A rchive Date
[ 21-11-2023 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Israel ]
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[https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/interactive/2023/11/20/ma
gazine/israel-gaza-oslo-accords.html
Was Peace Between Israelis and Palestinians Ever Possible?
Thirty years ago, a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed achievable. The story of how it fell apart reveals why the fight remains so intractable today.
A discussion moderated by Emily Bazelon
Nov. 20, 2023
The state of Israel was born in war. The year before its founding in 1948, the United Nations produced a partition plan that proposed to divide the stretch of land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea into two states, Arab and Jewish. The surrounding Arab countries rejected the plan, as did Palestinians living on the land.
And on May 15, a day after Israel declared itself a state, four Arab countries attacked. Jewish Israelis saw the ensuing war, which they won, as an existential fight for survival, one that came just a few years after the Holocaust. To Palestinians, 1948 marked the Nakba, or catastrophe, in which 700,000 people fled or were forcibly expelled from their homes. Many went to the West Bank, where Jordan took control, or the Gaza Strip, which Egypt occupied.
Chronic conflict followed. So too did periodic efforts to resolve it. None brought lasting peace. Negotiations between Israel and Palestinians barely existed for decades, and subsequent military conflicts made the situation more difficult. When Egypt mobilized troops on the border in 1967, Israel launched pre-emptive airstrikes, and in a war fought in six days against a coalition of Arab states, Israel took over contested territory, beginning a military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
Many Palestinians, living under occupation or as refugees around the world, still saw the founding of Israel as an act of dispossession that had robbed them of their land and homes. In 1968, when Yasir Arafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the group’s charter called the establishment of Israel illegal and sanctioned armed resistance in what it saw as a struggle for liberation. Some P.L.O. factions conducted bombings, hijackings and other attacks, including the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. As a result, Israel refused to negotiate with the P.L.O., considering it a terrorist group.
A political shift began in the late 1980s. With Arafat and other P.L.O. leaders in exile in Tunisia, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza mounted a locally led popular uprising in December 1987. Television footage of the First Intifada (which means “shaking off” in Arabic) showed Israeli soldiers beating children throwing stones, eroding Israel’s international standing.
Over the following years, with Israel and the P.L.O. under pressure for different reasons, momentum built for the two sides to negotiate a resolution. An opportunity for something unprecedented began to take shape: the first direct dialogue between Israel and the P.L.O. and what would become their most sustained effort to reach a settlement. This was known as the Oslo peace process, named for the city where the secret talks took place. It ran through most of the 1990s and came as close as any negotiated process ever has to resolving this intractable conflict. In the end, Oslo failed. The reasons for that failure - and the lessons it has to teach us - have been debated ever since.
We assembled a panel of scholars and experts - three Palestinian, three Israeli and an American - to help us understand the history of Oslo: Was it a genuine chance for peace? Was it doomed from the start? Why did it unravel?
Part 1: The Road to Oslo
In the 1990s, the international order in the Middle East realigned as a result of the gulf war. When Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, most Arab countries joined the U.S.-led coalition to push them out. The P.L.O., however, backed Hussein. The decision cost the P.L.O. the financial and diplomatic backing of many of its Arab allies.
President George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, saw an opening for international intervention. In October 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union hosted the Madrid peace conference, with delegations from Israel, Lebanon and Syria, as well as a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. The gathering represented a breakthrough, but it did not include the P.L.O. Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s prime minister, objected to the group’s presence, and Arab countries went along with his wishes.
Emily Bazelon:
What was the outcome of Madrid?
Daniel C. Kurtzer:
On the way home from Madrid, Baker came to the section of the airplane where the peace team was sitting. And he said to us that he was about to leave the State Department to run President Bush’s re-election campaign. He said, When we win re-election, we will come back and sign peace treaties. And all of us very hardened diplomats believed him because we figured that we had started down a road from which there wasn’t any turning back.
Khalil Shikaki:
There were three main difficulties with Madrid. First, it did not explicitly refer to a two-state solution as the goal of the parties. Second, the P.L.O. was not sitting at the table. And third, there was no clear Arab consensus on the need to formally link progress on regional issues like security, environment and economics to progress in the negotiations between Israel and the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. Without a formal link, Israel could gain what it wanted without concessions to Palestinians, similar to the negotiation process for normalization between Israel and some Arab countries today.1
These contradictions led Palestinians to seek a second track for talks and eventually to go to Oslo.
Omar Dajani:
The P.L.O. had to recover from being taken by surprise by the First Intifada.2
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza organized in unprecedented ways, which inspired Palestinians globally, including me, as a college student in the United States.
The P.L.O.’s Declaration of Independence3
in 1988 took seriously a commitment to pluralism and tried to chart a way forward for the diplomatic moment that Palestinians hoped the First Intifada would create. The P.L.O. also signaled a new readiness to engage in negotiations around the idea of a two-state solution by accepting U.N. Security Resolution 242.4
That’s important, because 242 set out the principle of land for peace and recognition of all the states in the region, which includes Israel even if the P.L.O. is saying that obliquely.
So the Palestinians were in the midst of a shift about how to approach their engagement with Israel.
Kurtzer: The 1988 decision by the P.L.O.’s legislative council to accept 242 was critical for everything that followed, as was Jordan’s decision5 in 1988 to give up its claim to the West Bank.
Avishai Margalit:
At the time of Madrid, the prime minister of Israel was Yitzhak Shamir, who was totally dedicated to the maximalist cause of Israel. He didn’t let his foreign minister head the delegation to Madrid. He went himself to keep monitoring that nothing of substance would take place.
Baker tried hard to pressure Shamir in the Madrid negotiations. He threatened to withhold $10 billion in loan guarantees unless Israel stopped building settlements in the territories, which became a big issue in Israel. And this helped enable Yitzhak Rabin to come to power in 1992.
Efraim Inbar:
For Israel, the road to Oslo begins with Rabin. He represented the Zionist consensus that favored partition. After believing for many years that Jordan could be the partner, he tried to reach a compromise with the Palestinian national movement. And he believed there was a certain urgency in trying to make a deal. In 1991, during the gulf war, Iraq fired Scud missiles into central Israel.6
Rabin saw the Tel Aviv people running away, and he believed the younger generation was not up to continuing the conflict, so we had to end it.
Margalit: As a kid, I was in the siege of Jerusalem in 1948.7
There was real resilience. But in 1991, the Scuds hit, and though they did little harm in life and limb, people felt that they can’t bear the idea that Saddam may use missiles carrying chemical weapons.
For Rabin, who had the ethos of standing fast and not yielding, this was for him Israeli society going soft - not cowardice, but softness. He sensed that Israelis are sick and tired of wars.
Kurtzer: Let’s start with why Rabin was attracted to backchannel negotiations at all. That was not easy for him. There were no senior leaders in Israel until that time - other than Shimon Peres, the foreign minister - who were ready to negotiate with or recognize the P.L.O. as the representative of the Palestinian people. Rabin, as Mr. Security, was certainly not in favor of it.
Margalit: All the Israeli leaders who negotiated for peace, starting with Rabin, were in a weak political position. Rabin’s coalition had only a slim majority of 62 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, and it depended on a religious party. Some of its leaders were pretty dovish, but their voters were not, or that was the perception.
Inbar: Rabin was under political pressure to succeed. He was not a very successful prime minister in his previous stint in the 1970s. Also, he viewed the international circumstances as very beneficial for having such an agreement. America was the winner of the Cold War, and we were America’s ally. The P.L.O. was weak, because it had sided with Saddam Hussein, and Rabin preferred to deal with it when it was weak, not when it was strong.
Kurtzer: The negotiations in Washington that followed Madrid didn’t go anywhere. And Rabin was torn. In February 1993, when academics were talking to the P.L.O. and Oslo had begun, Rabin came to Washington on an official visit. He asked to meet with us, members of the U.S. peace team, but not the secretary of state, which was unusual. He conducted a soliloquy: The P.L.O. is out to destroy us, but on the other hand, only Arafat can make decisions. When he walked out after 45 minutes, we looked at each other and said, This man is ready to figure out how to talk to the P.L.O.
Part 2: The Oslo Agreement
When the talks that followed Madrid stalled, a senior P.L.O. official, Abu Alaa,8 and a professor at the University of Haifa, Yair Hirschfeld, secretly met for coffee in December 1992 at the St. James Hotel in London. Yossi Beilin, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, wanted to open a channel for peace talks. He couldn’t go himself, because he did not have Rabin’s permission, so he sent Hirschfeld. Abu Alaa and Hirschfeld agreed to hold more meetings, with the help of a Norwegian institute, on the outskirts of Oslo. The negotiations remained secret, moving over the next nine months to out-of-the-way locations, including a farmhouse.
The two sides agreed not to discuss the past. They exchanged draft proposals. The negotiating teams grew to include other P.L.O. officials and representatives of Israel’s Labor Party government. Abu Alaa stressed economic cooperation and the progression from easier issues to harder ones, to build trust. Rabin and Arafat, whom the negotiators called the grandfathers, began monitoring the talks closely.
The two sides agreed to a “declaration of principles,” known as the Oslo Accord, which set the terms for further peace negotiations, with the promise of a permanent resolution within five years - more than anyone had achieved before. In the unprecedented agreement, Arafat, on behalf of the Palestinian people, recognized Israel’s right to live in peace and security and agreed to renounce the use of terrorism or any other form of violence.
Rabin recognized the P.L.O. as the official representative of the Palestinian people. The accord also included promises of Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and part of the West Bank, of elections for Palestinian self-governance and of a permanent resolution, based on the principle of land for peace in U.N. Resolution 242.
On Sept. 13, 1993, Rabin and Arafat met for the first time for the signing of the Oslo Accord on the White House lawn. With a nudge from a beaming President Bill Clinton, they shook hands. “We the soldiers who have returned from the battle stained with blood,” Rabin, a former general, said in a speech, “we who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: ‘Enough of blood and tears! Enough!’” Arafat spoke in a similar register: “Our two peoples are awaiting today this historic hope, and they want to give peace a real chance.”
Bazelon: In that famous moment on the White House lawn, what hopes did people have? What seemed possible?
Dajani: With the First Intifada, and then subsequently Madrid and Oslo, Palestinians suddenly see the possibility of agency. There is this idea that Palestinians would not allow themselves to be marginalized from the process of deciding the fate of their homeland.
There is a feeling during this juncture that independence is just around the bend. Palestinians having made this historic compromise in 1988, with the Declaration of Independence, and effectively having said, All right, we agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, alongside Israel, which means 78 percent of what Palestinians regarded as historic Palestine would not be part of that state. Having made that compromise, Palestinians, to a great extent, had the sense that independence and the end of occupation were imminent, that these processes in which they were participating directly were going to yield a completely new reality.
Shikaki: There is no doubt that in 1993, a large majority of Palestinians favored Oslo, despite the fact that they strongly rejected some of its components. Most fundamentally, they rejected that an end goal - that the purpose of Palestinian self-rule was to prepare for statehood - was not specified.9
This meant Palestinians were offering Israel what Israel wanted, an end to armed struggle and recognition, but their most vital interests were subject to future negotiations. The second issue the public had trouble accepting was that there was no explicit reference in Oslo to a settlement freeze.
Nonetheless, for the package as a whole, the Palestinians thought they would need to support Arafat, and they did.10
Dana El Kurd:
What occurs with the signing of Oslo is that Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, the local coalition in the West Bank and Gaza that led the First Intifada, makes the decision that they’re willing to save the P.L.O. by supporting the Oslo process to maintain unity, even though these backchannel negotiations essentially sidelined them. Hanan Ashrawi, one of the local leaders, gave a talk recently and said she told Arafat at the time that she was concerned about the structure, content and process of Oslo. She particularly pointed out that the mutual recognition document only recognized the P.L.O. as the representative of the Palestinian people, which as an organization it had already achieved, since Palestinians built it themselves.
But at the same time Ashrawi says they all knew the P.L.O. was in a weakened position. For her and others, supporting Oslo was the price to pay for moving the peace process forward and for giving the P.L.O. a new lease on life.
Kurtzer: The Oslo agreement was full of holes. The mutual recognition was asymmetrical, and that was to hurt the Palestinian negotiating position for years to come.
Rabin said11 after the agreement was signed that the most he could do was “an entity less than a state,” without the sovereignty you’d expect. He could say that because Oslo didn’t say that final status for the Palestinians would be a fully sovereign state. My assessment is that for Arafat, the most critical thing was recognition of his role and of the P.L.O.
Limor Yehuda:
I think most of us are concerned with criticisms of the process or what went wrong. But what Oslo brought that was really crucial and important, that we will not forget, is the possibility of mutual recognition of the two peoples and the start of building representative institutions by Palestinians, of local governance.
Before, the conflict was always described as Arab-Israeli, and people in Israel would say, Well, they have 22 Arab countries. But now we are recognizing a unique Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
All the time, comparisons are made to the peace process with Egypt or Jordan or even Syria. However, those are disputes over borders involving Israel and another state. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on the other hand, is of a different nature. It revolves around conflicting demands for self-determination, which both sides perceive as a zero-sum game, evoking feelings of existential threat and profound insecurity.
Margalit: Among my friends in the peace movement, I was the one who thought that it can’t work because of the gap between the expectations of Palestinians and what they were getting, which was less than a state. There was new friction from restrictions:12
Suddenly, you see many new roadblocks to reassure mainly the right that the security arrangements would be tight.
Yehuda: Yes. Until the 1990s, we had freedom of movement. When I was young, Palestinians were traveling or working or driving with their cars inside Israel, and Israelis were going to Gaza and to the West Bank.
Bazelon: Efraim, were you hopeful about the Oslo Accord at the outset?
Inbar: We hoped the deal was simple. This was the deal between Rabin and Arafat, and nobody should tell you anything else: You get land. We didn’t expect peace. We wanted you to keep away the terrorists from us. Just like with Egypt, with Jordan, we hoped that the embryonic Palestinian state will be able to have a monopoly over the use of force. And then there would be no terrorism.
And of course, this didn’t happen because of Hamas.13
The Israeli negotiating team thought the P.L.O. would suppress any other armed organization in building a state. But Arafat did not do that.
By the way, there is a wider problem in the region of establishing states that have a monopoly on the use of force. Look at Sudan, at Libya, at Yemen, Iraq and Syria. You don’t have to accept my analysis. But what’s important to understand is that the notion of peace for Rabin, and for most Israelis, is that peace is a lack of violence from the other side. Leave us alone. We don’t want violence.
Part 3: Threats to Oslo
Violence and extremism quickly threatened the Oslo Accord. Only five months after the signing at the White House, in February 1994, an American-born settler, Baruch Goldstein, opened fire on Palestinians who were praying during Ramadan at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank city Hebron, killing 29 people and wounding about 125 more. The Jewish supremacism to which Goldstein ascribed called for dominion over all of the land of Judea and Samaria, the biblical term for the West Bank, and treated any withdrawal as anathema.
The Islamists of Hamas also hated Oslo and jockeyed for power among Palestinians, by refusing to abide by Arafat’s promise to renounce terrorism. In April 1994, Hamas took credit for a suicide bombing on a bus in Afula, Israel, that killed eight people. It was the first of 12 such attacks over the next two years. For Palestinians, the encroachment of Jewish settlers was a continuing provocation.14
The interim nature of Oslo became an opening for religious extremists to undermine it.
Shikaki: That was a turning point, as far as the Palestinian public was concerned. The reaction of the Israeli government to the Palestinians showed that the political leadership in Israel, including Rabin, was too weak to take any significant measures to deal with the settlers, to evacuate settlers, for example.
Dajani: In the moment following the massacre, the Israeli government could have said, We are going to signal to the settler movement that we are shifting away from the dangerous messianic nationalism Baruch Goldstein represented. Imagine the gesture it would have represented to Palestinians if Israel had removed the Jewish settlement in the heart of Hebron first, knowing that it would never be feasible to have a two-state solution with that remaining. How much more difficult would it have been for Hamas to justify the attacks it commenced in the months that followed?
Barring Israel taking that path, the United States could have said, To ensure Oslo realizes its potential, we will have a third-party force on the ground in Hebron to stabilize things and ensure protection of civilians. That was similarly a missed opportunity.
Instead, a completely toothless U.N. observer mission was created, which had no role other than to literally watch what was happening and write it down.
Shikaki: The violence immediately brought about a significant rise in support for Hamas that was temporary but sufficient to give Hamas the strength it needed to be able to carry out large-scale violence to destroy whatever was being achieved.
Yehuda: Matti Steinberg, a former top adviser to the Shin Bet security service, told Rabin in March 1994 that he’d better move straight to the talks on a permanent resolution.
But I think it was impossible because Rabin lacked a broad base of support. Rabin’s decision to go for Oslo without having meaningful support from the right proved disastrous. And it’s not only about spoilers from the far right. Major parts of the Jewish society in Israel were not there with him.15
Inbar: What is most important, and people do not realize it, is that all Rabin’s intelligence officers, including the chief of intelligence, told him in not so many words, The Palestinians are preparing for war.
Rabin was Mr. Security, and he was really authoritative, and probably only Rabin could have convinced the Israelis to take the risk needed to make a deal with the Palestinians.
Kurtzer: The behaviors of both sides after Oslo undercut the agreement. Palestinians never stopped violence. Efraim is right in that respect. But where Efraim is wrong is that Israeli settlers were taking away the territory the Palestinians believed was going to be part of their state.16
So they were undermining the very agreement itself.
Inbar: But building settlements isn’t a violation of the accords. Maybe you mean a violation of the American or Palestinian understanding. But in the agreement, there is nothing written against expanding settlements.
Dajani: I think that Palestinians thought oblique statements in the Oslo Accord about preserving the status and integrity of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be enough to mean that no settlements would be built during the interim period, especially based upon assurances they felt that they had received orally by Israeli leaders in the negotiations - the sorts of things that as a contracts professor, I might have cautioned against.
Kurtzer: One can’t ignore the fact that the same people who got us into today’s crisis got us into the problem in the ’90s. It was Hamas, and it was far-right Israelis who hated Oslo, and from whose midst Rabin was assassinated.17
Margalit: The underlying understanding of the Oslo agreement was that Rabin was committed to go on. That he was the most trusted person among the people who supported Oslo and that he would be there carrying on the future stages of the agreement. And then his assassination obliterated this.
Then Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, took over. He could have won an election in a landslide. People were in shock over Rabin’s murder, and they blamed Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud party on the right. But Peres did not want to be in the shadow of Rabin. His vanity took over, and he waited to hold elections. And while he waited, the wave of terrorist attacks that followed the Baruch Goldstein murders really swept the country, suicide bombings within Israel. In May 1996, Peres lost the election to Bibi by a fraction.18
Shikaki: For Palestinians, the decline of support and optimism for the Oslo process was certainly consolidated in 1996 by the election of Netanyahu. Economic conditions in the West Bank and Gaza somewhat improved. Gross national product rose, with laborers working in Israel and businesses opening in Palestinian areas. But it was not enough to increase per-capita income, so it didn’t really have significant benefits for normal people. Most of the economic benefits went to Israelis, and people could see that.
Bazelon: Netanyahu governed from the right but continued with the Oslo framework. In 1998, he and Arafat signed another agreement, with Clinton as mediator, which provided for further Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank and for Palestinians to take specific steps to prevent terrorist attacks. But terrorism continued, and Israel postponed most of the withdrawal. In the end, the two sides breached the agreements signed in the 1990s. What effect did that have?
El Kurd: I think it exacerbated the dynamic that Dr. Shikaki mentioned. It seemed to the Palestinians, by 1996 especially, that the Oslo peace process was an attempt to reorder the status quo, to give Palestinians something less than a state and to avoid backlash.
I also think it’s important to note that the Oslo Accord not only inserted the P.L.O. leadership into the West Bank and Gaza from the outside but also hollowed out the civil society and grass-roots organizations, like women’s groups and agricultural groups, which engaged in the First Intifada. Western donors wound up undermining the Palestinian women’s movement by misunderstanding it and not recognizing how much women were adversely affected by the ongoing military occupation, as the political scientist Manal Jamal has described.
Furthermore, Arafat was elected in 1996 as the first president of the Palestinian Authority,19
but the P.A. leadership had a different view and experience than the people on the ground. They were members of a liberation movement that had operated outside the country, now trying to build a state. But they often had no direct experience with the occupation, and they had a more limited understanding of how their political project could be curtailed or co-opted.
Dajani: Despite the serious design flaws in Oslo, I don’t think today’s reality was an inevitable consequence. I think the U.S. could have played a useful role in compensating for the accords’ weaknesses.
One of the biggest problems was that there was no mechanism for third-party dispute resolution. Palestinians thought that the international community, and the United States in particular, would step in to ensure that the obligations of Israel were being implemented in good faith. And again and again, what the United States chose to do instead was to leave Israeli leaders with discretion, by blocking efforts in the U.N. Security Council to censure Israel for continuing settlement activity.
Kurtzer: I thought we would bend toward Israel on security and bend toward Palestinians on territory and governance. In other words, to assure Palestinians a serious state while finding ways to address Israel’s legitimate security concerns when they would have to give up those territories. But the U.S. negotiators didn’t do that.
In practical terms, you can see it in a book written by Dennis Ross, who was Clinton’s chief negotiator, where he admits that the negotiating methodology that he and his colleagues pursued was to work out agreements with Israel and then to try to market them to the Palestinians. So you had something that was later called America acting as Israel’s lawyer. And as Omar suggested, there were no monitoring mechanisms to hold anyone accountable.
Yehuda: Oslo was supposed to build trust. It did the opposite.
Part 4: Camp David Summit
In May 1999, with post-Oslo negotiations stalled, Israeli voters once again elected a would-be peacemaker. Ehud Barak, Rabin’s heir as leader of the Labor Party, defeated Netanyahu, whose coalition split over implementing his agreement to withdraw more troops from the West Bank.
Like Rabin, Barak didn’t have a strong coalition - the peace camp in the Knesset held only 36 of 120 seats. Barak decided that in contrast to the incremental process of Oslo, he would make an all-out push for a final peace agreement. He pressed for a speedy round of negotiations followed by a one-time summit with Clinton as host.
Bazelon: How did the prospects look for Camp David?
Dajani: I arrived in Israel-Palestine in the fall of 1999. It was my first time to visit the place, and I was there as a legal adviser as part of the team that was assembled to support the Palestinian negotiating team in the peace talks. And I think that the Israeli electoral politics are worth noting for just a second. We were coming out of several years of a Netanyahu-led government in Israel and the sense of deep immobility with regard to the things Palestinians expected the peace process to deliver. And I remember very vividly how optimistic we were about Barak taking the helm.
In November and December of 1999, we begin the discussions. Ehud Barak starts off by saying that U.N. Resolution 242 - land for peace, at the 1967 lines - doesn’t apply to the West Bank. And so suddenly, what we heard was, Oh, wait a minute, a main basis for negotiations is inapplicable. And as the negotiations proceeded in the first half of 2000, those anxieties deepened. I remember, just to cite one example, entering into a round of negotiations in spring 2000, and it was the first point at which the Israeli delegation presented a map of what a territorial settlement might look like. It was quite extraordinary: 30 percent of the West Bank was under continuing Israeli control, and all of the settlements in that map were under Israeli control, even the settlement inside Hebron.
What we were expecting was that almost all of the West Bank would be transferred to Palestinian sovereignty. What we were seeing instead was a fairly limited contiguity between Palestinian areas. And the American team is doing very little to place any kinds of guardrails around this process.
Bazelon: In July 2000, Barak, Arafat and their negotiating teams spent two weeks at Camp David with Clinton. I recently called Shlomo Ben-Ami, one of Barak’s central negotiators at Camp David. He said that whatever happened before Camp David, “maybe a wrong committed by one side or other, in the end, there was an offer on the table. The proposal at Camp David was more or less: 92 percent of the land in the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza, with ideas about Jerusalem that did not include clear-cut partition of east and west but gave the Palestinians status in quarters of East Jerusalem and sovereign status in outer neighborhoods.” The Palestinians were also reportedly20
offered permanent custodianship of the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif.21
At that point, why didn’t Arafat’s team set aside the earlier Israeli positions you describe?
Dajani: We had spent a very small amount of time in the negotiating room going into Camp David. We hadn’t discussed Palestinian refugees at all.22
We had given very short shrift to many of the issues on the table. I was working on borders and security and economic relations. We had maybe a couple dozen hours of conversations with the Israeli team about those incredibly difficult issues.
So I think it is true that once we began discussions in earnest, it was possible for us to start to make progress. But I would just say, Emily, that Barak’s approach seemed to be to decide what was good for them and for us, and to lay it out as kind of a proposition to be accepted or refused rather than one to be negotiated. During the Camp David talks, it was very difficult for us to recognize what seemed to be a bargaining maneuver versus what seem to be Israel’s positions, in part because he was so forcefully arguing that his coalition agreement and Israeli politics more broadly were constraining his ability to maneuver.
Margalit: Like all the Israeli leaders who tried to seriously negotiate, Barak had to deal with a weak domestic setup. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister who was deep in his legal problems with corruption, negotiated seriously to my mind23
in 2008 with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.
Bazelon: The offers at Camp David were not written down, and there are competing interpretations of what happened. Dennis Ross, the lead U.S. negotiator, said on NPR recently, about Camp David: “We moved the Israelis a lot. But Arafat - even though I would talk to him and he would say his negotiators were authorized to negotiate, they didn’t actually do so.” According to Ross, Arafat said no to the offers on the table.
Kurtzer: Look, Camp David was what we call in American football a poorly prepared Hail Mary. Nobody was ready. The American team had to call for reinforcements to discuss Jerusalem and refugees because there had not really been serious discussions on that previously. Arafat didn’t want to go to Camp David. I was ambassador to Egypt at the time, and I had to go see Hosni Mubarak to pressure Arafat. Arafat only went because Mubarak pressed him to go. And then the United States ended up blaming Arafat for the failure of Camp David.
Margalit: Actually, the Israelis were well prepared for the negotiations but ill prepared to deal with Jerusalem. There are two things that the Israelis realized are important to the Palestinian, to Arafat’s, narrative. The return of the refugees and the Temple Mount.
It became clear that Arafat could give up on the refugees’ return if he gets sovereignty over the Temple Mount. And it was clear that the Israelis won’t take refugees into Israel, apart from a symbolic number, because of the demographic fear of losing the Jewish majority. Maybe it can work, but maybe you have hostility between the two communities and end up in a civil war, like in Lebanon.
So the issue became about Jerusalem, and people toyed with all sorts of ideas, even that God will be the sovereign over the Temple Mount. (I was told an Egyptian diplomat asked: Which God? Your God or our God?) They couldn’t agree on the Temple Mount. And then Arafat and many of the Palestinians made, I think, a real blunder: They denied the attachment of the Jews to the Temple Mount.24
And Barak - he was willing to minimize the issue of sovereignty over Jerusalem, but he couldn’t really give it away entirely.25
Shikaki: To a large extent, Arafat knew that the deal on refugees was not doable. There was no way he would get any actual return, and he made peace with that. However, he needed to be able to legitimize the package by having sovereignty over Haram al-Sharif. And I think that is what Arafat wanted.
Unfortunately, Camp David was proposed as a one-shot deal, make it or break it. And that was the huge mistake. Had this been one of various meetings and discussions, things would have been easier.
So overall, I think for Arafat, a deal without sovereignty over holy places would be a deal that he cannot sell. In his mind, being able to go to Haram al-Sharif and have a photo while praying, this was the most important legitimating piece of diplomacy that he needed to sell a peace deal to the Palestinians.
Kurtzer: Barak’s proposal was more than the Palestinians had ever seen before, but it fell far short of their absolute minimum. They believed when they accepted a two-state solution in 1988, that they already had given up 78 percent of Palestine. To be asked in Camp David to give up more, and not to be given what they needed on Jerusalem or minimally on refugees - all these issues boiling after Oslo came to a head at Camp David.
The biggest single issue was Arafat’s failure to put forward an alternative. Israelis came to negotiate. Arafat never really entered into negotiations.
Shikaki: The Americans didn’t really have a vision of their own to present to the parties as they sat down at the table.
Inbar: From an Israeli perspective, Barak made incredible concessions at Camp David. Particularly, he violated the taboo on dividing Jerusalem, which in the Israeli psyche is really important.
And generally the expectation of the Palestinians that they will get 100 percent of their demands - and I understand that they feel that they just get less than 22 percent of the territory - is something that is not realistic. The Israelis saw it as another sign that they will get from Palestinians a two-stage strategy: First they get one part of the territory, and then there will be more struggle.
And of course, what happened afterward immediately is the Second Intifada.26
In the fall of 2000, Palestinian terrorists killed Israelis in a string of many attacks.
El Kurd: What comes up for me is that the Palestinian public can be forced to disregard their national aspirations. From my understanding, at Camp David, there’s not enough information for the Palestinian negotiating team. There is no movement on the right of return, as has been mentioned. There’s not enough movement on Jerusalem. So why would the Palestinian negotiating team agree with any of this? At the end of the day, it seems like the peace process was predicated on the idea that something could be forced on the Palestinian people.
On the point of the Second Intifada, it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It doesn’t come out of some nefarious Palestinian tactic. It comes out of the Oslo failure and also Israeli incitement. Ariel Sharon, as an opposition figure, incites the Second Intifada to some degree by going to Haram al-Sharif as a provocation,27
and then you have the shooting of the Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura during a protest in Gaza, which people actually saw on TV.
Bazelon: Despite the violence that fall, the U.S. team worked on what became the Clinton parameters, presented to the parties in late December 2000. They provided for Palestine sovereignty over 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank and a land swap of up to 3 percent more. Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to the West Bank and Gaza, and some might be absorbed into Israel, at Israel’s discretion. In Jerusalem,
Palestinians would have sovereignty over the Arab neighborhoods and over the Temple Mount. According to Robert Malley from the U.S. negotiating team and Hussein Agha, the Palestinian adviser, “The president’s proposal showed that the distance traveled since Camp David was indeed considerable, and almost all in the Palestinians’ direction.”
Barak largely accepted the parameters, but Arafat did not, and the clock ran out on Clinton’s presidency. Why did this proposal fail as well?
Shikaki: The most important reason is that the parameters were put forward in the last days of the Clinton administration. The second reason was that before Camp David, the Palestinians received a guarantee that they would not be blamed if the summit failed, and then afterward, Clinton did blame them.28
Now the Americans are coming up with ideas, and the Palestinian side is not in a mood to trust the administration or show the kind of willingness Barak was going to show. So the Palestinians delayed their response, and then they told Clinton they had several reservations.
Yehuda: The Second Intifada dealt a significant blow to the Israeli left. Public sentiment at the time was that Ehud Barak had made an extremely generous offer, which Yasir Arafat rejected, responding with violence. The horrific suicide bombings during the second intifada further erased the Israeli camp that believed in the possibility of peace, and bolstered the argument that “there is no partner for peace,” which translates to no alternative to conflict. I think, in a way, many Israelis do not see it29
as vital and existential for Israel that we will solve this problem, this conflict. It’s treated as the concern of leftists, who are viewed as bleeding hearts and naïve. But pursuing peace is in the quintessential self-interest of Israel, so we can survive as a democracy. And not only that: If people are oppressed, politically excluded and their basic human rights disregarded, they are likely to rise up violently against their oppressors. Continuing to occupy another people seriously threatens our ability to exist as a nation.30
The violence of the Second Intifada and onward isn’t only because of the triggers like Sharon visiting the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. It’s also because of the foundational deprivation of freedom and equality. We destine ourselves to be in a constant state of conflict. There was a period during Oslo when I think a bigger part of our population did understand. But then out of a mix of reasons that included legitimate fear about security, we didn’t take it seriously enough.
You know, David Ben-Gurion31
said in an interview in 1968 that if there will be a chance for peace he is in favor of returning all the occupied territory except for the Golan Heights and Jerusalem. “In my opinion, peace is more important,” he said.
Part 5: Lessons of Oslo
When Oslo began, and the Israeli and Palestinian teams decided not to talk about the past, they imagined setting aside their competing narratives - especially the origin stories of 1948 - to focus on practical questions about the present, about how to live alongside one another. Perhaps setting aside the past is impossible, however, when one people’s realization of its aspirations, and its sense of survival, mean the other people’s loss of roots and place.
Bazelon: Does finding a way forward begin with reckoning with the past?
Shikaki: There is really no way in which one can end the conflict if one is not to resolve ’48. In theory, one can reach a peace agreement without addressing ’48, and I think that some Palestinians might have agreed to that - that is, leaving the issues of ’48 for a later stage, including the right of return - if doing so is not the end to the conflict, and the parties can raise further claims in the future. But I think there might be greater resistance to that from the Israelis. And therefore, I do think that ’48 must be part and parcel if our goal is to permanently end the conflict.
Kurtzer: I am mindful as a former diplomat to avoid blunt language. But if Palestinians expect that anybody will accept reverting to 1948, they’re going to be sorely disappointed. And if Israelis believe that they can achieve an agreement on something less than 1967, they’re going to be sorely disappointed.
The only outcome that may work, but I don’t see it happening in the immediate future, is ’67. Meaning a Palestinian state that effectively covers 100 percent of 22 percent of Palestine, with some land swaps. East Jerusalem is going to be in that package. A creative solution to the Old City will be in that package. The United States is not under any foreseeable presidency going to deliver anything else.
Shikaki: I think the most important failure of the past has been the fact that the process was always open-ended, without a two-state solution as the goal. And that is certainly something that any new negotiations must not repeat.
Yehuda: Yes, we need a long transition, but there needs to be an end game. It’s not easy to build a functioning state. The transition period needs to be focused on building a viable, sustainable, successful Palestinian state. It also must be focused on security for Israelis. That has always been necessary, but now, after Oct. 7, it is even more so.
Bazelon: The Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 have made peace seem more elusive than ever. Hamas invaded Israel to commit terrible violence and provoked a war in which Israel is inflicting mass civilian casualties in Gaza. Though I know it feels remote now, out of war can come peace. This happened in the 1970s between Israel and Egypt, and later Jordan, and it has happened with some of the world’s other most intractable conflicts, like Ireland and Bosnia. Could it happen again?
Margalit: Remembering Rabin’s worry when some Israelis evacuated from Tel Aviv in 1991 because of the Iraqi Scuds, I think it’s crucial to understand what is abetting the Gaza war now, from the Israeli point of view, namely evacuating and destroying a whole suite of land, within southern Israel, with towns and kibbutzim, and also people leaving the north because of airstrikes from Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The evacuation of all these people is a crucial moment in Israeli history. Making a deserted strip of land in the north and south is in a way dismembering or dismantling not just the territorial integrity of Israel but really the whole Labor Zionist vision. Because this is all within the green line.
Under what conditions will people be willing to go back to these places? That will be the endpoint of the war, I think.
I’ve thought that only a catastrophe can bring about a solution. I think this moment has the potential to be this kind of catastrophe. Not only because of the momentous events both in Gaza and in Israel but also because it’s the first time, in this war, that Israel depends on a United States military presence in the Mediterranean Sea in a big way to deter Hezbollah and Iran. This is a real change, a dramatic change in terms of the dependence of Israel on the United States. It’s time for the United States to pursue a version of what Dan said, which to me is sheer common sense.
Inbar: I was lecturing on the conflict in Athens at a think tank, and somebody told me: Listen, you fight for so long. Enough is enough. So I asked him, How many years did you fight the Turks? And I believe his answer was about 250 years. And I thought, you know, if this is the frame of reference, then we have a young conflict.
It’s an ethno-national conflict, and we see that both sides have tremendous energy. Both sides are ready to fight to spill their own blood. It’s very important to get tired. Without getting tired of the conflict, we’ll continue to fight each other. And I do not believe an imposed solution will be useful.
On how the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza will influence the conflict, I disagree with Avishai and Limor. Because for Israel, this is a war to restore deterrence. Israel has to show deterrence in order to survive in the Middle East. In the Middle East if you are not strong, you invite aggression. I think this is true of how Middle Easterners, in various capitals, view interstate relations in this region.
El Kurd: For any kind of future agreement, if there is to be one, there has to be clarity that the Palestinian public does not just want self-governance. Palestinians want self-determination, and they want sovereignty.
Dajani: I think that really did disappear from view during Oslo. And at this juncture we are talking about parity. There are roughly seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And so what we have to figure out is how we live together in this space. There’s really not an alternative.
At present, the frame for how we live together is that some five million people in that space just don’t have political rights and also have deeply constrained civil rights and very limited access to social and economic rights, including health. That is an unsustainable frame.
I realize from Oslo and Camp David how incredibly difficult it is for international actors to intervene constructively to design a mission that could work, but in view of how far apart these parties are, I can’t imagine how we make any progress without such a step.
Margalit: There is a sense that if you think that you have a solution, it means that you don’t understand the problem and you are naïve.
But then there is the biblical question: Shall the sword devour forever? And I think that the answer should be no. I don’t think that we must wait for 250 years.
The Panelists:
Omar Dajani is a professor at the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific. From 1999 to 2001, he served as a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with Israel, participating in the summits at Camp David and Taba. He currently sits on the board of A Land for All, an Israeli-Palestinian peace group.
Dana El Kurd is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond and author of ‘‘Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine.’’ She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington D.C.
Efraim Inbar is president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and head of the program in strategy, diplomacy and security at Shalem College in Jerusalem. He was a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and the founding director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He is the author of ‘‘Rabin and Israel’s National Security,’’ published in 1999.
Daniel Kurtzer was the United States ambassador to Egypt from 1997 to 2001 and the ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005. He is a professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.
Avishai Margalit is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was the George Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 2006 to 2011. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Khalil Shikaki is a professor of political science, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah and a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Since 1993, he has conducted more than 200 polls among Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and, since 2000, dozens of joint polls among Palestinians and Israelis.
Limor Yehuda is a lecturer at the faculty of law at the Hebrew University and a research fellow at Haifa University and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She is also the author of the recent book ‘‘Collective Equality: Democracy and Human Rights in Ethno-National Conflicts’’ and a founder of the Israeli-Palestinian peace group A Land for All.
Emily Bazelon, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, moderated the discussion.
ANNOTATION PHOTO CREDITS:
Hussein: Nabil Ismail/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images. Qurei: Pascal Pavani/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images. Said: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.Rabin: Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images. Abdel-Shafi: Maggie Ohayon/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images. Yigal Amir: Yoav Lemmer/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images. Netanyahu: Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images. Temple Mount: Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images. Abbas and Olmert: Moshe Milner/GPO, via Getty Images. Arafat: David Scull/The White House, via Getty Images. Ben-Ami: Dani Cardona/Reuters. Sharon: Awad Awad/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images. Obama and Netanyahu: Ben Gershom/GPO, via Getty Images.
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