Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Agreement for the sake of 'agreement'

August 13, 2008


Agreement for the sake of 'agreement'


A report that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is offering the Palestinians 93 percent of the occupied West Bank as part of a peace agreement could very well be an Israeli trial balloon. Given the details given in the report, it could also be genuine. The Palestinian side has denied the report.
But it is clear that there is a lot of behind-the-scene contacts between Israel and the mainstream Palestinian leadership headed by President Mahmoud Abbas. Not everyone is privy to everything. Perhaps that is why Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said the report was "baseless" and contained "half-truths used by Israelis as a test balloon so they can blame the Palestinians" if negotiations fail.
According to Israel's Haaretz newspaper, the Israeli proposal would also compensate the Palestinians with the equivalent of 5.5 per cent of the West Bank adjacent to the Gaza Strip and a route connecting Gaza to the West Bank itself. This will be in return for Israeli annexation of land that houses most of the major Jewish settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem.
The final Palestinian state would be demilitarised and without an army, according to Haaretz. However, the Palestinians are reportedly demanding that their security forces be capable of defending against "outside threats."
For the first time, the reported proposal includes an explicit Israeli reference to the Palestinian refugee problem. It contains, according to Haaretz, a complex solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, allowing some refugees from the 1948 war to return to what Israel now claims as its own territory while settling most of the 4.5 million refugees and their descendants in the Palestinian state.
Haaretz also reported that the plan has a rider: Abbas would only receive the land and the overland connection once his Fatah forces retake the Gaza Strip from the Hamas movement, which seized power in the Mediterranean strip in June 2007.
As such the proposal is only a draft to be implemented in the coming months and years, and would not immediately include the thorny issue of the future status of Jerusalem, according to Haaretz.
The report raises the prospect that the proposal could very well be the draft of a document that the US wants Israel and the Palestinians to sign before George W Bush steps down as president of the US. If the document is signed as sought by the US, then it would represent, as far as the Bush administration is concerned, the realisation of a promise that Bush made at last year's Annapolis conference that there would be a an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in place before he leaves office in January 2009. And perhaps that is why Bush himself and people close to him like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are expressing confidence that the promise would be fulfilled even after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that he would be stepping down in September.
However, waving an agreement in order to serve someone's political purposes is one thing. Having it implemented with seriousness and commitment is something else.