in US-Arab relations, masking imperial designs and cultural prejudice. This prejudice undoubtedly feeds on various Old Testament theologies, which still produce "Christian Zionists", in the same way as the Dutch Reform Church had once given theological backing to apartheid in South Africa, and it underlies the bizarre alliance of the Protestant fundamentalists of the so-called "moral majority" and the Zionist Ultra-Right. It is also probably grounded on the pattern of settlement colonization which has presided over the historical formation of the USA, and makes the Zionist state a mere re-enactment of the American model, with our Palestinian Arab people in the role of the indigenous Americans. We should therefore understand that we have a problem, as the whole world has, with American society at large, instead of transforming this or that President, or this or that administration into a scapegoat for our inability to transform their attitude.

In the meantime, however, escalation continues on the ground. In spite of its semi-spontaneous and sometimes disorganized character, Palestinian armed struggle, a sporadic harassment of settlers and occupation forces, imposes a state of siege upon the Israeli war machinery. Thus have Israeli military and legal experts been busy, in the course of the last week, redefining the conflict: low intensity conflict, armed conflict, or outright war. The importance of those categories does not lie in their descriptive accuracy, but in their legal implications. In this context, and without forgetting for a second the suffering of the Palestinian victims of Israeli state-terrorism, the PNA and Fateh leadership have condemned the killing of Israeli civilians in Tulkarem, by a group of militants who organized themselves as a vengeance unit. Killing of civilians on the basis of their sole ethnic identity is both a political mistake and a war crime.

Terror cannot be the response to terror. Not only are we not formally at war, but even if we were, or if we considered that we are, we would still be bound to respect the laws of war, and in particular the IVth Geneva convention (1949) on the protection of civilians in times of war.

The dangerous and slippery descent into community ethnic-confessional strife, with its popular passion for vendetta and retaliation, which has characterized the ever self-reproducing conflict pattern, indeed tends to blur the distinction between military and civilian, between the fanatic, trigger-happy terrorist settlers and ordinary Israeli civilians within the Green Line.

This amalgam serves the attempt to portray the conflict as a struggle for Israel's very existence, which is not threatened in any way by the war of liberation in which our Palestinian people is engaged in order to achieve its internationally recognized fundamental national and human rights.

If the coming weeks were to witness a predictable collapse of the negotiating process, there would once again be no alternative to the dramatic escalation of colonization, repression and aggression but the intervention of the international community.