Arabs (99 page)

By May 1994 the technical details surrounding the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the establishment of Palestinian rule in Gaza and Jericho had been ironed out. Yasser Arafat made his triumphant return to Gaza to oversee the running of the Palestinian Authority on July 1. In September, Arafat and Rabin returned to Washington to sign the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known as Oslo II. Middle Eastern politics had entered the Oslo Era.

 

The Oslo Accords gained Israel unprecedented acceptance in the Arab world. Once the Palestinians had struck a unilateral deal with the Israelis, the other Arab countries felt free to pursue their own interests toward the Jewish state without risking accusations of betraying the Palestinian cause. For the most part, the Arab world had grown weary of the Arab-Israel conflict and was pragmatic in its views of Israel. The Jordanians were the first to respond to the new realities.

Once the Oslo Accords had been announced, the Jordanians did not hesitate. King Hussein saw peace with Israel as the best way for Jordan to break from the isolation it had suffered since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. King Hussein also believed that Jordan would be rewarded for making peace by substantial U.S. aid and international investment into his country. The day after the White House signing of the Declaration of Principles, representatives of Israel and Jordan met in the offices of the U.S. State Department to sign an agenda for peace that the two sides had worked out over the course of bilateral negotiations in Madrid.

On July 25, 1994, King Hussein and Prime Minister Rabin were invited back to Washington to sign a preliminary peace agreement, ending the belligerency between the two states, agreeing to settle all territorial issues in accordance with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and recognizing a special role for the Hashemite
monarchy in the Muslim holy places of Jerusalem. The final Jordan-Israel peace treaty was signed on the border between the two countries in the Araba Desert on October 26, 1994. Jordan became the second Arab state after Egypt to exchange ambassadors and normalize relations with the Jewish state.

The deals with the PLO and Jordan paved the way for other Arab governments to establish ties with Israel. In October 1994, Morocco and Israel agreed to open liaison offices in each other’s capital, and Tunisia followed suit in January 1996. Both countries have significant Jewish minority communities with long-standing ties to Israel. Mauritania, a member state of the Arab League in northwest Africa, established formal relations with Israel and exchanged ambassadors in November 1999. Two of the Arab Gulf states established trade offices with Israel—the Sultanate of Oman, in January 1996; and Qatar in April of the same year. Confounding those who had long argued that the Arab world could never live in peace with the Jewish state, the Oslo Era demonstrated widespread Arab acceptance of Israel from North Africa through the Gulf.

Yet the Oslo process continued to face strong opposition in some quarters—nowhere more intensely than in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Extremists from both Israel and the Palestinian territories resorted to violence in a bid to derail the peace agreements. Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a number of lethal attacks on Israelis in the immediate aftermath of the signing of the Declaration of Principles in September 1993. Israeli extremists stepped up their own attacks on Palestinians as well. In February 1994 Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron dressed in his Israeli army reserves uniform and opened fire on the worshipers gathered for dawn prayers, killing 29 and wounding 150 before being overwhelmed and killed by survivors of the attack. Goldstein was a medical doctor and resident of Kiryat Arba, a militant settlement neighboring Hebron that posthumously honored Goldstein for his act of mass murder with a graveside plaque reading: “To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah and the nation of Israel.”

The gulf between Palestinian and Israeli extremists was growing wider. Outrage over the Hebron massacre led to an escalation of Palestinian attacks and an increase in suicide bombings designed to inflict maximum casualties. In April 1994, suicide bombings on buses in Afula and Hadera claimed thirteen lives, and twenty-two people were killed by a suicide attack on a bus in Tel Aviv in October 1994. The Israelis responded by assassinating Islamist leaders. Israeli agents killed Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shiqaqi in Malta in October 1995 and used a booby-trapped mobile phone to kill Hamas leader Yahya ’Ayyash in January 1996. Israelis and Palestinians found themselves locked in a cycle of violence and retaliation that gravely undermined confidence in the Oslo process.

One murder presaged the end of the Oslo process. On November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin addressed a mass peace rally in downtown Tel Aviv. The Israeli premier was visibly moved by the sea of faces 150,000-strong, united by their common belief in Palestinian-Israeli peace. “This rally must send a message to the Israeli public, to the Jews of the world, to the multitudes in the Arab lands and in the world at large, that the nation of Israel wants peace, support[s] peace,” Rabin intoned, “and for this I thank you.”
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Rabin then led the crowd in a peace song before taking his leave.

One man came to the rally to put an end to the peace process. As Rabin was escorted from the podium back to his car, an Israeli law student named Yigal Amir broke through a gap in the prime minister’s security cordon and shot him dead. In his trial, Amir openly confessed to the assassination, explaining that he had killed Rabin to put a stop to the peace process. Convinced of the Jewish people’s divine right to the whole of the Land of Israel, Amir believed it his duty as a religious Jew to prevent any exchange of land for peace. In an instant, a process that had withstood many acts of violence between Palestinians and Israelis fell to a single act of violence between Israelis.

 

Rabin was the indispensable man for the Oslo process. His immediate successor as prime minister was his old rival Shimon Peres. Though an architect of Oslo, Peres did not enjoy the same degree of public confidence as Rabin. The Israeli voters did not place the trust in Peres that an enduring land-for-peace settlement required.

Deemed weak on security, Peres tried to confound his critics by launching a military campaign against Hizbullah in retaliation for its attacks on Israeli positions in South Lebanon and missile attacks on northern Israel. The April 1996 initiative, Operation Grapes of Wrath, confirmed voters’ doubts about Peres’s judgment on security issues. The massive incursion into Lebanon displaced 400,000 Lebanese civilians and provoked widespread international condemnation when the Israeli air force bombed a UN base in the southern Lebanese village of Qana, killing 102 refugees who were seeking shelter from the assault. The operation was brought to an ignominious end by American mediation, with no visible benefit to Israel’s security. Peres was punished by voters in the May 1996 election, when Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu won the premiership by the slenderest of margins.

Netanyahu’s election set Israel on a collision course with its Oslo commitments. Netanyahu and his party had consistently opposed the principle of exchanging land for peace. Although he did succumb to American pressure to conclude a redeployment scheme from the West Bank town of Hebron, Netanyahu’s minor land for peace deal left Israel in full control of more than 71 percent of the West Bank, and in control of security over 23 percent of the other territories. This was a far cry from the 90 percent transfer the Palestinians expected from the Oslo II agreement.

In his battle for Jerusalem, Netanyahu used the settlement movement to create unalterable facts on the ground. He commissioned 6,500 housing units on Jabal Abu Ghunaym to create a new settlement called Har Homa, which would complete the encirclement of Arab East Jerusalem with Israeli settlements. By encircling Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, Netanyahu intended to preempt any pressure to surrender the Arab parts of the city occupied in June 1967 to the Palestinian Authority. Har Homa was the latest of an escalating settlement policy that, more than any other factor, led to the collapse in Palestinian confidence in the Oslo process.

After three years in office, Netanyahu lost the confidence of his own party and, dogged by corruption scandals, was forced to call for new elections in May 1999. He was defeated, and the Labor Party returned to power under another retired general, Ehud Barak. One of Barak’s campaign promises had been to end Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon and withdraw all Israeli troops within one year if elected. The occupation of South Lebanon had grown increasingly unpopular in Israel, as persistent attacks by Hizbullah inflicted regular casualties on Israeli forces.

Having won a landslide victory over Netanyahu, Barak made the Lebanon withdrawal one of his first priorities. However, efforts to effect a smooth transfer of power from the departing Israeli forces to their local proxies of the South Lebanon army collapsed as the collaborators surrendered to Hizbullah units. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal degenerated into an unseemly retreat under fire, leaving Hizbullah to claim victory in its eighteen-year campaign to drive the Israelis from Lebanon. Israel’s top brass chafed, eagerly awaiting the next opportunity to settle the score with the Shiite militia.

The opportunity for future conflict was preserved in a territorial anomaly. Israel withdrew from all of Lebanon except the disputed “Shiba’ Farms” enclave, a strip of land 22 square kilometers (8 square miles) in area along Lebanon’s frontier with the occupied Golan Heights. Israel claims to this day that it is occupied Syrian territory, whereas Syria and Lebanon insist it is Lebanese territory. Hizbullah takes Shiba’ Farms as a pretext for continuing its armed resistance against Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory.

Once out of Lebanon, Prime Minister Barak resumed negotiations with the PLO. In view of Israel’s actions under Netanyahu, there was little trust or goodwill between the two sides. Yasser Arafat accused the Israelis of failing to meet their treaty obligations under the Oslo Accords and pressed Barak to respect unfulfilled commitments under the interim agreements. Barak, in comparison, wanted to proceed directly to discuss a permanent settlement. The Israeli premier believed that negotiations with the Palestinians had been undermined through endless disputes over interim details, and he wanted to take advantage of the closing months of the Clinton presidency to secure a permanent settlement.

Bill Clinton invited Barak and Arafat to a summit meeting at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland. The three leaders met for two weeks in July 2000, and though bold new ideas were put on the table, the summit ended without any substantive progress toward a settlement. A second summit was held in the Egyptian resort of Taba in January 2001. There, the Israelis offered the most generous terms yet tabled; even so, the Taba proposals still left too much of the proposed Palestinian state under Israeli control to serve as a permanent settlement. The failure of the Camp David and Taba summits led to bitter recriminations and finger pointing, as both the American and the Israeli teams wrongly placed the blame for failure on Arafat and the Palestinian delegation. The trust and goodwill necessary for Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking had evaporated.

 

The Oslo framework had been flawed, but it brought Israel and the Arab world closer to peace than at any point since the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. The gains of Oslo were very significant. Israel and the PLO had overcome decades of mutual hostility to exchange recognition and enter into meaningful negotiations toward a two-state solution. The Palestinian leadership left exile in Tunisia to begin building its own state in the Palestinian territories. Israel broke its isolation within the Middle East, establishing formal ties with a number of Arab countries for the first time, and overcoming an Arab League economic boycott that had been in place since 1948. These were important foundations upon which to build an enduring peace.

Unfortunately, the process was inextricably linked to building confidence between the two sides and to generating sufficient economic prosperity that Palestinians and Israelis would be willing to make the difficult compromises necessary for a permanent settlement. Whereas the Oslo years were a period of economic growth for Israel, the Palestinian economy suffered recession and stagnation. The World Bank recorded a significant decline in living standards over the Oslo years and estimated that one in four residents of the West Bank and Gaza had been reduced to poverty by 2000. Unemployment rates reached 22 percent.
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The decline in living standards between 1993 and 2000 produced widespread disillusion with the Oslo process.

Israel’s decision to expand the settlements was also a key factor in dooming the Oslo accords. As far as the Palestinians were concerned, settlements were illegal in international law and their continued expansion contravened the terms of the Oslo II Accords.
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Yet the Oslo years witnessed the greatest expansion of Israeli settlements since 1967. The number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem rose from 247,000 in 1993 to 375,000 in 2000—a 52 percent increase.
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Settlements were built in areas Israel wanted to retain either because of their proximity to urban centers within Israel or to crucial aquifers, providing control over scarce water resources in
the West Bank. Palestinians accused the Israelis of forsaking land-for-peace for a land grab, while the guarantor of the process, the United States, turned a blind eye.

The Palestinians expected nothing less of the Oslo process than an independent state on all of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinians knew their position was supported by international law and believed it was reinforced by the demographic reality that the territories were almost exclusively inhabited by Palestinians. The PLO had come to recognize the state of Israel in the 78 percent of Palestine conquered in 1948, and the Palestinians held to their rights over the remaining 22 percent of the land. With so little space on which to build a viable Palestinian state, there was no room for further concessions.