Word: palestinians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fortunately for him, Yasser Arafat tolerates drama well. Otherwise, the highs and lows, mostly lows, of recent days might have overtaxed his ballast. In the course of two weeks, Arafat has seen the clinching of a new peace accord with Israel, the worst anti-Palestinian Authority riots ever in the West Bank, the attempted slaughter of 40 Israeli schoolchildren, another botched bombing of a Jerusalem market and the issuing of unprecedented threats against his life. All this for the sake of a peace agreement that most Palestinians think the Israelis will not honor anyway. Arafat has always led a dangerous...
Arafat came out of the negotiations at Wye Plantation three weeks ago a happy man. For the Palestinians, the main issue had been how much more of the West Bank Israel would turn over to self-rule. Though Palestinian officials, who currently practice limited autonomy in 30% of the West Bank, thought they deserved another 30%, Arafat, as part of a strategic decision to get closer to the U.S., agreed last spring to an American compromise: 13%. Though ideologically opposed to withdrawing from any part of the West Bank, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of the right-wing Likud, finally...
While the Oslo Accords designated that 90 percent of the West Bank would eventually be under Palestinian control, this number has shrunk to 40 percent under the Wye Memorandum. How much more will it shrink before the final status is decided...
...also crucial to consider the conspicuous lack of accommodation of Palestinian refugees (64 percent of the total Palestinian population) or Palestinians living in Israel in both the Oslo Accords and the Wye Memorandum. Many Palestinians living in other places in the Arab world are still living as refugees in camps, deprived of citizenship and its benefits, often disproportionately impoverished. In Lebanon, where Palestinians have not been incorporated into the state because their large numbers are seen as a threat to the delicate balance of religious groups, Palestinians from the Ein El-Hilweh refugee camp, which holds 350,000 Palestinians, have...
...destructive implications regarding human rights, for the scant amount of land it transfers to the Palestinian Authority and for its failure to tackle central issues such as refugees, the Wye Memorandum is an inadequate and even dangerous agreement. As the growing resistance to Arafat from within the Palestinian Authority shows, an unjust peace simply will not be stable. We can only hope that after this peace process crumbles, as it almost inevitably will, a new one will begin that truly recognizes the needs and rights of all parties involved. Waqaas S. Fahmawi '99 is a government concentrator in Kirkland House...