No expectations from Oslo summit
Palestine-Israel-USA, Politics, 11/1/1999

The official final status talks are due to start next week in Ramallah but Palestinian expectations are very low. The gap separating the Palestinian demands and the guidelines of the Israeli government are too large to be bridged by hopes, one Palestinian observer commented Monday. He was voicing the concern of senior Palestinian officials who spoke lately of tough negotiations they expect with Israel over the final status of the Palestinian territories.

A US official, meanwhile, played down the expectations from the Oslo meetings and said that both the Palestinian government and Israel were engaged in the difficult part of the process. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak also declared that there won't be any dramatic announcements in Oslo. Barak spoke on television hours before he left and said he was heading to the meeting with the hope that he, along with President Clinton and Arafat, will be able to agree on the direction and mechanism through which they can achieve fast progress.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat had said earlier in the day that President Yasser Arafat left to Oslo with a number of major points on the agenda of his meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and US President Bill Clinton. Erekat said that Arafat had wanted an immediate halt of all unilateral Israeli measures such as Jewish settlement activities, land confiscation, the creation of new accomplished facts on the ground, imposition of new facts on ground and the siege on the town of Bethlehem.

According to Erekat, the Palestinians do not want to embark only on dates and scheduled meetings as much as on results achieved in those talks. "We will concentrate on the context of these negotiations which should be based on implementing UN resolutions 242, 338 and the Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories that Israel conquered in 1967," said Erekat. The context of the negotiations, he said, should be based on the illegality of Jewish settlements and on the right of the Palestinian refugees' to return according to UN resolution 194. He added that the Palestinians would also concentrate on maintaining their rights to water sources that are controlled by Israel.

Ahmad Abdul Rahman, secretary of the Palestinian Cabinet, was more right to the point when he voiced his skepticism, saying that he did not expect any real progress out of the Olso three-way summit meeting, except for the fact that it might indicate a return by US President Clinton to the area "to play a more active role in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations." "It seems to me now that President Clinton is not pleased with what have taken place so far," said Abdul Rahman, expecting the US President to convene a Wye-style long sessions meeting between Arafat and Barak until their reach an agreement on the framework of the final status negotiations.

President Arafat left to Oslo Monday morning to attend a memorial ceremony organized by the Norwegian government marking the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin. Nabil Abu Redeineh, Arafat's advisor, said that the Palestinian people could not wait too long and that the Palestinian Central Council would meet at the end of November to discuss the developments in the peace process and the Palestinian-Israeli talks.

Knesset member Uri Savir, one of the Oslo Accords' architects and currently a member of the new Center Party, had accompanied Barak as an official guest of the Norwegian government. He said that, "The trilateral summit does not only have ceremonial value, but a practical significance: the sides will exchange views on their fundamental stance of the final status arrangement and it will be an experiment to decide upon the outline of the negotiations, which are meant to officially start on the seventh of November."

Meanwhile, another summit meeting between Arafat, Clinton and Barak is expected to be held in January in a format similar to the Camp David summit between the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and former Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin. Press reports circulating in Israel said that the initiative for the summit meeting was President Bill Clinton's, as he would like to have this meeting produce a joint declaration of principles for the final status arrangement.

Previous Stories:
  Moving ahead in final status talks   (10/30/1999)
  Further redeployment this week   (10/30/1999)
  Trilateral meeting for Clinton, Barak and Arafat in Oslo on Tuesday   (10/30/1999)

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