Barak's idea is of never-endeng 'final status'

By Hans Lebrecht

TEL AVIV - Palestinian National Authority (PNA) President Yasser Arafat, following an invitation by Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak, came to Tel-Aviv to meet with Barak. The matter was arranged so secretly that even Barak's Foreign Minister David Levy was shocked to hear about it over the radio the next morning.

The question is asked by many, in Israel as well as in Palestine, whether Arafat came in order to express repentance for not accepting all of Barak's ideas about how to achieve a "final and permanent" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or in order to be blackmailed again into adopting Barak's "peace" dictate of "Red Lines?"

The hard-core problems of the conflict - the future of Jerusalem, the illegal colonial settlements on robbed Palestinian soil, the fate of the millions of Palestinian refugees, the drawing of borders between Israel and Palestine, as well as the definition of the "Palestinian entity" - were put off until the "final status" negotiations.

After the first step of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho, and turning over these two cities to the Palestinian Authority (PNA), several "re-deployments" of Israel's occupation army took place, the last one on Sept. 17. Another partial withdrawal is scheduled for Oct. 8.

Israel agreed to turn over these territories only to the Palestinian civil authorities, keeping its military - "security" - grip on those territories. Israel is, after all its partial "redeployments," still ruling over more than 80 percent of the West Bank, including occupied eastern Jerusalem.

The memorandum signed at the beginning of this month in Sharm-el-Sheikh, allegedly specifying the terms and long overdue schedule for implementing the Wye memorandum, increasingly turns out to be a tricky affair, aimed at blackmailing the Palestinian "peace partners" into agreeing to the will of Barak to combine the still open "re-deployments" and other venues of the Wye accord with the opening of the final status negotiations.

At the same time as Barak was holding those secret talks with Arafat, he repeatedly declared in public that he intends to enlarge the municipal boundaries of the illegal urban West Bank settlement Ma'aleh Adumim (25,000 Jewish inhabitants) by again seizing thousands of acres of Palestinian land. He also stresses time and again that "no Jewish settlement will be dismantled," and that these will remain on land to remain under Israeli sovereignty, safeguarded by Israeli "security forces."

Barak well knows that there will not be, and cannot be, a genuine peace with the Palestinians as long as his government, or any other Israeli government, will not consider the Palestinian partners to peace as equal partners and as long as Israel is not prepared to withdraw from all Arab Palestinian land conquered and occupied since 1967, as demanded by U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.

When Barak states that "Israel will never return to the lines of before 1967," when he states that major parts of the West Bank, "settlement blocs," wide areas of land around Nablus and Ramallah, the whole Jordan rift valley settlements, including all the roads connecting these "blocs" will remain forever under Israeli sovereignty, he leaves very little left to negotiate.

Barak is not acting like a prime minister voted into this job by the overwhelming majority of the Israeli electorate because of his promise to promote peace. He still acts as the former army general chief-of-staff, with supreme command over the occupied territories and their population. Most Israelis, among them not a few "Peace-Now champions," still think that Israel should "give" or "not give" the Palestinians land for peace.

They forget that Israel is not "giving" land but, rather, "returning" land conquered by force.

This policy of continuing the over-lording by force of a full or partly armed occupation, has no future. It is pregnant with more bloodshed and wars.