Netanyahu Drives the Peace Train--for Now

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already has proved that he can change routes and switch lanes. His adolescent approach to peacemaking manifested itself on more than one occasion before the “Jerusalem tunnel” cigar blew up in his face last September.

But now that he has negotiated the Hebron agreement with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, he has gone some way toward reaching political maturity.

While a debate is raging as to whether the new Hebron agreement is better, worse or the same as the original second Oslo accord, Netanyahu is not the same man. The evacuation of Hebron on Friday could become a positive and decisive reference point in his term, which ends in 2000. It all depends on the lessons Netanyahu learns.

In international terms, the evacuation of Hebron is likely to restore at least part of the credit he lost since he came to power last June, and especially after Israeli soldiers and Palestinian police faced off during riots after Netanyahu approved the midnight opening of a tunnel door in Jerusalem’s disputed Old City. In the Arab world, Europe and the United States, Netanyahu managed to accumulate a full measure of unreliability. Friday’s television footage of Israeli soldiers transferring the military administration building in Hebron to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority will contribute greatly to the rehabilitation of Netanyahu’s credibility and make a temporary lull possible in the perception of Israel in the Arab world--provided Netanyahu doesn’t go too far in paying hush money in the form of massive expansion of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

Netanyahu could extend this period of grace through further redeployments from the West Bank rural areas in repudiation of the Jewish settlers. But if he now sought to compensate himself for seemingly betraying the ideals he preached all his life by increasing Jewish settlement activity in the Palestinian territories and stopping all further progress in the political process, the post-Hebron period will become worse than the pre-Hebron period.

On the other hand, now that he has crossed the Rubicon and given back territories, Netanyahu may discover that peacemaking has become easier and that the only way forward is through an honest and genuine political dialogue with Arafat, the man he once considered an enemy who is today his only partner. This dialogue should lead to a Palestinian state emerging in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to coexist peacefully alongside Israel.

By analogy, if it is accurate to say that the legitimate right of the American people is to control their behavior but not their land or water sources, Netanyahu’s current view of Palestinian self-rule is excellent. If the legitimate rights of the American people end at the borders of the District of Columbia, Netanyahu is entitled to Jerusalem.

So far at least, the rights that Netanyahu envisions for the Palestinians are the legitimate rights of the inferior Palestinian people, the subhuman people, the quasi-people of Palestine. But they are not the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to independent statehood.

Netanyahu’s remarks a few weeks ago about Andorra and Puerto Rico being state-like models for the eventual Palestinian entity probably were interpreted beyond what he intended in his off-the-cuff answer to a foreign ambassador. He did not know that Andorra was a U.N. member. But the remarks were a lot more in the direction of Palestinian sovereignty than he would have said a year ago. To what extent this is tactical, only Netanyahu knows.

At the Hebron station, Netanyahu took over the engine of the peace train. His test as a peacemaker is still ahead of him. There is no knowing if and how he will reach the last stop with the Palestinians, when partition of the Promised Land into two national entities becomes inevitable.