PALESTINE -- PEACE NOT APARTHEID |
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Chapter 11: BILL CLINTON'S PEACE EFFORTS Unfortunately for the peace process, Palestinian terrorists carried out two lethal suicide bombings in March 1996, a few weeks after the Palestinian election. Thirty-two Israeli citizens were killed, an act that probably gave the Likud's hawkish candidate, Binyamin Netanyahu, a victory over Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The new leader of Israel promised never to exchange land for peace. Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon declared the Oslo Agreement to be "national suicide" and stated, "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours. ... Everything we don't grab will go to them." This policy precipitated Israel's tightened hold on the occupied territories and aroused further violence from the Palestinians.
Map 6: Palestinian Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000
Israeli Interpretation of Clinton's Proposal 2000 With Arafat now an officially elected leader, President Bill Clinton made strong and sustained efforts to find some reasonable accommodation between Israelis and Palestinians. A nine-day summit conference was convened at Wye Plantation in Maryland in October 1998, during which some agreements were reached involving redeployment of Israeli troops, security arrangements, prisoner releases, and the resumption of permanent status negotiations, but within a few weeks the Israeli cabinet voted to postpone execution of the Wye River Memorandum. Even after the Labor Party's Ehud Barak was elected as prime minister in May 1999, there was a sustained commitment by Israel's government to avoid full compliance with the Oslo Agreement or with key U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, while Palestinians were reluctant to abandon any of them as the basis for permanent peace. Despite these handicaps, the United States sponsored a series of peace talks at Sharm al-Sheikh, at BoIling Air Force Base, and then at Camp David for a fourteen-day session in July 2000. In September 2000, with Prime Minister Barak's reluctant approval, Ariel Sharon and an escort of several hundred policemen went to the Temple Mount complex, site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, where he declared that the Islamic holy site would remain under permanent Israeli control. The former military leader was accused by many Israelis of purposely inflaming emotions to provoke a furious response and obstruct any potential success of ongoing peace talks. Combining their reaction to this event with their frustration over Israel's failure to implement the Oslo Agreement, the Palestinians responded with a further outbreak of violence, which was to be known as the second intifada. Later, during his last months in Washington, President Clinton made what he called his final proposal. Eighty percent of Israeli settlers would remain in the West Bank, and Israel could maintain its control of the Jordan River valley and an early-warning capability within the West Bank, with an additional provision for emergency deployments to meet security needs. The new state of Palestine would be demilitarized, with an international force for border security and deterrence and Palestinian sovereignty over their airspace -- except for special arrangements to meet Israeli training and operational needs. In Jerusalem, the Arab neighborhoods would be administered by Palestinians and the Jewish neighborhoods by Israel, with Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount and Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall and the "holy place" of which it is a part. Palestinian refugees could return only to the West Bank and Gaza. It was stipulated that, if accepted, this agreement would replace all the requirements of U.N. resolutions that applied to the Middle East. There was no clear response from Prime Minister Barak, but he later stated that Israel had twenty pages of reservations. President Arafat rejected the proposal. As President Clinton made efforts to promote peace, there was a 90 percent growth in the number of settlers in the occupied territories, with the greatest increase during the administration of Prime Minister Ehud Barak. By the end of the year 2000, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza numbered 225,000. The best offer to the Palestinians -- by Clinton, not Barak -- had been to withdraw 20 percent of the settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 10 percent of the occupied land, including land to be "leased" and portions of the Jordan River valley and East Jerusalem. The percentage figure is misleading, since it usually includes only the actual footprints of the settlements. There is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition, there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements to one another and to Jerusalem, and "life arteries" that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and communications. These range in width from five hundred to four thousand meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into at least two noncontiguous areas and multiple fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan River valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan. About one hundred military checkpoints completely surround Palestine and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities, combined with an un-ccountable number of other roads that are permanently closed with large concrete cubes or mounds of earth and rocks. There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued. There were still some remaining pro forma commitments to the Oslo Agreement's "final status" peace talks to deal with Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, and relations and cooperation with neighboring countries. A new round of talks was held at Taba in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton presidency, between President Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, and it was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer" put forward by Prime Minister Barak with Israel keeping only 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact is that no such offers were ever made. Barak later said, "It was plain to me that there was no chance of reaching a settlement at Taba. Therefore I said there would be no negotiations and there would be no elegation and there would be no official discussions and no documentation. Nor would Americans be present in the room. The only thing that took place at Taba were non-binding contacts between senior Israelis and senior Palestinians." [1]
Map 7: Sharon's Plan 2002 The election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister two months later brought an end to these efforts to find accommodation. A government statement affirmed Israel's aspiration to achieve peace but declared that all negotiating failures had been due to the ongoing and escalating Palestinian terrorism supported by the Palestinian Authority. As the chief spokesperson for the Palestinians, responsible for promoting peace and human rights, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi responded to Israel's claims: So far, they have succeeded in holding the peace process hostage to this mentality on the one hand. And on the other hand they have provoked tremendous violence by acts of incitement like shelling, bombing, house demolition, uprooting trees, destroying crops, assassinating political leaders, placing all Palestinians under closure in a state of total immobility -- a prison. And then they wonder why some Palestinians are acting violently! And then they want to have the right to exercise violence against the captive population. Then they like to make non-violence on the part of the Palestinians a precondition for the Palestinians to qualify for talks, let alone for statehood. _______________ Notes: 1. Despite this official disclaimer, substantive discussions were held at Taba, which proved to be the foundation for what evolved into the Geneva Initiative, to be described in Chapter 13.
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