Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, President Bill Clinton and Palestinian Authority chair Yasser Arafat at Camp David.
The seemingly endless volleys of attack and retaliation in the Middle East leave many people wondering why the two sides can’t reach an agreement. The answer is simple, according to numerous commentators: At the Camp David meeting in July 2000, Israel “offered extraordinary concessions” (Michael Kelly, Washington Post, 3/13/02), “far-reaching concessions” (Boston Globe, 12/30/01), “unprecedented concessions” (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). Israel’s “generous peace terms” (L.A. Times editorial, 3/15/02) constituted “the most far-reaching offer ever” (Chicago Tribune editorial, 6/6/01) to create a Palestinian state. In short, Camp David was “an unprecedented concession” to the Palestinians (Time, 12/25/00).
But due to “Arafat’s recalcitrance” (L.A. Times editorial, 4/9/02) and “Palestinian rejectionism” (Mortimer Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report, 3/22/02), “Arafat walked away from generous Israeli peacemaking proposals without even making a counteroffer” (Salon, 3/8/01). Yes, Arafat “walked away without making a counteroffer” (Samuel G. Freedman, USA Today, 6/18/01). Israel “offered peace terms more generous than ever before and Arafat did not even make a counteroffer” (Chicago Sun-Times editorial, 11/10/00). In case the point isn’t clear: “At Camp David, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians an astonishingly generous peace with dignity and statehood. Arafat not only turned it down, he refused to make a counteroffer!” (Charles Krauthammer, Seattle Times, 10/16/00).
This account is one of the most tenacious myths of the conflict. Its implications are obvious: There is nothing Israel can do to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors. The Israeli army’s increasingly deadly attacks, in this version, can be seen purely as self-defense against Palestinian aggression that is motivated by little more than blind hatred.
Locking in occupation
To understand what actually happened at Camp David, it’s necessary to know that for many years the PLO has officially called for a two-state solution in which Israel would keep the 78 percent of the Palestine Mandate (as Britain’s protectorate was called) that it has controlled since 1948, and a Palestinian state would be formed on the remaining 22 percent that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem). Israel would withdraw completely from those lands, return to the pre-1967 borders and a resolution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 would be negotiated between the two sides. Then, in exchange, the Palestinians would agree to recognize Israel (PLO Declaration, 12/7/88; PLO Negotiations Department).
Although some people describe Israel’s Camp David proposal as practically a return to the 1967 borders, it was far from that. Under the plan, Israel would have withdrawn completely from the small Gaza Strip. But it would annex strategically important and highly valuable sections of the West Bank–while retaining “security control” over other parts–that would have made it impossible for the Palestinians to travel or trade freely within their own state without the permission of the Israeli government (Political Science Quarterly, 6/22/01; New York Times, 7/26/01; Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 9-10/00; Robert Malley, New York Review of Books, 8/9/01).
The annexations and security arrangements would divide the West Bank into three disconnected cantons. In exchange for taking fertile West Bank lands that happen to contain most of the region’s scarce water aquifers, Israel offered to give up a piece of its own territory in the Negev Desert–about one-tenth the size of the land it would annex–including a former toxic waste dump.
Because of the geographic placement of Israel’s proposed West Bank annexations, Palestinians living in their new “independent state” would be forced to cross Israeli territory every time they traveled or shipped goods from one section of the West Bank to another, and Israel could close those routes at will. Israel would also retain a network of so-called “bypass roads” that would crisscross the Palestinian state while remaining sovereign Israeli territory, further dividing the West Bank.
Israel was also to have kept “security control” for an indefinite period of time over the Jordan Valley, the strip of territory that forms the border between the West Bank and neighboring Jordan. Palestine would not have free access to its own international borders with Jordan and Egypt–putting Palestinian trade, and therefore its economy, at the mercy of the Israeli military.
Had Arafat agreed to these arrangements, the Palestinians would have permanently locked in place many of the worst aspects of the very occupation they were trying to bring to an end. For at Camp David, Israel also demanded that Arafat sign an “end-of-conflict” agreement stating that the decades-old war between Israel and the Palestinians was over and waiving all further claims against Israel.
Violence or negotiation?
The Camp David meeting ended without agreement on July 25, 2000. At this point, according to conventional wisdom, the Palestinian leader’s “response to the Camp David proposals was not a counteroffer but an assault” (Oregonian editorial, 8/15/01). “Arafat figured he could push one more time to get one more batch of concessions. The talks collapsed. Violence erupted again” (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, 12/4/01). He “used the uprising to obtain through violence…what he couldn’t get at the Camp David bargaining table” (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/21/00).
But the Intifada actually did not start for another two months. In the meantime, there was relative calm in the occupied territories. During this period of quiet, the two sides continued negotiating behind closed doors. Meanwhile, life for the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation went on as usual. On July 28, Prime Minister Barak announced that Israel had no plans to withdraw from the town of Abu Dis, as it had pledged to do in the 1995 Oslo II agreement (Israel Wire, 7/28/00). In August and early September, Israel announced new construction on Jewish-only settlements in Efrat and Har Adar, while the Israeli statistics bureau reported that settlement building had increased 81 percent in the first quarter of 2000. Two Palestinian houses were demolished in East Jerusalem, and Arab residents of Sur Bahir and Suwahara received expropriation notices; their houses lay in the path of a planned Jewish-only highway (Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, 11-12/00).
The Intifada began on September 29, 2000, when Israeli troops opened fire on unarmed Palestinian rock-throwers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, killing four and wounding over 200 (State Department human rights report for Israel, 2/01). Demonstrations spread throughout the territories. Barak and Arafat, having both staked their domestic reputations on their ability to win a negotiated peace from the other side, now felt politically threatened by the violence. In January 2001, they resumed formal negotiations at Taba, Egypt.
The Taba talks are one of the most significant and least remembered events of the “peace process.” While so far in 2002 (1/1/02-5/31/02), Camp David has been mentioned in conjunction with Israel 35 times on broadcast network news shows, Taba has come up only four times–never on any of the nightly newscasts. In February 2002, Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz (2/14/02), published for the first time the text of the European Union’s official notes of the Taba talks, which were confirmed in their essential points by negotiators from both sides.
“Anyone who reads the European Union account of the Taba talks,” Ha’aretz noted in its introduction, “will find it hard to believe that only 13 months ago, Israel and the Palestinians were so close to a peace agreement.” At Taba, Israel dropped its demand to control Palestine’s borders and the Jordan Valley. The Palestinians, for the first time, made detailed counterproposals–in other words, counteroffers–showing which changes to the 1967 borders they would be willing to accept. The Israeli map that has emerged from the talks shows a fully contiguous West Bank, though with a very narrow middle and a strange gerrymandered western border to accommodate annexed settlements.
In the end, however, all this proved too much for Israel’s Labor prime minister. On January 28, Barak unilaterally broke off the negotiations. “The pressure of Israeli public opinion against the talks could not be resisted,” Ben-Ami said (New York Times, 7/26/01).
Settlements off the table
In February 2001, Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel. Sharon has made his position on the negotiations crystal clear. “You know, it’s not by accident that the settlements are located where they are,” he said in an interview a few months after his election (Ha’aretz, 4/12/01).
They safeguard the cradle of the Jewish people’s birth and also provide strategic depth which is vital to our existence.The settlements were established according to the conception that, come what may, we have to hold the western security area [of the West Bank], which is adjacent to the Green Line, and the eastern security area along the Jordan River and the roads linking the two. And Jerusalem, of course. And the hill aquifer. Nothing has changed with respect to any of those things. The importance of the security areas has not diminished, it may even have increased. So I see no reason for evacuating any settlements.
Meanwhile, Ehud Barak has repudiated his own positions at Taba, and now speaks pointedly of the need for a negotiated settlement “based on the principles presented at Camp David” (New York Times op-ed, 4/14/02).
In April 2002, the countries of the Arab League–from moderate Jordan to hardline Iraq–unanimously agreed on a Saudi peace plan centering around full peace, recognition and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders as well as a “just resolution” to the refugee issue. Palestinian negotiator Nabil Sha’ath declared himself “delighted” with the plan. “The proposal constitutes the best terms of reference for our political struggle,” he told the Jordan Times (3/28/02).
Ariel Sharon responded by declaring that “a return to the 1967 borders will destroy Israel” (New York Times, 5/4/02). In a commentary on the Arab plan, Ha’aretz‘s Bradley Burston (2/27/02) noted that the offer was “forcing Israel to confront peace terms it has quietly feared for decades.”
Wow! Not that I am a political scientist, but I live in the US long enough to understand the political position of my US government and the US media on this issue . And its misconstrued thanks to the Zionist lobby and its influence on middle east foreign affaires in particular and international affaires in general. Specially when the stake is the palestinian basic human right, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Clinton is no different than another wanabe president they cant swim against the flow as salmons do they are not that smart and they lie. Clinton did not come up with the camp David Accord detailed plan
It was handed to him by Telaviv by the zionist lobby in the us and was asked to deliver if he wanted his wife to be the next president god forbid. I dont like trump and I dont like hilary even more. Thank you for bringing this up and incovering the truth.
The article points out that ” At Taba,. The Palestinians … for the first time, made detailed counterproposals”
That is precisely why the Camp David negotiations failed. The reason was not that Arafat refused to accept a detailed Israeli proposal. It was because Arafat, against the advice of his own negotiating team, refused to respond to the Israeli proposals with equally comprehensive Palestinian counter-proposals. In other words he refused to negotiate. Once innocent non-combatant Israeli kids began to be regularly targeted by the suicide bombings of the “Al Aqsa Intifada’ it was too late. The intentional attacks on innocent civilians in cafes, pizzerias, buses and school libraries discredited the peace camp among the Israeli electorate that had elected Barak on a platform to negotiate a peace agreement. The electorate switched its support to parties with hard line security oriented platforms.
Reference: http://normanfinkelstein.com/2006/02/14/democracy-now-debate-with-finkelstein-shlomo-ben-ami/
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Wait, one last point. One last point. Dr. Ben-Ami left out another crucial point in his account. He doesn’t tell us why Taba ended. It ended officially when Barak withdrew his negotiators. It wasn’t the Palestinians who walked out of Taba. It ended with the Israelis walking out of Taba, a matter of historical record, not even controversial.
SHLOMO BEN-AMI: Now, with regard to Taba, you see, we were a government committing suicide, practically. Two weeks before general elections, the chief of staff, General Mofaz, who is now the Minister of Defense, comes and in a — I say that in the book — in something that is tantamount to a coup d’état, comes and says publicly that we are putting at risk the future of the state of Israel by assuming the Clinton parameters, and we accept them, we assume them. And then I go to Cairo and I meet President Mubarak, and President Mubarak invites Arafat to see me in Cairo, and I say to Arafat, “We are going to fine tune this in a meeting in Taba, if you wish.” And then we go to Taba, and we negotiate in Taba. And in Taba, Prime Minister Barak instructs me to conduct secret negotiations with Abu Alla. Within the negotiations, we had the second track trying to reach an agreement, and he even agrees to all kind of things that he was not very open to before that. Now, this was the end. We saw that we are not reaching an agreement, and we need to go back, even if for the electoral campaign. I mean, we were a week before the elections. I mean, we were practically nonexistent. Our legitimacy as a government to negotiate such central issues as Jerusalem, as Temple Mount, the temple, etc., was being questioned, not only by the right that was making political capital out of it, but by the left, people from our own government. “Shlomo Ben-Ami is ready to sell out the country for the sake of a Nobel Prize.” This is what Haim Ramon said, one of the labor ministers, so it was unsustainable. We could not go any longer. So, to say that we — now the whole thing collapsed because we put a helicopter at the disposal of the Palestinians to go and see if we can rubricate some basic peace parameters on the basis of our negotiations, that they didn’t want it, Arafat didn’t want it. Anyway, the thing is that we need to understand that with all — frankly, with all due respect for the requirements of international law, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, a peace process is a political enterprise. And there are things that governments can do and things that they cannot do, because if you do things that leave you without political support, then you can do nothing. You can write poetry, not make peace. And we have been writing poetry ever since, because we are not in office. We have been advancing all kind of peace dreams. It is only when you are in office and you have a political support that you can move ahead. This is the only way that peace is done. We have done our very best. We went to the outer limits of our capacity for compromise without disintegrating entirely our home front, and this is an exercise that Sharon decided not to make, precisely because he learned from our experience. He said, “Listen, we are not going to do that. I am going to be unilateral. I don’t believe in negotiations.” It’s very bad, but this is the lesson that he learned from the sad experience of the collapse of the peace process in the last year of Clinton’s presidency.
Palestinians should learn this and learn this well. A country including Israel will never NEVER NEVER give up land it deems to be valuable because another group of people whine that it isn’t fair.
We don’t even have to argue if the land Israel won was legitimate. Which it was because the 1920 league of nations showed this state of Israel. 1948 Palestinians refused to recognize the state and Palestine was a very small country at the time. We don’t even need to argue this.
Arguing this would be akin to Americans arguing if their land is legitimate or Britain or Turkey. Once you go back long enough and everyone’s dead then it makes it legitimate?
The Palestinians can do 1 of 2 things. 1) Admit they are woefully incompetent and admit defeat. 2) Fight with cowardly terrorist attacks forever and celebrate a culture of death.
I would choose 1 but hey I don’t expect Palestinians to have a brain. It’s over, Palestinians. Israel will never ever give you land that is valuable. That’s not what moral or immoral countries do ever.
I think the war ends when Israel just admits, we won’t give you land we deem to be of any strategic value and you can have some scraps if you want. Sure Palestinians may go nuts but who cares what a bunch of people who got their ass handed to them in a war think.
We have 2 solutions. 1) Either Israel just move out hundrends of thousands of civilians and cut off valuable infrastructure. 2) Palestinians accept defeat.
Do you guys not see the difference in the negotiating position? Israel is negotiating in a position where it holds the royal flush. The fact it would be even willing to negotiate is probably it’s mistake. It should laugh them off like America would laugh off natives. Like Russia would laugh off the parts trying to separate there. And \Russia is a giant piece of garbage which no one wants.
Name me a country in history which would choose to unload huge parts of its GDP for no compensation?
See Palestinians people will first need to make an argument on why they are owed anything in the first place. In 1942 Palestine was a very small country with not many people. In fact around 1/3 of the country was already Jewish.
You may cite Geneva but it’s a little rich for Europe after killing 10% in the world population in war could then decide that all land won even in defensive wars is unjust.
As said above. It’s over Palestinians. You can whine for the next 1000 years. Israel will never give you what they’ve won.
Finally and lastly. never in history have a group of people been awarded land. You may say ironically Israel was. But who defended Israel in 1948? No one. Israel may have had the basis of legal declarations by a bunch of big wigs in Europe but they never got up from their chair to actually fight for it.
Israel’s existence actually came about exactly the same way every other country in history came out. Palestine would be the abberation and the new concept.
Also wouldn’t it be ironic if Israel granted Palestine the state today then on day 1 attacked them and won it all back?
your two choices are not acceptable by anyone, However the Israelis cannot live forever in a hostile dark sea, No one could occupy the Muslims land for ever, read the history, the great religion of Islam keeps reminding and urging its follower to defend and return their occupied land, even after a while, Things change fast, Rome had gone long time ago, the crusaders could not stay for long time, the british empire vanished in one year, America will not master the world for ever, for the sake of the Israeli generations to come; the winner/loser logic is not good for the long run.
I think that there is only one choice for both of the Israelis and the Palestinians, it is one secular country where jews, christians, Muslims and others can coexist and live in harmony and peace forever. This is a win-win situation for everyone, this solution works everywhere, jews have lived in the Arab world for thousands of years with no problems at all, the question is why a racists religious (jewish) country should be imposed?
AIPAC and the British Friends of Israel keep the wars going.
If Israel had to stand up without the big stick of other countries military might behind them, then they would see the need for a negotiated peace.
As it is, Israel fights proxy wars to destabilise it’s neighbours, and looks to establishing Greater Israel in their lands too.