Another Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, is saying that Palestinians have inexplicably hardened their stances and rejected another set of “generous proposals”.
Ehud Olmert and company did that after the failed Camp David negotiations in late July 2000. Years later, and the verdict is still not in.
Olmert sent out the same message last night, and is now going to convene the Israeli Cabinet at 2 pm today to offically throw the gauntlet down, yet again.
Egyptian officials have a few more frantic hours to try to work on all parties.
Meanwhile, the IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi has cut short a visit to Washington and is flying back to Israel, to be here in time for the cabinet meeting. Does that mean that renewed military action in Gaza is imminent? Or, perhaps, a little attack on Iran, as Askenazi has just called for? Maybe the Israeli government now actually believes that the way to influence Hamas is to beat up a bit on Iran.
The Israeli press is full of post-statement, pre-Cabinet meeting, commentary.
Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff have written in Haaretz that “Significant disagreement remains over what to do with the released prisoners. The gaps are greater than the common ground. Israel insists that many of the worst murderers on the list must be expelled from the West Bank, while it seems Hamas agrees to the expulsion of only a few – according to Palestinian sources Hamas is willing to consider the deportation of only five“. [n.b. – The Palestinian prisoners held by Israel are not in jail in the West Bank, except for the infamous Ofer Prison. Most are in Israeli jails — in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Conventions.] This article can be read in here.
Personally, I find it not credible to believe that Hamas is negotiating about deportations of prisoners who may or may not be released from Israeli jails.
Further down in this same Haaretz story, its authors write that “A senior Hamas figure said Monday, ‘It is inconceivable for the organization to agree to the expulsion of prisoners from their homes’. And yet, there is a historical precedent. Hamas has even mentioned the expulsion to Lebanon of 415 of its members in 1992. About a year later, Israel let 395 of them return, barring only 20. Hamas did not agree openly to Israel’s dictates, but asked the 20 remaining prisoners to tell the Red Cross they had decided to remain abroad ‘willingly’. That is one way to solve the present impasse”.
I don’t find this credible, either. It’s one thing to allow the partial “return” to their homes — in fact, of the majority of those 415 Palestinians who were taken blindfolded in helicopters from their places of detention and then dumped in an open field in south Lebanon in 1992. It’s quite another thing to talk about releasing Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails now, and then deporting them either to isolated and blockaded Gaza — where humanitarian and political conditions are extremely precarious, and which Israeli repeatedly threatens to re-attack — or to some unspecified places abroad, without allowing them to “return” to their homes in the West Bank. There is no valid comparison, here.
The authors of the Haaretz article go further, and say: “Another possibility, from Hamas’ perspective, would be to limit the expulsion to a few years. Hamas fears a permanent arrangement. This is not just a matter of principle. The organization underwent no small trauma from the expulsion of the men who were holed up in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002”.
It was not Hamas who experienced the trauma from the 2002 deportations — those gunmen were not members of Hamas. The European countries which reluctantly agreed to accept these men for one year, are still facing the problem of what to do with them. It hardly seems plausible that European countries would accept to do the same again.
And, even if Israel were to offer a time-bound limit for these proposed negotiated deportations, there is no Palestinian who would accept any such assurances. The 1993 Oslo Accords were supposed to lead to a conclusion of “final-status” negotiations by about 1999. The 2003 Road Map was supposed to arrive at an independent Palestinian State, with a seat in the UN General Assembly and other main bodies, by the end of 2003, with the conclusion of “final-status” negotiations by the end of 2005.
The Annapolis process, launched with great fanfare and many firm assurances in late 2007, was supposed to lead to an independent Palestinian State by the end of 2008 — or, as that date slipped a bit, by the last day of the Bush Administration’s term of office.
No, no Palestinian negotiator could seriously accept any “time-bound” deportation orders.
The Palestinian prisoners themselves could refuse to be released under such conditions … And then what?
In 2002, the Church of the Nativity gunmen reluctantly agreed to deportation, under pressure from Arafat et al. There is probably no one who could put today’s prisoners under any such pressure. Could they be deported involuntarily? Then, the ICRC would have to get involved, and the UN would have to get involved (if they were to be deported from Israel, they would then fall under UNCHR rules, as Israel is not one of UNRWA’s five fields of operation…), and these international organizations would have to take a stand against any forced “refoulement”. Would the Quartet stand idly by?.
Then, of course, there is the little matter about deportations being contrary to Israel’s obligations under Phase I of the Road Map (see our earlier posts here and here) — or was this among Ariel Sharon’s famous 14 “reservations” to the Road Map? [No, Israel did not say it reserved the right to deport Palestinians, at least not in any normal reading of these “reservations” .. but a clever negotiator could point out to me what I might be missing …]
In any case, the Road Map has been enshrined in a UN Security Council resolution, and mentioned in several others…
Are the Israelis really such bad negotiators?
As Khaled Abu Toameh wrote in the Jerusalem Post this morning, one Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip said; ” ‘After all the massacres the two committed against our people in the Gaza Strip, they now want us to help them by releasing the soldier’, he continued. ‘I don’t believe that Hamas should reward Olmert and Livni’ … Another Hamas spokesman said that had Olmert wanted to resolve the case of Schalit, he could have done so shortly after the soldier was kidnapped. Hamas’s demands have not changed since then, he said. ‘We have been providing Israel with the same list of prisoners for almost three years’, he said. ‘The list that we recently delivered to Israel through the Egyptian mediators is almost the same one we presented back then’. Schalit, he added, could have been returned to his family a few months after his abduction had the government accepted the captors’ demands for the release of several hundred security prisoners. ‘It seems that Olmert is now prepared to release more than 70 percent of the prisoners who are on the list,” the Hamas spokesman said. “This means that we have made some progress, given the fact that in the past, Israel refused to release more than 70% of the prisoners’. But as far as Schalit’s captors are concerned, it’s either 100% or nothing. They are convinced that the new government will have to resume the negotiations over a prisoner exchange from the point where they ended. They also have no doubt that a Netanyahu-led coalition will pay a heavy price in return for a soldier or an Israeli civilian. Hamas and the other groups holding Schalit can’t afford to make the slightest concession to Israel, particularly since the price the Palestinians have paid since the abduction in the summer of 2006 has been very high – almost 2,500 killed and thousands wounded.The kidnappers need to show the Palestinian public that the price was not unjustified. This can be achieved only if Israel releases hundreds of security prisoners, including ones with Jewish blood on their hands. And some Hamas officials really believe that Netanyahu and Lieberman might have the guts to do what Olmert and Livni are reluctant to do”. Khaled Abu Toameh’s article can be read in full here .
Speaking about Iran in this connection — which I really do not like to do — can I just ask: Does anybody remember the release of the U.S. hostages that were held for 444 days in Tehran? Carter, who tried a miserably-failed military rescue mission, did not get them out during his term in office. They were released just at Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. But the Iranians believed this would give them some leverage with the new administration. Can anyone in Hamas seriously believe that they would have any leverage in waiting for Netanyahu-Lieberman? No. Would they relish the prospect of getting an agreement with Netanyahu-Lieberman? Possibly. But not at the price of agreed, negotiated deportations. And, let’s not forget, Netanyahu has regretted the cease-fire that Olmert implemented on 18 January to halt the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and Netanyahu has since called for the complete defeat and ouster of Hamas.
On the other hand, for Hamas, the “return” of those who fled or were forced to flee the fighting in 1948 is one of it’s most fundamental and dearly-held positions. (For this, Hamas is accused — probably unfairly — of wanting the destruction of the Israel, or the “Jewish State”.) The “return” of Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee in 1948 is even more important to Hamas than the creation of a Palestinian State. (But, on this, Hamas did accept as part of the Mecca negotiations that lead to the creation of a National Unity government in March 2007 to work for a Palestinian State within 1967 lines/”boundaries”.)
Is it plausible that Hamas would agree to more “deportations” of more Palestinians, on their watch, now????