Prospects for Peace

Following the 1949 Armistice Agreements, feeble efforts were made by the West to find a permanent solution to the state of conflict and particularly to the plight of the Palestinian people who had become refugees in neighboring Arab countries.

The humiliation of the Arabs after the 1967 war did not bring them to the peace table, but rather increased their public defiance. This attitude was manifested in what became known as the “three no’s” of the 1967 Arab Summit in Khartoum: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, and no recognition of Israel. The status quo remained until the 1973 war and the events that ensued from it. After the 1973 war, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States stood up for Arab solidarity when they declared an oil embargo that quadrupled world oil prices. This position represented both a global economic threat, as well as a powerful symbolic expression of the profound divisions that had come to characterize the conflict, extending far beyond the territory of what was once Palestine to become a key component of international affairs.

After the 1967 war, the United Nations Security Council adopted two major resolutions, Resolution 242 (1967) and Resolution 338 (1973), which provided for Israel’s return of territories occupied in the 1967 war in exchange for peace. The fact that the resolution did not call explicitly for the return of “the” territories and spoke only of “territories” was by no means meant to imply that Israel was given a green light to expand its overall territory. The resolution’s language meant that negotiations might lead to minor border adjustments, not to major territorial changes.

From 1948, Israel, with the support of the West, has consistently treated the Palestinians as a question of “refugees,” not as a political dispute over the Palestinians right of self-determination (Resolution 242, for example still treats the Palestinians as refugees and does not call for the creation of a Palestinian state in the lands occupied by Israel), that is to be resolved by their resettlement, but not necessarily in Israel proper.

Israel’s military victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 left these countries’ leaders and people stunned. Military victory brought with it the unexpected consequences of administering territories three times as large as the State of Israel and an alien population almost equal in number to its own citizens. In Israel, agreement was found at the political and popular level for the reunification of Jerusalem and its annexation to the State of Israel. But the debate about what to do with territories inhabited by the Palestinians, namely, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were highly controversial.

The prospects of peace have all been based on the formula of “land for peace.” That formula was first accepted by Israel’s national unity government after the 1967 war. It remains the basis for the peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The 1973 war ushered in a new era of peace efforts. It started with two disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel between 1974 and 1975, followed by the 1977 visit to Jerusalem by Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat.

The Camp David Accords represented a historic opportunity for the Palestinians to establish a framework for a solution to the conflict. However, the Palestinian leadership failed to grasp that opportunity and rejected the two-state solution that was presented. Had they seized this opportunity, there might now exist a Palestinian state in its twenty-fifth year that would be larger than the territory offered by Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the 2000 Camp David Summit. This and other missed opportunities led the late Israeli statesman Abba Eban to coin the catchy phrase that the Palestinian leadership “never missed the opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Still, this analysis is only partly true.

Under the Carter administration, the United States vigorously expanded its efforts to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but to no avail. The first Bush administration, through the efforts of Secretary of State James Baker, continued these efforts, which produced the Madrid Conference in 1991. The Madrid efforts had two components, the Palestinian and multilateral Arab states and the Israel component. The latter included regional security, including the elimination of weapons of mass destruction. This was a laudable goal that came to a stalemate, however, when the Arab side insisted on an a priori Israeli commitment to the elimination of its nuclear military capabilities. That effort was preserved on an informal Track II basis between 1995-2003 by a group of experts from Israel, Jordan, Egypt and the United States, chaired by this writer. Under the Clinton administration, the Madrid process for all practical purposes came to an end, though that administration pursued the same goals. Clinton administration efforts evolved mostly during the second term, after early success brokering a peace treaty between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and culminated in the July 2000 Camp David II Summit between Barak and Arafat, and in President Clinton’s peace parameters of December 2000.

Camp David was the natural follow up of the separate peace track that had developed directly between Israelis and Palestinians through Norway and ushered eventually in the 1993 Oslo Accords, an agreement subsequently formalized under the auspices of the Clinton administration in a White House lawn ceremony involving Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Minister of Foreign Affairs Shimon Peres, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

The accords allowed Arafat to establish a Palestinian Authority on the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank. In January 1996, Arafat was elected as president in the Palestinian Authority’s first elections, receiving 88 percent of votes.

In July 2000, Clinton sought to emulate President Carter’s efforts at Camp David with a summit between Arafat and Barak. With the collapse of the talks into the al-Aqsa Intifada, efforts undertaken by President Clinton and President Hosni Mubarak at another summit at Sharm el-Sheikh in 2000, whose aim was to reach an end to the violence and bring back the parties to the negotiating table, ended in failure. Israel and the United States blamed the failure on Yasser Arafat’s inability or unwillingness to seize the opportunity for peace. There are various explanations of that failure, which had been so close to success. Among them is the proposition that Yasser Arafat failed to grasp the opportunity offered by Barak, that Barak’s proposal was not as generous as portrayed, and that Clinton lacked the patience and focus on detail to bring about successful closure.

The failure to capture the propitious opportunity at the 2000 Camp David Summit was followed by Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit tothe“Temple Mount” for the Jews and the “Haram el-Sharif’ for the Muslims, after the Friday Muslim prayers. Accompanied by 1,000 members of Israel’s security forces, Sharon provoked a riot that led to an unprecedented escalation of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Between September 2000 and July 2003 an estimated 3,000 Palestinians were killed and over 25,000 were injured, and an estimated 800 Israelis were killed and 5,000 injured. The Palestinians resorted to suicide bombings which spread terror among the Israelis, and the Israelis resorted to excessive and indiscriminate force as retaliation, destroying Palestinian public and private property, and crippling that society’s economy. As the violence escalated, each side blamed the other.

Efforts toward a peace treaty between Israel and Syria were undertaken during the Clinton administration based on Israel’s return of the Golan Heights, but nothing came of it. The reasons for that failure are uncertain, but they most likely have to do with Syria’s unwillingness to follow Egypt’s lead in entering into a comprehensive peace treaty with Israel, including full normalization of relations. But, it may also be due to Israel’s refusal to give up unconditionally the totality of the Syrian Golan Heights, as it did with Egypt with respect to the Sinai. The Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories are definitely a major obstacle to a peace settlement.

To the right wing in Israel, these settlements are irreversible, but to others, throughout the Israeli political spectrum, it is not so. In fact, for many of the settlers, except for ultra-Orthodox ones, the prospects of compensation and relocation are acceptable. As the settlement process expanded, particularly around Jerusalem, the Palestinians became more and more concerned about forever losing these territories.

As the territorial issue of the West Bank and “East Jerusalem” shifted from Jordan to the Palestinians whenJordan gave up in 1988 its claim to these territories, the Palestinians found themselves without much leverage to induce Israel to return all the territories occupied in the 1967 war to a Palestinian state to be established on these territories with parts ofJerusalem as its capital. The Palestinian Authority established pursuant to the Oslo Accords of 1993 was given the administration of the Gaza Strip and a substantial portion of the “West Bank,” but not including the territories illegally settled by Israelis.

Foreign occupation is always fraught with dangers. Only those occu­piers in history who have been most ruthless have succeeded in keeping foreign occupied populations in check. Israel learned that lesson when it found itself more and more enmeshed into repressive tactics against the Palestinians which were in fundamental opposition to their values. IDF and security forces engaged in massive arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, and other forms of physical mistreatment of prisoners, blowing up houses in retaliation, cutting down productive groves of trees, restricting people’s freedom of movement, and above all, engaging in conduct which constituted constant humiliation of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinians have felt these injustices, which have bred anger and despair. This in turn has led to violence, first intermittent, and then to the first full-fledged Intifada of 1987, and the Intifada of 2000, whose effects are still unfolding. The process of escalation of violence was inevitable, as each side blamed the other, and responded in kind. Israel, having the greater military strength, has been able to inflict the most harm. The Palestinians ultimately resorted to suicide bombings as the weapon of last resort.

Over the years, Israel has realized that it could not be a foreign military occupier engaging in repressive violent action against another people without feeling the consequences in its own society. This led to the realization by those in the center and left of the political spectrum that the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be part of a separate Palestinian state. Thus, Israel made the choice not favored by its right wing, to proactively engage in the process that would bring about a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem. This was, of course, the approach of the 1947 Partition Plan, as well as the 1978 Camp David Accords, which the Palestinians rejected. But as Israel grew stronger and inflicted greater punishment on the Palestinians, and the latter grew weaker with Arab states encouraging them to accept a two-state solution, that outcome appeared inevitable. Within Palestinian society, opposition remained strong, particularly among Hamas and other Islamic nationalistic movements, though many political observers of the Arab scene see this as political posturing, and as a way of strengthening the hand of Yasser Arafat and others in negotiating with Israel.

Within Israel, the political tensions between right and left are still present. The right still hopes either to gain more territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by denying it to the Palestinians, or by keeping the status quo festering in the hope that the Palestinians would despair and leave in large numbers, thus in effect achieving a subtle population removal. The balance is so precarious that on occasion, a single suicide bombing incident is capable of tipping the scales against the progress of peace.

Throughout this violent and humanly degrading occupation, the values of both communities have been sorely tested. As history is likely to point out, neither side will be very proud of that period in its history.

After the 9/11 attack upon the United States, Israel managed to marshal United States public opinion and the Bush administration to support its policy of retaliatory violence against the Palestinians. Israeli responses to Palestinian suicide bombers have wrought significant harm to the Palestinian people, and the cycle of violence has increased unabated.

The Bush Administration in the aftermath of the Iraq war opened the way for a new phase in the on-again, off-again peace process, based on the “Quartet Road-Map,” named after its preparation by the United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union. This present phase led to yet another dual summit in 2003 in Aqaba, with President Bush, King Abdallah of Jordan, Prime Minister Sharon, and then Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. This was then followed by another summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, with President Bush, King Abdallah, President Mubarak, and Prime Minister Abbas. But issues pertaining to the territory of the future State of Palestine, the Israeli settlements, Israeli and Palestinian security, the sovereignty of a Palestinian state and the Palestinian’s “right of return” remain to be solved.

By 2007, the Bush Administration decided to sponsor an initiative whose name came from the locaton of the meeting between Israelis, Palestinians, Arab states and others at Annapolis. No new ideas were presented. The initiative was essentially for the Administration’s window-dressing purposes, though it also had a positive influence on all concerned.

The problem lies elsewhere. It lies in the poverty of the leadership and in the fragmentation of the Palestinian political system. The tragedy of this conflict is that the only man, Yasser Arafat, whose signature on a peace agreement based on a two-state solution could have been legitimate in the eyes of his people took this legitimacy with him to the grave.

President Mahmoud Abbas was never an inspiring authority for his people, and with the loss of Gaza to Hamas, his political clout has been diminished even further. In fact, Mr. Abbas does not even control the militias of his own party, Fatah, that have been even more active than Hamas in launching terrorist attacks against Israel. The Palestinian Authority’s rule over the West Bank would have collapsed long ago if it were not for the Israelis’ daily incursions against Hamas and Fatah territories in areas under Mr. Abbas’ Fatah “control.”

Frequently throughout history, national movements, almost invariably consisting of a radical and a pragmatic wing, had to split in order to reach the promised land. Consensus is the negation of leadership and frequently a recipe for political paralysis. Zionism is a case in point. Had Menachem Begin’s ultra nationalist Irgun been in coalition with Ben- Gurion’s pragmatic Mapai in 1947, the Zionists would have rejected the partition of Palestine, and Ben-Gurion would not have been allowed to declare the Jewish state in May 1948.

But, the concept should not be elevated to the level of a dogma. In the Palestinian case, and with the lack of the kind of strong leadership that Arafat could provide, there is no way that the radical wing, Hamas, can be discarded from the process leading to Palestinian statehood. Moreover, unlike in the Israeli case, in Palestine the radical wing represents the democratic majority as it emerged from the polls two years ago.

It is a self-deceiving fantasy to assume that the highly unpopular craftsmen of the Palestinian peace industry, those who had been there throughout all the stages of the discredited Oslo process can still muster the necessary popular legitimacy in order to mobilize their nation in favor of a historic compromise with the Jewish state that would require painful concessions on issues so central to the Palestinian national ethos such as refugees, Jerusalem and territory.

To invade or not to invade Hamas-controlled Gaza, that is the Hamletian dilemma that dominates the Israeli discourse in these days. Locked in a self­imposed conceptual paralysis that does not allow for a solution outside the box of a military answer whose unrealistic objective is to bring about the collapse of the Hamas regime, the Israeli system refuses to see that Hamas’ attacks on Israeli territory are not intended to draw Israel into an invasion; they are rather an attempt to establish a new deterrent against Israel that would secure Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip.

Nor is it at all clear that a major invasion of the Gaza Strip can bring about the end of the rocket attacks on Israeli territory. Hamas has been undergoing a process of Hizballahization with the help of the Iranians. Its units are no longer simple terrorist cells; they are highly trained and well- equipped combat units, and its rockets, just like in southern Lebanon, are launched with the help of timers from crude underground silos. The traumatic experience of the Lebanon War has definitely made the Israeli leadership weary of yet another asymmetric war where a clear cut victory can never be claimed, and where the arithmetic of blood is always bound to turn the casualties of the supposedly superior force, Israel, into a severe domestic crisis.

Israel should therefore change its strategic objective in Gaza from that of toppling Hamas to that of rescuing the Annapolis process, and with it the last chance for a two-state solution, from inevitable perdition. This requires not only a cease-fire with Hamas, an important achievement of Egypt’s diplomacy, but also a return to a Palestinian national unity government that should offer the peace process the vital legitimacy that it lacks today. Without the resurrection of the Mecca agreement (an agreement that was brokered two years ago by the Saudis, and allowed the creation of a Fatah-Hamas unity government that later collapsed) neither can Hamas expect to secure its control of Gaza, nor the PLO deliver on the peace process.

The notion so dear to the architects of the Annapolis process that peace can be achieved only when a wedge is driven between the “moderates” and the “extremists” is in the Palestinian case a misconception. National unity would not be an impediment to a settlement for the simple reason that the moderates that are now negotiating with Israel would anyway strive for an agreement that the extremists could not label as a treacherous sell-out. Hence, the difference between the Palestinian positions in the current negotiations and those they might hold when a unity government is restored can only be very minor.

It has been a tragic trait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that there has been little compassion from either side towards the other, but more so by Israelis toward Palestinians, since they are, after all, the ones suffering the greatest brunt of the harm. Nevertheless, there are many on both sides who have reached out to one another. It should be noted that there are many Jews throughout the world and in Israel who have been vocal in support of peace, and in support of the rights of the Palestinians. Their voices have been submerged by the sounds of violence, and more so by the tragedies of suicide bombings. As violence on both sides decreases, it is expected that supporters of peace within Israel and within the Palestinian community will transcend their mutual distrust and allow them to move in the direction of peace and reconciliation.

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