In a quiet moment on her hectic Mideast mission, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright last week paid homage at the grave of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the warrior-turned-statesman assassinated by a Jew for pursuing peace with Palestinians.
Perhaps mindful of her recently discovered Jewish roots, she laid a stone, in the Jewish tradition, on his black and white headstone and bowed her head in prayer. Then she embraced Rabin’s widow, Leah, and resumed the difficult job of trying to salvage, perhaps even resurrect, Rabin’s legacy.
By any measure, the Mideast peace accord forged at Oslo and signed by Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn four years ago this weekend is in dire need of prayers.
Many Israelis and Palestinians feel that fragile deal, which won its framers Nobel Peace Prizes, is on its deathbed, if it has not passed away already, pulverized by Arab suicide bombings, Israeli reprisals and a loss of hope.
Some Israelis who once trumpeted the pact as irreversible now are calling it impossible. Many Palestinians who hailed it as a new beginning now consider it a dead end.
American mediators who basked in its early glory are at a loss about how to push forward a peace deal when there is little peace to keep and apparently insufficient will by Israel or the self-rule Palestinian Authority to renew it.
Albright’s mission to bolster peace and regional support, which continues Sunday in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, may be the most vexing and potentially explosive of her tenure as President Clinton’s secretary of state.
The stakes for American policy and stability in the region couldn’t be higher. Israelis are talking openly about the possibility of war should Oslo dissolve. Palestinians warn of a new intifada, or uprising, unless it is saved.
“Terrorists can create grief, but they cannot defeat hope,” Albright declared confidently on her arrival in Israel last week. But that is exactly what many on both sides feel they have lost.
Some believe it would be a miracle if she restored civil dialogue, let alone substantive progress, between peace partners whose faith in the process and each other is at its lowest point in four years.
“Before, there was hope, there was belief, there was willingness and there was respect,” a somber Leah Rabin said with a sigh, as she appealed to fellow Israelis and the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Bring back hope. Bring back belief.”
After helping victims of the slaughter in the suicide bombing in Jerusalem Sept. 4, Miriam Aharon, a 15-year-old Israeli high school student, was afraid to go to sleep, fearing nightmares about the dead, wounded and dismembered.
“It’s like you have a bomb go off here every month now,” said the teenager, lingering on the shattered pedestrian mall where three bombers blew up themselves, killing five Israelis and wounding 192. “You go on, but it shouldn’t be like that.”
Terror and anxiety reign in the Holy City’s streets these days. Israeli sappers blew up four suspicious packages on the mall last week, on high alert to intelligence warnings of more bombings by Muslim radicals opposed to peace.
In the teeming Gaza Strip, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a founder of the extremist Islamic group Hamas, whose military wing claimed responsibility for the two Jerusalem bombings in the last six weeks that claimed 25 lives, showed no remorse.
Pointing to the oppressive conditions Gazans have suffered from repeated closures of the strip by Israel, usually in response to the bombings, Rantisi asserted that all occupiers “killed themselves. It’s their fault when they came to my country.”
Albright waded into the morass of Israeli charges and Palestinian countercharges of bad faith and found blame on both sides. She strongly backed Netanyahu’s demand that Arafat fight terror with a 100 percent effort, and she warned there would be no peace to discuss if Arafat continues to embrace people such as Rantisi while Israeli security plummets.
Even so, the secretary of state reiterated Arafat’s demand that Israel refrain from what the Palestinians see as provocative one-sided actions that try to pre-empt the outcome of talks on a final settlement, such as expanding Jewish settlements, confiscating Arab lands and demolishing Palestinian homes.
The original deal at Oslo envisioned an interim phase in which Israel would trade land in Gaza and the West Bank, captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, for peace with the Palestinians. The idea was to build momentum and confidence in the early stages, leading toward “final status” talks on the thorniest issues of all: Jewish settlements, Palestinian refugees, final borders and disputed Jerusalem.
Those talks have been on hold since Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition took power in June 1996. Meanwhile, the interim phase has been stalled since talks broke down in March after Netanyahu’s government started a new housing project in disputed East Jerusalem.
The bombings that followed this summer prompted Netanyahu’s security Cabinet to decide there would be no further transfers of land to the Palestinians, as required under the interim accord, until Arafat truly fights terror. That impasse is what Albright hopes to untangle, but experts disagree on her prospects.
“The situation in a way is at the lowest ebb of the relations with the Palestinians since the signing of the Oslo agreement,” observed Ron Pundak, a fellow at Hebrew University’s Truman Institute and an architect of the original 1993 Oslo deal.
“But the Oslo process is still definitely alive, and I believe if there will be enough pressure by the Americans, we can definitely revive it. I think we are in a temporary hold, rather than a full stop, mainly because of the policies of Netanyahu,” he said. “Mainly it’s up to the Israelis to put hope back into the process.”
David Bar-Illan, the prime minister’s director of policy planning and communications, acknowledged the Oslo accord was at “its most critical point, with the possible exception of the point it was in in March 1996, when it totally collapsed and the Labor government thought it could not make one more step.”
Bar-Illan denied in an interview last week the suspicions of many Palestinians and some left-wing Israelis that the Netanyahu government was using the excuse of terrorism and the need for more Israeli security to try to torpedo a peace process it distrusted from the start.
“Are we trying in any way to get out of the Oslo agreement?” he asked rhetorically. “The answer is a flat `no.’ We’re only saying that this is an agreement between two sides. And unless the other side–after four years of not keeping the main and fundamental, essential part of the agreement that they’re committed to–as long as they’re not doing it, we cannot go on.”
Nabil Abourdene, an adviser to Arafat, insisted that the Palestinian Authority was making a total effort to fight terrorism, noting that Netanyahu “blames us for everything. Yet a month ago, there weren’t any attacks, and in spite of that, the peace process was frozen.
“So they were looking for a delay, and when the attacks came, they found it was a good pretext to delay and talk about security.”
Israelis insist that Arafat is not keeping his commitments under Oslo to round up all suspected terrorists, confiscate illegal firearms, stop incitement against Israel from the mosques or the streets, and destroy terrorist infrastructures operating from self-rule areas.
Palestinians complain that Israel has not kept its commitments under the interim stage to release political prisoners, allow Palestinians to open an airport and a seaport and permit the opening of a safe route between Gaza and the West Bank.
Israelis are bitterly divided on how to proceed. They still support the peace process, but they are more nervous than ever about whether it will lead to peace or more terror.
“The disaster of Oslo is unprecedented in the history of the state of Israel,” asserted a right-winger sympathetic to the government. “It has undermined the state and the morale of the people and put us in this awfully difficult position. There’s only bad and worse.”
Foreign Minister David Levy, however, reportedly surprised a recent Cabinet meeting by declaring that he was not among those who would let the process wither, according to Israeli media. Levy argues that would really leave Israel at a dead end.
Yaakov Levy, a senior spokesman at the Foreign Ministry, sought to put the current crisis in the context of the 100th anniversary of Zionism and the approaching 50th anniversary of the state.
“Most of our lives, as Israelis, have been driven by conflict, but at certain stages, we changed gears,” he said, referring to peace with Egypt, the 1991 Madrid peace conference and Oslo. “The gears have changed and the region is on a different path.”
