So it was signed, after all.

Twenty years ago, on the evening before Prime Minister Begin had set out for Camp David, there was a Peace Now rally in Tel-Aviv at which some hundred thousand people participated.

Nothing of the kind took place on the eve of Netanyahu's departure for the Wye Conference, and no peace activist of today's Israel would have repeated the passionate words which Tzali Reshef uttered on the podium of 1978: "When you go to America, Mr. Prime Minister, remember that all our hopes ride with you!".

The intervening two decades saw our hopes dimmed, tarnished and eroded - though never entirely extinguished; the Israeli babies born when Begin and Sadat solemnly swore "No more war, no more bloodshed!" are now in uniform, getting killed in the Lebanese guerrilla war or shooting lethal "rubber bullets" at their Palestiniuan contemporaries in Hebron.

After these two decades - and in particular, after more than two years of Netanyahu - the Wye Conference was greeted with sceptical reactions and low expectations in the Israeli peace movement (as in the Israeli society in general). Peace actions before and during the conference were limited to what can be mobilised by the dedicated and persistent hardcore: The spreading of a few big banners at street corners, with the good old slogan "Peace is Greater than Greater Israel"; a large net placed at the porch of the Prime Minister's residence by Young Labourites, to remind Netanyahu of opposition's offer of a "parliamntary safety net" to offset the hardliners in his own ruling coalition; a hastily-mobilised demonstration to confront a group of extremist settlers, who - just as the Prime Minister's plane took off - established yet another armed enclave in the heart of Arab East Jerusalem; a small vigil by the American Friends of Peace Now outside the sealed conference site itself, facing a more vocal (and better-financed) group of Israeli right-wing nationalists; a desperate campaign of faxes sent to the Prime Minister at his temporary office in Wye, on the night when the talks seemed about to collapse (the Israeli delegation's fax number was obtained from an intercepted e-mail message issued by an extreme right group...); the Gush Shalom ad in Ha'aretz, on the very last day, criticizing the Israeli delegation for playing "childish games."

We could not delude ourselves; at best, such actions had only a marginal effect on the outcome of the conference. But the long and weary years of trying to influence the terms of political discourse in Israel might have had their part in creating the massive majority in supporting of reaching an agreement at Wye - a majority evident not only in the opinion polls published in the papers, but also in the confidential polls which Netanyahu's aides reportedly conduct weekly and which seem to have a major influence on the Prime Minister's decisions.

Mostly, during the nine tense day of the Wye Conference, we were spectators - spectators who strove to pierce the veil of secrecy around the sealed site and collect contradicting fragments of information from newspapers, radio, television and internet; who followed, day by day and hour by hour, the spetacular alternating ups and downs of the negotiations; who got passionately involved from a distance and almost completely lost their initial sceptical attitude and became almost as tired and sleepless as the negotiators themselves and who finally - after watching to its end the White House ceremony - sunk into a long exhausted sleep.

And now, what shall we think of this document which emerged from these nine intensive days, this document with its twenty pages and its numerous annexes and its concomitant unofficial "deals" and "understandings"? Taken at face value, it is no more than a long overdue blueprint for implementing a transitory stage in a long interim process - a transitory stage which was made into a monstrous barrier during a year and a half of deliberate procrastination by the government of Israel, so that it needed a personal intervention by the President of the United States (and at that, the president had to sweat quite a lot).

But it is not by chance that this agreement was so difficult to achieve: it was signed with the most right-wing government with which the Israeli political system could come up, a government all of whose ministers, from the Prime Minister down, were less than thre yers ago vehemently opposied to this kind of agreement.

And to cap it all, a chief negotiator for the Israeli side at these talks was none other than the new Foreign Minister - Ariel Sharon, the man whose military and poitical career ever since the 1950's epitomises the most brutal and ruthless attitude towards Palestinians and other Arabs. The settlers, who had spent a great deal of effort in toppling the Labour Government and bringing Netanyahu to power, have a good reason to be bitter. Politically, their intansigent religious-nationalist creed is now shown to be a minority position, at growing variance with the mainstream of Israeli society.

Meanwhile, on the ground in the West Bank many settlements - including those inhabited by the most fanatic groups - will be transformed by the Wye Accords into enclaves surrounded by Palestinian territory. The hell through which the city of Hebron is passing in the past months, due to the settler enclave in its midst, demonstrates how dangerous and unstable such a situation will be.

One aspect was already tackled yesterday by our friends, members of the Red Line movement, several dozen of whom came to help in the olive harvest at the West Bank village of Hawara. In this particular place and time, picking olives is not an agricultural chore but a significant political statement, not without risk - since the inhabitants of the nearby Yitzhar Settlement are in the habit of threatening and/or assaulting anybody who enters the olive groves.

Together with their Palestinian hosts the Israeli peace activists, including Meretz Knesset Member Dedi Zucker, were able to pick a considerable amount of olives, in land of which Palestinian ownership is undoubted - but when the settlers came nearer and swung their weapons threateningly, it was the peace activists who were forcibly evacuated "to keep public order" and "for their own safety", with riot police picking them up one by one and dragging them down the rocky hill.

Vivid footage of this confrontation made it into the TV evening news, giving a new dimension to the learned discusssions by various experts over the implications of the Wye Accords. For the main argument used by Netanyahu and Sharon towards their right-wing followers is that these accords constitute "a last Israeli concession" after which the situation will be "stabilised". But it is impossible to stabilise a situation in which fanatic settler enclaves will remain stuck as thorns within self-governing Palestinian territories, which will themselves constitute enclaves within an outer ring of Israeli settlements...

Supporting the Wye Accords in no way implies supporting Netanyahu or Sharon. These accords can only be viable as being indeed a transitory stage on the way to further redeployment of Israeli forces, to the complete removal of the occupation and the dismantling of the settlements, to the creation of an independent Palestinian state which alone can ensure a peaceful future to Israel.

Next week, the third anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin will come around - and the circumstances of this week endow it with additional meaning. For at Wye, Binyamin Netanyahu had irrevocably vindicated the predecessor whom he had vilified in life, following willy-nilly in Rabin's footsteps. Even the decision to continue negotiating after the terrorist attack in Be'er Sheba was justified by Netanyahu with the very same arguments ("this was done by the enemies of peace") that Rabin had used on similar occasions... The figure of Rabin, the Martyr of Peace, has become the most potent symbol and rallying point of the Israeli peace movemment (quite independently of the actual character and career of Rabin himself, in which more than one dark spot can be found); the Rabin Memorial Rallies of the previous years had drawn crowds in the hundreds of thousands.

This year's rally is scheduled for the coming Saturday, October 31, at 7.00 PM in Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square. A massive turnout will not only constitute a show of support for the Wye Accords, but also send an unmistakable signal and demand to move further ahead - a message to Netanyahu, and also to any politician who may take his place in the wake of early elections or other political upheavals in the coming months.

Adam Keller and Beate Zilvesmidt
The Other Israel

The Full Text of the Wye Memorandum

Another article by The Other Israel at Ariga