Details of the negotiations remain shrouded in recrimination. Palestinian delegates say Barak’s proposals at Camp David amounted to Israeli annexation of the best Palestinian lands, a patchwork state of disjointed Bantustans, the perpetuation of Israeli control over much of East Jerusalem (the old city would have been more a Palestinian municipality than a capital), a continued Israeli military presence on Palestinian territory, Israeli control over Palestinian natural resources, airspace and borders, and the return of fewer than 1 per cent of nearly four million refugees to their homes, with no recognized right of return.
Israelis stress Barak’s political bravery in breaking Israeli taboos. According to Israeli negotiators, Barak agreed to withdraw from all the Gaza Strip and all but 5 per cent of the West Bank including the Jordan Valley, which since 1967 had served as Israel’s security border. Israel stated it had no plans to divide the territory into enclaves and that the only separation would be between Gaza and the West Bank with a safe passage attaching the two; according to Barak, Israel would also maintain a slither of land slicing through the West Bank from Jerusalem to the Jordan River, with Palestinians restricted to tunnels running underneath. On refugees, Barak proposed an annual drip into Israel of tens of thousands of refugees in the guise of ‘family reunification’, and a $20 billion compensation fund to settle the rest in the new state of Palestine, but flatly refused any ‘right of return’. To the exasperation of Palestinians, Barak characterized Palestinian refugees as ‘salmon’, suggesting in the words of one negotiator, Hussein Agha, that Palestinian ‘yearning to return to their land somehow is supposed to fade away in roughly eighty years in a manner that the Jewish people’s never did, even after two thousand years’. On settlements, Barak accepted evacuation of all but a small group of settlements abutting the Green Line, where 80 per cent of settlers would reside; unlike Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai, he offered to leave the remaining settlements intact to house returning refugees; finally, on Jerusalem, Israeli negotiators say Barak proposed transferring all East Jerusalem to Palestine, bar the Jewish quarter of the Old City, the Western Wall and the belt of Israeli suburbs built in East Jerusalem since 1967. Jerusalem would be an open city, and the capital of two states. Their key sticking point was sovereignty of the holy site that Muslims call the Dome of the Rock or al-Aqsa sanctuary and Jews the Temple Mount. As with Syria, negotiators were just a few square metres away from a peace treaty.
The negative chemistry cannot entirely explain their failure. Their predecessors at Camp David, Begin and Sadat, forged an agreement despite their equally mutual disdain. What was harder to reconcile was the deepening mistrust of their peoples for the Oslo process. Israelis saw seven years of concessions rewarded with suicide bombs and the Palestinian Authority’s revolving-door policy of imprisoning militants one day and releasing them the next. Palestinians saw the subversion of their dreams into the creation of an Israeli puppet police state. Promised a post-Oslo boom, Palestinians had instead experienced a dramatic decline in living standards, sparked in part by 400 days of curfews and bars on access and movement between the occupied territories and Israel, which prevented Palestinian labourers from getting to work, and traders from getting their goods to market. The cycle of negotiations and the endless prevarications seemed little more than a cynical Israeli delaying tactic to build more checkpoints, roads and settlements in an attempt to scupper the creation of a viable Palestinian state. In the seven years between Oslo and Camp David the settler population of the West Bank doubled to 200,000. In Gaza, 6,500 Jews continued to enjoy the most fertile land and plentiful water resources while one million Palestinians lived trapped in ghetto conditions. After a brief freeze under Rabin, there was a particularly intense period of construction under Netanyahu and his bullish infrastructure minister, Ariel Sharon. Engineers spread a web of highways across the West Bank – ostensibly to enable settlers to bypass Palestinian towns and villages, but in reality carving the territory into cantons. The rate of settlement under Barak was even faster than under Netanyahu (Barak explained he needed to mollify the right wing). For Palestinians, the language of negotiations for a two-strike settlement contrasted starkly with the intensifying colonization on the ground.
With dwindling popular support for the peace process, both sides sought to hide from rather than face the critics. Talks were held abroad and in secret, led by negotiating elites far removed from the festering resentment of the people they were supposed to represent. As much as the occupier, most Palestinians mistrusted the intentions of the self-styled honest broker, the US, which had repeatedly used its veto at the UN to protect Israel from criticism. There was also a gnawing doubt shared by many Palestinians that having won control over Nablus, Hebron and Gaza, they should now abandon for ever their claims to Nazareth and Haifa and much of Jerusalem. Despite Israel’s outright victory in the regional arms race, guerrilla warfare in Lebanon had shown it could nullify Israel’s overwhelming technological superiority. If Hizbollah could wage low-intensity warfare with success, why not the Palestinians’ veteran armed militias? Struggling to balance the appeal of liberation and self-determination with the responsibilities of nascent statehood, Arafat returned from Camp David to Gaza as a Palestinian Saladin clothed in combat fatigues, chanting the Arabic for Jerusalem, ‘al-Quds, al-Quds, al-Quds’.
Israel maintains that the uprising was premeditated and that Arafat was merely seeking a pretext. The intifada, Israel notes, erupted five years to the day after the signing of the interim agreement, which had stipulated a five-year period for a permanent settlement. Palestinians say the firelighter was Ariel Sharon, the new leader of the Israeli opposition Likud party. They saw his decision to parade on the al-Aqsa sanctuary, the third holiest shrine in Islam, with a 1,000-strong guard as a deliberate challenge to the delicate status quo prevailing atop the world’s most fought-over piece of real estate. Four times over the previous decade, furious clashes had erupted in the cobbled courtyard that religious firebrands of the three religions of the Book venerated as the holy fuse for Armageddon.
In the close confines of the sanctuary, Sharon’s military entourage opened fire on stone-throwers, killing four Palestinians and triggering what was named the al-Aqsa intifada, but became the first Israeli–Palestinian war. Initially the resistance was fought much like the first intifada. One month into the fighting, Israeli troops had injured 4,000 Palestinians and killed 130, including a twelve-year-old boy, Muhammad al-Durra, whose death huddled in his father’s arms on a Gaza street was broadcast worldwide on television. But where the first intifada had been waged with slingshots, increasingly the second was fought with bullets and suicide bombings. In the early weeks of the confrontation, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths was 25:1 as Israeli forces used what an official fact-finding committee led by US Senator Mitchell reported were ‘lethal means to control demonstrations of unarmed Palestinians’. After twenty months of fighting, the Palestinians had reduced the ratio to 2:1.
Ten years of pent-up frustration, misery and blame fed the belligerency. People on both sides were cooped up in their homes – Israelis for fear of inner-city bombings, Palestinians because of military curfews. A poll conducted in the heat of the violence in March 2002 showed 60 per cent of Israelis favoured the expulsion of Palestinians over the Jordan River. A Palestinian poll gave suicide bombers an 80 per cent approval rate, up from 10 per cent before the outbreak of fighting in 2000. Those who questioned the morality of suicide operations, such as the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem representative Sari Nusseibeh, were heckled. Within days of the uprising, the violence had spilled over to the Arab–Israeli villages of Galilee, where Israeli troops shot dead eleven Arab protestors, and a Jewish mob rampaged through the Palestinian streets of Nazareth, and torched an ancient mosque in Tiberias. As fighting flared, Israeli voters went to the polls in early 2001 to elect Sharon their prime minister.
While previous post-Oslo leaders had ordered Israel’s tanks to the foothills of Nablus, Sharon
sent them in, fighting Palestinian insurgents and the self-rule Oslo had delivered with fighter-jets and attack helicopters. Sharon prided himself on incremental reoccupations, noting that after a few months Israeli tank incursions, which had initially provoked a global outcry, barely raised an eyebrow. Israel bombed the international airport at Gaza, destroyed Arafat’s helicopters, and knocked down the Palestinian radio and television masts. In March 2002, tanks destroyed the Palestinian headquarters in Gaza and a month later bulldozed the presidential compound in Ramallah, caging Arafat in the basement in a grisly re-enactment of Sharon’s siege of the PLO in Beirut twenty years before. With Palestinian central government decimated, the refugee camp militias of the Islamist movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad had an increasingly free hand. To regain his grip on the uprising, Arafat’s own movement, Fatah, formed the al-Aqsa brigades, which sought to regain local credibility by mimicking Hamas’s suicide bombings. Sharon called up his reserves. On both sides, leaders incapable of making peace were sending their young to fight in a mutually reinforcing death cult.
Foreign mediation offered a more rational course to cool tempers, but the one superpower able to enforce a solution had a new president, George W. Bush, who appeared largely indifferent until faced with the need to secure regional cooperation for his war on Iraq. Fearing that Israel’s re-invasion might undermine Arab support for his plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Bush publicly demanded Sharon pull back the tanks. In March 2002, Washington sponsored a UN Security Council resolution proposing the creation of a Palestinian state, and finally made explicit what had been implicit in a decade of mediation. In a 2002 speech to assuage mounting anger at US plans to invade Iraq, President Bush stated that a Palestinian state ‘could’ be achieved within three years, outlining a path which subsequently materialized into the ‘Roadmap’. The efficacy of the undertaking, which could have been a Balfour Declaration for the Palestinians, was tempered by Bush’s demand that Palestinians create a model democracy and at the same time replace Arafat, one of the region’s few elected leaders.
Similarly seeking to divert regional attention from Iraq, Arab leaders weighed in with proposals of their own, including the eminently conciliatory initiative of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah which offered Israel a ‘full normalization and normal peaceful relations’ with the Arab world in return for a full withdrawal from occupied territory. Viewed from the battlefront, the offer was, in the words of Hizbollah, ‘US ink written with Arab hands’. And when it came to a vote at the Arab summit in Beirut in March 2002, over half the Arab leaders – though not their delegates – stayed away, including President Mubarak, who feared Saudi Arabia was stealing Egypt’s thunder as the regional peacemaker, and Libya’s Qadaffy, who announced his preference for the creation of a single secular state named Isratine. Nevertheless, for the first time the Arab League offered Israel a full peace with its twenty-two members. ‘No one expected,’ said an astonished Jordanian foreign minister, Marwan Muahser, ‘that all Arab states, including Libya and Iraq, would accept.’
Sharon never replied. His lack of courtesy at the time was blamed on the bombing of a Passover supper in a coastal Israeli hotel the night before the Arab League’s declaration. Instead he pulverized the remaining skeletal infrastructure of Palestinian statehood. The education ministry was stripped of its computer hard-drives, and safes ripped from the health ministry. The north-eastern quarter of Jenin refugee camp was flattened with a ferocity that participating Israeli soldiers were quoted as likening to Sharon’s earlier part in the ravaging of the Beiruti refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Initial claims of 500 dead were later revised down to fifty, of whom twenty-three were Israeli soldiers. But all told, the UN estimated that Israel inflicted $300 million of damage in its six-week operation. The popularity ratings of the two leaders among their own communities soared. Arafat again became a symbol of his people’s defiant struggle for a state; Sharon embodied the bunker mentality with which Israel would fight to preserve itself. Ten years after the Madrid summit, Palestinians had no land, the Israelis no peace, and the United States few pickings to show for ten years of regional brokerage.
The Elusive Promise of Democratization
Of the elder George Bush’s four pillars for a ‘new world order’, it was perhaps his promise to build ‘a world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations’ which most stirred the hearts of the congressmen. Here was the world’s most powerful state promising not only to project US military power, but also its values of liberal democracy and free markets among the world’s most closed political systems. The wave of democratization coursing through the communist empire in Eastern Europe only intensified the momentum for the United States to promote a new contract between ruler and ruled in the states for which it had just gone to war. These included not just Kuwait, but also such Gulf War allies as Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, whose dictatorship seemed as passé in the new world order as Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s of Romania.
As US troops amassed in the peninsula for the 1991 war on Iraq, a group of Saudi businessmen and former ministers petitioned King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to embark on the creation of a ‘modern Islamic state’, equipped with an independent judiciary and elected government. Later that month a convoy of Saudi women led by a princess drove round Riyadh in protest at the kingdom’s ban on women drivers. The results were less than impressive. The women were arrested and sent into internal exile, and the petitions politely filed. But Saudi Arabia’s neighbours were more open to glasnost. King Hussein lifted martial law in 1991, licensed political parties the following year, and in 1993 introduced a progressive press law guaranteeing the individual’s right to publish. In Kuwait, the newly restored emir eventually consented to stage elections for a parliament he had dissolved seven years earlier. Other Gulf principalities gingerly trod the electoral path. Even Saudi’s King Fahd appointed a majlis al-shura, Arabic for consultative council. Western diplomats-cum-apologists noted that within a few decades of statehood the Gulf had embarked on a path to democracy that had taken Europe centuries to realize. Critics said the changes were simply cosmetic.
In the euphoria of the communist collapse, Western strategists argued political liberalization would broaden the popular base of the United States’ Middle Eastern allies, bolster their legitimacy and improve stability. They also assumed that the process might answer the growing doubts over what sort of transition might follow the demise of the Middle East’s ageing coterie of rulers. But the received wisdom that democracy was good for Western interests was sorely tested by election results from Jordan, Yemen, Israel and Iran, the four Middle Eastern states most advanced on the road to multi-party democracy. All four elevated to parliament a bloc of religious politicians, suspicious of and hostile to US foreign policy. The same pattern was repeated even more starkly in Algeria. After adopting a constitution legalizing independent political parties, Algeria staged the first round of its first multi-party general elections in December 1991. The Islamic Salvation Front, FIS, won with a landslide, reaping 188 of the 231 seats contested. The National Liberation Front, the FLN, the dirigiste secular party which had governed since independence was pushed into third place. Responding to appeals from 150,000 panic-stricken secular demonstrators, the Algerian army staged a coup, cancelling the elections and appointing one of their own head of state. With the acquiescence of Western capitals, tanks moved on to the streets, martial law was declared, and the Islamist party, FIS, banned.
The lesson from the plight of Algeria was three-fold. It shocked Arab regimes into recognition of the harsh reality of the ice-thin levels of their popular support and the mass enthusiasm for political Islam. It dissuaded Islamist politicians from pursuing a democratic path to power, and goaded them to arms. And it turned both Western strategists and local westernized elites off the idea of democracy. In the final count, concluded Washington’s mandarins, pro-Western military tyrants were better guarantors of the new Middle East order than unpredictable, unsta
ble democracies.
Algeria paid a terrible price for denying Islamists power. As clashes erupted across Algeria, thousands of FIS activists were incarcerated in to internment camps. Hundreds more fled to the mountainous hinterland from where they began an armed assault on key economic installations, as well as members of the security forces, politicians, intellectuals and foreigners. At least 100,000 Algerians were killed in the bloodshed, and millions displaced. But in some ways their recourse to violence enabled an intensification of military rule. It allowed the army elites, first in Algeria, and later in Egypt and Israel, to treat Islamist dissent as a security not a political problem, and thereby spare the establishment from sharing power. Algeria’s generals – known as the eradicateurs – negotiated with the armed groups, but eliminated anyone found negotiating with the Islamist political wing, not least their own president, Mohammed Boudiaf, who was assassinated in June 1992. FIS politicians aspiring to make a comeback shared a similar fate. In 1999, Abdelkader Hachani, the most senior FIS leader to elude arrest, was shot during a dentist’s check-up, spoiling the Algerian joke that the dentist was the one place an Arab could open his mouth.
A History of the Middle East Page 46