ERUSALEM --
Days before the Palestinian uprising erupted in September, Prime
Minister Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat held an unusually congenial
dinner meeting in the Israeli's private home in Kochav Yair.
At one point, Mr. Barak even called President Clinton and, two
months after the Camp David peace talks had failed, proclaimed that
he and Mr. Arafat would be come the ultimate Israeli-Palestinian
peace partners. Within earshot of the Palestinian leader, according
to an Israeli participant, Mr. Barak theatrically announced, "I'm
going to be the partner of this man even more so than Rabin was,"
referring to Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israeli prime minister.
It was a moment that seems incredible in retrospect, now that Mr.
Barak talks of having revealed "Arafat's true face" and Ariel
Sharon, the present prime minister, routinely describes the
Palestinian leader as a terrorist overlord.
But during the largely ineffectual cease-fire effort now under
way in the Middle East, peace advocates, academics and diplomats
have begun excavating such moments to see what can be learned from
the diplomacy right before and after the outbreak of violence. Their
premise is that any renewal of peace talks, however remote that
seems right now, would have to use the Barak-Clinton era as a point
of departure or as an object lesson or both.
In the tumble of the all-consuming violence, much has not been
revealed or examined. Rather, a potent, simplistic narrative has
taken hold in Israel and to some extent in the United States. It
says: Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat the moon at Camp David last
summer. Mr. Arafat turned it down, and then "pushed the button" and
chose the path of violence. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
insoluble, at least for the forseeable future.
But many diplomats and officials believe that the dynamic was far
more complex and that Mr. Arafat does not bear sole responsibility
for the breakdown of the peace effort.
There were missteps and successes by Israelis, Palestinians and
Americans alike over more than seven years of peace talks between
the 1993 Oslo interim agreement and the last negotiating sessions in
Taba, Egypt, in January.
Mr. Barak did not offer Mr. Arafat the moon at Camp David. He
broke Israeli taboos against any discussion of dividing Jerusalem,
and he sketched out an offer that was politically courageous,
especially for an Israeli leader with a faltering coalition. But it
was a proposal that the Palestinians did not believe would leave
them with a viable state. And although Mr. Barak said no Israeli
leader could go further, he himself improved considerably on his
Camp David proposal six months later.
"It is a terrible myth that Arafat and only Arafat caused this
catastrophic failure," Terje Roed-Lar sen, the United Nations
special envoy here, said in an interview. "All three parties made
mistakes, and in such complex negotiations, everyone is bound to.
But no one is solely to blame."
Mr. Arafat is widely blamed for his stubborn refusal to
acknowledge publicly any evolution in the Israeli position, and
later to seize quickly the potential contained in the 11th-hour
peace pacakge that Mr. Clinton issued in late December.
Mr. Arafat did eventually authorize his negotiators to engage in
talks in Taba that used the Clinton proposal as a foundation.
Despite reports to the contrary in Israel, however, Mr. Arafat never
turned down "97 percent of the West Bank" at Taba, as many Israelis
hold. The negotiations were suspended by Israel because elections
were imminent and "the pressure of Israeli public opinion against
the talks could not be resisted," said Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was
Israel's foreign minister at the time.
Still, the details of a permanent peace agreement were as clear
at Taba as they ever have been, most participants said. So
afterward, United Nations and European diplomats scrambled to
convene a summit meeting in Stockholm. There, they believed, Mr.
Arafat who is known to make deci sions only under extreme deadline
pressure was prepared to deliver a breakthrough concession on the
central issue of the fate of Palestinian refugees, and a compromise
was possible on Jerusalem.
For a variety of reasons, the summit meeting never took place. In
the Israeli elections in February, Mr. Barak lost re soundingly to
Mr. Sharon. It was then that peace moves froze ?not six months
earlier at Camp David.
After Camp David:
Much Went On Behind the
Scenes
Key Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, as well as several
American and European diplomats keenly involved in the peace talks
of the Clinton-Barak era, were interviewed for this article. Mr.
Arafat also gave an interview. Mr. Barak did not; Gadi Baltiansky,
his former spokesman, said the former prime minister, who has kept a
low profile since his defeat, was unwilling to talk.
Few Israelis, Palestinians or Americans realize how much
diplomatic activity continued after the Camp David meeting appeared
to produce nothing. Building on what turned out to be a useful base,
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators conducted more than 50
negotiating sessions in August and September, most of them
clandestine, and most at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
There were also some field trips to examine the practicality of
ways to divide Jerusalem ?some so complicated that Nabil Shaath, a
senior Palestinian official, joked about fitting residents' shoes
with global positioning devices that would light up in different
colors to alert them as to whose territory they were in.
One day, Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator,
accompanied a high-ranking Israeli security official on what was to
be a quiet visit to the City of David area outside the Old City
walls, where some Jewish families have established homes in the
Palestinian residential neighborhood of Silwan.
The Israeli official gave Mr. Erekat an Israeli paint company
cap, and the burly Palestinian negotiator removed his eyeglasses and
dressed uncharacteristically in casual clothes. He thought himself
incognito, he said, but a young Palestinian boy on a bicycle peered
in the window of the Israeli secret service car and said loudly,
"Hi, Dr. Saeb!"
During August and September, Mr. Erekat and Gilad Sher, a senior
Israeli negotiator, drafted two chapters of a permanent peace accord
that were kept secret from everyone but the leaders even from other
negotiators, Mr. Erekat said.
At the same time, American mediators were pulling together Mr.
Clinton's permanent peace proposal. It appeared in December, but
Martin Indyk, the former American ambassador to Israel, disclosed
recently that they were already prepared to put it before the
parties in August or September.
All this behind-the-scenes movement was reflected in the
atmosphere at that dinner party at Mr. Barak's home. The prime
minister, who had refused to talk directly to the Palestinian leader
at Camp David, now courted him. Mr. Ben-Ami, then foreign min ister,
said he left the dinner and told his wife that Mr. Barak whom he
describes as "deaf to cultural nuance" was so intent on forging a
peace agreement that he was willing to change "not only his policies
but his personality."
But Palestinians drove away from that dinner with something else
on their minds Mr. Sharon's coming visit to what Muslims call the
Noble Sanctuary and Jews know as the Temple Mount. Mr. Arafat said
in an interview that he huddled on the balcony with Mr. Barak and
implored him to block Mr. Sharon's plans. But Mr. Barak's government
perceived the planned visit by Mr. Sharon, then the opposition
leader, as solely an internal Israeli political matter, specifically
as an attempt to divert attention from the expected return to
political life by a right-wing rival Benjamin Netanyahu, the former
prime minister.
On the heels of very intricate grappling at Camp David over the
future status of the Old City's holy sites, Mr. Sharon's heavily
guarded visit to the plaza outside Al Aksa Mosque to demonstrate
Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount set off angry Palestinian
demonstrations. The Israelis used lethal force to put them down. The
cycle of violence started, escalated, mutated and built to a peak
between mid-May and June 1 with the Israeli use of F-16 fighter jets
in Nablus and the terrorist bombing outside a Tel Aviv disco.
In June and early July, a flimsy, American-brokered cease-fire
rekindled talk by diplomats of what they said remained their goal:
to push the parties back toward "final status" talks. But all
acknowledged that the distance between what was achievable at the
negotiating table and what would be palatable to the Israeli and
Palestinian publics had become greater with every passing month of
violence.
Some Israelis and Palestinians, in fact, believe that the clock
has been set back decades and question the very two-state solution
that was the goal of the Oslo accords.
Many Israelis now believe that Mr. Arafat has been completely
discredited as a "peace partner" and that there is no point in
negotiating more agreements with him. They believe that he
deliberately resorted to violence to put pressure on Israel to give
him what he could not obtain at Camp David. And an increasing number
believe that he once more has his sights fixed on destroying Israel.
At the same time, many Palestinians have been led to believe the
worst of the Israelis. Many fear that the inclusion of far-right
parties in Mr. Sharon's coalition government signals a new
respectability in Israel for the extremist belief that Palestinians
should be "transferred" to neighboring Arab lands. In the last 10
months, their frustration has turned to despair, anger and, in some
cases, suicidal and homicidal vengefulness.
The bloom is off the rose for the "peace camps" on both sides as
well. "The Woodstock-like idea of peace ?did you hug your
Palestinian today is over," said Avra ham Burg, the speaker of the
Israeli Parlia ment who is the front-runner to become Labor Party
leader in September.
Similarly, Mr. Erekat, the Palestinian ne gotiator, said: "The
rosy peace is out. I just want my state and to be done with them."
Yet relatively few Israelis, Palestinians or outside observers
believe that there can be a military solution to their conflict or
that a solution can be imposed. Thus the two sides will eventually
have to return somehow to some kind of talks.
"For us living here, we have no alternative in the long run to a
permanent status agreement," said Mr. Sher, the Israeli negotiator.
"On the horizon, we will become a minority on the West Bank of the
Jordan River. And if we don't have recognizable and coherent
borders, we will live through a much worse period than we are living
through now."
Progress by Inches:
Peace Effort Meets Rising
Disaffection
In the Oslo accords signed in 1993, Israel and the Palestine
Liberation Organization agreed to recognize each other's legitimacy
and to enter a transitional period during which a permanent peace
was to be negotiat ed as Israel gradually transferred land in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip to a new self-governing Palestinian
Authority.
In actuality, the "peace process" involved considerably more
process than peace. Still, American mediators believed that it was
probably irreversible and would eventually achieve its goal of two
neighboring states. The mediators devoted themselves to inch ing the
effort forward as the region withstood assassinations, terrorist
attacks and count less political crises.
The inching, which produced several inter im agreements, went on
for more than seven years, however, and always the big final-status
issues the fate of Jerusalem, of Palestinian refugees and of Jewish
settle ments and the future borders were de ferred. Mr. Shaath, the
de facto Palestinian foreign minister, said: "The lingo during all
those years was 2 percent territory here and 3 percent there.
Release 20 prisoners today and 30 prisoners next week. Open this
dirt road. It was bits and pieces. This did not create any deep
understanding between the parties on the big issues."
Many Israelis were not in much of a hurry to get to the endgame.
They simply wanted the terrorism to stop. Right-wing Israeli poli
ticians complained that the Palestinian leadership was not educating
its people for peace, not collecting illegal weapons and not acting
to reduce incitement against Israel. But many Israelis chose to
focus instead on the relative quiet that they eventually came to
enjoy as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian security relationship.
The Palestinians, however, while they began the process of
building a state, lost faith as land transfers were routinely
delayed and as they watched the West Bank and Gaza sliced up by
Israeli bypass roads and expan sion of Jewish settlements. The
settler population increased by 80,000 between 1992 and 2001. The
expected economic dividends of the peace path did not materialize;
the Palestinian standard of living dropped by 20 percent. The
Palestinian Authority proved increasingly corrupt. And Mr. Arafat
kept setting and postponing dates for declaring Palestinian
independence, most recently last Sept. 13.
This created a growing disaffection with the peace effort that
was largely ignored by the Israeli and American negotiators. The
Palestinian opposition ?the Islamic militants who considered the
negotiations to be a sellout and others frustrated by the corrup
tion of the Palestinian leadership gained adherents who were more
than ready to return to the streets when the peace effort broke
down.
Looking backward, Dennis B. Ross, the long-serving American
mediator, told The Jerusalem Post recently that "one of the lessons
I've learned is that you can't have one environment at the
negotiating tables, and a different reality on the ground."
Yossi Beilin, an Israeli architect of the peace effort, echoed
the sentiment. In an interview in Tel Aviv, he said Israeli
advocates of a negotiated peace, those known as the "peace camp,"
had not been tough enough about the settlement expansion and not
tough enough on the Palestinians about incitement from their ranks
against Israel.
Rob Malley, the National Security Council's Middle East expert
under Mr. Clinton, added that the Americans had not been tough
enough on either side. Speaking at a public forum in Washington last
spring, Mr. Malley said, "If the fundamental equation had to be land
for peace, how can it have any meaning and any relevance when, on
the one hand, land was being taken away on a daily basis and, on the
other hand, the peace was being maligned on a daily basis."
An Israeli expert on the conflict, Joseph Alpher, who was an
adviser to Mr. Barak at Camp David, argues that the Palestinian
uprising, or intifada, was provoked by the failures of the
seven-year interim period rather than by the Camp David impasse.
"Postponing the discussion of the contradic tions between the
most fundamental Israeli and Palestinian narratives allowed the Is
raeli-Palestinian dynamic to be invaded by a virus that has now
paralyzed it," he wrote in a recent study for the Bertelsmann Founda
tion.
The Blame Game:
Why Did Talks End in
Collapse?
Assuming the mantle of Mr. Rabin, Mr. Barak came to office in
July 1999 trumpeting his intent to end the conflict with the
Palestinians in short order. But then he chose to to direct his
energy at seeking peace with the Syrians, and ignored the
Palestinians long enough to make them suspicious. He also brought
the settlers' representatives, the National Religious Party, into
his coalition and gave them the Housing Ministry, which led to a
significant expansion of the settlement enterprise.
Four years late by the original peacemaking timetable, the first
substantial final-status talks began secretly only in late March
2000, after the Israeli-Syrian talks died. "It all started too
late and on the wrong footing," said Mr. Larsen, the United Nations
envoy.
As a signal of his good faith, Mr. Barak promised to transfer to
the Palestinians three Jerusalem-area villages, a promise that was
relayed to Mr. Arafat by Mr. Clinton. Mr. Barak even won
Parliament's con sent to do so. But, on the day of the vote, an
intense spasm of violence erupted in the West Bank, which seems in
retrospect a harbinger of what was to come.
Mr. Barak indefinitely deferred the trans fer because of the
violence. Both Mr. Arafat and, according to Mr. Malley, Mr. Clinton
later said they felt burned by Mr. Barak's broken promise.
Nonetheless, what became known as the "Stockholm track" consisted
of 15 substantive sessions, culminating in three long weekends, two
in Sweden and one in Israel. Israelis and Palestinians who took part
say now that the discussions were groundbreaking and that the mood
was positive. They made progress on the issues of territory,
borders, security and even refugees, although there were both
advances and retreats on every issue.
In mid-May, the fact and the substance of the talks were leaked
to Israeli newspapers, and what was printed about potential
concessions caused political problems for both Mr. Barak and Mr.
Arafat. That in effect brought the talks to a halt and led Mr. Barak
to seek a summit meeting before the Palestinians considered the
groundwork laid.
"Stockholm died once revealed," Mr. Indyk, the former American
ambassador, said in an interview in June. "If Stockholm had
continued, it might have laid a better foundation for Camp David.
But Barak felt the leaks would lead to the breakup of his coalition
and he'd never get to the endgame."
Mr. Ben-Ami said the negotiators had supported Mr. Barak's
decision to push for an American-led summit meeting at that point.
"We didn't feel there was a purpose in eroding our positions
further before a summit where we'd have to give up more," he said.
For other reasons, though, Mr. Ben-Ami said that in retrospect he
considered it a pity that the Stockholm track was aborted. Referring
to Abu Ala, he said: "The Palestinian negotiator there was an
extraordinarily talented and able man who had the trust of the
chairman. And he liked discreet channels. The moment they collapsed,
he became an enemy of the process. He thought Camp David was a
show."
The palpable displeasure of Mr. Abu Ala, whose given name is
Ahmed Qurei, at Camp David was considered by many to have
contributed to the talks' failure just as his subsequent leadership
role at Taba was believed to have contributed to greater success
there.
Mr. Abu Ala himself said Mr. Barak had doomed Camp David by
cutting short the preparatory session. "We told him without
preparation it would be a catastrophe, and now we are living the
catastrophe," Mr. Abu Ala said in an interview in Abu Dis, his
village in the West Bank. "Two weeks before Camp David, Arafat and I
saw Clinton at the White House. Arafat told Clinton he needed more
time. Clinton said, ?hairman Arafat, come try your best. If it
fails, I will not blame you.' But that is exactly what he did."
The Palestinians went to Camp David so reluctantly that the
failure of the talks should have been foreseen, many now say. "The
failure of Camp David was a self-fulfilling prophesy, and it wasn't
because of Jerusalem or the right of return" of refugees, said Mr.
Beilin.
Mr. Larsen agreed: "It was a failure of psychology and of
process, not so much of substance."
The Palestinians felt that they were being dragged to the verdant
hills of Maryland to be put under joint pressure by an Israeli prime
minister and an American president who, because of their separate
political time tables and concerns about their legacies, had a
personal sense of urgency.
The Palestinians said they had been repeatedly told by the
Americans that the Israeli leader's coalition was unstable; after a
while, they said, the goal of the summit meeting seemed to be as
much about rescuing Mr. Barak as about making peace. At the same
time, they said, the Americans did not seem to take seriously the
pressures of the Palestinian public and the Muslim world on Mr.
Arafat. Like Mr. Barak, Mr. Arafat went to Camp David dogged by
plummeting domestic approval ratings.
Mr. Indyk, who is planning to write a book on the peace effort
called "Unintended Consequences," said Mr. Barak's requirement that
Camp David produce a formal end to the conflict had put too much
pressure on the summit meeting.
The discussions on some issues actually went backward during the
two weeks at Camp David, Mr. Sher and Mr. Ben-Ami said. Mr. Sher
said he believed that it was because Palestinian negotiators had
kept Mr. Arafat in the dark about key details of the Stockholm
talks, which they deny. He said he and Mr. Ben-Ami had traveled to
Nablus, in the West Bank, to see the Palestinian leader shortly
before Camp David and were stunned to discover that Mr. Arafat did
not know precisely what had been discussed.
The Israelis and the Americans describe a "bunker mentality" on
the part of the Palestinians at Camp David. In response, the
Palestinians say that at one point Mr. Barak did not come out of his
cabin, the Dogwood, for two days and that he refused to meet with
Mr. Arafat personally except for one tea.
"There was also one dinner in which Barak was on the right side
of Clinton and Arafat was on the left," said Mr. Shaath, the
Palestinian, adding in reference to Mr. Clinton's daughter: "But
Chelsea sat to the right of Barak all evening, and she received his
undivided attention. Why the hell did he insist on a summit if he
did not intend to meet his partner for a minute?"
Western diplomats here say the Palestinians believed that they
were being manipulated by the Americans. They said American
officials had made a crucial mistake in trying to nurture special
relationships with two younger-generation Palestinian offi cials
whom they thought were pragmatic: Muhammad Rashid, Mr. Arafat's
Kurdish economic adviser, and Muhammad Dahlan, the Gaza preventive
security chief. That angered the veteran Palestinian negotiators,
they said, who felt that the Americans were seeking to divide and
weaken them.
In the middle of Camp David, one of the negotiators, Abu Mazen,
flew back to the Middle East for his son's wedding. He was furious
about the American tactics, a European diplomats said, and pledged
that Camp David would never succeed if such games continued and that
he would use the refugee issue to foil it, if need be.
Mr. Sher said the Palestinians had never put forward any
counterproposals to what the Israelis were suggesting. They just
said no, he said. Mr. Malley, who was at Camp David, wrote in an
op-ed piece in The New York Times in mid-July that the American
mediators were "frustrated almost to the point of despair by the
Palestinians' passivity and inability to seize the moment."
The two sides had discussed territorial swaps at Stockholm, in
which the Palestinians would cede a percentage of the West Bank for
settlement blocs in exchange for territory elsewhere. They continued
the conversation at Camp David. But Mr. Abu Ala said the Israelis
had talked of an unfair swap annexing about 9 percent of the West
Bank and giving the Palestinians the equivalent of about 1 percent
elsewhere.
"I said, Shlomo, I cannot look at the maps. Close them," Mr. Abu
Ala said, describing a conversation with Mr. Ben-Ami. He declared
that he would discuss only the 1967 borders. "Clinton was angry at
me and told me I was personally responsible for the failure of the
summit. I told him even if occupation continues for 500 years, we
will not change."
But at Taba, the Palestinians were more than willing to look at
maps. Now the Israelis were talking about annexing 6 percent of the
West Bank in exchange for land else where that was equivalent to 3
percent. That would have given the Palestinians some 97 percent of
the total land mass of the West Bank, which is much closer to their
long-held goal that the Israelis should return all the territories
captured in 1967.
At Camp David, Mr. Ben-Ami said, the Israelis discovered very
late in the game how differently the two sides perceived the final
status talks.
"That the Palestinians would agree to less than 100 percent was
the axiom of Israeli politics since 1993," he said.
Mr. Sher said most members of the Palestinian leadership "knew
and agreed that this is a historic compromise that requires the
Palestinians yielding on some issues all except one: Arafat."
At the end of Camp David, the three parties agreed that the
chemistry had been bad. That was about all they agreed on. The
Americans were deject ed, although months later Mr. Clinton
described Camp David as a "transformative event" because it forced
the two sides to confront each other's core needs and al lowed them
to glimpse the potential contours of a final peace.
At the close of July 2000, however, the Israelis felt that their
generosity had been rebuffed. And the Palestinians felt that they
were being offered a state that would not be viable "less than a
bantustan, for your information," Mr. Arafat said in a recent
interview.
"They have to control the Jordan Valley, with five early warning
stations there," Mr. Arafat said. "They have to control the air
above, the water aquifers below, the sea and the borders. They have
to divide the West Bank in three cantons. They keep 10 percent of it
for settlements and roads and their forces. No sovereignty over
Haram al Sha rif. And refugees, we didn't have a serious discussion
about."
Mr. Ben-Ami said he spent considerable time after Camp David
trying to explain to Israelis that the Palestinians indeed did make
significant concessions from their vantage point. "They agreed to
Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, 11
of them," he said. "They agreed to the idea that three blocs of the
settlements they so oppose could remain in place and that the
Western Wall and Jewish Quarter could be under Israeli sovereignty."
Mr. Malley added that the Palestinians had agreed to negotiate a
solution to the refugee issue that would not end up threatening
Israel's Jewish majority. "No other Arab party that has negotiated
with Israel not Anwar el-Sadat's Egypt, not King Hussein's Jordan,
let alone Hafez al-Assad's Syria ever came close to even consider
ing such compromises," he said.
In the public analysis, the summit meet ing fell apart in bitter
disagreement over how to share or divide Jerusalem. Mr. Clinton
recently said it was the refugee issue that did it in. But Mr.
Malley and others who took part said there were gaps on every issue.
But at the end, Mr. Clinton praised Mr. Barak's courage and
vision and said Mr. Arafat had not made an equivalent effort.
Mr. Shaath said: "I personally pleaded with President Clinton:
please do not put on a sad face and tell the world it failed. Please
say we broke down taboos, dealt with the heart of the matter and
will continue.' "
"But then the president started the blame game, and he backed
Arafat into a corner," he added
Mr. Ben-Ami expressed a similar senti ment. "At the end of Camp
David, we had the feeling that the package as such contained
ingredients and needed to go on," he said. "But Clinton left us to
our own devices after he started the blame game. He was trying to
give Barak a boost knowing he had political problems going home
empty hand ed but with his concessions revealed. But in doing so he
created problems with the other side."
Mr. Arafat "rode home on a white horse," Mr. Shaath said, because
he showed Palestinians that he "still cared about Jerusalem and the
refugees." He was perceived as having stood strong in the face of
incredible pressure from the Americans and the Israelis.
Nonetheless, Mr. Erekat said he had traveled from Bethlehem to
Gaza preaching that "Camp David was good, Camp David was progress."
He also said Mr. Arafat had made such comments, but if he did, they
were very quiet.
But after Camp David, negotiators plunged back into their work at
the King David Hotel. And the results were positive enough that Mr.
Barak and Mr. Arafat held their upbeat dinner meeting, and the
Clinton administration summoned negotiators to Washington on Sept.
27. On Sept. 28, Mr. Sharon visited the Temple Mount. On Sept. 29,
the situation began disintegrating with a rapidity that shocked
everyone.
Each side blamed the other. The Israeli government has said the
Palestinians initi ated the uprising to force the Israelis to give
them what they could not get at Camp David. Mr. Arafat said in an
interview that Mr. Barak in effect conspired with Mr. Sharon "to
destroy the peace process" once he could not get the Palestinians to
accept his offer. Mr. Arafat called Mr. Sharon's visit to the Temple
Mount "a vehicle for what they had decided on: the military plan."
An international fact-finding committee headed by former Senator
George J. Mitchell did not hold either side solely responsible for
the breakdown and described a lethal dynamic on the ground that grew
from the behavior of both sides and took on a destruc tive life of
its own. More than 650 people have been killed since Sept. 29, the
over whelming majority of them Palestinians.
'Too Late' at Taba:
Some Still Look to Eventual
Peace
Both sides, in recent interviews, wondered aloud why Mr. Clinton
could not have presented his peace proposal at Camp David or
immediately afterward. In late December, when he finally did so, the
timing was very tight. Mr. Clinton was due to leave the presidency
on Jan. 20, and Mr. Barak faced elections on Feb. 6.
The proposal offered more to the Palestinians than what was on
the table at Camp David, but they initially responded with
skepticism. The plan was too vague, they said. In the midst once
more of a violent relationship with Israel, they were not
emotionally poised to abide by the political timetables of others
and to rush into a fuzzy deal, they said.
A European diplomat said the Palestinians did not understand the
imminence and implications of a victory by Mr. Sharon; another said
they did not want to waste their time with Mr. Barak, who was
predicted to lose.
Still, in early January, Mr. Arafat visited Mr. Clinton at the
White House. In a subsequent interview, he said he had suggested
that the president summon Israeli and Palestinian negotiators
immediately for marathon talks. Mr. Arafat said he had told Mr.
Clinton that he believed a deal was possible in 14 days.
Instead, the negotiators met later that month without the
Americans and without their leaders at the Taba Hilton on the Red
Sea. With the exception of Mr. Sher, who said Taba was little more
than "good ambience," most of the Israelis and Palestinians who took
part felt that it was a very successful session.
"Peace seemed very possible at Taba," Mr. Ben-Ami said. And Mr.
Abu Ala said, "In Taba, we achieved real tangible steps toward a
final agreement."
In Taba, the Israelis for the first time accepted the Palestinian
principle of a return to 1967 borders, the Palestinians said. The
Palestinians therefore agreed to settlement blocs, provided there
would be a swap of equivalent land. Mr. Shaath said they were to end
up with 10 percent more territory than they were offered at Camp
David.
The Israelis also agreed for the first time to give the
Palestinians full sovereignty over all Arab neighborhoods in
Jerusalem, both sides said, and to give the Palestinians air rights
over their land. The two sides were still grappling with the precise
terms under which Israel could retain small bases and radar posts in
the Jordan Valley, at least transitionally.
Many Israelis believe that throughout the final-status talks, the
Palestinians were inflexible in their demand that all refugees be
given the right of return to their former homes, which raises
existential fears in Israel. But Mr. Beilin, the Israeli who ran the
negotiations on refugees at Taba, said the two sides were exploring
an "agreed narrative" that would defuse the explosive nature of this
issue and protect the Jewish identity of Israel. They noted that
about 200,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem would drop off
the Israeli demographic rolls, and they devised a mechanism giving
refugees more financial incentive to settle outside Israel.
Mr. Abu Ala said: "When other issues move, this will move. It's
not a deal breaker."
The negotiations at Taba were interrupted by Mr. Barak after two
Israelis were killed in the West Bank. The talks resumed and then
halted again with the agreement to pick up after the elections. They
never did.
"If Camp David was too little, Taba was too late," Mr. Shaath
said.
Mr. Larsen, the United Nations envoy, said he believed that a
final peace deal could have been hammered out after Taba if both Mr.
Barak and Mr. Clinton had remained in office.
But that is a big if. Mr. Sher noted, for instance, that the
status of Jerusalem's holy sites -- always a potential deal-breaker
-- was barely touched during the Taba sessions.
In any case, on leaving office, Mr. Barak declared that his
successor would not be bound by the negotiations that began with
Stockholm and ended with Taba.
Similarly, Mr. Clinton said his peace plan would expire when he
stepped down.
Yet a year after Camp David, with the reality on the ground so
transformed by bloodshed, most of those who took part in or observed
the negotiations still believe that a permanent peace agreement is
possible.
Although they acknowledge little likelihood of final-status talks
under Mr. Sharon, they still believe in the inevitability of a
future agreement that is very near to what they were designing.
"Even at this darkest of hours, I believe that peace is
achievable," Mr. Erekat said in an interview in his Jericho office.
"Clinton took us on a futuristic voyage. We have seen the endgame.
It's just a matter of time."
Mr. Sher agreed. "I still think that peace is doable, feasible
and reasonable," he said in his Jerusalem office, which is decorated
with photographs from Camp David. "That's the tragedy, because the
basis of the agreement is lying there in arm's reach."