The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  Figure 29. A settler tossing wine at a Palestinian woman on Shuhada Street in Hebron. Corbis.

  The economic dependence of the territories on Israel is further deepened by Israel’s ability to literally close off the territories to through traffic. The road system, as already mentioned, reinforces the segmentation of the Palestinian economy and impedes economic integration and development. Attempts at slowing the pace of Palestinian economic development can also take more direct and blatant forms. On many occasions, for example, Israeli authorities have prevented fishermen and agricultural producers from Gaza and the West Bank from harvesting their crops or exporting them in a timely manner as needed.71

  As a result, both Gaza and the West Bank, especially the former, have consistently suffered from crushing poverty. According to the World Bank, the Palestinian per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in 2006 ($1,130) was 40 percent less than what it was in 1999. In 2012, some 22 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza lived below the national poverty line. Poverty was nearly twice as high in Gaza as in the West Bank (33 percent versus 16 percent), and “deep poverty,” measured by how far below the poverty line one falls, was also twice as high in Gaza as in the West Bank.72 Unemployment in both territories has also been persistently high, peaking at around 30 percent in 2002 before coming down somewhat to just below 24 percent in 2010. Palestinian youth unemployment remains a particular problem, averaging around 35 percent, in Gaza having reached a staggering 53 percent by the end of 2010.73

  Collectively, these are the conditions within which the two intifadas took place. For the thousands of young Palestinians who have taken part in the uprisings, life has held little promise. Their days have been defined by threats and intimidation, discrimination, poverty, and despair. Under conditions in which access to health care and garbage collection seemed like unattainable luxuries, the Palestinians’ frustrations turned them into stone throwers in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, and, as the violence escalated, into suicide bombers in the late 1990s. Like all spontaneous revolutions, the two intifadas developed their own logic and momentum, their own symbols, martyrs, and leaders. They also gave ample opportunities to those bent on unleashing indiscriminate terror on the Israelis, and many innocent bystanders were killed as a result.74 The second intifada, also known as the Al-Aqsa intifada, was especially violent. According to the U.S. Department of State, in 2002 an estimated 469 Israelis were killed and over 2,498 were injured as a result of more than sixty Palestinian suicide bombings.75

  From the beginning, the intifada’s mass-based, popular nature made it virtually impossible for the Israeli army to contain. In desperation, in the late 1980s the Israeli government turned to its archenemy, the PLO, which had itself become greatly weakened and was desperate to reassert its control over the full-fledged rebellion. In the process, the PLO hoped also to reinvigorate its ties with its constituency. By now, the sheer scope of the uprising and the gravity of the Israeli government’s response had made many ordinary Israelis question the wisdom of their country’s continued hold on the Occupied Territories. The alternative to peace, it seemed, was too costly, too brutal, and too much at variance with the original goals of Zionism. Somehow the madness needed to be stopped. Peace appeared as the most viable and attractive solution to the quagmire that the Occupied Territories had become.

  THE ELUSIVE SEARCH FOR PEACE

  The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians had been raging for nearly a century. At least four wars had been fought, tens of thousands of people had been killed on both sides, and countless lives had been shattered. The accumulated human and emotional costs of the conflict can be fully grasped only by the Israelis and the Palestinians who bore them. One land, two peoples—that’s how it all started. In the process, each side degenerated into “the enemy” of the other. Eager to defend their survival and right to exist, both sides all too often lost perspective and compromised their own humanity. Wars numb the senses, blur the distinction between right and wrong, and confuse means and ends. The conflict over Palestine/Israel was approaching the century mark, and it was only a matter of time before each side realized what it had become. Such was the realization of some, but by no means all, Israelis and Palestinians.

  The imperative of peace making was not so much a sudden epiphany by the actors involved as the product of a larger historical evolution of the conflict. Over time, a group of Palestinians and Israelis had come to realize that they could not deny the existence of the other, no matter how hard they tried or what weapons they used. They were also troubled by the increasing inhumanity to which the conflict had given rise—not only the enemy’s inhumanity but also their own. On each side of the divide there thus developed a group of “accommodationists” who gradually became convinced of the need to accommodate the other side and recognize its right to exist. Idealists willing to compromise with and accommodate the enemy had always existed on both sides. However, their voices had been drowned out by a majority righteously bent on the total destruction of the enemy. But the seven-year intifada, which had turned into the longest sustained battle between Palestinians and Israelis, drove home the costs of war for more Palestinians and Israelis. The 1967 War had lasted only six days and the 1973 War only a few weeks. But the intifada opened people’s eyes to the sobering realities of war: home demolitions, suicide car bombs, mass deportations, abject poverty, despair, fear and paranoia, stabbings, and a host of other tragedies unfolding before the eye day after day. In the words of two Israeli scholars, “The violence also deeply affected Israel itself. Many Israelis perceived their country’s occupation as morally indefensible, social--ly deleterious, economically ruinous, and politically and militarily harmful. Israel’s political leadership faced mounting pressures from broad segments of the public to stop quelling the uprising by force and instead to propose political solutions.”76 A similar process was also occurring among Pales-tinians, for whom the costs of the intifada were even more immediate and devastating.

  By 1992, the leaders of the state of Israel—notably Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had done long service in the military—had become convinced of the necessity of peace. Earlier, when he had been the defense minister, Rabin had tried desperately to stop the intifada but to no avail. Peace, he must have reasoned, was the only viable alternative. With the larger “accommodationist” trend growing among many Israelis, he could now sell his vision of the future to a larger audience. This vision, incidentally, was articulated most idealistically by Shimon Peres.77 The PLO, meanwhile, exiled in Tunis and despondent over its inability to fully control the intifada and the activities of those “inside,” saw accommodation with Israel as the only way to salvage its continued political viability and its relevance for the Palestinians. The PLO’s shift in strategy was welcomed by many Palestinians, who were elated at the prospect of finally living in peace.

  Palestinian and Israeli accommodationists were opposed by equally determined “rejectionists.” The accommodationist/rejectionist divide within both the Palestinians and the Israelis continues to persist to this day. For many people on both sides, the wounds are too deep to let go, the stakes are too high to compromise, and the enemy is too untrustworthy to negotiate with. For whatever reason, they cannot move beyond the “familiar, comfortable wall of hostility.”78 And rejectionists see the accommodationists as sellouts and traitors. Rabin, the military man turned peace hero, paid for his vision with his life. On November 4, 1995, soon after addressing a peace rally, he was assassinated by an Israeli seminary (yeshiva) student. In his defense, the assassin, Yigal Amir, claimed that Rabin had failed the Jewish people and had therefore deserved to die.79 In fact, as will be shown shortly, besides signing an agreement with them, by the time of his death Rabin had given the Palestinians very little.

  A convergence of the interests of the accommodationists on both sides and a realistic assessment of how the interests of their peoples could be served brought about the Oslo Accor
ds. In some ways, the Oslo Accords were a by-product of two major, previous Arab-Israeli peace initiatives, the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. The Camp David Accords initially held much promise for the Palestinians but ultimately ignored them altogether. The ensuing “absence of peace” paved the way for face-to-face Israeli-Palestinian talks beginning in 1991. As it turned out, these negotiations, first in Madrid and then in Washington, D.C., were a charade meant to conceal more meaningful, parallel negotiations underway in Oslo, Norway.

  The Camp David Accords came about after a realization by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat that the United States simply would not allow anyone to defeat Israel in a military conflict. This point had been made most forcefully during the 1973 War. The only way to win the Sinai back for Egypt and gain autonomy for the Palestinians, Sadat reasoned, would be through negotiations with Israel, under the auspices of an American-sponsored agreement. With a flair for the dramatic, Sadat flew to Tel Aviv on November 19, 1977, and, the next day, addressed the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem.80 In a long and flowery speech, he proposed a peace agreement based on five specific points:

  Ending the occupation of the Arab territories occupied in 1967.

  Achievement of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination, including their right to establish their own state.

  The right of all states in the area to live in peace within their boundaries. . . .

  Commitment of all states in the region to administer the relations among them in accordance with the objectives and principles of the United Nations Charter. . . .

  Ending the state of belligerence in the region.81

  The Israeli leadership, then composed of members of the Likud Party, was considerably less keen on including the issue of Palestinian rights in a peace agreement with Egypt. Prime Minister Menachem Begin simply mistrusted Sadat and his motives. According to Ezer Weizman, Israel’s defense minister at the time, Israel “seemed to be finding every possible tactic to impede the peace process.”82 At the most, Begin was willing to offer the Palestinians limited autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. U.S. president Jimmy Carter also vacillated on the issue. The PLO’s own vehement, public rejection of Sadat’s initiative did not help matters.83 Nevertheless, despite numerous obstacles, from September 5 through 17, 1978, Israeli and Egyptian negotiators gathered in the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David. After tense negotiations that several times came close to collapsing, they hammered out an agreement.

  The Camp David negotiations resulted in signing a treaty that contained two major components (or negotiating tracks). The first component was called “A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt,” based on which Israeli forces were to withdraw from the Sinai over a three-year period. Provisions were also made for establishing a demilitarized zone between the two countries, setting up a peacekeeping force, and making other security arrangements. Full diplomatic ties were also to be established between Egypt and Israel within nine months of signing a peace treaty.84 The second component, labeled “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” sought to make provisions for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement. Some of the key points of the accord were acceptance by all parties of UN Resolution 242; resolution of the “Palestinian problem in all aspects”; the establishment of mechanisms for the conduct of “good neighborly relations”; and “full autonomy” for the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip based on arrangements to be worked out between Egypt, Israel, and Jordan.85

  While on paper impressive in its scope and breadth, the Camp David Accords’ “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” immediately encountered problems. It assumed Jordan’s participation without having consulted its leaders, thus undermining Jordanian sovereignty. Instead, throughout the 1980s, King Hussein carried out his own secret talks with Israel.86 More consequential was the pressure put on Begin by the Israeli Right as a result of concessions the agreement made to both the Egyptians and the Palestinians. This in turn prompted the prime minister to interpret the provisions dealing with the Palestinians very differently than either the Egyptians or the Americans did. Gradually, those provisions were all but forgotten. By now, Sadat had invested too much of his prestige and personal legitimacy in the peace process with Israel to back out, and his position was made all the more unshakable by his increasing isolation within the Arab world.

  Sadat did get the Sinai back for Egypt, but ultimately he could not deliver for the Palestinians. King Hussein, meanwhile, wanted the West Bank for himself, and only in July 1988, amid mounting economic difficulties at home and an uncontainable popular uprising among the West Bankers, did he renounce his claims to the West Bank.87 Israeli-Palestinian peace, meanwhile, became more elusive and remote as the drama of Middle Eastern diplomacy took one tragic turn after another. From 1975 to 1991, Lebanon was engaged in a bloody civil war. In 1978 and again in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Only in 2000 did Israel fully pull out of Lebanon, but even then the hostilities between the two countries continued. In 1980 Iraq invaded Iran, and the two countries fought each other to exhaustion until 1988. Then in 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. In 1991, a U.S.-led alliance fought the Iraqis and ejected them from Kuwait. As the Middle East drifted from one crisis to another, the Palestinians felt forgotten and ignored. The intifada was a cry of anguish, and the Israelis soon realized that they simply could not suppress it. Thus ensued the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 and, more meaningfully, secret negotiations between the PLO and the Israeli government in Norway in 1993.

  In October 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union jointly invited Israel, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinians to a peace conference in Madrid. Since neither the United States nor Israel recognized the PLO, the Palestinians were to attend as part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, and, theoretically at least, those attending could not be affiliated with the PLO. The Palestinian delegation was made up of respected and influential “insiders,” many of whom had been hardened by nearly four years of the intifada. The talks soon degenerated into endless squabbles over procedures and mutual recriminations. Slowly but surely, the “internals” allowed the PLO to make the major decisions for them during the talks, which by then had moved from Madrid to Washington. Israel knew this but looked the other way. In the words of a senior Israeli diplomat, “Though we would never admit this openly, we were engaged in a charade. In Wash-ington, we were actually negotiating with Yasser Arafat by fax!”88

  Israel’s 1992 elections brought back to power the Labor Party, headed by the idealistic Shimon Peres and the more pragmatic Yitzhak Rabin. The former became the foreign minister and the latter the prime minister. Sensing the weakness of the PLO—its isolation, financial bankruptcy, and loss of control over both the intifada and a growing number of internals—Israel decided the time was ripe to hold direct talks with the PLO. Earlier, a Norwegian academic had facilitated informal contacts in Oslo between two Israeli academics and members of the PLO, and that in turn served as the conduit for in-depth, formal discussions between the two archenemies beginning in May 1993. In less than four months, the two sides signed a Declaration of Principles (DOP) that became the basis for a future peace agreement between them.89

  The secret talks in Oslo were always tense and on several occasions came near the breaking point. Throughout, Arafat and his team negotiated from a position of increasing weakness, and in many ways Israeli negotiators were able to dictate the terms of the resulting agreement.90 The agreement that was reached contained two parts. The first, which took the form of letters exchanged between the PLO and the Israeli government on September 9 and 10, 1993, dealt with mutual recognition, whereby each side recognized the right of the other to exist. The second was a Declaration of Principles (DOP), which the two sides signed in a face-to-face meeting at the White House between PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. After years of violent animosity, the former enemies sealed the a
greement with a historic handshake.

  The DOP outlined “interim self-government arrangements” for the Palestinian territories. For the Israelis, “‘Gradual’ was the key word describing the transition from occupation to self-rule, from violence to peaceful coexistence.”91 Israel was to withdraw its troops from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Jericho within six months after the declaration went into effect. Within nine months, Israel would redeploy its troops in other areas of the West Bank and elections would be held for a Palestinian Council. Within two years, negotiations would begin on the “permanent status” of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These permanent-status negotiations, which were to take no more than three years to complete, would settle all outstanding (and for both sides highly emotional) issues such as the status of Jerusalem, the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlements, and control over borders.92

  Figure 30. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signing the Oslo Accords. Corbis.

  Historic as it was, the DOP contained major flaws. To begin with, it was highly ambiguous and dealt with important issues—such as the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees—only in very broad terms.93 More importantly, while each of the two sides came to the bargaining table with the general intent of putting an end to years of violence and bloodshed, for both, immediate political considerations appear to have been more important. For Arafat and other “outside” PLO leaders, progress on the negotiations with Israel meant being able to finally territorialize the quasi-state apparatus of the PLO, supplant the “inside” leadership that had become emboldened as a result of the intifada, and consolidate the PLO’s rule throughout the Occupied Territories. All of these, in fact, the PLO did—now under the label Palestinian National Authority—as soon as it was officially recognized as being in charge of parts of the Occupied Territories.