Sense Of Complacency
This article is courtesy of The Jewish Week

With the Syrian peace front at an apparent dead-end, there has been a renewed flurry of activity to finalize negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. President Clinton met at the White House the other day with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat following a series of lower level talks held between Israeli and Palestinian diplomats near Washington. And higher level talks between the two sides, with an increased role for the U.S., are set for next week in Eilat.

Despite the impending Sept. 13 deadline for final-status resolution of the most intractable issues, including boundaries, water rights, settlements, Arab refugees and Jerusalem, there is a sense of complacency among many Israelis, and American Jews, that compromises can and will be reached to satisfy both Israeli security interests and Palestinian national demands. But this may be a case of wishful thinking, given that Arafat and his top officials have been consistent in insisting that they will make no more concessions. They are demanding a state on the West Bank and Gaza with pre-1967 boundaries and with east Jerusalem as its capital.

“We’ve made our compromises,” Palestinian spokesman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) told Palestinian radio last week, adding: “We won’t give up a single centimeter of lands which were conquered in 1967.”

This is nothing new, one might say, and all part of the diplomatic game of talking tough before getting down to the reality of hard bargaining. But is Israel prepared to consider that the Palestinians mean what they say this time? Perhaps an inevitable weariness has set in among Israelis eager to be done with the protracted negotiations. As a result, there may be a national unwillingness to consider that the resolution of final-status issues is still miles apart. What then?

Haaretz columnist Danny Rubenstein noted this week that the Palestinians have formed a broad consensus on these issues and show no willingness to back down from their positions. They mean business, he believes, and this would make the negotiations with Syria look like “child’s play when compared to the vexing quandaries and dilemmas on the Palestinian track,” he wrote.

Are Israelis in agreement on their red-line issues on which they would stand together, left and right? If not, it is time to address them, rather than assume that the Palestinians are prepared to accommodate Israeli interests and demands.