FOREWORD: A major impediment to future peace-making between Israelis andPalestinians is the widespread belief among Israelis that the Palestinianshave already violently rejected the opportunity to establish their ownindependent state alongside Israel. In the light of this, it follows thatdemands to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip andback a two-state solution are either naive or disingenuous, and cannot betaken seriously. This view holds that Yasser Arafat’s alleged repudiationof Ehud Barak’s ‘generous offer’ at the Camp David summit in July 2000,coupled with his apparently uncompromising affirmation of the ‘right ofreturn’, unmasked his true and unchanged intention to liquidate the Israelistate. Many erstwhile supporters of the Israeli peace camp felt betrayed andduped and have joined the chorus of vengeance that has swept the land. Onceagain, there is a mood in Israel of ‘no alternative’.
The besiegers feelbesieged. However, it is increasingly becoming clear that the simple Israeli view of events at Camp David and the popular Israeli interpretation of them are at variance with the truth. It is of the utmost importance for the destinies of the two peoples that the record is set straight and the myths debunked so that a path may be cleared for a future peace initiative. This article – to be published in the ‘Palestine-Israel Journal’, October/November 2001- is offered as a contribution to this vital process.
the Infernal Scapegoat
By Dr Tony Klug
September 2001.
The scapegoat is a recurring theme of Jewish history. In biblical times, it wasa real goat upon which the Jewish high priest cast all the sins of the people.In exile, it was frequently the Jews themselves, denounced and vilified for themisdeeds of others. Now it is the turn of Yasser Arafat, the Jewish state’serstwhile partner for peace and currently its supreme villain.In the wake of the collapse of the Camp David Summit in July 2000, thefinger of blame was instantly pointed at the Palestinian President,charging him with wilful sabotage of the peace process by repudiating EhudBarak’s ‘generous offer’, by indirectly espousing the liquidation of theJewish state and then by launching a violent uprising to this end. He hasbeen reviled as an unrepentant terrorist and an inveterate liar, who couldno longer suppress his true aims. Even US President Clinton and manyself-proclaimed supporters of the Israeli peace camp – nursing a deep sense oftrust betrayed – joined the orgy of defamation.
The accusations levelled against scapegoats are invariably false, and thiscase appears to be no exception. But this is by the way. The point of thescapegoat is to allow the finger-pointers to escape their share ofresponsibility and thereby the need to reflect on their own deficiencies.If Barak’s obsessive quest for absolution meant drowning the aspirations of hisnation, so be it. Being right is more important than achieving peace. However,especially now, these are dangerous indulgences. It is vital that Israelisociety swiftly emerges from its shell-shock, lets go of its righteousindignation and starts critically to examine its own part and that of itspolitical leaders in fomenting the current crisis.
What happened at Camp David – and the conclusions to be drawn – matterenormously and is the primary focus of this article. But it is not the keyto what went wrong. Rather, it was the culmination of a flawed process,pervaded by deep-seated misconceptions and self-delusions, particularly but notexclusively on Israel’s part. This aspect will be discussed later in thearticle.
The precise details of what was offered by whom at what point during thetwo-week summit cannot be stated with certainty as, in the absence of anofficial record, there appear to be almost as many versions asparticipants. As regards the big picture, however, it is more than clearthat the widespread perception in Israel of what transpired there isessentially false. This has already had dire consequences. Drawing on aspread of published and unpublished papers, reports and commentaries, among thesalient points missing from or misrepresented by the mainstream Israelinarrative are the following:
First, the Palestinians maintained from the outset that a summit waspremature and therefore likely to fail. Prophetically, they feared theblame would fall on them. They argued that more preparatory work was needed inseveral complicated areas which had been left to the ‘final basket’ preciselybecause of their complexity and sensitivity.
Against this, Prime Minister Barak was a man in a hurry. The veteranmilitary commander in him wanted quick results on the Palestinian track,having failed to wrap up a deal with Syria. Facing the imminent collapse of whatremained of his year-old coalition government, the novice political leader inhim imprudently staked his new career on swiftly securing an all-encompassingfinal peace package with the Palestinians, to embrace a mutual renunciation ofany and all further claims, including those of the 1948 refugees which lay atthe heart of the conflict. But Arafat had no mandate or authority to relinquish,just like that, the decades-old claims on their behalf. It would have been agross act of betrayal and, had he succumbed, he would simply have dealt himselfout of the picture, or worse.
By forcing the pace, Barak burdened the meeting with an almost impossibletask and unnecessarily put at risk the entire peace enterprise.
Secondly, Barak’s negotiating method has been compared to that of anemperor dispensing gifts. Few have doubted the sincerity of his intentions, buthis manner of pulling offers from under the table, as if they were rabbits outof a hat, meant that his interlocutors were unprepared with concrete responses.In combination with an allegedly arrogant take-it-or-leave-it, all-or-nothingstyle, it suggested a basic lack of respect for his negotiating partners – asure recipe for failure.
Thirdly, the ‘generous offer’ supposedly made at Camp David by Barakappears to be a fiction. The widespread impression, still holy writ inIsrael and the Jewish world, is that the Palestinians were offered aself-contained state in virtually the whole of the West Bank and GazaStrip; that in exchange for Israel incorporating between three and five per centof the West Bank to accommodate the bulk of the settler population, anequivalent area of the Jewish state would be ceded to the Palestinian state.
Israeli bewilderment at the apparently abrupt rejection of such an offer,had it actually been made, would indeed have been justified. But all theexpert accounts agree, notwithstanding the differences of detail, that theIsraeli proposal in fact involved substantial annexation of West Bankterritory, ranging from 9% to 13.5%, with a maximum of 1% landcompensation. In addition, a sizeable portion of the Jordan Valley, as well asall international borders, would remain under Israeli control in some form. Sotoo would the water below and the skies above. The remainder of the West Bank,already physically separate from the Gaza Strip, would be effectively dividedinto three or four barely connected or unconnected entities.
Whether through greed, dogma or foolishness, by advancing such a derisoryproposal in the final stretch of a seven-year negotiating marathon, Israelforsook a unique opportunity to achieve a mutually honourable settlement.Moreover, it may be assumed that Barak was aware of the proposal’s seriousdeficiencies, for why else would he later try to dupe the public intobelieving he had made a materially different offer?
Fourthly, while Barak displayed genuine courage in challenging the tabooabout negotiating over Jerusalem, and indeed by making far-reachingproposals from an Israeli perspective, he needlessly alarmed thePalestinians by raising the spectre of radical change to the status quo onthe Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. His suggestions that Jews be allowed topray there (despite a long-standing orthodox Jewish edict forbidding this)and that a synagogube constructed (the first for some 2,000 years) werevehemently opposed and the synagogue idea was reportedly then dropped.
Fifthly, the public verdict of Bill Clinton following the collapse of thesummit about the bravery of Barak and the culpability of Arafat was not thejudgement of an honest broker. The administration itself has since publiclydisclosed that all proposals put forward by the US were co-ordinated in advancewith the Israeli delegation. In effect, the most powerful country in the worldteamed up with the most powerful country in the region to induce one of theweakest non-states anywhere to accept a sequence of half-baked proposals, with athreat of sanctions if it did not comply. Revealingly, it has since beendivulged that in private Clinton voiced strong criticism of aspects of Barak’snegotiating technique.
Sixthly, it is not the case that Arafat simply refused to negotiate. Expertopinion is divided on the extent to which the Palestinians responded at CampDavid to US/Israel’s proposals with counter-proposals, but certainly thenegotiations continued (in Jerusalem) for some months after the break-up of thesummit in a less-frenzied, mostly clandestine, fashion. Following the disclosureof Clinton’s own ‘parameters’ for a settlement towards the end of the year -which both sides claimed to accept with reservations – negotiations resumedagain in January 2001 at the Egyptian resort of Taba. There, according toreports from both sides, the differences narrowed considerably on every issue tosuch an extent that a comprehensive agreement may have been feasible with alittle more time. However, the intifada was well under way by then and Barak wasabout to be trounced in the Israeli election by the notoriously hawkish Sharon,whose earlier incursion into the Temple Mount compound, accompanied by severalhundred armed guards, had helped spark the uprising.
Territorially, the basis for deadlock at Camp David was essentially nodifferent from the one that had scuppered previous efforts: the startingpoint for the Palestinians was the status quo in the early morning of 5June 1967 whereas for the Israelis it was the situation six days later. Itwas the difference between ‘occupied’ territories and ‘disputed’territories.
The occupied territories, for the Palestinians, were where they would buildtheir scaled-down state. This was their great historical compromise. It meantformally relinquishing to Israel 78% of the land they had previously claimed.Any encroachment on the remaining 22% would be regarded as plunder. Mutuallyagreed land exchanges – a legitimate subject for negotiation – were acceptableprovided this did not diminish their overall share.
It follows that what may appear as a magnanimous territorial concession inIsraeli eyes becomes, in Palestinian eyes, a flagrant erosion of anunequivocal right. It may be argued that the alleged inflexibility of thePalestinians at Camp David was less the cause of the deadlock than mistakenassessments by the Israeli and US delegations of the vital Palestinian stickingpoints, and their consequent illusions about what realistically was open fornegotiation.
Now it is Israel’s turn to confront its great historical dilemma. It canhave the spoils of war or the fruits of peace. It assuredly cannot achieveboth. It appears that the Israeli negotiators at Taba finally recognisedthis. What remains of the old Israeli peace camp has also embraced thisview. Other sectors of the Israeli population will surely follow over time. Butthere are major psychological and practical obstacles still to overcome.
At the psychological level, progress will be hard to achieve for as long as thenegotiators do not regard or treat each other as equal partners or view theirtwo peoples as having equivalent rights. More than 30 years of one peopleoccupying another has inevitably given rise to an essentially colonial mentalityon the part of the occupier towards the occupied. At first sight this may appearto be contradicted by the Oslo principles with their fine sentiments of”peaceful co-existence”, “mutual dignity and security”, “historicreconciliation” and “a spirit of peace”. But in reality the terms of theaccords were inherently unequal, and the methods of implementation not justcumbersome but patronising and humiliating.
This was probably best symbolised by the system of drip-feeding rewards tothe Palestinians as long as they proved, and kept on proving, they could betrusted. This one-way accountability assumed that one of the parties did nothave the natural right to run their own lives on their own territory, but had toearn it incrementally from the other. Far from this enhancing mutual dignity andcreating trust, it predictably fostered suspicion, contempt and even hatred,driven ever deeper during the three short-sighted and mean-spirited Netanyahuyears. As if this were not enough, the long drawn-out timetable for themini-withdrawals was, unsurprisingly, exploited by both sides’ saboteurs, whosedeathly art fatally undermined almost everyone’s faith in the process.
The paramount need was for the Palestinians to have their own state andthis should have been the primary aim. Its realisation would effectivelyhave removed the ever-present threats of curfews, closures and otherIsraeli sanctions on the one hand and violent Palestinian resistance to theoccupation on the other, freeing the governments of two neighbouring states toget on with the business of settling their outstanding differences at a steadypace in the knowledge that temporary setbacks would not be calamitous orendanger the entire peace edifice. Oslo reversed the logic of this order bymaking the end of occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian statehostage to the prior resolution of all other matters, thus locking into theprocess the seeds of its own undoing.
The most aggressive aspect of the occupation has been the stealthyrequisition of land and other resources for the construction of Israelisettlements and special roads throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip overa period of many years, which actually accelerated following the Osloaccords and continued to expand under Barak. Even if the question ofinternational legality were set aside, the personal distress caused to thethree million Palestinian inhabitants and the ugly and violent antics ofsome of the settlers have certainly poisoned relations. For this reasonalone, it is hardly surprising if the settlers are the first target of theintifada. But the greater menace is the threat posed to the prospect ofeventual Palestinian independence, potentially destroying all hope,creating a sense of overwhelming despair and fatally damaging any chance ofpeaceful co-existence between the two peoples. Israel’s standing – and indeedits very future – in the region, may in that circumstance be placed in jeopardytoo. The settlers – comprising less than four per cent of the Israeli population- may claim to be the pre-eminent defenders of the Jewish state, but the starkreality is that the settlements have set Israel on a path of national suicide.
Opinion polls repeatedly reflect the Israeli people’s desire for peace. Ifthey are truly serious about this, the settlers will have to face their day ofreckoning. Generous offers of compensation may speed up the evacuation processand reduce the casualties.
As the Israelis will never achieve peace while the Palestinians remainstateless, so the Palestinians will not eventually achieve their state, letalone make it work, without the collaboration of the Israelis. Ultimately, theywill live or die together. Currently, there is a strong violent element to thePalestinian battle for independence but, as time progresses, external support -including from within Israeli society – could be decisive. To attractsolidarity, there is a pressing need for clearly defined aims – internationallypublicised – together with a coherent strategy to achieve them. At present, itis difficult to discern either. If this is not addressed soon, there is a dangerof a legitimate political struggle degenerating into intfactional conflict oreven uncontrollable gang warfare, with no winners.
The battle for Israeli public opinion is critical and winnable. The Tabatalks indicated that the Palestinian leadership recognised the vitalIsraeli sticking point that any ‘return’ of refugees to their historicalPalestinian homeland (the area between the Jordan River and theMediterranean Sea) would not be enacted in a way that would prejudice thepredominantly Jewish nature of the Israeli state and would be subject tothe sovereign decision of the Israeli government over its own territory.Without these qualifications, President Arafat’s proclaimed allegiance tothe two-state solution would indeed seem disingenuous. A major challengefacing the entire mainstream Palestinian leadership is how to get themessage across convincingly to the Israeli people that they accept thesequalifications, without simultaneously alienating large segments of thePalestinian people.
For the immediate future, we are faced with the frightening prospect ofIsraelis and Palestinians continuing to kill, maim and brutalise eachother. Israel could seize the initiative at this point by declaring itsreadiness in principle to end the occupation and to negotiate in good faith themodalities of its withdrawal. A public statement of such intent could, ofitself, profoundly affect the mood between the two sides and create a newmomentum. But such a pronouncement is unlikely which, in itself, is revealing.Nor is it anticipated that the Palestinian leadership will take steps tofacilitate and expedite such a move by urgently recruiting Israeli publicopinion to its side.
The recommendations of the aimless and toothless Mitchell Report areunlikely to lead anywhere either. Their main function is to enable theinternational community to pretend that it is doing something as analternative to organising an international protection force, which would be highon the agenda of a less irresponsible US presidency. They also enable Sharon topretend that he is not playing for time and that it is only continuingPalestinian violence that is delaying ‘confidence-building’ measures as aprelude to meaningful negotiations. But what would Sharon have to negotiate withthe Palestinians other than their effective capitulation?
Yet the situation has deteriorated to a point where the conflict could getcompletely out of hand and pose a potential threat to regional and possiblyworld peace. What is needed now is a flurry of complementary diplomatic moveswhich will deliver an independent state for the Palestinians while satisfyingIsraeli fears about their existence and security and their country’s future inthe region. Urgent consideration should be given to proposals along thefollowing lines:
- A new UN Security Council resolution, supplementary to resolutions 242 and 338, affirming a two-state solution.
- A US/EU warning to Israel that it would face severe sanctions in the event of a mass flight of Palestinians or an attempt to re-capture their territories or to overthrow the Palestinian Authority.
- An imaginative and energetic campaign, pioneered by Arab states, for a comprehensive regional settlement, based on the principle of full Israeli withdrawal from Arab territories captured in 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, in exchange for the end of the conflict and full peace, involving normal diplomatic and commercial relations and credible assurances regarding Israel’s security and integration into the region. The initiative should be pitched not just to the Israeli government but also over its head direct to the Israeli people. An appeal by leading Arab statesmen delivered on Israeli soil may be particularly effective. The psychological dimension on both sides of the conflict should not be underestimated. Official rhetoric and propaganda hostile to Jews as a people, to Judaism as a religion or to Israel per se, should be brought to a complete halt.
- The burgeoning movements of resistance to the occupation within Israel and the eruption of ad hoc Palestinian-Israeli alliances on the ground should receive international recognition and encouragement. The further growth of Palestinian-Jewish and Arab-Jewish groups in countries around the world should be fostered and they should add their weight to a fair and achievable political solution. Civil society in Arab states should reassess whether shunning all contact with Israeli civil society is the most productive way of delivering support for the Palestinian cause.
The essential components of an eventual solution are well known and were more or less rehearsed at the Taba talks in January 2001. Yet, left to themselves, it is unlikely that the two parties will ever resume these talks, let alone produce a successful outcome. The purely bilateral phase has come and gone. Decisive outside intervention to bring the broader Arab-Israeli conflict to a belated but final conclusion is now vital and urgent and would probably be welcomed, overtly or covertly, by most Israelis and Palestinians caught up in a deathly vortex.
Dr Tony Klug may be contacted at tonyklug@compuserve.com .