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November 13, 1998/ 24 Cheshvan 5759, Vol. 51, No. 8
Cabinet vote puts Wye agreement back on course
DAVID LANDAU
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - After Islamic terrorists twice tried to derail the peace process in the three weeks since the signing of the Wye agreement, Israel's Cabinet has ratified the accord. But implementation of the land-for-security deal still faces more hurdles, with Israel watching closely a meeting of the Palestine National Council scheduled for next month that is expected to nullify, once and for all, the clauses in the Palestinian charter that call for the destruction of Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had postponed the ratification vote because of the terror attacks, and, in an effort to gain the support of hard-line ministers, he attached a number of conditions, including a demand that the council vote to annul the anti-Israel clauses of the Palestinian charter. In the end, however, he was unable to sway a majority of his ministers to give their explicit support. The Cabinet approved the accord Wednesday by a vote of 8-4, with five abstentions.
When the Knesset convenes in the coming days, a larger majority is expected to endorse the accord because the Labor opposition has promised Netanyahu a "safety net" of votes to protect him from any hard-right defections.
The Cabinet had been in session last Friday, Nov. 6, with the clear intention of ratifying the accord before the Sabbath began at sunset, when word of a car-bomb blast at Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market, barely a mile away, prompted the premier to bring the proceedings to a peremptory halt. A week earlier, a car-bomber missed a school bus full of children outside a Gaza Strip settlement, killing an Israeli soldier in a jeep that was escorting the bus.
On Nov. 6, only the two suicide bombers were killed in the teeming market; a score of shoppers were injured - but most of them lightly. Had either of these attacks achieved the perpetrators' intended results, the Wye agreement may well have unraveled.
On the Palestinian side, and indeed among some left-wing Israelis, the feeling is that Netanyahu, while obviously grieving innocent Israeli deaths, would have welcomed an excuse to escape implementing the further 13 percent redeployment in the West Bank called for under the Wye accord. As it is, relentless pressure both from the American go-betweens and from his own defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, has brought the prime minister back on track - provided that Israeli and Palestinian efforts to prevent further terror outrages bear fruit.
Mordechai is resisting a move led by Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon to couple Israel's implementation of the Wye agreement with high-profile government support for building at the controversial Har Homa site, a Jewish neighborhood, in southeastern Jerusalem.
The defense establishment, led by Mordechai and backed by somber warnings from the intelligence community, also is opposing demands from the settlers for a new West Bank road to bypass the refugee camp of el-Aroub between Hebron and the Gush Etzion settlement bloc. The army and Israel's domestic security service, the Shin Bet, warn of violent protests if that plan goes forward.
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