Palestinians Feel Sidelined in Peace Process

JERUSALEM — A cartoon in the Palestinian newspaper Al Quds on Friday shows Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak singing happily to himself as he polishes a table adorned with Syrian and Israeli flags. From a corner window, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat peeks in on the cheerful scene, unnoticed and clearly aghast.

Officially, the Palestinians said they were pleased by this week’s announcement that Israel and Syria have agreed to hold direct peace talks for the first time in nearly four years. They accepted assurances from Israel and Washington that their own peace process with the Jewish state won’t suffer because another guest is taking a seat at the table.

But barely a month after the much-heralded opening of talks aimed at reaching a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, the Palestinians, by numerous accounts, are dismayed to find themselves suddenly bumped from the limelight.

Israeli and U.S. attention has shifted to the resumption of negotiations in Washington next week between Israel and Syria, and many Palestinians are worried about the implications.

“They’re trying to put a brave face on it,” said a Western diplomat close to the Palestinian negotiations. “But in confidence, they’ll tell you they’re concerned that the Syrian talks will take energy and attention away from theirs, and that Barak will try to play the two tracks against each other.”

As if to underline that Syria was assuming center stage at the Palestinians’ expense, President Clinton’s televised announcement about the new round of talks interrupted a meeting Wednesday between Arafat and visiting Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

By the time Clinton stepped up to the microphones in Washington, Albright--and Barak, by telephone--had alerted Arafat to the news, but the timing was still symbolic, several Palestinians said this week: Syria’s reentry into the peace process was deemed significant enough to warrant disrupting critical discussions between the Palestinian leader and America’s top diplomat.

“It’s embarrassing and a little depressing,” said Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian political analyst and former peace negotiator. “It’s as if the Palestinians don’t really matter very much.”

Albright immediately sought to reassure the Palestinians that this wasn’t the case, saying that their issues, which include refugees, Jewish settlements and the desire for self-determination, are “at the core of the comprehensive [Middle East] peace settlement.”

But many of those interviewed, Palestinian and Israeli alike, pointed out that the major issues in the Syrian negotiations, unlike the complex, emotion-laden disputes that burden the talks with the Palestinians, are relatively straightforward and should be possible to resolve fairly quickly, once the motivation is there.

The most critical issue for Syria is the return of the Golan Heights, the strategic and fertile plateau captured by Israel in 1967. Barak has hinted that he would be willing to return all or most of the territory.

Now that Syrian President Hafez Assad appears to want to reach a deal, “it’s probably pretty appealing to Barak to move ahead quickly to try to wrap it up,” said Mark Heller, a research fellow at Tel Aviv’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. “The issues are intrinsically more clear-cut than on the Palestinian side. You don’t have the intermingling of populations or these intensively religious or ideological issues like Jerusalem and Jewish settlements that make resolving the Israeli-Palestinian problem so complicated.”

But once Barak has made concessions on one front, and won the international praise that an agreement with Syria would inevitably bring, he may feel under less pressure to make concessions on the other, many Palestinians worry.

Resumption of the Syrian talks, along with the goodwill that Barak has engendered abroad since his election in May, is also likely to make it tougher for the Palestinians to spur the sorts of international pressure against his government that they did with his right-wing predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“It’s hard to imagine any American or European leader putting serious pressure on Barak on the Palestinian question as he’s making concessions to the Syrians,” said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

In the short term, the sudden lumbering to life of the Syrian talks can only make the Palestinian negotiations more difficult, Khatib said. But there might be advantages for the Palestinians down the line, he and others said.

A full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan could help strengthen the Palestinian case for a complete pullback from the West Bank. Syrian involvement in the peace process may finally help mute continuing criticism of the Palestinians from hard-line Arab and Islamic states for entering into negotiations with Israel.

For now though, bruised Palestinian feelings are not soothed by the fact that the nation poised to compete with them in the peace process is Syria, led by Assad. The Syrian president has a long history of difficult relations with the Palestinians--marked by deep personal animosity toward Arafat.

In 1983, a Syrian-supported rebellion in northern Lebanon forced Arafat to evacuate many of his fighters from that country for a second time. In 1993, Assad and other Syrian officials castigated Arafat for signing the Oslo peace accords with Israel, accusing him of selling out the Arab cause. Now there are tensions between the two over the fate of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.