Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (31 page)

The reason was that this deal was the last thing Hamas and the other radicals wanted, and terror was the best tool of sabotage. Terror also served the Big Israel hawks, who could use it to refuse withdrawals and to justify their own violence. While many in Israel and the United States saw Israel as giving up land for uncertain Palestinian promises, many international observers saw the Palestinians as making the major concessions. According to this view, they gave up any claim to the bulk of the old Mandatory Palestine, got no commitments on removal of the hated settlements, and received no guarantees for the future except the right to negotiate an uncertain ‘final settlement.’ As one Israeli commentator noted, ‘Arafat must have been desperate to take such a chance.’ In any case, by late 1999 all the timetables had been pushed back, violence was rising on both sides, and it was clear the process was in deep trouble.

The Lobby

A central fact of the Israeli-Palestinian story is the continuous increase in the amount of land under Israeli control. Since 1967 this has largely come from unceasing expansion of settlements. While Palestinian terror attacks would probably not completely stop even if the Israelis dismantled all the settlements, surely the Palestinian perception that the Israelis mean to take all the land contributes to the violence. Over dinner recently, a former U.S. National Security Adviser not only agreed with that perception but told me how frustrating it had been to be unable to bring about a freeze on settlement expansion. Why, I asked, can’t the president of the most powerful country in the world get a freeze commitment from a much smaller country that is totally dependent on U.S. money and protection? ‘Clyde,’ he said, ‘that’s the first time you’ve asked me a question to which there’s an obvious answer: New York and Florida.’ What he meant was the importance of the American Jewish vote in those two states and more broadly the powerful Israeli lobby. I told him I would add the powerful influence of the Christian Coalition and other fundamentalist Christian groups as well, and he quickly agreed.

A major factor in the collapse of the peace efforts has been these lobbies’ ability to prevent U.S. pressure on Israel. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the strongest of the pro-Israel groups, and it has claimed that any legislation important to Israel starts with a dependable base of two hundred supporters in the House of Representatives and up to forty-five senators.
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In a speech to the Christian Coalition in October 2002, evangelist Pat Robertson added the weight of the evangelical community, saying, ‘We will stand with Israel,’ and adding that a ‘Palestinian state would be anathema.’
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Former congressman Paul Find-ley has written that the lobby assures that ‘open discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict is non-existent,’
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and former National Security Council official William Quandt says 70 to 80 percent of all members of Congress will go along with AIPAC.
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As if to bear this out, FoxNews reported in early May 2002 that pro-Israeli resolutions, including $200 million for Israeli military activities, passed the House by 352-21 and the Senate by 94-2.
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Prior to that, when Bush called for withdrawal of Israeli tanks from the West Bank in April, the White House received more than 100,000 angry e-mails from Christian conservatives.
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As an Israeli political analyst told me, ‘the space for debate on Israel is less in the United States than in Israel.’ He could have added that the level of the debate that does take place is sometimes laughable. House Majority Leader Richard Armey said on
Hardball
in May 2002 that he was for a Palestinian state, as long as it didn’t mean giving up Israeli-controlled territory.
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The Blame Game

In March 2000, with the Oslo process on its deathbed and his own reelection prospects sinking, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak called President Clinton with a bold new proposal – leapfrog the tedious Oslo arrangements and call a summit at Camp David for all-or-nothing talks on a final settlement. Despite the lack of time for preparation, the limited time left in both his own and possibly Barak’s tenure in office, and the risk that failure would intensify the conflict, Clinton saw a historic opportunity for an agreement and perhaps a legacy for himself, and bit. The ultimate failure of this gamble produced the suicide bombings, the election of the hawkish Big Israel proponent Sharon as Israeli Prime Minister, and brutal Israeli reprisals. More importantly, the inevitable attribution of blame has led to broad acceptance among Israeli and American leaders of an orthodox view that the Palestinians rejected generous Israeli offers because they truly hate Israel and prefer to seek its violent destruction rather than peace.

This argument is actually best stated by Barak himself. Over a breakfast with me, Barak insisted he had offered Arafat the deal of a lifetime: a demilitarized Palestinian state on 92 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip with some territorial compensation for the Palestinians from pre-1967 Israel; the dismantling of most of the settlements and relocation of settlers to an 8-percent portion of the West Bank to be annexed by Israel; creation of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem; custody (not sovereignty) of the Temple Mount; a return of refugees to the Palestinian state (but not to Israel proper), and a massive international aid program. But that the obdurate old Palestinian leader had said no. Barak insists Arafat was just ‘performing’ and seeking maximum Israeli concessions without ‘negotiating in good faith.’ He profoundly distrusts not only Arafat but Arabs in general, saying that in their culture there is no such thing as ‘truth’ and they therefore have no qualms about lying. As for why Arafat would turn down such an apparently good deal, Barak says it’s because the Palestinians don’t believe Israel has a right to exist and that they seek a Palestinian state in all of Palestine. He believes Arafat sees demographics as his main weapon, and says the Palestinians will take advantage of Israeli democracy to turn Israel into ‘a state for all its citizens’ and then push for a bi-national state until demographics gives them a majority and thereby an end to the ‘Jewish state.’ He also says Arafat planned all along to milk the talks for as much as he could get and then to unleash violence as a way of putting more pressure for concessions on the Israelis.

While he doesn’t say it exactly the same way, Clinton’s top Camp David negotiator, Dennis Ross, agrees that Arafat earned most of the blame for the failure by turning down the offer and then unleashing violence. He describes Arafat as a ‘surfer’ who missed the Big Wave because he was more interested in continuing to surf than in riding into shore, perhaps because the shore of a limited Palestinian state is not the one he is seeking. Clinton, too, has pointed the finger at Arafat, saying that for the first time in history a U.S. president proposed a deal close to longstanding Palestinian demands and Arafat refused even to consider it as the basis for negotiations.
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More important even than what these key people say is that the current President Bush believes them. Hence Bush’s patience with Sharon’s defiance, hence his oxymoronic call for free Palestinian elections of a new leader who cannot be Arafat, hence his equation of Palestinian violence with global terror and his demand that all violence cease before peace negotiations proceed, and hence his refusal to meet with Arafat or even to shake his hand at the UN. If the orthodoxy is true, even if Bush’s actions and attitude tend toward the inflammatory, there is little alternative. But what if it’s not true?

Having spoken with most of the key negotiators on all sides, my impression is similar to that of the Japanese movie
Rashomon
, in which several participants in a single event each relate what seem to be several completely different events. Arafat and his chief negotiator deny rejecting a deal and point the finger at Barak, who insists they did reject it. More interesting is the analysis of Robert Malley, who was part of the U.S. negotiating team and who subsequently has written ‘revisionist’ accounts of the negotiations that tend to square with my own research and interview findings.

To begin, Malley confirms Arafat’s concerns about lack of preparation time and the risks of failure. On June 15, 2000, he told Clinton of his fear that everything could ‘explode in the president’s face,’ and said that ‘the summit is our last card. Do you really want to burn it?’
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The answer was yes, and Arafat went along in order not to incur U.S. anger but without great expectations. The background of Barak’s urgency and Arafat’s caution is critical to understanding what actually seems to have happened. The Israeli Prime Minister was deeply suspicious of the gradualist Oslo process. To him it meant military withdrawals, for which Israel paid a heavy price, without anything tangible in return and without any idea of eventual Palestinian demands. On top of this, increasing Palestinian unrest was creating pressure for faster movement and a dramatic peace deal offered a chance to rescue his declining position in preelection polls. For all these reasons, he considered it better to avoid the salami machine and go for the whole sandwich. Because of his focus on the end game, he neglected a number of interim steps – most important, a third partial withdrawal of troops from the West Bank and transfer to Palestinian control of three villages near Jerusalem, to which Israel was formally committed by Oslo and subsequent agreements. At the same time, expansion of West Bank settlements accelerated. In Barak’s mind, none of this need matter, because by definition a final settlement would resolve the problems.

Arafat, of course, saw things differently. He also found Oslo a painful process, but for different reasons than Barak. To the Palestinians, the promise of Oslo had turned into an endless series of unfulfilled and deferred commitments. ‘Six years after the agreement, there were more Israeli settlements, less freedom of movement, and worse economic conditions.’ Against this background, Barak’s neglect of the required interim withdrawals and the continued rapid pace of settlement only confirmed Arafat’s suspicions of the Israelis and of Barak himself. To reassure himself about the summit, Arafat asked Clinton for more preparation time and also for Israeli execution of the previously committed partial army withdrawals. Clinton, who shared some of Arafat’s concerns, responded by getting a promise from Barak that the Israeli withdrawal would proceed with or without a final deal. The president also promised Arafat that he would not be blamed in the event of failure, saying ‘there will be no finger pointing.’ As it turned out, there was no additional preparatory time and no Israeli withdrawal, but Arafat went along because he had no choice.

The procedure at Camp David was very different from the public image of the Israelis and Palestinians facing each other across the bargaining table and hammering out proposals under American supervision. Barak and Arafat never had a substantive conversation and spent most of the time in separate rooms with the Americans shuttling back and forth conveying ideas and responses. I use the term ‘ideas’ advisedly because there never were any formal written proposals from one side to the other. Notes were taken by the American messengers and read back to the two sides to assure understanding, but everything was conditional. The ideas were presented as U.S. rather than Israeli proposals and couched in terms of an Israeli willingness to use them as a basis of negotiation if Arafat would do the same.

In this procedure, the U.S. team was not pushing a plan of its own but acting as a very high-class facilitator without knowing either side’s bottom line. To move the ball toward a goal, the U.S. moderators needed counterproposals to take back to the other side. Here the Palestinians’ great weakness was revealed. Although, as Erekat told me in Jericho, they had been creative in devising the idea of land swaps in order to enable Israeli annexation of some major settlements, in suggesting ways to limit actual return of refugees to Israel as part of a recognition of the right of return, and in granting Israeli sovereignty over Jewish areas of East Jerusalem, the Palestinians ultimately proved unable to give the U.S. negotiators a coherent peace plan. It is not entirely clear why, although several factors played a role. One was the feeling they had been burned in the past by ambiguous, contingent agreements and that if this was the final ball game it had to be crystal clear and written down with nothing left to the imagination. Yet it wasn’t clear that this was indeed the final ball game, because Barak never finally committed to a position. It was a catch-22. Barak didn’t want to show his bottom line until Arafat demonstrated he was serious, and Arafat didn’t feel he could afford to do anything until he could see the bottom line.

Another factor was the fractious domestic political situation of the Palestinians, which caused divisions in a negotiating team that was beginning to anticipate a successor to the aging Arafat. Finally, the Palestinians saw acceptance of the U.S. ideas, even as ‘bases for further negotiation,’ as fraught with subtle but important dangers. The ideas, while interesting in some respects, were silent regarding refugees and unbalanced regarding land exchange, and they left the Temple Mount and much of Arab Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. Accepting the proposed ideas, the Palestinians feared, might undermine the fundamental Palestinian position by shifting the debate from the Israelis’ obligations under the various UN resolutions to the fuzzy U.S. ideas. Nevertheless, the agonizing question is why Arafat didn’t come back with better suggestions. Several important Palestinian leaders have told me they think he missed a great opportunity.

At the same time, however, Barak faced no pressure from the United States to stop, let alone dismantle, the settlements the United States had been calling illegal for thirty-five years. Clinton and his team acted more like messengers than as powerful leaders with a vital stake in a just resolution and the means to achieve one. Thus, for a variety of reasons, the Camp David summit ended without conclusion.