A case of double-speak

Graham Usher, writing from Jerusalem, assesses the prospects for the Egyptian-Jordanian peace initiative
"The cease-fire that wasn't," mocked the headline of Israel's premier Yediot Aharonot newspaper on Monday morning. A more fitting banner would have been how not to conduct diplomacy in the Middle East, at least not with a government that has Ariel Sharon as leader and Shimon Peres as chief trouble-shooter.
The "cease-fire" of course referred to the one declared by President Hosni Mubarak and "agreed between the two sides" following his meeting with Peres in Cairo on Sunday.
The announcement took everyone by surprise. "There is in principle an understanding on a cease-fire with the Palestinians, but an agreement on this has not yet been reached", Peres "clarified", following his meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah in Amman the same day. The Palestinians denied even an "in principle understanding".
Later at the United Nations, Peres said that Israel and the Palestinians had reached a basic understanding on a cease-fire to end seven months of violence, but there is still no written agreement.
Peres said that President Mubarak was "basically correct" when he announced that a cease-fire deal had been reached.
According to President Mubarak, speaking in a televised address to a Labour Day rally, the "Israelis told us they met with two Palestinian officials and agreed on the principle to halt all kinds of violence."
At the United Nations, Peres confirmed that he asked Mubarak during their meeting on Sunday to appear before the Israeli press "and give a little bit of hope, which he did."
"We have agreed, as the president has said, on a line, on a track, how to handle a cease-fire," Peres said. "It's not yet an agreement. It's an understanding."
According to Israeli officials, quoted in Israel's Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, it was Egypt that bounced Israel, especially President Mubarak's comments that negotiations would resume after a cease-fire of four weeks.
"Israel wants a much longer period than that," said one official. "By saying 'four weeks' Mubarak was trying to force Israel's hand".
The only thing in common was on the cause of the spat. This had been a series of "secret meetings" Peres had held with Palestinian negotiators Ahmed Qrei and Mahmoud Abbas prior to his departure for Cairo.
Peres says the Palestinians agreed a cease-fire should precede any return to political negotiations, an agenda which implicitly concedes Israel's contention that the Palestinians are responsible for the violence in the occupied territories. The Palestinians insist there had been no agreement reached in the meetings save a commitment to keep talking.
If so, there would appear to be two possible explanations for the debacle. One is that Peres is ploughing his own independent diplomatic furrow, a tactic in line with his sobriquet as Israel's "inveterate schemer".
Or, and far more likely, Israel is saying one thing to the Arabs and another to everyone else. What Peres is saying to the Americans this week was cast in stone during his meeting with Sharon and Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer at Ben-Gurion airport after his meetings in Cairo and Amman.
According to Yediot Aharonot, Israel's conditions for accepting the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative are now these. First, and of course, there will be no negotiations of any kind before an end to "Palestinian violence and terror". As for the initiative's insistence that negotiations resume from the point they left off at Taba in January, "Israel is only committed to signed agreements [with the Palestinians] that have been endorsed by the Knesset".
And as for the Palestinians' central demand that there be an absolute freeze on settlement construction in the occupied territories, "including those in East Jerusalem", the Israeli stance is not so much an "amendment" as a refusal. "Settlements are not to be discussed at this stage," Yediot Aharonot quotes Sharon, with no demurral from Peres.
This is to change the initiative into Sharon's election platform. But Israel's revisionism may yet find receptive minds, especially in the US. According to Palestinian sources, US Secretary of State Colin Powell has already been on the phone to Arafat urging him to "soften" Palestinian opposition to Israel's proposed amendments. Similar telephone diplomacy can be expected with Egypt and Jordan.
The same double-talk was seen in Peres' promise in Cairo to authorise "immediate, unconditional measures" to alleviate the "suffering" of Palestinians, from allowing another 11,000 permits to Palestinian workers in Israel to opening Gaza airport. Not one of these measures has happened.
What did happen, early Wednesday morning, was an Israeli tank and bulldozer incursion into Gaza's Rafah refugee camp, leaving a destructive trail of one Palestinian dead, 15 injured (including children) and ten homes demolished. Unlike the similar invasion into Gaza's Beit Hanoun area two weeks ago, this assault passed in the night and with barely a murmur from the world, due perhaps to the strenuous "efforts for peace" Peres is making in the US and throughout the region.
It is because of these realities that most Palestinians spurn "cease-fire" initiatives. In the words of one Fatah leader, "they simply distort what the Intifada is about, which is a people's struggle for independence and against occupation".
They prefer the cease-fire package outlined by another West Bank Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, speaking amid the wreckage of a smouldering building in Ramallah that on Monday night left two Palestinian children and a Fatah activist dead. The blast was widely seen to have been the work of Israeli undercover agents or Palestinian collaborators.
"The only cease-fire the Palestinians will accept is one that leads to ending the occupation," said Barghouti. "The Israelis should leave here the way they fled Lebanon, as quickly as possible".
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