By Jennifer Thompson
As the Middle East and North Africa Cairo Economic Conference drew to a close, speculation increased that an agreement for Israeli redeployment from sections of the Palestinian West Bank city of Hebron would be signed. The US, the so-called "honest broker" of the Oslo accord between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel, used the November 12-15 conference to increase pressure on the Palestinian leadership to conclude an agreement.
The dispute over Hebron, where more than 140,000 Palestinians live alongside 400 extreme religious Israeli settlers, has encapsulated the problems of the "peace process". Successive Israeli governments have expected the Palestinian people to go along with a process that many hoped would result in statehood while refusing to commit to dismantling Israeli settlements, allowing East Jerusalem to be part of any future entity or allowing more than 3 million Palestinian refugees to return.
The alliance between the extreme-right religious settler movement and Israeli governments belies any Israeli intention to hand control of the West Bank over to Palestinians. The actions of the settlers, supported by Labour and Likud governments, have been deadly for Palestinians.
Under the September 1995 Oslo II agreement, which covers the interim stage of the five-year Oslo accord timetable, the Israeli military was supposed to be "partially" redeployed in March. However, Israel's Labour government, pandering to the settler movement before the May elections, delayed. Since the election of the conservative Likud coalition government, led by PM Benyamin Netanyahu, negotiations have been sporadic and characterised by Israeli attempts to reverse existing agreements.
Parts of Hebron's centre have been closed to Palestinians by the Israeli military since 1994. "In the name of security, the Israelis want to keep control over the city and keep it at the mercy of the same sort of aggressive occupation that exists now", Palestinian Authority (PA) information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told Palestine Report (November 1).
In recent weeks, Hebron settlers have been making more threats. According to Stephanie Nolan in the November 1 Palestine Report, settlers distributed leaflets on October 22 claiming to have stores of automatic weapons to use against Palestinians in Hebron should the PA police force in Hebron attempt to bring armed men into the city. The Australian reported on November 15 that Israeli officials had already found one weapons cache.
According to Nolan, in early November Netanyahu reiterated that "the Jewish community of Hebron will never be uprooted". On November 9, Israeli troops broke up a peaceful demonstration of Palestinians and Israelis calling for the evacuation of settlers from the middle of Hebron.
Netanyahu's statement coincided with a Dahav Institute poll that found that 62% of Israelis support evacuating right-wing settlers from Hebron, and 55% did not believe that coexistence between Hebron residents and settlers was possible after redeployment.
Nolan reported that, in preparation for anticipated redeployment, "Israel has begun to retrench in the Jewish-controlled areas of the city ... giving Israeli troops the ability to close off hundreds of shops and businesses". The interim agreement had stipulated that all main arteries in Hebron would be reopened for Palestinian traffic.
Israel's refusal to redeploy from Hebron is not the only problem. "Also at issue is the Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian lands in the West Bank in accordance to agreements on three phases ... the territories called B and C [in the Oslo II interim agreement] must be rid of occupation", Abed Rabbo said.
"Netanyahu and his accomplices call for separating the issues from each others so that the negotiators will limit their efforts to the Hebron issue only. He wants us to move to negotiate directly over the final status ... [and thus] eliminate the interim phase."
According to Middle East International's Graham Usher, other Palestinian activists agree that moving directly to negotiate the final status issues without carrying through the interim agreement would be a mistake. On October 25, Usher quoted Khalil Shaqaqi as saying that without the PA forcing Israel to adhere to all of the interim agreement, especially those clauses transferring three further instalments of West Bank and Gaza territory, Israel can maintain the status quo, "closing off the Palestinian self-rule areas" to improve its bargaining posture without breaching the current agreements.
US interest in an agreement on Hebron as a step toward a final agreement that reinforces its own and Israel's economic and strategic position in the region has been thinly disguised. Before the MENA conference began, representatives from the four core regional parties (Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and the PA) met under the auspices of the Regional Economic Development Working Group to discuss regional projects. One of the most prominent projects discussed was the Middle East Regional Development Bank, in which the US will hold 21% of the shares.