POLITICS-MIDEAST: Oslo Agreement Pushed to Sidelines

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 8 1998 (IPS) - The Oslo peace process for the Middle East, currently overshadowed by the storm clouds hanging over Iraq, may have entered a terminal phase, according to political observers in Washington.

In the two weeks since the visits here of Palestine Authority President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. mediation, including a high-profile scolding of both leaders by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, has failed to narrow the gap significantly.

U.S. officials are not optimistic about any further progress when low-level talks begin here next week. “Our expectations are not running high,” said one.

“The Oslo process is almost dead,” according to Ehud Sprinzak, a visiting fellow from Israel at the U.S. Institute of Peace, who warns that, faced with Netanyahu’s intransigeance, “insurrection is what is left to the Palestinians today.”

Other observers are not quite so pessimistic, believing that Washington may still cobble together a face-saving deal for a small Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank in the coming months and keep the peace process alive. But the overall mood among Middle East specialists is as gloomy as at any time since the Oslo accord was signed on the White House lawn in Sept. 1993.

U.S. President Bill Clinton, whose personal involvement in trying to bring the two sides closer together last month was unprecedented, has been distracted the ongoing White House sex scandal and the crisis over Iraq’s refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors. Both issues dominated a news conference held Friday by Clinton and visiting Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Clinton also failed even to mention the peace process in his 75- minute State of the Union Address last week, an omission which disappointed most Mideast specialists here and tended to confirm the pessimistic prognoses.

With U.S. leadership weakened and distracted, other mediators are trying to fill the vacuum. Norway, a co-sponsor of the Oslo accord, is sending its chief Mideast trouble-shooter to the region this weekend and European Commission President Jacques Santer – who has pushed for a bigger European role in the peace process – began his first official visit to the Middle East Friday.

They will be meeting with leaders whose mutual distrust, if anything, has increased in recent weeks. Whatever concession Arafat may be prepared to make on security, “he is absolutely certain in his mind that Netanyahu will not find it to be sufficient,” says Shibley Telhami, a regional specialist at the University of Maryland.

Netanyahu has done little in the past two weeks to disabuse Arafat of that notion. According to Sprinzak, Israel has effectively pulled out of a mechanism chaired by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that was designed to ensure joint Israeli- Palestinian cooperation in fighting terrorism.

In addition, his interior ministry has approved the construction of a new Jewish settlement in Ras al-Amud, a development which Palestinians have long warned could break the peace process once and for all.

Netanyahu has also firmed up his political position at home since returning from Washington. Recent polls suggest he has made up a 15-percentage point deficit with Labour Party chief Ehud Barak.

“His coalition today is much more solid,” says Sprinzak, who notes that former Foreign Minister David Levy, who deserted the government last month, may soon return to fortify its majority. These latest developments have tended to confirm what Telhami calls a “major shift in outlook across the region” since Netanyahu’s election in May 1996.

After the Oslo accords were signed, he says, “Israeli-Arab peace was (seen as) inevitable,” and the various regional forces lined up behind it. But “in the past few months, the assumption in the region is that…conflict is inevitable.” In some respects, the current crisis in the Gulf, the worst since 1991, reflects this tendency. To reverse this psychology, says Telhami, “you need some major new initiative” that will encourage leaders to take risks for peace.

Some analysts, such as Judith Kipper of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), believe declaration of principles by Clinton about what a final peace agreement would include could provide that kind of momentum, especially if it were endorsed by past Republican secretaries of state to give the president political cover.

Such a settlement would include the withdrawal of Israeli troops from about 90 percent of the West Bank, the creation of a Palestinian state which would agree to ban foreign troops and foreign alliances. “The United States has to define the end game,” says Adnan Abu Odeh, a former top Jordanian diplomat at CSIS.

Sprinzak, who has been working here over the past six months, says he has become “increasingly convinced that nothing can happen in this city” given the “enormous imbalance of power” in Washington between the Israel lobby and the Palestinians. At the same time, he believes that Netanyahu may be overestimating his own advantage, particularly if the ongoing impasse provkes a Palestinian insurrection.

“Netanyahu,” he says, “is taking a very uncalculated risk.” Israel’s military reserves will be reluctant to re-enter the occupied territories, while several weeks of insurrection resulting in “hundreds of Palestinians casualties” could rebound very badly against Netanyahu.

“Never underestimate the power of the powerless,” he stresses, adding that the Likud government is showing “a combination of arrogance and hubris” similar to that which prevailed in the early stages of Likud’s ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Ehud Ya’ari of Israeli Television also sees a great risk in a new confrontation on the territories, noting that any clash is likely to negatively affect Iraeli relations with its two other Arab peace partners, Jordan and Egypt, where anti-Netanyahu feeling already has been running very high.

At the same time, Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian historian at the University of Chicago, believes that Netanyahu would actually welcome such a clash because it would give him a pretext to formally renounce Israel’s commitments under Oslo. “Netanyahu has always been fundamentally opposed to this agreement,” he said.