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Answering the Palestinian Question
| Article
# : |
18548 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
3,061 Words |
| Author
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Graham E. Fuller
Graham E. Fuller is a senior political scientist at RAND and a
former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at
the CIA. |
This has been a bad year for the Palestinians. They have, so far, been one of the spectacular losers from the war in Kuwait. They have slid into an increasingly desperate position on the occupied West Bank in Israel--with fulfillment of their ambitions for their own national state drifting ever farther out of sight. And they have been badly let down by the disastrous judgment of Yasser Arafat, who opted to tie their fate inextricably to that of Saddam Hussein's. They are widely excoriated throughout the Gulf region and have suffered massive financial loss from the politics of the war.
Yet it is one of the paradoxes of the Middle East order that cataclysm is sometimes the only effective process by which impossible political deadlocks are broken and fresh initiatives toward peace are released. High stakes are now involved for the Palestinians in the political outcome of the Iraq war. They may be cast into political oblivion for a decade to come; or conversely they may benefit from renewed international determination that this "mother of conflict" in the Middle East--the Palestinian problem--must finally be brought to resolution.
Looking back two years, December 1988 now stands out as the high-water mark of the Palestinian movement in the eighties. It was then that PLO Chairman Arafat surprised much of the world by formally accepting Israel's right to exist, forswearing terrorism as an instrument of PLO policy and calling for a "two-state solution" to the Palestinian problem--in which Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza would mutually recognize each other and peacefully coexist. With that step, the PLO fulfilled the critical precondition Washington had established for direct American contact with the PLO; over Israel's bitter protest, the State Department immediately established direct political dialogue with the PLO--a major step forward in the PLO's struggle for international acceptance and the establishment of a state in the West Bank and Gaza.
But the honeymoon was not to last. The State Department placed considerable limitations on the content of the dialogue. American diplomats at no time met with Arafat personally, and all our contacts with the PLO were restricted solely to our ambassador in Tunis. The State Department was determined that no negotiations take place with the PLO: The PLO had not yet been granted the status of an independent actor in the peace process. Arafat increasingly had little to show for the talks with the United States, validating the objections of the PLO radicals to his December 1988 concessions to Washington and Israel. The radical wing accused Arafat of having moved too far
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