The American bridge

By Graham Usher
Five months after the Camp David summit, and three months into the Palestinian Intifada, the Americans finally unveiled last week their "bridging proposals" as bases for negotiations to reach an Israeli-Palestinian framework agreement. The working deadlines for the agreement are now President Clinton's effective departure from office on 10 January and Israel's prime ministerial elections on 6 February.
While not officially endorsing the proposals, Prime Minister Ehud Barak told Israeli TV on Monday that "it will be very difficult to refuse to discuss Clinton's proposals if the other side [the Palestinians] accepts them."
The Palestinians have yet to accept them, though there is a tendency within the leadership inclined to do so, including perhaps Yasser Arafat. "These ideas require thorough study," he told reporters on his return to Gaza from Egypt on Monday. "There are many obstacles."
According to Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Ahmed Qrei (Abu Alaa), the American ideas represent "progress on some points, no change on others, and a retreat on others" in comparison to those raised at Camp David. This would seem to be an accurate description if the account in the Israeli media of the ideas Clinton stated orally is anything to go by.
The "progress" is that the Americans are now proposing the Palestinians receive around 95 per cent of the West Bank (as compared to the 88 per cent offered at Camp David) and all of Gaza as the territory of their putative state. They would also receive about three per cent of lands from within Israel as a swap for the five per cent of the West Bank the US says Israel requires to annex the three main settlement blocs of Maale Adumim, Gush Ezion and Ariel and the 160,000 Jewish settlers that reside there.
In East Jerusalem the Palestinians would have sovereignty over all the Arab neighbourhoods while Israel would extend its sovereignty over the 11 Jewish settlements built within the annexed city borders since 1967. The Old City would be divided, with the Palestinians having sovereignty over the Muslim, Christian and part of the Armenian Quarters and Israel getting sovereignty over the Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall and the roads to them that bisect the Armenian Quarter.
The proposal on the Haram Al-Sharif [Temple Mount], as ever, remains tantalisingly vague. Some accounts say the Palestinians would get sovereignty over the Dome of the Rock, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the plaza between them. Others, citing Israeli officials, say the Palestinians would get "control" over these areas on condition that a "partial" Israeli sovereignty is recognised on the underground reaches of the Haram Al-Sharif, where Israeli Jews believe the Jewish Temple is buried.
As for the five million Palestinian refugees, these would have the right to return, not to Israel, but to a "homeland," meaning a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. There would be no return to their homes and lands in what is now Israel, though Israel would have to absorb "tens of thousands" under the "humanitarian" rubric of family reunification.
Should an agreement be signed along these lines, the Palestinians would be expected to recognise Israel within its borders as the "historic homeland of the Jewish people" and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The agreement would be implemented in two stages over a nine-year period.
The US proposals may represent an advance on what Israel was prepared to tolerate at Camp David but they also represent a retreat on the terms of international legitimacy, particularly the demands that Israel withdraw fully to the 1967 lines and the Jewish settlements be dismantled.
This is why Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank Fatah leader who maintains that it is the Intifada that has moved the Americans and perhaps the Israelis, insisted that while the US ideas represented "progress," no Palestinian leadership "could sign this kind of agreement."
As they stand, the US proposals would seem to mark a retreat on three parts of what has long been the Palestinian national consensus on a just resolution of the conflict, and which has hardened during the present uprising. The first is that Israel's annexation of the settlement blocs would still skew the territorial base of the Palestinian state in the West Bank into three cantons, "even if the cantons are now bigger," in the words of Palestinian activist Jamal Zaqout.
Second, it is difficult to see how the division of sovereignties could work in East Jerusalem other than in Israel's favour. But the greatest "obstacle" remains the fate of the refugees as outlined by the Americans. Regardless of whether Israel accepts or does not accept UN Resolution 194, it is clear the US and Israeli price for recognition of Palestinian statehood is going to be the practical renunciation of the right of return and removal of any choice in the decision exercised by the refugees themselves.
"No one, including Yasser Arafat, is legally or morally authorised to haggle over the right of return," said Hussam Khader, a leader in Fatah and resident of the Balata refugee camp in Nablus.
That sentiment will be echoed in, and beyond, every Palestinian refugee camp. And it is one that Palestinian and Arab leaders may ignore at their peril.
Related stories:
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An opportunity to end all war
Israel must concede more
Palestinian red lines 21 - 27 December 2000
Mission impossible? 21 - 27 December 2000
See Intifada in focus
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