The Modern Middle East (63 page)

The reaction on the Palestinian side was not quite as violent, at least initially, but it was equally determined. Many “outsiders,” most prominently Columbia University professor and longtime activist Edward Said (d. 2003), called the DOP “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.”
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In its zeal to become “a kind of small-town government,” Said charged, the PLO had negotiated away the rights of fourteen thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, leaving Israel in control of “land, water, overall security, and foreign affairs in [the] ‘autonomous’ areas.”
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Instead, Arafat had concentrated on the centralization of power: the Palestinian police force was some eighteen thousand strong, and Arafat’s personal bodyguards alone were said to number approximately 125.

The complaints voiced by Said were not just those of a frustrated outsider. By signing the peace agreement with Israel and establishing his Palestinian Authority, Arafat managed to end the
intifada
but failed to bring qualitative changes or improvements to the lives of ordinary Palestinians. In the process of consolidating power, during Arafat’s presidency the PNA often resorted to highly autocratic and patrimonial methods, frequently stifling dissent, ensuring the political dependence of the once-burgeoning Palestinian civil society, and, whenever possible, undermining prospects for democratic opening.
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The PNA’s difficulties were compounded in May 1996 with the election to office of hard-line Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who shared neither the vision of Rabin and Peres for Israel’s future nor their enthusiasm for the DOP. Netanyahu’s premiership set the Oslo Accords adrift. For three years, until he lost his bid for reelection to Labor’s Ehud Barak in May 1999, Netanyahu did his best to derail the Oslo Accords, to the extent that Israel met few of its obligations outlined under the terms of the DOP. Ariel Sharon, at the time Netanyahu’s foreign minister, went so far as to call the accords “national
suicide.” “Everybody,” he is reported to have said, “has to move, run, and grab as many hilltops as they can and to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours. . . . Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”
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Despite such attitudes, neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian leadership, nor for that matter the Clinton administration in Washington, could afford to be seen as indifferent to the “peace process” or, worse yet, to seem as if they were obstructing it. On October 23, 1998, therefore, after tense negotiations sponsored by the White House, Arafat and Netanyahu signed the Wye River Memorandum, named after the resort where the talks were held.

The Wye agreement broke no new ground but instead sought to facilitate the implementation of prior accords, in turn paving the way for the “final-status negotiations” originally outlined in the Oslo Accords. In reality, the new agreement gave legitimacy to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s highly peculiar interpretation of Oslo, outlining in great detail the steps that the Palestinian leadership needed to take—under the aegis of PNA cooperation with the American Central Intelligence Agency—in guaranteeing Israel’s security and preventing future terrorist attacks on Israel.
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Desperate to deliver something, anything, out of Oslo Accords that by now had all but collapsed, Arafat and the PNA were only too willing to buy for themselves some sorely needed international legitimacy through signing another agreement, even if it meant cracking down on Palestinian activism through cooperation with the CIA. As the scholar Norman Finkelstein observed, “Totally dependent, Palestinian elites will continue to do Israel’s bidding, while enjoying the prerequisites of collaboration.”
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“If Peres was a dreamer,” writes one Israeli scholar, “Benjamin Netanyahu was the destroyer of dreams.”
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Ultimately, his foot-dragging on the Oslo Accords and his perceived “character flaws” before the Israeli electorate cost him his reelection in the May 1999 parliamentary elections. Instead, some 56 percent of the electorate voted for Ehud Barak, leader of the Labor Party and one of Israel’s most decorated soldiers. Since the beginning of the
intifada,
a number of Israelis had warmed up to the idea of exchanging “land for peace” if in the process Israel’s security could be guaranteed. In his campaign for office, Barak had promised to withdraw IDF forces from southern Lebanon, sign peace treaties with both the Palestinians and the Syrians, and, at the same time, maintain some of the so-called red lines: Jerusalem would remain Israel’s “eternal, united capital”; there would be no return to the pre-1967 borders; Jewish settlements would not be dismantled; and no Palestinian or foreign army would be allowed west of the Jordan River.
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Barak won the elections by a landslide, but insofar as the Palestinians were concerned, Israeli policy changed little. In fact, the construction of new settlements continued at a feverish pace. Palestinian homes continued to be demolished, and even more Palestinian land was annexed. According to one estimate, from the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 until September 2000, which saw the eruption of a new
intifada,
one hundred thousand new Israeli settlers moved into the West Bank and Gaza, doubling the settler population, and thirty new settlements or settler-related infrastructures were built. During the same time, the Israeli government confiscated over forty thousand acres of agriculturally viable Palestinian lands worth more than $1 billion.
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The closure of Palestinian territories by the Israeli occupation authorities, and therefore their economic strangulation, became a regular feature of life in the West Bank and Gaza.

Despite his landslide victory, Prime Minister Barak was forced to rely on a highly diverse and fragmented coalition to put together a cabinet. Consequently, from the very beginning his domestic and foreign policy initiatives encountered significant resistance within the Knesset and even among his coalition partners. In the meantime, with the PNA increasingly relegated to oblivion and out of touch with the Palestinian “street,” sporadic Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets continued, each time followed by massive Israeli reprisals. For the Israeli electorate, Barak’s election promise of “peace and security” seemed more and more hollow. Within the context of the PNA’s steady irrelevance and desperation, and the Barak cabinet’s political fragmentation and increasing unpopularity, the two sides met once again in the United States in July 2000, this time to tackle the Oslo Accords’ most difficult provisions, the so-called final-status negotiations. They were hosted at the Camp David retreat by President Bill Clinton, himself in the final months of his presidency and eager to be remembered for fostering Palestinian-Israeli peace rather than for personal indiscretions while in office.

The final-status negotiations included by far the most contentious aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, at the core of more than fifty years of bloodshed: control over Jerusalem; “the right of return” of Palestinian refugees; the issue of Jewish settlements and control over territory; and access to and control over natural resources, especially water. Arafat and other Palestinian negotiators felt that tackling these issues was premature without first negotiating over other outstanding matters. “Madam Secretary,” Arafat is reported to have said to U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, “if you issue an invitation to a summit, and if it is held and fails, this will weaken the Palestinian people’s hopes for achieving peace. Let us not weaken these hopes.”
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According to an American official
involved at the summit, “Like Barak, the Palestinian leader felt that permanent status negotiations were long overdue; unlike Barak, he did not think that this justified doing away with the interim obligations.”
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But the summit was held anyway, this time at the site made famous by an earlier historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

From the beginning, Camp David II was doomed to failure. Each side felt that it was making major concessions to the other, at great political cost to its standing with its own domestic constituents, yet each felt that the other was unwilling to come to a reasonable compromise. The issue of Jerusalem turned out to be the biggest obstacle. The city is home to the religious site that the Israelis call the Temple Mount and the Palestinians call Haram al-Sharif. For Muslims, the Haram, which houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is Islam’s third-holiest site, after Mecca and Medina. The western flank of Haram al-Sharif forms the Western (or Wailing) Wall, the most important site of Jewish prayer and pilgrimage. Jews consider the Mount to have been the site of the First and Second Temples and home to the future Third Temple. Since Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967, the area has been under Israeli jurisdiction, but it is administered by the Council of Waqf (religious endowment) and Muslim Affairs.

Barak offered that the Palestinian leader could become the “custodian” of the Haram al-Sharif and fly the Palestinian flag over it but that the site would remain under Israeli sovereignty.
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While the proposal represented a major departure from Israel’s traditional stand toward Jerusalem and ignited intense debate in the Israeli press, it was not acceptable to Arafat, who felt that neither the Palestinian “street” nor the Muslim world at large would accept his negotiating away full control over the Haram. Various proposals for compensation, resettlement, and even “reunification” of a limited number of refugees with their families in Israel were also floated. Again, this represented a break with past Israeli approaches to the issue. But Prime Minister Barak was unwilling to recognize the principle of Palestinian “right of return.”
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This was also unacceptable to the Palestinian negotiators.

As for Israeli settlements, whose numbers had mushroomed since Barak’s election, the prime minister offered to return to the Palestinians 90 percent of the West Bank in return for the annexation of three large Israeli settlements, whose total population was approximately 160,000. According to the terms of the proposal, between 80,000 and 100,000 Palestinians would have been disenfranchised; an encircled and divided East Jerusalem would have been cut off from its Palestinian hinterlands; and the West Bank would have been divided into four cantons, with passage between them under full Israeli control.
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The Palestinians rejected this proposal as
well. With regard to control over natural resources, the most precious of which in the area is water, the Israelis insisted on control over all aquifers in the West Bank.
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Before long, it became obvious that the summit was at an impasse; in fact, while some creative solutions were suggested, the summit had failed to resolve the core issues of the conflict. On July 25, 2000, the summit concluded without a final agreement. A frustrated President Clinton publicly expressed his anger at Arafat and his negotiating team for their unwillingness to accommodate Prime Minister Barak’s visionary proposals. How much of this was out of genuine exasperation with the Palestinians and how much was a maneuver to stop Barak’s steady decline in opinion polls in Israel is unclear. The Palestinians viewed Barak’s “generous offers” as public relations stunts without any real value to their people. Their frame of reference at the start of the negotiations had been Israel’s pre-1967 borders; it was these borders that were up for “negotiations,” not the status quo borders from which Barak wanted to negotiate. In fact, the Palestinian negotiating team, not wanting to be accused of “giving away Palestine” again, as they had been after Oslo, had gone to Camp David “almost apologetically, determined that this time they would not be duped.”
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The PNA had already lost substantial ground to Hamas in the aftermath of Oslo’s failure to change the daily lives of ordinary Palestinians. It could not lose any more. As luck would have it, both Barak and Arafat lost even more after Camp David II’s failure.

On September 28, 2000, Knesset member and former foreign minister Ariel Sharon, who had by now become the leader of the Likud Party, visited the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, flanked by more than a thousand Israeli soldiers. Campaigning for the office of prime minister, Sharon wanted his visit to signify Israel’s control over the religious compound and Likud’s unwillingness to negotiate it away. One of contemporary Israel’s most controversial figures, Sharon had commanded Israel’s ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Subsequently, he had been condemned by an Israeli commission for failing to stop the massacre of 1,300 Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Christian Phalangists in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila outside Beirut.
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He became one of the most reviled Israeli figures among the Palestinians.

The Palestinians saw Sharon’s visit to the Haram al-Sharif not only as an affront to one of the most important symbols of their nationality but also as an insult to Islam. Even the United States asked Prime Minister Barak to prevent Sharon from visiting the compound, but to no avail. The day after the visit, on September 29, massive Palestinian demonstrations erupted. This was the tinder that set the Occupied Territories ablaze once
again and precipitated the Al-Aqsa
intifada.
According to a report prepared by former U.S. senator George Mitchell,

What began as a series of confrontations between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli security forces, which resulted in the Government of Israel’s (GOI) initial restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (closures), has since evolved into a wider array of violent actions and responses. There have been exchanges of fire between built-up areas, sniping incidents and clashes between Israeli settlers and Palestinians. There have also been terrorist acts and Israeli reactions thereto (characterized by the GOI as counter-terrorism), including killings, further destruction of property and economic measures. More recently, there have been mortar attacks on Israeli locations and IDF ground incursions into Palestinian areas.