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The Mythical Middle East Peace Process
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14618 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1988 |
3,037 Words |
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Evans Johnson
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On the heavily symbolic Ides of March this year, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir met with the leaders of the United States in Washington.
At issue was the most recent U.S. proposal to end the 40-year-long Israel-Arab stalemate, a relationship known as the "Middle East Problem" in the American media, and subtitled: the "Palestinian Problem."
Secretary of State George Shultz only a week earlier returned from the most energetic spurt of American shuttle diplomacy since the days of Camp David in the late 1970s. In little more than a week, he flew from Washington to Tel Aviv-Jerusalem, Cairo, Amman, Damascus, London, Brussels, and back to the Middle East again, before heading for home on March 5.
In his wake, Shultz had left a proposal that could lead to self-rule for the Palestinians now living in territories administered by Israel. However, no leader except Israel's Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was particularly optimistic. Shamir, Peres' political rival, was staunchly opposed to trading territory for peace. A chorus of mourners--including Arab officials who were linked to the peace effort--lamented Shultz's apparent effort to breathe renewed life into the Camp David peace process, an idea that even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak roundly debunked. Shultz deposited copies of the U.S. proposals in the laps of the four national leaders directly perched on the twin horns of the Middle East dilemma.
The United States proposed that sometime in early or mid-April an international conference be convened. It would serve as an umbrella arrangement under which negotiations about the future status of the administered territories of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip would take place. The conference would have a continuing role in the hoped-for peace process, but it could neither impose, nor veto a settlement by the warring nations; technically, all Arab nations except Egypt are in a state of war with what they call the "Zionist entity."
Those individuals involved in the negotiations would represent Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the Palestinians, and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and China).
Thus, for the first time--and to the great distress of Shamir's Likud bloc and many conservative strategic analysts in the United States--Moscow was offered a seat at the "peace table" that had been an exclusively American venue since the 1973 war.
On May 1, the conferees would begin negotiations on an interim phase of self-administration for those Palestinians still living under Israeli rule. The term self-administration was coined to replace autonomy, a word identified with Camp David. These negotiations were planned to last for just six months. By December, under the Shultz plan, delegates from Israel and a joint team of Jordanians and Palestinians would begin negotiating the "final status" of the territories.
The "interim phase"--self-administration--would not begin until the long-range negotiations were underway. These "final" talks were to last one year, and the solution--if one emerges--produced through the negotiations of 1989 would be
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