It’s not often that the book you are reading illuminates a news event that breaks as you are reading it, but that happened to me today as I was working my way through Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, by Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois.
The event that caught my eye was the headline reported in today’s Middle East Newsline, Israel accepts U.S. demand of [Palestinian] state in 2004: which reports that [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] has accepted a U.S. proposal for an interim Palestinian state in 2004 regardless of Palestinian Authority agreement to end the more than three-year-old war and dismantle Palestinian insurgency groups.
On the surface, it sounds as if some kind of significant breakthrough has been made here. After all, even as he was formally "accepting" the Road Map peace plan, Sharon made clear that he would not accept a real Palestinian state, but only a Palestinian “entity” with some “trappings of statehood”. Compared to those limitations, Sharon’s acceptance of an interim Palestinian state sounds like a constructive proposal and a definite step forward.
This same proposal, for an “interim” state, was also put forward during the 13 November visit of Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz to Washington, specifically in the speech he gave at the Washington Institute, a Middle East policy think tank. The most newsworthy point of Mofaz’s speech was his pessimistic assessment of the likelihood of Israelis and Palestinians reaching a permanent settlement in the near future. He maintained that [i]t will be very difficult from the situation that we are facing today to reach in a month or a few years a permanent agreement. (Though he didn’t explain how he reconciled this belief with the fact that the government of which he is an influential member is supposedly committed to following the Road Map to peace with the Palestinians, which envisages an end to Occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestine in 2005).
Mofaz’s solution was to suggest that both sides have to go through some kind of interim agreement that will rebuild the trust between the two sides, will give us a proper sense of security for the people of Israel and give hope to the Palestinian people. A suggestion which sounds reasonable enough at face value, until you recall that it was Oslo’s failure to make a clear commitment at the outset to the final goal of an independent Palestine alongside Israel that left Palestinians skeptical at a Peace Process which saw the their land and freedoms progressively reduced, while the prospect of a real end to Israeli Occupation became ever more remote. It is hard to see how the introduction of an interim stage to independence can renew Palestinian hope - and thence Israeli security - when it was the apparently endless interim nature of the Oslo process that snuffed those two features in the first place.
There are two other flies in the “interim state” ointment. First and foremost: WTF is an “interim state”? There is no such thing in international law or diplomacy. If you believe – as all the Road Map parties allegedly do - that the key to peace is two independent states side by side, one Israeli and one Palestinian, then establish the Palestinian state already! Not an “interim” or “provisional” or some other kind of almost-but-not-quite state, but an independent, sovereign state with the same characteristics and national rights as any other. If on the other hand you are an Israeli general or a politician – like, say, Mofaz or Sharon - who has made a career of denying Palestinian national rights, and you can’t now bring yourself to drop qualifiers like “interim”, “provisional” or “transitional”, then you cannot be surprised when people question whether your alleged commitment to Palestinian statehood is a big, fat, tactical lie.
There is a second failing - less obvious, but more profound – in Sharon and Mofaz’s proposal for an open-ended “interim” stage in the Peace Process, and this is where I was fortunate to be reading Professor Boyle’s book. Chapter Four - The Palestinian Alternative to Oslo – explains that it was inevitable that an open-ended Oslo-type agreement would get bogged down in an endless “interim” phase, and predicts that any future agreement that allows for an interim (or “transitional” or “provisional” phase) without specifying the end goal of the agreement and delineating a way to get there will also fail to end the Occupation or deliver peace. In reality, an open-ended interim stage effectively translates to an endless interim stage with no transformation of the status quo, and that is precisely why it is so appealing to Israelis like Mofaz and Sharon who remain profoundly unreconciled to the prospect of ending the Occupation and allowing the creation of an independent Palestine.
How do we know this? Well, the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt envisaged a solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through an undefined “autonomy” for the Palestinians. Shortly after the signing of the Accords, the U.S. State Department contracted with two professors of law (Professors Hannum and Lillich) to examine the history of autonomy under international law, specifically to find out what kind of endgame the U.S. was committing itself to in promoting Palestinian autonomy. Their study was later published publicly by the Procedural Aspects of International Law Institute in 1980, and was republished soon thereafter in The American Journal of International Law, as an article entitled “The Concept of Autonomy in International Law”. The conclusion that the authors reach is simple:
”…the present survey offers no examples of the successful implementation of a transitional regime without prior agreement on the general nature of the permanent regime to follow”.
So, the Israelis know on the basis of the State Department’s study that historically there has never been a successful interim arrangement unless there is a prior agreement on the ultimate outcome of the process. They know perfectly well that that if they can divert the Road map into an interim agreement without any assurances on the final outcome, they can safely assume that that interim agreement will fail to reach a final settlement and the status quo – i.e. the Occupation - will remain.
We’ve been in this movie before: it’s called Oslo. It begins with an implicit understanding that the PLO will recognize Israel on 78% of Mandate Palestine and in return, through an undefined, gradual, transitional process, the Occupation will end and a Palestinian state will emerge on the remainder. It ends after seven years with the Palestinian Authority in nominal control of just 18% of the West Bank, comprising the major Palestinian cities: eight islands of Palestinian autonomy, in a sea of occupied territory over which Israeli control is stronger than at any time since 1967. So, Oslo shows that if you can drag the PA into an "interim" agreement, it ends up responsible for keeping the population centers quiet while you double your settlement programme and intensify your grip on the land. You get to keep your military occupation, and the Palestinians police it for you! What's not to like about it from the perspective of the Israeli Right?
That, in short, explains why an “interim” agreement is so appealing to people like Mofaz and Sharon, who don’t believe in the endgame of a genuine Two State Solution anyway. It also, coincidentally, explains why these people who want to sell us on “interim Palestine” are the same people who have gone positively apoplectic at the Geneva Accord. Because the Geneva Accord supplies the one ingredient that Hannum and Lillich suggest can turn an open-ended transitional phase into a final settlement: [a] prior agreement on the general nature of the permanent regime to follow.
The Geneva Accord transforms the Road Map from another potential Oslo into a programme for a genuine transition to a Two State Solution. Geneva tells us where we are going, while the Road Map tells us how to get there. This is why Geneva is anathema to Mofaz and Sharon: it reminds us that the peace process is not an open-ended “interim” arrangement, aimed at making the Occupation easier to manage, but a short-term, purposeful plan of action aimed at ending the Occupation altogether, and establishing alongside Israel not an interim, provisional or transitional "entity" but, finally, Palestine.
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