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Totally at Israel's mercy: The myths of Camp David |
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by Kathleen Christison Global Echo Entered into the database on Tuesday, August 16th, 2005 @ 12:24:10 MST |
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A few months ago, nearly five years after the collapse of the July 2000 Camp
David summit at which President Bill Clinton expected to forge an historic Middle
East peace agreement, a leading member of Clinton's negotiating team publicly
acknowledged that rather than serve as a true mediator in peace negotiations,
successive U.S. administrations including Clinton's have acted as "Israel's
attorney." Writing on the Washington Post op-ed page in May 2005,
Aaron David Miller admitted that Clinton and company followed Israel's lead
"without critically examining what that would mean for our own interests,
for those on the Arab side and for the overall success of the negotiations."
The Clinton team's practice of running everything past Israel first "stripped
our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking.
Far too often . . . our departure point was not what was needed to reach an
agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel."
The result was utter failure; in these circumstances, no agreement could possibly
meet Palestinian as well as Israeli needs. Miller is a rarity among generations of senior policymakers who have been unable
or unwilling to look back at their own policies and actions with frank honesty.
Not surprisingly, the memoirs thus far published by the other policymakers involved
in the Camp David collapse exhibit none of Miller's honesty. One should never,
of course, take at face value the testimony of those who oversaw a years-long
policy that ended in tatters, but these particular retrospectives are remarkably
disingenuous. It is obviously difficult for anyone to acknowledge that a policy
so patently misguided was enthusiastically pursued through Clinton's two terms
(and, in the case of people like Miller and senior negotiator Dennis Ross, through
three terms, going back to George H.W. Bush). This is what makes Miller's exposé
so telling. What Miller essentially reveals, although he does not say this explicitly,
is that because it could not separate itself from Israel's interests and Israel's
demands, the Clinton administration is ultimately responsible not only for the
collapse of the peace process at Camp David, but for setting in motion everything
that has followed: the intifada that erupted two months later, the five years
(so far) of Palestinian-Israeli violence since then, the atrocities of Ariel
Sharon's governance of the occupied Palestinian territories, and the end of
Palestinian national hopes for a long time to come. Beyond all this, the continuation
of the set of policies on the Palestinian issue that Clinton and company put
in place probably wipes out any real hope of reducing terrorism against the
U.S. and its allies. Although U.S. and other Western policymakers refuse to
acknowledge this, Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, supported by the
U.S., is a major cause of the hatred and resentment that spawned terror attacks
such as September 11. As Israeli historian Avi Shlaim recently observed, "For
most Arabs and Muslims the real issue in the Middle East is not Iraq, Iran or
democracy but Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people and America's blind
support for Israel." This perception intensified on Clinton's watch. Clinton and his negotiators were so eager, in pursuit of Israel's interests
and of Clinton's much-ballyhooed "legacy," to forge a peace agreement
at all costs before the end of his term, and were so outraged when the Palestinians
refused to relinquish their hope for true independence and sovereignty by complying
with Israel's inadequate offer at Camp David, that they quite deliberately shifted
the entire onus for failure onto the Palestinians. At a time when everyone,
and certainly every policymaker, should have known that Palestinian frustration
with the slow, unproductive pace of the seven-year-old peace process and the
continued consolidation of Israel's occupation was near the point of explosion,
Clinton's obvious effort to blame the Palestinians and side unreservedly with
Israel when Israel did not get its way constituted an open invitation to violent
upheaval. The Myths The myths about Camp David, and particularly about Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak's supposedly "generous offer," have become part of an urban
legend by now, particularly among those many commentators, friends of Israel,
and instant experts who feel constrained to relieve Israel of any culpability
for the Camp David collapse or the intifada that followed. Five years later,
whenever the subject of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict comes up in any public
discussion or commentary, it is unfailingly asserted that the Palestinians,
and specifically Yasir Arafat, acting out of pure cussedness or pure hatred
for Jews, rejected an Israeli peace offer of unbelievable generosity, an offer
that would have given the Palestinians a state on 90 -- or sometimes 95 or 97
-- percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza, with all the Arab neighborhoods
of East Jerusalem as a capital. Had it not been for the Palestinians' turn to
violence, so the myth goes, we would not now have Ariel Sharon in office, there
would be a satisfactory peace, there would be no killings, and so on. What the myths ignore is, first and foremost, that Barak's offers both at Camp
David and six months later at the final negotiating session at Taba, Egypt,
were not generous by any objective measure. The offers went further than any
previous Israeli proposal had, but, since Israel had never before put forth
any proposals on the key, so-called final-status issues, this says nothing.
In fact, what the supposedly generous offer would have given the Palestinians
would have been a state in four pieces, three in the West Bank plus Gaza, with
a capital made up of Palestinian neighborhoods not contiguous either to each
other or to the rest of the state. The major Israeli settlements, housing fully
80 percent of the 200,000 West Bank settlers and 100 percent of the almost 200,000
additional settlers in East Jerusalem, would have remained in place; the 300-mile
road network throughout the West Bank built to connect the settlements and accessible
only to Israelis would have remained in place; the "state" left to
the Palestinians would have been a mere colony of Israel -- non-viable and indefensible,
without borders with any state but Israel, totally at Israel's mercy. Jeff Halper, the Israeli anthropologist and activist who heads the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions and has extensively studied all aspects
of the occupation, frequently points out that territory does not equate to sovereignty
and that even a prison gives 95 percent of its space to the prisoners, while
the prison walls, the cell doors, and occasional towers and other points of
control constitute the controlling five percent. Under Barak's offer, the five
percent (or three or ten percent) remaining in Israel's control -- made up of
settlements, Israeli-only roads separating Palestinian from each other, checkpoints
impeding movement, all of what Halper calls a "matrix of control"
-- would have given Israel continued dominance over Palestine. The ability of Clinton and his negotiators to ignore these realities, at the
time of Camp David and to this day, is striking evidence of the truth of Miller's
indictment and stands as testimony to their refusal to view anything about the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict except through an Israeli prism. Another critical truth that the Camp David myths ignore is the abysmal condition
in which Palestinians lived during the seven years preceding Camp David, beginning
with the Oslo agreement of September 1993, when the peace process was supposed
to be moving along smoothly. Israel expanded settlements in the West Bank, Gaza,
and East Jerusalem throughout the Oslo years, nearly doubling the number of
settlers, at a time when negotiations over Israel's withdrawal from these territories
should have been in train. The entire system of limited access roads connecting
the settlements was constructed in these years. Gazans were imprisoned behind
an impenetrable fence built in the 1990s to surround that entire territory.
A system of closure was imposed on the West Bank and Gaza that prevented Palestinians
from working inside Israel and that consequently severely damaged the Palestinian
economy. Israel allocated the West Bank's underground water resources so that
Israeli settlers consumed six or seven times the water per capita that was allocated
to Palestinians; Israeli settlements had swimming pools and gardens, while Palestinian
villages often went without running water. The West Bank was divided into a checkerboard of areas under varying types
of partial Palestinian or full Israeli administrative and security control,
designed primarily to protect Israeli settlements and limit Palestinians to
small, non-contiguous segments of land. As a result, Israeli military checkpoints
were set up throughout the West Bank, severely impeding the movement of people
and goods from one Palestinian town and village to another. Whereas before the
Oslo agreement Israel had imposed what one Ha'aretz analyst characterizes as
a "hovering occupation" in which the Israeli military and civil administration
controlled the external borders of the occupied territories but minimized interference
in Palestinian daily lives, when peace became more nearly a real prospect, a
relatively distant military occupation turned into an in-your-face reality for
Palestinians, with checkpoints and observation towers, a computerized system
of permits and movement controls, roadblocks, and Israeli tanks outside their
towns. The result, this analyst has pointed out, is that "most Palestinians
have not experienced Oslo as a peace process. Instead of hope, they received
militaristic strangulation from Israel, a corrupt self-government that depends
on Israel in a humiliating way, and prolonged poverty. The long and the short
of it is that the Palestinian hope for peace and independence had collapsed
long before September 2000," when the intifada broke out. These facts put the lie to the Israeli and U.S. claims that the intifada was
orchestrated by Arafat for political gain and was motivated by some kind of
unfathomable culture of hatred for Jews rather than any legitimate grievance.
In actuality, the intifada grew out of years of escalating oppression under
Israel's occupation, along with utter frustration over what appeared after Camp
David to be the end of any hope for peace and independence. The concerted U.S.
campaign to blame Arafat and the Palestinians for rejecting what they were repeatedly
told was "the best deal they would ever get" came as the final straw,
convincing the Palestinians that peace with Israel and real independence were
not on the horizon. In this atmosphere, Ariel Sharon's deliberately provocative
visit to the site of the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam,
two months after Camp David virtually guaranteed an explosion. The Clinton team's
obliviousness to the facts of the Palestinian situation and to the impact of
their campaign of blame is further confirmation that as Israel's lawyer they
were blind to any but Israel's point of view. The fact that the so-called "generous offer" of Ehud Barak is a blatant
lie --one that constitutes one of the most serious distortions of the historical
record in modern times, ranking at least as high in terms of geostrategic significance
as the Bush administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
-- goes blithely unnoticed in the mainstream media, among the general public,
and in policymaking circles. But unlike the WMD lie, this myth persists, this
lie grows like topsy. It comes up whenever a peace plan is put forth; it arises
as Israel's excuse whenever harsh Israeli control measures in the occupied territories
are publicized; it was rehashed ad nauseam when Arafat died in November 2004;
it was re-rehashed when Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed Arafat two months
later; and it has been used to propagate further myths, such as that the Palestinians
seek Israel's destruction and, most damaging to prospects for peace, that first
Arafat and now Abbas are not proper partners for peace. The typical assertion about Camp David and its aftermath usually runs along
the lines of a New York Times article several years later in which the correspondent
(Ethan Bronner, a Times editor, later to become deputy foreign editor, who should
know better) recounted a badly skewed "history" of supposed Palestinian
hatred of Jews and concluded with what he thought was the "worst of all":
"in 2000, when Israel offered Yasir Arafat more than 90 percent of the
occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for a Palestinian state, his rejection was
accompanied by a terrorist war that shows no signs of stopping." Something
like this line has also become a mantra for Times columnist Thomas Friedman
and many others. A Book of Truths The truth of things, which comes clear only in bare outline from Aaron Miller's
brief op-ed, becomes crystal clear in a remarkable book by a young graduate
student who, with no vested interest in any particular version of the story,
interviewed most of the principals involved in the peace process, as well as
several lower ranking functionaries, and produced an account of U.S. policymaking
that is strikingly honest and revealing. In
The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle
East Peace Process, Clayton E. Swisher demonstrates that asking the right
questions -- something no one in the media has yet attempted to do -- can unearth
the real story beneath the self-interested distortions of those involved and
the hype put out by a media completely locked in to the Israeli perspective. Swisher's story, covering the peace process during Barak's two years in office,
with an emphasis on U.S. policymaking, is a tale of an incredibly ham-handed
diplomatic effort. Clinton and his negotiating team come across as a kind of
gang that couldn't shoot straight. Swisher describes turf squabbles between
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger
and most particularly between an egotistical Dennis Ross and, at one time or
another, virtually everyone else. Albright, it comes clear repeatedly, knew
virtually nothing about the issues; both Israelis and Palestinians, in fact,
generally avoided her because she lacked mastery of the topic. Summit meetings,
between Syrians and Israelis and later Palestinians and Israelis, are shown
to be extremely poorly prepared. The U.S. mediators made little effort to narrow
positions before the summits, and there was little of the give-and-take essential
in negotiations. One State Department official tells Swisher that at Camp David
everything was "very loosy-goosy," with no prepared texts and no detailed
position papers, because "that's the way Dennis liked to run things." Throughout the Camp David summit, no one ever presented a formalized, written
proposal covering the major issues. Nor, incredibly, did the U.S. keep any written
record of what went on during the two weeks of negotiations. When the Israelis
asked Ross a month later for a reconstruction of what had occurred at the summit,
Ross acknowledged that there was nothing in writing. Things got no better as
the final months of Clinton's administration went on. Miller confesses to Swisher
that the so-called "parameters" that Clinton finally presented in
late December 2000 -- the first time the Clinton team had ventured to adopt
a policy position -- were still being revised the very day they were presented,
meaning that, as Miller notes, "we were not ready." This was less
than a month before the end of eight years in office. Clinton and company lacked
a clear strategy and "dithered" over what exactly the parameters were
to define. The dithering over its own position even months after Camp David and the poor
preparation for the summit in the first place were entirely attributable to
the utter reluctance of Clinton et al. to take any steps without Israel's approval.
The ruinous effect on the peace process of this obeisance to Israel comes through
loud and clear in Swisher's account, one interlocutor after another making it
patently evident that the strong tilt toward Israel is what ultimately upended
negotiations. Albright, in a rare mood of candor, all but apologizes several
times for not having pressed Israel harder. She tells Swisher that when Barak
first came to office in 1999, succeeding the very intransigent Benjamin Netanyahu,
the Clinton people were so pleased to see him that they simply assumed he had
"enough of a political strategic view" to move ahead on negotiations,
but they were mistaken. She acknowledges that throughout the process "we
should have been much harder" on Israel, particularly on Israeli settlements,
which Barak was expanding at a faster rate than Netanhayu had. The book is filled with statements by U.S. officials indicating an almost automatic
deferral to Israel's demands. One unnamed senior White House official, asked
why it took so many months after Camp David to release Clinton's parameters,
tells Swisher, "There were certain proposals that Barak didn't want put
forward because he didn't think he could sell them back home. Also, realize
that the U.S. is pro-Israeli. Clinton was the first president who first reached
out to Palestinians -- like no other -- but at the end of the day, Clinton was
a pro-Israeli president. When push came to shove . . . if Barak said don't put
this in front of him, [Clinton] wasn't going to." This very neatly sums up the entire story of the Clinton administration's role
in the peace process. Swisher himself concludes that the U.S. acted as "an
extra negotiator for the Israelis and an apologist for Barak's plans to sustain
the occupation." One State Department official who was present at Camp
David says, "Look, you never go into a negotiation without knowing an endgame!
We went in to the most high-stakes of negotiations not only not knowing the
endgame; we didn't know what Israel's positions were. . . . We saw them unfolding
in front of us." At the most critical point in 50-plus years of dealing with the Arab-Israeli
conflict, the United States, in a breathtaking abdication of responsibility,
allowed Israel alone to set the starting point, the pace, and the agenda of
what was to have been an historic, conflict-ending peace agreement. Probably most appalling in this story of a monumental U.S. policy failure is
that the major U.S. players had virtually no understanding of the Palestinians,
despite seven years of what can only be called intense dealings with them. Clinton's
policymakers did not understand what the Palestinians were enduring under Israeli
occupation; conveniently forgot the huge concession the Palestinians had made
a dozen years earlier by recognizing Israel's existence in 78 percent of original
Palestine; had no appreciation of the significance for Palestinians of the massive
spread of Israeli settlements throughout the only territory remaining for a
Palestinian state; did not understand the critical need from the Palestinian
standpoint for a reasonable resolution to the refugee problem; and fathomed
nothing of how totally impossible it was for Arafat or any Muslim or Arab leader
to agree to Israel's demand for sovereignty over Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.
They simply did not "get it," and Swisher's interviews demonstrate
that most of these U.S. movers and shakers, with the belated exception of Miller,
still steadfastly refuse to recognize the reasons for their failure. Even an Israeli negotiator laments that "The American team didn't know
the substance. It is one thing to know the principles of an agreement, and another
to master the details. If you don't have a rich, sophisticated understanding
of the issue, when you are confronted by reality you are left paralyzed,"
without the breadth of knowledge to be creative or to be able to compromise.
At Camp David, Swisher himself notes, even after seven years, "Ross was
still nowhere near the most basic understanding of what the Palestinians would
consider minimally acceptable regarding territory." Fundamentally, as Swisher
points out but Ross has apparently never grasped, as the occupying power with
total control over "the very thing the Palestinians wanted -- a state --
the Israelis would naturally have to be more forthcoming [than the Palestinian
side]; this could only occur if the central mediator stood between both parties
and demonstrated a willingness to 'swing elbows.'" But neither Ross nor
any of his colleagues, including Clinton, saw the need to do this. For most of the Americans, the basic issue came down to a mere mathematical
one, and they lost themselves in a forest of percentages. Clinton used to boast
that he knew the geography of the West Bank so well he could draw a map in his
sleep, but in fact he only saw that map in two dimensions; neither he nor any
of the others understood the territorial issue as it played out on the ground.
Ross was fond of saying that in any negotiation, neither side could expect to
gain 100 percent of what it wanted -- a statement intended pointedly to tell
the Palestinians that they could never expect the return of all of the occupied
territories, despite the fact that those territories constituted less than one-quarter
of original Palestine and the Palestinians had long since conceded Israel's
right to the other three-quarters. Within this limiting parameter, the U.S. simply played around with percentages
of territory. Even Miller failed to get it. One leading Palestinian negotiator
tells Swisher that shortly before Camp David he had asked Miller how much of
the occupied territories Miller thought the Palestinians could accept for a
state and Miller responded, astoundingly, 70 percent. This would be 70 percent
of the West Bank, which constituted only 22 percent of original Palestine. The
Palestinian exploded angrily, telling Miller he was "miserably misinformed,"
that in fact the Palestinians could not accept anything less than 100 percent,
plus or minus a few small parcels of land to be swapped on a one-for-one basis
for parcels of Israeli territory. Miller was shocked, indicating an almost unbelievable
level of ignorance after more than a decade in which he had personally been
involved with the Palestinian issue. If the Americans had not all been operating
from an Israeli perspective, they could not possibly have so badly misunderstood
the Palestinians. Perhaps this was the beginning of Miller's enlightenment, but the lesson did
not take with any of the other senior members of Clinton's team. Whenever in
the lead-up to Camp David the Israelis proposed to return 66 percent or 76 percent
of the West Bank, the U.S. team, still failing to understand the Palestinian
position, never objected and never attempted to narrow the huge gap. When the
gap did narrow at Camp David -- a function of increased Israeli but not U.S.
recognition of the possibilities -- the U.S. members were still merely dickering
with numbers. At one point Albright considered it a simple matter just to split
the difference between a Palestinian demand for 98 percent and an Israeli readiness
to relinquish no more than 92 percent -- as if the mathematical mid-point of
95 percent, although not based on anything real on the ground, could somehow
magically resolve all outstanding Palestinian territorial problems. Arbitrarily
flipping off two or three or ten percent here or there does not make the territory
remaining to the Palestinians contiguous or viable or defensible, does not address
fundamental issues of control over territory, and does not make the Palestinians
truly independent or sovereign in their own territory. As has been evident since the day Camp David collapsed, Yasir Arafat became
the focus and the easy scapegoat for all the Americans' frustrations over their
own failures. Their excuses for the collapse of negotiations -- almost all adopted
wholesale from Barak -- centered entirely on Arafat. He could not bring himself
to end the conflict, he could not make the change from revolutionary to statesman,
he wanted and indeed fostered turmoil and violence in order to improve his bargaining
position, he rejected Barak's generous offer without offering any counterproposal,
he rejected even Clinton's "parameters," and so on. According to Swisher,
the Palestinians he spoke to, as well even as some Israelis and Americans, believed
that putting the entire onus of blame on the Palestinians -- which Clinton had
sworn before the summit he would not do and which left the Palestinians with
virtually no hope of ever ending the occupation -- was the proximate cause of
the intifada that erupted two months later. The deliberate distortions and myths about supposed Palestinian intransigence
have been repeated and perpetuated by each of the principals and picked up and
made into legend by media commentators. Clinton spent Inauguration Day 2001,
according to Swisher, telling the incoming Bush team about his disappointment
with Arafat, who he said had torpedoed the peace process, and he urged Colin
Powell not to invest any energy dealing with the Palestinian leader. Ross, who
actually worked with an Israeli negotiator in the middle of the night before
the summit collapsed to draft Clinton's "blame speech," casting Arafat
as the bad guy and Barak as the courageous risk-taker, also briefed the Bush
team. He spent four hours with Powell during the transition and reportedly told
the incoming secretary of state not to believe a word Arafat said because he
was "a con man." Ross has continued to play the blame game ever since. In voluminous interviews
(including with Swisher) and commentaries over the last several years, as well
as in his own memoirs, Arafat always figures as the culprit and as Ross's central
obsession. The obsession -- fed by Barak, shared to a great degree by Clinton,
and magnified by an Israel-centric media in the U.S. -- became a comfortable
retreat for Americans who could not acknowledge U.S. responsibility and would
not acknowledge Israel's responsibility, so closely bound was the U.S. to Israel.
Swisher ends his account with a semi-apology from Miller, who participated in
Ross's four-hour briefing of Powell. "You don't want to give centrality
to how you fucked up," Miller confessed. "Dennis could have never
brought himself to do it, and neither could I." The Roots of Failure Because of its thorough examination of the thinking and the policy path followed
by the Clinton negotiating team and, as noted, because he thought to ask the
right questions about the policymakers' motivations, Swisher's book stands as
probably the best and certainly the most revealing of several retrospectives
on Camp David and the peace process. (One other book that also stands out as
an honest and disinterested account is Shattered Dreams, by French
journalist Charles Enderlin. Although it too is based on interviews with all
the principals from the U.S., Israel, and Palestine, it does not focus as Swisher's
account does on U.S. motivations. Among the myriad article-length recaps of
Camp David, an August 2001 New York Review of Books piece co-authored
by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, participants at Camp David on the U.S. and
the Palestinian delegations respectively, provides a very well informed if brief
assessment of the negotiations and is virtually the only one not written from
a U.S.-Israeli perspective.) The importance of Swisher's book is that it pieces together all the evidence
necessary to demonstrate inescapably that Clinton and company's pronounced tilt
toward Israel was the major, and perhaps the only, reason for the collapse of
the peace process. A pro-Israeli tilt in U.S. policy was obviously not unique
to the Clinton administration, but it was under Clinton that the Israel-centered
mindset that had always determined U.S. policymaking finally ran up against
a need for the kind of balanced approach that would have taken Palestinian concerns
into account equally with Israeli concerns. The Clinton team was unable to overcome
its biases and the blindness those biases produced long enough to function as
a truly honest mediator between the two sides. Clinton and company dropped all pretense of U.S. neutrality after Camp David.
One of the most significant but least noted comments in the virulent U.S.-led
campaign to paint Arafat as the culprit was Clinton's veiled accusation on Israeli
television that Arafat had actively worked at the summit to thwart Israel's
aspirations. "I kept telling the Palestinians," he said, "and
I will say again to the world, that you cannot make an agreement over something
as important as Jerusalem . . . if it is required of one side to say I completely
defeated the interest of the other side." Clinton's attribution to Arafat
of such malevolence, charging that his purpose was to "completely defeat"
Israel's interests rather than advance a Palestinian interest in part of Jerusalem,
was indicative of the kind of Israel-focused mindset that had long pervaded
American thinking. (It was no doubt also indicative of Clinton's desire to boost
the electoral prospects of his wife Hillary, then running for a Senate seat
from New York, where pro-Israeli credentials are thought to be essential.) Because
of this focus on the Israeli perspective to the exclusion of the Palestinian
viewpoint, all Palestinian actions are viewed according to their impact on Israel,
as if Palestinians always act only against Israel, never for themselves. For the same reasons, the U.S. tends to take Israel's maximum position as the
norm and the standard of reasonableness, and "progress" in negotiations
is judged according to that maximum: any Israeli movement away from the maximum,
however insignificant, is applauded; any Palestinian failure to accept Israel's
position is condemned. Although he would undoubtedly not acknowledge that he
was describing anything inappropriate, New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman captured the Clinton attitude, and the general American attitude, a
few days after Camp David when he observed that Clinton's criticism of Arafat
had demonstrated that "there is in the U.S. view a level of Israeli compromise
that is right and fair, and beyond which Israel should not be expected to go.
It is not just a bottomless pit of give-aways." Israel's interests are
supreme, in other words, both to Friedman and to Clinton, and Palestinians are
judged according to how well they accommodate, or at least refrain from interfering
with, those interests. Given this general attitude, one can only assume that Clinton must have been
totally dismissive, or perhaps mystified, when near the end of the summit Arafat
responded to Clinton's anger, according to Swisher, by trying to put the situation
in perspective. "You say the Israelis moved forward," Arafat said
to Clinton, "but they are the occupiers. They are not being generous
-- they are not giving from their pockets but from our land. I am only
asking that UN Resolution 242 be implemented. I am speaking only about 22 percent
of Palestine, Mr. President." (Emphasis added.) Camp David was the culmination of a mindset that had been forming and molding
itself for decades. Despite the understanding Clinton had exhibited for broad
Palestinian concerns, when negotiations came down to the specifics of critical
questions like Jerusalem and borders, he proved unable to shift his thinking
away from a primary focus on Israel's needs and Israel's demands. Like many
Americans, particularly in the Southern Baptist tradition, Clinton had grown
up on myths about Israel. He writes in his 2004 memoir, My Life, that
an old pastor and mentor had told him while he was governor of Arkansas that
he would probably be president some day but that God would "never forgive
you if you don't stand by Israel." The pastor did not argue that Israel
had not mistreated the Palestinians, but he thought God intended the Jews "to
be at home" in the Holy Land and that the Palestinians' problems could
only be solved through peace and security for Israel. Such notions of the priority of Israeli interests, taught early in life, inevitably
find their way into policy. All of Clinton's principal negotiators, moreover,
had what they all acknowledged was an emotional commitment to Israel. This conditioning
and ingrained way of thinking is evident in the memoirs thus far published.
Clinton's own memoir and others by Albright and Ross add up to an embarrassing
collection of apologias for a badly misguided U.S. policy and provide striking
evidence of how little the U.S., in its myopic attitude toward Israel, understood
the Palestinian position. Clinton's memoir is actually most notable for how little it says. For a man
of such widely recognized analytical acumen, this much-heralded policy wonk
writes a remarkably unwonkish memoir, a prosaic compendium of "who struck
Johns" and "who said what to whoms" almost totally lacking in
analysis. But he does manage to insert frequent snide asides about Arafat's
failure to do as Clinton and the Israelis wanted and his inability to move forward
as rapidly in negotiations as Clinton's time in office was receding. The memoirs
reveal a president wholly dedicated to safeguarding Israel's interests and unable
even to fathom the Palestinians' interests. Clinton's anger that Arafat would
not take risks for Israel's security, or for Clinton's own legacy, is obvious. Albright's memoir, Madam Secretary, is an even more abject statement
of U.S. devotion to Israel's perspective. The Israelis gave "all they could"
at Camp David, in Albright's view, whereas Arafat gave "no sign that his
vision extended to anything more forward-looking than victory over Israel."
When the intifada broke out, "Barak was personally involved in trying to
calibrate the response in ways that would minimize loss of life" (an outrageous
distortion after Israel fired more than a million rounds at Palestinian protesters
in the first few days of the intifada, before any suicide bombings had occurred,
and killed 117 Palestinians, one-quarter of them children, in the first month).
In the end, she says, the "core failure was the Palestinians' obsessive
focus not on how much could be gained but on the relatively little they would
be required to give up." Palestinians could have had a state but instead
they brought on the election of Ariel Sharon and they are left with "their
legalisms, their misery, and their terror." Barak and Sharon themselves could not have improved on this astounding anti-Palestinian
catalog. Little wonder that the Palestinians got nowhere toward getting their
point across at Camp David, to say nothing of advancing toward a just peace. Clinton's and Albright's retrospectives are strikingly self-centered, even
in their titles, but the prize for self-absorption goes to Dennis Ross, whose
memoir, The Missing Peace, is an 800-page pat on his own back. Clinton
is always asking Ross what to do, according to Ross's account, based almost
entirely on his own notes over the years. He knew the parties better than anyone;
he was always on the phone or in a private meeting with this or that leader;
in the first Bush administration, "I persuaded [James] Baker and [George
H.W.] Bush" to take various actions. Frequent comments like "knowing
Rabin as I did" dot his pages; Rabin frequently "shared highly sensitive
views with me." But far more important than his manifestations of ego are
Ross's frank statements of the pro-Israeli perspective from which he was coming.
Early in the book, he lays out his policy parameters: "Any effort at peacemaking
must be premised on a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship. . . . Criticism was
legitimate, but creating a breach in the relationship was not. . . . My approach
to the peace process was shaped by the conviction that Israel must feel secure
if it was to take risks for peace." If there were no other evidence of
his extreme tilt toward Israel, this alone would stand out as an unmistakable
clue to his devotion to Israel and whatever it demanded. One wonders why, as
a supposed middleman in negotiations, Ross did not also operate under the conviction,
to paraphrase what he says of Israel, "that the Palestinians must feel
secure if they were to take risks for peace." But the Palestinians received no such consideration. More's the pity, for a
just, more or less equitable peace forged at Camp David would have prevented
the intifada, which might then have headed off Osama bin Laden and prevented
September 11, which would in turn have prevented the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq. The possibilities are intriguing to imagine; the consequences of a too-pronounced
leaning toward Israel are frightening to dwell on. Lost Hope Although an honest Aaron Miller acknowledged to Swisher that none of the principal
U.S. players in the negotiations was capable of giving a frank appraisal of
what occurred because "the personal agenda and heat of the moment have
colored it," the media and public opinion throughout the U.S. know only
the distorted story as it emerged from these principal players when the summit
collapsed. Clinton and company set the mood and cast the story in concrete on
that day five years ago, and no amount of reappraisal, none of the second thoughts
or reconsiderations, have made it through the media curtain that dropped across
the Palestinian side of the story on that day. Like the old cliché about
the correction to an erroneous but much-publicized newspaper story appearing
only on page 30, buried deep inside the paper and never getting anything like
the attention of the original story, the damage done by the U.S. at Camp David
was done permanently the day Clinton gave the "blame speech." The
Palestinians lost hope; the peace movement in Israel felt it had been betrayed
by the Palestinians; the media in the U.S., ever eager to blame the Palestinians,
picked up the message and have never since retracted or reassessed. Very few
know, or are likely ever to know, the real story of how the Clinton administration
undermined the Palestinians and undermined all prospects for peace. |