Mideast In Limbo
After
Despite
discouragement
on both sides,
some say a deal
is still doable
but just barely.
•
A Palestinian girl in Gaza City on Monday passes a Hamas wall
painting of the Koran, with a hand grenade, symbolizing Islamic
resistance. The words on the wall read "martyr brigade."
LARRY DERFNER
Special to the Jewish News
9it
anyone who gave the Oslo
ccord at least a fighting
chance, it is deeply disillu-
sioning — and for many,
also baffling — to watch the
Palestinians make war in the face of
Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak's
peace offerings.
Even U.S. President Bill Clinton's
"bridging proposals," which go some-
what beyond Barak's positions, met
this week with a long list of Palestinian
objections, while influential hardliners
like Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti
rejected them outright as another
Zionist trick.
The once-hopeful have good reason
to be disillusioned. What more did the
Palestinians expect?
If Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian
1/5
2001
18
leadership are serious in their insistence
on the right of return to Israel for all
3.7 million refugees, the near-unani-
mous Israeli conlusion is that they
were never serious about peace.
In all, this appears to be the emerg-
ing Israeli view: that in Intifada II, the
Palestinians are showing their true,
hate-filled, violent face, the one they
hid behind smiles on the White House
lawn. The old right-wing verities —
Arabs only understand force, give them
an inch and they'll take a mile,
their only goal is to throw
the Jews into the sea —
have caught on with the
general public, just as the
embodiment of those verities, Ariel
Sharon, has caught on.
The Palestinians never accepted
Israel's existence, they nurture their
children on hatred of Jews and
Judaism, they are constitutionally una-
menable to compromise, goes the pop-
ular Israeli explanation for their bloody
answer to the proferred peace deal.
Dissenting Views
Yet there are observers of Palestinian
politics and society — critical scholars
who have close ties to many important
figures in the territories, academics
who've generated a number of "creative
ideas" that have been floated in the
peace process — who dispute this view.
Dr. Khalil Shikaki, director of
Ramallah's Center for
Policy and Survey
Research, and Dr.
Menachem Klein, a researcher
at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel
Studies, both insist that Arafat and a
substantial portion of the Palestinian
leadership sincerely want to reach a
peace agreement with Israel.
The Palestinians' doubts and suspi-
cions are, in many cases, "fair
enough," says Klein, considering their
experience of the peace process — or
at any rate their understanding of that
experience. They want an ironclad
agreement that leaves nothing open to
Israeli interpretation, for fear that
Israel will interpret it in such a way as
to maintain as much control over the
Palestinians and the disputed land as
possible.
He says the Palestinians are prepared
to accept Israeli sovereignty over the
Western Wall (Kotel) of the Temple,
but they want to know where the
Kozel begins and where it ends.
"They're afraid that Israel is going to
say, 'Okay, we have the Kotel, so we
have the airspace over the Kotel, and
the airspace extends all _the way out to
the mosques and minarets and
Moslem houses that are above the
Kotel.' They've come up against this