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Sharm el-Sheikh: None dare call it peace

By Tony Karon

(TIME.com) -- The price of failure at Sharm el-Sheikh would have been escalation of the Mideast crisis, which may be why Israeli and Palestinian leaders came under overwhelming pressure to announce a cease-fire. But they couldn't bring themselves to actually sign anything, and the verbal agreement was not between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak, but rather between each man and President Clinton. Not only that, its basic terms, measured against the backdrop of the state of the peace process, suggest that the latest agreement may simply mean a lull in the conflict. And perhaps not even that. Initial reports suggest that the Israelis have agreed to withdraw their troops to their deployments of three weeks ago -- they have effectively laid siege to almost every major Palestinian population center since the current violence began -- while the Palestinian Authority has agreed to maintain law and order in the territories it controls. But the Israelis are insisting they'll wait two days for calm to be restored before doing that, and of course the Palestinians insist that it's impossible to restore calm while the Israeli soldiers are but a stone's throw away.

If, in fact, the Israelis withdraw and Yasser Arafat is able to muster the requisite political authority to stop young Palestinians from marching on their positions -- and right now that's a very big "if," as not only his Islamist opposition but even much of the grassroots membership of his own Fatah organization has virulently opposed his making any concessions at Sharm el-Sheikh -- the latest agreement may keep the two sides apart for a while. But it won't necessarily prevent a recurrence.

The fact that Palestinian rage over an Israeli opposition leader staking his claim to Jerusalem's holy sites could have escalated within hours to an almost all of the fighting took place inside the territories occupied since 1967, most of which Prime Minister Barak had planned to turn over to Arafat. Indeed, President Clinton called at the conclusion of Tuesday's talks for a resumption of peace negotiations based, inter alia, on U.N. Resolution 242 -- which calls for Israeli withdrawal from all territories occupied in the war of 1967.

By contrast, Tuesday's agreement simply withdraws Israeli troops from the entrance to every Palestinian town. As long as they remain dotted throughout the West Bank and Gaza, protecting Jewish settlements built after 1967 that are viewed as illegal by Palestinians, they'll be a magnet for Palestinian rage. That had suited Arafat these past three weeks because it has given him leverage to counter pressure from the U.S. and Israel to sign away Palestinian claims on the Temple Mount. But despite having made his point and agreed to a cease-fire, Arafats political authority, even over his own loyalists, may have waned considerably -- particularly in light of such situations as that which led to the Ramallah lynching, where his security forces stand between angry Palestinians and the object of their anger. This suggests that those who'll want to continue the will have plenty of opportunity. Indeed, clashes continued throughout the two-day summit and after the announcement of the cease-fire.

The chances of resolving the potential for violence in the current pattern of troop and settlement distribution are considerably diminished now that the peace process itself is on the back burner. Three weeks of rage not only showed how deeply Palestinians distrust the peace process, they also bled the Israeli peace camp of much of its faith in the process. Just as the center of gravity in Palestinian politics has shifted toward the militancy of the Islamists and Fatah grass roots, so has the momentum in Israeli politics swung dramatically against Prime Minister Barak's peace policy. Barak is already seeking out a coalition with the right-wing Likud party, and few observers doubt that if he went to the polls now, he'd be trounced by a resurgent Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Oslo Accord left the hardest parts for last, assuming that Israelis and Palestinians would build mutual trust through incremental steps toward peace. Instead, the opposite occurred. And so the hardest parts of a long-term peace remain to be resolved, but the goodwill that first put them on the table has long since been burnt to a cinder. For now, the best Israelis and Palestinians, and their regional and foreign backers, may be able to hope for is not to resolve the conflict, but simply to contain it.

Copyright © 2000 Time Inc.