By Graham Usher In acknowledging the Palestinian Authority's (PA) jurisdiction and addressing its leadership (now an assorted crew of selected Palestinian National Council (PNC) and Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) members, PA cabinet ministers and security chiefs), US President Bill Clinton has signalled to all that it is now no longer a question of if the US will recognise a Palestinian state, but when. For Arafat, the event marks another stage of an odyssey that began formally on 14 December 1988, a decade to the day before Clinton touched down in Gaza. It was then that he performed what he himself described as the necessary diplomatic "striptease" to woo the Americans: he recognised explicitly Israel "as a state in the region" and renounced "all forms of terrorism". For such concessions, the PLO was rewarded with a low-level diplomatic "dialogue" with the former US President Ronald Reagan's administration. Following the Palestinian leader's ill-judged dalliance with Iraq in the 1990-91 Gulf War, the dialogue was resumed via the Palestinian delegation and former US Secretary of State James Baker, largely to obtain Arafat's endorsement of the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. It was capped when Clinton and his secretary of state, Warren Christopher, gave their blessing to the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles, negotiated mostly without their input in Oslo in 1993. Yet it was the election of Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud-led coalition in 1996 that turned Washington's wary sponsorship of the PLO leader into a de facto strategic alliance. Since the early 1970s, and especially after the Gulf War, Arafat had been convinced that the "key to Israel was the US". With Oslo, he discovered the opposite was true: that the key to the US was Israel. Through the various Oslo agreements, Arafat struck a strategic alliance with Israel's former Labour government based on the formula of territory in return for the PA's unconditional security cooperation with Israel. It was thus not Netanyahu who invented the notion of "reciprocity", no matter how he trumpets the achievement now. It was Shimon Peres' Labour coalition which, in the wake of the Islamist suicide operations in Israel in 1996, froze the Oslo process on the condition that Arafat "took care of terror". And the PLO leader did so, crippling the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, in Gaza -- in eight weeks -- more effectively than Israel had done in eight years. Such labours were not enough to prevent the advent of Netanyahu. Nor did they budge the new Israeli leader from the conviction that "security" had to be put "back in Israel's hands" since "Yasser Arafat cannot and does not want to protect us". The first fruit of Netanyahu's new line were the confrontations that erupted between the PA and Israel's military forces in September 1996, following his decision to open an archaeological tunnel in Jerusalem's occupied Old City. The second was Clinton's personal involvement in Oslo, calling the two leaders to a crisis summit in Washington and setting up US mediated "mechanisms" to ensure the Israeli army's partial redeployment from Hebron in January 1997. The same dynamic recurred after Netanyahu's decision to build the Har Homa Jewish settlement at Jebel Abu Ghneim in the occupied West Bank, though, this time, it was Arafat who suspended security cooperation with Israel. He resumed cooperation and negotiations publically in October 1997 with the proviso that, from now on, it would be the US who affirmed PA "compliance" and not Netanyahu. The American role in Oslo had turned from to sponsor to guarantor. In December 1997, a security memo was drafted between Israel, the CIA and the PA that, after a few revisions from Netanyahu, formed the basis of the Wye agreement signed in Washington on 23 October 1998. It amounts to a security pact between the three nations, committing the PA to "eliminate terrorist cells and the support structure that plans, finances, supplies and abets terror" and setting up a "trilateral committee" empowered to "address external (i.e. regional) support for terror". Given such arrangements, it is hardly surprising that neither the US nor the Israeli army (nor much of the Israeli political establishment) any longer sees a negotiated PA state as a "threat" to the Middle East. On the contrary, the PA is rapidly assuming the mantle of being a small but important part in the US's overall strategy for the region. This is predicated not only on ensuring Israel's military supremacy (preferably in alliance with Turkey), but on "containing" Iraq and any other regime "rogue" enough to challenge the terms of the Pax Americana. It is also predicated on resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, but on Israel's terms with the necessary Palestinian compliance. The parametres for this settlement were laid at Wye. In return for progressing with Oslo, the US guaranteed not only Netanyahu but any future Israeli government that "only Israel can determine its own security needs"; that the US will not "adopt any position or express any view" about the extent of any further Israeli redeployments; "opposes and will oppose" any unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood; and will not be a party to any final status arrangement "without the agreement of both parties". This means that any final settlement and any future Palestinian state will be in line with the Israeli consensus. That consensus boils down to a territorial dispensation in which the Palestinians will receive about 40 to 50 per cent of the West Bank and perhaps 70 per cent of Gaza, and is shared by every major Israeli politician from Labour's Ehud Barak on the "left" through Shas' Aryeh Deri in the "centre" to Likud's Ariel Sharon on the "right". The US is also aware that it is this coalition that will win the next Israeli elections, with or without Netanyahu. Clinton's visit to the PA areas is indeed another station on the road to a Palestinian state. But the Palestinians' joy at finding "a friend in the White House" is likely to be ephemeral, and not only because of Clinton's impeachment difficulties. For in greeting Clinton in Gaza and Bethlehem, Arafat has foreclosed the possibility for the forseeable future of a Palestinian leader greeting a US President in Jerusalem, or in any other part of the Occupied Territories that Israel deems vital for its "security" and the US sees as necessary for its hegemony.
