http://www.nysun.com/opinion/shelve-the-sh...greement/74314/Shelve the 'Shelf Agreement'
By HILLEL HALKIN | April 8, 2008
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A recent cartoon in an Israeli newspaper showed Prime Minister Olmert making a hole in a kitchen wall with an electric drill while the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, stands behind him, ready to hand him a board and some brackets. "Shelf Agreement," said the caption.
A "shelf agreement" is now being touted as the most feasible next step toward an ultimate resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea is a simple one. On the one hand, Israel and the Palestinians are to arrive at an immediate agreement on such final-status issues as borders, security arrangements, Palestinian refugees, etc. On the other hand, since the Palestinian Authority is too weak at the moment to implement such an agreement against the opposition of Hamas and other armed groups in Palestinian society, it will be "shelved" until the time comes when it can be carried out.
Meanwhile, it is said, the agreement's existence on the shelf will reduce tensions, since the Palestinians will know, not only that they will get their promised state, but the exact terms on which they will get it. Better yet, as long as the Palestinian Authority is unable to put an end to terror, Israel will be under no obligation to put the agreement into practice. Only once Israeli security needs are met will it be taken down from the shelf. In this fashion, the Palestinians will be given a horizon of hope and Israel will risk nothing.
But this is nonsense. The horizon of hope could prove to be an infinitely receding one and Israel will risk a great deal.
What Israeli negotiators will have to concede in order to get the Palestinian Authority to sign such a "shelf agreement" is clear: A near total retreat to the 1967 borders, land swaps for any Palestinian territory annexed, a re-division of Jerusalem, the admission to Israel of at least a small number of 1948 refugee families, and so on, and so forth. Each one of these concessions will involve a further attrition in Israeli positions that already have been whittled down considerably in the past. Each will involve doing things that a succession of Israeli governments since 1967 has promised never to do.
And what will Israel get in return from the Palestinian Authority? A theoretical commitment to live alongside Israel as a good neighbor once conditions for such coexistence are ripe. This commitment will not have to be honored at any particular point in time, nor will the agreement be revoked if it is not. The Palestinian Authority can take five years to reach the point at which it is ready; it can take 10; it can take 20. The agreement will remain all this time on the shelf, neatly wrapped and marked, "Do not touch."
And why indeed, once such a "shelf agreement" is signed, should the Palestinian Authority be in any hurry to take it off the shelf? Hamas and other radical Palestinian groups will be against it; why start the civil war with them that dismantling terrorist organizations will entail, and hazard a possible repeat in the West Bank of the Hamas takeover in Gaza, if this can always be put off for another day? What will there be to lose by postponing a full-scale war against terror for another year, and another, and yet another?
But Israel will have much to lose. In the first place, it will be chained to a series of concessions on which it will be unable to renege no matter how much the international or Middle-Eastern situation changes. Hamas may take over the West Bank; Iran may get the bomb; Islamic fundamentalists may seize control of Egypt; the Hashemite regime in Jordan may topple: the "shelf agreement" will remain, inviolable, on its shelf. Any attempt to change it in Israel's favor will be received with loud protests, not only from the Arab world, but also from Europe and America.
Moreover, while the agreement is sitting on the shelf, Israel will have to go on fighting Palestinian terror with all the sacrifice and expense that this involves. And what will happen to the nearly 100,000 Israeli settlers who will be required by the agreement to leave their West Bank homes?
If they are evacuated — in all likelihood with considerable violence and civil strife — Israel will be exposed at a great financial cost to a frightful national trauma that not only will have no benefits, but also will decrease even further the pressure on the Palestinians to make progress.
If the settlers stay where they are, they will be living with a death sentence hanging over them, with all the anger, despair, and dangerous readiness to take the law into their own hands that this may involve.
Indeed an Israel-Palestinian "shelf agreement" is such a bad idea that one may well wonder how Israel could possibly even consider it, let alone enter into actual negotiations on the basis of it, as the Olmert government, if it has not already done so secretly, is apparently on the verge of doing. The depressing answer is that it is this government's political desperation alone that has brought it to such a point. With Mr. Olmert's popularity remaining stuck in the low two digits at the polls, and an increasingly wobbly coalition, some kind of ostensible progress toward peace that can be paraded before the Israeli public seems to the prime minister his only hope for staying in power.
Hence the strategy of reaching an unimplementable treaty with the Palestinians that can be signed with great fanfare and installed in a display window, where it will gather dust while future prime ministers rack their brains over what to do with it. It should be shelved before it reaches any shelves.
Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.