By Graham Usher According to the Wye River Memorandum signed in Washington on 23 October, Oslo's final status negotiations were due to start once the agreement came into force. Following the Knesset's vote on 17 November to approve Wye's implementation, chief Palestinian negotiator Mahmoud Abbass met in Jerusalem with Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon. The talks will "start no later than next week", said Abbass on 18 November. Twelve days later Yasser Arafat was drumming up cash in Washington, the Palestinian Authority (PA) had suspended talks in protest over Israel's refusal to release political prisoners and the Israeli cabinet was split over the increasingly costly occupation of south Lebanon. The final status talks, it seemed, had been quietly shelved. On one level, this apparent lack of urgency over what are supposed to be the core issues of the conflict is understandable. Covering Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, water and relations "with other neighbours", the final status negotiations can only expose just how deep the chasm separating the two sides is. For the PA, at least publicly, resolution of these issues will result in an independent Palestinian state "on every millimetre" of the territory Israel occupied in 1967. The Israeli government's view was spelt out in the guidelines agreed to between the different parts of Binyamin Netanyahu's coalition in June 1996: no shared sovereignty in Jerusalem, no withdrawal to Israel's pre-1967 borders and no return (whether to Israel or the Occupied Territories) of Palestinian refugees. Since then, Netanyahu has repeated that in any permanent settlement with the Palestinians Israel will annex the Jordan Valley, "Greater Jerusalem" and every other part of occupied territory deemed "vital to Israel's security in Judea and Samaria". In response, Arafat has focused on getting Netanyahu to adhere to some variant of Oslo's interim agreement and, where this has failed, on threatening to declare a state at the end of Oslo's interim period in May 1999. Given these positions, it is difficult to see the final status negotiations leading anywhere other than to a full-scale confrontation next May. The only alternative would seem to be one where the negotiations are held less to address their substance than to work out a mutually agreed formula for their deferral. There are signs that such a deal is being considered, at least on the Israeli side. In June, Labour parliamentarian and Oslo architect Yossi Beilin suggested a solution in which Israel would recognise a Palestinian state on 4 May 1999 on condition that Arafat postpone Oslo's deadline for the final status talks until January 2001. It was a theme taken up by Israel's former coordinator of the Occupied Territories and one of Arafat's closest Israeli confidantes, Oren Shahor. Writing in the Israeli Maariv newspaper on 19 November, Shahor urged Sharon "to recognise a Palestinian state at the commencement of the final status talks in exchange for an extended interim period for some period of time or another." Is Israel's foreign minister likely to heed such advice? Publicly, Sharon has warned the PA that any unilateral declaration of statehood next May would be met with Israel's annexation of between 60 to 80 per cent of the West Bank. Two days before Wye's Knesset ratification and presumably as an insurance against it, he also urged Israeli settlers to "go and get the hilltops" in the West Bank because "whoever gets there first will have the hills, and those you don't grab will end up in their (i.e. the Palestinians) hands." Less publicly, however, Israel's foremost hawk has long since accepted that a "Palestinian state in the PA territories is an existing fact". As far as Sharon is concerned, the only matter to be resolved in the final status negotiations is its size, powers and the price to be extracted for Israel's formal recognition of its status. And on this issue, too, Sharon has been increasingly making his views known. Both before and since his appointment as Israel's chief negotiator, Sharon has argued the line that the final status issues should be "suspended" on completion of Israel's current redeployment. Should the PA agree to this hiatus, not only is it likely Sharon would recognise a Palestinian state; he would also, according to Israel's premier political commentator Nahum Barnea, be prepared to negotiate with the Palestinians about its economy, resources and future relations with Israel. Given the current territorial dispensation, this would leave the PA with a "state" in about 40 per cent of the West Bank and 60 per cent of Gaza. As for negotiations about "the rest of the area", wrote Barnea in Yediot Aharonot on 20 November, these would be conditional on an unspecified period of "continuous peaceful relations" between the two sides on the bases of the present interim arrangements. Since the Wye agreement was signed, Arafat has repeated his vow to declare a state, whether unilaterally or in agreement with Israel. For many in the PA, including perhaps Arafat, such a declaration is now the only "victory" salvageable from the ruins of Oslo. But as Palestinian analyst and Israeli parliamentarian Azmi Bishara warns, the "victory" would hardly challenge Israel or Sharon's vision of a final status settlement. "If Israel recognises a Palestinian state on 4 May 1999," says Bishara, "it would clearly not be over the whole of the 1967 territories but on the basis of those parts of the West Bank and Gaza where the PA currently exercises its authority. And the negotiations that flow from this recognition would not be about the final status issues of Jerusalem, settlements or the refugees but over how the PA is to exercise sovereignty and what the practicalities of the mini-state will be."
