A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  Faced with such predictions, the mood among the Israeli public oscillated between keeping a Jewish majority and keeping occupied land. In the run-up to the June 1992 elections, Labour Party leader Yitzhak Rabin promised to conclude an agreement on Palestinian self-government within a year, and freeze settlement building. Remarkably it was an election promise he nearly kept. Handsomely voted into office, the laconic former chief-of-staff spent the next three years negotiating the handover of the occupied territories he had conquered in 1967. To clear Palestinian decks of opponents he expelled over 400 Hamas activists to Lebanon, ended the thirty-year ban on contact with the PLO and entered into secret negotiations with Arafat’s advisers who had spent the previous eighteen months in Tunis barred from the negotiating table. Arafat’s authority had reached its nadir. He was isolated internationally for his perceived Gulf War support for Baghdad and internally by a grassroots leadership in the occupied territories which had waged the intifada and now basked in the spotlight of the negotiations. Aware that he was struggling for his political survival, Rabin calculated that Arafat might offer the best terms for peace for the minimum territorial price. In January 1993, two Israeli academics and Ahmed Qurei, the PLO treasurer better known as Abu Ala, began the first of fourteen rounds of secret talks in Oslo. On 13 September 1993, in one of the most abiding images of the twentieth century, President Clinton gathered the Middle East’s leaders on the White House lawn and like a mother-hen stretched out his arms over Rabin and Arafat. (The US judged it propitious to ignore Norway’s fundamental role: henceforth the US would make sure that subsequent agreements would be named after American locations, not European cities, and that they – not Europeans – would be effective intermediaries.)

  The Oslo Accords were less a treaty than a timetable, beginning with a pull-out from Gaza city and Jericho within four months and leading at the end of a five-year interim period (May 1998) to Israel’s withdrawal from all the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, excepting ‘specified military locations’, settlements and Jerusalem. For Rabin, the main advantage of Arafat’s deal over that offered by the formal Palestinian delegation was that the most intractable issues of sovereignty over Jerusalem, settlements, water and refugees were deferred for five years without any Israeli commitment to compromise; that Israel gained formal Palestinian recognition of its sovereignty over three-quarters of mandatary Palestine, without any Israeli recognition of Palestine’s right to a state; and that no sanction was written into the deal to prevent Israel from exploiting the clear asymmetry in the political, economic and military strength of the two sides.

  That said, for all its failings, the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government agreed in Oslo marked a seismic shift in Arab–Israeli relations and heralded the mutual recognition of two rival nationalisms that for a century had underpinned the Middle East conflict. In July 1994, Yasir Arafat was greeted back in Gaza with a hero’s welcome after twenty-seven years in exile, and shortly after was elected president of the Palestinian Authority. Over the following six years, his administration received $3.5 billion in donor aid, took full or partial control of 40 per cent of the West Bank and full control of 70 per cent of the Gaza Strip, and acquired many of the trappings of independence, including uniformed police. In the process, Israel, too, look set to mature from its 45-year existence as a paranoid shtetl into a diverse, economically prosperous state. Internally, Israel’s leaders advocated greater equality for non-Jews and investment for the country’s marginalized Arab towns. The appointment of Israel’s first Arab ambassador triggered a debate about the propriety of a national anthem which celebrated Jewish yearning for the East when a quarter of its 7 million people were not Jews. The Zeitgeist was characterized in the maturing of Rabin from a sullen general to a convinced apostle of Palestinian peace. In his last Knesset speech he made an admission which for a stalwart Zionist amounted to heresy: ‘We did not come to an empty country.’

  From the first, Oslo had its detractors. Livid at the Palestinian decision to abandon the principle of a comprehensive peace, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad warned Arafat to take more care of his personal safety. Jordan’s King Hussein, whose pre-1967 realm had included the West Bank, read the Oslo Accords as the last nail in the coffin of his dream to again be King of Jerusalem. He joined Assad in champing at Arafat’s betrayal. But neither was entirely ingenuous. Jordan had privately agreed the terms of its treaty with Israel by October 1992. And before Oslo, Hafez al-Assad, bereft of Soviet backing, had begun his long-distance chess game with Rabin, with the self-effacing US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, relaying the moves. Syria demanded full withdrawal, Israel full peace including open borders and an exchange of ambassadors. The shuttle diplomacy continued throughout 1994, and by the end of the year, Syria’s chief-of-staff, Hikmat Shihabi, was holding talks with his Israeli counterpart, Ehud Barak, in Washington. Not for the last time, Syria felt insulted at Barak’s arrogant approach. But the talks continued, resulting in a draft agreement on security arrangements intended to take effect following Israeli withdrawal. Syria began preparing its public for what it called the strategic option of peace.

  Tentative moves towards normalization between Israel and Arab states followed fast on the heels of agreements with the Palestinians. On his return from his reluctant White House handshake with Arafat, Rabin stopped over in Rabat to be publicly congratulated by King Hassan II of Morocco. And thereafter, with the exception of Libya and Iraq, all Arab states joined in the peace process, with even Hassan al-Turabi, the militant leader of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, appealing to his Palestinian counterpart, Hamas, not to reject the Oslo Accords. President Clinton presided over another public signing ceremony at the White House between King Hussein and Rabin in June 1994, followed four months later with peace treaty festivities in the Arava desert on the Jordanian–Israeli border culminating in a release of balloons. Plans were announced for a joint Red–Dead Sea canal, integrated electricity grids and direct telephone links – all economic symbols of a warm peace that Israel had failed to secure from Egypt. Jordan was rewarded by having its US debts cancelled and, to Arafat’s exasperation, by a formal Israeli commitment to respect Jordan’s special role in the Muslim shrines of Jerusalem. Temporarily seduced by talk of peace dividends, the Arab League debated lifting the economic boycott. Qatar offered to supply gas to Israel, and joined Morocco, Tunisia and Oman in opening liaison bureaux in Tel Aviv. Rabin’s old rival and foreign minister, Shimon Peres, peddled a romantic vision of a future Middle East common market, stretching from Marrakech to Muscat, modelled on the European Union. The United States offered backing, rallying Arab leaders and businessmen to a series of economic summits, of which the first in 1994 in the Moroccan city of Casablanca was to be the most elaborate. There was also a military component. Jordan agreed not to allow a third country to deploy forces in Jordan that could threaten Israel. And in February 1996, Turkey opened its airspace to the Israeli air force, in the process wedging Syria in a Turk–Israeli sandwich and ceding Israeli bombers a flight path to both Iran and Iraq.

  By 1995, the United States had much cause for satisfaction at the stability of its post-Gulf War hegemony. Washington’s policy of dual containment had successfully isolated Iran and Iraq in the region, just as it was integrating Israel into the fold. The family of Saddam Hussein seemed set to self-destruct, with the defection of his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil. And Israel had begun its withdrawal from the occupied territories. But from this high point in mid-1995, three events were about to rapidly upset the region’s Pax Americana: the elimination of Hussein Kamil, noted above; the publication of a fatwa by Usama bin Laden; and three bullets fired by an Israeli zealot.

  Israel’s Missed Opportunity for Peace

  In late 1995 an Israeli law graduate from Bar Ilan religious university attended a peace rally in Tel Aviv and shot dead its guest of honour, Israel’s prime minister. Yigal Amir, the assassin, argued that Rabin had betrayed the Messiah by preparing for an end to Israeli rul
e of biblical land, and claimed his act had rabbinic blessing. The killing, he argued, was a logical outcome of religious Zionism, the officially propagated ideology that hailed the conquest of the West Bank – Judea and Samaria – as inaugurating the messianic age. For three decades, Rabin and his fellow Israeli leaders had fostered the religious settler movement, only for the movement to turn on him when he tried to dump it. From the first days of the Oslo Accords, a heady cocktail of Jewish settlers, Russian migrants and students from religious seminaries demonstrated by burning effigies of Rabin in SS uniform. Settler leaders announced the formation of militias and warned that the dismantling of settlements would trigger revolt. In February 1994, an American-born settler, Baruch Goldstein, gunned down twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in Hebron’s shared shrine, known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs to Jews and the Ibrahim’s mosque by Muslims, before being disarmed and beaten to death. The rabbi officiating at his funeral said the fingernail of a Jew was worth more than the lives of a thousand Arabs, and his grave at the neighbouring Kiryat Arba settlement became a carefully manicured park. In a court case, Baruch Goldstein’s widow won the right to keep her husband’s machine gun, with which she triumphantly decorated her mantelpiece. In Jerusalem, Jews staged anti-Palestinian riots.

  Wildfire religious fanaticism among Palestinians was similarly destructive. For thirty years, the PLO had championed itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. But the intifada had spawned other contenders, most prominently Hamas. Denied a place in the peace process, they opted to spoil it instead. Tapping widespread public scepticism they topped polls in student and trade-union elections for the first time. And following Goldstein’s Hebron attack, they launched their first bus bombings on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

  Israel’s response marked the antithesis of the normalization the peace process was supposed to deliver. Rabin ended normal movement between the occupied territories and Israel, the greatest single benefit of its post-1967 occupation. He established barriers and checkpoints which emphasized the military occupation the Oslo Accords were designed to lift, and at a huge economic cost prevented tens of thousands of Palestinians from working in Israel. Amid the economic downturn and increase in restrictions on movement, Arafat was ridiculed as an Israeli lackey. He grappled to maintain control internally, clamping down on opposition and in the process intensifying the opposition to the PLO’s rule. Instead of a democratic state, the PLO established another regional autocratic regime, the Palestinian Authority or PA, dependent on 70,000 intelligence and security personnel, nearly four times the number stipulated under the Oslo Accords. A 1997 investigation revealed that a third of the Authority’s $800 million budget, for the most part foreign aid, was either wasted or skimmed off by corrupt officials. ‘It’s a mafia state,’ said Abdul Jawad Saleh, a former agriculture minister beaten by Palestinian police for leading an anti-corruption protest. As living standards for the majority plummeted, returning PLO exiles – Israel’s new interlocutors – swooned in luxury. Palestinian security officers were rumoured to frequent the bar at a Jewish settlement in Gaza where fifty families occupied a piece of land the size of a neighbouring camp housing 100,000 refugees.

  Rabin’s assassination attenuated the declining confidence in the Oslo process. Even King Hussein of Jordan found his successor, Peres, slippery. Peres’s vision of a New Middle East smacked suspiciously of a replacement of Israeli military might with economic hegemony, and Jordanians mocked the Arava treaty as the ‘king’s peace’. Among Israelis, Peres was seen as lacking the mettle of Rabin. In an attempt to counter his soft image ahead of early elections, he ordered the extra-judicial killing of Yahya Ayyash, the Hamas ‘engineer’ who had masterminded earlier bomb attacks. In the process Peres triggered a sickening cycle of violence. The suicide squads, which had lain dormant for the previous six months, blew up four buses in a week. Clinton and a host of Arab leaders desperate to preserve Peres in power staged an anti-terrorism summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh. But faced with Israeli jibes of appeasement, Peres looked north. For almost a decade, South Lebanon’s population had been mere bystanders as a few hundred guerrillas from the Iranian-backed Hizbollah Shiite militia engaged in a carefully choreographed routine of tit-for-tat clashes with the Israeli army and their Christian militia occupying the south of the country. But when Peres unleashed his ‘Grapes of Wrath’ offensive, it was civilians who bore the price. Four hundred thousand Lebanese fled a blizzard of 25,000 Israeli shells, one of which fell in a UN compound near Qana village and killed over a hundred Lebanese who had gone there for shelter. Grapes of Wrath not only set back Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction and restored Israel’s reputation as a colonial bully; it also cost Peres the election. Arab Israelis boycotted the poll en masse and Peres, who had entered the campaign 20 per cent ahead in the polls, lost albeit by a minuscule margin. Six months after Rabin’s assassination, Israelis elected Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister – the man who as Likud leader had compared the Oslo Accords to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler.

  For the next four years, the peace process sunk into hibernation. Netanyahu had a degree in architecture, and the political ambition to rebuild Greater Israel. He revived the spirit of religious Zionism, putting Bible teaching and Jewish history at the core of the school curriculum. Jewish settlements sprouted atop West Bank hills, cutting hopes for a contiguous and viable Palestinian state into pieces. Palestinian protests were dismissed as terrorism, the Arab world was portrayed as the perennial enemy of the Jewish people, and Israeli tanks rolled up to the outskirts of Nablus. President Clinton pressured Netanyahu to sign the 1998 Wye River memorandum committing Israel to withdraw from a further 13 per cent of the West Bank, but Netanyahu reneged on the deal and pulled troops out of just 2 per cent, part of Hebron, a town in the Southern West Bank. Further raising tensions, he confiscated one of the last segments of open land outer Jerusalem still in Palestinian hands, announced the construction of the Har Homa settlement on its soil, and declared, ‘the battle for Jerusalem has begun’. After five years of the peace process, Israel in Arab eyes was again resurfacing as a regional cancer, and US attempts to reshape the Middle East map were in disarray. Arab states backpeddled on normalization, and in Israel and the Arab world anti-Oslo voices stole the limelight. Netanyahu’s high-profile release of Hamas’s jailed spiritual leader, Ahmed Yassin, in exchange for Mossad agents caught in Jordan trying to assassinate a Hamas official resulted – deliberately or otherwise – in boosting Palestinian opposition to Oslo. The hysteria which greeted Yassin’s return to Gaza upstaged Yasir Arafat’s own triumphal return from exile three years earlier and revealed the dramatic growth in Palestinian popular support for the Islamist movement. Netanyahu’s coalition partners on the religious right were equally dismissive of the Oslo process and, following his partial withdrawal from Hebron, threatened to withdraw from his coalition. Facing a vote of no confidence, Netanyahu went to the polls in May 1999 and lost.

  On the eve of the millennium few would have predicted that the euphoria which greeted the victory of Labour leader, Ehud Barak, would so fatally and quickly turn to despair. In his post-election address, he promised ecstatic crowds to end Israel’s 22-year occupation of Southern Lebanon within a year. And after an effusive exchange of compliments between Assad and Barak, Syria and Israel sent their delegates to West Virginia to resume negotiations from the point at which discussions in Maryland had ended four years before – full withdrawal for a full peace. Talks were followed by a meeting in Washington between the Syrian foreign minister, Farouq al-Shara, and Barak – the highest-level public encounter between the two states since the conflict began. Their differences narrowed down to Syria’s demand to return to its pre-1967 borders lapping the shores of Lake Tiberias. Israel argued that in the intervening thirty years, over-usage by Israel had caused the lake to shrink several metres short of the pre-1967 border, and that Syria therefore had no claim to its shores. Even the charm of Clinton,
who travelled to the ironic setting of Lake Geneva to meet an ailing Assad was unable to bridge the impasse. Since neither side would yield a metre, the talks collapsed.

  Failure on the Syria track upset Barak’s other initiatives. Syria forbade Lebanon, where it maintained 30,000 troops, to make peace with Israel until it had retrieved the Golan Heights. And without a green light from President Assad, the Lebanese army declined Barak’s appeal to deploy along the Israeli border. Hizbollah instead filled the vacuum. Barak determined to push on regardless and present Syria with a fait accompli. But Israel’s orderly withdrawal, scheduled for 7 July 2000 turned into a rout by the end of May. Under attack, Israel’s proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), abandoned their positions and weapons to Hizbollah and withered away to Israel, leaving only the running sore of the Shebaa farms, the Israeli-occupied foothills of the Golan Heights where the borders of Lebanon, Syria and Israel meet still in their hands. A massive Israeli bombardment of Lebanon’s power stations failed to stem the Hizbollah advance. South Lebanese villagers joined the revelry by breaking down the doors of Khiam prison, a notorious torture centre, and freeing its inmates. Across the Arab world, Hizbollah’s victory was hailed as proof that armed resistance by a tiny Islamist guerrilla force could defeat Israel, the most heavily armed state between France and India.

  With his parliamentary coalition fast unravelling, Barak belatedly turned to the Palestinian track in a rush to conclude a deal. Barak sought to bypass the third phase of the Oslo agreement, which required Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and jump straight to negotiations on permanent status from which Israel had withdrawn in 1995. Much of the groundwork on settling the core disputes of Jerusalem, settlements, borders, water and refugees was completed in meetings in Stockholm over the summer of 2000. And on 11 July the two leaders arrived at the US presidential retreat of Camp David to spend a fortnight resolving a century-old dispute, while Bill Clinton, anxious to secure a final foreign policy coup in the twilight of his presidency, shuttled between them. The Camp David setting evoked the dramatic breakthrough concluded by the earlier trio of Carter, Sadat and Begin twenty-three years earlier. As Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat acknowledged at the time, the negotiations marked the closest Israelis and Palestinians had yet come to a final settlement of their differences. The Israelis insisted they had offered more to the Palestinians than ever before. Indeed five years earlier, prior to Rabin’s death, Palestinian negotiators appeared ready to accept far less, including a Palestinian capital outside the borders of Jerusalem. Why then did Camp David result in such a catastrophic collapse?