Agha and Malley v Morris and Barak - Camp David an Exchange

8/7/2019 Agha and Malley v Morris and Barak - Camp David an Exchange

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Articles included:

By Hussein Agha, Robert Malley. Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors.(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14380)

Benny Morris. Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with EhudBarak) (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15501)

Agha and Malley. Camp David and After: An Exchange (2. A Reply to EhudBarak) (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15502)

Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors

ByHussein Agha,Robert Malley

Mr. Malley, as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs, was a

member of the US peace team and participated in the Camp David summit. Mr. Aghahas been involved in Palestinian affairs for more than thirty years and during this periodhas had an active part in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

In accounts of what happened at the July 2000 Camp David summit and the followingmonths of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, we often hear about Ehud Barak'sunprecedented offer and Yasser Arafat's uncompromising no. Israel is said to havemade a historic, generous proposal, which the Palestinians, once again seizing theopportunity to miss an opportunity, turned down. In short, the failure to reach a finalagreement is attributed, without notable dissent, to Yasser Arafat.

As orthodoxies go, this is a dangerous one. For it has larger ripple effects. Broaderconclusions take hold. That there is no peace partner is one. That there is no possibleend to the conflict with Arafat is another.

For a process of such complexity, the diagnosis is remarkably shallow. It ignoreshistory, the dynamics of the negotiations, and the relationships among the three parties.In so doing, it fails to capture why what so many viewed as a generous Israeli offer, thePalestinians viewed as neither generous, nor Israeli, nor, indeed, as an offer. Worse, itacts as a harmful constraint on American policy by offering up a single, convenientculpritArafatrather than a more nuanced and realistic analysis.

1.

Each side came to Camp David with very different perspectives, which led, in turn, tohighly divergent approaches to the talks.

Ehud Barak was guided by three principles. First was a deep antipathy toward theconcept of gradual steps that lay at the heart of the 1993 Oslo agreement betweenIsrael and the Palestine Liberation Organization. In his view, the withdrawals of Israeli
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forces from parts of Gaza and the West Bank during the preceding seven years hadforced Israel to pay a heavy price without getting anything tangible in return and withoutknowing the scope of the Palestinians' final demands. A second axiom for Barak wasthat the Palestinian leadership would make a historic compromiseif at allonly after ithad explored and found unappealing all other possibilities.

An analysis of Israeli politics led to Barak's third principle. Barak's team was convincedthat the Israeli public would ratify an agreement with the Palestinians, even one thatentailed far-reaching concessions, so long as it was final and brought quiet andnormalcy to the country. But Barak and his associates also felt that the best way tobring the agreement before the Israeli public was to minimize any political friction alongthe way. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had paid a tremendous political (and physical)price by alienating the Israeli right wing and failing to bring its members along during theOslo process. Barak was determined not to repeat that mistake. Paradoxically, agovernment that believed it enjoyed considerable latitude concerning the terms of theultimate deal felt remarkably constrained on the steps it could take to get there. Bearing

these principles in mind helps us to make sense of the Israeli government's actionsduring this period.

To begin, Barak discarded a number of interim steps, even those to which Israel wasformally committed by various agreementsincluding a third partial redeployment oftroops from the West Bank, the transfer to Palestinian control of three villages abuttingJerusalem, and the release of Palestinians imprisoned for acts committed before theOslo agreement. He did not want to estrange the right prematurely or be (or appear tobe) a "sucker" by handing over assets, only to be rebuffed on the permanent statusdeal. In Barak's binary cost-benefit analysis, such steps did not add up: on the onehand, if Israelis and Palestinians reached a final agreement, all these minor steps (and

then some) would be taken; on the other hand, if the parties failed to reach a finalagreement, those steps would have been wasted. What is more, concessions to thePalestinians would cost Barak precious political capital he was determined to husbanduntil the final, climactic moment.

The better route, he thought, was to present all concessions and all rewards in onecomprehensive package that the Israeli public would be asked to accept in a nationalreferendum. Oslo was being turned on its head. It had been a wager on successablank check signed by two sides willing to take difficult preliminary steps in theexpectation that they would reach an agreement. Barak's approach was a hedgeagainst failurea reluctance to make preliminary concessions out of fear that theymight not.

Much the same can be said about Israel's expansion of the West Bank settlements,which proceeded at a rapid pace. Barak saw no reason to needlessly alienate the settlerconstituency. Moreover, insofar as new housing units were being established on landthat Israel ultimately would annex under a permanent dealat least any permanentdeal Barak would signhe saw no harm to the Palestinians in permitting suchconstruction. In other words, Barak's single-minded focus on the big picture only


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magnified in his eyes the significanceand costof the small steps. Precisely becausehe was willing to move a great distance in a final agreement (on territory or onJerusalem, for example), he was unwilling to move an inch in the preamble (prisoners,settlements, troop redeployment, Jerusalem villages).

Barak's principles also shed light on his all-or-nothing approach. In Barak's mind, Arafathad to be made to understand that there was no "third way," no "reversion to the interimapproach," but rather a corridor leading either to an agreement or to confrontation.Seeking to enlist the support of the US and European nations for this plan, he askedthem to threaten Arafat with the consequences of his obstinacy: the blame would be laidon the Palestinians and relations with them would be downgraded. Likewise, andthroughout Camp David, Barak repeatedly urged the US to avoid mention of any fall-back options or of the possibility of continued negotiations in the event the summitfailed.

The Prime Minister's insistence on holding a summit and the timing of the Camp David

talks followed naturally. Barak was prepared to have his negotiators engage inpreliminary discussions, which in fact took place for several months prior to CampDavid. But for him, these were not the channels in which real progress could be made.Only by insisting on a single, high-level summit could all the necessary ingredients ofsuccess be present: the drama of a stark, all-or-nothing proposal; the prospect thatArafat might lose US support; the exposure of the ineffectiveness of Palestinian salami-tactics (pocketing Israeli concessions that become the starting point at the next round);and, ultimately, the capacity to unveil to the Israeli people all the achievements andconcessions of the deal in one fell swoop.

2.

In Gaza and the West Bank, Barak's election was greeted with mixed emotions.Benjamin Netanyahu, his immediate predecessor, had failed to implement several ofIsrael's signed obliga-tions and, for that reason alone, his defeat was welcome. Butduring his campaign, Barak had given no indication that he was prepared for majorcompromises with the Palestinians. Labor back in power also meant Tel Aviv back inWashington's good graces; Netanyahu's tenure, by contrast, had seen a gradual coolingof America's relations with Israel and a concomitant warming of its relations with thePalestinian Authority.

Palestinians were looking for early reassuring signs from Barak; his first moves were

anything but. His broad government coalition (an assortment of peace advocates andhard-liners), his tough positions on issues like Jerusalem, and his reluctance to confrontthe settlers all contributed to an early atmosphere of distrust. Delays in addressing corePalestinian concernssuch as implementing the 1998 Wye Agreement (which Barakchose to renegotiate) or beginning permanent status talks (which Barak postponed bywaiting to name a lead negotiator)were particularly irksome given the impatient moodthat prevailed in the territories. Seen from Gaza and the West Bank, Oslo's legacy readlike a litany of promises deferred or unfulfilled. Six years after the agreement, there


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were more Israeli settlements, less freedom of movement, and worse economicconditions. Powerful Palestinian constituenciesthe intellectuals, securityestablishment, media, business community, "state" bureaucrats, political activistswhose support was vital for any peace effort were disillusioned with the results of thepeace process, doubtful of Israel's willingness to implement signed agreements, and,

now, disenchanted with Barak's rhetoric and actions.

Perhaps most disturbing was Barak's early decision to concentrate on reaching a dealwith Syria rather than with the Palestinians, a decision that Arafat experienced as atriple blow. The Palestinians saw it as an instrument of pressure, designed to isolatethem; as a delaying tactic that would waste precious months; and as a publichumiliation, intended to put them in their place. Over the years, Syria had done nothingto address Israeli concerns. There was no recognition, no bilateral contacts, not even asuspension of assistance to groups intent on fighting Israel. During that time, the PLOhad recognized Israel, countless face-to-face negotiations had taken place, and Israeliand Palestinian security services had worked hand in hand. In spite of all this, Hafez al-

Assadnot Arafatwas the first leader to be courted by the new Israeli government.

In March 2000, after the failed Geneva summit between Clinton and President Assadmade clear that the Syrian track had run its course, Barak chose to proceed full steamahead with the Palestinians, setting a deadline of only a few months to reach apermanent agreement. But by then, the frame of mind on the other side was anythingbut receptive. It was Barak's timetable, imposed after his Syrian gambit had failed, anddesigned with his own strategy in mind. Arafat was not about to oblige.

Indeed, behind almost all of Barak's moves, Arafat believed he could discern theobjective of either forcing him to swallow an unconscionable deal or mobilizing the worldto isolate and weaken the Palestinians if they refused to yield. Barak's stated view thatthe alternative to an agreement would be a situation far grimmer than the status quocreated an atmosphere of pressure that only confirmed Arafat's suspicionsand thegreater the pressure, the more stubborn the belief among Palestinians that Barak wastrying to dupe them.

Moreover, the steps Barak undertook to husband his resources while negotiating ahistorical final deal were interpreted by the Palestinians as efforts to weaken them whileimposing an unfair one. Particularly troubling from this perspective was Barak's attitude

toward the interim commitments, based on the Oslo, Wye, and later agreements. Thosewho claim that Arafat lacked interest in a permanent deal miss the point. Like Barak, thePalestinian leader felt that permanent status negotiations were long overdue; unlikeBarak, he did not think that this justified doing away with the interim obligations.

For Arafat, interim and permanent issues are inextricably linked"part and parcel ofeach other," he told the Presidentprecisely because they must be kept scrupulouslyseparate. Unfulfilled interim obligations did more than cast doubt on Israel's intent to


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deliver; in Arafat's eyes, they directly affected the balance of power that was to prevailonce permanent status negotiations commenced.

To take the simplest example: if Is-rael still held on to land that was supposed to beturned over during the interim phase, then the Palestinians would have to negotiate over

thatland as well during permanent status negotiations. And while Barak claimed thatunfulfilled interim obligations would be quickly forgotten in the event that the summitsucceeded, Arafat feared that they might just as quickly be ignored in the event that itfailed. In other words, Barak's seemed a take-it-or-leave-it proposition in which leaving itmeant forsaking not only the permanent status proposal, but also a further withdrawal ofIsraeli forces, the Jerusalem villages, the prisoner releases, and other interimcommitments. Worse, it meant being confronted with the new settlement units in areasthat Barak self-confidently assumed would be annexed to Israel under a permanentstatus deal.

In many ways, Barak's actions led to a classic case of misaddressed messages: the

intended recipients of his tough statementsthe domestic constituency he was seekingto carry with himbarely listened, while their unintended recipientsthe Palestinianshe would sway with his final offerlistened only too well. Never convinced that Barakwas ready to go far at all, the Palestinians were not about to believe that he was holdingon to his assets in order to go far enough. For them, his goals were to pressure thePalestinians, lower their expectations, and worsen their alternatives. In short, everythingBarak saw as evidence that he was serious, the Palestinians considered to be evidencethat he was not.

For these reasons, Camp David seemed to Arafat to encapsulate his worst nightmares.It was high-wire summitry, designed to increase the pressure on the Palestinians to

reach a quick agreement while heightening the political and symbolic costs if they didnot. And it clearly was a Clinton/ Barak idea both in concept and timing, and for thatreason alone highly suspect. That the US issued the invitations despite Israel's refusalto carry out its earlier commitments and despite Arafat's plea for additional time toprepare only reinforced in his mind the sense of a US-Israeli conspiracy.

On June 15, during his final meeting with Clinton before Camp David, Arafat set forthhis case: Barak had not implemented prior agreements, there had been no progress inthe negotiations, and the prime minister was holding all the cards. The only conceivableoutcome of going to a summit, he told Secretary Albright, was to have everythingexplode in the President's face. If there is no summit, at least there will still be hope.The summit is our last card, Arafat saiddo you really want to burn it? In the end,Arafat went to Camp David, for not to do so would have been to incur America's anger;but he went intent more on surviving than on benefiting from it.

3.

Given both the mistrust and tactical clumsiness that characterized the two sides, theUnited States faced a formidable challenge. At the time, though, administration officials


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believed there was a historic opportunity for an agreement. Barak was eager for a deal,wanted it achieved during Clinton's term in office, and had surrounded himself withsome of Israel's most peace-minded politicians. For his part, Arafat had the opportunityto preside over the first Palestinian state, and he enjoyed a special bond with Clinton,the first US president to have met and dealt with him. As for Clinton, he was prepared to

devote as much of his presidency as it took to make the Israeli-Palestinian negotiationssucceed. A decision notto seize the opportunity would have produced as many regretsas the decision to seize it produced recriminations.

Neither the President nor his advisers were blind to the growing distrust between thetwo sides or to Barak's tactical missteps. They had been troubled by his decision tofavor negotiations with the "other woman," the Syrian president, who distracted himfrom his legitimate, albeit less appealing, Palestinian bride-to-be. Barak's inability tocreate a working relationship with Arafat was bemoaned in the administration; hisentreaties to the Americans to "expose" and "unmask" Arafat to the world were largelyignored.

When Barak reneged on his commitment to transfer the three Jerusalem villages to thePalestiniansa commitment the Prime Minister had specifically authorized Clinton toconvey, in the President's name, to ArafatClinton was furious. As he put it, this wasthe first time that he had been made out to be a "false prophet" to a foreign leader. And,in an extraordinary moment at Camp David, when Barak retracted some of hispositions, the President confronted him, expressing all his accumulated frustrations. "Ican't go see Arafat with a retrenchment! You can sell it; there is no way I can. This is notreal. This is not serious. I went to Shepherdstown [for the Israeli-Syrian negotiations]and was told nothing by you for four days. I went to Geneva [for the summit with Assad]and felt like a wooden Indian doing your bidding. I will not let it happen here!"

In the end, though, and on almost all these questionable tactical judgments, the USeither gave up or gave in, reluctantly acquiescing in the way Barak did things out ofrespect for the things he was trying to do. For there was a higher good, which wasBarak's determination to reach peace agreements with Syria and the Palestinians. Asearly as July 1999, during their first meeting, Barak had outlined to Clinton his vision ofa comprehensive peace. He provided details regarding his strategy, a timetable, eventhe (astronomical) US funding that would be required for Israel's security, Palestinianand Syrian economic assistance, and refugee resettlement. These were not the wordsof a man with a ploy but of a man with a mission.

The relationship between Clinton and Barak escapes easy classification. The President,a political pro, was full of empathy, warmth, and personal charm; the Prime Minister, aself-proclaimed political novice, was mainly at ease with cool, logical argument. Wherethe President's tactics were fluid, infinitely adaptable to the reactions of others, Barak'severy move seemed to have been conceived and then frozen in his own mind. At CampDavid, Clinton offered Barak some advice: "You are smarter and more experienced thanI am in war. But I am older in politics. And I have learned from my mistakes."


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Yet in their political relations, the two men were genuine intimates. For all hiscomplicated personality traits, Barak was deemed a privileged partner because of hisdetermination to reach a final deal and the risks he was prepared to take to get there.When these were stacked against Arafat's perceived inflexibility and emphasis oninterim commitments, the administration found it hard not to accommodate Barak's

requests. As the President told Arafat three weeks before Camp David began, helargely agreed with the chairman's depiction of Barakpolitically maladroit, frustrating,lacking in personal touch. But he differed with Arafat on a crucial point: he wasconvinced that Barak genuinely wanted a historic deal.

The President's decision to hold the Camp David summit despite Arafat's protestationsilluminates much about US policy during this period. In June, Barakwho for some timehad been urging that a summit be rapidly convenedtold the President and SecretaryAlbright that Palestinian negotiators had not moved an inch and that his negotiators had

reached the end of their compromises; anything more would have to await a summit. Healso warned that without a summit, his government (at least in its current form) would begone within a few weeks.

At the same time, Arafat posed several conditions for agreeing to go to a summit. First,he sought additional preparatory talks to ensure that Camp David would not fail.Second, he requested that the third Israeli territorial withdrawal be implemented beforeCamp Davida demand that, when rebuffed by the US, turned into a request that theUS "guarantee" the withdrawal even if Camp David did not yield an agreement (what hecalled a "safety net"). A third Palestinian requestvolunteered by Clinton, rather thanbeing demanded by Arafatwas that the US remain neutral in the event the summit

failed and not blame the Palestinians.

The administration by and large shared Arafat's views. The Palestinians' most legitimateconcern, in American eyes, was that without additional preparatory work the risk offailure was too great. In June, speaking of a possible summit, Clinton told Barak, "I wantto do this, but not under circumstances that will kill Oslo." Clinton also agreed withArafat on the need for action on the interim issues. He extracted a commitment fromBarak that the third Israeli withdrawal would take place with or without a final deal, and,in June, he privately told the Chairman he would support a "substantial" withdrawalwere Camp David to fail. Describing all the reasons for Arafat's misgivings, he urgedBarak to put himself "in Arafat's shoes" and to open the summit with a series of goodwill

gestures toward the Palestinians. Finally, Clinton assured Arafat on the eve of thesummit that he would not be blamed if the summit did not succeed. "There will be," hepledged, "no finger-pointing."

Yet, having concurred with the Palestinians' contentions on the merits, the USimmediately proceeded to disregard them. Ultimately, there was neither additionalpreparation before the summit, nor a third redeployment of Israeli troops, nor any actionon interim issues. And Arafat got blamed in no uncertain terms.


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Why this discrepancy between promise and performance? Most importantly, becauseBarak's reasoningand his timetablehad an irresistible logic to them. If nothing wasgoing to happen at pre-summit negotiationsand nothing wasif his government wason the brink of collapse, and if he would put on Camp David's table concessions he hadnot made before, how could the President say no? What would be gained by waiting?

Certainly not the prospect offered by Arafatanother interminable negotiation over amodest territorial withdrawal. And most probably, as many analysts predicted, animminent confrontation, if Arafat proceeded with his plan to unilaterally announce astate on September 13, 2000, or if the frustration among the Palestiniansof which theworld had had a glimpse during the May 2000 upheavalwere to reach boiling pointonce again.

As for the interim issues, US officials believed that whatever Palestinian anger resultedfrom Israeli lapses would evaporate in the face of an appealing final deal. As a corollary,from the President on down, US officials chose to use their leverage with the Israelis toobtain movement on the issues that had to be dealt with in a permanent agreement

rather than expend it on interim ones.

The President's decision to ignore his commitment to Arafat and blame the Palestiniansafter the summit points to another factor, which is how the two sides were perceivedduring the negotiations. As seen from Washington, Camp David exemplified Barak'spolitical courage and Arafat's political passivity, risk-taking on the one hand, risk-aversion on the other. The first thing on the President's mind after Camp David was thusto help the Prime Minister, whose concessions had jeopardized his political standing athome. Hence the finger-pointing. And the last thing on Clinton's mind was to insist on afurther Israeli withdrawal. Hence the absence of a safety net. This brings us to the heartof the matterthe substance of the negotiations themselves, and the reality behind the

prevailing perception that a generous Israeli offer met an unyielding Palestinianresponse.

4.

Was there a generous Israeli offer and, if so, was it peremptorily rejected by Arafat?

If there is one issue that Israelis agree on, it is that Barak broke every conceivabletaboo and went as far as any Israeli prime minister had gone or could go. Coming intooffice on a pledge to retain Jerusalem as Israel's "eternal and undivided capital," heended up appearing to agree to Palestinian sovereigntyfirst over some, then over all,

of the Arab sectors of East Jerusalem. Originally adamant in rejecting the argument thatIsrael should swap some of the occupied West Bank territory for land within its 1967borders, he finally came around to that view. After initially speaking of a Palestinianstate covering roughly 80 percent of the West Bank, he gradually moved up to the low90s before acquiescing to the mid-90s range.

Even so, it is hard to state with confidence how far Barak was actually prepared to go.His strategy was predicated on the belief that Israel ought not to reveal its final


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positionsnot even to the United Statesunless and until the endgame was in sight.Had any member of the US peace team been asked to describe Barak's true positionsbefore or even during Camp Davidindeed, were any asked that question todaytheywould be hard-pressed to answer. Barak's worst fear was that he would put forwardIsraeli concessions and pay the price domestically, only to see the Palestinians using

the concessions as a new point of departure. And his trust in the Americans went onlyso far, fearing that they might reveal to the Palestinians what he was determined toconceal.

As a consequence, each Israeli position was presented as unmovable, a red line thatapproached "the bone" of Israeli interests; this served as a means of both forcing thePalestinians to make concessions and preserving Israel's bargaining positions in theevent they did not. On the eve of Camp David, Israeli negotiators described theirpurported red lines to their American counterparts: the annexation of more than 10percent of the West Bank, sovereignty over parts of the strip along the Jordan River,and rejection of any territorial swaps. At the opening of Camp David, Barak warned the

Americans that he could not accept Palestinian sovereignty over any part of EastJerusalem other than a purely symbolic "foothold." Earlier, he had claimed that if Arafatasked for 95 percent of the West Bank, there would be no deal. Yet, at the same time,he gave clear hints that Israel was willing to show more flexibility if Arafat was preparedto "contemplate" the endgame. Bottom lines and false bottoms: the tension, and theambiguity, were always there.

Gradual shifts in Barak's positions also can be explained by the fact that each proposalseemed to be based less on a firm estimate of what Israel had to hold on to and moreon a changing appraisal of what it could obtain. Barak apparently took the view that,faced with a sufficiently attractive proposal and an appropriately unattractive alternative,

the Palestinians would have no choice but to say yes. In effect, each successivePalestinian "no" led to the next best Israeli assessment of what, in their right minds, thePalestinians couldn't turn down.

The final and largely unnoticed consequence of Barak's approach is that, strictlyspeaking, there never was an Israeli offer. Determined to preserve Israel's position inthe event of failure, and resolved not to let the Palestinians take advantage of one-sidedcompromises, the Israelis always stopped one, if not several, steps short of a proposal.The ideas put forward at Camp David were never stated in writing, but orally conveyed.

They generally were presented as US concepts, not Israeli ones; indeed, despite havingdemanded the opportunity to negotiate face to face with Arafat, Barak refused to holdany substantive meeting with him at Camp David out of fear that the Palestinian leaderwould seek to put Israeli concessions on the record. Nor were the proposals detailed. Ifwritten down, the American ideas at Camp David would have covered no more than afew pages. Barak and the Americans insisted that Arafat accept them as general "basesfor negotiations" before launching into more rigorous negotiations.


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According to those "bases," Palestine would have sovereignty over 91 percent of theWest Bank; Israel would annex 9 percent of the West Bank and, in exchange, Palestinewould have sovereignty over parts of pre-1967 Israel equivalent to 1 percent of theWest Bank, but with no indication of where either would be. On the highly sensitiveissue of refugees, the proposal spoke only of a "satisfactory solution." Even on

Jerusalem, where the most detail was provided, many blanks remained to be filled in.Arafat was told that Palestine would have sovereignty over the Muslim and Christianquarters of the Old City, but only a loosely defined "permanent custodianship" over theHaram al-Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam. The status of the rest of the city wouldfluctuate between Palestinian sovereignty and functional autonomy. Finally, Barak wascareful not to accept anything. His statements about positions he could support wereconditional, couched as a willingness to negotiate on the basis of the US proposals solong as Arafat did the same.

5.

Much as they tried, the Palestinian leaders have proved utterly unable to make theircase. In Israel and the US, they are consistently depicted as uncompromising andincapable of responding to Barak's supreme effort. Yet, in their own eyes, they were theones who made the principal concessions.

For all the talk about peace and reconciliation, most Palestinians were more resigned tothe two-state solution than they were willing to embrace it; they were prepared to acceptIsrael's existence, but not its moral legitimacy. The war for the whole of Palestine wasover because it had been lost. Oslo, as they saw it, was not about negotiating peaceterms but terms of surrender. Bearing this perspective in mind explains the Palestinians'view that Oslo itself is the historic compromisean agreement to concede 78 percent of

mandatory Palestine to Israel. And it explains why they were so sensitive to the Israelis'use of language. The notion that Israel was "offering" land, being "generous," or"making concessions" seemed to them doubly wrongin a single stroke both affirmingIsrael's right and denying the Palestinians'. For the Palestinians, land was not given butgiven back.

Even during the period following the Oslo agreement, the Palestinians considered thatthey were the ones who had come up with creative ideas to address Israeli concerns.While denouncing Israeli settlements as illegal, they accepted the principle that Israelwould annex some of the West Bank settlements in exchange for an equivalent amountof Israeli land being transferred to the Palestinians. While insisting on the Palestinian

refugees' right to return to homes lost in 1948, they were prepared to tie this right to amechanism of implementation providing alternative choices for the refugees whilelimiting the numbers returning to Israel proper. Despite their insistence on Israel'swithdrawal from all lands occupied in 1967, they were open to a division of EastJerusalem granting Israel sovereignty over its Jewish areas (the Jewish Quarter, theWailing Wall, and the Jewish neighborhoods) in clear contravention of this principle.


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These compromises notwithstanding, the Palestinians never managed to rid themselvesof their intransigent image. Indeed, the Palestinians' principal failing is that from thebeginning of the Camp David summit onward they were unable either to say yes to theAmerican ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own. Infailing to do either, the Palestinians denied the US the leverage it felt it needed to test

Barak's stated willingness to go the extra mile and thereby provoked the President'sanger. When Abu Ala'a, a leading Palestinian negotiator, refused to work on a map tonegotiate a possible solution, arguing that Israel first had to concede that any territorialagreement must be based on the line of June 4, 1967, the President burst out, "Don'tsimply say to the Israelis that their map is no good. Give me something better!" WhenAbu Ala'a again balked, the President stormed out: "This is a fraud. It is not a summit. Iwon't have the United States covering for negotiations in bad faith. Let's quit!" Towardthe end of the summit, an irate Clinton would tell Arafat: "If the Israelis can makecompromises and you can't, I should go home. You have been here fourteen days andsaid no to everything. These things have consequences; failure will mean the end of thepeace process.... Let's let hell break loose and live with the consequences."

How is one to explain the Palestinians' behavior? As has been mentioned earlier, Arafatwas persuaded that the Israelis were setting a trap. His primary objective thus becameto cut his losses rather than maximize his gains. That did not mean that he ruled outreaching a final deal; but that goal seemed far less attainable than others. Beyond that,much has to do with the political climate that prevailed within Palestinian society. Unlikethe situation during and after Oslo, there was no coalition of powerful Palestinianconstituencies committed to the success of Camp David. Groups whose support wasnecessary to sell any agreement had become disbelievers, convinced that Israel would

neither sign a fair agreement nor implement what it signed. Palestinian negotiators, withone eye on the summit and another back home, went to Camp David almostapologetically, determined to demonstrate that this time they would not be duped. Moreprone to caution than to creativity, they viewed any US or Israeli idea with suspicion.They could not accept the ambiguous formulations that had served to bridge differencesbetween the parties in the past and that later, in their view, had been interpreted toIsrael's advantage; this time around, only clear and unequivocal understandings woulddo.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of what is known as the Haram al-Sharif to Palestinians and the Temple Mount to Jews. The Americans spent countless

hours seeking imaginative formulations to finesse the issue of which party would enjoysovereignty over this sacred placea coalition of nations, the United Nations SecurityCouncil, even God himself was proposed. In the end, the Palestinians would havenothing of it: the agreement had to give them sovereignty, or there would be noagreement at all.

Domestic hostility toward the summit also exacerbated tensions among the dozen or soPalestinian negotiators, which, never far from the surface, had grown as the stakes


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rose, with the possibility of a final deal and the coming struggle for succession. Thenegotiators looked over their shoulders, fearful of adopting positions that wouldundermine them back home. Appearing to act disparately and without a centralpurpose, each Palestinian negotiator gave preeminence to a particular issue, makingvirtually impossible the kinds of trade-offs that, inevitably, a compromise would entail.

Ultimately, most chose to go through the motions rather than go for a deal. Ironically,Barak the democrat had far more individual leeway than Arafat the supposed autocrat.Lacking internal cohesion, Palestinian negotiators were unable to treat Camp David asa decisive, let alone a historic, gathering.

The Palestinians saw acceptance of the US ideas, even as "bases for furthernegotiations," as presenting dangers of its own. The Camp David proposals wereviewed as inadequate: they were silent on the question of refugees, the land exchangewas unbalanced, and both the Haram and much of Arab East Jerusalem were to remainunder Israeli sovereignty. To accept these proposals in the hope that Barak would thenmove further risked diluting the Palestinian position in a fundamental way: by shifting

the terms of debate from the international legitimacy of United Nations resolutions onIsraeli withdrawal and on refugee return to the imprecise ideas suggested by the US.Without the guarantee of a deal, this was tantamount to gambling with what thePalestinians considered their most valuable currency, international legality. ThePalestinians' reluctance to do anything that might undercut the role of UN resolutionsthat applied to them was reinforced by Israel's decision to scrupulously implement thosethat applied to Lebanon and unilaterally withdraw from that country in the monthspreceding Camp David. Full withdrawal, which had been obtained by Egypt andbasically offered to Syria, was now being granted to Lebanon. If Hezbollah, an armedmilitia that still considered itself at war with Israel, had achieved such an outcome,surely a national movement that had been negotiating peacefully with Israel for years

should expect no less.

The Palestinians' overall behavior, when coupled with Barak's conviction that Arafatmerely wanted to extract Israeli concessions, led to disastrous results. The mutual andby then deeply entrenched suspicion meant that Barak would conceal his finalproposals, the "endgame," until Arafat had moved, and that Arafat would not move untilhe could see the endgame. Barak's strategy was predicated on the idea that hisfirmness would lead to some Palestinian flexibility, which in turn would justify Israel'smaking further concessions. Instead, Barak's piecemeal negotiation style, combinedwith Arafat's unwillingness to budge, produced a paradoxical result. By presenting earlypositions as bottom lines, the Israelis provoked the Palestinians' mistrust; bysubsequently shifting them, they whetted the Palestinians' appetite. By the end of theprocess, it was hard to tell which bottom lines were for real, and which were not.

6.

The United States had several different roles in the negotiations, complex and oftencontradictory: as principal broker of the putative peace deal; as guardian of the peace


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process; as Israel's strategic ally; and as its cultural and political partner. The ideas itput forward throughout the process bore the imprint of each.

As the broker of the agreement, the President was expected to present a final deal thatArafat could not refuse. Indeed, that notion was the premise of Barak's attraction to a

summit. But the United States' ability to play the part was hamstrung by two of its otherroles. First, America's political and cultural affinity with Israel translated into an acutesensitivity to Israeli domestic concerns and an exaggerated appreciation of Israel'ssubstantive moves. American officials initially were taken aback when Barak indicatedhe could accept a division of the Old City or Palestinian sovereignty over many ofJerusalem's Arab neighborhoodsa reaction that reflected less an assessment of whata "fair solution" ought to be than a sense of what the Israeli public could stomach. TheUS 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 aboutArafat.

A second constraint on the US derived from its strategic relationship with Israel. Oneconsequence of this was the "no-surprise rule," an American commitment, if not toclear, at least to share in advance, each of its ideas with Israel. Because Barak'sstrategy precluded early exposure of his bottom lines to anyone (the Presidentincluded), he would invoke the "no-surprise rule" to argue against US substantiveproposals he felt went too far. The US ended up (often unwittingly) presenting Israelinegotiating positions and couching them as rock-bottom red lines beyond which Israelcould not go. Faced with Arafat's rejection, Clinton would obtain Barak's acquiescencein a somewhat improved proposal, and present it to the Palestinians as, once again, thebest any Israeli could be expected to do. With the US playing an endgame strategy("this is it!") in what was in fact the middle of the game ("well, perhaps not"), the result

was to depreciate the assets Barak most counted on for the realfinale: the Palestinians'confidence in Clinton, US credibility, and America's ability to exercise effective pressure.Nor was the US tendency to justify its ideas by referring to Israeli domestic concerns themost effective way to persuade the Palestinians to make concessions. In short, the "no-surprise rule" held a few surprises of its own. In a curious, boomerang-like effect, ithelped convince the Palestinians that any US idea, no matter how forthcoming, was anIsraeli one, and therefore both immediately suspect and eminently negotiable.

Seven years of fostering the peace process, often against difficult odds, further erodedthe United States' effectiveness at this critical stage. The deeper Washington'sinvestment in the process, the greater the stake in its success, and the quicker thetendency to indulge either side's whims and destructive behavior for the sake ofsalvaging it. US threats and deadlines too often were ignored as Israelis andPalestinians appeared confident that the Americans were too busy running after theparties to think seriously of walking away.


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Yet for all that, the United States had an important role in shaping the content of theproposals. One of the more debilitating effects of the visible alignment between Israeland the United States was that it obscured the real differences between them. Time andagain, and usually without the Palestinians being aware of it, the President sought toconvince the Prime Minister to accept what until then he had refusedamong them the

principle of land swaps, Palestinian sovereignty over at least part of Arab EastJerusalem and, after Camp David, over the Haram al-Sharif, as well as a significantlyreduced area of Israeli annexation. This led Barak to comment to the President that, onmatters of substance, the US was much closer to the Palestinians' position than toIsrael's. This was only one reflection of a far wider pattern of divergence between Israeliand American positionsyet one that has systematically been ignored by Palestiniansand other Arabs alike.

This inability to grasp the complex relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv costArafat dearly. By failing to put forward clear proposals, the Palestinians deprived theAmericans of the instrument they felt they needed to further press the Israelis, and it led

them to question both the seriousness of the Palestinians and their genuine desire for adeal. As the President repeatedly told Arafat during Camp David, he was not expectinghim to agree to US or Israeli proposals, but he was counting on him to say somethinghe could take back to Barak to get him to move some more. "I need something to tellhim," he implored. "So far, I have nothing."

Ultimately, the path of negotiation imagined by the Americansget a position that wasclose to Israel's genuine bottom line; present it to the Palestinians; get acounterproposal from them; bring it back to the Israelistook more than one wrongturn. It started without a real bottom line, continued without a counterproposal, andended without a deal.

7.

Beneath the superficial snapshotBarak's offer, Arafat's rejectionlies a picture that isboth complex and confusing. Designed to preserve his assets for the "moment of truth,"Barak's tactics helped to ensure that the parties never got there. His decision to vieweverything through the prism of an all-or-nothing negotiation over a comprehensive dealled him to see every step as a test of wills, any confidence-building measure as aweakness-displaying one. Obsessed with Barak's tactics, Arafat spent far less timeworrying about the substance of a deal than he did fretting about a possible ploy.Fixated on potential traps, he could not see potential opportunities. He never quite

realized how far the prime minister was prepared to go, how much the US was preparedto push, how strong a hand he had been dealt. Having spent a decade building arelationship with Washington, he proved incapable of using it when he needed it most.As for the United States, it never fully took control of the situation. Pulled in various andinconsistent directions, it never quite figured out which way to go, too often allowingitself to be used rather than using its authority.


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Many of those inclined to blame Arafat alone for the collapse of the negotiations point tohis inability to accept the ideas for a settlement put forward by Clinton on December 23,five months after the Camp David talks ended. During these months additional talks hadtaken place between Israelis and Palestinians, and furious violence had broken outbetween the two sides. The President's proposal showed that the distance traveled

since Camp David was indeed considerable, and almost all in the Palestinians'direction. Under the settlement outlined by the President, Palestine would havesovereignty over 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank and it would as well have landbelonging to pre-1967 Israel equivalent to another 1 to 3 percent of West Bank territory.Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to their homeland in historicPalestine, a right that would guarantee their unrestricted ability to live in Palestine whilesubjecting their absorption into Israel to Israel's sovereign decision. In Jerusalem, allthat is Arab would be Palestinian, all that is Jewish would be Israeli. Palestine wouldexercise sovereignty over the Haram and Israel over the Western Wall, through which itwould preserve a connection to the location of the ancient Jewish Temple.

Unlike at Camp David, and as shown both by the time it took him to react and by theambiguity of his reactions, Arafat thought hard before providing his response. But in theend, many of the features that troubled him in July came back to haunt him inDecember. As at Camp David, Clinton was not presenting the terms of a final deal, butrather "parameters" within which accelerated, final negotiations were to take place. Asat Camp David, Arafat felt under pressure, with both Clinton and Barak announcing thatthe ideas would be off the tablewould "depart with the President"unless they wereaccepted by both sides. With only thirty days left in Clinton's presidency and hardlymore in Barak's premiership, the likelihood of reaching a deal was remote at best; if nodeal could be made, the Palestinians feared they would be left with principles that weredetailed enough to supersede international resolutions yet too fuzzy to constitute an

agreement.

Besides, and given the history of the negotiations, they were unable to escape theconclusion that these were warmed-over Israeli positions and that a better proposal maystill have been forthcoming. In this instance, in fact, the United States had resisted last-minute Israeli attempts to water down the proposals on two key itemsPalestiniansovereignty over the Haram and the extent of the territory of the Palestinian state. Alltold, Arafat preferred to continue negotiating under the comforting umbrella ofinternational resolutions rather than within the confines of America's uncertainproposals. In January, a final effort between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in theEgyptian town of Taba (without the Americans) produced more progress and somehope. But it was, by then, at least to some of the negotiators, too late. On January 20,Clinton had packed his bags and was on his way out. In Israel, meanwhile, Sharon wason his way in.

Had there been, in hindsight, a generous Israeli offer? Ask a member of the Americanteam, and an honest answer might be that there was a moving target of ideas,


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fluctuating impressions of the deal the US could sell to the two sides, a work in progressthat reacted (and therefore was vulnerable) to the pressures and persuasion of both.Ask Barak, and he might volunteer that there was no Israeli offer and, besides, Arafatrejected it. Ask Arafat, and the response you might hear is that there was no offer;besides, it was unacceptable; that said, it had better remain on the table.

Offer or no offer, the negotiations that took place between July 2000 and February 2001make up an indelible chapter in the history of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. This maybe hard to discern today, amid the continuing violence and accumulated mistrust. Buttaboos were shattered, the unspoken got spoken, and, during that period, Israelis andPalestinians reached an unprecedented level of understanding of what it will take to endtheir struggle. When the two sides resume their path toward a permanent agreementand eventually, they willthey will come to it with the memory of those remarkable eightmonths, the experience of how far they had come and how far they had yet to go, andwith the sobering wisdom of an opportunity that was missed by all, less by design thanby mistake, more through miscalculation than through mischief.

Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)

ByBenny Morris

In response toCamp David: The Tragedy of Errors(August 9, 2001)

1. An Interview with Ehud Barak

The following interview with Ehud Barak took place in Tel Aviv during late March andearly April. I have supplied explanatory references in brackets with Mr. Barak'sapproval.

The call from Bill Clinton came hours after the publication in The New York TimesofDeborah Sontag's "revisionist" article ("Quest for Middle East Peace: How and Why ItFailed," July 26, 2001) on the IsraeliPalestinian peace process. Ehud Barak, Israel'sformer prime minister, on vacation, was swimming in a cove in Sardinia. Clinton said(according to Barak):

What the hell is this? Why is she turning the mistakes we [i.e., the US and Israel] madeinto the essence? The true story of Camp David was that for the first time in the historyof the conflict the American president put on the table a proposal, based on UN SecurityCouncil resolutions 242 and 338, very close to the Palestinian demands, and Arafatrefused even to accept it as a basis for negotiations, walked out of the room, anddeliberately turned to terrorism. That's the real storyall the rest is gossip.
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Clinton was speaking of the two-week-long July 2000 Camp David conference that hehad organized and mediated and its failure, and the eruption at the end of September ofthe Palestinian intifada, or campaign of anti-Israeli violence, which has continued eversince and which currently plagues the Middle East, with no end in sight. Midway in theconference, apparently on July 18, Clinton had "slowly"to avoid misunderstanding

read out to Arafat a document, endorsed in advance by Barak, outlining the main pointsof a future settlement. The proposals included the establishment of a demilitarizedPalestinian state on some 92 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the GazaStrip, with some territorial compensation for the Palestinians from pre-1967 Israeliterritory; the dismantling of most of the settlements and the concentration of the bulk ofthe settlers inside the 8 percent of the West Bank to be annexed by Israel; theestablishment of the Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, in which some Arabneighborhoods would become sovereign Palestinian territory and others would enjoy"functional autonomy"; Palestinian sovereignty over half the Old City of Jerusalem (theMuslim and Christian quarters) and "custodianship," though not sovereignty, over theTemple Mount; a return of refugees to the prospective Palestinian state though with no

"right of return" to Israel proper; and the organization by the international community ofa massive aid program to facilitate the refugees' rehabilitation.

Arafat said "No." Clinton, enraged, banged on the table and said: "You are leading yourpeople and the region to a catastrophe." A formal Palestinian rejection of the proposalsreached the Americans the next day. The summit sputtered on for a few days more butto all intents and purposes it was over.

Barak today portrays Arafat's behavior at Camp David as a "performance" geared to

exacting from the Israelis as many concessions as possible without ever seriouslyintending to reach a peace settlement or sign an "end to the conflict." "He did notnegotiate in good faith, indeed, he did not negotiate at all. He just kept saying 'no' toevery offer, never making any counterproposals of his own," he says. Barakcontinuously shifts between charging Arafat with "lacking the character or will" to makea historic compromise (as did the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 19771979,when he made peace with Israel) and accusing him of secretly planning Israel's demisewhile he strings along a succession of Israeli and Western leaders and, on the way,hoodwinks "naive journalists"in Barak's phraselike Sontag and officials such asformer US National Security Council expert Robert Malley (who, with Hussein Agha,published another "revisionist" article on Camp David, "Camp David: The Tragedy ofErrors"[*]). According to Barak:

What they [Arafat and his colleagues] want is a Palestinian state in all of Palestine.What we see as self-evident, [the need for] two states for two peoples, they reject. Israelis too strong at the moment to defeat, so they formally recognize it. But their game planis to establish a Palestinian state while always leaving an opening for further "legitimate"demands down the road. For now, they are willing to agree to a temporary truce laHudnat Hudaybiyah [a temporary truce that the Prophet Muhammad concluded with the
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leaders of Mecca during 628629, which he subsequently unilaterally violated]. Theywill exploit the tolerance and democracy of Israel first to turn it into "a state for all itscitizens," as demanded by the extreme nationalist wing of Israel's Arabs and extremistleft-wing Jewish Israelis. Then they will push for a binational state and then,demography and attrition will lead to a state with a Muslim majority and a Jewish

minority. This would not necessarily involve kicking out all the Jews. But it would meanthe destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. This, I believe, is their vision. They may nottalk about it often, openly, but this is their vision. Arafat sees himself as a rebornSaladinthe Kurdish Muslim general who defeated the Crusaders in the twelfthcenturyand Israel as just another, ephemeral Crusader state.

Barak believes that Arafat sees the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants,numbering close to four million, as the main demographic-political tool for subverting theJewish state.

Arafat, says Barak, believes that Israel "has no right to exist, and he seeks its demise."

Barak buttresses this by arguing that Arafat "does not recognize the existence of aJewish people or nation, only a Jewish religion, because it is mentioned in the Koranand because he remembers seeing, as a kid, Jews praying at the Wailing Wall." This,Barak believes, underlay Arafat's insistence at Camp David (and since) that thePalestinians have sole sovereignty over the Temple Mount compound (Haram al-Sharifthe noble sanctuary) in the southeastern corner of Jerusalem's Old City. Arafatdenies that any Jewish temple has ever stood thereand this is a microcosm of hisdenial of the Jews' historical connection and claim to the Land of Israel/Palestine.Hence, in December 2000, Arafat refused to accept even the vague formulationproposed by Clinton positing Israeli sovereignty over the earth beneath the TempleMount's surface area.

Barak recalls Clinton telling him that during the Camp David talks he had attendedSunday services and the minister had preached a sermon mentioning Solomon, theking who built the First Temple. Later that evening, he had met Arafat and spoke of thesermon. Arafat had said: "There is nothing there [i.e., no trace of a temple on theTemple Mount]." Clinton responded that "not only the Jews but I, too, believe that underthe surface there are remains of Solomon's temple." (At this point one of Clinton's[Jewish] aides whispered to the President that he should tell Arafat that this is hispersonal opinion, not an official American position.)

Repeatedly during our prolonged interview, conducted in his office in a Tel Avivskyscraper, Barak shook his headin bewilderment and sadnessat what he regardsas Palestinian, and especially Arafat's, mendacity:

They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie...creates no dissonance. They don'tsuffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seenas an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that whichdoesn't. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whomeverything is permissible. There is no such thing as "the truth."


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Speaking of Arab society, Barak recalls: "The deputy director of the US Federal Bureauof Investigation once told me that there are societies in which lie detector tests don'twork, societies in which lies do not create cognitive dissonance [on which the tests arebased]." Barak gives an example: back in October 2000, shortly after the start of thecurrent Intifada, he met with then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Arafat in

the residence of the US ambassador in Paris. Albright was trying to broker a cease-fire.Arafat had agreed to call a number of his police commanders in the West Bank andGaza, including Tawfik Tirawi, to implement a truce. Barak said:

I interjected: "But these are not the people organizing the violence. If you are serious [inseeking a cease-fire], then call Marwan Bargouti and Hussein al-Sheikh" [the WestBank heads of the Fatah, Arafat's own political party, who were orchestrating theviolence. Bargouti has since been arrested by Israeli troops and is currently awaitingtrial for launching dozens of terrorist attacks].

Arafat looked at me, with an expression of blank innocence, as if I had mentioned thenames of two polar bears, and said: "Who? Who?" So I repeated the names, this time

with a pronounced, clear Arabic inflection"Mar-wan Bar-gou-ti" and "Hsein aSheikh"and Arafat again said, "Who? Who?" At this, some of his aides couldn't stopthemselves and burst out laughing. And Arafat, forced to drop the pretense, agreed tocall them later. [Of course, nothing happened and the shooting continued.]

But Barak is far from dismissive of Arafat, who appears to many Israelis to be a sick,slightly doddering buffoon and, at the same time, sly and murderous. Barak sees him as"a great actor, very sharp, very elusive, slippery." He cautions that Arafat "uses hisbroken English" to excellent effect.

Barak was elected prime minister, following three years of Benjamin Netanyahu'spremiership, in May 1999 and took office in July. He immediately embarked on hismultipronged peace effortvis--vis Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestiniansfeeling thatIsrael and the Middle East were headed for "an iceberg and a certain crash and that itwas the leaders' moral and political responsibility to try to avoid a catastrophe." Heunderstood that the year and a half left of Clinton's presidency afforded a small windowof opportunity inside a larger, but also limited, regional window of opportunity. Thatwindow was opened by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had since the 1950ssupported the Arabs against Israel, and the defeat of Iraq in Kuwait in 1991, and wouldclose when and if Iran and/or Iraq obtained nuclear weapons and when and if Islamic

fundamentalist movements took over states bordering Israel.

Barak said he wanted to complete what Rabin had begun with the Oslo agreement,which inaugurated mutual IsraeliPalestinian recognition and partial Israeli withdrawalsfrom the West Bank and Gaza Strip back in 1993. A formal peace agreement, he felt,would not necessarily "end the conflict, that will take education over generations, butthere is a tremendous value to an [official] framework of peace that places pacifichandcuffs on these societies." Formal peace treaties, backed by the international


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community, will have "a dynamic of their own, reducing the possibility of an existentialconflict. But without such movement toward formal peace, we are headed for theiceberg." He seems to mean something far worse than the current low-level IsraeliPalestinian conflagration.

Barak says that, before July 2000, IDF intelligence gave the Camp David talks less thana 50 percent chance of success. The intelligence chiefs were doubtful that Arafat "wouldtake the decisions necessary to reach a peace agreement." His own feeling at the timewas that he "hoped Arafat would rise to the occasion and display something ofgreatness, like Sadat and Hussein, at the moment of truth. They did not wait for aconsensus [among their people], they decided to lead. I told Clinton on the first day [ofthe summit] that I didn't know whether Arafat had come to make a deal or just to extractas many political concessions as possible before he, Clinton, left office."

Barak dismisses the charges leveled by the Camp David "revisionists" as Palestinianpropaganda. The visit to the Temple Mount by then Likud leader Ariel Sharon inSeptember 2000 was not what caused the intifada, he says.

Sharon's visit, which was coordinated with [Palestinian Authority West Bank securitychief] Jibril Rajoub, was directed against me, not the Palestinians, to show that theLikud cared more about Jerusalem than I did. We know, from hard intelligence, thatArafat [after Camp David] intended to unleash a violent confrontation, terrorism.[Sharon's visit and the riots that followed] fell into his hands like an excellent excuse, apretext.

As agreed, Sharon had made no statement and had refrained from entering the Islamicshrines in the compound in the course of the visit. But rioting broke out nonetheless.The intifada, says Barak, "was preplanned, pre-prepared. I don't mean that Arafat knewthat on a certain day in September [it would be unleashed].... It wasn't accurate, likecomputer engineering. But it was definitely on the level of planning, of a grand plan."

Nor does Barak believe that the IDF's precipitate withdrawal from the Security Zone inSouthern Lebanon, in May 2000, set off the intifada. "When I took office [in July 1999] Ipromised to pull out within a year. And that is what I did." Without doubt, thePalestinians drew inspiration and heart from the Hezbollah's successful guerrillacampaign during 19852000, which in the end drove out the IDF, as well as from the

spectacle of the sometime slapdash, chaotic pullout at the end of May; they said asmuch during the first months of the intifada. "But had we not withdrawn when we did,the situation would have been much worse," Barak argues:

We would have faced a simultaneous struggle on two fronts, in Palestine and insouthern Lebanon, and the Hezbollah would have enjoyed international legitimacy intheir struggle against a foreign occupier.


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The lack of international legitimacy, Barak stresses, following the Israeli pullback to theinternational frontier, is what has curtailed the Hezbollah's attacks against Israel duringthe past weeks. "Had we still been in Leb-anon we would have had to mobilize 100,000,not 30,000, reserve soldiers [in April, during 'Operation Defensive Wall']," he adds. Buthe is aware that the sporadic Hezbollah attacks might yet escalate into a full-scale

Israeli LebaneseSyrian confrontation, something the pullback had been designedand so toutedto avoid.

As to the charge raised by the Palestinians, and, in their wake, by Deborah Sontag, andMalley and Agha, that the Palestinians had been dragooned into coming to Camp David"unprepared" and prematurely, Barak is dismissive to the point of contempt. Heobserves that the Palestinians had had eight years, since 1993, to prepare theirpositions and fall-back positions, demands and red lines, and a full year since he hadbeen elected to office and made clear his intention to go for a final settlement. By 2002,he said, they were eager to establish a state,

which is what I and Clinton proposed and offered. And before the summit, there weremonths of discussions and contacts, in Stockholm, Israel, the Gaza Strip. Would theyreally have been more "prepared" had the summit been deferred to August, as Arafatlater said he had wanted?

One senses that Barak feels on less firm ground when he responds to the "revisionist"charge that it was the continued Israeli settlement in the Occupied Territories, during theyear before Camp David and under his premiership, that had so stirred Palestinianpassions as to make the intifada inevitable:

Look, during my premiership we established no new settlements and, in fact, dismantled

many illegal, unauthorized ones. Immediately after I took office I promised Arafat: Nonew settlementsbut I also told him that we would continue to honor the previousgovernment's commitments, and contracts in the pipeline, concerning the expansion ofexisting settlements. The courts would force us to honor existing contracts, I said. But Ialso offered a substantive argument. I want to reach peace during the next sixteenmonths. What was now being built would either remain within territory that you, thePalestinians, agree should remain oursand therefore it shouldn't matter to youorwould be in territory that would soon come under Palestinian sovereignty, and thereforewould add to the housing available for returning refugees. So you can't lose.

But Barak concedes that while this sounded logical, there was a psychologicaldimension here that could not be neutralized by argument: the Palestinians simply saw,on a daily basis, that more and more of "their" land was being plundered and becoming"Israeli." And he agrees that he allowed the expansion of existing settlements in part tomollify the Israeli right, which he needed quiescent as he pushed forward toward peaceand, ultimately, a withdrawal from the territories.


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Regarding the core of the Israeli-American proposals, the "revisionists" have chargedthat Israel offered the Palestinians not a continuous state but a collection of"bantustans" or "cantons." "This is one of the most embarrassing lies to have emergedfrom Camp David," says Barak.

I ask myself why is he [Arafat] lying. To put it simply, any proposal that offers 92 percentof the West Bank cannot, almost by definition, break up the territory into noncontiguouscantons. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are separate, but that cannot be helped [ina peace agreement, they would be joined by a bridge].

But in the West Bank, Barak says, the Palestinians were promised a continuous pieceof sovereign territory except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalemthrough from Maale Adumim to the Jordan River. Here, Palestinian territorial continuitywould have been assured by a tunnel or bridge:

The Palestinians said that I [and Clinton] presented our proposals as a diktat, take it or

leave it. This is a lie. Everything proposed was open to continued negotiations. Theycould have raised counter-proposals. But they never did.

Barak explains Arafat's "lie" about "bantustans" as stemming from his fear that "whenreasonable Palestinian citizens would come to know the real content of Clinton'sproposal and map, showing what 92 percent of the West Bank means, they would havesaid: 'Mr. Chairman, why didn't you take it?'"

In one other important way the "revisionist" articles are misleading: they focused onCamp David (July 2000) while almost completely ignoring the follow-up (and moregenerous) Clinton proposals (endorsed by Israel) of December 2000 and the

Palestinian Israeli talks at Taba in January 2001. The "revisionists," Barak implies,completely ignored the shiftunder the prodding of the intifadain the Israeli (andAmerican) positions between July and the end of 2000. By December and January,Israel had agreed to Washington's proposal that it withdraw from about 95 percent ofthe West Bank with substantial territorial compensation for the Palestinians from Israelproper, and that the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem would become sovereignPalestinian territory. The Israelis also agreed to an international force at leasttemporarily controlling the Jordan River line between the West Bank and the Kingdomof Jordan instead of the IDF. (But on the refugee issue, which Barak sees as"existential," Israel had continued to stand firm: "We cannot allow even one refugeeback on the basis of the 'right of return,'" says Barak. "And we cannot accept historicalresponsibility for the creation of the problem.")

Had the Palestinians, even at that late date, agreed, there would have been a peacesettlement. But Arafat dragged his feet for a fortnight and then responded to the Clintonproposals with a "Yes, but..." that, with its hundreds of objections, reservations, andqualifications, was tantamount to a resounding "No." Palestinian officials maintain to thisday that Arafat said "Yes" to the Clinton proposals of December 23. But Dennis Ross,Clinton's special envoy to the Middle East, in a recent interview (on Fox News, April 21,


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2002), who was present at the ArafatClinton White House meeting on January 2, saysthat Arafat rejected "every single one of the ideas" presented by Clinton, even Israelisovereignty over the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem's Old City. And the "Palestinians wouldhave [had] in the West Bank an area that was contiguous. Those who say there werecantons, [that is] completely untrue." At Taba, the Palestinians seemed to soften a

littlefor the first time they even produced a map seemingly conceding 2 percent of theWest Bank. But on the refugees they, too, stuck to their guns, insisting on Israeliacceptance of "the right of return" and on Jerusalem, that they have sole sovereigntyover the Temple Mount.

Several "revisionists" also took Barak to task for his "Syria first" strategy: soon afterassuming office, he tried to make peace with Syria and only later, after Damascusturned him down, did he turn to the Palestinians. This had severely taxed thePalestinians' goodwill and patience; they felt they were being sidelined. Barak concedes

the point, but explains:

I always supported Syria first. Because they have a [large] conventional army andnonconventional weaponry, chemical and biological, and missiles to deliver them. Thisrepresents, under certain conditions, an existential threat. And after Syria comesLebanon [meaning that peace with Syria would immediately engender a peace treatywith Lebanon]. Moreover, the Syrian problem, with all its difficulties, is simpler to solvethan the Palestinian problem. And reaching peace with Syria would greatly limit thePalestinians' ability to widen the conflict. On the other hand, solving the Palestinianproblem will not diminish Syria's ability to existentially threaten Israel.

Barak says that this was also Rabin's thinking. But he points out that when he tookoffice, he immediately informed Arafat that he intended to pursue an agreement withSyria and that this would in no way be at the Palestinians' expense. "I arrived on thescene immediately after [Netanyahu's emissary Ronald] Lauder's intensive [secret]talks, which looked very interesting. It was a Syrian initiative that looked very close to abreakthrough. It would have been very irresponsible not to investigate this because ofsome traditional, ritual order."

The Netanyahu-Lauder initiative, which posited an Israeli withdrawal from the GolanHeights to a line a few kilometers east of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, cameto naught because two of Netanyahu's senior ministers, Sharon and Defense MinisterYitzhak Mordechai, objected to the proposed concessions. Barak offered then PresidentHafiz Assad more, in effect a return to the de facto border of "4 June 1967" along theJordan River and almost to the shoreline at the northeastern end of the Sea of Galilee.Assad, by then feeble and close to death, rejected the terms, conveying his rejection toPresident Clinton at the famous meeting in Geneva on March 26, 2000. Barak explains,

Assad wanted Israel to capitulate in advance to all his demands. Only then would heagree to enter into substantive negotiations. I couldn't agree to this. We must continue


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to live [in the Middle East] afterward [and, had we made the required concessions,would have been seen as weak, inviting depredation].

But Barak believes that Assad's effort, involving a major policy switch, to reach a peacesettlement with Israel was genuine and sincere.

Barak appears uncomfortable with the "revisionist" charge that his body languagetoward Arafat had been unfriendly and that he had, almost consistently during CampDavid, avoided meeting the Palestinian leader, and that these had contributed to thesummit's failure. Barak:

I am the Israeli leader who met most with Arafat. He visited Rabin's home only after [theassassinated leader] was buried on Mount Herzl [in Jerusalem]. He [Arafat] visited mein my home in Kochav Yair where my wife made food for him. [Arafat's aide] Abu Mazenand [my wife] Nava swapped memories about Safad, her mother was from Safad, andboth their parents were traders. I also met Arafat in friends' homes, in Gaza, in

Ramallah.

Barak says that they met "almost every day" in Camp David at mealtimes and had one"two-hour meeting" in Arafat's cottage. He admits that the time had been wasted onsmall talkbut, in the end, he argues, this is all part of the "gossip," not the real reasonfor the failure. "Did Nixon meet Ho Chi Minh or Giap [before reaching the Vietnampeace deal]? Or did De Gaulle ever speak to [Algerian leader] Ben Bella? The right timefor a meeting between us was when things were ready for a decision by the leaders...."Barak implies that the negotiations had never matured or even come close to the pointwhere the final decision-making meeting by the leaders was apt and necessary.

Barak believes that since the start of the intifada Israel has had no choice"and itdoesn't matter who is prime minister" (perhaps a jab at his former rival and colleague inthe Labor Party, the dovish-sounding Shimon Peres, currently Israel's foreignminister)but to combat terrorism with military force. The policy of "targeted killings" ofterrorist organizers, bomb-makers, and potential attackers began during his premiershipand he still believes it is necessary and effective, "though great care must be taken tolimit collateral damage. Say you live in Chevy Chase and you know of someone who ispreparing a bomb in Georgetown and intends to launch a suicide bomber against acoffee shop outside your front door. Wouldn't you do something? Wouldn't it be justifiedto arrest this man and, if you can't, to kill him?" he asks.

Barak supported Sharon's massive incursion in April"Operation Defensive Wall"intothe Palestinian citiesNablus, Jenin, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Qalqilya, and Tulkarmbutsuggests that he would have done it differently:

More forcefully and with greater speed, and simultaneously against all the cities, not, aswas done, in staggered fashion. And I would argue with the confinement of Arafat to his


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Ramallah offices. The present situation, with Arafat eyeball to eyeball with [Israeli] tankgun muzzles but with an in-surance policy [i.e., Israel's promise to President Bush not toharm him], is every guerrilla leader's wet dream. But, in general, no responsiblegovernment, following the wave of suicide bombings culminating in the Passovermassacre [in which twenty-eight Israelis were murdered and about 100 injured in a

Netanya hotel while sitting at the seder] could have acted otherwise.

But he believes that the counter-terrorist military effort must be accompanied by aconstant reiteration of readiness to renew peace negotiations on the basis of the CampDavid formula. He seems to be hinting here that Sharon, while also interested in politicaldialogue, rejects the Camp David proposals as a basis. Indeed, Sharon said in April thathis government will not dismantle any settlements, and will not discuss such adismantling of settlements, before the scheduled November 2003 general elections.Barak fears that in the absence of political dialogue based on the Camp DavidClintonproposals, the vacuum created will be filled by proposals, from Europe or Saudi Arabia,that are less agreeable to Israel.

Barak seems to hold out no chance of success for IsraeliPalestinian negotiations,should they somehow resume, so long as Arafat and like-minded leaders are at thehelm on the Arab side. He seems to think in terms of generations and hesitantly predictsthat only "eighty years" after 1948 will the Palestinians be historically ready for acompromise. By then, most of the generation that experienced the catastrophe of 1948at first hand will have died; there will be "very few 'salmons' around who still want toreturn to their birthplaces to die." (Barak speaks of a "salmon syndrome" among thePalestiniansand says that Israel, to a degree, was willing to accommodate it, throughthe family reunion scheme, allowing elderly refugees to return to be with their familiesbefore they die.) He points to the model of the Soviet Union, which collapsed roughly

after eighty years, after the generation that had lived through the revolution had died.He seems to be saying that revolutionary movements' zealotry and dogmatism die downafter the passage of three generations and, in the case of the Palestinians, thedisappearance of the generation of the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948 will facilitatecompromise.

I asked, "If this is true, then your peace effort vis--vis the Palestinians was historicallypremature and foredoomed?"

Barak: "No, as a responsible leader I had to give it a try."

In the absence of real negotiations, Barak believes that Israel should begin tounilaterally prepare for a pullout from "some 75 percent" of the West Bank and, heimplies, all or almost all of the Gaza Strip, back to defensible borders, while allowing aPalestinian state to emerge there. Meanwhile Israel should begin constructing a solid,impermeable fence around the evacuated parts of the West Bank and new housing andsettlements inside Israel proper and in the areas of the West Bank that Israel intends topermanently annex (such as the Etzion Block area, south of Bethlehem) to absorb thesettlers who will be moving out of the territories. He says that when the Palestinians will


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be ready for peace, the fate of the remaining 25 percent of the West Bank can benegotiated.

Barak is extremely troubled by the problem posed by Israel's Arab minority,representing some 20 percent of Israel's total population of some 6.5 million. Theirleadership over the past few years has come to identify with Arafat and the PA, and anincreasing number of Israeli Arabs, who now commonly refer to themselves as"Palestinian Arabs," oppose Israel's existence and support the Palestinian armedstruggle. A growing though still very small number have engaged in terrorism, includingone of the past months' suicide bombers. Barak agrees that, in the absence of a peacesettlement with the Palestinians, Israel's Arabs constitute an irredentist "time bomb,"though he declines to use the phrase. At the start of the intifada Israel's Arabs riotedaround the country, blocking major highways with stones and Molotov cocktails. Inresponse, thirteen were killed by Israeli policemen, deepening the chasm between the

country's Jewish majority and Arab minority.

The relations between the two have not recovered and the rhetoric of the Israeli Arableadership has grown steadily more militant. One Israeli Arab Knesset member, AzmiBishara, is currently on trial for sedition. If the conflict with the Palestinians continues,says Barak, "Israel's Arabs will serve as [the Palestinians'] spearpoint" in the struggle:

This may necessitate changes in the rules of the democratic game ...in order to assureIsrael's Jewish character.

He raises the possibility that in a future deal, some areas with large Arab

concentrations, such as the "Little Triangle" and Umm al-Fahm, bordering on the WestBank, could be transferred to the emergent Palestinian Arab state, along with theirinhabitants:

But this could only be done by agreementand I don't recommend that governmentspokesmen speak of it [openly]. But such an exchange makes demographic sense andis not inconceivable.

Barak is employed as a senior adviser to an American company, Electronic DataSystems, and is considering a partnership in a private equity company, where he will be

responsible for "security-related" ventures. I asked him, "Do you see yourself returningto politics?" Barak answered,

Look, the public [decisively] voted against me a year ago. I feel like a reserve soldierwho knows he might be called upon to come back but expects that he won't be unless itis absolutely necessary. But it's not inconceivable. After all, Rabin returned to thepremiership fifteen years after the end of his first term in office.


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At one point in the interview, Barak pointed to the settlement campaign in heavilypopulated Palestinian areas, inaugurated by Menachem Begin's Likud-led governmentin 1977, as the point at which Israel took a major historical wrong turn. But at othertimes Barak pointed to 1967 as the crucial mistake, when Israel occupied the WestBank and Gaza (and Sinai and the Golan Heights) and, instead of agreeing to

immediate withdrawal from all the territories, save East Jerusalem, in exchange forpeace, began to settle them. Barak recalled seeing David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founderand first prime minister (19481953 and 1955 1963), on television in June 1967arguing for the immediate withdrawal from all the territories occupied in the Six- DayWar in exchange for peace, save for East Jerusalem.

Many of usme includedthought that he was suffering from [mental] weakness orperhaps a subconscious jealousy of his successor [Levi Eshkol, who had presided overthe unprecedented victory and conquests]. Today one understands that he simply sawmore clearly and farther than the leadership at that time.

How does Barak see the Middle East in a hundred years' time? Would it contain aJewish state? Unlike Arafat, Barak believes it will, "and it will be strong and prosperous.I really think this. Our connection to the Land of Israelis is not like the Crusaders'....Israel fits into the zeitgeist of our era. It is true that there are demographic threats to itsexistence. That is why a separation from the Palestinians is a compelling imperative.Without such a separation [into two states] there is no future for the Zionist dream."

Camp David and After: An Exchange (2. A Reply to Ehud Barak)

ByHussein Agha,Robert Malley

In response toCamp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)(June 13, 2002)

2. A Reply to Ehud Barak

Both sides in the IsraeliPalestinian war have several targets in mind, and publicopinion is not the least of them. The Camp David summit ended almost two years ago;

the Taba negotiations were abandoned in January 2001; Ariel Sharon has made nosecret of his rejection of the Oslo process, not to mention the positions taken by Israelat Camp David or in Taba; and the confrontation between the two sides has haddisastrous consequences. Yet in the midst of it all, the various interpretations of whathappened at Camp David and its aftermath continue to draw exceptional attention bothin Israel and in the United States.
http://www.nybooks.com/authors/7314http://www.nybooks.com/authors/7314http://www.nybooks.com/authors/7314http://www.nybooks.com/authors/7313http://www.nybooks.com/authors/7313http://www.nybooks.com/authors/7313http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15501http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15501http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15501http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15501http://www.nybooks.com/authors/7313http://www.nybooks.com/authors/7314


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Ehud Barak's interview with Benny Morris makes it clear why that is the case: Barak'sassessment that the talks failed because Yasser Arafat cannot make peace with Israeland that his answer to Israel's unprecedented offer was to resort to terrorist violencehas become central to the argument that Israel is in a fight for its survival against thosewho deny its very right to exist. So much of what is said and done today derives from

and is justified by that crude appraisal. First, Arafat and the rest of the Palestinianleaders must be supplanted before a meaningful peace process can resume, since theyare the ones who rejected the offer. Second, the Palestinians' use of violence hasnothing to do with ending the occupation since they walked away from the possibility ofreaching that goal at the negotiating table not long ago. And, finally, Israel must crushthe Palestinians"badly beat them" in the words of the current prime ministerif anagreement is ever to be reached.

The one-sided account that was set in motion in the wake of Camp David has haddevastating effectson Israeli public opinion as well as on US foreign policy. That wasclear enough a year ago; it has become far clearer since. Rectifying it does not mean, to

quote Barak, engaging in "Palestinian propaganda." Rather, it means taking a closelook at what actually occurred.

1.

Barak's central thesis is that the current Palestinian leadership wants "a Palestinianstate in all of Palestine. What we see as self-evident, two states for two peoples, theyreject." Arafat, he concludes, seeks Israel's "demise." Barak has made that claimrepeatedly, both here and

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Agha and Malley v Morris and Barak - Camp David an Exchange

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