Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace, Second Edition: Patterns, Problems, Possibilities

International Affairs, Middle East

—Rex Brynen, McGill University “Nothing in my library comes close to Eisenberg and Caplan’s unique and balanced treatment of the peace process. Their book is more essential today than when it was first published and contains many lessons that the parties could still benefit from.”

“In separating the Arab-Israeli from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this second edition clarifies important differences in their nature, dynamics, and degrees of intractability.” —Christina W. Michelmore, Chatham University “One of the best presentations of how the Middle East not only can be but should be approached from a theoretical perspective.”

A companion website featuring over 100 primary source documents and links to online sources for maps and analysis is available at http://naip-documents.blogspot.com. Laura Zittrain Eisenberg is Teaching Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University and author of My Enemy’s Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination, 1900–1948. Neil Caplan is author of Futile Diplomacy, a four-volume study of Arab-Zionist and ArabIsraeli negotiations to 1956, and The IsraelPalestine Conflict: Contested Histories.

Second Edition

—Glenn Palmer, Penn State University

Front cover design and illustration: Hilka Riba www.grafixd.com

INDIANA University Press

Bloomington & Indianapolis www.iupress.indiana.edu 1-800-842-6796

Arab-Israeli Peace

—Philip Mattar, editor-in-chief, Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa

Thoroughly updated and expanded, this new edition of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace examines the history of recurrent efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and identifies a pattern of negative negotiating behaviors that seem to repeatedly derail efforts to achieve peace. In a lively and accessible style, Laura Zittrain Eisenberg and Neil Caplan examine eight case studies of recent Arab-Israeli diplomatic encounters, from the Egyptian-Israeli peace of 1979 to the beginning of the Obama administration, in light of the historical record. By measuring contemporary diplomatic episodes against the pattern of counterproductive negotiating habits, this book makes possible a coherent comparison of over sixty years of Arab-Israeli negotiations and gives readers a framework with which to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of peacemaking attempts, past, present, and future.

Negotiating

“As with the first edition, the second edition of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace is extremely well-written. It covers the latest significant details in the negotiations and will be very useful as a resource for researchers and students alike.”

Eisenberg and Caplan

Indiana Series in Middle East Studies

Mark Tessler, general editor

indiana

Laura Zittrain Eisenberg and Neil Caplan

Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace Patterns, Problems, Possibilities

Second Edition

Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace

`

Indiana Series in Middle East Studies

Mark Tessler, general editor

Laura Zittrain Eisenberg and Neil Caplan

Negotiating

Arab-Israeli Peace Patterns, Problems, Possibilities

` Second Edition

Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Manufactured in the United States of America

Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA

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© 2010 by Laura Zittrain Eisenberg and Neil Caplan All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. ╃∞ ↜The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Eisenberg, Laura Zittrain. Negotiating Arab-Israeli peace : patterns, problems, possibilities / Laura Zittrain Eisenberg and Neil Caplan. — 2nd ed. p. cm. — (Indiana series in Middle East studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-253-22212-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Arab-Israeli conflict. I. Caplan, Neil, date II. Title. DS119.7.E353 2010 956.04—dc22 2009053212 1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10

He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality. —Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt We must think differently, look at things in a different way. Peace requires a world of new concepts, new definitions. —Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel

`

Contents List of Maps ↜ix Preface to the Second Edition ╇ xi List of Abbreviations ╃xv Introduction. Historical Patterns: Bad Habits Are Hard to Break ╇ ↜1 Part one. The Arab-Israeli Peace Process: Beginnings

1 Hot Wars and a Cold Peace: The Camp David Accords, 1977–1979

35

2 Mission Impossible: The 1983 Israel-Lebanon Agreement

52

3 Premature Peacemaking: The 1987 Hussein-Peres London Document

73

Part two. The Arab-Israeli Peace Process: Madrid and After

4 Setting the Peace Table: The Madrid Conference and â•…â•… Washington Talks, 1991–1993

95

5 Out of the Shadows and into the Light: The Jordanian-Israeli â•…â•… Peace Process, 1991–1994

116

6 Falling Short of the Heights: Israel and Syria, 1991–2000

135

Contents╇ /╇ vii

Part three. The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process: Oslo 1993 and Beyond

7 Breakthrough: The Oslo Accords

165

8 Breaking Down: Oslo Collapses

190

9 Broken beyond Repair? Camp David II and the â•…â•… Second Intifada

222

Conclusion. Peace as a Process

253

Epilogue. Rebuilding amid the Rubble

283

Appendix A. Timeline Appendix B. Documents Online Notes Bibliography Index

301 311 317 381 419

Maps

1. The Arab-Israeli Arena

╇╇ 4

2. Palestine under the British Mandate, 1923

╇╇ 8

3. United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, 1947

╇ 12

4. Armistice Lines, 1949 (the “Green Line”)

╇ 14

5. Israel and Occupied Territories, 1967

╇ 18

6. Israel-Jordan Treaty, 1994

126

7. Syria-Israel Frontier: 1923, 1949, 1967

152

8. Oslo II: Areas A, B, C, 1995

180, 212

9. Oslo II: Areas A, B, C, 2000

213

10. ↜Walled Old City of Jerusalem

237

11. Israeli Proposals for Palestinian Sovereignty â•…â•… in the West Bank, 2000–2001

251

Preface to the Second Edition

This book seeks to provide a historical backdrop and framework for understanding the still unfinished business of Arab-Israeli peacemaking. We conceived of it as an alternative to the flood of instant analysis and interpretation that invariably accompany current events in the often unpredictable Arab-Israeli arena. The book represents our conviction that today’s headlines follow naturally from the course of history, and that an understanding of current affairs is greatly enhanced by an appreciation of the past. Our thesis is that there exists a historical pattern for failed Arab-Israeli negotiations which contemporary diplomats must break if they are genuinely to advance the peace process. This pattern serves as the common thread running throughout the chapters that follow. We hope that both seasoned scholars and ordinary observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict will find this approach stimulating and helpful. The book combines case studies and frequent reference to supporting primary source documents that are available on this book’s companion website, http://naipdocuments.blogspot.com. The case-study method allows us to apply our theory in a systematic way to successive episodes of Arab-Israeli negotiations. We have foregone a strictly chronological narration of events in favor of seven subheadings that characterize decades of unsuccessful Arab-Israeli negotiating habits. Though this may be a more challenging approach for some readers, we believe they will be rewarded with a deeper and more analytical understanding of the processes at work. We offer not so much a rigid paradigm as a useful and orderly way to think about Arab-Israeli negotiations. Once familiar with our framework for analysis, readers will be well prepared to follow, on their own, unfolding events in the diplomatic roller-coaster ride known as the Arab-Israeli peace process. We write as historians who thrill to the exploration of past events via archival documents. We believe that the documents keyed to each case are critical to the negotiating episode under review and should be read in tandem with the chapter text. This stress on the importance of primary documentation reflects our professional and pedagogical preferences. Notwithstanding leaders’ penchants for secretive, undocumented top-level decision making,1 we firmly believe that the maximum accu-

xii╇ /╇ negotiating arab-israeli peace

racy possible demands a healthy respect for available primary sources, which are the building blocks of any balanced and comprehensive analysis. All too often students are introduced to the raw material of diplomacy and policymaking through the medium of an interpreter’s characterization only. As useful as secondary interpretations may be, our classroom experience has taught us that students are perfectly capable of wrestling with the textual milestones of this conflict for themselves. Through our online appendix of primary materials, students have an opportunity to read the protagonists in their own words, experience the interplay between text and context, and draw their own conclusions. Through this exercise they encounter firsthand not only the parameters of the historical times in which negotiation attempts took place, but also the conflicting interpretations drawn by various actors. Engaging primary sources, we have found, allows students to experience the obstacles and frustrations that peacemakers face in drafting mutually acceptable agreements. Dueling interpretations within the classroom enrich the learning experience by mirroring the competing interpretations offered by Arabs and Israelis. We similarly invite readers to use our framework to arrive at conclusions which may differ from ours. Although we offer the seven elements with which to examine multiple negotiation episodes, we understand that matters of intention and psychological nuance, to name but two, are difficult to quantify and may impress readers differently. Secondary sources are also of value, however, and we have tried to share with our readers the richness and complexity of the work of other authors upon whom we must also draw in reaching our conclusions. The course of international conflict and resolution is complex, and any presentation necessarily requires some measure of simplification and omission. To compensate, we include generous chapter endnotes containing both the standard brief citations for the sources of an idea or quotation, as well as recommendations of other books and articles that deal with secondary aspects or conflicting analyses of issues treated in our main text. Those in search of topics for research papers will find our notes and bibliography solid starting points for further academic inquiry. We have cited only English-language sources but we encourage serious students to develop the Arabic and Hebrew language skills required for more comprehensive research. Our approach to the conflict ascribes rational-interest explanations for the protagonists’ actions and decisions, and seeks to avoid culturally stereotyping the parties in our attempts to explain and understand them. While their respective cultures and histories are not entirely without influence, Arab and Israeli leaders are primarily motivated to advance what they perceive to be their short- or long-term personal, community, and/or national interests. We also take into account the often oversimplified and sharply contrasting versions of what “really” happened. These divergent viewpoints are essential components of each party’s narrative of the conflict and

Preface to the second edition╇ /╇ xiii

explain, for instance, how each party can perceive itself the victim and the other the aggressor. Where important “truths” diverge, we have striven to allude in the text or in the endnotes to existing rival or contrasting interpretations, thereby allowing our readers to explore alternative perspectives. This second edition of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace differs from the first in several significant ways. We have reorganized the chapters to focus separately on efforts to resolve the Arab-Israel and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Obviously the two are intertwined and cross-referenced in each chapter. But our twofold intention is to highlight the idiosyncrasies of negotiating along each Arab-Israeli track, and to present an uninterrupted examination of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process since the Oslo Accords of 1993. The original chapters have been updated to reflect new information and scholarship that have appeared in the twelve years since our first edition. Each chapter now concludes with a postscript assessment of events that have transpired between the time of that episode and the present. New chapters bring the Syrian-Israeli case into the mix and divide the disparate attempts at forging Palestinian-Israeli peace into three episodes. We have also taken advantage of internet technology to expand our selected documents section from seventy-seven pages within the covers of the original book to over 100 documents online at http://naipdocuments.blogspot.com. We also acknowledge that our take on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is significantly less optimistic in this new edition. Properly chastened by events of the past dozen years (and reminded again as to why we chose to be historians and not current-events commentators), we regard our earlier optimism as a reflection of the Oslo-engendered enthusiasm of the mid-1990s, whose gains we now know were not irreversible. We continue to believe that Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli peace are possible, but the intervening years have taught us to be ever more sensitive to the historical depth of the conflict, the immensity of the challenge facing those who would resolve it, and the unpredictable and even unfathomable pain that the enemies of peace are prepared to inflict upon others. We write with sobering certainty that more bloodshed and crises lie ahead, and we make few if any predictions, for at least two reasons: a sense of caution given the volatility of the region, and our desire for readers to bring their own instincts and experiences to their reading and to draw their own conclusions accordingly. As historians, we appreciate the constant pull of the past on the present, yet recognize that the future is not bound by any iron laws of historical determinism. As Mark Tessler has noted: “Not all historical injustices can be eliminated and most will not be forgotten. But the past need not determine the future, just as the history and evolution of the conflict were not preordained. Israelis and Palestinians can break with the past if they have the political will to do so. . . . It is on the parties

xiv╇ /╇ negotiating arab-israeli peace

themselves, and not on history, that the future depends.”2 We fully agree with these remarks, which apply equally to the wider Israeli-Arab conflict as well as to other protracted disputes. Finally, we are happy to acknowledge the assistance of our colleagues who gave generously of their time and expertise in critiquing our framework and analysis of Arab-Israeli negotiating efforts. Thanks are also due the many students who have used the first edition over the years and drawn to our attention all manner of interesting elements, some of which we have introduced in the new edition, and the occasional error, which we have corrected. We are delighted with the contributions of the American, Arab, and Israeli cartoonists who gave so generously of their art and imagination: Steve Benson, John Cole, Matt Davies, Goma Farafat, Emad Hajjaj, Yaakov Kirschen, Chan Lowe, Jeff MacNelly, Jimmy Margulies, Tim Menees, Mike Peters, Dwane Powell, Rob Rogers, and Ed Stein. We are especially grateful to our wonderful editors Dee Mortensen and Peter Froehlich of Indiana University Press for their kindness and professionalism in handling this manuscript and its authors. Any errors or inaccuracies, of course, are of our own devising alone.

Abbreviations

DOP Declaration of Principles GAA General Armistice Agreement IDF Israel Defense Forces ILMAC Israel-Lebanon Mixed Armistice Commission IPS Institute for Palestine Studies ISMAC Israel-Syria Mixed Armistice Commission JA Jewish Agency for Palestine JAE Jewish Agency Executive MAC Mixed Armistice Commission MFA(Israel) Ministry of Foreign Affairs MNF Multinational Force in Lebanon NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization PA/PNA Palestinian (National) Authority PCC United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine PLO Palestine Liberation Organization PNC Palestine National Council QIZ Qualifying Industrial Zone SLA South Lebanon Army UN United Nations UNEF United Nations Emergency Force UNGA United Nations General Assembly UNIFIL United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon UNSC United Nations Security Council

Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace

`

Introduction Historical Patterns Bad Habits Are Hard to Break

Most observers are aware that Arab-Israel enmity has a long and violent history. Less well known, however, is the equally long history of attempts to achieve peace. The earliest serious attempt at negotiation dates back to 1913–1914, when representatives of the Zionist Organization and members of the Arab Decentralization Party met in Cairo and Beirut to plan for Palestine’s future as Ottoman rule over the region crumbled.1 Since then, there have been many efforts, some better known than others, to resolve the persistent conflict for control over Palestine/Israel. The history of these mostly futile diplomatic encounters has been a discouraging record of failures. The apparently successful conclusion of several Arab-Israeli agreements since 1978 is a happy departure from that tradition.2 But despite accumulated progress and several important breakthroughs in recent decades, difficulties in implementing those fragile accords persist and important aspects of the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts have proven resistant to negotiated solutions. Cycles of violence, which only deepen mutual mistrust and hostility, have been a resilient feature of this many-layered and protracted dispute, not easily broken by political and diplomatic initiatives. One of the premises of this book is that the success or failure of contemporary negotiations may be better understood (although not always predicted) by a reexamination of historical patterns dating back to the early twentieth century and by carefully assessing the ways in which current episodes diverge from—or mirror— past negotiating experiences. We take as our point of departure Neil Caplan’s article, “Negotiation and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,”3 written on the eve of the 1977 EgyptianIsraeli breakthrough. Caplan examined the course of multiple failed Zionist-Arab efforts to negotiate a settlement before Israel’s independence in 1948 and identified characteristics that were both common to each case and largely responsible for their failures. In applying Caplan’s analysis to Arab-Israeli peacemaking initiatives since

2╇ /╇ negotiating arab-israeli peace

Courtesy of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

1977, we measure eight contemporary sets of negotiations, some apparently successful, against the historical patterns identified below, looking for both similarities and differences. The history of Arab-Zionist/Israeli attempts at negotiation reveals seven recurring areas of diplomatic difficulty; accordingly, in each chapter to follow, we examine a case study under seven headings: • • •

• • • •

Previous experience negotiating together The variety of purposes and motives for entering into negotiation Questions of timing that affected decisions to enter into, or refrain from, negotiation The status of the negotiating partners The effect of third-party involvement The proposed terms of agreement Psychological factors affecting both leaders and followers

Our examination frequently refers to the three words in the book’s subtitle. By “patterns,” we mean those behaviors, strategies, and outcomes common to most Zionist-Arab peace overtures since the eve of the First World War. “Problems” reflects the failure of those meetings to produce peace and suggests that, to the extent those patterns still hold true, contemporary negotiation efforts will similarly fail. “Possibilities” refers to the prospect that genuine change in circumstances, purpose, aspirations, or leadership may break the historical pattern and lead to genuine peace.

Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 3

Overview of Conflict and Diplomacy to 1977

The contemporary conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East is a multilayered dispute. One component is the struggle, since the early 1880s, between Jews and Palestinian Arabs for control of the same piece of land, called “the Land of Israel” (Eretz Yisrael) by Jews and “Palestine” (Filastin) by Arabs. The other is a regional conflict of more recent vintage, dating back to 1948, between states: the state of Israel and the various Arab states. This second conflict has been, at times, about the very existence of the Jewish state of Israel in the heart of the Muslim Arab world, but it has also been over tangible issues such as borders, resources, and territory lost and won in the cycle of wars between them (see map 1). Most accounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict use as milestones the episodes of violence and war between the parties. But there is also a long history of making peace, which runs parallel to that of making war. Unfortunately, most of these attempts to avoid conflict and/or make peace have met with little lasting success. It is our belief, however, that analysis of these failed diplomatic endeavors can illuminate new, more promising approaches. Our overview weaves together these two strands of activity within the historical Arab-Israel conflict arena, a double helix of war and peace. But our task is a doubly difficult one, due to the conflict’s great psychological complexity, in which two national communities appear locked in a double-edged existential struggle. On the one hand, each party seeks control over the same small piece of much-promised and symbolically laden land. At the same time, each genuinely considers itself to be a righteous victim of the other’s aggression and ill-will.4 Although they may agree upon a chronology of events, Israelis and Palestinians invariably view those events and ascribe blame differently. Scholars in recent decades have stressed the importance of understanding the differences between the competing “national narratives” of Palestinians and Israelis.5 We have therefore given ourselves the task of conveying this plurality of conflicting narratives and paying due attention to the diplomatic activity that has accompanied the episodes of violence.

Hardening Positions, Considering Solutions, 1913–1948 The origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lie in the clash of two fledgling nationalisms, Jewish and Arab, focused on the Land of Israel/Palestine. Zion (Tsiyon) is the biblical Hebrew reference for Jerusalem and its environs, including the “Land of Israel” as promised by God to the Jewish people according to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). Zionism is a political ideology which holds that the Jewish people constitute a nation and have a right to a sovereign nation-state in their ancestral homeland. A Zionist is anyone who subscribes to that political ideology. Zionism

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Jerusalem Jerusalem Hebron Hebron GAZA GAZA STRIP STRIP Gaza Gaza al-Arish al-Arish

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6╇ /╇ negotiating arab-israeli peace

developed in Europe in the 1880s (document 1).6 Suffering harsh anti-Jewish persecution in the Russian empire in the east and smoldering antisemitism in the supposedly enlightened countries of Western Europe, Jewish intellectuals proposed to normalize Jewish existence within the community of nations by establishing a Jewish state. Drawn to Eretz Yisrael/Tsiyon by a 2,000-year-old dream of returning to the biblical land of their ancestors, small numbers of Jews began coming to Ottoman Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, purchasing land and intending to establish there a Jewish national home and a haven from persecution. At the same time, the peoples of the Middle East were beginning to consider their fate in light of the impending dissolution of the political order established under the 400-year-old Ottoman Empire ruled from Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey). Arab nationalists sought independence from both Turkish rule and Western imperialism: their goal was the establishment of a vast Arab nation under Arab rule, although regional rivalries emerged over who should lead this new state and from what seat of power. “Palestina” was the Greek and Roman derivative of the “Land of the Philistines,” an ancient people who lived in the region in the twelfth century bce. Along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, the land generally known as “Palestine” was an area of Muslim-Arab conquest and habitation since the seventh century ce, becoming part of the Ottoman Empire after 1516. In the nineteenth century some of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, who had for centuries identified themselves with their religious community or with a local family or clan, began to look to Damascus (an ancient city which later became the capital of modern Syria) for leadership of this wider “pan-Arab” nation.7 Zionists focused on Eretz Yisrael but largely overlooked the Arabs already living there, seeing them as residents of the larger Ottoman Empire but not as a Palestinian people with distinct national aspirations. Ironically, by confronting the local populace with a unique challenge not directly encountered by Arabs elsewhere, Zionism contributed directly to the creation of a distinctive Palestinian experience and peoplehood.8 In contemporary times a Palestinian is an Arab whose ancestral origin is within Palestine; Palestinian nationalism holds that the Palestinian Arabs constitute a nation and have a right to their own sovereign nation-state in Palestine. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the British and French took over the Middle East. As part of the war effort, the British had made conflicting commitments to both Arabs and Jews, leading both sides to expect some form of imminent independence at war’s end.9 British promises to the sharif of Mecca (in today’s Saudi Arabia), Husayn ibn Ali, emerged from the correspondence between Husayn and Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Cairo, during 1915 and 1916 (document 2). Britain’s conditional promise to support a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine was communicated to the Zionists in the Balfour Dec-

Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 7

laration of 2 November 1917 (document 4). In the interim, the British and French secretly planned to divide the territory between themselves in accordance with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 (document 3). The first postwar episode of direct Zionist-Arab diplomacy was the negotiation of an accord between Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization and future president of Israel (1948–1952), and Amir Faysal ibn Husayn, son of the British-backed sharif of Mecca, and future king of Iraq (1921–1933). The British-inspired reconciliation aimed at harmonizing Arab and Zionist post–World War I aspirations and making them compatible with British and French plans to maintain direct and indirect control over much of the Middle East. By the terms of the Weizmann-Faysal “treaty” signed in January 1919 (document 5), Weizmann recognized Faysal as the head of a proposed Arab Kingdom (outside of Palestine), while Faysal recognized Jewish claims to Palestine as outlined in the Balfour Declaration. Between the lines of their entente, Zionists expected Faysal to influence the Palestinian Arabs to moderate their demands for full independence in exchange for anticipated benefits to his future kingdom from Jewish capital, technical skills, and international political support. This “exchange of services” approach became the preferred Zionist model for accommodation with the Arabs. The Weizmann-Faysal agreement was never implemented, however, largely because of the main parties’ respective inability—as minor actors on the world stage, dependent on the goodwill of England and France—to deliver the goods each expected from the other.10 Between December 1917 and May 1948 the British ruled the area which soon became known officially as “Palestine”—initially under temporary military occupation and thereafter under a mandate (document 6) from the League of Nations, the forerunner of today’s United Nations (see map 2).11 In 1921 Britain partitioned the area between the Mediterranean and the frontier of Mesopotamia (Iraq) to create the Arab emirate of Transjordan east of the Jordan River; provisions promoting the Jewish national home were to be restricted to Palestine west of the Jordan. After approval of the mandate in July 1922 and its coming into force in 1923, the term “mandate Palestine” referred to the territory west of the Jordan River only. Under the British mandate, Jewish immigration and settlement increased, as did Arab opposition. The willingness of some Arab landowners to sell property in Palestine to Jews persuaded many Zionists that the Arabs would eventually reconcile themselves to the establishment of a Jewish state, and led them to underestimate the seriousness of popular demonstrations against Jewish immigration and settlement.12 The flow of Jewish immigration accelerated after 1933, when Hitler took power in Germany. For Zionists, the Holocaust proved the urgent necessity for a Jewish refuge in Palestine. Arabs, who had all along feared the creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine, objected to paying the price of a Middle Eastern solution to what they saw as Europe’s

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Area allotted by Great Britain as the autonomous Amirate of Transjordan in 1921 and excluded from the application of the Jewish National Home provisions 0

Map 2.

50

100 mi

Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 9

Jewish problem. Where Zionists saw Jews returning to the land of their forebears, Arabs saw Europeans attempting to escape the murderous intent of other Europeans by injecting themselves into the Arab, Muslim heartland. Increasing Jewish immigration and land purchases and recurring Arab protests and violence brought both groups into conflict with one another and with the British. Against this background of unremitting hostility, and even while many observers recognized the inherent irreconcilability of Arab and Zionist aims, prominent Zionists and Arabs in Palestine met informally on dozens of occasions in the early and middle 1930s. In these talks they explored the limited possibilities for a ZionistPalestinian accord. On the Zionist side, many of the contacts involved senior policymakers, such as David Ben-Gurion (then chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive [JAE] and later prime minister of Israel), Moshe Shertok (later Sharett, head of the JAE Political Department and later foreign minister of Israel), and their colleagues. The basic Zionist approach was to work for an arrangement under which the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the future Jewish Palestine would agree to relinquish political control over part of their homeland in exchange for being able to share in the economic and other blessings that Zionist development would bring to the entire region. In this “exchange of services” model for peaceful coexistence, the Palestinian Arabs would abandon their local national aspirations for the economic bounty that citizenship in a modern, technologically advanced Jewish state would confer. In addition, controversial personalities from the yishuv (the Jewish community of Palestine) who championed a bi-national solution (a single jointly administered Jewish-Arab Palestine) or other formulas not consistent with official Zionist policy periodically made overtures to leaders of the Palestinian community.13 Only a few Palestinian spokesmen, such as Awni Abd al-Hadi, Omar Salih alBarghuthi, and Musa Alami, were willing, on occasion, to enter into face-to-face dialogue with important Zionist figures. The ranking leader of the factionalized Palestinian Arab community, the Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Haj Amin al-Husayni, wielded much greater influence than these individuals but was not inclined to negotiate. Leading notables of the rival Nashashibi family, on the other hand, were not averse to talks with the Zionists, but commanded considerably less popular supÂ�port. The political issues that dominated Zionist-Palestinian discussions by the late 1930s were the volume of Jewish immigration, communal representation in proposed self-governing bodies, electoral politics in mixed Arab-Jewish municipalities, and economic and security hardships caused by the Arab general strike of 1936–1939.14 Few of these negotiations aimed at achieving a comprehensive solution to the conflict over the future of Mandatory Palestine. Usually, contacts occurred with other purposes in mind, as when one party wished to forestall some undesirable Brit-

10╇ /╇ negotiating arab-israeli peace

ish action. Two examples of such motivation were Zionist hopes to avoid schemes for setting up a legislative council in 1928–1929 and 1933–1936 (which might have led to majority Arab self-government) and Arab fears of the implementation of the Peel Commission’s recommendations for partition (document 7) during 1937–1938 (which would have resulted in a Jewish state in part of what the Arabs saw as entirely Arab Palestine).15 Thus the few alliances achieved between Zionists and Palestinian Arabs were tactical and temporary, based on only short-term advantage. The Peel Royal Commission came to Palestine in 1936 and issued its 1937 report in response to the Arab general strike and the accompanying rebellion. The Arab revolt gripped Palestine for almost three years (1936–1939) and paralyzed much of the transportation and industrial infrastructure and brought even more frequent Arab attacks against Jewish settlements. Both Peel and the follow-up Woodhead Commission of 1938 recommended that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state. But Arabs in Palestine and the neighboring countries firmly rejected the partition idea, insisting the Jews were foreigners with no legitimate claim to Palestine. A majority of Zionists approved of partition in principle but rejected the boundaries of the proposed state as too confining for the expected growth in Jewish numbers. By late 1938 and early 1939, London, anxious to placate Arab and Muslim opinion at a time when a world war against the Axis powers was on the horizon, backed away from partitioning troubled Palestine. Instead, His Majesty’s Government issued the May 1939 MacDonald White Paper (document 8) restricting Jewish immigration and promising independence to Palestine in ten years’ time. Zionists slammed the White Paper for limiting Jewish immigration just as Nazism was sending tens of thousands of European Jews fleeing for their lives. Arabs objected to allowing any further immigration of European Jews into what they saw as Arab Palestine, and demanded immediate, rather than deferred, independence.16 Throughout the Mandate period Zionist leaders thought their best chances for winning Arab acceptance of a Jewish state lay with an Arab leader outside of Palestine who could persuade local Palestinians to cede Palestine to the Jews, in exchange for mutually beneficial relations with a Jewish state boasting cutting-edge European technology in industry, agriculture, and health services. Thus the Zionists focused their energy on building bridges with leaders in the lands surrounding Palestine and established contacts with a number of prominent Iraqi, Egyptian, Syrian, TransÂ�jordanian, and Lebanese personalities.17 Zionist emissaries traveled unimpeded throughout most of the Arab world and secured audiences with principal Arab politicians, editors, religious leaders, and businessmen, most of whom rejected the Zionist program in Palestine, but all of whom received their Zionist visitors hospitably nonetheless. Some of these contacts were of only limited duration, while others developed into sustained and passably good relationships over the years.

Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 11

Several of the Arab interlocutors suggested Arab-Jewish accommodation schemes that left the Jews as a protected minority under Arab sovereignty, all of which the Zionists politely refused. Zionists did briefly consider backing plans for a regional Arab federation in exchange for Jewish sovereignty in a part of Palestine. It is not entirely facetious to say that Zionists were perhaps among the most ardent panArabists, hoping that Palestinian Arabs would replace their local attachments with a wider nationalism in a way that would let them look elsewhere in the Arab world for their national fulfillment while allowing for Jewish self-government in Palestine.18 The most sustained relationship between Zionists and an extra-Palestinian leader was that between the Jewish Agency and Abdallah ibn Husayn, amir (and later king) of Transjordan. Secret good-neighborly relations between Abdallah and prominent Zionist officials began in the early 1920s and took on more serious political dimensions during the 1930s, when the Transjordanian ruler was wooed by regional factions both for and against the partition of Palestine.19 When the fate of Palestine hung in the balance after 1945, Abdallah and the Zionists discussed plans to divide the land on the West Bank of the Jordan River between Transjordan and a new Jewish state, leading one Israeli scholar to describe them as “the best of enemies.”20 The Zionist search for willing negotiating partners outside of Palestine took another twist with the development of a foreign policy based upon the concept of a “minority alliance.” Some Zionist strategists, skeptical of reaching a compromise with either the Palestinian Arabs or the Sunni Arab majority in the region, focused their attentions on forging bonds with other non-Arab and non–Sunni Muslim communities in the Middle East. To their way of thinking, potential allies included the Druze, Shi’a Muslims, Coptic Christians, Kurds, Turks, and especially the politically powerful Maronite Catholics in Lebanon. The logic of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” sustained a decades-long relationship between the Jewish Agency for Palestine and one particular Maronite faction, both of which struggled against Muslim Arab opposition to their aspirations for Jewish and Christian national homes in Palestine and Lebanon, respectively.21 Their shaky alliance against the anti-colonial, anti-European thrust of the new Arab nationalism that swept through the region in the interwar years was essentially a reaffirmation of the classic “exchange of services” model for Zionist-Arab cooperation. In exchange for providing political, diplomatic, and material support for the cause of Christian Lebanon, the Zionists hoped the Christian Lebanese could persuade other Arab politicians, the Palestinian Arabs, and the great powers to accept the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. But this relationship, as with all the other Zionist bonds with “outsiders,” amounted to little when the recognized Arab leadership inside Palestine proved unresponsive to

United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, 1947

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Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 13

pressure to compromise its desire to maintain the existing Arab majority and Arab character of the country.22 Several times during the 1920s and 1930s, the British summoned Arab and Zionist leaders to London, but all attempts at dialogue failed.23 With war looming in Europe and Arabs refusing to even sit with Zionists at the St. James Conference convened by the British in 1939, His Majesty’s Government finally sought to unilaterally impose a temporary settlement in Palestine in the form of the 1939 White Paper. Despite the significant volume of diplomatic activity between Zionists and Arabs during the Mandate period, leading figures on both sides had concluded at an early stage that Zionist and Palestinian goals in Palestine were simply incompatible. “We, as a nation, want this country to be ours,” Ben-Gurion declared in 1919; “the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.” Even before his mid-1934 meeting with Ben-Gurion, Palestinian leader Awni Abd al-Hadi had similarly recognized the harsh reality that “the goal of the Jews was to take over the country and the goal of the Arabs was to fight against that takeover.”24 But for three decades, the British refused to acknowledge this incompatibility and struggled to accommodate and then restrain the opposing Jewish and Arab national communities under their rule. Finally, in 1947 Great Britain turned its Palestine burden over to the new United Nations, and the struggle for Palestine shifted to two new arenas: (1) world capitals and the United Nations, where agents and supporters of the Arabs and the Zionists engaged in vigorous lobbying campaigns; and (2) battlefields inside and along the frontiers of Palestine, where both parties tried to create facts on the ground. In late November 1947 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab (document 9) (see map 3).25 Arab rejection of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine was absolute, however, based upon the will of the country’s two-thirds Arab majority and the conviction that the Jewish immigrants were a foreign bridgehead in Arab land. Hardened by Jewish losses in the Nazi Holocaust and driven by the need to rehabilitate hundreds of thousands of European survivors, Zionists were determined to declare Jewish statehood at the earliest opportunity, despite predictions of dire consequences. Immediately following the UN vote, fighting erupted inside Palestine. Following the departure of the British and Ben-Gurion’s 14 May 1948 declaration of an independent Jewish state, the neighboring Arab states invaded Israel in support of their Palestinian brethren but also with an eye toward territorial gain for themselves. The few high-level attempts at reconciliation at the eleventh hour—including a dramatic secret visit by the Jewish Agency’s Golda Myerson (Meir), a future prime minister of Israel, to King Abdallah in Amman on 10 May—proved too little, too late.26

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Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 15

Five Wars, No Peace, 1948–1977 The involvement of the Arab states in the first Arab-Israeli war meant that the dispute over Palestine was now an interstate conflict superimposed upon the original Zionist-Palestinian dispute. By the end of that war, as many as 700,000 Palestinian-Arab refugees had been evicted or fled from their homes; Palestinians refer to the occasion of Israel’s independence and their own dispersal as the nakba (disaster). Those Palestinians who stayed in their homes became Arab citizens of the state of Israel. By the time the armistices of 1949 were signed, there was no longer an Arab Palestine.27 Palestinian Arabs were now reduced to playing a secondary role as either refugees or an Israeli Arab minority, while the real initiative and responsibility for their fate lay in the hands of the Arab states.28 The recovery of Palestine and the return of the refugees became entangled in the inter-Arab politics of the region—the “Arab Cold War.”29 As a result of the 1948–1949 fighting, Israel’s borders extended beyond what the UN partition plan had proposed, and the rest of what had been slated as a Palestinian Arab state came under the control of Egypt (the Gaza Strip along the Mediterranean coast) and Transjordan (the West Bank of the Jordan river and the Old City of Jerusalem). King Abdallah I soon united the west and east banks of the Jordan River to create the enlarged Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (see map 4). With Arab Palestine gone, swallowed up by Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, the war left in its wake an existential battle between Israel and the surrounding Arab nations, the former trying to secure and develop the new Jewish state and the latter vigorously opposing the very idea of Jewish sovereignty in their midst. However, this struggle also displayed elements of a conventional interstate conflict, not unlike those elsewhere in the world, fought and resolved between neighboring states around the globe. After 1948 the four main unresolved issues between Israel and the Arab world were the following: • •

• •

The final determination of disputed borders The future status of Jerusalem (split between Israel and Jordan during the war, but under UN pressure for internationalization) Access to scarce water resources The return or resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees

On 11 December 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 (document 10), which called for the repatriation of refugees to their former homes now in Israel (the Palestinian “right of return”) or for their compensation and resettlement elsewhere. Arabs demanded the former; Israel insisted on the latter. Diplomatic deadlock kept the refugees languishing in camps scattered in neighboring Arab countries.

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Like the pre-1948 period, the years after Israel’s independence and the Palestinian nakba witnessed both highly visible confrontations and less public attempts to reach a resolution to the conflict. After several phases of fighting, the first ArabIsraeli war ended in early 1949 with separate general armistice agreements (GAAs) negotiated directly between Israel and each of four “confrontation states” with the help of United Nations mediator Dr. Ralph Bunche. In January 1949, Egypt and Israel became the first of the antagonists to meet on the Mediterranean island of Rhodes. These talks became the model for similar agreements with Israel signed shortly thereafter by Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria (documents 11–14), and served as a prototype for Israel’s preferred negotiating format in years following.30 At Arab insistence the GAAs specifically stipulated that the 1949 borders constituted cease-fire lines only and were not to be taken as political or territorial boundaries which might indicate Arab acceptance of Israel’s existence. Those lines, as demarcated by the GAAs in force until 4 June 1967, are known variously as the 1949 lines or the “green line.” The armistice regimes established Mixed Armistice Commissions (MACs) on each Arab-Israeli border, where junior Arab and Israeli military delegates could meet, under UN auspices, to exchange charges and investigate alleged incidents of border violations. Given the growing Arab rejection of direct dealings with Israel, in subsequent years these MACs were often the only points of contact between the unreconciled states. The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (PCC), created in December 1948 (document 10), attempted to capitalize on the positive experience at Rhodes by putting the remaining unresolved issues of refugees and territorial claims on the agenda of successive peace conferences convened in Lausanne (1949), Geneva (1950), and Paris (1951). The Arab states’ unwillingness to recognize and deal with the Jewish state and the Israelis’ refusal to consider Arab demands for a mass return of Palestinian refugees led the PCC to abandon its quest for a comprehensive solution, freezing the armistices (which were meant to be temporary) in place instead of leading toward formal peace treaties.31 Aside from these internationally sponsored diplomatic efforts, intensive secret talks between Israeli leaders and King Abdallah I of Jordan led to the drafting of agreements in the years 1949–1951, as we shall see in chapter 3. But the Jordanian king was unable to win the support of his cabinet and unwilling to act alone. Abdallah was assassinated by a Palestinian extremist while visiting the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in July 1951.32 King Farouk of Egypt was ousted by a military coup in July 1952. Egypt’s new prime minister (and future president) Gamal Abd al-Nasser and Israeli foreign minister Moshe Sharett explored the prospects of rapprochement through secret channels in Paris. Several years of increasing Palestinian fedayeen (guerrilla) cross-border raids, mainly from Egyptian-controlled Gaza, and Israeli reprisals had heightened

Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 17

the tensions between Egypt and Israel to dangerous levels. Relations between the two countries were further soured in 1954 by the discovery of an Israeli espionage and sabotage ring using Egyptian Jews in Cairo and Alexandria. In the deteriorating situation that preceded the 1956 Suez crisis, British and American intermediaries engineered a top-secret plan code-named “Alpha,” with the goal of maneuvering reluctant and suspicious leaders in Egypt and Israel into a diplomatic engagement. But these efforts collapsed in March 1956 when it became clear that no amount of Anglo-American encouragement or pressure would persuade Nasser to enter into direct negotiations with Israel.33 The failure of Operation Alpha was followed by further deterioration of Egyptian-American and Anglo-Egyptian relations, leading ultimately to the outbreak of the second Arab-Israeli war in October 1956. In that month Britain and France, unhappy with Nasser’s Soviet leanings and his flouting of long-established British and French influence in Egypt, and infuriated by his recent nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, colluded with Israel in an attack upon Egypt. The Europeans were quickly forced to withdraw by U.S. and UN pressure, but Israel, after having captured most of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, refused to withdraw until March 1957, when forces from the new United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) took up buffer positions along the Egyptian-Israeli border.34 The decade following the 1956 war saw few attempts at Arab-Israeli negotiation but much escalation of border tension. During this time fedayeen groups emerged from within the Palestinian refugee population and undertook cross-border strikes against Israeli, usually civilian, targets. Israeli units retaliated harshly against the fedayeen’s host countries; that and competition over limited regional water brought Arabs and Israelis to the brink of another inter-state war. Egypt’s ejection of the UNEF from Sinai in May 1967 and its blockade denying Israeli ships passage through the Straits of Tiran helped trigger the third Arab-Israeli war. During the June 1967 (“Six Day”) war, Israel captured large swaths of territory from its enemies: the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and Old City of Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria (see map 5).35 Prior to 1967, the Arab states had been rhetorically championing, and often manipulating, the Palestinians’ struggle to regain Palestine. After the 1967 war their focus shifted from the reclamation of Palestine to the retrieval of their own recently lost territories. Diplomats sensed a new quid pro quo in the offing: Israel would return the areas taken in 1967 in exchange for the Arab states’ recognizing and making peace with the state of Israel. The war ended on 10 June; on 19 June the Israeli cabinet voted to return the captured territory to the Arab countries in exchange for full peace treaties, except for Jerusalem, which Israel annexed and declared its capital. The Arabs responded in

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September with the famous “three No’s” issued at the Arab League summit meeting in Khartoum, Sudan: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel” (document 18).36 Meanwhile, in Washington, President Lyndon B. Johnson formulated American principles for a proposed settlement, setting the stage for third-party diplomacy (document 17). The international community weighed in with the passage of UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 242 in November 1967 (document 19), calling for, among

Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 19

other things, “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” (which pleased the Arabs) and “the right of every state in the area . . . to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries” (which pleased the Israelis). Resolution 242 has become a benchmark for every attempt at Arab-Israeli peacemaking since 1967. But crucial ambiguities in the text—notably, the omission of the definite article “the” from the phrase calling for Israel’s “withdrawal from territories occupied in the recent conflict”—led to legalistic wrangling among the parties. The Arabs believed that the resolution obliged Israel to withdraw from all of the territories captured in the 1967 war. Recalling that the Arab states had always insisted that the armistice lines of 1949 did not constitute recognized political boundaries, Israel argued that the resolution required withdrawal from some of those territories, allowing for some border modifications in order to produce 242’s “secure and recognized boundaries.”37 The failure of the resolution to refer directly to the Palestinians (who were not a “state”) or to seriously address any of their claims provided a source of future complication and Palestinian disappointment. In fact, “Palestine” does not appear in 242, and “Palestinians” can only be inferred in the reference to “refugees.” Many Israelis hoped that this resolution, backed by their decisive victories on the ground, would convince Arab leaders that the Jewish state was here to stay and that they could only retrieve their captured land as a result of direct negotiations. But the Arab states insisted upon the full return of their lost territories before they would consider dealing directly with Israel. These chicken-and-egg positions effectively reestablished the deadlock of the preceding twenty years. Immediately upon the passage of Resolution 242, UN Secretary General U Thant appointed Swedish ambassador Gunnar Jarring to confer with the Arabs and Israelis and forge a consensus among them for making 242 operational. Jarring shuttled intensively among the Arab states and Israel, but his efforts failed over the dueling interpretations of the resolution. Israel insisted upon direct negotiations with the Arabs over the captured territories, and the Arabs insisted on full withdrawal as a precondition for any talks, preferably indirect. Jarring finally issued a formal peace proposal in February 1971 (document 22), but the negative responses from Israel and the Arab states revealed serious differences which defied bridging. At the same time, the Nixon administration’s secretary of state, William Rogers, put his own plan on the table (document 21) and engaged in some shuttle diplomacy during 1969 and 1970. But circumstances shifted his objective from comprehensive ArabIsraeli peace to a narrow cease-fire between Egypt and Israel, who were caught in a costly “war of attrition” along the Suez Canal. Rogers finally achieved a stable cease-fire, but the reluctant parties sidestepped the political components of his plan that required some concrete land-for-peace applications of the UN resolution.38 Thus ended another Arab-Israeli war without political progress.

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The Arabs’ refusal to deal directly with a victorious post-1967 Israel while it still held Arab land became more entrenched with every passing year. And the longer the Arabs held out, the more Israel grew attached to the territories that diplomats had initially hoped to use as bargaining chips. Small groups of ultra-nationalist Jews, many convinced that God had delivered Judea and Samaria (the biblical West Bank) into Israeli hands, established Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. With government approval they settled at first in locations removed from Palestinian population centers, in security-sensitive areas; later Israeli governments would actively encourage a wholesale campaign of Jewish settlement throughout the territories in an effort to expand and maintain Israeli control there. The Palestinians who remained in their homes in those West Bank and Gaza territories fell under Israeli military administration and occupation. A second generation of newly displaced Palestinian refugees from the West Bank swelled refugee camps in Jordan, with serious repercussions for King Hussein’s control of the country. Great numbers of Palestinian youth, dismayed at the sweeping defeat of the Arab armies, joined guerrilla factions, most of which operated under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). A strong showing by Palestinian forces against an Israeli reprisal raid in Karameh, Jordan, in March 1968 further stoked Palestinian enthusiasm for taking their fate into their own hands and liberating Palestine for themselves. At the Palestine National Council meeting of February 1969, Yasir Arafat, leader of the mainstream Fatah movement, was elected leader of the PLO, signaling the organization’s growing independence from its original Egyptian and Arab League creators and controllers.39 Fedayeen stepped up their attacks against civilians in Israel. They also put their cause on the international agenda with sensational terrorist operations against civil aviation targets and with the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Wanting their territory back but refusing direct negotiations with Israel, Egypt and Syria launched a successful surprise attack on Israeli front lines on 6 October 1973, coinciding with the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. Although Israeli forces initially fell back, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) subsequently recovered, and when the two sides accepted a cease-fire on 23 October, Israel still held the 1967 territories and was on the roads to Damascus and Cairo. The Arab states’ early successes in the war, particularly the surprise attack and the fact that they held out three times as long as they had in 1967, allowed Egypt and Syria to recover much of their pride and dignity. Israel, despite having rallied and repulsed the invaders, perceived this war as an intelligence and military failure. Sobered by its close call and recognizing that military might alone could not guarantee its security indefinitely, Israel was now willing to consider a new diplomatic bid. By leveling the military playing field somewhat between the Arab states and Israel, the 1973 war can be seen in retrospect as the opening salvo in the Egyptian-

Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 21

Courtesy of Dwane Powell, News and Observer

Israeli peace process, ushering in some moderately successful mediation activities and hopes for a wider breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli dispute. On the international level, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 338 (document 23), which essentially reaffirmed Resolution 242 and called upon the parties to enter into negotiations.40 In a flurry of political maneuvering Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger orchestrated a conference in Geneva in December 1973, formally under joint U.S.-USSR stewardship, although the Americans were the moving force behind the event. The conference broke up in rancor after the first day’s opening speeches (document 24), but the very fact that delegations from Egypt, Jordan, and Israel had openly, if fleetingly, gathered together in the same room for the first time in twenty-five years constituted a notable psychological accomplishment. Syria and Lebanon did not attend.41 By cleverly recasting an essentially American mediation process in an international format, Kissinger created in Geneva a blueprint that became one of the preferred options promoted by other would-be Middle East peacemakers during the coming decades. The immediate usefulness of Geneva was its function as a legitimizing umbrella under which Kissinger subsequently embarked upon several marathon rounds of personal jet-setting diplomacy. In undertaking to mediate between Arabs and Is-

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raelis at the highest levels, Kissinger made the United States an indispensable actor in the drama while undercutting any Soviet role. Kissinger helped Israel and Egypt to negotiate two disengagement agreements, Sinai I (1974) and Sinai II (1975) (documents 25, 30). To achieve the Syrian-Israeli Disengagement Agreement (1974) (document 26), Kissinger logged more than 24,000 miles in thirty-four days, shuttling between Jerusalem and Damascus some fifteen times and visiting six other countries along the way.42 Against this background, our first case study (chapter 1) begins in late 1977, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat launched another surprise initiative, this time an offer to visit Jerusalem on a mission of peace. Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin immediately responded with an invitation. Sadat’s speech before the Israeli Knesset on 20 November 1977 and subsequent Israeli-Egyptian negotiations ultimately led to the 1978 Camp David accords mediated by U.S. president Jimmy Carter, culminating in the signing of an Israel-Egypt peace treaty in March 1979. Many hoped, at the time, that this treaty would be quickly followed by further agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, Jordan, and other Arab states. Subsequent chapters of this book examine those Arab-Israeli negotiation episodes conducted in the years following the Camp David breakthrough. Negotiation Patterns

An overview of the cumulative negotiating experience of Zionists/Israelis and Arabs between World War I and 1977 reveals several patterns that essentially constitute an operating manual for how to fail to achieve peace. Our hypothesis is that the more closely contemporary negotiations follow the old patterns, the less likely they are to succeed. Hopes for resolution of this conflict rest on deviations from these patterns in very specific directions, as suggested in the table at the end of the introduction. This book offers a framework for analyzing past and present peacemaking efforts, based on the seven areas of “diplomatic difficulty,” listed on p. 2, above. One of the purposes of the framework is to facilitate a meaningful comparison among different peacemaking episodes. By carefully considering the relevance of each of the seven elements in each episode, we can compare apples with apples in assessing negotiations from different historical contexts. As historians, we typically undertake exercises in “immediate history” with reluctance, aware of the difficulties in trying to compare events of fifty years ago against events which are still unfolding, the latter having no archival documentation and featuring politically active protagonists with axes to grind. One way to tackle assessments of contemporary peacemaking efforts is to situate them within the extended historical continuum of Arab-Israeli

Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 23

diplomacy. In so doing we can determine where they fall into the pattern of earlier failed diplomatic encounters, and where they deviate, perhaps positively, from the historical model. We can best appreciate these patterns by considering several familiar explanations for the lack of peace between Israelis and Arabs: •

•

•

•

•

•

The existence of a primordial and immutable clash between JewishZionist and Arab-Islamic civilizations and worldviews Zionist/Israeli failure since the 1880s to appreciate the legitimacy of Palestinian-Arab national sentiment and aspirations Arab failure since the 1880s to recognize the legitimacy of JewishZionist national sentiment and aspirations Third-party machinations and the pursuit of selfish interests that have undermined chances for Zionist-Arab reconciliation The lack of direct contact and resulting misunderstandings between Arabs and Zionists/Israelis The persistence of passionately held but genuinely irreconcilable national goals

While there is some merit in all these, the last explanation seems to us the most compelling on the basis of the historical record. Indeed, as the above-quoted remarks of David Ben-Gurion and Awni Abd al-Hadi illustrate, many leading Zionists and Palestinian Arabs themselves realized, long before 1948, the immensity of the gulf separating their minimum demands. If the parties recognized that their goals were essentially incompatible, why, then, have there been so many negotiation attempts? The answer requires an appreciation of how early Arabs and Zionists reinterpreted the standard definition of “negotiation” to suit their purposes. Negotiation commonly refers to a process by which actors in conflict engage in a process of making concessions to each other in order to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement. In the Arab-Israeli case, however, “the object of negotiations has seldom been the conclusion of a definitive peace treaty to end the conflict. The tactical usage of the negotiating process for other ends is perfectly consistent with the mutual recognition . . . of the basic incompatibility of the parties’ positions.” 43 In other words, it is not surprising that the many negotiations failed because a mutually satisfying peace was rarely their purpose in the first place. Futile Arab-Israeli diplomacy during the six decades prior to 1977 followed a pattern that lends itself to examination under the seven headings previously proposed: (1) previous negotiating experience, (2) purposes and motives, (3) timing, (4) status of negotiating partners, (5) third-party considerations, (6) proposed terms of agreement, and (7) psychological factors. Before beginning our case studies of post-1977

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diplomatic activity, let us briefly review the pattern that emerged under each of these headings.

Previous Negotiating Experience The record of multiple failed negotiations suggests that neither a lack of direct communication nor unfamiliarity with the enemy has been responsible for the persistent failure to produce an Arab-Zionist or an Arab-Israeli accord. The record also shows that, contrary to popular belief, merely increasing the amount of contact between the two sides does not necessarily increase the likelihood of negotiators actually achieving a working agreement. Many times direct negotiations only clarified for the protagonists just how far apart, even irreconcilable, their positions really were.44

Purposes and Motives Whatever the ostensible or stated purposes of a diplomatic overture, the parties in dispute have usually approached each other with a range of possible hidden motives. The historical pattern finds that the parties frequently came together when one or both wanted to forestall other, less appealing, initiatives. Most often they negotiated for appearances, trying to impress upon their constituents or upon a powerful third party the justness of their cause, the righteousness of their interpretation of events, and their flexibility and willingness to resolve matters, as opposed to the extremist, uncompromising posture of the other side. During the Mandate period, a mercenary instinct often brought Arabs to the table in search of Zionist resources, and Zionists often invited or entertained them out of a desire to win Arab hearts or weaken Arab opposition by playing off rivals against one another. In the historic pattern, Arabs and Zionists sought to invert von Clausewitz’s dictum by employing “diplomacy and negotiation . . . as an extension of their basic ‘war’ by other (nonviolent) means.”45

Timing This factor, closely related to motives (above), refers to both those circumstances that propel an actor to the negotiating table and those that enhance or obstruct his flexibility once there. Historically, Arabs and Israelis have come to the table not so much when conditions seemed ripe for peace as much as when “the status quo seemed more painful or dangerous than a potential negotiated compromise.”46 Like protagonists everywhere, Arabs and Zionists/Israelis proved reluctant to negotiate from positions of perceived weakness. Unfortunately, they similarly lacked the incentive to make concessions from positions of perceived strength, illustrating the vicious circle captured in the Middle Eastern adage: “When I am weak, how can I compromise? When I am strong, why should I?”47

Introduction: Historical Patterns╇ /╇ 25

Status of the Negotiators Successful negotiation requires leaders to identify one another correctly as politically capable of persuading their followers to accept whatever agreements they reach through the bargaining process.48 Too often, Arab-Zionist and Arab-Israeli peace efforts have suffered from a “Groucho Marxist” dilemma: “Anyone willing to negotiate with me can’t be worth negotiating with.” Arabs and Jews often refused to meet with one another’s hawks, while eschewing contact with the doves on the grounds that they were not truly representative or capable of delivering the goods. Many times one or both of the people at the table simply did not have adequate power to carry out his side of a proposed deal. A related problem has been asymmetry in the status of would-be negotiators. Official spokespeople on both sides often found themselves engaging in damage control necessitated by unofficial representatives from their own camps making overtures to leading personalities on the other side. The desire of these freelancers for personal gain or to do good often led them to propose concessions that the recognized leadership then repudiated, understandably increasing the level of confusion and mutual suspicion between the two communities. The intersection between Palestinian and inter-Arab politics created a special problem. Zionist diplomacy focused on non-Palestinian Arab leaders, hoping to find someone prepared to concede Palestine to the Jews in exchange for certain services to the Arab world as a whole, and able to influence Palestinian Arabs to go along with this arrangement. Such plans invariably fell flat when prominent Arab personalities outside Palestine proved unable to deliver Palestinian acquiescence.

Third-Party Considerations There have always been powerful external forces intimately involved in the core conflict between Zionists (later Israelis) and Palestinian Arabs, among them Ottoman Turkey, Great Britain, France, the Arab states, the Soviet Union, and the United States. It is a truism of Middle East politics that Palestinians, Zionists, and Israelis have more often sought to advance their interests by turning to outside powers than by engaging one another. But historically, the third party has been more of a hindrance than a help. It was, after all, the audience to which Arab, Zionist, and Israeli negotiators played for appearances, as noted above. Prior to 1948, both sides regularly petitioned the British to impose a solution wholly favorable to themselves. To the extent that His Majesty’s Government allowed Arabs or Jews to believe it might impose their maximum demands upon the other, neither side felt compelled to make the hard choices and difficult concessions needed for a negotiated settlement. When British policy wavered, Arab and Zionist leaders displayed even greater

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hesitancy, rather than risk getting out in front with a bold plan that did not enjoy the Mandatory’s support. Since 1948, the United States has replaced Britain in the process, while the U.S.USSR Cold War added a new third-party ingredient. Soviet and U.S. diplomatic, financial, and military support for rival regional proxies encouraged at least some of those parties to persist in unrealistic expectations of a one-sided victory, allowing them to cling to irreconcilable stances antithetical to the requirements of a negotiated compromise.49 In the post–Cold War era, other third parties such as the European Union, Iran, and Turkey have come to play more active roles in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Proposed Terms of Agreement The historical record shows that, during the course of negotiations, Arab, Zionist, and Israeli negotiators left themselves little room for any scaling back of their opening maximum demands. This refusal or inability to prioritize objectives and then compromise accordingly may reflect either the genuine incompatibility of the two sides’ most basic goals, or the fact that the negotiators’ aims were something other than a negotiated settlement. This zero-sum approach denied the opponent any benefit from an agreement, leading to recurrent instability marked by either constant deadlock or repeated requests for an imposed settlement. The two most contentious and precious cards that the Zionists pressured the British to play, the same ones Palestinian negotiators now demand of Israel, were control over immigration and the conditions for future independence. Prior to 1931, Arabs and Zionists clung stubbornly to their demands for a wholly Arab or Jewish Palestine, respectively. The 1930s witnessed deliberations as to possible compromises, although neither the main parties nor a flurry of well-meaning intermediaries could produce a plan able to bridge the chasm between them. Clever strategists devised a variety of complicated principles for Arab-Jewish coexistence in Palestine, such as cantonization, parity, bi-nationalism, limits on Jewish immigration, confederation, and partition. “The range of logical possibilities seems to have been fully probed and exhausted in Arab-Zionist negotiations prior to 1948,” and it is difficult to imagine a scenario for the post-1948 situation that had not been proposed, in some form, in the earlier period.50 The problem has not been a lack of imagination in devising creative solutions, but rather leaders’ lack of flexibility in considering departures from entrenched positions.

Psychological Factors If Arabs and Israelis are to negotiate lasting peace agreements, they must step out of their traditional diplomatic cultures and onto new, untried terrain. Among the

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new features of this territory must be “a new psychology and a new leadership factor which can alter the protagonists’ way of thinking about this conflict.”51 Underlining the centrality of these psychological factors, Mark Tessler has observed, “The most important obstacles to the achievement of peace are attitudes, perceptions, fears, and symbols, rather than the incompatibility of existential interests. . . . The key to genuine peace is not to be found in the realm of novel diplomatic formulas or innovative insights about the structure of a solution. . . . The most basic requirement for peace involves the intangibles of tolerance, empathy, trust or confidence.”52 Robert Jervis has written about “decision-makers’ tendency to overestimate the other side’s hostility”—understandable in a region wracked by war, but debilitating for the pursuit of peace.53 Barbara Kellerman suggests that “when there have been windows of opportunity for negotiation, the process has usually come to a halt in large part because of the inability of the different parties to imagine a reduction in the level of hostility.”54 Indeed, for much of a century, the rigors of maintaining national cohesiveness and morale during their protracted conflict encouraged the rise of Arab, Zionist, and Israeli leaders well suited to wage war, but not necessarily to pursue peace. In the Middle East, great leadership has usually been measured by the ability to eliminate defeatism and foster optimism even when the realities of a situation dictated otherwise. Leaders encouraged individual sacrifice for the national struggle by defining the conflict in existential terms, squelching dissent and promising their people ultimate, if not imminent, victory. This style of leadership creates what we call the “dynamics of deadlock.” This is a condition where the leader fails to prepare the people for the difficult choices and compromises required for negotiating with the enemy, as opposed to obliterating him. The first step in breaking out of it is a psychological transformation on the part of the political elites. Once the leaders decide that peace will serve their personal and national interests, the second step requires their justifying the new diplomatic approach to followers who have been conditioned to distrust and revile the enemy. Whole generations of psychologically traumatized Israelis and Arabs have grown up in fear and distrust of one another, tutored as to the virtue of their own cause and the evil intentions of the other side. The psychological element differs from the purposes and motives element in that it encompasses not only leaders’ personal movement from a war-waging to peace-pursuing mindset, but also leaders’ success in shepherding their constituencies along the new peace path. Any leader contemplating a peace option must consider the difficult tasks of building up a supportive political base and shaping a political environment that will support his diplomatic overtures. If negotiations succeed, a leader may find that legitimizing the deal in the eyes of his people is as difficult as negotiating it in the first place. The failure to persuade, overcome, or otherwise silence internal opponents

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can cost a leader his political power, whether by ballots or bullets. Legitimization requires strategies that effectively wean public opinion away from anticipating the next war to accepting normal relations with the former foe.55 All this is easier said than done. Experience shows that leaders caught up in the dynamics of deadlock, after years of rallying followers against the enemy, can find their hands tied by their own success. When circumstances change and a window of opportunity appears, they are often stymied in their efforts to persuade their skeptical countrymen that they should now abandon their fears and mistrust and contemplate negotiations and even accommodation with the enemy. The Arab-Israeli Peace Process: Case Studies, 1977–2010

Between 1948 and 1977, Arab-Israeli diplomacy consisted of a few reluctantly negotiated agreements, usually mediated by a third party and narrowly limited in scope. The armistice lines determined by the GAAs of 1949 were “not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary,”56 and for the reasons discussed above the GAAs never moved the parties beyond a cease-fire to peace. The 1956 war similarly ended without resolving the conflict, merely restoring the tense status quo. A decade later many of the same problems which had led to that war realigned to produce war in 1967. And although UN Security Council Resolution 242 is heralded as the granddaddy of all Arab-Israeli peacemaking since 1967, its ambiguity has always blunted its effectiveness. The first hints of a break in the bleak parade of limited agreements came in the wake of the 1973 war, with the successful negotiation of the Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreements in 1974 and 1975 (documents 25, 30). It was Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977, however, and the powerful speech he gave there, by turns demanding and generous, which finally made the prospect of Arab-Israeli peace seem possible. But other Arab parties did not follow Egypt’s path to peace with Israel, raising the unhappy prospect that perhaps Camp David was a unique response to specific Egyptian and Israeli circumstances not replicated, or replicable, elsewhere in the Arab-Israel conflict arena. In the decades since Sadat first set foot on the Israeli tarmac, the Middle East has witnessed wars, intifadas, political assassinations (including that of Sadat himself), invasions, the rise of religious extremism, horrific terrorism, multiple changes in leadership, the end of the Cold War, the rising influence of Iran, the fall of Iraq, the threat of nuclear proliferation in the region, the increasing influence of non-state actors like Hizballah and Hamas, and new domestic tensions within each country and community. This litany of turmoil and conflict is but one side (albeit the dominant side) of the double helix; running throughout have been concerted efforts to bridge dif-

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ferences and move toward peace. These volatile events produced much anxiety and uncertainty, but also realignments, policy changes, and potential new opportunities for peacemaking. To what extent have Arab and Israeli leaders taken advantage of the changing environment? To what extent have their attempts repeated the pre-1948 patterns of failure, and to what extent did they strike out in new diplomatic directions? The following chapters examine eight Arab-Israeli encounters since 1977, both diplomatic failures and successes, against the long legacy of counterproductive negotiating habits: • • • • • • • •

The Camp David peace process The Israel-Lebanon treaty of 1983 The Hussein-Peres London Document of 1987 The 1991 Madrid Conference and subsequent Washington talks The Israel-Jordan peace process The Syria-Israel peace process The Oslo peace process between Israel and the PLO The Palestinian-Israeli summits at Camp David and Taba, 2000–2001

An epilogue examines the record of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations since 2001, considers new possibilities in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and leaves readers with a framework and the background for assessing, on their own, new episodes in Arab-Israeli diplomacy.

FAILED VS. POTENTIALLY SUCCESSFUL NEGOTIATING APPROACHES

Historical Patterns (failure)

Possible Positive Changes (potential success)

Previous Experience Negotiating Together Negotiations build upon past positive encounters or transcend past negative experiences.

If the other elements incline toward success, lack of previous negotiating experience or even negative past experience will not necessarily derail a deal. But poor alignment of the other elements cannot be overcome by past positive negotiating experience.

Purposes and Motives for Entering into Negotiations The goal of striking a peace agreement is subordinate to other, ulterior motives for negotiating, such as impressing a third party (“public relations”), winning outside financial, military or political support, derailing another plan, or buying time.

Each party enters talks with a genuine desire to achieve a mutually satisfying resolution. Peace is reinforced by other self-interested purposes, such as improving diplomatic relations with third parties, winning financial or military aid, or interrupting another plan which the parties believe will have negative repercussions.

Timing Parties don’t want to negotiate from weakness or under the threat of violence and terror, but are also disinclined to make concessions when they are strong. Terror and violence disrupt ongoing diplomatic efforts. Elections and changes in leadership or competition between separate negotiating tracks cause negotiators to stall or mark time.

Both sides see greater benefits than costs in working now to resolve their conflict, rather than risk facing adverse or less favorable circumstances in the future. Weakness can force consideration of drastic peace initiatives never before contemplated; strength can allow for positive calculated risk-taking for peace.

Status of the Negotiators One or both leaders lack popular support and a sufficient power base to implement decisions. Asymmetry between negotiators often encourages the stronger party to dictate unpopular terms, forcing the weaker party into reluctantly accepting conditions it cannot subsequently deliver. Involvement of non-Palestinian Arabs in Palestinian issues complicates leaders’ abilities to follow through. A strategic or ideological refusal to recognize and engage the other side’s leaders leaves contacts and negotiations to marginal or unauthorized individuals or third parties; internal tensions in each camp between official spokesmen and unofficial negotiators add confusion to the negotiating process.

Leaders are firmly in power with a high degree of legitimacy and the requisite influence to deliver on their ends of a bargain and lead their constituencies into uncharted territory. Both side’s leaders recognize and engage in or authorize direct negotiations with the other.

FAILED VS. POTENTIALLY SUCCESSFUL NEGOTIATING APPROACHES (continued)

Historical Patterns (failure)

Possible Positive Changes (potential success)

Third-Party Involvement Third party enjoys greater trust from one side than from the other. Sympathy for one side’s maximalist demands discourages that party from making concessions. Mediator allows one or both parties to believe it will impose a lopsided solution. Lack of third party or “great power” attention and/or commitment makes both sides reluctant to take risks for peace.

Third party facilitates a process desired by both sides, enjoys the trust of each, stakes out a clear position potentially amenable to both sides, and judiciously employs carrots and sticks to move the parties along.

Terms of Agreement Each party considers the other side’s declared terms unacceptable. Parties put forth their own terms as non-negotiable, with minimal scaling back of demands during talks. Parties view the conflict as a zero-sum game and refuse to allow the other any benefit. No common ground exists, or maximum concessions still leave unbridgeable gaps and irreconcilable positions.

Parties are willing to consider a less-than-perfect mutually satisfying solution and abandon the zero-sum mentality, thereby allowing each side to achieve some of its most important goals.

Psychological Factors Leaders play or are hostage to their extremists and ultranationalists least likely to compromise. Repetition of combative slogans and images encourages worst fears and negative stereotyping of the other side. Leaders and followers reflect and reinforce fears, hatreds, and hostility vis-à-vis the other side. Leaders who desire to switch gears and pursue a diplomatic solution are unable to persuade their constituents to follow them.

Successful peacemakers are prepared to overcome opposition from their extremist elements and able to win the support of the population at large. Using new vocabulary and images, leaders persuade their publics that the other side can be trusted, that its intentions are honorable, and that compromise is not only possible but necessary to secure national interests. Leaders undertake public diplomacy aimed at winning over the other side’s population. Leaders assure constituents that if the other party fails to live up to its end of the bargain, violations of trust will be apparent before severe or irreversible damage occurs.

Part One The Arab-Israeli Peace Process Beginnings

Chapter 1 Hot Wars and a Cold Peace The Camp David Accords, 1977–1979

The 1977–1979 Camp David peace process is one of the best known and most written-about negotiation episodes between Arabs and Israelis. The name refers to the U.S. presidential retreat that was the site of intensive tripartite Israeli-Egyptian-American negotiations in September 1978,1 but actually encompasses several stages of a complex peace process that ultimately produced three separate agreements among the parties. Two were concluded in September 1978—“A Framework for Peace in the Middle East” and “A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel” (document 37)—and the third in March 1979—“The Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty” (document 39). The Camp David Accords2 are thus a “package deal” comprising these three agreements, each of which required a number of accompanying letters of understanding between Egypt and the United States as well as between Israel and the United States. The net result was the first peace treaty ever between Israel and an Arab state and a precedent against which all future Arab-Israeli negotiations would be measured. Previous Negotiating Experience

Although the Arab world’s official position toward the Jewish state since its inception was almost total ostracism, Egyptians and Israelis had engaged in intermittent contacts and negotiations dating from the end of World War II. Egypt and Israel, it will be recalled, had been the first antagonists of 1948 to sit down to direct bilateral negotiations with UN Acting Mediator Ralph Bunche and the first to conclude an armistice agreement to end the 1948–1949 fighting. During the years 1949–1951, Egyptian and Israeli delegations also shared many months of negative multilateral negotiating experiences while attending sterile peace conferences at Lausanne, Geneva, and Paris. At the same time, a fair amount of clandestine pre-negotiation maneuvering involving U.S. and British intermediaries took place between 1949 and

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1956, especially surrounding the aborted Operation Alpha, under which the U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office conspired to arrange secret peace negotiations between Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasser and Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion.3 Instead, Nasser flexed his anti-Western, anti-colonialist muscle, nationalizing the Suez Canal Company (which angered Britain and France), continuing material and political support for the Palestinian fedayeen operating against Israel, and closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. In October 1956 Great Britain, France, and Israel launched a coordinated attack against Egypt; the Europeans quickly withdrew under international pressure; Israel withdrew after a UN buffer force took up positions in the Sinai Peninsula and the waterways were reopened for Israeli shipping. In the spring of 1967, verbal sparring and belligerence among the Arab states, as well as between them and Israel, raised the specter of another Arab-Israeli war. In mid-May 1967, Nasser ordered the UN buffer force out of Sinai and again closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels. On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a preemptive attack against Egypt and in six days of fighting captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. Israeli defense minister (and later foreign minister) Moshe Dayan expected negotiations to follow, based on a return of Egyptian territory in exchange for Egyptian recognition of, and peace with, the Jewish state. But Dayan waited in vain for his phone call from Cairo. The Egyptians had no intention of suing for peace from their position of weakness after the 1967 defeat.4 Instead, Egypt launched a draining “War of Attrition” against the Israeli forces holding the eastern bank of the Suez Canal; Israel responded by bombing increasingly deep into Egyptian territory. This war ended only when the superpowers intervened to impose a cease-fire in August 1970. Anwar Sadat assumed the presidency upon Nasser’s death in 1970 and soon began combining traditional anti-Israel rhetoric with more subtle diplomatic overtures, most evident in 1972 when, making a play for U.S. affections, Sadat ejected thousands of Soviet advisers from Egypt and intimated that he was prepared to talk peace with Israel. Distracted by the Vietnam War and the growing Watergate scandal, however, the Nixon administration did not pick up on the cue. Kenneth Stein suggests that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger even considered Sadat’s surprise move, in Stein’s words, “a bit wacky” for not having been coordinated with the United States.5 Reverting to the military option, Egypt patched up its relations with the USSR, coordinated military plans with Syria, and surprised Israel in early October 1973 with a Syrian invasion aimed at retaking the Golan Heights and a dramatic Egyptian attack across Israeli lines on the east bank of the Suez Canal in an effort to recapture Sinai. Launched on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the initial assault caught Israel unprepared and the first few days saw Israeli troops

Hot Wars and a Cold Peace╇ /╇ 37

falling back along both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. Although the Israeli counteroffensive ultimately succeeded, Israel was deeply shaken by its initial losses. The Egyptians, on the other hand, felt that they had reclaimed their honor and could now face Israel in the diplomatic arena from a position of strength. The aftermath of the 1973 war thus left both sides more inclined to bargain.6 After two decades of recurring Egyptian-Israeli military battles, it was Kissinger, now President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, whose visits as intermediary in the wake of the 1973 war helped the parties negotiate two disengagement agreements, Sinai I (document 25) and Sinai II (document 30). Most commentators designate Kissinger’s 1973–1975 “shuttle diplomacy” as the direct antecedent that led to the U.S.-brokered peace between Egypt and Israel during the Carter administration.7 As Carter and his aides prepared their own Middle East peace probes in 1977, some observers wondered whether Egypt and Israel might be ready for a “Sinai III.” Purposes and Motives

Egypt’s purposes for engaging in negotiations at this time were deliberately oriented to wider national goals. Since taking office, Sadat had been working to eliminate popular frustration with the legacy of Nasser’s failed socialist experiment and the disappointing military alliance with the Soviet Union. Economic distress led to the cancellation of food subsidies, which precipitated widespread rioting in January 1977. With the rising prestige and economic power of the Gulf states during the 1970s—including their temporarily successful use of oil as a weapon against Israel’s Western allies during the 1973 war—Egypt’s aspirations to leadership of the Arab world were no longer as secure as they had once been. The warm relations that developed between Sadat and Kissinger during the latter’s frequent visits following the 1973 war offered a natural starting point for the Egyptian president’s efforts at seeking closer political and economic relations with the United States. Kissinger had reportedly advised the Egyptians that “the Soviet Union can give you arms, but [only] the United States can give you a just solution which will give you back your territories.”8 By 1977, the Egyptian leader was therefore primed to respond positively to Jimmy Carter’s stated intention to restart the Arab-Israeli peace process. Carter ran for president in 1976 on a foreign-policy platform that emphasized diplomacy over force and a moral imperative incumbent upon the United States to lead the search for peace in conflict-torn regions. He and Sadat held their first meeting in Washington in April 1977. Sadat intended to use these preliminary contacts with the Carter administration to align Egypt with the United States after breaking with the Soviets, to regain the Sinai from Israeli control, to settle his conflict with Is-

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rael in a way that would reassert Egypt’s leadership in the Arab world, and to relieve Egypt’s economic plight. These aims illustrate clearly the pre-1948 pattern in which would-be negotiators based their “peace” calculations on the desire to secure wider goals and impress third parties. The Egyptian delegation’s strategy paper on the eve of the Camp David summit explicitly stressed Egypt’s concern for impressing the Americans. Foreign Minister Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel recommended that Egypt’s strategic aims for the summit be “to expose the Israeli intransigence before the U.S. and before the world” and to show Egyptian flexibility “invariably in response to the American stand.”9 Sadat also put a novel spin on Arab regimes’ more common use of militant posturing vis-à-vis Israel as a means of establishing their credentials for pan-Arab leadership. By using the diplomatic option and the American card to obtain the return of occupied Egyptian lands, Sadat hoped to demonstrate the futility of traditional Arab belligerence and reassert Egyptian regional leadership in the face of the rival aspirations of Syria’s Hafez al-Asad, who backed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in rejecting the use of diplomacy to redress Arab grievances with Israel. On 1 October 1977, U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance and Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko issued a joint communiqué (document 32) calling for a new multilateral Arab-Israeli peace conference in Geneva, one facet of a broader peace initiative the Carter team was devising. But in a November 1977 address to the Egyptian parliament, Sadat stunned the Carter administration, and indeed the world, with the announcement that, in pursuit of peace, he would travel even to Jerusalem and address the Israeli Knesset. Since Sadat was “famous for the improvisations in his speeches,” however, the Egyptian parliamentarians and Arab foreign dignitaries before whom he was speaking did not immediately register the “momentous [diplomatic] bomb he had just exploded.”10 But Israel did, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin promptly extended an invitation. The most popular explanation for Sadat’s surprise decision to journey to Jerusalem in November 1977 is that he wished to avoid the U.S.-USSR proposed Geneva summit, having concluded that his bid for Sinai would get lost among unfruitful Syrian and Palestinian maneuvering at a multilateral conference. He was also probably reluctant to allow his still-smarting and possibly vindictive former Soviet ally an influential role. William Quandt emphasizes that Sadat did not object to a Geneva conference per se, but that he preferred it to be a ceremonial gathering to sign previously negotiated agreements. Carter’s vision of actual negotiations in Geneva and the constraints the Syrians could exercise there struck Sadat as “a straitjacket for his free-wheeling style of diplomacy.”11

Hot Wars and a Cold Peace╇ /╇ 39

“Enough is enough, Menachem. Get those settlements off Boardwalk.” © 1978 Dayton Daily News and United Features Syndicate. Courtesy of Grimmy, Inc. / Mike Peters.

In Israel, Begin was elected as part of a new right-wing government. Like the Labor Party that had governed the country since 1948, Begin’s Likud Party was dedicated to maintaining Israel’s regional military superiority and deterrence capability, optimizing Israel’s “special relationship” with the United States, working toward non-belligerency and peace with each of its Arab neighbors separately, and resolving the Palestinian issue short of recognizing the PLO or granting the Palestinians the right to statehood. Unlike their rivals in the Labor Party, however, Likud leaders maintained an ideological commitment to holding on to Judea and Samaria (their preferred biblical terms for the West Bank), captured from Jordan in the 1967 war, as parts of Israel’s historic patrimony. The Arabs demanded the immediate return of this territory to Arab sovereignty. The United States preferred a negotiated land-forpeace resolution of the West Bank controversy. In responding to U.S. and Egyptian overtures in 1977, Begin saw an opportunity to end the state of war with Egypt, thereby detaching the most populous and powerful Arab state from the pan-Arab military coalition. Another attraction, as with Egypt, was the chance to earn credit for statesmanship and cooperativeness in the eyes of the U.S. administration, in line with the historical pattern of playing to a powerful third party, while sidestepping the Palestinian issue as much as possible. Begin calculated that showing flexibility to Egypt in Sinai would relieve international pressure for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians on the West Bank.12

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In late December 1977, Begin armed himself with a twenty-six-point plan for limited Palestinian “self-rule” in “Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District” (document 35),13 hoping that this, together with the moves for peace with Egypt, would nominally satisfy international pressure for a solution to the Palestinian situation while allowing Israel to consolidate its hold over the West Bank through the continued development of Jewish settlements there. The Likud government’s position on the territories obviously conflicted sharply with that of Egypt and the United States. In the end, these differences were fudged rather than resolved at Camp David. An important incentive for Begin in welcoming Sadat’s personal mission to Jerusalem in November 1977 was his hope (soon fulfilled) that direct dealings would supersede U.S. and Soviet plans to reconvene the Geneva Conference. Like Egypt, Israel was suspicious of Soviet involvement, but also wary of Arabs uniting against it, worried about the American emphasis on a comprehensive solution and alarmed at the inclusion of “Palestinian rights” in the 1 October communiqué. Thus, the powers’ joint declaration, aborted in its intent, became a common catalyst that created one of those rare historic moments when two Middle Eastern leaders found the path of mutual recognition and direct negotiations preferable to all other available options.14 Timing

The Camp David peace process benefited from the convergence of the above conditions that allowed three relatively new leaders, Begin, Sadat, and Carter, to take risks toward a negotiated settlement. To differing degrees, all three had simultaneously come to believe that negotiations had a fair chance of succeeding, that the outcome would be an improvement over the status quo, and that the risks associated with potential failure would be manageable.15 An important difference, however, turned out to Begin’s advantage. While all three leaders found reasons for why the timing was attractive to enter into talks, only Sadat and Carter actually found it compelling to conclude them with positive results.16 Self-imposed deadlines created some of the timing constraints. Carter had already declared 1977 as the year for the resumption of the Geneva Conference, while Sadat pressed for some visible change in the Egyptian-Israeli status quo by early 1978, the nominal expiration date of the 1975 Sinai II disengagement agreement. Other timing factors included political and economic cycles in the United States and in the Middle East. As a first-term president, Carter had only a brief window of opportunity for foreign-policy risk-taking before midterm congressional elections in November 1978 would likely impose limits on his freedom to maneuver.17 Indeed, the negotiations that led to the third of the Camp David Accords in 1979

Hot Wars and a Cold Peace╇ /╇ 41

coincided with a period in which the president’s domestic standing was sagging, and thus Carter desperately sought a major foreign-policy success to boost his chances for reelection.18 For his part, Sadat needed to show quick and tangible progress on the Israel issue and tangible benefit from his rapprochement with the United States in the hope of overcoming growing domestic discontent, a deteriorating economic situation, and mounting regional criticism of his diplomatic initiative. In contrast, Begin was in an altogether different position, basking in the glow of negotiating one-on-one with Israel’s mightiest enemy, thereby satisfying the Jewish state’s longstanding hunger for acceptance and respect from the Arab world—regardless of the outcome of this round of negotiations. Status of the Negotiators

Unlike many of the earlier unsuccessful negotiation attempts involving marginal political figures, this initiative was undertaken by heads of state whose leadership within their respective camps was virtually unchallenged. By 1977 Sadat was in firm control in Egypt, able to outmaneuver, control, or replace (as needed) his prime minister, foreign minister, and other top-ranking officials so as to keep a pro-peace team around him throughout the negotiations. Sadat felt strong enough to cope with domestic dissent and foreign criticism. Largely unmoved by accusations of betraying the Arab world and abandoning the Palestinians, he pursued the peace process in defiance of a Syrian-led pan-Arab consensus against dealing with the enemy.19 At crucial moments during the difficult negotiations at Camp David and afterward, Begin demonstrated his personal power by overruling compromises proposed by Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Defense Minister Ezer Weizman. While previous governments in Israel “had refrained from offering concessions for fear of criticism” from people like Begin, the Likud government elected in July 1977 “embodied the right wing and possessed impeccable ultranationalist credentials.”20 Nevertheless, Begin’s peace policy encountered some opposition in the cabinet, the Knesset, and certain segments of the public; the skeptics distrusted Sadat’s sincerity and were loath to relinquish the Sinai buffer, the oil fields there, and the settlements and resort areas Israel had established in the peninsula since 1967. Although personally hurt by some party loyalists’ accusations of having sold out, Begin deflected the criticism and persevered in his pursuit of a Sinai-for-peace settlement.21 The distinction between Palestinian and non-Palestinian actors constituted the most problematic aspect of the status-of-negotiator factor. In this respect, the SadatBegin negotiations resembled the historical pattern by which Zionists and Israelis attempted to negotiate peace by circumventing the Palestinians through dealings with other leading Arabs. Despite the heightened sense of Palestinian consciousness

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that had developed since the Mandate period, despite the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 as a vehicle for Palestinian power and demands, and despite the salience of the Palestinian cause in public opinion throughout the Arab world, Sadat and Begin, each working according to his own distinct agenda, skirted the Palestinian issue with relative ease. Unlike previous negotiation attempts that crumbled because of the absence of a credible Palestinian negotiating partner, the Camp David process held firm because—the Palestinian issue notwithstanding—it produced satisfactory results in terms of each side’s immediate aims and those of their U.S. patron. Although Sadat and Carter had gone into negotiations with the intention of linking an Egyptian-Israeli treaty to a formula that would have obliged Israel to satisfy some Palestinian demands, Begin succeeded in watering down any linkage between Palestinian and Egyptian issues. In the face of Palestinian rejection and non-participation, Egyptian-Israeli talks about Palestinian autonomy, as called for in the Camp David Accords, quickly collapsed. The bilateral Egyptian-Israeli agreements, however, held. Given the relative weakness of the PLO and its allies, and the fact that peace with Israel satisfied Egypt’s aspirations to closer ties with the United States, increased American aid, and the return of Sinai, Arab rejectionists proved unable to persuade Egypt to disavow Camp David and powerless to reverse the first negotiated peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. Third-Party Considerations

Secret pre-negotiations in Morocco in September 1977 between Anwar Sadat’s personal envoy, Hasan Touhamy, and Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, preceded the Egyptian president’s surprise announcement that he would travel to Jerusalem.22 The Morocco meeting was kept from the Americans for fear of pressure to abandon bilateral Egyptian-Israeli approaches in favor of Carter’s preferred Geneva Conference. Sadat and Begin’s historic breakthrough succeeded in derailing the U.S. plan, but when open Egyptian-Israeli negotiations faltered due to personality differences and conflicting expectations as to what should happen next, both sides turned to the Americans to salvage their initiative. At Carter’s invitation, Egyptian, Israeli, and U.S. teams, personally led by Sadat, Begin, and Carter, spent twelve days sequestered at Camp David in September 1978 before producing the first agreements. A strong component in their success was the desire of both Israel and Egypt to please the United States in order to benefit from the familiar perks of a friendly alliance with a great power: loans and grants for economic development, arms purchases, and diplomatic support. As William Quandt has written: “The U.S. role became crucial because both Egypt and Israel wanted American involvement and hoped to win

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Washington to their point of view. Neither wanted the United States to be an entirely neutral intermediary. Neither expected the Americans to content themselves with the role of postman. Both hoped that the United States would advocate their views in their adversary’s capital and would be generous in rewarding any of their concessions made in the course of negotiations.”23 Egyptian and Israeli perspectives of the U.S. role fit the historical pattern in which Arab and Israeli protagonists negotiated with an eye toward persuading a third party to impose a solution wholly favorable to their own side. The pattern also holds for negotiations in which Arabs or Israelis sometimes requested a third party to impose terms that they could not appear to favor voluntarily before domestic public opinion. In this model, the parties were sometimes prepared to accept (however reluctantly) a proposal coming from a powerful outsider, which would have been unacceptable had it emanated from their Middle Eastern foe. Sadat enthusiastically adopted these tactics as part of his broader strategy of collusion with Carter against Begin.24 But Egyptians and Israelis differed on the exact nature of the U.S. involvement they were seeking. The conflicting preferences of the two parties were, in fact, continuations of a historic pattern discernable between 1948 and 1956. Sadat and his advisers were keen on seeing the United States submit its own proposals and participate fully in the negotiations. One of the aims of the Egyptian delegation at Camp David was “to force the U.S. to modify its role from that of mediator to that of full partner” on the grounds that “the formally declared American positions were closer to the Egyptian than the Israeli.”25 The Israelis, recognizing this closeness, worked against the imposition of any externally devised formula. Both Begin and Weizman (but not Dayan) displayed extreme caution by avoiding moves that might expand the U.S. role beyond that of helping to bring the parties to the table.26 While some of the attitudes the Middle Eastern protagonists displayed toward great-power mediation represent a repetition of the pre-1977 patterns of futile diplomacy, the United States deviated from the historically unhelpful third-party role. Unlike in the 1950s and 1960s, during the 1970s the United States enjoyed the unique position of being both sought after “as the only party that could bring the Arabs and Israelis together.”27 Its conduct during the 1973 war and mediation of the disengagement agreements afterward had gained Israel’s trust by means of a memorandum of understanding regarding conditions for recognition of the PLO and convening of any future international conferences (document 31), while demonstrating to the satisfaction of some Arab regimes that it was able to meet Arab needs as well. This element contributed to the success of Camp David, particularly since Sadat and Begin never overcame their mutual mistrust. Yet the parties’ faith in the Americans was fragile and could not be taken for granted. Israelis worried about having their interests subverted by a United States vulnerable to disruptions in Arab oil supplies.

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Egyptians and Arabs harbored doubts about the ability of Carter himself and of the American foreign-policymaking machinery to withstand domestic pro-Israeli pressures and electoral politics. Despite these frailties, the Carter administration demonstrated unusual skill in sidestepping their respective fears without alienating Egyptian or Israeli leaders. Even more important was the unprecedented level of personal activism by Carter, who was supported by a skilled team that invested heavily in elaborate pre-negotiation background preparations. Because the U.S. president proved unusually prepared to risk failure and the resulting political backlash, he saved the frequently faltering negotiations from complete breakdown on more than one occasion. He was similarly unafraid to wave the proverbial stick at times, reminding each guest in turn that he personally, not to mention the U.S. Congress, which had to approve foreign aid allotments, would have trouble maintaining a close relationship with the more uncooperative party should efforts fail. The Carter administration also offered the proverbial carrots in the form of its willingness to back up its diplomatic encouragement with security guarantees and financial incentives, taking the position that the United States was more than a simple intermediary, but rather a party with “a direct, substantial interest in a permanent peace in the Middle East.”28 American bilateral commitments to Egypt and to Israel were embodied in side letters and memoranda of understanding, which played no small part in overcoming potential deadlock. The Nixon/Kissinger administration was the first to inject incentives into the peace process by linking Middle East foreign aide to recipients’ behavior, defending huge monetary outlays as “an investment in peace.”29 Carter originally envisioned a comprehensive regional resolution bolstered by international economic support; during the negotiations at Camp David, however, he reluctantly adopted the paradigm of using U.S. financial resources to offer Egypt and Israel guarantees to seal their decision to compromise for peace. In the end, the price of peace between Egypt and Israel came to a combined $5 billion per year in U.S. foreign aid. Some observers believe Carter established an unfortunate precedent by rewarding the peacemakers so handsomely with U.S. largesse, while others crunch the numbers and have declared that an expensive peace is still more economically favorable to U.S. interests than the risk of another Egyptian-Israeli war.30 Proposed Terms of Agreement

A comparison of the opening bargaining stances of the United States, Egypt, and Israel with the final terms of the Camp David Accords suggests that, unlike many instances of failed Arab-Israeli negotiation attempts, the 1977–1979 negotiators did

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display some tactical flexibility. The bottom line appears to have been Egypt’s insistence on the return of all of Sinai to its full sovereign control and Israel’s equally firm insistence on maintaining its full claim to Judea and Samaria. Protracted bargaining successfully narrowed other gaps between the parties. Strategies were revised during the negotiating process, and all parties—though Sadat and Carter more so than Begin—backed down from most of their opening bargaining positions. The process of downscaling original demands for the sake of an accord is never mathematically even or symmetrical among negotiating parties. In this case the final agreement bore little resemblance to Sadat’s and Carter’s initial goals of linking developments on the Israeli-Egyptian front with progress on self-determination for the Palestinians. Here Menachem Begin achieved more of his original negotiating aims because he felt less pressure than his Egyptian and U.S. counterparts to descend from the Camp David summit with an agreement in hand. Indeed, once Sadat had played his ace card with a de facto recognition of Israel nine months earlier, the Egyptian president was under great pressure to justify his overture by bringing home a substantial reward. The Israeli prime minister was under no such constraint and could have returned from Camp David without an agreement, justifying his position at home as a defense of Israel’s vital security interests in the face of unacceptably dangerous proposals cooked up between Sadat and Carter.31 The same imbalance characterized the pressures on the three parties as they struggled over the final terms of the peace treaty between October 1978 and March 1979.32 As the first official treaty of peace between Israel and an Arab state, the March 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty is remarkable more for its very existence than for its content. While the Arab countries responded with dismay, euphoria gripped the West; the New York Times ran a bold, three-tiered headline quoting the agreement in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.33 Applying UN Resolution 242’s “land for peace” formula, Israel committed itself to a phased withdrawal from all of the Sinai Peninsula in return for a parallel, phased normalization of relations with Egypt leading to an exchange of ambassadors. Despite Begin’s efforts to retain Israeli settlements around Yamit and two Sinai airbases, the final agreement included provisions for their evacuation, with a U.S. commitment to finance the replacement of the latter on the Israeli side of the frontier. Israel held out for Egyptian and U.S. pledges to guarantee it continued access to oil supplies to compensate for an anticipated double loss: the retreat from the Abu Rodeis oil fields in Sinai and the end of petroleum purchases from Iran in the wake of the Shah’s downfall earlier that year. There were several important issues that simply defied resolution. The Carter team gradually retreated from its ambitious hopes for a comprehensive solution and reverted, consciously or unconsciously, to Henry Kissinger’s gradualist approach. This included the techniques of deferring difficult decisions to a later date (e.g., the

© 1979 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.

status of Jerusalem), agreeing to disagree, and ambiguous verbal formulations designed to give each party the impression that its requirements were being met.34 The Americans were especially concerned to provide Sadat with a fig leaf—ultimately inadequate—for what turned out to be an embarrassingly bilateral agreement and a separate peace, one that was difficult to justify before pan-Arab opinion.35 Camp

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David’s unresolved issues (Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees’ right of return, Jewish settlements, and Palestinian independence among them) proved to be the same issues which would ultimately derail major Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Satisfying narrow Egyptian and Israeli needs, however, the Egyptian-Israeli peace has persevered. The joys of the Egypt-Israel success story were diminished by the shortcomings of Camp David on two other fronts: the failure to expand the framework to include other Arab states, and the continuing absence of any Palestinian participation. Moderate, pro-U.S. states like Jordan and Saudi Arabia were dissuaded from following in Sadat’s footsteps by the outrage and ostracism Egypt suffered in the wake of what many Arabs perceived as an inadequate and humiliating agreement. It did not help that the confidence-building gesture of an Israeli freeze on the building of new settlements in the West Bank turned out to be much shorter-lived than either Sadat or Carter had understood from Begin’s commitment.36 And since neither the Americans nor the Egyptians had succeeded in coaxing the Israelis to declare their readiness to withdraw on all fronts in exchange for peace, neither the Jordanians nor the Syrians saw any incentive to become involved in follow-up negotiations. In light of the Hashemite kingdom’s steadfast rejection of the Camp David initiative, it initially seems peculiar that the architects envisioned such an important role for Jordan, which is cited by name fifteen times in the accords and was the recipient of a special U.S. questions-and-answers document about the meaning of the agreement.37 This apparent divorce from reality can be explained by the United States’ policy of providing a fig leaf for Sadat, by Sadat’s steadfast conviction that the other Arab states would have no choice but to follow him, and by Begin’s preference for dealing with Jordan on Palestinian matters. Palestinians correctly perceived the disinclination of the Camp David signatories to deal with the PLO or to allow for the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Even advocates of self-determination for the Palestinians were disappointed with the much weaker permutations of the term employed in the accords. This reflected Begin’s determination to downscale or “sterilize” any autonomy deal so that it could “never usher in a Palestinian state.”38 And yet, as Ilan Peleg notes, Begin was coerced into signing a “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” that contained (for him) some unpalatable phrases: the Palestinians’ “legitimate rights and just requirements,” “full” autonomy, and the Palestinian problem to be dealt with “in all its aspects.”39 Camp David supporters argued that by fully exploiting the agreement’s autonomy provisions, the Palestinians might nevertheless vastly improve their situation on the ground and perhaps build momentum for future claims.40 Looking back, they emphasize that in 1977 the West Bank and Gaza had relatively few Jewish settlements,

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with Jewish populations of only some 5,000 in the West Bank and 800 in Gaza, as compared to 115,000 and 4,000, respectively, when the PLO and Israel finally began direct negotiations in 1993.41 With their leadership clearly excluded from the process and no guarantee of post-autonomy independence, however, Palestinians remained overwhelmingly opposed to what they perceived as an Egyptian-Israeli deal that shortchanged their just requirements.42 Psychological Factors

The breaking down of psychological barriers was a crucial element both in paving the way to Camp David and in producing an agreement. The respectable showing by the Egyptian military in October 1973 removed the stigma of the 1967 humiliation, allowing Sadat to pursue a negotiated solution without appearing to give in to dictated terms of surrender. If Sadat had hinted at his readiness to consider the diplomatic route as early as 1971, in 1977 he made that crystal clear. Begin came around to the idea in response to the new opportunities presented by Sadat’s unmistakable signals. Once convinced of the need to change the prevailing dynamics of deadlock, the leaders’ task was to persuade their people to make the same psychological conversion. As one scholar has pointed out, people respond better to “the gestures and speeches that make up the drama of the state” than to intellectual arguments, “factors,” or “moral codes.”43 The dramatic fact of the Egyptian president’s presence in Jerusalem was a powerful gesture that did much to break down what Harold Saunders, echoing Sadat, has called the “other walls.”44 Sadat’s visit and especially his 20 November 1977 speech to the Israeli Knesset—both widely televised—played a crucial role in convincing Israelis of a new reality. Along with a largely unwelcome repetition of Egypt’s call for Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territories, Sadat’s speech to the Knesset contained, more significantly, words that recognized the humanity of his Israeli adversaries. Israelis listened in amazement to the Egyptian president declaring, “You want to live with us in this part of the world. In all sincerity, I tell you, we welcome you among us, with full security and safety” (document 33). His language, coupled with several emotional exchanges with leading Israeli personalities, touched a chord within the Israeli people and government. Defense Minister Weizman considered Sadat’s appearance in the Knesset perhaps “the most important event of its kind in modern history . . . the president of an enemy country, who had not acknowledged Israel’s right to exist, saluting our national anthem and addressing our government! The excitement swept everyone in its path.”45 Begin’s speech followed Sadat’s and took a slightly more defensive tone, although Begin also eloquently expressed the desire for a genuine peace between Israel and Egypt and, indeed, between Israel and each of its Arab neighbors (document 34). Although he

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invited the presidents of Syria and Lebanon and King Hussein of Jordan to come to Jerusalem for peace talks and declared his readiness to travel to their capitals, no more surprise visits or invitations ensued.46 Caught off guard by their president’s sudden about-face, Egyptians struggled to assimilate the new interpretation of the old conflict. The public display of huge Cairo crowds proclaiming Sadat a “hero of peace” concealed deep divisions over the substance of his achievement.47 Begin offered no dramatic appeal to the Egyptian public equivalent to Sadat’s Knesset speech. But tired of war and anxious to enjoy the economic benefits that Sadat promised would accrue from peace with Israel and its accompanying American largesse, many people were prepared to give Sadat’s new gambit a chance. U.S. foreign aid to Egypt soared after Camp David, but the treaty’s failure to produce a quick trickle-down economic bonus for ordinary Egyptians provoked disenchantment with their president’s new policy. Also disconcerting and painful for Egyptians was the Arab states’ boycott of all things Egyptian and Egypt’s suspension from the Arab League, of which it had always been a leader. While he was able to pilot his peace project over many hurdles by ignoring regional dissent and suppressing internal criticism, on 6 October 1981 Sadat fell victim to assassins dedicated to an Islamic vision of Egypt, militantly opposed to westernization, Americanization, and peace with Israel.48 His successor, Hosni Mubarak, affirmed Egypt’s continued commitment to its Camp David obligations, but adopted a much more cautious pace and a lower profile. In April 1982, Israel handed over the last segment of the Sinai to Egyptian control and the two countries began a new and uncharted era of proper political, economic, and security relations.49 The Post-Treaty Era

Although his approach contributed mightily to the coldness of the Egyptian-Israeli peace, Mubarak kept Sadat’s promises, did not “buckle to Arab criticism, sanctions or ostracism,”50 and, by 1989, with Egypt’s reinstatement in the Arab League, had put Egypt back on the path to reclaiming the mantle of Arab leadership, as Sadat foresaw, without renouncing its peace with Israel. Thanks to Camp David, Egypt continues to be the second largest recipient (after Israel) of U.S. foreign aid, investing much of the tens of billions of dollars received in national infrastructure and public works projects. The December 2004 U.S.-brokered Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) agreement between Egypt and Israel boosted the volume of trade not just between the two but, more significantly for Egypt, set off something of a trade boom between it and the United States.51 Egypt has also played an important role as an intermediary between other Arab states and Israel, among warring Palestinian factions, and between Palestinians and

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Israel, contributing to the larger Arab-Israeli peace process, also as Sadat envisioned. Sadat did not live to see this partial vindication (twenty-five years later, only Jordan had formally followed in Egypt’s footsteps by signing its own peace treaty with Israel, in 1994), but Egypt has had its cake and eaten it, too; Mubarak still struggles against domestic liberal and Islamic fundamentalist opposition, but Egypt has regained its position in the Arab world, in which its peace with Israel is now an accepted fact of life, and for which it receives few calls, domestic or within the wider Arab world, to abrogate, even during periods of intense Arab-Israeli conflict.52 Mubarak’s policy is one of dualism, requiring that his government preserve a delicate balance: between advancing Egypt’s national interest as vested in bilateral relations with Israel and maintaining its leadership obligation to express the anti-Israel sentiment prevalent on the Egyptian and pan-Arab streets.53 Indeed, the frosty Egyptian-Israeli peace has withstood the stresses of many severe Arab-Israeli crises in the years since 1979.54 Egypt and Israel have used the diplomatic channels between them to deliver harsh rebukes at times, and several times Egypt withdrew its ambassador from Israel for long periods. Indeed, with an Egyptian parliamentary delegation slated to attend a Knesset celebration of the twentyfifth anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Mubarak canceled the visit in late March 2004 upon Israel’s assassination of Palestinian Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yasin earlier that month. Far from signaling the frailty of Camp David, however, its proponents argue that these are exactly the ways countries at peace normally register their displeasure with one another’s actions from time to time. Normal, however, is the operative word. Egypt and Israel may be at peace, but they have not achieved normalization. Normalization in this context refers to the establishment of international standards of interaction in areas which include diplomacy, tourism, economics, business, communications, and people-to-people relations. Egyptians may accept the premise that economic and military factors require peace with Israel, but most still see normalization as a gift to the Israelis, which they choose to withhold as leverage for forcing Israeli compliance in the political arena, especially regarding the Palestinian struggle. This reflects a lingering sensitivity over the separate peace Camp David turned out to be.55 Whereas “the United States and Israel have promoted [Israeli-Arab economic and other] cooperation in part to advance normalization; Arab states have resisted cooperation in large part to avoid normalization.”56 Israeli ambassador Itamar Rabinovich confirms that the long Arab debate about “peace” with Israel “has been telescoped into a debate about ‘normalization.’ . . . Arabs have accepted the word ‘peace’ and the notion of signing a peace treaty and diplomatic relations with Israel . . . but all their remaining opposition and misgivings that were formerly invested in the word ‘peace’ are now transferred to ‘normalization.’”57 For all its despairing of Egypt’s perpetuation of a

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“cold peace,” however, some observe that Israel also “does very little” toward understanding and engaging Egyptians.58 One of the most hopeful lessons to emerge from the Camp David experience is the encouraging indication that even deeply held animosity is not impervious to change, as demonstrated by the resounding speed and joy with which Israelis embraced their former enemy. Sadat’s memoirs record the Egyptian leader’s delighted appreciation of the broad public support his initiative received in Cairo and in Jerusalem, even if his estimation of the latter proved more accurate than of the former.59 Yet the move from war to peace and normalization is a slow and shaky process, involving the implementation of painful concessions, the healing of psychological wounds, and the reversing of negative stereotypes. Genuine reconciliation between the Egyptian and Israeli peoples lags far behind the proper diplomatic formalities established between the Egyptian and Israeli governments. Camp David is a success in that Egypt and Israel remain at peace, but the Egyptian and Israeli people still hold one another at arm’s length. It will take generations for average Egyptians and Israelis to overcome psychological barriers and what Raymond Cohen has termed their ingrained “cultural incompatibility” before an authentic and warm peace is within reach.60 In the meantime, however, the gap between the government’s strategic commitment to peace with Israel and anti-treaty sentiment on the Egyptian street is cause for concern. Some scholars even worry that Egypt’s extraordinary modernization of its military since Camp David, largely with American arms and weapons systems, means that in the hands of Mubarak’s unknown successor—or Islamist opponents—the post–peace treaty era may become “one in which a cold peace may just become a cold war.”61 A cold peace is undoubtedly better than a war, hot or cold, but the chilly nature of Egyptian-Israeli relations some three decades after Camp David demonstrates that negotiating and signing a peace treaty are not sufficient in themselves to bring about a definitive resolution to international hostility.

Chapter 2 Mission Impossible The 1983 Israel-Lebanon Agreement

The Israel-Lebanon Agreement of 17 May 1983 (document 44) is what we might call a perfect failure. The negotiations leading to this agreement involved virtually all the characteristics of the early pattern of unsuccessful Arab-Zionist encounters. The presence of so many elements that permitted negotiations to persist for the wrong reasons—that is, those other than for actually making peace—allowed these talks to progress all the way through ratification of a formal agreement, which then failed entirely. The conception and collapse of the 17 May Agreement stem from the profound weakness of the Lebanese state. Carved out of the “Greater Syria” region of the Ottoman Empire by the European powers at the end of the First World War, the boundaries of modern Lebanon caught within it a population comprising many different sectarian and religious communities, primarily Christians (Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Melkite Greek Catholics), Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, and Druze. A civil war between the Maronites and Druze in the 1860s provoked French intervention on behalf of their fellow Christians; under French aegis again during the period of the French Mandate over Lebanon (1920–1943), Christians, particularly Maronites, enjoyed special power and privilege. Lebanon declared independence in 1943 and its confessional system of representative government, reinforced by the unwritten “National Pact” of that same year, called for institutional power sharing among the various sects by a fixed ratio of Christians to Muslims in the parliament (to the Christians’ advantage) and the distribution of high office by sect, with the president always a Maronite. For a while, the combination of a weak central government and the cooperation of the power brokers of Lebanon’s many sects brought prosperity and stability to the country. Over time, however, the Muslim portion of the population outstripped the Christian, while the Shi’a overtook the Sunni. As their numbers declined, the Christians’

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residual political power became increasingly disproportionate. In 1970 the largely Sunni leadership and fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fled Jordan for Lebanon, already the reluctant home to some 300,000 Palestinian refugees, tipping the precarious demographic and political balance among the ever more disaffected Lebanese groups. In 1975 Lebanon plunged into a brutal civil war. With its citizens continuing to self-identify with their clans or religious communities and lacking a common “Lebanese” identity, Lebanon dissolved into a web of warring sects, each with its own militia, all seeking outside backing in their fights with one another, drawing in the Syrians in 1976 and the Israelis, briefly, in 1978. During infrequent lulls in the fighting, factions within one group sometimes battled one another for communal supremacy. It was into this ferocious maelstrom, a veritable “vortex of the feuds and dissension of a ruinously riven society,”1 that Israel strode in June 1982. The 17 May Agreement came in the wake of the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Operation “Peace for the Galilee” aimed to destroy the PLO, thereby securing Israel’s northern border from attacks by PLO guerrillas based in Lebanon. Secondary goals were to drive the Syrians out of Lebanon (thereby reducing Syrian regional influence) and to win Israel a peace treaty with a newly “liberated” Lebanon, its second with an Arab country. The campaign’s supporters also believed that the elimination of the PLO, whose leadership operated freely in Beirut and whose fighters used southern Lebanon as a training and staging ground,2 would deal a mortal blow to Palestinian morale and thus Palestinian resistance to continued Israeli control of the West Bank.3 The invasion made the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) yet another combatant in the Lebanese civil war, further complicating an already labyrinthine situation. Nevertheless, after repeated delays and false starts, Israel and Lebanon entered into negotiations on 28 December 1982, ostensibly seeking border security, peace, and the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanese territory. Previous Negotiating Experience

Israelis and Lebanese came together in the early 1980s with a considerable wealth of experience interacting and negotiating with one another. During the 1930s and 1940s Jewish settlements in northern Palestine enjoyed good neighborly relations with Christian and Muslim villages across the border in Lebanon. The decades before Israel’s birth in 1948 also witnessed close Lebanese-Zionist political discussions, particularly between the Maronites and the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Periodic attempts were made to achieve tactical alliances based upon the similar minority positions of Palestinian Jews and Lebanese Christians and their shared fears of a perceived common Muslim enemy.4 Within the matrix of communal-religious-

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sectarian rivalries, increasingly desperate Maronite bids to ward off challenges to their political predominance led to closer relations with the Zionists in Palestine. In 1946 a formal treaty was concluded between the politically active Lebanese Maronite Church and the Jewish Agency. Like the 17 May Agreement drawn up thirty-seven years later, this was a remarkable document: meticulously negotiated, signed, accepted by the respective leaderships, but utterly inoperative; once word of the treaty leaked out, its existence was adamantly disavowed by the Lebanese side. The Zionists chalked up this unhappy outcome to Palestinian and Syrian pressure on their would-be Lebanese friends.5 In truth, however, most Lebanese sided with their Arab brethren in Palestine. Lebanon entered the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948–1949, but its nominal participation and the generally smooth negotiation of the Israeli-Lebanese armistice afterward reinforced pre-state Zionist assumptions that grounds for a mutually acceptable bargain with Lebanon existed. In fact, the negotiation of the armistice (document 12) had been fairly painless, and in alternating negotiating sessions between Ras al-Nakoura and Rosh Hanikra, on the Lebanese and Israeli sides of the border, respectively, these 1949 talks established the precedent for the 1983 meetings, which similarly alternated between Khalde, Lebanon, and Kiryat Shemona and Netanya in Israel. The Israel-Lebanon Mixed Armistice Commission (ILMAC), set up in 1949 to monitor and remedy border violations, functioned effectively and afforded Lebanese and Israeli officials a regular point of contact until 1967. In sitting down face-to-face in 1983, Lebanese and Israelis further replicated the 1949 pattern, in which they had negotiated directly with one another, often bypassing the UN mediator by addressing one another in Arabic.6 Contacts between Israel and different Lebanese groups after 1948 were minimal, until the 1975 civil war in Lebanon sent the Christian militias in search of external allies.7 In 1976 a mutinous Christian army major, Sa’ad Haddad, declared south Lebanon “Free Lebanon,” and with aid and encouragement from Israel led a band of local Maronites and Shi’a dedicated to keeping the PLO out of the immediate border region. In response to an attack by Lebanese-based terrorists on an Israeli civilian bus traveling between Haifa and Tel Aviv in March 1978, Israeli troops invaded Lebanon to push PLO forces north of the Litani River, creating a ten-kilometer-wide cordon sanitaire along the length of the Israeli-Lebanese border. Haddad’s troops were only marginally helpful during “Operation Litani,” but Israel continued to back them as the preferred alternative to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which took up positions after the Israeli withdrawal that June.8 The militarily more powerful Phalange approached Israel as well. The Phalange was an ultranationalist Maronite militia founded by Pierre Gemayel in the 1930s which, during the 1970s and 1980s, emerged as the leading opponent of the PLO in Lebanon.9 With an inter-

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est in seeing the Maronites take on the PLO in Lebanon, Israel responded to the Phalange overtures by establishing close clandestine contacts with the Gemayels and the other leading Christian families. By 1982, the Maronite-Israeli relationship was an open secret, with Maronite militiamen training in Israel and high-level Israeli and Maronite leaders making regular reciprocal visits to one another’s homes and headquarters.10 Lack of familiarity was thus not a factor accounting for the ultimate failure of the 1983 negotiations to produce a lasting agreement. Purposes and Motives

Israel undertook the 1982 operation in collaboration with Bashir Gemayel, Pierre’s son and the charismatic young scion of the Gemayel family. Bashir headed the Lebanese Forces, a military coalition of various Christian militias, including the Phalange. Israel entered into an alliance with Gemayel under the (mistaken) impression that, once installed as president of a PLO- and Syria-free Lebanon, he would commit his country to an open peace with the Jewish state. Other Israeli purposes and motives for entering into post-invasion negotiations with Lebanon evolved over time. Initially, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin set out to win far-reaching political, military, and economic concessions, first from Bashir and then from his brother and successor, Amin Gemayel.11 Their primary goal was an open and full-fledged treaty of peace between Israel and a newly reconstituted (with the help of the IDF) pro-Israeli Lebanese government. This treaty would assuage Israeli security concerns regarding the PLO and the northern border with Lebanon by allowing for Israeli access, patrols, overflights, early warning stations, and other surveillance facilities in southern Lebanon. Israel’s freedom of action in southern Lebanon, coupled with a Lebanese commitment to thwart anti-Israel activity in its territory, would serve Israeli military interests by restricting Syrian as well as PLO movement in Lebanon. Sharon and Begin aimed for an eventual Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, concomitant with a similar Israeli pullout. Another of Israel’s objectives was to see its longtime friend, the renegade Major Sa’ad Haddad, rewarded with a high position in Gemayel’s new government, possibly that of defense minister, and his south Lebanon militiamen incorporated into the Lebanese Army. That Begin believed he could manipulate the composition of Gemayel’s cabinet and impose upon the weak new president a controversial majorgone-AWOL as minister of defense speaks to the breadth, depth, and arrogance of Israeli plans for Lebanon. The purpose in entering into negotiations may have been peace, but this was to have been a peace dictated to the Lebanese rather than one negotiated with them. The Begin-Sharon team also expected its preferred arrangement

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with Lebanon to create economic benefits for Israel, by opening new markets for Israeli products and produce. This, in fact, happened briefly in the first heady weeks after the invasion, while a good many Lebanese were still prepared to view the IDF as their liberator from PLO (and Syrian) domination.12 Doubts about Bashir Gemayel’s ability to fulfill Israel’s dreams arose during the war when he refused to commit his troops to operations earlier agreed upon with the IDF.13 His assassination on 14 September 1982, probably by Syrian operatives, further jeopardized the Israeli-desired outcome when his brother Amin, more cautious and even less enthusiastic about a Lebanese-Israeli relationship, assumed the presidency. As both the fighting and the negotiating dragged on, it became clear that the chances for an active and open peace with Lebanon were slim to none. Nevertheless, there were other strong Israeli motives for continuing the negotiations. Among these were hopes of delaying attempts to implement the Reagan Plan of 1 September 1982 (discussed below under Timing) and, paradoxically, the desire to appear flexible and forthcoming in American eyes, thus repairing U.S.-Israeli relations which were then suffering from severe American unhappiness at having been dragged into Lebanon by Israel in the first place (see Third Party Involvement, below).14 Lebanese purposes and motives evolved similarly. In the context of the civil war, some Lebanese Christians looked to Israel for backing against common Muslim, Syrian, and Palestinian enemies. Bashir Gemayel believed he had a “unique ability to reconcile a pro-Israel orientation with authoritative national leadership.”15 He had planned to use Israeli (and American) resources and assistance in consolidating his control over war-torn Lebanon and driving the Syrians and the PLO from the country. Ilan Peleg writes that Bashir was hoping for a mass exodus of Palestinian refugees as well, a goal Begin encouraged.16 Following Bashir’s murder, Amin, although lacking his late brother’s charisma and political strength, devised a similarly ambitious agenda, which included the following: • • • • •

Securing multi-sectarian support for his presidency Ending the violence wracking the country Assimilating the fractious confessional groups into a united Lebanon Negotiating the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanese territory Presiding over the physical and political reconstruction of the nation

Another aim was to diffuse the Israeli-Palestinian spillover into Lebanon, which had contributed so much to Lebanon’s own inter-confessional tensions and tragedies. For Amin, even more than for Bashir, a peace treaty with Israel was a bitter pill to force down the throat of a skeptical nation, but one that he thought the nation could swallow if it meant an influx of U.S. dollars, a speedy Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, and possibly a Syrian pullback as well.17

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Courtesy of Emad Hajjaj, Al-Ghad

Bashir Gemayel’s people, especially, exhibited an initial temptation to indulge in a classic “exchange of services” with the Israelis, trading peace for services such as Israeli influence with the Americans and the sharing of intelligence. This faded in the face of stiff Arab opposition. Yet even as the negotiations foundered and the chances for a complete Israeli withdrawal dimmed, other Lebanese concerns—primarily the need to win domestic legitimacy and American backing for Amin’s shaky administration, and particularly American economic aid with which the government hoped to rebuild the shattered nation—dictated a continuation of the talks. When President Ronald Reagan looked at the Middle East, it was for the purpose of containing Soviet machinations in an important Cold War theater. To the extent that his administration had a Middle East vision, it was of a “strategic consensus” uniting Israel and Washington’s Arab allies (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States) against the Soviet Union and its Middle East Arab clients (Syria, Iraq) and revolutionary Iran. Although sympathetic to Israeli interests, the United States denied any foreknowledge of the invasion and any intention of wading into the Arab-Israeli conflict. But once Israel had besieged the western (Muslim) half of Beirut, where the PLO leadership and armed cadres were encamped, international condemnation and Reagan’s own discomfort with Israel’s imposed suffering on the civilians in the Lebanese capital led the U.S. president to dispatch Ambassador Philip Habib to the scene

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so he could negotiate the PLO’s orderly exodus from Beirut. The tortuous and convoluted negotiations among the Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians, via Lebanese go-betweens and often conducted under Israeli fire, strained U.S.-Israeli relations as the two sides argued furiously over the right combination of Israeli force and U.S. diplomacy necessary to convince the PLO to leave.18 As part of the evacuation agreement Habib eventually achieved, the United States committed troops to a multinational force (MNF), charged with both safely escorting the PLO fighters to ships to take them away from Lebanon and guaranteeing the safety of the Palestinian civilians left behind in the refugee camps. After successfully facilitating the PLO’s departure at the end of August 1982, the MNF departed from Beirut, its mission apparently a success. Bashir Gemayel’s assassination on 14 September, the movement of the IDF into West Beirut on the following day, and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by a faction of the Christian Lebanese Forces on 17 and 18 September brought the MNF scrambling back to Lebanon. This second deployment of U.S. marines there lacked the clear military purpose of the first (to evacuate the PLO) and further aggravated an ongoing conflict within the Reagan administration concerning the use of force as an instrument of diplomacy. The National Security Council, the White House, and the State Department, where George P. Shultz had replaced Alexander Haig as secretary of state in July, insisted that the marines had a role to play in advancing U.S. goals in Lebanon; the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not agree, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger vigorously protested that U.S. goals were ambiguous and required diplomacy, not military might. He warned that the marines’ base at the low-lying Beirut airport, where they were not even carrying loaded weapons, made them vulnerable to attack.19 Sharing Weinberger’s dismay, one critic wrote that in the year and a half after the MNF returned to Lebanon, the president and his supporters “cited at least a dozen different policy objectives, some incompatible with one another and others clearly beyond the reach of the intervention forces and their rules of engagement.”20 Gerald Astor lists among the administration’s myriad and often changing justifications for the marines’ deployment “guarding the Beirut airport, protecting Lebanese, enabling the local army to suppress insurgency, creating a democratic and unified Lebanon, advancing the Arab-Israeli peace process, preventing domination of Lebanon by either Syria or the Soviet Union, and the traditional ‘we will not be intimidated by terrorists.’”21 U.S. motivations for its involvement in Lebanon changed along with deteriorating conditions on the ground, but Shultz’s State Department pursued Israeli-Lebanese negotiations with a singular purpose: an agreement which would bring about an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and Lebanese-Israeli peace.22 As detailed earlier, however, neither the Lebanese nor the Israelis approached these negotiations with

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anything like Shultz’s determination to see them replace hostility with diplomacy. Instead, a multitude of shifting goals held by both Israel and Lebanon reflected the historical pattern whereby Arabs and Israelis negotiated at length for many reasons—none of which was an honorable and mutually satisfying peace. Timing

The timing of the negotiations, particularly the great delay in getting them under way, contributed to the course they took and the failure of the agreement. After the resounding defeat of Syrian forces in the first days of the June 1982 campaign23 and the expulsion of thousands of PLO fighters from Beirut that August, Israel felt strong enough to press Lebanon for maximum concessions while giving up few of its own. Once U.S. mediators became involved in the negotiating process, they too bought into Israel’s perception of a permanently weakened PLO and, more important, of an indefinitely disabled Syria. In the first three months after the departure of the PLO from Beirut, Syria and its Lebanese allies were at their maximum point of disorganization, possibly providing a narrow window of opportunity for Lebanon and Israel to hammer out an accord.24 Those three months, and the five additional months it took to conclude the agreement, however, were time enough for Syria to rearm and reestablish its position. By May 1983, with the infusion of over $2 billion in new and improved Soviet weaponry, Syria had sufficiently recovered so that it could thwart the implementation of the accord.25 Another event whose timing affected this agreement in a variety of ways was the Reagan Plan, unveiled by the president in a speech on 1 September 1982 (document 41). The announcement of the president’s plan came on the heels of the PLO evacuation of Beirut,26 which the Reagan administration saw as “an opportunity for a more far-reaching peace effort in the region.” Expressing the assumption that the Lebanon problem was all but taken care of, Reagan focused on a resumption of the stalled Palestinian autonomy talks (mandated by Camp David but boycotted by the PLO and Jordan) “to pave the way for permitting the Palestinian people to exercise their legitimate rights.” Reagan called upon the Israeli government to freeze further settlement activity in the occupied territories, and for the question of the future selfgovernment of the Palestinians there to be decided “in association with Jordan.”27 One of Israel’s purposes in the invasion of Lebanon and the destruction of the PLO infrastructure had been the consolidation of Israeli control over the West Bank. The Reagan Plan’s focus on autonomy for the Palestinians in the occupied territories and its proposal that those lands be federated with Jordan thus came as a rude jolt to the Begin government; Begin responded with “shock and outrage.”28 By making peace in Lebanon a stepping-stone to a resolution of the Palestinian problem, the

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Reagan Plan hampered Israeli-Lebanese negotiations by encouraging the Israelis to stall in Lebanon so as to postpone action on the West Bank.29 The Arab response to the plan was less categorical. King Hussein expressed noncommittal interest; some Arab states responded with their own plan issued from their summit meeting in Fez, Morocco (document 42); other opponents of Reagan’s initiative just sat back quietly and let the Begin government bury it for them.30 Poor American timing, in the most literal sense, also had a negative impact upon the Israeli-Lebanese negotiations: coincidentally, U.S. ambassador Samuel Lewis officially apprised Begin of Reagan’s agenda only hours before the Israeli prime minister was to meet Bashir Gemayel to congratulate him personally upon his election to the Lebanese presidency. Equally infuriated by the substance of the Reagan Plan as by its preparation behind his back, Begin arrived for what was to have been a victory celebration with Bashir in a black and bitter mood. Several accounts describe the disastrous meeting in which the ill-tempered Begin brusquely lectured the young president-elect on Israeli demands and the need for the immediate signing of a formal peace treaty.31 This unpleasant encounter further spoiled Gemayel’s already tenuous readiness to cooperate with his Israeli allies. A relentless succession of bloody setbacks in Lebanon constituted a timing factor in that each new catastrophe pushed the negotiators to try to wring from this mess something tangible that might stop the violence and justify the war. Bashir’s assassination by Syrian agents, the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla (both in September 1982), the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut (April 1983), and the steadily rising casualty rate among American service personnel, IDF soldiers, Lebanese civilians, and dueling Lebanese militiamen weighed on American, Israeli, and Lebanese shoulders as the diplomats tried to forge an accord. The worsening of the situation in Lebanon and its increasingly high cost in blood, money, and reputation were apparently not enough to bring the parties to an agreement during those first three months after the PLO evacuation, but became pressure enough to keep negotiators at the table long after it was clear to most that a workable settlement was not possible at that time. Status of the Negotiators

Traditional problems associated with the tenuous status of the negotiators greatly contributed to the accord’s failure. A quick check of the participants’ lofty titles looks promising, but in truth, the Israeli cabinet and electorate were already uneasy about Begin and Sharon’s ambitions in Lebanon, and Amin Gemayel, despite the presidential honorific, was no more than the leader of one Christian movement locked in civil war with multiple Lebanese rivals. This was no normal, functioning

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democracy in which the president had simply to make speeches, wheel and deal a little in parliament, or run a television ad campaign to persuade his constituents of the value of an accord with Israel. Many Arab regimes, and indeed many Lebanese, considered the Gemayel government illegitimate and representing one narrow Maronite faction at best, serving as Israeli-installed puppets at worst. Aware of this, and hoping to broaden the base of support for his policy, Gemayel attempted to draw representatives from all of Lebanon’s major sects into the negotiating process. The result, complained David Kimche, then director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry, an architect of the Israeli-Maronite alliance, and leader of the Israeli negotiating team, was that “the composition of the Lebanese delegation [including Chaldeans, Shi’a, Sunnis, Maronites and Greek Orthodox Catholics] destroyed any thought of rapid progress. . . . Each member had to report to his respective community leaders and to ask for their approval before he could agree to anything.”32 The Lebanese president similarly ran every proposal by his Sunni prime minister, Shafiq al-Wazzan. Although Bashir had been inclined to challenge Syrian sway in his country, Amin walked in the shadow Syria had cast over the Lebanese presidency for decades, and Syrian president Hafez al-Asad was pressing hard for the cancellation of the Lebanese-Israeli negotiations. Ultimately, the Lebanese delegates to the talks (and finally the president himself) proved unable to make good on their end of the 17 May obligations. Israel correctly perceived the weakness and malleability of the Lebanese government, but incorrectly calculated that it could use this frailty to its advantage. The asymmetry in status between Lebanon’s representatives and the high-ranking Israeli delegates, occasionally including Begin and Sharon themselves, further encouraged the Israelis in the belief that they could dictate terms rather than negotiate them. This showed a lack of appreciation for the fact that Lebanon’s very weakness, which made it vulnerable to Israeli pressure, also militated against its ability to implement a treaty with Israel. In lording their perceived superiority over first Bashir and then Amin Gemayel, Begin and Sharon repeatedly angered, embarrassed, and humiliated their Lebanese partners, who chafed at being treated like “spineless vassals.”33 The counterproductive U.S. pressure to produce an agreement increased commensurately with the status of each new mediator to come on the scene, from diplomat Morris Draper to Ambassador Philip Habib to Secretary of State George Shultz himself, who finally prevailed upon Amin to sign an agreement. But no matter how high Israel and the United States raised the ante, war-ravaged Lebanon simply could not produce one individual capable of striking a deal, selling it to the severely factionalized Lebanese people, and delivering upon his end of the bargain.34

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Third-Party Considerations

The Israeli foray into Lebanon necessarily brought the United States into the picture. From the outset, critics charged that the United States, most specifically Secretary of State Alexander Haig, had given Israel a green light to invade.35 The Reagan administration did share some of Israel’s goals in Lebanon: the reduction of the influence of Syria and its Soviet patron; Lebanon’s move into the Western camp; the marginalization of the PLO, which it perceived as the spoiler in the Arab-Israeli peace process since Camp David; and a peace treaty between Israel and a second Arab state. Despite Haig’s vigorous denial of having in any way encouraged Sharon in his invasion plan36 and his denunciation of conspiracy theories sweeping the Arab countries, it seems that the light was likely amber: not “stop” or “go,” but “proceed with caution.” There was nothing cautious, however, about the IDF’s mad dash to Beirut. The negotiations to extract the PLO from Israeli-besieged Beirut brought the United States into the fray both diplomatically and militarily: Philip Habib arranged the PLO exodus, and U.S. troops joined the first MNF, which oversaw their departure, and the second MNF, which returned during the havoc unleashed by Bashir’s assassination and the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. Thus mired in the Lebanese mud, the United States engaged in extensive mediation activity, giving third-party considerations a decisive role in these negotiations. U.S. goals evolved over time and in response to developments on the ground. On the Lebanese front, American aspirations included Israeli, Syrian, and PLO withdrawals, a quiet Israeli-Lebanese border, the restoration of a central Lebanese government, and the rebuilding of the Lebanese army so that it could extend the new central government’s role beyond the confines of the presidential palace. Reagan’s personal envoy, Philip Habib, had made a start by negotiating the evacuation of the PLO from the city in early September 1982.37 Unfortunately, the role that U.S. diplomacy went on to play followed the historically unhelpful model. Appreciating the importance of American support for their respective interests, both sides followed the pre-1948 pattern of directing more effort toward persuading U.S. intermediaries to accept and impose their versions of a settlement than toward compromising with one another. Amin Gemayel angled for concrete American support for his regime. In addition to its original goal of signing a peace treaty with a Lebanon liberated from PLO and Syrian interference, Israel now had to worry about mending its damaged relationship with the United States. Perhaps the strongest card the United States had to play was the threat to favor one side over the other.38 Once Shultz took personal control of the negotiations, committing the prestige of his office to their success, both Israel and Lebanon felt pressure

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to hand the American secretary of state a win—or at least not appear responsible for his failure. For some Lebanese and Israelis, the “success” of the document finally signed on 17 May 1983 lay more in terms of enhancing or repairing relations with the United States (for Lebanon and Israel, respectively) than in dealing with one another. Ironically, Shultz’s vigorous efforts were at odds with the lackluster interest displayed by the rest of the Reagan administration. Despite the steely rhetoric of the 1 September speech announcing his own plan, with its explicit proposals for an Arab-Israeli settlement that pushed the United States beyond its normally cautious mediatory position, Reagan never committed attention or resources to a serious follow-through. U.S. ambivalence about the course of events in Lebanon fit the Great Power pattern for irresoluteness.39 Although the initial U.S. goal was a Lebanese-Israeli accord leading to positive movement on the Palestinian-Israeli front and an eclipse of Syrian (and Soviet) influence, it quickly became clear that nothing could happen without a complete and rapid Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Recognizing by the outset of the negotiations that American policy had come to correspond more closely with Lebanese priorities (Israeli withdrawal first, then a peace treaty) than with Israeli goals (a peace treaty first, withdrawal afterward), Sharon initially tried to limit U.S. involvement by secretly negotiating an accord with Amin Gemayel’s personal emissary and then surprising and infuriating Habib with a lopsided fait accompli.40 From the acrimonious negotiations to evict the PLO, the disaster at Sabra and Shatilla, and throughout the negotiating process that followed, American-Israeli relations went from bad to worse.41 But Sharon’s suspicions that U.S. support would embolden the Lebanese to resist Israeli pressure for concessions proved accurate. Once Gemayel similarly discerned that U.S. policy inclined toward his position, he dismissed the secret protocol as merely exploratory and went on to solicit full American participation in tripartite negotiations. During this early phase of the talks, Lebanon tried to use its perceived common cause with the United States for leverage against the Israelis, pushed for greater American involvement while the Israelis wanted less, and held to hard-line positions that had worked for Sadat.42 Like the Egyptian leader before him, Gemayel at first refused to consider Israeli demands to maintain troops, proxies, or surveillance stations on sovereign Lebanese soil; he also rejected language that would have favored Lebanon’s treaty obligations with Israel over its relations with the Arab states or the Arab League.43 Gemayel correctly perceived that in many respects the dynamics among Lebanon, Israel, and the United States in 1983 resembled those of Sadat, Begin, and Carter five years earlier. The United States quickly assumed the mediator’s role, and only the personal commitment of the highest officials (Reagan and Shultz) kept the negotiations going until the end. Again, the U.S. position was closer to that of the Arab partner, leading Israel to work as hard to limit U.S. involvement as Egypt and

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Courtesy of Steve Benson, Arizona Republic

now Lebanon worked to expand it. Again, the final result proved that Israel had deviated the least from its opening position. Both times the parties negotiated more with an eye toward winning points (U.S. foreign aid), and each time Israel required side letters of assurances from the United States to accompany the agreement. But while Gemayel aimed for Camp David terms (a one hundred percent Israeli withdrawal), he was anxious to avoid the Arab ostracism, anger, and assassination visited upon Sadat. To that end, his government launched a diplomatic effort designed to win support from the Arab countries. Arab ambassadors in Beirut received copies of the agreement and Lebanese Cabinet ministers visited Arab capitals to personally brief heads of state.44 At the time, “Lebanese diplomats said that a major reason Lebanon was gaining support that was denied Egypt was that President Gemayel was determined to learn from Mr. Sadat’s mistakes. Lebanon carefully kept other Arab nations informed of the drawn-out negotiations with Israel, and avoided the ‘shocks’ that the more dramatically inclined Mr. Sadat indulged in. . . . Moreover, where, on the personal level, Mr. Sadat annoyed many Arab leaders, the low-key Mr. Gemayel took care to avoid such a course.”45 Despite his attention to the historical precedent and his attempts to learn from Sadat’s mistakes, Amin’s accord failed where Sadat’s still holds, although Amin survived and Sadat himself did not.

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As U.S. involvement in Lebanon increased, so did U.S. pressure on Israel and Lebanon to deliver even a scaled-back accord to vindicate its increasingly costly and unpopular role as peacekeeper in a land not at peace. The return of the MNF after Bashir’s assassination landed the United States the lead role in trying to untangle the Lebanese skein. To signal its good intentions (ostensibly peacekeeping and statebuilding), the U.S. stationed the marines on the exposed site of the Beirut airport; surely an army intending to fight would have adopted a more secure position. But in taking the side of Gemayel’s government and later firing upon its Druze and Syrian opponents, the United States lost whatever trust it once enjoyed as mediator and became, in the eyes of Gemayel’s many enemies, irrevocably associated with his government and the Israeli invaders. On 18 April 1983, a suicide bomber struck at the American Embassy in Beirut, killing more than sixty people, among them many of the top CIA Middle East experts. On 23 October 1983, a devastating suicide bomb attack against the marines’ barracks killed 241 servicemen, the largest loss of life suffered by the U.S. military in peacetime.46 Those attacks, combined with firefights with Druze and Syrian forces in September and December that year, sapped U.S. resolve to see the Lebanese imbroglio through to a peaceful resolution. Conspicuous by its absence from the negotiations, Syria proved to be the most critical third party of all and ultimately the one with the staying power after the Israelis and Americans had cut and run. Syria objected to Israeli (and later U.S.) intervention in Lebanon, which it considered part of the historic Syrian patrimony and refused to countenance a central Lebanese government independent of Syrian influence and inclined toward Jerusalem (and Washington). At the time of the Israeli invasion, some 30,000 Syrian troops were ensconced in eastern Lebanon, having been dispatched by Syrian president Asad in 1976 to protect Syrian interests and “allies” during the Lebanese civil war.47 Syria categorically rejected American mediation and derisively dubbed the 17 May Agreement “Camp Shultz,” mocking the Camp David Accords and highlighting the Syrian role as the leader of the rejectionist front in both cases.48 The most puzzling aspect of the 1983 accord is thus the veto power it gave to Syria by hinging an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon on a similar Syrian withdrawal. One explanation noted here has been that, while the parties correctly anticipated Syria’s disapproval, they underestimated the speed with which the Soviet Union would help Syria to rearm, recover, and reassert its dominance in Lebanon. Coupled with that miscalculation was the belief shared by Haig, Shultz, and probably Reagan that the main obstacles to a peaceful Lebanon and its inclusion in the Arab-Israeli peace process were the external forces of Syria and the PLO, who had to be isolated and excluded from the diplomatic process, not incorporated. Sandra Mackey terms this the “fatal flaw” in the agreement, and Yehoshafat Harkabi wonders “at the value of an agreement with Lebanon to which Syria, the major force in that country, was

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not a party. . . . Why should the Syrians comply with an agreement from which they were excluded?”49 Indeed, when Habib prepared to travel to Damascus the day after the accord was signed, Asad declared him persona non grata and refused to receive him.50 Many U.S. diplomats anticipated that Syria would render the deal useless, including, according to his biographer, eventually Habib himself. Weinberger was outspoken on this point, and the CIA weighed in on the negative.51 So, how to account for Shultz’s insistence that the agreement was workable? In his defense, Shultz writes that the Saudis and the Soviets both repeatedly insisted to him, privately, that if Israel were to withdraw from Lebanon, they were confident Syria would as well. Even the Lebanese foreign minister reported that his Syrian counterpart, in March 1983, had assured him “unambiguously and emphatically” that Syria would withdraw simultaneously with Israel, literally repeating, “We will withdraw, we will withdraw, we will withdraw!”52 And in the beginning, even Habib thought the Syrians might want an Israeli withdrawal so much they would match it with their own. But Asad knew how to be disingenuous: his biographer reported that in the first months immediately after the invasion, Asad purposefully lay low to “lull his opponents into believing he was finished,” thereby encouraging Shultz in his underestimation of Syria’s obstructive prowess.53 Indeed, Habib later reflected that the Syrians “had led the Lebanese . . . [and] us down the garden trail.”54 Perhaps most compelling, however, is the explanation that once Shultz had committed the office of the secretary of state to the negotiations, he could not afford to walk away empty-handed. In this case, Shultz’s grim optimism reflected the fact that the “only alternative to likely failure was certain failure.”55 Was there ever any prospect of successful U.S. intervention in Lebanon? Rashid Khalidi has argued that a history of multiple failed attempts over the years by external powers to manipulate events in Lebanon to their advantage boded ill for the ambitious U.S. agenda from the outset.56 From a different angle, William Quandt has detailed the many mistakes that sabotaged Reagan’s policy in Lebanon, among them errors of analysis, judgment, and execution, a mistaken assumption that limited force could achieve political objectives, and a lack of presidential leadership. Quandt suggests, however, that a more limited and realistic U.S. policy, carefully pursued, might have been within reach.57 Proposed Terms of Agreement

Israel and Lebanon held wildly different expectations regarding the terms of the agreement. Reminiscent of the establishment of the old ILMAC, Lebanese officials initially tried to deny any political color to the 1983 talks, assigning a military man to head their delegation and arguing for an agenda restricted to military matters.58

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Israeli interests necessitated a political arrangement, however, and again Israel’s agenda prevailed. Between December 1982 and May 1983, 138 hours of Israeli-Lebanese talks under U.S. auspices ultimately produced the ill-fated 17 May document, consisting of a twelve-article “Agreement” and a six-point “Security Arrangements Annex,” followed the next day by a letter of assurance from the United States to Israel (document 44). The Agreement declared an end to the state of war between Lebanon and Israel, forbade the presence of forces hostile to one in the territory of the other (implicitly, Syria and the PLO in Lebanon), established an American-led “Joint Liaison Committee” to oversee the normalization of relations; and called for a “security region” along the shared border. The security annex detailed the obligations and limitations Lebanon assumed for this buffer area and stipulated that “existing local units”—Haddad’s militiamen—be integrated into the Lebanese army. The American side letter to Israel confirmed the Israeli caveat hinging the IDF’s withdrawal from Lebanon upon a Syrian pullout, thereby explicitly handing Asad his unexpected veto.59 Neither Israelis nor Lebanese were happy with the document. In terms of security, for instance, Israel gave up on retaining a direct presence in south Lebanon and early warning stations in exchange for joint Lebanese-Israeli patrols. Zeev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari point out that, on the political side as well, the agreement fell far short of Israeli hopes: “The principle of a ‘package deal’ had been whittled down to . . . unofficial relations . . . underwritten by American guarantees. Amin Gemayel was not required to commit himself publicly to an open border with Israel; a joint supervisory committee took the place of diplomatic missions; and the framework that was supposed to formulate a peace treaty vanished altogether.”60 But Naim Qassem argues that “the May 17 accord and its subsequent security annexes represented a complete fulfillment of Israeli conditions, posting Lebanon as the police officer in charge of the occupier’s security, an assignment that was to be executed as per a set of Israeli-dictated details and controls.” 61 Others similarly criticized the accord for satisfying too many of Israel’s demands and leaving the Lebanese open to scathing Arab condemnation. Indeed, the agreement’s logic would require Lebanon to resign from the Arab League and treat all Arab countries (except Egypt) as enemies.62 As Michael Hudson writes, Under the terms of that agreement, the southern third of the country [Lebanon] would be a “security zone” in which Lebanese troop deployments or overflights would require Israeli approval. The Israel-supported South Lebanon Army would be incorporated into the Lebanese Army. Lebanon’s treaties with Arab countries not in conformity with the 17 May Agreement would be nullified; military transfers from other Arab countries would be curbed, as would anti-Israel political activity or publishing. The new Lebanese government, having come to power under the shadow of Israeli tanks, [apparently] considered this to be the best deal obtainable.63

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But the 17 May document was simultaneously a disappointment to the Israelis, who had hoped to claim their second official peace accord with an Arab neighbor; an embarrassment to most Lebanese, who rejected its tight Israeli embrace; and offensive to those in the Arab world who objected to a Lebanese-Israeli peace while Syrian, Jordanian, and Palestinian claims against Israel were left unresolved. Facts on the ground defeated fantasies on paper. Psychological Factors

Israeli and American leaders tried to exploit the psychological aspect of the negotiations by depicting the direct Lebanese-Israeli talks and the agreement as a breakthrough in Arab-Israeli relations: a second Camp David. In reality, however, Lebanese willingness to deal with Israel reflected not reconciliation but the country’s weakness, its president’s decision to seek U.S. backing, and a lack of alternatives for securing an Israeli withdrawal. The Lebanese leadership downplayed the negotiations accordingly, presenting them, when at all, as a joint American-Lebanese venture. Jeffrey Rubin has written that leadership is like a crime: to be considered a prime suspect (or an effective leader), “two elements are required: motivation and opportunity. . . . A leader may have ability, determination and unbridled energy at his or her command, but unless this ‘motivation’ is coupled with the opportunity conferred by . . . a state of ‘situational ripeness,’ leadership will probably prove ineffective.”64 Desperation is no substitute for determination. Gemayel was motivated by the lack of other options, not a genuine desire to reconcile with his enemy. And even had he wanted, his weak position and the circumstances of civil war–torn Lebanon would have denied him that opportunity. Along with the traditional opponents of Israel in the Lebanese body politic, there was now a new agent in the south of the country with whom both Gemayel and Israel had to contend: the fundamentalist Shi’a Muslim movement, Hizballah. The Shi’a had initially welcomed the IDF with rice and flowers for freeing them from PLO domination. But as the war and negotiations dragged on, they changed their perception of the heavy-handed Israeli troops hunkered down among them from liberators to occupiers.65 Hizballah suicide bombers and guerrillas in Israel’s so-called south Lebanon “security zone” became more persistent and deadly enemies for the IDF than the PLO there had ever been. Israel’s continuing control over the security zone and the collateral damage to south Lebanese villages from Israel-Hizballah firefights and Israeli operations further embittered Lebanese public opinion against Israel. For Gemayel, high public regard for Hizballah’s armed resistance to Israel made it that much harder for him to win respect for his interminable bargaining. For Israel, the assumption that removal of the PLO would make for a quiet border proved faulty,

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not having anticipated that its indefinite occupation of Lebanon would provoke an indigenous Lebanese backlash.66 The May 1983 accord failed to overcome a rapidly growing Israeli antipathy for the Lebanese as well. Prior to the war, many Israelis had harbored a romantic impression (dating back to the 1930s) of a beleaguered Christian Lebanese enclave anxious to make peace with Jewish Israel but constrained by their common Muslim enemy. The Begin government designed, described, and defended “Peace for the Galilee” as a strategic attack against the PLO, but it was not beyond trying to rally support for the operation by capitalizing on popular positive perceptions among Israelis of the Lebanese Maronites. Several times the prime minister expressed satisfaction at the IDF’s role in rescuing Christians from alleged Muslim oppression, publicly comparing their situation to the plight of European Jewry during World War II.67 But when Gemayel’s forces balked at openly siding with the IDF, and when the expulsion of the PLO failed to elicit an outpouring of Christian gratitude, the Israeli public began to rethink its previously rosy image of its Christian neighbors to the north. One factor in the PLO’s decision to evacuate Lebanon was a promise from Habib that the United States would guarantee the safety of unarmed Palestinians left behind in the refugee camps. The massacre of Palestinian women, children, and elderly people at the Sabra and Shatilla camps occurred in the chaotic aftermath of Bashir’s assassination and the immediate movement of the IDF into Muslim West Beirut, contrary to Israel’s promise to the Americans that it would stay clear of that area. Although the gunmen who perpetrated the massacre were Christian militiamen with Elie Hobeika’s Lebanese Forces, the fact that the killings occurred in an area under Israeli control and that the IDF allowed the murderers into the camps produced a ferocious international outcry aimed primarily at Israel and its U.S. patron. To many Arabs, Sharon would forever be the “Butcher of Beirut” and America his co-conspirator. Even Israelis staged demonstrations against their own government’s involvement in Lebanon, appalled at possible IDF complicity in the event. On 25 September 1982, some 400,000 people—10 percent of the entire population of Israel—turned out in Tel Aviv for a massive rally against the war.68 The Kahan Commission, an independent Israeli board of inquiry, later found Begin and Sharon, among others, “indirectly responsible” for the circumstances under which the massacre had occurred (document 43). Sharon resigned as defense minister and was replaced by Moshe Arens in February 1983.69 Bloodshed continued in tandem with the negotiations, and public opinion revolted against the mounting IDF casualties. By 17 May 1983 the collective psychological trauma of the Lebanese fiasco had inured most Israelis to their government’s attempts to celebrate the accord with Lebanon as a worthwhile outcome of the war. Three months later, Begin abruptly resigned from the premiership and went into virtual isolation until his death in 1992.

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The United States was similarly unable to derive much satisfaction from its Lebanese engagement. The administration congratulated itself on the conclusion of a Lebanese-Israeli agreement, but the continuing strife, Lebanon’s failure to achieve any of the stated U.S. nation-building goals, and steady casualties among U.S. troops there suggested to many Americans that they perhaps wanted peace for Lebanon more than did the trigger-happy Lebanese. The punishing attack against the marines’ barracks in October 1983 sealed the deal. By February 1984, Shultz perceived in Washington a “virtual stampede just to ‘get out’ of Lebanon.”70 Post-Treaty Postscripts

If they had genuinely believed that Gemayel could or would sell his people on full peaceful relations with Israel, the architects of the 17 May Agreement displayed a gross misreading of anti-Israel sentiment in Lebanon and the Arab world, as well as Syria’s recuperative power. Indeed, in retrospect, it would seem one could argue that Israeli and Lebanese negotiators were motivated at the time more by the prospect of making the Americans happy than by genuine belief in concluding an operable accord. Philip Habib, however, was not smiling. He did not even attend the signing ceremony, later observing that “by the time the negotiations were finished, they weren’t worth the paper they were written on, because they obviously couldn’t be implemented.”71 Opposed to U.S. military engagement in Lebanon from the outset, Caspar Weinberger famously reflected on the U.S. military’s misadventure there in a speech delivered to the National Press Club on 28 November 1984, entitled “The Uses of Military Power”; the speech was subsequently dubbed by many the “Weinberger Doctrine” (document 45).72 Despite a brief flurry of pro-accord activity by the Lebanese government, opposition in the Arab world sent Gemayel running to the Americans in November 1983, looking for American consent to modify, replace, or abrogate the 17 May Agreement and a U.S. promise to force Israel to withdraw.73 But the United States could not offer Gemayel promises or protection. Bowed and bloodied, the American troops in Lebanon “redeployed” to their ships between February and March of 1984 and quietly set sail for home. In the face of the abrupt U.S. departure from Lebanon, and unable to withstand alone the unrelenting Syrian pressure, Gemayel’s next trip was to Damascus, where, on 29 February 1984, “the pariah of Lebanon became the honored guest of Syria.”74 Five days later Gemayel’s government officially abrogated the 17 May Agreement and shut down the Israeli mission in Lebanon that had been established to administer the treaty.75 In 1985 the IDF undertook a unilateral withdrawal, leaving in its wake the selfdeclared security zone patrolled by small IDF units supporting the remnants of

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Haddad’s militia, reconstituted as the Israeli-sponsored South Lebanon Army (SLA). But SLA weakness and Hizballah’s increasing capabilities repeatedly drew Israeli troops back into Lebanon, which witnessed constant low-grade guerrilla warfare interrupted by several major Israeli-Hizballah military clashes. Israeli operations “Accountability” in July 1993 and “Grapes of Wrath” in April 1996 were aimed at breaking Hizballah’s military capabilities and purposely forcing south Lebanese civilians to flee north, hoping they would pressure Beirut to pressure Damascus to pressure Hizballah to stop its activities. Jerusalem also hoped the dislocated civilians would blame Hizballah for provoking Israel’s wrath. Both hopes failed. Lebanese from across the sectarian spectrum, even those with little sympathy for Hizballah’s wider aspirations (such as making Lebanon an Islamic state), rallied behind the refugees and behind Hizballah, especially when Lebanese civilians fell victim to Israeli attacks, most egregiously at the UN compound in Qana on 18 April 1996.76 The 1996 conflict was resolved when Israel and Hizballah, working through several third-party intermediaries while formally maintaining policies of mutual nonrecognition, negotiated the “April” or “Grapes of Wrath” understanding (document 84).77 The terms of that agreement constituted rules of engagement, stipulating that neither Hizballah nor Israel would target the other’s civilians but implicitly permitting continued warfare in the security zone, which quickly resumed. Carnage in the security zone prompted one observer to pronounce the buffer an “(in)security zone.”78 Mounting IDF casualties, a growing sense of purposelessness, increasing grassroots protests, and Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s 1999 campaign promise to bring the soldiers home culminated in a sudden unilateral withdrawal of all IDF troops from Lebanon on 24 May 2000.79 Syria appeared to enjoy the last laugh, again, until its apparent involvement in the assassination of a popular Lebanese former premier, Rafik Hariri, in February 2005 turned much of Lebanese public opinion against it. Massive demonstrations led to Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon one month later. But Lebanon’s delicate sectarian fabric is again tearing at the seams, with external actors like Syria and Iran (Hizballah’s patrons) still seeking to project power and influence via challenges by Hizballah to the sitting Lebanese government. The UN confirmed Israel’s withdrawal to the international border and its fulfillment of the withdrawal terms of UNSC Resolution 425 (document 36), but Hizballah contested Israel’s retention of one spot along the border, and instead of Lebanese Army troops taking up positions along the length of the border, as called for in 425, its own fighters did so, sometimes just yards away from IDF troops patrolling on the other side.80 Occasional incidents punctuated an uneasy calm until July 2006, when Hizballah troops infiltrated Israel and ambushed an IDF patrol, killing three soldiers

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and kidnapping two. Israel responded with massive bombardments and ground forays into southern Lebanon, laying waste to bridges, roads, Hizballah facilities, and Shi’a neighborhoods as far as Beirut, with heavy civilian casualties. Despite the unanticipated scope of the Israeli operation, Hizballah maintained a steady barrage of thousands of missiles into northern Israel, causing multiple casualties and driving inhabitants into bomb shelters or to points south. The “Second Lebanon War” ended after thirty-four days with a UN brokered cease-fire, UNSC Resolution 1701 (document 116).81 Thanks to its strong showing against the IDF, Hizballah emerged bloodied but unbowed, with its prestige heightened. In Israel the inconclusive outcome prompted the establishment of the investigative Winograd Commission, which excoriated Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz for their conduct and handling of the war (document 119). A quarter-century after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the border between them remains a tinderbox and the 17 May Agreement is long forgotten. Efraim Inbar has suggested that the 1983 Israeli-Lebanese accord is a case where the operation succeeded but the patient died.82 Repeating historically unsuccessful patterns of Arab-Israeli negotiating behavior, Israeli and Lebanese representatives painfully negotiated an inoperative accord. Mackey terms the agreement “the pinnacle of American diplomatic ineptitude in the Levant.”83 Shultz disagrees, arguing that while “the May 17 Agreement did not achieve a Lebanon free of foreign forces . . . it did achieve several changes for the good,” among them the fact that Israel’s commitment in principle to a withdrawal persuaded the Egyptians to maintain their own treaty with Israel; Arab countries, especially Jordan and Saudi Arabia, appreciated the U.S. efforts to forge peace in Lebanon; European countries resumed dealings with Israel after the accord; and Israeli-American relations improved.84 But these achievements pale when judged against the lofty goals with which the United States entered negotiations. And were they worth the cost in blood and treasure expended in their pursuit? A perfect storm of all-too-familiar dubious purposes, ulterior motives, external pressures, ineffective leadership, unhelpful third-party activity, and poor timing perpetuated negotiations and propelled the parties all the way to signatures on a dotted line. They could not, however, paper over the gaps in power and priorities that defied diplomatic solutions. As one seasoned commentator observed, “Write in your treaties what you will, but in the end, the only thing that will matter is who can impose his will.”85

Chapter 3 Premature Peacemaking The 1987 Hussein-Peres London Document

In 1987, Jordan’s King Hussein and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres personally drafted an accord in a secret London meeting, the culmination of many months of intense communication between the two men and their trusted aides. The London Document of 11 April 1987 (document 48) envisioned an international conference followed by bilateral Arab-Israeli negotiations. It broke new ground in a number of ways, but ultimately fell victim to several traditionally flawed conditions of ArabIsraeli negotiation. In this it was representative of the peace process of the 1980s, which witnessed several plans that, “while strong on form, delivered very little by way of outcome.”1 In other words, lots of process, but little peace. Previous Negotiating Experience

The scope and depth of Zionist-Transjordanian and Israeli-Jordanian contact since the 1920s are remarkable. Israel and Jordan are, after all, the Solomonic baby who survived. In 1921 the British divided the territory of the Palestine Mandate in two: the land west of the Jordan River remained “Palestine,” but that part east of the Jordan became the Hashemite Amirate (principality) of Transjordan, with Abdallah ibn Husayn as its ruler (amir) (see map 2). In importing Abdallah from Arabia and bequeathing a kingdom and a throne to him, the British were repaying a debt owed to Abdallah’s father, Sharif Husayn of the Hashemite family that ruled the Hejaz area of the Arabian Peninsula. The sharif had rallied an Arab revolt on behalf of the British and against the Turks during World War I, in return for which the British had promised to recognize an independent Arab state.2 But Abdallah was not content to govern only his assigned desert principality. Hegemonic ambitions to rule over “Greater Syria” made the ultimate disposition of western Palestine a matter of continuing interest to him. In the 1930s he solidi-

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fied a budding political relationship with the Jewish Agency Executive through a land-sales option.3 For the amir, an alliance with the Jews offered a common front against the Palestinian Arabs, who were demanding Palestinian-Arab sovereignty over the land Abdallah coveted and who absolutely rejected any formula for sharing Palestine with the Zionists. In his desire to outflank the Palestinians and extend his kingdom to the Mediterranean coast, he was prepared to accept a Jewish autonomous unit within western Palestine under his sovereignty—a scenario that had little appeal to Zionists. But the Zionists and the amir had reason to find one another appealing partners nevertheless. There is evidence that Abdallah held traditionally exaggerated beliefs about the wealth and influence the Jews could put at his disposal, perhaps reinforced by the gifts he was offered and accepted. For the Zionists, Abdallah was the panArab, non-Palestinian leader who might eventually accommodate a Jewish National Home in Palestine in the classic “exchange of services” mode.4 Frequent negotiating attempts were motivated by a mutual desire to bypass the Palestinian Arabs and win each other’s acquiescence in a shared arrangement for the future “partition” of Mandate Palestine between themselves. Abdallah and members of his inner circle and Jewish Agency for Palestine (JA) officials met often, exchanging ideas and proposals for resolving the conflict over Palestine to the satisfaction of both Hashemite and Zionist aspirations.5 Some Israeli scholars contend that as the first Arab-Israeli war approached, a plan took shape whereby Transjordan would not fight against Israel and in return would take that territory designated as Arab Palestine by the UN Partition Plan of 29 November 1947 (see map 3). Avi Shlaim has written extensively on this plan, arguing that military activity during the ensuing war was governed by “an explicit agreement . . . between the Hashemites and the Zionists on the carving up of Palestine following the termination of the British mandate, and that this agreement laid the foundation for mutual restraint during 1948 and for continuing collaboration in the aftermath of war.”6 The fact is that despite extensive discussions—including the last-minute May 1948 visit to Abdallah in Amman by future Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, disguised as an Arab peasant woman—Abdallah did send the Arab Legion into battle against Israeli positions when the war broke out. The cease-fire line on the Jordanian-Israeli front, however, did conform, more or less, to the 1947 partition plan map.7 The war on the Jordanian-Israeli front ended with an armistice, officially signed at Rhodes under the mediation of UN emissary Dr. Ralph Bunche on 3 April 1949 (document 13). The negotiations at Rhodes had been phantom talks, however: in reality, Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Dayan and Jordanian Colonel Abdallah alTal negotiated the armistice agreement directly, with personal input from the king

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during occasional visits to his winter palace at Shuneh.8 From 1949 to 1967, Jordan controlled the West Bank; in Jerusalem the armistice line ran through a no-man’s land dividing Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem and the Old City of Jerusalem from Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem. The Rhodes agreement established the Jordanian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission and a “Special Committee,” both of which met near the Mandelbaum Gate of the Old City and provided official points of contact between Israeli and Jordanian officials for several years.9 After concluding the armistice, Abdallah and his old friends in the new Israeli government entered into extensive talks, resulting ultimately in two draft documents that were to remain unconsummated: a non-aggression pact and a treaty of peace (documents 15–16). The negotiations had already run into familiar problems—the questionable ability of the king to deliver his end of the bargain; negative pressures from third parties, both Arab and Western; and the psychological gap between elite proposals and Jordanian public opinion—when Abdallah’s assassination by a Palestinian nationalist in July 1951 ended this chapter in Jordanian-Israeli relations.10 Two years later, Abdallah’s grandson Hussein assumed the throne and quietly resumed the historical pattern of clandestine, frequent meetings with Israeli officials.11 When it launched the June 1967 war on its Syrian and Egyptian fronts, the Israeli government communicated to Hussein that if he kept out of the war, Israel would not move against his troops. The pressures for pan-Arab unity were too great, however, and the king committed his army to battle on Israel’s eastern front. In the course of the fighting, Jordan lost the precious Old City of Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank to Israel. In the aftermath of the war, the Israeli and Jordanian leaderships resumed their quiet contacts, working together to administer the West Bank, which Israel now controlled, but in which Jordan retained much interest and influence. Their “Open Bridges” policy allowed for the movement of people and goods among Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan, which all sought to use to their own advantage.12 By all accounts Hussein met with every Israeli prime minister over the years, with the exception of Menachem Begin,13 creating ongoing relationships that weathered wars and regional crises. Informal Jordanian-Israeli cooperation in fields such as border security and the environment created a functional relationship of such depth and breadth that, writing in 1978, Ian Lustick doubted whether any open, negotiated settlement between the two countries could provide as satisfactory an arrangement.14 Nevertheless, there were efforts to negotiate a formal Jordanian-Israeli peace. Although our framework suggests that familiarity alone does not presage a successful negotiating experience, in this unusual case the two parties had been not just periodically talking to but actually cooperating with one another for many years.

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Israel and Jordan thus shared what Yehuda Lukacs has called a “de facto peace” and what Aharon Klieman has described as a durable “adversarial partnership” built on “a policy of de facto disengagement and conflict avoidance.” This policy reflected “a basic affinity of core political interests and concerns”: • •

• • • • •

The long border between them Mutual interests in the promotion of tourism and commerce (especially religious pilgrims, and a special development area in the Aqaba-Eilat region) A common aversion to the internationalization of Jerusalem The preponderant Palestinian impact upon their politics and societies A common American patron Similar fears regarding Syrian intentions (more recently) Challenges from Islamic fundamentalism15

By the 1980s, fifty years of high-level Jordanian-Israeli contacts were an open secret. But although leaders had come to know and understand one another well, the relationship resisted official rapprochement. Technically, the two states remained at war.16 Purposes and Motives

The London Document represents one of the more concerted efforts to advance Jordan and Israel from war to peace. A novel feature in this round of Arab-Israeli talks was the primary motivation of the parties themselves. Departing from the historical pattern in which Arabs and Israelis negotiated with one another more for the purpose of endearing themselves to an interested third party than for advancing shared interests, Jordanian and Israeli leaders now came to the table with similar primary goals of reaching a Jordanian-Israeli peace and finding a diplomatic mechanism that would allow for a comprehensive settlement of the larger conflict. This new motivational element gave the Hussein-Peres initiative an auspicious start. Familiar constraints, however, soon emerged. Strangely enough, the story of the London Document begins with an effort by Hussein to build a partnership with the PLO, with himself as the senior partner, aimed at resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and regaining the West Bank from Israeli control. Both Israel and Jordan preferred Jordanian rule of the West Bank to Palestinian, and had long cooperated to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state wedged between them. But their common concern with the final disposition of the West Bank Palestinian population did not necessarily mean they shared a vision for what should become of it. Hussein’s grandfather, Abdallah, had tried to claim the West Bank as part of his kingdom by annexing it in

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1950, although no one but Great Britain and Pakistan recognized his move. Annexation post-1967 was also problematic for Israel. If it annexed the West Bank and gave the Palestinians citizenship, an eventual Palestinian Arab majority would one day vote Israel, as a Jewish state, out of existence. To keep the land but disenfranchise the Palestinians, however, would spell the demise of Israel as a democracy. Some Israelis tried to have it both ways, aiming to keep the West Bank but encourage the implementation of Palestinian national aspirations elsewhere. Throughout the years, some prominent voices in Israel promoted, and Jordan greatly feared, the concept of Jordan as the missing Palestinian state. Originally known as “TransÂ� jordan,” the country that became in 1946 the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was created out of the eastern part of original Mandate Palestine, with the ruling Hashemite regime imported from the Hejaz and installed in Amman by the British. Since 1948 the Jordanian kingdom has included a majority of Palestinians, leading the Likud Party, and most prominently Ariel Sharon for a time, to argue on behalf of a Palestinian state by claiming that, indeed, one already existed: “Jordan is Palestine.” Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, also of Likud, believed all along that Hussein’s primary motives were less about peace with Israel than about retaining his throne and preventing Jordan “from turning into that independent Palestinian state that it, in fact, almost is.”17 For his part, King Hussein even feared on several occasions that Sharon might lead an invasion of Jordan, overwhelm his kingdom with the wholesale expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank, or otherwise facilitate the toppling of his regime by Palestinians who had calculated that eastern Palestine (Jordan) was going to be easier to liberate than western (Israel) and that they should begin there.18 Israeli versions of the “Jordanian Option” ran the gamut from Jordanian sovereignty in the West Bank in a land-for-peace exchange; a Jordanian-Palestinian (con) federation there; Jordanian citizenship and responsibility for the West Bank Palestinians under continuing Israeli control of the territory; to Israeli annexation of the West Bank and the expulsion of those Palestinians to the East Bank. Most of these options would have spelled destruction for the Jordanian regime, whose own dark vision of the “Jordanian Option” was the danger of becoming a Palestinian “watan badil”—an alternative Palestinian homeland.19 To the extent that King Hussein aimed to regain the territory he lost in 1967, he was gambling that the reunion of the West and East Banks would bring about the Jordanization of the West Bank—and not the Palestinianization of the East.20 The London Document was perhaps Hussein’s last attempt to achieve a “Jordanian option” for the West Bank. Jordan’s self-exclusion from Camp David in 1978 required that the king find a new avenue into the peace process. But he “could not move without the PLO and Peres could not move with it.”21 Could Hussein co-opt the Palestinians into allow-

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ing him to negotiate on their behalf, and could the PLO accept a Jordanian solution to the Palestinian problem? The PLO’s near-demise in the ashes of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the intensification of Israeli settlement activities in the West Bank led Hussein to think that PLO chairman Yasir Arafat might be weak and desperate enough to accompany him to the negotiating table as his junior partner and political cover. The king’s diplomatic initiatives bore fruit in the form of an 11 February 1985 accord with Arafat (document 46).22 The fifth of the agreement’s five points repeated King Hussein’s public calls for an international conference, at which the PLO would be represented under the umbrella of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. Hussein hoped that an international conference would be acceptable to the Syrians as well, thereby securing a second political fig leaf for Jordanian-Israeli negotiations under a multilateral screen.23 He also hoped that if Jordan were clearly dominating a partnership with an emaciated PLO, Israel would accept the Palestinian presence at a conference. Hussein’s flirtations with Arafat went parallel with continuing secret contacts with Israeli emissaries.24 Deadlocked Israeli elections in 1984 necessitated the creation of a national unity government under whose terms Labor leader Shimon Peres and rival Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir became prime minister and foreign minister, respectively. After a two-year period, they were to exchange positions for another two years. Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin retained the defense portfolio for the entire rotation period. Peres began his tenure with an “aggressive peace diplomacy aimed at an Israeli-Jordanian agreement” marked by a series of gestures designed to tempt King Hussein into negotiations and voicing Israeli support for an international conference, such as the king had in mind.25 Another consideration in Peres’s overtures was to exploit the Jordanian connection to build an acceptable Palestinian component into future negotiations, thus leapfrogging over the hurdle left behind by the unconsummated post–Camp David autonomy talks.26 To the extent that Peres hoped to circumvent the PLO by dealing with a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation, he risked repeating the traditional pattern of failed negotiations. Yet, in taking the gamble that a joint delegation would prove a politically safe vehicle for conducting Palestinian/ PLO-Israeli negotiations, he departed from the historical path in a significant way. But as long as the king’s primary peace efforts focused on coordinating Jordanian-PLO activities, Peres’s overtures remained unanswered.27 Within a year of the signing of the Jordanian-PLO agreement, however, the king grew disappointed with what he deemed a lack of cooperation and vision on Arafat’s part. In an eightyeight-page, three-hour radio and television address to the nation on 19 February 1986, Hussein bitterly criticized Arafat for his diplomatic failures and announced the abrogation of their entente (document 47).28 Thereafter Hussein concentrated his attentions on the back channel with Israel. Hussein found a ready partner in

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Jeff MacNelly © Tribune Media Services. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Prime Minister Peres, who had been wooing the king for over a year and whose “own schooling in the arts of back-channeling date[d] back to the early 1950s.”29 Like the king, Peres was ready to make a final attempt to rescue “from oblivion the famous Jordanian option.”30 Drawing upon decades of tacit cooperation and on the preparatory groundwork laid by Jordanian, Israeli, and American officials since early 1984, Hussein met with Rabin during the first week of April 1986 to kick-start a concerted Jordanian-Israeli approach to peace. In April 1987, Hussein and Peres finalized their London Document, which expanded upon the parties’ previous negotiating experiences and represented a test of whether the time was ripe for removing the unrealistic and inconvenient formality of the state of war between them. Timing

The unusual rotation requirements of Israel’s National Unity Government created special obstacles in terms of the timing and status-of-negotiator factors. The timing for an accord could not have been less propitious. The Arafat-Hussein partnership of February 1985–February 1986 had taken up much of Peres’s tenure as prime minister.31 By the time talks between the king and Rabin/Peres reached the takeoff point, Peres’s term was ending. Duly switching posts with Shamir, Peres nev-

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ertheless pressed on with his agenda and “operated abroad almost as if no rotation had occurred.”32 Indeed, in the days immediately preceding his demotion to foreign minister, Peres had memorably vowed that “I will continue with my initiatives, even if I have to feed Shamir snakes and scorpions,” and his biographer confirms that, “released from the tasks and obligations of the premiership, he could devote even more energy to peace initiatives.”33 This created a chaotic bargaining situation, with Shamir completely opposed to the framework Peres and Hussein were devising. Shamir strongly objected to the Palestinian focus, the international conference framework, the inclusion of the Soviets, the implicit land-for-peace gambit, and— not least—the fact that the accord had been negotiated behind his back.34 The dueling prime minister and foreign minister each appealed to the U.S. administration to use its influence to help him impose his preferred solution upon the other.35 Shamir and Peres sent separate envoys to Washington to argue their positions, and each privately assured the Reagan administration that his position enjoyed public support and would prevail. “A tug of war was taking place between the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister for the attention of the secretary of state,” wrote Shlaim.36 During the government of national unity, it was not uncommon for American diplomats to “conduct virtually all official meetings in duplicate, once with Shamir” and again with Peres. This schizophrenic Israeli diplomacy unnerved the Americans and contributed to their reluctance to interfere in Israeli domestic politics by issuing a definitive endorsement of the London Document.37 Peres presented the agreement with King Hussein to the inner cabinet on 6 May 1987, but with the ministers divided equally for (Labor) and against (Likud), he declined to bring it to a vote.38 Neither officially endorsed nor rejected, the accord entered the limbo of untried Arab-Israel peace proposals. Twenty years earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had famously announced that he was merely “waiting for a phone call” from King Hussein to resolve the status of the West Bank. Now in 1987, “Hussein was finally ready to lift the phone, only to find that Israel’s line was out of order, blocked by a paralyzing breakdown between her two major political parties.”39 Status of the Negotiators

The old status-of-the-negotiators conundrum drove the deepest nail into the coffin of the London Document. While King Hussein authoritatively represented Jordan, he had no mandate to commit the Palestinians or other Arab states to the procedures called for in the agreement. Both the king and his Israeli interlocutors preferred to see the problem of the occupied territories solved in a way that would enhance Jordanian influence there at the expense of the PLO. Hussein labored mightily

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to draw the PLO into an unequal partnership that would give him the legitimacy he required and the control he desired in negotiating an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. He had long counseled a parade of Israeli prime ministers: “For 100% you can talk to me. For anything less, you have to talk to Arafat.” Despite his efforts to supplant PLO loyalty in the West Bank, Hussein could neither replace Arafat nor win his blessing for Jordanian-Israeli talks.40 The king’s hands were tied by, among other factors, the 1974 Arab League summit in Rabat, Morocco, which had resolved that the PLO was “the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” (document 27), a formula regularly reaffirmed at subsequent Arab conferences.41 The king’s failure to secure Syrian backing for his plan, and his hesitancy to proceed without it or without PLO support, highlight the many differences between Egypt and Jordan, and between Anwar Sadat and Hussein. In 1987 Jordan simply could not withstand (or literally afford) the excommunication from the Arab world that Sadat-style negotiations and a Jordanian-Israeli “Camp David” would provoke.42 Gulf Arab outrage would threaten the millions of dollars in subsidies upon which Jordan was dependent; unhappy Palestinians within Jordan could foment anti-royalist sentiment; and an angry Syria and Iraq could easily menace their weaker neighbor economically, politically, and militarily. Writing in 1978, while the Camp David troika was still working hard to pull Jordan into the club, Ian Lustick calculated that for Jordan, “if the costs of negotiating à la Sadat are high, the risks of accepting a territorial compromise . . . are almost certainly intolerable.”43 Ultimately, Sadat’s bold journey to Jerusalem demanded political daring simply uncharacteristic of Hussein, or of Peres either, for that matter. Peres’s status proved even more problematic than Hussein’s. Simply put, although Peres began his Jordanian diplomacy as prime minister, he signed the agreement in the diminished capacity of a foreign minister negotiating, in Shamir’s words, “in total defiance of my extreme opposition to a concept I believed imperiled Israel—most of the time operating behind my back and always disregarding the resultant damage to the coalition.”44 But even had Peres retained his role as prime minister, the fact that he was presiding over a national unity government and not a Labor government might have been enough to nix the plan. The Likud side of the cabinet, rejecting an international conference, Soviet participation, and the very essence of the land-forpeace option, would have still vehemently opposed the London Document. Without the approval of the Israeli government, the agreement remained an inoperative piece of paper. Once again, Arab-Israeli negotiations faltered due to the inability of one signatory or the other (or both) to deliver his end of the bargain.45 Not surprisingly, Shimon Peres saw the status issue—the fact that Prime Minister Shamir refused to endorse his accord with Hussein—as the single most important reason for the London Document’s demise. Looking back with some bitterness in

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1993, Peres wrote, “We could have saved ourselves and the Palestinians six years of intifada, and the loss of so much human life, had the former head of the Likud-run government not undermined the agreement I had worked out with King Hussein of Jordan.”46 King Hussein was similarly disappointed and also saw the status problem as paramount, but with a slight twist. He had expected negativity from Shamir, he said, but ultimately “Peres, as far as I was concerned, was the Israeli interlocutor. I talked with him. I agreed with him on something, and he couldn’t deliver.”47 Third-Party Considerations

The United States at first welcomed the protagonists’ early steps toward the goal of an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, playing (as in the Camp David peace process) the role of trusted facilitator. Beginning in 1984, U.S. diplomats quietly shuttled between the king’s circle and the Israeli foreign ministry for months, trying to craft a common basis for a Jordanian-Israeli understanding. U.S. ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering, Secretary of State George Shultz, and even Vice President George Bush were called upon at times to lend the weight of their offices to the endeavor.48 Good relations had long existed between Jordan and the United States, and the United States was happy to shepherd the Jordanians further into the American fold. Among the ideas germinating were an international conference and a mechanism for a preliminary meeting between U.S. officials and a joint Jordanian/non-PLO Palestinian delegation. But due to rocky relations between the PLO and Jordan, the dysfunctional Shamir-Peres team, Reagan’s preference for direct Arab-Israeli talks over U.S. mediation, and Shultz’s own experience, having been burned in the failed 1983 Lebanese-Israeli negotiations and disappointed with Arab leaders’ response to the 1982 Reagan Plan, several years of tentative diplomatic feelers had come to naught.49 American cooperation was imperative for the London Document to succeed, however, so Peres and Hussein aimed to persuade Shultz that this was the right plan and the right time for another U.S. stab at Middle East peacemaking. Both leaders conferred often with Shultz, and Peres coordinated “his moves with Washington . . . via highly restricted diplomatic channels”; under his stewardship, the already unique relationship between Israel and the United States reached new “heights of intimacy.”50 The form of the accord itself—Parts A and B treated as U.S. proposals accepted by Israel and Jordan and Part C presented as a proposal to the United States—testifies to mutual Jordanian and Israeli reliance on, and expectations of, active and high-level U.S. support. Peres, in particular, needed the appearance of a “made in the USA” label in hopes of overcoming Shamir’s determined opposition to his bilateral dealings with Jordan.51 In fact, Israeli analyst Abraham Ben-Zvi has treated the document as a “trilateral,” rather than a bilateral, agreement.52

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Hussein and Peres had reason to think American support might be forthcoming. After all, American diplomats had long labored in the shadows to nurture this kind of initiative between Jordan and Israel. Shultz himself had tried to engage the king with a similarly structured international conference plan back in 1985, when Hussein was preoccupied with forging a partnership with Arafat.53 Thus the draft London Document could not help but pique the interest of the American secretary of state. He was troubled, however, by the prospect of tangling with the two-headed monster that was the Israeli government, and particularly uncomfortable with the fact that if he “portrayed the Peres-Hussein agreement as an American initiative,” as Peres and Hussein intended, “[he] would be deceiving—a deadly practice in diplomacy and one that would inevitably be discovered.”54 In their memoirs, Peres and Shamir each describe their awkward meeting immediately upon Peres’s return from negotiating the agreement with the king in London. In both accounts, Foreign Minister Peres reads the document aloud to Prime Minister Shamir but refuses to put the paper in his hands. Peres explains to Shamir that he feared leaks from the prime minister’s office, which would embarrass the king, and so kept the paper for himself. He also adds that “the idea was for the Americans to put these agreements forward as their proposal; it would be better, therefore, if he received them from the Americans.”55 Indeed, Shamir confirms that he did not actually see the document for himself until several days later, when U.S. ambassador Thomas Pickering presented him with a copy of the text. He writes of Peres’s idea to make it look as though the plan came from the Americans, that this “would have exonerated Hussein in Arab eyes of the sin of talking to us and cleared Peres himself of the charge of deception. Needless to say, neither aim was accomÂ� plished.”56 Thus, despite the new and promising cooperation among the two parties and their mutual desire for the United States to play an intermediary role, the United States was, in the end, reluctant to endorse the Hussein-Peres accord. The Reagan White House was uncomfortable with a process that invited the Soviets back into the Middle East, hesitant about staking its prestige on what might easily become yet another failed Middle East peace plan, uncomfortable with the fiction of an American initiative, and disinclined to interfere in the domestic struggle between Peres and Shamir. This American ambivalence contributed to the “rapid erosion of the entire diplomatic momentum” of the Hussein-Peres accord.57 By withholding its blessing, the United States unwittingly re-created one of the unhelpful traditional patterns of Arab-Israeli negotiations: namely, hesitancy on the part of the third party, which invariably caused Arabs and Israelis to pull back and resume status-quo attitudes, for fear of getting out ahead on a plan to which the Great Power was not firmly committed. Washington’s decision not to support the London Document was understand-

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able, but it disappointed King Hussein and denied Peres the political ammunition with which he was hoping to create a groundswell of support for the plan within the Knesset and among the Israeli electorate. Proposed Terms of Agreement

The London Document was just over 350 words long and typed in English on a single sheet of paper. It lacked signatures but included the date and venue at the bottom of the page.58 During their clandestine discussion in London on 11 April 1987, it rapidly became apparent that the king and Peres were, in Peres’s words, “clearly on the same wavelength,” and over the course of several hours they agreed upon the wording of a document which satisfied them both.59 The terms of the London Document, subtitled “A Three-Part Understanding between Jordan and Israel,” reflect considerable flexibility, indicative of the unusually straightforward goals (primarily a formal, bilateral peace, and secondarily a new burst of high diplomacy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israel conflict) held by both sides. Thus, on first glance the document seems to break the historical pattern wherein parties presented and adhered to maximal, irreconcilable demands, demonstrating evidence instead of a genuine back-andforth which allowed the parties to reach a mutually satisfying agreement. Peres, for instance, departed from a number of entrenched Israeli positions when he signed on to a document calling for the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” (a formula consistent with the 1978 Camp David Accords but since avoided by Likud); a comprehensive solution to the “Palestinian problem”; the formation of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation; and the holding of an international conference. But herein lies the rub: by its own admission the document is “an agreement between the Government of Jordan . . . and the Foreign Minister of Israel,” a clearly asymmetrical pairing that reflected Peres’s status problem and the fact that the government of Israel had not actually departed from entrenched positions. The agreement is divided into three sections, A, B, and C. The introductory paragraph specifies that Parts A and B “will be treated as [emphasis added] proposals of the United States to which Jordan and Israel have agreed”—not that they actually are U.S. proposals. This is the fiction Peres required if he was going to be able to win over Shamir, which Hussein required to protect himself from Arab charges of conducting bilateral talks with Israel, and which so unnerved Shultz. Part A introduced the international conference idea and then hit the familiar (if vague) notes of UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338, comprehensive regional peace and security, and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Part B clarified the conference’s purpose as the peaceful resolution of the Palestinian problem and envisioned the construction of “regional bilateral committees to negotiate bilateral

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issues.” Parts A and B would be made public at a time agreed upon by Jordan and Israel. Part C focused on strictly Jordanian-Israeli affairs. This section defined the nonÂ� coercive limitations of the international conference and de-linked the direct, bilateral Jordanian-Israeli negotiations from the success or failure of other bilateral committees. It specified that the “Palestinian issue” would be treated only within the framework of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation; PLO members were effectively barred from involvement by the requirements that participating Palestinians accept 242 and 338 and renounce violence and terror. In other words, Part C constituted the direct Jordanian-Israeli negotiations which Hussein and Peres were eager to launch but whose resulting firestorm they were reluctant to face. The fact that Part C was to remain secret even after the public unveiling of Parts A and B indicates the plan’s delicacy and the vulnerability of the king to charges of having effectively abandoned the Palestinian cause by pursuing a separate Jordanian-Israeli peace. Peres was perhaps most vulnerable on his acquiescence to an international conference. Such a conference, under the auspices of the UN Security Council, represented a far-reaching concession for Israel, whose leaders, especially those in the Likud Party, had consistently rejected any regional conference format for peace talks on the grounds that Soviet participation would likely embolden the Arab delegations and stiffen their bargaining positions; that the UN seemed heavily tilted in favor of promoting Palestinian rights to self-determination; and that the multilateral format would crystallize a pan-Arab anti-Israel stance based on a consensus reflecting the most hard-line position.60 But Peres hoped to persuade his ministerial colleagues and the Israeli public that Israel had nothing to fear, since the conference envisaged would be explicitly barred from imposing a settlement or vetoing any bilateral agreements reached.61 And despite public Jordanian statements to the contrary,62 the direct link from the conference to bilateral Jordanian-Israeli negotiations represented an important Jordanian departure from the historical pattern by reverting to Jordan’s 1948–51 inclinations for a separate deal. Peres intended to win Israeli hearts and minds by emphasizing that Hussein was offering Israel the welcome opportunity of negotiating with another of its neighbors individually, as had happened at Rhodes and, more recently, at Camp David.63 Given expressions of pan-Arab support for an international conference at this time,64 King Hussein could point to substantial achievements in the draft agreement: namely, recognition of the centrality of the Palestinian issue and Israel’s acquiescence to the international conference. Less popular in the Arab world would be the king’s acceptance of the first proviso of Part C of the agreement, which opened the way to negotiating a Jordanian-Israeli peace independent of events on other Arab-Israeli fronts. The multilateral opening

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conference leading to direct Jordanian-Israeli negotiations reflected the minimum the king could accept and the maximum Peres thought Israel could bear. Some scholars celebrated the London Document’s revival of the Jordanian option as a “pathbreaking agreement,” an idea whose time had finally come. Others scored it for the same reason, decrying the Jordanian option as a “major fallacy” and the agreement as a “last ditch attempt of the old peace diplomacy to rescue the Jordanian option from oblivion and give it a fresh lease on life by adapting it to the new diplomatic conditions, but not to the compelling logic of Palestinian nationalism and its legitimate aspirations.”65 Whatever the merits of these opposing views, these differences refer only to “process” and the mechanisms for engaging in the next round of negotiations; far more difficult questions awaited the would-be negotiators if ever they were to move forward to grapple with the terms and content of an actual agreement. Psychological Factors

Activating the London Document would have required of Hussein and Peres immense leadership skills in persuading both elite and popular constituencies to support the plan. For Peres, the former presented the greater obstacle, for this meant persuading the Likud half of the government not to torpedo his efforts. For the king, the greater challenge was the latter, which meant winning over not only Jordanians but the Palestinians on the West Bank and at least part of the PLO. But Jordanians, Israelis, and Palestinians were never required to respond to this proposal. One can only hypothesize as to how public opinion in each constituency might have reacted had leaders in Jordan and Israel unveiled the secret accord. Watching from the sidelines, Palestinians would have objected mightily to the London Document, which pointedly omitted any mention of the PLO (and indirectly denied PLO participation owing to the acceptance of 242 and 338 and the required renunciation of terrorism). With its implicit land-for-peace formula between Jordan and Israel, “the Peres-Hussein London agreement was as threatening to the Palestinians as it was to the Likud party.”66 Both objected to the assignation of the West Bank, the object of right-wing Israeli irredentism and Palestinian state aspirations, to Jordan. Along with losing the territory upon which they hoped to establish a Palestinian state, Palestinians would also have decried the decoupling of Jordanian-Israeli negotiations from progress on other Arab-Israeli fronts and the prospect of Israel enjoying a second peace treaty with an Arab country while the Palestinians continued to languish. But was a Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty ever within sight? Were Israelis and Jordanians ready to scale the psychological wall separating them, or would they have

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retreated into their familiar fortresses of mutual mistrust and official animosity? In 1992 Adam Garfinkle observed that, “while the Hashemite hierarchy operates in a normal, civilized and pragmatic manner toward its neighbors, including Israel, the attitudes of the population of Jordan do not exactly follow suit. Rather, there is a kind of inverse proportionality at work.” He went on to attribute this phenomenon to the following: (1) East Bankers resented that Israel foisted a huge West Bank Palestinian population upon them; (2) Palestinians, who constituted more than 50 percent of the Jordanian population, retained a high level of anger at Israel for their families’ displacement, and for the treatment of their brothers and sisters under Israeli occupation; and (3) the Jordanian government tolerated extensive Israel-bashing in the media, perhaps as a counterbalance to general public knowledge of its extensive contacts with Israel.67 Ironically, the Israeli public has always thought highly of King Hussein and looked to Jordan as the preferred negotiating partner in any deal over the West Bank. Jordan holds a special place in the collective Israeli imagination as well, with many Israeli youths over the years attempting, occasionally with tragic results, to reach the famous red rocks of Petra.68 Likudniks may have objected to the international conference and land-for-peace components of the London Document, but a straightforward peace with Jordan was not in itself controversial in Israel. Since the agreement remained a private and unconsummated understanding among leaders, efforts to prepare the populations for peace were indirect at best. In his radio address announcing the termination of the agreement with the PLO, the king tried to ready his subjects for direct Jordanian-Israeli talks and perhaps even a separate peace, blaming Arafat for the failure to move ahead with the peace process and stressing Jordan’s commitment to finding a path to peace with or without Arafat’s cooperation.69 Although the fact of Jordanian-Israeli ties was widely known, prior to 1986 most cooperative ventures were based on oral agreements; after the dissolution of the PLO pact, political insiders were tipped off as to the changing policy toward Israel by the king’s new willingness to put their mutual understandings on paper. Garfinkle calls this “an important psychological development” and cites paperwork regarding Amman’s debt to the Jerusalem Electric Company as precedentsetting. An Israeli-Jordanian agreement about opening branches of the Cairo-Amman Bank in the West Bank “was actually committed to paper and signed—the first such document ever in the history of Israeli-Jordanian relations.”70 Peres had preached reconciliation with the Arabs for so long and had claimed so often to be on the verge of a breakthrough that to many Israelis he had become the “little boy who cried peace.” In 1985 he had presented his own peace plan, foreshadowing the terms of the London Document, and spoke repeatedly of imminent opportunities for Arab-Israeli rapprochement. He endeavored to prepare the Israeli people for the reality of peace by example as well as with words. Visiting Morocco

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and Egypt in mid-1986, Peres declared that normal relations with the Arab world were indeed feasible and might soon become commonplace. Reporting to the Knesset following an enchanted encounter with King Hassan in the cedar-forested town of Ifrane, Peres emphasized the Moroccan king’s resounding message to the Arab world that it was time for the boycott on dialogue with Israel to end.71 But such messages were not enough to win the hearts of skeptical parliamentarians, the Israeli public at large, or—most significant—Peres’s Likud coalition partners. In the end, this negotiation attempt revealed a dire weakness in the Israeli political structure of that time, in which the second highest-ranking Israeli leader could not even sell his initiative to the first, and the first used all the resources at his command to make sure that the initiative went no further.72 Notwithstanding the pattern-breaking intersection of a number of positive factors—good intentions on the part of the negotiators, a not insignificant degree of assistance from a mutually acceptable third party, and a shared vision of the terms of the negotiation process if not an agreement—none of the parties involved was able to generate the energy and momentum necessary for changing the dynamics of deadlock and establishing the new psychological environment necessary for seeing the accord through to completion. London Document Postscripts

Observers clock the London Document’s time of death differently. Some pinpoint it as 20 October 1986, the date of the rotation which brought Shamir into the prime minister’s office and sent Peres to the Foreign Ministry.73 Others cite 6 May 1987, the date when Peres presented the agreement to the cabinet but, facing defeat, chose not to put it to a vote. Some might even argue that any such plan was dead in the water from the moment of the creation of a national unity government, three years earlier, in which “none of the Likud ministers was willing to break rank with his party on this matter, [thereby preventing] this agreement from being implemented.”74 Another possible death date is a secret July 1987 London meeting between Shamir and Hussein, which convinced the king of the impossibility of pursuing an international conference as long as Shamir headed the Israeli government. It was the king’s first meeting with a Likud prime minister and only Shamir’s second meeting with an Arab leader, after Egypt’s Sadat.75 In an uncharacteristically pessimistic mood, Peres wrote that “the breakthrough, full of hope and promise, was asphyxiated at birth” by Shamir.76 Other important negative timing factors that help account for the moment of the London Document’s last gasp are the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in December 1987, which signaled, among other things, a Palestinian rejection of Jordanian diplomatic activity on behalf of Palestine; King Hus-

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sein’s disengagement from the West Bank in July 1988; and the Palestine National Council’s declaration of Palestinian independence in November 1988. Clearly, poor timing, along with the uncertain status of the negotiators, were the prime reasons for the demise of the London Document. King Hussein’s conviction that peace with Israel was inevitable can be inferred from his actions even in the aftermath of the London Document’s apparent demise. For three days in November 1987 Hussein hosted an Arab summit in Amman. Focusing on Arab unity, the king successfully engineered Egypt’s return to the Arab League and the lifting of the collective Arab boycott against it, enacted in the wake of Sadat’s peace with Israel.77 Ostensibly a matter of inter-Arab relations, the move also quietly laid the groundwork for another Arab country to make peace with Israel without suffering total estrangement from the Arab fold. Tellingly, three years earlier Jordan had become the first Arab country to restore relations with Egypt, perhaps sending the message that “by making peace with Israel, Egypt had done the right thing” and signaling the king’s intention to follow suit.78 But key elements of the London Document were soon resuscitated by none other than the American secretary of state himself. In the fall of 1987 George Shultz began working on his own idea for advancing the Middle East peace process. In a lastditch effort to revive the international conference envisioned by Peres-Hussein, he proposed that President Reagan and Soviet premier Gorbachev invite the Israeli and Jordanian heads of state to join them at their already scheduled summit in Washington, D.C., at year’s end. Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese representatives would also be included, along with the secretary general of the United Nations. Shultz reasoned that this one-time gathering, to be followed by bilateral Jordanian-Israeli talks, could give Hussein “the international cover he needed to negotiate directly with Israel, [whereas] Shamir could avoid the dreaded words ‘international conference’ by calling the meeting a summit.”79 Indeed, Shamir professed a willingness to proceed, but this time Hussein objected. If Shamir were really ready to talk about an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, the king told Shultz, he would have gone along with the London Document’s international conference in the first place.80 The most interesting thing about Shultz’s U.S.-Soviet proposal was that he “put the proposal to [Hussein] as one from the President of the United States to the king of Jordan.”81 The secretary was moving toward turning the London Document’s fiction into fact. The Palestinian Intifada that erupted in Gaza on 9 December 1987 sent daily televised footage of Israeli soldiers harshly subduing masses of rock-throwing Palestinians around the globe, and demanded sustained U.S. attention to the Arab-Israeli crisis. Other timing elements encouraging active U.S. leadership at that time were messages reaching Shultz from prominent Jewish Americans asking for U.S. intervention; a personal plea from Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to Shultz that the

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United States step in; and signals from Shamir that he might be softening his position.82 By February 1988 Shultz had twice visited the region; he returned in March to present the Shultz Initiative (document 50) to Arab and Israeli leaders.83 Invoking Resolutions 242 and 338 and a condemnation of violence and terrorism, the Shultz Initiative of 4 March 1988 called for a ceremonial, one-time regional gathering, hosted by the UN secretary general and including the permanent members of the Security Council, which would lead within two weeks to bilateral talks between Israel and each of the neighboring Arab states. Palestinian representation would be through a joint Jordanian/non-PLO Palestinian team. The Shultz plan focused on the Israeli-Jordanian/Palestinian interaction and incorporated an accelerated timetable for moving from opening discussions to negotiations for transitional arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza to final-status talks to a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian problem. Again, movement on the Israeli-Jordanian/Palestinian track was delinked from progress on any other tracks. The similarities to the London Document are extensive. Shultz’s innovations were the concepts of “interlock” and “mixed sovereignty,” two terms which do not appear in the plan’s text but which he emphasized repeatedly in his discussions with Middle East leaders. “Interlock” referred to a mandated movement from talks about the transition period for the West Bank and Gaza to final-status negotiations, intended to assuage Palestinian fears about indefinite Israeli foot-dragging.84 “Mixed sovereignty” was the notion that a border need not be black and white, but rather that different actors could take responsibility for overlapping areas with regard to “external security, maintenance of law and security, access to limited supplies of water, management of education, health and other civic functions.”85 Besides affixing his name to the proposal, Shultz explicitly stated that “the United States will submit a draft agreement for the parties’ consideration at the outset of negotiations,” exposing his discomfort with the deceit of the original London Document’s presentation as an American initiative and reflecting his belief that the chances of success might be improved if the U.S. role as third party were transparent and genuine. Notwithstanding Shultz’s enhancements and improvements, the plan immediately ran up against serious obstacles. Shamir absolutely rejected the international conference, “interlock,” and “mixed sovereignty,” and demanded “peace for peace”—not “land for peace” as enshrined in 242. Syria was cool to the entire idea. The Soviets objected to the symbolic nature of the conference, desiring an active role in any negotiations. The Palestinians rejected their second-class status and insisted that only the PLO could speak for them. Kathleen Christison agreed that, coming “in the middle of a Palestinian popular revolt, Shultz’s continued refusal to let the Palestinians speak for themselves was unrealistic and a virtual guarantee of failure.”86 Interestingly, Shultz was, at the very same time, juggling an overture from the

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PLO designed to open a direct PLO-U.S. dialogue. When the PLO met the secretary of state’s conditions in December 1988, Shultz reluctantly authorized the dialogue; President George H. W. Bush suspended it in May 1990 when Arafat refused to condemn an attempted Palestinian terror attack on a Tel Aviv beach.87 Hussein, Mubarak, and Peres welcomed Secretary Shultz’s initiative in putting forth his plan, but they could do little to advance it. The death knell came on 31 July 1988, when King Hussein publicly renounced most of Jordan’s legal and administrative responsibilities for the West Bank (document 51).88 Opinion differs as to whether the king’s action was a peeved expression of frustration with the PLO, a genuine resignation that only the PLO could speak for Palestinian concerns, or a shrewd move to set the PLO up for failure, in effect handing Arafat a “poisoned chalice,” following which West Bankers would request a return to Hussein’s stewardship.89 Not only did the PLO not beg for the king’s return, however, but the Palestine National Council adopted a resolution accepting a two-state solution and dramatically issued a Palestinian Declaration of Independence at its 15 November 1988 meeting in Algiers (document 53).90 The eruption of the Intifada, King Hussein’s disengagement from the West Bank, and the bold declarations by the PNC served to heighten the Palestinian role in the West Bank and Gaza and further diminished the likelihood of any “Jordanian option” there. That trend was compounded by the Israeli elections of 1 November 1988, in which “the Israeli Labor Party lost much of its influence in the shaping of foreign policy.”91 The London Document and the Shultz Initiative quietly expired. While “weak in substance,” one observer contends that “the London agreement was nevertheless a major step forward, for it established the structure and mechanisms for the future peace process. Built on concepts agreed [upon] at Camp David I, it established the modalities that would later serve the Madrid Peace Conference.”92 The short-lived Shultz Initiative kept the basic premises of the London Document in play, providing a bridge between London 1987 and Madrid 1991. The 1980s witnessed much process but little peace; it “was a frustrating decade, [but] arguably a necessary one in terms of political gestation for the peace process.”93

Part Two The Arab-Israeli Peace Process Madrid and After

Chapter 4 Setting the Peace Table The Madrid Conference and Washington Talks, 1991–1993

On 30 October 1991, official Arab and Israeli delegates gathered together around a common negotiating table in Madrid, Spain. The Madrid Conference represented a victory for those who championed a multilateral format and a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It also reflected the recent victory of the U.S.-led multinational coalition in liberating Kuwait from Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, whose troops had invaded and occupied the tiny Persian Gulf sheikdom in August 1990. At the request of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, who feared it might be Saddam’s next target, the United States assembled a truly international coalition of forces, including nominal participation by other Gulf states, Egypt, and Syria. Although popular sentiment around the Arab world thrilled to Saddam’s refusal to back down in the face of international threats and to Iraq’s firing of thirty-nine Scud missiles into Israel during the course of the war, the presence of its Arab allies allowed the United States to argue that this was not a Western war against the Arab world but rather a global response to Iraqi aggression. Anxious to keep Egypt and Syria on board throughout the war, the United States leaned heavily on Israel not to become involved in the fighting, even persuading it not to respond to the missiles Iraq sent crashing into Israeli population centers.1 The war lasted for five weeks over January and February 1991 and ended in the successful eviction of Iraq’s army from Kuwait. Because of the unique alliance between the United States and many Arab states forged in the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker III believed that heightened American influence in the immediate postwar environment boded well for a new attempt at bringing the Arabs and Israelis together to resolve their differences. In his memoirs, Baker wrote: “We had tremendous strength and credibility around the world, and stood at the zenith of our influence in the Middle East. I believed it was time to seize the moment.”2 On 18 October 1991, in nominal partnership with the Soviet Union, Bush and Baker issued invitations to

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Madrid, which neither the Arabs nor Israel could refuse (document 59). Baker had already presented a rostrum of possible European venues to both Arabs and Israelis, and Madrid quickly emerged as the only site acceptable to both. It was on the day before the invitations went out, and only eleven days before the delegations arrived, that Baker called the Spanish foreign minister to inquire as to whether Spain would be willing and able to host the conference. In the Hall of Columns in Madrid’s Royal Palace, the delegations sat around a huge, custom-made T-shaped wooden table under eight dazzling chandeliers.3 The Madrid peace process launched a complex series of negotiations aimed at bringing together all the interested parties and tackling all the unresolved issues that kept the Arab-Israeli pot bubbling on the front burner of international concern. Although its formal sessions were concluded in a matter of three days, many months of serious (although mostly unsuccessful) negotiations in Washington followed. While there is no “Madrid Agreement” to point to as the crowning success of the negotiations, the Madrid format opened lines of communication and facilitated a breakthrough that led, in a few short years, to the signing of peace agreements of varying success between Israel and Jordan and—in a roundabout way—between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Previous Negotiating Experience

Given the historical record of failed international conferences aimed at overambitious targets, it would seem that the organizing force behind the Madrid Conference, Secretary of State Baker, had little reason to expect this format to produce successful Arab-Israeli negotiations. The record of failure dates back to Britain’s doomed St. James Conference of 1939, when the Arab delegates refused to sit with Zionist delegates. In September 1949 the United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commissioner (PCC) hosted the Lausanne Conference; even less potent than the British, the PCC similarly failed to seat the parties around the same table, let alone resolve any of the basic problems (boundaries, refugees, Jerusalem) resulting from the birth of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. Two further conferences under PCC auspices in Geneva (1950) and Paris (1951) also led nowhere, illustrating the counterproductive dynamics whereby “the least compromising party set the pace of negotiations” during multilateral gatherings.4 These experiences also confirmed the Israeli conviction that only separate negotiations with each Arab state could produce results and, conversely, crystallized the Arab refusal to meet directly with Israel at all. The 1973 Geneva Conference offered a slightly more promising model for the 1991 Madrid talks. Although the actual conference lasted only one day, it fulfilled three important tasks. Geneva 1973 had roughly satisfied the Arab requirement for multilateralism, Kissinger’s own inclination to mediate personally among elites

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and away from the spotlight, and Israel’s bilateralist preference for Kissinger’s shuttling between it and one Arab country at a time. The Ford administration inherited Kissinger’s model of a “minimalist” conference, one that would be largely “symbolic, a cover for serious negotiations which would take place elsewhere.” During his first eleven months in office, however, Jimmy Carter set out along the road to a more ambitious, “maximalist” type of conference, one that aimed at settling all outstanding claims among Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab states.5 By the end of 1977, however, Carter’s gallop to Geneva was effectively sidetracked by Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem. For both Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, Geneva symbolized everything undesirable in peacemaking, namely, predicating movement along any one Arab-Israeli front on the success of all the others, thereby putting the entire process at the mercy of the most intransigent party or the most intractable problem. The 1978 Camp David Accords, which led to peace between Egypt and Israel but failed to attract other Arab actors, sent U.S. policymakers in the 1980s back to the drawing board. The procedures adopted at Madrid represented the refinement of aspects of both the maximalist and minimalist types of international conferences promoted actively but unsuccessfully by various parties between 1985 and 1988,6 as we have seen with the Hussein-Peres London Document and the Shultz Initiative. The Madrid Conference was a two-day public multilateral convention followed immediately by one day of closed-door bilateral talks between Israel and Syria, Lebanon, and a Jordanian/ Palestinian delegation; its innovation was a structural formula that assigned delegations to separate but parallel bilateral and multilateral tracks.7 The large opening

The Madrid Conference: Structure and Process

U.S.

unintended split

Speeches by all; no debate, rebuttal, or dialogue

USSR

U.S. USSR Egypt Israel Jordan Lebanon Non-PLO Palestinians Syria

Israel-Syria Israel-Lebanon Israel-Jordan/non-PLO Palestinians Israel-Jordan Israel� non-PLO Palestinians

unintended split

M ULTILATERALS

}

30 Oct.-1 Nov. 1991

Madrid

Madrid and then Washington, D.C.

}

B ILATERALS THE OPENING CONFERENCE

Israel� non-PLO Palestinians (D.C.) Israel-PLO (Oslo)

Environment • includes Gulf States, Europeans, Japan Refugees • non-participation by Syria & Lebanon Water • numerous global summits Economic development Regional security & arms control

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conference served as an umbrella to shield from criticism those Arab states that had long refused individual meetings with Israel. Under this mixed format, they now participated in the bilateral talks, which began in Madrid on 3 November and soon moved to Washington, where the State Department hosted another dozen rounds of talks between December 1991 and July 1993. The first of the multilateral talks, which focused on region-wide problems and included experts from around the world, opened in Moscow in 1992.8 For the United States, a drawback to the multilateral conference idea had always been the risk of enhancing Soviet influence in the Middle East, but from its post–Gulf War apogee of international power (juxtaposed with the obvious Soviet decline), the Bush administration decided that it could safely convene such a conference under its own aegis and terms. A simple assessment is that American fine-tuning of the original Geneva concept in light of the experiences of the late 1970s and 1980s laid the groundwork for Madrid. One scholar credits the London Document for serving as a “preamble to [the] possible next stage,” while a more complex explanation is offered by the conference’s chief architect, James Baker: The real story of how Madrid came to fruition is a rich tale of determination, false starts, personal and political courage, blind alleys, perseverance, misjudgments, lost tempers, endless negotiations, scores of creative compromises, and both good faith and bad. In the end, the courage and determination of the parties themselves to give peace a chance—bolstered by the psychological sustenance, credibility, and catalytic creativity of the last superpower—somehow prevailed over years of enmity and chaos.9 Motives and Timing

Why did the Madrid planners achieve 100 percent attendance at their assembly, when similar calls in the past had proven non-starters? The key to Madrid’s initial success lay largely in the motives of the invited participants and in a unique configuration in the international balance of power at that time. At first glance, success did not appear likely. Many of the would-be negotiating parties perceived themselves to be in unfavorably weak positions after the war with Iraq, and were “reluctant and ambivalent about the necessity of talking.”10 Yet all parties apparently calculated that the alternative of refusing to participate in the proposed U.S.-inspired talks carried with it far greater costs or losses than did participation in what would probably be another round of sterile Arab-Israeli negotiations. Hence, all the required actors came to the table in short order. On the world stage, the era of superpower confrontation and the Cold War had come to a close. The conference came two months after an aborted coup against

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Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who increasingly looked to the United States for foreign aid and assistance, and only two months before the dissolution of the USSR. In between, the Soviet Union happily accepted the American invitation (and the fiction) to appear as a co-equal sponsor of the conference.11 The imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, however, “eliminated the ability of Middle Eastern countries to maneuver between the superpowers”12 and left each of the Arab invitees with an especially strong interest in upgrading its relations with the United States. With the U.S.-led coalition’s defeat of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War of early 1991, the United States became the sole and victorious superpower influencing regional developments. American diplomats saw this as a golden opportunity to bring so many almost-willing parties together and start them talking as part of the construction of President Bush’s much-heralded “New World Order.”13 It was, observed one participant, “an unusual confluence of circumstances and personalities . . . a fortuitous juncture of local and global events.”14 The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was particularly needy of American favors, “desperate for political rehabilitation—and Arafat for a personal comeback.”15 Almost mortally weakened by having sided with Iraq in the Gulf War, the organization was suffering stiff rebuffs from its former benefactors—and Iraq’s victims— among the Arab Gulf states. By 1991, the Intifada showed signs of exhausting itself and no longer attracted the same positive international media attention it had generated for the Palestinian cause during 1988 and 1989. Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories had meanwhile intensified, raising the prospect that the longer PLO chairman Yasir Arafat waited, the less there would be to negotiate about. The Palestinians could ill afford to absent themselves from this forum, notwithstanding their dissatisfaction with the perceived pro-Israel tilt of its American sponsors and certain restrictions that the conference format placed upon their participation. Among these were the requirement for a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation16 (instead of a separate Palestinian delegation) and the proviso that only non-PLO affiliated Palestinians from the occupied territories (as opposed to those from East Jerusalem or the Palestinian diaspora) were eligible to be delegates to this opening phase of the Madrid process. With the requirement of a joint JordanianPalestinian team, Madrid perpetuated the “Jordanian option” reviled by Palestinians but firmly enshrined in the 1982 Reagan Plan, 1987 London Document, and 1988 Shultz Initiative which preceded it.17 In the words of Camille Mansour, a leading Palestinian academic attached to the delegation, preparations for the Madrid Conference came at “an extremely difficult period for the Palestinian people, adding the worst conjunctural conditions to an already profound crisis. . . . For the Palestinian leadership, while the prospect of accepting the U.S. terms was bleak, refusing the initiative would [have] be[en] even bleaker.”18

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Courtesy of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Another potentially bleak point was the persistence of the historical pattern of participation geared toward impressing a third party, in this case the international community and Arab states, whose opinion of the Palestinians had deteriorated when the latter took Saddam’s side during the Gulf War. Palestinian comportment in Madrid garnered respect, however, and at conference’s end delegate Sami al-Kilani could observe that Madrid “enabled us to regain what we lost during the Gulf War.”19 They had repaired their foreign relations, but were they any closer to peace with Israel and a Palestinian state? The Arab countries received the Madrid invitation with varying degrees of interest. Egypt responded enthusiastically, seeing in it the long-overdue vindication of Sadat’s decisions to choose the Americans over the Soviets and to make peace with Israel. Still smarting from Arab rejection and isolation after Camp David, and eager to play the important intermediary role that Sadat had envisioned, Egypt came willingly to the conference table. Jordan also replied in the affirmative, seeing an opportunity to pursue a peace option as part of a pan-Arab consensus rather than in defiance of same as Sadat had done a dozen years earlier.20 Sandwiched between an angry Saddam Hussein and his own large Palestinian population, King Hussein had broken with his traditional U.S. ally and supported Iraq during the Gulf War of 1991. The United States and the Gulf states had responded by slashing or halting their financial support to Jordan. Reeling from this blow, coupled with the influx

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of several hundred thousand Palestinian and Jordanian refugees evicted from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the Jordanian economy suffered tremendously during 1991. King Hussein had always been interested in exploring different potential avenues to peace; that and his desire to regain U.S. diplomatic and economic favor sent Jordan to Madrid at an especially quick pace.21 Syria’s agreement to attend the peace parley came reluctantly.22 President Hafez al-Asad’s decision to join the American-led coalition against Iraq had put Syria in the unusual and awkward position of allying with Israel’s chief benefactor and against the Palestinians, whose cause Syria claimed to champion. Nevertheless, with the Soviet Union fading fast and no hope whatsoever of achieving military parity with Israel, Asad had no choice but to try to improve Syria’s standing with the only remaining superpower. If the Golan Heights could not be won back from Israel militarily, Syria would have to try to regain them diplomatically. Independent in name only, Lebanon followed Syria’s lead. Although not among the “confrontation states,” Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab countries, grateful for American support and Israeli restraint in turning back the threat from Iraq, accepted invitations to come to Madrid as observers and to participate in the multilateral working groups. Crises in Israel’s “strategic confidence” and in its relations with the United States immediately after the Gulf War led to the Shamir government’s grudging agreement to attend Madrid.23 The American refusal to include Israel in the alliance against Iraq raised the question of Israel’s continued relevance as a U.S. ally, potentially undermined Israel’s primacy in U.S. strategic planning, and made the refurbishing of the American-Israeli relationship of paramount importance for Israel.24 Also disquieting for Israelis was the realization that Israel depended so greatly upon U.S. economic assistance for its domestic development and weapons programs that the desire for good relations with Washington, as opposed to independent strategic or military planning, had dictated Israeli policy during the war. The Bush administration was not beyond using the fact of Israeli dependence to prod Israel down certain policy paths. In September 1991, the White House refused to approve $10 billion in guarantees for Israel, linking the loan request, and continued high levels of U.S. financial support in general, to a freeze on Jewish settlement activity in the occupied territories. Overt linkage between the U.S.-Israeli relationship and progress in the peace process constituted a new and disturbing (for Israel) or encouraging (for Arabs) feature in U.S. policy, and a low point in U.S.-Israeli relations.25 Shamir’s old rival Shimon Peres recorded his admiration for Baker as an “adept and gifted arm-twister; he exercised precisely the right amount of pressure on all parties to ensure that the conference took place and that it ended on a positive note. For Yitzhak Shamir, the arm-twisting now meant that he now accepted what he had previously resisted—a noncoercive international conference.”26 Peres was not the

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only one to register the irony of Shamir’s participation when “the form and structure of the Madrid Conference were virtually identical to the one [proposed by King Hussein and Peres which] Shamir had rejected four years and one intifada earlier.”27 Shamir had to weigh Baker’s invitation to Madrid against the new readiness of the Bush administration to use sticks, such as the loan guarantees, as well as carrots in persuading Israel to advance the peace process. He also had to consider the core interests of his right-wing government, which included protecting its claims to the West Bank, absorbing a flood of Russian immigrants, repairing relations with the United States, and reducing the Palestinian problem to an issue of limited autonomy only.28 Israel’s strong historic and strategic reservations about sending its representatives to face a roomful of hostile delegations, combined with the Likud government’s opposition to any land-for-peace policy, forced Washington to engage in extensive pre-negotiations before obtaining Israeli agreement to attend the Madrid Conference.29 In the end, however, Israel could not afford the costs associated with a refusal to join its neighbors at the bargaining table.30 The best the Shamir government could do was to try to protect its interests by insisting on several conditions regarding the composition of delegations and Palestinian representation (discussed above). The conference was designed at the foreign minister level, but Shamir decided to represent Israel personally. There, one of his own delegates described Shamir’s mood as “oscillat[ing] between two extremes: the feeling of being under siege, and indifference”; another observed that, in internal Israeli meetings “riddled with doubt, suspicion and even dread, . . . it was patently evident that [Shamir’s] prevailing desire was nothing more than to get the Madrid Conference over and done with.”31 Shamir’s attitude toward the conference perfectly illustrated the historic pattern whereby reluctant protagonists have felt forced to give the appearance of being flexible and wanting to negotiate—regardless of the intractability of their positions and/ or their distaste for their negotiating partners. Behind the façade of participation, Shamir’s “directive . . . to the Israeli negotiators was to engage in meaningless rhetoric and to concede nothing.”32After his electoral defeat in June 1992, Shamir admitted that he had agreed to attend Madrid and go through the motions without ever intending to give up Israel’s plans to consolidate and expand in the occupied territories through immigration and settlement. In an unusually frank confession, he stated: “In my political activity I know how to display the tactics of moderation, but without conceding anything on the goal—the integrity of the Land of Israel. . . . I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years and meanwhile we would have reached half a million [Jewish] people in Judea and Samaria.”33 But opinion polls and election results soon showed that Shamir’s ideological attachment to the territories was no longer in tune with a public more interested in exchanging its vulnerability (due at least partly to Israel’s rule over the West Bank and Gaza and the Likud’s settlements

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Courtesy of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

policy) for a chance at peace and security.34 Shamir’s replacement in June 1992 by a Labor government under Yitzhak Rabin heralded an important turning point in the motivation of the Israeli delegates to the various follow-up talks in Washington and elsewhere. Rabin distanced himself from his predecessor by explaining to the Knesset on 13 July: “We inherited the framework of the Madrid Conference from the previous government. But there is one significant change: the previous government created the tools, but they never intended to use them in order to achieve peace” (document 67).35 Status of the Negotiators

The high status of the summit’s participants could only benefit the chances of success, insofar as these were the men who could deliver on their end of a bargain, should they choose to make one. The trickiest issue was how the Palestinians would be represented. The vehicle for Palestinian participation constituted a highly charged issue for everyone involved. The Palestinians, of course, demanded full recognition of their national right to self-determination and the right to choose their own representatives; Shamir’s government had a stake in obstructing Palestinian nationalist claims and in denying the PLO any role whatsoever. The Arab states, which have historically conditioned their commitment to the Palestinian cause on its enhancement of their various national interests, did not form a common front demanding

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full status for PLO participants. The form and degree of Palestinian participation in the Madrid Conference were ultimately determined by a combination of factors, including the mixed bag of PLO relations with each of the Arab states; the U.S.-Israel understanding, dating back to the 1975 Sinai Disengagement Agreement, banning official U.S. dealings with the PLO;36 and the sometimes differing priorities of “outside” (PLO, Tunis) and “inside” (the occupied territories) Palestinians. The formula that satisfied the minimum conditions set down by the conference invitees (albeit without fully satisfying any of them) was a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, whose Palestinian component consisted of West Bank or Gaza residents having no formal affiliation with the PLO. An unofficial Palestinian “steering committee” headed by Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi, comprising PLO-sanctioned Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the Palestinian diaspora, accompanied the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the conference. In fact, all Madrid attendees soon realized that there was some “constructive ambiguity” at play here: although they discreetly avoided declaring so publicly, even the official Palestinian negotiators had been sanctioned by the PLO, which remained in contact with them from Tunis. The “steering committee” and other PLO officials rented rooms in nearby hotels from which they helped guide the Palestinian team throughout the proceedings.37 The ambiguous nature of the Jordanian-Palestinian team also became immediately apparent, as the head of the Palestinian side, respected Gaza physician Dr. Haydar Abd al-Shafi, received the same forty-five minutes for his opening and closing addresses as did the Jordanian foreign minister, Kamel Abu-Jaber, who ostensibly presided over one “joint” delegation.38 In Washington, powerplays and an immediate disagreement over whether Israel was to negotiate with the Palestinians and Jordanians as one unit or two delayed by a week the start of those negotiations, which began on sofas in the hallway when the State Department initially provided only one room for their negotiations. Subtle procedural maneuvers and couch fatigue eventually allowed the delegates to abandon the “corridor talks” and “sofa diplomacy” and move into two meeting rooms, where the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation began functioning on two tracks as separate Jordanian and Palestinian negotiating teams.39 Official PLO advisers again took up residence near the State Department, to guide the Palestinian team in the talks.40 In the spring of 1992, the public charade of the non-involvement of the PLO broke down entirely when members of the Palestinian delegation attended the May PLO Central Council meeting in Tunis, where the council passed a resolution expressing its appreciation of the performance of the negotiating team “which is the delegation of the PLO and of the people.”41 But the delegation was hampered by the need to refer every point of discussion back to the PLO, and months of unproductive negotiations in Washington ultimately led the Rabin government to the conclu-

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sion that only a full-fledged PLO team, directly authorized by Yasir Arafat, could make the hard concessions and choices that the negotiations required. These talks took place secretly, in Oslo, Norway, without the knowledge of the Palestinians (or Israelis) negotiating in Washington (see chapter 7). Madrid’s creative inclusion of a PLO-sanctioned non-PLO Palestinian team was probably the most the Shamir government could stomach, but this led, ironically (and to Shamir’s deep dismay),42 to direct PLO-Israeli talks. The Israeli prime minister’s decision to represent Israel himself, among all the Arab foreign ministers, was both good news and bad news in terms of status. The good news was that Israel was represented by the highest political leader in the land; the bad news was that he was also perhaps the least likely to make the gestures, let alone compromises, that successful negotiations demanded. Rumors circulated that the new foreign minister, David Levy, could not lead the delegation because he was unpracticed in foreign affairs and unable to speak English. But well-placed sources in the Foreign Ministry and elsewhere held that Shamir regularly sought to diminish Levy’s power and that his eclipse reflected not Levy’s limitations, but rather his enthusiasm and hard work in favor of the conference, which were not in accord with Shamir’s own negativism.43 The Madrid process thus set in place a new mechanism for direct dealings between official Israeli and Palestinian representatives regarding exclusively Palestinian matters. Even though Israel continued to insist on solving relevant aspects of its wider dispute with the Arabs through bilateral negotiations with each Arab state, its negotiators in Washington were forced to reluctantly break one of the well-worn negotiation patterns. For the first time, Israel dropped its reliance on outsiders like Anwar Sadat or King Hussein and went face to face with authorized Palestinian representatives to negotiate the issues of Palestinian self-rule and the fate of the occupied territories. Third-Party Considerations

Extensive U.S. activity in planning the conference and seeing it through to completion continued the pattern of escalating American involvement since the days of Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter. Careful U.S. preparations took into account the constraints under which the Arab and Israeli participants were operating. In order to overcome reservations expressed by the invitees and ensure their attendance, the official invitation stressed the flexibility and noncoercive nature of the conference’s format and aims (document 59). American officials also conducted extensive prenegotiations, including multiple trips to the Middle East by Secretary of State Baker, to reach consensus on the format of an international conference among all the par-

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ties prior to issuing an invitation.44 In a reversal of standard U.S. policy, he even met many times with prominent Palestinians at the home of the American ConsulGeneral in Jerusalem and also received some of them in his office in Washington.45 This painstaking diplomatic groundwork produced, along with the official invitation, “Letters of Assurances” about the proposed conference to the Palestinians, Israelis, Jordanians, and Syrians, each letter delicately phrased to correspond to the particular sensitivities of the recipient (documents 60–63).46 President Bush worked closely with his secretary of state, writing personal letters and making phone calls to specific parties when Baker encountered particularly stiff resistance. The heavy hand of a third party fits the traditional pattern of Arab-Israeli negotiations; however, the U.S. decision to declare a clear policy preference and then commit precious resources to making it work was a new and positive feature evidenced only rarely since Camp David. Another constructive aspect of U.S. involvement was the confluence between the conference at Madrid and the fact that the Bush administration was pursuing American global interests in cooperation, not confrontation, with its European, Soviet, and Japanese allies. Unlike previous situations in which co-sponsorship with the Soviets gave Arab leaders opportunities to play one superpower off the other, Madrid saw the evolution of “dual sponsorship . . . from an impediment to peace into a catalyst for successful negotiations.”47 Gorbachev even announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Israel, cut off in 1967, to coincide with issuance of the conference invitation. Another fortuitous circumstance was the absence of any competing European initiatives or declarations. This may have been because the phased format of the Madrid process satisfied other potential third parties that they would be able to make their own contributions through their participation in the later, multilateral stages of the peacemaking effort. An unexpected development in the wake of the hopeful post-conference buzz was the Vatican’s 1992 offer to open negotiations with Israel, which, following apparent Palestinian-Israeli and Jordanian-Israeli successes in 1993 and 1994, resulted in full diplomatic relations between Israel and the Vatican in 1994, including an exchange of ambassadors. Despite the third-party boon of new ties with the Soviet Union and the Vatican, Shamir feared that when the bilaterals moved to Washington, the historical third-party role would assert itself in that, “instead of negotiating seriously with Israel, the Arab delegations would prefer to talk to U.S. officials, hoping that the United States would deliver Israel to them.”48 Ashrawi confirms that Palestinian-U.S. talks occasionally superseded the Palestinian-Israeli, but never produced the end product Shamir worried about.49 But the most valuable form of American involvement came after the formal sessions had ended, when U.S. officials were called upon to supply ample quantities of patience, continuity, and ingenuity to help overcome the recurring deadlocks and

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slowdowns in the bilateral negotiations in Washington that the Madrid Conference had set into motion. As Israeli political scientist Galia Golan correctly predicted in early 1992, “it will probably be . . . the United States that will have to continue to provide the procedural solutions to the problems of keeping the various sides at the negotiating table when crises arise in the talks.”50 Commenting on the potential “traps” inherent in the U.S. mediation role at Madrid, I. William Zartman pointed to behavior consistent with the historical patterns already highlighted: “Both sides expect to have the luxury of talking themselves into a deadlock and then being saved by . . . the United States, upon whom the blame for an imposed solution can then be heaped. The mediator’s role is critical but misperceived by the parties, necessary but habit-forming and dangerous.”51 William Quandt writes that in the first year after Madrid, the United States performed effectively as a procedural facilitator or “convener” without succumbing to the temptation of becoming an arbitrator on matters of substance.52 American officials took full advantage of Israeli and Arab desires for good relations with and dependence upon the United States, shepherding and keeping sometimes reluctant delegations at the bargaining table with a combination of carrots and sticks. Not surprisingly, the Shamir government disagreed and resented what it saw as American activism and interference on behalf of both its rivals in the Labor Party and the Palestinians.53 For their part, the Palestinians bitterly observed that the United States was undermining them by “alternating between a spectator stance and the role of self-appointed guardian of Israel.” Israel, according to Hanan Ashrawi, “got all the carrots and asked for more; we got all the sticks.”54 Despite these contradictory criticisms, at Madrid the United States departed from the historical pattern in order to keep the parties talking, clearly enunciating the format for the conference, the issues for discussion, and schedules for negotiations, and acting resolutely on each. But U.S. handling alone was not enough to produce a comprehensive peace.55 And despite the sentiment of longtime State Department official Alfred Leroy Atherton Jr. that the administration had “invested too much to put the . . . initiative on hold or even into low gear” until after the November 1992 elections, when Bush’s popularity in the polls dropped the president deprived the Washington talks of their primary booster in August 1992 and asked Baker to leave the State Department to manage his reelection campaign instead.56 Proposed Terms of Agreement

The real success of the Madrid Conference was the breakthrough achieved on a number of procedural issues that had for years blocked the way to the very pursuit of negotiations. The formal sessions that assembled the delegations together rep-

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resented an important advance by sweeping aside long-standing taboos of mutual non-recognition. The participation of an official Palestinian delegation was another positive deviation from the historical pattern. Haydar Abd al-Shafi spoke movingly, outlining Palestinian suffering and grievances, while insisting that “we seek neither an admission of guilt after the fact, nor vengeance for past iniquities, but rather an act of will that would make a just peace a reality” (document 65).57 The vision of a just peace to which Palestinians were committed, he said, was “a state on all the territories occupied by Israel in the war of 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital,” coexisting alongside Israel. A tremendous concession in Palestinian eyes, this position was, of course, anathema to Shamir and many Israelis. Knowing this, the Palestinian delegation had come to the conference and prepared for the bilateral talks that followed with maximalist aspirations tempered by a minimalist fallback goal. Delegate Sami al-Kilani described the former as winning agreement on a period of self-governance leading to an independent state, and the latter as recognition by the other participants that Israel was in fact the spoiler, not the Palestinians, who should be rewarded with new international support and renewed Arab aid.58 And why was Madrid’s “self-government” suddenly attractive to Palestinians who had shunned Camp David’s “autonomy”? Abd al-Shafi emphasized that Madrid’s precise language called for “interim self-government,” thus keeping open the Palestinian quest for eventual statehood.59 The conclusion of the conference and inaugural bilateral talks found the delegation pleased with its “good performance . . . and excellent international media response, [which] produced an euphoric peak for the advocates of negotiation and for the negotiators themselves.”60 But, in fact, old habits die hard, and the positive precedent-setting nature of the Madrid Conference seems to have been lost on several delegates, particularly the Israeli prime minister and Syrian foreign minister, who paid lip service to the “historic” nature of the occasion but went on to devote the bulk of their remarks to “histrionics,” rehashing old grievances, accusations, and counterclaims.61 Baker’s Head of Policy Planning, Dennis Ross, observed ruefully that except for perhaps the Palestinians, “No one from the region took the high road.”62 In his closing remarks, Shamir declared: “I could go on and recite the litany of facts that demonstrate the extent to which Syria merits the dubious honor of being one of the most obsessive, tyrannical regimes in the world . . . but that is not what we have come here for” (document 66).63 Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa created a dramatic moment of his own when he referred to Shamir as a self-professed “terrorist” and charged him with having admitted to participating in the assassination of UN mediator Count Bernadotte in 1948, suddenly producing a 1947 British “wanted” poster featuring the photograph of a young Yitzhak Yzernitsky (later Shamir), accused by the British of terrorist activities against their troops in Palestine (document 64).64 Shamir had

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Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Al Sharra displays a mandate-era “wanted” photo of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Courtesy of Associated Press. Reprinted by permission.

excused himself from the conference immediately following his own remarks, citing a need to return to Israel prior to the Sabbath, but he left his delegation to sit stonefaced during al-Sharaa’s performance. Besides indicating the presence of an astute archivist at the Syrian foreign ministry, the main effect of al-Sharaa’s presentation and Shamir’s speech was to underscore the distrust and palpable enmity between the two parties, despite their presence at the same peace table. Nevertheless, once the rhetorical salvos had all been fired during the formal sessions, another important landmark passed quietly on 3 November 1991, when Israeli delegations sat down to parallel sets of direct bilateral talks in Madrid with representatives of Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan and the Palestinians. The architects of the Madrid Conference could point to three primary accomplishments. First, they managed to assemble the reluctant delegations and, even more

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significantly, to retain their participation until the conference’s scheduled conclusion, despite the strain of unabated mutual antagonism. Second, the conference set in motion the mechanism and rules for continuing Arab-Israeli peace negotiations into the 1990s. Third, it introduced what one observer called the “conceptually most innovative aspect of the new Middle East initiative” into the peacemaking process in the form of a multilateral track, by which working groups focused on region-wide problems in need of cooperative solutions.65 Inaugurated in Moscow in January 1992, the multilateral negotiations broadened the base of participation by including eleven Arab states (with the defiant exception of Syria and Lebanon) and twenty-seven other states and international agencies.66 As per the original Madrid invitation, the parties created five separate forums, each with a regional focus: water, refugees, the environment, regional economic development, and arms control and regional security.67 In a concerted attempt at de-politicization, world-renowned scientists and experts (as opposed to politicians and diplomats) dominated each working group, eager to apply their professional expertise to the issues within their respective domains. The goals of the negotiations in these working groups were manifold: most directly, to find real solutions for regional problems, but also to serve as “confidencebuilding measures” among the participants, to “provide a supportive framework for the bilateral negotiations, to lubricate the participants’ common domestic political and economic agenda, to weaken domestic rivals opposed to the peace process, to enhance the support of the international community, and to provide inducements for inclusion and signal opportunity costs to rejectionists in the region.”68 The multilaterals also created the opportunity for informal (“track-II”) interaction between participants from Israel and Arab countries not involved in the bilateral talks.69 Some of the groups made significant progress, thanks to the luxury of working away from the limelight and the professionalism of the specialists not beholden to any one country or political agenda. But despite extensive cooperation and analytical production, their work remained hypothetical since, absent diplomatic resolutions among them, the protagonists lacked the political will for implementing any cooperative ventures. Psychological Factors

In breaking sacred taboos and dealing directly with one another, leaders and negotiators created a huge gap between elite behavior and public attitudes. This presented a novel challenge requiring special efforts by would-be peacemakers. Rather than decrying the frustrating lack of visible progress in late 1992, one observer suggested that this slow pace was an asset that “allow[ed] national leaders to prepare

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public opinion for change.”70 Indeed, the diplomatic activity set off by the Madrid process in foreign capitals was mirrored by an uphill public-relations campaign— including an unfreezing of high-level Israeli-Egyptian diplomatic visits—aimed at convincing disbelievers throughout the region that benefits of peace were attainable and warranted an end to the state of belligerency and some territorial sacrifices. In January 1993, the Israeli Knesset removed a significant legal obstacle to normalization by voting to revoke a 1986 law banning contacts between Israelis and PLO representatives. Given the drastic nature of the changes that the prospect of peace introduced into both the foreign and domestic policy of Israel, decision makers and opinion makers in the 1990s had only one precedent from which to try to draw useful lessons: the Begin government’s 1979–82 campaign to legitimize its pioneering peace with Egypt. In his examination of how Begin sold Camp David to nationalist skeptics, Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov pointed to, among other things, “the perceived rationality of the proposed peace policy . . . [and] the conscious manipulation of national symbols, language, rituals, and ideology.” 71 The Rabin government that inherited the Shamir Madrid legacy faced formidable obstacles in pursuit of the “fundamental, stable, and comprehensive national consensus” to which Bar-Siman-Tov also referred. The wisdom of the post–Camp David experience was not so easily applied to legitimizing the Madrid peace process in the 1990s. The split within the Israeli population between those favoring and opposing continued negotiations in the Madrid-Washington framework, in the opinion of Tel Aviv University anthropologist Shlomo Deshen, reflected a schism far more profound than the classic difference of opinion on political options between “doves” and “hawks.” The chasm between the two camps was, in his view, based largely on a clash between two worldviews—one secular-socialist, the other religious—which carried the risk of a violent showdown between religious opponents to the land-for-peace formula and the secular government.72 The Rabin government’s attempts to manipulate “national symbols, language, rituals, and ideology” in the process of legitimizing the Madrid peace process failed, however, to win over its ultranationalist and religious opponents; eventually, Rabin paid for this failure with his life. The leaders of the Arab states and the Palestinians participating at Madrid and in the follow-up negotiations had similarly challenging tasks before them in persuading their constituents that the time was right to engage the Israelis in the conference room instead of on the battlefield. “Although Israel [was] still viewed with considerable suspicion in Damascus,” some observers saw evidence that the Asad regime was beginning to prepare the Syrian people “to accept the new official goal of getting the Golan Heights back by negotiation, not war.”73 Like its Israeli counterpart, Palestinian public opinion was also fractured. In the Palestinian case, one line of tension

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was between diaspora refugees demanding a return to territory within Israel proper and those on the land in Gaza and the West Bank demanding an end to the Israeli occupation. The former demanded an all-Palestine solution, setting their sights on locations within Israel’s borders. The latter, especially the secular pragmatists among them, were more prepared to accept a narrow West Bank/Gaza compromise that improved their quality of life and satisfied basic requirements of dignity and self-determination. Another division was between these secular pragmatists and the religious or ideological fundamentalists, who clung to maximalist visions of the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in its place. The PLO’s decision to sanction Palestinian participation at the conference engendered much debate, even within the PLO itself. In an attempt to engage the Palestinian population and enhance the pro-peace camp, the Palestinian delegation to Madrid convened over thirty town meetings both before and after the conference, listening to the voices of the people, trying to allay their fears, and reassuring them that the team shared their goals.74 Hardcore opponents of a negotiated compromise, Arabs and Israelis, were neither impressed by the event in Madrid nor persuaded that the enemy had done anything beyond don sheep’s clothing (if that) for a few hours. Most outside observers and many Middle Easterners, however, saw in Madrid the possibility of a genuine turning point, possibly akin to Sadat’s speech at the Knesset. The television and newspaper cameras repeatedly captured the view of the great chamber in the Royal Palace, documenting the incredible vista of Israeli and Arab leaders sitting around a common table, and panning wide to include glimpses of the Gulf Arabs, Europeans, and Asians in the gallery ringing the room. Some people saw in the confluence of Arab and Israeli delegations “the most tangible sign of Bush’s New World Order.”75 After months of deep personal diplomacy and much frustration, Baker observed that “by every reasonable barometer, Madrid was a resounding triumph. Its enduring legacy was simply that it happened at all. . . . Like the walls of Jericho, the psychological barriers of a half century came tumbling down with resounding finality that clear fall morning.”76 But “finality” required that the peacemakers work rapidly if they were to outpace those who, unpersuaded of the honesty of the others’ good intentions, were determined to rebuild those crumbling walls. Madrid Conference Post-Scripts

As a photo-op, Madrid was clearly an unqualified success. But the importance of the Madrid Conference cannot be gauged by the standard measure of agreements reached or treaties signed; it requires a more nuanced assessment. It is worth noting, for instance, that Madrid disproved skeptics’ claims that the public Egyptian-Israeli

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peace negotiations of a dozen years earlier would be the last. If “prior to Madrid the question was: Could negotiations ever [again] take place? Afterward, it was: Could the negotiations ever produce peace?”77 When negotiators in Washington finally settled down to dealing with the hard issues separating them, the historic incompatibility of basic aims became evident and quickly produced deadlock in three of the four sets of talks. Only the JordanianIsraeli meetings successfully broke with the historic Arab-Israeli negative negotiating pattern; in that case, delegates kept some give-and-take in reserve behind their opening stances, thereby allowing room for some real bargaining and the narrowing of differences. This is not surprising, given the long history of quiet Jordanian-Israeli cooperation that preceded Madrid. Madrid gave that cooperation new legitimacy, mirroring and extending Hussein’s and Peres’s efforts in London in 1987. The Jordanian and Israeli teams used the first year of their open work together in Washington to actually produce a draft peace agenda. Unwilling to get out ahead of the Palestinians, however, the Jordanians delayed the signing and publication of this “Common Agenda” until the next year, once Palestinian-Israeli negotiations had borne fruit.78 In the cases of the Syrians and (by extension) Lebanese, negotiations foundered over an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights and arrangements for returning the Israeli-imposed security zone in South Lebanon to effective Lebanese sovereignty, in exchange for a normalization of relations between Israel and Syria and Israel and Lebanon, respectively. Israeli and Syrian negotiators dug themselves into a catch-22 rut, going around in circles shadowboxing over how much of a withdrawal for how much peace, and how soon. Fitful Syrian-Israeli continuation of the talks begun at Madrid almost led to a breakthrough in 2000 (see chapter 6). The first element in our own framework for analysis suggests that simply expanding the background of negotiating experience between two parties is not necessarily a precursor to greater success in subsequent meetings. Resolution of the Syrian-Israeli conflict will come only when there is significant positive change in the timing, third-party, motivation, and/or leadership factors, each a multifaceted variable in and of itself. Although Lebanon was ostensibly freed from the Syrian yoke by the latter’s withdrawal of its forces from Lebanon in 2005, domestic political weakness, the government’s virtual eclipse by the Lebanese Shi’a group Hizballah, and recurrent Hizballah-Israeli fighting have precluded forward progress between Lebanon and Israel since Madrid. The Israeli-Palestinian talks finally began dealing with matters of substance in mid-January 1992. But the subsequent exchanges of position papers revealed the irreconcilability of the delegations’ positions over the nature, scope, and purpose of an “interim self-government” for the Palestinians, as called for in the letter of invitation to the conference. The Israelis sought at first to keep all discussions limited to Begin’s concept of “personal autonomy,” while the Palestinians aimed all their ar-

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guments at achieving territorial sovereignty. The first small break from the historic pattern of negotiating partners locked into rigid opening positions came in April 1993, with an agreement to form three separate Israeli-Palestinian working groups on self-government, land and water, and human rights. Late in coming, this procedural step helped the parties focus on narrower practical issues more amenable to resolution, but the chasm between them remained wide. Despite admirable efforts, the negotiators on the multilateral track were unable to bridge the gaps between Arabs and Israelis. The primary weakness of the multilaterals, perhaps unavoidable, was that “they were too closely tied to the issue of normalization for Israel. The fact that Israel was able to sit down with Arab countries, to develop ideas for future cooperation in itself constituted an element of normalization and legitimacy for Israel,” and some Arab countries balked at “offering Israel the rewards of peace before a full political settlement had been reached” (hence Syria’s non-participation).79 For its part, Israel overplayed its hand on occasion by trumpeting the large delegations it sent to the four economic summits which took place between 1992 and 1996, inadvertently fueling Arab fears that peace might replace their subjugation to Israeli military might with economic domination. The multilateral track fell moribund in 1996, although its proponents insist that the working groups had “made significant contributions to the bilateral negotiations, reinforcing them at times and at times outpacing them . . . [and may yet] play a critical part in the overall search for peace.”80 In the meantime, however, they remained stalled, hostage to the unresolved Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Palestinian delegates in Madrid and in Washington had presented the Palestinian case vigorously and eloquently. Their Israeli counterparts engaged them in serious discussion, particularly after the Rabin government came to power in 1992. Despite their best efforts, however, tangible progress eluded them. The Palestinian team insisted that, if the Palestinians in the occupied territories and in the diaspora were to make the huge psychological transformations demanded by the give-andtake of negotiations, they required the strong and open leadership of no less than the PLO and Yasir Arafat himself. Could Arafat publicly extend the hand of peace to Israel? Could Rabin reciprocate? And were the two of them powerful enough to convince the majority of their people to give peace a chance, while overcoming, in one way or another, the skeptics and extremists among them who demanded nothing less than absolute victory and the absolute denial of the others’ aspirations? The Madrid Conference, follow-up talks in Washington, and a myriad of multilateral meetings succeeded in establishing direct lines of communication between Arab and Israeli elites and created an ongoing mechanism by which Arab and Israeli negotiators could continue to chip away at the issues separating them. This was indeed progress.81 To mark the fifteenth anniversary of the 1991 conference, many of

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the original delegates as well as new faces from the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and Russia reconvened in Madrid in early 2007 for a gathering sponsored by private peace foundations. The goal was to breathe new life into the peace process. The expanded list of attendees was encouraging, although they were largely unofficial civil society activists and former or low-ranking government representatives; the fact that they felt compelled to meet at all reflected the sad fact that fifteen years later, the promise of Madrid had yet to be fulfilled. Nonetheless, the attendees called repeatedly for a resumption of the process set in motion in Madrid and expressed their conviction that diplomacy was the only route for resolving the conflict. Hanan Ashrawi recalled Madrid 1991 as having been “a miracle, defying credibility even with immaculate hindsight, but a place where illusion and reality, fact and fantasy, exhilaration and despondency intermingled enticingly to claim both our attention and our souls.” 82 As the fifteen-year reunion illustrated, much work still lies ahead if breaking the dynamics of deadlock is to become fact and not fantasy.

Chapter 5 Out of the Shadows and into the Light The Jordanian-Israeli Peace Process, 1991–1994

The Peace Treaty of 26 October 1994 (document 76) between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is one of the most promising negotiated settlements to emerge in the post-Madrid period. The treaty is actually the fourth in a series of Jordanian-Israeli agreements that grew out of their work together in the bilateral talks set in motion at the Madrid Peace Conference of October 1991.1 The formal Jordanian-Israeli peace deal would never have seen the light of day, however, had it not been for the surprise PLO-Israeli agreement of September 1993 (see chapter 7), which served as a powerful catalyst. Despite the fact that the treaty has yet to achieve its full potential for normal, let alone warm, Jordanian-Israeli relations, one can optimistically note that the process and product of 1994 reflect in many respects a positive divergence from the legacy of negative patterns of Arab-Israeli bargaining behavior. Strong leadership imbued with a genuine desire for peace, a willingness to prioritize demands and accept compromises, and constructive third-party support all contributed to the achievement of a formal Israeli-Jordanian accord. Previous Negotiating Experience

The quartet of documents concluding with the peace treaty was, in effect, public affirmation of a private relationship long recognized as “the worst kept secret dialogue in the Middle East,”2 remarkable for both “the longevity of the connection, and the many functional accomplishments” that it produced.3 The 1991–1994 Jordanian-Israeli peace process is best appreciated against the background of extensive Transjordanian-Zionist and Jordanian-Israeli relations discussed at length in chapter 3 (the London Document). In fact, the successful agreements of the early 1990s represent the continuation and belated fruition of the stillborn Peres-Hussein accord of 1987. Although that attempt at formal peacemaking failed, it did not de-

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Courtesy of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

plete the reservoir of goodwill, at least among the elites, that had developed from years of tacit alliance, clandestine cooperation, and informal agreements reached and kept. Intermittent contact between Jordanians and Israelis had been maintained not only at the highest levels, but between the king himself and a small number of top Israeli leaders, lending a sense of continuity and stability to the relationship and an element of trust completely lacking between Israel and any other Arab partner.4 Israel had long maintained secret links with agents of various Arab states, but only with Jordan was Israel “able to get right up to the top of the pyramid.”5 Yehuda Lukacs has characterized the relationship between Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein as that of “intimate enemies”; meeting at the White House in July 1994, the two leaders admitted to a curious President Bill Clinton that their “friendship” extended back some twenty years.6 In this scenario, “wealth of experience” very accurately describes the rich relationship between the two nations’ leaderships. Despite the general proposition that a history of frequent encounters does not necessarily enhance the prospects for a successfully negotiated settlement, it is likely that the trust and stability created by the unique nature of long-term Jordanian-Israeli relations did contribute to the achievement of a formal peace treaty, once the two parties decided to go public. The question, then, is this: if Jordan and Israel were enjoying a quiet, mutually satisfying relationship, what motivated them to come out of the shadows and into the light?

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Purposes and Motives

Israel was born a pariah in the Middle East, and it has always been Israeli policy to try to normalize Arab-Israeli relations through bilateral peace accords with its neighbors. Since the Mandate period, Zionist leaders had fantasized about the economic potential of an open Middle East market. In the Jordanian-Israeli case, economists have recently speculated about the potential financial rewards of jointly developing commercial and tourist facilities at the Dead Sea and at the twin cities of Eilat (Israel) and Aqaba (Jordan). A formal accord with Jordan was a necessary stepping-stone along the path of mutual fiscal gain. Beyond the economics of peace, however, security-conscious Israel clearly appreciated that peace with Jordan would constitute significant stability along its long eastern front, as well as a buffer between it and Iraqi troops who could march on Jerusalem only via Amman. A dalliance with Hussein was acceptable policy across Israel’s highly factionalized political spectrum. Peace with Jordan was a long-cherished goal, dating from the aborted 1950 agreement with King Hussein’s grandfather, Abdallah (document 16). After capturing the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war, many Israelis touted the “Jordanian option” as a way to trade that territory for a separate peace, without the trauma of having to deal with the Palestinians or the PLO. The popularity of an accord with Hussein reflected the traditional Israeli preference for dealing with non-Palestinian Arab state leaders, and the long-standing predominance of “Jordan-firsters” over “Palestine-firsters” within the Israeli foreign-policy establishment.7 This was true despite the 1993 breakthrough to direct Israeli-PLO dealings embodied in the Oslo Accords, and even more so in light of subsequent crises in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Enthusiasm for the treaty with Jordan was also an expression of relief at having found a counterweight to, or insurance policy against, Arafat’s and the PLO’s unproven ability to “deliver the goods.” The king shared many of Israel’s motivations to finally conclude a formal peace, and his thinking had similarly evolved to the point where the question was not whether peace was possible, but when and on what specific terms. Concerned that successive Israeli-PLO agreements post-1993 would leave him sidelined, Hussein was anxious to maintain Jordanian influence in the West Bank. His own declaration of 31 July 1988 (document 51) had reduced Jordanian responsibility for West Bank Palestinian affairs; any new PLO-Israeli security or economic measures established there would obviously have a huge impact on Jordan, and Hussein wanted to put his kingdom in the best position to shape developments to its advantage. The king worried specifically about the emergence of a Palestinian state that could subvert his government and about the possibility of a wave of refugees or immigrants flowing from the Palestinian West Bank to the Jordanian East Bank.8

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In making peace with Israel and removing even the small risk of war there, Hussein extricated Jordan from military dependence upon Iraq. This served two interrelated Jordanian goals: reconstitution of the friendship with the United States and economic recovery. Pressured by his vast Palestinian population to side with Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, the king found himself estranged from his traditional U.S. and Gulf Arab benefactors. During that war, Palestinian refugees from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia poured into Jordan, further straining its already meager resources. The king also worried that should the fledgling Palestinian autonomy envisaged in the September 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (DOP; see document 70 and chapter 7) come into being, it might divert potential West Bank investment from Jordanian to newly autonomous Palestinian hands. Although the United States rewarded Jordan’s participation in the Madrid Conference with a resumption of military assistance, Amman’s worsening economy was going to require massive foreign intervention, including U.S. forgiveness of Jordan’s $700 million foreign debt. In the minds of American officials, King Hussein would have to “pull a Sadat” in order to sufficiently impress Congress, the president, and the American public; nothing short of a historic, open declaration of peace with Israel could have brought such a handsome prize. Secretary of State Warren Christopher acknowledged that, in this situation, “the economics of it may be driving the politics of it.”9 Peace with Israel thus served Jordan’s goal of rehabilitating its image in American eyes and receiving U.S. aid and debt forgiveness, as well as the benefit of a new economic relationship with Israel itself.10 But, for Hussein, peace with Israel was never just a means to an American end; to this effect he purposefully chose the term “peacemaking” over “normalization” for the peace treaty’s text. The king himself remarked, “I can’t understand the term cold peace,” genuinely believing that only a warm peace could transform the regional environment and “bring benefits not only to Jordan but to the entire Middle East.”11 Timing

Jordan and Israel shared so many common or overlapping aims that the question is not why they were able to reach an agreement, but why at this time. The old expression comes to mind: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” What gave Jordan and Israel the impetus to formalize a private and low-key relationship that was already working well? Many of the key timing elements, both external and internal, have already emerged in the preceding discussion. The 1991 Gulf War struck a devastating blow to the Jordanian economy. The loss of foreign aid from the United States and the Gulf states, the abrupt influx of some 350,000 Palestinians and Jordanians, expelled

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by the Gulf states in which they had been working, and the sudden cessation of the remittances which these workers had been sending home—all these prompted Hussein to consider dramatic action. Another catalyst for diplomatic boldness was the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Arab states’ Soviet sponsor, which necessitated some degree of Arab accommodation with the sole remaining superpower. The Gulf states, Egypt, and even Syria sided with the United States against Iraq during Operation Desert Storm in 1991; further progress in relations with the United States would require Arab rapprochement with Israel. After Madrid and Oslo, with Syria and the PLO now talking to the United States, Jordan could not afford any strains in its relationship with the Americans. Peace with Israel would help vault Hussein back into the comfort of a U.S. partnership.12 Most important in forcing the king’s hand, however, were the Israeli-PLO Oslo and Cairo agreements of 1993 and 1994 (documents 70, 74). International excitement over an apparent Israeli-PLO reconciliation caused the king to worry that Jordan would lose its geopolitical value in the region and that the Palestinian territories might become the preferred address for international aid currently going to Jordan.13 Jordan’s on-again, off-again relationship with the PLO, and the uneasy tensions between Israel and the PLO, both constrained and motivated Jordanian interaction with Israel. Mindful of the sensibilities of the huge Palestinian component of his constituency (estimated at 50–60 percent), King Hussein had always been hesitant to effect a formal peace with Israel without the PLO’s endorsement or prior to a resolution of the Palestinian problem. The suddenly very real prospect of an Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank, the establishment of a Palestinian self-governing authority there, and Israeli-PLO negotiations about Jerusalem in the not-so-distant future persuaded Hussein that he had better move quickly to protect Jordan’s interests and influence in those areas. For example, once the PLO and Israel began negotiating openly in the autumn of 1993, the PLO goal to make Jerusalem the capital of an independent Palestine challenged Jordan’s self-stated responsibility for the Islamic holy sites in the city. Article 9 of the Israeli-Jordanian treaty recognized Jordan’s “special” and “historic” role there, potentially allowing the king to outflank Arafat on Jerusalem. Reflecting again the Israeli preference for Hussein over Arafat, Rabin was only too happy to facilitate this maneuver. It was surely no oversight that Arafat was not among the dignitaries invited to the treaty signing ceremony.14 Also important was the fact that, after September 1993, the PLO’s agreements with Israel removed the almost sacrosanct taboo against breaking pan-Arab ranks and dealing openly with Israel. According to scholar and former palace adviser Adnan Abu-Odeh, the Palestinian issue had “historically placed two decision-making

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restraints on King Hussein, one Arab (removed by the Gulf War and Madrid) and one Palestinian (removed by Oslo).”15 Once Arafat began negotiations with Israel, he freed Hussein from any responsibility for the Palestinian cause. Under no obligation to be more Catholic than the pope (or more Palestinian than Arafat), King Hussein finally authorized the signing of the year-old “Common Agenda” with Israel on 14 September 1993, the very day after the signing of the Palestinian-Israeli DOP. Meeting with Rabin two weeks later, Hussein affirmed: “I could not give an inch of Palestinian territory or an iota of Palestinian rights. But now that the Palestinians have been able to speak for themselves and have assumed their responsibilities, we can do business.”16 Domestic considerations provided yet another timing factor that encouraged the king in his diplomacy with Israel. In the months leading up to the 8 November 1993 Jordanian elections—the first multiparty general elections since 1957—the Islamic Action Front campaigned on a platform of no peace with Israel. But the electoral results favored the conservative, tribal, and independent blocs loyal to the king, confirming Hussein’s estimation that the time was ripe for an open Jordanian-Israeli peace and reinforcing his determination to make the process succeed. Hussein thus faced a rare moment when a settlement with Israel was simultaneously “mutually beneficial on the Israeli-Jordanian bilateral level, acceptable on the Jordanian-Palestinian level, and possible on the inter-Arab level.”17 In responding to external events and economic pressures with overtures to one another, Jordan and Israel repeated some of the traditional Arab-Israeli negotiating patterns. But, unlike the historical paradigm in which ulterior motives were usually limited to maintaining the status quo or subverting the other party’s position, this time the two parties independently concluded that their respective purposes could be best served by actually seeing the negotiations through to a successful conclusion. Both Jordan and Israel responded to timing considerations in the early 1990s in a proactive sense, seeing an open window of opportunity and reaching through it toward one another with the positive goal of ending their dispute through peaceful accommodation. Status of the Negotiators

Post-Madrid Israeli-Jordanian negotiations benefited from sustained, symmetrical, high-level interaction between the two sides. Like Sadat and Begin after Camp David, and in sharp contrast to pre-1948 precedents, the failed Lebanese-Israeli negotiations of 1983, and the doomed London Document of 1987, both King Hussein and Prime Minister Rabin commanded sufficient popularity and power at home to be able to make good on their promises. Rabin enjoyed a particularly strong position

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domestically. Even the right-wing opponents of his dealings with the PLO endorsed peace with Jordan, dubbed by one observer a “risk-free” policy, “a local equivalent to mom and apple pie.”18 Fondness for the king and the strong historical preference for dealing with him, rather than Arafat, meant that Israeli negotiators went into the Jordanian meetings with an unprecedented amount of public trust and support for an accord. King Hussein’s peace operation faced opposition from both Islamists and leftists, not insignificant elements in the Jordanian parliament. But the 1993 electoral defeat of the Islamic Action Front by Hussein loyalists suggested that the king was correct in his belief that he could expect parliamentary support for a treaty with Israel. Occasional Israeli pronouncements, particularly by the Likud, that “Jordan is Palestine” had long tormented Transjordanians with dark visions of a Palestinian or Israeli overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy and the declaration of Arab Palestine under the leadership of the PLO in Jordan’s place. According to Abu-Odeh, himself a Palestinian-Jordanian, since the Jordan-Israel peace agreement constituted explicit Israeli recognition of the territorial and national integrity of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Transjordanians were largely “happy because the treaty, as Prime Minister Majali said, ‘had buried al-Watan al-Badil’”—the notion that Jordan could become a “substitute homeland” for the Palestinians.19 The regime promoted peace with Israel as the panacea for all of Jordan’s people and problems, Palestinian-Jordanians among them. The strength of the king’s personality and the overwhelming respect he enjoyed among his subjects allowed Hussein at least this one attempt at peacemaking with Israel. By closely monitoring the shifting balance of power among Jordan’s domestic forces, the careful king of four decades prevailed. Again departing from the historical pattern, Jordanians and Israelis kept their negotiations restricted to the very highest leaders and a small coterie of their most trusted advisers. The third document in the Israeli-Jordanian package, the Washington Declaration, was actually drafted by Hussein and Rabin themselves in a year-long series of secret dusk-to-dawn meetings. The king perhaps captured the unique dynamic of this process best, saying to Rabin at their pivotal 19 May 1994 meeting in London, “You know, Yitzhak, you and I have been at this a long time.”20 Over the next few hours they worked out the basis for the July declaration in Washington. Unlike most Arab and Israeli negotiators, Hussein and Rabin were remarkably unplagued by errant or unofficial representatives. Shimon Peres’s role as foreign minister in the 1993–94 agreements with Jordan stands in sharp relief against his earlier negotiations with the king which produced the failed London Document. That accord died when then Prime Minister Shamir flatly rejected Peres’s initia-

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tive. Despite a bitter, decades-long rivalry between them, Rabin and Peres joined forces after 1993 and presented Hussein with a solid political partnership. At the treaty signing ceremony in the Wadi Araba (Arabic) / Arava (Hebrew) Desert on 26 October 1994, when the two Labor Party rivals went out of their way to praise each other for their diplomatic contributions, it was not clear which was the sharper hatchet being buried: the one between Jordan and Israel or the one between Rabin and Peres.21 Breaking the traditional pattern that had undermined the 1987 London Document, the 1993–94 Jordanian-Israeli accords thus benefited from direct and focused attention by strong leaders in control of their governments who were well served by loyal and experienced diplomats. Success was also facilitated by the smooth and pleasant interpersonal relations that developed between the high-level officials who were entrusted with the ongoing negotiations between the periodic meetings of Hussein and Rabin. After their first encounters under the Madrid and Washington formats, the delegations became effective in hammering out details and developing the substance of the principles enunciated by Israeli leaders and by King Hussein, who were recalled by their legal and military advisers and draftsmen only when the time was ripe to narrow remaining gaps and finalize agreed texts.22 Third-Party Considerations

In the 1993–94 Israeli-Jordanian talks, the United States again assumed the traditional role of an external Great Power whom both sides, particularly the Jordanians, were eager to impress. U.S. support, money, and arms were, after all, important motivating factors for the king in declaring an open peace with Israel. Aharon Klieman cautions, however, against blindly accepting the conventional wisdom that full U.S. participation is “absolutely essential; or, alternatively, that this involvement is both necessary and decisive at every single stage.”23 He reminds us that the “Israel-Jordan breakthrough achieved in the first half of 1994 . . . testifies to the ability of the protagonists to pursue direct channels on their own,” with the definitive negotiations taking place in Amman and London between the king and Peres (November 1993) and the king and Rabin (May 1994), before direct U.S. involvement began. Indeed, individual peace initiatives have often begun independent of the United States (e.g., Begin-Sadat in 1977, Hussein-Peres in 1986–87, and the 1993 PLO-Israeli talks in Oslo), and sometimes even in opposition to U.S. policy preferences (e.g., Sadat’s 1977 overture to Israel and trip to Jerusalem). Klieman notes that the critical American contribution has usually been in the later stages of the diplomatic process, when the United States acted as facilitator and guarantor, keeping the negotiators on track and enticing them to persevere until they reached an accord.24

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The importance of the U.S. “bandwagoning”25 an indigenous Middle East initiative—that is, endorsing, facilitating, and underwriting a process that has already begun—is evident in the different fates of the Jordanian-Israeli initiative of the late eighties and that of the early nineties. In contrast to the American hesitancy that helped undermined the prospects of the 1987 accord, the United States energetically supported the later attempts at a separate Jordanian-Israeli peace. When Jordanian-Israeli negotiations at the State Department under the Madrid formula stalled, the administration applied its best diplomatic resources to the problem. Secretary of State Warren Christopher shuttled repeatedly to the Middle East, and President Bill Clinton received the king, his brother Crown Prince Hassan, Foreign Minister Peres, and Prime Minister Rabin in Washington. In another happy departure from the historical pattern, the United States enjoyed the trust and friendship of both parties in nearly equal measure after Madrid; neither expected the Americans to impose a lopsided settlement on the other. Israelis and Jordanians regularly included American negotiators in their meetings, principally Martin Indyk (then chief Middle East specialist at the White House) and Dennis Ross (chief American negotiator for the Middle East). In the month immediately preceding the Washington Declaration, “triangular talks” among senior diplomats from the three countries occurred on an almost daily basis in Washington. In another example of the sometimes surreal nature of Arab-Israeli peacemaking in the 1990s, these talks were often dominated by Israeli efforts to persuade the Americans to grant the Jordanians the financial incentives for a peace treaty. This would reward the king and reinforce his position as an element of regional stability and an advocate of open Arab-Israeli reconciliation. Indeed, in the wake of the treaty, Jordan benefited from increased U.S. aid, including debt forgiveness and accelerated military aid designed to upgrade the Jordanian armed forces.26 The July 1994 document, like its unsuccessful 1987 predecessor, reflected Jordanian and Israeli desires for an American stamp of approval for their bilateral agreements. Hussein and Rabin had drafted the bulk of their document in London and the king intended to invite the prime minister to a signing ceremony in the Jordanian Wadi Araba, “so that Rabin would get esteem”; once President Clinton invited them to the White House, however, King Hussein explained that “both Rabin and I felt the Americans had been our partners in trying to get somewhere for so long that we could not turn down the invitation. We went with the paper already agreed to its last detail” and unveiled the newly named “Washington Declaration” (document 75) at the White House.27 The language specifically (but disingenuously) identifies it as the “initiative of President William J. Clinton” and pays tribute to the American president in four of the five introductory sentences and again in all three of the concluding sentences. The word “initiative” misrepresents and overstates the U.S.

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contribution to the negotiating process, but it clearly reflects both parties’ interest in cloaking themselves in American armor upon revealing and defending their accord. The October 1994 peace treaty (document 76) incorporates and elaborates upon the Washington Document, which is cited twice in the preamble. There is no doubt, however, that Jordanian-Israeli efforts benefited from serious and sustained U.S. attention throughout 1993 and 1994. Although the peace treaty was signed at a site on the Israeli-Jordanian border, President Clinton sat with the leaders on the dais and put his signature on the document as the primary witness. Perhaps most indicative of the importance both parties attached to a U.S. endorsement of their accord was the decision to schedule the desert ceremony for 1:00 pm, when the sun was most punishing. It may have been siesta time in the Middle East, but on the American East Coast the morning news programs were just beginning their broadcasts. Proposed Terms of Agreement

As the parties moved through the successive stages of their peace process, the terms of agreement increased in both breadth and depth. The culmination of a four-part process that evolved over twenty-four months, the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty terminated the state of war between the two countries, established a full and formal peace, and went on to outline quite specific and concrete steps in many areas. The treaty’s thirty articles and five annexes cover an extensive array of cooperative measures in fields including border demarcations and crossings, security, water sharing, cultural and scientific exchanges, tourism, transportation, crime, economics and trade, aviation, the environment, postal and telecommunications, energy, health, and agriculture.28 The emphasis and detail regarding economic cooperation (the word “cooperation” appears twenty times in the treaty’s text) contrasts with its fleeting attention to security issues, which are limited to rather cursory security clauses and the absence of any third-party or UN presence or guarantees in this domain. The fact that “conventional security arrangements, such as demilitarization, early warning stations, and so on [are] nonexistent” in the Jordanian-Israeli treaty is a “reflection of their shared geopolitical and strategic concerns relating to a series of third parties, such as Iraq, Syria, the Palestinians and the United States.”29 Neither Jordan nor Israel anticipated a serious military threat from the other. Ever mindful of the “Jordan is Palestine” mantra periodically emanating from Israel’s far right, Jordan neutralized the demographic threat of the wholesale transfer of Palestinians from Israel and the West Bank into Jordan with a clause prohibiting the “involuntary movements of persons in such a way as to adversely prejudice the security” of the Kingdom (Article

LEB A N ON

Lit ani R.

Sidon

Israel-Jordan Treaty, 1994

Damascus

Tyre

Dar’a

Nazareth Irbid Jordan R.

Jenin

WEST BANK Nablus

Tel Aviv Jaffa

Ramallah Jericho Jerusalem Bethlehem

GAZA STRIP

SYRIA

Sea of Galilee

Haifa

Mediterranean Sea

GOLAN HEIGHTS

Safad

Acre

Dead Sea

Hebron

Gaza

JORDAN

al-Karak

Beersheva

Rafah

Amman

ISRAEL

EGYPT

Jordanian land still farmed by Israeli farmers under treaty agreement

Wa di A raba

HaArav a

Land returned by Israel to Jordan at conclusion of peace treaty

Land ceded by Jordan to Israel in exchange for Israeli farming rights U.N. Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF)

Eilat Gulf of Aqaba

Aqaba

Map 6.

0

25

50 mi

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2.6). Israel’s agreement to this clause reflected the Rabin government’s commitment to a separate Palestinian peace and its abandonment of any hope of solving the Palestinian problem via a “Jordanian option.”30 In contrast to the historical pattern characterized by maximum demands and minimum movement toward a compromise agreement, Hussein and Rabin prioritized Jordanian and Israeli interests, identified where they overlapped, and strove to reach a mutually accommodating agreement. Despite the clear desire of both sides to reach an accord, however, there still existed a number of issues not easily resolved. Competition over scarce water resources and conflicting claims to several areas along the ill-defined Arava/Araba border posed serious obstacles. A creative negotiation resulted in an agreed increase in Jordan’s use of Yarmuk River waters, Israel’s handing over to Jordan of 300 (out of 381) square kilometers of disputed land south of the Dead Sea, and Israel’s agreement to return to Jordanian sovereignty (but continue to cultivate under a “special regime”) some 30 square kilometers of land in the southern Arava/Araba developed by Israeli kibbutzim—crowning testimony to the parties’ skill and determination in finding solutions to their problems (see map 6). In sealing their deal, “King Hussein and Prime Minister Rabin had established not only a personal affinity, but a strategic rapport as well.”31 Psychological Factors

Marwan Muasher experienced first hand the immense psychological shock of having to move from supporting peace in principle to acting upon his beliefs. A veteran of Jordanian-Israeli negotiations since the Madrid Conference, Muasher considered himself “a moderate, and certainly a champion of Arab-Israeli peace.” Nevertheless, upon being tapped by the king to become the first Jordanian ambassador to Israel, Muasher’s spontaneous response was to refuse. “I was a firm believer in the need to achieve peace between the Arab world and Israel, and I had crossed many psychological barriers in my dealings with Israelis. But to be ambassador, to actually go and live there, in Israel—that was a leap I was not yet ready to take.”32 In the end Hussein prevailed upon Muasher to accept the ambassadorship, in which post he served with great distinction. But the fact that an individual long committed to peace with Israel and familiar with Israelis required the personal intervention of the king to prod him across “the abyss that still exists between Arabs and Israelis”33 is a sobering indicator of the probable unpreparedness of average Jordanians and Israelis to change their perceptions of one another. With myriad public actions and declarations, King Hussein and Yitzhak Rabin each clearly demonstrated his personal metamorphosis from warrior to statesman and peacemaker. While they could embrace peace and sign agreements, could they sell that peace to their people as the

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optimal way of achieving the security and material well-being to which the ordinary citizen aspires? Rabin had the easier task, since Israeli public opinion had long thought highly of King Hussein and looked to Jordan as the preferred negotiating partner in any deal over the West Bank. Especially when compared to Arafat and the PLO—names many Israelis uttered in a tone usually reserved for Hitler and the Nazis—King Hussein was not feared as a vicious enemy but rather seen as a gallant opponent. In fact, Rabin used the momentum with Jordan to justify his more controversial dealings with the PLO, arguing that the former could not have come about without the latter. Rabin attempted to persuade the Israeli public that his was truly a broad policy aimed at winning peace for Israel with all its Arab neighbors—a process in which the distasteful partnership with the PLO was a necessary evil and the peace with Jordan a justifying reward. When Israeli and Jordanian diplomats abandoned the conference rooms of Washington to meet for the first time at their common border in mid-July 1994, the Rabin government portrayed the “change of venue [as] a triumph, signaling another step toward full acceptance [of Israel] by its Arab neighbors.”34 “Hussein’s personality,” wrote one scholar, “acted like magic on all Israeli leaders and that, along with more than 30 years of de facto peace, meant that peace between Jordan and Israel was a matter of consensus among Israeli leaders of all political persuasions.”35 But peace could not be pulled, rabbit-like, from the Jordanian hat. King Hussein had a considerably harder task before him in selling the peace treaty to his own constituents. As Adam Garfinkle observed in 1992, “while the Hashemite hierarchy operates in a normal, civilized and pragmatic manner toward its neighbors, including Israel, the attitudes of the population of Jordan do not exactly follow suit. Rather, there is a kind of inverse proportionality at work.” He attributed this phenomenon to such factors as: (a) East Bankers’ resentment that Israel had foisted a huge West Bank Palestinian population upon them; (b) the Palestinians, who comprised perhaps sixty percent of the Jordanian population, evincing a high level of anger at Israel for their families’ displacement and for the treatment of their brothers and sisters under Israeli occupation; and (c) the government’s toleration of widespread Israel-bashing in the media, perhaps as a counterbalance to general public knowledge of its extensive contacts with Israel.36 Not surprisingly, many Jordanians were skeptical that the benefits of peace with Israel would outweigh any damage to their interests at home, in the Arab world, and vis-à-vis the Palestinian cause.37 Although the treaty “addressed the deep yearning of Israel’s citizens to be accepted by their neighbors . . . this noble vision of peace . . . inspired only a minority of Hussein’s citizens.”38 Understanding this, the king worked tirelessly to prepare his subjects for peace, and to persuade them that accommodation with Israel was possible and would enhance their personal well-being as well as Jordanian national in-

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terests.39 In early July 1994, Hussein had publicly warned his parliament that without superpower support Jordan could not withstand the economic and political pressures it faced, adding that he would meet with Rabin if that would bring relief in the form of renewed U.S. support for the kingdom. The border meeting later that month between Israeli and Jordanian diplomatic teams, the signing of the Washington Declaration, the joint address to Congress by Hussein and Rabin later that month, and the treaty signing ceremony on 26 October 1994 were all broadcast live by Jordanian state television, clearly signaling the end of the era of sub rosa Israeli-Jordanian contacts and the regime’s new policy of open relations and normalization. Reflecting on a decade of secret contacts with the king, the deputy chief of the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service) confided to American negotiator Dennis Ross: “Now I no longer have to do business under cover of darkness and in the dead of night.”40 Indeed, a wave of optimism swept through Jordan and Israel in the months immediately following the conclusion of the treaty. The rapidity with which many of the treaty’s requirements were fulfilled and the early crush of border crossings by both dignitaries and ordinary citizens, albeit disproportionately from west to east, indicated that perhaps the leaders had succeeded in breaking down some of the psychological barriers between their peoples. As a Jordanian border guard observed, “It is much better to be invaded by tourists than soldiers.”41 Rabin and Hussein signed the treaty, each confident that he had instilled in the majority of his people hope for a new diplomatic dawn. In fact, negotiating the treaty would be the easy part; the hard part would be making it fully operational and sustaining popular enthusiasm for it. The Post-Treaty Period

Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995 posed a personal and political blow to the king and to the treaty whose achievement relied so heavily on his partnership with Rabin. King Hussein met the challenge head on and delivered a remarkable eulogy at Rabin’s funeral in Jerusalem, in which he declared his personal affection for Rabin, Jordan’s newfound openness in its relations with Israel, and his own commitment to pursue the peace process with Rabin’s successor (document 81). In the three-plus years between Rabin’s death and his own, King Hussein endeavored mightily to advance the peace between Israel and Jordan and between Israel and the Palestinians. Several months of optimism prevailed, but events quickly put the king’s diplomatic skills, and Jordanian-Israeli peace, to the test. A series of Hamas suicide bus bombings in Israel in the spring of 1996 garnered some sympathy for Israel among Jordanians, but the closure and hardship inflicted on the Palestinians by Israel in return and a brief but deadly battle between Israel and Hizballah in Lebanon, in which Lebanese civilians suffered the most, turned

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that sympathy into outrage.42 Right-wing challenger Benjamin Netanyahu defeated acting prime minister Shimon Peres in the Israeli elections that spring. Netanyahu was determined to halt what he saw as unreciprocated Israeli concessions to the Palestinians and declared a freeze in the Oslo process until Arafat made good on several outstanding Oslo promises. But Netanyahu’s openly anti-Oslo platform during the electoral campaign and several of his earlier policy choices suggested to some that he had no intention of really moving forward with further Israeli Oslo commitments.43 King Hussein revealed his personal frustration with what he perceived as Netanyahu’s lackluster, even damaging contributions to the peace effort in a highly unusual letter to the Israeli prime minister dated 9 March 1997, which surfaced in the Israeli press (document 88).44 Only four days after Hussein’s written reprimand to Netanyahu, a Jordanian soldier on a shooting spree killed seven Israeli schoolgirls on a field trip along the Jordanian-Israeli border. The atrocity swept attention away from the king’s letter and its pressure on Netanyahu to make a bold peace move, especially when the king, appalled at the destruction wrought by one of his soldiers, traveled to northern Israel to pay his respects directly to the girls’ bereaved families.45 But it was an incident in Jordan—a bungled attempt by the Mossad to poison Hamas official Khaled Meshal on the streets of Amman—that sent Israeli-Jordanian relations plummeting in September 1997. Feeling personally betrayed and politically at risk, King Hussein threatened to close the Israeli Embassy, put the captured Mossad agents on public trial, and abrogate the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty. Israel immediately issued an apology and provided the antidote to the poison used in the attack. Reflecting the king’s position that “if Meshal dies, the treaty is over,”46 IsraeliJordanian relations teetered on the brink until it became clear that Meshal would recover. The crisis was finally resolved when Israel acceded to Hussein’s demand that it release Hamas operatives from Israeli jails, including the charismatic Hamas leader Sheik Ahmad Yasin. Although the king’s regard for Netanyahu never improved, the two men nonetheless worked together in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations at the Wye Plantation in Maryland in October 1998. Hussein literally left his hospital bed to help President Clinton, Netanyahu, and Arafat reach the Wye River Memorandum (document 89), demonstrating that, regardless of their uneasy interpersonal relationships, contact and negotiation were still taking place at the very highest levels. With King Hussein’s death in 1999, “both of the statesmen whose personal rapport had given the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty its unique sense of intimacy had passed from the scene. The web of mutual state interests between Israel and Jordan remain[ed] intact. . . . But the added value of the personal chemistry and the strategic rapport at the highest political level” have eluded their successors.47 King Abdallah II moved quickly to consolidate his power at home and earn respect abroad,

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pledging himself to the perpetuation of his father’s vision of peace.48 But the quick turnover between prime ministers in Israel since 1995, and the polar leaps in political orientation from Labor to Likud and back again, militated against a stable and personal partnership between the Jordanian and Israeli leaders. Ehud Barak’s victory in the Israeli elections of 1999 renewed hope that the Israeli-Jordanian agreement would finally yield the rich rewards promised, particularly among those who held Netanyahu responsible for its failings. But the obstacles to genuine Jordanian-Israeli normalization were not as one-sided or as simple as Netanyahu’s detractors believed, and these persisted throughout the tenures of his prime ministerial successors Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert. Among the explanations for the persisting chill in Jordanian-Israeli relations are economic obstacles and continuing Palestinian-Israeli strife, both of which block the way to greater progress in increasing people-to-people trust. The treaty’s architects had intended for the strong Israeli economic engine to lend power to the weaker Jordanian one, but the payoff has simply not materialized. This is partly due to unrealistic expectations encouraged by the Jordanian regime, as part of the campaign to convince ordinary citizens that their own economic well-being would improve after the treaty. Peace was supposed to have invigorated the Jordanian economy through enhanced exports to Israel, heightened tourist activity, and increased international investment.49 Although tourism did increase significantly, it was not to the extent anticipated, inhibited by the threat of terrorism and regional insecurity. The reality of Jordan’s struggling economy and its people’s ongoing hardship was a critical factor in the erosion of popular support for the treaty. Other Jordanian complaints are that Israeli bureaucratic complications and deliberate impediments—non-tariff barriers, protectionism under a security pretext, and a desire to retain the West Bank as a captive market—are responsible for the negligible increase in Jordanian exports to Israel and the West Bank and Gaza.50 In fact, Jordanian economic analysts challenge the basic assumption of the peace process architects that a graduated peace would invigorate regional economies with a “peace dividend.” They argue instead that economic relations with Israel prior to a comprehensive peace (including an Israeli-Palestinian settlement) will actually foster Israeli economic and political hegemony over the Arab world.51 This represents a throwback to traditional Arab-Israeli encounters in which each side suspected the motives and purposes of the other, and further illustrates that the peace breakthrough at the level of Jordan’s political elites was not mirrored sufficiently among professionals and the general population. For its part, Israel decries the fact that Jordan’s professional unions and business community blacklist those members who undertake joint ventures with Israel or travel there. Most Israeli proposals for cooperative projects cannot find Jordanian

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partners, although some joint ventures emerged in the U.S.-facilitated “Qualifying Industrial Zones,” through which “goods with a minimal level of Israeli and Jordanian input can enter the U.S. duty and quota free.”52 Together, Jordan’s thirteen professional associations, Islamist-dominated, are “the most vocal and active component of Jordan’s anti-peace movement that rejects any normalization of ties with Israel.”53 Israelis also point out that continued political instability throughout the Middle East, even in Iraq and the distant Gulf region, inhibits international investment in prospective Israeli-Jordanian projects. The “al-Aqsa Intifada” (a second Palestinian uprising against Israel) erupted in September 2000 and brought into sharp relief the link between Jordanian-Israeli relations and Palestinian-Israeli relations. In Jordan, popular support for the Palestinians brought tens of thousands of protesters into the streets of the capital. Jordanian troops forcibly held back crowds, some trying to march on the Israeli Embassy and others intending to cross the border into Israel, demanding that they be allowed to join in the Palestinian protests. One commentator later noted that the new king had “managed to steer Jordan through the second Palestinian uprising as his father did the earlier one—through a combination of diplomacy, repression, and domestic games of divide and rule. However,” he continued, the “warm peace” between Israel and Jordan had “cooled” and would remain cool “until the Israelis and Palestinians reach a final agreement.”54 The spillover effect of Israeli-Palestinian violence is such that full and fruitful normalization of relations between Jordan and Israel cannot materialize prior to a settlement of the Palestinian problem. Asher Susser writes that “Jordan was born out of the Palestine question and has been tied by an umbilical cord to its fortunes and misfortunes.”55 Indeed, the history of Jordanian-Israeli relations has always reflected a tension between Jordan’s desire to satisfy its genuine shared interests with Israel and its disinclination to challenge both pro-Palestinian sentiment and general Arab resistance to the legitimization of Israel.56 The persistence of anti-Israeli sentiment in Jordan since 1994 bespeaks the fragility and limitations of a treaty whose well-intentioned drafters were, on the Jordanian side, way out ahead of mainstream Jordanian sentiment and, on the Israeli side, not sufficiently sensitive to Jordan’s dilemmas. Picking up on this disparity between sentiments expressed by Kings Hussein and Abdallah II and the attitude of the Jordanian street, the former chief of the Jordanian Royal Court, Marwan Kasim, observed that what Jordan and Israel achieved in 1994 was “a peace of the palace, not of the people.”57 In assessing the impact of the treaty on Jordanian-Israeli relations, two scholars describe what they believe quickly became a “three-tier relationship” between the two countries. The first tier consists of “military, intelligence and diplomatic connections [which] warmed quickly.” The second tier draws from the Islamist and leftist opposition forces which oppose “any opening to Israel . . . [and] the

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third tier constitutes the general public opinion in Jordan,” which at first adopted a skeptical wait-and-see reaction to the treaty but then turned mostly against it.58 A 1998 poll by the Jordan Times revealed that “80 percent of Jordanians viewed Israel as an enemy, not as a partner in peace.”59 Indeed, a positive Jordanian appreciation of treaty relations with Israel is limited to a small circle around the king who believe that geostrategic and economic imperatives make peace with Israel a necessity for Jordan and are at pains to point out that the king made minimal concessions but retrieved every centimeter and drop of the country’s land and water.60 Elsewhere there is popular unhappiness with the post-treaty economy at home and continued regional violence between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and Hizballah. The anti-normalization movement, spearheaded by the professional and cultural elite, is a significant counterbalance to the palace’s efforts to make the peace work. In the absence of a tangible payoff and in the presence of continuing Arab-Israeli tensions, pro-Palestinian sentiment in Jordan remains strong and has made the peace with Israel an awkward one, particularly in times of severe Israeli-Palestinian unrest.61 The perspective from the Israeli side is more sanguine. Israeli strategists are satisfied that the long border with Jordan is quiet and see in Jordan a partner with shared interests in the nature of the Palestinian state that may yet emerge along their shared border. Entrepreneurs still hope for increased economic cooperation with their Jordanian counterparts, and popular Israeli opinion continues to support the treaty, albeit with some disappointment. After an initial rush to take in the sights in Amman, Petra, and Jerash, Israelis’ enthusiasm for travel to Jordan has been dampened by fears for their personal safety and by a Jordanian cold shoulder. Israelis are resigned to a frosty peace to the east for the foreseeable future.62 The upsurge in Islamic fundamentalist violence associated with al-Qaeda’s attack against the United States on 11 September 2001 and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) were not without consequence for the Jordanian-Israeli relationship. One of Osama bin Laden’s key lieutenants was Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who allegedly directed multiple attacks upon U.S. forces and their indigenous allies in Iraq. Even more shocking to Jordanians was al-Zarqawi’s orchestration of terrorist attacks against fellow Jordanian citizens in a series of hotel bombings in Amman on 9 November 2005. Victims of the “11/9” atrocities included members of a Jordanian wedding party.63 An American strike killed al-Zarqawi in Iraq in June 2006, but al-Qaeda and like-minded Islamist extremists in Jordan continue to target the Jordanian regime, unhappy with its degree of westernization, its close relationship with the United States, and its recognition of Israel. Jordan and Israel share a common enemy in these Muslim (and Palestinian) extremist groups, who may prove yet the most compelling reason for their close cooperation.64

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Indeed, despite its limitations, the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty of 1994 is alive and functioning in the twenty-first century. Security cooperation between Jordan and Israel is effective; it is both good news and bad news that Jordanian forces still periodically foil attempts to infiltrate Israel from Jordan. The border crossings are generally open and people and goods move in an orderly manner in both directions, if not in equal measure. There is direct phone, mail, and transportation service between the two countries, and their leaderships maintain open lines of communication and consultation. In a perfect world, the rapid conclusion of a comprehensive settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would allow today’s functional Jordanian-Israeli relationship to become something more substantial and deep-seated. In the meanwhile, however, the imperfect peace between them is still a precious commodity to be treated with care. In spite of the uniquely prepared groundwork laid by decades of quiet Jordanian-Israeli cooperation, and despite the success of the leaders in avoiding almost all the historic pitfalls in Arab-Israeli negotiations, the Jordanian-Israeli experience demonstrates that it is easier to negotiate peace on paper than it is to implant it in the minds and lives of ordinary men and women on the ground.

Chapter 6 Falling Short of the Heights Israel and Syria, 1991–2000

For many years Syria prided itself on leading an Arab front opposed to negotiations with Israel. Yet, as we saw in chapter 4, Syria surprised observers by participating in the 1991 Madrid Conference and then sent a delegation to follow-up talks held at the U.S. State Department. From the summer of 1993 until the spring of 2000, Israelis, Syrians, and Americans became engaged in no less than three concerted rounds of negotiation: •

•

•

Post-Madrid Washington meetings between official delegations developed into one-on-one talks between the Israeli and Syrian ambassadors to Washington, supplemented by two sets of meetings between the Israeli and Syrian chiefs-of-staff. One tangible result of this activity was a May 1995 working document known as the “Aims and Principles” non-paper on security arrangements (document 77).1 When progress in the ambassadorial and chief-of-staff channels seemed in need of a boost, Americans convened several rounds of high-level talks at the Wye Plantation, Maryland (27 December 1995–4 March 1996).2 Serious diplomatic activity during the second half of 1999 climaxed in talks in Washington and Shepherdstown, West Virginia (15 December 1999–10 January 2000), followed by a summit in March 2000 in Geneva between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Syrian President Hafez al-Asad.3

Looking back upon the diplomacy in which he participated, senior State Department adviser Aaron David Miller writes, “Never has so much time and energy been expended on a process that produced so little in the end.”4 The Syrian-Israel dispute focuses on the Golan Heights, Syrian territory lost to Israel in the 1967 war. Syria failed in its bid to regain the Heights in the October 1973 war, leaving the area under Israeli occupation. In the absence of any land-for-

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peace exchange in the intervening years, Israel allowed more than 15,000 Israeli Jews to settle throughout the Golan Heights. In 1981 Israel “extended Israeli law” to the Golan, a somewhat ambiguous step just short of annexation, and offered the 20,000 Syrian Druze living there Israeli citizenship; most rejected it. Although not imbued with the religious fervor animating many of the Jewish settlers in the biblically evocative West Bank, Golan settlers are also attached to their communities and will abandon them only with great reluctance. Atop the Heights, Israel has erected a listening station outfitted with satellite dishes, military antennas, and other hightech equipment with which to keep close tabs on Damascus, only forty miles to the east. Also in contention are the Jordan River headwaters in the Golan which empty into the Sea of Galilee (also known as Lake Tiberias, or, to Israelis, the Kinneret), to which both countries want access. Syria demands the return of its territory and access to the Sea of Galilee in principle; Israel will only consider swapping the land for a full peace treaty. Despite obstacles, setbacks, and misunderstandings, each of the public episodes between 1991 and 2000 built up its own momentum and expectations. Haltingly and reluctantly, the parties responded to energetic American “facilitation” by disclosing and redefining their positions on the questions of boundaries, security provisions, normalization, and process. Yet, as one student of Israeli-Syrian relations has observed, “every time the two countries appear to be ‘on the brink’ of a breakthrough, peace becomes even more elusive than before.”5 These formal efforts came to an abrupt halt following a disastrous March 2000 Clinton-Asad summit meeting in Geneva, but they were followed by a number of ongoing feelers and off-the-recÂ� ord (“track II”) talks. Both Israeli and Syrian governments agreed to resume talks mediated by Turkey during 2008, with results—breakthrough or breakdown—still pending. This chapter reviews the unconsummated negotiations of 1991–2000 as well as developments since that period and seeks to understand what Israeli and Syrian negotiators engaged in subsequent talks might have learned from the experience. Previous Negotiating Experience

Despite Syria’s proud preeminence as a leader of oppositionist forces against Israel, Syrian politicians have nonetheless taken part in cautious negotiation attempts dating back to the Mandate period. During the Arab revolt in Palestine (1936–1939), for example, leaders of both main political parties in Syria maintained contact with Zionist officials, offering to mediate between Arabs and Jews in Palestine with hopes of a positive spin-off for their own dreams of advancing Syrian independence and/ or creating a pan-Arab federation under Syrian leadership.6

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Following its military engagement in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948–1949, Syria participated in UN-sponsored armistice talks between April and July 1949 in the no-man’s-land between the Israeli and Syrian cease-fire lines near the Sea of Galilee. Syria was the last of four Arab states to sign an armistice agreement with Israel, ending that war but not the conflict between them.7 In mid-1949 there was a brief flurry of Syrian overtures for peace with Israel, but these foundered upon a combination of Israeli hesitations and leadership upheavals in Damascus.8 From 1949 to 1967, both Syrian and Israeli governments respected their armistice agreement in principle, while attempting to assert de facto rights of usage or possession in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) along their frontier. Israel’s drainage project of the Huleh marshes that began in 1951, its water diversion plans after 1953, and its agricultural efforts in the DMZ all raised Syrian ire, while repeated Syrian harassment of Israeli fishing operations on the Sea of Galilee, periodic Syrian shelling of Israeli targets from atop the Golan Heights, and Syrian support for Palestinian guerrilla groups provoked Israeli complaints. These six contentious issues contributed to permanently strained relations between the two states, leading to a pattern of low-level provocations and reprisals that occasionally exploded into short, serious military actions. After 1959, Lebanese and Syrian plans to divert the Jordan River’s headwaters resulted in Israeli protests, threats, and, eventually, aerial bombardment of Syrian construction work on the Banias River. The armistice regime in 1949 created the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization (UNTSO) and an Israel-Syria Mixed Armistice Commission (ISMAC), which served as a neutral ground for contacts between Syrian and Israeli liaison officers. These stiff, formalistic meetings sought to minimize friction and investigate violations of the Armistice Agreement. Being virtually the only point of contact between the two sides, the ISMAC also became the focus of repeated complaints and recriminations, as well as the place for floating the occasional trial balloon or peace feeler.9 Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel in the final days of the 1967 war. On 19 June 1967 a secret Israeli Cabinet decision authorized the government to offer the Syrians the return of the Golan Heights, with demilitarization, in exchange for peace. The Syrian response came several months later when Damascus boycotted the Khartoum summit of Arab heads of state which, despite its call for “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with it,” contained hints of possible “moderation.”10 Syria also waited five years before accepting, with conditions, UN Security Council Resolution 242 (document 19), passed in November 1967 and enshrining the “land for peace” formula as the solution to the Arab-Israel conflict.11 Following the October 1973 war, Syria boycotted the brief Arab-Israeli conference in Geneva (document 24), maintaining its avoidance of direct contacts with Israel. In mid-1974,

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however, extensive shuttle diplomacy by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger succeeded in inducing Syria to accept a disengagement agreement with Israel (document 26). True to form, however, the Syrians authorized an Egyptian general to sign the agreement on their behalf, thereby maintaining, on paper at least, their strict posture of no contact with the enemy. In 1977 Syria led the pan-Arab opposition to Anwar Sadat’s maverick overture toward Israel, and subsequently vied with Iraq for leadership of a “Steadfastness Front” of parties opposed to the 1978 Camp David Accords and Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.12 Yet most scholars agree that, behind the pan-Arab posturing and Baathist ideological rhetoric, Syrian decision making under Hafez al-Asad was highly pragmatic, promoting above all his continued rule and the country’s national security interests.13 As regards Israel, Asad learned, in the words of Eyal Zisser, to “distinguish between his vision and world view, which rejected Israel’s existence out of hand, and the constraints of reality, which obliged him to adopt a balanced and pragmatic policy.”14 Away from the glare of publicity, Syria quietly and consistently sought to advance its diplomatic options vis-à-vis Israel. Lebanon provided a second arena for guarded Israeli-Syrian diplomatic activity. In May 1976 Syrian forces entered Lebanon to quell the civil war which erupted there in 1975 and facilitate a Lebanese political arrangement responsive to Syrian interests. Shortly after the entry of the Syrian army into Lebanon, Syria and Israel became parties to an unwritten agreement on a “Red Line” in Lebanon, below which Syrian troops and proxies would not venture and beyond which Israeli troops and clients would not cross. Designed to prevent Syrian-Israeli clashes in Lebanon, this agreement, indirectly negotiated and scrupulously observed, displayed to the Israelis the Syrian regime’s effectiveness in controlling its troops and influencing its allies; it also served to build some measure of trust in Israeli intentions with Asad. Although the indirect negotiations which produced the “Red Line Agreement” do not fall under the rubric of “negotiating peace,” the durability of that tacit understanding enhanced both parties’ respect for the other as a potential negotiating partner who would be able to “deliver the goods”—if ever they found themselves simultaneously motivated or pressed to seek a diplomatic settlement.15 Purposes and Motives

In the fall of 1991, an auspicious combination of motives and interests seemed to promise a long-awaited “normative transformation” in Israel-Syria relations.16 The immediate motives behind Israel’s and Syria’s attendance at Madrid were enumerated in chapter 4. Despite the quick collapse of frosty bilateral Israeli-Syrian talks at Madrid, the two sides dutifully provided delegations to what turned out to be eleven

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rounds of drawn-out and inconclusive follow-up meetings organized at the State Department in Washington, extending throughout 1992 and ending in September 1993. Syria’s main motives for pursuing talks during the period of 1991–1993 and beyond remained the recovery of the Golan Heights and a return to the prewar “line of 4 June” that had given the Syrians shoreline access to the Sea of Galilee. For Hafez alAsad, regaining the Golan was a matter of both personal dignity (he had been acting minister of defense and commander of the Syrian air force during the 1967 war) and protecting the national interest; in the view of his biographer and confidant, Patrick Seale, “the essence of any settlement [was] not the recovery of this or that piece of occupied territory, but the ‘containment’ of Israel, just as his notion of a ‘comprehensive peace’ [was] not about normalization but, on the contrary, about holding the line against Israel.”17 According to former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, “Asad’s motives in peace were not essentially different from his motives in war. In both cases it was a matter of deterrence, a question of balance of power, a quest for a regional role.”18 Of almost equal importance to the Syrians were the expected benefits to be had from pleasing the Americans—notably, the removal of Syria from the State Department’s lists of states engaged in drug trafficking and supporting terrorism. Some analysts were skeptical as to Asad’s genuine desire for peace, crediting the Syrian leader with only the desire to appear interested in negotiations so as to curry favor with the United States.19 Others offered more nuanced interpretations of Asad’s desire for peace with Israel, which they believed he understood would require the active involvement of the Americans.20 Frequently during Israeli-Syrian negotiation efforts, comparisons arose between Asad’s approach and the successes—and limitations—of Anwar Sadat’s diplomacy during the years 1977–1979, which Asad had roundly denounced at the time, but which had nonetheless resulted in Egypt’s regaining the entire Sinai Peninsula. As American mediator Dennis Ross observed, Asad wanted to get what Egypt got, but for less: “He wanted to show that he could do better than Egypt.” Yet Asad “was content to live without an agreement, especially if the agreement would not meet his standards of dignity and honor.”21 A related Syrian purpose was to contain Israel and offset its hegemonic position in the region.22 This coincided with Asad’s broader concerns about his country’s geostrategic weakness vis-à-vis its powerful non-Arab neighbors, Turkey (allied with Israel) and Iran (with its overlapping, but sometimes competing, alliances with Hizballah in Lebanon). Another strategic interest for Syria was to obtain Israel’s tacit agreement not to intervene in Lebanese affairs—in effect allowing Syrian troops and agents greater operational freedom in influencing the internal politics and balance of power in that country.23

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Israel’s motives for concluding a peace agreement were similarly mixed. The stated purpose was to win peace and normalization in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlements from the Golan Heights. Any deal with Syria would also ideally secure Israel’s water resources, whose headwaters lie in the Golan. Beyond this, an agreement with Syria, following that reached with Egypt (1979) and, as time went on, the Palestinians (1993) and Jordan (1994), would finally formalize Israel’s borders and create an opening to other bilateral treaties between Israel and Lebanon and the Gulf Arab states, an end to the Arab economic boycott, and Israel’s acceptance in the region.24 An agreement with Syria, some Israeli generals argued, would at a minimum reduce the chances of direct military confronÂ� tation.25 Israelis also hoped that, in the context of an agreement, Syria would use its perceived influence over Hizballah to curb attacks on IDF forces in Israel’s self-declared “security zone” in south Lebanon. But skeptics argued that even after the implementation of a Golan-for-peace deal, Damascus would be reluctant to abandon the extremely useful tool that Hizballah presented for maintaining pressure on Israel. Assuming the premiership in 1999, Ehud Barak committed Israel to withdrawing from Lebanon and sought to secure a guarantee from Damascus that its Hizballah client would not follow an IDF pullout with rocket attacks and guerrilla incursions into northern Israel. But Asad was not interested in militating Israeli problems in Lebanon before resolving his own problem of the Golan. On 24 May 2000, Israel withdrew its army unilaterally from south Lebanon, removing a daily source of friction with Hizballah but not, as it had hoped, the Hizballah lever with which Syria was still able to apply pressure on Israel through cross-border attacks.26 Finally, Israelis pursued diplomatic options with Syria out of a desire to please the Americans, who consistently during the 1990s declared an Israeli-Syrian settlement as one of their regional foreign policy priorities. Successive Israeli prime ministers approached negotiations with Syria with varying degrees of confidence or skepticism, but with the similar goals of pacifying the northern border with Lebanon, finalizing the border along the Golan, securing Israel’s water supply, and using peace with Syria as a stepping-stone to Israel’s integration into the Middle East and relations with other Arab countries. Like Asad, Israeli prime ministers demonstrated a readiness to consider a deal but, barring far-reaching concessions from the other side, displayed an even greater willingness to live with the status quo. As one participant at the Wye Plantation talks observed, because Israel and Syria were not “dealing with life and death issues of coexistence in the same land [as were Israel and the Palestinians], there was a sense among both delegations that, if necessary, we could go on living without peace.”27

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Timing

Auspicious timing in the global, regional, and domestic arenas had contributed heavily to the success of the Madrid Conference in October 1991. But in the decade that followed, several timing factors played a role in undoing many of the small steps achieved in the difficult face-to-face negotiations between Israeli and Syrian representatives. A major timing consideration involved competing diplomatic activity on the parallel Israeli-Palestinian track. Israeli prime ministers Shamir, Rabin, and Barak all attempted to play one set of negotiations off the other—resulting in both deliberate and unintended slowdowns or breakdowns. Israel’s shifting back and forth between the Palestinians and Syrians reflected both the hope that progress on one track could spill over and positively influence events on the other, but also the calculation that the Israeli body politic simply could not bear major concessions and territorial withdrawals on more than one front at a time. This Israeli predilection for allowing the Palestinian and Syrian tracks to “compete, to see which one would have the breakthrough,” led to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s fateful decision in August 1993 to shift his attention away from negotiations with Syria and give priority to the Oslo back channel with the Palestinians. Upon learning that their talks with the Israelis were being put “on hold,” Syrians experienced what one author has called a “double whammy”: in addition to the “painful surprise” that the Palestinians had abandoned them for a dubious solo deal, Syrian negotiators felt victimized by what they saw as Israeli insincerity.28 Rapid postOslo movement between September 1993 and October 1994 on the Jordanian-Israeli track, culminating in a peace treaty, made it a “triple whammy.” A similar scenario occurred in 1999 and 2000, when the newly elected Ehud Barak shifted gears from his initially enthusiastic “Syria-first” orientation to one refocusing on the Palestinian track.29 Rabin’s assassination on 4 November 1995 was catastrophic in its timing, necessitating a break in talks while a stunned Israel investigated the crime and adjusted to a caretaker government under Shimon Peres. Trying to make up for lost time, Peres pushed as soon as he was able for a Syrian-Israel breakthrough, hoping to have a deal in hand when he faced rival Benjamin Netanyahu at the polls. Timing also seemed ripe for an intensified effort in the last year of Clinton’s second term, before a new administration with different priorities took over. But 1996 witnessed a series of adverse timing factors that caused the breakdown of negotiations that had finally opened amid great hopes at the Wye Plantation in January. One was Peres’s tactical decision—partly influenced by his disappointment in the Syrian position taken during these first meetings—to bring forward the date of general elections in Israel from October to May. This introduced a whole range of

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cautious considerations into the Israeli bargaining stance and bitterly disappointed Asad; the Syrian president had been led to believe that Peres was going to stick to the scheduled October election date in order to allow more time for progress in their negotiations.30 Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory over Peres in that May election was described by Secretary of State Warren Christopher as a “body blow” to the peace process.31 Netanyahu purposely put the brakes on the process—one which he saw as leading Israel not to peace but into danger. The timing of a number of external events also caused setbacks in the negotiations. The death of the Syrian president’s oldest son and original heir-apparent, Basil, in a car accident in January 1994 shook the Syrian political program. Several weeks later an Israeli settler on a killing spree left 29 Palestinian worshippers dead and another 125 wounded in Hebron’s al-Ibrahimi Mosque. The immediate impact of the Hebron massacre was Syria’s suspension of talks in Washington. In early April, Palestinian terrorist bombings killed a dozen Israeli civilians in the towns of Afula and Hadera. Warren Christopher’s shuttle diplomacy between Damascus and Jerusalem gradually produced a series of warily positive statements, but progress on the Israeli-Syrian track was once again compromised when Israel began to focus instead on negotiations with the Palestinians, leading finally to the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (“Oslo II”), signed on 28 September 1995.32 In mid-February 1996, Israel and Turkey signed the first of several strategic cooperation agreements which Asad interpreted as a threat to his regime.33 The next blow to the Syrian-Israeli peace talks was dealt by Hamas, which responded to Israel’s assassination of one of its military chiefs by launching four suicide bombings over a nine-day period in February–March 1996 that killed fifty-nine Israelis and wounded hundreds in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Ashkelon. The failure of Syrian delegates to denounce the attacks or even to express sympathy for the victims deeply disappointed the Israeli negotiators, who withdrew on 4 March from what turned out to be the last session of the Wye talks.34 The final nail in the coffin came with an upsurge in Hizballah attacks against Israeli forces in south Lebanon and against Israeli civilians in northern Israel. Although it is likely that Hizballah mounted these attacks in connivance with Iran, Israelis saw them as a sign of Syrian bad faith, in accordance with Israel’s assumption that it was within Syria’s power to curb Hizballah military activity. Israel’s massive retaliatory attack against Hizballah in south Lebanon, “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” not only kept Syrians from returning to the bargaining table but also proved hugely counterproductive in both military and political terms, made worse by Israel’s shelling of a UN camp at Kafr Qana on 18 April 1996 that killed one hundred Lebanese civilians.35 Barak’s initial enthusiasm for a “Syria-first” policy succeeded in enlisting the full and active backing of the Clinton administration and reunited the Syrian and

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Israeli negotiating teams at Shepherdstown in 2000. But there the talks foundered on Barak’s political woes at home and his last-minute assessment that the Israeli public did not see a need for a painful withdrawal from the quiet Golan. Exhausted Americans, Syrians, and Israelis left Shepherdstown in January 2000 for a few days’ break, but the appearance of a leaked draft agreement in the Arab and Israeli press in the interim and the resulting uproars ensured that no one returned there. Barak’s interest in the Syrian track continued, however, and he prevailed upon Clinton to meet with Asad in March 2000. The meeting was frosty and did not serve to reignite Syrian-Israeli negotiations as Barak had hoped.36 A change of leadership in Syria was looming as well. As Asad’s health worsened, pundits speculated that a desire to bequeath a recovered Golan to Bashar, his second son and successor, might cause him to finally blink and cut a deal. Yet others argued that Asad was calculating that his son would be better off inheriting a stable status quo, instead of assuming power just as a controversial and unfamiliar new scenario was unfolding atop the Heights.37 Hafez al-Asad’s own time ran out on 10 June 2000, and his son’s assumption of power became, in itself, a timing element overshadowing future talks. Status of the Negotiators

In terms of the status of the negotiators, the Syrian-Israeli peace process appeared to offer much reason for optimism. Negotiations were conducted by a small group of very high-ranking Syrians and Israelis reporting directly to the president, in the case of the former, and often including the prime minister himself, in the case of the latter. While Asad steadfastly refused to meet personally with an Israeli prime minister, he regularly received the American secretary of state and his or her aides in Damascus and communicated directly with the American president. Israelis, and even more so American mediators, saw Hafez al-Asad as a figure of great stature whose word, once given, could be relied upon. Americans who dealt with him often remarked upon his sharp intelligence, even as they regretted the cautious pace upon which he insisted, determined not to appear too eager for or needy of reconciliation with Israel.38 All endured what Secretary of State James Baker called Asad’s penchant for “bladder diplomacy,” namely, marathon meetings of six to eight hours without a break.39 Asad was first and foremost an autocratic leader of an authoritarian regime, “the only man in Syria who mattered,” according to Secretary of State Christopher, and one with a habit of “masking his penchant for the brutal use of power with humor and a curious sort of charm.”40 Asad’s personal involvement in the negotiations sug-

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gested that, if the two sides could hammer out an agreement, Syria could deliver the goods. As Baker observed, “There was no one in the Syrian Arab Republic with whom Asad needed to consult, except himself.”41 Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa or Ambassador Walid Moualem usually led the Syrian team in talks with the Israelis and answered directly to President Asad. This tight personal control by Asad had the disadvantage of decreasing the negotiators’ autonomy and flexibility at the table. In his determination to maintain exclusive personal control of the proceedings, Asad ruled out from the start Israeli requests for a back channel to supplement the work of the main negotiators—a procedure that had proved useful in advancing other bilateral negotiations. Syrian rejection of this avenue was, for Ambassador Moualem, a matter of integrity and credibility: We never had back channel negotiations or “testing” meetings; everything takes place in the negotiating room. This has been our policy from Day One. There is no need for a back channel: Both sides can go through the American mediator with any new ideas, and in our view secret talks eventually are bound to cause mistrust and misunderstanding. We may not reveal the details but we always tell our public the general direction of our talks, where we are meeting, when we start, when we finish. That is why you find support for the Syrian position in the Arab world.42

Despite these Syrian denials and professions of patriotic integrity, there have in fact been Israeli-Syrian “track II” efforts, although tightly controlled and extremely limited in scope and personnel.43 During Netanyahu’s first term in office, when IsraeliSyrian talks were officially suspended, for example, the Israeli prime minister secretly authorized Ronald Lauder, a Jewish American businessman and personal friend, to act as his emissary and continue probing Asad’s conditions and intentions.44 Asad’s status as the dictator of Damascus sometimes led Israelis to believe that he was immune to the constraints of public opinion and could simply declare a peace policy if he wanted to. It is overly facile, however, to assume that Asad could operate with a totally free hand simply because Syrian autocracy relieved him of having to confront critics or court voters in debates or elections. Although Raymond Hinnebusch confirms that Asad’s foreign policy decision making was not directly vulnerable to public opinion or political veto, even an autocratic leader requires some consensus between his policies and popular opinion in order to maintain his legitimacy. Thus, Hinnebusch argues, “when it comes to actually making peace with Israel, the regime cannot disregard the need to protect its legitimacy. And such legitimacy as it enjoys rests squarely on its claim to represent the national interest against Israel. No nationalist regime—especially an Alawi-dominated one—can, without grave risk, be seen to accept less than an honorable settlement.”45 All Israeli prime ministers have kept a tight grip over negotiations with Syria by involving only a handful of their most trusted confidants. Yitzhak Rabin con-

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trolled the Israeli side of the negotiations, led by Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich from 1992 to 1995, by exercising stern leadership to override criticism of his dealings with Damascus from within his own party and cabinet. When Shimon Peres assumed office after Rabin’s death, he removed the Syria dossier from Rabinovich and transferred it to his own closest aide, Uri Savir.46 Nonetheless, these delegates exercised a greater degree of autonomy than did their Syrian counterparts. When discussions in Washington and Wye in 1995–1996 expanded to cover security issues, both sides sent their chiefs of staff to the talks, maintaining among the negotiators a high degree of credibility and a “close rapport with the ultimate decision makers” and involving individuals who “moved comfortably across the military and political domains.”47 When official talks resumed under the Barak government, the prime minister himself led the Israeli team to the summit at Shepherdstown. Such tight personal control by the most powerful leaders on each side augured well for a successful agreement—yet Shepherdstown’s failure suggests that it was not enough. Barak began his term as prime minister in 1999 with a decisive electoral triumph and a remarkably “broad mandate to translate his political views into action and complete the peace negotiations on the Syrian track, even at the expense of painful territorial concessions on the Golan Heights.”48 Barak’s readiness to withdraw to the line of 4 June was well known, and this no doubt contributed to Asad’s readiness to send a delegation to Shepherdstown and the relative flexibility that Clinton detected among the Syrian representatives there.49 Barak had pushed the Americans to convene the meeting in Maryland, but once there he balked. Different observers put forth various explanations for Barak’s unexpected reticence, but at the end of the day his unwillingness or perceived inability to buck a hostile Knesset and public opinion meant that even the prime minister of Israel did not feel he had the necessary status to strike a deal on the Golan and sell it in Israel.50 Third-Party Considerations

The Syrians’ long-standing aversion to direct contacts with Israel necessitated the intervention of an intermediary. Although Henry Kissinger had successfully shuttled between Syria and Israel in the 1970s, the early 1980s offered few opportunities for the United States to continue to play that role. Following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent dispatch of U.S. marines there, U.S. and Syrian troops actually came to blows, exchanging rocket and anti-aircraft fire and culminating in Syria’s successful downing of two U.S. warplanes in December 1983 and the capture of one U.S. airman.51 The Reagan administration’s tilt toward Iraq in the context of the Iran-Iraq war also pitted the United States against Syria, which supported Iran.

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In the late 1980s, however, Asad began his own tilt, toward Washington and away from Moscow, after a decrease in Soviet military assistance and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s declared “new thinking,” which stressed a negotiated SyrianIsraeli peace. In public remarks ostensibly in honor of the visiting Asad in April 1987, Gorbachev tempered the professed Soviet “solidarity with the Arabs” with the observations that “it [was] impossible to put up with billions spent on military needs . . . any longer” and that “the dependence on military power in settling the conflict has come to be completely discredited” (document 49).52 Asad understood that the politically and financially failing Soviet Union could no longer contribute to the Syrian goal of “strategic parity” with Israel, without which Syria had no military option for regaining the Golan. Like Sadat before him, Asad now realized that the diplomatic path to retrieving his lost territory passed not through Moscow but through Washington. Syria’s decision to join the U.S.-led alliance against Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War was one among many moves “directed particularly to the [first] Bush administration as the only power able to induce Israel to negotiate a comprehensive settlement and pull back from the Golan, and/or render Syria economic assistance, and have its name erased from the list of countries supporting international terrorism.” 53 In the early 1990s Asad began to speak of having made a “strategic choice for peace.”54 American interest in a rapprochement with Syria similarly increased with the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the build-up of the American anti-Saddam coalition in 1990. The first Bush administration worked arduously to woo Syria into joining the campaign to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi invaders, eager to demonstrate to a skeptical Arab public that its was an anti-Saddam, and not anti-Arab, program. After the quick ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the Americans evinced an increasing appreciation for the pivotal role Syria might play in advancing regional peace and stability. President Clinton and Secretary of State Christopher continued the friendly approach of the Bush-Baker administration.55 The Clinton administration sent Christopher to Damascus almost thirty times in four years. According to adviser Aaron David Miller, there were at least three opportunities for closing a Syrian-Israeli deal had the United States undertaken more “heavy lifting,” by being insistent with Asad that he needed to undertake the public diplomacy the Israelis needed, and by being equally insistent with Israel that it would have to withdraw 100 percent to the line of 4 June as the Syrians demanded.56 Clinton’s visit to Syria in October 1994 marked the first by a U.S. president since Richard Nixon’s visit twenty years earlier. Clinton not only served as a postman, delivering messages between the two sides, but also sought to become the trusted confidant of both Asad and Rabin. Just as each of the Middle Eastern actors sought

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to involve the United States in ways advantageous to his nation’s position, so too did the Clinton administration pursue the goal of Israeli-Syrian reconciliation as a means to its own regional goals: a “Pax Americana” in the Gulf, stability in Lebanon, the dual containment of Iran and Iraq, and an eventual U.S.-brokered IsraeliPalestinian peace. But even as the Rabin, Peres, and Barak governments all sought to take advantage of America’s newly defrosted lines of communication with Asad, the White House was hampered in its pursuit of Syrian options by Congress and U.S. public opinion, both of which considered Damascus to be a rogue regime harboring terrorist groups, engaged in drug smuggling, dictating Lebanese politics, and funneling Iranian money and arms to Hizballah. American citizens and their congressional representatives were more inclined to punish and pressure Damascus than to woo and engage its strongman.57 Asad’s strategic decision to develop closer relations with the United States initially paid off in terms of frequent American interventions and statements that put pressure on Israeli leaders to respond positively to what U.S. officials considered generous and forthcoming gestures from Damascus.58 Despite widespread perceptions in the Arab world that Washington and Jerusalem always enjoy harmonious, even conspiratorial relations, Clinton’s and Christopher’s promotion of the Syrian track and transmission of Syrian positions led to several near-breakdowns in mutual trust with Rabin.59 In Israeli eyes, Asad was clearly “trying to maneuver the United States into ‘delivering’ Israel and to extract . . . a written position on the issue of withdrawal.” Rabin found himself forced to argue during a May 1993 visit to Washington that “it was particularly important for the United States to be emphatic in explaining to Asad that . . . everything he had heard from the United States [about Israel’s position] was hypothetical and conditional.”60 But on 3 August 1993, Yitzhak Rabin unwittingly complicated matters for years to come when he authorized Christopher to find out from Asad whether, in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, Syria would be willing to accommodate Israeli security concerns and sign a peace treaty, to be implemented in stages over the next five years. Christopher and his aide Dennis Ross transmitted the question to Asad the next day in Damascus; sharp disagreement exists over exactly what transpired.61 The Syrians interpreted the question as a breakthrough statement of Israeli intentions to withdraw entirely from the Golan to the line of 4 June 1967, giving them their demanded access to the Sea of Galilee; successive Israeli governments have insisted that it was only a hypothetical query. The distinction is critical, since all subsequent rounds of negotiations have been greatly consumed by dueling definitions of what each side considered the correct interpretation of Israel’s stand on withdrawal as it was “deposited” with, or “pocketed” by, the Americans in August 1993.

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Did Rabin commit Israel to a full withdrawal to the line of 4 June 1967? Syria says yes, absolutely; Israeli responses (and their Syrian comebacks)62 vary: •

•

•

•

No; Christopher conveyed a hypothetical query, not an official offer. (Syria: Anything expressed within the context of meetings between official representatives is by definition official.) Maybe; but that hypothetical offer was conditional on receiving specific Syrian security guarantees, without which the offer was null and void anyway. (Syria: The commitment was given; the security guarantees were to be negotiated separately.) No; why would Rabin give away, in advance and in deference to Syrian preconditions, his biggest bargaining chip?63 (Syria: Because he understood that there was nothing to talk about without an initial commitment to the 4 June line.) No; if he did, why didn’t Syria jump on it and clinch the deal right then? (Syria: Because the rest of the deal, i.e., what Israel would receive in return, had yet to be worked out.)

One would think the way out of this dizzying he-said-he-said exchange would be to ask Clinton and Christopher, in whose pockets the Rabin commitment allegedly lay. In their memoirs, Clinton and Christopher write that the Israeli message conveyed by Christopher and subsequently deposited in Clinton’s pocket was hypothetical only and linked any Israeli withdrawal to Syrian concessions that would satisfy Israel’s water and security concerns.64 Ross, who was there when Christopher received the charge from Rabin and who accompanied Christopher to the Asad meeting in Damascus, similarly writes that Rabin’s withdrawal offer to the line of 4 June was conditional upon Syrian peace and security concessions.65 For those sympathetic to the Syrian, side, however, this evidence of a U.S. president and secretary of state and his aide backing up Israel’s interpretation proves nothing, except that the United States and Israel are, as always, in cahoots. Asad’s biographer and confidant, Patrick Seale, drew upon Syrian sources in undertaking his own investigation into the pocket commitment affair. Seale contends that what Christopher transmitted from Rabin was an “indirect, oral, conditional, secret, eleventh hour offer of full withdrawal to Asad.” Seale interprets this awkward offer as “a political deception, a ruse of war,” calculated by Rabin to string the Syrians along with false hope and dampen Syrian opposition to the upcoming revelation of the Oslo Agreement with the PLO.66 Other explanations for the confusion over the pocketed commitment range from the devious (one party or another is simply lying) to the mundane (misunderstanding; poor communication; faulty translation). The use of the curious term “pocket,” however, suggests another interpretation, namely, that Christopher was supposed to

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Courtesy of Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post

sound out Asad on his willingness to make full peace in return for a full withdrawal, without revealing that he had Israel’s conditional acceptance of such a deal in his pocket. Seale, in fact, cites an Israeli source claiming to have overheard Rabin berating Christopher for having tipped his hand;67 Christopher mentions no such incident. One certainty, however, is that the use of third-party American intermediation in this instance caused more problems than it resolved.

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Despite the confusion engendered by this use of the American messenger, Shimon Peres began his short tenure as acting prime minister by reaffirming Israel’s commitment to whatever Rabin had promised, along with far-reaching suggestions for a “deeper American involvement” and a bold new “Clinton Plan”—but this went far beyond what the Americans were prepared to underwrite.68 Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu publicly opposed any Israeli withdrawal from the Golan, and the Clinton administration had every reason to suppose that the Israel-Syria track went cold during his tenure (1996–1999). It was subsequently revealed, however, that Netanyahu had conducted his own personal back-channel contacts with Damascus via his American friend Ronald Lauder, but that effort came to naught. Netanyahu’s successor, Ehud Barak, spent the first months of his term of office in 1999 seeking to engage Clinton as a full partner in resuming negotiations with Syria, giving the appearance to some that he wished to use the American president as his proxy in personally courting Asad.69 Clinton’s 1994 summit meetings with Asad in Geneva and Damascus suggested that he might be ready to oblige. But the U.S. president could not stand in for the Israeli prime minister indefinitely, and, from 15 December 1999 to 10 January 2000, Clinton and his second-term secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, convened high-level Syrian-Israeli peace talks in Shepherdstown. Clinton recalls that both Barak and Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa agreed at the outset that the American president could decide the order in which they would tackle the various issues and welcomed his facilitation.70 In the final push for a breakthrough at Shepherdstown, American mediation reached new heights when the president put on the table a draft peace treaty (documents 91–92 ) that embodied the Americans’ summary understanding of where the two sides stood. But rather than propelling the parties to make the last compromises needed to bridge the remaining gaps, this bold American move collapsed when parts of the working document were leaked to the Arab and Israeli press with the effect of making their respective negotiators appear to have been too generous to the other side—leading to the speedy unraveling of the progress that had been made.71 Even after the failure at Shepherdstown, Barak, like Peres and Rabin before him, focused on American mediation as the essential key to a breakthrough in SyrianIsraeli negotiations. In light of Asad’s ongoing refusal to meet his Israeli counterpart directly, Barak prevailed upon Clinton to meet with Asad one more time, which he did, with disappointing results, in Geneva in March 2000. Asad was under the impression that Clinton would be bearing the news that Barak had acquiesced to the 4 June lines; Clinton had reason to believe Asad was going to tell him that he was ready to modify his absolutist stance. Within moments it became clear that neither was going to hear what he wanted, although the meeting persisted for a chilly two hours. Not all Israelis had such high expectations of the Americans as third parties,

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but most were disappointed that the United States did not, during almost a decade of “facilitating,” exert more pressure on Syria to engage in “public diplomacy” and undertake more “confidence-building measures.”72 Syrians were similarly unhappy with the Americans who, as the operative third party, did not press Israel to stick to Rabin’s 1993 “commitment” which they ostensibly had in their pocket. During one of many episodes of Syrian-American bickering over this, an exasperated Asad argued: “If all this does not constitute a commitment, nothing else will. If we did not consider this a commitment, we would not have embarked on the peace negotiations.”73 In this respect both Syrians and Israelis evinced the traditional disappointment with the third party, namely, its refusal or failure to lean harder on the other side. Secretary of State Albright divined as much when, pleasantly surprised by the initial Syrian and Israeli optimism about the chances for success at Shepherdstown in 2000, she took aside first al-Sharaa and then Barak to ask them privately why they were so hopeful. To her dismay, their responses revealed that “they each believed that in the end President Clinton would intervene to force concessions upon the other.”74 Proposed Terms of Agreement

At first glance it seems like a Syria-Israel agreement should be a straight-forward land-for-peace swap modeled on the Camp David Accords. But the strategically sensitive, moderately populated, and water-rich Golan Heights are not the vast, virtually unpopulated Sinai desert, and the unblinking, patient Asad was not the dramatic and visionary Sadat. However, a Syrian-Israeli deal has its own inner logic. A comparison of various leaked and draft agreements and insider accounts of SyrianIsraeli bargaining all suggest that the components of a Syria-Israel agreement boil down to four basic elements: • • • •

Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights Security arrangements Normalization A timetable for implementing the above, and linkages among them

Underscoring their interconnectedness, these elements became known to the negotiators as the “four legs of the table,” a phrase coined by Rabin and drawing on the agenda items originally proposed by Syrian ambassador Moualem.75 Bargaining over the exact placement of the line to which Israel would withdraw— one of the most concrete of the disputed issues—has been intense, with serious implications not only for Syria’s sovereignty and Israel’s security, but also for access to fresh water sources in the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret/Lake Tiberias). There are three map lines in play (see map 7).76 One is the international frontier, established in 1923

Syria-Israel Frontier, 1923, 1949, 1967 Demilitarized zone,1949-1967

LEB A N ON

Occupied by Israel in 1967 UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) 1967 line 1949 line 1923 line

SYRIA Banias

Dan Shear

Tel al-Azaziat

GOLAN HEIGHTS

UNDOF

Quneitra

Lake Hula (former)

Jordan R.

Mishmar ha-Yarden

Dardara (Ashmura)

GOLAN HEIGHTS Armistice Demarcation Line of 1949

ISRAEL

1923 International Boundary

Sea of Galilee

Sea of Galilee

10-meter strip

Ein Gev Kafr Hareb

Ya

Tiberias

Khirbet al-Tawafiq

rm

k R. ou

Line of June 4, 1967

Upper al-Nuqeib

Upper al-Tawafiq al-Hamma (Hamat-Gader)

Shaar Hagolan

JO RDAN Yarmouk salient

0 0

Map 7.

5 5

10 mi 10 km

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by the British and French mandatory authorities in Palestine and Syria, respectively. This line leaves all of the lake and a strip running the length of its eastern shoreline within Israel. The second line is the armistice line of 1949, agreed upon by Israel and Syria at the end of the first Arab-Israeli war, which included an interim demilitarized zone between them, including the eastern shoreline. Skirmishes and encroachments by both sides within the DMZ after 1949 brought the Syrians down to the northeastern shore of the lake and produced a third, unofficial line reflecting the disposition of Israeli and Syrian forces on 4 June 1967, the day before the eruption of the war in which Israel captured the Golan Heights. Israel’s preference is obviously for reinstatement of the 1923 border, which allows for exclusive Israeli control over the lake. Syria, on the other hand, insists upon an Israeli withdrawal to the “line of 4 June 1967,” which gives Syria shoreline along the northeastern edge of the lake. This is the crux of the dispute over Rabin’s pocket commitment—to which line did he mean when he spoke of a full Israeli withdrawal? At times the negotiations have come down to a strip literally only ten meters wide along the northeastern shore, allowing for Israeli sovereignty over the entire lake, although Barak pledged to give the Syrians “access to the lake for tourism, for water for their farmers, and for their fishermen.”77 Asad rejected any accommodation which denied Syria sovereignty over a length of shoreline and the unfettered right to “dip his toes” in the Sea of Galilee, in which, he often reminded visitors, he had fond memories of having swum as a child.78 An early ten-point draft agreement allegedly reached between Netanyahu’s personal emissary, Ronald Lauder, and Asad in the summer of 1998 seemed to satisfy most of Israel’s concerns, including withdrawal based on the 1923 border. Upon learning of the agreement in 2000, Barak apparently hardened his own negotiating position, even as American mediator Dennis Ross warned that the Lauder draft deal was “too good to be true.”79 Indeed, a later (eight-point) plan subsequently revealed by Lauder reversed most of the Israeli gains and emphasized Syrian concerns, returning the talks to square one.80 Occasionally military experts joined the political appointees at the bargaining table. As the experience between Israel and Egypt had shown, “the military establishments of the two parties had to make their own peace and come to an agreement on the nature of the security regime that would be constituted.”81 Although difficult, the negotiations conducted by legal and military experts on security and technical matters were the most successful of all. The high point in the Syrian track during Rabin’s tenure as prime minister came in May 1995 when Syrian and Israeli delegates agreed upon a statement of “Aims and Principles of the Security Arrangements” (document 77). This document (given the deliberately informal status of a “non-paper”) served as a “diplomatic device agreed to by both parties with American assistance to help

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push the negotiations forward.”82 Demilitarization and limitations on the numbers of troops and kinds of weapons were discussed, along with proposals for observation posts, an early-warning station, and the use of third-party monitors. A particularly difficult point was whether demilitarized areas on either side of the new border were to be literally or proportionately symmetrical, given that Syria enjoys much greater depth on its side of the Heights.83 Some of these highly complex and sensitive issues were resolved through compromise formulae; others resisted resolution.84 Since this “high point” in May 1995, however, there has been little or no progress toward agreement on most of the remaining points—concrete or symbolic—in dispute. All phases of the negotiation were hampered by serious disagreements and maneuvering over the two remaining “legs” of the “table”: the extent of “normalization,” and a timetable for linking phases of Israeli withdrawal from the Golan with the establishment of diplomatic relations between Jerusalem and Damascus. Israel wanted a phased withdrawal/normalization over a five-year period; Syria wanted a withdrawal within six months and no diplomatic relations until the withdrawal was complete. And even then, “Asad was determined to teach the Egyptians what a cold peace with Israel really looked like.”85 The definition of the word “peace” itself proved problematic. An early formulation submitted by Syrian foreign minister al-Sharaa—“total peace for total withdrawal”—became unacceptable to the Israelis once they realized that the Syrian definition of “peace” did not include full normalization, diplomatic relations, tourism, or economic cooperation, but was rather an extended form of non-belligerency. In May 1993, Prime Minister Rabin announced that the depth of the Israeli withdrawal would reflect the depth of the peace to be offered by Syria. In semi-appreciative response, President Asad indicated that Syria was prepared to offer “full peace for full withdrawal.” In 1994, the Syrian leader spoke of establishing “a peace of the brave” and in some contexts began using the phrase “normal peaceful relations.” At the point at which negotiations broke off in early 2000, Israel seems to have accepted the reduced Syrian formulation of “regular relations” as distinct from the slightly fuller “normal relations” associated with the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties. But, as Eyal Zisser has pointed out, all these fancy phrases and delicate understandings have so far defied translation into the “contractual language of a peace agreement,” let alone meaningful political action.86 Psychological Factors

The failed Syrian-Israeli negotiations of 1991–2000 and their post-2000 hiatus offer a classic illustration of leaders who have excelled at maintaining national cohesiveness and morale better suited to waging war rather than pursuing peace. A

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cautious psychological transformation has been under way at the level of the political elites, but the “dynamics of deadlock” have made it difficult for the leaders to justify the risks of new diplomatic approaches to their followers, who have been well conditioned to distrust the enemy. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was not so sure that Asad himself had made the necessary psychological transformation, even after his declared adoption of peace as a strategic goal. Remarking upon what he saw as missed opportunities for peace by the Syrian leader, Christopher perceived “that Asad was immobilized by his ingrained mistrust of Israel.”87 But even leaders genuinely committed to closing a deal have a Herculean task before them in persuading their constituents to switch course and accept compromise. Underscoring one of the psychological difficulties on the Arab side, Robert Rabil notes that, since Israel’s creation in 1948, “Syrian propaganda against the Jewish state, whether out of conviction or out of need for public consumption, created an odious image of the mortal enemy in the Syrian collective mind.”88 Against this background, Syria’s defeat in the 1967 war was particularly “humiliating and domestically untenable. In a society that applauds pride and strength,” Rabil continues, “humiliation and weakness are perceived as mortal enemies, more so than the enemy (Israel) itself.”89 Ridiculing Israel’s expectations of Asad being able to “push a button” and create a “warm peace,” Ambassador Moualem argued that it was “rare to find a household in Syria that has not lost someone on the battlefield,” and that therefore any agreement “signed by the leadership, tells what is required from our side, but we cannot be obliged to make the peace warm.”90 The Israeli public’s anxiety over a withdrawal from the Golan similarly constrains the government’s flexibility and requires that any prime minister trying to strike a Golan-for-peace deal must conduct a rigorous public relations campaign as well. Building on the canonical historical memory of Syrian gunners on the Heights shelling Israeli towns below between 1948 and 1967, the Israeli public has developed an almost mythical belief that retaining all or much of the Golan is essential to Israeli security. Many Israelis don’t believe that Syria sincerely wants peace. And unlike Gaza or the West Bank, with their overwhelming Palestinian demographic threat, suicide bombers, and Intifadas, the Golan Heights have been quiet, with the Israeli settlers living in peace, prosperity, and security alongside the Syrian Druze villages there. Much of the Israeli public simply sees no pressing reason to relinquish the Golan to a suspect Syrian partner when the cost of retaining it does not seem particularly onerous. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who served as Barak’s foreign minister, fully recognized the dilemma in that the “peacemaker is always condemned to break national unity and split the nation if he wants to conclude a difficult agreement.” Yet he registered the following retrospective critique of his own party’s leadership:

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Courtesy of Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post

The major weakness in our peace enterprise was political and domestic. The lesson from Barak’s experience—in a way it was also the case of Rabin—is that, however grandiose and enlightened the peace vision of a leader might be, he will be doomed if he is not sustained by careful domestic political organization. . . . Inspiration alone is not sufficient. . . . A foreign policy needs to have domestic foundations. Barak was desperately awkward in putting together those vital foundations for

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peace. . . . Barak clearly failed to legitimize his policy in public opinion, and, no less importantly, within the polity and within the governmental apparatus.91

Thanks to years of repeated hostile rhetoric about the intractability, untrustworthiness, and aggressive intentions of the other party, leaders in both Israel and Syria have painted themselves into a corner with their extreme caution and hard-line positions. Alon Ben-Meir captures the psychological quandary in which both Syrians and Israelis find themselves: For the vast majority of Syrians, President Asad’s characterization of the requirements for peace—full Israeli withdrawal—touches deep nationalistic and emotional chords. Like the Israelis, the Syrians have become prisoners of a national psychological disposition created to explain the 1967 war and its consequences. Whereas for 30 years successive Israeli governments projected the Golan as indispensable to their country’s national security, the Syrians during the same period were told by their government that the Golan was captured through a war of aggression that exacted a heavy national toll. Therefore, as desirable as peace has become to ordinary Syrians, national pride and honor loom even larger, making it unthinkable that there be peace under any circumstances other than total Israeli withdrawal. Asad has made the removal of any and all traces of the 1967 war and its consequences a matter of national honor and thereby a prerequisite for peace.92

Leaders in search of a negotiated settlement can break this self-inflicted “dynamics of deadlock” only by reinventing the enemy as having become a possible, worthy partner for peace. Given these psychological impediments, a number of participants, especially on the Israeli side, have focused on the special need for creative, orchestrated “public diplomacy” aimed at each other’s public opinion. For their part, Syrians immediately ruled out Israeli suggestions for achieving a psychological breakthrough with a ceremonial meeting or handshake between top leaders, on the model of Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem or Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn. This Syrian stance has disappointed all Israeli prime ministers. Shimon Peres, for example, believed that “only a drama of this magnitude would persuade the Israeli public that an extraordinary development was taking place.”93 On more than one occasion Rabin complained that President Asad had “not done two percent of what President Sadat did to convince the people of Israel that he means real peace.”94 But Asad insisted on saving that precious public “photo op” for the finale of a done deal, instead of making it part of the process of achieving one. There were a few public confidence-building measures undertaken, but these were clumsily executed and failed to persuade anyone that anything new was under way.95 Syrians objected that the Israelis were expecting too much of them, with Ambassador Moualem complaining:

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We always felt that the Israelis wanted Syria to do their work for them. They wanted us to convince their public that peace was in their interests. We prepared our public for peace with Israel. Many things changed in our media. But they wanted us to speak in the Israeli media to prepare Israeli public opinion. They wanted us to allow Israelis to visit Syria. We considered such insistence a negative sign: When you do not prepare your own public for peace with your neighbor, this means you do not really have the intention to make peace.96

Difficulties between leaders and followers increasingly plagued negotiators on the Israeli side. Under the Rabin government, negotiations with Syria were challenged by a vigorous public campaign inside Israel against withdrawal characterized by the proliferation of banners and bumper stickers announcing “The People are with the Golan” and the formation in 1994 of “the Third Way,” a political faction of mostly Labor Party dissidents who supported the Golan settlers. In addition, Jewish organizations in the United States undermined the negotiations by actively lobbying Congress against contributing American observers to monitor the Golan in the event of an Israel-Syria agreement.97 Shimon Peres’s assumption of the premiership after Rabin’s assassination introduced a different psychological dynamic, further weakening the chances for a breakthrough. The perception, shared by Israelis and Syrians alike, that Peres was more flexible than his predecessor had the unfortunate result of raising Syrian expectations that remained unfulfilled, in large part because Israelis did not fully trust Peres to drive a tough bargain. Peres’s announced intention to “fly high and fast” to achieve an agreement with Syria caused consternation and uneasiness within both parties; Ambassador Moualem responded with a preference for flying “low and slow.”98 President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright both observed that Barak came to Shepherdstown having to impress an even tougher crowd back home than the one with which Rabin had to contend. In the intervening years, even more Jewish settlers had moved into the Golan Heights. There were also many more immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Barak’s Israel, and as a rule “the Russians” were opposed to Israeli territorial concessions. Fifty percent or more of respondents to public opinion surveys in Israel consistently say that they are unwilling to give up the Golan—even in exchange for full peace and adequate security arrangements. Indeed, a telling indication of the limited power of any Israeli leader wishing to withdraw from the Golan is the understanding, since Rabin’s day, that any agreement would have to be subjected to a national referendum.99 The outcome of such a referendum would not be a foregone conclusion, and serious preparatory efforts—involving credible Syrian gestures—would be required to win sufficient domestic support. Not surprisingly, Ambassador Rabinovich’s retrospective view of the 1992–1996 negotiations concluded that, for any resumption of negotiations, “the hard core of

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bargaining and deal-making will have to be wrapped with a thick and effective crust of public diplomacy, without which the Israeli public will not endorse an agreement with Syria predicated on a territorial concession.”100 Even Patrick Seale—Asad’s biographer and sometimes the conveyor of his thinking, and a staunch critic of Israeli bargaining tactics—seemed to agree. A few months before the Syrian president’s death in 2000, Seale published an open letter to Asad in the newspaper al-Hayat, suggesting that he consider changing the way he negotiated with the Israelis: “You cannot make peace with Barak alone, but [you must] make peace with the government of Israel, the Knesset and even the entire Israeli people. . . . Syria must convince them through public diplomacy and negotiating that peace is not a danger, and that they must accept it.”101 Three weeks later, in a follow-up article in which he eulogized the failed peace process, Seale laid most of the blame for the failure on Barak and secondarily on the United States. But he also criticized “Syria’s style in the negotiations, which was characterized by intransigence, refusal to deal with public diplomacy and ignoring Israeli public opinion.”102 One month and one day later, the newspapers were eulogizing Hafez al-Asad. Post-2000

So many national, regional, and global power shifts have occurred since the last official Syrian-Israel talks in January 2000 that one observer has commented that “the legacy of the last decade . . . appears now as ancient history.”103 Yet, despite some important changes, there has been striking continuity in a number of factors. Since the death of the Syrian president in June 2000, his son and successor Bashar al-Asad and successive Israeli prime ministers have continued the pattern of publicly and privately exchanging both tentative peace feelers and belligerent words. A graduate of the medical school at the University of Damascus, Bashar was studying ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital in London when his brother’s sudden death in 1994 brought him back to Syria to be groomed in his place.104 After thirty years of rule by Asad the father, the assumption of power by the relatively unprepared Bashar raised serious timing and status questions. Could the new president consolidate and wield power? Were the old hands in the top political echelons prepared to take their marching orders from the young ophthalmologist? And how long would it take for him to establish his authority and decide which advisers to purge and which to rely upon? To Bashar’s challenges of domestic leadership consolidation and regional jockeying were added the global upheavals following the devastating 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Given the surge in anti-American sentiment in the Middle East caused

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by the U.S. assault on Iraq, the ongoing conflict between Israel and Syria’s Palestinian, Hizballah, and Iranian allies, and his own newness in office, Bashar seemed unwilling to take the political risks associated with resuming negotiations with Israel—negotiations which previous experience indicated would be difficult and, most probably, unsuccessful. In fact, Bashar’s inaugural speech included harsh rhetoric against Israel. “It was probably to be expected,” observes David Lesch, that a young, relatively untested leader such as Bashar would stake out a tough line vis-à-vis Israel, if anything to show that he was in control, that Tel Aviv should not expect that he was going to be soft in any negotiations that may resume, and to reassure those powerful elements within his regime that had so recently fired shots across his father’s bows that he was not going to willy-nilly make concessions nor repeat the mistakes made at Shepherdstown.105

Subsequent remarks by the new president were extremely hostile to Israel, occasionally antisemitic, and supportive of Palestinian suicide terrorism as legitimate resistance to occupation.106 Observers were thus pessimistic as to the likelihood of successful diplomatic outcomes in terms of the timing, status of the negotiator, and psychological factors in play in Damascus. The changing of the guard in Jerusalem was no less discouraging. Soured on the peace process by Barak’s failure to make a deal with the Palestinians at Camp David and stung by the outbreak of the Second Intifada shortly thereafter, Israelis swung the political pendulum in the opposition’s direction and elected Ariel Sharon prime minister in March 2001. Although Sharon subsequently moderated his positions and undertook some surprising, uncharacteristic decisions, especially the complete withdrawal of all Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza in August 2005, he maintained a consistently hard line toward Syria. Sharon held Syria responsible for suicide bombings in Israel by Palestinian groups with headquarters in Damascus, and in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq he accused Syria of protecting Iraqi weapons of mass destruction allegedly transferred to Syria for safe-keeping. In Sharon’s last interview, given to a Japanese newspaper the day before he suffered a massive stroke on 4 January 2006, he scored Syria as a terrorist safe haven and averred, “I don’t see any situation where Israel will not be sitting on the Golan Heights. For 19 years [i.e., 1948–1967] the northern part of Israel was under [a] heavy war of attrition. We are not going to return to this situation.”107 In the area of third-party mediation via “track II” negotiations, 2004 witnessed some interesting developments. The first episode, which stretched over nine months, saw the Turks playing an intermediary role, at Bashar Asad’s suggestion.108 The second episode featured private American citizens using a Swiss intermediary to bring a former director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry together with Syrian Vice

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President Farouk al-Sharaa and Foreign Minister Walid Moualem. Although the promotions of al-Sharaa and Moualem by Bashar augured well for the status of the Syrian negotiators, the American go-betweens were working on their own initiative, and it was not clear to what extent the Israeli and Swiss governments backed the talks. Nevertheless, in August 2004 these negotiators produced a “non-paper” outlining a prospective agreement whose terms advanced slightly beyond those reached in the official pre-2000 negotiations (document 114). The talks broke off in July 2006, a casualty of the second Lebanon War.109 Another third-party consideration that may have helped stifle post-2000 negotiation efforts was the attitude of President George W. Bush. Immediately after 9/11 the United States responded positively to Syria’s offer to share intelligence concerning al-Qaeda activity. Perhaps Asad calculated that from this tragedy might emerge an opportunity to improve U.S.-Syria ties; perhaps he feared that Syria might become a target of the war declared by President Bush on terror. Although initially appreciative of Syria’s assistance, Washington hardened its stance as the “war on terror” came to include full-scale war in Iraq. Syria’s place on the State Department’s list of states supporting terrorism, its close relations with Hizballah and Iran, and allegations that it was sheltering or assisting anti-American insurgents in Iraq after 2003 made the Bush administration want to isolate, rather than engage, the regime in Damascus.110 American displeasure with Syria may have created an unusual third-party dynamic, such that when Bashar began signaling a readiness to resume talks with Israel in 2004, many observers attributed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s reluctance to American pressure.111 It is also possible, however, that Olmert sidestepped Asad’s overtures for domestic reasons of his own. Plagued by corruption charges, unable to protect his citizens in the south from Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza, and having presided over the largely unsuccessful Lebanon War of 2006, the unpopular Olmert could easily have been playing to, rather than trying to shape, Israeli public opinion. Israelis still generally distrusted Syrian motives and intentions, having noted that most of Hizballah’s rockets and munitions came from Iran via Damascus, and retained their traditional deep reservations about a Golan-for-peace deal. The weak Olmert could not have faced down the strong Golan lobby. He announced his resignation in September 2008 and was replaced by Netanyahu in the February 2009 elections. In the years following the breakdown of official talks in 2000, activity on the Israeli-Syrian front has followed the historical pattern of oscillation between cautious diplomatic maneuvering and political and military antagonism. Since his ascension to power, Bashar has alternated between hinting at a willingness to negotiate with Israel and taking a tough line that continued to use Hizballah as a “proxy” military threat. Belligerent language naming Israel as the real obstacle to peace became part

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of the daily diet of political pronouncements from Damascus.112 In September 2007 Israeli warplanes bombed a mysterious site in the northeast Syrian desert, which the international press speculated was a nuclear site in some early stage of construction. Despite Syria’s outrage at the flagrant violation of its airspace, Syrian deputy foreign minister Fayssal Mekdad and Israeli prime minister Olmert both attended the U.S.-sponsored regional conference in Annapolis, Maryland, just two months later. Hastily pulled together and devoid of the 1991 Madrid Conference’s pre-agreed structural framework for continuing bilateral and multilateral negotiations after the meeting adjourned, Annapolis did not promise much in the way of concrete accomplishments, but in the context of Syrian-Israel relations it may have signaled a new U.S. readiness to consider working with, rather than marginalizing, the regime in Damascus. In 2009 the new Obama administration moved quickly to reopen lines of communication with Syria by sending senior American officials to meet with Asad. The announcement that a U.S. ambassador would return to Damascus, after a four-year absence, indicated even more clearly a new willingness on the part of the American administration to support and perhaps mediate a rapprochement between Syria and Israel. Barring a surprise breakthrough à la Oslo, however, one can expect a continuation of back-and-forth veiled intimations, periodic assertions of diplomatic readiness, mutual accusations, and aggressive posturing. In many respects, the terms of agreement have been thoroughly thrashed out and the peace table set, albeit gingerly, on those four legs. If the parties are to pull up their chairs and sit openly around it, however, something or someone will have to stimulate a new psychology among leaders strong enough to finally propel Syrian-Israeli negotiations to reach new diplomatic heights—and bring their domestic publics along with them.

Part Three The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Oslo 1993 and Beyond

Chapter 7 Breakthrough The Oslo Accords

The stunning revelation of a secret agreement in September 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) completely recast the anatomy of the Arab-Israeli peace process and seemed to promise, for the first time, a breakthrough between the principal protagonists at the very core of this century-old conflict. The fact that direct PLO-Israeli negotiations had taken place was startling enough; even more surprising was the “diplomatic equivalent of a ‘blitzkrieg’”1 that unfolded in the following months, beginning with the 9 September exchange of mutual recognition letters and the signing of the 13 September Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (also known as the DOP and the Oslo Accords; documents 69–70). Following the DOP were the 1994 Cairo Agreement, the 1995 “Oslo II” Agreement (documents 74, 78), and smaller agreements negotiated along the way to implementing these major accords.2 Despite this apparently successful series of historic signed documents, serious differences between the Palestinians and Israel remained unresolved. The gravity of the domestic opposition that the PLO and Israeli leaderships faced within their own communities was driven home soon enough, when in November 1995 a young Israeli Jew, fanatically opposed to Israel’s relinquishing its biblical claim to the occupied territories, shot and killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin following a massive peace rally in Tel Aviv. Rabin’s assassination, the first ever of a prime minister in Israel’s history, demonstrated the huge gap between the Rabin government’s commitment to trading land for peace and the fervent rejection of that policy by those on the far right.3 Palestinian society was similarly torn between those who supported the peace process and those who would destroy it. Hamas’s violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007 exposed the magnitude of that rift, pitting the West Bank (governed by the Palestinian Authority) against Gaza (ruled by Hamas).

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This chapter focuses on the breakthrough achieved by the Rabin government and the PLO in 1993 and attempts to explain the initial successes4—along with some of the drawbacks that became evident in the early stages—in terms of the seven factors examined for each of the previous case studies. The next chapter considers the breakdown of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process in the 1990s, along the lines of those same seven elements. Chapter 9 focuses on the dramatic attempt to revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process which climaxed in the failed summit at Camp David (July 2000), the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada in September of that year, and the continued resistance of the conflict to diplomatic resolution in the years following. Previous Experience

From their first awkward encounters, Palestinians and Zionists set themselves a pattern of mutual avoidance and denial rather than engagement. The Palestinians objected to Jewish immigration into Palestine and demanded an Arab state; the Zionists aimed to create a Jewish state in roughly the same territory. Fruitless ZionistPalestinian negotiations during the Mandate period left Jewish Agency officials with a decided preference for working toward an accommodation over Palestine through Arab leaders beyond its borders. Israel’s post-1948 inclination to deal with individual Arab states rather than with Palestinian groups reflected a continuation of this pattern. The creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 signaled the emergence of a new generation of Palestinian leaders and the awakening and radicalization of the dispersed Palestinian community. The PLO’s 1968 National Charter declared a perpetual armed struggle aimed at destroying the Zionist state, explicitly ruling out a diplomatic solution (document 20). By the time the 1974 Rabat Arab summit crowned the PLO the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people (document 27), most Israelis and Palestinians had no inclination to pursue direct contacts with one another. The PLO aspired to the destruction of Israel, and in 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon with one goal, among several, being the destruction of the PLO headquartered there. From the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, the official “non-dialogue” between Israelis and Palestinians consisted of parallel efforts to delegitimize each other in the eyes of the international community. The PLO denounced Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza as violations of their internationally recognized human rights, while Israel pointed to a series of horrific PLO terrorist attacks, including the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. In 1975 Israel obtained an American promise that the United States would not recognize or talk with the PLO until it formally accepted

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UN Resolution 242, with its implied recognition of the Jewish state, and renounced terrorism.5 But the PLO was on a diplomatic roll. In November 1974 Arafat became the first head of a non-governmental organization to speak before a plenary session of the UN General Assembly; Israeli Ambassador Yosef Tekoah delivered an immediate rebuttal (documents 28–29). In November of the following year the General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism a form of racism (document 31a).6 The PLO also successfully imposed a ban against Palestinian contact with Israel, largely observed by other Arab actors as well. Israel resorted to the familiar pre-1948 tactic of dealing with non-Palestinian leaders like Jordan’s King Hussein (in secret) and Egyptian President Sadat (openly), while fostering rival Palestinian organizations, such as the West Bank “Village Leagues” and (according to some observers) even the Islamic forerunners of the Hamas movement, to undermine or challenge the authority of the PLO.7 In the years after 1948, only a handful of Israeli and Palestinian mavericks dared to talk to “the enemy,” and these advocates of dialogue or mutual recognition had little or no impact on mainstream opinion or official policy.8 Ideological purists in the Palestinian camp attempted to enforce the boycott against dealing with Israelis by ostracism and assassination.9 Israel sharpened its long-standing discouragement of contact with the PLO in August 1986 when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government amended the Prevention of Terror law to make such encounters illegal. Yet breaches of the mutual boycott were common during the 1980s, especially among intellectuals and academics working or traveling in Europe and North America.10 These top-secret meetings between individual Palestinians and Israelis, however, were hardly enough to challenge the century-long history of avoidance and antagonism that characterized the two people’s shared experiÂ�ences. The lack of contact did not mean that the conflict turned on misunderstood intentions which could be easily rectified through direct communications. Given each party’s extensive familiarity with the other’s objectives, the dearth of contact cannot serve as an explanation for the ferocity of the conflict between them. It did, however, contribute substantially to the easy demonization of the other, creating a psychological obstacle to peace of tremendous import. While the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference brought Israelis and Arabs to the same table and broke important taboos, it did little to create a promising Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough. Accommodating Shamir’s adamant refusal to sit with PLO representatives, the American conveners of the conference allowed only “non-PLO” Palestinians to attend as part of the Jordanian delegation. By the time the PLO and Israel began the secret meetings which led to the Oslo Accords, Israel and the Madrid Palestinians had been fruitlessly engaged in talks in Washington for two years. If nothing else, each was even

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more intimately acquainted with the other’s irreconcilable terms, with no softening of position or perspective on the horizon. Purposes and Motives

Historically, ulterior motives—rather than the quest for a peaceful accommodation—brought Zionists (and later, Israelis) together with Palestinian Arabs for encounters which invariably proved futile. Driven by timing elements (discussed below), veteran soldier-diplomat-politician Yitzhak Rabin broke with the pattern of a century of mutual evasion and enmity and won the June 1992 Israeli elections on a platform built on two interrelated goals: normalization of relations with the Arab world and an agreement with the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Despite Rabin’s reputation as a hard-liner on security issues, he and his former rival, Shimon Peres (now serving as foreign minister), applied themselves diligently to the various Arab-Israeli talks taking place in Washington under the Madrid peace process.11 The Rabin government quickly showed greater flexibility than its predecessor, particularly in accepting the evolution of the Jordanian-Palestinian talks into separate Jordanian and Palestinian negotiating tracks. Israeli aims under the Rabin-Peres team included terminating the occupation of Gaza and much of the West Bank and reaching an arrangement with the Palestinians that would diminish terrorism, end the (first) Intifada that had erupted in December 1987, and allow for normal interstate Arab-Israel relations. Yitzhak Rabin, the military man, came to believe that only the PLO had the manpower and legitimacy to police the Palestinian population and control residual anti-Israel violence in the wake of a future Israeli withdrawal. Recognizing and cooperating with the hated PLO was a decidedly hard pill for most Israelis to swallow; Rabin hoped to sweeten it with the promise that a Palestinian deal would open the doors to the long-term Israeli goal of achieving normal relations with the rest of the Arab world, bringing about the full integration of Israel into a politically and economically stable region. Peres laid out his own sweeping vision of Rabin’s pragmatic goals in a book titled The New Middle East.12 Mainstream PLO intentions had also apparently evolved from the original goal of destroying Israel to proposals for coexisting with it, as officially declared at the Palestine National Council meeting in November 1988 (documents 53–54).13 However, not everyone was buying the metamorphosis, and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir labored successfully to exclude PLO members from the Palestinian portion of the joint Jordan-Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. But as we saw in chapter 4, PLO chairman Yasir Arafat gave his nod of approval to nonPLO Palestinian participation in Madrid and follow-up negotiations in Washington.

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Courtesy of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

That the PLO was working hard to control the Palestinian agenda from behind the scenes was something of an open secret.14 In the summer of 1992 the PLO responded positively to a Norwegian proposal to open a back channel and move into secret but direct talks with Israeli representatives in Oslo.15 The purpose of engaging in these negotiations was to initiate a process leading to a comprehensive resolution of the Palestinian plight, with these short-term aims: • •

•

•

Recognition of the PLO by Israel An immediate Israeli withdrawal from some occupied Palestinian land, an accomplishment with which to turn back the growing popularity of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic movement based in Gaza An Israeli commitment to future pullbacks from additional land in the occupied territories Recognition by, diplomatic relations with, and economic support from the United States

This last point repeats the historical pattern of negotiating with an eye toward a powerful third party: indeed, lead PLO negotiator Ahmed Qurie (Abu Ala) writes that part of the Palestinian motivation in negotiating in Oslo was to “break through the political stalemate and to attract American interest . . . by showing our willingness to negotiate. Our basic problem was the underlying [negative] attitude of the United States” toward the PLO.16 To deviate from the failed precedent, the PLO

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would have to have something new and positive to say if and when the Oslo talks captured U.S. attention. This time, it appeared that there might be common ground between Palestinian readiness to focus only on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 and the Rabin government’s possible readiness to terminate much of the occupation. Departing from the historical precedent, both parties were motivated to strike a less-than-zero-sum bargain. To achieve all this, Arafat—like Rabin—would have to play his “recognition” card. Timing

By the fall of 1992, a wide range of events converged to convince both Israeli and PLO leaders that their interests might best be served by a Palestinian-Israeli compromise, something that neither had ever been prepared to accept before. Why now? The 1991 Madrid Conference had broken the historic taboo against direct ArabIsraeli talks and set in motion follow-up bilateral and multilateral talks in Washington and other world capitals. Yitzhak Rabin took office in June 1992 keenly aware that he would be judged by history—and the Israeli electorate—on his ability to use those negotiations to fulfill his campaign promises to deliver a quick agreement with the Palestinians and normal relations with the Arab states. Early in Rabin’s tenure, however, domestic Israeli politics, independent of the peace process, threatened the viability of his Labor coalition. The government needed something as spectacular as a Palestinian peace deal to pull itself above the internal political fray and to enhance its chances of making good on the most difficult of its campaign promises. Once it became clear that the Palestinians in Washington, negotiating under Shamir’s Madrid Conference constraints and hamstrung by the need for repeated underthe-table consultations with the PLO in Tunis, could not deliver what Israel needed from them, Rabin reluctantly came to believe that Israel had no choice but to speak directly with the PLO. The timing was such that the PLO was now equally prepared for direct talks with Israel. Both the suffering and the renewed self-esteem connected with the first Intifada had activated a new cadre within the Palestinian movement—an indigenous Palestinian leadership inside the occupied territories—that was “anxious to see progress on the diplomatic front that would make their sacrifice worthwhile.”17 For his part, Arafat was struggling to maintain a minimum level of PLO services to his far-flung Palestinian constituency; as such, the development of a new, independent, and alternative Palestinian leadership drawn from among the population in the West Bank and Gaza posed new challenges to PLO officials in distant Tunis.18 The fall of the Soviet Union had stripped the PLO of a large source of its diplomatic

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and military support. Angry at Arafat’s support for Iraq during the Gulf War, the PLO’s wealthy Gulf state patrons instituted a “financial siege” that forced reductions in essential Palestinian social, educational, medical, and cultural programs, with devastating repercussions for both Palestinian society and the PLO’s leadership role within it. With the Palestinian condition deteriorating and the PLO estranged from many of its natural Arab supporters, Arafat knew that a growing number of Palestinians were finding the PLO increasingly bankrupt, politically and financially. Hence the PLO chief ’s desperate need to produce tangible results on the ground.19 The rise in popularity and power of Hamas further caused Arafat and Rabin to look upon each other through new eyes.20 Hamas emerged during the first Intifada as a dynamic, Islamic alternative to the secular PLO, and its covenant added a fundamentalist imperative to existing Palestinian demands, calling for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic Palestinian state in its place (document 52).21 Arafat feared that a militant Hamas would quickly rival and perhaps overtake the PLO as the object of the people’s loyalty and the standard-bearer of their cause. After more than a quarter of a century, the PLO had liberated not one centimeter of Palestine; compared to the young, hard-bitten Hamas militants, Arafat and his companions looked tired and old, their energy and their treasury depleted. Arafat gambled that if he could negotiate an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, popular support would swing dramatically in his favor. Oslo presented him with “an opportunity for personal and organizational recognition and political rehabilitation.”22 The timing was indeed “ripe,”23 as the Israeli government was coming to the same conclusion at the same time.24 Hamas created for the Israelis a new sense of urgency for settling the Palestinian problem. As Richard Bulliet has suggested, an “instinctive feeling that suicidal religious fanatics are more dangerous than suicidal secular fanatics” led to an Israeli estimation that “the prospect of being marooned in a sea of militant Islamic enemies seemed more horrifying than the longstanding reality of being marooned in a sea of militant secular enemies.”25 By absolutely rejecting any Israeli-Palestinian compromise, Hamas unwittingly pushed the PLO and Israel into an awkward embrace. Rabin and his advisers calculated that, between Arafat and Hamas, Arafat was clearly the lesser of two evils. The time had come to strike a deal with Arafat, while he was still inclined to deal, and before he became irrelevant. In a major departure from the historical pattern, Israel and the PLO simultaneously came to perceive immediate benefits with acceptable costs in a preliminary negotiated settlement between them.26 Both the PLO and Israel hoped that a deal between them that allowed Arafat to claim responsibility for an initial Israeli with-

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drawal would pull the rug out from under Hamas and pave the way for a mutually acceptable resolution to their conflict. Arafat calculated that the PLO’s recovery of some land from Israeli control, along with Israeli and American legitimization of his organization, would counter the anticipated backlash from those Palestinian quarters that had consistently rejected any compromise with Israel. For his part, Rabin believed that the Israeli people could tolerate a deal with the PLO if it was quickly followed by the palliative of open and positive relations between Israel and the Arab world. The Israeli prime minister’s commitment to the Oslo channel was compounded by what he saw as a negative Syrian response to feelers for a SyrianIsraeli channel put forward by the United States in the summer of 1993. Ironically, the very exploration of Syrian-Israeli talks contributed to Arafat’s commitment to the Oslo channel, as he feared being marginalized by possible activity on the SyrianIsraeli front.27 This confluence of conditions—the rise of an Israeli government specifically committed to a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, the impotence of the Palestinian negotiating team in Washington, the financial woes of a PLO desperately in need of a tangible victory, and the increasing power of a mutually threatening common enemy in Hamas—combined to create a unique moment in Palestinian-Israeli history. Veteran Egyptian analyst Mohamed Heikal contends that the momentum in Norway was such that, by the end of May 1993, “Rabin was on the road to acceptance of the tentative Oslo deal, Peres was full of excitement, and Arafat wanted to press ahead as soon as possible. The negotiations had reached a point where it was less difficult for the parties to go ahead than to turn back.”28 Veering sharply from the historical pattern, sworn enemies simultaneously realized that, without the other’s cooperation, each lacked both the power to impose its own solution against the other’s objections and the wherewithal to overcome internal opponents. Status of the Negotiators

Unlike in the past, when only mavericks or dissidents dared to make contact with the other side, the Oslo talks took place with the knowledge and blessing of Israeli and Palestinian leaders of the highest echelon. It was shortly after Labor’s June 1992 victory that deputy foreign minister Yossi Beilin secured Foreign Minister Peres’s permission to contact some Norwegian academics and officials who had earlier offered to introduce him to senior PLO officials. Beilin tapped academics Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak to be the first Israelis to meet with a PLO official. They were joined at the later stages of the process by Uri Savir, director-general of the Foreign Ministry, and Joel Singer, Peres’s legal adviser. The last important Israeli

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passenger to board the “PLO Express” was the prime minister himself.29 Of all the Israelis in the know, Rabin clung the longest to the formal position of avoiding the PLO, preferring if at all possible to reach a settlement with the (only technically “non-PLO”) Palestinian negotiators in Washington. Once convinced, however, that the D.C. negotiating team simply could not make grand decisions without Arafat, Rabin ordered stepped-up negotiations with the PLO itself via the Norwegian back channel.30 This cadre of Israeli officials prepared to negotiate with the PLO deviated dramatically from Israel’s previously preferred strategy of seeking out non-Palestinian interlocutors and/or talking only with so-called “moderate” (i.e., non-PLO) Palestinians. Lead PLO negotiator Abu Ala described a “test” the Israelis demanded of him to confirm his status as an authorized negotiator, and writes of the PLO’s own concern that several rounds of intensive talks had taken place before it received definitive evidence that Rabin had “legitimized” the Oslo channel with the PLO and that the Israeli interlocutors held “official status.”31 Once Rabin endorsed the talks with the PLO, the Israeli negotiators in Oslo were fully empowered to make difficult compromises that no Israeli representatives had ever been ready or able to make before. Rabin and Peres also offered a particularly strong team for selling those compromises to the Israeli public. Peres had diplomatic vision, but lacked popularity and support; Rabin was dogmatic, but his tough reputation meant that more Israelis were willing to trust him not to sign a deal endangering the nation’s security.32 The equally surprising willingness of the PLO to negotiate directly with Israel constituted another important step in overcoming the historic futility of only lowerstatus representatives negotiating with the other side. The conditions that brought PLO chairman Arafat to the table have been discussed above. After conferring with Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), an expert on Israel and a veteran of many clandestine meetings with Israelis, Arafat dispatched trusted senior associates Hasan Asfour, Abu Ala, and the latter’s former economic adviser, Maher al-Kurd, to meet the Israelis in Oslo. For the first time ever, the Palestinian case was presented directly to the Israelis by a popular and authentic Palestinian leadership. A comparison of the parallel Palestinian-Israeli negotiations—the lower-level Israelis and supposedly “non-PLO” Palestinians (led by Hanan Ashrawi and Faisal Husseini) meeting in Washington versus the high-level Israeli and PLO delegates meeting in Norway—reveals that both the Israeli and PLO teams in Norway proved more flexible in their positions and more willing to compromise than their counterparts in Washington. The D.C. negotiators were laboring under old priorities, the Madrid constraints, and the media’s constant glare.33 The secret Oslo talks also proved more crisis-resistant than the public ones in Washington: Rabin’s expulsion

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to Lebanon of 400 Hamas activists in December 1992 caused a four-month suspension of the D.C. negotiations, whereas the Oslo talks began in January 1993 while the Hamas members still languished on a snowy Lebanese hillside.34 Interestingly, both parties kept their official negotiators in Washington in the dark about the more serious encounters under way in Oslo, while allowing their secret negotiators in Norway to draw upon the strengths and learn from the weaknesses of the effort in the United States. Hasan Asfour, who drafted much of the DOP, was also the secretary of the PLO follow-up committee to the Washington negotiations and borrowed freely from the D.C. documents to which he had full access.35 Abu Ala eventually advised Hirschfeld that “the Palestinian leadership has actually made a policy decision to refrain from placing any substantial issue on the negotiating table in Washington before agreement on that issue had been reached in [the Oslo] channel.”36 According to Ashrawi, the restrictive directions emanating from Tunis and decreasing PLO interest in the diligent and conscientious work put forth by the D.C. team led her several times to wonder if a back channel had emerged, rendering the Washington talks nothing but a front for the real negotiating going on elsewhere. Israeli stalling tactics and tepid American attention further reinforced that perception.37 Although the PLO negotiators in Oslo shared the same background and objectives as the Palestinians negotiating in Washington, Abu Ala observed that the D.C. delegates had been dictated by Shamir in a manner meant to reflect Palestinian-Israeli asymmetry and were working their way “through an agenda not of their choosing”; the Oslo talks, on the other hand, “were the result of the free choice of their participants,” with the Palestinian side enjoying the full status of PLO members directly connected to Arafat himself.38 The unusually high status of the Israeli and Palestinian parties to the DOP was a drastic deviation from the historical pattern and can partially explain their success at reaching an agreement. By July 1993, “positions were being dictated by Peres and Rabin, on the one hand, and by Abu Mazen and Arafat on the other.”39 The final details of the DOP were hammered out in an eight-hour phone call between Peres (in Sweden, with Holst conveying his positions) and Arafat (in Tunis, where Abu Ala worked the phone with Abu Mazen and Asfour by his side). Peres kept a line open to Rabin in Tel Aviv.40 Participants recall with great emotion the secret ceremony in Oslo on 19 August 1993, during which the agreed-upon document was initialed.41 Difficulties and delays in implementing parts of the accord, however, indicated that even support from the highest political echelons was no guarantee that each side would be able to continuously “deliver the goods.” And as Rabin’s assassination attested, high status offered no immunity against attacks by determined domestic opponents.

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Third-Party Considerations

Given their long-standing mutual policies of not recognizing the other’s legitimacy, the PLO and Israel had relied over the years on third parties to exchange what little communication passed between them. Traveling journalists and academics from many countries transmitted messages back and forth; the Jordanians, Egyptians, and Moroccans played postman on occasion as well. In the era of Madrid-style talks, however, everyone assumed that the United States held the preeminent thirdparty position. Surprise at the September 1993 announcement that secret IsraeliPLO negotiations had produced an accord was compounded by the revelation that Norway—rather than the United States—had played the critical third-party role. “The minnow,” quipped the PLO’s number two, Abu Mazen, “was able to perform miracles which the whale could not.”42 Although in late 1992 the Clinton administration “inherited the most promising Arab-Israel diplomatic initiative since the Camp David Accords of 1978,”43 the Madrid process had already begun to falter at the end of his predecessor’s term, due in part to a lapse of attention by the Bush administration. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s problems and the dissolution of the USSR distracted American foreign policymakers. Furthermore, Secretary of State Baker was suddenly called away from the State Department to manage the struggling Bush presidential reelection campaign. Although President Clinton retained those diplomats responsible for U.S. Middle East policy, his new secretary of state, Warren Christopher, had to introduce himself and establish trust with a panoply of Middle East leaders before he could act to revive the languishing Israeli-Palestinian effort in Washington.44 This electoral hiatus in U.S. activity contributed unwittingly to the determination of the conspirators in Oslo to forge ahead. The Norwegian initiative developed from contacts in the spring of 1992 among Yossi Beilin, then an opposition member of the Knesset; Mona Juul, assistant to Norway’s deputy foreign minister Jan Egeland; and her husband, Terje Rød Larsen, a Norwegian academic conducting research in the occupied territories. After Labor’s June 1992 electoral victory, Egeland proposed to introduce now deputy foreign minister Beilin to some of Larsen’s senior PLO acquaintances, principal among them Abu Ala, and offered Norway as the venue for secret talks. Beilin had a personal history of quiet meetings with non-PLO Palestinian leaders, among them Hanan Ashrawi and Faisal Husseini from the West Bank and Jerusalem, respectively. Ashrawi had long recommended Abu Ala to Beilin as a serious interlocutor, but as an Israeli official, Beilin had to draw the line at a meeting with a PLO official.45 In the summer of 1992, however, Ashrawi, Husseini, and Norwegian intermediar-

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ies successfully arranged several clandestine and tentative meetings between Abu Ala and Israeli professors Hirschfeld and Pundak, whom Abu Ala correctly understood to be connected to Beilin and Peres. On the strength of those first furtive encounters, PLO and Israeli negotiating teams were dispatched to Oslo where they undertook fifteen sessions over an eight-month period beginning in January 1993, and succeeded in Norway where their counterparts in the parallel negotiations in Washington failed.46 Reflecting back on the clandestine meetings, all Palestinian and Israeli participants consistently remarked upon the invaluable role played by Norway. Hirschfeld suggested four elements that had enhanced the chances of success: (1) absolute secrecy, (2) excellent working conditions, (3) personal chemistry among all individuals involved, and (4) a sense of realism.47 All these can be credited, in different degrees, to the unique Norwegian factor, a judgment echoed by the accolades offered by Palestinian participants as well.48 Norway, a “middle” rather than a “great” power and off the beaten track of international diplomatic activity, contributed to the peacemaking effort in ways that differed from the usual patterns of third-party involvement. For one thing, Norway genuinely enjoyed good relations with both Israel and the PLO.49 The hush-hush nature of the Oslo talks also offered a sharp contrast to the talks in Washington, which came under the daily scrutiny of the mass media. Away from the public eye, Israeli and PLO negotiators could float trial balloons and dispense with dramatic posturing. Larsen, Juul, and Norwegian foreign affairs minister Johan Jørgen Holst facilitated the second and third of Hirschfeld’s four conditions, personal chemistry and positive working conditions, by serving “as generous hosts and gentle mediators,”50 providing comfortable and expansive accommodations in various homes and estates. In a series of secluded mini-Camp David-like secret escapes, Israelis, Palestinians, and Norwegians stayed together at the same site, taking meals together and augmenting formal negotiations with informal late-night discussions. Subsequent marathon negotiating sessions in Taba and Eilat tried to duplicate the intimate sequestration model used with success in Oslo.51 Norway also footed the bill for the extensive travel, lodging, meals, and secretarial services required by the negotiators, to the tune of half a million dollars.52 Norway satisfied the fourth condition, a sense of realism, by breaking with the historical pattern by which a powerful third party perpetuated the conflict by permitting one or both sides to maintain unrealistic hopes of having its preferred solution imposed on the other by an outside arbitrator. The Norwegians adopted various roles, from hands-off hosts to helpful interventionists, reconciling viewpoints, suggesting alternatives, and even traveling to Tunisia, the United States, and Israel to ferry top secret documents and take soundings among the highest leaders.53 But

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President Bill Clinton observes the famous handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat. Courtesy of CORBIS. Reprinted by permission.

with no expectations whatsoever that the government of Norway would dictate a one-sided accord, Israelis and Palestinians got down to the business of driving hard but ostensibly workable bargains among themselves.54 Norway and Israel informed the United States of the secret talks several times, but when Peres met with Warren Christopher in late August 1993 to brief him on the impending accord, the American secretary of state registered surprise that the talks in Norway “had become a decision-making channel.”55 The U.S. assumption was clearly that if there were to be a Palestinian-Israeli breakthrough, it would be born of the process to which the United States had played midwife in Madrid and under whose aegis the talks in Washington were taking place. Indeed, Israelis and Palestinians expressed the desire to sign their accord, not at the Norwegian parliament, but on the White House lawn.56 By shaking hands in Washington, Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat signaled to their respective constituencies that the fragile accord between them enjoyed the backing of the United States, which they could expect to be manifest in material, economic, and diplomatic forms. “Opposition voices would be notably muted after the agreement was seen to have the support and blessing of the Americans,” wrote Abu Ala. “That was why

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we were pleased to have it signed under the brightest spotlight the Americans could bring to bear.”57 Throughout the complex follow-up negotiations leading to the Cairo Agreement of May 1994 and the Oslo II pact of September 1995, the United States resumed its traditional third-party role; the Israelis and Palestinians fell into their old historical pattern as well, asking the Americans to “produce from the other what they could not produce on their own.”58 “There are so many pitfalls en route to . . . the final status settlement,” observed Michael Hudson, “that the behavior of the ‘Only Remaining Superpower’ can either facilitate or destroy the negotiations.”59 The DOP enjoyed expert Norwegian facilitation, but its actualization would require American promotion and protection. Proposed Terms of Agreement

After much debate, the negotiators agreed that the DOP should be preceded by a public gesture of mutual recognition between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. This was accomplished with three letters, all dated 9 September 1993: one from Arafat to Rabin, a second from Arafat to Holst, and a third from Rabin to Arafat (document 69). Every word of each letter had been hotly debated in Tunis, Tel Aviv, and Oslo, with the end results reflecting the asymmetry in power (and enthusiasm) between Arafat and Rabin.60 Arafat recognized Israel’s right to exist, renounced terrorism, pledged to rid the PLO Charter of its anti-Israel clauses, and waxed eloquent about the historic nature of the undertaking. He balked, however, at Israel’s demand that he also use the letter to call for an end to the Intifada, on the grounds that the PLO had not initiated the uprising and therefore was not in a position to terminate it. The compromise solution was his letter to Holst, in which he called upon the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to reject violence and embrace peace. Proving that sometimes the fewest words speak the most, Rabin recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and Israel’s peace partner in one curt sentence. An awkward and unequal exchange, to be sure, but these three brief letters formally swept away decades of mutual non-recognition.61 The rhetorical accompaniment to these changes was provided in the speeches delivered by Arafat and Rabin on the White House lawn (document 71). Measured against the historical record, the terms embodied in the DOP, Cairo, and Oslo II agreements suggest that both sides had dramatically scaled back previously irreconcilable demands, while drawing upon the phased implementation of a permanent land-for-peace solution as embodied in UNSC Resolution 242, the Camp David Accords, and the Madrid process. The new agreement moved beyond the 1978

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Camp David Accords, however, by including mutual Israeli-PLO recognition and the early transfer of a small amount of territory from Israeli to Palestinian control.62 The September 1993 DOP framed new terms of agreement for a preliminary accommodation, based on the following: • • • • • • • •

Immediate Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho Redeployment of Israeli troops away from Palestinian population centers Palestinian elections for an Interim Self-Government Authority A PLO renunciation of violence PLO recognition of Israel Israeli recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians Economic cooperation between the two parties Scheduled “permanent-status” negotiations to resolve the most tendentious matters in dispute: Jerusalem, refugees, Jewish settlers, security arrangements, borders, and the final settlement

Eight more months of difficult negotiations produced the May 1994 Cairo Agreement, a hefty document including almost 300 pages of annexes dealing solely with the “Gaza-Jericho-first” provision of the DOP (document 74). The agreement provided for the withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from virtually the entire Gaza Strip and the West Bank Palestinian Arab town of Jericho, for the creation of a new Palestinian Authority (PA) to assume responsibility for two dozen spheres of administration in those regions, and for the entry of Arafat and his Tunis-based circle into Gaza. By including Jericho, the negotiators signaled that Palestinian selfgovernance would not be limited to the impoverished Gaza Strip but would eventually extend to areas of the West Bank.63 This agreement also started the five-year countdown to the end of the proposed transitional period and the start of negotiations for a final settlement. Peres proposed a special international donors’ fund to assist the PLO in developing the projects and institutions necessary for its successful administration of the areas over which it took control; the first Donors’ Conference convened in Paris in September 1994.64 In September 1995, after continued frustrations and missed deadlines, Arafat and Peres signed the Oslo II Agreement (document 78), weighing in at almost 400 pages and including seven annexes. Oslo II sought to broaden Palestinian self-government in the West Bank through Palestinian elections, as well as the following: • •

•

Further Israeli withdrawal from 456 Palestinian cities, towns, and villages The creation of areas “A,” “B,” and “C” to be under Palestinian, Israeli, or joint jurisdiction (see map 8) The transfer of further administrative powers to the PA

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•

A PA pledge to act vigorously against anti-Israel violence emanating from within its domain A PLO commitment to convene the Palestine National Council to change the 1968 National Charter (document 20) within two months of the Palestinian elections

The last item reflected Israel’s insistence that the Palestinians officially renounce those Charter articles that delegitimized Jewish nationhood, the Zionist movement, and the Jewish connection to Palestine, that rejected the legality of the establishment of the State of Israel, and that called for the destruction of Israel by violent means.65 These PLO goals stood in stark contradiction to the Arafat-Rabin mutual recognition letters of September 1993 (document 69). That they remained in the PLO National Charter constituted, for Israel, an obstacle to continued bargaining in good faith. Abu Ala recounts that Israel’s insistence on changing the Charter “was almost enough to make us dig in our heels and refuse, even though the wording of the Palestinian Charter was no longer an issue of great importance to us.” In fact, Israel’s preoccupation with their modifying the charter encouraged some Palestinians to advocate refusing to do so, maintaining the original language as leverage until “after we had achieved our own declared objectives of liberation, self-determination, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”66 But by the spring of 1996 the PLO was ready to change the Charter so as “to forestall any attempt by Israel to use it as an excuse to backtrack on its promises.” 67 On 24 April 1996 the Palestine National Council voted to nullify the Charter articles which contradicted the Oslo process. Although no official text of a revised Charter was ever published, Savir writes that Abu Mazen shared new wording with Joel Singer, who confirmed that it met the Oslo requirements.68 Oslo critics on the Israeli side insist that without a formal written document, it is “unclear” whether the Charter was indeed revised.69 In assessing the new terms of agreement, one finds both encouraging deviations from and worrisome repetitions of traditional patterns. A strikingly new feature, of course, is that PLO and Israeli leaders agreed on anything at all. Oxford historian Avi Shlaim characterized the DOP as “the triumph of pragmatism on both sides. After a hundred years of conflict and bloodshed, the two principal protagonists have put behind them the ideological dispute as to who is the rightful owner of Palestine and turned to addressing the practical problem of how to share the small piece of territory on which they are doomed to live together.”70 Implicitly, the DOP recognized the basic principle of partitioning the land of Israel/Palestine between Jews and Arabs.71 Partition of the original Palestine Mandate into an Arab state and a Jewish state had been a frequently suggested and rejected solution to the conflict

Oslo II: Areas A, B, C, 1995 Area A: Full Palestinian Civil and Security Control

Haifa

Area B: Palestinian Civil Control, Israeli Security Control

ISRAEL

Area C: Israeli Civil and Security Control 15 miles

Jordan R.

0

Sea of Galilee

Jenin

Mediterranean Sea

Tulkarm

Nablus

Qalqilya

Ramallah Jerusalem

Jericho

WEST BANK Bethlehem

Gaza Hebron

Dead Sea

GAZA STRIP

Map 8.

JORDAN

Tel Aviv

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since the 1930s. Palestinian Arab opinion categorically opposed partition recommendations by the Peel Commission (1937) and the UN Special Committee on Palestine (1947). The Zionist leadership had accepted the UN partition plan, but Israel’s first government declared the plan to have been superseded by the ensuing war, for which it held the Arab states responsible. The distance between the 1968 National Charter’s demand for the liberation of all of Mandatory Palestine (comprising contemporary Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan) and the 1993 DOP’s recognition of Israel is vast, and it is remarkable that the PLO survived as an organization, with Arafat as its leader, throughout this fiercely contested metamorphosis of ends and means. This transformation did not happen overnight but was accompanied by subtle policy shifts, contradictory public and whispered statements, and deep intra-Palestinian schisms over the intervening twenty-five years.72 The Palestinian Declaration of Independence proclaimed during the November 1988 Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers retained the lofty and militant rhetoric of the late 1960s; the PNC Political Communiqué issued at the same meeting was replete with similar sentiments, but also included new references to the PLO’s commitment to “peaceful coexistence” and the “settlement of regional and international disputes by peaceful means” (documents 53–54). A series of carefully crafted PLO speeches and press statements the next month73 led many observers to believe that the PLO goal had become an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, coexisting with both Jordan and Israel. Five years later, Arafat’s letter to Rabin and his embrace of the DOP seemed to make those ambiguous inferences explicit. Pro-Oslo Israelis appreciated that the PLO’s terms represented a scaling down of its earlier maximalist demands, but wary Palestinians worried that in its eagerness for international recognition, the PLO’s readiness to postpone negotiations on the primary Palestinian concerns (statehood, refugees in the Palestinian diaspora, Israeli settlements, and Jerusalem) constituted an overly generous concession in the terms of agreement, by which the PLO was giving away too much too soon. The Rabin government also evinced a considerable scaling back of traditional Israeli maximalist demands. Many early Zionists had aspired to a Jewish state in all of Mandatory Palestine, including both banks of the River Jordan. In 1969, Labor prime minister Golda Meir argued that “there was no such thing as Palestinians.”74 Nine years later at Camp David, Menachem Begin, Israel’s first Likud prime minister, proposed personal autonomy for the “inhabitants of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district” (skirting the issue of Palestinian peoplehood), but insisted on preserving Israel’s control over “Greater Israel” within its biblical boundaries, including “Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank) (document 35). The succeeding Shamir government firmly adhered to this same goal.75 It was Yitzhak Rabin who

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focused on the one million Arabs living in the occupied territories, insisting that a democratic Israel could not rule over another people—a position that, over the coming decade, became mainstream and was even adopted by some leaders of Likud. Rabin declared Oslo II “a mighty blow to the delusion of Greater Israel.”76 His government was the first to recognize the Palestinian people, with the PLO as its representative, and the first to pledge an Israeli withdrawal from the territories and peaceful coexistence with some type of Palestinian political entity there. Out of Oslo emerged the first-ever functioning embryo of a genuine Palestinian government.77 For the first time, the parties’ respective definitions of their national goals seemed to allow for some common ground. In coming full circle to the partition concept, the DOP was “a powerful testimony to the limits of perversity in politics. . . . Both the Palestinian leadership and Israel had tried and exhausted every other alternative, including stalemate, and had been left with nothing but what might be called the default option of their history.”78 The successive Cairo and Oslo II accords addressed many of the issues and concessions in “stunning . . . detail and scope,”79 but even “seemingly innocuous phrases concealed a powerful clash of principles.”80 Each agreement proved significantly more difficult to negotiate than the one before, each a plank in “a wobbly bridge to a still obscure future.”81 Yet, whatever the outcome of the peace process, in endorsing the concept of partition and beginning its implementation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, the DOP, Cairo, and Oslo II agreements represent important departures from the historical record of mutually exclusive Zionist and Arab claims to the land. Thus could one of Israel’s negotiators look back, even after chronicling numerous flaws and difficulties, at substantial achievements. “The Oslo Agreement,” wrote Ron Pundak, “represents the link between the era of conflict and the era of peace. The Oslo process . . . created an Israeli-Palestinian consensus on a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders and on a reconciliation founded on a fair interim agreement and common interests. The period of the implementation of the agreement and the negotiations on permanent status were supposed to lay the foundation for a comprehensive and lasting peace.”82 Psychological Factors

On the day after Rabin and Arafat exchanged their letters of mutual recognition, veteran journalist Thomas L. Friedman wrote that mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO had “fundamentally alter[ed] both the political and psychological maps of the region. It may not bring peace tomorrow or the day after,” he predicted, “but it will reshape the Middle East more than any other single event since the es-

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tablishment of Israel in 1948.” 83 Oslo’s negotiators similarly assured one another that their success was “irreversible.” 84 The greatest significance of the 1993–1996 steps toward PLO-Israeli rapprochement lay within the psychological realm. In many respects the psychological impact of mutual recognition was more profound than that of the DOP itself.85 Even the most cynical of seasoned Middle East watchers caught their breath when Rabin and Arafat clasped hands on that day in September 1993. Mutual recognition involved emotional symbols and implied, in Abu Ala’s words, “a profound transformation in the relationship between two old adversaries, who had perpetuated distorted stereotypical images of each other throughout the generations. Such a change was hard to bring about.”86 Uri Savir echoed Abu Ala’s assessment, writing that with mutual recognition, the two sides “were dealing with the ideological roots of the conflict. Without a mutual change in attitude by the representatives of the Palestinian people and the State of Israel, the principles of the Declaration of Principles would never be realized.”87 The following anecdote indicates just how crucial and sensitive was the symbolism of the moment of recognition. Only hours before the signing ceremony on the White House lawn, each party threatened not to appear. Rabin refused to participate if Arafat wore his customary green military uniform and pistol; Arafat was furious to discover that the letters “PLO” appeared nowhere in the DOP document. With less than fifteen minutes to go, the Israelis agreed that “PLO” could be penciled in on the typed documents to replace “Palestinian delegation” on the first and last pages of the agreement. Arafat came unarmed. He wore brown.88 As individuals, Rabin and Arafat and members of the elite circles around them reluctantly made the difficult psychological transformation that led them to mutual recognition and diplomacy. But by negotiating an end to their conflict in secret and then springing it suddenly upon their people, PLO and Israeli leaders made the already Herculean task of persuading their colleagues and constituents to make the necessary, abrupt psychological about-face that much more difficult.89 Without advance preparation of their public opinion for the new realities of mutual acceptance, PLO and Israeli officials scrambled to capitalize on the surprise and euphoria that swept through much of both camps immediately after the DOP signing in September 1993. Using television, radio, and print interviews, PLO officials appealed directly to the Israeli people, insisting upon the sincerity of their commitment to coexist peacefully with Israel. They were seconded by Rabin government officials who testified to Arafat’s credibility and to the good working relationship between them and their PLO counterparts. Israel appealed to the Palestinians with goodwill gestures such as the immediate redeployment of IDF troops away from Palestinian population centers, the repatriation of the Hamas deportees from Lebanon, and the release of

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Courtesy of Jimmy Margulies, The Record

Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Arafat’s lieutenants emphasized to the Palestinian population their conviction that diplomacy would lead to a full satisfaction of Palestinian rights, and that their negotiating experience had convinced them that Rabin’s people could be trusted. Abu Ala stressed to Peres that “the Palestinians on the street must immediately feel some results from the agreement”; Peres agreed that slow implementation would “allow space for negative reactions, especially at the beginning,” and estimated that they had only a few weeks and “must make maximum use of [their] time.”90 These appeals to each other’s constituencies—known as “public diplomacy”— were a welcome departure from decades of mutual stereotyping and boycotting, but faced huge obstacles in attempting to reverse ingrained negative perspectives. Despite Rabin’s denunciation of the 1994 massacre of Palestinians at prayer by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, in Hebron (document 73)91 and Arafat’s condemnation of multiple Hamas suicide bombings in Israel and his expression of deep sorrow at Rabin’s murder, large numbers of Palestinians and Israelis still held their former enemy’s leader suspect: Rabin as the defense minister who had issued the order to “break the bones” of Palestinian rioters during the first Intifada, and Arafat as the personification of terrorism. Even those who accepted the sincerity of their post-Oslo sentiments worried that they did not truly reflect the will of their people. Elation at the withdrawal of IDF troops from one Palestinian town after another was tempered by restrictions on the movement of Palestinians among these

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islands of PA authority, continued Israeli land confiscations in the Jerusalem environs, and the perpetuation of special privileges for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Perhaps most damaging of all to Palestinian opinion was Israel’s continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And contrary to the hopes of both sides in Oslo, Israeli troop withdrawals from Gaza and most of the Palestinian population centers in the West Bank did not weaken the appeal of Islamic extremists. Categorically opposed to the existence of the Jewish state and any compromise with it, Hamas and Islamic Jihad responded to each new phase of the Oslo Accords with an upsurge in murderous attacks directed at civilians within Israel proper, as well as at Jewish settlers and soldiers in the occupied territories. By the second anniversary of the DOP, 149 Israelis had been killed in terrorist attacks, compared with 86 in the preceding two years, leading many in Israel to question a peace that was proving more lethal than the former state of war.92 Hamas suicide strikes hardened mainstream Israeli public opinion against further concessions, and reinforced Israeli fears that the interim stage of Palestinian selfgovernance might be only the first step in a long-suspected Palestinian plan for the elimination of Israel by “stages.”93 The PA’s reluctance or inability to crush Hamas and its refusal to extradite Palestinian fugitives to Israel confirmed for many Israelis their presumption that Arafat could not be trusted.94 After a series of spectacular suicide bus bombings perpetrated by Hamas within Israel in mid-1995, acting prime minister Shimon Peres spoke candidly “about the political hazards of peacemaking, [admitting] ‘We are winning historically, but losing politically.’”95 In an unprecedented challenge to the democratically elected civil authority, a group of rabbis, led by former chief rabbi Avraham Shapira, adopted a religious ruling in July 1995 prohibiting the “uprooting of IDF bases” in the West Bank and urging religious soldiers to disobey such orders.96 Rabin’s secular opponents made common cause with the rabbis and religious extremists, who castigated him for violating God’s will by his willingness to relinquish parts of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) to Palestinian control. Immediately preceding Rabin’s assassination, the vitriolic debate between those opposed to and supportive of the government reached unprecedented heights of viciousness. One right-wing rally depicted Yitzhak Rabin, in Nazi uniform, hanged in effigy; elsewhere he was routinely portrayed in either Nazi or Arab garb. It was from this hysterical atmosphere that Rabin’s killer, Yigal Amir, emerged.97 At the time of his first appearance before an Israeli court, Amir’s brief statements to reporters constituted “a virtual inventory of the basic tenets of the far-right—the belief that the Government was surrendering the biblical heritage of the Jews and betraying settlers in the West Bank, and that the new Palestinian autonomy taking shape in once-occupied lands put Israel in mortal

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danger.”98 “There can be no doubt,” writes Yossi Beilin, “that a direct line connects [Rabin’s] signing of the agreement and the handshake with Arafat to the bullets fired at him by Yigal Amir.”99 After Rabin’s murder, security forces moved quickly against members of the unrepentant radical right, and Peres’s caretaker government announced harsh new laws against political incitement.100 Although the vast majority of Israelis united in horror at the lethal excess to which their political differences had led, the basic issues dividing them—trust in Arafat and continued withdrawal from the West Bank—remained as vivid as ever.101 Nevertheless, the highly visible presence of King Hussein, President Mubarak, and representatives from Oman, Qatar, Mauritania, Morocco, and Arafat’s PA at Rabin’s funeral, in Israeli-controlled Jerusalem, no less, testified to the vast sea change in Arab-Israeli relations that the Oslo process had wrought in twenty-six short months. After multiple bus bombings in February and March 1996, Egypt invited Israel to join twenty-seven other nations, including Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, at an unprecedented anti-terrorism conference in Sharm el-Sheikh. Convened in support of Israel’s struggle against Hamas attacks and in an effort—which proved unsuccessful—to shore up electoral support for Peres’s Labor Party, the “Summit of the Peacemakers” made for a spectacular photo opportunity.102 Before turning to an examination of the ultimate breakdown of the IsraeliPalestinian peace process in chapter 8, let us recall that it was not obvious from the outset that Oslo would fail. In the heady months after its revelation, Oslo produced new conditions which both parties found beneficial. After decades of ostracism, the PLO basked in its newly warm relationship with the United States and accompanying increase in international legitimacy. The erstwhile “terrorist organization” also reveled in the triumphant return of Arafat and thousands of PLO exiles to Gaza and Jericho, and the promise of financial assistance from around the globe. By 1995, nearly all the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were “under Palestinian rule in their daily lives,” the PA had received several billion dollars of international aid, and the Palestinian gross domestic product had risen signifiÂ�cantly. Israel, for its part, enjoyed a thaw in diplomatic and economic relations with several Arab countries, the beginning of an end to the Arab boycott, increased tourism, greater foreign investment, and the normalization of economic relations with countries around the globe.103 October 1994 witnessed the signing of the JordanianIsraeli peace treaty, the product of a process brought into the open thanks to Oslo. The following month Morocco’s King Hassan II hosted an international economic conference in Casablanca, where Uri Savir observed that “for the first time Israelis and Arabs were able to meet in an open forum and simply discuss business. . . . Peres

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From left to right, front: Jordan’s King Hussein, Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, U.S. president Bill Clinton, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and PLO chairman Yasir Arafat at the end of the “Summit of Peacemakers.” Courtesy of Associated Press. Reprinted by permission.

met with leaders and foreign ministers of some fifteen Arab countries.” Savir went on to marvel that “kaffiyehs, elegant robes, starched uniforms and Bond Street suits merged almost surrealistically, because of the inclusion of Israel into a framework that had hitherto been exclusively Arab.”104 By the time Oslo II was signed in 1995, public opinion polls suggested that 73 percent of Israelis and 72 percent of Palestinians evinced moderate to strong support for the peace process.105 For the optimistically inclined, there certainly was evidence that an indigenous Middle East constellation of forces was gathering strength as it moved toward Arab-Israeli reconciliation. Some of the initial Oslo magic was already starting to fade, however,106 and by late May 1996 there was no denying the increasingly dark clouds obscuring the path to peace. Rabin’s assassination and the Hamas bus bombings demonstrated that time had not sapped the strength or determination of Oslo’s violent opponents. Traditional problems regarding the leaders’ ability to implement agreements against vehement opposition, the remaining gulf between their stated terms of agreement, differing interpretations of what the accu-

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mulating accords actually required of each side, and a continuing crisis in popular psychological perceptions left the unfinished reconciliation process in a weak and precarious state. It was remarkable that it had come so far so quickly, but the IsraeliPLO partnership entered its fourth year with its stewardship in shaky hands and the terrain ahead increasingly rocky. Observers were openly wondering if Oslo could survive, or if its demise was inevitable.

Chapter 8 Breaking Down Oslo Collapses

It would not be spoiling the end of the movie to reveal at the beginning of this chapter that Oslo did not live up to the high hopes it had engendered. In fact, backsliding and provocations by many parties undid much of the early progress the Oslo architects had made toward Palestinian-Israeli peace. The iconic photograph of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shaking hands in front of a beaming Bill Clinton on the White House lawn in September 1993 became a sad reminder of hopes and promises unfulfilled. By mid-1996 there were already signs that the obstacles temporarily overcome or diminished in the immediate wake of the famous handshake were reasserting themselves. That the peace process would be beset by difficulties did not surprise anyone, especially the participants. Palestinian negotiators Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Ahmed Qurie (Abu Ala) relate similarly in their memoirs that along with joy in having advanced the Palestinian-Israeli peace process was anxiety and trepidation for its future.1 Abu Mazen recalled coming to two conclusions as he traveled to Washington to sign the Declaration of Principles (DOP): “First, that I was engaged in an historical undertaking and was presenting our people with a great achievement, and second, that reckless actions and a backward-looking mentality on either side would wreck this achievement. Thus I was prey to two contradictory feelings: on the one hand there was a sense of achievement, on the other there was fear about its realization in the future.”2 And indeed, by the end of the 1990s, the Oslo process was battered, behind schedule, and under unmitigated attack by both those threatened by the prospect of a peace based on compromise and those disappointed by its slow arrival. Explanations for Oslo’s shortcomings are myriad. Many observers—Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and their respective supporters—lay blame entirely on one party or another for ruining, intentionally or otherwise, the march toward peace. Some

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Courtesy of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

fault, to different degrees, Israeli and Palestinian leaders for failing to inspire in their people a reversal of deeply ingrained distrust. Other critics include those of the “Itold-you-so” variety, who had either found Oslo structurally deficient from the start or had always doubted one party’s or another’s intentions or capabilities to pull off a deal; these people were soon able to watch their predictions of failure come to pass with grim satisfaction.3 The breakdown manifested itself in various forms: missed deadlines; unfulfilled, disputed, or ignored commitments; ongoing violent acts by increasingly well organized and bold Oslo opponents among both Palestinians and Israelis; the unceasing expansion of Israeli settlements; the growing strength of Hamas; contradictory rhetoric from ostensible Oslo supporters and leaders; and, paradoxically, minimal improvement in or even deterioration of the security and quality of everyday life for ordinary Israelis and Palestinians. In this chapter we apply the seven elements of our framework for analysis in an attempt to understand the breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process which had been born amidst so much hope on that sunny September afternoon in 1993. Here we consider the increasingly difficult course of Palestinian-Israeli relations through the 1990s, reserving for the next chapter the high-stakes effort to rejuvenate Oslo at the Camp David summit in July 2000. How did the post-Oslo period come to be “adjudged in retrospect to have been disastrous by most Palestinians”?4 Why did Israelis lose so much faith in the peace process that in 1996 they elected a

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prime minister who ran on an anti-Oslo platform? Although the answers to these questions will emerge from the analysis, the more interesting and useful question, perhaps, is whether the Oslo process failed because it was not properly implemented or because it was inherently flawed.5 Previous Experience

The 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles emerged from the hugely negative past experience of the two parties interacting with one another up until that time. As we saw in the previous chapter, however, the dearth of positive past negotiating episodes neither obscured the sides’ mutually destructive aims from one another nor prevented them from reaching an agreement once changing conditions convinced both parties of the utility of striking a deal. After having signed the DOP, however, all further peacemaking efforts would be judged against the immediate background of the experience negotiating and implementing Oslo and moving beyond it to the interim and then final stages of conflict resolution. Unfortunately, the post-Oslo period witnessed a rapid return to the suspicions that had long dominated Palestinian and Israeli perceptions. Initial DOP obligations went unfulfilled and the increasingly long time it took to negotiate each subsequent building-block agreement made a mockery of the original Oslo timetable.6 Despite the predictably positive speeches which accompanied the signing of each new agreement, the more relevant of the two sides’ pronouncements were the increasingly regular mutual accusations of noncompliance with each party’s respective Oslo commitments. For the Palestinians the violations were Israeli delays in carrying out scheduled territorial withdrawals and the ongoing construction of new Jewish settlements in the territories over which they were supposed to be negotiating. Israelis pointed to the PLO’s failure to halt Palestinian incitement to violence and the continuing menace of suicide bombers within their midst.7 One of Oslo’s founding principles was that of gradualism. Gradualism assumed that if yesterday’s bitter enemies could successfully make and uphold a series of small, reciprocal agreements, they would create new reserves of trust initially lacking but necessary if they were to take the big steps required for the final resolution of the conflict. This purposeful condition of interdependency was designed as both carrot (giving the parties many opportunities to prove their trustworthiness) and stick (making stalemate very costly to both sides, thus encouraging them to continually advance).8 Reasoning that “the only alternative to total success is complete failure,” Oslo’s gradualist architects eschewed a “single deal” comprehensive strategy and hedged their bets with the goal of multiple interim accords along the way to peace.9 But the confidence-building measures anticipated by Oslo’s slowly

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unfolding process did not materialize. Even worse, the rancor created by the laborious negotiation of each new phase actually increased distrust between the two sides. Sari Nusseibeh recounts an old children’s story to convey the Palestinians’ feeling of being duped by the Israelis in the post-Oslo era, although it can express Israeli feelings of having been suckered as well. He writes about a hunter slitting the throat of a bird on a bitterly cold and rainy day. “A child, seeing the hunter bent over the dead animal and mistaking raindrops on the man’s face for tears, turns to his mother and says, ‘Look, Mother, that poor man is crying over the bird.’ ‘Don’t pay attention to his tears,’ replies the mother. ‘Look what he’s doing with his hands.’”10 Israeli negotiator Ron Pundak understood why Arafat’s Fatah colleagues within the PA felt betrayed and ashamed when the Oslo process seemed not only “barren” but “even an historical trap”: For seven years, they had defended the peace process and fought for it in Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps, and against opposition from right (Hamas) and left (rejection front), out of a belief that it would result in a Palestinian state, peace, and economic growth. The explosion was just a matter of time once they concluded that Israel wasn’t a partner for peace, that the negotiations were being dragged on, that building in the settlements had accelerated, and that the hope for a state evaporated.11

Once the PLO-Israeli accords went public, ordinary people could judge Oslo’s success by what they saw with their own eyes. Despite official Israeli and PLO exhortations that a new day had dawned and peace was at hand, what Palestinians saw with their own eyes was the ever-growing stretch of settlements quickly expanding across the territory where they were told a Palestinian state would be. For their part, Israelis stared, transfixed in horror, at the mangled buses and bodies which suicide bombers continued to visit upon their cities. Although the negotiators had indeed developed positive personal working relationships with one another and professed to understand the various constraints their counterparts were laboring under, the continued delays and interruptions in moving ahead on the Oslo track post-handshake served to undermine public trust and enthusiasm for the process. The negotiators’ deep engagement in discussions was not a magic cure-all for the remaining gaps between their positions. Writing thirty years before Israel and the PLO finally opened direct talks, Yehoshafat Harkabi cautioned that “the day negotiations start will indeed be a great occasion for celebration. Yet let us remember the lessons psychologists teach—that direct contacts between human groups do not always draw them together, but may make them realize how far apart they are and thus lead to further estrangement.”12

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Purposes and Motives

With Oslo’s implementation proving so difficult, the parties’ true motives and purposes for engaging in continuing negotiations fell under suspicion. Palestinians observed Israel’s accelerated settlement activity and questioned whether Israel had truly given up dreams of a “Greater Israel” and would withdraw the settlers, and if there would literally be space left for a contiguous and viable Palestinian state.13 Taken aback by terms in the DOP which specified that all Palestinian economic development projects had to be negotiated with Israel or subject to approval by a joint committee, Palestinian businessmen who had eagerly anticipated a peace dividend via access to new global markets and vendors now suspected that Israel’s true purpose was to box the emerging Palestinian entity into economic straits wholly advantageous to Israel.14 This tapped into long-held Arab fears that Israel aspired to regional economic domination during peacetime as it had achieved military hegemony during times of war. Some veteran commentators detected a shift in Israel’s orientation toward the Palestinians and the Arab world at large, perceiving that once the ink had dried on the initial Palestinian-Israeli agreement, Israel began “tactically using the Palestinians as the lever to the rest of the Arab world, rather than the opposite.”15 Israelis similarly doubted Palestinian motives for pursuing peace. Despite a voice vote by the PNC in April 1996, Arafat’s failure to produce a written, revised PLO Charter which no longer called for Israel’s destruction caused wide skepticism as to actual Palestinian aims. This tapped into long-held Israeli fears that the Palestinians’ true policy was one of Israel’s destruction by stages, by which the PLO would accept any sliver of Palestine offered from which to continue the struggle against Israel proper. Incitement to violence against Israelis in both the West Bank/Gaza and within the green line continued unabated from the mainstream PLO/Palestinian Authority (PA) print and broadcast media and within Palestinian mosques and schools. Ongoing terrorist acts by Hamas and Islamic Jihad made Israelis wonder if Arafat was playing “good cop, bad cop” with these groups, blending his own diplomacy with their militancy to pressure Israel into further concessions. Israeli suspicion was heightened when the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed wing of Arafat’s own Fatah party, also perpetrated suicide bombings. Where some see duplicity, however, others see incompetence. Raja Shehadeh writes that since the inauguration of the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, “the only consistent diplomatic objective” pursued by the PLO was “the attainment of recognition and the status of a full negotiating partner with Israel. . . . In this the PLO proved successful. . . . [But] the effect on the negotiations of this assiduous pursuit of this

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singular political objective and the failure to formulate interim objectives”16 was to leave the Palestinians unprepared once recognition was achieved and substantive negotiations began. Throughout 1993–2000 Yasir Arafat retained leadership of Israel’s Palestinian partner, whether that was the PLO, which had signed Oslo, or the PA, which the Cairo Agreement brought into being in 1994. Some of the Israeli diplomats who worked with him and his associates expressed frustration that during this extended period Arafat “never managed, nor did he ever try, to convey to the Israelis that he had a sense of the finality of the conflict . . . [and of] . . . the final price they would have to pay to reach the end of the conflict.”17 If it is true that “Arafat’s strategy was based on permanent negotiations,”18 then his motives followed the historical precedent of negotiating with an eye toward a great power, in this case aiming to satisfy American requirements for a PLO-U.S. relationship and hoping to induce the United States to soften the Israeli position. During this same time period, Israeli prime ministers came and went at a rapid pace. Not only was turnover frequent, but the political orientation of the prime ministers veered dramatically between the left and the right. For the 1991–2000 period, mainstream assessments generally credit Labor Party leaders Yitzhak Rabin (1992–1995), Shimon Peres (1995–1996), and Ehud Barak (1999–2000) with genuinely striving to advance the peace process, however awkwardly or imperfectly, and Likud Party leaders Yitzhak Shamir (1986–1992) and Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu (1996– 1999) with actively trying to halt it, or to reverse what momentum remained.19 Many Palestinians and their supporters, however, see such distinctions among Israeli parties and prime ministers as cosmetic at best and ascribe to each of them the similar goals of expanding Israel’s territorial and economic reach to the disadvantage of the Palestinians.20 But Rabin, Peres, and Barak did put their careers (and lives) on the line in pursuing Oslo, each in his own fashion; Netanyahu, in contrast, stridently voiced his conviction that Oslo was a terrible mistake which had imperiled the State of Israel, while paying lip service to his obligation to respect previous governments’ commitments. In 1996 he won just enough votes from previously cautious Oslo supporters, now fearful and angered by the suicide bombings, to prevail over Peres by a one percent margin. Simultaneously respecting and obstructing Oslo subjected Netanyahu to great personal contradictions, reflecting a similar schism within the government and the country generally.21 Netanyahu’s stated parameters for a final settlement—personal autonomy for Palestinians as individuals but continued Israeli control of the land, resources, foreign policy, and security; no Palestinian state; no compromise on Jerusalem; no “right of return” into Israel for Palestinian refugees; and continued Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria—suggested that under his stewardship Israel’s goal was to make

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the interim settlement into a permanent one. In this sense the Netanyahu government’s motives for perpetuating peace talks were reminiscent of the historical pattern by which parties negotiated to impress an outsider, to give the appearance of flexibility, or to wear down the opponent, but with no intention of moving beyond the status quo.22 William Quandt suggests that, even prior to Netanyahu’s tenure, Israel and the Palestinians were coming to the table with some very basic, conflicting motivations and goals.23 Israel wanted to negotiate long interim arrangements to allow for a period of calm, mutual confidence building, and, some argue, time to create more facts on the ground to strengthen its hold on occupied territory. The Palestinians, however, having gone out on an Oslo limb, were anxious to move quickly to finalstatus negotiations, Israeli withdrawals, and Palestinian sovereignty. When Ehud Barak retrieved the premiership for the Labor Party and the pro-Oslo camp in 1999, his purposes were far removed from those of the recalcitrant Netanyahu and, in theory, dovetailed with Arafat’s. Barak’s goal in negotiating was also to move rapidly to a final comprehensive peace agreement. Arafat was alarmed, however, by Barak’s stated intention of bypassing Oslo’s unconsummated interim agreements (primarily the phased Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank, which Arafat wanted implemented immediately) and arriving directly at a final settlement—even though the gaps between Israeli and Palestinian demands, as we shall see below, remained considerable. Timing

The most basic timing issue associated with the breakdown of the Oslo process may be the lack of timeliness with which it unfolded. Once publicly unveiled, its architects had only a short period in which to exploit the element of surprise, which inspired many people to give peace a chance and caught nay-sayers off-guard. But as subsequent steps in the process fell behind Oslo’s ambitious schedule and grievances accumulated faster than trust, support for the peace process deflated and its opponents had an opportunity to regroup and counterattack, both figuratively and literally. Other timing factors contributed to Oslo’s difficulties as well. Did the mutual decision by Arafat and Israel to initiate negotiations and make a deal simply come too late? As discussed below under “Status of the Negotiators,” some say that by 1993 Arafat was already too weak to rally diverse Palestinian populations and groups around a surprise agreement which contradicted many long-standing Palestinian demands. Some have also cited Clinton’s disinclination to push his friend Rabin along (also a third-party factor); this allowed the cautious Rabin to “set the pace of

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negotiations,” which backfired with Rabin’s untimely demise.24 Others warn against a posthumous overestimation of the Rabin factor, with Shlomo Ben-Ami arguing that already “by the time Rabin was murdered, the peace process was, for all practical purposes, in a state of political coma.”25 The extended time period over which the Oslo process stretched also allowed for the impact of the exit and entrance of key actors, among them U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who replaced Warren Christopher in the second Clinton administration, and the rapid succession of Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, and Barak. “Not committed to the principle, the schedule, or the extent of withdrawal”26 as negotiated by the prime ministers before him, Netanyahu’s ascension to power constituted a severe directional shift in post-Oslo Palestinian-Israeli relations. Other events whose timing distracted the protagonists from the negotiations at hand were the numerous scandals during the Clinton years, Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives and acquittal by the Senate in 1998–99, and Syrian president Hafez al-Asad’s sudden interest in resuming Syrian-Israel talks in late 1999 and early 2000, the last of which partially eclipsed Barak’s attention to the Palestinian track for a time. Elections influenced the pace and outcome of events as well. In January 1996 Palestinians officially elected Arafat president of the PA, which added to his formal status for external consumption but did not accurately reflect the growing domestic displeasure with his leadership and regime. Elections in Israel ushered in Netanyahu in 1996 and saw him out in 1999. Clinton began his second term in January 1997 “at the peak of his powers,” but by the third year he had assumed something of a lameduck status.27 The end of the five-year Oslo transition period came on 4 May 1999, at which time the final-status arrangements from the 1994 Cairo Agreement should have come into effect. With final-status negotiations hopelessly behind schedule, Arafat threatened to unilaterally declare Palestinian independence, to which Netanyahu responded with a threat to unilaterally annex the West Bank. Both men climbed down from the brink, and it fell to the rapidly fading Clinton administration to induce the parties to issue new diplomatic initiatives instead of ultimatums. The unpredictability of the timing factor was also on display during the difficult post-Oslo era. An unexpected event, such as Rabin’s November 1995 assassination, is an obvious example. Another, however, was the unintentional outcome of Netanyahu’s September 1996 decision to open (in the middle of the night) a new entrance to an ancient tunnel which emerged at the Western (Wailing) Wall, the holy Jewish site located within the Old City of Jerusalem and at the base of the Dome of the Rock, the holy Muslim site directly above. Of negligible import in and of itself, the new tunnel gate, for Palestinians, challenged their claim to the Old City and represented a defiant Israeli violation of the pledge to resolve the Jerusalem problem through ne-

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Courtesy of Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post

gotiations, not via faits accomplis. In scenes reminiscent of the first Intifada, Palestinians engaged IDF troops in running street battles in dozens of cities throughout the West Bank and in Jerusalem itself. This time, however, they were accompanied by thousands of Palestinian police officers, armed as per Oslo stipulations, some of whom opened fire on their IDF counterparts. The ensuing chaos resulted in over sixty Palestinian and Israeli deaths.

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Among the unplanned outcomes of the tunnel mélée was a boost in PA-IDF cooperative security arrangements, with an eye to preventing future breakdowns. Having purposefully avoided an encounter with Arafat since assuming office in June, on 4 September Netanyahu succumbed to pressure from Israeli president Ezer Weizman and the United States and met face to face with Arafat, conceding the requisite handshake but making no promises of substance.28 The tunnel crisis, which erupted three weeks later, however, served as a catalyst which kick-started diplomatic efforts to stabilize the situation; within four months, it led to the IsraeliPalestinian agreement for the IDF’s redeployment from Hebron and the release of some Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails—certainly not where Netanyahu expected the tunnel to lead. We often use the term “ripeness” in timing assessments, asking whether conditions have changed or realigned in such a way that a conflict heretofore resistant to diplomacy is now ripe for resolution. In the previous chapter we considered changes which made the 1993 environment ripe for precedent-shattering PLO-Israeli recognition, negotiation, and the conclusion of the Oslo Agreement. But Oslo was never more than a stepping-stone toward a comprehensive settlement, and as subsequent talks and interim accords failed to create trust and bring peace, analysts reassessed the element of “ripeness.” Ben-Ami concluded that just because “the conditions were ripe in 1993 for the initiation of a peace process did not mean that they were also ripe for the sacrifices needed for its conclusion. It is one thing to initiate a process, another to come to terms with the formidable concessions needed for a final settlement.”29 Echoing these observations from an international relations “realist” perspective, Jonathan Rynhold concurs that “’ripeness’ for negotiations is not the same as ripeness for conflict resolution. Although both Israel and the PLO were ripe for negotiations, there remained large gaps between how they conceived a permanent settlement.”30 Status of the Negotiators

Under this heading we ask of each leader: Can he deliver on his end of the bargain, making the hard calls and bringing his constituency along with him? The fact that it was the threat from an increasingly powerful Hamas that drove Arafat to make a deal with Israel already suggests that his political star was falling. In fact, Oslo was the deal which was supposed to empower him again and catapult him to a position of clear supremacy over Hamas. But his unwillingness—or was it inability?—to rein in Hamas challenged his claim to effective Palestinian leadership. With Oslo, Arafat backed himself into something of a lose-lose situation. If he cracked down on Hamas his constituency might see him as doing the Israelis’ dirty work, putting Israeli security above Palestinian suffering; if he allowed Hamas to operate freely and

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Courtesy of Emad Hajjaj, Al-Ghad

continue its violent anti-Israel assaults, outsiders would see him as a feeble kingpin who could not live up to his obligations, and with whom it made no sense to continue negotiating. It didn’t help matters that, while Rabin, Peres, and Barak publicly worked with Arafat and called him “partner,” Netanyahu’s initial refusal to meet personally with Arafat revived the historic status-of-negotiator obstacle in which one or both sides refused to meet with the other’s recognized leadership. Whether born of the arrogance of power, ideological precepts, or misjudged negotiating tactics, Netanyahu’s early insistence upon avoiding the Palestinian leader was so strong that, when crises necessitated serious Israeli-PA consultation, the Netanyahu government insisted upon secret “dark channel” talks.31 Netanyahu’s determination not to shake Arafat’s hand carried as much symbolism and as many implications as Rabin’s historic decision to do so three years earlier. When the Jerusalem tunnel incident resulted in full-blown firefights between Israeli and Palestinian troops, Netanyahu’s first response was to place an emergency call to Hosni Mubarak, requesting his assistance in restoring calm. The incredulous Egyptian president responded that, in the post-Oslo age, the Israeli prime minister should pick up the phone and call Arafat instead. The phone call to Egypt is clearly reminiscent of the traditional Israeli preference for dealing with the Palestinians via non-Palestinian Arab interlocutors.

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Rashid Khalidi has argued that Arafat, by basing the new foundation of his leadership on a “devil’s bargain with the Israeli government,” had drunk from “a sort of poisoned chalice” from whose toxin he could not easily recover. The PLO chief’s return to the homeland, along with his exiled lieutenants, was purchased in the heavy coin of “serving Israel’s interests.”32 Arafat had become, in effect, “tarnished goods.”33 As his support among disillusioned Palestinians living under his control waned, so did it among Palestinian refugees abroad who, searching the Oslo Accords in vain for any imminent redress of their claims, “were profoundly embittered by an accord that apparently consigned them to oblivion.”34 Insistence on the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return”—a principle endorsed by UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 194835—had become a litmus test for safeguarding Palestinian national interests. In abandoning the refugees and their claims, and in failing to negotiate more effectively with the Israelis, Arafat’s Fatah movement “lost much of its legitimacy and credibility due to its failure to negotiate more effectively with the Israelis, to provide protection, security, or proper governance for the 3.6 million Palestinians under its sway, and to deliver effective leadership for the struggle of the entire Palestinian people for the recovery of their national rights. In consequence, armed groups and major opposition factions like Hamas were increasingly able to operate with impunity.”36 Writing about Israeli bypass roads, closures, land confiscation, building restrictions, inaction on the refugees’ issues, and control of West Bank aquifers, Khalidi notes: “Each of these gradually worsening chronic problems undermined the legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership engaged in negotiations with Israel, and stoked Palestinian popular frustration. Over time, the leadership’s popularity declined precipitously in consequence.”37 In accounting for the success of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in Oslo in contrast to the stalemated negotiations in Washington, D.C., the previous chapter pointed to the critical distinction between the hamstrung non-PLO team in Washington and the officially empowered PLO team in Norway. But this distinction in the status of the negotiators may also have contributed to Oslo’s weaknesses. Consider the repeated characterization of the non-PLO delegation as “inflexible” and of the PLO delegation as “flexible.” D.C. Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashrawi argues that her group, comprising, as per Madrid rules, Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, was less flexible than the Tunis-based PLO group precisely because its members were from the Palestinian territories, had a better understanding of the situation on the ground, and knew firsthand the reality of living under Israeli occupation. In fact, many believe that the PLO erred seriously by not drawing upon the expertise of the Palestinians negotiating in the U.S. capital. Led by West Bankers Ashrawi and Faisal Husseini, this team proved to be better prepared, better organized, and more experienced bargainers than their PLO counterparts nego-

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tiating in Oslo.38 Ashrawi writes that when her delegation finally saw the DOP, on the eve of the signing ceremony, they pleaded with Arafat to postpone the event so they could revise the documents, to no avail.39 Indeed, some of the Israeli negotiators observed that, in their desperation to cut a deal, the PLO’s Tunis-based delegates made concessions and omissions, almost “to the degree of even being negligent,” which negotiators from inside the Palestinian territories would never have made.40 Among the key conditions conceded by the PLO but demanded by the non-PLO team were a settlement freeze; explicit Israeli recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination; a nod toward the refugees’ right to repatriation and/or compensation; and linkage between interim and final agreements.41 In the view of one Palestinian critic, the PLO was so fixated on winning recognition from Israel that, in its rush to be the more flexible of the two Palestinian interlocutors, it allowed Israel (and the United States) to frame the agreement to the Israelis’ advantage.42 Had the Oslo team included members from within the occupied territories who were prepared to draw firmer red lines, it could have possibly struck a harder bargain—or possibly none at all. Palestinians debate: Which outcome would have been preferable? This distinction between the status of the two sets of Palestinian negotiators also reflects a larger reality relevant to the implementation of the DOP. We have written previously of “insider” Palestinians—those who live in the territories under Israeli occupation—and “outsider” Palestinians—those in the refugee camps or elsewhere in the diaspora beyond Palestine. Khalidi argues that after their 1982 expulsion from Lebanon to Tunis, Arafat and the PLO had grown old, idle, and far removed from the reality of life in the occupied territories. Having operated a secretive, authoritarian guerrilla organization for so long, Arafat’s old revolutionary guard was ill equipped to establish and govern a transparent and democratic national entity.43 This brought them into conflict with the insiders, who were generally better educated and whose familiarity with Israel (including stints in Israeli jails) often gave them, ironically, a respect for the democratic rule of law. In his bid to reserve power for himself and the PLO/Fatah, Arafat marginalized and demoralized those Palestinians living in Palestine—many fluent in Hebrew, with professional degrees and skills, and savvy as to the workings of the Israeli political system—and prevented them from contributing to the creation of a vibrant and viable Palestinian state-inthe-making.44 Instead, Arafat returned to Gaza and Jericho in July 1994 and quickly went about constructing a corrupt and repressive regime characterized by nepotism, fiscal impropriety, and secrecy. The late Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said noted bitterly, “[He] has not been able to clean the streets of Gaza, but he has been able to establish five intelligence services all spying on each other.”45

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Independent-minded Palestinians determined to protect Palestinian human rights and interests from the baser inclinations of the Arafat regime found themselves the victims not only of the regime but, oddly enough, of the initial Oslo euphoria. Hanan Ashrawi identified serious problems with both the terms of the peace agreement and the stewardship exercised by the returning PLO cadres, problems she had hoped to address within a democratic system via a watchdog institution. But the popular impression that peace was at hand, she discovered, “gave the whole world leave to wash its hands of the Palestinian question. . . . Along with our voice, we lost our moral edge. Those of us who cried foul sounded peevish and petty before the grandeur of the historic moment of reconciliation, at least as it was packaged and presented by media,”46 and uncorrected by the leadership. Likewise, Said eloquently and prolifically expressed his contempt for what he perceived as the Palestinians’ twin punishments: the unfair asymmetry of the Oslo agreements and Arafat’s backward and despotic rule. In August 1995 Arafat proved him right by banning Said’s books in the Palestinian territories.47 Had a vigorous and enlightened PA quickly set up shop in Gaza and Jericho, successfully receiving international donations and immediately putting those monies to use on infrastructure and institutions that improved the lives of the people, Arafat might have earned popular support for his deal with “the devil” and the backing required for pushing onward in the peace process. Questions about Arafat’s status reflected the longevity of his reign and doubts as to whether he could change his longtime leadership habits; for Israeli leaders trying to retain command of a sharply polarized Israeli public, the problem was the opposite. With the premiership turning over so quickly, the question was whether any Israeli leader had the status and staying power to both make dramatic choices and remain in office long enough to see his programs through to completion. Between 1992 and 2000, only Rabin and Netanyahu served for slightly more than three years; Peres and Barak served for only seven and twenty months, respectively. But all four prime ministers were politically embattled throughout their tenures, strong-willed, and removed from office before completing a full term. All four also allowed the continued expansion of Israeli settlements, evidence of the reluctance of the proOslo premiers to act forcefully against the powerful pro-settlement movement. The negative impact on the Palestinian side of the continued expansion of Jewish settlements cannot be overstated. Between the signing of the DOP in September 1993 and January 2000 there was a dramatic increase of more than 35 percent in the settler population.48 It did not help that, “hemmed in by irresistible domestic constraints, every new Israeli government asked for a revision of the agreements signed by the previous government. . . . All this, of course, was hardly conducive to the cultivation of trust between the parties.”49 Palestinian officials began to hold back in negotiations for

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Courtesy of Chan Lowe, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

fear that the next Israeli prime minister would require further concessions. In most cases, the renegotiation of a document produced only greater ill will and negligible substantive changes. Netanyahu’s insistence on renegotiating the IDF withdrawal from Hebron (postponed by the Hamas bus bombings and the Israeli elections of 1996) is a case in point. Netanyahu portrayed his version of the Hebron withdrawal arrangement as a vast improvement over that negotiated by the previous Labor government, with substantial new security guarantees for the enclave of 450 Jews dug in among 150,000 Palestinian Arabs. In actual fact, the differences between the Netanyahu agreement and the earlier one were largely symbolic or insignificant, and the Israeli withdrawal finally went off without a hitch within a week of the mid-January 1997 signing. The real difference lay in the acrimony, distrust, and bad faith that distinguished these tortuous negotiations from the original ones. Netanyahu’s tenure was, in general, characterized by vacillations between gestures to pacify the proOslo crowd (the grudging withdrawal from Hebron) and gestures to reassure his own nationalist, anti-Oslo camp (announcing a new Jewish settlement, Har Homa, in East Jerusalem). Not surprisingly, he earned the trust and satisfaction of neither. It is tempting to conflate Rabin’s death with the demise of the Oslo process and to hypothesize that, had Rabin lived, he would have steadily shepherded the peace process to a more robust and positive finale. But Israeli opposition was growing even during his tenure, voiced both by vociferous right-wing elements out of principle as well as by centrists who had come to doubt the wisdom of the endeavor as it sput-

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tered along. It is entirely possible that the Rabin government would have been cut short anyway, if not by the bullets of an enraged assassin then by the ballots of a disillusioned electorate.50 Was Oslo a noble effort by highly motivated leaders, but one too deeply flawed to withstand implementation? Or was the deal doable but left undone for a lack of sufficiently bold and heroic leadership? Third-Party Considerations

Although the Israelis, Palestinians, and Norwegians had surprised President Clinton in presenting him the DOP on a silver platter, the United States quickly assumed a primary role in keeping the protagonists talking and moving forward from one interim agreement to the next. Most observers characterized Norway as an impartial and noncoercive facilitator whose very weakness meant that the parties were unlikely to resort to the traditional negotiating tactic of trying to persuade it to bring pressure to bear on the other side. Norway had been the right intermediary at the right time and place, so the conventional interpretation goes, but once the agreement went public, only the United States was sufficiently powerful enough to buttress Oslo against the strong opposition it would face. Nevertheless, there are those who argue that, although Norway may have acted with the best of neutral intentions, the vast asymmetry between the Palestinians and Israel, and the fact that Norway was not strong enough to effect a balance between them, led Norway to act to the Israelis’ advantage, resulting in a document that was biased against and detrimental to the Palestinian side. Critics argue that, whenever stalemates arose, Norway resorted to leaning on the weaker Palestinian party to make concessions, helping Israel to “out-negotiate” the Palestinians “at every turn.”51 This reflected not a special Norwegian affection for Israel, but rather its own lack of a carrot or stick with which to entice or pressure Israel when diplomatic logjams arose. And although Norway worked assiduously to ensure symmetry between the accommodations and privileges it provided the Palestinian and Israeli negotiating teams, the result was a false sense of equality between the parties in their Oslo cocoon, which did not reflect the vast asymmetry of power which prevailed in the real world where Oslo was going to have to function.52 As Hilde Henriksen Waage has argued, “In retrospect, it seems clear that to accomplish [Palestinian-Israeli peace] strong muscles are needed. Norway had none. And it would seem that, in cases of great asymmetry of power, the results that can be achieved by a powerless facilitator are no more than the strongest party will allow. Any other outcome could only be achieved by a superpower, someone with both muscles and the willingness to use them to achieve a sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”53

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In addition to echoing this criticism of the Norwegian role, Rashid Khalidi saw no improvement for the Palestinians once the third-party participant became the United States. Khalidi argues that the imbalance in the Oslo Accords was a direct product of the unfair restrictions (no PLO or diaspora Palestinians at the table) upon which Secretary of State James Baker conditioned a Palestinian presence at the Madrid Conference back in 1991: The practical effect of these Israeli-inspired and American-imposed ground rules was to lighten the moral, political, and security burden for Israel of its military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem for a decade. . . . Israel, which appeared to the world as if it was negotiating peace with the Palestinians, was simultaneously expanding not only its settlements but also the extensive infrastructure of roads, electricity, water, and phone lines needed to sustain them. Thus . . . the lasting fruit of this nearly ten-year “peace process,” which resulted in the Oslo Accords and subsequent Palestinian-Israeli accords that produced the Palestinian Authority (PA), has been the hardening of Israel’s occupation regime, and a considerable expansion of its illegal settlements.54

Like Khalidi, Ashrawi also cited the Madrid Conference in criticizing American intermediary actions in the years afterward. The Palestinian negotiator protested the U.S. failure to respect the terms of its own 18 October 1991 Invitation to the Madrid Conference and Letter of Assurances to the Palestinians (documents 59, 61), which anticipated an end to the Israeli occupation and warned all conference participants against “unilateral actions that seek to predetermine issues that can only be resolved through negotiations” or “those prejudicial or precedential to the outcome of negotiations.” The letter specifically confirmed U.S. opposition to “settlement activity in the territories occupied in 1967, which remains an obstacle to peace,”55 yet Israeli settlement activity actually accelerated in the years after Madrid and again after Oslo. American intervention in the peace process intensified during Netanyahu’s tenure, partly to counteract his stated intention of throwing a monkey wrench into the Oslo works. Distrustful of Arafat and convinced that continued Israeli withdrawals would make the country unacceptably vulnerable, Netanyahu was not inclined to look the other way, as had Rabin and Peres, when the PLO failed to adhere to the letter and spirit of the agreements. His predecessors were not unaware that Arafat had built up armed security forces twice the size authorized by Oslo, had not produced a written revision of the PLO Charter, and had allowed anti-Israel propaganda to remain in and on Palestinian schoolbooks and airwaves. But while they had chosen to overlook these “small” items in order to keep the big picture alive, Netanyahu used these actual transgressions to justify Israeli noncompliance with Oslo-mandated IDF withdrawals. The prime minister emphasized “reciprocity” and worked to link

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each new Israeli step with the Palestinians’ successful completion of their corresponding obligations—not in itself a bad idea. The twin tools of U.S. mediation and “reciprocity” are clearly demonstrated in the texts of the Hebron withdrawal accord of 15 January 1997 and the accompanying “Note for the Record” (documents 86–87). Intimate U.S. activity on the ground, literally measuring street widths and spatial relations in Hebron,56 bespoke a heavy reliance on the Americans, a backward step in the peace process, and the disintegration of the fragile mutual trust that Arafat and Rabin had tentatively established between their teams. In a remarkable testimony to both sides’ distrust of the other and view of the U.S. as an essential player, neither would sign the Hebron Accords until U.S. special counselor for Middle East affairs Dennis Ross drafted and appended the “Note for the Record,” essentially an American guarantee as to what had been agreed upon and mutually understood. This intensification of American third-party involvement testified to the sad reality that the Oslo peace process was collapsing. While Arafat and Netanyahu continued to trade accusations of noncompliance, President Clinton applied the personal prestige of his office in October 1998 and convened a Palestinian-Israeli summit meeting at the Wye Plantation in Maryland.57 With his own time in office running out and the Netanyahu-Arafat stalemate approaching its third year, Clinton sequestered Arafat and Netanyahu in Wye with his Middle East team, headed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross, until they hammered out an agreement. In the end, it took an all-night session under Clinton’s personal command and a visit from the ailing King Hussein of Jordan before the deal was done. The Wye River Memorandum of 23 October 1998 (document 89) was intended to clarify the parties’ mutual and reciprocal obligations as agreed to in the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (“Oslo II”) of 28 September 1995. Upping the American ante, Wye incorporated CIA involvement in joint Israeli and Palestinian anti-terror endeavors. Clinton could lead the protagonists to the Wye River, but he couldn’t make them follow through with their commitments. He made a grand effort with a personal visit to Israel and Gaza in December 1998, where he became the first U.S. president to enter Palestinian territory and address the Palestinian parliament.58 Although Clinton’s arrival in Gaza met a warm welcome, Netanyahu’s return to Israel from Wye was greeted with angry denunciation from his right flank, which began the process of bringing his government down. Wye slowly ground to a halt as well. At this point, the United States was no longer shepherding the parties along as much as pushing and dragging them, kicking and screaming. The Wye outcome may be a classic expression of the pattern by which an actor negotiates for the sake of advancing its relations with a powerful third party.

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As William Quandt has observed, “The improvement in U.S.-Palestinian ties was perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Wye negotiations, helped immeasurably by Netanyahu’s poor chemistry with the American president.”59 Along those same lines, Aaron Miller writes that “Arafat clearly made a decision that with Rabin gone, his real partner was America, not Israel.”60 Proposed Terms of Agreement

The previous chapter examined the general terms of the Oslo Agreement and marveled at the impressive deviations each side made from its previous, zero-sum positions. Mutual PLO-Israeli recognition, pledges of peaceful coexistence, an end to violence, Israeli troop redeployments away from Palestinian population centers, and pledges to begin working on the refugee, border, and Jerusalem problems in the near future—all these certainly looked like promising first steps along the road to a happy two-state solution. But the route was riddled with potholes and slick spots. There are two broad explanations offered for why Oslo never reached its destination. The first holds that an inexperienced and/or inept PLO was out-negotiated by the Israelis and that the resulting agreements were deeply flawed and unfair; once their parameters became known, the Palestinian people rejected the process. The second explanation says there is nothing wrong with the terms of the various Oslo agreements, and that the failure lies in the refusal or inability of one or both sides to live up to its obligations. Abu Ala proved a passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause and a sharp negotiator, but as a whole the Palestinian team was at a disadvantage, pitted against an Israeli team that had considerably more negotiating experience under its belt, including veterans of various Madrid talks. The same holds true for legal counsel: Israel had on its Oslo delegation veteran attorney Joel Singer, who vetted the wording of every sentence in every paragraph of every document. The Palestinians, on the other hand, seem to have mismanaged their legal expertise. Only a few hours before the secret initializing ceremony in Oslo did the PLO call in Taher Shash, an Egyptian lawyer who had participated in the first Camp David summit, to confirm that everything in the DOP was in order. Shash confirmed that the text was legally acceptable, but Cheryl Rubenberg notes that he also expressed his opinion that the terms were worse than what Sadat had achieved for the Palestinians in the moribund “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” at Camp David in 1978.61 Abu Ala and Abu Mazen, however, record receiving from Shash “his opinion that [the DOP] contained no legal errors or pitfalls” and his assessment that it was “a good text with no shortcomings.”62 Arafat’s choice of Shash for an eleventh-hour review of the DOP was itself an odd decision, perhaps reflecting his disinclination to empower “inÂ�

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sider” Palestinians. The experienced West Bank attorney Raja Shehadeh was serving as legal adviser to the Palestinian delegation in Washington, but his expertise was not brought to bear on behalf of the PLO in Norway. Arafat’s failure to include on his negotiating team Palestinian experts in the various fields under discussion contributed to poor choices and less than optimal outcomes for the Palestinian side. The PLO, a secretive non-state organization well-versed in guerrilla tactics, was clearly outclassed in these talks with Israel, a flourishing nation which enjoyed all the features of recognized statehood, such as a professional diplomatic corps, powerful military and intelligence organizations, and a strong economy. Palestinian dependency upon Israel on the ground was symbolically represented by the fact that the PLO allowed Israel to produce all the maps and documents in play in Oslo.63 Those who subscribe to the flawed document thesis maintain that the massive power imbalance between the two sides, including a dynamic Israeli legal tradition set against a politically stunted Palestinian one and the fact that Israel held all of the territory in dispute, virtually guaranteed that there was very little chance that the PLO would be able to hold its own in any negotiations with Israel.64 The disadvantages of that inescapable asymmetry were amplified by what these critics see as Arafat’s personal weaknesses, particularly his affection for the symbols and trappings of power (such as flags and postage stamps)65 to the detriment of substance. A telling example is his decision to exchange mutual recognition with Israel. Israeli negotiators fully understood how important this was to Arafat and chose not to play that card until the very end, as an irresistible temptation for the PLO to snap up the recognition it had long desired and accept Israel’s final version of the DOP.66 But Abu Ala advised Arafat repeatedly to resist the Israeli lure, arguing that legitimization by the PLO was also something Israel deeply desired and expressing his conviction that the PLO could hold out for actual substantive changes on the ground, perhaps even statehood, instead of simply swapping ephemeral words.67 Rubenberg points out that Arafat then compounded his error by recognizing Israel’s right to exist, thereby implicitly legitimizing the entire Zionist enterprise, when merely recognizing the fact of its existence and indicating the PLO’s readiness to coexist with it would have sufficed.68 Palestinians close to Arafat argue that he “seem[ed] unaware of his own value” to the Israelis and Americans, and repeatedly made damaging concessions when he could have pressed for much more from the other side.69 Palestinians and Oslo critics sympathetic to their cause have undertaken close textual analyses of the DOP and its documentary offspring. The list of other terms of the agreement which this school finds unfavorable to the Palestinian side is a long one, including the following:

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•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

The absence of any guarantee that the agreed final outcome will be a sovereign Palestinian state The absence of any freeze or restrictions on Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza in the interim That the PA’s domain is described in functional, as opposed to territorial terms, meaning it can administer people but not control territory and natural resources That the mission of the Palestinian police force is construed to safeguard Israelis against rogue Palestinian attackers That there is no recognition of the national rights of the Palestinian people and no recognition of Palestinian claims to the Arab parts of Jerusalem That Israel is required only to “redeploy” its troops (i.e., away from Palestinian population centers) but not necessarily “withdraw” them from the West Bank or Gaza entirely That reference to UN Resolutions 242 and 338 did not specify which of the many different interpretations would apply here The repeated use of the Israeli-preferred term “disputed areas” to refer to that territory which the Palestinians (and much of the world) recognize as “occupied” by Israel Israeli involvement in and veto over Palestinian decisions on economic, political, civil, criminal, and other internal matters↜70

These critics also point to what they consider a fatal structural flaw in the Oslo Accords, namely, that key Israeli concerns (security, in its many guises; changing the PLO Charter) are “front-loaded” and that action on all of the most important Palestinian concerns (borders, sovereignty, refugees, Jerusalem, settlements) are “backloaded,”71 or postponed, technically for the five-year transition period but in practice indefinitely, due to delays in making the transition period operational. Rashid Khalidi observed that, throughout the negotiations spanning 1991–2000, treatment of the core issues dear to Palestinians was “indefinitely frozen” by the repeated postponement of the “final status” talks, “while there was no concomitant freeze on the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”72 He argues that the ongoing settlement activity not only demoralized Palestinians but in fact made the physical possibility of the two-state solution increasingly remote: “The map that was ostensibly the subject of Israeli and Palestinian negotiation was all the while being drastically transformed by one party to the discussion.”73 In his penetrating examination of the Oslo Accords, Raja Shehadeh notes that the terms of the DOP and related documents allowed Israel to “reliev[e] itself from the administration and governance over the Palestinians living in the Occupied Areas

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while retaining full control over the settlements and Israelis living in them,” leaving open “the very real option of eventual annexation of large areas of the settlement blocs to Israel.”74 He argues that, in creating new facts on the ground, Israel “operated on two levels: altering the physical conditions on the ground and developing the legal reality to serve its purpose” of maintaining the settlements,75 while the Palestinian side neglected to develop any legal strategy for preserving its claim to the land. In Shehadeh’s assessment, it was a Palestinian “tragedy” that the PLO “failed to capitalize on [the] international consensus” that the Israeli settlement policy was “legally, morally and politically” wrong; “even within Israel there was a considerable anti-settlement lobby.”76 In his view, the PLO could have demanded and achieved a settlement freeze in advance of the final-status talks. While scholars and advocates representing Palestinian interests parsed the documentary language with dismay, ordinary Palestinians assessed the impact of the Oslo peace process by examining their pocketbooks, landscape, and standard of everyday living. As mentioned earlier, the ever-expanding construction of Jewish settlements and a costly web of new bypass roads certainly made it seem that Israel was tightening its grip on the West Bank, not preparing to relinquish it to a new Palestinian state. As Khalil Shikaki observed, in 1993 Palestinians expected the “peace process to lead to the end of occupation.” In the end, however, what they saw was Oslo as a cover used by consecutive Israeli governments to colonize the land and transfer Israeli civilians into it, confiscate land to build homes for Jewish settlers, build bypass roads that criss-cross Palestinian territory in a way that make continuity impossible and prevent the implementation of any national development project, thus turning Palestine into more than a hundred small enclaves in . . . Israeli-controlled territory. In other words, the Palestinians saw the peace process as providing Israel with the means to consolidate, rather than end, occupation.77

The intricate Oslo I and II maps dividing the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C called to mind an archipelago of Palestinian islands, separated from one another in Israeli-patrolled waters which their inhabitants were not allowed to traverse at will (see maps 8 and 9).78 In Area A Palestinians had full civil and security control. Administration of Area B was divided between Palestinian civil control and Israeli security control. In Area C Israel retained full civil and security control. Although portions of Areas B and C continued to be transferred to A and B through 2000, traveling from one Palestinian area to another actually became more rather than less difficult, requiring multiple passes and permits and the navigation of various checkpoints and roadblocks. In practice, Palestinians could no longer travel freely through the West Bank, and many found themselves cut off from family, employment, or schools only a few miles away. The result was a sorry substitute for a geo-

Oslo II: Areas A, B, C, 1995 Area A: Full Palestinian Civil and Security Control

Haifa

Area B: Palestinian Civil Control, Israeli Security Control

ISRAEL

Area C: Israeli Civil and Security Control 15 miles

Jordan R.

0

Sea of Galilee

Jenin

Mediterranean Sea

Tulkarm

Nablus

Qalqilya

Ramallah Jerusalem

Jericho

WEST BANK Bethlehem

Gaza Hebron

Dead Sea

GAZA STRIP

Map 8.

JORDAN

Tel Aviv

Oslo II: Areas A, B, C, 2000 Area A: Full Palestinian Civil and Security Control

ISRAEL

Area C: Israeli Civil and Security Control 15 miles

Jordan R.

0

Sea of Galilee

Haifa

Area B: Palestinian Civil Control, Israeli Security Control

Jenin

Mediterranean Sea

Tulkarm

Nablus

Qalqilya

Ramallah Jerusalem

Jericho

WEST BANK Bethlehem

Gaza Hebron

Dead Sea

GAZA STRIP

Map 9.

JORDAN

Tel Aviv

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graphically contiguous and economically viable state; instead, there were cantonlike swaths of land that Said referred to as humiliating “Bantustans.”79 Under these conditions, the standard of living for most Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank began deteriorating with each new stage of Oslo, even as the IDF continued to withdraw from Palestinian cities and towns. Israeli objections to Oslo generally reflected more distrust of the PLO than dismay with the terms themselves, although they also found faults. Of course, the settler population and the hard right objected to Israel’s withdrawal from any territory at all, but even peace supporters were nervous about the formula which had Israel “giving up” (Palestinians would say “giving back”) something tangible—territory— in exchange for something intangible, possibly fleeting and easily reversed—Palestinian declarations of peaceful intent. Many Israelis simply were not buying the PLO’s metamorphosis from foe to friend, and did not like Israel putting weapons into the hands of some 30,000 Palestinian police.80 And when Hamas and its offshoots unleashed a campaign of anti-Israel terror across both sides of the green line, Israelis criticized Oslo for the lack of any effective mechanism to deter, intercept, or punish them. This brings us back to the Norwegian cocoon, where men of good intentions, good manners, and fragile friendly relations created an exciting and visionary agreement based, first and foremost, on “good faith implementation.”81 But, some wondered, how realistic was it to rely on “good faith” between two parties who had known nothing but the most severe enmity between them? More than one Israeli critic scored the terms and structure of Oslo for having been “designed to function under the sterile conditions of a laboratory” and not “in the laboratory of real life.”82 There is also the Palestinian complaint that the economic structures put in place by Oslo brought about Palestinian deprivation and hardship. If true, the architects achieved the opposite of what they desired. The failure of the various Oslo agreements to improve the Palestinian economy or Israeli security runs counter to a basic assumption upon which the peace process was founded, namely, that the dismantling of the occupation in stages would allow for the steady improvement in the standard of living of Palestinians; that as Palestinians became more secure and more prosperous they would be less inclined to commit or support violence against Israelis; as violence abated Israelis would come to support the further dismantling of the occupation, until both sides achieved freedom and security. Shimon Peres, one of the most vocal exponents of the theory that improved economics would improve the chances for peace, wrote: “To construct a political staircase without economic banisters is to take the risk that people will begin to climb, only to fall off before they reach the top.”83 Skeptics, like Shlomo Ben-Ami, see a “double fallacy” in Peres’s logic. One is “the assumption that economic development would convince Palestin-

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ians to lower their political expectations. . . . The second [is] the assumption that the Arabs would welcome this neo-colonialist Israeli version of the White Man’s Burden.”84 Similarly, international relations analysts challenge Peres’s peace-throughprosperity plan. Jonathan Rynhold writes, “From a Realist perspective . . . the Oslo process was flawed from the outset. Attempts at integration actually made matters worse by increasing friction. . . . The key to successfully managing ethno-national conflict is the physical and political separation of ethno-national groups, not mutual trust and economic integration.”85 The second school of thought on Oslo’s failings defends the terms of the agreement and blames human duplicity, cowardice, or weakness for the fact that Oslo did not deliver the peace it promised. Oslo’s negotiators insist that they were fully cognizant of the limitations of the hostile “real-world” setting and still believe that the deal struck reflected the best possible terms in light of real-world conditions, if not necessarily the best terms, period. On paper, at least, Oslo smashed decades-old barriers between Palestinians and Israelis and said all the right things about coexistence and peace. Even if it was not yet the complete fulfillment of either’s side newly prioritized goals, it did offer a historic starting point: a territorial base for the PLO in Palestine, Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho, a Palestinian commitment to safeguard Israeli security, and a pathway and vision for a final peace between Palestine and Israel. Psychological Factors

The argument that the fault lies not with the paperwork but with the people leads us to consider the psychological elements at play. In their memoirs of taking part in the historic Oslo breakthrough, Abu Ala and Yossi Beilin both recorded similar wonderment at the sudden transformation of the forbidden to the norm. Abu Ala wrote: “Our entire struggle had been predicated on the illegality of Israel’s existence. We had always even avoided mentioning the name of the country.” Beilin marveled that up until the government’s approval of the DOP, the name “PLO” could not “be mentioned in any official communication,” adding, “and today—there’s no problem, the taboo has been lifted!”86 They were indeed calling one another by name, and calling one another “partner.” But despite the shocked rush of enthusiasm touched off by the revelation of the Declaration of Principles in 1993, neither the Israeli nor Palestinian publics were able to sustain a high level of hope and optimism over time. During the first few years, public support was roughly between 65 and 70 percent in each community,87 but thereafter began to drop. No Israeli or Palestinian leader succeeded in creating among his constituency a critical mass in favor of peaceful compromise and coexistence.

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The early euphoria on both sides which first greeted the DOP was steadily replaced by disenchantment, stemming in large part from a failure of the PLO and Israeli leadership to communicate to their people realistic expectations of what had been accomplished and promised. The initial announcement that an agreement had been reached sent thousands of Palestinians and tens of thousands of Israelis into the streets in jubilation.88 But, as Mark Heller pointed out at the time, there was some question as to what they were celebrating: “In Israel, the accord was often referred to as a peace agreement, rather than simply as an agreement on a process that might ultimately culminate in peace. Among Palestinians, there was a widespread perception, which the leadership did not try very vigorously to dispel, that this was an agreement on Palestinian independence, rather than simply an agreement on a process that might fulfill that aspiration.”89 According to political scientist and Peace Now activist Galia Golan, the basic underlying concept of an interim trustbuilding period was flawed precisely by this confusion: the public shared “an illusion that peace had been reached, with an accompanying expectation of changes on the ground—when in fact peace had not yet been negotiated and therefore reality on the ground could not live up to expectations.”90 Implementation of the initial agreements soon enough revealed these and other discrepancies, and both camps experienced mounting popular disappointment and a corresponding upsurge of domestic opposition, running the spectrum from skeptics to fanatics. Arafat’s opponents came from a wide range within the Palestinian constituency. Opposition from Hamas, and the smaller, even more radical group Islamic Jihad, was of course anticipated. Less expected was evidence of the limits of Arafat’s ability to win over the Palestinian street. Although revered for his years as the leader and symbol of the Palestinian national resistance movement, Arafat’s transition from revolutionary to governor did not impress important segments of his community. Despite his election as president in January 1996, the Palestinian Authority under his control was highly undemocratic and staffed largely with personal cronies from Tunis. In passing over qualified administrators from Gaza and the West Bank, Arafat alienated those Palestinians who were most supportive of his deal with Israel, were most familiar with the ways of Israel and the IDF, were most eager to participate in shaping the Palestinian future, and had the most to gain from its success. His initial marginalization of several of his closest aides, such as Abu Ala, Abu Mazen, and Bassam Abu-Sharif, pointmen in the negotiations with Israel and architects of Palestinian self-rule, sent confusing signals; in general, chaos ruled in the PLO camp.91 Opposition to the entire Oslo program by a “hard core minority” of important mainstream PLO members and supporters, such as Farouk Qaddumi, Hanan Ashrawi, Raja Shehadeh, Hasan al-Hani, Rashid Khalidi, and Edward Said, and the dissatisfaction of local heroes like Haydar Abd al-Shafi, head of the Palestin-

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ian delegation to Madrid, called into question Arafat’s continued command of broad Palestinian loyalty.92 Muhammad Muslih has argued that, once Arafat compromised with Israel and accepted the imperfect reality of something less than an independent Palestinian state in less than all of Palestine, his status was necessarily reduced to smaller dimensions: “The relationship with the masses that the charismatic Arafat had enjoyed during the bright youthful days of Amman and Beirut was diminished by the concessions he made to Israel. Arafat would stand at the helm not as a revolutionary resister, but as a subdued figure.”93 Ordinary Palestinians initially prepared to give peace a chance also found cause for concern as the Oslo process unfolded in fits and starts. In late 1994, Eyad Elsarraj, a Gazan psychiatrist, human rights activist, and former delegate to the Washington talks, expressed the increasing Palestinian perception that the DOP and Cairo Agreement were signed by “two unequal parties.” Israel has in effect dictated the terms of the Agreement to the Palestinians, whose leadership entered the negotiations from a position of inner weakness edging on total collapse, thus giving grounds for a big measure of submission. There is a growing consensus among the Palestinians that the peace accords have devastated their dream of liberation, reduced the size of Palestine even further and the PLO leadership to a ghetto life. . . . [The] sensation of loss is bewildering and overwhelming, making the road to peace replete with potential hazards.94

The initial scenes of jubilation, as Palestinian police took over town after town from withdrawing IDF units, became a bitter memory, replaced by a cyclical pattern of Israeli closures of the green-line borders following Palestinian bombings inside Israel. Israeli employers began replacing Palestinian laborers with workers from Europe and Asia, which reassured many Israelis who worried about terrorists coming from the territories but angered Palestinians who saw this as unfair collective punishment and a serious blow to their fledgling economy. Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 rampage at the al-Ibrahimi mosque not only killed twenty-nine Muslims at prayer, but also dealt a staggering blow to Palestinian faith in a post-Oslo reconciliation, despite Rabin’s immediate and powerful public denunciation of the act and rejection of the killer. The assassinations by the Israeli Mossad of Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shikaki in October 1995 and of Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash in January 1996 further angered Palestinians, who accused Israel of taking Arafat’s cooperation as a license to kill. Perhaps most damaging of all to Palestinian opinion was Israel’s continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Despite repeated assurances by Arafat that an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza was forthcoming, Palestinians observed that between 1992 and 1996, under the Rabin and

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Peres governments, there was a 40 percent increase in the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and a 30 percent increase of those in the Gaza Strip.95 If this was peace, many questioned, how was it bringing Palestinian national aspirations any closer to fruition than had the previous state of war?96 The terrorist attacks that exhausted ordinary Israelis’ confidence in the peace process also galvanized the forces of the most committed Israeli opponents of the land-for-peace approach: the Jewish settlers in Gaza and the West Bank, who were but a small percentage of the electorate but whose “concerns and actions resonate[d] with Israelis in the ideological hinterland on the right of the national political spectrum.” 97 During the summer and fall of 1995, after devastating Hamas bus bombings, nationwide demonstrations by an alliance of religious and nationalist opponents of Oslo threatened a massive campaign of civil disobedience and potential civil strife. Prime Minister Rabin further incensed “Greater Israel” adherents by brusquely dismissing them as “crybabies” and ridiculing their concerns.98 Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, combined with Peres’s defeat at the polls and the election of Benjamin Netanyahu six months later, put an end to efforts to break the dynamics of deadlock between Israeli leaders and their followers. Neither was the leadership within the Palestinian Authority capable of dispelling the disillusionment with the Oslo peace process among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Snug in their Norwegian cocoon, the Oslo negotiators had developed what one of them has called “an almost mystical faith in the power of the written word to control reality.” 99 Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal warned, however, that “peace cannot simply emerge from secret negotiations among leaders closeted away in a magical castle. . . . The Palestinian public’s response to and participation in the Oslo peace process determined whether it would succeed.”100 The same holds true for the Israeli leaders’ (in)ability to successfully engage their public. Palestinians and Israelis were equally disappointed as several truths emerged. Palestinians lost hope as they came to understand that independence was not imminent but would come only gradually, and in the meantime their most important concerns were consigned to future, far-off negotiations. The refugees were unaccounted for in the new agreement; Jerusalem was not theirs; Israeli control was still insidious, if slightly removed; and the settlements continued to grow at an accelerated rate. Movement within the West Bank was more difficult than before Oslo.101 Joy at Arafat’s triumphant return to the homeland abated as his system of misrule became entrenched and the standard of living in the Palestinian territories steadily declined. Continuing Palestinian losses in encounters with armed IDF troops conducting sweeps and searches and Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 attack on the Hebron mosque were reminders that it was not Israelis alone who required greater security.

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Israelis lost hope as they came to realize that Arafat either could not or would not police the extremist Palestinian factions which rejected Oslo, coexistence with Israel, and Arafat’s leadership. Either way, his effectiveness as a peace partner was questionable. While Palestinians were losing faith in the likelihood of achieving an independent Palestine, Israelis were, grudgingly, coming to accept it as inevitability. But Israelis soon saw Oslo leading to a Palestinian state that would be increasingly willing and able to threaten Israel. Continuing Palestinian attacks which stymied Oslo’s process suggested to Israelis that perhaps the real Palestinian goal remained the destruction of Israel after all. In the eyes of many Israelis, the Palestinians were inexplicably squandering a previously unimaginable opportunity to repair their situation and achieve their national goals. Governments of the Israeli left and right had recognized and dealt with the PLO, as had the United States. Arafat and his entourage of thousands had returned from Tunisia, Lebanon, and other places of exile to Palestine. Israel had agreed to the arming of 30,000 Palestinian policemen and turned a blind eye when the number of men under arms swelled beyond that. Israeli troops had withdrawn from Palestinian cities and villages, and most Palestinians were living under governance of the PA. The international community was pledging millions of dollars in aid for the Palestinians. Yet Oslo’s critics were quick to notice the Palestinians’ failure to exploit all these early steps to statehood. Instead of investing in the infrastructure and economy in preparation for future independence, Arafat’s companions were growing rich and the PLO leader seemed more interested in creating a Byzantine bureaucracy and numerous intelligence organizations. Explanations ranged from political immaturity among the Palestinian leaders to their desire for personal gain to the suspicion that a West Bank/Gaza state was not the Palestinian aim after all, that the real goal remained the destruction of Israel by stages. Terrorism was taking a greater toll post-Oslo than it had previously. Oslo’s psychological challenge was immense; as the Israeli mother of a terror victim observed, the peace process was demanding nothing less than “a transformation in all our souls.”102 In the end, laments Moshe Ma’oz, both Palestinians and Israelis were “psychologically unprepared” to reach the compromises necessary: the Oslo process did not allow or encourage the creation of “significant empathy or sensitivity for the concerns, grievances, individual ethos and expectations of each other.”103 A debate over the revision of school textbooks to remove hateful portrayals of “the enemy” illustrates the difficulties of implementing Oslo in spirit as well as in letter. Watchdog groups in Israel complained that the revisions of the PA’s new series of elementary school texts did not adequately correct the prevalent demonization of Israelis and the denial of their claims and rights. Those with firsthand experience in

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Courtesy of Tim Menees, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

curriculum building and in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue responded that it was unreasonable to expect such significant curriculum revisions to serve as a pre-condition for mutual understanding; rather, such changes in civil society would have to come about as a product of political understandings reached through hard negotiations.104 But Israelis still worried about their hostile and often antisemitic representations in textbooks and in the official PA media and on television. In its post-Oslo form, the dynamics of deadlock meant that Israel’s leaders had minimal public support for making concessions to Arafat until he demonstrated that he could govern all factions of his people and make good on his security promises. But Arafat needed those very concessions from Israel in order to secure his role as the popular leader who could deliver what his followers were seeking. The Palestinian-Israeli peace process thus became locked in a new vicious circle, and “anti-Oslo militants on both sides discovered a dirty little secret: they had virtual veto power over the negotiations, because every outrageous act that they perÂ�petrated brought yet another interruption, another setback to the peace process.”105

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With Hamas snapping at his heels and the refugees demanding redress, Arafat vacillated between defending the peace process and—citing Islamic precedent— suggesting that it was an “expedient peace that could be broken” when circumstances changed.106 The task of selling the Palestinian people on peaceful compromise was complicated by the PLO’s prior success in imbuing the people with revolutionary anti-Israel fervor. Abu Ala recognized the enormity of the challenge: “The PLO had worked relentlessly for many decades to harden Palestinian opinion against any settlement that failed to give the Palestinians their full rights on the entirety of their national soil in Palestine.”107 How could these leaders now expect to maintain their standing and win public support for an agreement which, in Palestinian eyes, clearly gave them less than their full rights in less than their entire homeland? With roughly half of the nation backing them, Rabin and Peres struggled mightily to persuade the other half to give their new peace gambit a chance. Their inability to overcome the resistance of that other half of the nation served as a brake on the speed and scope of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and a catalyst for severe internal dissension between Israeli proponents and opponents of continuing the peace process. Ongoing terrorism and Arafat’s ambivalence played into the hands of Oslo’s detractors: “The Israeli public could not stomach a policy whereby the victims of terrorist attacks were buried in the morning and negotiations were resumed in the afternoon.”108 Rabin and Peres failed from the center-left; Netanyahu failed from the right. In 1999 the Israeli electorate swung the political pendulum left again, bringing to power Ehud Barak, a highly decorated IDF career soldier who had attained the rank of Lt. General, the highest in the Israeli military, before beginning a political career as a government minister in 1995. Determined to replicate in the diplomatic arena the lightning quick strikes for which he was famous in the military arena, Barak determined that what the Israeli-Palestinian peace process needed was an intense, do-or-die summit to rejuvenate Oslo and produce a final settlement. He would lead Oslo back to the future by heading back to Camp David.

Chapter 9 Broken beyond Repair? Camp David II and the Second Intifada

By the summer of 1999, pundits were asking whether the Oslo peace process required resuscitation or an autopsy. Voting for the former, the Israeli electorate resoundingly rejected the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and in July 1999 made Ehud Barak the country’s new prime minister. Having risen to the pinnacle of prestige and power in the Israeli military, Barak now set his sights on ambitious political prizes: the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon; peace with Syria; and a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On 24 May 2000 the IDF unilaterally evacuated the territory it held in Lebanon. But as we saw in chapter 6, negotiations with the Syrians stalled and then died along with Syrian president Hafez al-Asad in June 2000. That left Barak to focus his attention on wrapping things up with the Palestinians. He moved quickly, persuading the Clinton administration to host a high-stakes summit the next month between Palestinian and Israeli teams led by Yasir Arafat and himself. Hoping that diplomatic lightning would strike twice, the would-be peacemakers sequestered themselves at Camp David—the site of the dramatic 1978 Carter-Begin-Sadat breakthrough—between 11 and 25 July 2000. But there were no new Camp David Accords to crown the endeavor. Although Palestinian-Israeli negotiations continued at other locations for the remaining six months of President Clinton’s term, they were overshadowed by the outbreak in September 2000 of the second Palestinian Intifada. This chapter applies our now familiar framework for analysis to the failure of the intense make-or-break negotiations at Camp David in July 2000, also taking into account the serious post-summit talks culminating and then collapsing in the resort town of Taba, Egypt, in January 2001. As noted in the Introduction, the more recent the event, the less documentation about it that is available and the more awkward it is for historians to undertake a thorough analysis. This is particularly the case with the second Camp David negotiations, since acute controversy over what had occurred

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arose immediately upon the summit’s sorry conclusion.1 Since then, dozens of books and articles, many authored by summit participants, have appeared purporting to establish what really happened. An outstanding illustration of the instant-history dilemma, scholarship about the events at Camp David features wildly divergent accounts, but most of them generally fall into one of two dueling narratives about who was to blame for the diplomatic failure. According to one account, Ehud Barak made Yasir Arafat an unprecedented and generous offer for ending the conflict, which Arafat rejected. This version emphasizes Barak’s willingness to cede all of Gaza and over 90 percent of the West Bank (by some accounts up to 97 percent) to the Palestinians for a Palestinian state and his readiness to make territorial concessions in Jerusalem as well. According to this presentation, the Palestinian leader balked at the moment of truth, and his unwillingness to offer a counter-proposal exposed the Palestinians’ true disinclination to make any compromises for peace and their preference for weakening Israel over time and ultimately replacing it, rather than living side by side with it. For this school of thought, the outbreak of the second Intifada two months later confirmed this Palestinian strategy of using both diplomacy and violence to continually press Israel for ever greater concessions. According to a second account, Barak dictated a non-negotiable deal to Arafat which left the Palestinians a geographically truncated and weak semi-state, perpetuated Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, preserved the settlements, and denied the refugees any right of return. According to this understanding of events, Barak’s arrogant take-it-or-leave-it offer was anything but generous and scarcely hid Israel’s real intention of retaining its settlements and denying the Palestinians a viable state.2 Absent any official document to emerge from the talks, the contradictory nature of the available accounts means that the give-and-take of these negotiations is not very clear. Thus this chapter offers a consideration of the peacemaking attempts from July 2000 through January 2001 with the caveat that, even more so than with the previous case studies, the assessment of this one is likely to require significant revision as new primary and other sources emerge. Previous Negotiating Experience

Like the 1978 summit, the July 2000 encounter at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, featured the extended sequestration of American, Arab, and Israeli teams led by the presidents and prime minister themselves; the deep personal mediation of the American president; a virtual media blackout; and the promise of American financial incentives for successful peacemakers.3 Obviously the protagonists were hoping to repeat the positive experience of Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem Begin. The very name “Camp David” cre-

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ated both high expectations and the heavy burden of a near-impossible standard of achievement. The American hosts strove to recreate the intimate and informal atmosphere of Oslo as well as that of the first Camp David meeting, ensuring that the participants shared comfortable accommodations, fully equipped work facilities, informal group meals, and recreational opportunities. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright even offered to have a piano moved into Barak’s cabin when he seemed especially tense.4 Senior Israeli negotiator Gilead Sher reported that Palestinian Gaza security chief Mohammed Dahlan’s porch “emerged as a popular hangout where [Israelis and Palestinians] would sit to smoke, drink and talk. These informal meetings, which sometimes lasted into the early hours of the morning, were sometimes more important than the official discussions that took place the day before or the morning after.”5 But as had happened with Oslo, the “reality of the conflict was stronger than the unreal world they had created at Camp David.”6 And, as in the past, more time spent together did not necessarily bring the two sides closer to an agreement but rather highlighted the gaps between them. The decision to convene a summit at Camp David came, as we saw in chapter 8, on the heels of six years of almost daily face-to-face Israeli-Palestinian interaction, as the two sides struggled to implement interim arrangements as required by Oslo. The impact of this sustained and intense contact after decades of mutual non-recognition was largely discouraging, as the participants experienced successive missed deadlines, setbacks, frustrations, recriminations, and loss of mutual trust. Overall, a surfeit of negative post-Oslo negotiating episodes contributed to the ultimate failure of the high-stakes meeting at Camp David. Indeed, the previous decade afforded a backdrop of so few positive negotiating experiences that, barring a dramatic shift in some of the other elements in our analytic framework, there was little reason to expect a successful outcome at Camp David, which Clinton acknowledged: “There was not a high probability of success for the summit. I called it [anyway] because I believed that the collapse of the peace process would be a near certainty if I didn’t.” 7 Purposes and Motives

Palestinians and Israelis arrived at Camp David with very different goals in mind. The initiative for President Clinton to invite the parties came from the Israeli prime minister. Yasir Arafat had repeatedly implored Clinton not to convene the summit, insisting that the Palestinian team needed more time to prepare, that the mood within the Palestinian community was not conducive for compromise, and that Palestinians wanted to see Israel complete the delayed interim withdrawals

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before moving ahead in new negotiations.8 Even though Barak refused to reveal his red lines or final positions to Clinton, the Americans, anxious to crown Clinton’s tenure with a Middle East success, took his word that he had fresh new ideas to reveal, like “rabbits” that “Barak the magician” would pull from a Camp David hat.9 Once Clinton issued the invitation, Arafat had no choice but to reluctantly accept. Still convinced that success was unlikely, the Palestinian president asked Clinton for, and allegedly received, a promise that he would not blame the Palestinian side if and when the talks failed.10 So Arafat went to Camp David with the primary purposes of maintaining good relations with the American president and avoiding blame for an expected negative outcome. Beyond that his goal was to demonstrate to his Palestinian critics that he could hold firm to Palestinian national demands: an Israeli withdrawal from as close as possible to 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount and East Jerusalem, and a refugee solution which preserved some element of the right of return.11 Barak had a decidedly different agenda. His unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon was drawing heavy criticism from the Israeli right, and his diplomatic exercise with Syria now lay in shambles. Of his campaign promises, only the possibility of a deal with the Palestinians remained, and Barak seemed determined to see this one through to fruition. Clearly impatient with the slow pace of the contested, oftdelayed interim agreements, he wanted to leapfrog over them and go straight for a comprehensive resolution of the conflict. A final agreement would turn back the political threat from the Likud-led opposition which was playing on the increased insecurity and dangers Israelis were experiencing under Oslo’s gradualist approach. Clinton understood that every Israeli concession that failed to end Palestinian violence was for Barak “death by a thousand cuts.”12 Barak’s “entire negotiating strategy [at Camp David] was based on [an] all-or-nothing formula.”13 As Ghassan Khatib saw it, Barak’s purposes were twofold: “either to reach a final settlement ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and achieve Israel’s objectives of peace, security, integration and prosperity without compromising on Jerusalem, the refugees or many of the settlements, or to end the entire peace process and place the blame squarely on the other side.”14 If a speedy “end-of-conflict” deal was Barak’s initial motive for requesting the summit, his undeclared aim—one that was to become more prominent as deadlocks and showdowns surfaced—was to put Arafat’s sincerity to the test and unmask him as an obstacle to, rather than a partner for, peace.15 Such contradictory purposes for going to Camp David set Arafat and Barak on a collision course. But Alan Dowty suggests that the unsurprising collapse reflected much more than simply incompatible goals at that time and place. The much larger problem was one of very different Palestinian and Israeli perceptions of peace

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and of the peace process. In Dowty’s assessment, the Palestinians saw themselves as victims who had made all their concessions back in September 1993 when the PLO recognized Israel and accepted a two-state solution. Palestinians felt that, as the wronged party, they had nothing else to relinquish, and that the whole purpose of the peace process was to create the mechanism for establishing an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and some formulation of the right of return for the refugees. From the Israeli perspective, Oslo was a starting point whose destination was not entirely predetermined. Israelis expected the peace process to play out in an ongoing series of negotiations, with each side trading assets and concessions, until they finally arrived at a mutually acceptable agreement.16 With neither side motivated by an overriding desire to achieve a negotiated compromise requiring important concessions, it is not surprising that Camp David broke up in acrimony and immediately spawned divergent and accusatory interpretations of what had gone wrong. Although the summit ended with a bland trilateral statement laced with good intentions (document 94), there was no disguising the summit’s failure. Mindful of his promise to Arafat not to single him out for blame, Clinton “tried to praise Barak without burying Arafat” in his post-summit statement, dubbed by his aides the “marshmallow” speech (document 95).17 But in the press conference immediately after the prepared statement and in subsequent interviews, partially designed to bolster Barak against a challenge by Netanyahu in the wake of the Camp David debacle, and in his memoirs, Clinton made clear his disappointment with Arafat. Thus Arafat saw his original fear materialize and the hard-won “mutual confidence between the U.S. and the Palestinians quickly deteriorated.”18 When the Intifada broke out two months later, some saw it, along with Arafat’s defense of the Palestinian resort to violence, as a natural response to Barak’s intransigence and Clinton’s betrayal. Others saw it as evidence of Arafat’s true colors, perceiving that, once the Intifada began, Arafat was more motivated to regain his stature with the Palestinians and other Arab leaders by riding the wave of a popular uprising than he was to make bold but unpopular concessions in negotiations with the Israelis. Timing

In the months immediately preceding Camp David II, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Gilead Sher, Abu Ala (Ahmed Qurie), and others were making tentative progress toward clarifying the parties’ positions on territory, refugees, and Jerusalem in secret talks begun in Stockholm. Nothing indicated, however, that the time was ripe for a supersummit breakthrough.19 But the 2000 summer calendar offered many reasons for

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the sense of urgency which propelled the parties to Camp David nevertheless. Barak had replaced Netanyahu in July 1999, inspiring in many parties the notion that the time had come to make a big move, before the Israeli pendulum swung right again. Indeed, the day before Barak arrived at Camp David he barely survived a no-confidence vote in the Knesset.20 Along with the Likud hot on his heels, Barak also had Arafat breathing down his neck: if Israel did not meet its interim withdrawal obligations to Palestinian satisfaction by the approaching Oslo II deadline of 13 September 2000, Arafat was threatening to unilaterally declare Palestinian independence.21 Clinton’s clock was ticking also, with just six months left in his term. In deciding whether or not to hazard a risky summit in July 2000, Clinton had to weigh the temptation to make a huge last-ditch effort to cap his presidency with a historic Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement against the likelihood of an embarrassing failure. Along with his own political legacy, he had to think about Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign and the fact that an electoral period would not be the best time to lean on Israel, if that was what clinching a deal came down to.22 With both the Israeli and American leaders running out of time, Barak pushed and Clinton bought into the principle that it was time to “go for broke,” despite Palestinian concerns over the unimplemented interim withdrawals and despite the high risk of failure.23 Clinton and Barak’s impending departures from office made Arafat even less likely to cut what would be an unpopular deal back home. Arafat calculated that if he just sat tight through the U.S. elections, a George W. Bush White House might be more inclined to pressure Israel, as the elder Bush had done when he was president, which would help the Palestinians strike a better bargain. Given the political pendulum pattern in Israeli politics, there was also the probability that Barak’s successor would be the Likud’s Ariel Sharon, who would obviously adopt a harsher line than Barak. Arafat had to decide: was it smarter to grab Barak’s offer while it was still on the table and hope that it would tie Sharon’s hands, or to pass it up, hope for an American administration less sympathetic to Israel, and avoid the risk that Sharon would use any last-minute compromises with Barak as the new starting line from which to demand further Palestinian concessions?24 In December 2000 Barak resigned the premiership, staying on in a caretaker capacity until new elections in February 2001. Although Israeli and Palestinian delegates tried mightily to eke out an eleventh-hour agreement between July 2000 and January 2001—one that might have saved Barak from electoral defeat—the electoral countdown did not increase Arafat’s generosity or flexibility. Palestinian negotiator Akram Hanieh reports that Arafat was not interested in saving Barak for anything less than the full satisfaction of Palestinian demands.25 And even some Israeli ob-

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servers wondered why now, of all times, would Arafat be tempted to conclude “a complex final-status agreement with an outgoing U.S. president and an Israeli prime minister who had lost his coalition?”26 Barak and Arafat both perceived time to be working against Israel, leading each to overplay his hand. Barak believed that “potential Israeli accomplishments in the negotiations were continually being eroded by global and regional trends such as international terrorism (Osama bin Laden), the growing strength and scope of Islamic fundamentalism, and the growing armament of a ‘second circle’ of countries with unconventional arms, including nuclear (Iran).”27 This helped bring him to the disastrous decision that it was time to press for nothing less than final resolution of the conflict in its entirety, which would have allowed Israel to turn its full attention to these new threats. Some observers, particularly among the Arabs, also saw evidence of increasing domestic weakness within Israel. By the late 1990s, popular impressions were widespread that Israeli society had grown soft and complacent. After Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in the spring of 2000, “Hizballah, Iran and many Palestinians drew the lesson that it was wrong to make concessions to Israel; that Israel, when confronted with durable opposition, will blink first.”28 In bringing the Israel Defense Forces home from Lebanon, Barak fulfilled one of his central campaign promises. But the execution of the retreat on 24 May 2000 was hasty and slipshod, and caught Israel’s South Lebanon Army (SLA) ally by surprise and left it vulnerable. And because the withdrawal was unilateral, Israel received no security guarantees from either Lebanon or Syria as to who would fill the power vacuum created by Israel’s departure. Indeed, only hours after the last IDF troops crossed back into Israel, Hizballah militiamen took up positions within yards of the Israel-Lebanese border. The fallout from Israel’s withdrawal reached beyond Hizballah’s celebrations and the congratulations pouring in from around the Arab world for its successful eviction of the IDF. In a conversation with Arafat shortly thereafter, Shlomo Ben-Ami noted the “admiration and envy” in Arafat’s voice when speaking of Hizballah, and his anger and concern that the precipitate Israeli pullout had weakened his own position. Admiring Palestinians observed that in liberating Lebanese land, Hizballah had achieved with force what the PLO had not yet achieved with diplomacy. Hamas claimed vindication and exhorted Arafat to abandon diplomacy and return to armed struggle. Ben-Ami came away with the sense that the Palestinian leader “despised the notion that the national liberation of [his] people was something to be negotiated with the occupier instead of being achieved by means of military force and through a popular uprising.”29 One month later, his colleagues at Camp David agreed that Arafat was still smarting with anger and humiliation over the victory

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Israel had handed its Hizballah foe while expecting its Palestinian peace partner to persist in unsatisfying and tiresome negotiations.30 Adding to Arafat’s bitterness was the fact that throughout 1999–2000 Israel had repeatedly put the Palestinians on the back burner to focus on talks with Syria, another Arab actor that seemed to get more Israeli respect and attention the harder the line it adopted.31 U.S. State Department official Aaron David Miller strongly believes that competition with what mediators jokingly called “the other woman” was a strong contributor to Arafat’s hard-line stance at Camp David. If there was any Palestinian flexibility on the question of borders, he noted, “it was stripped away by the fact that Arafat saw Israel prepared to give 99.9% of the Golan Heights to Syria, to a man who refused to play by any of the rules or conventions of normal peacemaking.”32 The Israeli negotiating team was fully aware that Barak’s dealings on the Syrian track since 1999 had negatively affected Arafat’s attitudes, stiffening Palestinians demands at Camp David considerably.33 Hastily convened with inadequate preparation, with Clinton and Barak both running out of time in office, and coming too close to the U.S. presidential elections, the timing elements were stacked against a successful outcome at Camp David.34 Clinton recalled, “Arafat was famous for waiting until the very last minute to make a decision, or ‘five minutes to midnight’ as we used to say. I had only six months to go as President. I certainly hoped Arafat’s watch kept good time.”35 Status of the Negotiators

Consideration of the status of the negotiators at Camp David II inevitably begs a comparison between Carter, Sadat, and Begin in 1978 and Clinton, Arafat, and Barak in 2000. Simply put, the first trio was much stronger than the second.36 Jimmy Carter was only midway into his first term when he convened the first Camp David summit. Not yet saddled with reelection concerns, Carter had some freedom with which to operate. Clinton, however, was three and a half years into his second term and rapidly moving into lame duck territory.37 Impeached by the House of Representatives in December 1998 (he was acquitted by the Senate in February 1999), the scandal-scarred president’s ability to persuade Congress to deliver the necessary U.S. inducements that might be negotiated at Camp David would have been highly problematic.38 Nonetheless, the weight of the presidential office carried such significant power at Camp David II that when Clinton temporarily left Camp David for the G8 summit in Japan, the negotiators largely shut down any serious bargaining; it was all the mere secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and Middle East adviser Dennis Ross could do to keep the parties treading water while they awaited the president’s return.39 As Palestinian participant Akram Hanieh observed, “No

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one wanted to give any ‘merchandise’ to Mrs. Albright, for the simplest rule of politics dictates that one should reach an understanding with the ‘boss.’”40 In 1978, Anwar Sadat exercised firm control over his country and countrymen and enjoyed virtually unchecked decision making. He was sufficiently in command during the summit to weather the resignation of several key ministers, stand up to general Arab opprobrium, and fully deliver on his end of the Camp David Accords. Arafat, on the other hand, was struggling to administer a weak and unpopular quasi-state regime while under fire from multiple domestic opponents including Hamas, Palestinian refugees in neighboring countries, and a population increasingly unhappy with the deteriorating economic and security situation since Oslo. Arafat had not wanted to attend the summit in the first place and his mood there was accordingly petulant. His team was not without talent, but its talents went underappreciated and underused; given the authoritarian nature of Arafat’s rule, he brooked no challenges and was not eager to entertain new or different opinions. Arafat also repeated the Oslo error of excluding experienced and highly respected negotiators from within the Palestinian territories (Hanan Ashrawi, Faisal Husseini, Haydar Abd al-Shafi) in favor of PLO loyalists who had been in exile in Tunis with him.41 This time, at least, the Palestinians brought lawyers from the new Negotiation Support Unit (NSU) who, with their Israeli counterparts, decamped at a facility several miles removed.42 Although he considers Camp David an American-Israeli ambush, Rashid Khalidi still criticizes the PLO for coming to the summit in a state of unpreparedness and makes the more general argument that since its 1982 expulsion from Lebanon, the PLO had experienced a “steady decline in the competence of its leadership,” hastened by the fact that by the mid-1990s many of the PLO’s most dynamic founders and members had been lost to natural causes or assassination.43 Even if the Palestinian negotiators at Camp David had succeeded in reaching some sort of agreement with the Israelis, their ability to return home and sell a package of compromises to their followers was highly doubtful. Hanieh contends that the Israelis overestimated Arafat’s weakness, never dreaming he had the personal will or Arab support to buck U.S.-Israeli pressure; consequently they miscalculated that, in exchange for even a limited state, “the Palestinian leadership would most likely be willing to pay a high price.”44 In 1978, Menachem Begin came to Camp David with the full support of the Israeli left and himself representing the Israeli right, from where opponents to Israeli withdrawal from Sinai would most likely come. As Shlomo Ben-Ami noted, “When the moment of truth arrived and Begin was required to take an agonizing decision on the [removal of] the settlements in northern Sinai, he received a vitally crucial telephone call from the most hawkish of his ministers back home, Ariel Sharon, who encouraged him to dismantle them. The only telephone calls Ehud Barak would re-

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ceive from Israel during the summit were those with the disheartening news about the disintegration of his coalition and the collapse of his home front.”45 Indeed, Barak “arrived at Camp David at the lowest point of his political career since creating [his] coalition,”46 having just narrowly survived the no-confidence vote in his government. The Israeli team included highly experienced individuals with “impressive legal, military and intelligence credentials,” such as Israel’s attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, who had served as an adviser to Begin at the first Camp David summit. But like Arafat, Barak also exhibited a penchant for calling the shots in a brusque manner and displayed haughty disinterest in assessments different from his own. Barak kept Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, Oslo veterans, far removed from the peace process, another indication of the fissures within his party, his government, and the Israeli body politic. Observed Ben-Ami, “By the sad end of our voyage to the boundaries of the peace process, [Barak was] a leader without a following.”47 Although the fact that the Camp David II delegations were each headed by their chief leaders and decision makers should have increased the summit’s chances for success, the truth was that, “unlike Begin and Sadat, neither Barak not Arafat had the political strength to ensure that their compromises would not be overturned back home.”48 Third-Party Considerations

Camp David II is an excellent example of full-throttle U.S. third-party activity. Convened at the behest of the Israelis and against the better judgment of the Palestinians, the summit was quickly embraced by Bill Clinton, who threw himself into the mediator’s role with great enthusiasm. The president crammed for the summit like an eager graduate student, memorizing street names and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and mastering the nuances of even the smallest issues.49 “Warm, captivating, perceptive and incredibly eloquent,” the American president made a “positive impression on all of the protagonists,”50 all of whom were prepared to give him the opportunity to play the honest broker. Held in high personal esteem by both sides, Clinton began his mediation from a position of considerable personal influence, which he exercised by meeting individually with both Arafat and Barak, sometimes several times a day.51 This was particularly important due to the poor chemistry between the Palestinian and Israeli leaders; Clinton oversaw trilateral talks among the three of them on only the first and last days of the summit.52 Arafat tried to draw on his special relationship with Clinton to protect him during the Camp David negotiations. That relationship between an American president and the Palestinian leader was indeed unique. Prior to 1993 successive U.S. admin-

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istrations considered Arafat a terrorist, but since then Clinton had welcomed him to the White House thirteen times, more than any other foreign leader. And Clinton himself traveled to Gaza in 1998 to give his landmark, empathetic speech to the Palestinian parliament (document 90). Sufficiently impressed with Clinton’s openness to the Palestinian narrative, Palestinian negotiators were prepared to give Clinton, the “honest broker,” the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, Clinton “had undoubtedly gone further than any other U.S. president in recognizing the Palestinians and their leadership.”53 Bill Clinton similarly drew on his special relationship with Arafat in hopes of inducing him to say yes to a Camp David deal. This was reminiscent of the Sadat-Carter friendship going into Camp David I, where the U.S. president used that relationship as a lever for obtaining Egyptian concessions. But despite his unprecedented litany of friendly gestures toward the Palestinians, during Clinton’s administration “little had been done to ready the US public for the eventuality of a Palestinian state.”54 William Quandt suggests that open presidential support for the creation of a Palestinian state might have smoothed the evolution toward not only American but even Israeli acceptance of an emergent Palestine and reassured Arafat of the U.S. commitment to Palestinian national aspirations.55 In the absence of authoritative documentation, researchers are sharply divided over whether Clinton did or did not dangle the carrot of U.S. recognition of Palestinian statehood during the summit in his attempts to soften Arafat’s firm stance on many issues.56 But Clinton was not able to coax Arafat into a Camp David accord. However much the many participants might have respected Clinton’s personal efforts at playing a useful third-party role, some Palestinians and Israelis thought that the American “peace team” at Camp David was not as sharp as their boss. Focusing on Albright, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and Dennis Ross, and including their support staff, some accounts of the summit note a general unpreparedness among the Americans which undermined their ability to execute a decisive third-party role. American author Clayton Swisher documents a litany of missteps and examples of indecision and turf wars among the staffers, which created disunity between Albright’s people from the State Department and Sandy Berger’s White House and National Security Council group.57 On at least one occasion, U.S. miscommunication resulted in a misunderstanding which kept Barak and Arafat at Camp David when each was threatening to leave, but then boiled over when they sat down and discovered “the two leaders had precisely opposite conceptions of what would happen next.”58 Israeli participant Gilead Sher writes that, while Clinton initially instituted an “orderly process of presenting positions, mapping interests, and giving the sides ‘homework,’” there was not any “follow-up, which could have provided the impetus for decision-making.” It did not help that some members of the

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U.S. team “appeared to be less knowledgeable than the president in the details and implications of the process. . . . The leader needs to focus on leadership, on setting principles and general policy.” In Sher’s view, Clinton had to deal too much with “small details, instead of preserving his precious time for trilateral ‘cracking-heads’ meetings with the two leaders with the aim of softening their positions.”59 Sher’s colleague Shlomo Ben-Ami agrees that “the deficiencies in the performance of the United States had an extraordinarily negative effect.” He perceived that the complexity of the issues, the clash between the parties’ positions, and the fading tenure of the Clinton administration made Clinton’s top people “insecure and erratic in their tactics” and unwilling to “hold the reins of the summit with authority.”60 By way of example, several accounts comment on the negative Palestinian and Israeli responses to a major (some say sloppily prepared) position paper presented by the United States on the third day of the summit, and the fact that in the face of withering rejection the American team meekly allowed the document to fall by the wayside.61 One Palestinian participant faults Clinton’s advisers for buying into Israeli misperceptions and assumptions and for leading the president to believe that Arafat was weak enough to accept Barak’s diktat; in that sense, he feels that Clinton’s Middle East “experts” were responsible for the president’s anger and disbelief when Arafat said no. Akram Hanieh’s tone is one of personal and palpable disappointment when he writes that Clinton did not function as an honest broker or even just a broker, period.62 Neither does Israeli negotiator Shlomo Ben-Ami let Clinton off the hook: “Brilliant, passionate, humane and hard-working, proverbially patient, tolerant and good humored, always shunning confrontation and with his days at the White House numbered,” Clinton was unfortunately “not a president who was capable of browbeating the parties.” He lacked Carter’s “capacity to intimidate” and was not inclined to use the “brutal manipulative tactics” of Nixon and Kissinger nor the “diplomatic arm-twisting” of Bush and Baker, which those administrations had used to move the peace process along in years prior. “At Camp David, America looked like a diminished and humble superpower, unable to assert its will.”63 Barak came to Camp David trying to repeat one of the traditional, unproductive practices of Israeli-Arab negotiations, pressing the powerful American third party to impose upon the Palestinians a solution they would not accept on their own. Madeleine Albright writes that, on a visit to Gettysburg while Clinton was away at the G8 summit, “Barak told me that he wanted the President to force Arafat to accept his ideas before negotiations resumed. He said we should tell the Palestinians that the United States would sever contacts with them if they did not yield.”64 Quandt notes Albright’s surprise at discovering that Barak’s goal seemed to be the creation of a “‘pressure cooker’ atmosphere, with Clinton joining him in forcing Arafat to

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make concessions.”65 Hanieh writes that the Palestinian delegation fully understood that Barak thought that he could, “with the support of the Americans, impose [his] peace on the Palestinians.”66 This suggested to him that Barak was not really listening to his own officials, given that many of them had conferred with Arafat directly in the weeks prior to the summit and had surely advised Barak as to the Palestinians’ red lines—advice the Israeli prime minister chose to ignore. Abu Ala similarly concluded that Barak was “alienated from his own negotiating team, [which] worked hard for a positive result.”67 While Barak left disappointed that the Americans did not lean harder on the reluctant Arafat to accept his proposal, Palestinian and other commentators were blistering in their opposite perception, namely, of American-Israeli collusion at Camp David. Hanieh charges that the “Israeli delegation and the American peace team coordinated their steps, step-by-step and word-by-word” to the point where “the American and Israeli delegations were melting into one.”68 Hanieh stands by his early impression of Clinton as more open and receptive to Palestinian concerns than previous American officials and notes that in discussion Clinton often differed with his own advisers, to the Palestinians’ advantage. But he believes that in the end the president and his team were too wedded to the traditions of U.S. behavior with regard to the Palestinian-Israel conflict, which he defines as follows: •

•

•

Sensitivity and responsiveness to the needs of the current Israeli government69 Acceptance of the main Israeli demands as facts and not positions to be questioned or negotiated Demand for equal Palestinian and Israeli concessions, even though the Palestinians see themselves as victims and Israelis as aggressors 70

Another Palestinian negotiator registered a similar impression: “The [S]tate [D]epartment and White House team in charge of the file always viewed the issue in terms of Israeli demands. They thought that every time the Israelis conceded something, this should be enough for the Palestinian side. It had nothing to do with the logic of justice or a fair solution. The logic was that anything Israel was ready to relinquish, you Palestinians should just take.”71 Cheryl Rubenberg argues that even on those occasions when the United States functioned as a neutral third party, “given that Israel was the vastly stronger party and in physical control of all the territory under negotiation, and given that the only resource of power available to the Palestinians was verbal argument, [a] hands-off U.S. policy strongly favored Israel.”72 Abu Ala goes a step further, asserting that the United States “was always too keen to achieve success at any price, with the result that pressure was always exercised on the weaker of the two negotiating parties, namely the Palestinians.”73

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Obviously the American participants reject the notion that they mishandled the summit and place blame elsewhere (primarily upon Arafat) for its failure. Clinton insists in his memoirs (despite Barak’s disappointment) that he did indeed lean on Arafat to accept a deal, first at Camp David and later in presenting his “Parameters” for peace (document 97)—not because he was beholden to any Israeli or domestic pro-Israel pressure, but because he genuinely believed this was a great deal for the Palestinians. Clinton expresses satisfaction that he was able to move Israel away from some of its early, strident demands, and laments that Arafat stubbornly clung to his opening, hard-line positions. Leaving no stone unturned, the president tried to expand the third-party contribution to the summit by calling friendly Arab leaders and asking them to encourage Arafat to seriously consider various compromises under discussion, but at this time most of the Arab leaders “refused to say much, for fear of undercutting Arafat.”74 Albright and Ross similarly defend their Camp David activity and that of their teammates, explaining in detail the reasoning behind their various decisions. They also record their frustration with Barak’s arrogant and erratic behavior (although they credit him with reluctantly accepting some serious compromises, such as the division of Jerusalem into Israeli and Palestinian spheres of influence) and with Arafat’s enigmatic refusal to counteroffer or otherwise engage in bargaining.75 Although Israeli accounts are not without criticism, as noted above, overall they agree that the Americans made a mighty and respectable effort at Camp David and in the six months afterward. Arafat tried to preserve his relationship with Clinton, even as it became clear that the president’s mediation effort had failed to guide the parties to a final agreement. Arafat, wrote Clinton, “thanked me for all my efforts and told me what a great man I was. ‘Mr. Chairman,’ I replied, ‘I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.’”76 Proposed Terms of Agreement

Although they were hoping to repeat the success of the first Camp David summit, the participants at the second Camp David summit actually had before them a much more daunting agenda. Egypt and Israel successfully turned Camp David’s 1978 “Framework for Egyptian-Israeli Peace” into a bona fide bilateral peace treaty in 1979, but their “Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” which focused on Palestinian issues, fell by the wayside (documents 37, 39). The core Palestinian concerns on the eve of Camp David II—Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, Palestine’s independence and borders, Israeli settlements, and security—were the five “permanent status” issues postponed by the DOP (document 70) until after the

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transitional measures were implemented. If the July 2000 summit were to produce a final peace agreement, negotiators there were going to have to finally tackle and resolve these most difficult of issues. Shibley Telhami warns that any assessment about how much Israel was prepared to relinquish in the West Bank and how much the Palestinians demanded to receive must be viewed within the proper frame of reference. For Israelis, Barak’s readiness to withdraw from significant portions of the West Bank was “generous,” and Arafat’s rejection a sign of his malevolent intentions. But the corresponding Palestinian view is that whatever Israel “gives” to Palestinians in the West Bank it is really giving back, and whatever Israel keeps of the West Bank, the Palestinians are giving up.77 It was from these two sharply divergent perspectives that Israelis and Palestinians sat down at Camp David and attempted to overcome the most combustible obstacles between them. Despite the disagreements over what happened at Camp David II mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, a careful consideration of the available memoirs and interviews of the participants allows us to draw preliminary conclusions about the extent of agreement and disagreement over the terms proposed and discussed.78

Jerusalem Jerusalem (in Arabic, al-Quds) is the complicated “City of Peace” which has rarely known it. The municipal region contains three basic areas: the Old City, which is completely surrounded by a wall; East Jerusalem, predominantly Arab; and West Jerusalem, which is Jewish. Between 1948 and 1967, Jordan controlled the Old City and East Jerusalem, while Israel controlled the newer half of the city to the west. The ancient walled city is divided into four quarters: Muslim, Christian, Armenian, and Jewish. In the 1948 war the Jewish quarter was besieged and then evacuated when the entire Old City fell to the Jordanians. Straddling the Muslim and Jewish quarters is the site of the biblical first and second temples, which were destroyed in 586 bce and 70 ce, respectively; all that remains of the second temple today are the large stones that made up its western wall. The holiest site in Judaism, Jews come to the Western (or Wailing) Wall to pray to God and lament the destruction of the temple. When Jordan controlled the Old City, Jews had no access to the Wall. Directly above the Wailing Wall is a large plateau on which sit the Dome of the Rock, the famous golden domed mosque, and the al-Aqsa mosque, both of which date to the seventh century and constitute the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina. Muslims call the plateau al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), while Jews refer to it as the Temple Mount (see map 10). Discussion about Jerusalem’s fate is thus fraught with great emotion and religious passion as well—as if pragmatic concerns about the security, economy, and sover-

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Walled Old City of Jerusalem

Old City Walls

Muslim Quarter

Temple Mount / Haram al-Sharif

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Dome of the Rock

Christian Quarter Western (Wailing) Wall

Armenian Quarter

al-Aqsa Mosque

Jewish Quarter

N W

E S

0

500

1000 feet

Map 10.

eignty of the city were not difficult enough. The issue transcends direct Palestinian and Israeli concerns, as billions of Muslims, Christians, and Jews around the globe evince concern over the ultimate disposition of the city. Surprisingly, Palestinians and Israelis arrived at Camp David in agreement that Jerusalem would function as two capitals for two states, Israel and Palestine. Israel came to the summit offering

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Palestinians self-rule over most of Arab East Jerusalem, the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City and the Haram al-Sharif, although Israel wished to retain formal sovereignty over the latter. Several times Israel raised the issue of the right of Jews to pray and even build a synagogue on the Temple Mount. In the course of negotiations Israel acceded to Palestinian sovereignty over the Muslim, Armenian, and Christian quarters of the Old City and Arab East Jerusalem and dropped reference to Jewish prayer rights. They refused, however, to concede Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram, which Jews recognize as their biblical Temple Mount. The Palestinians agreed that the Jewish quarter of the Old City, the Wailing Wall, and Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem could come under Israeli sovereignty, but they similarly refused to relinquish their claim for sovereignty over the Haram. The Israelis floated the idea of purposefully ambiguous sovereignty over Jerusalem with shared political administration, but the Palestinians rejected it.79 Another creative, albeit unsuccessful, formulation proposed a shared administration of the Haram/ Temple Mount, with “sovereignty” reserved for God. As Clinton recorded, “There was little difference between the two sides on how the affairs of Jerusalem would actually be handled; it was all about who got to claim sovereignty.”80 By most accounts, sovereignty over Jerusalem—or, more specifically, the Haram/Temple Mount—was the deal breaker.81

Palestinian Refugees and the Right of Return While the parties could envision functional arrangements by which most refugees would “return” to the new Palestinian state, others would accept compensation and settle elsewhere, and a very few would be admitted into Israel under a humanitarian “family reunification plan,” they could not come up with a formula which respected each side’s basic principles. Israel refused to accept sole responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem and rejected any right of return, theoretical or actual. As firm as this position may have appeared, some Israeli critics believe that negotiators may have endangered Israel’s vital interests because they “erred in accepting the very term ‘right of return’ as a legitimate part of the vocabulary used to address the refugee problem.”82 In Israel there remained “a suspicion among the vast majority . . . from left to right, that the Palestinian intention remain[ed] to eradicate the Jewish state using a Trojan horse in the form of the Right of Return.”83 At most, Israel was prepared to express sorrow at the suffering of the refugees and to participate in an international effort to compensate or repatriate the refugees, primarily outside Israel. Recalling that some of the harshest condemnations of Oslo among the Palestinians focused on its relegation of the refugee issue to the back burner, it was understandable that during final-status talks Arafat would want to hold firm on this issue. The Palestinians insisted that Israel accept responsibility for having cre-

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ated the refugee problem and consequent responsibility for resolving it, and that it recognize the inalienable right of all refugees to return to pre-1948 Palestine (Israel proper). Negotiators searching for common ground proposed distinguishing between the right of return in principle and the act of returning in practice.84 Many of the Palestinian villages and homes in Israel had long since been demolished, repopulated, or developed into new projects. Therefore, while the Palestinians still formally held the refugees’ right of return as sacrosanct, negotiators assumed that only a small proportion of the refugee population would actually want to relocate to the State of Israel. Some scholars postulate that it is the symbolism infused within the right of return that makes it, like Jerusalem, such a difficult issue on which to find flexibility. Jonathan Rynhold sees the right of return as not really about numbers as much as a competition between whose “right” is symbolically more compelling: that of the Palestinians to return, or that of Israel to exist.85 Negotiators had to struggle on two levels: the pragmatic, which required a cool-headed calculation of numbers of people and dollars, and the emotional, in which two exclusive drives for legitimization, justice, and responsibility heatedly collided.

Territory, Borders, and Settlements Barak and Arafat came to Camp David believing that the end result would be some kind of militarily limited Palestinian state; its borders on the map, however, were a matter of disagreement. The Palestinians demanded an Israeli withdrawal to the lines of 4 June 1967 and the creation of a Palestinian state in 100 percent of Gaza and the West Bank. During the course of negotiations, however, they accepted the concept of a 1:1 land swap, not to exceed 2.3 percent of the West Bank, to allow Israel to retain up to 30 percent of its settlers in individual settlements connected to Israel by roads and to allow Palestinians a safe passage across Israel, under Palestinian sovereignty, to connect the West Bank and Gaza. Maintaining Palestine’s territorial contiguity was the Palestinians’ guiding principle regarding borders. In the Israeli plan the land corridor between Gaza and the West Bank would be under Palestinian control but Israeli sovereignty. Israel initially offered Palestinians control of 91 percent of the West Bank and aimed to keep 80 percent of the settlements under its sovereignty in large territorial blocs, necessitating annexation to Israel of 9 percent of the West Bank and a corresponding land swap of a 9:1 ratio. Over the course of the negotiations various sources allege that Israel reduced its annexation demands to 6–8 percent of the West Bank, thereby raising its offer to the Palestinians to 92–94 percent of the West Bank. The Palestinian deputy minister of planning, Samih al-Abed, did not find any of the

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percentages so generous to the Palestinians or the demographic result so rational, even from Israel’s point of view. He complained that his American and Israeli negotiating partners at Camp David II “behaved like mathematicians, not statesmen. They were always speaking about percentages of land, without knowing exactly what the effect of their proposals would be on the population on the ground.”86 Often lost in the debate was the fact that the Palestinians were as worried about contiguity as they were about percentages. Shlomo Ben-Ami believes that it was a “major tactical blunder” by Barak to keep changing his red lines, thereby encouraging Arafat to reject each offer and wait for a more attractive one.87 One Israeli commentator agrees that by basing each of his proposals on a changing estimate of what he thought the Palestinians would accept, instead of a firm estimate of what he thought Israel needed to keep, Barak allowed “each successive Palestinian ‘no’ [to lead] to the next best Israeli assessment of what the Palestinians couldn’t turn down.”88 Without a clear Israeli bottom line regarding territorial compromise, there was no reason for the Palestinians to identify any particular offer as the final one. It is on the topic of territory and borders where Palestinians express their deepest disappointment and anger at the United States for what they see as a U.S. failure to respect the terms of UN Resolution 242 and those of its own 18 October 1991 “Letter of Assurances” to the Palestinians, delivered on the eve of the Madrid Conference. The Palestinian reading of Resolution 242 assumes the “all of the territories” interpretation, which implies that the “land for peace” formula applies to the entire West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Old City. The U.S. letter confirms its commitment to 242 and warns that “no party should take unilateral actions” which might serve to prejudge or preempt the outcome of negotiations. Hence Palestinian expectations that the border lines of any territorial settlement should restore close to 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinians (who felt they had already conceded 78 percent of historic Palestine to the state of Israel). In both cases, Palestinians argue, the United States has done nothing to make Israel cease its extensive settlement activity, which was progressively reducing the amount of West Bank territory actually left for Palestinian state-building.89

Security Arrangements Both sides accepted that the Palestinian state would not possess major weapons systems, although Israel pushed for total demilitarization and the Palestinians wanted “a state of limited arms,” the latter suggesting the acceptability of a robust security force. There was also agreement that the IDF would withdraw gradually from the strategic Jordan rift valley (although no time frame was established) and that an international presence could deploy along the newly defined border between

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Palestine and Israel. Israel demanded the retention of several early warning stations in the West Bank, to which the Palestinians agreed in principle while rejecting an Israeli demand for a corresponding network of security roads there and the right of the IDF to enter Palestinian territory and airspace for reasons of security or an Israeli-declared military emergency. Despite (or because of) Arafat’s long-standing but unsuccessful campaign to make Israel enact interim withdrawals it had suspended due to security concerns, by the time the parties reached Camp David the “logic of small, confidence-building steps as the way to reach peace seemed to have exhausted itself.”90 In aiming for a comprehensive “end of conflict” pact, the parties agreed that “nothing was agreed to unless everything was agreed to.” Thus, despite the fact “that the Camp David II Summit narrowed the gap between the two sides more than all the negotiations in the seven years that followed the 1993 Oslo Accords,”91 Camp David II failed. Several observers wondered that if those July talks in the bucolic woods of Maryland had constituted a private, preparatory “pre-negotiation” for an upcoming summit instead of a public, do-or-die summit itself, might the next round of talks have taken the two sides across the slim remaining gaps between them to peace? Or were the parties’ bottom-line positions, particularly on Jerusalem and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, even after the diplomatic exertions at Camp David, simply still irreconcilable? Psychological Factors

“If women leaders had acted the way Arafat and Barak did during Camp David,” observed U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “they would have been dismissed as menopausal.”92 Indeed, the many different Camp David II accounts uniformly describe repeated instances of rudeness, grandstanding, and unhelpful conduct by the two primary protagonists.93 The psychological element at play at Camp David, in terms of the leaders’ bargaining behavior, personal peace convictions, and ability to persuade constituents to give peace a chance, did not bode well for a successful summit. Famous video footage from the first day at Camp David shows Barak and Arafat awkwardly jostling one another as each struggles to propel the other through a doorway and into the room where Clinton awaits. As their smiles harden into grimaces, they begin literally shoving one another, in a pathetic but accurate representation of each side’s fear of going first. In the end Barak prevails and Arafat stumbles in before him. That first day and the last day would be the only two which brought Arafat and Barak face to face. Ben-Ami writes, “It is difficult to imagine a greater incompatibility than that which existed between the Israeli prime minister, an intellectually arrogant and undoubtedly brilliant general who was totally blind

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An awkward moment at Camp David II. © Reuters/CORBIS. Reprinted by permission.

and deaf to cultural nuances and . . . Arafat, a mythological leader who to his last day continued to embody the will of his people, but . . . [who] would only speak in slogans, catchwords [and] Islamic metaphors . . . ; he was . . . elusive, non-committal, [and a] master of double talk.”94 The awkward incompatibility of the two leaders was indeed unfortunate, especially in view of the excellent relations between their respective teams. Clinton was “immensely impressed” with the quality of the delegations, finding them “patriotic, intelligent, and hardworking and they genuinely seemed to want an agreement. Most of them had known each other and their counterparts on the other side for years, and the chemistry between the two groups was quite good.”95 Barak’s natural condescension hampered the talks in a variety of ways. The Palestinians were insulted by his assumption that they would happily sign his peace plan without discussion or negotiation. Because he was convinced that his ideas were so obviously the best, he invested minimal effort in persuading the other side to accept them and entertained minimal consideration of Israeli concessions beyond those he

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had outlined. Convinced that his plan would fly, Barak came to Camp David with no fallback position or exit strategy in case the Palestinians refused his offer—which was inconceivable in Barak’s mind.96 Barak’s absolute self-assuredness also meant he invested minimal effort in persuading the Israeli public of the correctness of his policy, whose logic he found self-evident but which they apparently did not.97 Also contributing to Barak’s inability to keep the Israeli people moving along his peace path was, ironically, the Israeli “generous offer” narrative which he had encouraged; during the post-summit Israeli elections, “Barak began to fall prey to his own spin, looking like a sucker for having made Arafat such a ‘generous offer.’”98 At one point during the Camp David summit Barak’s own team members lectured him on the negative impact of his disrespectful behavior and penchant for dictating, which had insulted and humiliated Arafat and embittered their negotiating counterparts. Yossi Ginossar tried to make Barak stand for a moment in the shoes of the Palestinians, who were feeling, Ginossar believed, defensive and even ganged up upon, especially since the American team was “almost entirely Jewish.”99 Later, when Barak frequently gloated about having “unmasked” Arafat at Camp David, he “cast a shadow on the sincerity of his own (genuine) quest for a definitive agreement”—not only among Palestinians but even among many Israelis.100 Also discrediting Israeli intentions was the accelerated settlement drive taking place during Barak’s tenure, concurrent with the negotiations which the Palestinians believed were supposed to produce an independent Palestinian state in all or most of the West Bank and Gaza. When Barak assumed the premiership in mid1999 there were approximately 175,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza; by the end of 2000 that number had reached 200,000.101 The expansion involved further Israeli seizures of Palestinian land, water, and natural resources and the construction of Jewish-only bypass roads; settlement activity under Barak even surpassed that under Netanyahu.102 Had Barak implemented a settlement freeze instead, Palestinian public opinion might have changed for the better. Palestinian good intentions were similarly undercut by the PA’s apparent retention of “low-level violence,” which it had effectively wielded as a revolutionary movement, even as it attempted to evolve into a “proto-state.”103 Khalidi writes that “the inability of the PLO leadership to understand the limits of violence . . . produced the strategic incoherence that resulted from, on the one hand, accepting a two state solution and renouncing violence in 1988, but not, on the other, drawing the logical conclusion that what was necessary was the reeducation of the Palestinians away from armed struggle and toward a whole new approach of unarmed mass popular struggle.”104 To preserve its credibility at the bargaining table and continue moving toward statehood, the PA would have “to give up violence as a weapon and to move on to the more acceptable weapons of influence among states.” Alan Dowty felt that

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Courtesy of Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post

one of those weapons, “almost entirely unexploited,” was a concerted Palestinian attempt to influence Israeli public opinion. A credible campaign clarifying Palestinian acceptance of a two-state solution, coupled with a cessation of terrorism, might, he believes, have “revolutionize[d] opinion in Israel.”105 Arafat came to Camp David not only under American and Israeli pressure, but also bearing on his shoulders the weight of his own unhappy constituency. As previ-

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ously noted, many Palestinians felt that Arafat had abandoned the millions of refugees who expected him to wring from Israel their right to return to their homes in pre-1948 Palestine. Instead, it appeared to many that the PLO had only “fulfilled its own ‘right of return’ to Palestine under the Oslo Accords, had feathered its nest, and had come to care only for the interests of those under occupation.”106 And even those living under the PLO were not happy with its corrupt administration of the Palestinian Authority. Acutely aware of the ire and unhappiness Oslo had aroused in so many Palestinian circles, Arafat frequently rejected what he saw as unfair proposals at Camp David with the warning that acceptance would lead to his funeral. While the threat was not totally imaginary, the times demanded a leader with the extraordinary courage to embark nevertheless upon a vigorous campaign to reeducate and reassure his people that diplomacy and nonviolent civil disobedience were the only ways to achieve their national aspirations. Referring to his continuing hardline speeches in Arabic, Madeleine Albright lamented that “instead of trying to forge a new Palestinian consensus, he reinforced the old one.”107 If Israel and its U.S. friends were frustrated that Arafat did not seem to be preparing the Palestinian people for the hard choices to come, in Arafat’s view, he had already made the only necessary hard choice and the supreme concession back in 1993, when he recognized Israel and accepted Oslo’s promise of Palestinian statehood alongside the Jewish state. Teetering on that fine line between leading one’s people to embrace new visions and reflecting their hardened historical position, Arafat tipped to the latter and chose not to make further concessions at Camp David. In the assessment of Itamar Rabinovich, “Yasser Arafat failed the test of statesmanship. A statesman is defined by his ability to read correctly the trends of unfolding history, to make the right decision in that light and to build the requisite support [among his constituents] for implementing those decisions.”108 But in a rare defense of Arafat’s decision making, his most merciless Palestinian critic, Edward Said, wrote that “Arafat did the right thing by not signing.”109 Albright writes that at Camp David, Clinton’s “first task was to change Arafat’s psychology.”110 As the previous discussion indicates, however, that may have been an impossible aspiration. Shibley Telhami argues that Clinton was mistaken from the beginning in thinking that only Arafat stood between him and a peace agreement. Clinton thought he sensed that the Palestinian team and Arafat’s closest advisers were satisfied with the deal and anxious to accept it; in his view, Arafat was the only holdout and the one person who could crown Camp David II with success. Albright agreed, later writing that if Arafat had said yes in 2000, “Palestine would now be a member of the UN, its capital in East Jerusalem.”111 Among those in the closed Camp David bubble, the president’s and secretary of state’s reading of Palestinian sentiment may not have been wholly inaccurate, but they, unlike Arafat, failed to take into account Palestinian, Arab, and Islamic public opinion. We have seen this ten-

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Courtesy of Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post

dency for the United States and Israel to downplay the importance of public opinion in non-democratic regimes before. Telhami suggests that, if nothing else, the “depth of feeling evident in the second Intifada exposed the powerful feelings of the Palestinians. The PA was not popular enough to inspire that on its own. If the Palestinians had to choose between a deal without [full sovereignty] in East Jerusalem or no deal, they would pick no deal.”112

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It did not help that neither the Palestinian leader nor the Israeli one were psychologically inclined at the time to listen to one another’s grievances, exchange plans for their resolution, and find a middle ground with which they both could live, literally and figuratively. And even had the spirits of Carter, Sadat, and Begin miraculously moved them to compromise, neither Arafat nor Barak, under severe pressure from significant quarters of their own constituencies not to bend, were in any position to persuade their fractured peoples to follow them into the unknown. Camp David II: Postscripts from Taba

Two related events dominated the period immediately after the conclusion of the Camp David II summit. One was the eruption of a second Palestinian Intifada, with violent Palestinian-Israeli confrontations in the streets of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The other was the continuation of brisk negotiations by the Camp David alumni in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Washington, and Taba, Egypt, in the six months between July 2000 and January 2001. With hindsight it is clear that Camp David II failed, but this failure was not accepted as a fait accompli until several months later. In the immediate aftermath of the summit, Gilead Sher insists that “the failure . . . did not kill hope. On the contrary, the fear that another opportunity would be missed just strengthened our resolve as well as our feeling that we were close—within reach—and that we could not let the effort go.”113 Sher sensed that his Palestinian counterpart, Saeb Erekat, was also “optimistic,”114 as were other members of the Israeli and Palestinian teams. On 25 September 2000 Arafat dined at the home of Barak in the presence of Sher, Erekat, and other Palestinian and Israeli guests, including Abu Mazen, Abu Ala, and Shlomo Ben-Ami. During this evening idyll, Barak and Arafat strolled into the garden “armin-arm, alone. . . . They sat outside for about an hour, speaking in English.”115 Possible new target dates for an agreement were the 13 September 2000 deadline set by the Oslo II agreement for a permanent status agreement, or surely before the departure of the Clinton administration on 20 January 2001. Drawing upon all they had learned in their previous negotiating experiences since Oslo, the peacemakers threw everything they had into the frantic post–Camp David II effort. Decoy public talks were staged to distract the press while at the same time some forty to fifty secret meetings, primarily organized by Erekat and Sher, took place between July and September through more “discreet channels.”116 At one point Sher and Erekat “spent time combing the neighborhoods of Jerusalem on foot. With the help of aerial maps, they made a determined effort to understand how the parameters of peace would look from the ground.”117 Multiple third parties were also drawn into the mix, among them Egypt, Jordan, and France.118 And even though some of the participants agreed that “one benefit of not having American involvement in the exchanges be-

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tween Israel and the Palestinians was that it led to more candor—there was no need to posture for the Americans,”119 the enormity of the task before them and the violent interruption of their talks by the Intifada sent both sides in search of renewed U.S. diplomacy. The second Intifada began on 29 September 2000, four days after Arafat and Barak’s charming garden tête-à-tête. On the previous day Likud leader Ariel Sharon, controversial among Israelis and loathed by Palestinians, had visited Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, accompanied by hundreds of Israeli police.120 Posturing for domestic consumption, Sharon wanted to demonstrate his commitment to keeping all of Jerusalem in Israeli hands. He may have been aiming his message at his Likud rival Benjamin Netanyahu, but Palestinians had no trouble reading it as well. The next day angry Palestinians rioted at the site of the al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques, clashing with Israeli police and sparking violent demonstrations throughout Jerusalem and in the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli troops responded with live fire. Seven years into the Oslo peace process, this second Intifada came as a “‘seismic shock’. Such widespread violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli forces seemed like ghosts from the past, wildly incongruent when 98 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza . . . no longer lived under direct Israeli occupation.”121 Dueling narratives quickly emerged: Israelis insisted that Arafat had orchestrated the violence, proving there was no Palestinian peace partner after all; Palestinians insisted that it was a spontaneous outbreak of legitimate rage and frustration. Arafat chose to “ride the wave,”122 which was, ironically, “as much a revolt against Arafat and the PA as it was against Israel and the farce of Oslo.”123 Two televised events came to symbolize the Intifada for Palestinians and Israelis. For Palestinians it was the death of a petrified young boy, Muhammad al-Dura, as he sheltered in his father’s arms in the crossfire of an Israeli-Palestinian shootout; for Israelis it was the lynching shortly afterward of two Israeli soldiers by a crowd in Ramallah, and the bloody hands of a beaming Palestinian in the window of the room where the soldiers were killed.124 Truly, “each side could see now only what was worst in the other.”125 After a failed attempt by France to broker a cease-fire,126 Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak hosted Clinton, Barak, Arafat, and Jordan’s King Abdallah II in Sharm al-Sheikh on 16 October 2000, where a fragile truce was adopted (document 96).127 Serious Palestinian-Israeli peace talks resumed even as the Intifada bloodshed persisted. Barak’s 10 December resignation did not stop him from authorizing the continued negotiations, even in his diminished capacity as caretaker prime minister. The opposition denounced the talks as “immoral,” on the grounds that Barak had neither governmental approval nor a popular mandate for them.128 Barak may have been gambling for reelection by producing that peace rabbit from his hat at the very last minute. But the Intifada had already convinced many Israelis that there was

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no Palestinian partner for peace. As for Arafat, “in some ways the Intifada seemed to have strengthened his shaky position, but it had also radicalized popular opinion and weakened support for the idea of peace with Israel.”129 From 19–23 December, high-ranking Palestinian and Israeli delegations met at Bolling Airforce Base, whose proximity to Washington allowed for regular American mediation.130 On the last day Clinton upped the third-party ante when he called the delegations together into the Cabinet room off the Oval Office so he could read aloud to them his “Parameters,” also known as the Clinton Bridging Proposals (document 97).131 This was “not a U.S. proposal,” he emphasized, only his own best personal understanding of where the parties stood and where they might find common ground. He made it clear that his plan would depart with him when he left office in twenty-four days’ time. Dennis Ross observed that the president was “breaking new ground. The United States, even at Camp David, had never adopted a position on all the final status issues. To go on record with firm positions on all the core issues was a historic step.”132 Clinton asked that the two sides accept or reject his non-negotiable Parameters within four days, later writing in his memoirs, “It was time—past time—to put up or shut up.”133 The president recommended the establishment of a Palestinian state in 94–96 percent of the West Bank, along with a land swap of another 1–3 percent which would enhance Palestinian contiguity and create a safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank; Israel would annex a bloc including 80 percent of the settlers. The security solution called for a phased Israeli withdrawal over three years and the insertion of an international force to safeguard Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security. Clinton suggested Palestine be a “non-militarized state” with a strong security force. For Jerusalem the president suggested the principle that what was Arab should become Palestinian and what was Jewish should be Israeli, within the Old City and without, allowing Jerusalem/al-Quds to function as the capital of each state. For the highly sensitive issue of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount and the Western Wall, Clinton proposed Palestinian sovereignty over the former, Israeli sovereignty over the latter, and a mutual agreement as to any excavation in the contested area below the Haram and behind the Wall. Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to the area of historic Palestine: this could mean either to the new State of Palestine, to areas in Israel transferred to Palestine in the land swap, or in a very few cases, and solely as determined by Israel, to Israel itself. Other options were rehabilitation in their host countries or resettlement in third countries, to be facilitated by an international fund. Barak’s cabinet accepted the Parameters, with several reservations, on 27 December; Arafat asked many questions. Clinton tried to increase third-party pressure on him by “calling other Arab leaders daily to urge them to put pressure on Arafat to say yes.” His sense was that “they were all impressed with Israel’s acceptance and

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told me they believed Arafat should take the deal.”134 When he didn’t hear from Arafat he invited him for a last meeting in the White House. There Clinton even introduced a new timing imperative, warning Arafat that his administration was also near a deal with North Korea to end its long-range missile production and that Clinton could not manage two major agreements simultaneously in his last weeks in office, leaving it to Arafat to decide which would it be, the Middle East or Korea.135 The president found the Palestinian leader “confused [and] not wholly in command of facts,” confirming Clinton’s feeling “for some time that he might not be at the top of his game any longer.”136 Arafat departed, leaving Clinton still unsure as to what his answer might be, although in Clinton’s estimation “the deal was so good I couldn’t believe he would be foolish enough to let it go.”137 On 1 January 2001 the Palestinian team made public the nature of their concerns with the shortcomings of Clinton’s plan (document 98); but in the end the president concluded that although “Arafat never said no, he just couldn’t bring himself to say yes.”138 Others, however, see evidence of an admittedly tardy but nonetheless qualified acceptance by the Palestinians of the Clinton Parameters.139 In spite of Arafat’s equivocation, he allowed his negotiators to participate in a feverish spate of fresh negotiations under the leadership of Abu Ala.140 Although Clinton had packed up his Parameters and gone, Israelis and Palestinians spent the first week of George W. Bush’s administration in Taba, Egypt, locked in marathon talks based squarely on Clinton’s proposal.141 Ben-Ami, who led the Israeli team, observed that “with the new American administration almost demonstratively uninterested in, and indifferent to, the talks, the parties were denied the bait and the incentives that a robust American involvement could offer, but they were also free from the cumbersome negotiation through a third party.”142 Yossi Beilin agreed: “You do nothing ‘for the Americans,’ you cannot decide in your heart to say no for the sake of the negotiations, and wait to be ‘persuaded’ by the Americans. If you agree, you agree—and if you refuse, you refuse. . . . The moment of truth is much more tangible, and crucially, more exposed.”143 The negotiators specifically chose to leave no written record of what was proposed, accepted, or rejected at Taba, but Miguel Moratinos, Middle East emissary of the European Union, was there and spoke in detail with both Palestinian and Israeli participants.144 Importantly, neither side has challenged the accuracy of his summary report, which comes closest to an official Taba account (document 101).145 According to Moratinos and subsequent analyses, Taba anticipated an independent Palestinian state of limited arms in all of Gaza and up to 97 percent of the West Bank,146 plus a land swap to accommodate most of the settlers and Palestine’s contiguity, although no agreement was reached over the proportionality of the swap and the Israeli demand to retain certain settlement blocs (see map 11). The ques-

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Israeli Proposals for Palestinian Sovereignty in the West Bank, 2000 -2001

PALESTINE

PALESTINE

Jerusalem

Jerusalem

PALESTINE

Jerusalem

ISRAEL

ISRAEL

ISRAEL

Camp David Proposal

Bolling AFB Proposal

Taba Proposal

July 2000

December 2000

January 2001

Palestinian sovereignty

Israeli sovereignty

Land leased by Palestine to Israel

Israeli territory offered as part of a land swap

Map 11.

tion of sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount also remained without resolution, but negotiators agreed that Jerusalem/al-Quds could serve as the capital of two states and that Palestine and Israel would assume control over the Arab and Jewish parts of Jerusalem, respectively. Security issues included anti-terror cooperation.147 According to Beilin, a formula based upon Israel’s acceptance of a symbolic number of refugees was achieved, although other participants suggested otherwise.148 After the parties departed from Taba, many reports suggested that they had come closer to an agreement than ever before, and with a little more time might have achieved a final accord.149 The joint press statement at the conclusion of the Taba talks read, in part, “The sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps can be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli elections.”150 During his interviews with Taba negotiators, dispute resolution expert David Matz asked: “If you had four more days in which to negotiate, could you have reached agreement on your topic?” The answer was almost uniformly positive.151 By the end of the Taba talks, the Israeli and Palestinian publics each believed the other side had been too rigid, and worried their side had been ready to concede too

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much. Some Israelis were relieved that Taba ended without agreement, some were disappointed, and “much of the Israeli public was simply astonished by the Palestinian refusal” to accept what they understood to have been Israel’s most generous offer ever.152 The Palestinian team returned home to accolades for having steadfastly held to its red lines. Some were inclined to see the Taba cup as half-full (so close!) and others saw it as half-empty (if not now, then never). But no matter how much progress had been made, Camp David II and Taba failed to produce the expected next stepping-stone toward Palestinian-Israeli peace. David Matz argues that history will vindicate this set of negotiations: “In the same way that Palestinian concessions at Oslo, Israeli concessions around and after Camp David II, and President Clinton’s guidelines will be seen in the view of history as the largest steps toward finding the acceptable ground for agreement, Taba will be seen as the occasion on which the negotiators demonstrated that an agreement between them was, probably, reachable.”153 Gilead Sher and others wonder if the end of this story might have been a happy one had Clinton presented his Parameters at, or right after, Camp David.154 Quandt takes a more measured position, but writes that Clinton’s plan “provided a serious and substantive framework for eventual negotiations. . . . Whenever negotiations do resume they are likely to build on the forward positions explored by Clinton in his last year of hyperactive involvement in the peace process.”155

Conclusion Peace as a Process

Peace is never made but is always in the making. Like other human relationships, peace must be constantly tended, nurtured and developed. —Harold Saunders, Senior U.S. State Department official

One of the most misused phrases in the lexicon of the Arab-Israeli conflict is “peace process.” For years it has been used to describe every non-battlefield encounter between the two sides and every American foray into Arab-Israeli affairs, regardless of purpose or outcome. But was “peace” really the common objective? And how often was a “process”—a series of actions or operations leading toward a particular result—really under way? Our case studies suggest answers to those questions. We believe the Arab-Israeli peace process began with Egyptian president Sadat’s 1977 trip to Jerusalem. Supporters of the Egypt-Israel Camp David Accords see this as the first step on a decades-long journey that eventually led to Madrid, Oslo, and Israeli-Jordanian peace. Detractors dismiss Camp David as a one-time aberration whose Sinai-for-peace formula did not apply to other Arab-Israeli fronts. These skeptics point out that neither the Golan nor the West Bank offers a comparably large and unpopulated buffer zone as did the Sinai Peninsula, and that the West Bank and Jerusalem have the additional problem of being religiously significant in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian history and therefore more symbolically and politically sensitive than vast acres of Sinai sand. Other critiques have come from both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide. Writing in 1988, ten years after Camp David I but in the absence of any subsequent diplomatic accomplishments, Irving Kristol insisted that “there really is no such thing as a Middle East peace process. What there is, and has been since 1973, is a cold war between Israel and the Arabs, interrupted occasionally by bursts of violence.”1 After another decade of diplomatic activity coupled with continued struggle and blood-

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Courtesy of John Cole, The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.

shed, Edward Said referred bitterly to “the wanton murder of language evident in the phrase ‘peace process.’”2 Such cynicism is understandable. The Camp David Accords were a genuine breakÂ�through, but not the precursor to expected quick follow-up agreements between Israel and other Arab actors. And despite the poignant accuracy of such cynical observations when viewed through a post-Intifada (2000) and post-9/11 lens, for several years following 1991 events did indicate a real, albeit halting, momentum toward diplomatic resolution. At Madrid, leaders—like Sadat before them, but lacking his zeal—began to diverge cautiously from the negative historical pattern. After Madrid, practitioners and pundits could speak with some confidence of a genuine, working peace process. That tumultuous decade of diplomatic highs and lows ended in 2000 with the collapse of Camp David II and the eruption of the second Intifada. Our review of eight cases reveals the extent to which all subsequent peacemaking efforts have been compared with Camp David I and suggests two aspects that characterized most of them: ambiguity and gradualism. Ambiguity

Sometimes, in the name of building confidence or maintaining momentum, negotiators agree to disagree or otherwise fudge remaining disagreements on some

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matters so as not to derail limited or emerging consensus on others. UNSC Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967 was a masterful exercise in constructive ambiguity (document 19). With its missing “the,” possibly contradictory calls for both the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” and “the right of every state in the area . . . to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries,” and no mention of the Palestinians or Jerusalem, Resolution 242 passed unanimously in the Security Council and succeeded in eventually winning the reluctant approval of all the combatants, who could read into it what they wanted to see.3 The Camp David Accords similarly resorted to euphemisms or coded expressions, such as “the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza” (employed nine times), which everyone understood to be the “Palestinians” (used only four times), but which allowed Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to avoid recognizing a “Palestinian people.” Camp David’s treatment of Jerusalem provides an excellent example of an “agreement to disagree.” Appended to the accord without commentary are letters from Sadat and Begin; Sadat reaffirms the Egyptian position that the Arab portions of Jerusalem must be under Arab sovereignty and Begin clarifies that by Israeli law, Jerusalem is the indivisible capital of Israel. These dodges kept the unresolved issues from obstructing progress in areas where there was consensus, resulting in the successful Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of March 1979. U.S. president George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker similarly relied upon what William Quandt has called “constructive obfuscation”4 in the careful drafting of the invitation to the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference and the accompanying Letters of Assurances. By emphasizing what each party wanted to hear and either omitting the more contentious elements or couching them in vague phrases, Baker allowed parties with disparate views of what a just peace (and a just peace process) should look like to interpret the documents in ways that justified their attendance at Madrid. In Oslo, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators encountered both the opportunities and the pitfalls historically associated with deliberately ambiguous language. The DOP endorsed the premise of Israel and the Palestinians partitioning the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Ambiguity in this case concerned the final parameters of a settlement. It was no secret that the Palestinians’ ultimate goal was an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and all of the West Bank, with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel’s declared goal, on the other hand, was coexistence with a less-than-sovereign Palestinian entity in Gaza and most of the West Bank, with united Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel. From the moment the DOP was announced, Rabin and Arafat proceeded to regale their followers with conflicting assertions as to the inviolability of unified Jerusalem as Israel’s capital versus the destiny of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.5

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Courtesy of Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post

Postponing a decision on Jerusalem and accepting uncertainty as to what its fate might be made it possible for the dueling leaders to approve and proceed with the broad accord. Jerusalem’s unresolved status, however, proved a lethal obstruction in later stages of the overburdened Oslo process. Can two parties espouse such radically contradictory goals and still advance the peace process? Is it not dangerous for ambiguity to permit each side to believe that

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the agreements between them will eventually satisfy its full demands? An optimistic answer to these questions is that popular support, the passage of time, and a successful trial run at coexistence might produce revised demands that allow for more common ground than do current positions. A pessimistic interpretation suggests that such ambiguity permits unrealizable expectations to fester, and that sooner or later the process will implode when the signed accord is shown merely to have papered over an unbridgeable chasm. For all of Oslo’s successes in breaking taboos, its collapse in late 2000 provides proof of the danger of relying on ambiguity where irreconcilable goals still prevail. Gradualism

Gradualism refers to a phased process by which warring parties resolve the simpler and more immediate of their problems and, by demonstrating their ability to follow through with their obligations, build up the trust required for tackling the most sensitive issues. Gradualism can apply to the resolution of the entire ArabIsraeli conflict or to the resolution of one of its component parts. Camp David I was designed to comprise the first step (Egyptian-Israeli peace) in what its architects hoped would be a process leading to successive Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli peace treaties, culminating in the resolution of the entire conflict. The Camp David Accords themselves adopted a gradualist strategy: in September 1978 the two sides agreed to two frameworks, one for peace in the Middle East and one for an Egyptian-Israeli peace. The former, never implemented, represented the vision of a comprehensive Arab-Palestinian-Israeli peace, emergent at the end of a series of interim agreements. The latter, actualized in March 1979 with the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, was itself a microcosm of the gradualist approach. In the months following the signing of their treaty, Egypt increased the level of its diplomatic relations with Israel in increments pegged to Israel’s staged withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. It was not until April 1982, three years after the treaty went into effect, that Israel returned the last grain of sand to Egypt, Cairo posted a full-fledged ambassador to its new embassy in Tel Aviv, and an Israeli ambassador set up shop in Egypt. Since 1967 Israel had expressed a preference for a “gradualist” or step-by-step conception of peacemaking, as opposed to a comprehensive approach. This reflected Israel’s deep suspicion that any Arab peace offer might be only a ploy to weaken Israel for a later attack. Oslo’s gradualist structure assuaged these Israeli suspicions and Yitzhak Rabin’s personal concerns about Palestinian reliability. Morton Deutsch explains that conflicting parties departing from a long-standing zero-sum mentality “must have confidence that if a mutually accepted agreement is concluded, both will abide by it or that violations will be detected before the losses to the self and the gains to the other become intolerable” or irreversible.6 The Palestinian pref-

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erence was for a comprehensive agreement that would result in a complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and immediate Palestinian independence; grudgingly, they might have agreed to a gradual implementation over the course of months, not years. As the more powerful party and, more important, the one in possession of the contested land, however, Israel set the negotiation pace to suit its own preference for cautious gradualism. Israel could point to the long-term success of Camp David I in making a persuasive case in favor of pursuing other Arab-Israeli peace initiatives through a series of interim agreements rather than seeking one grand comprehensive solution. Despite the fashion among academics to deride Camp David’s narrow bilateral accomplishments (a cold Egyptian-Israeli peace) and lament its larger shortcomings (rejection by all other Arab parties), the Egyptian-Israeli agreement nevertheless stands as the first concrete evidence that peace between Arabs and Israelis is possible and that, when mutual national interests favor calm over conflict, an Arab-Israeli treaty can even withstand substantial crises. Zeev Maoz also rebukes the naysayers by pointing out, “The lack of a ‘warm peace’ between Israel and Egypt and [later] Israel and Jordan is a symptom of the failure to solve the Palestinian problem, but does not represent a strategic problem. Cold peace is a typical Middle East practice, even among Arab states.”7 The successful Camp David Accords might be the nominal foundation of later agreements, but they did not prove to be a patented formula easily applied to other negotiations. Deriving from the context of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Reagan Plan of 1982 enunciated concrete suggestions for implementing the unfinished Palestinian agenda contained in Camp David, which the president explicitly mentioned seven times. His emissary, Philip Habib, declared the Reagan Plan a “valid sequel” to Camp David, which offered Jordan, the Palestinians, and even Syria entrée into the peace process begun by Israel and Egypt, without requiring them to retroactively endorse Camp David.8 Observing that sometimes “nothing fails like success,” Robert Gromoll contends that Begin erred in 1983 by trying to impose his version of a prefabricated Camp David–like formula on a uniquely Lebanese situation.9 In pressuring Bashir Gemayel to follow in Sadat’s footsteps and in demanding of him, and later of his brother Amin, the conclusion of a separate and open peace treaty with Israel, Begin ignored the reality that weak, factionalized Lebanon was not Egypt, leader of the Arab world, and that neither Gemayel brother ever commanded the kind of control over his country and countrymen that Sadat did. In the end, the Egyptian-Israeli accords survived Arab wrath, Sadat’s assassination, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, and decades of other crises, whereas the 1983 Lebanese-Israeli agreement folded as soon as the United States departed and Syria flexed its reconditioned muscles. The day after the 17 May Agreement was signed,

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the Damascus daily al-Ba’th characterized it as an “instrument of surrender” and accurately prophesied that “this document which, at best, is an even worse version of Camp David, will be no more than a scrap of paper and a catalogue of delusive dreams for Israel’s henchmen to hang on the walls of their homes.”10 Stalled in the 1980s, the peace process was revived in the 1990s by the parlay in Madrid, which perpetuated the gradualist norm. Harkening back to the Camp David model, the Madrid planners envisioned a series of interdependent relationships and multiple levels of conflict-resolution, sequentially timed to allow for confidence-building measures along the way. Madrid’s architects envisioned the brief conference as the jumping-off point for further bilateral and multilateral negotiations, the successful ones of which would build upon one another, while failure in any one set would not derail movement elsewhere. The Jordan-Israel peace, unfolding in its four consecutive agreements, followed the Madrid prescription beautifully. Oslo was an indirect product of the Madrid process and a response to the stymied Palestinian-Israeli talks in Washington. The utter lack of trust between the PLO and Israel and the depth of their enmity seemed to dictate against a single all-encompassing solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The September 1993 Declaration of Principles adopted the classic step-by-step approach to peacemaking in which a problem is broken down into “negotiable pieces” involving partial agreements that “build confidence and . . . change the political environment.”11 But in this case, confidence was not forthcoming. Critics charge that “Oslo was designed to function under the sterile conditions of a laboratory, not in real life, for it assumed that trust could be built between the occupied and the occupier.”12 Aaron Miller writes in defense of gradualism that the Arab-Israeli conflict “evolved in phases over time. Given its complexities, it’s likely it will be resolved in phases over time. . . . There’s no such thing as the quick fix in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. There is simply long and longer.”13 Abba Eban similarly observed, “When descending to earth from an exceptionally tall ladder, it is often prudent to use the intervening rungs, rather than seek posthumous glory by a single leap.”14 But there are those who argue that the ladder has broken and the peacemakers are in free fall. Impatient to see Israel-PLO agreements produce definitive results, both Israelis craving regional acceptance and an end to terror attacks and Palestinians desperate for full and immediate independence in a settler-free West Bank and Gaza have found the merits of this incremental approach unconvincing. Rashid Khalidi is blistering in his attack on the gradualism that began with Madrid and led to the Oslo Accords and subsequent Palestinian-Israeli agreements because they effectively postponed decisions on the final-status issues most important to the Palestinians. Noting the increase in Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza

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in the years since Oslo, he finds the Palestinians in the “absurd situation [of] being restrained from negotiating for an end to Israel’s occupation while Israel reinforced it.”15 He argues that the problem with the Madrid invitation and letters was not so much their ambiguity as the failure of the United States to enforce their points of specificity, namely that no party should undertake unilateral actions which might preempt the outcome of negotiations, and that the process should result in the end of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. According to Khalidi, not only did the interim periods between Oslo agreements not build trust; they resulted instead in “the hardening of Israel’s occupation regime, and a considerable expansion of its illegal settlements.”16 The likelihood of a viable Palestinian state, concludes Khalidi, seems increasingly remote. Oslo’s architects banked their agreement on their belief that, once the parties demonstrated to one another their ability to faithfully uphold their interim agreements, subsequent negotiations would find both sides better prepared to reconsider their previous positions, thereby unblocking the route to the final resolution of the conflict. Sadly, those interim agreements were often delayed, ignored, unevenly observed, or carried out with such rancor that the passage of time served to toughen positions post-Oslo rather than soften them. Insincere motives suggest themselves as an explanation for this unhappy phenomenon. In that case, perhaps the problem lay not so much with the adoption of a gradualist model of peacemaking as with leaders’ dubious intentions and the lack of a mechanism to penalize parties for noncompliance. Breaking the Patterns

The short list of successfully negotiated agreements since 1977 demonstrates changes in virtually all of the seven elements—previous experience interacting, dubious purposes and ulterior motives, timing difficulties, the problematic status of negotiating partners, generally negative third-party involvement, a gulf between proposed terms of agreement, and psychological obstacles—of our model of failed peacemaking. Some of these changes were more far-reaching than others, but by the close of the twentieth century Arab-Israel diplomacy had several times deviated dramatically from the earlier patterns of futile negotiations in a number of ways, including: •

• •

Parties coming together with the genuine intention of resolving their conflict Parties recognizing and negotiating with one another’s chosen leadership Parties scaling back their minimum demands from a zero-sum to a mutual-accommodation approach

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•

Parties looking to third-party mediators to facilitate or underwrite a compromise rather than impose a unilateral solution A growing perception among Arabs, Israelis, and Palestinians that coexistence and peace are possible and worthy of risks and sacrifices

But just as peace is always in the making, so too is deviation from complex negative historical patterns a subtle and ever-incomplete affair. Regressions are likely and clear-cut departures from the hostile status quo are relatively rare. As with the conflict itself, efforts at resolving it will be long-lived. In returning to the elements of our framework for analysis, we can begin to assess their relative importance and degree of difficulty for future negotiations. Previous Negotiating Experience

The wealth (or dearth) of experience interacting together appears to be the least influential of the elements in determining the outcome of negotiations. Extensive contacts, whether secret or open, and even positive, could not guarantee affirmative results at the bargaining table, as in Israeli-Lebanese and Israeli-Jordanian negotiations in 1983 and 1987. Our findings thus caution against expecting the increase in the volume of direct Arab-Israeli talks since Madrid to enhance the prospects for peace. Although decades of purposeful avoidance did not obstruct agreement once Israel and the PLO finally decided to recognize one another in Oslo in 1993, the ragged and uneven unfolding of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process post-Oslo certainly contributed to the negative environment and outcome of subsequent Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Many of the individual Arab and Israeli negotiators who spent hundreds of hours in each another’s company developed genuine respect for one another and forged personal friendships but, as will be discussed below, they were unable to transfer those positive feelings to the masses back home or draw upon them to find common ground with respect to hot-button topics like refugees, settlements, and Jerusalem. Purposes and Motives

Given that “political leaders are supposed to protect the public interest, [which] demands nothing if not elimination of the death and destruction caused by war between nations,” Barbara Kellerman wonders “why political leaders have generally failed to carry out this fundamental charge.”17 As our case studies have demonstrated, leaders sanction negotiations and make decisions ostensibly in the pursuit of peace, but often with other purposes in mind, such as preserving their own power, enhancing their countries’ positions vis-à-vis others in anticipation of future

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combat, winning superpower support, or denying gratification of their opponents’ goals.18 The Lebanon-Israel Agreement of 17 May 1983 constituted a perfect example of the old dubious-purposes, ulterior-motives charade. The traditional desire for thirdparty (American) approval and tangible rewards also figured as persuasive incentives in bringing the various parties together at the 1991 Madrid Conference. Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir scarcely disguised their ulterior motives for attending, took their seats at the table, but once there, resisted all pressures to move beyond minimum correct formalities. But those actors willing to take risks with the genuine aim of resolving their differences ended up taking advantage of the Madrid mechanism and momentum. Jordan under Hussein and Israel under Rabin followed through to their 1994 peace treaty, while the Palestinians/PLO and Israel finally emerged from recurrent deadlocks with the DOP and its offshoots. Given the long history of mutual antagonism and official boycott, the apparent shift in Palestinian and Israeli purposes and motives was nothing short of revolutionary. Nevertheless, the DOP and its sister agreements suffered because significant constituencies on each side remained suspicious of the other’s true intentions. And many of those initially ready to believe that the enemy had indeed had a change of heart grew skeptical as the Oslo process failed to produce the anticipated peace. But even assuming that Palestinians and Israelis entered into negotiations with the genuine goal of reaching a mutually acceptable solution with the general contours of Palestinian statehood, security for Israel, and peaceful coexistence, and even assuming that Israelis and Syrians came together at Shepherdstown for the purpose of hammering out a Golan-for-peace swap, our review of multiple negotiating episodes reveals that the devil is in the details, and that the terms of agreement themselves became formidable obstacles, not easily surmounted even when the interlocutors’ motives for cooperation were genuine. Good intentions are a great and much-needed improvement over past behavior but cannot, by themselves, resolve the conflict. Timing

Timing emerges as something of a wild-card factor in the launching and outcome of diplomatic initiatives. Encompassing as it does the unpredictable actions of lone fanatics and unstable rulers in the global community, timing is undoubtedly the least controllable of all the elements in our analytical framework. The complexity and longevity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict left many fearing that a propitious moment for a negotiated settlement might never materialize. Some worried that

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Oslo arrived too late, that the Israeli settlements and their supporters had passed a point of no return, and that Hamas would make Arafat obsolete. Others bemoaned the impression that the agreement was announced prematurely, before the negotiators had resolved all the details, thus squandering the euphoria so soon with contentious post-handshake wrangling. In launching their daring diplomacy when they did, Rabin and Arafat exhibited a classic timing impulse taken directly from the historical record. Like Sadat and Begin before them, they chose to enter into direct negotiations in order to circumvent imminent threats coming from elsewhere. For Sadat and Begin that was the U.S.Soviet intention to convene a new Geneva conference in late 1977. Rabin and Arafat responded to the deteriorating Palestinian-Israeli talks in Washington in mid-1993 and the rising popularity of Hamas. The timing of other encounters was in varying degrees a byproduct of wars, such as the 1983 Israel-Lebanon Agreement which followed Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the Madrid Conference and Jordanian-Israeli peace accord which came in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. Further timing examples include the impact of electoral cycles and the perceived weakening or strengthening of various leaders. Such was the case for the 1987 London Document, when Peres had to leave the premiership for the foreign ministry; the initial PLO-Israeli reconciliation, which saw Arafat trying to outrun Hamas, and Rabin replacing Shamir’s status-quo agenda with his own favoring peace; and the Syrian-Israeli talks in the shadow of Barak’s slipping political fortunes and Asad’s declining health. Sometimes negotiators simply ran out of time, with the departure from the scene of leaders like Rabin, Asad, and Clinton. In the latter case, Clinton’s last-minute “Parameters” couldn’t close the deal before his presidency ended, although they did help the protagonists narrow the remaining gaps further at Taba. The notion of having been so close speaks to the often romanticized missed opportunity of a time past. Shlomo Ben-Ami regrets that local Palestinians did not come forward (or were not deputized by the PLO) to “seize the opportunity . . . for a transitional autonomy” during the years 1979–1982, opining that it was “a capital sin that the Palestinians should have rejected such a golden opportunity to join the Camp David process at a time when the West Bank was still practically free of Israeli settlements.”19 Shimon Peres laments the hundreds of first Intifada deaths which he believed his London Document could have avoided. An opportunity is missed, however, only if a party could have chosen to act and did not. Other than timing, our framework elements usually explain why the party that passed up an opportunity felt it had no other choice but to do so. We must also reconsider the familiar notion of time as healer. Writing in 1978, John Stoessinger observed that “when people of good will despair of finding a solu-

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tion, they tend to find solace in time as the great healer of wounds.” But, he cautions, this confidence in the power of time “has not been warranted by the experience of the [many] wars between the Arab states and Israel.”20 Thirty-some years later it is clear that Stoessinger was correct to argue that the passage of time had not served to diminish the conflict. Yet sometimes the passage of time is required to allow protagonists to slowly assimilate the necessity of ideas previously rejected out of hand. We have seen this just within the context of preparing the second edition of this text twelve years after the publication of the first. In concluding our original study in 1998, we noted that the Israeli position on Palestinian self-determination was that it be something less than full sovereignty. In 2010, Israeli parties of both the right and the left were assuming “the inevitability of a Palestinian state.”21 Similarly, time may enhance progress toward peace to the extent that “conflict fatigue” sets in among leaders and significant portions of their people. The constant and cumulative drain of protracted strife has the power to exhaust protagonists on both sides and leave them with no options more attractive than compromise. The ever-quotable Abba Eban may have put it best when he observed in 1978: “My experience teaches me that men and nations do behave wisely, once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.”22 Status of the Negotiators

Our analysis reveals the status of the negotiator as one of the most critical elements in influencing an initiative’s success or failure. The best-intentioned of negotiators may shatter precedents in terms of motivation, flexibility, and psychological reorientation, but if he cannot persuade his peers and people to follow him down his chosen path, his signature on a dotted line is worthless. The archives of pre-1948 Zionist diplomacy contain dozens of such agreements. Amin Gemayel’s tenuous and fragile position greatly contributed to the futility of the 1983 Israeli-Lebanese accord. Because he was jockeying for position within a tense coalition government, Shimon Peres was similarly unable to operationalize the document drafted during his 1987 negotiations with King Hussein. Alternatively, leaders firmly and formally in power have been able to implement agreements despite opposition from domestic or regional rivals and hesitancy on the part of their people, as with Camp David I, the 1994 Israel-Jordan Treaty, and portions of the DOP and its successor agreements. Status-of-the-negotiator issues figured prominently in the fledgling IsraeliPalestinian rapprochement. Ironically, it was the Shamir government’s insistence upon the non-PLO status of the Palestinian delegates at Madrid that eventually led the frustrated Rabin government to seek out genuine PLO leadership. The world watched in amazement as the iconic leader of the Palestinians and a popular and

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cautious Israeli prime minister shook hands and announced the termination of the conflict between their peoples. The fact that their mutual recognition declarations bore the signatures of negotiators of the highest possible stature sent hopes soaring for the successful conclusion of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But even then the status of these most senior and accepted leaders was not enough to propel agreements from one benchmark moment to the next. Similarly, the legitimacy and personal attention of both Hafez al-Asad and Ehud Barak were insufficient to produce an accord, let alone sign it and sell it back home. The most debilitating status-of-negotiator factors on the Israeli side have been the rapidity with which prime ministers come and go and the wide political pendulum swings from one to the next. The inability of Israeli prime ministers to carry out a full four-year term in office “was due to the simplest of reasons: they lost the public’s faith and the ability to govern.”23 This also made it difficult for Arab interlocutors to enter negotiations with confidence that their Israeli counterparts could see their plans through to completion. The weak staying power of Israeli prime ministers is not a new phenomenon. Looking back in 2008, Aaron Miller calculated that since 1948 Israel had had thirty-one governments, only two of which served full four-year terms; the average term was 1.86 years.24 Despite his preeminent triple status as PLO chairman, Fatah leader, and Palestinian Authority president, Arafat’s capability to carry out existing agreements and forge ahead with the next round was undermined by radical Islamic opposition and dissent from secular activists and intellectuals disenchanted with his leadership. Hamas refused to legitimize his relationship with Israel and Oslo’s acceptance of Israel’s right to exist. Other opponents rejected the nepotism and mismanagement that characterized his stewardship. Writing in 2001, Edward Said fumed, Arafat is finished; why don’t we admit that he can neither lead, nor plan, nor do anything that makes any difference except to him and his Oslo cronies who have benefited materially from their people’s misery? All the polls show that his presence blocks whatever forward movement might be possible. . . . A leader must lead the resistance, reflect the realities on the ground, respond to his people’s needs, plan, think, and expose himself to the same dangers and difficulties that everyone experiences.25

Unfortunately, Arafat was too weak to steer Oslo toward Palestinian statehood, but he was strong enough to beat back all challenges to his leadership. Both Abu Ala and Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) of Oslo fame “failed miserably in 2003 to impose themselves against Arafat’s will in the newly created post of prime minister.” Arafat was similarly successful in crushing an open challenge to his leadership in the summer of 2004 by Muhammad Dahlan.26

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Courtesy of Emad Hajjaj, Al-Ghad

Compounding Arafat’s difficulties of exercising political power commensurate with his titular status was the fitful ambivalence inherent in Israel’s stance toward him. Rabin’s recognition catapulted the Palestinian leader to a higher level of legitimacy than he had ever commanded before. Abu Ala reported with satisfaction that “mutual recognition initiated an important change in the status of the PLO in the international sphere, especially as regards Palestinian-American relations, which underwent a great improvement in the subsequent years.”27 But Benjamin Netanyahu tried to revert to the pre-Oslo status quo by denying Yasir Arafat the dignity of a meeting for the first three months of his premiership. This and other humiliations of the Palestinian leader recall the historical pattern (repeated a decade and a half earlier in Menachem Begin’s derisive attitude toward Bashir Gemayel) by which the stronger party assumed it could use its greater strength to impose an uneven resolution upon its weaker opponent. Ehud Barak’s repeatedly brash behavior similarly demeaned Arafat, “severely hampering efforts to restore the trust between the two sides” in the wake of the Netanyahu years. Although Barak’s motivation to achieve an agreement was more genuine than Netanyahu’s, Barak undercut his own negoti-

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ating efficacy by failing to realize that “getting the Palestinians’ cooperation could not be achieved with an edict from the conqueror to the conquered, but rather on a basis of mutual respect and direct dialogue between the leaders.”28 As prime minister, Ariel Sharon studiously avoided meeting with Arafat and in late 2001 declared the Palestinian leader “irrelevant,” effectively imprisoning him in his half-ruined headquarters in Ramallah in the West Bank. Unable to prevail at either the negotiating table or on the battlefield, politically impotent and physically frail, Arafat died in November 2004. Was there ever a chance of Arafat making the successful transition from nationalist warrior to effective leader of a state-in-the-making? South Africa’s Nelson Mandela was most often cited as a model for Arafat’s evolution; some would argue that precedent was also set, ironically, by Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, former underground leaders of the outlawed Lehi and Irgun in Mandate Palestine who went on to become Israeli prime ministers. But, as Hanan Ashrawi points out, colorful renegade heroes often lose their mystique when success saddles them with the mundane trials and tribulations of daily governance: “When symbols take on substance and become accessible, they turn into the stuff of daily life. When icons lose their mystical aura, they hang on walls like badly drawn portraits, all the more grotesque because of their two-dimensional reductive lack of depth.”29 Third-Party Considerations

Third-party contribution is often critical to the success or failure of negotiation efforts. Norway used an unusual low-key approach and moderate resources to excellent advantage in providing Palestinians and Israelis with the inducements to reach an agreement. More often, however, it is a strong outside actor, typically the United States, which can advance the process by offering material incentives, political support, and military guarantees necessary for persuading Arabs and Israelis to take risks for peace. This was the modus operandi by which President Carter achieved success at Camp David I and President George H.W. Bush brought a full complement of guests together in Madrid. It was Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the 1970s that heralded the emergence of the United States as the sole Middle East peace broker, a role reinforced by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. All our case studies show Arabs and Israelis lobbying the United States to shape peace agreements conducive to their respective interests, and looking to the United States to mediate, endorse, and guarantee diplomatic initiatives. Another legacy of the Kissinger era was the expectation of Middle Eastern leaders that effective U.S. involvement necessarily entails personal commitment at the very highest level of government.30 The recent

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and important contributions of Norway notwithstanding, almost every major peace initiative since Camp David can be linked with an American president or secretary of state, and in those cases where actual U.S. mediation was minimal, as with the DOP and in many respects the Jordanian-Israeli treaty, the parties still found it necessary to sign their agreements in the presence of the American president and with his full and public support. The reciprocal American enthusiasm for presiding over these ceremonies reflected both the classic interest in asserting U.S. superpower primacy and the tendency of each administration, particularly those “under siege,” to “become almost fixated with registering a dramatic achievement on the Arab-Israel front, thereby redeeming themselves politically.”31 Some observers draw from the original Camp David episode the lesson that direct negotiations without American involvement have little chance of success. But even President Clinton’s deep personal involvement was not enough to add Shepherdstown and Camp David II to the short list of successful Arab-Israeli agreements. Here we must recall Aharon Klieman’s important cautionary alert against the blithe assumption of U.S. indispensability to the Arab-Israeli peace process.32 There are enough examples of independent, bilateral Arab-Israeli initiatives—the initialed treaty between Abdallah and Israel, Jordanian-Israeli cooperative measures throughout the years, Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem, the Hussein-Peres London Document, the secret PLO-Israeli agreement negotiated in the Oslo back channel, and the Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty—to argue that much of Middle East diplomacy has unfolded independent of direction from Washington. Nevertheless, some form of U.S. involvement or blessing, even after the fact, has helped to solidify agreements concluded by the parties themselves. Based on our case studies, we may conclude that successful negotiations have required both bilateral Arab-Israeli activity as well as creative and consistent American facilitation. The simultaneous availability of both direct channels and third-party mediation contributed heavily to the successful culmination of the Camp David Accords, the early Israeli-Palestinian agreements, and the Israel-Jordan peace treaty. One of the main features of the pattern for failed Arab-Israeli negotiations was that third parties have meddled more than they mediated, often unwittingly discouraging leaders from making difficult compromises. As useful as American activity was at Camp David I, in Madrid, and with the 1994 Jordanian-Israeli treaty, misguided American pressure to conclude the Agreement of 17 May 1983 encountered a complex Israeli-Lebanese situation and took it from bad to worse. Uncertain American support for the London Document of 1987 made King Hussein hesitant to pursue the agreement and denied Shimon Peres important leverage against Yitzhak Shamir’s dissent. Apparent U.S. mishandling of Rabin’s “pocket” proposal made Syrian-Israeli negotiations even more difficult and Shepherdstown failed to

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redeem U.S. mediation. The jury is still out regarding the helpfulness of the U.S. role at Camp David II. Some analysts argue that, given the immense power imbalance between the Palestinians and Israelis, Clinton should have drawn a hard line and leaned on Israel when deadlines elapsed without consequence. Having come to the conclusion that it was Arafat creating the impasse, however, the president chose to focus his attention on the Palestinians instead, producing the American side of the dueling narratives over what went wrong at Camp David. The remaining SyrianIsraeli and Lebanese-Israeli impasses and the demise of the Palestinian-Israeli accords offer the United States a continued, high-profile intermediary role, which, our survey of case studies shows, it can either use or squander. Proposed Terms of Agreement

Arabs and Israelis have historically not been very forthcoming in their negotiations with one another. Zeev Maoz calls the traditional refusal to budge from their first and most stringent demands “the ‘over my dead body’ syndrome.”33 Shortsightedness further impaired by psychological fears and ideological rigidity meant both sides have only with great reluctance accepted compromises which they had previously and vehemently rejected, often after paying a heavy price in blood and treasure for their rejectionism. The stirrings of a peace process began only when Egypt and Israel departed from a zero-sum mentality characterized by an unwillingness to compromise and a determined refusal to allow the other side to realize any part of its aspirations. Once Egypt and then Jordan, fifteen years later, subscribed to the full return of land for full peace approach, bilateral peace treaties between those countries and Israel were rapidly concluded and carried out. Syria and Israel also appear to have advanced quite far along the same track, although problems in timing and trust created a terms-of-agreement obstacle over mere yards of shoreline demanded by both. An Israel-Lebanon peace necessarily waits in the wings for Syria and Israel to successfully complete their own pas de deux. The failed 1983 Israel-Lebanon Agreement demonstrated what can go wrong when a militarily dominant party seeks to dictate a unilaterally pleasing outcome to a weaker party. In principle and under different circumstances, however, a land-for-peace formula might work for Israel and Lebanon, although the land in dispute is minimal since the Israeli withdrawal of 2000.34 The terms-of-agreement element in the Palestinian-Israeli case is by far the most complex, requiring not the return to some previous defined territorial arrangement but rather the creation of an entirely new Palestinian state somewhere alongside Israel. Unfortunately, the collapse of the Oslo process at Camp David II and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada shortly thereafter obscure the remarkable progress

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Courtesy of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

achieved in defining positions and narrowing differences. With increasing frequency, analysts of and participants in protracted Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli negotiations have been saying that the “shape” of a future settlement has been growing clearer and clearer—but that the mechanism by which it will come into being remains murky. Alan Dowty summarizes this widely shared prognosis as envisioning a Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state; that its borders will be based on the 1949–67 armistice lines with minor changes; that the status quo on holy sites (the Haram al-Sharif under Muslim control, the Western Wall under Jewish control) will be maintained, and formal sovereignty fudged; that Palestine will have forces to maintain law and order but not to threaten Israel; that an international presence may be needed to guarantee the agreement; and that the number of refugees returning to Israel will be severely limited.35

While the achievement of a Palestinian-Israeli peace treaty along these lines would be extraordinary, the actual terms of the agreement would not be. Contemporary peacemakers have knowingly or unknowingly drawn on formulae previously devised and rejected, some dating as far back as the 1930s, including autonomy, interim periods, a self-governing authority, phased solutions, bi-nationalism, international peacekeepers, confederations, and lease-back options. As we observed earlier, it is likely that the eventual resolution of the Palestinian-Israel conflict will incorporate one or more proposals suggested and spurned as unworkable in earlier periods. History has shown that “yesterday’s rejected idea” may become “tomor-

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row’s accepted plan,” following a pattern of recycling proposals dating back to the Mandate period.36 Does this reflect the obviousness of the solution? Or the limited imagination of the human mind? It is one of the ironies of Arab-Israeli negotiation that the complex and laborious Oslo process resulted in a form of Palestinian autonomy that Sadat had put on the table during the post–Camp David I autonomy negotiations (1980–1982). Rejected as unacceptable by the Arab states and the Palestinians and accepted without enthusiasm by Israel, Camp David’s 1978 “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” (document 37) “contained all the fundamental principles and components that would eventually constitute the foundations of the 1993 Oslo accords.”37 In Oslo terms, Camp David I would have turned the entire West Bank into “Area B”—Palestinian administrative rule and Israeli responsibility for security; by 2005, however, barely twenty percent of the West Bank fell into the “B” category.38 Shlomo Ben-Ami and other observers therefore classify Camp David I as a “missed opportunity” for Palestinian-Israeli peace. Our framework, specifically the intersection of the terms-ofagreement, timing, and status elements, explains why the PLO was ready to accept terms in 1993 which it had rejected from the sidelines in 1977. The determining factor that changed for the PLO between 1977 and 1993 was the huge improvement of its own status, elevated to equal partnership in the Oslo process. A consistent feature of the struggle between Palestinians and Israel has been their zero-sum mentality. The architects of the PLO-Israeli accords deviated significantly from that unhelpful historical habit by finally agreeing in 1993 to share Mandatory Palestine between their peoples. Intellectually, most Palestinians and Israelis understand that neither will achieve 100 percent of their aspirations, although emotionally they are hard put to relinquish their conflicting claims. But in an imperfect world, sometimes the “good” must suffice when the “best” is unattainable. “The ‘best’ solution for either side is one that the other cannot accept. So, in the end, a solution has to be found whereby each part concedes parts of its dream.”39 The proposed terms of agreement have not remained static. For Israel and the PLO, recognizing one another and accepting in principle their people’s mutual coexistence constituted one tectonic shift; accepting the necessity of establishing a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel is another. For decades an unbridgeable chasm separated the minimum acceptable Arab and Israeli terms for agreement; surely in a post-Oslo world a winning formula can be found. But as Aaron David Miller has noted, the primary hurdle blocking peace is not . . . the absence of clever diplomatic solutions. Such solutions abounded in the discussions at Camp David, the Clinton parameters of December 2000, the ideas put forth during the Israeli-Palestinian Taba talks of January 2001, and the [2003] Geneva initiative developed by unofficial Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. What stands in the way of a solution is

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the absence of political will and leadership on both sides to understand what’s necessary to meet the other side’s needs and to take the political decisions to move forward.40

Compatible terms of agreement are obviously a critical element in the successful conclusion of any peace effort, but the historical record suggests that the failure of so many efforts has lain more with the practitioners than with the plans. The Psychology of Peacemaking

No other single factor outweighs the psychological element as a determinant of the ultimate success of negotiations. In this book, we have considered the psychological dimension of peacemaking in terms of leaders choosing diplomacy over war and convincing their people to give peace a chance. Barbara Kellerman laments the casual imprecision with which the media and scholars interchange a country’s name with that of its leader, attribute policy choices to vague “decision-makers” or “actors,” and underplay the human element. She argues that there is much to be gained from exploring specific leaders’ personal significance in energizing their constituents and relating to fellow leaders. “Opportunity for containment, management and reduction of international conflict through negotiation,” she writes, “will be significantly enhanced by the availability of information on the role, history, style, beliefs, policies and situations that characterize or confront each pertinent national leader.”41 Hence our decision to include personality as a psychological element in the failure or success of negotiations. Consider at different junctures in the peace process Yitzhak Shamir’s immovability; Anwar Sadat’s courage and flair for the dramatic; Menachem Begin’s rising to the occasion of Sadat’s opening in contrast to the prime minister’s later condescension toward Bashir and Amin Gemayel; Ehud Barak’s arrogance toward his Syrian and Palestinian counterparts; Benjamin Netanyahu’s disdain and distrust of his Arab interlocutors; Shimon Peres’s unbridled, often inexplicable, optimism; Yitzhak Rabin’s embrace of King Hussein and reluctant relationship with Yasir Arafat; King Hussein’s cautious but persistent readiness to work with all Israeli leaders; Hafez al-Asad’s enigmatic absolutism; and Arafat’s own highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable behavior. In similar circumstances with equivalent access to intelligence and information, different leaders respond differently and relate to one another in ways sometimes reflecting more the sheer force of personality than an objective calculation of costs and benefits. Different leaders also provoke different reactions from their own people and from the opponent’s. Israelis quickly gave Anwar Sadat and King Hussein their trust and, until rebuffed, were prepared to approach their everyday Egyptian and Jordanian counter-

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parts with good will. Whatever the quality of personal relations within Palestinian and Israeli leadership circles, fear, mistrust, and animosity between ordinary Palestinians and Israelis remain high. For years, Israelis considered Arafat terrorism personified, and he remained forever suspect in the minds of most. The Holocaust experience is still a convincing reminder to many Israelis that nothing is so terrible that it cannot come true. After narrowly escaping genocide at the hands of the Nazis, Jews and Israelis tend to take Arabs (and Iranians) at their word when they threaten “politicide”—the destruction of the Jewish state—and regard with suspicion Arab overtures for peace. Accustomed to a continuous state of struggle in the Middle East, Israelis find it difficult to imagine a world in which Arab leaders and their people are prepared to coexist with Israel. For their part, Palestinians see Israelis as their historical oppressors, rather than as fellow victims of circumstance or of world powers. The harsh conditions of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 have brought average Palestinians into extended, frequent, and almost always negative contact with Israeli soldiers and settlers. They remember Yitzhak Rabin as the defense minister who in 1988 ordered his troops to break the bones of Palestinian protesters during the first Intifada, and Ariel Sharon as the “Butcher of Beirut” who, as defense minister in 1982, sent the IDF into Lebanon to pursue and destroy the PLO, and whom they blame for the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla. While our own analysis emphasizes the impact on the peace process of leadership change among Israeli prime ministers, many Palestinians are not inclined to distinguish among the platforms or pronouncements of one prime minister and another. Rather, they see them all as Zionists aiming to preserve Israeli territorial, military, political, and economic hegemony, and perceive any differences among them as more cosmetic than real. Arabs throughout the Middle East have grown up with Palestinian refugees in their midst, and they know by heart their story of displacement and disenfranchisement. They also recall their own countries’ experiences fighting Israel in many wars. Even after the advent of formal peace treaties signed between Israel and their governments, Egyptians and Jordanians still look askance at Israelis, their leaders, and the relatively high-powered Israeli economy. The economic benefits of peace to the Arab economies have been slow to materialize. Some Arabs perceive the eagerness that Israeli companies and entrepreneurs display toward extending business dealings across Israel’s borders as “typical” Israeli aggressiveness in a new fiscal form, and invoke the old Arabic saying, “He left by the door but came back in through the window.” In other words, some Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, and Palestinians fear that the peace heralded in the “New Middle East” will merely replace Israeli military domination with economic domination.

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Our case studies illustrate that leaders who opted for the diplomatic route had to fight against being held hostage to the very same sentiments they themselves had previously incited in order to rally public opinion against the enemy. Held accountable to the extremist, religiously fundamentalist, and ultranationalist wings of their constituencies, both Arab and Israeli leaders struggled to maintain their domestic legitimacy and still engage each other in diplomatic discourse. Longtime negotiator Dennis Ross writes, “Having never made any effort to prepare their publics for a peace that requires genuine acceptance of Israel, much less compromise, Arab leaders are easily put on the defensive by charges that they have surrendered their rights when compromising with Israel. . . . Israeli leaders [also] have found it easier not to level with their publics about what it will take to make deals with their putative Arab partners.”42 Ross credits Ehud Barak with doing “more to condition his public than any of his predecessors” in the context of his negotiations with the Syrians; in the end, however, fear of losing popular support made him hold back from a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights as the price for peace. The Rabin and Barak experiences offer Israeli prime ministers the lesson that “however grandiose and enlightened the peace vision of a leader might be, he would be doomed if he is not sustained by a careful domestic organization.”43 Hillel Halkin relates a conversation in which a friend charges that Labor would never have been elected in 1992 had Rabin openly talked about a PLO Palestinian state, and not just peace with the Palestinians, “to a public that had been brainwashed against such an idea for years.” Halkin responds that “no serious person expects politicians always to tell the truth. It is a leader’s duty to get elected and lead, not to get permission for every step he takes.”44 Madeleine Albright agrees: “True leadership requires the capacity to shape public opinion, not merely reflect it.”45 A review of the dynamics-of-deadlock factor reveals a counterintuitive phenomenon by which hard-line leaders are sometimes in a better position than card-carrying peace seekers to sell diplomatic solutions to people primed for military ones. The 1973 war is widely seen as the baptism by fire that Anwar Sadat needed to prove he could make war with Israel before he could make peace. Yasir Arafat would have been unable to negotiate the initial Oslo compromise without his revered standing as a veteran freedom fighter in the Palestinian armed struggle. Shlomo BenAmi writes that “the history of peacemaking between Israel and her Arab neighbors shows that it was the change of mind of the hawks and the shift in their positions, not the preaching of the doves, that allowed Israel to exploit chances of peace at vital crossroads.”46 Menachem Begin, nationalist credentials firmly in place, was able to let go of Sinai at Camp David. Unlike Shimon Peres, whom Israelis largely perceived as too eager to make peace with the Arabs, Yitzhak Rabin, the tough and dour military man, commanded sufficient public trust to make the peace gamble.47 Those

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who placed great stock in this phenomenon were disappointed that neither Asad nor Netanyahu joined the ranks of unlikely warmakers-turned-peacemakers, although Netanyahu did execute an Israeli withdrawal from Hebron in 1997. Leaders who pursued the peace option often paid the supreme price for forcing their followers to confront and reverse deeply ingrained prejudices. One longtime diplomat ruefully observed that “the diplomat is the bearer of a view of the world which his fellow citizens cannot always accept.”48 Sometimes they do shoot the messenger: King Abdallah I, President Sadat, and Prime Minister Rabin paid with their lives for having dared to negotiate with the enemy. They joined Issam Sartawi, an early Palestinian proponent of PLO-Israeli dialogue, felled by a Palestinian hardliner’s bullet in Lisbon, and Peace Now activist Emil Grunzweig, victim of a rightwinger’s grenade in Jerusalem, both of whom died in 1983.49 President-elect Bashir Gemayel paid the same price, although his intentions in allying with Israel were more self-serving than peace-seeking. But despite the precedents for assassination along the tortured trail of Arab-Israeli relations, the murder of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 stunned observers around the world, Arabs no less than Israelis. The assumption had always been that the threat to Rabin was by ballot, not bullet, and that Arafat was the more likely of the two to be struck down by one of his own. The often raw and riotous Israeli political scene had been remarkably free of lethal violence, 50 and even those following the increasing radicalization of the ultra-religious and ultra-nationalist opposition to Rabin’s peace policies did not anticipate the lengths to which its adherents would go.51 To Israelis the battle against terrorism meant a war against Hamas, not against fanatics from within. The willingness of radical Arab and Jewish opponents of peaceful compromise to engage in violent opposition to Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation is its most serious threat. Unfortunately, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders tended to underestimate or downplay their opponent’s domestic political constraints, while proving highly sensitive to their own. Scrutinizing every utterance from the other side, leaders give little thought to the impact there of their own pronouncements.52 Uri Savir reflects upon the misconception that Palestinian society would blindly accept dictates from Arafat, relieving Israel of the need to woo Palestinian public opinion. “Perhaps there was an Israeli-Palestinian ‘mirror effect’ at work here,” writes Savir. “For the Palestinians always treated our claim about the deep division in Israeli society as a ploy to weaken their resolve. They knew better after November 4, 1995, of course, but it took the assassination of Rabin to make the point.”53 Leaders must pay as close attention to the psychology of peacemaking as to the politics of peacemaking. This means using gestures and words to nurture a realistic reappraisal of an acceptable resolution to the conflict, and acting mercilessly to

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Courtesy of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

restrain those who are determined to use violence to prevent others from doing so. Yitzhak Rabin had made that personal psychological transformation, and on the night he died he gave a speech designed to accomplish precisely those two tasks, vigorously urging his fellow citizens to stay the difficult diplomatic course and condemning those who would resort to violence. Breaking the dynamics of deadlock requires that a leader imbue his people with a strong sense of mission: Rabin used the word “peace” twenty-five times in his brief remarks and in his usual direct way declared: I was a military man for 27 years. I fought so long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is now a chance for peace, a great chance. . . . I want to say bluntly, that we have found a partner for peace among the Palestinians as well: the PLO, which was an enemy, and has now ceased to engage in terrorism. Without partners for peace there can be no peace. We will demand that they do their part for peace, just as we will do our part for peace, in order to solve the most complicated, prolonged and emotionally charged aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. (document 80)

In the words of Abu Ala, Rabin “was, in the end, a victim of his conversion, having made too many enemies through his abandonment of his erstwhile hawkish position.”54

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There is also documentary evidence suggesting that Yasir Arafat had made his own difficult psychological transformation to peacemaker. One could not ask for any finer words than those he spoke upon the signing of the 1994 Cairo Agreement, where he announced that the Palestinian public extends its hand to the Israeli people to start this era and end the whirlpool of violence for the sake of our real interests today, and the interests of the coming generations. Coexistence is possible. It is inevitable. It is our common fate to live together as neighbors governed by the rules of justice, democracy, and national and human dignity. . . . Our peace is a peace for the Arab nation. It is a peace for Israel, for the Middle East region, for the whole world. Yes, it is a peace for the whole world.55

His penchant for more militant Arabic speeches, away from Western microphones, however, also yielded considerable counter-evidence which contributed to the suspicion among many that his conversion was less than complete. There is no question but that King Hussein underwent the necessary psychological transformation. Echoing the word “peace” fifteen times at Rabin’s funeral, he delivered a moving eulogy (document 81) which called unequivocally for Arab-Israeli reconciliation. After years of clandestine meetings and furtive diplomatic probes, the quiet king declared, “I believe it is time for all of us to come out openly and to speak our peace. . . . Let us not keep silent.” Rising to the challenge of leadership, he urged his audience to follow him all the way across the vast psychological divide, while warning the religious extremists who resorted to violence that the peace camp had reclaimed God and would not let them prevail in their perverse reading of God’s will. One should not underestimate the symbolic importance of the funeral scene on Mount Herzl on 6 November 1995: slain by a Jewish assassin’s bullets, an Israeli prime minister was eulogized in Jerusalem by an Egyptian president and a Jordanian king in the presence of high-ranking Moroccan, Omani, Qatari, and Palestinian dignitaries.56 It was a stunning illustration of both how far the peace process had come and how vulnerable it remained. In terms of sheer drama and impact, however, the 1993 handshake between Rabin and Arafat was clearly a symbolic gesture without compare. It offered a stunning photo opportunity and an excellent case study in body language. Whereas Arafat’s eager pumping indicated how much he relished his newfound legitimacy and his place on stage with Israeli and U.S. leaders, Rabin reached toward the Palestinian leader with a gesture clearly radiating discomfort and reluctance. Afterward Rabin admitted publicly that the prospect of shaking Arafat’s hand had given him “butterflies in the stomach”; privately he confided that it had made him want to “retch.”57 Daubed by one observer “the most famous handshake in history,”58 everyone who

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King Hussein delivers a eulogy at Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. © 1995 Peter Turnley/CORBIS. Reprinted by permission.

writes about the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, regardless of political position, makes note of their simple, symbol-laden act of pressing palms together. But the handshake was also misleading. It may have looked like the conclusion of a peace accord, but it was only the beginning of the possibility of the end of a very long and bitter conflict. Eager media juxtapositions of the Rabin-Arafat-Clinton portrait with the famous Camp David I photograph of the Begin-Sadat-Carter handclasp, and comparisons of the Oslo speeches with those which accompanied the EgyptianIsraeli and Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty ceremonies, obscured the fact that these upbeat images and words came after the hardest part of the negotiations were over, not before. As Yossi Beilin reminds us, “The Agreement between Israel and the PLO was signed at the very first encounter between Arafat and Rabin, and the handshake, in reality just the handshake of recognition, was interpreted as the handshake of peacemaking.”59 The same holds true for the speeches which accompanied the signing ceremonies. Time and time again, Israeli spokespeople lamented the absence in Syrian or Palestinian society of a leader cut from the same cloth as Egypt’s former president or Jordan’s king. President Sadat’s eloquence and King Hussein’s humanity captured Israeli hearts. What the same Israelis ignored is that most of the pretty speeches

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made by the two about the right to live together in peace and their public gestures for the most part had followed the signing of treaties based on the principle of land for peace, in other words, in an entirely different historical and political context.60 Palestinians, surprised by the sudden announcement of Oslo and the visually astounding signing ceremony, could only assume that Arafat had cut a deal as generous as those achieved by Sadat and King Hussein. But with no written blueprint guaranteeing the return of their territory and of their refugees, the handshake and speechifying raised Palestinian hopes that later turned to bitter disappointment. Here we have the intersection of the timing, psychological, and leadership elements. Hillel Halkin indulges in some hypothetical history, proposing that the foundation of Oslo would have been much more secure on the Israeli side had Labor been more careful about preparing and persuading public opinion regarding a turnabout in relations with the Palestinians: It could have asked the PLO to help change the climate in Israel by declaring a moratorium on terror, or by repealing the provisions in the Palestinian Charter which call for Israel’s destruction, or some other dramatic act. It could have begun tentative, noncommittal talks with the PLO, and then revealed the content to the public. And having done any or all of these things, [Rabin] could have then said: Citizens of Israel: now that you have seen how the PLO has changed and is ready to recognize the state of Israel and live peacefully alongside it, we are calling new elections in order to ask you for a mandate to commence negotiations with it that may lead to a Palestinian state.61

One can similarly hypothesize about gestures the PLO might have asked of the Israelis, prior to the signing and handshaking which raised hopes (and outrage) so impossibly high. It could have asked Israel to help change the climate within the West Bank and Gaza by facilitating the movement of Palestinians within the territories, by releasing political prisoners, or by declaring a moratorium on settlement building, or some other dramatic act. It could have begun tentative, noncommittal talks with Israel, and then revealed the content to the public. And having done any or all of these things, Arafat could have then said: People of Palestine: now that you have seen how Israel has changed and is ready to recognize the national rights of the Palestinian people and live peacefully alongside them, we are calling for a national referendum in order to ask you for a mandate to commence negotiations for the purpose of establishing a Palestinian state to coexist beside Israel.

There is no way to know, of course, if either Rabin or Arafat would have been granted his mandate. We likewise cannot know if either would have been in a better position to confront the ferocious determination of rejectionists in both camps who

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would continue fighting for a 100 percent solution that satisfied zero percent of the other’s claims. What is clear, however, is that bold, creative, and honest leadership is required to persuade Arabs and Israelis to relinquish the zero-sum mentality so deeply ingrained. Conclusion

It is striking how often authors resort to anthropomorphism when describing the Oslo peace process. Many writers invoke medical metaphors in response to the blunt question, “Is Oslo dead?” A recurrent analogy has Oslo lingering like “a comatose patient on life support,” “in a political coma,” and “on a respirator . . . about to come unplugged.”62 The election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 inspired dire prognoses from his domestic opponents, particularly Shlomo Ben-Ami, who argued that even though under Rabin “the Oslo process had started to show signs of terminal illness,” it was Netanyahu who acted as “the zealous undertaker of a patient he had received in an advanced state of illness.”63 Oslo negotiator Uri Savir notes that “during the first year and a half of Netanyahu’s tenure, last rites were repeatedly chanted over the Oslo process, but few were willing to pronounce it dead and even fewer had a viable alternative.”64 Aaron Miller, writing with both certainty and hindsight, has no reservations in asserting that, with Netanyahu’s election, “Oslo, as Israelis and Palestinians had known it, was already dead.”65 Abu Ala thought he detected a “spark of life” in Oslo when Barak replaced Netanyahu.66 A collection of essays on the Middle East peace process from the conservative journal Commentary, critical of Oslo and supportive of Netanyahu, appeared in a book subtitled simply “An Autopsy.”67 Zeev Maoz entitles a chapter subsection “The birth, short life, and sudden death of the Israeli-Palestinian peace, 1993–2003.”68 Perhaps the ubiquitous reliance on the language of life and death indicates the seriousness of the subject and the profound implications—often literally life or death—that observers across the political spectrum ascribe to Oslo’s success or failure. So, is Oslo dead? Neither physicians nor undertakers, we cannot make so absolute a call. Surely the name “Oslo” has been bloodied, perhaps beyond resuscitation. New initiatives have borne distinct names, and their creators have emphasized how these plans differed from Oslo, and what they had learned from Oslo’s failings, if they referenced Oslo at all. But the processes set in motion by Oslo—Israeli-PLO mutual recognition, open channels of communication between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, acceptance of a two-state solution, the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the identification of Areas A, B, and C (even after Israel retook most of the West Bank during the second Intifada)—have endured. If the ultimate prize is

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ever achieved, it may well look much like the destination to which Oslo pointed but never arrived.69 Since 1977, Arab and Israeli peacemakers have made progress insofar as they have several times managed to negotiate complicated compromise arrangements within cozy confines removed from the public glare. The problem lies with their repeated inability to transmit their enthusiasm and newly found trust to their publics at large. On the macro level Oslo obviously failed to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but on the micro level, “Israeli and Palestinian negotiators did manage to forge cordial personal relations, and neither side reverted to blunt threats of violence if negotiations failed.” 70 Hilde Henricksen Waage has written about the Norwegian facilitation model whose success relied upon the “radical intimacy of the hearth.”71 Sipping coffee or tea by a warm fire on a cold Norwegian night, Israelis and Palestinians discovered one another’s humanity and were able to perceive one another as something other than congenital enemies. Uri Savir confessed that “we [Israelis] had all sinned in our pretensions to being great experts on the Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular. The more time I spent with our partners, the more I discovered that we have known a lot about them but understood very little.” 72 But Waage faults the gracious Norwegian hosts for creating “an illusion [which] enabled the Palestinian delegates to feel empowered and thus equal to their Israeli counterparts,” and wonders “was this creation of process symmetry helpful in achieving a peaceful settlement?”73 She answers her own question in the negative: “The problem with process symmetry is that it cannot address the power asymmetry that inevitably distorts the outcome of negotiations.”74 Clearly the intelligent and well-intentioned people sitting by the fireside were one another’s equals, but the same could not be said of the PLO and Israel sitting at the negotiating table. By all accounts, no participant deeply involved in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations walked away unchanged. Those individuals literally touched by and touching their opposite counterparts did experience, to different degrees, the psychological evolution necessary for abandoning zero-sum goals and envisioning peaceful coexistence and compromise in their place. But as Jane Corbin observes, “It is possible that the understanding these men reached to help them fashion a peace accord is but a cruel trick of fate which cannot be repeated between their peoples.”75 Only so many people can personally gather round the hearth. We close by returning to the three “p” words in the subtitle of this book. Our research has indeed identified a specific pattern that characterizes both early and recent failed negotiation attempts. We have argued that that pattern can serve as a checklist of obstacles which negotiators must overcome if they are to be successful. When contemporary efforts at negotiating Middle East solutions falter or fail, the

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problems are likely among those that have repeatedly plagued generations of wouldbe Arab-Israeli peacemakers. The limited successes to date—among them Camp David I, Madrid, Jordanian-Israeli peace, and perhaps the early Palestinian-Israeli overtures—suggest that possibilities for breakthroughs to peace lie in bold deviations from historical patterns.

Epilogue Rebuilding amid the Rubble

Historians generally enjoy the luxury of pursuing their work unfettered by the hazards of current events. The thesis of this book, however, is that an application of our framework for analysis to ongoing and future Arab-Israel negotiations will continue to clarify the forces at work behind the headlines and beyond these case studies. Thus it may be useful at this point to offer an epilogue in which we review the peacemaking efforts that transpired in the years following Camp David II and to consider those developments (and subsequent ones) in terms of our seven headings. In those years, extraordinary events caused shifts of global and regional priorities which largely sidelined serious efforts at negotiating Arab-Israeli peace. There is no single negotiating episode or serious new diplomatic initiative during the years 2001–2010 around which to construct a full case study like the others in this book. Instead, we offer here a sketch of how the traditional elements of the Arab-Israeli negotiating pattern contributed not to the failure of a specific diplomatic venture, but rather to the failure to inspire or sustain any appreciable forward movement toward Arab-Israeli peace. Should new information subsequently emerge as to secret initiatives during this period, we encourage our readers to assess them in light of our framework. By the same token, future developments along the unfinished tracks of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, Syria, Lebanon, and other Arab countries will also provide excellent opportunities for a further application of our model. The opening salvos of the twenty-first century did not bode well for Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Despite an intense barrage of mediation by the outgoing Clinton administration, when the forty-second president departed the White House in January 2001 the Palestinian-Israeli peace process lay in smoking ruins and Israelis and Palestinians were locked in the bloody throes of a second Intifada. Palestinian suicide bombers and IDF assassinations of Hamas leaders dominated the political landscape. In response to increasingly devastating terrorist attacks within Israel, in 2002 the IDF militarily reoccupied much of the West Bank, inflicting consider-

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Courtesy of Emad Hajjaj, Al-Ghad

able Palestinian suffering, and in 2003 began building a controversial security wall to keep West Bank suicide bombers from entering Israel. While the wall dramatically decreased the number of terrorist attacks within Israel proper, the wall’s route, which often deviates from the 1949–1967 green line to include Jewish settlements deep inside the West Bank, suggested to critics that Israel was using a security pretext for a new unilateral land grab. The wall definitely stops suicide bombers from reaching Israeli cities but, by blocking Palestinians from their work, fields, schools, and one another, does nothing to reduce—and probably exacerbates—the conditions which produce them. In the years following the 2000 breakdown at Camp David, a number of global issues relegated the Arab-Palestinian-Israeli problem to the back burner of international attention, among them the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, the subsequent shifting of regional power, and Iran’s emergence as a major player in the Middle East and as nuclear aspirant. Bursts of third-party activity, intermittent Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli talks, and grassroots reconciliation campaigns nodded toward “peace,” but a lack of coordination among them or follow-up and forward movement in their wake made a mock-

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ery of the word “process.” Nevertheless, despite President Bush’s stated intention of leaving Israelis and Palestinians to their own devices, the region as a whole would quickly demand his attention and dominate his foreign policy. George W. Bush came to Washington from the Texas governor’s office with virtually no experience in foreign policy. The previous Arab-Israel negotiating experience which most influenced his thinking was that of his predecessor, who had tried mightily and failed utterly. Bill Clinton even sought out both Bush and the incoming secretary of state, Colin Powell, to warn them away from Yasir Arafat, whom he blamed for the collapse of the peace process.1 The desire to avoid the pitfalls into which Clinton had fallen became what Aaron Miller calls the “ABC syndrome” (“anybody or anything but Clinton”)2 in Bush administration thinking, further encouraging the new president to disengage almost totally from the process in which Clinton had invested so heavily. A personal experience which reinforced his handsoff tendency was a 1998 governors’ trip to Israel, where Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon personally narrated a helicopter tour of Israel. Impressed by Israel’s small size and Sharon’s larger-than-life military and political experience, then governor Bush returned home from the trip “inclined to see things Israel’s way.”3 Some of the last actions of the Clinton administration played out during the opening months of the Bush administration. Former senator George Mitchell, whom Clinton had charged with investigating the causes of the Intifada which erupted in September 2000, released his report in May 2001 (document 102). In his report Mitchell took a middle line, exonerating Arafat and Sharon of the charges of purposefully instigating the uprising while criticizing Arafat for not acting to contain it and Sharon for his provocative visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in the first place. The escalating violence inside Israel and the Palestinian territories cast doubt on the genuineness of both sides’ motives and purposes in their declared desires to halt the violence and return to peace talks. Israelis and Palestinians reluctantly endorsed Mitchell’s various suggestions for diminishing the violence and even went through the motions of meeting with CIA director George Tenet, whom Bush had dispatched to facilitate Israeli-PA security cooperation. Lackluster Israeli and Palestinian attention to the Tenet Work Plan of June 2001 (document 103) reflected the Bush administration’s failure to penalize noncompliance, Bush’s reluctance to engage too deeply into Middle Eastern affairs, and, perhaps most important, the fact that Israel and the PA were in open warfare, as Colin Powell described it, with “Arafat and Sharon in a kind of death tango, with neither leader interested in much more than getting rid of the other.”4 The catastrophic attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001 made timing the single most powerful element driving the course of U.S. and Middle Eastern history during George W. Bush’s two terms. On that incongruously lovely Sep-

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tember morning, al-Qaeda operatives hijacked two commercial planes out of Boston and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York; a third plane, departing from Washington, crashed into the Pentagon, and a revolt by the passengers on a fourth plane out of Newark sent it smashing into a Pennsylvania field before it could reach its intended target. For the purposes of our study, the question is: What were the implications of 9/11 for the Arab-Israeli peace process? Immediately after the attacks, President Bush focused all American military and political energies on pursuing al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, toppling the Taliban government sheltering him there, destroying al-Qaeda, then zeroing in on Saddam Hussein in Iraq, whom the administration alleged was producing weapons of mass destruction. The United States went to war against Afghanistan in October 2002 and invaded Iraq in March 2003. The total diversion of American political and military attention to those two theaters largely eclipsed the Arab-Israel issue for the United States and meant that the third party upon whom the Arabs and Israelis had been counting was suddenly preoccupied elsewhere.5 Even as those wars unfolded into a new foreign policy normalcy for the Bush administration, the newly defined “Warrior President”6 was more inclined to focus on military solutions than diplomatic ones. Predisposed to favor the Israelis over the Palestinians, Bush drew the United States and Israel even closer together as allied democracies who saw themselves fighting similar Arab and Muslim extremists in the “War on Terror.” But the rest of the world would not allow the United States to ignore the ArabIsrael conflict entirely. In an interesting twist on the historical pattern whereby opponents negotiate for the purpose of pleasing a more powerful third party, here the greater power aimed to do just enough Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking to satisfy its European and Arab allies, whose support it needed for the pressing U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite several exciting speeches, including a landmark call in June 2002 for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state (document 107), Bush’s modus operandi appeared to be heavy on talk and light on action. After Ehud Barak’s failure at Camp David and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, Israelis elected hard-liner Ariel Sharon as prime minister. Longtime patron of the settler movement, Sharon surprised everyone by proposing a unilateral Israeli “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip, a plan he pushed through the Knesset with the same bulldozer tenacity he had previously applied to military operations (document 115). In August 2005 the IDF oversaw a tense but successful withdrawal from Gaza of all Israeli settlers and soldiers. Harkening back to the historical precedent for surprising compromises coming from the right, Sharon defected from the Likud Party in 2005 and founded a new centrist party, Kadima, for the express purpose of overseeing a similar unilateral Israeli withdrawal from large parts of the West

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Courtesy of Gomaa Farahat, Al-Ahram

Bank. Palestinians watched the Gaza disengagement with skepticism, suspecting that Israel was abandoning Gaza in order to strengthen its hold on the West Bank. But no one will ever know Sharon’s true intentions, since his plans were derailed by a debilitating stroke which left the nascent Kadima without its charismatic leader. The unhappy outcome of the Gaza withdrawal was a Hamas-Fatah turf war within Gaza, from which Hamas emerged the victor, and the frequent rocket bombardment of Israeli towns near Gaza by Hamas and other Islamist cells. All of this sapped Israeli enthusiasm for a West Bank withdrawal and strengthened the position of those who argued that relinquishing territory would not bring calm. We have often invoked elections and regime change as critical timing factors in influencing the course of Arab-Israeli negotiations. In contrast to the United States, where George W. Bush served two full terms as president, the Palestinians, Israelis, Syrians, Lebanese, and Iraqis all experienced turnovers at the highest levels of government during the same period. Upon Arafat’s death in 2004 Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) became the new PA president and announced his readiness to negotiate. A veteran of the Oslo talks and a talented negotiator, Abu Mazen did not have the charisma to animate the

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masses or win over Hamas. His domestic weakness was exacerbated by Bush’s close embrace of the Sharon government’s agenda (document 113). Ehud Olmert replaced Sharon when the Israeli prime minister suffered his stroke in January 2006. A political lightweight compared to the experienced and imposing Sharon, Olmert was leery of jumping immediately into the Palestinian-Israeli quicksand. Saudi Arabia and Egypt tried to encourage the new leaders to reengage, but looking back on the devastation since 2000, neither had any reason to believe that the odds had changed in favor of a negotiated settlement. With upheaval rocking the region and international attention focused on Iraq and increasingly on Iran—which benefited from the Americans’ removal of its rival, Saddam Hussein, and whose nuclear aspirations alarmed many in the global community—there was never an obvious moment when timing seemed right for another massive effort at negotiating Arab-Israeli peace. With the main events playing out on the stages of Afghanistan and Iraq, Palestinian-Israeli violence worsened, Israel was able to operate more freely against Palestinian targets, Hamas grew in power, and the Arab-Israel peace process appeared to go into reverse. Near the end of its second term the Bush administration hastily convened an Arab-Israeli peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, in November 2007. The lack of either pre-conference consultations or post-conference follow-up, however, suggested to many that the president was more interested in burnishing his legacy than doing more than the minimum to bring about Middle East peace. In the aftermath of the conference and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s many visits to the region, Abu Mazen and Olmert and/or their foreign ministers met regularly, as the Americans had asked. They seemed to develop a positive rapport with one another but produced no substantive progress toward peace. It appeared that, like so many Arab and Israeli leaders before them, they were going through the motions of peacemaking primarily to please the United States. The status of the negotiators also worked against the feasibility of negotiations leading to a sustainable peace settlement. Throughout the 2001–2010 period, the representatives of the original Oslo partners, Israel and the PLO, suffered diminished status, while Oslo’s opponents, primarily Hamas and by extension Iran, became increasingly powerful. Because Sharon had insisted upon a unilateral disengagement from Gaza, as opposed to an exit coordinated with PA officials, there were no precautions put in place to bolster Abu Mazen’s control of Gaza and guarantee a quiet border with functioning crossing points. Instead, Hamas quickly dominated the streets of Gaza, won an electoral majority in the 2006 Palestinian elections, and, after a short-lived unity government with the PA/Fatah in the spring of 2007, actually drove Fatah officials from Gaza in a successful coup that summer. Observers noted with grim irony that the “two-state solution” had never anticipated a Hamasrun Gaza versus a PA-run West Bank.

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Courtesy of Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

In an effort to strengthen the legitimacy of PA President Abu Mazen, third parties convened a June 2007 summit meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, where Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s King Abdallah II, and Israeli prime minister Olmert lauded President Abu Mazen and reaffirmed their commitment to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process already—albeit haltingly—in motion. But Olmert’s announced release of 250 Fatah prisoners from Israeli jails, intended as evidence of Abu Mazen’s effective leadership, was completely overshadowed by Hamas’s simultaneous release of an audio recording from Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, kidnapped and held by Hamas in Gaza since June 2006.7 Egypt’s ongoing consultations with Hamas to effect a Palestinian-Hamas reconciliation (and later a Hamas-Israeli cease-fire) also undercut Sharm el-Sheikh’s insistence that there was only one legitimate Palestinian leadership, namely that of Abu Mazen. The United States and some European nations joined Israel in isolating Gaza and boycotting Hamas, hoping the worsening conditions there would force Gazans to rebel against the Hamas government. But even as Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli towns provoked painful Israeli retaliations, including closure of the Gaza crossings, shortages of basic foodstuffs and medicine, and electrical blackouts, Palestinians there remained supportive of Hamas. Over the course of three weeks in December 2008 and January 2009, the IDF carried out Operation Cast Lead, a combination of airstrikes and ground operations against Hamas targets in Gaza designed to destroy Hamas’s ability to shower Israel’s south-

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ern cities with rockets.8 But the high number of Palestinian civilian casualties and extensive damage to Gaza’s infrastructure further embittered Palestinian, Arab, and international public opinion against Israel. Hamas retained its firm grip on power in Gaza and quickly rearmed. In September 2009, a UN-commissioned report by Justice Richard Goldstone (document 123) suggested that both the IDF and Hamas were guilty of war crimes during the fighting. Abu Mazen, who had anxiously observed the hostilities in Gaza from the Fatah-controlled West Bank, was unable to extract any political advantage from this episode. Neither did Ehud Olmert fare well in terms of legitimacy, status, and influence. He had come to office unexpectedly when Sharon suffered his stroke, inheriting Sharon’s personal Kadima Party project before it had gotten far, but with none of the history, experience, or charisma necessary to fill Sharon’s enormous shoes. Dogged from the beginning by rumors of corruption dating back to his days as mayor of Jerusalem, Olmert lacked moral and historical legitimacy and had to fight just as hard to keep his domestic critics at bay as he did against Israel’s external critics and enemies. When Hizballah killed and captured Israeli soldiers along the border with Lebanon in June 2006, Olmert ordered a full-scale war against Hizballah. The scope of the massive military campaign surprised Hizballah and Israelis alike, but Hizballah successfully fought off the IDF for thirty-four days, all the while raining thousands of missiles on cities in northern Israel. The second Lebanon War provoked a huge public outcry in Israel, whose citizens demanded to know why their soldiers had been vulnerable to kidnapping and why the once-invincible IDF had been unable to silence Hizballah’s missiles now that Israel’s vulnerability and the IDF’s limitations had been revealed (document 119).9 Olmert’s mishandling of the second Lebanon War was just one of many Israeli grievances against the prime minister, and his approval ratings sank irretrievably into single digits. He was finally forced to resign in late 2008 when the Israeli attorney general’s office indicted him on charges of corruption. Israeli elections in February 2009 returned Benjamin Netanyahu to the prime minister’s office. Status-of-negotiator and third-party elements overlapped in the case of the U.S. envoys sent periodically by the Bush administration to mediate or monitor Palestinian-Israeli attempts at achieving cease-fires and increasing security. Paradoxically, 9/11 both discouraged U.S. attention to Palestinian-Israeli affairs (the U.S. response focused on Afghanistan and Iraq) and encouraged it (important Arab and European allies, whose support the United States desired for its war effort in Iraq, pressured the United States not to neglect the Palestinian issue). In a peace process accustomed to the extended personal participation of the U.S. president and secretary of state, the parade of American envoys dispatched to the region did not bode well for a concerted and successful new round of diplomacy. Although Secretary of State Rice

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did make many stopovers in Arab and Israeli capitals throughout the president’s second term, the real work on the ground was “sub-contracted”10 to officials sufficiently removed from the White House, such that the chances of bold and successful action were reduced but the administration was largely shielded from blame if and when talks failed. Former senator George Mitchell, CIA chief George Tenet, General Anthony Zinni, Foreign Service special envoy John Wolf, and former NATO commander James Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, racked up the frequent flyer miles in this modest parade of American facilitators. The 2007 Annapolis Conference was an eleventh-hour departure from the norm, allowing President Bush and Secretary Rice to ramp up the third-party participation. Forty countries attended; the joint appearance of the Saudi Arabian foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, Syrian deputy foreign minister Fayssal Mekdad, and Prime Minister Olmert marked the first time Arabs and Israelis of such high stature had gathered under one roof since the “Summit of Peacemakers” eleven years earlier, to support then Prime Minister Shimon Peres in the aftermath of an extended Hamas suicide bombing spree.11 As evidence of the evolution over a thirty-four-year period in the status of the parties, one could note that the 1973 Geneva Conference excluded Palestinians; Madrid allowed for non-PLO Palestinian representation; and Annapolis included, almost as a guest of honor, the president of the Palestinian Authority and PLO leader, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). But despite the conference’s intention to buttress Abu Mazen’s authority, the loss of Gaza to Hamas and the expulsion of Fatah officials from the Strip cast a long shadow over his relative status. Annapolis was a breath of fresh air but a faint shadow of the three-day Madrid Conference of 1991. Madrid incorporated extensive pre-negotiations, a structure for opening remarks, an immediate first round of bilateral negotiations, and a system for continuing post-conference bilateral and multilateral talks. Annapolis resembled more the day-long Geneva Conference which U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger convened two months after the October 1973 war. Annapolis wrapped up after one day, culminating with a “Joint Understanding” (document 118) between Abu Mazen and Olmert, in which they reiterated their commitment to a two-state solution and announced an intention to establish a joint steering committee and to meet regularly themselves, with the goal of inking a Palestinian-Israeli peace treaty by the end of 2008. Annapolis never developed Madrid’s momentum, however, and 2008 ended with no peace accord on the horizon. The failure of all official peacemaking attempts inspired grassroots efforts to produce alternative blueprints for ending the conflict. One notable example was an agreed-upon set of principles co-signed in July 2002 by the Palestinian president of Al-Quds University, Sari Nusseibeh, and Ami Ayalon, former director of

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Israel’s security services (document 108). Also known as the “People’s Voice,” the Nusseibeh-Ayalon agreement was a petition drive circulated and signed by at least 100,000 Israelis and 65,000 Palestinians in the first year and a half after its creation. These post-Intifada efforts drew upon the pioneering contribution of the 1995 Beilin–Abu Mazen document (document 79), drafted by Rabin’s and Arafat’s chief advisers at the time. Despite each leader’s decision to distance himself from the terms of agreement outlined in this quickly neglected document, its terms were later revived and incorporated into the 2003 Geneva Accord (document 111) by Beilin and Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed-Rabbo, both now working without government authority. Geneva synthesized, with detailed provisions, the various partial agreements reached during the official negotiations that ended at Taba in January 2001 and attempted to gain public support by bypassing the recognized leaderships of both camps.12 Both exercises drew considerable popular support, inspiring other grassroots initiatives by ordinary Israelis and Palestinians similarly dedicated to Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation.13 Long on process and short on progress, 2000–2010 nevertheless produced a prolific paper trail, allowing us to track the terms of agreement under discussion. Early in his presidency President Bush had casually spoken of a two-state solution, Palestine and Israel, for the Arab-Israel conflict. In a speech on 19 November 2001 (document 104), Secretary of State Colin Powell’s reiteration of the two-state formula confirmed that the president’s seemingly offhand comments did indeed reflect a new American policy. Further evidence of this policy evolution came on 12 March 2002, when the United States voted with the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1397, which calls for the peaceful coexistence of two states, Israel and Palestine (document 105). Referencing the familiar UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338 but clarifying some of their (in)famous ambiguities, 1397 is explicit in its support for a Palestinian state. Later that month an Arab Peace Initiative was unveiled by then Crown Prince (later King) Abdallah of Saudi Arabia at an Arab summit meeting in Beirut, where the Arab League endorsed it on 28 March 2002 (document 106). The plan was reconfirmed by the Arab League in March 2007 (document 117) and, in a rare act of public diplomacy, Abu Mazen’s PA published a colorful, full-page Hebrew translation in several Israeli newspapers in November 2008.14 On the face of it, the Arab Initiative offers Israel normalization and peace with all Arab League members in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines (including the Golan), the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a “just solution” to the Palestinian refugee problem. Israel expressed interest in the Arab Initiative as a basis for new negotiations; as a take-it-or-leave-it plan, however, Israelis objected to language suggesting that the only possible solu-

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tion to the Palestinian refugee problem was the mass return of refugees into Israel. Former ambassador and negotiator Itamar Rabinovich voiced wariness about negotiating with a collective, since, “as a rule, the radicals will end up dominating,” also observing, however, that “on the other hand, if the initiative can help the Palestinians make compromises—part of the problem in July 2000 was that Arafat did not have real Arab support for compromises in Jerusalem or on the refugees—that would be helpful.”15 In his plan of 1 September 1982 (document 41), Ronald Reagan had specifically ruled out the creation of an independent Palestine; in a landmark speech on 24 June 2002, George W. Bush revealed the metamorphosis twenty years had wrought in American thinking with his history-making, unambiguous call for a two-state solution (document 107). Critics expressed dismay, however, that instead of articulating a powerful American contribution to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the president’s phrasing shifted the burden of creating a state to the long-suffering Palestinian people. He asked them to elect new leaders “not compromised by terror,” promising that only after “the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors” would the United States happily “support the creation of a Palestinian state, whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East.” But many Arab and European parties were happy to take the president at his word. Hard on the heels of Bush’s 24 June speech came “A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” proposed by the “Quartet,” a foursome composed of the United Nations, the European Union, the Russian Federation, and the United States. Initially reluctant to put the UN, Europeans, and Russians on equal third-party footing, the Bush administration made several modifications and then published a finalized version of the Roadmap on 30 April 2003 (document 109). Proving that everything old is new again, the Roadmap lists as the foundations of its two-state solution “the Madrid Conference, the principle of land for peace, UNSCRs 242, 338 and 1397, agreements previously reached by the parties, and the initiative of Saudi Crown Prince Abdallah—endorsed by the Beirut Arab League Summit—calling for acceptance of Israel as a neighbor living in peace and security, in the context of a comprehensive settlement. This initiative is a vital element of international efforts to promote a comprehensive peace on all tracks, including the Syrian-Israeli and Lebanese-Israeli tracks.” A three-phased program of timelines, benchmarks, and reciprocal “steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic, humanitarian, and institution-building fields,” the Roadmap declared that its “destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005.” In October 2003 UNSC Reso-

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Courtesy of Ed Stein, Rocky Mountain News

lution 1515 (document 112) endorsed the Roadmap as the best route to the two-state solution. As every traveler knows, delays are unavoidable in any arduous journey, but five years later, in December 2008, the Security Council found itself passing yet another resolution, 1850 (document 121), affirming the “irreversibility of the ongoing bilateral negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians” and support for a “two-state solution” which seemed no closer than it had five years earlier when the Roadmap was first unfolded. Harkening back to the long history of unfortunate timing obstacles in ArabIsraeli negotiating, we must recognize a contemporary intersection of timing and terms: just as critical masses of Israelis and Americans have become convinced of the necessity of a Palestinian state, Palestinians are increasingly skeptical that a viable Palestinian state is even still possible.16 The route of Israel’s massive separation barrier (condemned by some as an “Apartheid Wall”), the increasingly violent behavior of the Jewish settlers, and, most of all, the incessant Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank have convinced many Palestinians that the two-state solution is no longer feasible or desirable; indeed, a growing number of voices in the Palestinian community are speaking about a “one-state solution.”17 But promotion by Palestinians and a fringe group of Israelis of one new “state of all its citizens,” Arab and Jewish alike, with “one person, one vote,” provokes overwhelming objection by the Israeli mainstream. The Israeli fear is that the wholesale return of millions of

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Palestinians and the higher Arab birth rate would rapidly turn the new bi-national state into a de facto Arab state with a sizeable Jewish minority. This corresponds with the original PLO demand for a “secular democratic state in Palestine,”18 which similarly projected the demographic deconstruction of Israel as a Jewish state. It also comes full circle back to King Abdallah’s mandate-era offer, politely declined by the Jewish Agency, to allow for Jewish autonomy within a Jordanian kingdom encompassing all of mandate Palestine. Ironically, this early-twenty-first-century embrace of the one-state solution by some Palestinians puts them at odds with even right-leaning governments in the United States and Israel which have finally, after decades of fierce resistance to Palestinian arguments, been persuaded of the wisdom of a two-state solution. Always the most amorphous element and perhaps the most difficult to quantify, the psychological dimension of peacemaking was much in evidence between 2000 and 2010. We have used the term in this book both to refer to the psychological transformation required of leaders if they are to make strategic decisions in favor of diplomacy over force, and to the ordinary constituents who must be persuaded of the feasibility of their leader’s new diplomatic vision and lend their enthusiasm to it. Camp David I, which this book has identified as the point of departure for the contemporary Arab-Israeli peace process, speaks volumes about the psychology of peacemaking and peacemakers. The “eventful hero” is one who “exercises leadership or heroism because he or she happens to be around when there is an available part requiring such a person.” The classic example is that of the proverbial Dutch boy, whose “famous finger . . . was able to save Holland from a terrible flood only because there happened to be a dike whose opening could be sealed with his finger.”19 In our context, the easy analogy is Anwar Sadat who, like the little Dutch boy, was the right man in the right place at the right time. But Jeffrey Z. Rubin goes further and identifies Sadat as an “event-making” hero, distinguished from the “eventful hero” as the individual who strides over the great wash of history, creating (rather than responding to) history through dramatic, transcendent acts. Most of us would like to believe in the possible emergence of such event-making heroes; how much simpler and more appealing to hold out hope for the few good men and women who will lead us from darkness into light than to rely on turgid explanations of “situational ripeness” or favorable circumstance. . . . However, despite the appeal of the legendary event-making hero—the leader with transcendent authority and charisma— such individuals rarely appear. Even President Anwar Sadat . . . was only able to stride into the Israeli parliament because of his strong, ongoing relationship with the United States and the previous contacts established between Egyptians and Israelis. His was a heroic act, to be sure, but one that was probably made possible by the larger context of political relationships in which it occurred.20

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Sadat’s example throws into high relief the dearth of genuine statesmen and heroes among the politicians leading the peoples of the Middle East, but also reminds us that great leadership alone is not enough: the other elements in our framework must align properly if peace is to be wrested from the jaws of war. Subsequent leaders who looked to Sadat as a role model understood that his legacy cuts both ways: Arafat, for instance, was compared to the late Egyptian leader “both by those who revere Sadat as a statesman and those who revile him as an opportunistic traitor to the Palestinian and Arab cause.”21 That Sadat’s political sojourn ended in his assassination, as did that of Rabin, surely gives pause to possible heroic successors. Interestingly, King Hussein, whose commitment to Arab-Israeli peace was never in doubt and who demonstrated his willingness to lead even into the crosshairs, left Sadat out of his eulogy for Rabin, even as he praised the legacy of two other brave leaders felled for their peace efforts, Rabin and Hussein’s grandfather, King Abdallah I. Even though history may eventually vindicate Camp David I and Oslo as the foundational blueprints for Arab-Israeli peace, those two venues may have been sufficiently tainted that negotiators pouring old wine feel compelled to do so from newly labeled bottles. Like King Hussein’s omission of Sadat, UNSC Resolution 1850 of December 2008, calling for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, omits Oslo while citing UNSC Resolution 242, Madrid, the PerformanceBased Roadmap, the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, and the 2007 Annapolis Joint Understanding as foundations of the peace process. Neither Oslo nor the Declaration of Principles is anywhere to be found in this resolution; they can only be inferred by a nod to the parties’ “agreed principles for the bilateral negotiating process.” We have consistently argued, however, that regardless of the nomenclature, the shape of the settlement that may ultimately end the conflict will most likely resemble suggestions that were previously rejected or that failed. The difference will lie in the nature and intersection of the elements above and, psychologically, in the emergence of individual Arab and Israeli “event-making heroes” whose personalities predispose them toward making and reciprocating dramatic historical gestures. Although he was primarily examining Israel’s security and foreign policy, Zeev Maoz’s observations can apply to both Israelis and Arabs, whose leaders have historically exhibited a tendency to be “as reluctant and risk-averse when it came to making peace as they were daring and trigger-happy when it came to making war.” Not surprisingly, a military strategy characterized by “he who dares, wins,” and a diplomatic culture of “better safe than sorry”22 have not produced many leaders prepared to take chances on peace, or publics prepared to give them a chance to do so. A review of the situation from 2001 to 2010 reveals that many of the historical obstacles overcome or diminished during the brief, bright era of Madrid, Oslo, and Jordanian-Israeli peace (1991–1996) reasserted themselves in traditionally more neg-

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ative ways. Psychologically, the twisted twins of settlements and terrorism sapped the hope of Palestinians and Israelis alike that real peace is in the offing. Fewer and fewer Palestinians believe they will ever see a viable independent Palestinian state. Five years after leaving office, former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami characterized Israel’s settlement policy as “the most absurd march of folly that the State of Israel has ever embarked on, [which] narrowed the living space of the Palestinian people [and] destroyed beyond repair the faith of its Palestinian partners in the peace process.”23 Meanwhile, more and more Israelis are despairing of Palestinian readiness to coexist alongside Israel rather than to destroy and replace it. If Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was, from the Israeli point of view, a test of Palestinian intentions, the Palestinians failed miserably. Hamas quickly demonstrated that it was capable of controlling events in the Strip, but instead of embarking upon a program of state-building institutions and infrastructure, it chose to invest its money and energy in weapons procurement, continuing rocket attacks across the Gaza-Israel border, and to threaten a return to suicide bombing. Israel barricaded Gaza and built an elaborate separation barrier on the West Bank, leaving would-be Palestinian suicide bombers and state builders locked together within what Khalidi has called “an iron cage.” Peacemakers sought ways to contain the bombers while freeing the builders, and wondered how and when to ultimately dismantle the cage. Arab-Israeli negotiations since 1977 have made headlines, but have they made headway? Our case studies demonstrate that there have been some significant changes over time, with several diplomatic successes to show for it. Clearly, however, violence still dominates Palestinian-Israeli and other Arab-Israeli relationships. Interestingly, mainstream Palestinian, Israeli, and third-party peace proponents are finally speaking with the same vocabulary: two states; Palestinian sovereignty; Israeli security; coexistence. But lofty rhetoric in and of itself cannot create a new reality, and there is no such thing as a self-implementing peace plan. Important aspects of current Arab-Israeli diplomatic engagements remain true to the historical pattern, but the political environment is far from static. In fact, some analysts wonder if the Arab-Israeli conflict is not taking on a new formulation entirely, in which the divide is not between Arabs and Israelis but rather between those governments and groups that support a negotiated peace (Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Fatah) and those opposed (Iran, Syria, Hizballah, and Hamas). The nature of warfare in the immediate conflict area may also be undergoing a significant change. As Arab states seem increasingly disinclined to do conventional battle against Israel, Iran’s considerable support for Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza has enhanced those organizations’ ability to successfully engage Israel in asymmetrical combat to their own advantage. Also of grave concern are

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Matt Davies, courtesy Gannett Suburban Newspapers, United Feature Syndicate

the deepening gaps in Egypt and Jordan between regimes committed to a strategy of peace with Israel and the people who largely oppose it. Paradoxically, hopes for maintaining the treaty relationships between Egypt and Israel and Jordan and Israel rely on the continued ability of those Arab governments to control or suppress popular anti-Israeli sentiment. This second edition of our book coincided with the exit of the George W. Bush administration and Barack Obama’s assumption of the U.S. presidency. Many people around the world anticipated that the new American president would usher in an era of diplomatic promise. That optimism soon proved to be premature. What an American president intends to do and what circumstances ultimately demand of him or her are not the same thing; one need only recall that George W. Bush came to office determined to avoid the Middle East quagmire which had so preoccupied Bill Clinton, only to have al-Qaeda and Iraq dominate his presidency. President Obama took early steps to distinguish his administration from that of his predecessor by championing international cooperation and dialogue over muscular unilateralism. In June 2009 Obama traveled to Cairo to deliver an address to the world’s Muslims, assuring them that the battle against al-Qaeda was not an attack on Islam, and promising that his vision of Middle East peace was compatible with Muslim concerns and interests (document 122). Precisely one year earlier, as a presidential candidate, he had similarly sought to reassure Israel’s supporters in

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a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (document 120). In his remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2009 (document 124), Obama offered a further illustration of how American presidents face the almost impossible task of winning the confidence of all sides. Only eight months after his ringing Cairo speech, a reflective Obama acknowledged that his administration had raised expectations too high and had “overestimated [its] ability” to jump-start moribund Arab-Israeli negotiations.24 The election of a new American president does not change the intelligence reports, security assessments, regional balance of power, economies, domestic rifts, external threats, and internal challenges facing the leaders who must weigh all these before venturing their “yea” or “nay” to each new peace initiative. In light of the various explanations for why the Arab-Israel conflict has persisted so long, we recall the existence of fundamental gaps between the terms of agreement each party is prepared to accept. And sometimes, in choosing to sidestep an overture, leaders are correct in seeing through the disingenuous motives of their counterparts and wise in acting to protect their people from a dubious “peace partner” rather than risk a potentially dangerous deal. Truly great leaders are those who know when to hold back and when to make a calculated choice for change and peace. Reflecting on his own activism on behalf of Arab-Israeli peace, Palestinian scholar Sari Nusseibeh has written: “Over the past few years I’ve seen my share of smashed dreams, but like my father, I believe that human life is much more than the sum total of all our mistakes. Rubble, he used to tell me, often makes the best building material.”25 Arabs and Israelis have indeed created an immense amount of rubble together, but have made little progress in using it to construct a foundation for genuine and peaceful coexistence. It is true that Arab and Israeli leaders of great courage and vision have emerged periodically since 1977 and have even achieved some narrow successes. What the region needs is a cohort of pathbreaking statesmen working in concert, wise enough to unlearn a century’s worth of destructive behavior, persuasive enough to inspire their people to follow their lead, and powerful enough to neutralize violent rejectionists in their midst. If and when such leaders emerge, they will find plenty of rubble with which to start building a negotiated Arab-Israeli peace.

Appendix A. Timeline

1516–1918 1881 March 1882 1897 August 1908 July 1913 May June 1914 May August 1915–16 1916 May June 1917 November 1918 November 1919 January 1920 April 1921 March May 1922 July 1929 August 1933 January 1935 July â•… 1936 April

Ottoman rule over Palestine Assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia; anti-Jewish pogroms spark Jewish emigration First Zionist immigrants from Tsarist Russia arrive in Ottoman Palestine First World Zionist Congress convenes in Basle, Switzerland Young Turk Revolution First Zionist-Arab political contacts in Beirut and Cairo First Arab Nationalist Congress meets in Paris Meetings in Cairo between representatives of the Zionist Organization and the Arab Decentralist Party Outbreak of World War I McMahon-Husayn correspondence Sykes-Picot agreement Husayn declares Arab Revolt against the Ottomans Balfour Declaration World War I ends Weizmann-Faysal Agreement League of Nations awards mandates to Britain (Palestine, Iraq) and France (Syria, Lebanon); Arab riots in Jerusalem protesting the Balfour Declaration Britain creates Transjordan Arab riots in Jaffa protesting Jewish immigration League of Nations sanctions Mandate for Palestine, which comes into force September 1923 Arab riots triggered by fears over Jewish designs on holy places in Jerusalem and Jewish immigration to Palestine Adolf Hitler appointed chancellor of Germany; increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine Anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws passed in Germany; surge in Jewish immigration to Palestine Arab rebellion and general strike begins in Palestine

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November 1937 July 1938 November 1939 February– March May Summer September 1945 March May/August 1946 May 1947 February June–July November December 1948 May December 1949 February March April– September May July 1950 January–July February April 1951 July September– November 1952 July 1953 May

Peel Royal Commission arrives in Palestine Peel Report recommends partition of Palestine; Arab rebellion resumes Woodhead Commission’s inconclusive report on feasibility of partition of Palestine “Round table” conferences at St James’ Palace fail MacDonald White Paper restricts Jewish immigration, land purchase in Palestine Arab rebellion subsides Outbreak of World War II League of Arab States founded End of World War II Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry report recommends immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine; secret treaty between Jewish Agency and Maronite Church in Lebanon Britain submits Palestine question to United Nations UNSCOP visits Palestine, recommends partition into Jewish state and Arab state UNGA Resolution 181 calls for the partition of Palestine into Jewish state and Arab state, which Arabs reject fighting erupts between Arabs and Jews within Palestine British leave Palestine; first Arab-Israeli war begins; Israeli independence, Palestinian nakba UNGA Resolution 194 urges that refugees be permitted to return home or receive compensation; creates PCC Egypt-Israel GAA Israel-Lebanon GAA; Israel-Jordan GAA PCC peace conference in Lausanne, few results Israel admitted to membership in the UN Syria-Israel GAA PCC peace conference in Geneva fails draft accords between Israel and Jordan Jordan annexes West Bank Jordan’s King Abdallah assassinated in Jerusalem PCC peace conference in Paris fails Egyptian army officers overthrow King Farouk Hussein becomes king of Jordan

appendix a. timeline╇ /╇ 303

1956 January– March July October November December 1957 March 1958 1964 January 1965 January 1967 April–May May June September November 1968 March July 1969 February December 1970 September 1971 February March 1972 July September 1973 October December 1974 January

Final unsuccessful U.S. mediation attempt to promote Project Alpha collapses without direct Egypt-Israel talks Nasser nationalizes Suez Canal Company Israel, France, and Britain attack Egypt UNEF takes up peacekeeping mission in Sinai last British and French forces withdraw from Egypt Israel completes withdrawal from Sinai Palestinian guerrilla group Fatah established Arab League meeting in Cairo creates Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Fatah’s first cross-border raid into Israel Israel-Syria incidents along frontier Nasser mobilizes troops, orders UNEF troops out of Sinai, blockades Straits of Tiran to shipping to/from Israel Decisive Israeli victory against Egypt, Jordan, Syria; Israel captures Sinai, West Bank, Jerusalem, and Golan Heights; U.S. President Johnson’s speech lays out “principles for peace” Arab League summit at Khartoum rejects recognition of Israel or negotiations or peace with it UNSC Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal, right of all states to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries; Gunnar Jarring appointed UN Special Representative IDF attacks Palestinian base in Karameh, Jordan; battle involves PLO and Jordanian forces PLO meets in Beirut, issues revised National Charter Fatah head Yasir Arafat elected chairman of the PLO March 1969 (to August 1970) Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition Rogers plan announced Jordanian Army expels Palestinian guerrilla groups during “Black September”; PLO headquarters and fedayeen move to Lebanon; Nasser dies, succeeded by Anwar Sadat Jarring Mission peace proposal Hafez al-Asad becomes president of Syria Sadat expels Soviet advisers from Egypt Palestinian “Black September” terrorists kill Israeli athletes at Munich Olympics Egypt and Syria attack Israel; UNSC Resolution 338 declares cease-fire and reiterates call for negotiations Opening session of inconclusive Geneva Conference first Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement

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May October November 1975 April September November 1976 April 1977 January May October September November December 1978 March June September 1979 February March 1980 September 1981 January June October December 1982 April June August September

Syrian-Israel disengagement agreement Rabat Declaration recognizes PLO as sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people Yasir Arafat addresses the UN General Assembly outbreak of Lebanese civil war second Israeli-Egyptian disengagement agreement; U.S.-Israel Memorandum of ↜Understanding regarding conditions for U.S. recognition of and negotiation with the PLO UNGA Resolution 3379 declares Zionism a form of racism Syrian forces enter Lebanon; Syria-Israel “red line agreement” in Lebanon; Sa’ad Haddad declares “Free Lebanon” in southern Lebanon Jimmy Carter assumes U.S. presidency first Likud victory over Labor Party makes Menachem Begin Israel’s prime minister U.S.-USSR Joint Communiqué announces Geneva Conference Secret Egyptian-Israeli talks in Morocco Egyptian president Sadat addresses Knesset, launching peace negotiations Begin presents plan for Palestinian self-rule terror attack in Israel; Israel invades southern Lebanon to drive Palestinian groups away from the border (“Litani Operation”); UNSC Resolution 425 demands that Israel withdraw from Lebanon Israel withdraws from southern Lebanon, UNIFIL peacekeepers take up positions Israel and Egypt sign Camp David Accords (Framework for Peace in the Middle East, Framework for Egyptian-Israeli Peace) Islamic revolution in Iran Israel and Egypt sign peace treaty; Baghdad Summit resolutions denounce Egypt Iraq attacks Iran, begins the Iran-Iraq war Ronald Reagan assumes U.S. presidency Israeli jets destroy Iraqi nuclear reactor Sadat assassinated; succeeded by Hosni Mubarak Israel “extends law” to Golan Heights Israel completes withdrawal from Sinai Israeli invasion of Lebanon first MNF deploys in Lebanon PLO evacuates Lebanon and moves headquarters to Tunis; Reagan Plan; Fez Arab Summit adopts Saudi (Fahd) Plan;

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1983 February April May August October 1984 February March September 1985 February June 1986 February April August October 1987 April May July December 1988 February March July August November December 1989 January October 1990 June August 1991 January– February

President-elect Bashir Gemayel is assassinated, succeeded by brother Amin; Christian Lebanese Forces massacre Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla; second MNF deploys to Lebanon Kahan Commission report on Sabra and Shatilla massacres U.S. embassy in Beirut bombed Israel and Lebanon sign the 17 May Agreement Begin resigns as prime minister, succeeded by Yitzhak Shamir suicide attack against U.S. marines in Beirut U.S. marines “redeploy” out of Lebanon; Hizballah emerges in southern Lebanon President Amin Gemayel abrogates Israel-Lebanon Agreement Israel unity government with rotation; Shimon Peres is prime minister King Hussein–PLO agreement Israeli troops withdraw from most of Lebanon; IDF supports SLA in southern Lebanon King Hussein announces failure of agreement with PLO secret meeting between King Hussein and Yitzhak Rabin in London Israeli law passed making contact with PLO illegal Israel national unity government rotation: Shamir replaces Peres as prime minister King Hussein and Peres draft London Document; Gorbachev hosts Asad in Moscow Peres brings London Document to Israeli cabinet, no vote secret meeting between King Hussein and Shamir in London outbreak of first Palestinian Intifada first appearance of Hamas movement Shultz Initiative King Hussein announces Jordan’s disengagement from West Bank Hamas Covenant adopted; end of Iran-Iraq war PNC Meeting in Algiers declares Palestinian statehood Arafat addresses UN General Assembly in Geneva, meets terms for opening U.S.-PLO dialogue George H.W. Bush assumes U.S. presidency Taif Agreement ends Lebanese civil war U.S. suspends dialogue with PLO Iraq invades Kuwait U.S.-led coalition drives Iraq out of Kuwait (first Gulf War)

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March October December 1992 January May June Summer October 1993 January July August September 1994 February May July October December 1995 May September October November December 1996 January

Gulf War ends; President Bush delivers “New World Order” speech Madrid Peace Conference Bilateral Arab-Israeli talks commence in Washington, DC; dissolution of the USSR; UNGA Resolution 4686 repeals “Zionism is racism” resolution First Madrid multilateral talks open in Moscow “non-PLO” Palestinian Madrid team attends PLO meeting in Tunis Rabin succeeds Shamir as prime minister PLO and Israel begin back-channel talks in Oslo, Norway Jordan and Israel sign a draft agenda for peace Bill Clinton assumes U.S. presidency; serious back-channel talks accelerate between Israeli and PLO representatives in Oslo; Knesset repeals ban on contact with PLO Israel launches “Operation Accountability” in southern Lebanon Rabin gives “pocket commitment” to U.S. Secretary of State Christopher, then shifts Israeli attention from the Syrian track to the Palestinian track Rabin and Arafat sign letters of mutual recognition; Israel and PLO sign Declaration of Principles (Oslo Agreement); Israel and Jordan sign “Common Agenda” Baruch Goldstein massacres Muslims in Hebron mosque Israel-PLO Cairo Agreement (Gaza-Jericho); creation of the PA, Palestinian self-rule begins in Jericho and Gaza “Washington Declaration” ends state of war between Israel and Jordan; Arafat returns to Gaza Israel and Jordan sign peace treaty; first Middle East economic conference, Casablanca, Morocco; Clinton visits Syria Israeli and Syrian chiefs-of-staff meet in Washington; Rabin, Peres, and Arafat receive Nobel Peace Prize Syrian-Israel “Aims and Principles” non-paper; Rabin shifts Israeli attention from Syrian to Palestinian track Oslo II agreement between Israel and PA second Middle East economic conference, Amman; Beilin–Abu Mazen document; Israel assassinates Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shikaki Rabin assassinated, Peres succeeds him as prime minister Israeli-Syrian talks at Wye Plantation Arafat elected president of the PA in first Palestinian elections; Israelis assassinate Hamas bomb “engineer” Yahya Ayyash

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February March April May September November 1997 January March September November 1998 August October December 1999 February May September December 2000 January March May June July September October December

Hamas suicide bombing of bus in Jerusalem Hamas suicide bombers hit four Israeli buses in one weekend; Israel joins anti-terrorism “Summit of Peacemakers” in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt Israel launches “Grapes of Wrath” operation in southern Lebanon; PNC meeting in Gaza amends PLO Charter by voice vote Benjamin Netanyahu becomes prime minister first Netanyahu-Arafat meeting; Jerusalem tunnel incident leads to Palestinian-Israeli clashes third Middle East economic conference, Cairo Netanyahu and Arafat sign Hebron Protocol, IDF redeploys from Hebron Hussein-Netanyahu exchange of letters failed Mossad assassination attempt on Khaled Meshal in Amman fourth Middle East economic conference, Doha, Qatar; Jordan-Israel QIZ agreement secret meetings between Ronald Lauder and Asad Netanyahu and Arafat sign Wye River Memorandum Clinton addresses Palestinian assembly in Gaza King Hussein dies, succeeded by son Abdallah II Ehud Barak succeeds Netanyahu as prime minister, adopts “Syria first” approach, shifts Israeli attention away from Palestinian track; Asad exhibits new interest in Israel talks; Cairo Agreement deadline for final Israeli-Palestinian agreement missed Israeli-Palestinian accord signed at Sharm el-Sheikh Syrian-Israel talks at Shepherdstown Clinton presents draft Israel-Syria peace treaty as Shepherdstown talks end without agreement Clinton-Asad summit in Geneva; Barak shifts Israeli attention from Syrian track to Palestinian track Israel unilaterally withdraws IDF from southern Lebanon Hafez al-Asad dies, succeeded as president by his son Bashar Camp David II summit ends without results Oslo II deadline for a final agreement missed; Arafat and aides dine with Barak at Barak’s home; Ariel Sharon visits Temple Mount; second Palestinian Intifada begins Sharm el-Sheikh summit fails to quell violence Palestinian-Israeli talks at Bolling Airforce Base; Clinton outlines “Parameters” (“Bridging Proposal”) for an IsraeliPalestinian agreement

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2001 January March April June September October November 2002 March June July 2003 March April June October November 2004 April August September October November December 2005 January February April August

George W. Bush assumes U.S. presidency; Israeli-Palestinian talks at Taba, Egypt, no agreement reached Ariel Sharon succeeds Barak as prime minister Mitchell Report assesses causes for second Intifada Tenet Plan aims to restore cease-fire and Palestinian-Israeli security cooperation al-Qaeda 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, Washington U.S. topples Taliban government in Afghanistan Secretary of State Colin Powell speech recommitting U.S. to Arab-Israel peace process Terrorist upsurge against Israeli civilians; Israel reoccupies much of West Bank; Saudi peace proposal endorsed by Arab League meeting in Beirut; UNSC Resolution 1397 endorses two-state solution President Bush gives two-state solution speech Nusseibeh-Ayalon Statement of Principles U.S. invades Iraq Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) becomes first Palestinian prime minister; Quartet (U.S.-Russia-UN-EU) unveils “Roadmap” peace plan Sharon and Abu Mazen attend summit meeting in Aqaba, Jordan; Israel begins construction on “security fence”; Palestinian hudna goes into effect unofficial Israeli and Palestinian negotiators unveil Geneva Accord UNSC Resolution 1515 endorses Roadmap and two-state solution Sharon announces plans for unilateral disengagement from Gaza secret Israel-Syria talks, mediated by Turkey; unofficial “track II” Israel-Syria negotiations via private American intermediaries result in “non-paper” UNSC Resolution 1559 calls on Syria to leave Lebanon, Lebanese militias to disarm Sharon presents Gaza disengagement plan to Knesset Arafat dies in Paris; Bush reelected to second term Egypt-Israel QIZ agreement Abu Mazen elected president of the PA former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri assassinated in Beirut, anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon Syria withdraws troops from Lebanon Israel removes troops and settlers from Gaza Strip

appendix a. timeline╇ /╇ 309

November 2006 January June July August 2007 March June July September November 2008 January May December 2009 January March June September December

Sharon quits Likud, creates centrist Kadima Party Israeli PM Sharon suffers stroke, replaced by Ehud Olmert; Hamas wins majority in Palestinian parliamentary elections Hamas and Hizballah capture Israeli soldiers in separate border incidents Israeli-Hizballah “Second Lebanon War” UNSC Resolution 1701 institutes Hizballah-Israel cease-fire Riyadh Declaration re-endorses Arab League peace plan Hamas takes control of Gaza from Fatah in civil war; Mubarak, Olmert, Abdallah II, Abu Mazen meet in Sharm el-Sheikh Arab League representatives visit Jerusalem to promote peace plan Israel bombs alleged Syrian nuclear site Annapolis Peace Conference Winograd Commission report on second Lebanon War Turks mediating Syria-Israel talks Olmert announces intention to resign under criminal indictments; UNSC Resolution 1850 endorses Roadmap, two-state solution; Israeli “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza Barack Obama assumes U.S. presidency Benjamin Netanyahu becomes Israeli prime minister Obama addresses Muslim world in Cairo speech Goldstone Report on 2008 Gaza fighting released Obama receives Nobel Peace Prize

Appendix B. Documents Online

The texts of the following source documents are available on the companion website of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace at http://naip-documents.blogspot.com. 1.╇ The Basle Program, 29 August 1897 2.╇ The McMahon-Hussein correspondence, 1915–16 3.╇ The Sykes-Picot Agreement, May 1916 4.╇ The Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1917 5.╇ The Faysal-Weizmann Agreement, 3 January 1919 6.╇ The Mandate for Palestine, July 1922 7.╇ Peel Royal Commission Report, July 1937 8.╇ The MacDonald White Paper, May 1939 9.╇ UN General Assembly Resolution 181, 29 November 1947 10.╇ UN General Assembly Resolution 194, 11 December 1948 1↜1 .╇ General Armistice Agreement between Egypt and Israel, 24 February 1949 12.╇ General Armistice Agreement between Lebanon and Israel, 23 March 1949 13.╇ General Armistice Agreement between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 3 April 1949 14.╇ General Armistice Agreement between Syria and Israel, 20 July 1949 15.╇ Draft Agreement between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 24 February 1950 16.╇ Jordanian and Israeli Drafts of a Non-Aggression Agreement between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 28 February 1950 17.╇ President Lyndon B. Johnson, Five Principles for Peace in the Middle East, 19 June 1967 18.╇ Resolutions of the Arab Summit Conference, Khartoum, 1 September 1967 19.╇ UN Security Council Resolution 242, 22 November 1967 20.╇ Palestine National Charter, July 1968 21.╇ Statement by U.S. secretary of state William Rogers, 9 December 1969 22.╇ Aide-mémoire presented to Israel and the United Arab Republic by Ambassador Gunnar Jarring, 8 February 1971, with replies 23.╇ UN Security Council Resolution 338, 22 October 1973 24.╇ Opening Addresses, Geneva Conference, 21 December 1973 25.╇ Israel-Egypt Disengagement Agreement, 17 January 1974 26.╇ Israel-Syria Disengagement Agreement, May 1974 27.╇ Seventh Arab League Summit Conference Resolutions (Communiqué), Rabat, 28 October 1974

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28.╇ Yasir Arafat, Address to the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 13 November 1974 29.╇ Yosef Tekoah, Address to the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 13 November 1974 30.╇ Interim Agreement between Israel and Egypt, 1 September 1975 31.╇ Israel–United States Memorandum of Understanding, 1 September 1975 31a.╇ UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, 10 November 1975 32.╇ Joint Statement by the Governments of the United States and the USSR, 1 October 1977 33.╇ Statement to the Israeli Knesset by President Anwar el-Sadat, 20 November 1977 34.╇ Statement to the Israeli Knesset by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, 20 November 1977 35.╇ Israel’s Plan for Self-Rule for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, 28 December 1977 36.╇ UN Security Council Resolution 425, 19 March 1978 37.╇ The Camp David Accords: Framework for Peace in the Middle East and Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel, 17 September 1978 38.╇ American Answers to Jordanian Questions, October 1978 39.╇ Treaty of Peace between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the State of Israel, 26 March 1979 40.╇ Arab League Summit Conference Resolutions, Baghdad, 31 March 1979 41.╇ The Reagan Peace Plan, 1 September 1982 42.╇ Resolutions of the Arab League Summit Meeting, Fez, 6 September 1982 43.╇ The Beirut Massacre: Kahan Commission Report, 7 February 1983 44.╇ The Israel-Lebanon Agreement, 17 May 1983 45.╇ The “Weinberger Doctrine,” 28 November 1984 46.╇ Jordan-PLO Agreement, 11 February 1985 47.╇ King Hussein, Address to the Nation, 22 February 1986 48.╇ The Hussein-Peres Agreement (The London Document), 11 April 1987 49.╇ Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Remarks to President Hafez al-Asad, Moscow, 24 April 1987 50.╇ The Shultz Initiative, 4 March 1988 51.╇ King Hussein, Address to the Nation, 31 July 1988 52.╇ Hamas Covenant, August 1988 53.╇ Palestinian Declaration of Independence, Algiers, 15 November 1988 54.╇ PNC: Political Communiqué, Algiers, 15 November 1988 55.╇ Letter from Secretary of State George P. Shultz to Swedish foreign minister Sten Andersson, 3 December 1988, with enclosures 56.╇ Yasir Arafat, Address to UN General Assembly, Geneva, 13 December 1988 57.╇ Statements by Yasir Arafat and George Shultz, 14 December 1988 58.╇ President George H.W. Bush, Address before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Cessation of the Persian Gulf Conflict, 6 March 1991 59.╇ U.S.-USSR Letter of Invitation to the Peace Talks in Madrid, 8 October 1991 60.╇ U.S. Letter of Assurances to Jordan, 18 October 1991

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61.╇ U.S. Letter of Assurances to the Palestinians, 18 October 1991 62.╇ U.S. Letter of Assurances to Syria, 18 October 1991 63.╇ U.S. Letter of Assurances to Israel, 18 October 1991 64.╇ Farouk al-Sharaa, Opening and Closing Statements, Madrid Conference, 31 October and 1 November 1991 65.╇ Haydar Abd al-Shafi, Opening and Closing Statements, Madrid Conference, 31 October and 1 November 1991 66.╇ Yitzhak Shamir, Opening and Closing Statements, Madrid Conference, 31 October and 1 November 1991 67.╇ Presentation of the New Government, Address to the Knesset by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 13 July 1992 68.╇ Draft Agenda for Peace between Jordan and Israel, October 1992 69.╇ Letters Exchanged between PLO chairman Arafat, Israeli prime minister Rabin, and Norwegian foreign minister Holst, Tunis and Jerusalem, 9 September 1993 70.╇ Declaration of Principles [DOP] on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (The Oslo Accord), 13 September 1993 71.╇ Speeches at the Signing of the Israel-PLO Accord, the White House, Washington, D.C., 13 September 1993 72.╇ Jordan-Israel Common Agenda, with speeches, 14 September 1993 73.╇ Yitzhak Rabin, Statement to the Knesset on the massacre at Hebron, 28 February 1994 74.╇ Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area (The Cairo Agreement), 4 May 1994 75.╇ The Washington Declaration: Israel–Jordan–United States, 25 July 1994 76.╇ Treaty of Peace between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 26 October 1994 77.╇ Israel-Syria “Non-Paper” on the Aims and Principles of the Security Arrangements, 24 May 1995 78.╇ Oslo II: Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 28 September 1995 79.╇ [Beilin–Abu Mazen] Framework for the Conclusion of a Final Status Agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, 31 October 1995 80.╇ Remarks by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at Tel Aviv Peace Rally, 4 November 1995 81.╇ Eulogies at the funeral of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, 6 November 1995 82.╇ Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich, Statement on Syrian-Israeli Negotiations, 18 January 1996 83.╇ Summit of Peacemakers, Final Statement Issued by Co-chairmen Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and U.S. president Bill Clinton, Sharm el-Sheikh, 13 March 1996 84.╇ “Grapes of Wrath (April) Understanding” and U.S.-Israel side letter, 26 April 1996 85.╇ “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Negotiations.” Interview with Syrian Ambassador Walid al-Moualem, October–November 1996

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86.╇ The Hebron Protocol, 15 January 1997 87.╇ Note for the Record, appended to the Hebron Protocol, 15 January 1997 88.╇ Hussein-Netanyahu Exchange of Letters, March 1997 89.╇ The Wye River Memorandum, 23 October 1998 90.╇ Remarks by President Clinton to the Palestine National Council and other Palestinian organizations, Gaza, 14 December 1998 91.╇ Israel-Syria Draft Peace Agreement (“Clinton Plan”), 8 January 2000 92.╇ U.S. State Department Briefing: The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 10 January 2000 93.╇ Essentials of the Israeli Proposals at Camp David, July 2000 94.╇ Trilateral Statement on the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David, 25 July 2000 95.╇ President Clinton Statement (“Marshmallow Speech”), 25 July 2000 96.╇ Sharm al-Sheikh Summit Statements, 16 October 2000 97.╇ The Clinton Parameters, 23 December 2000 98.╇ Remarks and Questions from the Palestinian Negotiating Team Regarding the United States Proposal, 1 January 2001 99.╇ Israeli Response to Clinton [January 2001] 100.╇ Israeli-Palestinian Joint Statement (Taba), 27 January 2001 101.╇ Moratinos “Non-paper” on the Taba Talks, January 2001 102.╇ Sharm al-Sheikh Fact-finding Committee Final Report (Mitchell Report), 30 April 2001 103.╇ Israeli-Palestinian Ceasefire and Security Plan (Tenet), 13 June 2001 104.╇ Speech by U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, 19 November 2001 105.╇ UN Security Council Resolution 1397, 12 March 2002 106.╇ Arab League Summit Resolutions, Beirut, 28 March 2002 107.╇ President George W. Bush speech, 24 June 2002 108.╇ Ayalon-Nusseibeh Statement of Principles (“The People’s Voice”), 27 July 2002 109.╇ A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, 30 April 2003 110.╇ Palestinian Ceasefire (“hudna”) declarations from Fatah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad, 29 June 2003 111.╇ The Geneva Accord, 20 October 2003 112.╇ UN Security Council Resolution 1515, 19 November 2003 113.╇ President George W. Bush letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 14 April 2004 114.╇ Israel-Syria Non-paper, Draft 4, 29 August 2004 115.╇ Ariel Sharon Address to Knesset, Vote on Disengagement Plan, 25 October 2004 116.╇ UN Security Council Resolution 1701, 11 August 2006 117.╇ Riyadh Summit Resolutions, 29 March 2007 118.╇ Joint Understanding between Ehud Olmert and Abu Mazen at Annapolis, Maryland, 27 November 2007 119.╇ Winograd Commission Final Report, 30 January 2008 120.╇ Senator Barack Obama, Address to AIPAC Policy Conference, 4 June 2008 121.╇ United Nations Security Council Resolution 1850, 16 December 2008

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122.╇ President Barack Obama Speech, “A New Beginning,” Cairo University, 4 June 2009 123.╇ Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission (Goldstone) on the Gaza Conflict, 15 September 2009 124.╇ President Barack Obama Remarks, United Nations General Assembly, 23 September 2009 125.╇ Remarks by President Barack Obama upon Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo, 10 December 2009

Notes

For brevity, full publication details appear only in the Bibliography (pp. 381–418). Preface to the Second Edition 1. See, e.g., Israel Harel, “The Invisible Government,” Ha’aretz, 7 June 2007. 2. Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, xiv. Introduction 1. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, chap. 9; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 1: chap. 1. 2. For a seminal overview of the many-wars-little-peace phenomenon, see Itamar Rabinovich, “Seven Wars and One Peace Treaty,” in Rubinstein, The Arab Israeli Conflict, 34–58. 3. Neil Caplan, “Negotiation and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Jerusalem Quarterly 6 (Winter 1978), 3–19. 4. Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999. 5. Two thoughtful compilations offering multiple perspectives are Scham, Salem, and Pogrund, Shared Histories: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue, and Rotberg, Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict. 6. Some of the classic works about Zionism include Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader; Laqueur, A History of Zionism; Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, chaps. 1–4; and Vital’s trilogy, The Origins of Zionism; Zionism: The Formative Years; and Zionism: The Crucial Phase. For a Palestinian critique of Zionism, see Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948. 7. Some of the classic works about the origins of pan-Arab and Palestinian-Arab nationalism are Antonius, The Arab Awakening; Haim, Arab Nationalism: An Anthology; Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism; Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism; Khalidi et al., The Origins of Arab Nationalism; Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, chaps. 1–6; and Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 3–76. 8. For works dealing specifically with the origins of Palestinian Arab nationalism and its confrontation with Zionism, see Quandt, Jabber, and Lesch, The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism; Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1918– 1929; Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1929–1939; Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I; Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939; Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People; Khalidi, The Iron Cage.

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9. For discussions of the conflicting British promises to the Zionists and the Arabs in this era, see Stein, The Balfour Declaration; Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth; Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem; Friedman, The Question of Palestine; Smith, “The Invention of a Tradition,” 48–61. 10. Caplan, “Faisal Ibn Husain and the Zionists, 561–614; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 1:51–61. 11. For analyses of the period of the British Mandate, see Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine; Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest; Sykes, Crossroads to Israel; Cohen, Palestine, Retreat from the Mandate; Horowitz, Origins of the Israeli Polity; Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, chap. 2; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, vol. 2; Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, chaps. 6–11; Segev, One Palestine, Complete; Morris, Righteous Victims, chaps. 3–5. 12. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939. 13. Best known among the dissenters were land-purchase agent Hayim Margaliuth KalÂ� varyski and Hebrew University president Dr. Judah L. Magnes. 14. See., e.g., Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:29–40, 73–77, 118–29. 15. See, e.g., Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 1:76–77, 101–6, and 2:5–11, 20–28, 70–84, 233–39. 16. The main components of the MacDonald White Paper were as follows: (1) Jewish immigration was to be restricted to 15,000 per year for the coming five years, after which Arab consent would be required; (2) land sales to Jews were to be forbidden in certain zones, restricted in others, and unrestricted in a third area; and (3) self-government would be granted following a ten-year transition period during which relations between the Arab and Jewish communities would have to become stabilized. For discussions of its effect on the Arab and Jewish communities, see Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 290–94; Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem, 84–85; Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti, 52– 55; Bauer, From Diplomacy to Resistance, chaps. 1–2; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:114–18; Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, chap. 11. 17. These leading figures included Nuri as-Said and Tawfiq as-Suwaidi of Iraq; Mahmud Azmi, Abbas Hilmi, Ali Mahir, and Ismail Sidqi of Egypt; Syrians Shakib Arslan, Ihsan al-Jabiri, Amin Said, Jamil Mardam, Shukri al-Quwatly, and Abd ar-Rahman Shahbandar; and Lebanese leaders Riad as-Sulh and Emile Eddé. 18. A leading proponent of this thinking in the 1930s was David Ben-Gurion. See his My Talks with Arab Leaders. 19. Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 1:51–54, 221–24, and 2:11–14, 40–42, 65–67, 92–95, 188–89, 203–6, 216–17, 238–39. Relations also had their economic dimension, when Zionists purchased an option to lease some of the Amir’s lands. See Shapira, “The Option on Ghaur al-Kibd,” 239–83. 20. Bar-Joseph, The Best of Enemies. See also Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:145–48, 157–64, 268–71, 277–79; Sela, “Transjordan, Israel and the 1948 War,” 623–88. 21. Eisenberg, My Enemy’s Enemy; Eisenberg, “Desperate Diplomacy,” 147–63. 22. See, e.g., Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:58–84, 130–64; Eisenberg, My Enemy’s Enemy, 19–21. 23. See, e.g., Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 1:47–51, 168–87 and 2:18–21, 85–118, 181–82, 240–62.

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24. David Ben-Gurion speech, 19 June 1919, cited in Caplan, “Negotiation,” 4–5; Awni Abd al-Hadi, in conversation with Hayim Arlosoroff, quoted by Moshe Shertok (Sharett), 12 February 1932, reproduced in Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:186. Cf. Ben-Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:5–8, 189–96, 199–202. 25. The landmark United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 181, recommending a plan of “partition with economic union” for the future government of Palestine, dated 29 November 1947, was adopted with the required two-thirds majority: 33 in favor, 13 against, with 10 abstentions. For the text, see document 9. 26. For firsthand and other accounts of the transition from Palestine to Israel see Garcia-Granados, The Birth of Israel; Horowitz, State in the Making; Eban, An Autobiography, 79–80; Wilson, A Calculated Risk; Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine, 212–331; Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945–1948; Louis and Stookey, The End of the Palestine Mandate; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:139–64, 274–79. 27. For a selection of important studies on the end of the Mandate period and the first Arab-Israeli war, see Louis and Stookey, The End of the Palestine Mandate; Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited; Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 3: chaps. 2–6; Rogan and Shlaim, The War for Palestine; Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War; Bregman, Israel’s Wars, chap. 1; Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, chaps. 12, 13. 28. Khalidi, Iron Cage, 125–26, 136. 29. Kerr, The Arab Cold War. 30. See, e.g., Eytan, The First Ten Years; Touval, The Peace Brokers, chap. 3; Caplan, “A Tale of Two Cities,” 5–12. 31. Caplan, The Lausanne Conference, 1949; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 3: chaps. 4–10. 32. On Abdallah’s postwar negotiations with Israel, see Shlaim, Collusion, chaps. 17–19; Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan, 202–7. 33. For details of Egyptian-Israeli negotiation episodes leading up to the 1956 war see Shamir, “The Collapse of Project Alpha,” 73–100; Oren, “Secret Egypt-Israel Peace Initiatives Prior to the Suez Campaign,” 351–70; Oren, Origins of the Second Arab-Israel War, chap. 5; Bar-On, The Gates of Gaza, chaps. 7–8; Ben-Gurion, My Talks, chaps. 47–53; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, vol. 4. 34. On the 1956 Suez/Sinai war, see Heikal, Cutting the Lion’s Tail; Berger, The Covenant and the Sword; Love, Suez: The Twice-Fought War; Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, chap. 7; Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, chap. 17; Neff, Warriors at Suez; Bar-On, The Gates of Gaza; Louis, Suez 1956; Golani, Israel in Search of a War; Kyle, Suez 1956; Morris, Righteous Victims, 289–301. 35. On the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, see Hussein, with Vance and Lauer, My “War” with Israel; Abu-Lughod, The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967; Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars, 145–91; Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, chap. 8; Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 War; Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, chaps. 1–5; Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 378–464; Parker, The Six Day War; Morris, Righteous Victims, chap. 7; Oren, Six Days of War; Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East; Bowen, Six Days; Quandt, Peace Process, chap. 2; Gluska, The Israeli Military and the Origins of the 1967 War; Aboul-Enein, “The Heikal Papers”; Gerges, “The 1967 Arab-Israeli War,” 163–81; Ginor and Remez, Foxbats over Dimona;

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Shemesh, Arab Politics, Palestinian Nationalism and the Six Day War. For postwar diplomatic activity, see Eisenberg, “Peace Plans: 1967–1993.” 36. See Meital, “The Khartoum Conference and Egyptian Policy after the 1967 War,” 64–82. 37. On the maneuvering and redrafting that led to the historic resolution, see Caradon, Goldberg, El-Zayyat, and Eban, UN Security Council Resolution 242; Rafael, Destination Peace, chap. 20; Riad, The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East, 58–75; Kissinger, White House Years, 345–47; Korn, The Making of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. 38. On the Jarring and Rogers mediation episodes and the backdrop of the War of Attrition, see Touval, The Peace Brokers, chaps. 6–7; Korn, Stalemate; Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, chap. 6; Quandt, Peace Process, chap. 3; Morris, Righteous Victims, chap. 8; Bregman, Israel’s Wars, chap. 3. 39. On the evolution of the PLO in the late 1960s, see Cobban, The Palestine Liberation Organization; Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, part 2; Quandt, Jabber, and Lesch, The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism, parts 2 and 3. 40. For a firsthand account of some of the immediate postwar diplomatic activity, see Kissinger, White House Years, chap. 13. On the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, see Laqueur, Confrontation; Heikal, The Road to Ramadan; Aruri, Middle East Crucible; Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, chaps. 24–25; Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 474–89; Stein, Heroic Diplomacy; Morris, Righteous Victims, chap. 9; Herzog, The War of Atonement; Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War; Quandt, Peace Process, chaps. 4–5. 41. Touval, The Peace Brokers, 238–41; Kissinger, White House Years, chap. 17. 42. Kissinger, White House Years, chaps. 18, 21, 23. On the kilometer-101 talks, see Siilasvuo, In the Service of Peace in the Middle East, 1967–1979, 196–217; Stein, Heroic Diplomacy, chap. 4. 43. Caplan, “Negotiation,” 5. 44. Stein and Lewis, Making Peace among Arabs and Israelis, v; Caplan, “Negotiation,” 8, quoting Harkabi, Palestinians and Israel, 209. 45. Caplan, “Negotiation,” 6. Cf. “[In the] Middle East diplomacy often times serves as a war of attrition by other means.” Aharon Klieman, Approaching the Finish Line, 29. 46. Stein and Lewis, Making Peace among Arabs and Israelis, 14–15. Cf. Saunders, The Other Walls, 24–25, 121. 47. Quoted in Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, 194. Cf. Saunders, The Other Walls, 30–31, 49–51 (“Power for Negotiation or Power for Digging In?”), 124. 48. See, e.g., Saunders, The Other Walls, 28–30, 123. 49. For a brief discussion of the role of third parties since 1967, see Saunders, The Other Walls, 106–9, 125. A comprehensive examination of U.S. involvement in Arab-Israeli diplomacy can be found in two seminal works by Quandt: Decade of Decisions and Peace Process. 50. Caplan, “Negotiation,” 18. 51. Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:180. 52. Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, xv–xvi. 53. Kellerman, “Introduction,” 10. 54. Ibid.

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55. See Saunders, The Other Walls, 116, 126–30. For an analytical study of the process of legitimizing the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace, see Bar-Siman-Tov, Israel and the Peace Process. 56. Egypt-Israel General Armistice Agreement, 24 February 1949, Article V.2 (see document 11). 1. Hot Wars and a Cold Peace 1. Among the vast literature on Camp David, this section relies heavily on the perspectives offered in Quandt, Camp David, Touval, The Peace Brokers, chap. 10, Kamel, The Camp David Accords, Boutros-Ghali, Egypt’s Road to Jerusalem, Dayan, Breakthrough, and Weizman, The Battle for Peace. 2. This successful encounter at Camp David under Carter’s presidency should not be confused with the failed Palestinian-Israeli summit convened by President Bill Clinton at the same site—”Camp David II”—in July 2000. 3. See, e.g., Caplan, “A Tale of Two Cities,” 5–34; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, vol. 3 (chaps. 3–7, 9–10) and vol. 4; Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken, chaps. 1–2, 5; Shamir, “The Collapse of Project Alpha,” 73–100. 4. For in-depth treatments of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, see Oren, Six Days of War; Quandt, Peace Process, part 1; Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, parts 1 and 2; Parker, The Six Day War. 5. Stein, Heroic Diplomacy, 65, 59–67. See also el-Sadat, In Search of Identity, 279–81; Riad, The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East, 231, chap. 12; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 134–36; Heikal, Secret Channels, 164–65; Telhami, Power and Leadership in International Bargaining, 7. One active diplomat who did not view Sadat’s signals as being clear enough was Henry Kissinger. See Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, chap. 6. Norman G. Finkelstein argues that Israel rejected Sadat’s early 1970 peace signals (and also other opportunities for peace with the Arabs following the June 1967 war). See Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, chap. 6. But Mordechai Gazit challenges the view that Sadat was prepared to make peace before the 1973 war and that Israeli avoidance and U.S. disinterest sabotaged his efforts. Gazit, “Egypt and Israel—Was There a Peace Opportunity Missed in 1971?” 97–115. 6. Stein, Heroic Diplomacy, chap. 3; Quandt, Peace Process, part 2; Heikal, The Road to Ramadan; Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War. 7. Stein, Heroic Diplomacy, chaps. 4–6; Quandt, Peace Process, part 2, esp. chap. 5; Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis and Kissinger; Brown, The Last Crusade. For less charitable perspectives on Kissinger’s work, see Riad, The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East, chaps. 11 and 14; and Fisher, “Playing the Wrong Game,” 95–121. 8. Heikal, quoted in Touval, The Peace Brokers, 277. Cf. Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 80. 9. Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel, Memorandum to the President of the Republic [of Egypt] on the Tripartite Camp David Meeting, 28 August 1978, reproduced in Kamel, The Camp David Accords, 273, 276, 279. 10. Finklestone, Anwar Sadat, 200; Riad, The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East, 306. Egypt’s ambassador to Germany and soon-to-be foreign minister and Camp Da-

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vid negotiator Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel assumed that Sadat had simply ad-libbed his willingness to go before the Israeli Knesset as a rhetorical flourish, which Begin cleverly seized, thereby “cornering Sadat into a position where he could not decline the invitation.” Kamel, The Camp David Accords, 16. Egypt’s foreign minister at the time, Ismail Fahmy, assured a puzzled Yasir Arafat, a guest in parliament that day, that Sadat’s words were just rhetoric and a “slip of the tongue.” Fahmy, Negotiating for Peace in the Middle East, 266. 11. Quandt, Peace Process, 188–89; Quandt, Camp David, 123–25, 146n12. See also Indyk, “To the Ends of the Earth”; Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 45–47, 51–53; Stein, Heroic Diplomacy, chap. 7; Fahmy, Negotiating for Peace in the Middle East, 233–36, 243, 250–51, chap. 14. For the text of the U.S.-Soviet Joint Communiqué of 1 October 1977, see document 32. 12. Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 95–99. 13. For a critical discussion, see ibid., 106–109 and 136–37n31. 14. Ibid., 100. 15. Cf. Saunders, The Other Walls, 36. 16. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 172, echoes this point. 17. See, e.g., Quandt, Camp David, 8, 14–22, 198. 18. Ibid., 23–24. 19. See, e.g., Quandt’s December 1977 assessment of Sadat’s strategy, ibid., 152. Cf. ibid., 211; Dishon, “Sadat’s Arab Adversaries,” 3–15; Jiryis, “The Arab World at the Crossroads,” 26–61. For an introduction to the personalities and proclivities of the key actors at Camp David and how they affected each leader’s bargaining style, see Stein, Heroic Diplomacy, chap. 1; Kamel, The Camp David Accords, chap. 15 (Sadat); Telhami, “The Camp David Accords,” 43–45, http://www.guisd.org. The Egyptian minister of foreign affairs, Ismail Fahmy, and the minister of state for foreign affairs, Mohammed Riad, resigned before Sadat reached Jerusalem. Fahmy’s successor, Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel, participated in the various Camp David negotiations for a year, but resigned as foreign minister and absented himself from the signing ceremony in September 1978. Kamel, The Camp David Accords, 361–82; Fahmy, Negotiating for Peace in the Middle East, chap. 14. 20. Touval, The Peace Brokers, 287–88. Interestingly, Weizman went into Camp David a hawk, but the negotiation process with the Egyptians and the personal rapport that developed between him and Sadat turned him into an outspoken dove. Weizman, The Battle for Peace. 21. Friedlander, Sadat and Begin, 240–43. The author credits both leaders for winning a national pro-peace consensus through their mastery of the techniques of domestic intraelite bargaining. See also Stein, Heroic Diplomacy, chap. 1; Telhami, “The Camp David Accords,” 43–45. Before he agreed to withdraw the Israeli settlements in the Sinai, Begin telephoned Likud Knesset member Ariel Sharon, “the father of the settlement movement,” to make sure he would not make trouble for Begin over the issue. 22. Dayan, Breakthrough, 38–54; Rothman, “Negotiation as Consolidation,” 23. Cf. Touval, The Peace Brokers, 288; Quandt, Camp David, 109–10; Heikal, Secret Channels, 255–57; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 155; Fahmy, Negotiating for Peace in the Middle East, 219–20, 252–53. 23. Quandt, Camp David, 4; cf. 61, 213, 237.

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24. See, e.g., ibid., 163, 174–77, 187, 195, 202–203, 215, 224. 25. Kamel, Memorandum to the President of the Republic, 28 August 1978, reproduced in Kamel, The Camp David Accords, 273. See also Quandt, Camp David, 92, 95, 116, 174, 198, 207, 226; Touval, The Peace Brokers, 296, 298–99. 26. See, e.g., Quandt, Camp David, 78, 180, 189, 224; Telhami, Power and Leadership, 121–22; Touval, The Peace Brokers, 243, 298. 27. Quandt, Camp David, 33. Cf. Touval, The Peace Brokers, 243–44. 28. Carter press conference, 16 September 1977, cited in Quandt, Camp David, 111; cf. ibid., 315, 324–25, 333–35. This stance has been reiterated, with varying degrees of sincerity, by other presidents since Carter. Cf. Saunders, The Other Walls, 112; Ambassador Martin Indyk (representing the Clinton administration’s approach), The Jimmy Carter Lecture, Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 16 May 1995. 29. Kissinger, addressing the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce on 16 September 1975, quoted in Lasensky, “Paying for Peace.” 30. Quandt, Camp David, 241, 335; Touval, The Peace Brokers, 317–18. Experts argue as to the efficacy, limits, and appropriateness of using U.S. money to lure reluctant combatants to the peace table or punish those who refuse to participate in or undertake actions damaging to a peace process. Lasensky, “Paying for Peace”; Lasensky, “Underwriting Peace in the Middle East”; Clawson and Gedal, Dollars and Diplomacy, chap. 3; Ofira Seliktar, “The Peace Dividend,” 223–24; Bouillon, The Peace Business, introduction; Stauffer, “The Cost of Middle East Conflict.” 31. However, some students of Begin’s ideological and political course believe that Begin was also under tremendous personal pressure—perhaps even more so than Anwar Sadat—from President Carter and his advisers to yield on certain issues or be blamed afterward for the summit’s collapse. See, e.g., Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 103–104. 32. For different analyses of the gains and losses (and the relative backing down) of each of the parties involved at Camp David, see Quandt, Camp David, 324–27; Telhami, Power and Leadership, chap. 7 and 206–9; Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, Israel and the Peace Process, chaps. 7, 9. An interesting collection of interviews with leading Egyptian and American participants is in Mahmood, “Sadat and Camp David Reappraised,” 62–87. 33. New York Times, 27 March 1979, A11. 34. Stein, “Structure, Tactics and Strategies of Mediation,” 340; Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 21–22. 35. Quandt, Camp David, 118, 169–70, 188, 226, 251, 262, 283, 329–32; Touval, The Peace Brokers, 291, 296, 301–2. Saunders, The Other Walls, 95, reports that at the 1978 signing ceremony the comprehensive “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” was signed first, at Sadat’s insistence, and that the framework for the separate Egyptian-Israel peace treaty was only brought to the table for signature afterward, in an attempt to dramatize that “the peace treaty would be negotiated only in the framework of a comprehensive peace.” 36. Carter, Keeping Faith; Carter, The Blood of Abraham, 50. 37. American Answers to Jordanian Questions, October 1978 (document 38). Cf. Friedlander, Sadat and Begin, 243–48; Robins, A History of Jordan, 146–49. 38. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 123, 165. See also Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, chap. 4; Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 436–42.

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39. Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 103–104. 40. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 169–70, holds that the blanket rejection of Camp David by the Palestinians constituted a “capital sin” by their leadership, who in 1993 would negotiate the Oslo agreement with Israel, a document premised on principles not dissimilar to those of Camp David. 41. Martin Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 109; Dowty, Israel/ Palestine, 197–98. Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 110–11, gives even lower figures for 1977: twenty-four settlements in the West Bank and Gaza with a total population of 3,200. 42. For an American assessment of Camp David’s failure to win Palestinian backing, see Saunders, The Other Walls, 60–62. 43. Murray Edelman, quoted in Bar-Siman-Tov, Israel and the Peace Process, 12. 44. Saunders, The Other Walls, xxi–xliv, 1–2. 45. Weizman, The Battle for Peace, 2. For discussions of the effects of Sadat’s Knesset speech, see Quandt, Camp David, 147–48; Touval, The Peace Brokers, 289; Saunders, The Other Walls, xii–xiii; Bar-Siman-Tov, Israel and the Peace Process, 58–59; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 158, 163. For Egyptian impressions see Riad, The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East, 307; Kamel, The Camp David Accords, 17–18; Boutros-Ghali, Egypt’s Road to Jerusalem, 22. 46. Begin’s apparent belief that the countries would yet meet in Geneva is somewhat surprising. However, reference to Geneva appears in only one paragraph at the end of his remarks, well after he had emphasized Israel’s preference for bilateral talks with each Arab country individually. 47. Friedlander, Sadat and Begin, 238–40. 48. For an analysis of Egyptian impulses and constraints in making peace with Israel, see Ajami, The Arab Predicament, secs. 2 and 3. 49. Egypt and Israel each claimed as its own the tiny resort town of Taba on the Sinai-Negev border, but they agreed to submit the case to international arbitration, which found in favor of Egypt in 1988. The diplomatic resolution of this lingering dispute was evidence that the treaty was working. 50. Clawson and Gedal, Dollars and Diplomacy, 65. “Cairo faced the Arab world squarely in the eye over its peace treaty and forced the latter to blink.” For a multifaceted assessment of the impact of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty at the end of its first decade see Quandt, The Middle East: Ten Years after Camp David. 51. Gamal Essam El-Din, “Flourishing QIZ,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 12–18 October 2006, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg, distributed by Search for Common Ground, http://www .commongroundnews.org. For a more pessimistic assessment of the QIZ experiment, see Yadav, “The Political Economy of the Egyptian-Israeli QIZ Trade Agreement.” 52. Some scholars argue that conflicts pitting Arab states against one another and the eclipse of the Arab states by Israel, Turkey, and Iran in the Middle East in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century have weakened the reality of an “Arab world” and, by extension, Egypt’s “‘Arab’ leadership role.” Cantori, “Egypt at the Crossroads,” 158–63; Doran, “Egypt: Pan-Arabism in Historical Context,” 118–19. For an alternative argument, see Alterman, Sadat and His Legacy; Ibrahim, The Vindication of Sadat in the Arab World; Ginat, “Egypt and Its Involvement in the Disengagement Process.” 53. Hatina, “Egypt’s Role in the Israeli-Arab Peace Process.”

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54. Stein, “Continuity and Change in Egyptian-Israeli Relations,” 296–320; Doran, “Egypt: Pan-Arabism in Historical Context,” 116. 55. Clawson and Gedal, Dollars and Diplomacy, 13, 162, and chap. 6; Saunders, The Other Walls, 99–100; Doran, “Egypt: Pan-Arabism in Historical Context,” 116. 56. Clawson and Gedal, Dollars and Diplomacy, xii. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, argues, however, that the United States only pushed so hard, seeing an advantage to a “cold peace” that mitigated against its Egyptian ally’s isolation in the Arab world. 57. Rabinovich, “Ivory Tower and Embassy,” 15. See Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 267– 304; Sela, “Politics, Identity and Peacemaking,” 15–71. For a sympathetic treatment of the anti-normalization forces among Egyptians, see Colla, “Solidarity in the Time of AntiNormalization,” 249–59. For Egyptian reactions to the thirtieth anniversary of Sadat’s speech at the Knesset see Mira Tzoreff, “Commemorating or Forgetting? Sadat’s Peace Initiative as Reflected in the Egyptian Press,” Commentary, The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 22 January 2008, http://www.dayan.org/frameana .htm. 58. Jacky Hugi, “Yaakov Setty: I am Arab-Jewish,” Ma’ariv, 5 July 2006, distributed by the Common Ground News Service, http://www.commongroundnews.org. 59. Sadat, In Search of Identity, 310–11. 60. Cohen, Culture and Conflict in Egyptian-Israeli Relations, 6–8. On the Israeli process of legitimizing peace with Egypt between 1979 and 1982, see Bar-Siman-Tov, Israel and the Peace Process, 188–242. For continuing evidence of the incompleteness of the process on both sides, see Alan Cowell, “To Egypt, Peace Pact Is a Stigma on Its Arab Soul,” New York Times, 19 March 1989, 6; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 3–4; interview with Elyakim Haetzni of the ultra-nationalist Tehiya Party, 16 July 1991, in Telhami, “Israeli Foreign Policy after the Gulf War,” 49; al-Ahram Weekly poll conducted in December 1994, discussed in Gerges, “Egyptian-Israeli Relations Turn Sour,” 74–75; Amos Elon, “The Thinking Men’s War,” New York Times Magazine, 11 May 1997, 40–43; Deborah A. Starr, “Egyptian Representation of Israeli Culture,” 263–82. 61. Azarva, “From Cold Peace to Cold War?” http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2007/issue1/ jv11no1a10.html. 2. Mission Impossible 1. Sofer, Begin: An Anatomy of Leadership, 212. 2. See Israeli, PLO in Lebanon: Selected Documents; Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival. 3. Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, 171, 176; Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 42–43, 71, 304–5; Rabinovich, The War for Lebanon, 133; Kimche, The Last Option, 144–45, 153–58; Rubin and Blum, The May 1983 Agreement over Lebanon, 6–7; Hof, Galilee Divided, 98, chap. 10. Shlomo Ben-Ami goes so far as to claim that “the architects of the invasion . . . believed that the defeat of the Palestinians in Lebanon would trigger a mass exodus of Palestinians to the East Bank of the River Jordan, which in turn would bring about the collapse of the Hashemite dynasty and the Palestinisation of the kingdom in a way which would allow Israel a free hand to assert her rule in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank].” Scars of War, 179. See also Davis, 40 KM into Lebanon; Gabriel, Operation Peace for Galilee; Randal, Going All the Way; Schiff, “Lebanon: Motivations and Interests in Israel’s Policy,” 220–27.

326╇ /╇ notes to pages 53–56

4. Eisenberg, My Enemy’s Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination, esp. 28– 36; Eisenberg, “Desperate Diplomacy,” 147–51. 5. Eisenberg, My Enemy’s Enemy, 32–33, 65–66, 110–11, 136–41, 163–69; Eisenberg, “Desperate Diplomacy,” 147–63; Caplan and Black, “Israel and Lebanon: Origins of a Relationship,” 48–58; Gelber, “Antecedents of the Jewish-Druze Alliance in Palestine,” 352–73; Parsons, “The Druze and the Birth of Israel,” 60–78. 6. Shabtai Rosenne to Eliahu Sasson, 13 March 1949 (Report on Talks at Ras al-Nakoura), Israel State Archives, Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel, 3:309–11. A selection of documents pertaining to the negotiation of the Israeli-Lebanese armistice agreement appears in 3:279–326. 7. In 1950 the Phalange engaged the new Israeli government in a brief flurry of exploratory negotiations, looking for assistance in the upcoming Lebanese elections, but with no significant results. Morris, “Israel and the Lebanese Phalange,” 125–44; Morris, “The Phalange Connection,” Jerusalem Post Magazine, 1 July 1983, 7–8; Eisenberg, My Enemy’s Enemy, 159; Schulze, Israel’s Covert Diplomacy in Lebanon, chap. 2. 8. Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon, chap. 6; Ezer Weizman, The Battle for Peace, chap. 21; Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival, 115–19; Hof, Galilee Divided, chap. 9. 9. Contacts between the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the Phalange under Pierre GeÂ�mayel occurred during the pre-1948 period, but, as a rule, Gemayel’s battle against Muslim rule in Lebanon did not translate into a pro-Zionist orientation on the Palestine question. See Eisenberg, My Enemy’s Enemy, 83–84, 126, 135, 137; Eisenberg, “Desperate Diplomacy,” 152, 154n22; Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 11–12; Eisenberg, “From Benign to Malign: Israeli-Lebanese Relations, 1948–1978.” Note: some English language accounts render Gemayel as “Jumayyil.” 10. Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, chap. 1; Rabinovich, The War for Lebanon; Kimche, The Last Option, 125–26, 130, 132–33, 153–55, 157, 164–68; Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, 171; Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security; Evron, War and Intervention in Lebanon; Eisenberg, “History Revisited or Revamped?” 11. Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 41–43; Rubin and Blum, The May 1983 Agreement over Lebanon, 6–7; Gromoll, The May 17 Accord, 6; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 103; Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 151–56. Peleg assesses Israel’s success in achieving its multiple goals, 169–75. 12. According to one Israeli account, for a short while Lebanese tourists crossed into Israel, and Lebanese merchants imported Israeli goods not only for the Lebanese markets but also to reexport to Arab countries after suitable repacking and relabeling. Kimche reports that trade between the two countries soared, exceeding that between Israel and many of her traditional European trading partners. Kimche, The Last Option, 167; “First Boomlet in Tourism from Lebanon,” Jerusalem Post, 30 November 1982, 3; Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon, 310. 13. Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 15, 22–25, 46–51, 56–57; Kimche, The Last Option, 154–56; Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security, 152–53; Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, 184; Schulze, Israel’s Covert Diplomacy in Lebanon, 130–32. Already in the first week of the war, Bashir gave an interview to American television in which he denied the existence of an alliance with Israel. Extracts of the interview, broadcast on ABC news, 27 June 1982, and ABC’s 20/20 program, 9 July 1982, are in Israeli, PLO in Lebanon, 256–59;

notes to pages 56–59╇ /╇ 327

David M. Rosen, “Lebanon’s Elias Sarkis, Bashir Gemayel, Amin Gemayel,” in Kellerman and Rubin, Leadership and Negotiation in the Middle East, 27. The Kellerman and Rubin book offers a detailed look at the psychological makeup and leadership skills of the Arab, Israeli, American, and Soviet actors in this case study and includes a “Subjective Index of Leadership Effectiveness,” 266. 14. See, e.g., Schiff, “The Green Light,” 73–85; Tanter, Who’s at the Helm? Lessons of Lebanon, 31–35, 110–13. 15. Rubin and Blum, The May 1983 Agreement over Lebanon, 3; Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, 186–87. 16. Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 159. 17. In the heady days of his apparent success, immediately prior to his assassination, Bashir had proposed to Weinberger that Lebanon become the United States’ “strategic outpost in the Middle East,” just short of a “fifty-first state.” Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 146. 18. Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, chap. 15 and 276; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, chap. 5; Tanter, Who’s at the Helm? Lessons of Lebanon, chaps. 5–8; Korbani, U.S. Intervention in Lebanon, chaps. 5–6; Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, 183–85. 19. See Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 157–62 and throughout, and Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 221–22 and throughout; for an overview of the channels of U.S. decision making regarding Lebanon, see Korbani, U.S. Intervention in Lebanon, chaps. 5 and 6; Christison, “The Arab-Israeli Policy of George Shultz,” 34; Haig, Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy, 342; Tanter, Who’s at the Helm? Lessons of Lebanon; Fisk, Pity the Nation, 480. 20. Record, Making War, Thinking History, 83, quoted in Astor, Presidents at War, 200. 21. Astor, Presidents at War, 200. 22. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 196. 23. Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, 181. 24. Kimche, The Last Option, 164; Rubin and Blum, The May 1983 Agreement over Lebanon, 28; Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, 180, 198–99 (quoting U.S. Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis and U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Robert Dillon); Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 198, 209, 219, 232–33; Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 278, 308; Haig, Caveat, 318, 342, 350; Inbar, “Great Power Mediation,” 81; Christison, “The Arab-Israeli Policy of George Shultz,” 33; Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, 197. 25. “Shultz Doesn’t Take a Damascus No for an Answer,” New York Times, May 15, 1983 (Week in Review section); Shultz reports that along with “massive arms transfers,” the USSR even sent Soviet soldiers to man surface-to-air missiles in Lebanon and Syria. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 198, 221, 233; Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 153, 158; Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 308; Seale, Asad, 397–400; Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, 196–97; Margaret G. Hermann, “Syria’s Hafez al-Assad,” in Kellerman and Rubin, 89–90; cf. Dina Rome Spechler, “The Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev,” in Kellerman and Rubin, chap. 9. Spechler argues that Soviet backing for the Syrians was actually restrained and modest. 26. See Khalidi, Under Siege. 27. Reagan Plan (document 41). For documentation on the conflicting Israeli and Egyptian interpretations of the nature of future Palestinian “autonomy,” see Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 160–70.

328╇ /╇ notes to pages 59–63

28. See, e.g., Israel Cabinet communiqué, 2 September 1982, in Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 200–203. Begin’s reaction was characterized and communicated by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis to Secretary of State George Shultz. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 94; Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 148–49; Seale, Asad, 402. 29. Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 278, 297; Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, 194. 30. See Quandt, Peace Process, 254–57; Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 600–609; Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 478–79. For details of the decisions, wording, timing, and reactions to Reagan’s speech see Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, chap. 6. 31. Gromoll, The May 17 Accord, 21–23; Kimche, The Last Option, 157–58; Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, 183; Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 233–36; Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security, 152; Perlmutter, The Life and Times of Menachem Begin, 386. Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 276, suggests that Begin may have already had a treaty ready for Bashir’s signature in August, but Bashir balked. 32. Kimche, The Last Option, 166–67. 33. Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 235. 34. Mackey, Lebanon: The Death of a Nation, 188–89; Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 305; Inbar, “Great Power Mediation,” 75–76; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 196, 210; Some Lebanese contend, however, that it was the United States’ inability to deliver on its promises, especially the rapid withdrawal of all foreign forces, which sentenced the agreement to an early death. Korbani, U.S. Intervention in Lebanon, 71–77. 35. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 141, 143, writes that the prospect of an Israeli victory over Soviet-backed PLO and Syrian forces in Lebanon appealed to Haig and other “Cold Warriors” in the administration. He describes Haig as “a one hundred percent supporter of Israel on all issues.” 36. Haig, Caveat, 317, 330–35; Betty Glad, “The United States’ Ronald Reagan,” in Kellerman and Rubin, Leadership and Negotiation in the Middle East, 213–17; Inbar, “Great Power Mediation,” 73. 37. While their objective was not “peace,” the three-way negotiations among the Americans, Israelis, and PLO for an agreement on the terms and conditions under which the PLO would depart Beirut make an excellent case study in political bargaining behavior. See Khalidi, Under Siege; Tanter, Who’s at the Helm? Lessons of Lebanon; Habib, Diplomacy and the Search for Peace in the Middle East; Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker; Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War. 38. Rubin and Blum, The May 1983 Agreement over Lebanon, 26. 39. In addition to the sources cited above, see the following for their interpretations and critiques of U.S. policy: Young, Missed Opportunities for Peace; Hudson, “The United States’ Involvement in Lebanon,” 210–31. 40. Seale, Asad, 404–5; Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East, 184; Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 290–91; Kimche, The Last Option, 164–65; Gromoll, The May 17 Accord, 32–33; Rubin and Blum, The May 1983 Agreement over Lebanon, 14–15; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 112; Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 279–84, 289; Inbar, “Great Power Mediation,” 77.

notes to pages 63–66╇ /╇ 329

41. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 103–104, 200, 207–208; Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 285–87, 289–92. 42. Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 275–79, 285; Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 293. 43. Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 292. David Kimche, who had developed a close relationship with both Bashir and Amin Gemayel, claims that U.S. envoy Philip Habib actually urged Gemayel not to sign a separate peace with Israel so as not to estrange Lebanon from the Arab world, adding that the United States had given Sadat the same advice in 1978, much as the British had advised King Abdallah of Transjordan three decades earlier. Kimche, The Last Option, 172, 182. 44. Thomas L. Friedman, “Lebanese Cabinet Votes to Accept Pact on Pullout,” New York Times, 15 May 1983. 45. Bernard Gwertzman, “Pullout Pact: The U.S. Role,” New York Times, 16 May 1983. 46. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 173–74, claims that he had never approved of the second MNF and the marines’ vulnerable position and questionable mission. Two hundred forty-one marines died in the bombing, and Weinberger blamed himself for not having been able to persuade the president to withdraw them months earlier. It was, he writes, an “unhappy truth that the second MNF was a sad and grievous error.” Islamic Jihad, probably an early incarnation of Hizballah, claimed responsibility for both suicide attacks. For analysis of the success of MNF-1 and the failure of MNF-2, see McDermott and Skjelsbaek, The Multinational Force in Beirut, 1982–1984. 47. On Syrian involvement in Lebanon in the 1970s, see Walid Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon, chaps. 2–3 and 82–84; Seale, Asad, chap. 17. On Syrian opposition to the 17 May Agreement, see Seale, Asad, chaps. 22, 23; Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security, 153. See also Abukhalil, “Determinants and Characteristics of Syrian Policy in Lebanon,” 123–36; Hermann, “Syria’s Hafez al-Assad,” in Kellerman and Rubin, Leadership and Negotiation in the Middle East, chap 5. Additional analysis of the Lebanese civil war and beyond can be found in Barakat, Toward a Viable Lebanon; Fisk, Pity the Nation; Gilmour, Lebanon: The Fractured Country; Gordon, The Republic of Lebanon; Haley and Snider, Lebanon in Crisis; Harris, Faces of Lebanon; Hollis and Shehadi, Lebanon on Hold; Norton, “Lebanon after Ta’if,” 457–73; Salibi, A House of Many Mansions. 48. “Shultz Doesn’t Take a Damascus No for an Answer,” New York Times, 15 May 1983 (Week in Review section). 49. Mackey, Lebanon: The Death of a Nation, 188; Harkabi, Israel’s Fateful Hour, 102; Haig, Caveat, 317–18; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 197; Christison, “The Arab-Israeli Policy of George Shultz,” 31; Rabil, Syria, the United States, and the War on Terror, 72– 75. 50. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 221; Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 306. 51. Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 289, 304–309. Weinberger called the Accord “absurd” and expressed frustration that “State stubbornly clung to its ‘agreement’ as if it were a major diplomatic triumph. Because the Israelis had insisted on Syria’s parallel withdrawal . . . the stillborn agreement meant nothing.” Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 155–60; Tanter, Who’s at the Helm? Lessons of Lebanon, 219.

330╇ /╇ notes to pages 66–69

52. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 197, 226, 233–34; Syrian foreign minister Abd al-Halim Khaddam quoted in Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 302; Fisk, Pity the Nation, 538. 53. Seale, Asad, 395. 54. Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 308. 55. Ibid. 56. Khalidi, “Problems of Foreign Intervention in Lebanon,” 24–29. 57. Quandt, “Reagan’s Lebanon Policy,” 237–54. Another critique of U.S. mediation efforts is Inbar, “Great Power Mediation,” 71–73, 82. 58. Another parallel may be drawn with the 1949 Egyptian foreign minister’s appointment of three military men and one civilian to his country’s Rhodes delegation (while the Israelis did the reverse: four foreign ministry officials and one senior military officer). See Caplan, “A Tale of Two Cities,” 7–8. 59. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, 155–56; Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 306; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 220–21; Mackey, Lebanon: Death of a Nation, 188; Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon, 310–11; Seale, Asad, 407–8; Bernard Gwertzman, “Israel and US Sign an Agreement on Lebanon Raids,” New York Times, 18 May 1983; Fisk, Pity the Nation, 482; Deeb, Syria’s Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process, 86; Hof, Galilee Divided, chap. 11. 60. Schiff and Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 296. 61. Qassem, Hizballah: The Story from Within, 92–93. 62. Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon, 311; Seale, Asad, 409–17. 63. Hudson, “Lebanon’s US Connection in the New World Order,” 143. 64. Rubin, “Conclusion,” 265. The Kellerman and Rubin book offers a detailed look at the psychological makeup and leadership skills of all the main actors in this case study, and includes a “Subjective Index of Leadership Effectiveness.” 65. Norton, Amal and the Shi’a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon, 84–85, and esp. chap. 7; Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History; Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, 194–95; Nasrallah, Prospects for Lebanon; Eisenberg, “Israel’s South Lebanon Imbroglio,” 60–69; Qassem, Hizballah: The Story from Within, 88–89; Gordon, The Republic of Lebanon, 144; Seale, Asad, 396. 66. Qassem, Hizballah: The Story from Within, 87. 67. Begin insisted upon viewing the Maronite situation in European, post-Holocaust terms, relishing the irony in the Jewish state aiding persecuted Christians while the rest of the world stayed mute. This was a completely inaccurate reading of the Christian position in Lebanon, however, and no doubt contributed to what Ofira Seliktar called his “failed leadership” during the Lebanon campaign. Seliktar, “Israel’s Menachem Begin,” in Kellerman and Rubin, Leadership and Negotiation in the Middle East, 35–36, 38, 42, 45; Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 165–66, 174; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 54; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 180; Eisenberg, “History Revisited or Revamped?” 390. 68. For an evocative description of the protest, see “Eyewitness,” in Hareven, The Vocabulary of Peace, 157–63. 69. For the findings of the official Israeli Commission of Inquiry investigation into Israeli culpability for the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, see The Beirut Massacre: The Complete Kahan Commission Report (document 43). See also Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph,

notes to pages 70–74╇ /╇ 331

chap. 7; Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 162–65. No one in Lebanon has ever been charged, arrested, or tried for the murders. 70. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 221–31. 71. Boykin, Cursed Is the Peacemaker, 305. 72. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace, appendix, 445–57. 73. Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon, 332–34; Thomas L. Friedman, “Gemayel Visit: Plea for US Action to break Impasse,” New York Times, 30 November 1983. 74. Fisk, Pity the Nation, 537; Seale, Asad, 417. 75. Schulze, Israel’s Covert Diplomacy in Lebanon, 142–44. 76. An excellent survey of the multiple facets of the 1996 fighting, which appeared immediately in its aftermath, is Hollis and Shehadi, Lebanon on Hold. See also Eisenberg, “Israel’s Lebanon Policy”; Gambill, “The Balance of Terror,” 51–66. 77. A side letter from U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to the Israelis explicitly acknowledged Israel’s right to self-defense in responding to Hizballah attacks in southern Lebanon or northern Israel. The negotiations which produced the agreement make for a fascinating case study in political bargaining, but since the goal was not ArabIsraeli peace, they unfortunately fall beyond the purview of this book. 78. Norton, “(In)security Zones in South Lebanon,” 68. 79. Norton, “Hizballah and the Israeli Withdrawal from Lebanon,” 22–35; Eisenberg, “Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?” 80. Hizballah used the Shebaa Farms dispute as an excuse not to disarm after the Israeli withdrawal. The UN and Israel maintain that Shebaa Farms is actually Syrian territory which Israel occupied in the course of the 1967 war, and as such any negotiated return would be to Syria, not Lebanon. 81. The 2006 Hizballah-Israel war was especially discouraging to those who had hoped that, having successfully driven Israel from southern Lebanon, Hizballah would disarm and focus its energies on domestic political advocacy on behalf of the Lebanese Sh’ia. Eisenberg, “Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?”; cf. Zisser, “Hizballah: New Course or Continued Warfare?” and “The Return of Hizballah.” 82. Inbar, “Great Power Mediation,” 81. 83. Mackey, Lebanon: The Death of a Nation, 188. 84. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 234. 85. Heikal, “An Arab Era Has Been Ended,” 188. 3. Premature Peacemaking 1. Robins, A History of Jordan, 158. 2. Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan, 24–32; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 16–19; Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, 44–49; Robins, A History of Jordan, chaps. 2–3. Regarding the British pledge of Arab independence in return for Hashemite support against the Turks (the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence of 1915) see Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, 27–39, 63–66; Antonius, The Arab Awakening, chap. 9, appendix A; Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth; Friedman, Palestine: A Twice-Promised Land? 3. Shapira, “The Option on Ghaur al-Kibd,” 239–83; cf. Neil Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:11–14, 40–42. On Abdallah’s contacts with Zionists during the 1920s, see Caplan, Pal-

332╇ /╇ notes to pages 74–76

estine Jewry and the Arab Question, 1917–1925, 171–82; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 1:51–54, 106. 4. Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 1:51–54; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 20–24. 5. Representing Abdallah at different times were Muhammad al-Unsi, Hasan Khaled, and Dr. Shawkat Sati, while Moshe Shertok (Sharett), Reuven Shiloah, Eliahu Sasson, Ezra Danin, A. H. Cohen, and Golda Myerson (Meir) participated on behalf of the JA. For a discussion of early Zionist-Transjordanian relations, see Shlaim, Collusion; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War; Robins, A History of Jordan; Yoav Gelber, Jewish-Transjordanian Relations, 1921–1948; Sicker, Between Hashemites and Zionists; Nevo, King Abdallah and Palestine. 6. Shlaim, Collusion, 1. 7. Other scholars draw on similar archival sources to challenge Shlaim’s claim of collusion. See Sela, “Transjordan, Israel and the 1948 War,” 623–88, and Yoav Gelber, IsraeliJordanian Dialogue, 4. Cf. Shlaim, “The Debate about 1948,” 171–92. For background on Zionist-Israeli contacts with Abdallah at this time, see Sharef, “Meeting of the National Administration and the Formation of a Provisional Governmental of Israel,” 63–68; Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, 27–30, 342–43, 361–62; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:7–64, 277–79; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 24–26; Bar-Joseph, The Best of Enemies; Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken, 15–16, 113. 8. Bar-Joseph, The Best of Enemies, chap. 6; Shlaim, Collusion, 400–428; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 26–27; Neil Caplan, The Lausanne Conference, 1949, 38–41; al-Tal, “The Jordanian-Israeli Negotiations,” 116–18. 9. Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 29–32; Shlaim, Collusion, 442–47. 10. Shlaim, Collusion, 513–612; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, chap. 4; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 26–27; Satloff, From Abdullah to Hussein, 8–29. 11. In the 1960s King Hussein’s Jewish doctor in London, Dr. Emanuel Herbert, served as a quiet go-between; in the 1980s a similar intermediary role was played by the king’s friend Lord Victor Mishcon, a British Jew, attorney, and member of the British Labour Party. Shlaim, Lion of Jordan, 194–99, 436, 447, and The Iron Wall, 226, 443. Shlaim repeats verbatim in Lion of Jordan much text that originally appeared in his earlier work, The Iron Wall. 12. Lukacs, Israel, Jordan and the Peace Process, chap. 2. 13. Begin’s exclusion is noted by Melman and Raviv, Beyond the Uprising, 202; Shlaim, Lion, 456; Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 173. 14. Lustick, Israel and Jordan, 1, 14–46, 22–29. In 1992, Garfinkle (Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 2) listed the following issues on which Jordan and Israel enjoyed functional contact: agricultural development, pest control, water conservation and allocation, pollution control, intelligence, navigation, air-traffic control, mining, utilities management, banking and commerce policy, and scientific and technical exchange. 15. Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, chap. 3; Klieman, Statecraft in the Dark, 103–8; Lustick, Israel and Jordan, chap. 3. 16. See, e.g., Klieman, Statecraft in the Dark, chap. 7; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War; Zak, “A Survey of Israel’s Contacts with Jordan,” 390–94; Zak, “Talking to Hussein”; Zak, “Secret courtship,” 12A.

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17. Shamir, Summing Up, 177; Shlaim writes that in his private meeting with the king, “Shamir knew that the Jordanians were worried that the extremists within the Likud wanted to expel Palestinians from the West Bank to the East Bank in line with the slogan ‘Jordan is Palestine.’ He therefore tried to reassure Hussein that this was not the policy of his party or of the government he headed.” Shlaim, Lion, 454. 18. Melman and Raviv, Beyond the Uprising, 202–206; Morris, Righteous Victims, 630; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 87; Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 71. 19. Salibi, The Modern History of Jordan, 260–61, 266–69; Abu-Odeh, Jordanians, Palestinians and the Hashemite Kingdom, 213, 223, 228, 234, 255–58; Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 70–72; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking: The Inside Story of the 1994 Jordanian-Israeli Treaty, 17. See also Israeli, “Is Jordan Palestine?” 49–66; Schueftan, “Jordan’s ‘Israeli Option,’” 254–55; Shlaim, Lion, 452, 454; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 477, 543. 20. Schueftan, “Jordan’s ‘Israeli Option,’” 257–58. 21. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 185; Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 443. 22. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 444–62, discusses the Hussein-Arafat agreement and the political environment around it. See also Lesch, “The Reagan Administration’s Policy towards the Palestinians,” 182–84; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 106–10; Sahliyeh, “Jordan and the Palestinians,” 279–318; Tessler, A History of the IsraeliPalestinian Conflict, 648–62; Robins, A History of Jordan, 160–61; Shlaim, Lion, 428–38; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 241–44. 23. Sahliyeh, “Jordan and the Palestinians,” 303; Quandt, Peace Process, 271; Shlaim, Lion, 446. 24. Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, 171. 25. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 442–43; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 432. 26. Peres, “A Strategy for Peace in the Middle East,” 896; Helen Davis, “Israelis Get the Feeling Peace Has a Chance,” Gazette (Montreal), 5 October 1985, B4; Lars-Erik Nelson, “Israel Puts Its Enemies on the Spot,” Gazette (Montreal), 25 October 1985 (reprinted from the New York Daily News). 27. Lewis, “Israel: The Peres Era and Its Legacy,” 597–600, and Lewis, “The United States and Israel: Constancy and Change,” 247–48; Quandt, Peace Process, 270; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 111–13; Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 164–65. 28. Shlaim, Lion, 439, and Iron Wall, 437; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 245–46. James Lunt points out, however, that not all Jordanians were as quick to assign Arafat full blame. Hussein of Jordan, 197–200. 29. Klieman, Statecraft in the Dark, 52; Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 662–66; Quandt, Peace Process, 270–71; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 125–26. 30. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 184. 31. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 444. 32. Lewis, “The United States and Israel,” 252; Shimon Shamir, “Israeli Views of Egypt and the Peace Process,” 210; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 442–43. In his memoirs, Yitzhak Shamir (Summing Up, 168) fumed that Peres pursued his King Hussein plan “with the same disregard for propriety whether he was foreign minister at the time or prime minister. All that seemed to matter to him was that he should get his own way.” 33. Golan, The Road to Peace, 323.

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34. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 447; Peres, Battling for Peace, 264, Shamir, Summing Up, 167. 35. It is ironic that Peres and Shamir—in appealing to a powerful third party to impose their preferred policy on one another, instead of directly negotiating a compromise between the two of them—followed the traditionally flawed pattern of Arab-Israel negotiations. See Quandt, Peace Process, 272. Regarding Shamir-Peres maneuvering see Shlaim, Iron Wall, 445–47; Frankel, Beyond the Promised Land, 37–38. Shultz himself (Turmoil and Triumph, 939) thought it “extraordinary [that] the foreign minister of Israel’s government of national unity was asking me to sell to Israel’s prime minister, the head of a rival party, the substance of an agreement made with a foreign head of state, an agreement revealed to me before it has been revealed to the Israeli government itself!” Peres maintains that Shultz had not understood that he, Peres, had already informed Shamir of the terms of his agreement with Hussein. Peres, Battling for Peace, 269–70. 36. Shlaim, Iron Wall, 445–47. 37. Peres, Battling for Peace, 268–69; Lewis, “The United States and Israel,” 249, 252; Mylroie, “Israel in the Middle East,” 146; Quandt, Peace Process, 272. Another interesting timing argument for the lack of American support, advanced by Avi Shlaim, is that it was “a result of the fallout from the Iran-Contra affair that Shultz did not throw his full weight behind the London Agreement.” Israel had secretly worked with deputy director for political-military affairs Oliver North and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane to sell U.S. arms to Iran in exchange for freedom for U.S. hostages in Lebanon, after Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger had clearly decided against such a plan. When the subterfuge was revealed, Shultz was angry at the conspirators for embarrassing the administration and complicating his own Middle East agenda. Shlaim, Iron Wall, 442. 38. Golan, The Road to Peace, 324, 331; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 447; Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 446. 39. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 187. 40. Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 114–15, 132–33, 137. 41. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 185. Hussein reluctantly supported the resolution and hinted in his conference remarks that Jordanian protection and diplomatic representation would be better for the Palestinians than that of the PLO. http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/ views_palestine2.html. 42. Schueftan, “Jordan’s ‘Israeli Option,’” 266. 43. Lustick, Israel and Jordan, 13–16. 44. Shamir identifies “Peres’s obsessive campaigning on behalf of an international conference” as a major bone of contention between Labor and Likud and between the two men. Shamir, Summing Up, 167–68. 45. Although their status was insufficient to turn their plan into policy, it was sufficient that Joan Mishcon, the wife of attorney Victor Mishcon, in whose London home the two were secretly meeting, was appalled at the spectacle of the king and prime minister preparing to wash the dinner dishes. 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs, PBS video, 1999; Peres, Battling for Peace, 265; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 443. 46. Peres, The New Middle East, 16. 47. Shlaim interview with King Hussein, quoted in Shlaim, Iron Wall, 448. Ultimately, writes Peres’s biographer, Shamir prevailed and “managed to let the air out of the tires of

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the political chariot, which remained by the roadside like an unwanted vehicle. Peres was portrayed . . . as a man with the best of intentions, but who could not deliver the goods.” Golan, The Road to Peace, 331. On the damage to Peres’s credibility among Jordanians, see also remarks by Ali Shukri, Hussein’s chef de cabinet, quoted in Shlaim, Lion, 453. 48. Lewis, “The United States and Israel,” 247–48; Quandt, “US Policy toward the ArabIsraeli Conflict,” 373; Quandt, Peace Process, 260–63, 270–71. Americans most heavily involved behind the scenes were Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy, Murphy’s special assistant Wat Cluverius, and legal adviser Abraham Sofaer. 49. Quandt, Peace Process, 260–65; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 439–62. Kathleen Christison argues that although Shultz came into office with an even-handed approach, his negative encounters with the PLO and Syria in Lebanon in the early 1980s led him to adopt a pro-Israeli orientation. Christison, “The Arab-Israeli Policy of George Shultz,” 29–30. 50. Lewis, “Israel: Peres Era,” 598, 603. 51. Shamir wasn’t buying it. He writes (Summing Up, 169) that he understood immediately that Peres hoped that “if no one else, at least George Shultz would be able to persuade me to accept this so-called London Agreement.” Heikal suggests that Shamir hoped to present his own plan, on different terms, to King Hussein after the failure of Peres’s London Document. Heikal, Secret Channels, 379–82. 52. Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 8–9, 69. 53. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 455–60; Quandt, Peace Process, 270–71. 54. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 939. Peres’s biographer describes an emotional Shultz embracing the agreement with much enthusiasm, a depiction very much at odds with Shultz’s own account of his measured reaction to the agreement. Golan, The Road to Peace, 330. Peres (Battling for Peace, 269) also reports on elated U.S. officials who hailed the agreement as a breakthrough. On the pretense of U.S. initiation, see also Heikal, Secret Channels, 381. 55. Peres, Battling for Peace, 268 56. Shamir, Summing Up, 169. 57. Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 88–89; Mylroie, “Israel in the Middle East,” 146; Shamir, “Israeli Views of Egypt and the Peace Process,” 212–13; Quandt, Peace Process, 272; Quandt, “US Policy,” 374–75; Lewis, “Israel: Peres Era,” 600; Shamir, Summing Up, 170. 58. Shlaim, Iron Wall, 444, and Lion, 449; Heikal, Secret Channels, 381. 59. Peres, Battling for Peace, 264–68. For other accounts of the Peres-Hussein meeting, see Shlaim, Iron Wall, 443–45, and Lion, 447–49; Golan, The Road to Peace, 325–29; Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 172; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 247–48. 60. In “An International Conference on the Middle East,” 14–28, Zak makes an especially strong case for the first of these objections. See also Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 59–60, 66–67. 61. Sahliyeh, “Jordan and the Palestinians,” 303; Shamir, “Israeli Views of Egypt and the Peace Process,” 211–13; Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 8–9, 65–66, 68–70. The London Document called, in Ben-Zvi’s terminology, for a “minimalist” rather than a “maximalist” type of international conference. 62. In arguing for an Arab-Israeli settlement via an international peace conference, Hussein’s brother Crown Prince Hassan argued that the resolution of the PalestinianIsraeli tier of the conflict ought not to be pursued in isolation from the Arab-Israeli tier:

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“Decoupling those two tiers is not only inadvisable, it may be detrimental to the process as a whole.” Speech at the Washington Institute for Public Policy, 12 September 1989, quoted in Susser, “Jordan, the PLO and the Palestine Question,” 225. 63. Ben-Zvi (Between Lausanne and Geneva, 26–35) makes this point, while underlining Hussein’s shifting position on the conference format. 64. See, e.g., Yorke, “Domestic Politics and the Prospects for an Arab-Israeli Peace,” 17–19. 65. Quotations taken from Maoz (Defending the Holy Land, 444–46), who views the agreement favorably, and from Ben-Ami (Scars of War, 186), who is not impressed. 66. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 258; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 445. 67. Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 83–89. See also Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, 171–72. 68. A popular song in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s was “The Red Rock” (Ha-Sela HaAdom) written by Haim Hefer and Yohanan Zar’ai and sung by Arik Lavi. Some Petrabound Israeli hikers were shot as enemy infiltrators upon encountering Jordanian troops. There was some controversy over the appropriateness of playing this song on Israel radio, since it glorified and romanticized a trek which was—absent peace between the two countries—foolhardy, not to mention potentially lethal. See Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 239–40. Once Israel and Jordan made peace in 1994, Israeli tourists flocked to Petra. See also Serge Schmemann, “Through the Gorge to Petra,” New York Times, 11 February 1996; Yadin Roman, “The Lure of the Trail,” Eretz 96 (November–December 2004), http://202. org.il/Pages/moreshet/petra/roman.php (accessed 12 January 2009). 69. Document 47; Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 34–35, 118–52; Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 665; sources cited above, chapter 3, note 28. 70. Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 129, 131–32. 71. On the plan presented to Washington in late 1985, see Peres interview in Davar, 25 October 1985, document 106 of Israel’s Foreign Relations 1984–1988; on the Peres-Hassan meetings, see Joint Communiqué on 22–23 July Summit at Ifrane, Morocco: Rabat and Jerusalem, 23 July 1986, and Peres, Knesset Statement, 28 July 1986—all available from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) website, http://www.mfa.gov.il; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 438. 72. It is impossible to overstate the depth of animosity and contempt with which Shamir and Peres viewed one another and the impact of their negative relationship upon the conduct of Israeli foreign policy at the time and on the nature of other nations’ dealings with Israel. A comparative reading of their autobiographies is fascinating; basic facts are not in dispute—i.e., Shamir derailed the London Document plan—but their judgments of those facts differ wildly. See Shamir, Summing Up, and Peres, Battling for Peace. Shultz, in his Turmoil and Triumph, serves as a third-party witness to the Shamir-Peres machinations. 73. Heikal, Secret Channels, 380; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 439. 74. Shamir, Summing Up, 170. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 447, argues that had Peres resigned and brought down the government over this issue, Labor could have presented the London Document to the Israeli electorate and denounced the Likud as antipeace, perhaps winning enough seats in the ensuing election to solidly regain the premiership and make the plan with King Hussein official Israeli policy. Peres’s response to the resignation argument is that, by revealing the London Document to the Israeli public

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as his reason for leaving the government, he would have violated his pledge of secrecy to Hussein. Peres, Battling for Peace, 270. That did not prevent him, however, five months later, from reading aloud “almost verbatim” the text of the agreement during a speech at the UN. “Address in the General Assembly by Vice-Premier and Foreign Minister Peres,” 30 September 1987,” available at http://www.mfa.gov.il. 75. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 447; 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs, PBS video, 1999; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 942–44; Melman and Raviv, Beyond the Uprising, 192– 93; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 448–19, and Lion, 454–58; Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 173. 76. Peres, Battling for Peace, 269. 77. Shlaim, Lion, 458. 78. Robins, A History of Jordan, 159–60; Heikal, Secret Channels, 369. 79. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 944. 80. Ibid., 948–49. Shamir confirmed in his memoirs (174) that the king was correct: Shamir did not accept the London Document (and was not tempted by the Shultz Initiative) because he was indeed unwilling to relinquish territory captured in 1967. It did not help, however, that Shamir suspected that the source of Shultz’s idea for the international conference was his own nemesis, Shimon Peres. Indeed, Peres takes credit for the idea in Battling for Peace, 269. 81. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 948. Shlaim (Lion, 457) reveals that Shultz left his confidential briefing folder behind a sofa cushion where the Jordanians found it, read it, made a photocopy, and returned it to the sofa for a Shultz aide to find when he returned to look for it the next day. King Hussein “was upset by the content of the file . . . [which] smacked of craven appeasement to Shamir and displayed indifference towards Arab sensitivities.” 82. Quandt, Peace Process, 274. 83. Ibid., 364–67, 486–87; Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 713, 716; Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 104–15; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, chap. 47. Cf. Christison (“The Arab-Israeli Policy of George Shultz,” 41), who considered the Shultz Initiative “unimaginative, [and] designed to give the appearance of movement without the substance.” Christison’s article is a blistering critique of Shultz’s performance in the Arab-Israel arena and a counterweight to the other sources cited. 84. Quandt, Peace Process, 275; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 456; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 1016, 1021–31, chap. 47. 85. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 936, 1022–23. The Oslo II accords of 1995 would later incorporate this concept by creating zones A, B, and C in the West Bank, reflecting different areas and degree of Israeli and Palestinian control. 86. Christison, “The Arab-Israeli Policy of George Shultz,” 41. Christison (42) scores Shultz for failing to innovate or draw “any new conclusions from the uprising and its obvious implications. . . . To the end, he remained wedded to formulas that were clearly no longer applicable in the wake of the Intifada.” See also Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 1030–34; Shamir, Summing Up, 175–79; Quandt, Peace Process, 276; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 456; Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 174. 87. The indirect negotiations between the PLO and the United States about the conditions for opening a direct channel of communication between them make for a fascinating case study in bargaining but, their goal not being Arab-Israeli peace, fall beyond the

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purview of this book. Gerner and Wilbur, “Semantics or Substance?”; Rabie, US-PLO Dialogue, and Rabie, “The U.S.-PLO Dialogue,” 54–66; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 1034–45; Quandt, Peace Process, 277–85, 300–301. 88. See Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 218–21; Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 137–38 and chap. 4; Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, 175–77; Lukacs, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 174–80. 89. Remark by former Jordanian ambassador Walid Sa’di, quoted in Robins, A History of Jordan, 164 (see also 163–64); Gerner and Wilbur, “Semantics or Substance?”; Quandt, Peace Process, 277; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 457–58; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 188–89. Ashton (King Hussein of Jordan, 250–53) links Hussein’s disengagement from the West Bank with the king’s distress over a call to arms against the Jordanian regime early in the first Intifada by the Palestinian Unified National Command, which characterized Jordan as an enemy of the Palestinian people along with the IDF, the settlers, and collaborators. 90. See also Muhammad Muslih, “Towards Coexistence: An Analysis of the Resolutions of the Palestine National Council,” 3–29; Robins, A History of Jordan, 263–64. 91. Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 104. 92. Ben Ami, Scars of War, 186–87; Robins, A History of Jordan, 162. 93. Robins, A History of Jordan, 158. 4. Setting the Peace Table 1. Regarding Israel’s surprising decision to forego a response to the Iraqi missile attacks see Eisenberg, “Passive Belligerency: Israel and the Gulf War,” 304–29. 2. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 415. All of chap. 3, “A Postwar Vision for the Middle East,” is devoted to Baker’s developing the idea of a multilateral peace conference and trying the persuade the various leaders in the region to agree, in principle, to participate. Cf. Shamir, Summing Up, 229. 3. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 512; cf. 510–13. 4. Bannerman, “Arabs and Israelis: Slow Walk toward Peace,” 143. Cf. Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 15–17. 5. Quandt, Camp David, 36, 108, 113, 115, 198; Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 17–22. 6. The minimalist-maximalist dichotomy is taken from Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva. For a comparison of the Geneva and Madrid conferences see Bentsur, Making Peace, 176–77. 7. This “two-tier” approach became part of American proposals in March 1989. See Rubenberg, “The Bush Administration and the Palestinians,” 199. See also Atherton, “The Shifting Sands of Middle East Peace,” 124–25. 8. For details of the changing positions of the United States, USSR, and Middle Eastern parties regarding an international conference prior to 1988, see Ben-Zvi, Between Lausanne and Geneva, 26–104; Yorke, “Domestic Politics and the Prospects for an ArabIsraeli Peace,” 17–20. 9. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 488; Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, 182. 10. Golan, “Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 38. 11. Baker (The Politics of Diplomacy, 509) observed that “the Soviets were so pleased to be co-sponsors that I essentially had their proxy for any arrangements.” The Palestinians

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initially looked to the Soviets for diplomatic support several times. Ashrawi found them ineffectual while Abu Mazen appreciated their good will. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 128–29; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 86–96. 12. Bannerman, “Arabs and Israelis: Slow Walk toward Peace,” 144. Cf. Golan, “ArabIsraeli Peace Negotiations,” 46. 13. George H.W. Bush, Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Cessation of the Persian Gulf Conflict, 6 March 1991 (document 58). Bush used the phrase for the first time in an address to a joint session of Congress on 11 September 1990. For discussions, see, e.g., Spiegel and Pervin, “Introduction: The Search for Arab-Israeli Peace after the Cold War,” 1–4; Gazit, “After the Gulf War,” 18–20; Bentsur, Making Peace, 154–57; Quandt, Peace Process, 304–305. Atherton, “The Shifting Sands of Middle East Peace,” 114–33, puts the conference in a broader historical context going back to 1967. 14. Bentsur, Making Peace, 172. 15. Karsh, “Peace Not Love,” 151; Segev, “The Arab-Israeli Conflict under President Bush,” 114; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 184–85. 16. Cf. Susser, “Jordan, the PLO and the Palestine Question,” 226. 17. Gerner and Wilbur, “Semantics or Substance?” 3. 18. Mansour, “The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 5–7; cf. 30–31. Abu-Amr, “Palestinian-Israeli Negotiations,” 27. Haydar Abd al-Shafi concurs that the Palestinians “had to go” to Madrid: “It didn’t cost us anything to enter the process,” and it denied Israel “the chance to make propaganda that we don’t want peace.” Abd al-Shafi, interviewed by Rashid I. Khalidi, “Looking Back, Looking Forward,” 33. He made a similar point in an interview ten years earlier: “Reflections on the Peace Process,” 57. Palestinian delegate Sami al-Kilani similarly wrote that “you can refuse only if you are strong enough and you have everything in your hand.” Al-Kilani and Hiltermann, “Why We Negotiate,” 18. 19. Al-Kilani and Hiltermann, “Why We Negotiate,” 46; Abd al-Shafi, “Reflections,” 57–58. Abd al-Shafi considered Madrid the first instance of genuine coordination between the PLO and the Arab states. 20. Muasher, “Jordanian Attitudes to the Peace Process”; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 450–51. 21. For a firsthand account, see Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, chap. 1. 22. Baker details his drawn-out pre-negotiations with Asad in The Politics of Diplomacy, chaps. 23, 25, and 27. See also Ross, The Missing Peace, 73–76, 79. 23. Telhami, “Israeli Foreign Policy after the Gulf War,” 49. 24. Eisenberg, “Passive Belligerency: Israel and the Gulf War,” 315–16, 318–19; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 197–200; Shamir, Summing Up, 219–21. 25. Eisenberg, “Passive Belligerency: Israel and the Gulf War,” 317; Frankel, Beyond the Promised Land, 307; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, chap. 29; Atherton, “The Shifting Sands of Middle East Peace,” 133; Bentsur, Making Peace, 49–50, 101; Quandt, Peace Process, 307, 310, 312–13, 318; Shamir, Summing Up, 210–11, 233–35; Segev, “The Arab-Israeli Conflict under President Bush,” 125–28; Ross, The Missing Peace, 82–84; Moshe Arens, Broken Covenant, 245–51, 301. Bush released the loan guarantees to Yitzhak Rabin when the latter replaced Shamir as prime minister in 1992 and committed Israel to a more vigorous search for Palestinian-Israeli peace. 26. Peres, Battling for Peace, 274.

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27. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 450; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 197. 28. Telhami, “Israeli Foreign Policy after the Gulf War,” 51–53, 59–60. Cf. Eisenberg, “Passive Belligerency: Israel and the Gulf War,” 305–306. Some observers wonder why subsequent U.S. administrations did not draw a lesson “from the Bush experience of 1991–1992, when Bush and Baker used precisely the leverage of US aid to exert pressure on an intransigent Likud government and ultimately persuaded the Israeli body politic to vote it out of office.” Christison, “Bound by a Frame of Reference,” 55, 58, 62; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 555–57. 29. Frankel, Beyond the Promised Land, chap. 12. 30. In 1988 Shamir had (correctly) calculated that he could pass on the Shultz Initiative without damaging U.S.-Israeli relations. Shamir, Summing Up, 175. Segev emphasizes the personal and political clash between Shamir, on the one hand, and Bush and Baker on the other, in his account of the course of Madrid. Segev, “The Arab-Israeli Conflict under President Bush.” 31. Bentsur, Making Peace, 121. Shamir even claimed to have dozed off during Gorbachev’s speech. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 199. 32. Shlaim, The Iron Wall, 492. Cf. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 217–18; Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 451. 33. Interview with Yosef Harif, Maariv, 26 June 1992, quoted in Shlaim, “Prelude to the Accord,” 10–11; Bannerman, “Arabs and Israelis: Slow Walk toward Peace,” 150; Frankel, Beyond the Promised Land, 309; Quandt, Peace Process, 314, citing Clyde Haberman, “Shamir Is Said to Admit Plan to Stall Talks ‘for Ten Years,’” New York Times, 27 June 1992, A1. 34. See, e.g., Golan, “Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 42–44; Frankel, Beyond the Promised Land, 221; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 199–200; Ross, The Missing Peace, 84–85; Quandt, Peace Process, 313. 35. Some Israeli negotiators felt that their new mandate under the Rabin government improved the atmosphere of the talks with the Palestinians almost immediately. Some Palestinian and Jordanian participants write that the change was long in coming, and still not as forthcoming as they had hoped. Bentsur, Making Peace, 139–40; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 92; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 217; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 163. 36. These restrictions still carried some weight, in spite of the attempts by the Palestine National Council and Arafat to satisfy American criteria for recognition and the start of a fledgling U.S.-PLO dialogue in late 1988. See Rabie, US-PLO Dialogue: Secret Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 24–35; Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 717–25; Schiff and Ya’ari, Intifada, 300–306. 37. The process of producing a “non-PLO” Palestinian team acceptable to both the Israelis and, behind-the-scenes, the PLO, was a long and arduous one. See Quandt, Peace Process, 307–10; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 445–46, 491–93, 504, 507; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 123–31, 143–44; Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country, 338–48. Senior PLO leader Abu Mazen later wrote that “the PLO was running everything but announcing nothing.” Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 87–88; see also Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 158. 38. Shamir, Summing Up, 237, writes that the United States “misled” him as to the functioning of the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and that he only learned upon arrival in Spain that the Palestinians would receive equal time to speak.

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39. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 161–62, 171–73; Arens, Broken Covenant, 259–62; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 88; Majali et al. (Peacemaking, chap. 2, 56) remark upon the decidedly more tense atmosphere between the Israeli and Palestinian teams than that between the Israelis and Jordanians. For some of the memoranda and proposals exchanged during the Washington talks (22 November 1991–5 August 1993), see Institute for Palestine Studies, The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Agreement, 35–113. 40. Bentsur, Making Peace, 129–45 (chap. 5), 175; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, chap. 10. 41. Mansour, “The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 18. Chairman Arafat met the entire delegation publicly in Cairo in April, and in Amman in June 1992. Cf. Mansour, 18, 28–29; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, chap. 6; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 209–10. In The Politics of Diplomacy (423), Baker reveals that at his very first meeting with Palestinians in Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi presented him with “a letter from Yasir Arafat stating that he had empowered them to represent his interests” and that he “received a similar pro-forma letter at every subsequent meeting.” Shamir fought hard to distance the PLO from the conference, although he knew of its behind-the-scenes activity, as did Baker, which Shamir could not prevent and Baker merely required remain unpublicized. Shamir, Summing Up, 227–28; Segev, “The Arab-Israeli Conflict under President Bush,” 129–30; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 100, 128, 211. 42. Shamir, Summing Up, 258–62. 43. Bentsur, Making Peace, chap. 3, 174; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 421, 444, 513; Arens, Broken Covenant, 255. 44. Although Baker had vowed early on to avoid any forays into extensive personal shuttle diplomacy, Arab and Israeli leaders would not commit to participating in the conference until he became personally involved, jetting from one country to the other and back again, convincing and cajoling them personally. In the seven months between March and October 1991, Baker traveled to the Middle East eight times. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, chaps. 25, 27. See also Bentsur, Making Peace, chap. 3; Jarbawi and Heacock, “Winds of War, Winds of Peace,” 13–14; Quandt, Peace Process, 303; Ross, The Missing Peace, 70–77; Arens, Broken Covenant, chap. 8; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, chaps. 5 and 6. 45. Bentsur, Making Peace, 73–74, 97–98; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 423–24, 445, 465–66, 491–93, 496–501. If the shuttling was reminiscent of Henry Kissinger after the 1973 war, Baker’s inclusion of a stop to talk with Palestinians was a clear divergence from Kissinger’s route. Quandt, Peace Process, 303; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 127. 46. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 497–501; Ross, The Missing Peace, 77–78; Bentsur, Making Peace, 112–15; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 41. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace (91–92, 100, 129–30, 245), describes the evolution of the Palestinians’ letter through almost a dozen drafts, and her disappointment with the final version. 47. Bannerman, “Arabs and Israelis: Slow Walk toward Peace,” 145. Cf. Golan, “ArabIsraeli Peace Negotiations,” 46. 48. Segev, “The Arab-Israeli Conflict under President Bush,” 134. 49. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 249. 50. Golan, “Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 46. 51. Zartman, “The Negotiation Process in the Middle East,” 65. 52. Quandt, Peace Process, 311; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 44. As much as Arab representatives needed the Americans to facilitate issues at times, Majali

342╇ /╇ notes to pages 107–108

et al. also comment (85) on cultural differences between themselves and their American hosts with respect to negotiating, and write (54) about the unique opportunity Jordanians and Israelis enjoyed to talk without a third party present, even free of secretaries, stenographers, and tape recorders. 53. Moshe Arens, then Israel’s minister of defense, found the Bush-Baker team to be “heavy handed” and resented Bush’s “repeated attempts to interfere in Israel’s internal politics.” Arens, Broken Covenant, 245–51, 301. 54. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 116, 85. 55. Richard Haas, then Special Assistant to President George Bush and Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council, observed that “Madrid revealed both what the United States could do—Madrid would never have happened without an awful lot of American involvement—but it also revealed the limits to what the United States could accomplish. . . . The United States may be critical, but the United States is not enough.” Haas, “Discussant: Richard N. Haas,” 151. 56. Atherton, “The Shifting Sands of Middle East Peace,” 132. “Baker and his entire top team” stepped down the day before the sixth round of the Washington talks commenced. Quandt, Peace Process, 315–17; Ross, The Missing Peace, 85. 57. Ross, The Missing Peace, 81, writes that the United States insisted on seeing Abd alShafi’s speech in advance to check for language that might provoke Shamir to walk out; the Palestinians provided the text only minutes before Abd al-Shafi spoke. For a comprehensive selection of Madrid-related letters, speeches, statements, and draft proposals, see The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Agreement, 5–11; see also “The Madrid Peace Conference: Special Document File,” 117–49. Bentsur, Making Peace, assesses the speeches in chapter 4 and gives the texts of the speeches in an appendix. 58. Al-Kilani and Hiltermann, “Why We Negotiate,” 18. 59. Abd al-Shafi, “Reflections,” 60. See also Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 422. 60. Jarbawi and Heacock, “Winds of War, Winds of Peace,” 15. Segev, “The Arab-Israeli Conflict under President Bush,” 131, writes that the Palestinian delegation’s sentiment after the first day of the conference “was that of ecstasy and triumph.” Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 155, notes that the Palestinians left Madrid “with a combined sense of euphoria and loss,” the former for having been heard, and the latter reflecting that the first bilateral meeting had not actually produced any results and that the hardest part was yet to come. 61. Thomas L. Friedman, “Amid Histrionics, Arabs and Israelis Team Up to Lose an Opportunity,” New York Times, 3 November 1991, A1. 62. Ross, The Missing Peace, 80–81. 63. Video and audio of Shamir’s remarks and al-Sharaa’s poster presentation are in The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs, PBS video, 1999. For retrospective comments, see Shamir, Summing Up, 238–41; Arens, Broken Covenant, 258. 64. Alan Cowell, “Syria Offers Old Photo to Fill an Empty Chair,” New York Times, 2 November 1991, 4. Photo on p. 1; video and audio in PBS, 50 Years War; text of speech in Bentsur, Making Peace, 252–54. Interestingly, Shamir includes in Summing Up (242) a photograph of a similar British “Wanted” poster on which he appears. See also Arens, Broken Covenant, 258; Ross, The Missing Peace, 80.

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65. Atherton, “The Shifting Sands of Middle East Peace,” 123. 66. For each participant’s rationale for participating (or not) in the multilaterals, see Kaye, Beyond the Handshake, 53–58. 67. For detailed charts of the participants in the five working groups, their key projects, and the venues of some three dozen meetings between January 1992 and June 1995, see Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Middle East Peace Process, 42–43, and Kaye, Beyond the Handshake, xv. 68. Solingen, “The Multilateral Arab-Israeli Negotiations”; Peters, Pathways to Peace, chap. 2; Bentsur, Making Peace, chap. 6; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, chap 7. 69. Peters, Pathways to Peace, chap. 9. 70. Bannerman, “Arabs and Israelis: Slow Walk toward Peace,” 152. Cf. Golan, “ArabIsraeli Peace Negotiations,” 39–40; Zartman, “The Negotiation Process in the Middle East,” 69; Saunders, The Other Walls, 36–37. Klieman argues, however, that optimism about the gradual, “evolutionary” nature of such agreements is based on the dubious assumptions that time can “stand still,” that “it is on the side of peace,” and that “regulating it is the prerogative of superpowers.” Klieman, Approaching the Finish Line, 26–28. 71. Bar-Siman-Tov, Israel and the Peace Process, 243–44. 72. Deshen, “Applied Anthropology in International Conflict Resolution,” 180–84. Deshen’s analysis of the depth of this rift, read with hindsight after the events surrounding the November 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, is eerily prophetic. See also Kass and O’Neill, The Deadly Embrace, 101–6 and 175, where the authors quote Yitzhak Rabin’s July 1995 comment on his government’s troubles dealing with settler rabbis: “We must realize that we are headed toward a confrontation between two world views.” 73. Sam Cahnman, “Inching toward Peace,” Jerusalem Report, 28 January 1993, 30–31. 74. Al-Kilani and Hiltermann, “Why We Negotiate,” 17; Jarbawi and Heacock, “Winds of War, Winds of Peace,” 13–15. While delighting in the joy with which most Palestinians received the delegation upon its return from Madrid, Abd al-Shafi repeatedly cautioned the crowds that celebration was “premature” and Ashrawi tried to “deflate the monster of excessive optimism and unrealistic expectations.” Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 156–58. 75. Greene, The Presidency of George Bush, 139. 76. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 512. 77. Avi Shlaim, “The Lost Steps,” The Nation, 30 August 2004, posted 12 August 2004, http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040830&s=shlaim. 78. Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, chap. 9, 237–40. 79. Peters, “Can the Multilateral Arab-Israeli Talks be Revived?”; Bar, “Regional Security: An Israeli Perspective,” 16. 80. “Madrid Revisited,” Forum Fax, 17 April 2002, vol. 16, Washington, D.C.: Israel Policy Forum, The Washington Policy Center, http://www.ipforum.org/display.cfm?rid=48. 81. Bentsur, Making Peace, chap. 7; Arens, Broken Covenant, 256, 258. 82. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 140. 5. Out of the Shadows and into the Light An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Israel, the Hashemites and the Palestinians: The Fateful Triangle, ed. Efraim Karsh and P. R. Kumaraswamy, 87–110.

344╇ /╇ notes to pages 116–121

1. Preceding the October 1994 treaty are a draft agenda for peace, a product of the Washington talks of October 1992; a Common Agenda of 14 September 1993; and the Washington Declaration of 25 July 1994, which formally ended the state of war between the two countries. See documents 68, 72, and 75 for the texts of the three agreements. 2. Thomas L. Friedman, “Another Wall Is Tumbling Down as Israel and Jordan Meet in US,” New York Times, 2 October 1993, A1. 3. Klieman, Statecraft in the Dark, 94; Zak, “Thirty Years of Clandestine Meetings.” 4. “No Arab leader understands as well as Hussein the intricacies of Israel’s domestic politics, none has spent as much time talking candidly with senior Israeli leaders.” Lewis, “Israel: The Peres Era and Its Legacy,” quoted in Klieman, Statecraft, 111. 5. Shlaim, Lion of Jordan, 202. 6. Lukacs, Israel, Jordan and the Peace Process, 181; Elaine Sciolino, with Thomas Friedman, “Amid Debt, Doubt and Secrecy, Hussein and Rabin Made Peace,” New York Times, 31 July 1994, A1; Shlaim, Lion, 544–55, and Shlaim, The Iron Wall, 542. 7. For discussions of these two orientations, see Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan, chap. 16; Ilan Pappé, “Moshe Sharett, David Ben-Gurion and the ‘Palestine Option,’ 1948– 1956,” 77–96; Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken, 60; Klieman, Israel and the World after 40 Years, 213–32. Hussein’s advisers also included a “Jordan Firsters” school. See Elon, “Look over Jordan,” 14. 8. Elon, “Look over Jordan,” 12; Scham and Lucas, “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 4. An almost identical version of this article appears in Karsh and Kumaraswamy, Israel, the Hashemites and the Palestinians, 141–64. 9. Ross, The Missing Peace, 173, 177. Christopher’s remark is quoted in Douglas Jehl, “Jordan and Israel Join in Pact,” New York Times, 26 July 1994, 1. Cf. Muasher, “Jordanian Attitudes to the Peace Process”; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 255. 10. For more on King Hussein’s rationale, see Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 75–76, 93–95; Shlaim, Lion, 552–53. ↜11. Shlaim, Lion, 551, 554; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 544–55. 12. See Zunes, “The Israeli-Jordanian Agreement,” 57. 13. Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 77–81, 86; Shlaim, Lion, 540. 14. Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, 194. For Arafat’s angry response, see Garfinkle, “The Transformation of Jordan,” 113; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 303. Cf. Raphael Israeli’s warning that “by playing Jordanians against Palestinians in the city, Israel runs the risk of losing to both and of seeing its own authority eroded.” “The IsraeliJordan [sic] Peace Agreement: A Missed Opportunity,” 254. For evidence of Jordan’s continuing interests in Jerusalem and its holy places, see Etgar Lefkovits, “Jordan Plans New Temple Mt. Minaret,” Ha’aretz, 11 October 2006. Regarding a Jordanian-PLO compromise over Jerusalem see Lukacs, Israel, Jordan and the Peace Process, 193–95. 15. Eisenberg interview with Adnan Abu-Odeh, Amman, 29 June 2000; Stewart, Good Neighbourly Relations, 20–22. 16. Avi Shlaim and King Hussein, “His Royal Shyness: King Hussein and Israel.” Hussein said of the 14 September 1993 ceremony: “In fact, we had a Jordanian-Israeli agenda worked out but we held back until the Palestinians moved.” The Jordanian negotiating team successfully resisted an American suggestion that Israel and Jordan sign the Com-

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mon Agenda on the same day as the Oslo Accords, insisting that that day should be “a Palestinian day . . . [and that] moreover, it was important for reasons of their own for the Jordanians to sign after the Palestinians.” Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 239 and chap. 9, appendices 2, 3. For the texts of the “Common Agenda” and speeches at the signing ceremony, see document 72. 17. Dan Schueftan, “Jordan’s ‘Israeli Option,’” in Jordan in the Middle East, 265. Concerning continued Islamist challenges to King Hussein’s peace venture, see Robins, A History of Jordan, 187–90. For more on the 1993 Jordanian elections, see Scham and Lucas, “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 4–5; Shlaim, Iron Wall, 539. King Hussein may have somewhat prefigured the election results, however, with the pre-election “adoption of a number of laws that tightened the government’s hold on the domestic scene at the expense of personal freedoms and further democratization. To the government, these measures were crucial to maintaining a pro-peace foreign policy.” Al-Oran, “The First Decade of the Jordanian-Israeli Peace-Building Experience.” 18. Clyde Haberman, “Israel-Jordan Handshake,” New York Times, 16 July 1994, 5. The bipartisan appeal of peace with Jordan is reflected not only in the personal diplomacy of Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, but also in the summer 1987 secret meetings between Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and King Hussein. See, e.g., Klieman, Statecraft, 102; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 179. 19. Abu-Odeh, Jordanians, Palestinians and the Hashemite Kingdom, 213, 223, 228, 234, 255–58; Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 70–72; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 17. See also Israeli, “Is Jordan Palestine?” 49–66; Shlaim, Lion, 539, 552. According to Shlaim (Lion, 586), Ariel Sharon personally informed the king that he had abandoned the “Jordan is Palestine” notion. Cf. Uriel Heilman, “The ‘Palestinian Question’ on Both Sides of the Jordan,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 12 October 2006. 20. Sciolino with Friedman, “Amid Debt, Doubt and Secrecy, Hussein and Rabin Made Peace”; Shlaim, Lion, 549, 21. In his interview with Avi Shlaim (“His Royal Shyness”), King Hussein claimed that Peres was involved only minimally in the negotiations with Jordan in the 1990s and was resentful that Rabin left him so often in the dark, but that he supported the treaty nonetheless because he had always been “a believer in peace.” 22. In Peacemaking, Majali, Anani, and Haddadin introduce the men who negotiated on behalf of Jordan and offer a detailed portrait of the inner workings of the Jordanian delegation and its various members’ interactions with their Israeli counterparts. 23. Klieman, “Approaching the Finish Line,” 18. Cf. Kass and O’Neill, The Deadly Embrace, 319–20. 24. Klieman, “Approaching the Finish Line,” 16–18. 25. Ibid., 17. 26. Sciolino with Friedman, “Amid Debt, Doubt and Secrecy”; Ross, The Missing Peace, 167–85; Robins, A History of Jordan, 186–87; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 305; Sasley, “Changes and Continuities in Jordanian Foreign Policy,” 40; Shlaim, Lion, 541–43, 546. 27. Shlaim and Hussein, “His Royal Shyness.” 28. Hussein and Rabin personally worked out many of the details together. Shlaim, Lion, 549, and Iron Wall, 543.

346╇ /╇ notes to pages 125–129

29. Susser, “The Jordanian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 1, 21; Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 83–86; Stewart, Good Neighbourly Relations, chap. 3; Shlaim, Lion, 551. 30. At least one observer—an energetic proponent of the creation of a “Hashemite Palestine” in Jordan—believes that Israel erred in letting Jordan off the hook, thereby maneuvering itself into an almost impossible corner in which “the entire Palestinian burden now rest squarely on Israel’s shoulders, out of its own choice.” Israeli, “Israeli-Jordan Peace Agreement,” 253–56. Another scholar argues that until the Jordanian-Israeli-Palestinian triangle is closed and stabilized by a third agreement—a Jordanian-Palestinian Treaty—the Jordan-Israel Treaty and Oslo (or succeeding Palestinian-Israeli agreements) alone will not bring stability to the area. Jarbawi, “The Triangle of Conflict,” 92–108. 31. Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 86, 125. The land and water arrangements were detailed in Annexes I and II, respectively, of the treaty. See also Israeli, “Israeli-Jordan Peace Agreement,” 253; Borthwick, “Water in Israeli-Jordanian Relations: From Conflict to the Danger of Ecological Disaster,” 165–86; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, chap. 14, appendix 4; Lukacs, Israel, Jordan and the Peace Process, 190–91; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 309–14. 32. Muasher, “Jordanian Attitudes to the Peace Process,” 33. 33. Ibid. 34. Clyde Haberman, “Israelis and Jordanians Meet in Public,” New York Times, 19 July 1994, A1. Cf. Elyakim Rubinstein remarks, Israel-Jordan Peace Talks (Ein Avrona), 18 July 1994; Peres address, 5th session of the Trilateral Talks (Dead Sea Spa Hotel, Jordan), 20 July 1994, MFA; Ross, The Missing Peace, 181–83. 35. Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, 196. 36. Garfinkle, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War, 83–89. For an exposé of disturbing antisemitic themes in Jordanian publications up until the early 1980s, see Victor Nahmias, “Israel in Jordanian eyes,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 25 January 1986, 15. 37. Muasher, “Jordanian Attitudes”; Stephanie Genkin, “Not Quite Normal,” Jerusalem Report, 7 September 1995, 22–25; Hirsh Goodman, “The Mirage of Peace,” Jerusalem Report, 5 October 1995, 72; Michele Chabin, “Jordanians Skeptical of Peace,” Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, 2 November 1995, 7; Zunes, “The Israeli-Jordanian Agreement,” 57–68; Scham and Lucas, “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 3, 8; Lucas, “The Death of Normalization in Jordan with Israel,” 95–96; Brand, “The Effects of the Peace Process on Political Liberalization in Jordan,” 52–67; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 159. 38. Shlaim, Lion, 554–55. 39. Scham and Lucas, “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 5–6. Lucas distills the regime’s efforts to sell the public on peace with Israel into four main arguments: the strategic, the territorial, future multilateral attention to region-wide problems, and the economic windfall Jordan and Jordanians could expect. Lucas, “Death of Normalization,” 95. For Jordan’s willingness to engage in public diplomacy see Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 307–309; Shlaim, Lion, 542. 40. Quoted in Ross, The Missing Peace, 165. 41. Chris Hedges, “On Road to Peace, a Gate Is Opened,” New York Times, 10 August 1994, A1.

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42. Scham and Lucas, “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 9–11; alOran, “The First Decade.” 43. Netanyahu pointed out that Israel had withdrawn troops from the most populated areas of the West Bank, turning them over to the PA, while Arafat had not yet convened the necessary gathering of the Palestine National Council (PNC) required to remove those clauses of the PLO Charter which denied Israel’s right to exist. He was also unhappy that the numbers of armed men in the Palestinian security forces had soared above Oslo’s limit. For a “report card” of respective Israeli and Palestinian compliance with their Oslo commitments, see Watson, The Oslo Accords: International Law and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreements. Regarding Jordanian concerns about Netanyahu, see Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 98–100; Abu-Odeh, Jordanians, Palestinians and the Hashemite Kingdom, 267. Two Netanyahu decisions that contributed to Jordanian skepticism concerning the Israeli prime minister’s intention were the September 1996 opening of the Hasmonean tunnel in Jerusalem’s Old City and the Har Homa building expansion project in February 1997. Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, 196–97; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 324–25; Shlaim, Lion, 569, 572, and Iron Wall, 576–77, 581–82. 44. See Scham and Lucas, “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 12–13; Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 99–100; Stewart, Good Neighbourly Relations, chap. 4; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 328–30; Shlaim, Lion, 574–75. 45. News photographs of Hussein kneeling beside the grieving parents greatly touched Israelis and reinforced their perceptions of the king as a man of great humanity and humility. Shlaim reveals that, with no publicity, Hussein sent one million dollars to Israeli president Ezer Weizman for distribution among the families of the murdered girls. Many Arabs, however, were critical and unnerved at the sight of the monarch humbling himself to such an extent. Shlaim, Lion, 576–77. 46. Eisenberg interview with Natheer Rasheed, Member of the Upper House of Parliament, former Minister of the Interior and former Director of Intelligence, Amman, 28 June 2000; Kumaraswamy, “Israel, Jordan and the Masha’al Affair,” 114; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 332–33; Shlaim, Lion, 577–83 and Iron Wall, 585–87. Scham and Lucas (“‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 13–14) write that Jordanian public opinion thought the king’s response was “mild.” 47. Susser, “Jordanian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 37–38. 48. Satloff, “From Hussein to Abdallah: Jordan in Transition”; Lucas, “The Death of Normalization,” 109–11; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 314, 316. 49. Robins, A History of Jordan, 191; Lucas, “Death of Normalization,” 105–109; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 159. For a positive representation of a potential Jordanian-Israeli peace dividend see Seliktar, “The Peace Dividend,” 231, 234; Stewart, Good Neighbourly Relations, chaps. 6, 7. In a completely different take, Raphael Israeli views the agreement as containing provisions “all . . . work[ing] in Jordan’s favor,” spurred by “Israel’s almost pathological need to seek acceptance and recognition for any quarter the world over, and at almost any price.” The economic cooperation clauses of the treaty, in his view, are nothing but “a euphemism for a one-sided Israeli line of credit, technical assistance, fund-raising and lobbying in the West for grants to the Kingdom.” Israeli, “Israeli-Jordan Peace Agreement,” 253–56.

348╇ /╇ notes to pages 131–135

50. Nsour, “Arab-Israeli Economic Relations and Relative Gains Concerns,” 283–307; Eisenberg interview with Zeid al-Rifa’i, former Speaker of the Upper House of the Jordanian Parliament, Amman, 30 June 2000; Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 97; al-Oran, “The First Decade”; Shlaim, Lion, 555–56. 51. Nsour, “Arab-Israel Economic Relations.” 52. Robins, A History of Jordan, 191, 222; Andoni, “Report from Jordan: King Abdallah: In His Father’s Footsteps?” 84–85. Lucas (“Death of Normalization,” 110) notes that the new king’s focus on ensuring Jordanian access to U.S. markets meant that “Amman’s road to Tel Aviv passed through Washington.” Even the QIZ success stories, however, do not always mean economic reward for Jordanians. See al-Oran, “The First Decade.” 53. Sarah Schaffer, “No Peace Now: Jordan’s Young and Fragile Pro-peace Camp Is on the Verge of Extinction,” Jerusalem Report, 4 December 2000, 24–25; Sasley, “Changes and Continuities,” 44. In fact, the very word “normalization” (tatbi’ah) quickly acquired a sense of scorn and shame as its opponents marshaled their criticism of the treaty. Scham and Lucas, “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 2, 6–7; Lucas, “The Death of Normalization,” 99–102; Shlaim, Lion, 571–72 and Iron Wall, 578–79. 54. Lucas, “Death of Normalization,” 111. 55. Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 121. Jordan’s Minister of Information, Nasser Judah, remarked in a similar vein that there exists “a real twinship (tawa’ma) between Jordan and Palestine.” Judah quoted in Susser, Jordan: Case Study, 93. 56. Sasley, “Changes and Continuities,” 41. 57. Eisenberg interview with Marwan Kasim, Amman, 29 June 2000. For similar sentiment see Andoni, “Report from Jordan,” 88–89. Remarking on the overwhelming Knesset majority which passed the Treaty, Yitzhak Rabin (unwittingly) highlighted this asymmetry, calling it “a peace between Jordan and the whole people of Israel.” Rabin quoted in Shlaim and Hussein, “His Royal Shyness.” 58. Scham and Lucas, “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 2. For poll results on Jordanian public opinion toward Israel in 1994–1996 see Khashan, Partner or Pariah?; Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, chap. 4; Stewart, Good Neighbourly Relations, chap. 9 59. Poll cited in Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 222. See also Rhonda Spivak, “Few Jordanians will Mention Israel,” Canadian Jewish News, 27 June 2008, http://www.cjnews.com/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14867&Itemid=86. 60. Majali, Anani, and Haddadin, Peacemaking, 307–10, 315. 61. Scham and Lucas, “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 15–16; Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 333–35. 62. Scham and Lucas ( “‘Normalization’ and ‘Anti-Normalization’ in Jordan,” 16) write that the reduction of the treaty to a cold propriety “would constitute the ‘Egyptianization’ of Israeli-Jordanian relations.” 63. Muasher, Arab Center, 1–6. 64. Andoni, “Report from Jordan,” 87–88; Sasley, “Changes and Continuities,” 42–43. 6. Falling Short of the Heights 1. Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 205–11; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 147–95; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, chaps. 3–4.

notes to pages 135–138╇ /╇ 349

2. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, chap. 7; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, chap. 6; document 82. 3. Zisser, “The Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 233–40; Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 125–35, 140–42; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 218–22; Ross, The Missing Peace, 509–90; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 61–130; Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 126–40; Bregman, Elusive Peace, 19–63. 4. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 254. 5. Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 199. Provocatively, perhaps, Ambassador Rabinovich entitled his 1998 memoir of these negotiations The Brink of Peace. But, after carefully defining the term “breakthrough,” his assessment is more pessimistic and hard-nosed: “At no time during this period (August 1992–March 1996) were Israel and Syria on the verge of a breakthrough.” Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 235. 6. Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 2:46–51, 61, 77, 102–103, 217–21 (documents 16–17), 229–33 (document 20); Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 8–13; Ben-Gurion, My Talks with Arab Leaders, 35–40. 7. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, chap. 2. For a study of Syrian involvement in the 1948 war, see Landis, “Syria and the Palestine War,” 178–205. For official Israeli records of the armistice talks, see Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel, 3:509–679 (documents 270– 359). 8. Shlaim, “Husni Za’im and the Plan to Resettle Palestinian Refugees in Syria,” 68–80; Rabinovich, The Road Not Taken, 65–110; Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 20–26; Caplan, Futile Diplomacy, 3:104–5; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 11–14. 9. For details, see Khouri, “Friction and Conflict on the Israel-Syrian Front,” 14–34; Berger, The Covenant and the Sword, chap. 7; Bar-Yaacov, The Israel-Syrian Armistice; Shalev, The Israel-Syria Armistice Regime; Pelcovits, The Long Armistice, 64–73; Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 26–52; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 16–20; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 14–19; Frederic C. Hof, Line of Battle, Border of Peace? 5–18. 10. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 102–3; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 23–24; “‘Moderation’ Puts Strains on Arab Unity” (editorial), New York Times, 3 September 1967; Yoram Meital, “The Khartoum Conference”; Khartoum summit resolution, 1 September 1967 (document 18). 11. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 120; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 26. 12. Dishon, “Sadat’s Arab Adversaries,” 3–15; Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 146–47, 153, 183; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 27–28, 32–33; Baghdad Summit Resolution, 31 March 1979 (document 40). 13. Seale, “Asad’s Regional Strategy and the Challenge from Netanyahu,” 27–41; HinneÂ� busch, “Does Syria Want Peace?” 42–57; al-Azm, “The View from Damascus”; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 32–33. Ba’athism is a political movement espousing a secular, nationalist, socialist, pan-Arab ideology and the Ba’ath is the dominant political party in Syria. 14. Zisser, Commanding Syria, 151. 15. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 149, 166–68, 174; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 28–31; Peres quoted in Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 165; Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 147. 16. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 201–206, 260; Hinnebusch, “Does Syria Want Peace?” 48–49. For an insightful attempt to draw lessons from the Syrian-Israeli limited negotiations of 1974 to the post-1991 situation, see Mandell, “The Limits of Mediation,” 129–49.

350╇ /╇ notes to pages 139–142

17. Seale, “Asad’s Regional Strategy and the Challenge from Netanyahu,” 36. 18. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 225. 19. Two convinced skeptics are Daniel Pipes (e.g., “Just Kidding: Syria’s Peace Bluff”) and Marius Deeb (Syria’s Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process, chap. 6); see also Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, 113. 20. Inter alia, Patrick Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” 65–77; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 13, 37, 149, 164, 167, 238; Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 141–52; Hinnebusch, “Does Syria Want Peace?”; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors; Evron, War and Intervention in Lebanon. 21. Ross, The Missing Peace, 142, cf. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 74–75, 142, 167; Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 224; Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 148. 22. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, chap. 9; Hinnebusch, “Does Syria Want Peace?” 42–43; Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations”; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 243–44; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, chap. 6 and 243–45. 23. For a good summary of Hafez al-Asad’s motives, positions, and red-lines vis-à-vis Israel, see Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria, 45–48. 24. Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 109–10, 126–27; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 117–78, 129–30, 203–4, 213–14; Zisser, “Syria and Israel: Between War and Peace,” 128. 25. E.g., Chiefs of Staff Sagi and Yaalon, cited in Peri, Generals in the Cabinet Room, 43–44, 151–52; Zisser, “Syria and Israel,” 128. 26. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 101, 186, 230; Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 242; Savir, The Process, 288–91; Albright, Madame Secretary, 474; Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 151. 27. Savir, The Process, 271. According to one well-placed Israeli journalist, many Israelis in 2008 shared this feeling that peace with Syria was probably not achievable at a reasonable cost, nor urgently required. Yossi Klein Halevi, “Who Gets the Golan?” Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2008, accessed online 30 June 2008 at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-halevi28–2008may28,0,7315902.story. 28. See, e.g., Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 46–53, 59–61, 101; Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 207, 237–40; Hinnebusch, “Does Syria Want Peace?” 49–50, 52–53; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 104–11, 115, 119; Ross, The Missing Peace, 109–11, 137–38; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 257; Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 220, 222; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 219; Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” 67–68; Seale, “Asad’s Regional Strategy and the Challenge from Netanyahu,” 35; Moualem, “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 89; Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 254. 29. Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 232; Bregman, Elusive Peace, 34. 30. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 215, 222–23, 244; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 100, 136; Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, 110–11. 31. Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 226. 32. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 246–50; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 120–48, 163; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 61–62, 64, 67, 100; Ross, The Missing Peace, 163. 33. Moualem, “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 88; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 223–24; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 146–47; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 178–79, 183–86. A few years later the Syrian minister of defense was denouncing the “satanic Israeli-Turkish alliance” as “the most serious thing the Arabs are

notes to pages 142–144╇ /╇ 351

facing.” Mustafa Tlas, quoted in Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 185; Sever, “Turkey and the Syrian-Israeli Peace Talks in the 1990s.” 34. Savir, The Process, 284–85; Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 150. 35. Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 159–64. For indications of the immediate impact of this operation on Arab (and especially Asad’s) perceptions of Peres’s sincerity and credibility as a peacemaker, see Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 163–64; Seale, “Asad’s Regional Strategy and the Challenge from Netanyahu,” 28–30, 36, 41. 36. Albright, Madame Secretary, 480–81; Clinton, My Life, 903–904; Ross, The Missing Peace, 583–89; Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 282–89. 37. See the interesting hypotheses and discussion by Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 249–50. Clinton, My Life, 884, 903; Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 153–54; Ben-Meir, “Why Syria Must Regain the Golan to Make Peace.” 38. Ross, The Missing Peace, 509, 523; Clinton, My Life, 574–75, 626; Albright, Madame Secretary, 475; Savir, The Process, 271–72. Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, 117, suggests that Asad’s steely steadfastness that both impressed and aggravated Americans and Israelis was really a narrow, “crystallized worldview” which limited his diplomatic vision, leading his negotiators to “demonstrat[e] a passivity so extreme that it bordered on apathy.” 39. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 454; Ross, The Missing Peace, 143; Clinton, My Life, 575. 40. Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 217, 219. Dennis Ross observed that Asad could strike fear in the hearts of even his highest ranking officials, if they believed they had made a misstep. Ross, The Missing Peace, 155–56. 41. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 457. 42. Moualem, “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 89. Moualem’s important interview with Linda Butler is reproduced in full as document 85. Cf. Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 181–82. In the case of post-2000 informal talks (see below), Mahdi Dahkhallah, a former Syrian information minister, sternly denied press reports in early 2007: “Syria has always declared that it does not believe in secret contacts, and has nothing to hide under the table.” Echoing these sentiments, Abd al-Fatah Awad, editor of Al-Thawra, admonished Israelis for thinking that Syria believed in “games under the table,” adding: “Syrian peace will only occur under the sun . . . without secret negotiations.” Quoted in Barkat and Stern, “Both Sides Deny Haaretz Report of Back-Channel Talks with Syria,” and in Benn and Stern, “Israeli Officials: No Document of Understanding Reached with Syria,” both in Ha’aretz, 18 January 2007. 43. For an account and an assessment of the Israeli-Syrian track-II talks of 1992–93, see Agha, Feldman, Khalidi, and Schiff, Track-II Diplomacy: Lessons from the Middle East, chap. 7. 44. Ross, The Missing Peace, 510–14, 527–28; Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 230–31; Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 152; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 218; Pipes, “The Road to Damascus”; Pipes, “What Was Benjamin Netanyahu Ready to Concede on the Golan Heights?” 27 June 2004, http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/279, accessed 11 April 2005; Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, 122–23. 45. Hinnebusch, “Does Syria Want Peace?” 47, 44. Cf. Ben-Meir, “Why Syria Must Regain the Golan to Make Peace”; Telhami, The Stakes: America in the Middle East, chap. 3. Indeed, Asad was not without his domestic critics; one leading detractor was Ali Hai-

352╇ /╇ notes to pages 145–147

dar. The talks with Israel were also openly attacked by the secretary general of Syria’s Arab Writers Union, Ali Uqla Ursan, forcing Foreign Minister al-Sharaa to publicly justify the 1999–2000 negotiations in Washington and Shepherdstown. Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 245–47; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 245; Rabinovich, Waging, 135–37; Ross, The Missing Peace, 566, 588; Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 150. Alawites are a minority offshoot of Shi’a Islam. Asad and those in his immediate political circle were Alawites. 46. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 149–51, 205; Savir, The Process, 266–67. 47. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 171, 173; Savir, The Process, 270; Ross, The Missing Peace, 237, 240–43. 48. Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 231. 49. Clinton, My Life, 886, 903. 50. Albright, Madame Secretary, 476–78; Ross, The Missing Peace, 509–55, 590; Clinton, My Life, 884–87; Bregman, Elusive Peace, 34–51; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 61–94. Rabinovich, certainly no apologist for Barak, rejects the simple “Barak got cold feet” explanation (Waging Peace, 133–34), while Bregman (Elusive Peace, 34) acknowledges that, after optimistically forging ahead, Barak “began to slow the whole process down, and for good reason” (emphasis added)—alluding here to hostile Knesset and public opinion. Dennis Ross suggests a further reason: namely, that between his push for the summit with the Syrians in 2000 and the moment of truth in the negotiations there, Barak acquired a list of points secretly negotiated between his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Asad in the summer of 1998. Ross believes that, emboldened by what Netanyahu had achieved—on paper—Barak hardened his negotiating stance and sought to drive a harder bargain than the one he had discussed with the Americans or signaled to the Syrians prior to the talks at Shepherdstown. Ross, The Missing Peace, 509–20, 527–29; http://www .imra.org.il/story.php3?id=6061. 51. Despite U.S. protestations, the Syrians held Navy Lt. Robert O. Goodman Jr. for one month before releasing him, not to U.S. officials, but into the hands of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who traveled to Damascus on a private humanitarian mission to retrieve him. 52. Gorbachev also described the absence of Soviet-Israeli relations as not “normal,” foreshadowing the resumption of diplomatic relations in October 1991. Golan, “Gorbachev’s Middle East Strategy,” 41–57; Freedman, Soviet Policy Toward Israel under Gorbachev; Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, chap 3. 53. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 203–204, 241; Seale, “Asad’s Regional Strategy and the Challenge from Netanyahu,” 32–33; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 297–98. 54. Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, chap. 7; Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, 57–59, 63–65, 106–7. 55. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 129, 248; Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 218– 19. 56. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 254–57, 282–89. 57. Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, chap. 3; Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 250; Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, 75–77. 58. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 129–30, 142 (quoting Ross, The Missing Peace), 164; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 47 (quoting Ambassador Samuel Lewis); Ross, The Missing Peace, 138–40. This approach would be reversed during the second (George W.)

notes to pages 147–151╇ /╇ 353

Bush administrations of 2001–2009, which sought to isolate Syria and reduce its regional standing, and in consequence openly discouraged Israeli leaders from responding to Syrian trial balloons and diplomatic overtures. 59. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 133–34. 60. Ibid., 178–79, 239–40. 61. Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 221–22; Ross, The Missing Peace, 111–14; Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 254. 62. The Syrian position is most clearly expressed in Moualem, “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Negotiations,” document 85. 63. This argument is made frequently in the writings of Ambassador Rabinovich (e.g., Waging Peace, 133–34); Savir, The Process, 278. More recently, Americans Colin Powell, Richard Haass, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross, and Warren Christopher have taken similar positions. Powell is quoted as saying, “You can’t negotiate when you tell the other side, ‘Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start.’” Christopher himself writes that he was “more than a little surprised” at the mission Rabin had just assigned him: “Rabin was entrusting me with what should have been the ultimate winning hand on the Syrian track: Israel’s departure from the Golan Heights. . . . Rabin had put in my pocket the promise Asad had been demanding for years.” Christopher also insists, however, that the questions he posed to Asad on Rabin’s behalf were clearly hypothetical and not expressions of intention, let alone commitment, by Israel. Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 221. Zisser is alone in contending that the Americans brought Rabin’s willingness to consider a full withdrawal from the Golan “to the Syrians’ attention without Rabin’s knowledge or consent.” Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, 75, 100–101. 64. Clinton, My Life, 883, 885; Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 221–22. 65. Ross, The Missing Peace, 111–14, 147–48. Ross’s account includes his notes recording the exchange between Rabin and Christopher on 3 August and between Christopher and Asad on 4 August. Although Ross writes that “there was a very clear understanding of what was meant” between Rabin and Christopher and that with Asad “everything was explicit,” most readers will probably find the notes cryptic enough to invite differing interpretations. 66. Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” 68. Interestingly, Seale himself acted as gobetween for Asad and the newly installed Barak in 1999, enticing some relatively positive comments from each man about the other. Ross, The Missing Peace, 138, 510. 67. Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” 69. 68. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 203; Clinton, My Life, 883; Savir, The Process, 262. 69. Ross, The Missing Peace, 495–551; Bregman, Elusive Peace, 34–51; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 61–94. 70. Clinton, My Life, 885. 71. Ross, The Missing Peace, 565–67; Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 237; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 88–89; Bregman, Elusive Peace, 49; Clinton, My Life, 887; Albright, Madame Secretary, 479; Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 154–55. At a conference in June 2003, Barak presented an altogether different view of Syrian and Israeli positions, the Rabin “deposit” and why Shepherdstown failed. See Barak, “The Myths Spread about Camp David Are Baseless,” 132–34. 72. Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 250.

354╇ /╇ notes to pages 151–154

73. Quoted in Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” 74. Several participant observers as well as scholars examine this episode in some detail, with contradictory conclusions. In addition to Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” see Rabinovich, “From Deposit to Commitment,” 277–82; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 48–51, 73–74; Deeb, Syria’s Terrorist War on Lebanon, 207; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 205, 247–48; Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 228–30, 232–33; Ross, The Missing Peace, 111–14, 137–63; Moualem, “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 84–85, 90; Clinton, My Life, 883; Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 220–24. 74. Albright, Madame Secretary, 479. 75. Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 46, 63; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 151. 76. Ross, The Missing Peace, 146, 521–27, 583–85; Clinton, My Life, 885, 903; Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” 70–71; Albright, Madame Secretary, 475–76. The single best presentation of this complicated border issue is Hof’s Line of War, Border of Peace? which includes maps. An abbreviated version is Hof, “The Line of June 4, 1967,” 17–23. See also Hof, “The Water Dimension in Golan Heights Negotiations,” 129–42; Muslih, “The Golan,” 611–35; Garfinkle, War, Water, and Negotiation in the Middle East; Abu Sitta, “The Line of 1967—and 1949”; Garfinkle, “The Line of 1967—and 1923”; Hof, “The Line of 1967—Revisited.” 77. Ross, The Missing Peace, 529. On 522 Ross reproduces the map Barak had Clinton propose to Asad. 78. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 104–106; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 49; Ross, The Missing Peace, 146–48, 525–27, 553; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 209, 226; Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 228–29, 237–40, 243; Albright, Madame Secretary, 475–76; Clinton, My Life, 903; Moualem, “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 85; Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 252–57. 79. Ross, The Missing Peace, 512. See also 510–29; Draft “Treaty of peace between Israel and Syria,” 29 August 1998, http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=6061. 80. Ross, The Missing Peace, 527–29; Pipes, “The Road to Damascus”; Middle East Forum, http://www.meforum.org/article/pipes/311, accessed 11 April 2005; Pipes, “What Was Benjamin Netanyahu Ready to Concede on the Golan Heights?” 27 June 2004, http://www .danielpipes.org/blog/279, accessed 11 April 2005. With the two sides firmly entrenched behind irreconcilable border demands, a former Israeli negotiator nevertheless sounded an encouraging note by suggesting that resumed discussions may one day allow for a creative solution along the lines of land swaps as occurred between Israel and Jordan and as discussed between Israel and the Palestinians. Arad, “Creative Measures Needed for a Peace Accord between Israel and Syria,” 167–68. 81. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 153. 82. Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” 73; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 178–79; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 67–69; Ross, The Missing Peace, 158; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 210. 83. Ross, The Missing Peace, 153; Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 148–49. 84. For details of the parties’ extensive debates over security issues, see Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, chap. 6; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 66–69, 87–102; Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” 71–75. 85. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 224.

notes to pages 154–160╇ /╇ 355

86. Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 229; see also 227, 247–48, and Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 209, 232–34; Seale, “Asad’s Regional Strategy and the Challenge from Netanyahu,” 36–37; Hinnebusch, “Does Syria Want Peace?” 51–53; Seale, “The Syria-Israel Negotiations,” 70–71; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 62, 94, 211–13, 219; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 48; al-Azm, “The View from Damascus”; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 204–5; Muasher, The Arab Center, 119, 123, 126. 87. Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 223; Pipes, Syria Beyond the Peace Process, 101–2. 88. Rabil, Embattled Neighbors, 143. 89. Ibid., 26. 90. Moualem, “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 86; cf. Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 125; Rabil, Embattled Neighbors (citing Asad’s remarks to Kissinger in 1974), 143. As one veteran Israeli analyst has remarked, given the “high wall of suspicion and hostility . . . [that] has remained in place because of Damascus’ inability, to say nothing of its lack of desire, to adopt a peace policy,” it is not surprising that Syria’s desire for a settlement with Israel should be limited to an arrangement “of a formal and even a technical nature, . . . no more than a state of non-belligerency with diplomatic relations.” Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 247. 91. Ben-Ami, “So Close and Yet So Far,” 79. 92. Ben-Meir, “Why Syria Must Regain the Golan to Make Peace.” 93. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 82, 203. 94. Quoted in Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 245; cf. 228–29; 244–45. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 79–84, 92 (where Rabin is quoted as indicating that Asad had not yet done “one percent”), 135, 153, 158–60, 190, 242 (quoting Warren Christopher). 95. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 153, 158–61; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 187–89; Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, 107–108, 235–36; Ross, The Missing Peace, 540. 96. Moualem, “Fresh Light on the Syrian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 87. Cf. Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 64–65, 188; al-Azm, “The View from Damascus.” 97. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 165, 180, 189–91. 98. Fifty Years War, PBS documentary. 99. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 211–13, 242, 244–45, 251; Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 73, 92, 156; Cobban, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks, 78; Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 244. 100. Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 254–55. 101. Al-Hayat, 17 April 2000, quoted in Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 241. 102. Al-Hayat, 9 May 2000, quoted in Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 241. See also Zisser, “Israel-Syria Negotiations,” 247. For an interesting comparison between Israeli and Syrian negotiating “philosophies,” see Rabinovich, The Brink of Peace, 101–2; Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, 113, 119–20. 103. Arad, “Creative Measures Needed for a Peace Accord between Israel and Syria,” 165–66. 104. Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, chaps. 1, 4; Zisser, Asad’s Legacy, chap. 8, and Commanding, chap. 1. 105. Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 157. 106. Ibid., 155–61; Zisser, Commanding, 152–53, 156–59. 107. Reprinted in Israel News, 6 January 2006, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340, L-3196291,00.html#n. For Sharon’s extended assessment of Syrian-Israeli negotiations un-

356╇ /╇ notes to pages 160–165

der the Barak government see Ariel Sharon, “Why Should Israel Reward Syria?” New York Times, 28 December 1999. 108. Leon Hadar, “Reporter-at-Large: Time to Talk to Syria?” National Interest online, 21 September 2007, http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=15576. 109. Akiva Eldar, “Background: How the Covert Contacts Transpired,” “Israeli, Syrian Representatives Reach Secret Understandings,” and “Exclusive: Full Text of Document Drafted during Secret Talks,” all in Ha’aretz, 16 January 2007; Yoav Stern, “Alon Liel: Israel Rejected Syrian Bid for Wartime Talks,” Ha’aretz, 18 January 2007; Jaap Van Wesel, “The Man Who Would Make Peace,” Jerusalem Report, 16 April 2007, 25–27; “Aronson: Secret Syrian-Israeli Talks Produced Unofficial Agreement,” Bernard Gwertzman, interÂ�view with Geoffrey Aronson, Council on Foreign Relations, 5 February 2007, http:// www.cfr.org/publication/12553/aronson.html; Hadar, “Reporter-at-Large: Time to Talk to Syria?” 110. Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus, 161–66; Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen, “Meet the New Villain: The Neo-cons Threaten Syria,” Counterpunch, 16 September 2004, available at http://www.counterpunch.org/landau09162004.html; Saul Landau, “Return to Syria: Where Washington Lets No Good Deed Go Unpunished,” Counterpunch, 23 March 2007, available at http://www.counterpunch.org/landau03232007.html; Perry, “A Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood”; Rabinovich, “The Annapolis Opening Has Closed.” 111. Zisser, “Syria and Israel,” 128; Hadar, “Reporter-at-Large: Time to Talk to Syria?”; Perry, “A Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood”; Rabinovich, “Annapolis Opening.” 112. Leverett, Inheriting Syria, 112–32; Zisser, Commanding, 152–71. 7. Breakthrough 1. Klieman, “Approaching the Finish Line,” 13. 2. In a comprehensive legal analysis, Geoffrey Watson treats the following eight documents as an integral package constituting the Oslo Accords: (1) September 1993 Declaration of Principles; (2) 4 May 1994 Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area; (3) 29 August 1994 Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers and responsibilities; (4) September 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; (5) 15 January 1997 Protocol Concerning the Redeployment in Hebron; (6) 15 January 1997 Note for the Record “prepared by Ambassador Dennis Ross at the request of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Ra’ees Yasser Arafat”; (7) 23 October 1998 Wye River Memorandum; and (8) 4 September 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum on Implementation Timeline of Outstanding Commitments of Agreements Signed and the Resumption of Permanent Status Negotiations. Watson, The Oslo Accords, 317–89. For a more critical legal analysis of these accords, see Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords. For an official Israeli summary of the early stages of the Israel-PLO negotiations, see Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Middle East Peace Process, 13–29. For critical general treatments of the Oslo process, see Bruck, “The Wounds of Peace,” 64–91 (cf. Said, The End of the Peace Process, 114–16); Rabinovich, Waging Peace, chap. 2; Meital, Peace in Tatters, chap. 3; Golan, Israel and Palestine, chap. 2. 3. Rabin was not, however, Israel’s first “peace victim.” In 1983, right-wing counterdemonstrators tossed a grenade into a Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) rally protesting Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, killing peace activist Emil Grunzweig.

notes to pages 166–169╇ /╇ 357

4. Several of the participants in the extended Oslo talks and their confidants have written detailed memoirs of the negotiating experience. Among them are Peres, Battling for Peace; Abbas, Through Secret Channels; Beilin, Touching Peace; Corbin, Gaza First; Savir, The Process; Ross, The Missing Peace; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem; Egeland, A Billion Lives, chap. 7. 5. Washington’s commitment was made as part of a package leading to the 1975 IsraeliEgyptian disengagement in Sinai. See Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 300–303. For a critical assessment of this U.S. commitment to Israel, see Neff, “Nixon’s Middle East Policy,” in Suleiman, US Policy on Palestine from Wilson to Clinton, 156. 6. The resolution was repealed in December 1991 by UNGA 4686, under U.S. pressure and with the momentum coming out of the Madrid peace conference. 7. For a critical look at the Village Leagues, see Tamari, “In League with Zion,” 41–56; Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, 197–201, 208–9. Some observers allege that, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Israeli Shin-Bet (internal security service) also deliberately supported Islamists like Sheikh Ahmad Yasin (the future spiritual leader of Hamas) as a counterweight to Arafat’s secular-nationalist PLO. E.g., Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country, 199, 208–209, 294–95, 308. For an assessment of Israel’s early orientation toward Hamas see Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, 200–205. 8. See, e.g., Flapan, When Enemies Dare to Talk; Avnery, My Friend, the Enemy; Heikal, Secret Channels, 321–25, 343–51. 9. Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 13; Heikal, Secret Channels, 343–44. 10. For an account of several Israeli-Palestinian dialogue projects (some of which were indirectly connected to attempts to foster a U.S.-PLO dialogue) during the 1980s, see Rabie, US-PLO Dialogue, chaps. 3, 8, 12. See also Abu-Sharif, “Prospects of a Palestinian-Israeli Settlement,” in Lukacs, Israel, Jordan and the Peace Process, 397–99; the Abu-Sharif document is also reproduced, along with “Response by Prominent American Jews to the Abu Sharif document,” 30 June 1988, in Journal of Palestine Studies 18:1 (Autumn 1988), 272–75, 302–3; Abu-Sharif and Mahnaimi, Best of Enemies, 257–62; Makovsky, Making Peace with the PLO, 17; Beilin, Touching Peace, 7–46; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 4–8, 13–18; Heikal, Secret Channels, 343–51; Gidon D. Remba, interview with Stanley Scheinbaum, discussed in “Self-Appointed, Arrogant American Jewish Interlopers Offer Illusions of Peace,” 17 August 2007, available at http://www.ameinu.net/perspectives/current_issues .php?articleid=252, accessed 29 August 2007. 11. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 50–55. 12. Peres, The New Middle East. For an excellent overview of the evolution in Rabin’s thinking on the Palestinian issue and Middle East peace, see the afterword by Yoram Peri in Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs, 339–80. See also Horowitz et al., Shalom Friend, 1996. 13. Muslih, “Towards Coexistence,” 3–29; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 153–55, 159, 190. BenAmi recounts a humorous anecdote about Arafat’s difficulty in uttering the formula statement denouncing terrorism (one of the conditions for a PLO dialogue with the United States), stumbling over the word “terrorism” three consecutive times and mispronouncing it “tourism.” Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 193. 14. Abbas, Through Secret Channels, chap. 6. Khalidi (The Iron Cage, 160–63) recounts from personal experience as an adviser to the Washington talks the awkward attempts of PLO policymakers in Tunis to micromanage the D.C. negotiations.

358╇ /╇ notes to pages 169–174

15. On the creative uses of back channels in international diplomacy, see Wanis-St. John, Back-Channel Negotiation. 16. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 36–37. 17. Karsh, “Peace Not Love,” 149. 18. Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 327–28. 19. Khalidi, “A Palestinian View of the Accord with Israel,” 64–65; Mansour, “The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Negotiations,” 5–7, 30–31; Abu-Amr, “Palestinian-Israeli Negotiations,” 27; Corbin, Gaza First, 24; Peres, Battling for Peace, 284; Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 128–29. 20. Abu-Amr, “Hamas: A Historical and Political Background,” 5–19; Kass and O’Neill, The Deadly Embrace, chap. 4; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 210; Corbin, Gaza First, 209; Beilin, Touching Peace, 67. 21. On the first Palestinian Intifada generally and the emergence of Hamas, see Melman and Raviv, Beyond the Uprising; Schiff and Ya’ari, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising; Freedman, The Intifada; Hunter, The Palestinian Uprising; Mishal and Sela, The Palestinian Hamas; Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice; Gunning, Hamas in Politics. 22. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 55–56, 62. 23. Zartman, “The Negotiation Process in the Middle East,” 66, defined a diplomatically “ripe” moment as “a mutually hurting stalemate, optimally marked by a recent or looming catastrophe (sticks), a way out (carrots), and valid spokespersons for all parties.” See also Haass, Conflicts Unending. 24. Makovsky, Making Peace with the PLO, 53, 96, 113–14. 25. Bulliet, “The Future of the Islamic Movement,” 41. Some observers assert that Israel had initially viewed the emergence of Hamas with equanimity, pleased to see an alternative to Arafat that might sap the appeal of the PLO. No one anticipated the rapid expansion of genuine Hamas power. Abu Ala (From Oslo to Jerusalem, 84) reports that Israel worried about Hamas not only outstripping Arafat but also toppling King Hussein in Jordan. See also Corbin, Gaza First, 36. 26. Heller, “The Israeli-Palestinian Accord,” 58. 27. Corbin, Gaza First, 144–45; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 231; Savir, The Process, 21–22; Beilin, Touching Peace, 114–15. 28. Heikal, Secret Channels, 445. See also Beilin, Touching Peace, 2. 29. Mohamed Rabie writes that Yitzhak Rabin, as defense minister in Yitzhak Shamir’s national unity government, allegedly initiated several secret overtures to the PLO, starting in February 1988, in search of a face-saving formula to end the Intifada. See Rabie, US-PLO Dialogue, 9–12, 106, 142–43. Cf. Peres, Battling for Peace, 285. 30. Leslie Susser, “What Next?!” Jerusalem Report, 7 October 1993, 18; Corbin, Gaza First, 147. 31. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 111–16, 139–41, 157; Corbin, Gaza First, 51–52, 72–74. 32. Savir, The Process, 26, 176; Corbin, Gaza First, 54–55. 33. Corbin, Gaza First, 93; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 207; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 55; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 244; Peres, Battling for Peace, 285. 34. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 215–21; Peres, Battling for Peace, 284. 35. Shaath, “The Oslo Agreement,” 8–9. Shehadeh (From Occupation to Interim Accords, 116) disagrees: “Little use was made during the Oslo talks of the work done by the Palestinian Delegation to the Washington talks.”

notes to pages 174–176╇ /╇ 359

36. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 119. 37. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 173, 182–85, 197–201, 218, 257. 38. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 291. For other views comparing the two delegations, see Shaath, “The Oslo Agreement,” 9; McDowall, The Palestinians, 120. 39. Corbin, Gaza First, 127; Savir, The Process, 96. In early August, there was apparently “an exchange of unaddressed letters between Rabin and Arafat.” Beilin, Touching Peace, 115; Peres, Battling for Peace, 294–95. 40. Corbin, Gaza First, 154–58; Savir, The Process, 55; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 237–43; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 175–76, chap. 10; Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 14–15; Peres, Battling for Peace, 299. 41. Palestinians Abu Ala and Asfour and Israelis Uri Savir and Joel Singer initialed the DOP on 19 August 1993, paving the way for the public signing ceremony one month later. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, chap. 16; Savir, The Process, 56–59; Corbin, Gaza First, 165–71; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 179; Beilin, Touching Peace, 118; Peres, Battling for Peace, 300–302. 42. Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 103. 43. Hudson, “The Clinton Administration and the Middle East,” 51. 44. Aharon Klieman discusses the problems of broken continuity in “Approaching the Finish Line,” 16–21. Middle East advisers from the Bush administration who continued on under Clinton were Samuel Lewis, Edward Djerejian, Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, and Aaron Miller. See also Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 194–98; Ross, The Missing Peace, 94–98; Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 239–40; Quandt, Peace Process, 322–23. 45. Beilin, Touching Peace, 7–46; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 220–22, 266–67. 46. Accounts of the genesis and evolution of PLO-Israeli talks in Norway include Shlaim, “The Oslo Accord,” 24–40; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, chap. 8; Makovsky, Making Peace with the PLO, chap. 1; Heikal, Secret Channels, 433–70; Corbin, Gaza First, 18–28, chap. 2; Peres, Battling for Peace, chaps. 25–27. Beilin and Peres saw the secret process which had produced the 1987 London Document as the original model for the contemplated Israeli-Palestinian back-channel talks, and both mention Peres’s recurring concern that the Americans would be reluctant to support the Oslo Accord as they had passed on the London Document. Beilin, Touching Peace, 50–53, 56–57, 104, 120–21; Peres, Battling for Peace, 269–70, 296–97, 303–4. Abu Ala and Abu Mazen reproduce in their books transcripts of many of discussions with the Israeli negotiators and of Israeli-PLO meeting minutes and post-meeting reports submitted to Yasir Arafat. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, chap. 2; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, chaps. 7, 8. For full character sketches of the many individuals involved in the Oslo negotiations over time, see Corbin, Gaza First, chap. 1. 47. Hirschfeld, quoted in Shlaim, “Olso Accord,” 33. 48. Abbas, Through Secret Channels, chaps. 7, 11; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, chap. 3; Corbin, Gaza First, 18–20. 49. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 52–53; Corbin, Gaza First, 18; Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 7. 50. Shlaim, “Oslo Accord,” 30. 51. Serge Schmemann, “Negotiators, Arab and Israeli, Built Friendship from Mistrust,” New York Times, 28 September 1995, A1; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 58–59, 233–34;

360╇ /╇ notes to pages 176–178

Savir, The Process, 11–12, 30–31; Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 8–9; Corbin, Gaza First, 18–20, 211, chaps. 2, 3, and elsewhere. 52. Corbin, Gaza First, 37, 202; Beilin, Touching Peace, 78–79, 137–38. 53. Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 104–9; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 200–201, 233–34; Savir, The Process, 42–44, 76–77; Corbin, Gaza First, chap. 8, 193–96; Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 12–17; Beilin, Touching Peace, 106–107; Peres, Battling for Peace, 294–95. 54. Despite the overwhelmingly positive assessment of the Norwegian contribution by the negotiators themselves and most secondary analysts, some scholars argue persuasively that Norway’s relative weakness meant it unwittingly played to Israel’s advantage and proved damaging to the Palestinian case. See Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 18–20; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 161. 55. Hudson, “Clinton Administration,” 52; Beilin, Touching Peace, 42, 79, 88, 120–23; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 250–54; Peres, Battling for Peace, 284–85, 303–306; Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 199–200; Savir, The Process, 21–22, 41, 66–67; Ross, The Missing Peace, 114–18; Corbin, Gaza First, 66–67, 95–96, 174–76; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 230–31, 264–65; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 73–74. (Citations in this volume refer to this full-length version of Hanieh rather than to the abridged version published in the Journal of Palestine Studies in 2001.) Clinton (My Life, 541) makes the odd comment that Christopher played a role in keeping the secret Oslo talks “on track.” The PLO and Israel also informed the Egyptians of the Oslo track. 56. Christopher and others recalled that Peres even suggested presenting the agreement as an American initiative, an offer which Christopher declined. Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 200; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 256, 265; Ross, The Missing Peace, 116; Corbin, Gaza First, 176–77; Beilin, Touching Peace, 108. Peres writes that both the Israeli and PLO sides supported the idea that the United States “adopt” the peace plan produced by the Oslo channel and then “propose” it at the D.C. talks as its own initiative, but that the United States declined. Battling for Peace, 283–84, 296–97. 57. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 278. 58. Ross, The Missing Peace, 203–204. 59. Hudson, “Clinton Administration,” 53. Ironically, by the time the Oslo II pact was ready to be signed, the Washington venue had become a burden on Rabin and Arafat, further incensing their opponents, but a gift from them to President Clinton, whose lackluster approval rating sorely needed a foreign policy victory. Clinton acknowledged that the signing ceremony at the White House felt “like a gift.” Clinton quoted in Corbin, Gaza First, 198; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 275; R. W. Apple Jr., “Score One for Clinton,” New York Times, 29 September 1995, A1. 60. In a fourth, secret, letter to Holst, Peres pledged that Israel would permit existing non-PLO Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem to remain open. Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 17; Savir, The Process, 72, 76–77; Beilin, Touching Peace, 118; Golan, Israel and Palestine, 14–15. 61. Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 338–40; Beilin, Touching Peace, 90–92, 126–28; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 208–9; Savir, The Process, 49–53, 67–77; Makovsky, Making Peace with the PLO, 79–81; Ross, The Missing Peace, 117–19; Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 15–17; Corbin, Gaza First, 134–36, 174–97; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 216–17, 255, 258, chap. 17.

notes to pages 179–182╇ /╇ 361

62. Quandt, Peace Process, 329. Corbin writes that the final DOP necessitated some twenty-five drafts. Corbin, Gaza First, 165. For a textual juxtaposition of Palestinian vs. Israeli proposals along the way, see Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 218–20. Abbas, Through Secret Channels, chap. 9, reproduces the major draft DOP that had emerged after the first five rounds of discussions. 63. Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 200–204; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 132–33, 170–75; Makovsky, Making Peace with the PLO, 34–38; Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 205–207; Savir, The Process, 19, 139–40; Ross, The Missing Peace, 188–90; Corbin, Gaza First, 68–69; Beilin, Touching Peace, 82, 116, 137; Peres, Battling for Peace, 286–94. The 4 May 1994 signing ceremony was briefly interrupted when Arafat initially balked at signing off on an appendix of maps. 64. Savir, The Process, 145–46. 65. I.e., Articles 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 19, 20, 22, and 23 of the Charter (document 20). Assessments of this document are offered by Yehoshafat Harkabi, The Palestinian Covenant and Its Meaning; Cobban, The Palestine Liberation Organization, 43–44; Muslih, “Towards Coexistence”; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 190; Savir, The Process, 70–75; Rubin, The Transformation of Palestinian Politics, 96. See also Miller, The PLO and the Politics of Survival. For a dissenting Israeli view that the PLO Charter was already a dead letter long before Oslo, see Avnery, “Should the Palestinians Change the Charter?” 66. Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 14. 67. Ibid., 16. 68. Savir, The Process, 298. Raja Shehadeh reproduces in the appendix to his book an “Extract from the Palestine National Council, Draft Bill Amending the Palestine National Charter, Gaza, 24 April 1996,” which reveals the decision taken to amend the Charter and a charge to the PNC “Legal Committee” to produce a new draft, but no draft itself. Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 277–78. Cf. Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 14–17. The Palestinian commitment to amend the Charter was reaffirmed in the Wye Plantation Agreement, in a letter from Arafat to President Clinton (22 January 1998), and by the PNC meeting of 14 December 1998. See also the introductory remarks to the text of the Charter as given on the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, accessed 18 October 2009 at http:// www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process/Guide+to+the+Peace+Process/The+Palestinian +National+Charter.htm. 69. Yossi Ben-Aharon, in a retrospective critique of the Oslo process, claims that the vote taken at the April 1996 PNC meeting in Gaza was questionable, “if not altogether invalid,” in terms of the Charter’s own rules for amendment (Article 33)—a view not shared by many Palestinians. He further points to the decisions taken at a February 2001 meeting of prominent Palestinians in Cairo as confirming that the original Charter was still in force for several reasons. Ben-Aharon, “Foundering Illusions,” 60. See also Podhoretz, “Intifada II: Death of an Illusion?” 90. 70. Shlaim, “Prelude to the Accord,” 19. 71. Heller, “The Israeli-Palestinian Accord,” 56; Thomas L. Friedman, “Partition of Palestine,” New York Times, 9 July 1995, E15. 72. Milestones along the way included the twelfth PNC platform (June 1974), which called for the establishment of a “Palestinian national authority” in any part of liberated Palestine and the PLO’s endorsement of the August 1981 Fahd peace plan, which went

362╇ /╇ notes to pages 182–184

further than any other Arab declaration in “affirming the right of all countries in the region to live in peace” and which was largely echoed by the Arab League Summit relations at Fez (September 1982). Many Israelis saw these as modifications of means but not ends. See Lukacs, Israel, Jordan and the Peace Process, 307–12, 477–79; Muslih, “Towards Coexistence.” Cf. Saunders, The Other Walls, chap. 4 (“Palestinians: Moving toward a New Pragmatism”); Rabie, US-PLO Dialogue, 63–64, 83–87; Lesch, “The Reagan Administration’s Policy toward the Palestinians,” 175–76, 189–90; Yorke, “Domestic Politics and the Prospects for an Arab-Israeli Peace,” 11. 73. Arafat’s address to UN General Assembly, Geneva, 13 December 1988; Arafat press statement, Geneva, 15 December 1988 (documents 55–57). See also Lukacs, The IsraeliPalestinian Conflict, 397–99, 403–11, 438–41, 449–53; Saunders, The Other Walls, 203–34; see multiple PLO documents in Journal of Palestine Studies 18:2 (Winter 1989), 213–23, and 18:3 (Spring 1989), 161–71, 176–81; Lesch, “The Reagan Administration’s Policy toward the Palestinians,” 175–76, 189–90; Abu-Sharif and Mahnaimi, Best of Enemies, 257–62, 272–73; Heikal, Secret Channels, 388–99. 74. Quoted in the Sunday Times, London, 15 June 1969; Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, xxvi–xxvii. 75. For a discussion of Likud prime ministers caught between the pragmatics of ruling the country and adherence to ideologies of “Greater Israel,” see Ilan Peleg, “The Zionist Right and Constructivist Realism,” 127–53; Naor, “Hawks’ Beaks, Doves’ Feathers,” 154–91. 76. Makovsky and Yudelman, “PM: Oslo II Is ‘Blow to Greater Israel,’” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 26 August 1995, 1; Herb Keinon, “Massive Oslo 2 Protest Floods Zion Square,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 14 October 1995, 3. 77. Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 346–52. 78. Heller, “The Israeli-Palestinian Accord,” 56; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 290. 79. Hirsh Goodman, “Oslo II: Can It Work?” Jerusalem Report, 19 October 1995, 58. Kimmerling and Migdal (The Palestinian People, 333), writing in 2003, referred to the “astounding proportion” of the Oslo plans and promises that “were actually put into effect between 1993 and the end of 1995.” 80. Serge Schmemann, “Beyond the Details, a Sketch of Peace,” New York Times, 1 October 1995, 4:4. 81. Savir, The Process, 79. 82. Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba,” 112. 83. Thomas Friedman, “The Brave New Middle East,” New York Times, 10 September 1993, A1. 84. Qurie, quoted in Savir, The Process, 227; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 277. 85. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 267. 86. Ibid., 268. 87. Ibid., 268; Savir, The Process, 68–69. 88. Ross, The Missing Peace, 118–20; Clinton, My Life, 542; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 276–77; Corbin, Gaza First, 200–202; Beilin, Touching Peace, 130; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 263–71; Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 13. 89. For thoughtful analyses of the psychological difficulties inherent in a PalestinianIsraeli reconciliation written by peace proponents from both camps, see “Psychological Dimensions of the Conflict,” Palestine-Israel Journal; Corbin, Gaza First, 182. On Arafat

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breaking the news of the DOP to PLO officials, see Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 205, 243, 258–62; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 205–6. On the presentation of the DOP to the Israeli government for ratification, see Beilin, Touching Peace, 123–25. 90. Peres, quoted in Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 256–57. Abu Ala suggested that Israel allow the return of the Hamas deportees in Lebanon, release Palestinian detainees, cease IDF action in Palestinian areas, and lift the closure of Jerusalem. 91. Kass and O’Neill, The Deadly Embrace, 61; Savir, The Process, 121–23; Ross, The Missing Peace, 126–28. 92. Figures compiled by the monitoring group Peace Watch, cited in Jon Immanuel, “Riding a Peace Jalopy,” and Herb Keinon, “Peace Watch: 83 Israelis Killed in Past Year, 66 in Previous Year,” both in Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 23 September 1995, 8, 32. 93. Such a plan is how many Israelis interpreted the PNC Platform of June 1974 and even the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of November 1988. Cf. “PLO Statements on the Middle East: Speaking with a Forked Tongue?” FBIS Analysis, 26 July 1989. 94. David Horowitz, “Beyond the Law,” Jerusalem Report, 21 September 1995, 26; Herb Keinon, “Extradition: Politics before Justice,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 23 September 1995, 3. McDowall, The Palestinians, 124. 95. David Makovsky, “Shortsighted Visionaries,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 5 August 1995, 14. 96. Herb Keinon, “Rabbis: Halacha Forbids Moving Army Bases from Judea, Samaria,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 22 July 1995, 1; Yossi Klein Halevi, “Torn between God and Country,” Jerusalem Report, 10 August 1995, 12–17; Ehud Ya’ari, “A Jewish Fatwa,” Jerusalem Report, 10 August 1995, 35; Chaim Herzog, “Divide the Land, Not the People,” Jerusalem Report, 10 August 1995, 60. 97. Serge Schmemann, “Israel’s Leader Declines to Call Early Elections,” New York Times, 8 November 1995, A1; Thomas Friedman, “How About You?” New York Times, 8 November 1995, A15; Zeev Chafets, “Israel’s Quiet Anger,” New York Times, 7 November 1995, A15; A. M. Rosenthal, “For Peace in Israel”; Serge Schmemann, “The Political Finger-Pointing Begins,” New York Times, 10 November 1995, A6; Frankel, Beyond the Promised Land, 388–89, 391–93; Savir, The Process, 247–48, 254–55; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 69. 98. Serge Schmemann, “Rabin Is Laid to Rest, Mourned by Israel and the World,” New York Times, 7 November 1995, 1. 99. Beilin, Touching Peace, 137, 189. 100. John Kifner, “Israelis Investigate Far Right; May Crack Down on Speech,” New York Times, 8 November 1995, A1; Alan Cowell, “Among Hard-Liners in Hebron, Ambivalence and Brooding but Little Grief,” New York Times, 7 November 1995, A10. 101. See Peri, The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. 102. Summit of Peacemakers, Final Statement Issued by Co-Chairmen Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and U.S. president Bill Clinton, Sharm el-Sheikh, 13 March 1996 (document 83); Clinton, My Life, 702; Savir, The Process, 286–87; Ross, The Missing Peace, 248–49. 103. Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 149–50; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 231. 104. Savir, The Process, 83, 151–53, 252–54; Beilin, Touching Peace, 141; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 60–61.

364╇ /╇ notes to pages 188–196

105. Poll results cited in Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 150. 106. Serge Schmemann, “Living Apart in Mideast,” New York Times, 26 September 1995, A1; Alison Mitchell, “A Less Stirring Moment than Last Time,” New York Times, 29 September 1995, A1. Cf. Clyde Haberman, “No More Magic in the Middle East,” New York Times, 14 May 1995, E3. 8. Breaking Down 1. Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 9; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 249. 2. Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 2. 3. There are several collections of essays doubting Oslo’s potential to bring genuine peace, dating back to the initial handshake and continuing throughout the following years. Writing pessimistically from a Palestinian perspective is Edward Said. See his “Symbols vs. Substance,” 60–72; Peace and Its Discontents; The End of the Peace Process; and From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map. For early analyses skeptical of Oslo from a perspective sympathetic to Israel, see various Commentary magazine articles collected in Kozodoy, The Mideast Peace Process. 4. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 149. 5. Rynhold, The Failure of the Oslo Process. 6. See the eight agreements listed in chap. 7, note 2. 7. For a detailed examination of the claims and counterclaims of non-fulfillment of the commitments undertaken (with a resulting mixed report card for each side), see Watson, The Oslo Accords, parts iii and iv. See also Ma’oz, “The Oslo Peace Process,” 142–44; Golan, Israel and Palestine, 24–35. 8. Savir, The Process, 311. 9. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 295. 10. Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country, 420. 11. Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba,” 111. 12. Harkabi, Palestinians and Israel, 209. 13. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 49–50. 14. Ibid., 59; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 226–27. 15. Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 357; Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 129. 16. Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 15–16, 122–23. 17. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 210. 18. Ibid. 19. Abu Ala devotes an entire chapter to Netanyahu’s stint as prime minister. Qurie, Beyond Oslo, chap. 2. “All in all,” he writes (19), “Netanyahu’s three years in office were a wretched time for the peace process. It was a nightmare not only for the Palestinians but also for many level-headed Israelis.” 20. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 49–57 (including her assessment of Arafat’s motivations); Said, The End of the Peace Process, 361; Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 378. 21. Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 151. 22. Interestingly, Abu Ala writes that the Palestinian leadership’s despair of making any diplomatic headway with Netanyahu led them to open a channel of communication with

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his highly influential rival, Ariel Sharon, then serving as minister of infrastructure, hoping he might lean on the prime minister to modify some of his positions. Abu Ala found Sharon unexpectedly amiable, but rigid in his thinking. Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 26–62, 75–81. 23. Quandt, Peace Process, 326. Amos Perlmutter makes the same point in “The IsraelPLO Accord is Dead,” 61–62. 24. Quandt, Peace Process, 340. 25. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 235. 26. Quandt, Peace Process, 351. 27. Ibid., 350–51. 28. The maverick Israeli president threatened to upstage the prime minister by sitting down with the Palestinian leader himself. See Thomas L. Friedman, “Bibi’s Moment of Truth,” New York Times, 29 September 1996, 4:15. 29. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 233. 30. Rynhold, The Failure of the Oslo Process. 31. David Makovsky, “A Peek into the Dark Channel Talks,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 14 September 1996, 1. 32. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 171. 33. Perlmutter, “The Israel-PLO Accord is Dead,” 60. 34. McDowall, The Palestinians, 119; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 181 and elsewhere. 35. Article 11 of UNGA Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948 (document 10). 36. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 152–53, 171. 37. Ibid., 199. 38. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 186; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 161–63; Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 100. 39. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 287–88. 40. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 212, 269; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 260. 41. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 211–12. 42. Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 122–24, 161. 43. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 157–61, 176–78. See also Haetzni, “In Arafat’s Kingdom.” 44. In November 1999 a group of Palestinian intellectuals published what became known as the “Petition of the Twenty: A Call from the Homeland,” accusing the PA of corruption and the neglect of basic human rights. Journal of Palestine Studies 29:3 (Spring 2000), 144–45. The PA promptly arrested several of the signatories and intimidated others. See also the website of the British International Socialist Group, http://www.isg-fi .org.uk/spip.php?article179 and http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article178, accessed 12 January 2009. 45. Said, “Symbols,” 62, 65. Edward Said is scathing in lambasting the PA as a “kind of mafia” and Arafat and the PA for presiding over a repressive authoritarian regime which benefits only themselves and the Israelis. Said, The End of the Peace Process, 22, 40, and elsewhere; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, chap. 6; Haetzni, “In Arafat’s Kingdom,” 57–68. 46. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 293; Said, The End of the Peace Process, 5. Shehadeh (From Occupation to Interim Accords, 131) agrees that the PLO’s satisfaction with its own favorable image and that of the Palestinians post-handshake obscured the fact that the most pressing obstacles to peace, such as the settlements, remained unresolved. 47. Said, The End of the Peace Process, 71, 107, 117.

366╇ /╇ notes to pages 203–209

48. Data from the Foundation for Middle East Peace, accessed 23 September 2008 at http: //www.fmep.org/settlement_info/settlement-info-and-tables/stats-data/comprehensivesettlement-population-1972–2006. According to Cheryl Rubenberg (The Palestinians, 117), the figures are even more striking. She claims a 52 percent growth in housing in the settlements and a 72 percent growth in the settler population in the same period. 49. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 213. 50. Hillel Halkin cautions against posthumous overestimations of Rabin’s power of persuasion and reminds readers of the contentious Israeli political environment in which he was struggling at the time of his death. Halkin, “The Rabin Assassination: A Reckoning,” 45–56. 51. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 161; Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 14–16, 20; and Waage, “Postscript to Oslo,” 56, 62–63. In “Postscript” Waage reveals that all the files related to the Oslo negotiations have gone missing from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive. Her conclusion is that the Norwegian principals did not want the record of their favoritism to blemish the standard account of Norway’s evenhandedness in working with the PLO and Israel. 52. Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 18–19. 53. Ibid., 20. 54. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 196–97. 55. Letter of Invitation to the Peace Talks in Madrid and U.S. Letter of Assurances to the Palestinians, 18 October 1991 (documents 59, 61); Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 198; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 245, 249. 56. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 10–11. 57. Quandt, Peace Process, 354–56; Albright, Madame Secretary, chap. 19; Clinton, My Life, 814–20, 832–33; Ross, The Missing Peace, 415–59; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 76–77; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 63–72; Muasher, The Arab Center, 82–86, 99. 58. Clinton, My Life, 832–33; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 72–75. 59. Quandt, Peace Process, 355. 60. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 271. 61. Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator, 255; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 52. 62. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 52; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 243–46; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 169, 172; Savir, The Process, 56; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 47; Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 159 (esp. n. 3). 63. Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 166; Said, The End of the Peace Process, 14, 21. 64. Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 356; Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 100, 155, 161–63. Shehadeh explains how political considerations consistently trumped legal imperatives for the Palestinians, dating back to 1948. 65. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 48. 66. Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 122. 67. Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 13–15; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, Chap. 17; Abbas, Through Secret Channels, 207–209. See also Savir, The Process, 49–53 and chap. 3; Corbin, Gaza First, 134–36; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 55–56. 68. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 30. Ian Lustick argues, however, that a closer parsing of the text in Arafat’s 1993 recognition letter to Rabin reveals that the PLO leader did not

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legitimize the Zionist enterprise. Lustick writes that for the Palestinians (and other Arabs) “there is . . . a crucial difference between acknowledging rights of an existing entity and recognizing that it was right for that entity to come into existence. This distinction is . . . present [in the 1993 letter] which did not recognize Israel’s ‘right to exist,’ but rather its ‘right to live in peace and security’ (given that it does exist and no matter whether it originally had a right to exist or not).” Lustick, “Abandoning the Iron Wall,” 33. 69. PA Minister of Information and Culture Yasser Abed-Rabbo, quoted in Said, The End of the Peace Process, 100. 70. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 57–61, chap. 2; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 251–61, 282–88; Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 27–29, 70–72. 71. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 137–39; Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 356–61; Golan, Israel and Palestine, 13. 72. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 196. 73. Ibid., 195–96; cf. 161–62, 180, 198. 74. Shehadeh, From Occupation to Interim Accords, 29, 104–105. 75. Ibid., 163. 76. Ibid., 129–30, 160, 168–69. 77. Shikaki, “Ending the Conflict,” 37–38. 78. Areas A-B-C have also been characterized as “Swiss cheese.” 79. Said, The End of the Peace Process, 15, 65, 78. 80. Oslo allowed for a Palestinian police force of 30,000, although estimates of the number of men actually under arms reached 50,000. 81. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 27; Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 17. 82. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 213; Savir, The Process, 87. 83. Peres, Battling for Peace, 280. See also Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 386–91. 84. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 226. 85. Rynhold, The Failure of the Oslo Process. 86. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 267; Beilin, Touching Peace, 125–26. 87. Golan, Israel and Palestine, 24. 88. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 279, 286; Beilin, Touching Peace, 136. 89. Heller, “The Israeli-Palestinian Accord,” 59. Cf. McDowall, The Palestinians, 118–19; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 157; Corbin, Gaza First, 210. 90. Golan, Israel and Palestine, 13. 91. Youssef M. Ibrahim, “Ousted Arafat Aide Assesses Future of the PLO,” New York Times, 28 May 1995, A3; Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 260–62, 274–75, 283–85; Savir, The Process, 80–81, 94, 95; Corbin, Gaza First, 205–207; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 278. Arafat interfered almost immediately in the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDR), which Abu Ala had begun to shape with input from the World Bank, and Edward Said reported that, within a year, Arafat, Abu Ala, and Abu Mazen were barely on speaking terms. “Symbols vs. Substance,” 61–62; Corbin, Gaza First, 205–7. 92. Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 336–68. For an early and forceful Palestinian critique of the Oslo Accords, see Dajani, “The September 1993 Israeli-PLO Documents,” 5–23. See also Said, “Projecting Jerusalem,” 5–14; Abd al-Shafi, “Interview,”

368╇ /╇ notes to pages 217–220

76–85; Said, “The Mirage of Peace,” 413–20; Said, “Symbols vs. Substance,” 60–72; Said, Peace and Its Discontent; Said, The End of the Peace Process; Aruri, The Obstruction of Peace; McDowall, The Palestinians, 119, 124; Aruri, “Palestine: How to Redress the Wrongs of Oslo?” 18–19. See also Farouk Qaddumi, quoted in Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 284; Savir, The Process, 85–87; Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 260–62, 274–75, 282–88. 93. Muslih, “Arafat’s Dilemma,” 24. Cf. David Hirst, “A Movement Withering on the Inside,” Guardian, 17 April 1995, 7. 94. Elsarraj, “Shaping a Culture of Peace,” 59. Many observers remark upon the asymmetry between a powerful Israeli state and a weak Palestinian organization during the negotiations. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 199; Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 18–20; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, chap. 2; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 160–62. 95. Data from the Foundation for Middle East Peace, accessed 23 September 2008 at http: //www.fmep.org/settlement_info/settlement-info-and-tables/stats-data/comprehensivesettlement-population-1972-2006. See also Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 212, 216; Ross, The Missing Peace, 195; Geoffrey Aronson (updated by Mallika Good and Ashley Brott), “Israeli Settlements,” Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, rev. ed., ed. Philip Mattar (New York: Facts on File, 2005), 252. 96. This was, for Rashid Khalidi (The Iron Cage, 196–200, 211) and others, the fatal flaw in the Oslo process. 97. Heller, “The Israeli-Palestinian Accord,” 59. For discussions of Israel’s populist, radical-right movements, beginning with the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) founded in 1974, see Harkabi, Israel’s Fateful Hour; Lustick, For the Land and the Lord; Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right; Kass and O’Neill, The Deadly Embrace; Savir, The Process, 86–87. 98. Clyde Haberman, “Settlers Fight Next Step in West Bank Transfer,” New York Times, 15 June 1995, A3; Chaim Herzog, “Divide the Land, Not the People,” Jerusalem Report, 10 August 1995, 60; Abba Eban, “Tyranny of the Few,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 19 August 1995, 12; Serge Schmemann, “Bus Bombing Kills Five in Jerusalem; 100 Are Wounded,” New York Times, 22 August 1995; Herb Keinon, “1,000 Reservists Say They Will Refuse to Uproot Settlements,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 16 September 1995, 1–2; Joel Greenberg, “Settlers Angrily Protest Accord in Hebron,” New York Times, 29 September 1995, A1; Sarah Honig, “Opposition Stages Its Own Signing, Declares Loyalty to Land of Israel,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 7 October 1995, 4; A. M. Rosenthal, “For Peace in Israel,” New York Times, 7 November 1995, A15. 99. Savir, The Process, 82. 100. Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 356. 101. Khalidi (The Iron Cage, 200–206) describes with great bitterness the growth of Israel’s “Matrix of Control” during the Oslo process. See also Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 153–54. 102. Corbin, Gaza First, 199–200. 103. Ma’oz, Syria and Israel, 143. 104. Podeh, “History and Memory in the Israeli Educational System,” 65–100, esp. 89–91; Brown, Palestinian Politics after the Oslo Accords, chap. 6; Brown, “Contesting National Identity in Palestinian Education,” 225–43; Naveh, “The Dynamics of Identity Construction in Israel through Education in History,” 244–70; Miller, Inheriting the Holy Land,

notes to pages 220–225╇ /╇ 369

45–68; Bar-On, “Conflicting Narratives or Narratives of a Conflict,” 153–56, 167–68; Golan, Israel and Palestine, 13; Said, The End of the Peace Process, 352. 105. Kimmerling and Migdal, The Palestinian People, 378. Golan argues that the fiveyear “interim” period offered a “relatively extended period for opponents to a final settlement to disrupt the entire process and bring it to a close.” Golan, Israel and Palestine, 13; see also 33. 106. The reference is to the Hudaybiyya agreement between the Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh tribe in 628 ce, which established the precedent of a temporary truce, valid as long as it served Muslim interests but expendable if circumstances changed. See, e.g., Israeli, “Arafat’s Peace,” 12–26; Abu Sway, “Islamic Perspectives in the Oslo Process,” 85; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 214. 107. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 212. 108. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 215. See also Arian, Israeli Public Opinion on National Security. 9. Broken beyond Repair? 1. Among the first dueling accounts to appear in the summit’s wake were Agha and Malley, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors”; Ross and Grinstein vs. Malley and Agha, “Camp David: An Exchange”; “Camp David and After: An Exchange”; Morris and Barak vs. Agha and Malley, “Camp David and After—Continued.” See also Deborah Sontag, “And Yet So Far: A Special Report; Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why It Failed,” New York Times, 26 July 2001; Singer, “Camp David, Real and Imagined.” 2. Jeremy Pressman subjects both of these dueling narratives to critical scrutiny in his “Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba?” 5–43. Itamar Rabinovich (Waging Peace, 160–76) distinguishes among four narratives, the first two of which (the “orthodox” and the “revisionist”) correspond roughly with the two presented here. An outstanding overview and comparison of the Camp David II and Taba “what went wrong” literature is Matz, “Reconstructing Camp David,” 89–103. 3. Quandt, Peace Process, 365. As part of his preparation for Camp David II, Clinton read Quandt’s seminal work on the first Camp David summit (Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics [1986]) and consulted with Quandt, who had attended Camp David 1978 as a staff member of the National Security Council. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 244, 262; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 244; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 11–12. 4. Albright, Madame Secretary, 487–88, 491; Clinton, My Life, 912–13; Ross, The Missing Peace, chap. 23; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 231–49; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 23–24; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 175. 5. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 99. 6. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 26. 7. Clinton, My Life, 912. In retrospect, Ehud Barak similarly explained his attitude about the importance of convening a conference, despite its low chances of success, as the lesser evil. Barak, “The Myths Spread about Camp David Are Baseless,” 145–46. 8. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, chap. 5; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 9–11, 15, 43. Arafat repeatedly made his appeal to Dennis Ross and Madeleine Albright as well.

370╇ /╇ notes to pages 225–229

9. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 14–15, 45–46; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 81; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 162. 10. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 242, 336; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 302; Agha and Malley, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” 60; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 161. 11. Clinton, My Life, 912; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 331 and elsewhere. 12. Clinton, My Life, 911. 13. Shibley Telhami, “Camp David II: Assumptions and Consequences,” 11; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 2–3. 14. Khatib, “A Palestinian View: Camp David.” 15. In retrospective remarks, a defensive (and not altogether convincing) Barak protested that “we did not go to Camp David planning to expose some hidden face that we knew Arafat had. . . . We went there to make a bona fide peace agreement.” Barak, “The Myths,” 120–21. 16. Dowty characterizes the Palestinian view of the peace process as an “implementation model” and the Israeli view as a “negotiating model.” Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 158– 59. 17. Albright, Madame Secretary, 493; Clinton, My Life, 916; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 333–37; Ross, The Missing Peace, 710–11; Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 308. 18. Telhami, “Camp David II: Assumptions and Consequences,” 10; Quandt, Peace Process, 371. 19. Agha, Feldman, Khalidi, and Schiff, Track-II Diplomacy, chap. 5; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, chap. 4; Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 150–51; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 21–46; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 282–83. 20. Ross, The Missing Peace, 650; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 59. 21. Clinton, My Life, 911. The PLO declared Palestinian independence in November 1988, but without control of any territory the proclamation was more symbolic than real. Clinton understood that Arafat’s 2000 threat to declare independence unilaterally was one of many factors leading Barak to push for the convening of a summit. 22. Quandt, Peace Process, 361; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 12. 23. Quandt, Peace Process, 372–73; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 223, 239; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 161. 24. Quandt, Peace Process, 375–77; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 276; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 402; Clinton, My Life, 944; Ross, The Missing Peace, 757. 25. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 60. 26. Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 179. 27. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 2–3. 28. Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 178–79. 29. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 265. 30. Clinton, My Life, 912; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 265; Albright, Madame Secretary, 482–83; Ross, The Missing Peace, 626–27; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 214, 218–20. 31. Ross, The Missing Peace, 593; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, chaps. 3, 5–8. 32. Miller, “The Effects of the ‘Syria-First’ Strategy,” 96–97. See also Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 179; Quandt, Peace Process, 367.

notes to pages 229–232╇ /╇ 371

33. Yatom, “Background, Process and Failure,” 33–34; Lipkin-Shahak, “The Roles of Barak, Arafat and Clinton,” 45; Barak Ravid, “Israel-PA Talks Resume under Shadow of Camp David Lessons,” Ha’aretz, 13 December 2007. 34. Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 176; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 335; Quandt, Peace Process, 372. 35. Clinton, My Life, 916; Albright, Madame Secretary, 489. 36. For an overview of the composition of each delegation see Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 253–34, 257–58. 37. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 262; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 12. 38. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 262. 39. Quandt, Peace Process, 369; Albright, Madame Secretary, 490–92; Ross, The Missing Peace, 696–702; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, chap. 11; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 313–20; Clinton, My Life, 915; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 81, 85, 88, 90–91. 40. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 85. 41. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 162. Saeb Erekat, from Jericho, was the exception to the Tunis rule. 42. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 254; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 26. 43. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 163. 44. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 13. 45. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 262. See also Quandt, Peace Process, 365. 46. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 59–60; Ross, The Missing Peace, 650. 47. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 282. 48. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 244. 49. Ibid., 243–44, 262–63; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 34–35, 78–79. 50. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 66; Quandt, Peace Process, 365. 51. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 35. 52. Ibid., 36. Hanieh (The Camp David Papers, 88–90) writes that Arafat had been ready to establish a positive working relationship with Barak immediately upon his election, and that Barak’s cold shoulder disappointed Arafat and led to his unwillingness to trust the Israeli prime minister and the failure at Camp David. By contrast, Ben-Ami (Scars of War, 261) argues that poor chemistry, a lack of trust, and mutual avoidance at Camp David I between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin did not inhibit the two sides from reaching an agreement in 1978. 53. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 19; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 15–16, 33–34, 58. 54. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 19. 55. Quandt, “Clinton and the Arab-Israel Conflict,” 26–27. 56. Galia Golan (Israel and Palestine, 38) believes that Clinton clearly suggested, “on more than one occasion,” ultimate U.S. support for Palestinian statehood at Camp David. Cheryl Rubenberg (The Palestinians, 298) disagrees: “In reality, Clinton did not function as an honest arbiter and not once spoke positively of a Palestinian state as a possible outcome of the negotiations.” Cf. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 19. 57. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 290–94 and elsewhere.

372╇ /╇ notes to pages 232–236

58. Albright, Madame Secretary, 490; Ross, The Missing Peace, 696–67. 59. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 70–71, 115. 60. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 262–64. 61. Albright, Madame Secretary, 485; Ross, The Missing Peace, 656–66; Quandt, Peace Process, 367–68, 371; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 262–70; Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 63–64. 62. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 38–39, 87. See also Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 297–98. 63. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 263; Quandt, Peace Process, 379–81. 64. Albright, Madame Secretary, 492; Quandt, Peace Process, 367. 65. Quandt, Peace Process, 367, quoting Madeleine Albright. 66. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 45. 67. Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 326. 68. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 50, 66; see also 37–39. Quandt, Peace Process, 367–68; Said, The End of the Peace Process, chap. 58; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 262, 265–68. Swisher contends (262) that ultimately the United States “surrendered summit control to the Israelis.” 69. An Israeli Oslo negotiator registered the same criticism: “The traditional approach of the State Department . . . was to adopt the position of the Israeli prime Minister.” Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?” 107. 70. Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 36–37. Cheryl Rubenberg devotes an entire chapter of her book to decades of U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians and asserts, “Aside from Israel’s rejectionism, US policies are the single most important factor impeding the Palestinians from achieving national and political rights in a viable, independent state along side Israel.” Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 276 and chap. 7. See also Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 211–17. 71. Dahlan, “Nothing Tangible Was on the Table.” 72. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 297–98. 73. Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 326. 74. Clinton, My Life, 915; Albright, Madame Secretary, 490; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 306–8, Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 77. Hanieh writes that the few Arab leaders who did call “quickly expressed unlimited support for the Palestinian position,” once they heard the Palestinian account of the negotiations. 75. Ross, The Missing Peace, chap. 24; Albright, Madame Secretary, 489–95; Clinton, My Life, 915, 938, 944. 76. Clinton, My Life, 944. 77. Telhami, “Camp David II: Assumptions and Consequences,” 11. 78. The following discussion of the permanent-status items is reconstructed from Golan, Israel and Palestine, 38–47; Shikaki, “Ending the Conflict,” 42–43; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, chaps. 6–7; and Barak Ravid, “Document Shows Progress on Core Issues at Camp David Summit,” Ha’aretz, 13 December 2007. Ravid’s article summarizes and discusses a recently disclosed twenty-six-page document entitled “The Status of the Diplomatic Process with the Palestinians; Points to Update the Incoming Prime Minister,” prepared by a team under Gilead Sher for Barak to hand over to the incoming prime minister, Ariel

notes to pages 238–245╇ /╇ 373

Sharon, in early 2001. See also Essentials of the Israeli Proposals at Camp David, July 2000 (document 93). 79. Ravid, “Document.” 80. Clinton, My Life, 915–16. 81. Al-Abed, “The Israeli Proposals Were Not Serious,” 76–77; Telhami, “Camp David II: Assumptions and Consequences,” 11, 13–14; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 125–28. 82. Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 179–80. 83. Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba,” 109. 84. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 281–82, 324. 85. Rynhold, The Failure of the Oslo Process, 2–3. 86. Al-Abed, “The Israeli Proposals Were Not Serious,” 75. 87. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 250–51, 256. See also Pundak, “The 1967 Lines,” 152. 88. Singer, “Camp David, Real and Imagined.” 89. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 197–200; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 274. 90. Quandt, Peace Process, 367; Albright, Madame Secretary, 483; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 232. 91. Telhami, “Camp David II: Assumptions and Consequences,” 11; Quandt, Peace Process, 371. 92. Albright, Madame Secretary, 490. 93. For only a few of many examples see Clinton, My Life, 913–15; Albright, Madame Secretary, 488; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 4, 94–95; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 282; Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 241. 94. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 253. 95. Clinton, My Life, 912–13. 96. Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 177. 97. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 120. 98. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 343. 99. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 86–87; Said, The End of the Peace Process, 355. 100. Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 177. Rabinovich and political scientist Galia Golan are among the few to write sympathetically, in retrospect, about Barak’s sincerity. See also Barak’s apologetics on this point during the 2003 symposium at Tel Aviv University. Barak, “The Myths,” 120–21. 101. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 145; “Comprehensive Settlement Population, 1972–2008,” Foundation for Middle East Peace website, accessed 9 February 2010 at http:// www.fmep.org/settlement_info/settlement-info-and-tables/stats-data/comprehensivesettlement-population-1972–2006. 102. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 116–21; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 245–48, 150, 160, 192–93; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 200–206; Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 153–54. 103. Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 226. 104. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 178. 105. Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 226–27; Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 178–80. 106. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 180–81.

374╇ /╇ notes to pages 245–248

107. Albright, Madame Secretary, 483. Two days after the Taba talks ended, Arafat struck a new low in speechmaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he accused Israel, among other things, of using depleted uranium in attacks against Palestinian civilians. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 229–30; Arafat quoted in the Financial Times, 29 January 2001, accessed 9 September 2008 at http://specials.ft.com/ davos2001/FT303665KIC.html. 108. Rabinovich, Waging Peace, 177. 109. Said, The End of the Peace Process, 357. 110. Albright, Madame Secretary, 484. 111. Ibid., 497. 112. Telhami, “Camp David II: Assumptions and Consequences,” 12. On the last page of his Camp David II account, Akram Hanieh relates the remarks of the Pakistani cab driver who took him from Camp David to the airport: “You were excellent, Jerusalem is ours. We should not give up any part of it. Arafat’s position is great. . . . Don’t surrender Jerusalem!” Hanieh, The Camp David Papers, 98. 113. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 129. 114. Ibid., 119. 115. Ibid., 150–51; Albright, Madame Secretary, 494; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 379. 116. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 122–23; Ross, The Missing Peace, 714; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 270; Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 267–87. 117. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 360–61. 118. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 121–22, 161–64, 183–85, 204–206, 227; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 366–68; Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 269–71, 274–76, 278–82. 119. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 374. 120. PA officials warned their Israeli colleagues not to allow Sharon’s visit; Israelis say they were assured that as long as Sharon did not enter either mosque there would not be violence. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 152, 155–59; Albright, Madame Secretary, 494; Ross, The Missing Peace, 728; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 382–86; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 266; Clinton, My Life, 924; Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 285–87, 297. 121. Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 157. 122. Ibid.; Ross, The Missing Peace, 730–33; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 157–67; Rubenberg, The Palestinians, chap. 8; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 264. 123. Rubenberg, The Palestinians, 276. Edward Said agreed that the second Intifada was directed at both the Israelis and at Arafat, “who has led his people astray with phony promises and maintains a battery of corrupt officials holding down commercial monopolies even as they negotiate incompetently and weakly on his behalf.” The End of the Peace Process, 362. 124. Quandt, Peace Process, 374; Meital, Peace in Tatters, 96–97, 100. 125. Albright, Madame Secretary, 495. 126. Ross, The Missing Peace, 733–66; Quandt, Peace Process, 373; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 158–64; Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 297–311.

notes to pages 248–251╇ /╇ 375

127. Quandt, Peace Process, 374; Ross, The Missing Peace, 739–41, chap. 25; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 167–70, chaps. 17, 18. 128. Barak later denied that he had authorized or supported the Taba talks, but Ben-Ami, Sher, and others insist otherwise. Ben-Ami, for example, wrote, “Political constraints and electoral concerns would later cause Barak to dismiss Taba. . . . But the truth of the matter was that, in real time, he did his utmost to encourage the Israeli team to reach an agreement.” Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 274; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 221, 224–25; Barak, “The Myths,” 141; Pundak, “The 1967 Lines,” 153; Makovsky, “Taba Mythchief,” 120. 129. Quandt, Peace Process, 375. 130. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 192–95, chap. 19; Ross, The Missing Peace, 748–50. 131. Clinton, My Life, 936–37; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 195–202; Quandt, Peace Process, 375–77; Ross, The Missing Peace, 751–58; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 395–97; Albright, Madame Secretary, 496–97; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 270– 72; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 279–85. 132. Ross, The Missing Peace, 725. 133. Clinton, My Life, 936–37. 134. Ibid., 938, 943. Clinton refers to Saudi and Egyptian encouragement specifically. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 273. 135. Clinton, My Life, 929, 938. In the end, Clinton gambled on Arafat and sent Secretary of State Albright to Korea instead, but without the presidential imprimatur North Korea pulled back. 136. Ibid., 943. 137. Ibid., 944; Ross, The Missing Peace, 10–14. 138. Remarks and Questions from the Palestinian Negotiating Team Regarding the United States Proposal, 1 January 2001 (document 98); Clinton, My Life, 944. 139. Arafat to Clinton, 28 December 2000, and White House press conference statement the day after the 2 January 2001 Arafat-Clinton meeting in the Oval Office, cited by Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 399–402. Cf. Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 285–93. 140. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, chaps. 19, 20; Beilin, Path to Geneva, chap. 10. 141. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, chap. 21; Matz, “Trying to Understand the Taba Talks” and “Why Did Taba End?”; Beilin, Path to Geneva, 53. Makovsky (“Taba Mythchief,” 122) quotes Abu Ala and Nabil Shaath denying that the Clinton plan served as the basis for the talks. 142. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 273; Swisher, The Truth about Camp David, 402. 143. Beilin, Path to Geneva, 231–34. 144. Regarding the parties’ preference for oral agreements and the non-publication of any negotiation notes, see Matz, “Why Did Taba End?” 145. Abu Ala includes his “Taba Diaries” in Beyond Oslo, chap. 8. 146. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 248. 147. Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 155–57; see 194–213 for Dowty’s elaboration on each item of negotiation. See also Beilin, Path to Geneva, 246–47.

376╇ /╇ notes to pages 251–259

148. Beilin, Path to Geneva, 247–49; cf. Makovsky, “Taba Mythchief,” 125; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 310. 149. Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 157; Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 221; Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 320; Beilin, Path to Geneva, 247. 150. Document 100. For contradictory accounts of the parties’ characterizations of their progress at the joint press conference at the end of the Taba talks, see Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 316–20; Beilin, Path to Geneva, 248. 151. Matz, “Trying to Understand the Taba Talks.” A minority Israeli view rejects the “so close” assessment of Taba and suggests that a “Taba myth” irresponsibly exaggerated the level of agreement reached upon the hard issues of Jerusalem, refugees, land, and borders. See Makovsky, “Taba Mythchief.” 152. Makovsky, “Taba Mythchief,” 120. 153. Matz, “Why Did Taba End?” 154. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 191, 201. See also Meital, Peace in Tatters, 86; Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, 339; al-Abed, “The Israeli Proposals Were Not Serious,” 80; Maoz, “The Strategy of Summit Diplomacy,” 207. 155. Quandt, Peace Process, 377; for a discussion of whether Clinton could have done more to close a deal see 378–81. Conclusion The epigraph is from Saunders, The Other Walls, 37. 1. Irving Kristol, “There’s No ‘Peace Process’ in Mideast,” Wall Street Journal, 19 February 1988, 18. 2. Said, “The Mirage of Peace,” 416. Similarly, one Israeli scholar’s critical review of the six years between Oslo and the election of Ehud Barak used ironic quotation marks around each of the two “p”-words. Meital, Peace in Tatters (chapter 3 is entitled “Oslo: The ‘Peace’ ‘Process’”). 3. Korn, The Making of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. See also sources cited in Introduction, note 37. 4. Quandt, Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics, 118. 5. Arafat’s Johannesburg Mosque speech, 10 May 1994 (extracts quoted in the Jerusalem Post, 18 May 1994, audio excerpt at http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=202&fld_ id=404&doc_id=486, accessed online 18 October 2009); Evelyn Gordon, “Labor MK: Arafat’s Speeches Violate Accord,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 12 August 1995, 4. See also Joel Greenberg, “Plans to Celebrate Past Divide Jerusalem Anew,” New York Times, 28 May 1995, A8; Helen Kaye and Bill Hutman, “Rabin: Undivided Jerusalem Is Ours,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 16 September 1995, 1–2. 6. Deutsch, “Commentary: On Negotiating the Non-Negotiable,” 251, 7. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 481. 8. Philip C. Habib, “Diplomacy and the Search for Peace in the Middle East,” the Fifth Samuel D. Berger Memorial Lecture, Georgetown University: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 29 April 1985. 9. Gromoll, The May 17 Accord, 17–19. 10. Quoted in “Arab Reports and Analysis: Reactions to the Lebanese-Israeli Agreement,” Journal of Palestine Studies 12:4 (Summer 1983), 171; commentary from other Arab

notes to pages 259–274╇ /╇ 377

newspapers also appears in the same issue, 168–74. Arab reaction is also discussed in Inbar, “Great Power Mediation,” 81; Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon, 313. 11. Saunders, The Other Walls, 36. 12. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 213. 13. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 372. 14. Eban, “Camp David: The Unfinished Business,” 348. 15. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 196. 16. Ibid., 197. See also ibid., 162. 17. Kellerman, “Introduction,” 1. 18. Touval, “Commentary: The Leader versus the Academic Analyst,” 230–31. 19. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 170. 20. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War, 216. Cf. Klieman, “Approaching the Finish Line,” 27–28. 21. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 247; Quandt, Peace Process, 371. 22. Eban, “Camp David: The Unfinished Business,” 354. 23. Yediot Aharonot, editorial, 5 August 2008. 24. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 369. See also Rabinovich and Reinharz, Israel in the Middle East, appendix 3, 568–69. 25. Said, “Occupation is the Atrocity,” in The End of the Peace Process, 367. 26. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 149. 27. Qurie, From Oslo to Jerusalem, 295. 28. Sher, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations, 4. 29. Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, 280. 30. Stein and Lewis, Making Peace among Arabs and Israelis, 8–11. 31. Klieman, “Approaching the Finish Line,” 9. 32. Ibid., 5–6, 15–16. 33. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 388, 478. 34. Israel maintains, and the UN has verified, that with its unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 Israel restored the international border between the two countries and all that remains is to negotiate the details of the peace to which it is entitled in return. Prodded by Hizballah, however, Lebanon claims pockets of land on the Israel side of the border. Arabs call the disputed territory Shebaa Farms; Israel calls it Har Dov. Israel says it took the area from the Syrians in 1967 and is eligible for a land-for-peace swap with the Syrians only; Lebanon says Syria has given it to Lebanon. Precedence suggests that these are precisely the kinds of tangible terms over which parties can negotiate a mutually satisfactory agreement once they are committed to terminating their conflict. 35. Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 213–14. 36. Stein and Lewis, Making Peace among Arabs and Israelis, 25–26. 37. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 169–70. 38. Ibid., 170. 39. Beilin, Touching Peace, 186. 40. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 362–63, 370. 41. This quotation is from Kellerman, “Introduction,” 4; cf. 1–13. 42. Ross, The Missing Peace, 589–90. 43. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 281.

378╇ /╇ notes to pages 274–278

44. Halkin, “The Rabin Assassination: A Reckoning,” 49. Halkin goes on to argue, however, that Rabin’s acceptance of a PLO partnership was so drastic that it would have been better to prepare or consult with the electorate beforehand. 45. Albright, Madame Secretary, 497. 46. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 313. 47. “There is historic irony in the fact that it took a leader of Rabin’s known hawkishness on security to bring the Labor party back to the path of political moderation.” Shlaim, “Prelude to the Accord: Likud, Labour and the Palestinians,” 18. 48. Abba Eban, “A Diplomatic Reality,” Jerusalem Post International Edition, w/e 22 February 1997, 10. 49. Heikal, Secret Channels, 343–44; Avnery, My Friend, the Enemy, 117–294; “Eyewitness,” in Hareven, The Vocabulary of Peace, 157–63. Albright (Madame Secretary, 497) distinguishes between political survivors and leaders, writing that leaders are those who “walk willingly into the crosshairs.” 50. There are at least two historical precedents for political assassination in the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine: the killing of an outspoken anti-Zionist Dutch Jew, Jacob de Haan, in East Jerusalem in 1924, and the gunning down of the young labor leader and political secretary of the Jewish Agency Executive, Dr. Hayim Arlosoroff, on the Tel Aviv beach in 1933. 51. Ehud Sprinzak, an Israeli academic and a leading authority on the religious right, revealed that “only a week before the shooting he met with top security officials to discuss ‘the very real possibility’ of a Jewish plot to assassinate Israeli leaders. But, he added, ‘we just couldn’t bring ourselves to really believe it.’” John Kifner, “Zeal of Rabin’s Assassin Springs from Rabbis of Religious Right,” New York Times, 12 November 1995, A1. For general background, see Peri, The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; Sprinzak, Brother against Brother. 52. Meital, Peace in Tatters, 2; Albright, Madame Secretary, 486. 53. Savir, The Process, 34. 54. Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 7–8. 55. Yasir Arafat, speech at the signing of the Cairo Agreement, 4 March 1994, in Laqueur and Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, 457–59. 56. Shortly thereafter, Yasir Arafat, accompanied by Oslo architects Abu Mazen and Abu Ala, paid a surprise visit to Rabin’s widow in Tel Aviv and praised the fallen Israeli leader as “a hero of peace” and a “personal friend.” Joel Greenberg, “Arafat Visits Israel to Give Condolences to Leah Rabin,” New York Times, 10 November 1995, A6. 57. Leslie Susser, “What Next?!” Jerusalem Report, 7 October 1993, 18; Clyde Haberman, “Ambivalent Rabin Reflects Israel’s Wary View of Peace,” New York Times, 7 July 1995, A1; Haberman, “Recalling a Realist Peacemaker, Not a Dove,” New York Times, 6 NovemÂ�ber 1995, A1; Clinton, My Life, 543–44; Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 201–204; Qurie, 277–81; Ross, The Missing Peace, 120–21; Corbin, Gaza First, 4, 198–99, chap. 14; Savir, The Process, 77–79; Beilin, Touching Peace, 129, 135. For Rabin’s reflections on the handshake, see Rabin, “On the Road to Peace” (December 1993), in Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs, appenÂ� dix G. 58. Podhoretz, “Intifada II: Death of an Illusion?” 87. 59. Beilin, Touching Peace, 135.

notes to pages 279–292╇ /╇ 379

60. Meital, Peace in Tatters, 6. 61. Halkin, “The Rabin Assassination: A Reckoning,” 50. 62. Perlmutter, “The Israel-PLO Accord is Dead,” 59–69; Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 235; Albright, Madame Secretary, 292. 63. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 229, 236. 64. Savir, The Process, 311. 65. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 268. 66. Qurie, Beyond Oslo, 83. 67. Kozodoy, The Mideast Peace Process: An Autopsy. 68. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 458. 69. For a snapshot of some early “post-mortems,” see Rothstein, Ma’oz, and Shikaki, The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process; Enderlin, Shattered Dreams. 70. Quandt, Peace Process, 371. 71. Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 18, citing Deiniol Jones, Cosmopolitan Mediation? Conflict Resolution and the Oslo Accords (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 144. 72. Beilin, Touching Peace, 34. 73. Waage, “Norway’s Role,” 18–19. 74. Waage, “Postscript to Oslo,” 63. 75. Corbin, Gaza First, 213. Epilogue 1. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 321. 2. Ibid., 325, 327–34. 3. Ibid., 324. 4. Ibid., 329, 332. 5. For a critical evaluation of past U.S. contributions to Arab-Israeli peacemaking and recommendations for future administrations, see Kurtzer and Lasensky, with Quandt, Spiegel, and Telhami, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East. 6. Quandt, Peace Process, 385, 393. 7. “The Shalit Tape and the Sharm Summit: Competing for Attention,” Daniel Levy, Prospects for Peace, http://www.prospectsforpeace.com/2007/06/the_shalit_tape_and_ the_sharm.html. 8. “Special Focus: Operation Cast Lead,” Journal of Palestine Studies 33:3 (Spring 2009), 93–258. 9. Israel ended up negotiating with Hizballah via German mediators for the return of the captured soldiers. Two years later, in July 2008, Hizballah exchanged the remains of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in return for the freedom of Samir Kuntar, convicted and imprisoned by Israel since a deadly terrorist attack in 1979, along with four other Lebanese prisoners and the bodies of almost 200 combatants and infiltrators from Lebanon. 10. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 326, 331–32, 337–38, 344, inter alia. 11. Ibid. 12. The website of the Geneva Initiative is at http://www.geneva-accord.org/HomePage .aspx?FolderID=11&lang=en. See also Klein, A Possible Peace between Israel & Palestine; Beilin, The Path to Geneva.

380╇ /╇ notes to pages 292–299

13. For directories of grassroots organizations, initiatives, and activists, see Kaufman, Salem, and Verhoeven, Bridging the Divide, 223–302, and the JustVision website at http:// www.justvision.org. 14. See, for example, Ha’aretz, 20 November 2008, 5. The Center for Middle East Peace (www.centerpeace.org) placed English translations in leading American newspapers, e.g., New York Times, 10 November 2008, A7. For close textual analyses of the Arabic wording of the original initiative and its Hebrew translation see Asher Susser, “Looking Straight at the Initiative,” Ha’aretz, 18 December 2008, and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, “A Pebble in the Peace Pond,” Jerusalem Report, 5 January 2009, 48. Jordanian foreign minister Marwan Muasher offers Arab reassurances to Israelis with his own parsing of the Initiative’s language on the Jordanian Embassy website, http://www.jordanembassyus.org/ arab_initiative.htm, and devotes an entire chapter to the evolution of the Arab Initiative (for which he credits King Hussein as the originator) in The Arab Center, chap. 4. The text of the initiative as adopted at the Beirut Arab Summit of March 2002 is reproduced in Muasher’s book, appendix 4. 15. “A Conversation with Itamar Rabinovich,” by David B. Green, Ha’aretz, 9 December 2008. 16. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 211–17. 17. A prominent advocate of the one-state solution is Abunimah, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. For recent Israeli contributions to this debate, see Inbar, “The Rise and Demise of the Two-State Paradigm”; Morris, One State, Two States; Jonathan Spyer, “Forward to the Past: The Fall and Rise of the ‘One-State Solution’”; Giora Eiland, Regional Alternatives to the Two-State Solution. 18. “PLO chairman Yasir Arafat (Abu Ammar): An Interview” (August 1969), in Laqueur and Rubin, The Israel-Arab Reader, 135–39; Karmi, Married to Another Man, chap. 7. 19. Rubin, “Conclusion,” 265. Rubin references two classic works: Thomas Carlyle, On Hero, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), and Sidney Hook, The Hero in History (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1943); excerpts in Barbara Kellerman, ed., Political Leadership: A Source Book (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986). 20. Rubin, “Conclusion,” 265. 21. Hudson, “The Clinton Administration and the Middle East,” 54. 22. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 479, 485, 488, 495, inter alia. 23. Ben-Ami, Scars of War, 212. 24. Joe Klein, “Q & A: Obama on his First Year in Office,” TIME magazine, 21 January 2010, http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1955072-6,00.html, accessed 9 February 2010. 25. Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country, 13.

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Index

Abbas, Mahmoud. See Abu Mazen Abd al-Hadi, Awni, 9, 13, 23 Abd al-Nasser, Gamal, 16–17, 36–37, 303 Abd al-Shafi, Dr. Haydar, 104, 108, 216–17, 230, 313, 339nn18,19, 342n57, 343n74 Abdallah ibn Husayn, Amir of TransÂ� jordan, King of Jordan, 11, 13, 15–16, 73–76, 118, 295–96; assassination (1951), 75, 275, 296, 302; agreement with Israel, 85, 268 Abdallah II, King of Jordan, 130–32, 248, 289, 307, 309 Abdallah, Crown Prince (later King) of Saudi Arabia, 292–93 Abu Ala (Ahmed Qurie), 169, 173–77, 180, 184–85, 190, 208–209, 215–16, 221, 226, 234, 247, 250, 265–66, 276, 280, 358n25, 359nn41,46, 363n90, 364nn19,22, 367n91, 375n141, 378n56 Abu-Jaber, Kamel, 104 Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), 173–75, 180, 190, 208, 216, 247, 265, 287–92, 308–309, 314, 338n11, 340n37, 359n46, 367n91, 378n56; document co-authored with Beilin, 292, 306 Abu-Odeh, Adnan, 120–22 Abu Rodeis, 45 Abu-Sharif, Bassam, 216 Accountability (Operation, 1993), 71, 306 Aims and Principles of the Security Arrangements (Syria-Israel, 1995), 135, 153, 306 Alawites, 144, 352n45 Albright, Madeleine, 150, 151, 158, 197, 207, 224, 229–30, 232–33, 235, 241, 245, 274, 369n8, 375n135, 378n49

Alpha (Operation, 1954–1956), 17, 36, 303 ambiguity in negotiation, 28, 104, 254–57, 260 Amir, Yigal, 186–87 Amman, 5, 8, 12–14, 18, 74, 77, 87, 89, 118, 123, 126, 130, 133, 217, 306–307, 341n41 Amman Arab Summit meeting (1987), 89 Annapolis Conference, Joint UnderÂ� standing (2007), 162, 288, 291, 296, 309, 314 Aqaba, 5, 8, 12, 14, 18, 76, 118, 126, 308 al-Aqsa (Second) Intifada (2000–), 132, 160, 166, 222–23, 226, 246–49, 255, 269–70, 280, 283, 285–86, 307–308, 374n123 al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, 194 al-Aqsa Mosque, 16, 236–37, 248 Arab boycott: of Egypt, 49, 89; of Israel, 88, 140, 167, 187 Arab-Israeli war of 1948, 13, 15, 35, 54, 74, 137, 236, 302 Arab-Israeli war of 1956, 17, 28, 36, 303 Arab-Israeli war of 1967, 17–20, 28, 36, 39, 75, 80, 108, 118, 135–37, 139, 153, 155, 157, 303 Arab-Israeli war of 1973, 20–22, 28, 36–37, 43, 48, 135–38, 274, 291, 303, 321n5, 341n45 Arab League, 18, 20, 49, 63, 67, 74, 89, 292–93, 303, 308–309, 362n72; peace plans (2002, 2007), 292–93, 309, 380n14 Arab nationalism, 6, 11, 38–39, 41, 46, 50, 74–75, 85–86, 100–101, 120–21, 136–38, 349n13 Arab Peace Plan (2002–). See under Arab League; Beirut, Arab summit (2002)

420╇ /╇ index

Arab revolt (1916), 73, 301; in Palestine (1936–1939), 10, 136, 301–302 Arafat, Yasir: heads PLO, 20; agreement with King Hussein (1985), 78–79, 83, 87; comeback after Gulf War (1991), 99, 171; authorizes non-PLO team at Madrid, 105, 341n41; at Wye River talks, 130, 207; addresses UN (1974), 312; recognizing Israel, 170, 209; rivalry with Hamas, 171–72, 196, 199, 201, 263; supports Oslo, 172, 174; handshake with Rabin, 177, 184, 190, 277–79; letter to Rabin, 178, 180, 182–83, 313, 366n68; letter to Holst, 178, 313; return to Gaza, 179, 187, 202; “public diplomacy,” 184–85; political longevity, 195, 197, 203; tension with “insider” Palestinians, 202, 231; rule criticized, 203, 209, 216–17, 219, 265, 365n45; ambivalence, 221, 277, 374n107, 376n5; at Camp David, 223–34; reluctance to go to Camp David, 224–26, 230; relationship with Clinton, 226, 231–32, 235, 241, 250, 269; admiration for Hizballah, 228; and alAqsa Intifada, 248–49, 285 Arens, Moshe, 69, 342n53 Arlosoroff, Hayim, 378n50 al-Asad, Bashar, 159–62 al-Asad, Basil, 142 al-Asad, Hafez, 38, 61, 65–67, 101, 111, 135, 138–40, 142–51, 153–55, 157, 159, 197, 222, 263, 265, 272, 275, 303, 305, 307; meeting with Clinton (2000), 136, 150, 307 Asfour, Hasan, 173–74, 359n41 Ashrawi, Hanan, 104, 106–107, 115, 173–76, 201–203, 206, 216, 230, 267, 339n11, 341n41, 342n60, 343n74 Atherton, Alfred Leroy, Jr, 107 Autonomy talks (1980–1982), 42, 47–48, 59, 78, 108, 182, 263, 271. See also Palestinian autonomy (post-1991) Ayalon, Ami, 291–92, 308, 314 Ayalon-Nusseibeh Statement (2002), 291–92, 308, 314

Ayyash, Yahya, 217, 306 Baathism, 138, 349n13 back-channel negotiations, 78–79, 141, 144, 150, 169, 173–74, 268, 306, 359n46 Baker, James, III, 95–96, 98, 101–102, 105–108, 112, 143–44, 175, 206, 233, 255, 338nn2,11, 340nn28,30, 341nn41,44,45, 342nn53,56 Balfour Declaration (1917), 6–7, 301, 311 Banias, 137, 152 Bantustan, 214 Barak, Ehud: prime minister (1999), 131, 196, 222, 227, 307; withdrawal from Lebanon, 71, 140, 228; push for Syria talks, 142–43, 145; domestic opposition, 143, 156–58, 227, 230–31, 248, 352n50; at Camp David II, 223, 225, 233; relationship with Clinton, 231; approach critiqued, 233, 235, 242–43, 266, 277 Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov, 111 Begin, Menachem: invites Sadat to Jerusalem, 22, 38, 40, 48, 312, 321n10; first Likud prime minister, 39; wants to keep West Bank, Jewish settlements, 39–42, 47–48; powerful leader, 41, 230; Camp David (1977–1978), 35–51; wanted minimal U.S. role at Camp David, 43; bad chemistry with Sadat, 43, 371n52; goal for Palestinian self-rule, 40, 47, 113, 182, 255, 304, 312; peace with Egypt, 35, 46, 111, 312; goals in Lebanon, 55–56, 69; rejects Reagan Plan, 59–60, 328n28; failure in Lebanon, 258, 266, 330n67; resignation, 69, 312. See also Autonomy talks (1980–1982) Beilin, Yossi, 172, 175–76, 187, 215, 231, 250–51, 278, 359n46; document coauthored with Abu Mazen, 292, 306, 313 Beirut, 1, 5, 8, 53, 59, 62, 64–65, 69, 71–72, 217, 301, 303, 305, 308, 312, 314, 328n37; Israeli siege of (1982), 57–58; U.S. embassy bombed (1983), 60; Arab summit (2002), 292–93, 380n14

index╇ /╇ 421

Ben-Ami, Shlomo, 139, 155, 197, 199, 214– 15, 226, 228, 230–33, 241, 247, 250, 263, 271, 274, 280, 297, 324n40, 325nn56,3, 336n65, 357n13, 371n52, 375n128 Ben-Gurion, David, 9, 13, 23, 36, 318n18 Ben-Meir, Alon, 157 Ben-Zvi, Abraham, 82, 336n63 bi-national solution, 9, 26, 270, 295 Black September terror group, 303 Bolling Airforce Base talks (2000), 249, 251, 307 British mandate for Palestine (1922–1948), 7–8, 10, 13, 24, 42, 73–74, 77, 118, 136, 166, 180, 182, 267, 271, 295, 302, 311 Bulliet, Richard, 171 Bunche, Ralph, 16, 35, 74 Bush, George H.W., 82, 91, 95, 98–99, 101–102, 106–107, 305, 340nn28,30, 342n53; “New World Order,” 99, 112, 146, 175, 227, 233, 255, 267, 306, 312, 339nn13,25 Bush, George W., 161, 227, 250, 285–88, 290–93, 298, 308; speech (2002), 293, 314, 352n58 Cairo Agreement (1994), 120, 165, 178–79, 195, 197, 217, 277, 306–307, 313 Camp David (1978) summit, accords, peace process, 22, 28–29, 35–51, 59, 62, 64–65, 68, 77, 81–85, 91, 97, 100, 106, 111, 121, 138, 151, 175, 178–79, 182, 208, 222, 232, 235–36, 253–59, 263–64, 267–68, 271, 274, 278, 282, 295–96, 304, 312, 322nn19–21, 324n40; Palestinian opposition to, 47–48. See also Egypt, ostracism by Arab world Camp David (2000) summit, 160, 166, 191, 221, 222–47, 251–52, 268–72, 283–84, 286, 307, 314, 352n50, 371nn52,56, 372nn68,74,78, 374n112; dueling narratives of blame, 190–91, 223–26, 285; performance of Clinton, Barak, Arafat, 223–31; Palestinian view of summit shortcomings, 234; Jerusalem, 236–38

Carter, Jimmy, 22, 37–38, 40–47, 63, 97, 105, 222–24, 229, 232–33, 247, 267, 278, 304, 323n31 Casablanca Conference (1994), 187–88, 306 Cast Lead (Operation, 2008–2009), 289–90, 309 Christison, Kathleen, 90, 335n49, 337nn83,86, 340n28 Christopher, Warren, 119, 124, 142–43, 146–49, 155, 175, 177, 197, 306, 331n77, 353nn63,65, 360nn55,56 Clausewitz, Karl Von, 24 Clinton, Bill: witnesses Jordanian-Israeli peace, 124–25; hosts Wye River talks, 130, 207; Clinton-Asad Summit (2000), 135–36, 143, 150; at Shepherdstown (2000), 143, 145, 150; opening toward Syria, 146–47; and Barak, 150, 158; lame duck, 197, 227, 229, 263; visits Gaza, 207, 232, 314; hosts Camp David II (2000), 222, 231–33, 241, 371n56, 376n155; blames Arafat, 225–26, 285, 314, 354n77; and Arafat, 235, 331–32; at Sharm el-Sheikh, 248, 313; Clinton Parameters (2000), 249–50, 252, 263, 271, 314; Oslo signing ceremony, 360n59. See Camp David (2000) summit Cohen, Raymond, 51 Cold War, 26, 28, 57, 98, 120, 146 confidence-building measures, 47, 110, 151, 157, 192–93, 196, 241, 259 Dahlan, Mohammed, 224, 265 Damascus, 5–6, 8, 12, 14, 18, 20, 22, 66, 70–71, 111, 126, 136–37, 140, 142–48, 150, 154, 160–62, 352n51, 355n90 Dayan, Moshe, 36, 41–43, 74, 80 Dead Sea, 5, 118, 127 Declaration of Principles (Israel-PLO, 1993), 119, 121, 165, 174, 178–80, 182–84, 186, 190, 192, 194, 202–203, 205, 208–10, 215–17, 235–36, 255–56, 259, 262, 264, 268, 296, 306, 313, 359n41, 361n62, 362n89

422╇ /╇ index

De Haan, Jacob, 378n50 Desert Storm (Operation, 1991), 120 Deshen, Shlomo, 111, 343n72 Dome of the Rock mosque, 197, 236–37, 248 Dowty, Alan, 225–26, 243–44, 270, 370n16 Draper, Morris, 61 Druze, 11, 52, 65, 136, 155 dynamics of deadlock, 27–28, 48, 88, 115, 155, 157, 218, 220, 274, 276 Eban, Abba, 259, 264, 378n48 Egeland, Jan, 175 Egypt, 312–13; armistice with Israel (1949), 16, 35, 311; Sinai I and II disengagement agreements (1974–1975), 22, 28, 104, 311–12; tensions with Israel (1950s), 16–17, 36, 319n34; 1967 War, 17–18, 36, 319n35; 1973 War, 36–37, 48; and Gaza, 15–17, 20; and the PLO, 20; peace treaty with Israel (1979), 22, 35, 42, 45–47, 50–51, 72, 235, 255, 257–58, 304, 312, 323n35, 324n49; ostracism by Arab world, 49, 89, 138, 324n50; relations with the U.S., 38, 42–44, 49; opposition to normalization with Israel, 49–50, 273, 298, 325n57; at Madrid, 100; mediation between Israel and Palestinians, between Palestinian factions, 175, 187, 247, 289. See also Camp David (1978) summit, accords, peace process; Sadat, Anwar Eilat, 5, 12, 14, 18, 76, 118, 126, 176 Elsarraj, Eyad, 217 Eretz Yisrael, 3, 6 Europe: pre-1948 Middle East activity, 11–13, 52; antisemitism, 6–9 European Union: as third party, 26, 250, 286; and Madrid multilaterals, 96–97, 106, 112, 115, 293; and Roadmap, 293 “exchange of services” approach, 7, 9, 11, 57, 74 Fahd, King, Peace Plan (1981), 304, 361n72 al-Faisal, Saud, 291

Fatah movement, 20, 193–94, 201–202, 265, 287–91, 297, 303, 309, 314 Faysal ibn Husayn, Amir, 7, 301, 311 fedayeen, 16–17, 20, 36, 303 Fez, Arab Summit Meeting (1982), 60, 304, 312, 361n72 Ford, President Gerald R., 97 Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel. See Camp David (1978) summit, accords, peace process Framework for Peace in the Middle East. See Camp David (1978) summit, accords, peace process Friedman, Thomas L., 183 Galilee, Sea of (Kinneret), 5, 8, 12, 14, 126, 136–37, 139, 147, 151–53, 182, 212–13 Garfinkle, Adam, 87, 128, 332n14 Gaza, 5, 8, 12, 14–18, 20, 36, 40, 47–48, 89– 91, 102, 104, 112, 126, 131, 142, 155, 161, 165–66, 168–70, 179, 181–82, 186–87, 194, 201–203, 206–207, 210, 212–13, 215–19, 223–26, 232, 239–40, 243, 247–50, 255, 259, 273, 279, 292, 297, 306, 312, 314–15, 324n41; “Gaza-Jericho first,” 179, 306; Israeli withdrawal from (2005), 160, 186, 286–90, 297, 308; Hamas takeover (2007), 165, 287–88, 291, 297, 309. See also Cairo Agreement (1994); Cast Lead (Operation, 2008–2009) Gazit, Mordechai, 321n5 Gemayel, Amin, 55–64, 67, 272, 329n43; comparison with Sadat, 63–64 Gemayel, Bashir, 55–62, 65, 69–70, 258, 266, 272, 275, 305, 326n13, 327n17, 328n31, 329n43 Gemayel, Pierre, 54 General Armistice Agreements (1949), 16, 28, 35, 74–75, 137, 302, 311. See also United Nations Geneva Accord, Initiative (2003), 271, 292, 308, 314 Geneva Conference (PCC, 1950), 16, 35, 96, 302

index╇ /╇ 423

Geneva Conference (1973), 21, 38, 40, 42, 96–98, 137, 263, 291, 303–304, 311, 324n46, 338n6 Golan Heights, 5, 17, 36, 101, 111, 113, 135–37, 139–40, 145, 147, 151, 153, 155, 158, 160–61, 229, 274, 303–304, 353n63 Golan, Galia, 107, 216, 371n56, 373n100 Goldstein, Baruch, 185, 217–18, 306. See also Hebron, massacre (1994) Goldstone Report (2009), 309, 315 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 89, 99, 106, 146, 175, 305, 312, 340n31, 352n52 gradualism in negotiation, 192, 254, 257–60 Grapes of Wrath (Operation, 1996), 71, 142, 307, 313, 351n35 Greater Israel movement, 182–83, 194, 218 Gromyko, Andrei, 38 Grunzweig, Emil, 275, 356n3 Gulf Arab countries, 37, 57, 81, 95, 97, 99–101, 112, 119–20, 132, 140, 171 Gulf War (1991), 95, 98–101, 119–21, 146, 171, 263, 305–306 Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, 368n97 Habib, Philip, 57–58, 61–63, 66, 69–70, 258, 329n43 Haddad, Sa’ad, 54–55, 67, 71, 304 Haig, Alexander, 58, 62, 65, 328n35 Hamas, Islamic Resistance Movement: suicide bombings, 129, 142, 185–88, 194, 214, 218; takeover of Gaza, 165; catalyst for PLO-Israel mutual recognition, 169, 171–72, 199; deportees, 174, 184, 363n90; rivalry with Fatah, 191–93, 201, 221, 228, 230, 263, 287–91, 357n7, 358n21 Hanieh, Akram, 227, 229–30, 233–34, 371n52, 372n74, 374n112 Haram al-Sharif, Jerusalem, 236–38, 248–51, 270, 285. See also Temple Mount, Jerusalem Har Homa, 204, 347n43

Hariri, Rafik, 71, 308 Harkabi, Yehoshafat, 65–66, 193 Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. See Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of Hassan II, King of Morocco, 88, 187 Hassan, Crown Prince of Jordan, 124, 335n62 Hebron, 5, 12, 14, 18, 126, 181, 212–13; massacre (1994), 142, 185, 218, 306, 313; Israeli deployment from (1997), 199, 204, 207, 275, 307, 314 Heikal, Mohamed, 172, 335n51 Heller, Mark, 216 Hinnebusch, Raymond, 144 Hirschfeld, Yair, 172, 174, 176 Hizballah, 28, 68, 71–72, 113, 129–30, 133, 139–42, 147, 160–62, 228–29, 290, 297, 305, 309, 329n46, 331nn77,80,81, 377n34, 379n9 Hobeika, Elie, 69 Holocaust, impact on Jews and Israelis, 7–10, 13, 69, 128, 273, 330n67 Holst, Johan Jørgen, 174, 176, 178, 313, 360n60 Hudson, Michael, 67, 178 Huleh Valley, 137 Husayn ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca, 6, 73, 301 al-Husayni, Haj Amin, 9 Hussein, King of Jordan: threatened by Palestinians, 20, 77; negotiations with Peres, 73, 82–85, 113; relations with Israeli prime ministers, 75; and West Bank, 76, 89, 91, 118; relations with Arafat, 78, 80–81, 312; Israeli affection for, 87, 118, 128, 278; meeting with Shamir, 88, 333n17; and 1991 Gulf War, 100, 120, 167; close working relations with Rabin, 117, 122, 127; eulogy for Rabin, 129, 187, 277–78; frustration with Netanyahu, 130, 314. See also London Document (Hussein-Peres, 1987) Hussein, Saddam, 95, 99–100, 146, 286, 288 Husseini, Faisal, 104, 173–76, 201–202, 230, 341n41

424╇ /╇ index

Ifrane, 88 Inbar, Ephraim, 72 Indyk, Martin, 124, 359n44 Intifada (1987–), 82, 88–89, 91, 99, 102, 168, 170–71, 178, 185, 198, 263, 273, 305, 338n89, 358n29. See also al-Aqsa (Second) Intifada (2000–) Iran, 26, 29, 45, 57, 71, 139, 142, 145, 147, 160–61, 228, 273, 284, 288, 297, 304, 324n52 Iran-Contra affair, 334n37 Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), 145, 304–305 Iraq, 7–8, 28, 57, 81, 95; Gulf War (1991), 98–101, 119–20, 146; U.S. invasion (2003), 133, 159, 160–61, 284, 286, 288, 290, 298; opposition to Camp David I, 138 Islamic Action Front, 121–22 Islamic fundamentalist movements, 50, 68, 76, 112, 133, 171, 228, 274 Islamic Jihad movement, 186, 194, 216–17, 306, 314, 329n46 Israel: declaration of independence (1948), 13; war and armistice (1947–1949), 13–15; Knesset, 22, 38, 41, 48–50, 84, 88, 103, 111–12, 145, 159, 227, 286, 304, 306, 308, 312–14, 321n10, 348n57, 352n50; relations with U.S., 39, 43–44, 56, 58, 62–63, 99–102, 147, 235, 335n49, 339n25, 340n30; Memorandum of Understanding with U.S. (1975), 43, 104, 304, 312; relations with and war in Lebanon, 52–72, 69; war with Hizballah (2006), 71–72, 161–62, 290, 309, 379n9. See also Arab-Israeli war of 1948; Arab-Israeli war of 1956; Arab-Israeli war of 1967; Arab-Israeli war of 1973; Camp David (1978) summit, accords, peace process; Egypt; General Armistice Agreements (1949); Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of; Lebanon; Madrid Conference (1991); Palestinian refugees; Syria Jackson, Rev. Jesse, 352n51 Japan, 97, 106, 160, 229

Jarring, Gunnar, 19, 303, 311 Jericho, 112, 126, 179, 181, 187, 202–203, 212–13, 215, 306, 313, 371n41 Jerusalem, 3, 5, 8, 12, 14–18, 22, 45–49, 75–76, 96, 118, 120, 142, 175, 179, 182, 187, 195, 197–98, 208, 210, 212–13, 219, 223, 225, 241, 247–49, 253, 255, 293; as capital of Israel, 17, 237, 249, 251, 255–56, 261, 301–303, 307, 309; Old City, East Jerusalem, 17, 75, 99, 104, 106, 186, 197, 206, 210, 225, 236–40, 245–46, 255; Sadat’s visit to (1977), 28, 38, 40, 42, 48, 81, 97, 123, 126, 157, 253, 268; aspiration as Palestinian capital, 108, 120, 180–81, 226, 237, 245, 249, 251, 255, 292; at Camp David II, 227, 231, 235–41, 255; Hasmonean tunnel crisis, 197–200, 307, 347n43. See also Haram al-Sharif, Jerusalem; Temple Mount, Jerusalem; Western (Wailing) Wall, Jerusalem Jewish Agency for Palestine, 9, 11, 13, 53–54, 73–74, 166, 295, 302, 326n9, 378n50 Jewish fundamentalist and ultranationalist movements, 41, 111, 274, 368n97 Johnson, President Lyndon B., 18, 303, 311 Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of: draft agreements with Israel, 16; armistice with Israel (1949), 16, 75; Palestinian refugees, 20, 119; rejects Camp David Accords, 47, 59; relations with U.S., 57, 82, 123–25; relations with Israel, 75–76, 117–19, 258; JordanianPLO accord (1985), 77–79, 312; joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, 78, 82–85, 90–91, 99, 104, 167, 340n37; relations with the PLO, 80–81, 120, 182; Palestinian population, 87, 120, 128; opposition to normalization with Israel, 87, 131–33, 273, 298, 348n53; Madrid conference, 99, 113; impact of 1991 Gulf war, 101, 119–20; Jordan-Israel Common Agenda (1992–1993), 113, 121, 306, 313, 344nn1,16; peace treaty with Israel (1994), 116–34, 187, 262, 264, 268,

index╇ /╇ 425

278, 298, 306, 313, 346n30, 347n49, 348nn53,57,62; Jerusalem, 120, 236; Islamic fundamentalism, 133. See also “Jordanian option” Jordan River, 7, 11, 15, 73, 136–37, 255 “Jordanian option,” 76–77, 79, 86, 91, 99, 118, 127, 345n19 Judea and Samaria, 20, 39–40, 45, 102, 182, 186, 195–96, 325n3. See also West Bank, Transjordan Juul, Mona, 175–76 Kafr Qana, 71, 142 Kadima Party (Israel), 286–87, 290, 309 Kahan Commission of Inquiry (1983), 69, 305, 312 Kalvaryski, Hayim Margaliuth, 318n13 Karameh (battle, 1968), 20, 303 Kasim, Marwan, 132 Kellerman, Barbara, 27, 261, 272 Khalidi, Rashid, 66, 201–202, 206, 210, 216, 230, 243, 259–60, 297, 357n14 Khartoum, Arab Summit meeting (1967), 18, 137, 303, 311 Khatib, Ghassan, 225 al-Kilani, Sami, 100, 108, 339n18 Kimche, David, 61, 326n12, 329n43 Kimmerling, Baruch, and Joel Migdal, 218, 362n79 Kinneret. See Galilee, Sea of (Kinneret) Kissinger, Henry, 21–22, 36–37, 44–45, 96–97, 105, 138, 145, 233, 267, 291. See also shuttle diplomacy Klieman, Aharon S., 76, 123, 268, 343n70, 359n44 Knesset. See Israel, Knesset al-Kurd, Maher, 173 Kuwait, 95, 146, 305; Jordanians and Palestinians evicted from, 101, 119. See also Gulf War (1991) Labor Party (Israel), 123, 158, 170, 175, 187, 196 “land-for-peace” approach, 19, 39, 45, 77, 80–81, 86–87, 90, 102, 111, 135–38, 151,

165, 178–79, 218, 240, 269, 279, 293, 377n34 Larsen, Terje Rød, 175–76 Lauder, Ronald, 144, 150, 153, 307 Lausanne Conference (PCC, 1949), 16, 35, 96, 302 Lebanon: early contacts between Maronites and Zionists, 11, 53; 1949 armistice, 16, 54, 311; Maronite privilege, 52; civil war (1975), 53; Israeli invasion (1982), 53, 145, 166, 258, 325n3; PLO in, 53; Israeli invasion (1978), 54; Israel-Maronite partnership, 55, 61, 69, 330n67; Saad Haddad, 55; Lebanon’s goals post-1982, 55; Bashir Gemayel, 55–56, 58, 60–61; Amin Gemayel, 55–58, 61, 68; Sabra and Shatilla massacres, 58, 60–63, 69, 273, 330n69; MNF, 58; U.S. involvement, 63–64, 70; comparison to Sadat, 64, 258; Syrian influence in Lebanon, 65–66, 138, 269, 329n47; Israeli “security zone,” 68, 71, 140, 222, 225, 228, 377n34; Second Lebanon War (2006), 72, 161, 290; at Madrid, 97, 101, 110, 113; Hizballah, 101, 110, 113; Kafr Qana, 142. See also Hizballah; May 17 Agreement (IsraelLebanon 1983) Lesch, David, 160 Levy, David, 105 Likud Party (Israel), 39–41, 77–78, 80–82, 84–88, 102–103, 122, 131, 182–83, 195, 225, 227, 248, 286, 304, 309, 333n17, 334n44, 336n74, 340n28, 345n18, 362n75 Litani (Operation, 1978), 54–55, 304 London Document (Hussein-Peres, 1987), 29, 73–91, 97–99, 116, 121–23, 263, 268, 305, 312, 335nn51,61, 336nn72,74, 337n80, 359n46 Lukacs, Yehuda, 76, 117 Lustick, Ian S., 75, 81, 366n68 Macdonald White Paper (1939), 10, 13, 302, 311, 318n16

426╇ /╇ index

Mackey, Sandra, 65, 72 Madrid Conference (1991), 91, 95–115; U.S. role, 95–96, 105–107; structure, 97–99, 102, 110; Palestinian representation, 99–100, 104–105, 114, 167; Shamir’s reluctance, 102–103; Letters of Assurances, 106, 206, 240, 260, 312–13, 341n46, 342n57, 366n55; Rabin’s enthusiasm, 170 Magnes, Judah L., 318n13 Majali, Abdul-Salam, 122, 341n52 Mansour, Camille, 99 Ma’oz, Moshe, 219 Maoz, Zeev, 280 Maronite community (Lebanon), 11, 52–55, 61, 69, 302, 330n67 May 17 Agreement (Israel-Lebanon, 1983), 52–55, 58–72, 258–59, 262, 268, 305, 312 McFarlane, Robert, 334n37 McMahon-Husayn Correspondence, 6, 301, 311 Meir (Myerson), Golda, 13, 74, 182 Mekdad, Fayssal, 162, 291 Meshal, Khaled, 130, 307 Miller, Aaron David, 135, 146, 208, 229, 259, 265, 271–72, 280, 285, 359n44 missed opportuninites, 155, 263, 271 Mitchell, George, 285, 291, 353n63 Mitchell Report (2001), 285, 308, 314 Mixed Armistice Commissions (MACs), 16, 54, 75, 137. See also United Nations Moratinos, Miguel, 250, 314 Morocco, 42, 60, 81, 87–88, 187–88, 304, 306 Mossad, 129–30, 217, 307 al-Moualem, Walid, 144, 151, 155, 157–58, 161, 313 Muasher, Marwan, 127, 380n14 Mubarak, Hosni, 49–51, 89–91, 187–88, 200, 248, 289, 304, 309, 313 Multinational Force in Lebanon (MNF), 58, 62, 65, 304, 329n46 Munich Olympic Games (1972), terror attack, 20, 166, 303

Muslih, Muhammad, 217 mutual recognition. See Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) nakba, 15–16, 302 Nashashibi family, 9 Nasser. See Abd al-Nasser, Gamal Netanyahu, Benjamin (Bibi): prime minister (1996), 130, 142, 218, 307, 364n19; tension with King Hussein, 130, 314; at Wye Plantation talks, 130, 207; secret contact with Syria, 144, 150, 153; no withdrawal from the Golan, 150, 351n44; prime minister (2009), 161, 290, 309; anti-Oslo, 195, 206, 364n19; parameters for final agreement, 195; antipathy for Arafat, 199–200, 207, 266, 272; renegotiates Hebron withdrawal, 204, 275, 314; relations with Clinton, 208 The New Middle East (Peres), 168, 273 Nixon, President Richard M., 19, 36–37, 44, 146, 233 North, Oliver, 334n37 Norway, 105, 172–77, 201, 205, 209, 267–68, 306, 360n54, 366n51 Nusseibeh, Sari, 193, 291–92, 299. See also Ayalon-Nusseibeh Statement (2002) Obama, President Barack H., 162, 298–99, 309, 314–15 Olmert, Ehud, 72, 131, 161–62, 288–91, 309, 314 Oslo Accords (1993), 118, 120, 148, 165–89, 245, 296, 306, 313, 324n40, 344n16, 346n30, 362n79, 367n80; breakdown of Oslo peace process, 190–222, 224–26, 230, 238–39, 245, 247–48, 255–57, 259–65, 269–71, 278–81, 296, 347n43, 368n96. See also Declaration of Principles (Israel-PLO, 1993) Oslo talks (1992–1993), 105, 123, 130, 141, 162, 167–72, 261, 306, 358n35, 360n56. See also back-channel negotiations

index╇ /╇ 427

Oslo II Agreement (1995), 142, 165, 178–83, 188, 207, 212–13, 227, 247, 306–307, 313, 337n85, 360n59 Ottoman Empire, 1, 6, 25, 52, 301 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 20, 38, 42, 53, 62, 68, 91, 96, 99, 103–104, 114, 122, 128, 165–84, 187–89, 192–95, 199, 201–202, 206–11, 214–21, 226, 228, 230, 243–45, 259, 261, 263–66, 271, 273, 275–76, 279, 281, 288, 303–304; mutual recognition with Israel, 43, 165, 167–71, 178–84, 194–95, 199, 208–10, 226, 245, 261, 265–66, 271, 278–80; dialogue with U.S., 43, 91, 195, 232, 305, 340n36, 357nn10,13. See also Declaration of Principles (Israel-PLO, 1993); Oslo Accords (1993) Palestine National Charter (1968), 166, 178, 180–82, 194, 206, 210, 279, 303, 307, 311, 347n43, 361nn65,68,69,72 Palestine National Council (PNC), 20, 89, 91, 168, 180, 182, 194, 305, 307, 312, 314, 361nn68,69,72, 363n93 Palestinian autonomy (post-1991), 102, 108, 113–14, 119, 186–87, 195–96, 271 Palestinian (National) Authority (PA), 120, 165, 179–80, 186–87, 193–95, 197, 199–200, 203, 206, 210, 216, 218–20, 243–48, 265, 270, 280, 285, 288, 291–92, 306, 347n43, 365nn44,45 Palestinian Declaration of Independence (1988), 89, 91, 182, 312, 363n93 Palestinian nationalism, 6, 11, 96 Palestinian refugees, 15–16, 19–20, 47, 96–97, 110–12, 118–19, 179, 182, 201, 210, 218, 221, 225–26, 230, 245, 251, 261, 270, 273, 279, 293, 302, 376n151; right of return, 15, 47, 195–96, 201–202, 223, 235, 238–39, 241, 245, 249, 302; in Lebanon, 53, 56, 71; during Gulf War, 101, 119 pan-Arab national sentiment. See Arab nationalism Paris: PCC Conference (1951), 16, 35, 96, 302; Donors Conference for Palestine

(1994), 179; Arab nationalist conference (1913), 301 partition of Palestine, 10–15, 26, 74, 180–83, 255, 302, 319n25. See also Peel (Royal) Commission (1937); United Nations, Special Committee on Palestine (1947) Pax Americana, 147 Peace for the Galilee (Operation, 1982), 53, 69 Peel (Royal) Commission (1937), 10, 182, 302, 311 Peleg, Ilan, 47, 56 People’s Voice. See Ayalon-Nusseibeh Statement (2002) Peres, Shimon: destructive rivalry with Shamir, 78, 80–83, 334n35, 336n72; optimism regarding Arab-Israeli peace, 87–88, 272, 274; partnership with Rabin, 121–23, 168, 221; defeated by Netanyahu, 130, 142, 195; acting prime minister (1995), 141, 145, 150, 158, 187, 306; authorizes contact with PLO, 172, 174, 176; economics supports peace, 214–15. See also London Document (Hussein-Peres, 1987) Peretz, Amir, 72 Petra, 87, 133, 336n68 Phalange militia (Lebanon), 54–55, 326nn7,9 Pickering, Thomas, 82–83 Powell, Colin, 285, 292, 308, 314, 353n63 Prevention of Terror law (Israel), 167 public diplomacy, 31, 146, 151, 157–59, 185, 292 Pundak, Ron, 172, 176, 183, 193, 372n69 al-Qaeda, 133, 161, 284, 286, 298, 308 Qassem, Naim, 67 Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ), 49, 132, 307–308, 348n52 Quandt, William B., 38, 42–43, 66, 107, 196, 208, 232–34, 252, 255, 369n3 Quartet, 293, 308 Qurie, Ahmed. See Abu Ala

428╇ /╇ index

Rabat, Arab Summit meeting (1974), 81, 166, 304, 311 Rabil, Robert, 155 Rabin, Yitzhak: minister of defense, 78, 185, 273; working with King Hussein, 79, 117, 121, 124, 129; prime minister (1992), 103, 121, 168, 306, 339n25; direct talks with PLO, 104–105, 170–73, 178, 264; assassination and funeral, 111, 129, 141, 165, 174, 187–88, 197, 204, 218, 275; relations with Peres, 123; relations with Clinton, 146, 196; “pocket commitment” to Syria, 147–49, 153; opposition to his peace policies, 158, 186–87, 218; handshake with Arafat, 175, 177, 184, 190, 200, 277–78 Rabinovich, Itamar, 50, 145, 158–59, 245, 293, 313, 349n5, 352n50, 369n2, 373n100 Reagan, President Ronald, 57–58, 62–66, 80, 82–83, 89, 145, 304 Reagan Plan (1982), 56, 59–60, 82, 99, 258, 293, 304, 312 Red Line Agreement (Syria-Israel, 1976), 138, 304 refugees. See Palestinian refugees Rhodes, negotiations at (1949), 16, 74–75, 85, 330n58. See also General Armistice Agreements (1949) Rice, Condoleeza, 288 Riyadh Declaration (2007), 309, 314 Roadmap to permanent two-state solution (2002), 293–96, 308–309, 314 Rogers, William, 19, 303, 311 Ross, Dennis, 108, 124, 129, 139, 147–48, 153, 207, 229, 232, 235, 249, 274, 351n40, 352n50, 353nn63,65, 359n44, 369n8 Rubenberg, Cheryl, 208–209, 234, 371n56, 372n70 Rubin, Jeffrey Z., 68, 295 Rubinstein, Elyakim, 231 Rynhold, Jonathan, 199, 215, 239 Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps massacre, 58, 60, 62–63, 69, 273, 305. See also Kahan Commission of Inquiry (1983)

Sadat, Anwar: trip to Jerusalem (1977), 22, 28, 38, 40, 48, 312, 321n10, 324n45; ejects Soviets (1972), 36; relations with Kissinger, 37; relations with Carter, 37, 43, 232; firm control of Egypt, 41, 230, 258; relations with Begin, 43, 371n52; assassination, 49, 275, 296; vindicated, 100; dramatic, 119, 138, 151, 157, 254, 272; “event-making hero,” 295 Said, Edward, 202–203, 214–17, 245, 253–54, 265, 364n3, 365n45, 367n91, 374n123 Sartawi, Issam, 275 Saudi Arabia, 5–6, 18, 47, 57, 66, 72, 95, 101, 119, 187, 288, 291, 297, 304, 308, 375n134. See also Beirut, Arab summit (2002); Riyadh declaration (2007) Saunders, Harold, 48, 253, 323n35 Savir, Uri, 145, 172–73, 180, 184, 187–88, 275, 280–81, 359n41 Schiff, Zeev, and Ehud Ya’ari, 67 Scud missiles, 95 security wall. See separation barrier Seale, Patrick, 139, 148–49, 159, 353n66 Segev, Samuel, 340n30, 343n60 separation barrier, 284, 294, 297 settlements, settlers: Israeli, in disputed lands after 1967, 20, 40–41, 45, 47–48, 59, 78, 99–103, 135–36, 140, 155, 158, 179, 182, 186–87, 191–96, 202–206, 210–14, 217–18, 223, 225, 230, 235, 239–40, 243, 249–50, 259–63, 273, 279, 284, 286–87, 294, 297, 308, 322n21, 324n41, 343n72, 365n46, 366n48. See also Gaza; Golan Heights; West Bank, Transjordan Shaath, Nabil, 358n35, 375n141 Shamir, Yitzhak: Jordan is Palestine, 77; rotation with Peres, 78, 80, 305; conflict with Peres, 79–88; meeting with Hussein, 88, 333n17; rejects Shultz initiative, 90; negative attitude at Madrid, 102, 108–109, 262, 264; anti-PLO stance, 103, 105, 167–68, 174 Shapira, Avraham, 186 al-Sharaa, Farouk, 108–109, 144, 150–51, 154, 161, 262, 313, 352n45

index╇ /╇ 429

Sharett, Moshe (Shertok), 9, 16 Sharm el-Sheikh, 5, 18; Summit of the Peacemakers (anti-terrorism conference, 1996), 187, 307, 313; summit conference (2000), 248, 307, 314; EgyptJordan-Israel summit (2007), 289, 309 Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-finding Committee. See Mitchell Report (2001) Sharon, Ariel, 55, 60–63, 69, 77, 131, 160, 227, 230, 267, 273, 285–88, 290, 307–309, 314, 322n21, 345n19, 364n22; visit to the Temple Mount (2000), 248, 285, 307, 374n120; prime minister, 308, 372n78 Shash, Taher, 208–209 Shebaa Farms dispute (Israel-Lebanon), 331n80, 377n34 Shehadeh, Raja, 194, 209–11, 216, 358n35, 361n68, 365n46, 366n64 Shepherdstown Conference (1999–2000), 135, 143, 145, 150–51, 158, 160, 262, 268–69, 307, 351n45, 352n50, 353n71 Sher, Gilead, 224, 226, 232, 247, 252, 372n78 Shi’a Muslims, 11, 52–54, 61, 68, 72, 113, 352n45 Shikaki, Fathi, 217, 306 Shikaki, Khalil, 211 Shlaim, Avi, 74, 80, 180, 333n17, 334n37, 337n81, 345n19, 347n45 Shultz, George P., 58–59, 61–66, 70, 72, 82–84, 89–90, 328n28, 334nn35,37, 335nn49,51,54, 336n72, 337n81; Shultz Initiative (1988), 90–91, 97, 99, 305, 312, 337nn80,83,86, 340n30 shuttle diplomacy, 19, 22, 37, 82, 97, 124, 137–38, 142, 145, 267, 341nn44,45 Sinai I and II disengagement agreements. See under Egypt Singer, Joel, 172, 180, 208, 359n41 Six Day War. See Arab-Israeli war of 1967 South Lebanon Army (SLA), 67, 71, 228, 305 South Lebanon “security zone,” 67–68, 70–71, 113, 140

Soviet Union: as third party, 25–26, 37; partnership with U.S., 38, 95–99, 312, 338n11; as backer of Arab cause, 57–59, 65; dissolution of, 101, 146, 170–71, 267 Sprinzak, Ehud, 378n51 St. James (Round-Table) Conference (1939), 13, 96, 302 Stoessinger, John, 263–64 strategic parity (Syria-Israel), 146 Suez Crisis. See Arab-Israeli war of 1956 Summit of the Peacemakers (1996), 187 Susser, Asher, 132 Swisher, Clayton, 232, 372n68 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 7, 301, 311 Syria: early contacts with Zionists, 10, 136; 1949 armistice with Israel, 16, 137; 1967 War, 17, 137; 1973 War, 20–21, 36–37; Disengagement Agreement (1974), 22, 138, 311; rejection of Camp David (1978), 41, 47; influence in Lebanon, 53–56, 59, 61–62, 65–66, 69–71, 329n47; firefights with U.S., 65, 145; rejection of London Document, 81; at Madrid, 97, 101, 106, 108–10, 262; movement toward peace with Israel, 111, 113, 135, 138–39, 269, 291; relations with the U.S., 120, 147, 161–62, 229; vs. Israel in Lebanon, 138; and Hizballah, 140, 142; at Shepherdstown, 143–45, 150–51, 313–14; relations with weakened USSR, 146; “pocket commitment” controversy, 148–49, 353n63; border dispute, 151–53; Syrian population distrustful of Israel, 155–57; objection to “public diplomacy,” 157–59. See also al-Asad, Bashar; al-Asad, Hafez Taba, 5, 12, 14, 324n49; Talks (2001), 29, 176, 222, 247–52, 263, 271–72, 292, 308, 314, 374n107, 375n128, 376n151 al-Tal, Abdallah, 74 Tekoah, Yosef, 167, 312 Temple Mount, Jerusalem, 225, 236–38, 248–51, 285, 307. See also Haram alSharif, Jerusalem

430╇ /╇ index

Tenet, George, 285, 291, 308, 314 terrorism, terrorist operations, 20, 28, 30, 54, 58, 90–91, 108–109, 131, 133, 139, 142, 146–47, 160–61, 166, 168, 185–87, 194, 207, 214, 217–21, 228, 231–32, 251, 259, 273–75, 283–84, 293, 297, 303–304, 307–308, 379n9; suicide terrorism, 65, 68, 129–30, 142, 155, 160, 185–87, 192–95, 283–84, 291, 297, 305, 307, 329n46; renunciation of terrorism, 85–86, 166–67, 178, 244, 276, 279, 357n13; Bush “war on terror,” 161, 286. See also Sharm al-Sheikh, Summit of the Peacemakers (anti-terrorism conference, 1996) Tessler, Mark, xiii, 27 Third Way faction (Israel), 158 “three noes.” See Khartoum, Arab Summit meeting (1967) Tiran, Straits of, 5, 8, 17–18, 36, 303 Touhamy, Hasan, 42 Transjordan: creation of, 7–8; relations with yishuv, 11, 332n5; and West Bank, 15, 74; relations with Israel, 73–75, 332n7. See also Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of Tunis, 104, 170–71, 174, 178–79, 201–202, 216, 230, 304, 306, 313, 357n14 Turkey, 6, 25–26, 136, 139, 142, 308, 324n52 two-state solution, 13, 91, 183, 208–14, 226, 237, 243–44, 251, 280–81, 288, 291–97, 308–309, 314, 380n17 U Thant, 19 United Nations: GA Resolution 181—partition (1947), 13, 302, 311, 319n25; GA Resolution 194 (1948), 15, 201, 302, 311; Conciliation Commission for Palestine (PCC), 16, 96, 302; United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), 17; SC Resolution 242 (1967), 18–19, 21, 28, 45, 84, 90, 137, 166–67, 178, 210, 240, 255, 292, 296, 303, 311; SC Resolution 338 (1973), 21, 84, 90, 210, 292, 303, 311; SC Resolution 425 (1978), 71, 304, 312; SC Resolu-

tion 1701 (2006), 72, 309, 314; Truce Supervisory Organization (UNTSO), 137; GA Resolution 3379 (1975), 167, 304, 312, 357n6; Special Committee on Palestine (1947) (UNSCOP), 182, 302; SC Resolution 1397 (2002), 292, 308, 314; SC Resolution 1850 (2008), 294, 296, 309, 314; General Assembly, special meeting at Geneva (1988), 305, 312; GA Resolution 4686 (1991), 306, 357n6; SC Resolution 1515 (2003), 308, 314; SC Resolution 1559 (2004), 308. See also General Armistice Agreements (1949); Mixed Armistice Commissions United States: as intermediary, 22, 26, 267, 269, 288; and Camp David (1978), 35, 37, 38; “special relationship” with Israel, 39, 62–63, 67, 82, 101, 312; goals aligned with Egypt, 40, 42–43, 49; electoral cycles, 40; and Lebanon, 57, 62, 67, 70; troops in MNF, 58, 62, 65, 70; pressure for Israel-Lebanon agreement, 61, 63, 65; negotiate PLO exit from Beirut, 62, 69; goals aligned with Lebanon, 63; reluctance to endorse, 80, 83; and London Document, 82; relations with PLO, 90–91, 166, 169, 178, 195, 219, 337n87, 357n13; Gulf War (1991), 95, 99, 120; convenes Madrid conference, 95–96, 98, 107, 342n55; relations with Jordan, 119; invasion of Iraq (2003), 133, 159, 160–61, 284, 286, 288, 290, 298; and 9/11 attacks, 133, 161, 284–85; relations with Syria, 139, 145–47; American Jews, 158; at Shepherdstown, 158; and Oslo Accords, 177–78, 205; hosts Wye River conference, 207–208; Camp David (2000), 224, 231, 233–34, 249; backs two-state solution, 292–93, 295; supports Road Map, 293. See also “Third party” within each chapter Vatican, 106 Village Leagues, 167

index╇ /╇ 431

Waage, Hilde Henriksen, 205, 281, 366n51 War of Attrition (Egypt-Israel, 1969–1970), 19, 36, 303 Washington Declaration (1994), 122, 124, 129, 306, 313 Washington talks (post-Madrid, 1991– 1993), 29, 98–107, 174, 217, 341n39, 342n56, 357n14, 358n35 al-watan al-badil, 77, 122 water resources, 15, 17, 90, 97, 110, 114, 125, 127, 133, 137, 140, 148, 151–53, 206, 243, 332n14, 346n31 Weinberger, Caspar, 58, 66, 70, 327n17, 328n35, 329n46, 334n37; Weinberger Doctrine, 70, 312 Weizman, Ezer, 41, 43, 48, 199, 322n20, 347n45 Weizmann, Chaim, 7 Weizmann-Faysal agreement, 7, 301, 311 West Bank, Transjordan: 1948 War, 15, 74–77; 1967 War, 17, 20, 75; Jewish settlements, 40, 47, 53, 59, 74–75, 118, 165, 187; King Hussein renounces respon-

sibilities, 88–89, 91, 312. See also Judea and Samaria; settlements, settlers Western (Wailing) Wall, Jerusalem, 197, 236–38, 249, 270 Winograd Commission (2008), 72, 309, 314 Woodhead Commission (1938), 10, 302 Wye River/Plantation talks: Wye River Memorandum, 130, 207, 307, 314, 361n68; (Israeli-Syrian, 1995–1996), 135, 140–45, 306; (Israeli-Palestinian, 1998), 207–208 Yamit, 45 Yarmuk River, 127 Yasin, Sheikh Ahmed, 50, 130, 357n7 yishuv, 9 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 133 Zartman, I. William, 107, 358n23 Zinni, Anthony, 291 Zionism, 3–6, 167, 304, 306 Zisser, Eyal, 138, 154, 353n63, 355n90

Laura Zittrain Eisenberg is a Teaching Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of My Enemy’s Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination, 1900–1948 (1994) and many articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Her interests include the peace process and the pedagogy of cross-cultural education. Neil Caplan is Scholar-in-Residence at Vanier College and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Concordia University, both in Montreal, Canada. He has published numerous articles and eight books, including Palestine Jewry and the Arab Question, 1917–1925 (1978), Futile Diplomacy, a four-volume study of Arab-Zionist and Arab-Israeli negotiations to 1956 (1983–1997), and The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories (2010).

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