By Graham Usher When, on 21 December, the Knesset voted to move to early elections, a numbed Binyamin Netanyahu responded with uncharacteristic honesty, "I promise you that Arafat is the first person who thinks any alternative is better than Netanyahu," he said. This is entirely true. Yasser Arafat's sole strategy during 1998 and arguably since Israel's Likud-led coalition was elected in 1996, has been to keep some mutant of hope alive against the mortal threats posed to it by Netanyahu's premiership. In pursuit of such survival, the Palestinian leader has not only made concessions fateful to the Palestinian cause. He has struck a virtual strategic alliance with the world's remaining superpower whose only real concern with the Palestine question -- from former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger through to US President Bill Clinton -- has been how best to prise it from its Arab context. In compensation for such labours, Arafat hopes to receive American endorsement for a Palestinian state -- a prospect that is becoming more likely (and less meaningful) by the day. The year saw America's active engagement in the Oslo process. Diplomatically, this meant interminable negotiations about the so-called "US initiative" to get the process "back on track." Originally proposed by Netanyahu to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in October 1997, the idea boiled down to a 13 per cent first and second Israeli redeployment in the West Bank in return for specific security actions taken by the Palestinian Authority. The US leaked the initiative extensively in March. By April, Arafat had officially adopted it, since "we don't want to leave any chance for Netanyahu to escape implementation" of Oslo's interim and Hebron agreements. The Palestinian leader's stance was supported by Israel's Labour opposition, Jordan, Egypt and the European Union, led by Britain. But Netanyahu was no longer interested. One reason was the Israeli leader's awareness that any further West Bank redeployment would be anathema to the far right parties in his coalition, the "moderates" already weakened by the defection of David Levy and his Gesher faction in January. But Netanyahu also knew that with a US president ensnared in domestic scandals -- and a Palestinian leader utterly dependent on the president -- he could do better on his original 13 per cent "peace for security" package. His essential aim was to reduce the scale of all further redeployment to the contours of the "national and security" maps drawn up by Defence Minister Yitzak Mordechai and Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon in November 1997. These envisage a final settlement with the Palestinians in which 60 per cent of the West Bank remains under Israel's control. After a further six months of stonewalling, Netanyahu finally got his way. On 23 October the Wye River Memorandum was signed, ostensibly resolving those issues left outstanding from the Hebron agreement and pledging to kick start Oslo's final status negotiations. But its true achievement was to make the terms of those negotiations the red lines drawn on Mordechai and Sharon's maps. At Wye the 13 per cent redeployment became 10 per cent, courtesy of a three per cent "nature reserve" in which Israeli soldiers can patrol but Palestinians cannot build. The PA's "specific security pledges" were translated into "concrete and verifiable" (and probably unimplementable) conditions such as a ban on all anti-Israeli "incitement" in the self-rule areas, the confiscation of all illegal weapons and the arrest and transfer of those Palestinians "wanted" by Israel. The territorial result -- should the redeployment ever be carried out -- is that Israel will enter the final status talks with 60 per cent of the West Bank under its absolute control and 22 per cent under its military control. Yet Netanyahu's greatest prize at Wye was the guarantees he extracted from the US concerning the final status negotiations. These apparently entail an understanding that Netanyahu's verbal pledge of "no significant expansion" of existing settlements would become operative only on completion of the 2,025 settlement units currently being built in the occupied territories, and would not include the 6,500 units slated for construction at the Har Homa settlement on Jabel Abu Ghneim. In a series of letters from Albright and US Israeli Ambassador Edward Walker to Israeli Cabinet Secretary Danni Neveh, the US also pledged not "to adopt any position or express any view" about the scale of any further redeployment; that "only Israel can determine its own security needs;" that the US "opposes and will oppose" any unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood; and that it would not convene any final status summit "without the agreement of both parties." In compensation, Arafat received an elevated US role: from sponsor to active broker and guarantor. As importantly, given his increasing regional and domestic isolation, he was rewarded with massive and public American endorsement of the regime he had installed in the self-rule areas. On 14 December, Clinton became the first American president to set foot on PA-administrated soil. He attended Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem, addressed Palestinian leaders in Gaza and described their decision to annul, for the third time, those articles of the Palestinian charter offensive to Israeli sensibilities as a "victory for peace." He then went home to authorise four days of bombings on Iraq. Clinton also led the way on 30 November, cajoling a fatigued donor community into pledging a further $2 billion to the PA over the next five years, with the US raising its annual contribution from $100 to $500 million. But the real ties binding the "new relationship" between Washington and Arafat were in the realm of security, with the PA assuming a small but important role in the CIA's "counter-terrorism" strategies for the region. During the tenure of Israel's Labour government, Arafat's principal alliance had been with Israel's military and intelligence services based on the formula of progressive transfers of territory in exchange for "security cooperation" with Israel. The cooperation started to unravel with Netanyahu, who disliked the concept in principle and overruled those army officers and intelligence heads still wedded to it. In October 1997, Arafat agreed to resume cooperation with Israel on condition that the CIA also be a party to it and that Washington (rather than Netanyahu) be the arbiter of PA "compliance." In December 1997 Israel, the PA and the CIA drew up a draft security memorandum rejected by Netanyahu on the grounds that it equated "Palestinian terrorism" with extremist settler movements in the West Bank. But the groundwork for active PA-CIA collaboration had been laid, with the aim of disabling all political and military resistance to Oslo, especially that represented by the Islamist Hamas movement. On 29 March, the corpse of Hamas military leader Mohieddin Al-Sharif was found outside the smouldering wreckage of a workshop in Ramallah. The PA said the death was due to a "power struggle" within Hamas. Hamas countered initially that the PA (or more precisely, the PA's West Bank head of Preventive Security Jibril Rajoub) and Israel were responsible. Among Palestinians, conspiracy theories ran rampant, reinforced by the PA's refusal to even acknowledge that Israel might be behind the killing and by the ruthlessness with which it arrested those Hamas leaders (including its Gaza spokesman Aziz Rantisi, who remains in prison to this day) who challenged its version of events. Suspicions of collaboration with Israel and the CIA deepened even more with the fate of another Hamas military leader, Imad Awadallah, arrested by the PA in April as the prime suspect in the Al-Sharif killing. In August, the PA's most prized political prisoner "escaped" under the nose of Rajoub from a PA jail in Jericho. A month later Imad Awadallah, together with his brother and fellow Hamas military leader Adel, were found shot dead by the Israeli army in a village near Hebron. The Israeli press suggested that the PA had planted an electronic bug on Imad Awadallah that led the Israelis to their prey. The PA said nothing at all. The US told Netanyahu in September that Arafat was "making a serious effort in the war against terrorism." Given this web of political, economic and military ties, it is extremely unlikely that Arafat will make good on his vow to declare unilaterally a Palestinian state at the close of Oslo's interim period in May 1999, though he may invoke the threat occasionally as a means to rally the faithful. The safer bet for the first quarter of 1999 is that the PA will do all in its power to ensure that Israel's next prime minister is either the Labour leader Ehud Barak or the new centrist candidate and former army chief of staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak rather than the detested Netanyahu. And the first thing Barak has told the PA is that any putative Palestinian state will be "negotiated" rather than declared unilaterally. The reward for this cooperation has already been intimated by Barak, Sharon and Clinton. It will be Israeli and US recognition of a Palestinian state in most of Gaza and parts of the West Bank, but no withdrawal to the 1967 borders, no dismantling of settlements, no shared sovereignty in Jerusalem and no meaningful return of the Palestinian refugees. Should he comply, Arafat, now in the twilight of his life and visibly ailing, will go to his grave as the leader who declared the Palestinian state. As for the Palestinians, inside the Occupied Territories and out, they will be left to ponder the future of their struggle for self-determination against the enormous defeats inflicted on it by Oslo, the PA and the Washington process.
