Geneva Accord: Political Theater, But Worth Watching

The "Geneva Accord" outlining a hypothetical Israeli-Palestinian peace is classic political theater. The script is an adaptation of the draft understandings left on the table in January 2001 by the last official Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations at Taba, three weeks before Ariel Sharon took power. But Taba was a deal worked out by Israeli and Palestinian leaders; the Geneva document was negotiated by groups of former (and in the Palestinian case, one or two current) cabinet ministers and politicians marginalized during the three years of the intifadah. This deal is simply a group trying to make the point that the conflict can be ended by a two-state solution based on Israel's 1967 borders.

The Geneva proposal is challenged by more immediate realities:

the security barrier Israel is building deep inside the West Bank, which together with settlement expansion has prompted even the Bush administration to warn Sharon against prejudicing prospects for a two-state solution;

ongoing violence and terror and the latest attempts by the Egyptian government to draw the militants of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah into a truce that would end terror attacks on Israelis; and

a Bush administration that has long embraced Sharon's perspective that Palestinian terrorism must be ended before a political solution to the conflict can be pursued has recused itself from any real efforts to enforce its own "roadmap" concept, is now bogged down with the increasingly messy occupation of Iraq and has little interest in pursuing the delicate matter of Middle East peace during an election year.

Who, then, is the intended audience of the Geneva process, and how have they responded?

Among the Palestinians, the picture is mixed. Their leadership sees considerable gain from reiterating the Taba principles and showing the Israeli electorate that, Sharon's insistence to the contrary, there is a Palestinian partner with whom peace can be concluded. Like the Israeli peaceniks, they hope to convince Israel's electorate to dump Sharon, with whom they see no prospect of achieving a settlement.

Still, Yasser Arafat's response to the Geneva Accord has been lukewarm. He sent representatives and a message of support to the signing ceremony, but avoided actually endorsing it. That's because ceding the demand for Palestinian refugee families displaced in 1948 to return to homes in Israel would open Arafat to condemnation by a significant section of Palestinian public opinion. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were quick to condemn Geneva, and may even take it as a pretext to refrain from supporting a truce to allow a resumption of negotiations with Israel. Still, opinion surveys have found that more than half of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza would accept a solution similar to that outlined at Geneva.

Among the Israelis, the object of the Geneva process is to reinvigorate the peace camp, dispatched to political oblivion by Sharon's election victory in 2001. Sharon scuttled the Oslo agreements, insisting that there could be no pursuit of a political solution before the intifadah was crushed — a goal he has pursued primarily through military action. But after three years of terror, Israelis are increasingly recognizing that their prime minister has no solution to the intifadah. Last month, four former directors of Israel's Shin Bet security service warned publicly that Sharon is leading Israel down a path to catastrophe, and urged rapid movement to a political solution that ends the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And this not from peaceniks, but from the unsentimental hard men entrusted with Israel's security. By pronouncing the Geneva Accord a threat to Israel's existence, Sharon appeared to confirm his vulnerability over a political settlement with the Palestinians. By reopening debate on the questions of withdrawing from the 1967 territories, the Israeli peace camp is looking to challenge — and ultimately oust — Sharon, by showing that peace with the Palestinians is possible but not on the road being pursued by the current government.

Currently, polls suggest more Israelis oppose the Accord than support it. Still, its architects tell TIME, public support has been far greater than they anticipated, and it is rising as the debate reopens.

The most important audience for the Geneva process may be U.S. public opinion. The Bush administration has papered over its own internal divisions over where and how the borders between Israel and Palestine might be drawn, initially by simply backing away on the grounds that the conflict was intractable, and then later — under pressure from Britain and Arab allies — by adopting a "roadmap" that left its destination deliberately vague. The authors of the Geneva Accord stress that what they are doing is simply fleshing out the final agreement envisaged in Phase III of the "roadmap," which they want Washington to do a lot more to actually implement.

The Bush administration is facing a potentially tough reelection battle in which pressure on Israel would not play well with either the Christian Right or many Jewish voters. So the administration says the primary issue is Palestinian terrorism, but at the same time warns Sharon off cementing "facts on the ground" (the security fence and settlement expansion) that imperil the eventual emergence of a viable Palestinian state. Thus the response to the initiative by President Bush on Thursday, which conceded that it was "productive," but only so long as its authors adhere to his security preconditions. The fact that the administration was willing to get up Sharon's nose by sanctioning a meeting between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the Geneva authors was simply a warning to the Israeli leader to refrain from actions in the coming year that might force Washington to come back from its preferred place on the sidelines.

The chances of the Geneva Accord being implemented anytime soon, of course, are zero. That's something its authors knew from the outset. But that doesn't deny the importance of the exercise. Anything that invites Israelis and Palestinians to look beyond their immediate blood-soaked reality to the terms of a shared peaceful future is useful. So, too, is any process that weakens the grip, on both sides, of political strategies that reinforce the stalemate. But Geneva may represent two more important breakthroughs: The first is conceptual, recognizing that a fatal flaw of both the Oslo Accord and the "Roadmap" is that their avoidance of specifics on the most intractable issues of the conflict, such as borders, settlements and refugees. Oslo and the "Roadmap" asked Israelis and Palestinians to embark on a journey without specifying its destination, except in the most general terms. Geneva specifies the destination as the basis for making the journey. It may be more difficult to win endorsement when all the disappointments and concessions for both sides are in plain view, but that support will be more durable than if the endpoint remains fudged.

But the greatest significance of the Geneva process could be its potential to cement a civil society alliance for peace that spans the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Even if its numbers are small right now, it represents a group of Israeli and Palestinian politicians who appear ready to make common cause against the more demagogic nationalists on both sides, working as an alliance to grow their consensus among both peoples, and, in the process creating a bi-national peace movement. But the real test of that achievement will come not in debates over specifics, but in its ability to survive the next wave of suicide bombings, air strikes and invasions.