THE JOINT STATEMENT at the Moscow summit affirming the US and Russian commitment to international talks on the Middle East confirms the seriousness of the quartet, which includes the EU and the UN, to hold their summer peace gathering. But one danger posed by such a conference is that it can be a tool to suppress the present frames of reference of the peace process and replace them with others tilted in Israel’s favor.
Its most dangerous feature is that it would not resume negotiations from the point where they left off, but from scratch, on the basis of the new realities imposed on the ground by Ariel Sharon’s military operations against the Palestinians. Most of the previous agreements concluded within the Madrid and later the Oslo frameworks might be scrapped, leaving only those that serve Sharon’s vision of a settlement. In short, the conference would be the jewel in the crown of the victor, an occasion to extract political gains from his bloody campaign against the Palestinians and stamp them with the seal of international legitimacy.
A clearer picture of the aims of the Israeli military assault emerges: The repression of Palestinian resistance, annihilation of the Palestinian national movement and the attempt to crush the whole of Palestinian society. The Palestinians still live under siege. Their economy is paralyzed. Their officials are routinely assassinated or rounded up. Just Saturday, Israel returned troops, tanks and armored personnel carriers to Bethlehem. Israel is imposing a wide range of individual and collective punishments on the Palestinians, manipulating the scene in the hope of changing the course and agenda of the negotiations.
Ultimately, Israel wants to impose on the Palestinians the type of leaders and negotiators who would agree to Sharon’s — and President Bush’s — idea of a solution. Hence all this talk about reforms. There is a difference between reform that is willingly undertaken and reform that is imposed by Israel and America. Palestinian reforms must be undertaken, developed in such a way that they meet the needs of an independent and sovereign future state, not operating under the supervision of another state. And not with Israel as the authority to decide whether something is reform or not. As with his earlier demand for seven days of quiet, Sharon’s insistence that the reforms first be completed before talks can begin is yet another move designed to evade substantive negotiations on a permanent settlement. Incapable of furnishing a political initiative, Sharon has opted for a series of delaying tactics designed to permanently avoid the day of reckoning.
Such an open-ended outlook is characteristic of Israeli diplomacy. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was ready to go on negotiating for 10 years as long as he did not have to alter his position or sign an agreement to that effect. In the event, or rather certainty, that Sharon refuses to tackle and resolve the fundamental issues — he has said the conference must not decide any core issues, meaning that the more intractable problems responsible for the failure of the Camp David negotiations would remain suspended — a new, unwelcome dimension might be introduced.
Such is the danger of the proposed conference, that it might tacitly accept a new mechanism that would not necessarily draw on the terms of reference that have hitherto governed the peace process. Whatever is adopted by the new conference could supersede all previous resolutions representing international legitimacy, including Security Council Resolution 242, the cornerstone of all peace efforts to date.
Israel and its friends must be naive if they believe that anyone in the Arab world would be willing to take this poisoned chalice.
