The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict_A Very Short Introduction
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Unbridgeable as the gaps remained during the initial Camp David II summit, they did narrow, and enough had been achieved to warrant the continuation of talks by individual Palestinian and Israeli negotiators. At the end of September, Barak and Arafat again met cordially. More significantly, in December, and on the verge of leaving office, President Clinton put in one last effort as mediator by drawing up his own set of parameters for a peace settlement. According to Clinton’s plan, the Palestinians would build their state on 94 per cent of the occupied territories. In return for Israel annexing 6 per cent of occupied land—that is, the major West Bank Israeli settlements—the new state of Palestine would be given the equivalent of 3 per cent in land contiguous to the Gaza Strip. That is, Palestinians would be compensated by a ‘land swap’, using the 1949 armistice lines as the basis for the border. On the issue of Jerusalem, sovereignty would be shared, with Arab neighbourhoods becoming part of the Palestinian state and Jewish areas, including the Jewish quarter of the Old City, coming under Israeli sovereignty. On the highly sensitive issue of the ‘right of return’ for Palestinian refugees, Clinton’s plan envisaged it being met by their return to the new state of Palestine, not to their original homes which were now part of Israel. In an effort to provide the Clinton parameters with a more detailed framework, Israelis and Palestinians held marathon meetings in the Egyptian resort town of Taba. They concluded the Taba meetings in January 2001 with the announcement that they had never been so close to a resolution of the outstanding issues.
The al-Aqsa intifada
The window of opportunity had, however, closed. As one negotiator lamented, ‘If Camp David was too little, Taba was too late.’ The spirit of compromise had been profoundly overtaken by a second intifada, the violent Palestinian uprising that consumed the region for the next few years. Its outbreak resulted from the widespread disillusionment of Palestinians, especially the younger generation, both with the failure of the Oslo peace process to end the daily humiliations of an occupation that had gone on for over thirty years and with the inept and authoritarian rule of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. The pent-up anger exploded in late September 2000, triggered by the provocative visit by Ariel Sharon (successor to Netanyahu as leader of the Likud opposition) to al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), the site in East Jerusalem on which stands the golden Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque (see Illustration 13). Accompanied by hundreds of Israeli police, Sharon sought to assert that any Jew had the right to visit the site (known to Jews as the Temple Mount), also the location of the Jewish First and Second Temples. Palestinians reacted the following day with stone-throwing demonstrations which were put down by Israeli security forces with lethal force. The death of eighteen protesters at the hands of the Israeli security forces brought to the surface the stresses and strains felt by Palestinians. The demonstrations quickly transformed into a sustained popular uprising that came to be known as the al-Aqsa intifada in reference to both the 1987 uprising and to the tensions, in the wake of the Camp David failure, over the question of sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy places. By summer of 2003, some 2,400 Palestinians and 800 Israelis had lost their lives, with thousands more wounded.
13. Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif (present day)
As was the case with the first intifada, the sudden outbreak of violence took the Palestinian leadership by surprise. But in the volatile environment, marked by widespread mistrust and anger, Arafat did little to restrain the mounting violence. Without a coordinated leadership, the array of militant acts broadened, with Palestinian security forces employing their light automatic weapons and Hamas directing suicide bombing campaigns that targeted Israeli civilians. Pent-up anger also lay behind the intensity of the Israeli response to the uprising. As the cycle of violence gathered steam, the political equations on the ground changed dramatically. Among Palestinians, power became more fragmented: internal discord within Fatah intensified, while Hamas was able to capitalize on its rejection of the failed Oslo process to put forth an increasingly credible challenge to Fatah’s position in the Palestinian Authority. In Israel, on the other hand, the suicide attacks in the wake of the Camp David failure traumatized the political left and helped Ariel Sharon defeat Barak in the 2001 elections. In this way, the second intifada in effect strengthened the forces of Greater Israel, that is a Jewish state in the region between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.
Upon coming to power, Sharon set about destroying the Palestinian Authority’s political and economic infrastructure. The deployment of helicopters and fighter jets, and the incursions of Israeli Defence Force tanks into Palestinian civilian areas, brought about tremendous human suffering. In the eyes of Israelis, such massive military force was warranted by the overriding concern for security. Israel argued that not only had Arafat consistently failed to comply with the security provisions set out in the Oslo accords, he was now engaging in violence as a strategic gambit to pursue political objectives. Held responsible in these ways, Arafat was confined in 2002 to his office compound in Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem. As the Israeli military forcibly reoccupied Palestinian areas, it effectively undid the Palestinian Authority in all but name, and increased the checkpoints that severely restricted the Palestinians’ movements in the occupied territories.
Sharon’s actions were bolstered internationally by the events of 9/11, when Islamist militants from Saudi Arabia and Egypt turned airplanes into missiles destroying New York’s World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon in Washington DC on 11 September 2001, leaving more than 3,200 people dead. Following these attacks by al-Qaeda, President George W. Bush launched his ‘war on terrorism’ in which he judged countries either ‘with us or against us’. Although some members of the US administration, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, stressed the need for greater engagement with the Israeli–Palestinian peace process to strengthen the United States in its battle against al-Qaeda, most members of the Bush administration simply regarded Sharon as confronting his own bin Laden in Arafat, and concluded that Israel should be left alone to deal with the terrorist networks threatening it.
Rather than negotiate, Sharon at this stage initiated a unilateral approach towards separating Israelis from Palestinians. The policy came to be known as ‘disengagement’. One key component of the policy was the construction of a physical barrier made up of a complex network of barbed write, electric fences, patrol roads, and concrete walls 8 metres (about 26 feet) high. The idea was justified by the need to prevent entry into Israel by suicide bombers. But Palestinians condemned the way the barrier snaked its way well beyond the 1967 border to envelop large Jewish settlement blocs (see Illustration 14). Palestinians claimed that such annexation of land was a violation of international law, a claim upheld by the International Court of Justice in 2004. A second feature of Sharon’s disengagement plan involved the removal of 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, home to 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs. Though he had once personified the settlement ethos, Sharon was increasingly worried about the need to reconcile the dream of a Greater Israel with demographic projections of an approaching Arab majority. Furthermore, the pulling of settlements out of Gaza provided cover for deepening Israeli control over West Bank settlements. As an adviser to Sharon put it, the Gaza withdrawal applied the necessary formaldehyde to freeze the political process.
From the start, Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan was presented as an alternative to negotiation. Arafat was blamed for the violence and rejected as a possible partner in peace. Some observers worried about the impact of isolating and marginalizing Arafat as an enemy of peace: they argued that only ‘Mr Palestine’ had the mandate for making the painful compromises expected from the Palestinians in a peace settlement. No doubt, the authority of the Palestinian leadership suffered greatly from Arafat’s marginalization and the deepening of internal splits within Fatah.
Arafat died of a mysterious illness in 2004. He was succeeded as president of the Palestinian Authority by Mahmoud Abb
as (also known as Abu Mazen). Abbas had strongly opposed the second intifada, describing it as disastrous for Palestinians. One of the key architects of the Oslo accords, Abbas remained a believer in negotiations throughout the escalating cycle of violence. But his failure to persuade Israel to ease life in the occupied territories made it extremely difficult for him to rebuild the credibility of Fatah and to shore up a basis of popular support for continuing with the Oslo process. In contrast to the fragmentation and disarray of Fatah, Hamas’s power and influence were growing.
14. Map showing walls and barriers in the West Bank
With the goal of integrating, and subordinating, Hamas within the constitutional structures created by the Oslo accords, Abbas offered a round of parliamentary elections, set for January 2006. The result stunned everyone. Whereas Fatah had little to show for its diplomatic efforts over a decade, during which Israel’s arbitrary restrictions in the occupied territories had in fact increased, Hamas effectively positioned itself during the election campaign to take credit for the evacuation of Israeli settlers from Gaza. Hamas also benefited greatly from the disarray in which Arafat’s authoritarian leadership had left Fatah. Despite having dominated the Palestinian legislature for its first decade, Fatah was trounced by Hamas in free and open democratic elections.
Hamas’s victory severely complicated Abbas’s efforts to restart negotiations with Israel. Both Fatah and much of the international community called for a boycott of the Islamist government until it honoured previous Palestinian commitments that recognized Israel and renounced violence. Fatah officials, meanwhile, continued to behave as though they were still in charge. Political activists from both sides confronted each other in increasingly violent clashes. This was especially the case in Gaza, where deteriorating economic conditions were exacerbated by growing lawlessness. In June 2007, fearing a US-supported effort by Fatah to overthrow it, Hamas brutally but swiftly seized all Fatah bases in the Gaza Strip, and gradually established its own effective control over the territory. Abbas accused Hamas of staging a coup, dismissed the Hamas-led government, and created an emergency cabinet to rule the West Bank separately. With Palestinian society politically as well as geographically divided and Israelis increasingly sceptical of a peaceful settlement, the two-states solution proved more elusive than ever.
Conclusion
The Oslo peace process began, amidst great fanfare and optimism, with the signing of the first Israeli–Palestinian agreement on the White House Lawn on 13 September 1993. However, from the outset there was fierce opposition on both sides to a diplomatic settlement. The position of the opponents was strengthened by the slow and hesitant progress in implementing the accords. Rather than lead to a final peace treaty, the Oslo Accords contributed instead to greater insecurity for Israelis and, in the occupied Palestinian territories, a more deeply felt, and resented, matrix of Israeli military control.
Although the Oslo accords did eventually lead to a blueprint for a two-states solution, as agreed upon in 2001 at the Egyptian resort town of Taba, the mounting frustration and rising anger on both sides made that plan impossible to implement. The Taba framework promised a resolution to the conflict, but the Oslo process had over eight years gravely deepened the mistrust felt by everyone. Each side accused the other of sabotaging the peace process. Palestinians accused Israel of taking advantage of negotiations to further entrench Jewish settlements on the land they sought for their own state, while Israel accused the Palestinians of equivocating on their commitment to end armed attacks.
In late 2000, the region descended again into a spiral of violence, known as the al-Aqsa intifada. Hamas’s popularity grew dramatically as political opposition to Fatah rose, and Israelis became increasingly opposed to the idea of living beside an independent Palestinian state. Meanwhile, Jewish settlements in the occupied territories continued to expand, raising real concerns about whether the land of historic Palestine could in fact practically be partitioned.
As a result, the Oslo process ended, on the one hand, with individual negotiators successfully outlining the main ingredients of a peace settlement but, on the other, with the chances of implementing that resolution crushed by the spiralling violence that erupted out of the pent-up mistrust and anger revealed or manufactured over the previous eight years. Like the story of the lost traveller who, after asking for directions to his destination, is told: ‘If I were going there, I wouldn’t start from here,’ no common ground could be found after Taba from which the two sides could begin again down the road to a genuine reconciliation and negotiated peace. The Oslo accords had been premised on the idea that time was needed to build the political space in which negotiations could succeed. Far from healing wounds, the Oslo process rubbed more salt into them.
Conclusion
This is just really hard … This is as intractable a problem as you get.
President Barack Obama, Time Magazine
interview, 15 January 2010
First laid out in the Taba accords of early 2001, the parameters for a resolution of the century-old Palestinian–Israeli conflict have since been elaborated upon by several initiatives. Each, in turn, has strengthened the regional and international consensus supporting a two-states solution. In early 2002, Saudi Arabia proposed a peace plan that came to be known as the Arab Peace Initiative when it received the unanimous approval of the Arab League meeting in Beirut: it promised Israel that in return for the full withdrawal from all occupied territory Israel would receive regional recognition and that its relations with the Arab world would be normalized. In April 2003, the Quartet group (United States, Europe, Russia, and the United Nations) announced a three-stage plan known as the ‘Road Map’ for bringing an end to the 1967 occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestine state. In December 2003, prominent Israeli and Palestinian politicians, many of whom had participated in the Camp David summit, avoided the usual recourse to gradual measures and arrived at a comprehensive agreement: known as the Geneva Initiative, it filled many of the gaps left by the Taba accords. In 2004, the International Court of Justice called for an end to the construction of the wall which it described as contrary to international law. In June 2009, in a widely anticipated speech delivered in Cairo, Egypt, President Barack Obama underlined the United States’ endorsement of a two-states solution:
For decades … there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It’s easy to point fingers—for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: The only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.
That is in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest, and the world’s interest.
Finally, on 29 November 2012—sixty-five years after the two-states solution first garnered explicit international recognition—the United Nations General Assembly recognized a Palestinian state.
Text of the United Nations General Assembly resolution on the status of Palestine
29 November 2012
The General Assembly,
Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and stressing in this regard the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples …
Stressing the importance of maintaining and strengthening international peace founded upon freedom, equality, justice and respect for fundamental human rights,
Recalling its resolution 181 (II) of 29 November 1947 …
Reaffirming also relevant Security Council resolutions, including, inter alia, resolutions 242 (1967) of 22 November 1967, 338 (1973) of 22 October 1973 …
Recalling the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice
of 9 July 2004 …
Recalling also the Arab Peace Initiative adopted in March 2002 by the Council of the League of Arab States,
Reaffirming its commitment, in accordance with international law, to the two-State solution of an independent, sovereign, democratic, viable and contiguous State of Palestine living side by side with Israel in peace and security on the basis of the pre-1967 borders …
1. Reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967;
2. Decides to accord to Palestine non-member observer State status in the United Nations, without prejudice to the acquired rights, privileges and role of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the United Nations as the representative of the Palestinian people, in accordance with the relevant resolutions and practice;
3. Expresses the hope that the Security Council will consider favourably the application submitted on 23 September 2011 by the State of Palestine for admission to full membership in the United Nations;
4. Affirms its determination to contribute to the achievement of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and the attainment of a peaceful settlement in the Middle East that ends the occupation that began in 1967 and fulfils the vision of two States: an independent, sovereign, democratic, contiguous and viable State of Palestine living side by side in peace and security with Israel on the basis of the pre-1967 borders;
5. Expresses the urgent need for the resumption and acceleration of negotiations within the Middle East peace process based on the relevant United Nations resolutions, the terms of reference of the Madrid Conference, including the principle of land for peace, the Arab Peace Initiative and the Quartet road map to a permanent two-State solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement between the Palestinian and Israeli sides that resolves all outstanding core issues, namely the Palestine refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, borders, security and water;