2. US
President Clinton would like nothing more than to hold over Israel like a sword of
Damocles the conference against Israeli settlements by the signatories of the Fourth
Geneva Convention. Israel isn't asking for a favor when it calls for the conference's
cancellation - it is demanding that agreements be honored.
The principle that Israel and the Palestinians settle their differences on final-status
issues, including the settlement issue being discussed at the conference, via mutually
agreed forums is the very backbone of the entire Oslo process.
It was set in Arafat's breakthrough September 9, 1993 letter to prime minister Yitzhak
Rabin ("all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through
negotiations"), and reiterated in Article XXI of the September 28, 1995 Interim
Agreement witnessed by the US, Russia, Egypt, Jordan, Norway and the European Union.
Arafat and the non-American witnesses to this agreement grossly violated it by
initiating or not voting against the conference. The claim that the conference is a quid
pro quo response to Israeli settlement activity is specious. Israel can't annex territory
in the West Bank and Gaza during the interim period, but the agreements don't prohibit the
construction of Jewish settlements any more than of Palestinian homes.
3. Israelis aren't happy with Clinton's support of the return of the
1948 refugees to within the Green Line. An IMRA-commissioned Gallup Poll of adult Israeli
Jews last week found that 67.6% believe it will cause the Palestinians to adopt a harder
stance in the upcoming negotiations.
The Clinton administration's laconic clarification that it is an issue to be negotiated
between the parties only rubs salt into the wound.
Clinton may not be willing to drag the refugee-comment "horse" back into the
barn, but there is something he can do that in no way changes US foreign policy: He can
publicly state a historic fact so often distorted by Arab propaganda - that UN Resolution
242 requires Israeli withdrawal "from territories" not from "the
territories."
This is not a question of interpretation. As then-US under-secretary of state for
political affairs Eugene V. Rostow wrote in the September 1970 issue of the American
Journal of International Law, "It is... not legally possible to assert that the
provision requires Israeli withdrawal from all the territories."
4. The oversimplified term "fighting terror" has led many to
believe that as long as bombs don't blow up, Arafat has kept his part of the bargain. But
Arafat's security obligations, as spelled out in the Wye Memorandum, go far beyond that.
Before the next Israeli withdrawal, Arafat was supposed to, among other things, reduce
the size of his security force, collect illegal weapons and hand over his own illegal arms
caches (including antitank and antiaircraft missiles) to the CIA. He hasn't. Last week,
Ahmed Sabawi, press officer for the Palestinian Authority Preventive Security and General
Intelligence for the Gaza area, told me that only around 120 handguns - no rifles - have
been confiscated in the last year.
Clinton's team now claims that Israel is obligated to withdraw in the same period that
the Palestinians are supposed to get around to complying. If the Palestinians cheat, they
argue, it should only hold up the third withdrawal.
But that's not what Arafat promised in "solemn verbal understandings made by the
parties in the presence of the president of the United States."
A senior member of the Netanyahu administration recently told me he thought it was
"criminally negligent" to rely on Clinton to stand behind the deal, an
observation just as damning of Clinton as Netanyahu.
Yes, Clinton took Netanyahu for a patsy. But those understandings are among the
Palestinian Authority, the United States of America, and the State of Israel - not
Netanyahu.
If, when Clinton meets Barak, he continues to ignore these understandings, it won't be
Netanyahu that Clinton is taking for a dupe; it will be Barak.
Barak's message should be simple. He is a serious man who takes his own word seriously
and expects the same from others. If Barak fails to stand firm in Washington, it will be a
loss for Israel and all others who seek a lasting peace."
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