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Has the goal of a State of Palestine been advanced?

When I met President Arafat in Gaza in May, he was in despair over Netanyahu. Warmly recalling "my friend, Rabin", Arafat held Netanyahu personally responsible for the guttering of the Oslo process. He recited the number of Israelis, from President Weizmann to Shimon Peres, and from retired generals of the Israeli army to the Israeli-in-the-street, who wanted to get on with peace. One man's obduracy, he said, was standing in the way of progress.

That one man has now been brought around. At the Wye River resort, the hardest bargaining was less between an immovable Netanyahu and an irresistible Arafat than between Netanyahu and Clinton over the fate of a CIA operative who had passed on US intelligence secrets to Israel. After King Hussein of Jordan's impassioned intervention, the impasse over land-for-security was broken. The Palestine National Authority inched towards administrative control over a larger portion of the West Bank. In exchange, it gave tough new undertakings for a crackdown and persistent action against Palestinians resorting to individual acts of indiscriminate violence against non-combatant Israelis. The Israeli word for this is " terrorism".

A fortnight after Wye River, it appears as if Netanyahu is by no means the sole stumbling block. There is so much opposition within Israel to the resumption of the peace process along the Oslo-Wye River route that the Israeli prime minister has failed to even call a Cabinet meeting to endorse the accord of October 23. Arafat himself is, apparently, not encountering opposition within the jurisdiction of the Palestine National Authority on anything like the scale of Netanyahu's problems; but that is like a delayed fuse. The Palestinians are ready to take a winding road to independence but almost no one is willing to settle for anything short of an independent State of Palestine.

That goal has hardly at all been advanced by the negotiations on the Wye River. The implementation of Oslo was to have gone full-steam ahead after the "Gaza-Jericho first" agreement of May 4, 1994, concluded at Cairo on President Mubarak's birthday five years ago. With but a few months to go for the terminal date of that agreement, Wye River barely pushes forward a process that should by now have been hurtling towards a final settlement. Instead, final status negotiations are not even in the air. Compared to sovereignty, matters like an airport and a seaport and 13% of West Bank territory are matters of relatively minor detail. Certainly, no one expects implementation of even these minor matters to be over by May 4, 1999 when the present process comes to an end.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Al-Naqba ("The Catastrophe"), mid-May 1998, with a full year still to go for the Cairo agreement, Arafat was talking of a unilateral declaration of independence on May 4, 1999 unless the peace process was firmly back on track. When I asked him how that would be different to the declaration of independence made at Tunis nearly a decade ago, he said that was there, this would be here, the return of the PLO to Palestine itself the signalling the final phase of liberation.

Has that stand changed? Over the next few weeks, either the Israeli government will ratify Wye River or fresh elections will be called. The election process itself will tend to make the Israeli radical more cautious and the Israeli conservative more hard-line. The outcome is likely to be as confused as the present situation because the Israelis do not have the "first-past-the-post" Westminster model of elections that allows small pluralities to be reflected in large gains or losses of seats. The same reactionary forces within Israel that have held back real progress these five years will, therefore, continue indefinitely to be a force to reckon with in the future.

Arafat's credibility as the Liberator of Palestine will, therefore, be on the anvil as May 4, 1999 comes nearer. By then, there will have to be at least some signal of the two parties embarking on final status negotiations. The PLO would then have to define and demand what it means by an independent State of Palestine. The Israelis would also have to dispense with the little ambiguity that remains with respect to their stand.

But, above all, it is the Americans, who have brokered Wye River, who will have to decide between Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. For the First Lady said last April that, eventually, there would have to be an independent State of Palestine. She was immediately contradicted by her husband's spokesman, who emphasised that that was not the position of the US government.

Whatever concessions have so far been offered, and they include very harsh action against non-PLO Palestinians, have been possible because all Palestinians are united behind Arafat in the demand for independence. The awesome challenge before Arafat is less to pressure Netanyahu and Clinton into implementing Wye River than to get them to concentrate their minds on what comes after Wye River. If Wye River flows to sovereignty for Palestine, it would prove truly historic. If it has merely secured a reprieve for Clinton from Monica Lewinsky, then it will soon be relegated to the dustbin of history as a gimmick that saved in the Democrats a few seats in the Congressional elections that took place ten days after Wye.

If Wye does not lead very shortly to final status negotiations, the PLO will have to take to civil disobedience, and Hamas and others to more violent forms of response. The Israelis do not seem to understand that the sooner Gaza and the West Bank secede from Israel, the brighter are the long-term prospects of sustaining a Jewish state in Israel. To deny sovereignty to the Palestinians in a composite state is, by definition, to confer on them the second-class citizenship of an alien state. That would be unacceptable.

Meanwhile, the demographic clock is ticking. Already, the number of Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin far outstrips the number of Palestinians driven out during Al-Naqba and after. The Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, together with the Palestinians within Israel, are growing in numbers at a rate that is much faster than the natural growth of population and immigration of the Israeli Jews. It is, therefore, in Israel's interest that Palestine come into being. But, alas, there is no sign of the dawning of even a late wisdom.

Mani Shankar Aiyar