NON-COMPLIANCE WITH SIGNED AGREEMENTS AND COMMITMENTS: A RECORD OF BAD FAITH AND MISCONDUCT

PT 2

[IMRA [Independant Media and Review Analysis] note: The Barak Government's public affairs coordinator, Nahman Shai, released the following "white book" on 20 November 2000. The following is the complete text. Photographs and a graph in the publication have not been included. While the publication was distributed by the Government of Israel at an official meeting with the press, for some reason there is no identifying marking on the publication indicating the source of the publication, the author or that the Government of Israel is in any way associated with the publication]

Editor's note: this document was prepared by IMRA, http://www.tzemach.org/fyi/www.imra.org.il.

Why were formal commitments important in the post-1993 peace process?

Since September 1993 the P.L.O., as an organization, became a signatory to the Declaration of Principles and Israel's negotiating partner. This meant that on a broad set of issues, formal commitments were needed - to try and ensure, as much as possible, that the P.L.O. leadership had clearly broken with past positions, practices and patterns of bad faith, which had marked its conduct as a coalition of "Fidai" (i.e. terrorist) organizations.

At various points in their history, the P.L.O. and its constituent organizations were committed to a strategy of eliminating Israel as a state, (this strategy was embodied, at the time, in the Palestinian National Covenant). They were implicated in: -

• Extensive terrorist activity;
• Breach of agreements and understandings reached with host Arab states;
• Abuse and misgovernment in the zones which their "State within a State" controlled in Lebanon.

It is against this background that Israel felt obliged to demand formal commitments on some of the most basic and presumably obvious aspects of the process. Such commitments were indeed obtained; but more often than not, they were interpreted in a slippery way, particularly as regards the key issues of security, the use of violence, and the prevention of terrorism.

Against the mounting evidence of bad faith, as detailed below, .Israel and other parties engaged in the negotiations - kept alive the hope for a stable peace, based on the assumption that the process, and its momentum, would modify Arafat's stance on compliance and on the question of violence as an option. This hope has now been shattered.

Indications of Essential Bad Faith; Arafat creates a rationale for non-compliance

As early as Arafat's own speech on the White House lawn, on September 13, 1993, there were indications that for him, the D.O.P. did not necessarily signify an end to the conflict. He did not, at any point, relinquish his uniform, symbolic of his status as a revolutionary commander; moreover, in terms of the broader historic "narrative", as distinct from the official position at the negotiating table, the map of "Palestine" remained as it has always been for him, the entire territory of pre-1948 mandatory Palestine (as the attached photograph, of an August 22 1999 visit to a school, clearly indicates[photo from Al-Hayat al-Jadida showing Arafat standing next to such a map].

On various occasions, Arafat continued to use the language of "Jihad", literally a "Struggle", but in the specific (religiously colored) context of the Palestinian struggle, a clear reference to the violent option. Thus, in a eulogy to a Palestinian official - on June 15 1995 (at the height of the Oslo Process) - he paid homage, among others, to two women terrorists (Dalal al-Mughrabi and 'Abir Wahidi); and spoke of the children throwing stones as "the Palestinian Generals". He also swore to his audience (which was clearly sympathetic with the Hamas) that "the oath is firm to continue this difficult Jihad, this long Jihad, in the path of martyrs, the path of sacrifices".

Of special interest, in this context, are Arafat's repeated references to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, signed by the Prophet Muhammad with his Meccan enemies when they were still stronger than him, and then abandoned (as he conquered the city) within a much shorter time than the Treaty itself warranted. The first such reference made public came shortly after the signing of the Interim agreement, in the "Jihad" speech he made at the Mosque in Johannesburg (obtained by the Jewish community, and broadcast in Israel in May 1994).

What Hudaybiyyah means for him was made even clearer when he spoke, a few months later, on the occasion of the anniversary of the fire in al-Aqsa (an event, in 1968, caused by an Australian madman, but often used in Palestinian pro da as proof of Israel's evil intentions).

"Did the Prophet, Allah's Messenger, the Last of the Prophets, really accept a humiliation [as "umar bin al-khattab blamed him?] No, and no again. He did not accept a humiliation. But every situation has its own circumstances" (Palestinian Television, August 21, 1995).

The reference to the Hudaybiyyah treaty re-surfaced in 1998, coupled with the warning that "all the options are open to the Palestinian people". (Orbit television, April 18, 1998). In essence, here was a rationale for accepting Oslo and the place at the negotiations, and the various commitments involved, not as the building blocks of trust and cooperation but as temporary measures, to be shed off when circumstances allow.

To Muslim audiences, such as the one he had in the Mosque in Johannesburg in May 1994 (one of the first such speeches in the post-Oslo phase) Arafat a former Muslim Brother, forced to leave Nasser's Egypt for that reason in the 1950's - spoke in the familiar idiom of Islamic radicalism.

To more secular audiences he offered a possible argument for the conditional or .temporary nature of his commitments by addressing them in the context of the "Strategy of Stages" for the Liberation of Palestine, as endorsed by the PNC in 1974.

References to the 1974 decision to establish a "Palestinian Authority" on any piece of land Israel would withdraw from were made by Arafat both on the White house lawn in September 1993, and on the occasion of the first session of the P.A. Legislative Council in March 1996 ("al-Ayyam", March 8, 1996).

This instrumental view of the commitment to non-violent means, central as this commitment may have been to the entire process, was shared by Arafat's lieutenants.

In a speech (documented on video) to a forum in Nablus in January 1996 - again, at a time when the negotiations were going forward - Nabil Sha'ath described the strategy in terms which then sounded unrealistic, but now ring familiar:-"We decided to liberate our homeland step-by-step... Should Israel continue no problem. And so, we honor the peace treaties and non-violence... if and when Israel says "enough"... in that case it is saying that we will return to violence. But this time it will be with 30,000 armed Palestinian soldiers and in a land with elements of freedom... If we reach a dead end we will go back to our war and struggle like we did forty years ago".

Following the change of government in Israel, and three weeks before the actual outbreak of violence over the opening of the Western Wall tunnel in Jerusalem, a senior Palestinian Officer -Muhammad Dahlan, the Head of "Preventive Security" in Gaza and currently complicit in the license given to terrorist activity there - warned ("Al-Hayyat", September 2 1996) that a return to the armed struggle, with the active participation of the P.A. forces, cannot be ruled out in view of the impasse in the process.

In the wake of the "Tunnel" events (referred to by the Palestinians as the "al-Aqsa Campaign"), Arafat spoke at the Dhaisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, and again stressed the continuous nature of the Palestinian Jihad ("we know only one word...") and the fact that "All the options are open".

Others continued to reflect this sentiment. The highest religious functionary in the Palestinian hierarchy- the Mufti of "Jerusalem and the Palestinian Lands," Shaykh lkrimah Sabri, told the Palestinian newspaper "al-Ayyam" (March 3, 1997) that Jerusalem cannot be retrieved through negotiations, and hence the only option is war. The Fatah leader in the West Bank, Marwan Barghuti - a key operator in the present crisis - warned as early as March 1997 that his men are inclined to resume the armed struggle, and applauded the Hamas bombing in Tel Aviv, in which three women were killed ("al-Ayyam", "al-Hayyat al-Jadidah", March 26, 27 1997).

In a rally on November 15, 1998, Arafat again openly threatened that "the Palestinian Rifle is ready and we will aim it if they try to prevent us from praying in Jerusalem... the "Generals of the Stones" are ready". (al-Ayyam, (November 16, 1998). In much the same vein, he spoke to Fatah cadres from the Jerusalem area on the occasion of 31 years after the battle of Karameh, and expressed readiness to face such battles in the future to defend Palestinian rights ("Haaretz", March 21. 1999).

More recently - to some extent, under the influence of what was perceived as the "victory" of Hizbullah in Lebanon - references to the violent option proliferated, and indeed the training of children for the armed struggle was deliberately used - during the Camp David Summit - as a hint of what was to come if Palestinian demands were not met.

As the present crisis unfolded, it was Nabil Sha'ath again who offered an explanation as to what Arafat had meant when he said that "All the options are open": in an interview with ANN television in London (October 7, 2000) he reminded his interlocutor that "No one believed him when he used to say it... [but] The choice is not at all between options of negotiation and fighting: you can have negotiations and fight at the same time" (as did the Algerians and the Vietnamese). Hence, "the Palestinian people fight with weapons, with jihad, with Intifada and suicide actions... and it is destined to always fight and negotiate at the same time."

Specific aspects of non-compliance

The issues listed below are by no means exhaustive. They do, however, prove that the rationale for non-compliance, as presented above, actually led to a repeated pattern of abuse, misconduct and outright violence on the part of the P.A. In this respect, the current crisis does mark a watershed. It has been preceded by previous "eruptions", including the "Tunnel" Crisis of September 1996, and the short-lived "Nakba" events in May 2000. Nevertheless, nothing in previous P.A. practice resembles the collapse of all existing commitments, and the systematic creation - day by day, week by week - of an atmosphere of raw emotions, fear and hatred, in pursuit of a general Palestinian and Pan-Arab mobilization.

All of this is not only in breach of the clearly stated commitments offered at the beginning of the Oslo process, but also in obvious, at times blatant, rejection of the understandings reached at the recent Sharm al-Sheikh Summit. The overwhelming pattern of disregard for both written and informal understandings (overt or otherwise), and in particular the use of an illegally armed militia - answerable to Arafat - in a Low-Intensity Conflict masked as "popular protest" or an "Intifada", all confirm that from a Palestinian point of view, the new dynamics of the "struggle" - and of the call for Arab and International intervention - take precedence over "pacta sunt servanda".

Beyond the current state of warfare, Palestinian non-compliance encompasses broad aspects of everyday practice, from school texts to car theft. Some (not all) of these are discussed here.