Home > Israel & Palestine: A Way Out?
Wars and conflicts International
By Conn Hallinan
In a 2002 Le Monde Diplomatique article titled
’Constructing Catastrophe,’ Israeli journalist
Amon Kapeliouk challenged one of the central
myths about the ongoing conflict between Israel
and the Palestinians. To wit: that Palestinian
President Yasir Arafat was offered a great deal
at the Camp David talks in July 2000, but
turned it down and launched Intifada II.
What is so damaging about the Camp David myth
is that it perpetuates the fable that the
Palestinian side of the peace equation is
unreliable. It is at the core of Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon’s argument that Israel has ’no
partner for peace,’ and Israeli Defense
Minister Shaul Mofaz’s comment that Israel
’will have to wait for the next generation [of
Palestinian leaders] for a peace agreement.’
The ’no partner’ myth is the rationale behind
the unilateralism the Sharon government has
practiced over the past four years on
everything from building the wall, to
withdrawing from Gaza. It will also be at the
center of the upcoming Israeli elections in
March, which will go a long way towards
determining whether there will be a peace
agreement or another generation of war and
reprisal.
According to Kapeliouk, the Palestinians were
wary about Camp David because Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Barak refused to lay out a pre-
talk proposal. But because the Palestinians
were also worried that if they refused to sign
on, Barak and President Bill Clinton would
paint them as obstructionists, they agreed to
the negotiations.
Sure enough, when the Palestinians got to Camp
David they were handed an offer they could only
refuse: Israeli sovereignty over the Haram al
Sharif, Islam’s third holiest site; continued
Israeli presence in the West Bank; no sharing
of Jerusalem; and no plan for the 3.1 million
Palestinian refugees. To top it off, Barak
insisted nothing be written down.
The Palestinians countered with a proposal to
give up 9 percent of the West Bank, agree to
Israeli sovereignty over settlements in East
Jerusalem, and to find a solution to the
refugee issue that ’would not threaten Israeli
demographic and security interests.’
The Palestinians also wanted this in document form
because they felt that by not insisting on specific
language concerning the settlements they had been
burned in the 1993 Oslo Accords. At the time, the
Palestinians assumed Oslo meant the settlements would
be frozen until a final agreement was worked out.
Instead, Israel doubled the settler population and
built more than 40 new ones.
The U.S.-Israeli response was ’take it or leave
it.’ Arafat said no and for most Israelis and
virtually all Americans (Europeans and the rest
of the world never thought the Camp David
proposals were fair), the Palestinians got
tagged as the bad guys.
Sharon and his new Kadima Party will run on
this ’bad guy/no partner’ myth, particularly
since Hamas did so well in the last round of
Palestinian elections. His only serious
opposition-Amir Peretz, the newly elected head
of the Labor Party-will have to confront this
myth.
If there is anyone who has the credentials to do this,
it is Peretz.
He was one of the so-called ’Eight,’ the members of the
Knesset who called for full withdrawal from the
territories and a two-state solution back in 1988. He
is also a long-time member of Peace Now. He told
LaborStart last June, ’I see the occupation as an
immoral act,’ and that the issue is ’not a territorial
question but one of morality,’ adding, ’when a nation
rules for 38 years over another people, moral norms
become twisted.’
However, it appears that Labor will try to
avoid getting into a slugging match with Sharon
over security by focusing on a platform of
’it’s the economy, stupid!’
Yuri Tamir, a Labor Party politician close to
Peretz, says the fight with Sharon is ’not
about policy toward the Palestinians-on which
we largely agree-but about economic policy.’
However, with the occupation costing $1.4 billion a
year (not counting building the wall) there is simply
no way to separate those issues. As former Knesset
member Uri Avnery points out, the two are intertwined
and Labor must link the growing economic inequities in
Israel to the occupation: ’Peace equals reducing the
gap,’ he argues.
So far, Peretz supports Labor’s basic positions on the
territories: keep the major settlements in the West
Bank, deny Palestinians full sovereignty in economic,
diplomatic and military affairs, and maintain control
of a united Jerusalem. He also supports the wall, which
is slowing strangling the possibility of a viable
Palestinian state.
Unlike Sharon, however, he promises to negotiate with
the Palestinians
Labor’s current proposals will not lead to peace.
Support for the wall, for instance, is incompatible
with a just settlement. ’To talk about replacing direct
occupation with a form of life imprisonment is not,
after all, to talk about peace,’ says University of
Haifa professor Ilan Pappe, in the London Review of
Books. Pappe is the author of A History of Modern
Palestine and The Modern Middle East.
The settlements, and the network of roads and tunnels
that service them, turn living in the West Bank into a
nightmare. Gerald Kaufman, a member of the British
Parliament who recently led a Parliamentary delegation
to the West Bank, told the Guardian that there are 600
fixed checkpoints, plus hundreds of ’flying
checkpoints,’ which ’make free movement almost
impossible.’ He concluded that the ’motivations of this
policy is to make the lives of Palestinians so
intolerable that they get out.’
A recent European Union (EU) report came to very
similar conclusions, drawing special attention to what
it called the ’annexation’ of East Jerusalem in
’violation of international law.’
East Jerusalem produces more than three times the GDP
per capita as the rest of the West Bank, and is what
the EU report calls the ’political, commercial, and
infrastructural center of Palestinian life.’ As chief
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat says, ’Without the
economic engine of East Jerusalem as its capital, there
can be no viable Palestinian state,’ adding, ’Without a
viable Palestinian state there can be no viable peace.’
A recent poll by Yedioth Ahronoth indicates Israelis
are evenly split about giving up parts of Arab East
Jerusalem.
Peretz’s election to head Labor has already driven the
national dialogue to the left. No other major
politician uses the words ’occupation’ and ’morality’
in the same sentence. He has also turned a spotlight
on the neo-liberal economic policies of former
Economic Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Even the right-
wing Shas Party has started to talk about the ’gap,’
and has suddenly decided that giving up land for peace
is not a bad idea.
As the Labor Party’s first Sephardic leader, Peretz
will directly challenge the lock Likud and Shas has had
on this population of poor and marginalized Israelis.
As the leader of Histadrut, Israel’s trade union
organization, he has campaigned for raising the minimum
wage, guaranteeing trade union rights, and resisting
the wave of privatization that has impoverished a
growing number of Israelis.
He also initiated a series of meetings with the
Histadrut’s counterpart, the Palestinian General
Federation of Trade Unions.
Peretz says he wants to address the ’strange
situation’ in Israel, ’in which the lower
classes and the working class tend to support
the parties of the right, and the upper class
tends to support the Left.’ He says this not
only prevents the Left from winning elections,
’it has also caused the concept of peace to
become an elitist product which is identified
with factory owners and not factory workers.’
It has been a long time since Labor has used this kind
of language, and it has stirred hope among peace
activists. Even a critic like Pappas says, ’A cool-
headed assessment of Peretz’s politics should not
preclude the kind of hope that attended Yitzhak Rabin’s
second term as prime minister, when he joined the peace
camp, despite his previous brutal policies in the
Occupied Territories.’
At the same time, Pappas warns that unless
there is a willingness to negotiate seriously
with the Palestinians, Israel can expect
’Strong international pressure, of the kind
that was directed against apartheid in South
Africa in the form of sanctions, boycotts and
disinvestments.’
Such a campaign is already underway among a
number of churches in the U.S., and Europe, and
the EU recently proposed scaling back support
for infrastructure work like roads and rail
lines in the West Bank. The organization is
also contemplating giving legal help to stop
the demolition of Palestinian houses and to
meet with Palestinian leaders in East Jerusalem
rather than Ramallah.
There is much at stake in the upcoming
election, for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Polls predict a Sharon victory, but he is not
in the best of health, and the election is
still three months away. According to Avnery,
Peretz must seize this opportunity to take the
issue of peace head-on. ’After so many
sacrifices of blood and money,’ he argues, ’the
public may be ripe for this.’
[Conn Hallinan is an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus and a
journalism instructor at the University of California at
Santa Cruz.]
Forum posts
24 December 2005, 19:05
Ms. Amnon Kapeliouk is a Journalist, based in Jerusalem.
A PARTNER FOR THE FUTURE
Conducting catastrophe
What really happened at Camp David? Three books by Israelis who were involved in the peace negotiations both reveal and conceal Ehud Barak’s strategies ? and the parts that the authors themselves played in the events.
by AMNON KAPELIOUK *
Why did the peace negotiations between the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) fail? A year after Ariel Sharon’s electoral victory, the question is still the subject of debate. Did Yasser Arafat turn down "a generous offer"? Did he, yet again, miss a historic opportunity to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Three Israelis who took an active part in those negotiations have written books (1) that reveal new facts about the complicated and circuitous negotiations. The authors support the Barak line, but they offer interesting personal accounts and try to analyse the reasons for the failure of the talks; sometimes they agree with each other, sometimes not.
There is some criticism of the Israeli side. Yossi Beilin sometimes disagrees with the approaches and conceptions of Ehud Barak - to whom he nonetheless dedicates the book. This is a thought-provoking work by a statesman who is worth listening to. Gilad Sher’s book is full of details, but criticism of the Israeli side, where it exists, is localised and marginal. Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former minister of foreign affairs and internal security, mainly criticises the other side, heaping censure on "the enemy," as he calls the Palestinian leadership. "For Arafat," he writes, "Oslo was a huge camouflage behind which he disguised himself. He entered a process which for him was not intended to legitimise the principle of two states for two peoples, but rather to create a basis and a springboard for a plan combining political and terrorist moves in order gradually to cast into question Israel’s right to exist" (p 358).
In contrast to the other two authors, Ben-Ami criticises both the Oslo agreements and Shimon Peres himself, the father of the agreements. While Beilin and Sher have built their books around diaries and valuable documentation, rich in quotations and dates, Ben-Ami’s book is constructed as a long interview that jumps from topic to topic, almost without dates, without index or bibliography, but full of polemics. It has four long chapters - the first devoted to the story of his own life. This may be interesting, but has little to with a book entitled "What future for Israel". In this chapter (p 74) he says: "I am interested in being education minister, or foreign minister, or prime minister. The rest doesn’t interest me." He fails to mention that he served as minister of public security.
There are also errors in Ben-Ami’s book, some of them serious. Ben-Ami may not like UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967, but he cannot rewrite it: He explains that there is a difference between Security Council Resolution 425 (1978), which called for a withdrawal from Lebanon, and Resolution 242. He claims that 425 "relates only to a withdrawal, without inviting the sides to conduct negotiations about it. However, Resolution 242 does not speak about withdrawal, but rather about negotiations to determine secure and recognised borders." Yet the first word in Resolution 242, after the preamble, is "withdrawal [of Israeli armed forces]," and there is no mention of negotiations about borders, as Ben-Ami claims (p 140).
Barak’s approach to the Palestinian problem, when he was elected in May 1999, largely dictated its outcome. He was unable to create personal ties or develop a special relationship with Yasser Arafat. All three authors recognise that. The Palestinian leader was delighted by the victory of his new partner to "a peace of the brave," and I heard him say at the time that after "three wasted years of [Binyamin] Netanyahu, now we shall march quickly toward completing the peace process."
Orders from Barak
But there was a bitter surprise. Barak was in no hurry to meet him. An initial, hasty meeting took place only on 11 July 1999, almost two months after the elections, and one of the Palestinian participants called it a disaster. A second meeting, on 27 July, also at the Erez roadblock, was described as a "holocaust".
Beilin and Sher discuss the negative effects of these two meetings (Ben-Ami does not mention them). Barak played an open hand, and the name of the game was diktat. Barak informed Arafat at that time that he wanted to combine the implementation of the Wye memorandum, which had been signed under Netanyahu and called for a substantive army withdrawal from the West Bank, with advancing the negotiations on a permanent status agreement for the West Bank and Gaza.
Barak reopened all the issues and imposed a new invention: "a framework agreement on a permanent status agreement," another "intermediary" step which the Palestinians had to accept. Beilin says that Barak wanted to overturn the Oslo process through this move. He comments timidly: "Even now, I find it difficult to understand the wisdom of this" (p 120). He calls the framework agreement "something strange and superfluous."
Sher writes that this behaviour of Barak’s damaged the relationship between the two peoples, as "such a move has to be carried out in coordination with the Palestinians - not as a dictate by an occupier to the occupied" (p 25). Beilin relates that "Clinton told Barak that changing a signed agreement was very problematic and noted that Arafat saw the implementation of the Wye agreement as a test of his intentions" (p 77), but the prime minister did not take this advice. At the second meeting Barak was already giving Arafat orders, a kind of "shock treatment," it is called in Sher’s book: "You have to take a decision," he told him (p 28).
Barak used talks with the Syrians, which had resumed under United States auspices, to put pressure on the Palestinian leadership. Sher cites Barak as saying explicitly in February 2000: "If there is a breakthrough with the Syrians, the negotiations with the Palestinians will be delayed for many months (p 64). ... The Palestinians felt cheated, humiliated and shouldered against their will into a remote corner."
The fruitless contact with the Palestinians continued, and the secret talks in Sweden trod water for about a month. Instead of making an effort to accelerate and deepen the negotiations as the Palestinians wanted (Beilin, p 187), Barak, with Clinton’s prior agreement, played his trump card: he proposed holding a summit conference at Camp David, saying: "The time has come for the leaders to decide."
Arafat and all the factions of the Palestinian leadership saw the summit as a trap, even a plot, aimed at tripping up the Palestinians. Beilin explained: "The Palestinian side did almost everything it could to prevent the convening of the summit, apart from [making the] announcement that they would not participate in it. Arafat feared a summit that would take place without him knowing in advance what Barak was really prepared to offer him. He did not want to be surprised and he did not want to confront a Barak-Clinton axis and be accused at the end of the summit of not having compromised enough" (p 120).
’No one to talk to’
There is a great deal of evidence that Arafat wanted to agree on the basic principles in advance. But Sher writes that Barak forced him to go without any preparation. During the summit Barak shut himself in and refused to meet with Arafat even once, to the irritation even of the US. National security advisor Sandy Berger said in a moment of anger that "Barak, the man who wanted the summit and pressured us all, is actually retreating from previous positions" (Sher, p 171).
Some argue that Barak’s entire aim at the Camp David summit was to prove that "there is no one to talk to" on the other side, so that he would be free to work on a plan for a unilateral separation from the Palestinians. All three authors reject this. But, without a doubt, this was one of Barak’s options. Beilin relates that Barak repeatedly stated that the alternatives were either to come to an agreement with the Palestinians or "reveal their true colours." From the descriptions of the Camp David days in the three books, a picture emerges of very peculiar negotiations. There were Israeli proposals to the Palestinians, to take or leave. The proposals were transmitted orally, never in writing. Barak forbade that.
The authors could have tried to examine the other side but none of the books devote much space to Palestinian positions. At Oslo the PLO took upon itself to arrive at a full peace agreement and an end to the conflict and to accept, after the appropriate arrangements, the territories occupied in 1967, under Resolution 242 - that is, 22% of Mandatory Palestine. It was not ready to make further concessions. Therefore, the Palestinians took care to base all negotiations with Israel on Resolution 242, which negates annexations and determines explicitly in the introduction "the inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war."
This was the reason for Barak’s declared intention of bypassing this resolution by turning the agreement he wanted to sign with the Palestinians into "an agreed-upon interpretation of 242" (Sher, p 21). Ben-Ami proposed transforming "the Clinton parameters," which he submitted in December 2000 (2), into a special Security Council resolution that would be defined as an accepted translation of 242 (Ben-Ami, p 345).
Beilin is the only one of the three writers who comes out against this trickiness. He criticises Barak’s foolish attempt several months before the Camp David summit to stipulate that Resolution 242 does not apply to the border between Israel and the Palestinians. These statements, writes Beilin, were the match that almost ignited a conflagration on the ground: "Essentially, this statement served no purpose. The 1967 border was the point of reference at Camp David, in the Clinton plan and at Taba, and it is the basis for the border between the two states, and 242 is mentioned in the Oslo agreement as a basis for the resolution of the conflict. This [Barak’s statement] aggravated the distrust before and during the Camp David talks" (p 249). One Israeli advisor, aware of the bleak mood in the Palestinian delegation at Camp David, suggested to Barak that he should meet Arafat. Barak replied: "I will not meet with Arafat to discuss Jerusalem until he gives Palestinian agreement to president [Clinton’s] ideas" (p 195).
Approval from the settlers
Barak took neither Yossi Sarid nor Yossi Beilin with him to Camp David. Some of the people he appointed to the delegation came from a different conceptual world. "It sometimes seemed as though some of the Israeli team were aiming, just to be certain, to get a kashrut [kosher] certificate from the Yesha [West Bank settlements] Council for any position we presented," writes Sher (p 185).
Clinton served as a mediator at the summit, but in full coordination with the Israelis. He presented a document containing new ideas, when there was no progress in the negotiations. It was a surprise to everyone except the Israelis. At a meeting of the Israeli team at Barak’s home in Kochav Yair about a month before the summit, Barak had revealed the news of the expected document, but forbade talk about it: "Only at the summit, when it is convened, will it be possible to talk about the American document that might be submitted to the sides - under no circumstances before that" (Sher, p 120). Edward Walker, one of Albright’s advisors, says in a rare interview (3) that the Americans at Camp David always consulted the Israelis before they made any proposal.
The Palestinians were aware of the fears nurtured by Israeli propaganda about the 3.7m refugees anxiously waiting to return to their homes. Beilin recounts that even before the summit Arafat met Clinton and informed him that the solution of the refugee problem would be one that would take Israel’s demographic concerns into account (p 106). Sher writes that the Palestinians "are not demanding the practical right of return to Israel - which, in my opinion, is not an element of their ’core position’" (p 156). What Barak proposed was the return of 5,000 refugees "in one blow" or 10,000 over 10 years.
The no less sensitive issue of Jerusalem was dealt with irresponsibly at Camp David, in a way that invited trouble, especially with respect to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. The demand for Israeli sovereignty over the site and the allocation of a location for Jewish prayer there, which was immediately interpreted as a call to set up a synagogue in the mosque compound, and the hurtful proposal regarding the declaration of the town of Abu Dis as the capital of Palestine increased the Palestinians’ despair and anger (4).
In the diplomatic stagnation - with the third scheduled redeployment not implemented, with more Jewish settlements being built and bypass roads paved, land confiscated, closures and deepening economic crisis, with hundreds of prisoners waiting for years to be released under agreements already signed - the ploys concerning Jerusalem were like a fuse. Then came Sharon’s visit to the mosque compound on 28 September 2000. The following day, after the Friday prayers, protests welled up in Jerusalem and in other parts of the West Bank and Gaza. The police used live ammunition against the young Palestinians. At the end of three days of fierce but unarmed demonstrations, 28 Palestinians were dead and 500 wounded.
The Mitchell report (5), a model of balance and caution, says that the Sharon visit "was poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been foreseen; indeed it was foreseen by those who urged that the visit be prohibited." What comes next is just as interesting: "More significant were the events that followed: the decision of the Israeli police on 29 September to use lethal means against the Palestinian demonstrators."
This is a clear indictment against the minister of public security at the time - Shlomo Ben-Ami. In his book, Ben-Ami says that Sharon’s visit had no connection to the outbreak of the intifada, which was a strategic move by the Palestinian leadership. It was "a very quiet visit," he says, and only the following day did "they" begin to talk about it. "It is insufferable to use this visit as an excuse for the outbreak of violence. The visit was a legitimate act" (Ben-Ami, p 289). The reader learns nothing from this about the writer’s responsibility for the bloody disturbances, as the minister in charge of the police.
Sher is less definite. He believes that for many years, historians will still be debating whether Sharon’s visit was an excuse seized by Arafat, or whether it created a spontaneous surge of violence. Sher points an accusing finger at the senior police commander, and a critical finger at his colleague, the minister, "who this time failed to predict the miserable chain of escalation. ? The picture of the Israeli policeman shooting at the al-Aqsa mosque - shooting that was not at all a necessity under the circumstances - ignited a conflagration and anger among millions of Muslims in the world" (p 290).
And Beilin? He says that the visit to the mosque compound was a provocation, and notes that Barak refused to say, from the first, that Sharon had caused the intifada, "even though no special intellectual effort is needed to understand that his visit on Thursday caused the intifada on Friday" (p 162).
Barak brought about his own downfall, and the path to his failure was paved with spin that cynically exploited the fears of the average Israeli. With his policy, Barak paved the way for Sharon and vanished, leaving behind scorched earth. Publications by Americans who took part in the peace process, like Robert Malley (6), and books like the three reviewed here help to demystify the role of Barak. Exposing the emptiness behind the spin is necessary if there is to be any move forward, any new attempt at relaunching negotiations to get the Israelis and Palestinians out of their present impasse.
* Journalist, Jerusalem
(1) A Manual for a Wounded Dove (in Hebrew), by Yossi Beilin, Yedioth Ahronoth Books, Tel Aviv, 2001, 304 pages, NIS 78; Just Beyond Reach: The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations 1999-2001 (in Hebrew), by Gilad Sher, Yedioth Ahronoth Books, Tel Aviv, 2001, 454 pages, NIS 88; Quel avenir pour Israel?, by Shlomo Ben-Ami, PUF, Paris, 2001, 360 pages, 21 euros.
(2) See Focus: The Middle East on our English edition website.
(3) Al-Ayyam, Ramallah, 3 November 2001.
(4) The prime minister did not propose sharing sovereignty over Jerusalem until 29 September 2000.
(5) The text of the Mitchell report can be seen at http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/mitchell.htm
(6) The text of his article in the New York Review of Books can be seen at www.nybooks.com/articles/14380.