NEWS

Boosting Netanyahu's final status plan AIPAC to publicize peace proposal

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by Michael Shapiro
Staff Writer

With the United States now backing accelerated final-status talks on key issues dividing Israel and the Palestinians, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobby, is launching a campaign to publicize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's final status-plan, which was first floated in the Israeli press in June.

The plan, described as Netanyahu's starting point for the final-status talks, is significant, AIPAC says, because it represents the first time a Likud Party-led government has proposed territorial compromise on the West Bank. The proposal, dubbed by AIPAC as the ``Israeli peace plan,'' would place 40 percent of the land and 99 percent of the Palestinian population under the permanent control of the Palestinian Authority, while keeping under Israeli sovereignty areas that military officials deem important for Israel's security.

Under the plan, Israel would maintain control of the strategic Jordan Valley while fortifying the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem by including the surrounding Jewish settlements. Jerusalem would be extended to Ma'aleh Adumim and Kfar Adumim in the east, Gush Etzion in the south and Beit El in the north. The plan also thickens the so-called Green line, Israel's pre-1967 armistice line, by several miles.

The plan does not exclude the possibility of a Palestinian state and relinquishes some Israeli settlements near Jenin, according to Ha'aretz military analyst Ze'ev Schiff, who prepared the unofficial map of the plan now being publicized by AIPAC.

Netanyahu has said he does not envision a Palestinian state and does not want to uproot Jewish or Palestinian populations. A vocal critic of the Oslo Accords while he was opposition leader, Netanyahu, who long opposed territorial compromise with the Palestinians, has described the plan as ``an accommodation with reality.''

``We found an agreement that was made by the previous government,'' Netanyahu said in a June interview with Washington Post columnist Lally Weymouth. ``We found facts on the ground as a fait accompli. I am a realist. I understand we have to take into account those facts on the ground and I have offered something that enables a balance between the Palestinians' need for governing themselves and the Israeli need to secure our future.''

AIPAC believes Netanyahu's ``flexibility'' on this issue and the plan itself have largely been ignored because people have focused on the deteriorating situation between Israel and the Palestinians, who have not held regular negotiations since March.

The fact that the plan has not been formally proposed by Netanyahu, but has been pieced together in the Israeli media through discussions with authoritative sources has added to the lack of attention the plan has garnered, according to Toby Dershowitz, AIPAC's director of media relations.

While stressing that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat must cooperate with Israel on security matters before the negotiations can proceed, Dershowitz said AIPAC is starting the campaign as a way to look beyond the current impasse.

``We want to help move [the situation] from crises mode to solution mode,'' she said in an interview with WJW last week. ``It is important for people to understand that there is a new starting point'' for the final-status negotiations, she said, adding that the plan reflects a consensus among Israelis aligned with both the Labor and Likud parties.

Final-status negotiations, originally scheduled to start last spring with a target completion date of May 1999, will attempt to address the most contentious issues such as the status of Jerusalem and Jewish settlements, final borders, refugees and the question of a Palestinian state.

AIPAC's effort to raise the public's awareness of the plan _ which coincides with the four-year anniversary of the White House handshake behind Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin _ will not only target journalists, policy makers and opinion leaders but those in the Jewish community who have not paid much attention to the proposal.

``The right in the community often feels so much despair about Arafat's failures that they have focused almost sle-handedly on that and have not taken a look at real-life situations that the government has proposed,'' Dershowitz said. And on the left, she said, ``the debate is often about whether the United States should pressure Israel to do more'' in terms of making concessions to the Palestinians.

AIPAC also will ``encourage'' the Clinton administration to get the Palestinians to take a ``serious look'' at the plan. Palestinian leaders have so far rejected the plan, saying the Israeli government has not discussed it with them.

Gadi Baltiansky, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, said there is a lot ``fresh thinking going on in Israel'' and AIPAC is ``playing an important role'' in disseminating information about the plan, which he stressed has not been formalized as an official government plan.