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The Mideast Peace Conference: Keep the PLO Out
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19616 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
2,241 Words |
| Author
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Aharon Klieman
Aharon Klieman is professor of international relations in the
Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University and
author of Israel & the World after Forty Years (Pergamon-
Brassey's, 1990). |
In giving the United States and Secretary James Baker "the 'yes' we were hoping for," Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir from the very outset has spelled out in explicit, unambiguous terms the conditions for Israel's agreement to attend the Middle East peace conference scheduled for October. Nowhere is this clarity more readily evident than on the issue of Palestinian representation, with Israel insisting that no member of the Palestine Liberation Organization be permitted to take part, nor any stateless Palestinian or east Jerusalem resident.
These demands, although tough, are defensible both from the standpoint of Israeli self-interest and from the favorable balance of forces currently strengthening Israel's hand.
If, in domestic foreign policy decision making, "where you stand is a matter of where you sit" bureaucratically, then the closest equivalent in international peacemaking would probably be: What is finally negotiated largely depends upon with whom you negotiate. In Israeli diplomatic experience, representation and procedure have far deeper substantive and long-term implications. Thus, consent now to a separate Palestinian delegation would certainly be turned later into an argument supporting the Palestinian claim to independent political status--which is precisely what every one of Shamir's predecessors and a large majority of Israelis have always opposed as threatening and unviable in equal measure.
The Israeli government, in preparing for the coming round of high-stakes diplomacy, sees the question of Palestinian representation as central to its entire negotiating strategy. Dismissing its position as legalistic or obstructionist, therefore, would be a serious error, underestimating the chain of logic behind Jerusalem's stand. The links in the argument are worth enumerating.
The fact that Israel has always favored a peace settlement with its neighbors is a matter of public record; so, too, is its readiness to compromise, confirmed by the return of Sinai to Egypt under the 1979 peace treaty. But it insists, however, on direct, face-to-face talks at the interstate level, according to the principle that resolution of the Arab-Israel dispute, just like the military conflict in six wars, involves sovereign states as the directly concerned parties. In force since 1948, this principle, to be sure, is meant implicitly to disqualify the Palestinians as a nonstate actor and to deal with the plight of the Palestinian people and their rights--acknowledged by Menacham Begin in 1978 at Camp David--as one dimension of the regional
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