The Great War for Civilisation (79 page)

U.S. secretary of state James Baker suggested they were merely posturing for the cameras. They were not. Watching the faces at the T-shaped table—sullen, watchful, suspicious, occasionally images of suppressed fury—it was clear that they really hated each other. Had automatic weapons been available to the delegates, there might have been a rush for the doors. Around the walls of the banqueting hall, arrogant busts of the great Caesars stared down with marble implacability at this lamentable failure of spirit. Shamir had already left, of course. A Jew is allowed to break the Sabbath if human life is at stake but he had chosen to depart the conference—negotiations that might save countless lives—without listening to the other delegates. However sincere his reasons, it was as if Shamir had excused himself for a dentist's appointment. “Friday is a holy day for us,” Abdul Shafi reminded the Israeli with dignity. “But we chose to stay in this conference today rather than go to our religious rites.”

Syria's criticism of Israel, Shamir had said earlier, “stretches incredulity to infinite proportions.” How dare al-Sharaa condemn Israel's human rights record when Syria was “one of the most oppressive regimes in the world”? “Lies,” responded al-Sharaa. Israel's accusations were “a total forgery.” The Israelis had murdered the first UN negotiator to arrive in the region, he said. Maybe all of us journalists, I began to wonder, will in future have to arrive at peace conferences with a “fact kit.” Yes, it will inform us, the Jews of Syria were not all free to leave the country—and were treated badly under previous regimes—but they are free to practise their religion today. Yes, the Israelis did shoot down a Libyan civilian airliner after it strayed into Israeli airspace. Yes, the Israelis forced a civilian airliner carrying Syrian government officials to land at Tel Aviv. Yes, Syria has an atrocious human rights record. Yes, Shamir and his colleages in the Jewish Stern and Irgun gangs murdered civilians. Yes, a Jewish hit squad murdered Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Yes, Haj Amin al-Husseini encouraged Hitler and Himmler to prevent Jewish emigration to Palestine and thus probably helped to doom thousands of European Jews.

But this was supposed to be a peace conference, a place of compromise, not a murder trial. Abdul Shafi emerged with credit, still pleading for an end to Jewish settlements, accepting Israel's need for security, insisting that “it is the solution that brings about peace, not the other way round.” Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa besought delegates to avoid “passionate speeches” and condemned Shamir's “wild dreams of expansion.” Yet it was a sorry enough affair, and the response to it was deeply inadequate.

Officially, the Madrid peace conference was meeting under the auspices of the United States, the Soviet Union—hence Gorbachev's presence—and the United Nations. But in the auditorium beside the palace, there was no doubt who was running the show. The Americans had a bank of offices manned by hundreds of State Department officials. The United Nations had two offices, a bunch of bureaucrats and a fax machine. The Russians had one office, three officials and no fax machine. Shamir would later admit that his sole intention at Madrid was to prevaricate. Real work—real proposals for peace—was put together by the Arabs in the luxury hotels to which they had been appointed around Madrid.

Syria, for example, had drawn up an eleven-point plan for the Middle East which demanded a comprehensive and total Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands but which also accepted a demilitarised zone on both sides of the Israeli–Syrian frontier and the continued existence of an unspecified number of Jewish settlers under Arab sovereignty in a “liberated” Palestinian West Bank. In other words, Syria, which lost the Golan Heights in 1967 and was always portrayed as the most intransigent of the Arab “confrontation” states, was even at this early stage prepared to contemplate the maintenance of some Jewish settlements on Arab land. The plan, which represented Syria's maximum demands, followed a confidential letter of assurance to President Hafez Assad from Secretary of State Baker in which, according to the Syrians, the United States refused to accept the Israeli annexation of Golan, its annexation of East Jerusalem or the legality of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

The Syrian proposals, which tolerated no deviation from UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338 and 425,
⁸⁶
were drawn up after Baker had visited Damascus to talk to Assad. The Syrian president told Baker that UN resolutions were not “up for discussion” but had to be implemented in full, adding that “if you had let Iraq discuss the implementation of UN resolutions, the Iraqi army would still be occupying Kuwait.” Assad's all-or-nothing approach to Israeli withdrawal was also influenced by America's separate “letter of assurance” to the Lebanese government which, again according to the Syrians, might allow Israel to stage its withdrawal from Lebanon, claim it had given “land for peace,” and then refuse to give up Golan, the West Bank and Gaza. If any UN resolutions were dropped, Assad told his delegation, he would regard Madrid as “null and void.”

While not suggesting that all Jewish settlements could stay on the West Bank, Syria was prepared to contemplate Jewish residents in the territory who could have free passage to and from Israel but who would not be permitted to fly the Israeli flag over their settlements and who would have to accept Arab sovereignty. “If the Israelis refuse to accept this,” al-Sharaa said to me privately, “then we could demand Arab flags and sovereignty over Israeli Arab villages inside Israel.” But the Syrians could also be uncompromising. They would not accept what the Americans called “confidence-building measures”—the presence of military observers, an end to propaganda campaigns—before the start of Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab land. There would be no end to the Arab economic boycott of Israel and no agreements on water resources until the Israelis had undertaken “a comprehensive withdrawal from occupied territories.”

In their private discussions with the Americans, the Syrians had also insisted that they would negotiate on the Palestinian question as well as on Golan in order to prevent the Israelis exploiting what Damascus feared was the weakest Arab team at the conference, the joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation. The Palestinian right to “self-determination”—the all-important phrase that implied future statehood—must be “in association” with Jordan rather than “within Jordan.” The Syrians said a private letter from Baker to Assad also refused to recognise the Israeli expansion of Jerusalem's administrative area. All Jewish settlements built around East Jerusalem since 1967—which the Israelis now claimed were part of the city (and thus part of Israel)—would be regarded as part of the West Bank, where the United States regards settlements as illegal. East Jerusalem itself must revert to Arab sovereignty but the Syrians would be willing to study “administrative procedures” which would allow all religions—including, of course, Israeli Jews— access to the Holy City. Syria believed that 60 per cent of Israel's water resources came from the West Bank, Golan and southern Lebanon—which is why Assad wanted the Israelis to negotiate with the Arabs as equal partners in talks only after a military settlement—when Israel would no longer be able to make unacceptable demands.

Behind the Palestinians on the joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation, of course, Arafat's leadership was not hard to discern. Though banned from Madrid—indeed, the Israelis would hunt for any evidence that the “terrorist” PLO was influencing the likes of Abdul Shafi or that most urbane of academics, Hanan Ashrawi—Arafat had met Assad prior to the talks and given his promise that UN resolutions must be rigidly adhered to, an obligation he would betray within two years. A Palestinian official quoted Assad as telling Arafat that “we will barricade ourselves behind international legitimacy because our demands are consistent with international legitimacy.”

President Bush's electoral defeat in 1992 sapped the Middle East talks of their momentum. If they were one of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration, President-elect Clinton's initial remarks were hardly encouraging. The only promise he made at his first press conference was an almost offhand comment that he would “keep the Middle East peace process on track” and do “whatever I can to make sure there is no break in continuity.” The phrase “peace process” was already a cliché, and in the years to come, peace—like a creaking railway carriage constantly derailed on a branch line—was always being put back “on track.” These were slim pickings for the Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese now wasting hours in their Washington hotel suites. By the second week of November 1992, their meetings at the State Department had been dominated by a farcical episode at the multilateral talks in Ottawa when the Israelis agreed to resume negotiations only when they were told that one of the Palestinian delegates—to whose presence they objected because he had been a PLO member—was eligible to participate because his membership of the Palestine National Council had “lapsed.”

In Washington, I found the chief Syrian delegate, Mouaffaq Alaf, depressed that Clinton seemed to have no grasp of the issues involved in the talks—even if the new president was going to sidestep his pre-election promise to move the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “At least the Bush administration was involved in this for four years and the peace process was linked to the personal efforts of Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker,” Alaf moaned. “But . . . any president, even if he comes with preconceived ideas not based on fair or balanced information, will very soon come to know more about the facts of the situation in the light of
American
interests.”

Arab delegates now feared more than ever that the amount of time it was taking to reach any agreement would prove increasingly damaging at home. In private, the Palestinians admitted that opposition to their participation in the talks was growing daily more violent in the West Bank and Gaza. The Syrians were deeply concerned at the effect on Syrian Muslim fundamentalist sentiment of any apparent failure at the talks. The detail in which they were now negotiating was excruciating. It took the Palestinian delegate Saeb Erekat, for example, months to persuade the Israeli delegation to stop calling the occupied West Bank by the biblical title of “Judaea and Samaria”—names that annulled the word “Palestine” from the Israeli narrative—and this was only achieved when Danny Rothschild, an Israeli delegate, leaned towards Erekat across a State Department table and said he would call them “territories” if the Palestinians would stop calling them “occupied.” Another compromise was reached: the Palestinians would refer to “Palestinian Occupied Territories” only by their acronym, “POT.”

That it took a whole year of negotiations merely to reach this level of verbal horse-trading was an unhappy commentary on the talks. The Palestinians wanted to talk about land; the Israelis wanted to talk about “devolved functions.” The Palestinians wanted to talk about “transition autonomy”; the Israelis wanted to talk about “interim autonomy.” The Palestinians wanted to talk about a country called Palestine; the Israelis would not hear of it. Jerusalem remained an unmentionable subject during these “interim talks,” open for negotiation only in the final stages of the negotiations.

The problem for the Palestinians was that the Israelis wanted to talk about “double territoriality” and overlapping jurisdictions. The Israelis would not have Jewish settlers ruled by Arabs in an autonomous “Palestine.” Nor would they accept the separation of East Jerusalem from Israel. Even though by 1992 Israeli taxi-drivers would no longer cross the city at night, Jerusalem had to remain the “permanent and unified capital of Israel.” The Israelis had come forward with “Arab zones,” “security zones,” “settler zones,” and an area where both Palestinians and Israelis were supposed to “cooperate” together. An Israeli spokeswoman in Washington said that her government realised that Arab-owned land existed in these areas and was willing to recognise this ownership, provided it was backed up by land and property deeds. But she said that most of the land was “disputed.” “Whose law is supposed to prevail in it? Israeli law? Jordanian law from before the 1967 war? British Mandate law? Ottoman law?”

The Palestinians would not accept this. An infuriated Erekat, still waiting for talks to restart in Washington, could scarcely control his anger when I called on him. “We are willing to give security guarantees. But it was the Israelis who created this problem in the first place. It was the Israelis who created the settlements. It was they who set up what they call ‘security zones' on our land. Since 1967, only the Israelis have access to deeds and laws on West Bank land. Why should we have to accept all this overlapping of functions? We should be given more rather than less power. Then we will have the authority to rule our people and give the security guarantees that the Israelis say they need.”

Inevitably, the Palestinian delegates in Washington were playing the role of a conquered people, unable to make substantive concessions—since their land was occupied—but asked to match the concessions of their occupiers by reducing their own demands for autonomy. “When I go into that room at the State Department and see Rothschild, the man they call the ‘coordinator of the territories,' ” one of the Palestinian officials said, “I feel as if I am sitting down with my own jailer.” And the Israeli response? “We are not on trial at these talks,” one of their delegates told me angrily. “This is not a trial where we discuss who did what to whom.
History
created this problem.”

The Arabs, I wrote in a dispatch from Washington in November 1992, were fearful that Israel would reduce their strength by cutting a deal with individual Arab states, just as it did with Egypt in 1979. “Hence Syria is worried that Jordan will make a separate agreement with Israel and Arafat has said he fears Syria may do the same . . . Already Jordan has drafted an agenda for final peace negotiations with Israel, agreeing to the two countries' mutual security . . . and to settle the conflict over two slivers of Jordanian territory . . .”