It is difficult to know whether the disengagement agreement reached between Mr Shimon Peres and Mr Yasser Arafat on Wednesday night will be implemented or can hold, given the rapid deterioration in relations between Israel and the Palestinians over the last five weeks. Violence continued yesterday, as it did on the day before. The agreement is open to differing interpretations, depending on whether Mr Arafat is assumed to be in total control of the street protesters and on whether the quite disproportionate use of Israeli military power against them will be scaled back commensurately.
Even if the agreement holds and violence subsides, there is an equally large question of whether negotiations can resume between the two sides as if the status quo ante is any longer attainable. The collapse of trust is palpable. Both leaderships have lost leeway to opponents. Mr Barak has apparently outmanoeuvred General Ariel Sharon and won himself a few more weeks to assess the political state of play in Israel. He refused to agree with the Likud leader that the Oslo peace process must be abandoned by a grand coalition. But his back-room deal with the right-wing Shas party, which agreed not to force a vote in the Knesset, is inherently unstable. It looks increasingly as if early general elections are unavoidable. That would open up the likelihood of a victory for Likud, led either by General Sharon or by what dovish Israelis regard as the even more objectionable Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, who sat on the Oslo accords between 1996-9.
Mr Arafat has his own problems. Were he to crack down hard on street protesters, he would lose popular support and risk being overthrown. He faces increasing competition from opponents of the Oslo accords and the compromises he was prepared to make at Camp David. But without that framework, he would inevitably be a much diminished figure, despite his rhetorical appeal. Confronted by a Likud rejectionist adversary there is no knowing how events could unfold. That is precisely what alarms regional states and the wider international community. The Peres-Arafat understanding is intended to implement the Sharm El-Sheikh ceasefire accord reached under United States tutelage and involving Arab states, the United Nations Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan and the European Union's Mr Javier Solana. They have been relatively powerless to influence events, but are deeply concerned about regional instability and the knock-on effect to oil prices. Their task in coming weeks will be more to contain the conflict and resulting pressures, than to develop a new strategy for the peace process. That will require longer-term clarifications of Israeli and Palestinian politics, not to mention the outcome of the US presidential elections. It may well be that all concerned will have to return to first principles, based on United Nations Security Council resolutions covering land for peace and Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, rather than to the compromises worked out in the Oslo process. Realistic assessments increasingly conclude that it is incapable of delivering peace to the Middle East region.