Grasping for Peace

B’merchak Negi’a (Just Beyond Reach)
By Gilead Sher
453 pages, Tel Aviv: Yedioth Aharonot, 2001 (in Hebrew)
Madrich Le’yona Ptzu’a(Manual for a Wounded Dove)
By Yossi Beilin
304 pages, Tel Aviv: Yedioth Aharonot, 2001 (in Hebrew)

What went wrong? That’s the question asked over and over again since the July 2000 Camp David peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians collapsed amidst harsh recriminations. The question has taken on even broader implications as more than a year of fighting and suicide bombings has left both sides not only convinced of the futility of seeking a final settlement, but wondering whether the entire Oslo peace process was a blueprint for disaster.

Thus, the attempt to figure out what went wrong at Camp David has a significance beyond the usual blame game to salvage reputations and score propaganda points. The lessons of failure might hold the key (unlikely though it might seem right now) to ending a political deadlock that gets deadlier by the day.

New memoirs of those fateful negotiations, published separately by two of Israel’s most prominent veteran peacemakers, offer somewhat divergent assessments of why the peace process collapsed at the precise moment when the "end of conflict" appeared a reasonable political goal. Gilead Sher, an attorney and one of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s closest confidants and top negotiators, puts the blame on Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat in his book Just Beyond Reach: "Barak gave Israel a brave, far-sighted leadership, even though he made mistakes, while Arafat failed as a man and national leader when the moment of crucial decision came about." But in his book Manual for a Wounded Dove, Yossi Beilin, the ideologue of the Israeli left wing and the originator of the Oslo negotiations with the Palestinians, splits the responsibility for the failure, nevertheless putting the larger share on Barak’s mistakes. His time-wasting tactics "reminded the Palestinians of Netanyahu," writes Beilin, "and they didn’t know how to take it."

Camp David was meant to be the pinnacle of the peace process. Modeled after the 1978 summit that produced the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, the idea behind the 2000 talks was that bringing the leaders together, under then U.S. President Bill Clinton’s hospitality, would somehow produce in itself the necessary momentum toward a deal. However, Beilin and Sher’s memoirs confirm what had become increasingly clear to outside observers: The conference was ill-prepared. There was no real engagement. The Israeli leader refrained from meeting his Palestinian counterpart. Clinton did all the negotiating work himself, putting his proposals on the table and asking his guests to take them or leave them.

With so much at stake, tensions were high. Sher recalls the moment when Clinton lost his temper and shouted at the Palestinian negotiator, Abu Ala. "Abu Ala left the room, pale and very hurt," Sher writes. "In hindsight, this was a more substantive breaking point than could be envisaged." The American hosts, asserts Sher, should have imposed more discipline on the summit. "Many beginnings of structured, concrete, assertive processes simply faded out without continuity." Arafat ultimately balked at the Israeli offers, and Clinton called off the summit.

Beilin, who stayed at home and helped Barak’s propaganda efforts, asserts that "Barak did not grasp the importance of personal relationship in diplomatic engagement … culminating at Camp David where he refrained from tête-à-tête meetings with Arafat, save one or two morning encounters." Beilin says that 15 days of frank conversations between the leaders might have produced a breakthrough. "But Barak," he notes, "feared that every commitment from his mouth would be ‘filed’ immediately."

Barak and his negotiators believed that their Palestinian counterparts would eventually compromise and meet Israel’s territorial and security demands. Sher distinguishes between the "substance" and "image" in the Palestinian positions. He believes that on the refugee issue, the Palestinian negotiators cared mostly about their image, and the right wording could have resolved the problem without returning refugees to Israel proper. Likewise, Sher writes that the Palestinians would be willing to accept Israel’s security demands, provided they were wrapped up in face-saving formulas of sovereignty. At the same time, Sher sees no Palestinian flexibility on the territorial demands or on Jerusalem.

At the end of the day, Arafat played his old tune and stuck to his demands: a Palestinian state in all the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital; Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount (Haram al Sharif); and the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees. "In hindsight, our basic assumption about the other side’s intentions has been wrong," Barak’s foreign minister and chief negotiator Shlomo Ben-Ami admitted in a recent interview. "Unlike Zionism, the Palestinian national movement cannot compromise." The Palestinians had spoken their minds, but their partners refused to listen.

Indeed, although political leaders in Israel and the United States soundly criticized Arafat for walking away from the deal of the century — including Barak’s surprising and far-reaching offer to discuss the division of Jerusalem — the peacemakers’ memoirs suggest the Palestinian leader’s intransigence was not without some justification. Sher acknowledges that Barak was a political rookie who refrained from consulting his seasoned fellows and who never truly grasped the need to build strong domestic support for his peace moves. "The sad truth," writes Sher, "is that even if Camp David would have ended with an agreement, it is highly doubtful if Barak could have pulled his ambitious move through politically." Barak’s coalition, badly maintained through his tenure, collapsed on the eve of Camp David, and he flew to the summit backed by a minority government.

Moreover, Beilin suggests that Barak was holding back at Camp David and refutes the prime minister’s assertion that he "turned every stone." Beilin cites as evidence the talks held seven months later in Taba, Egypt, wherein Barak gave even more far-reaching instructions to his delegation. For instance, the Israeli map presented at Camp David gave the Palestinians 88 percent of the West Bank. At Taba, the Israelis offered an additional 6.5 percent, and Barak agreed to a "land swap" to compensate the Palestinians. The Taba positions were also more flexible on Jerusalem and, to a lesser extent, on the refugees issue. Beilin suggests, therefore, that Arafat can’t be blamed for wanting more than what was on the negotiating table at Camp David. "Barak claims that he exposed the true face of Arafat, but he exposed nothing," writes Beilin. "Arafat remains a man of many faces and many masks, like most other world leaders." His conclusion is that Arafat remains "a tough, problematic partner," but nonetheless the only one in the Palestinian camp who is able to make the final agreement with Israel and commit his people to it.

Barak warned the public that a peace failure might lead to conflict. But they wouldn’t listen. The violent eruption following Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 took Israelis by surprise, even though, as Beilin notes: "For over a year, our Palestinian colleagues told us time and again about the danger of explosion, but we looked at the writing on the wall only after the explosion happened." From then on, there were two parallel realities, one of bombing and shooting on the ground, and the other in meeting rooms.

Instead of riding on the popular anger toward Arafat and the Palestinians, Barak broke left, and called in veteran peacemakers like Shimon Peres and Beilin, whom initially he had left out of the loop. The political maneuvers in the shadows of the intifada and elections created havoc in the Israeli peace team. Sher tells about the internal struggles between Ben-Ami, who went far beyond Barak’s instructions, and another member who refused to enter the meeting room and threatened to resign. Endless discussions on cease-fire plans and arrangements for Jerusalem failed to produce any results. The last-minute round of talks at Taba in late January 2001 ended inconclusively a few days before the election, and the Israeli participants agree now that going to the Egyptian resort with a waning political mandate was a mistake.

The Israeli peace camp, which broke down after the Camp David debacle and the outbreak of violence, remains leaderless and devoid of direction. Shimon Peres — the left’s elder statesman, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Barak’s bitter adversary — says he "burst in laughter" upon reading these memoirs. In his view, they show amateurism and adventurism in handling the state’s affairs. The Palestinian accounts, published even before the recollections from the Israeli side, expectedly put the blame on Barak and his less-than-acceptable proposals and behavior.

The main lesson learned at Camp David is that a leader needs a good understanding of the other side, as well as a strong political base at home for necessary compromises. Courage and vision are not sufficient in themselves to conclude a half-century conflict with a peace deal. Such an analysis would have shown Barak what some of his ministers had told him all along — that there is no real chance to end the conflict with the Palestinians, because the gap between the two sides is too wide and deep. Barak’s "all or nothing" approach was brave but flawed. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, it’s better to move gradually, and delay the final decisions to the distant future.