Within days, up to 1,000 Palestinians presently barred from entering Israel will be free to travel each day on a 26-mile \”safe passage\” that links the Palestinian-controlled territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Glittering ceremonies and lofty rhetoric are the essential byproducts of every milestone in Middle East peacemaking.
Now that Yasser Arafat has called Ehud Barak his \”friend and partner,\” and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has pronounced himself pleased and encouraged with the new Israeli prime minister, and President Clinton is just waiting to welcome him to Washington, the old euphoria seems to have arisen again.
\”Binyamin Netanyahu is no longer the leader of the national camp,\” Aharon Domb, general secretary of the West Bank and Gaza Jewish settlers\’ council, said this week, with all the finality of a judge pronouncing sentence.
Israel and its Arab neighbors are still feeling the effects, militarily, politically and psychologically, of the coordinated Egyptian-Syrian surprise attacks and of the desperate Israeli struggle to drive the invading forces back across the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights.
Charges that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are running a corrupt, brutal police state are no longer being voiced only by the Israeli right wing; they are now coming from Palestinian nationalists who, before the Oslo Accord, fought the Israeli occupation.<
Regarding the domestic political pressures thatBinyamin Netanyahu faces in his decision-making on the peace process,the prime minister himself probably summed it up best in the \”Israelat 50\” interview he gave to Newsweek: \”I am a coalition ofone.\”
The bad news is that the peace process is going nowhere. The good news is that the Palestinians are learning all over again how to enjoy themselves.
On Sept. 10, the day Secretary of State Madeleine Albright arrived in Israel, the country became preoccupied with another event: the disappearance of Ya\’acov Schwartz.
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