“Every time there is a deal they say it is a major breakthrough, that’s what the politicians feel they have to say… There’s no doubt that there is a major shift in the road ahead, but whether it is going to lead to a stable and just peace, to be very frank I’m quite skeptical… In the end it will all depend on the details….in fact there is no guarantee that they can be worked out…there’s tremendous dissention within the Palestinian world… We only have a few minutes, let’s call it straight.

The Palestinian people have been beaten into submission now for a generation. They’re destitute, theyv’e been living under military occupation, their economy is in shambles, their institutions are in shambles, all along they’ve had the hope for eventual independence in their own State. That’s what the PLO was set up to achieve. On the other hand, in the wake of the Gulf War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American govt really is in control in the Middle East with client regimes all the way from Saudi Arabia to Morocco….

What you are witnessing today is a very uncomfortable deal between long-time enemies…. So you are witnessing an accommodation that these two parties are making. And when politicians have been negotiating for a number of years placing peoples hopes in the forefront, they don’t like to come forward and say we failed…. Well if you are Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin saying that you’ve failed is your ticket to maybe loosing power

(Host – I suppose from Rabin’s point of view if he didn’t strike some kind of a deal with Yasser Arafat he would soon not have Yasser Arafat to deal with and Hamas would be much more difficult).
Well absolutely, but what you are witnessing now is the kind of tension that unleashes other forces. Now in the last 20 years since I got out of school I have been to the Middle East maybe 200 times, and I was there during the Camp David period, knew Sadat, had dinner with Arafat, so I’ve met these people, know them personally.

I think nobody knows what this initial agreement, this initial breakthrough agreement is going to lead to, but I think it’s very fair to say that there will be tremendous tensions placed on the agreement and it’s very difficult to see right now how the agreement is gong to be implimented because one side from Day 1 is going to say “Statehood, flag, Palestinian independence, return of the Palestinian exiles”, the other side is going to say
“oh No No No, autonomy, limited self-rule, 5-year trial period, doesn’t go beyond this one city and Gaza”.

It’s going to be an extremely unstable and fragile arrangement, but it probably will keep the current political leaders in their jobs because they will all be able to say that we are the leaders that started this process, give us more time, we know what we’re doing even if they don;t have the slightest idea where this is going to take them….

The Palestinian society will in the beginning I think look at this agreement and say well, if it’s really a step on the road to our indpenednece and statehood, ok, maybe, but they’ll be very skeptical and I suspect within a short time there will be all kinds of signs that it is not a step on the road to independence. If you listened to Abba Eban last night he made it very clear he said “Let’s come back to reality” after Hanan Ashrawi started talking about eventual independence.

(Host: Well one would think that if the Iraelis really want this deal to work in order to be dealing with a moderate group as opposed to a more violent one that they would be trying pretty hard to make it appear that eventual independence is something that can be achieved).

No, there I think you are wrong. You say if the Israelis want the agreement to work. The Israelis want recognition. They want the Palestinians… What they really want, they won’t say it, is they want the Palestinians on reservations, on Bantustans, they want to be able to control the territory, they want to economically move within the Middle East, they want to be able to make peace agreements with the pro-American Arab regimes that are being pressed tremendously by the United States to make agreements. They don’t want Palestinian independence and they will do everything they can to prevent Palestinian independence.

(Host: And Arafat is not acting like Mandella is he).

Well he’s acting more like Bouthelazi rather than Mandella.