by David Landau
The interaction in the months ahead between Barak and these two gifted but difficult men was to bring Israel to the brink of peace, much, much closer than any previous leaders had ever dared to go.
On May 8, Barak and Arafat met at Abu Mazen’s home in Ramallah. Their negotiators then enplaned for Sweden, where, courtesy of the prime minister, Göran Persson, they held relaxed, secluded conversations at a remote government guest complex. Ben-Ami indicated that the three “settlement blocs” that Israel wanted to keep would require annexation of 8 percent of the West Bank.13 This was unacceptable to the Palestinians. But it was already a far cry from the double-digit annexation being bandied about in public. And the concept of land swap, a political unmentionable in Israel until then, was firmly on the table at the Swedish guesthouse.
This hopeful beginning was soon disrupted when serious violence broke out in the Palestinian territories around May 15, Naqba Day in Palestinian parlance, the anniversary of the creation of Israel. Barak ordered the negotiators home.
In the north, the IDF’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon was gathering pace but increasingly looking like an undignified flight. Thousands of Lebanese civilians, marshaled by Hezbollah, were marching southward, sweeping through the crumbling lines of the South Lebanese Army, Israel’s mainly Christian militia ally in the “security zone.” Barak gave orders to speed up the pullback. SLA men and their families desperately but fruitlessly clustered at the border fence demanding to be let through, too.
The constant toll of military deaths in the unending guerrilla war with Hezbollah would now, hopefully, end. A wave of visceral relief swept the country. The withdrawal, moreover, had been accomplished without any further loss of Israeli lives. But the abandonment of the SLA gnawed at the national conscience. And Hezbollah trumpeted the Israeli retreat as a great victory for its Shiite fighters and a shining example to the Palestinians of what armed resistance could achieve.
Barak pointed to the unilateral withdrawal as a bold act of leadership and the honorable discharge of a solemn electoral commitment. Sharon tried to tap into the public’s ambivalence. “It’s a very good thing that we’ve gotten out of Lebanon,” he told the Knesset on June 5. “It was the right decision, though it should have been taken earlier. But while getting out was right, the way it was done was absolutely wrong.” The “erosion of the IDF’s deterrence” in the eyes of the Arab world would make Arafat even more intransigent. “He wants to achieve what the Hezbollah ostensibly achieved … to the last centimeter.” Unbeknownst to Sharon, that logic was shared by the Palestinian negotiators who were working with Ben-Ami and Sher on ideas for compromises. “What have you done to us with this crazy withdrawal from Lebanon?” Abu Ala (Ahmed Qureia) complained.14 Mohammed Dahlan, the head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Forces and a powerful political figure in the PA, said the Israeli withdrawal “gave our people the message that violence wins … the message from Barak was that he would move under pressure … that he would withdraw only if forced to.”15
Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon provided double closure for Sharon. By bringing back the army to the international border, Barak finally stanched the hemorrhaging of IDF blood that began in June 1982 and had never really stopped for eighteen years. Moreover, by briefly reopening the national debate over Lebanon, Barak showed that time, and perhaps Sharon’s own incessant battles with his critics, had had their effect. The burden of Lebanon no longer made Sharon unelectable.
Buoyed by the public’s support for the Lebanon withdrawal, and with the Syrian track in indefinite abeyance following the death of Hafez Assad on June 10, Barak now swung all his energies behind his push for a tripartite summit. Arafat was reluctant, fearing that if the summit failed, Clinton would line up with Barak to blame him for it. Clinton promised him that whatever happened, he would not point fingers afterward, and he invited the two leaders to come to Camp David on Tuesday, July 11.
Like the abortive Geneva summit between Clinton and Assad, Camp David has been subjected to a good deal of twenty-twenty hindsight analysis by participants and pundits. Clinton did go back on his word and blamed Arafat for the summit’s lack of success. Others faulted the U.S. president for allowing himself, as they saw it, to be cajoled by Barak into holding the summit in the first place. Clinton made no determined effort, moreover, once the summit got under way, to break down Barak’s high-handed decision not to deal with Arafat directly and to leave the negotiating to their subordinates. There was no substantive dialogue between the two leaders, even though Barak’s logic for pressing Clinton to host the summit had been that the endgame must be conducted by the principals themselves.
Barak decided early that there was no chance of a breakthrough until the eve of Clinton’s scheduled departure, on the eighth day of the summit, for a meeting of the G8 in Okinawa. That naturally became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the first week was spent treading water. On the night before Clinton left, Barak asked to meet with him alone and presented him with a proposal that both gobsmacked and delighted the Americans: the partitioning of the Old City of Jerusalem. The Palestinians would have sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian Quarters, Israel over the Jewish and Armenian Quarters. The Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, would be handed by UN resolution to the joint custodianship of Palestine and Morocco, the nation that chaired the Islamic Conference’s Jerusalem Committee. The Palestinians would have sovereignty over all the outer Arab neighborhoods of the city, and there would be shared sovereignty in the inner neighborhoods. Barak whittled down his demands to control the Jordan River border, now suggesting an IDF presence in a small area for a period of years. He spoke of some land swap as compensation for Israel’s annexing up to 9 percent of the West Bank for its settlement blocs. There would be a “satisfactory solution” to the refugee question.
The idea of sharing Jerusalem, including the Old City, between Israel and the Palestinians has since become so commonplace, at least among pro-peace advocates, that it is instructive to rehearse here the U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk’s words to Bregman in Elusive Peace: “The idea that half of the Old City would be under Arafat’s sovereignty was completely unthinkable to any American at Camp David, and any Israeli, other than Ehud Barak himself.” Bregman adds: “This was a generous, even stunning offer … that had never before been proposed by an Israeli prime minister.”
Even those superlatives are inadequate to express the change that Barak wrought in more than thirty years of Israeli dogma. “United Jerusalem,” in the distended city limits that Israel unilaterally imposed after 1967, was an axiomatic and virtually consensual tenet of Israeli policy. It was rehearsed by politicians of the Right and of the Left—apart from the Far Left—in almost every speech, like a catechism. “The united city, never to be divided again.” Audiences would applaud automatically. Suddenly all this was challenged, opened to rational reexamination.
But when Clinton took the offer to Arafat, the Palestinian leader demurred. Custodianship was not sovereignty, he pointed out. He did not have the right to cede sovereignty over the Haram. He insisted, too, on exclusive Palestinian sovereignty over the Palestinian suburbs adjacent to the Old City (the inner neighborhoods). He remained impervious to the combined pressures and blandishments of the president, the secretary of state, and the national security adviser. He managed to infuriate Clinton still more by insisting that the ruins of the ancient Jewish temple were not in Jerusalem at all but in Nablus, blithely nullifying thereby important parts of the Old and the New Testaments.
Clinton returned to Camp David on July 23 and plunged back into the discussions with renewed energy. But Jerusalem remained the crucial deal breaker. That is how the president himself assessed the summit on the morning of July 25, after trying one last time, and failing, to move Arafat on this issue. Shlomo Ben-Ami agreed. The considerable progress made on borders and security “was only hypothetical,” he wrote later, “because in the Palestinians’ working assumption it was conditional on Israel
’s accepting the fundamentalist Palestinian positions on two key issues: Jerusalem and the refugees.”
Writing as a historian as well as a politician and negotiator, Ben-Ami saw in the religious zealotry prevalent in the Muslim world on the issues of Jerusalem and the refugees the factor that furnished the deeper reason, or pretext, behind Arafat’s position. He noted that both the imam of al-Aqsa and the mufti of Jerusalem, the second an Arafat appointee, spoke out during Camp David forbidding on religious grounds any concession on sovereignty.16
Tragically, this analysis can be applied to Ben-Ami and Barak. They, too, were influenced by the religious fundamentalism on the Israeli side regarding the Temple Mount. They, too, were swayed by this fundamentalism to advance a position at Camp David that made a pragmatic compromise on Jerusalem effectively unattainable. In a cynical and ultimately hopeless effort to win support from zealot circles in Israel, Barak and Ben-Ami proposed that a synagogue for Jewish prayer be built on a tiny area of the Temple Mount. This drew outraged rejection from Arafat and his top aides.17
Back in 1967, Moshe Dayan vested administration of the Mount/Haram in the Muslim waqf, or religious authority, and banned Jewish prayer there. Jews, like anyone else, were free to visit this sacred site. But only Muslims were allowed to pray there. Happily, as Dayan knew, this edict coincided with the provisions of the Orthodox Jewish law, the halacha, which forbade observant Jews to set foot on the Mount until the Temple was restored in God’s good time. Orthodox Jews had meticulously observed this prohibition for centuries. After 1967, the chief rabbinate of Israel solemnly reaffirmed it.
For many years, pressure to pray on the Temple Mount came from a marginal group of ultranationalist but not especially Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount Faithful. They would make periodic set-piece attempts to enter the precincts with prayer shawls and would be carted off by the police. The Muslim authorities, though forever warning of nefarious Jewish plots to take over the Mount and destroy the mosques, were well aware of the Israeli government’s strictly enforced ban on Jewish prayer there.
The Muslim warnings, however, turned out not to be wholly without foundation when a Jewish underground was discovered by the Shin Bet security service among Jewish settlers on the West Bank and the Golan Heights in the mid-1980s. Among its plans was one to plant explosives beneath the mosques. Although the underground group was excoriated by the settler leadership, in the wake of this episode the blanket religious ban on ascending the Temple Mount began to fray. One prominent plotter, released from jail after five years, began agitating in favor of sacrificing the Paschal Lamb on the Mount. Settler rabbis searched for ways of ritually purifying people so as to enable them to tread on the Mount without defying the age-old Orthodox halachic ban. Others ruled that the ban did not apply to certain parts of the precincts, and they began exhorting religious Jews to visit those areas of the holy site.
Barak and Ben-Ami’s synagogue proposal fed into this dangerous trend within the settler-based community. It also contributed to the breakdown of Camp David, providing Arafat with proof for his suspicions that Israel was ultimately bent on taking over the holy site. In the wake of the failed summit, political attacks on the government were suffused with religious jingoism centering on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Even though the synagogue idea faded from the negotiations after Camp David, it remained a part of the backdrop to Ariel Sharon’s ill-advised visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, which preceded—some say triggered; some say caused—the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada.
Sharon’s action, too, was designed to feed the jingoism, which he had been busily fomenting throughout the summer. His perverse provocation must be seen in this broader context of political and religious ferment.
“Mr. Speaker, no prime minister has the right to make concessions over Jerusalem,” Sharon proclaimed in the Knesset on July 24, while Camp David was still in progress.
Jerusalem is the birthright of the entire Jewish people. Our generation had the honor of liberating Jerusalem and uniting it, and we must preserve it in precious trust for future generations. Arafat says, and I must say I really admire him for this … that in the matter of Jerusalem he needs the approval of the Arab and Muslim world. Barak, on the other hand, doesn’t understand that before he signs anything, before he agrees to anything even verbally, he must have the consent and approval of the entire Jewish people, in Israel and in the Diaspora.18
A week later, with Barak now back, the controversy raging, and the coalition floundering, Sharon lambasted the prime minister. “Eighteen times in your election broadcasts you promised not to divide Jerusalem. You promised it would remain united forever. You have broken every promise you made. You say you speak in the name of your supporters. But they no longer support you, Mr. Barak. They’ve changed their minds, like you changed your promises.”19f
Barak had already lost Shas, the National Religious Party, and Yisrael B’Aliya. The three coalition partners bolted on the eve of Camp David. David Levy, who had switched sides and become Barak’s foreign minister, now announced his resignation, too. The government no longer commanded a Knesset majority. That made the regular business of governing difficult. But Barak could still rely, just about, on the “blocking bloc” of Jewish and Arab MKs that precluded an alternative, Likud-led government.
On August 15, Sharon attacked the synagogue scheme: “Barak has agreed to cleave in two the heart of the Jewish people: the Old City of Jerusalem … He is ready to concede on the Temple Mount. He is trying to soften the blow by demanding that Arafat recognize the Jews’ right to pray. This very proposal, that Arafat recognize our right to pray at the holy of holies of the Jewish people, is in itself debasing and only goes to show to what depths our side has sunk.”20
The holiness of Jerusalem, he continued, was “many times more meaningful for the Jewish people than it is for the Christians and Muslims.” The Jewish people “were the only pioneers in the annals of the Land and of Jerusalem who transformed the rocky and … barren scrubland into green and arable terraces. They did this by hard work and sweat; no other people were creative in the same way. The Jewish people were the first who built a glorious temple in Jerusalem, which was the font of holiness for the entire nation and the entire land.”
Sharon was a thoroughly secular Jew. But this confused exposition on “holy” and “holiness” reflected more than the modern, secular Jew’s grappling with the significance of a unique, religion-based national identity in today’s world. It was also a politician’s shameless milking of these emotive terms for whatever populist advantage he could get from them. But, as we have seen, politicians on both sides of the Israeli divide were engaged in this dubious pursuit.
At the UN Millennium Summit in New York in September, Clinton and Arafat discussed vesting sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram in the Organization of Islamic States. Barak was encouraged, although for his part he spent much of his time in New York persuading world leaders that the outcome of Camp David proved that Arafat was not a serious partner for peace. Negotiators for the three sides continued batting ideas about. Clinton’s presidency was running out, but he still hadn’t given up hope of pulling off a peace deal in the closing weeks of his term.
Back home, in an unwonted gesture of conviviality, Barak invited Arafat and his top aides to dinner at his home in Kochav Yair. He sent an army helicopter to bring them over. Nava, his wife,21 radiated good cheer and plied her guests with good food. Barak and Arafat strolled arm in arm through the French doors and sat alone in the garden, without note takers. They seemed to get along fine. Their aides wondered why they hadn’t tried this simple technique of talking to each other at Camp David. Clinton, apprised ahead of time, phoned in to exhort them. They confirmed to the president that their negotiators would be leaving for Washington that same night for further intensive talks.
There was an elephant in the room, but no one seemed to notice it. According to Gilead Sher, “Nobody mentioned the imminent visit by Ari
el Sharon, the leader of the opposition, to the Temple Mount.”22 The dinner took place on September 25. Sharon’s visit was scheduled for September 28. Shlomo Ben-Ami, the minister of public security, was effectively doubling as foreign minister (the only job he really wanted: he was formally appointed foreign minister on November 2, 2000, and held both portfolios until the end of the Barak administration). He was to fly out to Washington later that night at the head of the Israeli negotiating team.
In the garden, the visit did come up. “Why didn’t Sharon visit the Haram when he was defense minister or foreign minister?” Arafat complained to his host. “That’s our democracy,” Barak replied. “I can’t prevent the leader of the opposition from visiting the site.”23
In any event, any disturbing thoughts about the impending visit did not cloud the upbeat atmosphere at the dinner or at the talks that opened in Washington a day later. These talks were intended as a final refinement of the parties’ positions, and a final attempt at narrowing the gaps between them, before the United States presented its own package of proposals designed to bridge or resolve all the remaining points in dispute.
Ben-Ami took time out from the talks on September 27 to be briefed over the telephone by his commissioner of police, Yehuda Wilk, as to what was expected the next day on the Mount. “He told me that on the basis of intelligence assessments he recommended allowing the visit to go forward,” Ben-Ami recalled. “He said he had a contingency plan in place to get Sharon out fast if serious violence erupted.” The minister for internal security spoke by phone, too, with Jibril Rajoub, the PA’s head of preventive security on the West Bank. “Rajoub told me that if Sharon did not enter the mosques themselves, he believed there would not be any rioting, and whatever demonstrations did take place would be kept under control.”24