Unofficial Mideast Peace Plan Met With Israeli Criticism, Threats

by Ferry Biedermann

The Geneva accord, sponsored by the Swiss government, is supposed to point a way out of the conflict between the two peoples after the breakdown of the Oslo accords over three years ago.

"No, this is not the same as the Oslo accords," says one of the key initiators of the peace talks of more than a decade ago who watched the ceremony from his home in the northern Israeli city of Haifa.

Professor Yair Hirschfeld was this time around not at the centre of the peace talks but he does support the outcome and calls it a "fantastic plan."

The problem, though, is that while ten years ago the secret Oslo talks were backed by the leaders from both sides, the Geneva talks have no official support and therefore the plan "is not enough for a breakthrough," says Hirschfeld.

The plan has been negotiated between moderate politicians, academics and intellectuals from both sides, who are largely not in power.

Palestinian political scientist Ali Jirbawi from Bir Zeit University near Ramallah agrees. "The problem of this plan is that it has no official status," says Jirbawi. He does not necessarily object to the contents of the plan but he does think the Palestinian participants in the talks have made a serious mistake in engaging in unofficial negotiations.

"Every time the Palestinians agree to something that the Israelis don't want to implement, it is taken as a basis to squeeze more concessions from them in negotiations the next time around," asserts Jirbawi.

It does seem that certainly this time around there is an imbalance in the reaction to the plan. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has sharply criticized the Geneva accord and the people who negotiated it.

Senior Palestinian negotiators participated on the other hand with the full knowledge of the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat.

Arafat has not officially adopted the plan but has praised it.

And when his own Fatah faction threatened to bloc participation of its key members in the signing ceremony in Geneva, Arafat gave special permission for the delegation to travel. He even sent the head of his National Security Council, Jibril Rajoub, to Geneva.

The Geneva accord sets out a detailed final peace agreement between the two sides. It is based on the two-state solution, a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The accord does not start from a scratch; it builds on official negotiations that were conducted previously and on the Clinton plan that was submitted to both sides toward the end of 2000, after the Palestinian intifada had already started.

The basic trade-off in the plan is a near-total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including the dismantling of major settlements, in exchange for an effective end to the claims of Palestinian refugees to live in what is now Israel.

Jerusalem is to be divided and will serve as the capital of both states.

As was to be expected, opponents of the plan object to these central provisions. Many Israelis are opposed both to the wide-ranging 'territorial concessions' and to what they consider too vague guarantees that the Palestinians will not continue to claim their "right of return."

For many Palestinians, on the other hand, it is unpalatable to "give away" the right of return and large parts of Jerusalem.

Even though the Geneva accord has no official status, it has already led to threatening reactions on both sides.

A group of 250 right-wing Israeli rabbis has branded the participants in the Geneva talks "traitors." The same group whipped up sentiment against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before he was assassinated by a religious student in 1995.

In the Palestinian territories there have been demonstrations against the accord, organised by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and parts of Fatah. Shots were fired near the home of the initiator of the talks, former minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. The word traitor has also been bandied about.

On both sides many people object to the Geneva accord because it was conceived by the same crowd that brought the world Oslo. Many Israelis and Palestinians consider Oslo a failed process that led to the current violence.

Yair Hirschfeld does not agree. "Before 1993 nobody, on either side, dared talk about a two-state solution," he says. "Now everybody talks about it, including Sharon. That is the success of Oslo."

He advocates using the Geneva accord to pressure Sharon into making progress on the road map to peace, the international peace plan that was adopted by the UN Security Council last week.

Ali Jirbawi is concerned that Sharon will be pushed into accelerating the construction of the separation wall that Israel is building on the West Bank. Once that is complete, he is afraid that the Israeli Prime Minister will want to implement his very limited version of the so-called road map.

"Sharon wants to lock up all Palestinians in some 40 per cent of the West Bank, surrounded by the wall," says Jirbawi. "He will call the mini-state a Palestinian state; he doesn't even care if we call it the Palestinian empire."

Jirbawi does not count on the U.S. to come to the Palestinians' aid, despite recent positive noises from Washington about the Geneva accord and other alternative peace plans.

"The Americans just want this part of the Middle East to stay quiet now. If Sharon can deliver that quiet, they will not pressure him into anything."