Dr. Baruch Goldstein killed some 30 Palestinian worshipers in the West Bank town of Hebron three weeks ago. He also buried the already troubled Oslo agreement signed by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat last year.
Just as the secret Israel-PLO negotiations in Oslo leading to the now-defunct declaration of principles grew out of the stalemated Madrid talks, the challenge now facing Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat, as well as the United States, is to fashion a workable successor to Oslo.
No progress toward this objective was made during Mr. Rabin's visit to Washington last week.
Initially planned as a celebration of the Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement and a follow-up to President Clinton's January meeting with Syrian President Hafez el Assad, the visit stalled on the question of how to craft a diplomatic response to the massacre in Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs.
Mr. Rabin insisted that the Oslo declaration must not be altered. "We signed the declaration of principles," he explained. "It is written very clearly that the issues that have to be settled once we negotiate a permanent solution will not be deal with now; and it is written very clearly, as examples of these kinds of issues -- Jerusalem, settlements, borders, refugees and others."
While the killings in Hebron have called into question the revelance of Mr. Rabin's interpretation, it would not be fair to blame the current crisis on the massacre.
Oslo, and the declaration that emerged from it, rested upon a number of assumptions that had come to be seen as all but unworkable in the months and weeks before the Hebron massacre.
The most evident failure has been the inability of the parties to keep to the timetable established for the conclusion of an interim agreement by December. The agreement would have governed the five-year period before the final status of the territories occupied by Israel in the June 1967 war is to be resolved.
When this December date passed, Mr. Rabin announced that no dates were "sacred." The easy dismissal of this key element of the agreement, symbolic of the real and abiding differences between Israel and the PLO that had prevented an accord on the details of the five-year interim period, only contributed to growing public disaffection with the agreement itself.
Public confidence, both Israeli and Palestinian, has been further undermined by the repudiation of another basic assumption of Oslo -- that the agreement would inaugurate the start of a series of confidence-building measures that would facilitate reconciliation.
In fact, the opposite has occurred. Israelis see more of their sons serving military duty in the territory today than at any time in recent years.
For Palestinians living in the territories, the agreement has only produced a worsening of their already perilous economic and security situation. The months since the September agreement have witnessed greater economic insecurity, increased restrictions on access to Israel and the jobs it provides, and growing anarchy in the streets and alleys of Gaza and the West Bank.
Almost none of the millions that were promised with such great enthusiasm in October at an international donors conference sponsored by the United States have been put to work in the territories. Israel has not relaxed its military grip and where it has, the vacuum has been filled by warring gangs of free-lancing young Palestinians. Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization, who were hailed by Palestinians in a brief moment of enthusiasm after the September agreement, are today routinely derided as incapable of managing even the circumscribed authority awarded to them by the Oslo declaration.
As the talks dragged on into February and the prospect of an April redeployment by the Israeli army in Gaza and Jericho faded, the interim-period concept essential to
the Oslo accord came under increasing attack.
Palestinians naturally have always preferred a "jump" to final status negotiations where, they assume, their powers and authority in the territories will be broadened. But many Israelis had also concluded that the interim period was unworkable. Not only would it fail to build confidence between them and Palestinians, but its probable failure would endanger the prospect of a historic rapprochement between the two peoples.
But the fatal flaw to the Oslo accord was brutally but effectively exposed by the actions of Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in the early hours of Feb. 25. Oslo was based upon the premise that the interests of 2 million Palestinians and 300,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied territories (including 170,000 in East Jerusalem) could be reconciled and that a future could be constructed in which each community's vital interests could be accommodated.
The extended negotiations since September about how to protect 5,000 settlers living among 800,000 Palestinians in Gaza had disabused all but the most partisan supporters of the accord of this fanciful notion. The killings in Hebron merely confirmed the tragic consequences of Oslo's failure to confront the principal obstacle to a sustainable Israel-Palestinian agreement.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was the most prominent of those voicing these doubts about the logic of keeping settlements off the agenda.
"I'll tell you the truth," he declared only days before the massacre, "there are some questions that have to be asked out loud. What is the point of maintaining a settlement with 28 families that needs workers from Thailand, that needs an army platoon to guard them, that needs to have their road guarded by patrols? Where is the logic? What is the point?"
Mr. Peres was speaking about the Gaza settlement of Netzarim, but he could have been speaking about Hebron -- indeed, he could have been speaking about many of the more than 200 locations in the occupied territories where Israelis live.
Hebron has sparked a whirlwind of attention to settlements and militant settlers. Much of this outrage is opportunistic. Goldstein's deed was unique only in the number that he killed. Settler violence against innocent Palestinians has long been a regular feature of Israel's occupation, tolerated by Israeli officials and its system of justice.
But the massacre has put the coup de grace on the structure of diplomacy created in Oslo. The intrusion of settlers and settlements onto the diplomatic agenda cannot be accommodated under the Declaration of Principles.
Russia has announced its re-entry into the circle of diplomacy (and its consideration that Oslo has failed), with a suggestion to
hold another international conference modeled upon the Madrid framework.
The PLO is the most adamant proponent of a change of the rules of the game -- demanding as prerequisites to new talks the evacuation of some settlements, the disarming of all settlers, and some form of international protection for Palestinians. Israel's ambassador in Washington has hinted that a formal Palestinian demand to revise the terms of the Oslo agreement would jeopardize the entire diplomatic process.
Prime Minister Rabin, confronting not only PLO demands but also those of a growing number of his own ruling coalition, has suddenly discovered that the Oslo accord as written is indeed sacred and that settlements will only be discussed in the context of final status negotiations sometime in the future. But his actions belie his words. The halting steps announced by Israel to contain what Mr. Rabin described as "Hamas Jews" reflect the necessity, and a grudging, limited, Israeli willingness, to confront the obstacle that all settlers and settlements pose to peace.
The United States, which was all but removed from Israeli-PLO negotiations these last months, seems to view the massacre as an opportunity to reassert its power over the course of events. Washington's ability, and willingness, to enter the fray marks a critical departure from the framework established by the Oslo declaration.
At a March 1 appearance on Capitol Hill, Robert H. Pelletreau, newly appointed assistant secretary of state for Middle East affairs, while praising the measures promised by the Rabin government, suggested that the PLO would only be mollified by them "if [Israel] implements them fully and the implementation goes beyond tokenism to really address the question of militant VTC settlers."
There are signs that the Clinton administration is not satisfied with the limited restrictions placed by Mr. Rabin upon only the most extreme settlers, and it is prepared to push Israel, and Mr. Rabin, to move beyond Oslo. Washington may prefer an Oslo II -- modeled upon the original but broadened to include minimal Israeli concessions aimed at bringing the PLO back to the negotiating table.
The massacre at Hebron was anything but the terror of a madman. It reflected cool calculation and a sophisticated appreciation of the killings' crippling effect on the already rocky Israel-PLO rapprochement. Goldstein's spirit of rejectionism is shared by most settlers, who remain adamant opponents of any reconciliation with Palestinians that is not dictated by Israel. Goldstein has scuttled Oslo I, but Oslo II may force Mr. Rabin to commence the confrontation with settlers he had hoped to postpone.
Geoffrey Aronson is director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington.