On October 5, 1998, the Global Intelligence Update contained the following: "Israel cannot decide between the Rabin or the Netanyahu courses of action, and is therefore following both poorly. In a sense, either strategy works, where a compromise between the two is the worst strategy of all." On October 23, 1998, Israel and Palestine reached what will be known as the Washington Accords, confirming this analysis. Netanyahu, in essence, endorsed the Oslo Accords while making it clear that he did not intend to follow their logic. He was accompanied by Ariel Sharon, who simultaneously praised the accords while refusing to commit himself to voting for them. A dying King Hussein of Jordan looked on benignly while Yasir Arafat signed the agreement. Arafat then left the meetings declaring that a Palestinian state, an idea loathed even more by Hussein than Sharon, would be declared very shortly. And the CIA found itself in the strange position of having to guarantee Yasir Arafat's behavior to the Israelis. It was a strange culmination to nine days of theatrics.

To begin with, the Washington Accords are the Oslo Accords resurrected. Let there be no mistake about that. The Palestinian National Authority will now be given control over a total of about 40 percent of the West Bank, while Israel will retain control over the Jordan River line and key security infrastructure, transport, and communications links. Beyond that, as with Oslo, nothing is clear. The Palestinians see this as culminating in a Palestinian state, while the Israelis merely see the possibility of further transfers of control, depending on Israeli evaluation of Palestinian behavior. Some of the specifics have changed, but the general principle of Oslo has been affirmed: Israel is prepared to transfer land to PNA control if the Palestinians are prepared to commit themselves to fighting against Palestinian terrorism within Israel proper. As with Oslo, everyone is free to interpret the rest as they wish.

There is only one truly important distinction. Netanyahu and Sharon negotiated this agreement rather then by Rabin and Peres. That makes a great deal of difference. Rabin and Peres fell for two reasons. First, and this is particularly true of Peres, their public presentation of the Oslo Accords was too sweeping and too hopeful for the Israeli public. Peres' enthusiasm for Oslo carried him away, finding him admitting things semi-publicly and semi-officially that frightened the badly divided Israeli public. Because of the sense that Peres had an inferior grasp of Israeli security needs, Israeli Oslo-anxiety increased exponentially as time went on. Once Rabin was assassinated, deep concerns about Peres' ability to protect Israeli interests defeated him. The elections were less about Oslo than about Peres' ability to police Oslo.

Two men who cannot be accused of indifference to security issues negotiated these accords. The very presence of Sharon at the table reassures the majority of the Israeli right. Moreover, as bitter as it is, the Israeli left cannot help but endorse the settlement. Thus, the first polls taken in Israel after the announcement of the agreement show that about three-quarters of the Israeli electorate endorse the accords. It is difficult to imagine an evolution in which Netanyahu will not be able to either hold his cabinet together or, if needed, hold an election in which a pro-settlement coalition will not emerge.

The condition on the Palestinian side is similar to that after the Oslo Accords. There is a deep sense of unease at what Arafat brought back. The accord promises increased power for Arafat's political apparatus, including an opportunity for a devastating crackdown on his Palestinian opponents. This is something Arafat wants to do and needs to do anyway. Now he can do it under the cover of the Washington Accords. Arafat has apparently already initiated actions by his intelligence and security apparatus, who assaulted a headquarters of the Fatah faction within hours of the signing. In follow-on demonstrations, a Palestinian youth was badly wounded by gunfire from Palestinian National Authority security personnel.

Arafat has seen his authority vigorously attacked by Palestinian factions who see him as a puppet in Israeli hands. After Oslo, they accused him of both selling out the Palestinian vision of an independent state and abandoning the struggle for the liberation of Palestine proper. He used his security apparatus fairly ruthlessly to maintain his power and was actually weakened when Netanyahu's rejection of Oslo forced him to limit his suppression of opponents. It is therefore not accidental that Arafat immediately claimed that the accords pave the way very quickly to a Palestinian state. By making this assertion, Arafat plausibly reclaims the mantle of Palestinian nationalism, portraying his critics as maximalists who would undermine the triumph that was near at hand. Thus, the accords both require and free Arafat to crack down on Hamas and the rest of his opponents.

From the Israeli side, this was the heart of the agreement. Control over land on the West Bank is meaningless. The Israelis would just as soon be rid of security responsibilities in the region so long as they retain strategic control of the area. The Israelis were trading a trivial matter for a matter of grave importance: anti-terrorist cooperation. On the other hand, Arafat was being forced to do what he badly wanted to do anyway. So we have a situation in which the Israelis have given away control over territory they neither need nor want. In exchange, Arafat has agreed to do something that Arafat wants to do anyway. Why in the world did this take nine days to negotiate.

As always, there was a deeper issue: the United States. As we said on October 5, Israel has national security responsibilities that outstrip its industrial plant. It must have an outside source of military hardware in order to implement its national strategy. This supplier has varied over time but since 1967 it has been the United States. Israel is constantly trying to increase U.S. dependency on Israel in order to strengthen Israeli access to U.S. weaponry. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. strategic dependence on Israel has declined as U.S. strategic exposure has declined. Israel has felt extremely exposed during this period.

Since objective U.S. dependency on Israel has declined, Israel has tried to increase subjective dependency. It has tried hard to convince the United States that it has a fundamental interest in a stable Middle East. In fact, everyone in the region has worked very hard to convince the United States that it should care what happens in the region. This has been difficult to do, since, in fact, the future of the region is not really all that important to the United States. But old habits die hard. The Cold War era interest in the region has remained in place. Everyone, but particularly the Israelis, have tried to harden this mild sentiment into firm policy. Israel has been helped by Bill Clinton's problems. Clinton does have a political interest in a Middle East settlement, simply in the sense that he needs every foreign policy triumph he can get prior to the elections and impeachment hearings. Netanyahu, Arafat, Hussein, and everyone not in attendance, such as Mubarak and Assad, used Clinton's strong interest to generate a U.S. national interest. An Israeli-Palestinian agreement could have happened in hours. Getting the United States to guarantee the agreements took nine days. It was nine days in which Netanyahu worked very hard to convince the Americans that he didn't want an agreement.

For Netanyahu it was important to behave as if making this agreement were a major concession, not only to the Palestinians, but to the United States as well. Since the territorial concessions being made were of little consequence, and Netanyahu could not claim major polittical exposure at home, it was extremely important to make the case that the settlement posed a major threat to Israel. Hence the emphasis on Arafat's willingness to control extremists. However, since Arafat was quite happy to crack down, Netanyahu badly needed another angle. The solution was easy: how could Netanyahu trust Arafat's commitment to controlling terrorism, given his record? This became the key "stumbling block."

Netanyahyu, of course, knew the answer to his own question: Arafat's own political interests dictated a crackdown on Hamas and the others. But Netanyahu carefully posed the question in such a way that it could not be solved simply within the Israeli- Palestinian context. Enter the United States as guarantor of the agreement, in the same sense that U.S. forces in the Sinai guarantee the Camp David accords, but with a wildly different twist. The Israelis charge that Arafat's intelligence people know about terrorist attacks on Israel and do nothing about them. Arafat denies this. There is one party that knows precisely what Arafat knows, because it overhears all of his telephone conversations, reads his faxes and email, and has penetrated his organization -- the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency or, more precisely, the U.S. intelligence community including the NSA, NRO, DIA and everyone else.

Netanyahu maneuvered the talks so that it was the United States who really wanted an agreement. It then followed that if the United States wanted a settlement, it would have to be willing to police it by using the Central Intelligence Agency to guarantee the cooperation of the Palestinians. This of course raised an interesting question. If the CIA pretty much knows everything the Palestinians know, a prerequisite assumption for this deal to work, why didn't the CIA pass information on to the Israelis directly, warning them of action. Better still, why doesn't the CIA do something about terrorist actions. And that takes us to the heart of the matter.

Israel is badly in need of U.S. intelligence cooperation. Just as its national security apparatus is outstripped by its national security requirements, so too its intelligence apparatus is outstripped by its intelligence requirements. Israeli-U.S. intelligence cooperation has been strained over the years by events like the Pollard affair, by strengthening U.S. ties with Arab leaders like Arafat, and a general divergence of Israeli-

U.S. interests. It is clear that Israel feels that the CIA has sufficiently penetrated the Palestinians that it knows not only what actions are planned, but also knows what Arafat knows. It is also clear that Israel feels that the United States has not passed this information on to Mossad in a timely fashion. By claiming that it could not rely on Arafat's own intelligence sharing with Israel, or on the PNA's willingness to protect Israel from terrorists, Netanyahu maneuvered the United States into an intelligence sharing agreement guaranteed by an international agreement. Not bad for nine days of meetings!

From Netanyahu's perspective, the key was to be placed in a position in which his agreements with Arafat were seen by the United States as an Israeli concession to the Americans. Once that happened, everything followed naturally. The least the United States could do in return was to guarantee Palestinian compliance with the agreements. The only way for that to work was an enhanced intelligence sharing regime. Not surprisingly or incidentally, part of the price Israel asked for its agreement was the release of Jonathan Pollard from a U.S. prison and of an Israeli intelligence agent being held by the Egyptians. The heart of the Washington accords was a reconciliation between the American and Israeli intelligence communities. What could be more natural than to have one of the major bones of contention dividing the two countries dealt with. In fact, Netanyahu thought he had an agreement in place with Clinton. He may have had. But in the light of day, Clinton realized that the outright release of Pollard would not only have grave political consequences in the United States, but should be used as a stick to guarantee Netanyahu's own behavior in the coming weeks.

The essence of the Washington Accords, therefore, has less to do with land or with Arafat's commitment to anti-terrorist actions than it has to do with U.S.-Israeli intelligence cooperation. That is what the Israelis really brought away from these meetings, and it is an important prize indeed. With U.S. guarantees of monitoring Arafat's compliance, Israel is in a position to access U.S. intelligence sources and methods in the region as it has not had in many years, perhaps since the Pollard fiasco broke.

The United States has come out of these talks with a massive burden. An intelligence failure on the part of the United States, and such failures are inevitable, will now allow the

Israelis to cast the Americans as colluding with the Palestinians, whose intelligence is also subject to breakdown. Each terrorist bombing in Jerusalem will now become a bill the Israelis can present to the Americans. The U.S. will be constantly trying to prove its good will to the Israelis, as part of the Washington Accords, a matter of obligation. In addition, Arafat is now publicly labeled a CIA agent, as he publicly acknowledges that not only has the CIA completely penetrated his apparatus, but that the Washington Accords make his acquiescence to this regime a necessity.

So Israel leaves Washington with a major victory. But it is the type of victory Israel has been winning for years without really solving its fundamental problem. Israel remains dependent on the United States for its strategic interests and the U.S. commitment to Israel is more subjective than objective, more a matter of passing atmospherics than of fundamental national interest. Israel's ability to manipulate the United States for short-term gain does not translate into a sound foreign policy. Israel needs Arafat to be credible in the Arab world, but this agreement does not do that. Israel needs a national security problem congruent with its capabilities but this agreement does not bring Israel closer to it.

Like Oslo, Washington moved things forward without defining a solution. Unlike Oslo, it rests on firm political ground in Israel, and therefore will survive. But the Washington Accords have created a time-bomb in U.S.-Israeli relations. Israel now has an intelligence sharing agreement it can manipulate to its advantage. However, every manipulative act increases the objective divergence of U.S.-Israeli interests and that is the real danger embedded in these accords. The U.S. is now too deeply involved in events no one can control. The possibilities of friction between Israel and the United States are multiplied enormously by this agreement. But that is at the heart of Israel's strategic dilemma.

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