Although Israel continued to negotiate with Arafat, increasing numbers of Israelis were asking whether it made sense. After all, if Arafat couldn’t control the terrorists, what good was it to sign an agreement with him that he could not enforce? And if he could control them, he obviously chose not to and therefore was not really a partner for peace.
The Least You Need to Know
Israel agreed to transfer Gaza and Jericho to the control of a Palestinian Authority.
The agreements with the Palestinians allowed Jordan’s King Hussein to step forward and sign a treaty with Israel.
Syria’s Assad refused to make concessions and tried to sabotage Israel’s agreements with Jordan and the Palestinians.
Under the Oslo II agreement, Israel ceded more territory to the Palestinians and allowed them greater control over their affairs. The Palestinians, however, failed to fulfill their obligations, particularly with regard to stopping terrorism.
Chapter 23
The Shot Heard ’Round the World
In This Chapter
Rabin is assassinated
Syria wastes an opportunity
Terror helps sink Peres’s visions
Clinton squeezes Netanyahu
After signing the Oslo II agreement, Israel pledged to begin withdrawing from one city a week. Hoping to build Palestinian confidence, the timetable was actually accelerated.
At the beginning of November, a historic economic summit was held in Amman, Jordan, with more than 2,000 government and business officials from 60 countries. During that conference, Israel signed its first public agreement with a Gulf state—a deal to purchase natural gas from Qatar.
These positive developments allowed those who harbored the delusion that the stability of the region is solely determined by normal relations between Israel and the Arab states to feel optimistic. The truth, of course, was that inter-Arab and intra-Arab threats remained. The United States continued its policy of dual containment—preventing both Iran and Iraq from extending their influence or threatening their neighbors. But those two countries were slowly rebuilding their strength and, thanks to third parties, developing new capabilities that endangered the region.
The Unthinkable Happens
The dangers of the Middle East were not on the minds of the thousands of Israelis who assembled in downtown Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995. The rally had been called to show support for the government’s peace policies and warmth for the prime minister. At the end of the rally, when Yitzhak Rabin joined Shimon Peres and one of Israel’s leading pop singers on stage, he was showered with applause. Then, uncharacteristically, the normally reserved prime minister joined in a song of peace with the assembly.
A few minutes later, as he was leaving the rally, a man approached Rabin from behind and shot him in the back. He was rushed to the hospital, but died shortly afterward.
The killing was a shock, but what made it even more horrifying was that the assassin was a Jew who believed the prime minister’s policies had endangered the country. The murder was perhaps the most traumatic event in Israeli history—comparable to the impact on Americans of the assassination of John
Kennedy.
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Sage Sayings
You lived as a soldier. You died as a soldier for peace, and I believe it is time for all of us to come out openly and to speak of peace. Not here today, but for all the times to come. We belong to the camp of peace. We believe in peace. We believe that our one God wishes us to live in peace and wishes peace upon us.
—King Hussein
* * *
Killed by Amir—and Hot Politics
Rabin’s killer, Yigal Amir, was captured immediately, tried, and convicted of the murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. (Israel has applied the death penalty only once—to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.) Controversy was aroused when the press reported that Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, had an informer who knew of Amir’s hostility to Rabin and did not report his threats. In 1998, a friend of Amir’s was convicted of knowing in advance his intention to kill Rabin.
No Israeli politician had ever been killed for his views before; the idea had previously been unthinkable. In the aftermath of the murder, many Israelis blamed the political opposition’s rhetorical excesses for creating an environment in which extremists could view the danger to Israel as so great that almost any measure would be justified in preventing the peace process from continuing. Leaders from every party denounced the murder, and Israelis began a period of soul-searching to figure out what had gone so wrong in their society that someone would feel it necessary to commit murder to affect political change.
Funeral for a Hero
When President Clinton heard the news, he was grief-stricken. The two leaders had developed a genuine friendship. When he spoke about the murder, he ended his remarks with the words, “Shalom, Chaver”—Goodbye, Friend—which so moved Israelis that they plastered the phrase on bumper stickers and posters.
Rabin’s funeral was attended by 60 heads of state, including President Clinton, British prime minister John Major, German chancellor Helmut Kohl, and French president Jacques Chiraq. Seven Arab countries also sent representatives, and Egyptian president Mubarak (who had never been to Israel) and King Hussein offered eulogies.
Assad Overplays His Hand
It was widely believed that Rabin had a reasonable chance of negotiating an agreement with Syrian prime minister Assad and might have come to an understanding on the outlines of a peace treaty. Withdrawal from the Golan Heights was extremely unpopular in Israel because the territory was deemed vital to the country’s defense. Because of Rabin’s impeccable military credentials, he had persuaded most Israelis that Israel could withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza without endangering the state, and he hoped the public would also trust him to make a deal with Syria that would provide similar assurance. In the case of the Golan, however, more Israelis were willing to openly question his judgment, so the negotiations with Assad were kept secret.
Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, was also anxious to reach an agreement with Assad, but he did not have the same credibility. Sure, Peres had been around the military all his life and had played a key role in the Israeli Defense Force’s development, but he was not a soldier. Whereas Rabin was a brusque, practical, hard-nosed security hawk, Peres was a diplomatic dove who reveled in his image as a visionary.
Just as George Bush had talked about a new world order following the fall of the Soviet Union, Peres loved to lay out his dream of a new order in the Middle East—where Israel and the Arabs cooperated in a range of mutually beneficial activities. Although appealing to American officials who shared his ideals, the Israeli public was less optimistic. They were concerned that Peres might be too willing to make dangerous concessions to the Palestinians and Syrians in hopes of fulfilling his prophecy.
Two things interfered with Peres’s vision. First, the Syrians reverted to their longstanding position that they would not offer anything before receiving the entire Golan back. Second, Palestinian terrorists demonstrated that all the territorial concessions had not brought the Israelis peace.
Stopping Peace in Its Tracks
While the Syrian track slowly derailed, progress with the Palestinians appeared on schedule when the Palestinians went to the polls on January 20, 1996, and elected their legislative council. Turnout was estimated at nearly 70 percent, but the outcome was foreordained, as in the rigged elections in much of the rest of the Arab world, with Yasser Arafat receiving almost 90 percent of the vote and winning the presidency. Peres subsequently demanded that Arafat fulfill the Palestinians’ obligation to annul its covenant, which the Palestine National Council went through the motions of doing that April.
Terrorism Hurts Peres’s Campaign
Israeli elections were scheduled for October, but Peres was riding high and wanted an early public affirmation of his policies, so he decided to move up the date of the election to May. Running against h
im was Benjamin Netanyahu—a telegenic member of the Likud who had become well known to American audiences from his frequent appearances on television when he served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations (1984–88). Netanyahu was an underdog and hammered at Peres for pursuing policies that were endangering the country. Netanyahu’s campaign was boosted by a series of attacks by Palestinian terrorists and Hizbollah that reinforced his message.
The next major step in the peace process was to be Israel’s withdrawal of troops from most of the city of Hebron, but the actions of the Palestinians made this impossible for Peres to carry out. On February 25, a Hamas terrorist boarded a Jerusalem bus and detonated a bomb, killing 25 people and wounding dozens more. This was the beginning of a suicide-bombing campaign that left as many as 59 people dead and more than 200 wounded by March 4. Politically, Peres had no choice but to postpone the Hebron redeployment, angering the Palestinians.
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Mysteries of the Desert
Israel was not the only target of terrorists in the Middle East. On June 19, 1996, a bomb exploded at the U.S. military base near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 people. Evidence indicated that the attack was carried out by terrorists supported by Iran, with possible support from Syria. The perpetrators were never found, and U.S. officials were frustrated by the unwillingness of the Saudis to cooperate with the investigation.
* * *
In a transparent effort to boost Peres’s campaign, as well as to encourage an international response to terror, President Clinton organized the “Summit of Peacemakers” on March 13 in Sharm el-Sheikh. The meeting was hopeful because 13 of the 21 nations that participated were Arab states. (Syria was noticeably absent.) Although the participants pledged to do more to fight terror, little was actually accomplished.
The government’s inability to prevent the terrorist attacks eroded support for Peres, and instead of the landslide projected early in the campaign, he was in the fight of his political life on election day. In the end, Netanyahu won the election with a mere 50.3 percent of the vote.
Israel Turns Right
Netanyahu’s campaign had been largely based on opposition to the Oslo agreements, but after taking office, he declared his commitment to fulfill the nation’s obligations. The Arab countries were skeptical and vilified the new Israeli leader because of his past statements expressing a reluctance to withdraw from further territory and his emphasis on security concerns.
The new prime minister had made a career out of attacking Yasser Arafat, maintaining that he was a terrorist who was unable and unwilling to fulfill his treaty obligations. The political reality, however, was that, whether Netanyahu liked it or not, Arafat had been recognized by Israel as the Palestinians’ leader and was the only interlocutor.
In September 1996, Netanyahu reluctantly met Arafat for the first time. As in Rabin’s case, much was made of the symbolism of Netanyahu shaking the hand of his nemesis. It had the effect of demonstrating that Arafat was now the unquestioned leader of the Palestinians and even the “hard-line” prime minister now accepted him as a peace partner.
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Tut Tut!
A series of terrorist bombings in 1997 severely undermined Israeli faith in Arafat’s ability to comply with the peace agreements. In fact, Israel accused him of giving Hamas a “green light” to terrorism. In March, the group bombed a Tel Aviv cafe, killing three people. In July, a bomb in Jerusalem left 16 dead and 150 injured. Another suicide bomb on Jerusalem’s main pedestrian mall exploded on September 4, wounding 150 and killing five.
* * *
A second meeting, a month later in Washington, produced an agreement to speed up negotiations that would allow Israel to complete the overdue withdrawal from Hebron. These talks bogged down, however, as Arafat introduced new demands, and Netanyahu was critical of the Palestinian Authority’s failure to arrest and convict terrorists.
After about three months of mutual recriminations and shuttle diplomacy by U.S. envoy Dennis Ross, Netanyahu and Arafat finally concluded an agreement on January 15, 1997, providing the terms for Israel’s redeployment from Hebron and a commitment to carry out three further redeployments from the West Bank before August 31, 1998—the date when talks to determine the final status of the territories were scheduled to begin.
Netanyahu continued to be vilified by the Arabs and many of the more dovish Israelis, but his willingness to withdraw from Hebron, the town with the greatest religious significance to Jews in the West Bank and the most zealous settler population, marked an irrevocable shift away from the Likud’s ideology that maintained the West Bank was part of “Greater Israel” and must remain under Israeli control.
The Thirteen Percent Solution
Netanyahu felt obligated to go through with the Hebron redeployment, but the continuing terrorist attacks, inflammatory rhetoric by Arafat and other Palestinian officials, and opposition within his government caused him to postpone any further territorial concessions. U.S. officials became increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress and tended to blame Netanyahu. Throughout 1998, relations between Netanyahu and the Clinton administration grew strained.
In May 1998, U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright tried to break the logjam by proposing that Israel withdraw from an additional 13 percent of the West Bank. The United States had never before tried to dictate how much territory Israel should give up. Moreover, the peace agreements specifically gave Israel the responsibility to determine the extent of the withdrawal. Tensions were further exacerbated when Albright tried to impose a deadline for Israel to accept the proposal and suggested that U.S.–Israel relations would suffer if Netanyahu balked.
* * *
Tut Tut!
A trend that increasingly alarmed Israelis was the smuggling of weapons caches into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. According to the peace agreement, the Palestinians are not allowed to have an army and their police force is only permitted light weapons. By the beginning of 1999, however, the Palestinians had stockpiled anti-tank missiles, mortars, machine guns, and other heavy weapons.
* * *
The Israelis were unmoved by the American threats. They believed that if the United States insisted on a 13 percent withdrawal, this would be the absolute minimum the Palestinians would expect, and, initially, Arafat did demand more. Recognizing the rift the issue was causing between the United States and Israel, however, Arafat cleverly decided to accept Albright’s proposal so that the onus for a breakdown in the peace process would be on Netanyahu.
The U.S. Congress also weighed in with letters to the president, signed by majorities from both houses that warned Clinton about the damage that public pressure and confrontation could do to the peace process. This helped reassure Netanyahu that he could ignore Albright’s threats without worrying about any sanctions being imposed by Clinton.
As the year wore on, Israel’s image continued to suffer because it was widely portrayed as the party that was violating the peace accords and was reluctant to make peace. Netanyahu tried with little success to make an issue of the Palestinians’ noncompliance with the agreements.
In fact, the Palestinians consistently tried to win new concessions from the Israelis in exchange for fulfilling obligations they already had made in earlier agreements. Netanyahu was particularly disturbed by Arafat’s failure to do more to prevent terrorism, to dismantle the infrastructure of radical groups like Hamas, to reduce the size of the Palestinian police force to the level fixed in the Oslo accords, and to confiscate the illegal weapons proliferating in the Palestinian Authority.
Clinton Asks, Wye Not?
In September 1998, Clinton invited Netanyahu and Arafat to the White House in a new effort to stimulate movement in the negotiations. The aura of the White House, combined with the prestige of the leader of the Free World, makes it difficult to walk away from such summit talks without making compromises. This was true again this time, with Israel agreeing to a further withdrawal in exchange for reciprocal Palestinia
n gestures.
In what was called the Wye Summit, the specifics were hammered out in October during a meeting conducted at the Wye River plantation in Maryland. Israel agreed to withdraw from an additional 13 percent of the West Bank over a 3-month period and to release 750 Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinians said they would arrest Palestinian terrorists, formally revoke the Palestinian covenant’s controversial articles, and take measures to prevent anti-Israel incitement.
In December, President Clinton made a historic trip to Gaza to witness the Palestine National Council revise the covenant. Although some hard-line Israelis continued to insist that the procedure was improper, Netanyahu accepted the result and carried out the first of the three withdrawals—amounting to about 9 percent of the West Bank—and released the required number of prisoners.
* * *
Ask the Sphinx
When the terms of the Wye agreement were fulfilled, 99 percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank and 40 percent of the territory would be under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
* * *
The Palestinians failed to carry out their side of the deal, however, by refusing to arrest terrorists, prevent incitement, confiscate weapons, and reduce the size of their police force to the Oslo limit. Worse,
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