The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict_A Very Short Introduction
Page 10
Chapter 6
The rise and fall of the peace process 1987–2007
Following the failure of diplomatic efforts in the wake of the 1982 Lebanon war, the 1987 Palestinian intifada (which means ‘shaking off’ in Arabic) carried the conflict back into the spotlight of the international arena. Television images of Palestinian youths armed with slingshots facing off against Israeli tanks upended common international perceptions of a David and Goliath conflict. The intifada also fundamentally transformed political equations on the ground. More than a venting of anger at the Israeli occupation, the intifada was a powerful expression of the depth of Palestinian nationalism.
As the intifada gathered steam in the late 1980s, the PLO and the Israeli government were both forced to devise appropriate responses. Both had been taken by surprise by the scope and nature of the intifada. The intifada forced and empowered the Arafat leadership in Tunis to develop new diplomatic strategies based on a two-state solution. Eager to capitalize on the political momentum to gain international legitimacy, the PLO in 1988 accepted Resolution 242 and recognized Israel’s right to exist. Israel too was forced to respond to the transformed landscape. Searching for ways to disengage from the direct violence of the intifada, which was increasingly spearheaded by the militant religious group, Hamas, Israel initiated direct talks in 1993 with PLO leaders. After reaching an agreement in secret talks in Oslo, Norway, Israeli and Palestinian dignitaries were invited by US President Bill Clinton to sign the new accords on the White House Lawn. At the time, the event was considered a groundbreaking moment.
From intifada to peace process
PLO leaders living in exile in Tunisia worried about becoming increasingly marginalized. Inside the West Bank and Gaza, the protests comprised all strata of Palestinian society and gave birth to a new, young, and clandestine leadership known as the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU). Though composed of representatives of the main PLO factions, this local leadership encouraged grass-roots initiatives aimed at making the occupation an immoral and unaffordable burden on Israeli society. Popular committees were mobilized to coordinate acts of civil disobedience, including the boycotting of Israeli goods and services and replacing them with those produced through local networks, and to organize daily life with the eventual aim of achieving self-determination. With the political initiative lying firmly in the hands of Palestinian leaders inside the occupied territories, a certain tension emerged between the local leadership and the outside PLO. But the successful coordination of the political goals of the UNLU with those of the PLO provided salvation to its chairman, Yasir Arafat, and his fellow Fatah colleagues. Further validation of Arafat’s role came in July 1988 when King Husayn dropped Jordan’s claims to the West Bank.
However, the intifada also gave birth to a religious resistance movement that outright challenged the PLO’s authority. Best known by the acronym Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or Islamic Resistance Movement), which means ‘zeal’ in Arabic, this movement was an offshoot of the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood had long been involved in religious missionary activities. When the intifada erupted, younger, university-educated leaders in the movement feared that it would lose support if it did not get involved politically. Initially encouraged by the Israeli government as a counterweight to the PLO, Hamas built on its long record of providing social services in the occupied territories and gained widespread popularity during the intifada. It vehemently opposed the PLO’s willingness to compromise on the partition of historic Palestine. Hamas’s platform sacralized the whole of what had been mandate Palestine, calling for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of a ‘state of Islam’. Crude and simplistic as its initial charter was, the movement’s popularity, and its ability to mobilize an effective network of institutions, posed a real challenge to Fatah’s authority.
For Israel, the impact of this rapidly changing political landscape was profound. Israel’s eventual success in arresting many of the UNLU leaders led to the gradual disintegration of the grass-roots networks, but not before their civil disobedience campaigns had effectively convinced many Israelis that the occupied territories could no longer be considered a secure economic or even defensive asset. The Israeli state’s initial decision to use the brutal force of an ‘iron fist’ to crush the intifada had only fuelled further rebellion while tarnishing the state’s reputation abroad as well as at home. Israelis became convinced that the status quo was both morally and practically untenable, and increasing numbers began to pressure their government to extricate itself from the occupied territories.
A further push towards some kind of political reconciliation was spurred on by Iraq’s 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait. US forces, supported by a multilateral coalition that included many Arab countries, had little difficulty dislodging Iraq’s forces from Kuwait. During the war itself, however, Iraq launched scud missiles against Israeli cities, hoping to break up the coalition. These missiles, which Israel feared were equipped with chemical warheads, exposed Israelis to new threats and vulnerabilities, against which control over the West Bank and Gaza offered little defence. Furthermore, the war against Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait generated growing calls that the United States also bring an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinians. Indeed, following its 1991 victory in the Gulf War, the United States moved quickly to convene an international peace conference in Madrid in which all the states of the region participated (without the PLO). The Gulf War had in fact greatly weakened the position of the PLO. Arafat’s decision to side with Iraq dictator Saddam Husayn left him isolated diplomatically and financially cut off from further contributions from oil-rich Gulf countries: the PLO lost subsidies that it had previously received from the Kuwaiti and Saudi governments, and over 300,000 Palestinians resident in Kuwait lost their homes and their livelihoods. Israel effectively barred PLO officials from attending the Madrid conference but negotiators from the West Bank and Gaza nonetheless participated under the PLO’s authority. They gave by far the most eloquent speeches. Not only were Palestinian demands framed in reasonable terms, they were presented face to face to Israeli leaders for the first time. The Madrid talks otherwise achieved little of substance beyond securing a commitment from all parties to support an ongoing framework of bilateral negotiations. With the exception of the Israel–Jordan talks, which led successfully in 1994 to a peace treaty, the bilateral negotiations soon became stalemated. In these post-Madrid meetings, the main sticking point was Israeli settlement policies. The Palestinian delegation led by the ‘insiders’—leaders who lived and worked in the occupied territories—insisted on a settlement freeze.
The intifada’s operations against the Israeli occupation continued after Madrid. Yet they seemed to become more fragmented, more militarized, and increasingly overshadowed by internecine fighting. Then suddenly, in late August 1993, it was disclosed that a small team of individuals representing the PLO and the Israeli government had reached an agreement, while meeting in complete secrecy in Oslo, Norway. The whole world—including Palestinian and Israeli delegates in Washington who were gearing up for yet another round of Madrid talks—was astonished.
The rise and fall of the Oslo accords
The 1993 Oslo accords did not emerge from a vacuum. Their centrepiece was an agreement formally known as the Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self-Rule (DOP), which sketched out a phased approach to Palestinian autonomy that was consistent with the timetable outlined by the 1979 Camp David talks. The main difference was that Oslo provided for formal mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel. The PLO renounced the use of violence and recognized Israel’s right to peace and security and, in return, Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. The first phase of the Oslo process consisted of a transitional period, not meant to exceed five years, during which a newly elected government, known as the Palestinian Authority, would be given a territorial base from which to begin the process of
self-governance.
The basic assumption of the Oslo process was that new partnerships would form as Israelis and Palestinians together developed administrative and security arrangements. Step by small step, the interim period was expected to build the trust and momentum necessary for the eventual discussion of the thorniest issues, which were placed in the short term on the back-burner. Known as the ‘final status issues’, these were the most difficult and complex—the borders and status of a Palestinian state, the claims and repatriation of the Palestinian refugees, the fate of the Jewish settlements, and the disposition of East Jerusalem. The Oslo process said nothing about these issues. Oslo was not about forging a permanent peace agreement based on Resolution 242: it was all about building the political space that would allow for a later negotiation.
Whether or not the phased two-stage approach represented a necessary, or even genuine, move towards a final resolution to the conflict, it was essential that the interim agreements be implemented promptly and in good faith. For political momentum to have a chance to build, Palestinians and Israelis at the grass-roots level needed to see immediate benefits of the compromises being made by their leaders. Delay in the Oslo process thus only worked to the benefit of the extremists on both sides who sought to destroy it.
For Palestinians, the misery of occupation in fact worsened under the Oslo framework. A major contributor to this was the continued expansion of the whole infrastructure of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. The number of Israeli Jews living in the occupied territories rose dramatically, from approximately 250,000 in 1993 to almost 400,000 in 2003. So did the confiscation of land that was required to construct an elaborate system of bypass roads connecting the settlements but fragmenting Palestinian society. The five-year transition period envisaged by Oslo was specified in the 1995 Oslo II agreement, which divided the Palestinian territory into three zones—‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ (see Illustration 12)—while calling for a phased redeployment of the Israeli military. Most of the Palestinian population resided in zones ‘A’ (the major towns) and ‘B’ (the major village areas), which came to form a patchwork of dozens of separate districts. Area ‘C’, almost three-quarters of the territory, was to remain under Israeli control. It contained the Israeli settlements and was the only contiguous area. In combination with Israel’s continued control of the water supply, the restrictions that these divisions placed on the Palestinian economy resulted in increasing unemployment and poverty. Israel’s actions during this period made Oslo look to many Palestinians like a trap, reminiscent of the South African Bantustans.
Palestinians’ deepening frustration with Oslo stemmed also from the perceived failures of the accords’ architect, Arafat, as a government leader. His desire to replicate in the West Bank and Gaza the decision-making processes developed in exile, and to centralize and monopolize the power hierarchy in the new Palestinian Authority faced strong opposition from two poles of local leadership. One was the younger leadership resident in the West Bank and Gaza who had gained experience from the popular committees that had sustained the intifada but now found themselves undermined by the new Palestinian Authority. Pivotal as they were in elevating Fatah exiles to proto-state politics in the form of the new Palestinian Authority, this younger leadership was perceived as a threat to Arafat and his old-guard coterie, who were increasingly referred to as ‘the Tunisians’. A second group of local leaders also born of the intifada and who resented Arafat unfairly reaping the benefits of their resistance work was Hamas. In rejecting Fatah’s idea of a negotiated partition, and by referring to all of mandate Palestine, including present-day Israel, as an Islamic waqf (religious trust), Hamas for many years rejected anything to do with the Oslo accords. By positioning itself as the main opposition to Fatah, Hamas then became the chief beneficiary to the growing disillusionment with the cronyism of Arafat’s authority. Furthermore, fearing marginalization if Oslo actually succeeded, Hamas had a vested interest in ensuring its failure. From 1994, its sabotage of the Oslo process took the form of suicide bombings against civilian targets in Israel.
12. Map of Oslo areas A, B, C
For many Israelis, the whole point of the Oslo accords was to secure the Palestinians’ commitment to end armed violence and to resolve the conflict peacefully. ‘Enough of blood and tears, enough,’ announced Prime Minister Rabin on the White House Lawn in 1993, to which Arafat responded by assuring Israelis that Palestinian sovereignty was Israel’s strongest guarantee of its security. But Arafat’s failure to curb Hamas’s violence against Israeli civilians profoundly increased their suspicions of the Palestinian leadership, and raised deeply felt fears over the emergence of an independent Palestinian state.
Emotions ran highest among militant Israeli groups, who, mirroring Hamas, framed their opposition to the Oslo process in religious terms. For them Oslo was more than a security risk; it was an abandonment of God’s mandate. In 1995, one young religious extremist, Yigal Amir, assassinated Prime Minister Rabin during a massive peace rally in Tel Aviv. Amir had concluded that Rabin’s death was sanctioned by the Prime Minister’s willingness to forfeit tracts of land intended by God exclusively for the Jews. In 1996 elections, the Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister by a narrow margin. During the campaign, held during a surge of suicide bombings undertaken by Hamas, Netanyahu presented himself as ‘Mr Security’ and ran on a platform of slowing down the peace process. He had opposed the Oslo accords, not willing to give up control over the West Bank, what he referred to as Judea and Samaria, and refusing to acknowledge any connection between land and peace. Upon becoming prime minister, Netanyahu announced that the Israeli military would make no further redeployments in the West Bank and Gaza until Arafat complied scrupulously with all of the security provisions. His goal was for Israel alone to determine the location and extent of any future redeployments, while continuing to build settlements in the territory it controlled.
A volatile period, Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister (1996–9) witnessed the derailing of the Oslo accords. The military control and closures exercised by the Israeli Defence Forces in Area C worsened an already dire economic situation throughout the occupied territories. Netanyahu’s demand that Arafat crack down on Hamas reduced the Palestinian leader in the eyes of most of his people to the role of Israel’s policeman. Given the basic power imbalance between the two sides, Arafat had little leverage with which to prevent Netanyahu from slowing down or reversing the Oslo process. A desperate attempt to restore momentum was made by the United States at the Wye Summit held in September 1998. Netanyahu agreed to further gradual redeployments of the Israeli military from Zones B and C, and in return Arafat committed Palestinian forces to cooperate closely with the Central Intelligence Agency in curbing Hamas activity. But Netanyahu’s concessions lost him the support of his own political base. The coalition of religious and nationalist parties on which Netanyahu depended was already riddled by dissension, and his government was brought down before he could follow through on the promised redeployments. With the five-year interim period of the Oslo accords coming to a close, the all-important discussion of the contentious issues that had been left for the final status talks (sovereignty, refugees, settlements, Jerusalem) had yet to be broached.
Camp David II and the al-Aqsa intifada
Whatever the initial promise of Oslo, negotiations on the final status issues had to await the last-ditch efforts of Labour leader Ehud Barak, elected prime minister in 1999. These negotiations took place during a momentous round of diplomacy convened by President Clinton in 2000 at the same presidential retreat where President Carter had mediated the historic deal between Begin and Sadat. In what came to be known as Camp David II, Clinton, Arafat, and Barak spent a couple of weeks in July 2000 trying to end over a century of conflict. Going in with little advance preparation, and substantial gaps separating the stated positions on the thorniest issues, the summit by all accounts faced the odds of a ‘Hail Mary Pass’, a final, d
esperate attempt to score at the end of the game. Not only did the Israeli and Palestinian leaders face huge challenges in bridging the chasm between them, they also had to navigate the growing gulf that separated them from large segments of their populations at home. Neither leader had made much effort to prepare their people for the agonizing compromises that would be needed to achieve a historic reconciliation in the final status negotiations.
The two-week conference ended in anger and frustration. Amidst competing attempts to allocate blame, both sides came out more distrustful than ever about the real intentions of the other. Because no written offers were minuted during the conference, reports on the precise nature of the exchanges between the two negotiating teams differ widely. Barak is reported to have offered proposals—on the sharing of Jerusalem as well as on the percentage of West Bank territory on which a future Palestinian state could be built—that went far beyond what previous Israeli negotiators had countenanced. Nonetheless, the package fell well short of Palestinian demands, especially regarding the question of sovereignty over Jerusalem and recognition of the rights of Palestinian refugees. Israeli negotiators were angered by the unwillingness of the Palestinian side to respond with counterproposals, and accused them of not bargaining in good faith. For their part, Palestinians were deeply suspicious from the outset that the United States and Israel were colluding against them. Moreover, they were vexed by Barak’s arrogant negotiating style and greatly resented the notion that occupied territories were being ‘offered’ to them, as opposed to ‘returned’.