Camp David: the myth of a “generous offer”

The Camp David summit, held in July 2000, is widely held to be a straightforward demonstration of Palestinian intransigence. The standard version of events is that a generous offer was made to the Palestinians, it was categorically turned down, and the congenitally belligerent Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat unleashed the second intifada in response.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the summit, US President Bill Clinton took the step of appearing on Israeli television to praise the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s outstanding courage, and to blame Arafat for the failure of the summit.

Barak himself went further in an interview with Israeli historian Benny Morris, accusing Arafat and his colleagues of wanting “a Palestinian state in all of Palestine,” and alleging that Arafat believed Israel “has no right to exist, and he seeks its demise.” (Benny Morris, “Camp David and After: An Exchange”, New York Review of Books, August 9 2001)

Arafat and colleagues, so Barak claimed, could publicly profess belief in a two-state solution because: “They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie...creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture” (Morris, ibid.) – though, rather ironically, the convener of the summit and Barak’s partner in negotiations happened to be one of the most renowned liars in American political history.

What is most remarkable about this narrative, however – one into which substantial sections of both British and American media have bought – is that not only does it discard virtually every relevant contextual factor that determined the Palestinian decision (and misrepresents the proposal), but it fails to question by what rationale such a proposal, which fails to fulfil Israel’s minimum obligations under international law (including numerous UN resolutions), can reasonably be called “generous” – or, indeed, an “offer”. The Palestinians, it should be noted, had already made their own historic offer by ceding 78% of mandatory Palestine to Israel.

The context of the summit

An examination of the situation at the time the summit was convened is instructive. Barak’s public attitude was characterised, as Dr Ron Pundak notes, by “public declarations … that UNSCR 242 does not include the West Bank and Gaza.” (“From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?”, http://gush-shalom.org/archives/pundak.doc).

Furthermore, Israel had failed spectacularly to comply with its interim obligations under both the Oslo agreement and subsequent agreements – as Robert Malley, a US negotiator at Camp David, writing with historian Hussein Agha, points out – while settlements expanded:

“When [Barak] took office he chose to renegotiate the agreement on withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank signed by Benjamin Netanyahu rather than implement it. He continued and even intensified construction of settlements. He delayed talks on the Palestinian track while he concentrated on Syria. He did not release Palestinian prisoners detained for acts committed prior to the signing of the Oslo agreement. He failed to carry out his commitments to implement the third territorial redeployment of Israeli troops and the transfer of the three Jerusalem villages.

“… Settlement activity, to which both the Palestinians and the US objected, nonetheless proceeded at an extraordinary pace – faster than during Netanyahu's tenure, with over 22,000 more settlers. This was done, as Barak concedes in his interview, in order to “mollify the Israeli right which he needed quiescent’ ...” (Hussein Agha, Robert Malley, “Camp David and After: An Exchange – A reply to Ehud Barak”, New York Review of Books, June 13 2002)

Barak’s initial courting of the Syrians, it should be noted, seems to have been in no small measure a move to weaken the Palestinian position by cutting off ideological support (in effect replicating the achievements of the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt, an essential precursor to the Lebanon campaign). As he notes himself in Haaretz on 18 June 1999: “As a military threat [the Palestinians] are ludicrous” – but “reaching peace with Syria”, he told Morris, “would greatly limit the Palestinians’ ability to widen the conflict.” (Morris, ibid.)

Throughout this period, claim Malley and Agha, the Palestinians, who had been calling for further talks, were repeatedly rebuffed:

“... The Palestinian leaders had called for negotiations on a comprehensive settlement between the two sides as early as the fall of 1999. They had asked for an initial round of secret talks between Israelis and Palestinians who were not officials in order to better prepare the ground. They had argued against holding the Camp David summit at the time proposed, claiming it was premature and would not lead to an agreement … They later asked for a series of summit meetings following Camp David so as to continue the talks. Each of their requests was denied.” (Malley, Agha, ibid.)

It is also crucial to note that Camp David constituted the “final status” agreement, by which Barak and Clinton wished to resolve the entire Palestinian question once and for all. This inordinately inflexible framework naturally alienated Palestinian negotiators, who felt that an ultimatum was being presented to them. (see Robert Malley, Hussein Agha, “Camp David: Tragedy of Errors,” New York Review of Books, 9 August 2001)

The land proposal

The main offer which Barak purports to have made was of around 96% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But, as Robert Fisk has reported:

“In reality, Palestinian officials and American sources – the latter wisely avoiding Israeli condemnation by talking anonymously – have pointed out that the figure of 96 per cent represented the percentage of the land over which Israel was prepared to negotiate – not 96 per cent of the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Left out of the equation was Arab east Jerusalem – illegally annexed by Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War – the huge belt of Jewish settlements, including Male Adumim, around the city and a 10-mile wide military buffer zone around the Palestinian territories.

… the total Palestinian land from which Israel was prepared to withdraw came to only around 46 per cent – a far cry from the 96 per cent touted after Camp David.” (Independent, 23 July 2001)

Greg Philo and Mike Berry note: “In the run-up to the final status talks in May 2000 Israel released maps of a projected final settlement indicating that Palestinian self-rule would be limited to three or four discontinuous pieces of territory.” (Greg Philo & Mike Berry, Bad News From Israel, London, Pluto, 2004)

The preservation of the existing network of Israeli roads linking settlements also seriously disrupts the territorial contiguity of the proposed “state” – as does the proposed wedge of Israeli territory running from Jerusalem through the major settlement bloc of Maale Adumim to the Jordan River.

David Clark, a former special advisor at the British Foreign Office, noted this feature of the projected Camp David map, with the West Bank “carved into three chunks, surrounded by Israeli troops and settlers, without direct access to its own international borders,” while the only territory offered to the Palestinians “consisted of stretches of desert adjacent to the Gaza Strip that Israel currently uses for toxic waste dumping.”

Israel also, according to Akram Hanieh, a Palestinian negotiator and editor of al-Ayyam newspaper, wanted “bases, patrols, and, finally, early-warning stations in the Jordan Valley along the Jordanian border”, and would “impose strict restrictions on the military personnel and capabilities of the State of Palestine.” (Akram Hanieh, “The Camp David Papers”, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 2001), p. 82)

As Israeli academic Jeff Halper points out:

“A Palestinian state carved into small, disconnected enclaves, surrounded and indeed truncated by massive Israeli settlement blocs, subject to Israeli military and economic closures, unable to offer justice to its dispersed people and without its most sacred symbols of religion and identity, can hardly be called a viable state. ‘Peace’ may be imposed, but unless it is just it will not be lasting.” (Middle East Report, Fall 2000)

Refugees

Because of Israel’s long-standing “demographic problem” of preserving a decisive Jewish majority, Barak felt intensely threatened by any recognition of the right of return for Palestinian refugees – which, in a quaint conspiracy theory, he subsequently framed as Arafat’s “main demographic-political tool for subverting the Jewish state.” (Morris, ibid.)

For Palestinian negotiators, by contrast, while the right of return was an essential issue because of the sizable constituency the refugees represent among Palestinians, “all acknowledged,” Agha and Malley record, “that there could not be an unlimited, ‘massive’ return of Palestinian refugees to Israel.” While they “insisted on the need to recognize the refugees’ right of return” (enshrined in UN resolution 194), Palestinian negotiators “acknowledged that Israel’s demographic interests had to be recognized and taken into account.” Ultimately, nothing was agreed upon. (Malley, Agha (2002), ibid.)

Morris wrote of Barak: “He seems to think in terms of generations and hesitantly predicts that only ‘eighty years’ after 1948 will the Palestinians be historically ready for a compromise. By then, most of the generation that experienced the catastrophe of 1948 at first hand will have died; there will be ‘very few salmons around who still want to return to their birthplaces to die’” – though it is questionable why for Jews this aspiration persists for 2,000 years, but is extinguished within a generation for Palestinians. (Morris, ibid.)

Jerusalem

According to the account related to Fisk: “The Israelis had only offered the Palestinians ‘control’ over some Arab streets in Jerusalem – a miniature version of the little ‘bantustans’ that already exist in the West Bank – and ‘control’ over the Al Aqsa mosque and its surrounds, the territory beneath (including the remains of the Jewish Temple) being under Israeli sovereignty.” In return, the Palestinians “were apparently to receive some territorial waters in the Dead Sea – upon which they could hardly build any houses.” (Fisk, ibid.)

The Palestinian position

Barak also upbraids the Palestinians for not having a proposal of their own – a total misrepresentation, as Agha and Malley point out:

“True, the Palestinians rejected the version of the two-state solution that was put to them. But it could also be said that Israel rejected the unprecedented two-state solution put to them by the Palestinians from Camp David onward, including the following provisions: a state of Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers; the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city's history; preservation of Israel's demographic balance between Jews and Arabs; security guaranteed by a US-led international presence.” (Malley, Agha (2002), ibid.)

This, it should be noted, is well beyond Israel’s allotment under international law. The projected map from the Taba negotiations, which came hard on the heels of Camp David – and at which both sides claimed to be closer than ever to reaching a settlement – is a good deal closer to these geographical specifications.

The aftermath of Camp David

Both Barak’s and Clinton’s acrimonious recriminations in the wake of the summit’s failure can only be ascribed to a cynical desire to rewrite (or, indeed, to write) history.

Barak’s contention – now almost orthodoxy – that Arafat, determined to destroy the Jewish state, having “preplanned, pre-prepared” the second intifada and rejected negotiation, resorted to violence, makes little sense considering that secret negotiations were ongoing throughout 2000-2001. Moreover, why would negotiators have released jointly a statement of their unprecedented progress, as they did in January, if this was the case?

“the two sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli elections.” (see: Guardian, 29 January 2001)

Deborah Sontag, who conducted interviews with various Palestinian and Israeli negotiators, as well as American and European diplomats involved in peace talks, confirms this appraisal: “most of those who took part in or observed the negotiations still believe that a permanent peace agreement is possible.” (New York Times, 26 July 2001)

What scuppered the continuing Taba negotiations, however, was Barak’s withdrawal prior to, and subsequent defeat by Sharon in, the Israeli elections. Israel’s continuing resort to massive and appalling levels of violence subsequently is well-documented.

The real trigger of Palestinian violence is also easy to account for: in September Ariel Sharon undertook a tour of the Haram al-Sharif as an assertion of Jewish sovereignty, and Israeli troops were stationed on the Temple Mount area.

Arafat, Sontag writes, had “implored [Barak] to block Mr Sharon’s plans. But Mr Barak’s government perceived the planned visit by Mr Sharon … as solely an internal Israeli political matter …” (Sontag, ibid.)

According to the Mitchell report into the violence, “Police used rubber-coated metal bullets and live ammunition to disperse [stone-throwing] demonstrators, killing 4 persons and injuring about 200.” (14 Israeli policemen were injured, according to the Israeli government.) Furthermore, as Malley and Agha point out:

“According to the Mitchell report, for the first three months of the intifada, ‘most incidents did not involve Palestinian use of firearms and explosives.’ The report quotes the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem as finding that ‘73 percent of the incidents [from September 29 to December 2, 2000] did not include Palestinian gunfire. Despite this, it was in these incidents that most of the Palestinians [were] killed and wounded.’ Numerous other organizations, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Human Rights, criticized the excessive use of force by the Israel Defense Forces, often against unarmed Palestinians …” (Malley, Agha (2002), ibid.)

Difficult facts to account for, if Arafat did indeed “pre-plan” and “unleash” the violence from on high.