Too much distrust between Israelis and Palestinians

PHIL REEVES argues that Arab anger and frustration can no longer be ignored.

JERUSALEM - What on earth went wrong? Were we not being told less than three months ago that Israel and the Palestinians were closer to a deal than they have ever been? Were we not being cheerfully reassured that a historic watershed had occurred at the Camp David summit and that - though it ended without an agreement - things would never be the same again?

And yet the descent into violence in the Middle East has been swift and terrifying. It has happened, above all, because the parties involved, including Yasser Arafat, for too long underestimated the rage and frustration that had built up among the Palestinians. Even now, the Israelis are continuing to make the same mistake by insisting that Arafat has only to snap his fingers to stop it all.

It is not that simple. The anger is felt not only by the youths from Fatah's military wing, the Tanzim, who have been hurling stones and petrol bombs at Israeli outposts and Jewish settlements for the past 12 days. It is felt by the parents who daily allow their youngsters to go to the flashpoints, knowing that Israeli soldiers have shot children; by the thousands of Palestinian security men, who stand back and let the riots continue - or join in, blasting away with Kalashnikovs; by the Arabs of Israel, a full fifth of the population, who have seen their civil rights abused for decades, and by Palestinians cooped up in the sordid refugee camps of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

The truth is that the majority of Palestinians long ago abandoned any faith in the Oslo peace process. They judged it on the basis of what they saw - not what was said by the United States State Department and Israeli spinmeisters.

They saw that Israeli security officials still barred Palestinians from moving freely between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - despite the wildly over-hyped opening of a "safe passage" through Israel a year ago. They saw that bulldozers carried on knocking down Arab houses and clearing Arab land to make bypasses for Jewish settlers.

They saw their workers trooped through the cattle pens at Gaza's border with Israel to work for a pittance in menial jobs - victims of Israel's economic throttle-hold which far overshadowed recent signs that the Palestinian economy was picking up. They saw the Israelis crank up the demographic war against the Arab world by opening their doors to almost 1 million arrivals from the Soviet Union over a decade - many of them not Jewish. And, in particular, they saw Ehud Barak building on occupied land at a faster pace than his hard-line predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, making a mockery of the pretence that the Oslo negotiations were founded on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242.

Barak's aides marketed him skilfully to the world as a peacemaker - emphasising, accurately, that he was willing to go further than any Israeli leader before him in the quest for peace. It is perfectly true that he was willing to discuss the division of Jerusalem and it is true that this took some courage - not least because it wiped out any prospect of rebuilding his collapsed coalition Government.

It is also true that overall, Israel softened its conduct in certain areas - for example, by announcing the end of the practice of revoking residency permits of Arabs in east Jerusalem in an effort to reduce their numbers, and - at least, officially - ending the use of torture by the security services.

But these moves are seen by ordinary Palestinians as nothing more than their rights. Nor was it enough. The whole peace process continued to be blighted by a fundamental lack of goodwill, and a strong suspicion that ultimately Barak, ex-chief of staff of Israel's armed forces, believed that peace was a matter of bamboozling Arafat into compliance.

Despite TV pictures of Arafat and Barak joshing good-humouredly at Camp David, the truth is the two leaders have long detested each other.

Complacency also afflicted the Palestinian leadership - Yasser Arafat and his officials, or the "Oslo class" as Palestinians on the street sneeringly began to call them. They were seen as a world apart, glossy courtiers jetting from one international capital to another while those confined within the Palestinian Authority's disjointed scraps of territory were left to fester.

Arafat's tactic of securing loyalty by handing out business contracts had sown the roots of corruption. As one monstrous mansion after another appeared on the skyline of the otherwise squalid, broken-down landscape of Gaza, the public's cynicism and sullenness deepened. Yet the signs were there - although they were ignored by the leadership on both sides, and also by the Americans, keen to score a foreign policy triumph before President Bill Clinton left office. Last November, for instance, 20 prominent Palestinians signed a blistering petition accusing Arafat of being responsible for corruption in the Palestinian Authority, and expressing deep disillusion with the Oslo process.

The negotiations, it said, fell far short of the promised goals - producing instead more Jewish settlements, more land confiscations, and more Palestinians in jail - albeit in Palestinian lock-ups. In what are now prophetic words, it called on Palestinians to "ring the bells of danger." Arafat's response was to arrest half the signatories.

Throughout, the Americans soldiered on, believing that getting a deal was more important than attending to the danger signals.

The credibility of the US as a mediator had long been questioned by Palestinians, and with reason. "The Palestinians always complain that we know the details of every proposal from the Americans before they do," one Israeli Government source confided recently. "There's a good reason for that; we write them."

It is ironic, sad even, that Barak's one notable achievement in office, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from south Lebanon, also fuelled the fires destroying his one main goal - that of securing a Middle East peace deal on Israeli terms. The Arab world saw the pullout as a victory for the Hizbollah guerrillas that had fought Israel's 22-year occupation for so long. Those now fighting in the streets considered it inspiring proof that violence, albeit by a far weaker side, faced with overwhelming military force, can achieve results.

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