Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

by Sandy Tolan

  Over the next two days, Clinton met with Arafat at least eight times. The president reiterated the land-for-peace proposals, approved in advance by Barak, in which the Palestinians would be allowed to establish a capital in the Arab outskirts of East Jerusalem and to have a combination of sovereignty, "guardianship," and "functional autonomy" over parts of the Old City. They would be given control over some religious sites, but not full autonomy over the Haram al-Sharif, the third most sacred place for Muslims across the world.

  As for refugees, Clinton promised a "satisfactory solution." The right of return, however, would be limited to the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza—not to the part of old Palestine that was now Israel. Instead the United States would offer a massive aid program, in the tens of billions of dollars, to resettle and rehabilitate the refugees—now numbering more than five million, many in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.

  "I have great respect for you, Mr. President," Arafat responded, according to Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, "but your proposals are not a basis for a solution."

  President Clinton banged his fist on the table and shouted at Arafat: "You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe. Barak presented proposals, but you take them and pocket them."

  "I came here representing Arabs, Muslims, Christians around the world," Arafat told them. "I came to make peace and won't accept that you or anyone else put me down in history as a traitor." Arafat still saw himself as the leader of a national liberation movement and after thirty-five years in the PLO didn't want to be remembered for giving up important parts of East Jerusalem. Arafat knew the importance of the Haram al-Sharif to Muslims around the world and that therefore it would be impossible for him to concede even partial sovereignty over the site to the Israelis, even if it was also the site of the Temple Mount. He also refused to concede the right of return at Camp David, even though, for many Palestinians and Israelis alike, by accepting Oslo and a two-state solution, he had essentially done so already. But Arafat knew the importance of the issue to millions of refugees, and he still sought room to maneuver.

  That night, Arafat told the Palestinian delegation to pack up and prepare to leave Camp David. Late in the evening, the president came to the porch of Arafat's cabin and saw the delegation's luggage stacked neatly in preparation for departure. "Won't you change your mind?" the president asked. He prevailed on the Palestinian leader to stay until he returned from a four-day trip to Japan. "I will go to G-8 meeting on Wednesday, and I will ask them to provide the support you need for your state," Clinton told the Palestinian leader. "What I ask you to do is make a principled compromise on Jerusalem. It is not everything you want, but it's the price you have to pay."

  The president returned to Camp David on July 23, and the next day, he pressed Arafat one last time. At a meeting with Albright, Berger, CIA director George Tenet, and Palestinian negotiators Abu Ala and Saeb Erekat, Clinton proposed a "sovereign presidential compound" for Arafat inside the Muslim quarter of the Holy City. The proposal would still not grant full autonomy to the Palestinians over the Haram al-Sharif, and Arafat rejected it. "So there will be a small island surrounded by Israeli soldiers who control the entrances," he said. "This is not what we are asking for. We are asking for full Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem occupied in 1967."

  Bill Clinton lost his temper. "You have lost many chances," the president told Arafat, echoing former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban's slogan that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. "First in 1948 . . . now you are destroying yourselves in 2000. You have been here fourteen days and said no to everything. These things have consequences. Failure will mean the end of the peace process. Let hell break loose and live with the consequences. You won't have a Palestinian state and you won't have friendships with anyone. You will be alone in the region."

  Arafat did not budge. "If anyone imagines that I might sign away Jerusalem, he is mistaken," the Palestinian chairman told the president. "I am not only the leader of the Palestinian people, I am also the vice president of the Islamic Conference. I will not sell Jerusalem. You say the Israelis move forward, but they are the occupiers. They are not being generous. They are not giving from their pockets but from our land. I am only asking that UN Resolution 242 be implemented. I am speaking only about 22 percent of Palestine, Mr. President."

  Clinton continued to press Arafat to compromise on Jerusalem. Arafat, however, knew that Muslims around the world expected the Palestinians to be custodians of the Haram al-Sharif and therefore that no Palestinian could sign away sovereignty. He knew that if he did, he might not live long enough to see any agreement implemented. "Mr. President," he said to Clinton, "do you want to come to my funeral? I would rather die than agree to Israeli sovereignty to Haram al-Sharif."

  Moments later, Arafat told the president: "I respect you very much, and I realize that you are affected by the Israeli position. I have led my people's revolution. The siege of Beirut was easier on me than the siege of Camp David. The revolution is easier than peacemaking."

  Barak was also furious with Arafat. He had gone further than any Israeli prime minister to make peace. Arafat, by contrast, "did not negotiate in good faith" and never intended to come to any agreement. "He just kept saying 'no' to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own," Barak told Israeli historian Benny Morris. Arafat, Barak said, believed Israel "has no right to exist, and he seeks its demise." This became the prevailing view in the United States and Israel: that in rejecting Israel's "generous" offers, the PLO chairman alone was to blame for the failure at Camp David.

  Many other observers, including diplomats present at Camp David, believe the reasons for the summit's failure were far more complex and were partly the result of American favoritism toward the Israeli side and deficient understanding of the Palestinian perspective. All of this was exacerbated, according to these critics, by poor American preparation and rivalries between Madeleine Albright's State Department and Sandy Berger's National Security Council, which resulted in what American insiders called a "dysfunctional" negotiation conducted by "too many poobahs."

  A strong retort to the Clinton-Barak analysis came from Robert Malley, part of the Clinton team at Camp David, and Hussein Agha, a veteran Arab political analyst and former negotiator on the Palestinian side, who argued in a series of articles that such analysis failed to take into account the Palestinian point of view. "For all the talk about peace and reconciliation, most Palestinians were more resigned to the two-state solution than they were willing to embrace it," Malley and Agha wrote. The path to Camp David, after all, had begun in the secret discussions at Oslo, and those had emerged from the 1991 Gulf War, when Arafat had sided with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. What much of the world viewed as historical concessions by Arafat at Oslo, many Palestinians looked upon as terms of surrender by the man who stood against the United States and its allies. "They were prepared to accept Israel's existence, but not its moral legitimacy," Malley and Agha wrote of the Palestinian delegation at Camp David. "The notion that Israel was 'offering' land, being 'generous,' or 'making concessions' seemed to them doubly wrong, in a single stroke both affirming Israel's right and denying the Palestinians'. For the Palestinians, land was not given but given back."

  Some accounts maintain that the apparent Israeli offer of 92 percent, when factoring additional land deductions in East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, actually amounted to far less, and that Israel would have retained sovereignty over airspace, aquifers, "settlement blocs" in the West Bank, and a "wedge" of Israeli land between East Jerusalem and the Jordan River that would have divided Palestinian territory. In essence, this critique holds, Palestine would have been not a state, but an "entity" broken into several parts, with limited sovereignty and little control of its own resources. Even for those Palestinians willing to achieve a historic compromise, this was not an acceptable outcome to decades of struggle and sacrifice.

  Malley
and Agha criticized the U.S. team for its "exaggerated appreciation of Israel's substantive moves" and its acute sensitivity to Israel's domestic politics, "a reaction that reflected less an assessment of what a 'fair solution' ought to be than a sense of what the Israeli public could stomach. The US team often pondered whether Barak could sell a given proposal to his people, including some he himself had made. The question rarely, if ever, was asked about Arafat." As for Barak offering more to the Palestinians than any other Israeli leader, Malley wrote in the New York Times, "The measure of Israel's concessions ought not be how far it has moved from its own starting point; it must be how far it has moved toward a fair solution."

  Two months after Camp David, at eight o'clock on the morning of September 28, 2000, Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon arrived in the Old City at the most contested religious site in Jerusalem. It was known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif. Control of the site was a crucial element in the failure of the Camp David summit two months earlier. Sharon, disgraced in the wake of the 1982 massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon, had returned from his journey in the Israeli political wilderness. He served as minister of infrastructure in the Netanyahu government, a position he used to help expand the settlements in the West Bank. Now, as the top opposition leader in the Israeli Knesset, Sharon was sending a message about Israeli sovereignty at a place Muslims consider the third most holy in Islam: To them, what the Israelis call the Temple Mount, with its Western (or Wailing) Wall, is the Haram al-Sharif ("Noble Sanctuary"), a large complex of Muslim holy places that include the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Sharon's move was a political challenge to Barak, his Labor Party rival, and Netanyahu, who had pledged to contest the Likud Party leadership. Under Israeli law, Sharon had a right to visit the Temple Mount, and for security, Barak, as prime minister, authorized some 1,500 Israeli police to accompany Sharon to the contested East Jerusalem site. The next day, at the end of Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, large crowds of Palestinians began throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Most of the demonstrators were young men and teenage boys, and none fired weapons, according to later investigations. Israeli troops opened fire with live ammunition, killing four Palestinians.

  Barak and other Israelis charged that Arafat had planned the new intifada as part of a "grand plan" of terror and violence after the failure at Camp David. Over the next eight weeks, however, nine times more Palestinians were killed than Israelis, and the disparity in rates of wounded civilians was higher still. Israel blamed this on Palestinians seeking "moral high ground by deploying children to stand in front of men with machine guns who fire at Israelis." Numerous fact-finding teams found such cases to be the exception, not the rule. Later, however, Palestinian resistance would indeed grow more violent, as Fatah's militia, Tanzim, led by Marwan Barghouti, carried out attacks against Israeli troops. Palestinians looked to Israel's pullout from Lebanon, driven by what they considered Hezbollah's resistance, and saw a parallel in the West Bank and Gaza.

  By October, the uprising had spread to Arab communities within Israel, including Nazareth and other villages in the Galilee. Palestinians within Israel made up nearly 20 percent of the population. Violent clashes between these "Israeli Arabs" and police left thirteen Palestinians dead. On the Israeli Right, talk returned of a disloyal "fifth column" of Arabs who might have to be expelled from Israel. Other prominent Israelis, including the tourism minister, Rehavam Zeevi, advocated an increasingly popular idea: "transferring" all Palestinians out of the West Bank to Jordan and returning Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people. The deaths of the Palestinian citizens of Israel also provoked an outcry within Israeli society, and a national investigative committee headed by an Israeli supreme court justice put the police behavior under high-profile scrutiny.

  As mistrust grew throughout the divided country, Dalia and Yehezkel found themselves on an island at Open House: They were amazed at the outpouring of emotion from Arab citizens who began talking openly about their own family stories from 1948. "Suddenly, Arabs opened up with statements of pain," Yehezkel recalled. "Liberal, well-meaning Israelis who thought they were building cultural bridges and alliances were forced to confront the fact that there were endemic problems and injustices in Israeli society that required much more than cross-cultural encounter and coexistence activity. It required social and political transformation on a societal scale." That same fall, Dalia, Yehezkel, Michail, and other Open House supporters were approached by a member of the Israeli Knesset to participate in a national think tank to improve the conditions of Arabs in Israel.

  Yet the polarization in Israel was taking its toll. Elsewhere, Yehezkel noted, reconciliation groups were shutting down, their work made virtually impossible by the tensions within the country. Israeli television showed repeated images of two soldiers being lynched by an angry mob in Ramallah and their mutilated bodies being dragged triumphantly through the streets. Israel, Yehezkel said, was "more polarized than at any time since 1948—probably because their hopes had been raised so high"—by Oslo—"and then dashed."

  Israelis still wanted an agreement with their longtime enemies but were growing increasingly inclined to support Sharon in the upcoming 2001 elections. In December 2000, three months into the Al-Aqsa intifada, Barak and Israeli negotiators met intensively with Arafat and the Palestinian team in the Egyptian resort town of Taba. By all reports, the two sides were much closer to an agreement than they had been at Camp David, with progress on Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem and even movement, however slight, on the right of return.

  On January 1, 2001, a suicide bomber struck in Netanya, injuring more than forty Israelis. It was three weeks before the end of Clinton's second term and a month before Israelis would choose between Barak and Sharon. Barak briefly suspended the Taba discussions but said he would send representatives to Washington if the Palestinian leader put an "end to terror. . . . We truly have deep doubts about the seriousness of his intentions." The talks came closer still, and at one point the two sides appeared close to an actual agreement. In the end, they foundered, in part on the issue of right of return. "We cannot allow even one refugee back on the basis of the 'right of return,' " Barak would say. "And we cannot accept historical responsibility for the creation of the problem."

  As time ran out, the Taba discussions collapsed, and Sharon was elected by a landslide.

  Bashir awoke to the sound of loud banging. It was a familiar sound, and Bashir, now fifty-nine years old, walked quickly to the door, sensing what he would find: Israeli soldiers surrounding the house. He estimates there were two hundred of them. It was 5:30 A.M. on August 27, 2001.

  "Why are you making so much noise?" Bashir asked angrily of the officer in charge, his left hand thrust in his pocket. "You'll wake up all the sleeping people! Who do you want?"

  "We want Bashir Khairi," the officer replied.

  "I am Bashir."

  "We want you. If you move, we will shoot you. You people make trouble for us."

  "Who is 'you'?" Bashir asked.

  "You, PFLP."

  "I'm not PFLP," Bashir insisted.

  The soldiers surrounded Bashir and escorted him into a waiting olive jeep. He was taken to a tent prison outside Ramallah surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers and dogs. The moment he arrived, he spotted some men playing chess and went to join them.

  The same day, Israeli helicopters fired two missiles into the Ramallah headquarters of the PFLP, killing the organization's leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, also a prominent member of the PLO and a friend of Bashir's. Mustafa was the highest-ranking target killed to date in an Israeli policy of assassination of Palestinian militants.

  Revenge for Abu Ali Mustafa's death was taken in October, when Rehavam Zeevi, the Israeli minister of tourism who advocated expelling Palestinians from the West Bank, was shot twice in the head after finishing breakfast at the Hyatt Hotel in Jerusalem. The PFLP claimed responsibility, and Sharon vowed to launch "a wa
r to the finish against the terrorists."

  Six weeks later, on Monday December 3, Ariel Sharon returned from a meeting with President Bush in Washington and declared war on the Palestinian Authority. It was nearly three months after September 11 and eight weeks since the United States launched the invasion of Afghanistan. Sharon pledged his solidarity with the U.S. war on terror. Over the previous two days, a car bomb and three human bombs had exploded in Jerusalem and Haifa, killing 25 Israelis and wounding 229.

  At dusk on Monday, American-made F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopter gunships unleashed a barrage of rockets and missiles on Palestinian Authority headquarters and police buildings in Gaza and the West Bank, bombing the Palestinian airport and Arafat's helicopters in Gaza and rocketing a Palestinian fuel depot, from which a massive cloud of smoke rose over the Gaza coast. Israeli tanks rolled into towns across the West Bank, reoccupying the territories. On December 13, following new suicide bombings, Israeli shells slammed into the Voice of Palestine, toppling the antenna and taking out the station. Helicopter gunships shelled Arafat's Ramallah offices, leaving only part of the compound standing. Arafat, a statement from Sharon's cabinet declared, was "irrelevant." The man who had driven Arafat out of Lebanon twenty years earlier was now intent on dismantling his Palestinian Authority. All but officially, Oslo was dead.

  In February 2002, Arafat published an appeal on the op-ed page of the New York Times, declaring that "the Palestinians are ready to end the conflict" and have a "vision for peace . . . based on the complete end of the occupation and a return to Israel's 1967 borders, the sharing of all Jerusalem as one open city and as the capital of two states, Palestine and Israel. It is a warm peace," Arafat added, "but we will only sit down as equals, not as supplicants; as partners, not as subjects; as seekers of a just and peaceful solution, not as a defeated nation grateful for whatever scraps are thrown our way." Sharon and his cabinet were unmoved. They believed Arafat was orchestrating much of the violence and that he never intended to make peace at Camp David. In late February, the Israel Defense Forces launched additional rocket attacks on Arafat's headquarters in Gaza and in Ramallah, where he was now confined; the Ramallah compound, or Muqata, was reduced largely to rubble. The Palestinian leadership declared that "our people will continue their steadfast resistance until the military occupation and settlers are kicked out, to ensure the freedom, independence, and dignity of our people." Arafat, whose support had been dwindling, enjoyed a sudden surge in popularity. A tattered Palestinian flag fluttered from amid the smoking ruins.