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    21 November, 2000

    Palestinian Authority and P.L.O. Non-Compliance with signed agreements and commitments: A record of bad faith and misconduct

    Why were formal commitments important in the post-1993 peace process?

     Since September 1993 the P.L.O., as an organization, became a signatory to the Declaration of Principles and Israel's negotiating partner. This meant that on a broad set of issues, formal commitments were needed - to try and ensure, as much as possible, that the P.L.O. leadership had clearly broken with past positions, practices and patterns of bad faith, which had marked its conduct as a coalition of "Fidai" (i.e. terrorist) organizations.

    At various points in their history, the P.L.O. and its constituent organizations were committed to a strategy of eliminating Israel as a state, (this strategy was embodied, at the time, in the Palestinian National Covenant). They were implicated in: -

  • Extensive terrorist activity;

  • Breach of agreements and understandings reached with host Arab states;

  • Abuse and misgovernment in the zones which their "State within a State" controlled in Lebanon.

    It is against this background that Israel felt obliged to demand formal commitments on some of the most basic and presumably obvious aspects of the process. Such commitments were indeed obtained; but more often than not, they were interpreted in a slippery way, particularly as regards the key issues of security, the use of violence, and the prevention of terrorism.

    Against the mounting evidence of bad faith, as detailed below, .Israel - and other parties engaged in the negotiations - kept alive the hope for a stable peace, based on the assumption that the process, and its momentum, would modify Arafat's stance on compliance and on the question of violence as an option. This hope has now been shattered.