The Ramallah compromise

Israel ends the Ramallah siege a month after it invaded Palestinian territories, as a quid pro quo for the disbanding of a United Nations fact-finding mission.

ON May 1, the Israeli military withdrew from the positions it had taken inside the muqata (headquarters compound) of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, and Arafat was able to drive outside for the first time since December last. This withdrawal marked the end of the month-long Israeli invasion of Palestinian territories. However, the situation was far from back to normal.

Abnormality was at its sharpest in Bethlehem where Israeli tanks and troops continued to besiege Palestinians holed up in the Church of the Nativity and routinely imposed curfew in the rest of the city. Palestinians were not secure from further armed incursions in other parts of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip either. The Israeli military continued to ring most of the larger concentrations of Palestinian habitation, towns and refugee camps, and reserved the right to re-enter at any time of its choosing. It was a right it frequently exercised with a most dramatic demonstration being a two-day raid into Hebron even as negotiations to end the Ramallah siege were drawing to a successful conclusion.

Palestinians maintain, and probably correctly so, that the real toll will never be known. Journalists and members of international aid agencies, who were able to enter West Bank towns and refugee camps only days after Israeli troops withdrew from each, were of the opinion that the toll might not be as high as it was once feared it would be. No outside agency had found evidence to support the Palestinian claim that a massacre had taken place in the Jenin refugee camp or that mass graves had been dug for the civilian dead by the Israeli Army trying to cover up atrocities. What they did confirm was that many civilian deaths had taken place and often in circumstances that threw doubt on the Israeli claim that the military had taken the utmost care to minimise "collateral damage".

Conflicting conclusions were drawn on the question of whether the Israelis had given sufficient warning and time to the civilians to evacuate zones where they were about to strike. A median line conclusion was that the warning might have been given but in many places the Palestinians might not have heard the announcement because of the firing and shelling that was going on. Human rights groups were pointing to four different areas where the Israeli Army might have violated international humanitarian laws, including the relevant Geneva Conventions. Besides the civilian deaths, these groups pointed out, there had been wanton destruction of property and civilians had been denied access to medical help and even used as "human shields" by the Israeli Army in several instances.

Instances of these kinds of abuses were being reported from the West Bank. But the main focus was on trying to ascertain what had happened in the Jenin refugee camp during more than a week of fighting. After much debate in the United Nations Security Council, Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced, with Israel's prior approval, that he would send a fact-finding mission to Jenin. A three-member panel was constituted and provided with a bevy of advisers (eventually as many as 20) on matters as diverse as military, police and forensic operations and refugee relief. Then Israel, which had initially declared that it would welcome the panel because it had nothing to hide, developed cold feet.

Israel raised several objections and feared that the panel would not simply ascertain facts but draw conclusions and make recommendations, obviously pertaining to humanitarian law. It wanted to retain control over which Israeli soldiers and officers would be called for questioning; it also wanted immunity from prosecution for all those who testified. Israel took its objections to the Secretary-General and after several rounds of discussions Annan offered at least a partial accommodation. Several more military men were added on to the board of advisers, although none was elevated to full membership, and immunity from prosecution was also guaranteed. Suddenly, on April 30, Israel finally concluded that it would not cooperate with the panel, which had met in Geneva and was waiting for the go-ahead.

Annan gave in without a fight and said that he was inclined to disband the panel. The United States administration had largely kept out of this rumpus except at the outset where it used its clout to ensure that the U.N. ordered only a fact-finding mission and not a war crimes investigation. After Israel declared that it would not cooperate, there was speculation that the U.S. might strive for a compromise. But in Israel analysts had speculated, before the government's announcement, that the fact-finding mission would be shelved as a quid pro quo for the "concession" that Israelis Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made in respect of the muqata.

Sharon had insisted that he would not allow Arafat to leave the two rooms within the muqata where he had been holed up for the past one month, unless six wanted men inside were handed over for trial in Israel. Four of these men were involved in the killing of Israel's Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi, a fifth was the secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the group to which Ze'evi's assassins belonged) and the sixth man is a senior Palestinian official whom Israel accuses of arranging a major weapons shipment. Arafat refused to hand over these men, insisting that even Ze'evi's killers would have to be tried by the Palestinian Authority as per the Oslo accords. (Incidentally, Israel had allowed U.S. security officials to accompany Palestinian policemen who transported Ze'evi's killers from Nablus to Ramallah weeks before the invasion was launched.)

In the last week of April a hastily constituted Palestinian tribunal, which held its sittings inside the muqata, tried and sentenced Ze'evi's killers with the main accused drawing an 18-year prison term. Israel called this a sham trial and refused to lift its siege. Arafat too put his own conditions, insisting that he would not leave his compound, even if the Israelis lifted the siege, unless the siege of the Bethlehem church was also lifted. Finally, it was left to U.S. President George W. Bush, who had in the meanwhile hosted Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and promised a stronger mediatory effort, to effectuate a compromise. After a phone call from Bush, Sharon announced that he would accede to a request from him and accept a compromise.

A security team consisting of U.S. and British personnel would take custody of the six wanted Palestinians and escort them to a jail in Jericho. Once in Jericho the U.S./British security teams would supervise the incarceration of these men by Palestinian jailers. With the U.S./British team in place, the Palestinians had the assurance that Israel would not try to kill the wanted men and Israel had the assurance that Arafat would not release them through the "revolving door" policy which it accuses the Palestinians of. Once the wanted men were taken out of the muqata on May 1, Arafat was technically free to travel about the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The Ramallah compromise could possibly have wider implications. European allies of the US, moderate Arab leaders and even a few U.S. analysts have been of the strong opinion that the Israelis and the Palestinians distrust each other so deeply that the scope for security cooperation (envisaged and operated during the Oslo processes) has evaporated completely. There was a pressing need for an international force, even a body of unarmed monitors, which could act as a buffer. Such a force would screen the Palestinian Authority from future Israeli attacks as it rebuilt itself economically and organisationally, and its presence in the territories could help smother the scope for Palestinian terror attacks on Israel.

While the U.S. has so far been reluctant to countenance the insertion of a force of this kind, the Ramallah compromise could represent the thin edge of the wedge. If some sort of similar arrangement is made in respect of the two scores or so of wanted Palestinians cooped up along with more than a hundred innocents in the Bethlehem church, the resistance against extending the scope for security operations by outsiders could erode further. Negotiations in respect of the Bethlehem siege are still under way.

In assessing its gains from the invasion, Israel was to claim that it had substantially attained its objective of "eradicating the infrastructure of terror". About 35 key organisers of suicide operations and bomb-making engineers were among those either killed or captured, and of the 3,000 persons taken into custody during the month-long operation at least 1,500 were arrested for being associated with the three main militant factions. The leaderships of the Hamas, the Islamic Jehad and the Al Aqsa Brigades were in disarray, Israel claimed. Israel also admitted that its troops had, in several cases, trashed, ransacked and looted Palestinian Authority offices and private homes. Some soldiers had been arrested in this connection and Israeli military spokesmen claimed that these men had acted in violation of the orders.

There was, however, sufficient evidence of an Israeli policy to deprive the Palestinian Authority of its registers and records. Israel claimed that these documents had been seized because they would produce information about the full scale of the terrorist infrastructure. But in effect Israel had destroyed the Palestinian Authority's ability to perform its functions. Indeed, in certain respects the Authority could be said to have ceased to exist. There is no longer an Area 'A' - those zones in the Palestinian territories that were under full Palestinian civilian and security control. The whole of the Palestinian territory has been converted into an Area 'B' where Israel exerts overriding security control and the Authority administers mainly municipal functions.

Sharon, who has always opposed the Oslo processes, had tried to impose a Village League system on the Palestinian territories when he was a Minister 20 years ago. He might have thought that the current situation would provide scope for a repeat of the Village League experiment in which Palestinian quislings would look after municipal administration under Israel's benign colonial supervision. But the unintended results of Israel's military operation is that it has strengthened Palestinian solidarity and cemented Arafat's leadership role both among his people and in the eyes of the international community. The Palestinian civil and security services have begun shaking themselves back into shape and the world is waiting for Israel to start dealing with the Palestinian Authority.