To Rabin's and Peres' credit, the agreement does not create irreversible facts in three critical areas--responsibility for security, the fate of the settlers, and Jerusalem. Less than a third of Judea and Samaria goes over to Arafat. If the accord hits serious snags, Israel will still hold key positions--the West Bank hills, Greater Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and control over the roads. The key to the future of the territories is still in Israel's hands.

On September 28, Israel and the PLO initialed the "Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip." This accord details the mechanisms, and the limitations, of the extension of Palestinian self-rule to significant portions of the West Bank. The text of the interim agreement, which is 29 pages long, is dwarfed by 7 lengthy annexes, 9 detailed maps, and an exchange of letters that run close to 300 pages.

The main feature of the agreement is the provision for the division of the West Bank into three areas (four, if Jerusalem is included)--each with varying degrees of Israeli and Palestinian responsibility. Area A, colored brown in the maps accompanying the agreement, consists of the seven major Palestinian cities--Jenin, Kalkilyah, Tulkarem, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. In Hebron, however, a 3.5 sq. km. area of the city that is home to 400 Israelis and 20,000 Palestinians will remain under complete Israeli control. In Area A, which comprises perhaps one percent of the West Bank, the Palestinian Council will have complete authority for civilian security.

In Area B, the "yellow" zone, which comprises all other Palestinian population centers (except for some refugee camps) and which totals 27 percent of the West Bank, Israel will retain "overriding security responsibility."

Israel retains sole security authority in Area C, which comprises 72 percent of the West Bank including all settlements, military bases and areas, and state lands. Powers not related to territory will be transferred to the Palestinian Council. The agreement includes a vague timetable for the transfer of unspecified parts of Area C to Palestinian control, beginning in the latter part of 1996.

Although the Declaration of Principles signed in Oslo in September 1993 specifically excluded the issues of Israeli settlements and settlers from consideration during the interim period, their status is clearly and precisely addressed by the September 1995 agreement. The accord reaffirms, and in some instances expands, the broad range of protections for settlements and settlers first established in the declaration and later enumerated in the Gaza-Jericho accord signed in May 1994. The understanding includes the following protections during the 5-year interim period scheduled to end in May 1999:

• Agreement that no settlement will be evacuated;
• Exclusion of settlements, settlers, and "vital arteries"--main roads, water pipelines, electrical and telephone lines--and water resources from any Palestinian jurisdiction, interference, or control;
• The creation of blocs of settlements and the assurance of territorial continuity between them;
• Extensive and complex arrangements for security cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian military, police, and internal security forces, aimed at minimizing contacts between settlers or settlements and Palestinian security, judicial, and legal authorities;
• Limitation on the size, armaments, and jurisdiction of Palestinian security forces;
• Limitation on Palestinian land use near settlement areas and continuing Israeli supervision over Palestinian zoning and land-use decisions;

The agreement also reaffirms the provision in the Cairo accords establishing that Palestinian legislation cannot "deal with a security issue that falls under Israel's responsibility," nor can it "seriously threaten other significant Israeli interests protected by this agreement."

 

In an extraordinary display of Israel's ability to win Palestinian recognition of the legality of settlements, the agreement also has secured the critical recognition by the yet-to-be-elected Palestinian Council of the "legal rights of Israelis related to Government and Absentee land located in areas under the territorial jurisdiction of the Council." This important clause establishes continuing Israeli control over all state and absentee lands in Areas A and B. According to well-informed Palestinian sources, Palestinians have thus recognized Israel's legal right to control up to 90 percent of lands in Area B. The clause also establishes a precedent for the continuation of settlements and their expansion under Israeli sovereign authority even in the event of their transfer to nominal Palestinian control.

 

In principle, however, the Rabin government acknowledged that in a permanent solution, Israel's explicit territorial requirements in the occupied territories will be limited to settlements and military locations. While these considerations still provide the basis for an assertion of formal sovereignty over a large proportion of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, they do represent the first time that Israel has established any limitation on its territorial claims to the areas.

 

Rabin's view of a final territorial settlement is reflected in the map depicting the territorial arrangements made in this interim pact: Israel is laying claim to significant territories around Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and its western highlands, and the June 1967 border region. Israeli control of West Bank roads and strategic heights along the area's central spine has produced a gerrymandering of territory in much of the remainder of the West Bank.

 

Major General Uzi Dayan, head of the IDF Planning Branch and a chief negotiator of the accord, explained that elements of the agreement relating to security were guided by three considerations: the position of the West Bank in Israel's overall strategic security concept, defense of the settlements and their routine life, and the prevention of Palestinian armed attacks against Israeli population centers.

 

The treaty's text has slowly made its way into the public domain, but at the time of this writing its maps are a more elusive commodity. The true import of the treaty--which aims to end the century-old contest over the lands of Palestine--can not be understood without these maps.

 

Palestinian negotiators were laboring at such a disadvantage during most of the negotiations, because Israel refused to produce any maps until early September--that is, after

the text of the treaty had been hammered out. When PA Chairman Yasser Arafat got his first glance at the maps--only on September 19--he stormed out of his session with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. He complained that Israel was cutting the West Bank into bits and pieces. Palestinians, he argued, were being awarded a multitude of isolated cantons--yellow islands in a sea still controlled by Israel.

 

Israeli negotiators undertook to mollify Arafat. The fixes that brought Arafat back to the negotiating table--ones that added an insignificant percentage to Israel's original offer--are clearly visible on the working maps as a different shade of yellow than the original. According to a U.S. official who has viewed it, this revised map "connects some yellow areas in the most minimal way imaginable" by creating "cheezy little causeways" between a few Palestinian yellow areas. One Palestinian negotiator has likened the map of Palestinian authority to "Swiss cheese."

 

It has been obvious from the beginning of the talks between Israelis and Palestinians that Israel was intent on exploiting the advantages awarded by its superior power. So that it is no surprise that the just-signed Oslo II interim accord extending limited Palestinian authority to parts of the West Bank reflects, in large measure, Israel's successful effort to preserve what it considers to be its cardinal interests in the West Bank--principally its demands to remain in strategic control of the entire area and to preserve its exclusive control over its settlements and settlers.

 

On the ideological level, Rabin, more forcefully than any previous Israeli leader, repudiated what he called "the hallucination of Greater Israel"--which claimed Israel as the exclusive heir to a divinely ordained sovereignty throughout "Judea and Samaria." In the wake of Oslo II, one can no longer speak of a single entity called Judea and Samaria, but rather of many Judeas and Samarias with pieces of the West Bank sandwiched among them.

 

The negotiations for Oslo II have begun to deconstruct the long outdated myth--deeply ingrained in Israel's national consciousness--that Israel's settlements, in and of themselves, have any security value whatsoever. Rabin acknowledged in a September 22 interview that "the settlements, which had always been given defense significance, lost their value in the public's consciousness." Stripped of their protective ideological and security raisons d'etre, settlements nevertheless remain a principal obstacle to additional Israeli withdrawal as well as the most potent means of assuring popular Israeli support for the maintenance of an IDF presence beyond Israel's borders--a presence that will be expanded, not reduced, in the wake of the agreement.

 

Former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir has decried the agreement as "the opposite of peace." According to Ariel Sharon, who rightly prides himself for his central role in Israel's settlement drive, "There is no doubt that without the line of settlements, the Rabin government would have no problem [withdrawing from the occupied territories]. This is what is stopping them today." Settlers, who were once viewed by Israelis as leading the way to a solution--Greater Israel--are today understood by their supporters and opponents alike to be the principal obstacle to a lasting agreement modeled on the Oslo accords.