Har Homa Is a Test of the ‘Peace Process’: Arab Violence Will Prove the Process to be Simply Warfare by Other Means

(Washington, D.C.): The government of
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
is expected to announce today that it
will go ahead with construction of 2,600
homes for Jews on a Jewish-owned site in
East Jerusalem known as Har Homa — the
first of 6,500 units there. Such a
decision signals Mr. Netanyahu’s
commitment to the principle of Jerusalem
as the undivided capital of the State of
Israel.

Predictably, Palestinian Arabs opposed
to that principle are threatening to
respond to the Netanyahu government’s
decision on Har Homa with violence. They
seek to portray this project as just
another “settlement” in
disputed territory, an area — like
others throughout the West Bank and Gaza
Strip — over which the Palestinian
Authority (PA) hopes to exercise
sovereign control in due course. They
have not been placated by the Prime
Minister’s commitment to accompany the
Har Homa construction with new building
of 3,500 apartments in East Jerusalem for
Arabs.

Instead, Palestinian leaders have
warned of a renewal of the violence
perpetrated by the PA’s police force and
other Arabs after a second exit to an
archeological tunnel was opened in
Jerusalem last September. Yasser Arafat
has declared that Har Homa “is a
very sensitive subject and could threaten
the peace process.” Others have been
even more publicly inflammatory. Faisal
Husseini, the top Palestinian official in
Jerusalem, said yesterday: “We are
telling them [Israel]: You are playing
with fire. There will be an
explosion.”

A ‘Test’ it Is

In fact, those who describe
Har Homa as a test of the peace process
are correct. It is not, however,
simply a litmus test — as the
Palestinian Arabs and their sympathizers
in the Middle East, Europe, the United
States and elsewhere are suggesting — to
see if the peace process will continue
into the future.

It is, instead, is a measure
of whether there is a genuine peace
process underway now.
The answer to that question will be
answered not by Israeli actions
concerning Har Homa, but by the
response of the Palestinian leadership —
and Yasser Arafat in particular.

After all, a true peace process cannot
be said to exist if it applies only when
one side is making concessions
satisfactory to the other. The real issue
is, when concessions from Israel are not
forthcoming, do the two parties work to
resolve their differences without the
Palestinian Arabs threatening to resort
to violence, or actually engaging in it?
If not, the “peace process”
really amounts to war prosecuted by other
means.

As the Center warned at the time of
President Clinton’s emergency summit
convened in the wake of last September’s
violence,⁽¹⁾
the U.S. must be extremely
careful not to appear disposed to reward
Arafat for threatening — to say nothing
of engaging in — mayhem when he does not
get his way. It is incumbent on
the Clinton Administration to communicate
in the most explicit possible terms that
the United States will consider any
efforts by Arafat to foment violence as
proof of bad faith that is incompatible
with any process leading to a true peace
in the Middle East.

By the same token, Washington must put
Yasser Arafat on notice that it will
regard any effort by him to deny
responsibility or otherwise to claim an
inability to prevent violent upheavals
that might occur in the wake of the Har
Homa decision as evidence that he is not
a leader of the Palestinian Arabs with
whom real peace agreements can be
fashioned.

The Bottom Line

The Clinton Administration should make
clear to Arafat that there will be
tangible costs to him and his cause if he
precipitates or fails to prevent new
bloodletting over Israeli construction in
East Jerusalem. If it does so
convincingly, chances are that Arafat and
his people will refrain from engaging in
such violence. If it fails to do so,
however, Arafat will almost surely
conclude that mayhem will once again win
him international attention, sympathy and
intervention at Israel’s expense. This is
a formula not for peace but for war
pursued by turns through diplomacy and
violence.

Given the Clinton team’s record, it
behooves the Congress to engage in its
own signal-sending, both to the
Administration and to the Palestinians: The
United States continues to regard
Israel’s sovereign control of a unified
Jerusalem as its capital as a sine
qua non for a just and durable peace
in the Middle East. It will view any
effort by Yasser Arafat to use violent
means to press his claims on Jerusalem —
seeking by threats and killings what he
cannot through diplomacy — as a mortal
threat to Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy,
one that will bring to a prompt end
support for the Palestinian Authority on
Capitol Hill.

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1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled Birth of a Nation?:
Arafat’s Ambitions to ‘Liberate
Palestine’ Make Violence Inevitable;
Better Now Than Later ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_92″>No. 96-D 92,
27 September 1996).