The Modern Middle East (62 page)

Palestinian and Israeli accommodationists were opposed by equally determined “rejectionists.” The accommodationist/rejectionist divide within both the Palestinians and the Israelis continues to persist to this day. For many people on both sides, the wounds are too deep to let go, the stakes are too high to compromise, and the enemy is too untrustworthy to negotiate with. For whatever reason, they cannot move beyond the “familiar, comfortable wall of hostility.”
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And rejectionists see the accommodationists as sellouts and traitors. Rabin, the military man turned peace hero, paid for his vision with his life. On November 4, 1995, soon after addressing a peace rally, he was assassinated by an Israeli seminary (
yeshiva
) student. In his defense, the assassin, Yigal Amir, claimed that Rabin had failed the Jewish people and had therefore deserved to die.
⁷⁹
In fact, as will be shown shortly, besides signing an agreement with them, by the time of his death Rabin had given the Palestinians very little.

A convergence of the interests of the accommodationists on both sides and a realistic assessment of how the interests of their peoples could be served brought about the Oslo Accords. In some ways, the Oslo Accords were a by-product of two major, previous Arab-Israeli peace initiatives, the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. The Camp David Accords initially held much promise for the Palestinians but ultimately ignored them altogether. The ensuing “absence of peace” paved the way for face-to-face Israeli-Palestinian talks beginning in 1991. As it turned out, these negotiations, first in Madrid and then in Washington, D.C., were a charade meant to conceal more meaningful, parallel negotiations underway in Oslo, Norway.

The Camp David Accords came about after a realization by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat that the United States simply would not allow anyone to defeat Israel in a military conflict. This point had been made most
forcefully during the 1973 War. The only way to win the Sinai back for Egypt and gain autonomy for the Palestinians, Sadat reasoned, would be through negotiations with Israel, under the auspices of an American-sponsored agreement. With a flair for the dramatic, Sadat flew to Tel Aviv on November 19, 1977, and, the next day, addressed the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem.
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In a long and flowery speech, he proposed a peace agreement based on five specific points:

Ending the occupation of the Arab territories occupied in 1967.

Achievement of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination, including their right to establish their own state.

The right of all states in the area to live in peace within their boundaries. . . .

Commitment of all states in the region to administer the relations among them in accordance with the objectives and principles of the United Nations Charter. . . .

Ending the state of belligerence in the region.
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The Israeli leadership, then composed of members of the Likud Party, was considerably less keen on including the issue of Palestinian rights in a peace agreement with Egypt. Prime Minister Menachem Begin simply mistrusted Sadat and his motives. According to Ezer Weizman, Israel’s defense minister at the time, Israel “seemed to be finding every possible tactic to impede the peace process.”
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At the most, Begin was willing to offer the Palestinians limited autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. U.S. president Jimmy Carter also vacillated on the issue. The PLO’s own vehement, public rejection of Sadat’s initiative did not help matters.
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Nevertheless, despite numerous obstacles, from September 5 through 17, 1978, Israeli and Egyptian negotiators gathered in the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David. After tense negotiations that several times came close to collapsing, they hammered out an agreement.

The Camp David negotiations resulted in signing a treaty that contained two major components (or negotiating tracks). The first component was called “A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt,” based on which Israeli forces were to withdraw from the Sinai over a three-year period. Provisions were also made for establishing a demilitarized zone between the two countries, setting up a peacekeeping force, and making other security arrangements. Full diplomatic ties were also to be established between Egypt and Israel within nine months of signing a peace treaty.
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The second component, labeled “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” sought to make provisions for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli
peace settlement. Some of the key points of the accord were acceptance by all parties of UN Resolution 242; resolution of the “Palestinian problem in all aspects”; the establishment of mechanisms for the conduct of “good neighborly relations”; and “full autonomy” for the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip based on arrangements to be worked out between Egypt, Israel, and Jordan.
⁸⁵

While on paper impressive in its scope and breadth, the Camp David Accords’ “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” immediately encountered problems. It assumed Jordan’s participation without having consulted its leaders, thus undermining Jordanian sovereignty. Instead, throughout the 1980s, King Hussein carried out his own secret talks with Israel.
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More consequential was the pressure put on Begin by the Israeli Right as a result of concessions the agreement made to both the Egyptians and the Palestinians. This in turn prompted the prime minister to interpret the provisions dealing with the Palestinians very differently than either the Egyptians or the Americans did. Gradually, those provisions were all but forgotten. By now, Sadat had invested too much of his prestige and personal legitimacy in the peace process with Israel to back out, and his position was made all the more unshakable by his increasing isolation within the Arab world.

Sadat did get the Sinai back for Egypt, but ultimately he could not deliver for the Palestinians. King Hussein, meanwhile, wanted the West Bank for himself, and only in July 1988, amid mounting economic difficulties at home and an uncontainable popular uprising among the West Bankers, did he renounce his claims to the West Bank.
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Israeli-Palestinian peace, meanwhile, became more elusive and remote as the drama of Middle Eastern diplomacy took one tragic turn after another. From 1975 to 1991, Lebanon was engaged in a bloody civil war. In 1978 and again in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Only in 2000 did Israel fully pull out of Lebanon, but even then the hostilities between the two countries continued. In 1980 Iraq invaded Iran, and the two countries fought each other to exhaustion until 1988. Then in 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. In 1991, a U.S.-led alliance fought the Iraqis and ejected them from Kuwait. As the Middle East drifted from one crisis to another, the Palestinians felt forgotten and ignored. The
intifada
was a cry of anguish, and the Israelis soon realized that they simply could not suppress it. Thus ensued the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 and, more meaningfully, secret negotiations between the PLO and the Israeli government in Norway in 1993.

In October 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union jointly invited Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinians to a peace conference in
Madrid. Since neither the United States nor Israel recognized the PLO, the Palestinians were to attend as part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, and, theoretically at least, those attending could not be affiliated with the PLO. The Palestinian delegation was made up of respected and influential “insiders,” many of whom had been hardened by nearly four years of the
intifada.
The talks soon degenerated into endless squabbles over procedures and mutual recriminations. Slowly but surely, the “internals” allowed the PLO to make the major decisions for them during the talks, which by then had moved from Madrid to Washington. Israel knew this but looked the other way. In the words of a senior Israeli diplomat, “Though we would never admit this openly, we were engaged in a charade. In Washington, we were actually negotiating with Yasser Arafat by fax!”
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Israel’s 1992 elections brought back to power the Labor Party, headed by the idealistic Shimon Peres and the more pragmatic Yitzhak Rabin. The former became the foreign minister and the latter the prime minister. Sensing the weakness of the PLO—its isolation, financial bankruptcy, and loss of control over both the
intifada
and a growing number of internals—Israel decided the time was ripe to hold direct talks with the PLO. Earlier, a Norwegian academic had facilitated informal contacts in Oslo between two Israeli academics and members of the PLO, and that in turn served as the conduit for in-depth, formal discussions between the two archenemies beginning in May 1993. In less than four months, the two sides signed a Declaration of Principles (DOP) that became the basis for a future peace agreement between them.
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The secret talks in Oslo were always tense and on several occasions came near the breaking point. Throughout, Arafat and his team negotiated from a position of increasing weakness, and in many ways Israeli negotiators were able to dictate the terms of the resulting agreement.
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The agreement that was reached contained two parts. The first, which took the form of letters exchanged between the PLO and the Israeli government on September 9 and 10, 1993, dealt with mutual recognition, whereby each side recognized the right of the other to exist. The second was a Declaration of Principles (DOP), which the two sides signed in a face-to-face meeting at the White House between PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. After years of violent animosity, the former enemies sealed the agreement with a historic handshake.

The DOP outlined “interim self-government arrangements” for the Palestinian territories. For the Israelis, “‘Gradual’ was the key word describing the transition from occupation to self-rule, from violence to peaceful coexistence.”
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Israel was to withdraw its troops from the Gaza Strip and
the West Bank city of Jericho within six months after the declaration went into effect. Within nine months, Israel would redeploy its troops in other areas of the West Bank and elections would be held for a Palestinian Council. Within two years, negotiations would begin on the “permanent status” of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These permanent-status negotiations, which were to take no more than three years to complete, would settle all outstanding (and for both sides highly emotional) issues such as the status of Jerusalem, the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlements, and control over borders.
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Figure 30.
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signing the Oslo Accords. Corbis.

Historic as it was, the DOP contained major flaws. To begin with, it was highly ambiguous and dealt with important issues—such as the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees—only in very broad terms.
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More importantly, while each of the two sides came to the bargaining table with the general intent of putting an end to years of violence and bloodshed, for both, immediate political considerations appear to have been more important. For Arafat and other “outside” PLO leaders, progress on the negotiations with Israel meant being able to finally territorialize the quasi-state apparatus of the PLO, supplant the “inside” leadership that had become emboldened as a result of the
intifada,
and consolidate the PLO’s rule throughout the Occupied Territories. All of these, in fact, the PLO did—now under the label Palestinian National Authority—as soon as it was officially recognized as being in charge of parts of the Occupied Territories.

For Rabin and the rest of his cabinet, meanwhile, Israel’s national and security interests—defined in the form of facts on the ground—far outweighed any other consideration. In the words of an Israeli observer, “Rabin’s policies between 1992 and 1995 were disastrous for the Palestinians and very favourable to Israel. He had somehow succeeded in turning around Israel’s isolation (caused by the
intifada
) while still holding on to virtually all of the West Bank and a wholly disproportionate slice of Gaza. Rabin’s genius was in appearing to compromise whilst in fact securing all of Israel’s objectives.”
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But the signing of the DOP unleashed a torrent of angry emotions among the “rejectionists.” Before his assassination in November 1995, Rabin was maligned by many Israelis, some even likening him to Hitler or calling him “Arabin.”