The US peace envoy, Mr Dennis Ross, left Jerusalem empty-handed on Saturday, following a four-day shuttle between the Israeli government and the Palestine Authority seeking progress in the stalled peace process.
His mission had special urgency because of meetings between President Clinton, the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestine President, Mr Yasser Arafat, scheduled for later this month. It seems that US diplomacy is attempting to intervene in an Alice and Wonderland situation where confusion and obfuscation reign.
First, Mr Ross tried in vain to secure from Mr Netanyahu a commitment to a credible "second further redeployment", or withdrawal of Israeli troops from areas of the West Bank. While Mr Ross spoke of a "double digit redeployment" (reportedly, 10 to 13 per cent) Mr Netanyahu, who had previously agreed to 10 per cent, reverted to the 6 to 8 per cent he initially proposed, hedged with conditions he knows will not be accepted by Palestinians.
But, since there was no "first redeployment", how could the discussions focus on a "second"? According to the Hebron Protocol signed by Mr Netanyahu on January 15th last year, Israel was required to make three such "redeployments" before the middle of this year. The first, due in March 1997, was cancelled after the Palestinians objected to Israel's unilateral offer to hand over only an additional 2 per cent of the West Bank. Then (as now) the Palestinians had total control of a mere 3 per cent and administered another 27 per cent, with the Israeli army exercising security control.
Mr Arafat has now demanded a combined "first" and "second redeployment" of 40 per cent and a "third" of 30 per cent, giving the Palestinians at least administrative authority over the entire territory. But the US and Israel are quibbling over two to four points on either side of 10 per cent for the "second" stage, while dropping both the first and third stages in advance of negotiations on a final settlement.
This amounts to a complete distortion of the Oslo Accords. They stated the objective as "implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338" involving Israeli withdrawal from virtually all occupied Palestinian territory (excluding settlements and military bases, which occupy about 12-15 per cent of the land) and specifying that the West Bank and Gaza should be viewed as a "single territorial unit" and not carved up into Israeli and Palestinian cantons.
According to a leading Israeli columnist, Mr David Landau of Ha'aretz, the framers of the Oslo accords intended that Palestinians should receive 85 per cent of the West Bank through the process of "further redeployments".
Mr Netanyahu has not only ignored the US call for "time out" in Israeli settlement activity but announced that Israel would build 30,000 new housing units in the West Bank, thus doubling the present Jewish population of 150,000 by 2020.