A History of the Middle East (59 page)

On the eve of the millennium few would have predicted that the euphoria which greeted the victory of Labour leader, Ehud Barak, would so fatally and quickly turn to despair. In his post-election address, he promised ecstatic crowds to end Israel’s 22-year occupation of Southern Lebanon within a year. And after an effusive exchange of compliments between Assad and Barak, Syria and Israel sent their delegates to West Virginia to resume negotiations from the point at which discussions in Maryland had ended four years before – full withdrawal for a full peace. Talks were followed by a meeting in Washington between the Syrian foreign minister, Farouq al-Shara, and Barak – the highest-level public encounter between the two states since the conflict began. Their differences narrowed down to Syria’s demand to return to its pre-1967 borders lapping the shores of Lake Tiberias. Israel argued that in the intervening thirty years, over-usage by Israel had caused the lake to shrink several metres short
of the pre-1967 border, and that Syria therefore had no claim to its shores. Even the charm of Clinton, who travelled to the ironic setting of Lake Geneva to meet an ailing Assad was unable to bridge the impasse. Since neither side would yield a metre, the talks collapsed.

Failure on the Syria track upset Barak’s other initiatives. Syria forbade Lebanon, where it maintained 30,000 troops, to make peace with Israel until it had retrieved the Golan Heights. And without a green light from President Assad, the Lebanese army declined Barak’s appeal to deploy along the Israeli border. Hizbollah instead filled the vacuum. Barak determined to push on regardless and present Syria with a
fait accompli
. But Israel’s orderly withdrawal, scheduled for 7 July 2000 turned into a rout by the end of May. Under attack, Israel’s proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), abandoned their positions and weapons to Hizbollah and withered away to Israel, leaving only the running sore of the Shebaa farms, the Israeli-occupied foothills of the Golan Heights where the borders of Lebanon, Syria and Israel meet still in their hands. A massive Israeli bombardment of Lebanon’s power stations failed to stem the Hizbollah advance. South Lebanese villagers joined the revelry by breaking down the doors of Khiam prison, a notorious torture centre, and freeing its inmates. Across the Arab world, Hizbollah’s victory was hailed as proof that armed resistance by a tiny Islamist guerrilla force could defeat Israel, the most heavily armed state between France and India.

With his parliamentary coalition fast unravelling, Barak belatedly turned to the Palestinian track in a rush to conclude a deal. Barak sought to bypass the third phase of the Oslo agreement, which required Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and jump straight to negotiations on permanent status from which Israel had withdrawn in 1995. Much of the groundwork on settling the core disputes of Jerusalem, settlements, borders, water and refugees was completed in meetings in Stockholm over the summer of 2000. And on 11 July the two leaders arrived at the US presidential retreat of Camp David to spend a fortnight resolving a century-old dispute, while Bill Clinton, anxious to secure a final foreign policy coup in the twilight of his presidency, shuttled between them. The
Camp David setting evoked the dramatic breakthrough concluded by the earlier trio of Carter, Sadat and Begin twenty-three years earlier. As Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat acknowledged at the time, the negotiations marked the closest Israelis and Palestinians had yet come to a final settlement of their differences. The Israelis insisted they had offered more to the Palestinians than ever before. Indeed five years earlier, prior to Rabin’s death, Palestinian negotiators appeared ready to accept far less, including a Palestinian capital outside the borders of Jerusalem. Why then did Camp David result in such a catastrophic collapse?

Details of the negotiations remain shrouded in recrimination. Palestinian delegates say Barak’s proposals at Camp David amounted to Israeli annexation of the best Palestinian lands, a patchwork state of disjointed Bantustans, the perpetuation of Israeli control over much of East Jerusalem (the old city would have been more a Palestinian municipality than a capital), a continued Israeli military presence on Palestinian territory, Israeli control over Palestinian natural resources, airspace and borders, and the return of fewer than 1 per cent of nearly four million refugees to their homes, with no recognized right of return.

Israelis stress Barak’s political bravery in breaking Israeli taboos. According to Israeli negotiators, Barak agreed to withdraw from all the Gaza Strip and all but 5 per cent of the West Bank including the Jordan Valley, which since 1967 had served as Israel’s security border. Israel stated it had no plans to divide the territory into enclaves and that the only separation would be between Gaza and the West Bank with a safe passage attaching the two; according to Barak, Israel would also maintain a slither of land slicing through the West Bank from Jerusalem to the Jordan River, with Palestinians restricted to tunnels running underneath. On refugees, Barak proposed an annual drip into Israel of tens of thousands of refugees in the guise of ‘family reunification’, and a $20 billion compensation fund to settle the rest in the new state of Palestine, but flatly refused any ‘right of return’. To the exasperation of Palestinians, Barak characterized Palestinian refugees as ‘salmon’, suggesting in the words of one
negotiator, Hussein Agha, that Palestinian ‘yearning to return to their land somehow is supposed to fade away in roughly eighty years in a manner that the Jewish people’s never did, even after two thousand years’. On settlements, Barak accepted evacuation of all but a small group of settlements abutting the Green Line, where 80 per cent of settlers would reside; unlike Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai, he offered to leave the remaining settlements intact to house returning refugees; finally, on Jerusalem, Israeli negotiators say Barak proposed transferring all East Jerusalem to Palestine, bar the Jewish quarter of the Old City, the Western Wall and the belt of Israeli suburbs built in East Jerusalem since 1967. Jerusalem would be an open city, and the capital of two states. Their key sticking point was sovereignty of the holy site that Muslims call the Dome of the Rock or al-Aqsa sanctuary and Jews the Temple Mount. As with Syria, negotiators were just a few square metres away from a peace treaty.

The negative chemistry cannot entirely explain their failure. Their predecessors at Camp David, Begin and Sadat, forged an agreement despite their equally mutual disdain. What was harder to reconcile was the deepening mistrust of their peoples for the Oslo process. Israelis saw seven years of concessions rewarded with suicide bombs and the Palestinian Authority’s revolving-door policy of imprisoning militants one day and releasing them the next. Palestinians saw the subversion of their dreams into the creation of an Israeli puppet police state. Promised a post-Oslo boom, Palestinians had instead experienced a dramatic decline in living standards, sparked in part by 400 days of curfews and bars on access and movement between the occupied territories and Israel, which prevented Palestinian labourers from getting to work, and traders from getting their goods to market. The cycle of negotiations and the endless prevarications seemed little more than a cynical Israeli delaying tactic to build more checkpoints, roads and settlements in an attempt to scupper the creation of a viable Palestinian state. In the seven years between Oslo and Camp David the settler population of the West Bank doubled to 200,000. In Gaza, 6,500 Jews continued to enjoy the most fertile land and plentiful water resources while one million
Palestinians lived trapped in ghetto conditions. After a brief freeze under Rabin, there was a particularly intense period of construction under Netanyahu and his bullish infrastructure minister, Ariel Sharon. Engineers spread a web of highways across the West Bank – ostensibly to enable settlers to bypass Palestinian towns and villages, but in reality carving the territory into cantons. The rate of settlement under Barak was even faster than under Netanyahu (Barak explained he needed to mollify the right wing). For Palestinians, the language of negotiations for a two-strike settlement contrasted starkly with the intensifying colonization on the ground.

With dwindling popular support for the peace process, both sides sought to hide from rather than face the critics. Talks were held abroad and in secret, led by negotiating elites far removed from the festering resentment of the people they were supposed to represent. As much as the occupier, most Palestinians mistrusted the intentions of the self-styled honest broker, the US, which had repeatedly used its veto at the UN to protect Israel from criticism. There was also a gnawing doubt shared by many Palestinians that having won control over Nablus, Hebron and Gaza, they should now abandon for ever their claims to Nazareth and Haifa and much of Jerusalem. Despite Israel’s outright victory in the regional arms race, guerrilla warfare in Lebanon had shown it could nullify Israel’s overwhelming technological superiority. If Hizbollah could wage low-intensity warfare with success, why not the Palestinians’ veteran armed militias? Struggling to balance the appeal of liberation and self-determination with the responsibilities of nascent statehood, Arafat returned from Camp David to Gaza as a Palestinian Saladin clothed in combat fatigues, chanting the Arabic for Jerusalem, ‘al-Quds, al-Quds, al-Quds’.

Israel maintains that the uprising was premeditated and that Arafat was merely seeking a pretext. The
intifada
, Israel notes, erupted five years to the day after the signing of the interim agreement, which had stipulated a five-year period for a permanent settlement. Palestinians say the firelighter was Ariel Sharon, the new leader of the Israeli opposition Likud party. They saw his decision to parade on the al-Aqsa sanctuary, the third holiest shrine
in Islam, with a 1,000-strong guard as a deliberate challenge to the delicate
status quo
prevailing atop the world’s most fought-over piece of real estate. Four times over the previous decade, furious clashes had erupted in the cobbled courtyard that religious firebrands of the three religions of the Book venerated as the holy fuse for Armageddon.

In the close confines of the sanctuary, Sharon’s military entourage opened fire on stone-throwers, killing four Palestinians and triggering what was named the al-Aqsa
intifada
, but became the first Israeli–Palestinian war. Initially the resistance was fought much like the first
intifada
. One month into the fighting, Israeli troops had injured 4,000 Palestinians and killed 130, including a twelve-year-old boy, Muhammad al-Durra, whose death huddled in his father’s arms on a Gaza street was broadcast worldwide on television. But where the first
intifada
had been waged with slingshots, increasingly the second was fought with bullets and suicide bombings. In the early weeks of the confrontation, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths was 25:1 as Israeli forces used what an official fact-finding committee led by US Senator Mitchell reported were ‘lethal means to control demonstrations of unarmed Palestinians’. After twenty months of fighting, the Palestinians had reduced the ratio to 2:1.

Ten years of pent-up frustration, misery and blame fed the belligerency. People on both sides were cooped up in their homes – Israelis for fear of inner-city bombings, Palestinians because of military curfews. A poll conducted in the heat of the violence in March 2002 showed 60 per cent of Israelis favoured the expulsion of Palestinians over the Jordan River. A Palestinian poll gave suicide bombers an 80 per cent approval rate, up from 10 per cent before the outbreak of fighting in 2000. Those who questioned the morality of suicide operations, such as the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem representative Sari Nusseibeh, were heckled. Within days of the uprising, the violence had spilled over to the Arab–Israeli villages of Galilee, where Israeli troops shot dead eleven Arab protestors, and a Jewish mob rampaged through the Palestinian streets of Nazareth, and torched an ancient mosque in Tiberias. As fighting flared, Israeli
voters went to the polls in early 2001 to elect Sharon their prime minister.

While previous post-Oslo leaders had ordered Israel’s tanks to the foothills of Nablus, Sharon sent them in, fighting Palestinian insurgents and the self-rule Oslo had delivered with fighter-jets and attack helicopters. Sharon prided himself on incremental reoccupations, noting that after a few months Israeli tank incursions, which had initially provoked a global outcry, barely raised an eyebrow. Israel bombed the international airport at Gaza, destroyed Arafat’s helicopters, and knocked down the Palestinian radio and television masts. In March 2002, tanks destroyed the Palestinian headquarters in Gaza and a month later bulldozed the presidential compound in Ramallah, caging Arafat in the basement in a grisly re-enactment of Sharon’s siege of the PLO in Beirut twenty years before. With Palestinian central government decimated, the refugee camp militias of the Islamist movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad had an increasingly free hand. To regain his grip on the uprising, Arafat’s own movement, Fatah, formed the al-Aqsa brigades, which sought to regain local credibility by mimicking Hamas’s suicide bombings. Sharon called up his reserves. On both sides, leaders incapable of making peace were sending their young to fight in a mutually reinforcing death cult.

Foreign mediation offered a more rational course to cool tempers, but the one superpower able to enforce a solution had a new president, George W. Bush, who appeared largely indifferent until faced with the need to secure regional cooperation for his war on Iraq. Fearing that Israel’s re-invasion might undermine Arab support for his plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Bush publicly demanded Sharon pull back the tanks. In March 2002, Washington sponsored a UN Security Council resolution proposing the creation of a Palestinian state, and finally made explicit what had been implicit in a decade of mediation. In a 2002 speech to assuage mounting anger at US plans to invade Iraq, President Bush stated that a Palestinian state ‘could’ be achieved within three years, outlining a path which subsequently materialized into the ‘Roadmap’. The efficacy of the
undertaking, which could have been a Balfour Declaration for the Palestinians, was tempered by Bush’s demand that Palestinians create a model democracy and at the same time replace Arafat, one of the region’s few elected leaders.