Arabs (98 page)

Abdul Shafi’s speech provoked divided reactions from Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The Islamist Hamas movement, unreconciled to a two-state solution, had announced its opposition to participation in the conference from the outset. Secular Palestinians were fearful that their delegation might come under such pressure from the United States and Israel as to make concessions inconsistent with Palestinian national aspirations. After four years of the Intifada, all Palestinians wanted to see some concrete results for their years of struggle and sacrifice.

 

As the Palestinians had most to gain from Madrid, their speech was the most forward-looking. The other delegations paid lip service to the historic nature of the conference but otherwise used the occasion to review past grievances. The Lebanese focused on the ongoing Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, the Israeli premier catalogued Arab efforts to destroy the Jewish state, and the Syrian foreign minister provided a list of “inhuman Israeli practices” to make clear his distaste at having to meet with the Israelis at all.

After three days together, the delegates took off their gloves and openly brawled in their closing speeches. Prime Minister Shamir set a vituperative tone; he lambasted the Syrians, offering to “recite a litany of facts that demonstrate the extent to which Syria merits the dubious honor of being one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world.” He patronized the Palestinians, claiming Abdul Shafi “made a valiant effort at recounting the sufferings of his people,” though he accused the
Palestinian of “twisting history and perversion of fact.” At his speech’s conclusion, Shamir stormed out of the conference hall with his delegation, ostensibly to observe the Jewish Sabbath.

Abdul Shafi responded angrily, addressing his words to the empty seats vacated by the Israeli delegation. “The Palestinians are a people with legitimate national rights. We are not ‘the inhabitants of territories’ or an accident of history or an obstacle to Israel’s expansionist plans, or an abstract demographic problem. You may wish to close your eyes to this fact, Mr. Shamir, but we are here in the sight of the world, before your very eyes, and we shall not be denied.”

The exchange of insults reached its climax when the outraged Syrian foreign minister pulled out a British “Wanted” poster for Yitzhak Shamir dating back to his days in the Stern Gang fighting the British mandate in Palestine. “Let me show you an old picture of Shamir, when he was 32 years old,” Farouk al-Shara‘a said, brandishing the poster and pausing to note Shamir’s diminutive stature—“165 cm,” he sneered. Warming to his theme, Shara’a continued: “This picture was distributed because he was wanted. He himself confessed he was a terrorist. He confessed he . . . participated in murdering U.N. mediator Count Bernadotte in 1948, as far as I remember. He kills peace mediators and talks about Syria, Lebanon, terrorism.”
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Shara’a’s tirade was an unedifying spectacle that bode ill for the prospect of Arab-Israeli peace. On that sour note, the Madrid conference came to an end. Yet with the conclusion of the formal conference, a new phase of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations opened under American auspices: bilateral negotiations to resolve the differences between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and multilateral talks involving over forty states and international organizations to address issues of global concern such as water, the environment, arms control, refugees, and economic development. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the Madrid process initiated the most extensive peace negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors in over forty years of conflict.

The bilateral negotiations were intended to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict by returning occupied land in exchange for peace, in line with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. But the divergent ways in which the Arabs and Israelis interpreted these resolutions bedeviled negotiations from the outset. The Arab states seized on the principle of the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” set out in the preamble of the resolution to argue for a full Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territory occupied in the June 1967 War as a prerequisite for peace. The Israelis, in contrast, claimed that the resolution only required “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied” in the 1967 War—not
all
territories, just “territories”—and insisted they had already fulfilled their commitments to Resolution 242 by withdrawing from the Sinai Peninsula following the peace treaty with Egypt. The Israelis argued that the Arab parties had to sue for peace for its own sake
and negotiate a mutually acceptable territorial solution without preconditions. No progress was achieved in talks between Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

Talks between Israel and the Palestinians had a different focus. The two sides agreed to negotiate the terms of a five-year interim period of Palestinian self-rule, after which they would enter into final negotiations to conclude the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But once the negotiations began, the Shamir government did everything in its power to prevent meaningful progress with the Palestinians, and it stepped up settlement activity to deepen Israel’s hold over the West Bank. In an interview after his electoral defeat in 1992, Shamir confirmed his government had obstructed negotiations to prevent Palestinian statehood and retain the West Bank for Israeli settlements. “I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria.”
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Shamir’s stonewalling came to an end when his government was defeated at the polls. The Israeli elections of 1992 brought Yitzhak Rabin to power at the head of a left-leaning Labor coalition. Rabin’s reputation as the man who had authorized physical violence against Intifada demonstrators gave the Palestinian negotiators little grounds for confidence that “Rabin the bone-breaker” could “become Rabin the peacemaker.”
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In his first months in office, Rabin delivered more continuity than change in the deadlocked bilateral negotiations. In December 1992, Hamas activists kidnapped and murdered an Israeli border guard. Rabin retaliated by ordering the roundup and deportation to Lebanon of 416 suspects without charge or trial. All Arab delegations suspended negotiations in protest. If anything, Rabin appeared to be even more of a hard-liner than Shamir.

Bill Clinton’s surprise defeat of George H. W. Bush in the American presidential elections in 1992 raised concerns among the Arab negotiation teams. During the presidential campaign, Clinton had made clear his unconditional support for Israel. The Arab delegations did not believe the change in presidents bode well for them. Although negotiations did resume in April 1993, the Clinton administration took a hands-off approach to the negotiations, and in the absence of strong American leadership the framework launched by the Madrid conference reached a dead end.

The breakthrough in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations came from a change in Israeli policy. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his deputy, Yossi Beilin, were convinced that a settlement with the Palestinians was in Israel’s national interest. They also recognized that a settlement could only be reached through direct negotiations with the PLO. Yet since 1986, Israelis had been forbidden by law to meet with members of the PLO. By 1992, the number of Israeli journalists and politicians who had violated the ban had grown to such an extent as to make the law irrelevant. Yet the Israeli government could not knowingly break Israeli law. Rabin was not enthusiastic
about dealing with the PLO, but he agreed to overturn the law banning contact between Israeli citizens and the PLO in December 1992.

The following month, Yossi Beilin gave the green light for two Israeli academics, Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak, to meet in secret with the PLO treasurer, Ahmad Qurie, in Oslo, Norway. It was the beginning of an intense and fruitful negotiation conducted through fourteen meetings under the auspices of the Norwegian foreign ministry.

The Norwegians were impartial brokers who provided the neutral terrain and discretion to allow the Palestinians and Israelis to work out their differences with minimal interference. The Norwegian facilitator, Terje Roed Larsen, set out his country’s role as the Palestinians and Israelis began the first round of secret diplomacy. “If you want to live together, you have to solve your own problems,” Larsen insisted. “It is your problem. We are here to give you the assistance you might need, the place, the practicalities, and so on. We can be facilitators . . . but nothing more. I will wait outside and will not interfere unless you come to blows. Then I will interfere.” Larsen’s humor helped break the ice between the two delegations. “This made us all laugh,” PLO official Ahmed Qurie recalled, “as it was meant to.”
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Qurie, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Ala, had never met an Israeli prior to his first encounter with Professor Yair Hirschfeld, and he brought to the table all of the dread and mistrust accumulated over years of mutual hostility between Palestinians and Israelis. Yet in the isolation of the Norwegian winter, the five men—three Palestinians and two Israelis—began to break down barriers. “The atmosphere in the house became more relaxed, and though we still felt on our side some mistrust of the Israelis, we nonetheless began somewhat to warm to them.” In their first meeting, the delegates set a pattern they were to follow through future rounds. Putting recriminations over the past behind them, Abu Ala recalled, “we focused our attention on the present and the future, trying to gauge the extent to which we had common ground, to identify such points of agreement as we might reach, and to estimate the distance which separated us on the various issues.”
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Behind closed doors, in total secrecy, Palestinians and Israelis discussed their differences and secured their governments’ backing for a framework to resolve them—in eight brief months. They experienced breakdowns, and the Norwegians occasionally had to play a more active role. Foreign Minister Johan Joergen Holst even engaged in a bit of discrete telephone diplomacy between Tunis and Tel Aviv to help overcome deadlocks. Yet by August 1993, the two sides had concluded an agreement they were willing to take public.

When Israel and the PLO announced their agreement on Palestinian interim self-rule in Gaza and Jericho, they caught the world by surprise—and faced predictable criticism. The Clinton administration was nonplussed to see the Norwegians succeed
where the Americans had failed in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. In Israel, the opposition Likud Party accused the Rabin government of betrayal and promised to annul the accord when it returned to power. The Arab world criticized the PLO for breaking Arab ranks to conclude a secret deal with the Israelis, and Palestinian dissident groups condemned their leadership for extending recognition to Israel.

Oslo was a desperate gamble for Yasser Arafat, but the PLO chairman was running out of options. The Palestinian movement faced imminent financial and institutional collapse in 1993. The oil states of the Gulf had severed all financial support to the PLO in retribution for Arafat’s support of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf crisis. By December 1991 the PLO’s budget had been halved. Thousands of fighters and employees were made redundant or went months without pay; by March 1993, up to one-third of all PLO personnel received no pay at all. The financial crisis led to charges of corruption and maladministration that split PLO ranks.
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The PLO as a government in exile would not long survive the pressures. A peace deal with Israel stood the chance of opening new sources of financial support and would give the PLO a toehold in Palestine on which it could realize the elusive goal of a two-state solution.

The Oslo Accords offered the Palestinians little more than a toe-hold. The deal provided for a provisional Palestinian authority over the Gaza Strip and an enclave surrounding the West Bank town of Jericho. For many Palestinians these seemed small territorial gains for such important Palestinian concessions to Israel. Arafat confided his strategy to Hanan Ashrawi shortly before the Oslo Accords were announced: “I will get full withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho as the first step of disengagement, and there I will exercise sovereignty. I want Jericho because it will get me to Jerusalem and link up Gaza with the West Bank.” Ashrawi looked unconvinced. “Trust me, we will soon have our own telephone country code, stamps, and television station. This will be the beginning of the Palestinian state.”
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The “Gaza-Jericho First” plan became a reality with the signing of the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993. Before a global television audience, Yitzhak Rabin overcame his reluctance and shook Yasser Arafat’s hand, sealing the deal. “All Arab television stations carried the ceremony live,” Abu Ala recalled. “Many people around the Arab world could scarcely believe what was happening.”
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The PLO and Israel had agreed to what was effectively a partition plan for Palestine. The document called for the withdrawal of Israeli military administration from Jericho and the Gaza Strip and its replacement with a Palestinian civil administration for a five-year interim period. It also provided for the creation of an elected council so that the people of Palestine would be governed “according to democratic principles.” The Palestinian Authority would gain control over education and culture,
health, social welfare, taxation, and tourism. Palestinian police would provide security for the areas under Palestinian control.

The agreement deferred discussion of the most controversial issues. The future of Jerusalem, the rights of refugees, the status of settlements, borders, and security arrangements were all to be addressed in final status negotiations set to begin three years into the interim period. The Palestinians expected more from the permanent settlement than the Israelis were likely to concede: an independent Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Israelis anticipated a disengagement from unessential Arab territory leading to a demilitarized Palestinian entity. Leaving such fundamental disagreement to future negotiations, the Israeli Knesset ratified the Declaration of Principles with a comfortable majority, and the eighty-member Palestinian Central Council gave its overwhelming approval (sixty-three in favor, eight opposed, with nine abstentions) on October 11.