2 - 8 August 2001
Issue No.545
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 August 2001 Issue No.545 |
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What really happened
New revelations by US, Palestinian and Israeli officials shatter the Israeli claim that Arafat is to blame for the failure of the Camp David talks last summer, writes Michael Jansen
In recent weeks, well-informed sources have finally started challenging the widely believed Israeli line that last summer's Camp David summit, hosted by former US President Bill Clinton, failed because of the intransigence of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
According to the Israeli version of events, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made "courageous, generous" and "far- reaching proposals," which Arafat rejected.
A European official in the know, Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN peace envoy who helped broker the Oslo accords in 1993, dismisses this line. "It is a terrible myth that Arafat and only Arafat caused this catastrophic failure," he said in recent statements. There has never been any mystery about the identity of the authors of this "terrible myth": Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak. Barak used it to camouflage his devious intentions while Clinton relied on it to explain why he failed to achieve a comprehensive peace in the Middle East.
Robert Malley, an adviser to Clinton at the summit, launched the "revisionist" line in articles he contributed to the Western press and in leaked portions of an upcoming article he wrote for The New York Review of Books in collaboration with Hussein Aga, an adviser to the Palestinian Authority. Malley exploded the Clinton-Barak myth when he revealed that even the former US president had been "frustrated" with Barak for retracting positions put forward during the talks.
According to Malley, Clinton also accused Barak of not being "serious" and compared Barak's negotiating tactics at Camp David to those he used with Syrian President Hafez Al- Assad at the Geneva summit on March 26, 2000.
At Geneva, Barak knew that Al-Assad would only accept a total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan. Barak did propose to pull out of almost all of the Golan, but insisted that Israel annex a strip of land along the shore of Lake Tiberias.
Showing more bad faith, Barak reneged on other issues which an angered Assad believed had been wrapped up during talks held between the two sides in the US in January. Publicly, though, instead of blaming Barak for offering a deal Assad was certain to reject, Clinton blamed the Syrian president for rejecting the unacceptable.
This pattern was repeated, with modifications, at Camp David a year ago. The major difference between the two events is that the late Assad entered negotiations thinking a deal possible, while Arafat was extremely reluctant to go to Camp David because the differences between the two sides were too wide. Moreover, the Palestinians were deeply disillusioned with Barak. Since his election in May 1999, he had talked peace but done nothing to promote it in practice. He refused to yield an inch of occupied Palestinian land and instead accelerated settlement building. Arafat agreed to attend the summit only after Clinton assured him that the US would not blame him for any failure to reach accord. But this promise proved untrue. Thereafter, Palestinian spokesmen were unable to present a true record of events in Western capitals or in Israel, although their version is generally believed by Arabs.
At Camp David, Barak repeated what could be called the "Geneva subterfuge." He proposed a plan which appeared to be dramatically "concessionist" but fell far short of what Palestinians need for a viable state in Gaza and the West Bank with East Jerusalem as its capital. Barak was prepared to pull out of all of Gaza but sought to reduce and cantonise the West Bank. Israel would retain sovereignty over "Greater Jerusalem," covering 28 per cent of the West Bank, and annex another nine to 13.5 per cent. Israel would lease a further 10 per cent in the Jordan Valley, establish six military bases, several staging areas and three early warning stations. In exchange for the annexation of at least 47-51.5 per cent of the West Bank, Barak offered land in the Negev desert equivalent to one per cent. Israel would retain control of external borders and main West Bank roads which carve the area into three cantons, giving Israel control of all movement between the three West Bank cantons as well as between the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would also retain control of Palestinian water sources and airspace. The Palestinian state described in Barak's plan would have no territorial continuity, integrity or sovereignty, according to Malley and other Palestinian officials in revelations made last week. According to the same sources, the Palestinians were expected to administer Muslim and Christian holy places and the outer Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.
In return for this insulting deal, Barak wanted the Palestinians to sign a document proclaiming an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Clinton's "bridging" proposals, in fact, accepted the Israeli cantonisation plan, exacerbating Palestinian opposition. Barak worsened matters by playing with terms and percentages and leaking misleading reports to the press in violation of a pledge of silence.
Arafat suspected the Camp David exercise was a set-up. And it indeed was. A set-up designed to torpedo final status negotiations and prevent Arafat from proclaiming an independent state. Barak did not intend to reach any agreement with the Palestinians any more than he had intended to conclude a deal with the Syrians. In any case, Barak, a lame-duck premier, could not have delivered even the appalling deal he tabled. Barak had been elected to make peace, so he had to put forward a peace plan to keep faith with Israeli voters. But his real objective was to create the illusion that Israel was ready to make peace while it maintained and built on the status quo, in line with the strategy all Israeli premiers have followed since the Jewish state was founded in 1948.
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