By Ronnie Glassberg
After months of negotiations, Israel's hard-line prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu of the conservative Likud Party, finally met with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat last week. While this is an important step forward, true peace in the Middle East is far from fulfillment.
At the current time, the West Bank cities of Bethlehem and Jericho - both important religious cities - are in the control of the Palestinian Authority. While technically part of Israel, their infrastructure and internal security are under Palestinian control. Israeli redeployment of Hebron, another West Bank city, was delayed last spring by then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres after a series of suicide bus bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Current talks between Netanyahu and Arafat will focus on Hebron and the future security of Israelis living there.
The opening of talks between Netanyahu and Arafat was a critical point. It showed that the progress in the peace process did not represent the will of only two political leaders. Rather, the Middle East process is the commitment of the Israeli and Palestinian people - along with the rest of the world - to peace.
While Likud ministers have been extremely critical of Netanyahu's meeting with Arafat, the prime minister wisely recognized the political value, at least on an international level, of restarting the peace talks.
Just a week before Netanyahu's meeting with Arafat, I visited Israel with a group of campus newspaper editors. In a meeting that week, Moshe Fogel, the director of the Israeli Government Press Office and a spokesperson for the Likud Party, said that the prime minister would not meet with Arafat just for the sake of a meeting. The prime minister, Fogel said, would only meet with Arafat to discuss substantive issues. With the peace at such a fragile stage, it was extremely detrimental for Netanyahu to shun Arafat in an attempt to earn political points with his supporters. Despite the prime minister's campaign rhetoric, much could have been accomplished in the past few months through direct negotiations between the two leaders.
Although the path to peace has reopened, the most difficult issues have not been discussed yet. First, the Palestinian Authority wants to establish a sovereign state known as Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while the Israeli government wants to retain control over the area to prevent a new military threat from forming on its border.
In a meeting in Bethlehem during my trip, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Salah Tamari, expressed his opposition to Israeli control of the Palestinian areas.
"How can you normalize relations with occupation? It cannot happen. We need to be free," he said.
However, it would not be a simple step for Israel to give up control of the West Bank. Since 1967, Israelis have been moving into undeveloped areas and forming advanced communities, and construction continues at the present time. Such an action would be similar to our government asking those in the Western United States to leave their homes so the land could be returned to Native Americans. While this may be a morally appropriate course, it definitely would not be easy to convince Westerners to leave their homes, and the Israeli government faces the same obstacles.
Beyond the West Bank dispute, other issues will likely be more difficult to resolve. Syria will not even enter into peace talks until Israel is willing to give up its control of the Golan Heights, a move that is extremely unpopular among Israelis. In 1967 Israel gained control of the region, which overlooks the Sea of Galilee. Returning the area would give Syria a huge strategic advantage over Israel - opening the entire width of the country to the threat of Syrian shelling.
Peering at the Golan Heights from Israel, it is understandable why Israelis fear the possibility of Syrian control. The only possibility for peace would need to be coupled with disarmament zones that expanded into Syria.
But the issue that will probably be the most difficult to resolve is control of Eastern Jerusalem - a holy city for Jews, Muslims and Christians. After the 1967 war, Israel added the control of the holy sites in Eastern Jerusalem to Israel, and nearly all Israelis want it to remain the undivided capital of Israel.
For Tamari, however, East Jerusalem is the "occupied part of Jerusalem, and I stress occupied."
Many of the Arab-Israeli conflicts are political in nature - tracing back to British mishandling of the region; however, control over Jerusalem is a religious and far more emotional issue.
While the path toward peace may have moved forward last week, the region is left with more conflicts. The world will likely soon find that getting Bibi and Yasser to shake hands last week was the easiest part in the process, and most of the conflicts will be far more difficult to resolve.