WHO's afraid of a Palestinian state? The answer to this question is: just about everyone, Israel, the US, Europe and the Arabs.
A Palestinian mini-state will never be a significant security threat to Israel, the regional superpower. This means that fear of a Palestinian state flows from political concerns and has nothing to do with the survival of the 51-year-old Jewish state. Why then is everyone afraid?
In the immediate term, the international community fears that President Yasser Arafat will make a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) on May 4th, the cut-off date for the Oslo self-rule accords. This could secure the re-election of the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, on May 17th. No one on the world scene wants this to happen. During his 2 1/2 years in office Mr Netanyahu has effectively blocked the peace process everyone prays will succeed.
Mr Arafat had no choice but to announce his intention of proclaiming UDI on May 4th, because his own people expected liberation at the end of the fiveyear self-rule period. But this leaves him in a catch-22 situation. As Dr Ghassan Khatib, a leading Palestinian analyst, put it, Mr Arafat is "damned if he does . . . damned if he doesn't".
If Mr Arafat goes ahead with UDI, Mr Netanyahu has threatened to annex the 70 per cent of the West Bank remaining under Israel's control and either reoccupy or blockade Palestinian cities. This could mean another Arab-Israeli war which the Arabs do not want to fight.
If Mr Arafat postpones UDI, Mr Netanyahu can take credit for blocking the emergence of the state, which 64 per cent of Israelis oppose.
The only way Mr Arafat can escape from this bind is to exact from the international community a high enough price for postponement to deny Mr Netanyahu the chance of claiming victory. On Friday Mr Arafat increased pressure on the world leaders to produce a formula for UDI acceptable to the Palestinians by stating he was prepared to fight for independence.
Today the Palestinian leader is in France to discuss his price with President Jacques Chirac; tomorrow he meets President Clinton at the White House. Later in the week Mr Arafat is scheduled to attend the European summit in Berlin.
According to a reliable Palestinian source, Mr Arafat's price is a guarantee of recognition by Europe and a pledge by the US not to oppose the state when it is proclaimed later this year. The Palestinians also seek assurances that the state would comprise most of the West Bank and Gaza, from which Israel will have to withdraw.
If a formula is not found, the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Mr Ahmad Qurei, says the Palestinians will declare a "state under occupation" and demand that the occupation of a recognised state should end. This means that Israel and its western friends now face the entity they wished never to see emerge. Traditionally, they have opposed a Palestinian state because it would diminish Israel by questioning its moral and ethical foundations. A Palestinian state destroys the myth that Israel was established in "a land without a people for a people without a land" and requires Israel to share the land with another people.
During Israel's war of establishment in 1948 a major strategic objective of the underground army was to prevent the emergence of the Palestinian state proposed in the 1947 UN partition plan. Such a state would have conferred an identity, rights and land on the native Palestinian population, which the Zionist movement sought to cleanse and dissolve into neighbouring countries.
Since it seized East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel's objective has been to absorb these areas into "Greater Israel" and deny the Palestinians the land they need for their own state. But the Palestinians have not dissolved or disappeared. Israel is under greater challenge than ever before to repartition and share the land. Palestinian self-determination has been accepted by the whole world, including the US.
On November 15th, 1988, the Palestinians proclaimed their independence and were recognised by 117 Third World and east European governments. Since the Oslo process began in 1993 the Palestinians have secured control of 60 per cent of Gaza and a token 4 per cent of the West Bank, established a government, a legislature and an administration to run their self-rule enclaves. In the minds of Palestinians the state exists. But it remains a state without recognised borders and without sovereignty over its own land. Mr Arafat's UDI on Palestinian soil is designed to fix borders and assert sovereignty by fiat.
The international community says those attributes of statehood - without which a state is not a state - can only be obtained through negotiations with Israel. But the international community refuses to put pressure on Israel to withdraw from the land the Palestinians need for a viable state.
Unless it does, Mr Arafat will have no choice but UDI, on May 4th or some other day during 1999. But if Israel responds by annexing and reoccupying the territories, Egypt and Jordan would be compelled to cancel their peace treaties with the Jewish state. The Arabs and Israel would return to belligerence.