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NEW YORK—It is widely assumed that the instability and violence that have marked the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in recent months have been caused by the breakdown in the permanent status negotiations at Camp David last July.
For Israel, that assumption translates as follows: Yasser Arafat rejected the most far-reaching concessions ever made by an Israeli government, and to extract even greater concessions he masterminded the eruption of new levels of Palestinian violence. For Palestinians, it translates differently: Ehud Barak's continued rejection of basic Palestinian demands for fairness and "international legality" with respect to the status of Jerusalem, the return of refugees and the removal of settlements enraged the Palestinian street and triggered a new intifada.
Both these readings of what happened in recent months are dangerously wrong. The eruption of violence on Sept. 28 had little to do with alleged shortcomings in Israel's positions on the final status issues. Indeed, most Palestinians had no idea what Mr. Barak proposed at Camp David, for his proposals went largely unreported in the Palestinian press. Palestinian violence was first and foremost the consequence of what Palestinians see as a never-ending Israeli occupation. For nearly a full year before the Camp David talks, Israeli intelligence repeatedly warned Mr. Barak that Palestinians would no longer endure the constraints and humiliations of occupation, and that outbreaks of violence, possibly on a large scale, were imminent. These warnings were ignored. The intifada erupted because Palestinians reached a point of despair, no longer believing that the peace process would improve their wretched condition or bring about an end to the occupation. The daily restrictions and humiliations of the occupation, and the relentless Israeli encroachments on Palestinian land and lives, are the cause of Palestinian rage, not shortcomings in proposals made by Mr. Barak to Mr. Arafat.
New agreements that contain new promises of withdrawal will have no impact on the Palestinian street, for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza no longer believe anything that Israeli leaders tell them. They also do not believe much of what Palestinian Authority leaders tell them. The more than seven years of Oslo promises have yielded only greater poverty, greater loss of Palestinian lands and greater Israeli control over Palestinian lives. Palestinian disillusionment is too deep to be dissipated by new promises. It will end only with the actual withdrawal of Israel's military and the end of the stranglehold that they exercise over every aspect of Palestinian existence.
Mr. Arafat was aware before Camp David that the Palestinian street could explode at any moment, and that not only Israel but also he and the Palestinian Authority would be targets of that violence. (One of his closest associates, Hisham Mikki, head of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, was assassinated on Jan. 17 by fellow Palestinians disgusted with his corruption.) So his reluctance to attend the Camp David summit is understandable. He knew he was not about to sign a peace agreement that would enable his opposition to add the charge of capitulation to Israel to a long list of other complaints. And a document in which he renounced all further claims against Israel, a condition that Mr. Barak insisted on, was seen by him as signing his own death warrant.
The climate of distrust, rage and violence created by the occupation makes acceptance of difficult compromises impossible. This climate cannot be dissipated by promises of change, however genuine, for these promises are inevitably seen by Palestinians as pretexts for a prolongation of the occupation. Violent Palestinian resistance will abate only when Israel actually removes itself from Palestinian lives and withdraws its military and its checkpoints from the territories. The pattern of all previous peace efforts must therefore be reversed. Instead of aiming at a peace agreement that enables Israel to withdraw its forces from the territories, Israel will have to withdraw its forces from the territories in order to be able to negotiate a peace agreement.
The withdrawal should be nominally unilateral, although it would have to be fully coordinated with the Palestinian Authority, however unofficially and informally. The withdrawal would be followed by a "unilateral" declaration of Palestinian statehood.
Both Israel and the Palestinians would have to agree that these unilateral measures would not be followed by any further unilateral actions that would preempt negotiation of any of the final status issues. These issues should remain open for negotiation - including the issue of Jerusalem, where the status quo would prevail. When negotiations resume after Israel's withdrawal and the first-phase establishment of a Palestinian state, they will hold far greater promise of success. Not only will the withdrawal have removed the primary cause of Palestinian violence (occupation by Israel) but the negotiations will now be conducted between two sovereign states, not between an occupying power and its subjects. If, as argued here, occupation is the primary obstacle to reaching agreement on final status issues, then the fact that Palestinians will not resume negotiations on terms less generous than those offered by Mr. Barak becomes less of a problem. If the primary objective is an end to the occupation as a condition for resolving final status issues, then a Sharon-led government could conceivably move the situation forward more quickly than the previous government was able to.
This seemingly paradoxical conclusion follows from Mr. Sharon's publicly stated position that he would accept Palestinian sovereignty as an interim measure in 43 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. He has said that this area would be territorially contiguous, allowing Israel to withdraw its military checkpoints, whose presence, more than any other factor, contributes to the misery of the occupation.
Presumably Mr. Sharon recognizes that this would necessarily require the removal of isolated Israeli settlements. He has also said that such an arrangement would not preempt continued negotiation of all remaining final status issues.
Palestinians have good reason to fear that such a first interim step might well be the last one, leaving Palestinians with a state in less than half of the West Bank. That is why Mr. Arafat rejects such a transitional arrangement. But this is where American diplomacy comes in. For this approach to work, the United States must help secure an Israeli commitment to a resumption of permanent status negotiations immediately after the implementation of these interim measures. If the new U.S. administration is unwilling to assume even so minimal an involvement in the peace process, then neither this proposal nor any other holds any promise of preventing an imminent escalation of violence. Establishment of the first phase of a Palestinian state would offer a lifeline to the Palestinian Authority, which may well be on the verge of institutional collapse.
It would also offer the leaders what may be their last chance to regain the trust of the Palestinian community by finally establishing a level of transparency and accountability that Palestinians demand and surely deserve.
The refusal of the executive branch to relinquish any of its near total authority and the impotence of the Palestinian Legislative Council and of the Palestinian judiciary are as much an obstacle to Palestinian statehood as are Israel's policies. Coordination of Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of a Palestinian state would be difficult in the best of circumstances. It is a formidable challenge. But if both parties see that an end to the occupation is the absolute precondition for an end to the violence and for the creation of a far more promising climate in which to negotiate a peace agreement, they may be convinced of the advantages of this approach.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He contributed these personal views to the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright 2001 International Herald Tribune