The Hebron agreement is a milestone in the Middle East peace process, with the potential to release a new dynamic for the region if it is properly managed and implemented. There are still a great many issues on which the Israeli and Palestinian authorities remain deeply divided, but there can be no denying that the clearing of this hurdle gives the process a new momentum.
Following the agreement's endorsement last night by a divided Israeli cabinet, the Knesset is expected to, give it a far more decisive vote of confidence today. This will symbolise a new alignment between the major parties in Israel, which have been so sharply polarised since the elections last June. As a consequence, the settler movement, in alliance with the far right wing, was able to determine much of prime minister Netanyahu's political trajectory. He has all," along faced a choice over whether to go along with the Oslo accords or to reject them. With this agreement the balance of political forces in Israel has changed, making it more likely that the Oslo agenda will be addressed, even though there are many questions outstanding about its eventual outcome.
Much of the Oslo process was taken by the Palestinians and the then Labour Party government in Israel on trust between themselves and this was destroyed by the election of Mr Netanyahu. As a result, the peace process became internationalised to an unprecedented extent. It has involved the United States in a role extending beyond mediation to brokerage of this agreement and unprecedented guarantor of the dates for Israeli withdrawal from West Bank land and towns in 1998. The European Union became much more engaged in the course of the last six months, still much less centrally than the US, as is made quite clear by the Hebron agreement, but more influentially than before. And the agreement depended crucially on King Hussein's intervention, giving the Arab states a new purchase on the Israeli Palestinian relationship. Mr Netanyahu has therefore gained a few months' delay in implementing the interim phase of the Oslo accords at the price of more international involvement and now a probable realignment of Israeli politics. It is not surprising that many of his supporters wonder whether it was a price worth paying in the longer term.
On the Palestinian side, Mr Yasser Arafat emerges in a much stronger position from the agreement. He has been shown to have been right to delay on Hebron in order to be sure that the other Israeli withdrawals agreed in Oslo would be implemented and that these would lead on to the final deadline in 1999 for agreement on an overall settlement, including the questions of Palestinian statehood and the status of Jerusalem. It became clear yesterday that there will be prolonged argument about the precise extent of the Israeli commitments to withdraw, about the privileged status of the Israeli settlers in Hebron and about whether Mr Arafat's authority can prevent the Hamas fundamentalists from sabotaging the agreement. None of this will make it any easier for Mr Arafat to pursue his objective of statehood, but he must be satisfied with the political shape of this agreement, reached in the face of such adversity.