Distilled Knowledge

Source contribution

Ben-Ami’s insider history treats failed peace as a product of interacting asymmetries: occupation and territorial expansion, Palestinian fragmentation and maximalism, incompatible narratives, weak leadership, violence, timing, and flawed mediation. It resists a single-cause account while warning that the two-state horizon can be lost through cumulative facts.

Negotiation positions must be reconstructed by date; later parameters should not be projected backward.
Near-agreement on abstractions can conceal unresolved maps, implementation, security, refugees, and Jerusalem.
Participant testimony offers unique access but also retrospective framing and self-justification.

Routes: Deterrence and negotiation · Narrative Recognition and Material Compromise · Peace Offers

Evidence boundary

“Offer,” “acceptance,” and “rejection” require exact terms, reservations, sequence, authority, and implementation. Cross-check memoir and synthesis claims against documents and other participants.

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DESCRIPTION

A high-level insider’s history of the efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from 2000 Camp David Talks to the present, that explains why successive attempts have all failed. The clash between Israel and Palestine has been one of the most emotionally engaging causes of modern times. Prophets without Honor tells the story of the grueling attempts to solve the conflict and examines the reasons for its resilience. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who participated at a high level in the July 2000 Camp David peace talks that almost led to a historic deal, uses his insider experience to illuminate the specific factors that impede a solution to the conflict. He finds that the occupation’s traits of permanence, Israel’s insatiable quest for Lebensraum, and a hopelessly fragmented and disoriented Palestinian national movement are to blame. Ben-Ami challenges the funereal historiography that emerged in the wake of the Camp David process, when—for the first time ever—Israelis and Palestinians engaged in the Sisyphean task of breaking the taboos surrounding the conflict. The Clinton Peace Parameters that emerged out of this process eventually became the litmus test of every serious peace proposal in the future. But ill-conceived perceptions of the other party, all-or-nothing theological fanaticism, and a lack of bold and enlightened leadership have made these attempts at peace-making a defining failure of the two-state concept. Ben-Ami scrutinizes the ominous alternatives to the two-state solution, such as the binational state, a unilateral pullout from much of the West Bank, and Donald Trump’s Deal of the Century. He also examines the merits of a Jordanian-Palestinian solution. In discussing Palestine from a comparative perspective, he underlines its singularity while also shedding light on the dilemmas that stand at the center of any peace enterprise. Ultimately, his account is the most non-partisan, comprehensive, and balanced written by an insider representing one of the parties.

Prophets without Honor - Shlomo Ben-Ami.pdf (file not included in this release)

Highlights

Prophets without Honor - Shlomo Ben-Ami.pdf (file not included in this release)

Summary

1. A Tragic Conflict of Asymmetries and Missed Rhythms

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in a clash between a determined people (the Jews) and a fragmented indigenous population (the Palestinians).
Over time, peace opportunities were missed due to mismatched historical timing, ideological rigidity, and failed leadership.
Fanaticism, nationalism, and the inability to reconcile with reality turned the conflict into a tragedy fueled by myth and grievance.

2. The 1967 War: A Turning Point

Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War was a double-edged sword: it brought strategic advantage and moral corruption.
The conquest of East Jerusalem and the West Bank gave rise to a messianic-nationalist vision of “Greater Israel,” sidelining pragmatic diplomacy.

3. The Rise and Fall of Peace Efforts

Despite early signs of flexibility (e.g., the PLO’s 1988 Algiers Declaration), Israel and the U.S. treated the PLO as a terrorist entity for too long.
The Oslo Accords (1993) were an interim success, creating limited Palestinian autonomy, but lacked follow-through.
Settlement expansion, collective punishment, and lack of trust derailed progress. Rabin’s assassination was a huge blow.
Bill Clinton invested deeply in the peace process but ultimately failed to broker a lasting agreement.

4. The Collapse of the Two-State Solution

The book views the Camp David Summit (2000) and subsequent negotiations as the “obituary” of the two-state paradigm.
Both Israeli and Palestinian leaders were unable (or unwilling) to make the final compromises needed for peace.
Barak was strategic but rigid, expecting others to follow his script; Arafat was evasive, myth-driven, and unwilling to accept what was offered—especially regarding Jerusalem and refugees.

5. Deep Psychological and Cultural Barriers

Both sides were imprisoned by historical myths: Israelis failed to admit their role in Palestinian dispossession; Palestinians often saw history as favoring inevitable justice.
Arafat embodied this mythology, seeing himself as a Saladin-like figure. He was deeply mistrustful and, at times, preferred martyrdom to pragmatic compromise.

6. Structural and Methodological Failures

Negotiators had fundamentally different methods: Israelis favored practical arrangements first; Palestinians demanded recognition of principles first (e.g., 1967 borders, right of return).
American diplomacy under Clinton lacked consistent pressure and strategy, especially compared to Carter’s Camp David I approach.
The U.S. also underestimated the emotional and symbolic weight of issues like Jerusalem.

7. Leadership Failures

Barak’s character flaws—rigidity, poor emotional intelligence, and tunnel vision—hurt negotiations.
Arafat’s evasiveness and performative politics eroded trust. He rejected reasonable offers, often assuming time or outside actors would deliver more favorable terms.
Both leaders failed to rise above their systems to become “peace heroes” like Sadat.

8. Lessons and Aftermath

The book critiques both sides for their inability to seize history’s critical moments.
Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton Parameters and Barak’s inflexibility led to the collapse of the peace process.
The two-state solution, while still invoked internationally, is described by Ben-Ami as structurally impossible—an idea sustained more by habit than viability.

Introduction

The chapter opens by discussing the moral complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, noting that it is not a tale of absolute righteousness.
The clash between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism is depicted as a significant and emotionally engaging cause for the Western mind, driven by mutually exclusive claims on sacred lands and religious shrines.

The Palestinian Tragedy and Israeli Responsibility

Ben-Ami acknowledges the role of Jewish return to their ancestral homeland in the Palestinian tragedy of disinheritance and exile.
He critiques both sides for missed peace opportunities, ill-conceived perceptions, theological fanaticism, and a lack of enlightened leadership.

Western Perceptions and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

The narrative explains how the Israel-Palestine conflict has a unique resonance in the Western world, evoking strong emotions and reactions.
The rise of pro-Palestinian activism on Western campuses is highlighted, particularly the shift towards advocating for a single democratic state.

Missed Opportunities for Peace

The chapter outlines various missed opportunities for peace, including Palestinian rejections of statehood offers in 1937, 1947, 2000, and 2008.
The complexity of these rejections is discussed, with an emphasis on the Clinton peace parameters and Ehud Olmert’s Annapolis peace deal.

Historical Context of Palestinian Statehood

The narrative traces the historical context of Palestinian statehood from the 1947 UN partition plan to the 1967 Six Day War, and subsequent peace efforts.
Key moments, such as the Camp David peace process and the Oslo Accord, are analyzed in detail.

The Role of Arab States and International Stakeholders

The involvement of Arab states and international stakeholders in shaping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is explored.
The chapter emphasizes that the prevention of a Palestinian state was not solely an Israeli responsibility but involved a combination of Palestinian errors and external influences.

The Oslo Accord and Its Aftermath

The chapter provides an in-depth look at the Oslo Accord, its intentions, and its ultimate failure due to lack of trust and compliance mechanisms.
The narrative reflects on Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and its impact on the peace process, followed by the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.

Challenges and Failures of Peace Negotiations

The difficulties faced during peace negotiations, including character flaws of leaders like Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat, are examined.
The chapter delves into the complexities and paradoxes of the peace process, highlighting the inherent intractability of the conflict.

Conclusion

The chapter concludes with a reflection on the structural impossibility of the two-state solution and the need to consider alternative scenarios.
Ben-Ami emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive and balanced historical perspective in understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Overall, the chapter offers a detailed and nuanced analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighting missed opportunities, the role of various stakeholders, and the challenges inherent in achieving a lasting peace.

Chapter 1: First Steps, Harsh Truths

Peace Strategies: The chapter discusses the internal debates within Barak’s cabinet about prioritizing peace with Palestine over Syria. Barak believed a Syrian agreement would facilitate a Palestinian settlement.
Jerusalem’s Importance: Ben-Ami highlights the contradiction in Barak’s strategy to avoid discussing Jerusalem, despite its central role in peace negotiations.
Initial Negotiations: The first meeting with Palestinian negotiator Abu Ala set the stage for tough discussions on borders, refugees, and Jerusalem, with Barak’s instructions reflecting a desire for peace but with positions unlikely to entice the Palestinians.
Palestinian Demands: Abu Ala emphasized a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, Jerusalem as its capital, and the right of return for refugees.

Chapter 2: “A Secluded Nordic Castle”

Swedish Track: This chapter details secret negotiations held at the Swedish Prime Minister’s residence. Despite initial progress on issues like borders and refugees, leaks and internal Palestinian politics undermined the talks.
Palestinian Internal Conflicts: Abu Mazen’s opposition to the process due to personal rivalries and a preference for a different negotiation model further complicated the situation.
Negotiation Dynamics: The talks highlighted differing methodologies: Palestinians wanted to establish principles first, while Israelis preferred dealing with practical arrangements before defining principles.

Chapter 3: Back to Square One

Collapse of Swedish Talks: The failure of the Swedish channel marked a significant setback, forcing both sides to reassess their strategies and seek engagement with broader Arab leaders.
Arab Leaders’ Perspectives: Ben-Ami’s interactions with leaders like Mubarak and King Abdullah II revealed varied regional attitudes towards the peace process, with some favoring a Syrian first approach due to the perceived risks of a Palestinian state.
Jerusalem’s Centrality: The chapter emphasizes the persistent difficulties surrounding Jerusalem, with Barak hesitant to engage on this issue due to domestic political constraints.

Chapter 4: Longing for Hezbollah

Lebanon’s Influence: The Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon empowered Palestinian perceptions that a similar approach might force Israeli concessions.
Security Concerns: Israeli security demands were increasingly met with Palestinian skepticism, viewing them as a means to continue the occupation.
Negotiation Challenges: Discussions on refugees and Jerusalem remained contentious, with Palestinians insisting on the right of return and significant territorial adjustments.

Chapter 5: Forcing the Leaders’ Hands

Pre-Summit Dynamics: Barak’s reluctance to compromise ahead of a summit meeting and the divergent expectations of both sides complicated the peace process.
American Mediation: The chapter details the American role in trying to bridge gaps between the parties, with mixed success. Clinton’s administration faced the challenge of balancing pressures from both sides.
Summit Preparations: Despite efforts to prepare for a meaningful summit, underlying tensions and unmet promises, particularly around the third-phase redeployment, continued to erode trust.

Chapter 6: A Conceivable Endgame?

Optimism and Flexibility: The chapter opens with a glimpse of optimism as Abu Ala shows unexpected flexibility in discussions, driven by fears of a new Israeli government and Clinton’s departure.
Jerusalem Proposals: Ben-Ami proposes that the Palestinian capital should include areas beyond the current municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, with functional sovereignty for Palestinians in inner neighborhoods.
Arafat’s Stance: During a crucial meeting with Arafat, Ben-Ami presents detailed positions on core issues. Arafat is focused on Jerusalem and refugees, highlighting the symbolic importance of the right of return and stressing the need for a solution for refugees in Lebanon.
Symbolic Sovereignty: Arafat rejects the proposal for functional autonomy under Israeli sovereignty, emphasizing the need for full Palestinian sovereignty over most areas, including the Temple Mount.

Chapter 7: The Promise of an American Steamroller

Political Challenges: As Barak’s government faces internal political challenges, the narrative highlights the instability and pressures on both Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Summit Preparation: The chapter details preparations for the Camp David summit, with Secretary Albright emphasizing the urgency and the need for a concentrated effort. The American team is optimistic about potential Palestinian flexibility.
Divergent Expectations: The Palestinians are wary of an American-Israeli collusion and feel trapped in the summit’s process. Barak’s positions are still seen as unrealistic by his negotiators.

Chapter 8: Inauspicious Beginnings

Camp David Summit: The chapter describes the setting and initial atmosphere at the Camp David summit, with fundamental differences immediately apparent.
Jerusalem as a Core Issue: Clinton and Arafat have different perspectives on how to approach Jerusalem and the refugee problem, with Arafat’s positions being non-negotiable endgame demands.
American Working Paper: An American working paper is introduced, proposing mutual concessions on borders, refugees, and Jerusalem. Barak’s harsh reaction to this paper and Clinton’s subsequent retraction undermine the negotiation process.

Chapter 9: Clinton: “We have Exhausted the Beauty of This Place”

Negotiation Stalemate: The chapter describes the breakdown in negotiations as both sides dig in their heels. Barak is unwilling to compromise significantly, and Arafat remains firm on core Palestinian issues.
Clinton’s Frustration: Clinton’s frustration peaks with an outburst against the Palestinians for their perceived lack of good faith. This marks a turning point in the summit, highlighting the deep mistrust and rigid positions of both sides.

Chapter 10: A Game Changer (or So It Looked)

American Proposals: The chapter outlines new American ideas, including two capitals in Jerusalem and a mix of sovereignty and functional autonomy. Barak’s vacillation and reluctance to fully embrace these proposals reflect his internal conflict.
Backchannel Negotiations: Secret backchannel negotiations begin, with Ben-Ami attempting to break the Jerusalem taboo. The chapter underscores the complexity and difficulty of reaching a consensus on such deeply contentious issues.

Chapter 11: Oh Jerusalem! (and Its Lies)

Jerusalem’s Expansion: The chapter discusses how Jerusalem’s boundaries expanded significantly post-1967, incorporating numerous Arab villages and a refugee camp, transforming it into a metropolis with deep disparities between Jewish and Arab areas.
Inequality: Ben-Ami highlights the stark differences in services and infrastructure between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, pointing out the lack of parks, playgrounds, mother-care stations, and legal building permits for Arabs.
Demographic Trends: The demographic growth of Palestinians in Jerusalem and their socio-economic conditions are examined, revealing high poverty rates and educational dropout rates among Palestinians.
Failed Judaization: Efforts to “Judaize” Jerusalem have not been successful, with the Jewish population percentage declining since 1967.
Israeli Governance: The chapter critiques the Israeli approach to governance in East Jerusalem, highlighting the lack of effective control and the autonomous Palestinian institutions that operate there.
Temple Mount and Religious Sensitivity: The administration of the Temple Mount by the Muslim Waqf and the sensitivity surrounding any changes to the status quo are emphasized.

Chapter 12: Saeb Erakat: “Arafat Is Interested in a Crisis”

Barak’s Red Lines: Barak downgrades his previous offers, maintaining a hardline stance on key issues, which frustrates Clinton.
Clinton’s Rage: Clinton’s frustration with Barak’s retrenchment and insistence on presenting a less generous offer than previously discussed leads to a heated confrontation.
Arafat’s Rejection: Arafat rejects the American proposals, insisting on full sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the right of return for refugees.
Improved Proposals: Clinton presents an improved proposal on Jerusalem, including Palestinian sovereignty in the Old City’s Muslim and Christian quarters and custodianship over the Temple Mount, but Arafat remains unyielding.

Chapter 13: Albright’s Intermezzo, Clinton’s Last Push

Barak’s Seclusion: Barak’s seclusion and reluctance to engage with Arafat mark a period of stagnation in the negotiations.
Legal and Security Discussions: Discussions on the Temple Mount’s status and security arrangements continue, with American and Israeli teams trying to find acceptable wording and frameworks.
Arafat’s Stubbornness: Despite various proposals and attempts at compromise, Arafat remains steadfast in his demands for full Palestinian sovereignty.
Backchannel Negotiations: Secret backchannel negotiations with Palestinian representatives continue, exploring different options for Jerusalem’s holy sites.

Chapter 14: Our Faintest Hour

Clinton’s Frustration: Clinton’s exasperation with Arafat’s intransigence peaks, as he reviews past missed opportunities and pleads for compromises.
Arafat’s Defiance: Arafat’s refusal to make any concessions on Jerusalem and his claim to defend both Muslim and Christian holy sites intensify the deadlock.
Final Proposals: Clinton’s final proposals include various sovereignty arrangements for Jerusalem’s neighborhoods and holy sites, but Arafat rejects them.
End of the Summit: The chapter concludes with the collapse of the Camp David summit, highlighting Arafat’s unwillingness to negotiate on Jerusalem and the resulting missed opportunity for peace.

Chapter 15: “Arafat: ‘Barak Has Gone beyond My Partner Rabin’”

Mixed Reactions to the Talks:
- Return to a divided country with mixed emotions.
- Some were disappointed by the lack of agreement, while the right wing felt relief.
Palestinian Reaction:
- Palestinians felt liberated from what they considered a trap at Camp David.
- Abu Mazen and Abu Ala described their departure as a relief and escape from confinement.
Concessions and Misconceptions:
- Both sides made concessions, but their official post-summit discourses were biased.
- Arafat later revealed that Barak had gone further than Rabin in the negotiations.
Barak’s Communication and Leadership Challenges:
- Barak faced challenges in defending his concessions against the right wing without losing support from the left.
- He lacked exceptional communication skills necessary for political battles.
Domestic Political Fallout:
- Barak returned to Israel facing criticism and a government on the verge of collapse.
- The peace camp felt battered, while the right wing felt vindicated.
Complex Negotiation Dynamics:
- The summit revealed deep-seated issues and complex dynamics between the parties.
- Arafat and Barak’s differing approaches to negotiations highlighted the difficulties in reaching a comprehensive agreement.
Long-term Implications:
- The chapter suggests that the outcomes and experiences of Camp David had long-term implications for both Israeli and Palestinian leadership and their respective peace camps.

Chapter 16: Reaping the Fruits of Success

European trip starting in Turkey after Arafat’s visit.
Meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ismail Çem and Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit.
- Discussions on Arafat’s Islamic extremism and Turkey’s commitment to the peace process.
- Turkish undersecretary Uğur Ziyal noted Arafat’s influence on radical positions on Jerusalem.
Meeting with Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Piqué and EU’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana in Barcelona.
- Solana suggested Arafat’s enjoyment of the process and need for his resignation.
- Meeting with EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten in France, reflecting on historical context and progress.
Meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato in Tuscany, highlighting Arafat’s nature as a revolutionary.
Meeting at the Vatican with Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran on Jerusalem’s sovereignty and holy sites.
Telephone discussion with Norwegian Foreign Minister Thorbjørn Jagland about Arafat’s political maneuvering.
Meetings with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and discussion on Europe’s role and US dominance.
Encounters with Arab stakeholders, including Egyptian President Mubarak and Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdul Ilah el-Khatib.
- Discussions on Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and peace process dynamics.
Analysis of the behavior and positions of various Arab and European leaders regarding the peace process.

Chapter 17: Moments of Grace on the Precipice’s Edge

Arafat’s erratic behavior during the UN Millennium Assembly in New York.
- Aggressive and vainglorious actions, including storming out of a CNN interview and reprimanding Madeleine Albright.
Israel’s improved international standing, becoming a member of the UN West European and Others Group (WEOG).
Meetings with ministers from Arab states and improved bilateral relations with Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Indonesia.
Interactions with Indian and South African foreign ministers regarding peace process dynamics.
Greece’s strategic vision of an Eastern Mediterranean alliance including Israel.
Russia’s foreign minister Igor Ivanov’s creative attitude and suggestions for dual-track peace negotiations.
Discussion with American peace team on a “package” of nonnegotiable principles for a peace agreement.
Barak’s willingness for an American peace outline and discussions on Palestinian positions.
Dinner meeting between Barak and Arafat at Barak’s house, with positive interactions.
Series of meetings in Washington with American peace team and discussions on a final American peace proposal.
Challenges and misreadings of Palestinian positions by Americans and internal Israeli disagreements.
Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount and subsequent outbreak of the Second Intifada.

Chapter 18: “With Our Soul and Blood We’ll Redeem Palestine”

Outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada following Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount.
Palestinian violence and its disproportionate impact on both sides.
Arafat’s ambiguous role and Palestinian leadership’s dual strategy of negotiation and armed struggle.
Internal Palestinian tensions and the role of armed militias.
Israeli response to the Intifada and political challenges faced by Barak.
Palestinian leadership’s revolutionary rhetoric and Arafat’s strategy to use violence as a political tool.
Misjudgments and consequences of the Intifada on the peace process and regional stability.

Chapter 19: Diplomacy under Fire

Proposal for a series of summit meetings to stabilize the situation and progress negotiations.
Meetings with President Chirac in Paris and focus on ceasefire and international committee investigations.
European involvement and challenges due to their historical and political contexts.
Continued efforts to involve Arafat in meaningful negotiations and the complexities of international diplomacy.
Discussions with American peace team and challenges in forming a cohesive strategy.
Israeli and Palestinian internal and external political dynamics impacting the peace process.

Chapter 20: Trapped in No-Win Conditions

Cycle of violence between Israeli regional superpower and Palestinian independence fighters.
- Barak’s conversation with Clinton highlighted the dilemma of responding to Palestinian violence.
- Helicopter attack on police station in Ramallah as reprisal for lynching of Israeli reservists.
Barak’s balancing act between military response and peace negotiations.
- Suspected that Arafat wanted to arrive at Arab Summit with ongoing bloodshed.
- Effort to reach a ceasefire at Sharm El-Sheikh conference with international leaders.
Egyptian press’s incitement against Israel and Mubarak’s fears of mass demonstrations.
- Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman’s commitment to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Conference dynamics:
- Mubarak’s criticism of Israel’s aggression.
- Clinton’s supportive stance towards Israel.
- Need to avoid the rise of a right-wing government in Israel that would disengage from the peace process.
Challenges in Israeli politics:
- Opposition’s call for all-out war in Knesset debate.
- Barak’s response emphasizing the inevitability of returning to the negotiating table even after military victory.
The perpetual cycle of conflict and the difficulties in achieving a political solution.

Chapter 21: “Neither Inspiring nor Intimidating”

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposed deploying an international force in Palestinian territories, which was not supported by Russian or French foreign ministers.
Clinton administration was becoming increasingly impotent, with Clinton hesitant to present an ultimate peace plan due to concerns about US standing in the Arab world.
Ambassador Indyk mentioned that condemning Arafat might damage US strategic interests.
Financial and military support packages promised to Israel were delayed.
The US-Israel strategic alliance demand by Barak had potential negative impacts on US-Arab relations.
Barak’s oblique way of presenting his views posed a challenge in negotiations.

Chapter 22: “Take It or Leave It”: The Clinton Peace Parameters

On December 20, the delegations arrived at the White House, where President Clinton presented general peace parameters.
Yasser Abed-Rabbo from the Palestinian delegation suggested territorial changes of 3% with swaps.
Full delegations faced difficulties, with Saeb Erakat demanding Israel’s acceptance of the right of return and moral responsibility for the Nakba.
Barak’s provocative map showing a 10.5% annexation led to a twenty-minute angry meeting.
Incoming US administration under George W. Bush indicated less priority on pushing for an agreement.
Israeli proposals included reducing annexation claims and addressing the Temple Mount sovereignty in exchange for Palestinian recognition of the site’s sanctity to Jews.

Chapter 23: “A Crime against the Palestinian People”

Upon returning to Israel, the inner Cabinet supported Clinton’s parameters.
Barak emphasized the alternative to the agreement was tragedy.
Chief of General Staff Mofaz was a vocal opponent, while Head of Mossad Efraim Halevy supported the plan.
Barak sent Gilead Sher and General Yanai to meet with Mubarak, which was met with opposition from both Israeli and US sides.
Barak’s government approved a Palestinian state on 97% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Arafat was anticipated to face violence and assassination within a year of signing the agreement.
Israeli military hierarchy’s failure to adapt non-military security components was criticized.

Chapter 24: Barak in a Cage of Doves

Clinton abandoned the idea of visiting the region, opting to send Dennis Ross instead.
Europe’s involvement in supporting the peace parameters was minimal.
King Juan Carlos of Spain and other European leaders tried to impress the urgency of the situation on Arafat.
Clinton convinced Arafat to renew negotiations at the Erez Crossing, but Arafat did not attend.
Palestinians presented a radical amendment to each chapter of Clinton’s parameters.
Palestinian demands included exclusive sovereignty over Temple Mount and the Holy Basin, rejection of Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall, and significant territorial compromises.
Beilin and Shaath discussed the refugee problem, with Beilin proposing moral compensation and Shaath wanting the return of 300,000 refugees.
The negotiations struggled with issues of territory, refugees, and Jerusalem, with the Palestinians demanding extensive concessions without reciprocating.

Chapter 25: Taba: “The Boss Doesn’t Want an Agreement”

At Taba, Palestinians rejected Clinton’s proposals as a basis for negotiations.
Ben-Ami proposed a 4.5% annexation of the Palestinian state including Gaza, aligning with Clinton’s parameters.
Barak’s different instructions to Sher involved counting the Gaza-West Bank passage as part of the annexation.
Palestinian optimism boosted by intelligence assessments indicating a purposeful negotiating process.
Internal Israeli discussions showed optimism for resolving the refugee issue without deviating from Clinton’s parameters.
The Temple Mount imbroglio remained a major sticking point, with proposed solutions including Palestinian recognition of its sanctity to Jews.
Palestinians presented a map with settlement blocs amounting to 2.3% of the West Bank, rejecting Israeli claims over religious sites.
Barak’s note indicated a willingness for land swaps and leasing arrangements, but Palestinians categorically rejected leasing.
The Israeli negotiating team faced pressure from upcoming elections, public opinion, and the ongoing conflict.
Arafat’s inner circle expressed concerns over militias and the potential disintegration of the Palestinian Authority.
The negotiations at Taba ultimately aimed for a joint declaration or “non-paper” summarizing the stage of talks, without reaching a final agreement.

Chapter 26: Post-Mortem

The failure of the Camp David process is debated intensely, seen as vindication by the Israeli right and a missed opportunity by the left.
Barak blamed Palestinian adherence to the narratives of return, refugeeism, and Islam, while the left contends the two-state solution remains viable.
Camp David should be viewed beyond binary perspectives; it marked significant progress, breaking taboos and educating Israelis on the Palestinian narrative.
The summit and the subsequent Clinton parameters and Taba talks represented a significant step towards a balanced peace outline.
Despite errors, these negotiations advanced discussions on the Nakba and mechanisms for solving the refugee problem, as well as Jerusalem.
Camp David altered public opinion in Israel, increasing acceptance of a divided Jerusalem for peace.
The process also shifted the Israeli right’s stance, converting figures like Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni into peace seekers.
History should seek to understand processes and the truth rather than assign blame; Arafat was unable to reconcile his people’s tragedy with the offered territorial solution.
Arafat’s inability to escape his nation’s core narratives played a part in the failure, but all parties faltered in the peace effort

Chapter 27: The Conversion of the Hawks

The quest for peace did not die at Taba, but the unbridgeable gap between the necessary and possible actions reflects the intractability of the conflict.
Every peace plan since 2000 has been a reshaped version of the Clinton parameters approved by the Barak government.
The Palestinians, trapped in deepening occupation and denied a peaceful political solution, might now see the Clinton parameters as a missed opportunity.
George W. Bush’s Road Map (2002–4) emerged from the need to forge an Arab coalition against jihadism post-9/11.
For the US, Israeli-Palestinian peace was not a paramount national security priority.
Israeli Prime Ministers serious about Palestine often faced political downfall, exemplified by Olmert’s resignation amid corruption accusations, driven more by internal rebellion than legal necessity.

Chapter 28: The Impossible Triangle: Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas

Obama’s commitment to Israel was questioned by Netanyahu, who viewed Obama’s approach as divergent from traditional US support for Israel.
Obama’s policy focused on reconciling the US with Muslim civilization, seeing this as key to addressing Islamic terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
Obama insisted on halting settlements and withdrawing from territories for a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Netanyahu, an ideologue of Jewish catastrophe, viewed Israel through the lens of historic Jewish struggles and anxieties.
Direct negotiations launched with fanfare in 2010 failed to progress, with Netanyahu rejecting Palestinian proposals and insisting on Israel’s security needs.
Netanyahu’s demand for Israel to be recognized as a Jewish state was a strategy to negate the Palestinian right of return, complicating peace efforts.

Chapter 29: An Uninviting Concept

The Geneva Understandings are viewed as a rational yet politically remote solution for a two-state resolution.
The settlements, despite their moral and political implications, are not seen as an insurmountable obstacle to peace, with 80% of settlers near the Green Line.
Netanyahu’s strategy included expanding Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem and placing 100,000 Palestinians beyond municipal borders, undermining the Clinton parameters.
The Palestinian strategy shifted towards internationalizing the solution, seeking UN recognition of statehood, potentially risking future Israeli unilateral actions.
Unilateral statehood could reduce the conflict to a border dispute, sidelining key issues like refugees and Jerusalem.

Chapter 30: The Failed “Zionization” of Palestine and the Three-State “Solution”

The Palestinian cause has become one of the most widely acclaimed in modern history, often embraced by Palestinian elites who may prefer their international standing to an imperfect political solution.
A state in the making holds a more heroic condition than a fully realized state, which would likely fall short of the dream.
Palestine is likely to face significant challenges as a state, including lack of resources, internal divisions between Islamist Gaza and secular West Bank, and a weak democratic culture.
The PLO and Hamas both govern in undemocratic ways, relying on security services and external support rather than democratic legitimacy.
Palestinians receive more financial aid per capita than any other nation, but this dependency could complicate their transition to statehood.
The younger generation of Palestinians, highly educated but underemployed, is largely nonpolitical and more focused on civic rights and equality than on the creation of an independent state.
Israeli and Palestinian youth are both disillusioned with the two-state solution, with younger Israelis more right-wing and influenced by memories of conflict and Netanyahu’s leadership.
The fear of civil war and the grip of messianic settlers on Israeli life make the creation of a Palestinian state seem more remote than ever.
Even mainstream Israeli leaders have lost faith in the peace process of the 1990s, with iconic figures like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres never fully envisioning a sovereign Palestinian state as the outcome of their efforts.

Chapter 31: The Region and the World: A Broken Reed

Changing Regional Strategic Game
- Window for Israeli–Palestinian peace has closed post-Clinton and post-Iraq War.
- Conservative Arab regimes have shifted focus from Palestine to existential threats.
- Israel faces threats from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
- The collapse of the Sykes-Picot order has destabilized the region, making peace efforts seem unrealistic.
- Various regional and international moves have exposed the fragility of the old political order.
International Community’s Apathy
- International community shows little energy for a combined effort in Palestine.
- Persistent regional instability and broader geopolitical issues overshadow the Palestinian cause.
- Goodwill gestures and financial aid for Palestinians continue, but meaningful action is lacking.
- Israel has adapted to living with routine condemnations and minimal substantive intervention.

Chapter 32: The Occupation’s Traits of Permanence

Failure of the Peace Process
- The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is seen as a major diplomatic failure.
- A two-state solution through direct negotiations appears dead.
- The rise of nationalist-religious ideology in Israel and Palestinian resistance complicates peace efforts.
- The conflict transcends land and security, involving deep-rooted issues of narrative, religion, and legitimacy.
Occupation and Discrimination
- Israel has developed an efficient and cost-effective occupation regime.
- The occupation is sustained by security claims, settlements, and legal frameworks.
- International aid to the Palestinian Authority indirectly supports the occupation.
- Palestinians face severe restrictions and harassment under the occupation.
Permanent Occupation Reality
- The occupation is seen as irreversible, leading towards a one-state, binational reality.
- Israeli settlement expansion and control mechanisms are deeply entrenched.
- The international community remains largely ineffective in addressing the situation.

Chapter 33: Ominous Unravelings

Two Plausible Scenarios without a Two-State Solution:
- A binational state, emerging by osmosis.
- Israeli unilateral disengagement with annexation of large parts of the West Bank, reminiscent of the 1967 Alon Plan, Ehud Olmert’s 2006 Convergence Plan, and Trump’s “Deal of the Century”.
The Specter of a Binational State:
- Historically advocated by intellectuals and some disillusioned former Zionists.
- Seen as a desperate escape by some Palestinians.
- Israel’s 2018 Nation State Law targets Palestinians in the occupied territories, aiming to maintain Jewish pre-eminence.
Unilateral Disengagement:
- Various plans toyed with unilateral annexation while confining Palestinians to small enclaves.
- The Alon Plan proposed post-1967 war and Olmert’s Convergence Plan reflect these ideas.
- Both plans create isolated Palestinian enclaves and propose retaining strategic areas of the West Bank.
- Critics argue these plans would lead to a hostile Palestinian state and a state of permanent civil war.

Chapter 34: Exit Oslo, Enter Madrid

Failure of Oslo Accords:
- Oslo was an attempt to bypass the parameters of the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference.
- Oslo has long run its course and failed to deliver a two-state solution.
Jordan’s Role:
- Jordan and Egypt may be drawn deeper into Palestinian affairs out of survival instinct.
- Jordan’s re-engagement with the West Bank could become a necessity for its stability.
New Ideas for Peace:
- Yossi Beilin proposed an Israeli-Palestinian Confederation with two states in one fatherland.
- This idea suggests Jews and Arabs move freely within a common space, but critics argue it introduces a binational state through the backdoor.
Challenges of a Confederation:
- Differences in political cultures and systems between a pluralistic democracy (Israel) and an authoritarian system (potential Palestinian state).
- The concept of a confederation may not resolve daily clashes between divergent nationalisms.
The Future of Unilateral Disengagement:
- Olmert’s Convergence Plan and similar ideas suggest evacuating settlers and redrawing borders.
- Critics argue these plans create hostile entities and undermine the prospects for peace.
- The central Palestinian issues—Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and refugees—remain unresolved.

Chapter 35: Palestine: A Comparative Perspective

Opening Quote: Bill Clinton reflects on the complexity of the Camp David summit.
Tolstoy’s Analogy: Compares unhappy families to conflict-ridden societies, suggesting each is unhappy in its own unique way.
War as a Prelude to Peace: Explores historical examples where military deadlocks led to diplomatic solutions.
Failed Peace Efforts: Compares the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other global conflicts, highlighting the unique challenges in achieving peace.
Significant Conflicts: Discusses various conflicts, including the 1973 Yom Kippur War, First Gulf War, and the Palestinian Intifada, and their role in peace processes.
Self-Determination Struggles: Analyzes different struggles for independence and the outcomes of these conflicts.
Unique Nature of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Explores the deep-rooted and irreconcilable narratives between Israelis and Palestinians, emphasizing the clash of historical and religious claims.

Northern Ireland and Colombia

Comparative Analysis: Draws parallels between the Northern Ireland and Colombian conflicts with the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
Role of External Enablers: Highlights the impact of external support in conflict resolution, with the US playing a significant role in both Northern Ireland and Palestine.
Differences in Conflict Nature: Points out the differences in the nature of conflicts, with Northern Ireland and Colombia being more ethnosectarian and sociopolitical respectively.
Civil Society’s Role: Emphasizes the importance of civil society in the peace processes of Northern Ireland and Colombia, contrasting it with the limited impact in Israel-Palestine.

Multidimensional Conflicts

Global Conflict Examples: Lists various global conflicts, including India-Pakistan, Cyprus, South Africa-Namibia, Sudan, and more.
Demographic Changes: Discusses how wars and border redelimitation lead to massive demographic shifts and migrations.
Partition Rejections: Highlights the rejection of the partition paradigm by both Palestinians and Jewish dreamers of a biblical homeland.
Ethnic and Religious Claims: Examines the unique aspects of ethnic and religious claims driving conflicts, particularly in Israel-Palestine.

The Colonial Paradigm

Empires as Nation Incubators: Explains how modern empires have led to the creation of new nations and free states.
Unique Case of Palestine: Argues that Palestine is not a classic case of colonial occupation, despite exhibiting colonial practices.
Zionism vs. Colonialism: Differentiates between Zionism and European colonialism, emphasizing the ideological and national revival aspects of Zionism.

End of Conflict?

Delusive Aspirations: Describes the aspiration of ending the conflict with a peace agreement as delusive.
Compromises and Narratives: Discusses the difficulty in reconciling the competing narratives and the inevitability of compromises being revisited.
State-Building Challenges: Highlights the importance of state-building in the post-conflict phase, noting the lack of focus on this by the Palestinian national ethos.

Refugees

Global Displacement: Provides historical examples of mass displacements due to wars and conflicts.
Unique Treatment of Palestinian Refugees: Explores how Palestinian refugees have been treated uniquely by the international community, with UNRWA’s role being significant.
Return and Restitution: Discusses the complexities of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and the moral dimensions of the conflict.

Peace and Justice

Transitional Justice Models: Examines various models of transitional justice, including the Nuremberg trials and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Reconciliation vs. Accountability: Emphasizes the need for a trade-off between reconciliation and accountability in peace processes.

Epilogue

Post-Conflict Challenges: Discusses the ongoing challenges and potential solutions for achieving lasting peace and reconciliation.
Hope and Realism: Balances hope for future resolutions with a realistic understanding of the complexities and deeply rooted issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Timeline of Camp David, Clinton Parameters, and Taba Summit

Camp David Summit (July 2000)

Preparation and Anticipation:
- Barak’s internal debates about prioritizing peace with Palestine over Syria.
- Barak’s strategic decision to avoid discussing Jerusalem, despite its central role in peace negotiations.
- Initial discussions set the stage for tough negotiations on borders, refugees, and Jerusalem.
Initial Meetings:
- First meeting with Palestinian negotiator Abu Ala, emphasizing a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and the right of return for refugees.
- Secret negotiations in Sweden initially make progress but are undermined by leaks and internal Palestinian politics.
Summit Commences:
- Camp David Summit begins with fundamental differences immediately apparent.
- Jerusalem and refugee issues are central, with Clinton and Arafat having different perspectives on how to approach these.
Stalemate and Frustration:
- Negotiation stalemate as both sides dig in their heels.
- Clinton’s frustration peaks with an outburst against Palestinians for their perceived lack of good faith.
American Proposals:
- New American ideas include two capitals in Jerusalem and a mix of sovereignty and functional autonomy.
- Barak’s reluctance to fully embrace these proposals reflects internal conflict.
Breakdown:
- Continued deadlock over Jerusalem and refugees.
- Final collapse of the summit with Arafat’s firm stance on non-negotiable endgame demands.

Clinton Parameters (December 2000)

Presentation of Parameters:
- On December 20, Clinton presents general peace parameters.
- Palestinian delegation suggests minor territorial changes and insists on the right of return for refugees.
- Barak’s provocative map showing a 10.5% annexation leads to a contentious meeting.
Proposals and Reactions:
- Clinton proposes Palestinian sovereignty in parts of Jerusalem and a mix of arrangements for refugees.
- Israeli cabinet supports Clinton’s parameters despite internal opposition from military officials.
- Arafat is expected to face significant internal opposition if he accepts the parameters.
American Involvement:
- Efforts to renew negotiations and gain international support.
- Discussions continue on resolving the Temple Mount sovereignty and refugee issues.

Taba Summit (January 2001)

Negotiations Resume:
- Palestinians reject Clinton’s proposals as a basis for negotiations.
- Ben-Ami proposes a 4.5% annexation, aligning with Clinton’s parameters.
- Palestinian map with settlement blocs amounting to 2.3% of the West Bank, rejecting Israeli claims over religious sites.
Complex Discussions:
- Israeli proposals include land swaps and leasing arrangements, which Palestinians categorically reject.
- Internal Israeli discussions reveal optimism for resolving the refugee issue without deviating from Clinton’s parameters.
Key Issues:
- Temple Mount remains a major sticking point.
- Refugee problem discussed with proposals for moral compensation and limited return.
End of Summit:
- Negotiations aim for a joint declaration summarizing the stage of talks.
- No final agreement reached, highlighting the persistent deep-seated issues.

Post-Mortem Analysis

Impact and Legacy:
- The failure of the Camp David process and subsequent talks viewed as a major diplomatic failure.
- Camp David marked significant progress, breaking taboos and educating Israelis on the Palestinian narrative.
- Despite errors, these negotiations advanced discussions on key issues like the Nakba and Jerusalem.
- Clinton parameters and Taba talks represented steps towards a balanced peace outline but failed to achieve a lasting solution.

Highlights

Introduction

Highlight [page 17]: Partisan accounts are bound to pervert the complex truth of a story that started when a decimated people, resolute as only a nation desperately gasping for life can be, clashed with a fragmented indigenous Arab community.

Highlight [page 17]: It later evolved into a tragedy of discrepant historical rhythms where peace overtures aimed at splitting the land were defeated in order to be missed when history had already swept them into oblivion. Ill-conceived perceptions of the other, all-or-nothing theological fanaticism, and a lack of bold, enlightened leadership combined to turn the conﬂict into a cruel lesson about the inherent amorality of history.

Highlight [page 18]: A Brookings Institution poll in August 2021 found that 84 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans favor a single democratic state with Arabs and Jews as equal.

Highlight [page 19]: Palestinians opted for high stakes with inadequate resources.

Highlight [page 19]: But the war whose consequences still reverberate to this day is the 1967 Six Day War. Israel’s lightening victory brought her military grandeur and moral decay. The nationalist-religious intoxication that followed the conquest of Jerusalem and the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, the Palestinian West Bank, reached dangerous heights to the degree that this “mother of all victories” was now being interpreted as a messianic, providential event. The 1967 annus mirabilis threw the Jewish state into the realm of the fantasy of Greater Eretz Israel. The new zeitgeist gave popular legitimacy to the irresistible Bacchanalia of nationalist ardor. “We have returned to our holiest shrines in order not to part from them ever again,” afﬁrmed then Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.4

Highlight [page 20]: Sadat did revolutionize the entire geostrategic structure of the Middle East by indicating to Arab leaders that only by extricating themselves from the Soviet Union’s grip and embracing instead the US-led peace diplomacy could they get back their territories.

Highlight [page 20]: This was also true of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). From the early 1970s, it started a process of change that would eventually lead its legendary leader, Chairman Yasser Arafat, to embrace in the November 1988 Algiers Declaration the two-state solution. But Israel’s infatuation with the conquered Palestinian lands was such that it preferred to discard any diplomatic approach; it was more politically convenient to ﬁght the PLO as a terrorist organization.

Highlight [page 20]: It took, however, a change of government in Israel from Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud to a transformed Laborite, Yitzhak Rabin, to reach in 1993 the historic Oslo Accord between Israel and the PLO. Oslo was an interim agreement that allowed the creation of a Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and parts of the West Bank, and established a roadmap for negotiations of the core issues of the conﬂictJerusalem, Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlements, and Palestinian statehood.

Highlight [page 21]: Rabin also expected Arafat to be the subcontractor of Israel’s security by putting an end to the First Intifada in the occupied territories that had been going on unabated since 1987. But Arafat was incapable of delivering. He rightly gathered that clamping down on the Islamist radicals from Hamas and Islamic Jihad would portray him in the eyes of his people as a “collaborator” of the Israelis. Israel could do little to help him, for Yitzhak Rabin was trapped in his unsustainable double-edged approach of ﬁghting terrorism as if there was no peace process and pursuing the peace process as if there was no terrorism.

Highlight [page 21]: A fatal vicious cycle was created whereby the Palestinians were hit by collective punishment, economic decline, and the expansion of settlements, whose population increased under Rabin’s government by 48 percent in the West Bank and 62 percent in the Gaza Strip. Rather than as a modern state bound by international law, Israel behaved in the territories as possessed by an irresistible agrarian hunger.

Highlight [page 22]: Clinton’s emotional attachment to Israel, and his admiration for the late Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination he took as the intimate loss of a father ﬁgure, consumed him with a sense of mission to accomplish the peace legacy of his fallen hero well into the very last days of his presidency.

Highlight [page 23]: This book should be read as an obituary to the two-state solution. The story of the Camp David process and that of all the attempts at peacemaking that followed it, which are all reviewed and scrutinized in this book, needs to be seen as a deﬁning failure of the entire peace paradigm based on the two-state concept. This rote religion that continues to dominate the international discourse on Palestine is dead and buried, and it is about time that all stakeholders shift their attention to other possible scenarios, some ominous and other less so, which are also examined in this book. Whatever “solution” happens in the future, it is not going to be the classic two-state solution with an orderly settlement of the refugee problem and arithmetically calculated land swaps; it would be a situation born out of chaos amid broad regional changes, the exact nature of which one cannot predict.

Highlight [page 23]: Clinton’s decision to convene the summit was not an irresponsible act of desperation of a lame-duck president. Palestinians and Israelis gave his team pre-summit ideas from which they believed a conceivable endgame could emerge.

Highlight [page 24]: The summit itself made enormous progress in breaking taboos no one before had ever dared touching, and it ended with an outline that became the foundation upon which the Clinton peace parameters were produced six months later. These parameters became eventually the litmus test of every serious peace proposal since then, all of which are scrutinized in Part III of this book. Against the unpromising background of the Oslo legacy of the expansion of settlements and terrorism, we succeeded in coming closer than ever to breaking the genetic code of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The two-state solution that was bequeathed by the Netanyahu government in a comatose state, was given in these negotiations a living form, and a precise set of peace parameters.

Highlight [page 25]: Henry David Thoreau’s advice that “it takes two to speak the truth”

Highlight [page 25]: Albert Camus’s adage on the role of the intellectual not being “to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.”

Highlight [page 25]: We tried to make peace while destroying the Palestinians’ trust by expanding settlements, and by not respecting goodwill pledges.

Highlight [page 25]: Also, the incompatibility in character between the two leaders was truly abysmal. Barak was a man of brilliance, broad strategic

Highlight [page 26]: understanding, and the necessary courage to take difﬁcult decisions such as the dramatic withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000. In our team’s internal deliberations, he was open-minded, responsive, ironic at times, and always wittily humorous. In wrapping up such meetings, he tended, however, to display an almost preternatural capacity for opaque and ambiguous instructions that left one with the liberty of interpreting them. A uniquely gifted and thrusting military man with the calling of a statesman, Barak had an unorthodox mind and a vast knowledge. But his character ﬂaws were a major handicap when he needed to reach out to others. He was inept at managing the sensibilities of either friends or rivals, and he lacked the intuitive tactile sense that makes a great politician. He was blessed with an elephantine skin that shielded him against criticism, and a mental fortitude that made him impervious to pressure, which was perhaps what also made him at times an overbearing negotiator. He expected people to act according to the scenario he had written for them and, when they refused, he tended to lose his composure, and dig in his heels. He obstinately assumed that what he considered a “reasonable agreement” must also appear thus in the eyes of whomever he was talking to, in this case the historic leader of a disinherited nation who had been forged by long years of struggle and steadfastness.

Highlight [page 26]: Arafat’s “stubbornness” in acting against his own interests, as Barak saw them, was intellectually incomprehensible to him. A conceited and bumptious Cartesian, he was too abrasive to be able of levelling with a Palestinian counterpart who was wholly consumed in theological hallucinations and national mythologies.

Highlight [page 26]: There was one thing they did not take into account: the unbounded human will of

Highlight [page 27]: the enemy, as well as the basic fact that the ethos of his struggle did not answer to the same “rational” patterns upon which the Americans had built their working assumptions.

Highlight [page 27]: effectiveness trap” dilemma of ofﬁcials willing to serve under a leader whose positions they did not share, in the assumption that at some point down the road they would be able to be effective in improving them. 8I admit that was my attitude when Barak tried to convince me how reasonable his idea of a Palestinian state in 66 percent of the land was. Expecting that Barak could make the leap to more realistic standpoints made all of us around him hostages to fortune, though. His initial negotiating positions were, indeed, of monumental absurdity, and his febrile conviction of their validity was truly perplexing.

Highlight [page 27]: delusionary positions a ﬁnal agreement could still be reached in the breakneck speed of a tight timetable that he imposed on all sides.

Highlight [page 27]: were not about the creation of two states but about “a just partition of the West Bank between the parties.” 9He also rejected the idea that UN Resolution 242 should have any bearing whatsoever on the Palestinian question. And when Arieli prepared a plan for a Palestinian state on 87 percent of the West Bank, Barak asked him to shelve it. The myth surrounding Yitzhak Rabin’s peace legacy should not, however, obscure the fact that Barak’s positions were practically identical to those of his slain mentor.

Highlight [page 28]: In Palestinian iconography, Arafat was a metahistorical ﬁgure, a pater patriae almost devoid of human features. In his own insatiable appetite for adulation he saw himself as the reincarnation of Saladin, the redeemer of Jerusalem from the inﬁdel Crusaders in the twelfth century. It was through Arafat that the Palestinian kefﬁyeh became the icon of an internationally acclaimed national cause. To be sure, he was also a cunning and deceitful politician, always capable of rising like a phoenix from the ashes of innumerable setbacks and defeats. He deserved much of his people’s adoration, though, for it was he who extricated the Palestinian national movement from the cynical grip of Arab leaders, gave it a sense of purpose, and turned it into the most widely resonant national cause in recent times. Alas, he also was responsible for missing the optimal peace deal once it was offered. With Arafat, everything was complex and indecipherably ambiguous. He was incorrigibly evasive, his penchant for doublespeak disguised and distorted his intentions, and his showmanship made his interlocutor’s capacity to distinguish between reality and performance a truly disconcerting task. The way Lloyd George described his talks with the Irish nationalist Eamon de Valera —a hopeless exercise in picking up mercury with a fork—is perfectly applicable to talks with Arafat as well. Arafat also could never resist the temptation of trading with Palestinian blood, which, admittedly, did not make him unique among nationalist leaders throughout history. Leaders of national movements have always used and abused the blood of their people to advance the national cause. The Zionists did it brilliantly on the way to statehood with the Holocaust of European Jewry. 11But, they were also determined state-builders, which Arafat was not. He was a freedom ﬁghter who fought to redress an injustice, not to build a future.

Highlight [page 28]: An Israeli leader has yet to emerge to genuinely commiserate on, let alone admit, Israel’s share of responsibility for the Palestinian tragedy of dispossession and exile. Israel owes its existence to the

Highlight [page 29]: Jews’ extraordinary memory of history; it now relies on the Palestinians forgetting theirs. This compulsive ignorance of the givens of human nature greatly contributed to making the IsraeliPalestinian dispute such a desperately protracted conﬂict.

Highlight [page 29]: Alas, history is a textbook of moral paradoxes, and it is absurd political correctness, or postcolonial patronization, to assume that the weaker side can never have a responsibility for the tragedies that have befallen them. The Jews are a living testimony of the maxim that being the underdog is not to be blameless. That an independent Jewish state existed for only short periods of Jewish millenarian history was the result of the blunder of ignoring political realities and suicidally challenging the world powers that governed the international system of the time.

Highlight [page 30]: Nabil Amr, a minister in Arafat’s cabinet, valiantly made precisely such an accusation in an open letter to Arafat, two years into the AlAqsa Intifada, that is, when it was becoming tragically clear that Arafat’s failure to give a ﬁnal yes to Clinton’s peace proposals had doomed the Palestinian cause: Didn’t we dance when we heard of the failure of the Camp David talks? Didn’t we destroy pictures of President Bill Clinton who had the temerity to propose a Palestinian state with small border modiﬁcations? We are not being honest. Today, after two years of bloodshed we are asking for exactly what we rejected then, and now it is beyond our reach … How often have we agreed to compromises, only to change our mind and reject them, and later still ﬁnd ourselves agreeing to them once again? We were never willing to learn from either our acceptance or our rejection. How often were we asked to do something that we could have done, and did nothing? Afterwards, when the solution was already unattainable we roamed the world in the hope of getting what had already been offered to us and rejected. And we discovered that in the span of time between our “rejection” and subsequent “acceptance” the world had changed, and we were faced with additional conditions which again we felt we could not accept. We failed to rise to the challenge of history.13 Amr eventually paid for his daring with the amputation of his leg after being shot at by Arafat’s men.

Highlight [page 31]: He said the Palestinians believed that a mysterious higher power would always come to their rescue, as if the laws of history did not apply to them.

Highlight [page 31]: And what is one to think when, in a desperate attempt to break the deadlock, a bold proposal of mine to concede full sovereignty for the Palestinians on the Temple Mount, something Arafat valued even more than the refugees’ right of return, if only they would acknowledge the existence of the remains of a holy Jewish shrine in the depth of the Mount, was rejected on the ground that there had never existed such a holy Jewish site?

Highlight [page 32]: Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton peace parameters as a “crime against the Palestinian people and the Arab nation.”

Highlight [page 32]: That the Israeli right has dominated Israeli politics ever since Camp David is the direct result of the discredit of the peace camp’s trounced core message.

Highlight [page 32]: Only one more Israeli government, Ehud Olmert’s, would still embark on a genuine attempt to reach a Palestinian peace. He also failed.

Highlight [page 34]: Gaza’s evolving tragedy these days is a direct consequence of Ariel Sharon’s unilateral disengagement from that troubled strip.

Highlight [page 35]: History seldom has single inﬂection points, where one act or omission proves decisive. Rabin’s assassination has been accorded a disproportionate bearing on the prospects of peace. Our failure to clinch a ﬁnal settlement was a deﬁning failure, for the two-state solution has proved to be a structural impossibility. I took from the Camp David experience a sense of the irrevocability of our dispute, a perception that would subsequently be borne out by the serial failures of each and every future peace enterprise discussed in this book. This was why, immediately after the Taba conference, I pinned my hopes, vainly it turned out, on an international solution that would save the parties from themselves and succor the two-state idea.16 The preponderant world powers have simply lost interest.

PART I ANATOMY OF A SEMINAL MISENCOUNTER

1. First Steps, Harsh Truths

Highlight [page 38]: 1 First Steps, Harsh Truths

Highlight [page 39]: That much we later heard from Hassan Asfour, a minister in Arafat’s government and a member of the Palestinian negotiating team. “Arafat,” he said, “would consider sacriﬁcing the refugees in return for Jerusalem.”

Highlight [page 39]: The tools he gave me to work with, though interesting opening positions for a man who had never been enamored of the left’s “peace industry,” would turn out to be clearly not tempting enough to induce the Palestinians to hurry to the summit, let alone to agree to an end of conﬂict.

Highlight [page 41]: Abbas had been consistent in his call for switching from the armed struggle to a diplomatic strategy. However, during and after the Camp David negotiations, he was, regrettably, unable to rise to the occasion. It was as if he was present in body but not in mind, often apathetic and indifferent rather than playing the role of a leader advancing initiatives and identifying areas of compromise and decision. He would show signs of leadership only during the Second Intifada, when he had the courage to stand up to the armed militias and call for an end to the military way.

Highlight [page 41]: Not unlike Arafat, Abu Ala believed, as he wrote in a programmatic article commemorating the ﬁftieth anniversary of the Nakba, that Jews never actually lived in Palestine, and Zionism was based on the manipulation of invented mythologies. He even compared the loss of Palestine to that of Islam’s loss of Al-Andalus. I have always been indulgent with these kinds of myths; aren’t we all in varying degrees trapped in the lies of our past?

Highlight [page 42]: Abu Ala stated his objectives at the very outset: a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and Jerusalem as its capital, and, once Israel had accepted the right of return, an “acceptable” way for its implementation would be agreed upon. Yet, like burned children avoiding the ﬁre, all the Palestinian negotiators, Abu Ala included, avoided quantifying the number of returnees involved in his “acceptable” solution. It was practically impossible to ever know what they really meant by the term

Highlight [page 42]: True, the Palestinians were a nation without an economy and an army but, he said, it was they who held the key to war and peace in the Middle East. But, he asked, What happened after your peace with Egypt? Nothing. Not a single Arab country established relations with you, and your international standing remained unchanged. But the Oslo Agreement with us entirely altered your international standing, and for the ﬁrst time Arab states began establishing economic and political ties with you.

Highlight [page 44]: Palestinian longing for peace offers of yesteryear that were either ignored or bluntly repudiated has been a recurrent pattern in this conﬂict. Resolution 194 was a non-binding General Assembly Resolution that was rejected at the time by the entire Arab world, the Palestinians included. They had also rejected an Israeli proposal made a few months later at the UN-sponsored Lausanne Peace Conference to admit 100,000 refugees. Nor did the Palestinians accept in 1967 the UN Security Council Resolution 242 that was now the fundamental premise upon which our entire peace process was based.

Highlight [page 44]: These initial discussions ended up exposing ﬁve fundamental Palestinian truths. Oslo represented the major historic compromise in which they had ceded 78 percent of mandatory Palestine; in the 22 percent left they were prepared for small reciprocal adjustments, but were unwilling to accept a substantive redrawing of the map. Second, while they said they wanted a practical solution to the refugee problem, they always insisted that Israel recognize ﬁrst the principle of the Palestinian right of return. Third, they insisted absolutely that Jerusalem be divided into two capitals. Four, unlike our critics in Israel who thought that we should have gone for an interim agreement instead of getting bogged down in negotiations over an impossible ﬁnal settlement, the Palestinians were sick and tired of interim situations. “It would be better to postpone the deadline for a ﬁnal settlement, so long as there are no partial agreements,” Abu Ala averred time and again. “The Palestinians are interested in a full package,” I was also told by Dennis Ross, the head of the American Peace Team overseeing our talks, “They have come to hate these interim arrangements.” Five, the Palestinians made it unequivocally clear that the era of “constructive ambiguity” that characterized the old Interim Agreements had come to an end. In simple terms, they argued: “What is yours is yours, and what is ours is ours; one color for you another color for us. Don’t cover the land in a multi-colored mosaic.”

2. “A Secluded Nordic Castle”

Highlight [page 45]: 2 “A Secluded Nordic Castle”

Highlight [page 45]: The Palestinian philosophy whereby they entered negotiations on the basis that they had already made their compromises by waiving their right to 77 percent of historical Palestine, and that all that was left for them to do was to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, had never been the working assumption of the Israeli side. Unlike the case of Syria and Egypt, where the result of the negotiations was practically a given, we all agreed, the Palestinian process was more open-ended.

Highlight [page 45]: Ehud Barak, who used to ridicule the Oslo Accords idea of “secret talks in remote Scandinavian castles,” ﬁnally agreed to precisely such a Scandinavian venue, not exactly a castle, but rather the country residence of the Swedish prime minister Göran Persson in Harpsund, about two hours south of Stockholm.

Highlight [page 45]: Before setting off for Sweden, we went to an impossible mission, calming Arafat’s stormy temperament.

Highlight [page 45]: “I should get 100 percent of the land, you

Highlight [page 46]: should dismantle all the settlements, and there would then be peace,” he said. He also complained of Barak’s inﬂexible attitude: “Rabin used to listen to me; you are never willing to change your positions.”

Highlight [page 46]: Military Intelligence assumed that the territorial issue was the paramount Palestinian concern, and a core narrative such as the refugees was just a bargaining card. 2This certainly was not the case with Arafat. At Camp David he was willing to give away 10 percent of his land in exchange for an acceptable offer in Jerusalem.

Highlight [page 47]: He wanted the Swedish channel to be run along the lines of the Oslo model, that is, ﬁrst Track Two among academics to deﬁne the gaps and if possible bridge them, and only later bring in the ofﬁcials. Academics had the liberty to engage with

Highlight [page 48]: imagination and the privilege of denial, which the ofﬁcials obviously lacked.

Highlight [page 48]: It was Barak who, in his utter detestation of Oslo, insisted on the Swedish model. This episode was to have dire consequences for the prospects of our entire peace enterprise, for from that moment Abu Mazen lost trust in the process and practically disengaged from it. Arafat was no negotiator, and he now lost the man whom he always needed to help him navigate through the intricacies of a process about whose details Arafat was neither well informed, nor interested.

Highlight [page 49]: Despite the fact that the Palestinians always maintained that “the whole area of the settlements does not exceed 2 percent” (of the territory), Hassan Asfour admitted that “the area of the settlements was really 4 percent” and in an off-the-record conversation he even went as far as to say, “If it is, say, 8 percent or 9 percent, we can discuss it and reach a compromise.”

Highlight [page 49]: Regrettably, the promising Swedish track ended up being wrecked by malevolent leaks to Agence France Press, allegedly through Abu Mazen, who felt sidelined by Arafat. The leak was a hard blow for Abu Ala and undermined his ability to give of his best. Once the whistle had been blown, he felt pressure from the Palestinian street, where rumor had it that he was “selling off the Palestinian people’s national assets.” He acknowledged in his memoirs that the leak “changed the nature of our meeting … We felt we had to tread more carefully.”

Highlight [page 50]: How was he to ensure that he had upheld Palestinian orthodoxy so that no one at home could dare accuse him of “a treacherous sellout”

Highlight [page 50]: Following two days (May 19–20) of violent Palestinian disturbances —“Days of Wrath” commemorating the Nakba Day—Barak announced the recall of the team from Sweden. The riots, inspired by what was then seen as a hasty, precipitate Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and a victory for Hezbollah’s resistance, highlighted a quintessential Arafatian strategy, or that of his militia chief and head of Tanzim, Marwan Barghouti. “Lebanon today, Palestine tomorrow!” shouted Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza. While there was still time, President Clinton sent an urgent message to Arafat in an attempt to cut short the waves of violence.

Highlight [page 50]: Arafat did not really regret the death of the secret talks —he referred to our back channel as “the bad channel”—and lost no sleep over Barak’s political difﬁculties.

Highlight [page 50]: Arafat did not lift a ﬁnger to prevent the riots. Arafat was always utterly indifferent to Israel’s domestic politics, even though he should have known how vitally central they were to her capacity to deliver on the peace process.

Highlight [page 51]: I deﬁned the problem of these negotiations as one of methodology. The Palestinians wanted to nail down principles, such as the 1967 border and the right of return, and then deal with the details. Ours was a diametrically opposite approach of progressing with the practical arrangements and then applying the principles accordingly. This methodological difference was to remain a factor well into the discussions at Camp David.

Highlight [page 52]: did Arafat truly stand behind his negotiators? It was Arafat’s way to use multiple channels and create competition among his men. Abu Ala was never sure he had Arafat’s backing; he also knew that back home others prayed for his failure.

3. Back to Square One

Highlight [page 53]: 3 Back to Square One

Highlight [page 53]: That Barak dug his heels in and refused to offer his negotiator more leeway was not particularly helpful in assuaging the Palestinians’ rising resentment.

Highlight [page 53]: Muhammad Rashid

Highlight [page 53]: It was possible, he said, to reach a territorial arrangement based on “somewhere in the range of 80–100 percent or 85–98 percent,” provided Arafat got what he wanted in Jerusalem. Jerusalem, he said, was “a killing point.” He proved to be right. On Jerusalem, that is.

Highlight [page 54]: Mubarak’s comment fully concurred with the late Yitzhak Rabin’s opposition to what he used to denounce as “political settlements” deep inside Palestinian territory.

Highlight [page 56]: The day after my return from Amman, we discussed with Barak alternative solutions to the core issues. Both Gilead Sher and the prime minister did not concur with my view against the 13 percent annexation fantasy.

Highlight [page 57]: On Tuesday, May 30, Yossi Ginossar passed on to me messages from the Palestinian “young guard,” Mohammed Dahlan and Muhammad Rashid, warning that the situation was explosive. Arafat, they said “was no longer capable of controlling the impatient public mood.”

Highlight [page 57]: Israel’s failure to keep its promise to transfer the Jerusalem villages led to an ever-increasing distrust between Barak and Arafat.

Highlight [page 58]: The affair severely shook the Palestinians’ faith in him as a “strong” leader. If he could not push through the transfer of Abu Dis, they wondered, how could they rely on him to carry out the difﬁcult concessions involved in a permanent settlement?

Highlight [page 59]: Arafat understandably rebelled against Barak’s obsessively coercive timetable. But it is also true that, to him, negotiations needed to be part of a revolutionary process mired in crisis and bloodshed. For the national liberation warrior that he was, nations were born in war, not around the negotiating table. The late Yitzhak Rabin’s description of the process—“We’ll negotiate as if there were no terror, and ﬁght terror as if there were no negotiations”—was to Arafat like a soothing balm.

4. Longing for Hezbollah

Highlight [page 60]: 4 Longing for Hezbollah

Highlight [page 63]: Arafat, they reported, had expressed to Clinton a readiness to change the western border line by 2 percent, provided he got back land in Israel on a similar scale. In other words, the Palestinians wanted 98 percent of the West Bank and for now we had only agreed to 87 percent. As for Jerusalem, a recognition by Israel that Resolution 242 applied would satisfy Arafat prior to the summit. Since the intelligence failures leading to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel’s intelligence had been taught not to lock itself into one single interpretation, but to present divergent assessments on issues of war and peace. A previous intelligence analysis forecasting that Arafat was nearing the point of no return and feared losing the package deal that was now taking shape proved to be utterly wrong. Neither Camp David, nor the Clinton parameters, not even Taba, were points of no return so far as Arafat was concerned.

5. Forcing the Leaders’ Hands

Highlight [page 66]: 5 Forcing the Leaders’ Hands

Highlight [page 68]: This was the trap in which the two leaders were now tragically caught. Barak was constrained by his shaky political support, while Arafat’s demand for the implementation of the interim agreements was substantive, not just tactical. He simply doubted that a ﬁnal settlement was achievable.

Highlight [page 69]: Barak clearly lived in a fantasy world.

Highlight [page 69]: Over at the State Department, Madeleine Albright described Clinton’s meeting with a belligerent Arafat as particularly difﬁcult. It was “the worst meeting they had over the past seven years,”

Highlight [page 69]: He again spoke to me with longing and envy of Hezbollah’s success in driving Israel out of Lebanon. There was more than a hint of a threat that he would set the Palestinian territories on ﬁre, as Hezbollah had done in Lebanon. “They were our students,” he told me proudly. Arafat had also Syria’s Assad as a compelling model.

Highlight [page 70]: Arafat’s mindset was clearly shifting. He needed to keep the revolutionary ﬁre in Fatah, and emulating Hezbollah’s way was becoming a realistic option to him. This did not preclude allowing his men to explore the limits of Israel’s concessions. On the contrary, ﬁghting and negotiating at the same time were what all national movements of liberation which Arafat embraced as a model—e.g., Vietnam, Algeria—had done.

Highlight [page 70]: elaborate paper brilliantly drafted by Gilead Sher.

Highlight [page 70]: We proposed, inter alia, that the border “would be based on the 1967 lines with changes to conform to the reality on the ground and the needs of the two sides.” Our paper also offered Palestinian sovereignty in the Jordan Valley provided Israel was satisﬁed with the security arrangements there, and got her three blocs of settlements

Highlight [page 71]: Saeb Erakat was a most eloquent spokesman of the Palestine cause

6. A Conceivable Endgame?

Highlight [page 73]: 6 A Conceivable Endgame?

Highlight [page 73]: Rejecting Abu Ala’s proposal was, however, a fatal mistake. Peace, not the summit as such, was supposed to be the strategic objective. We lost in Abu Ala a vital ally in the preparation of the summit, and when it was ﬁnally called, he proved to be ill-tempered and a totally unhelpful negotiating partner.

Highlight [page 75]: Arafat was not willing to accept any part of the proposal I had earlier presented to the American team, and now to him. He was willing to agree to Israeli sovereignty over only two sites: the Wailing Wall—he reminisced about his childhood spent with his aunt who lived nearby—and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Everything else was to be under Palestinian sovereignty. To my proposal for functional autonomy under Israel sovereignty for the inner Palestinian neighborhoods, Arafat reacted with a cutting rejoinder: “You’re not willing to recognize the refugees’ right of return, yet you’re willing to annex 300,000 Palestinians to Jewish Jerusalem.”

Highlight [page 76]: was in the domain of practical arrangements; Arafat was ﬂying higher into categorical statements and Muslim mythology. He mentioned to me the Covenant of Omar, signed in ad 638 between the conqueror of Jerusalem, Caliph Omar I, and the Byzantine patriarch, Sophronius, which set out the terms for the Christians’ surrender to their Muslim conquerors, with the stipulation that Jews should not be allowed to live in Jerusalem. Arafat concluded, “Would any Muslim Arab accept what you are proposing? That the Al-Quds al-Sharif issue remain unresolved? Forget it. They would kick me. I cannot be left with nothing in Jerusalem.” He also categorically rejected Barak’s idea of postponing the discussion on Jerusalem for a few years. “Not even for two hours,” he replied.

Highlight [page 77]: Abu Ala sensed that I was going beyond Barak’s positions. Indeed, as I saw it, our task as negotiators was to drag the leaders along by taking personal initiatives, and stretching their willingness to compromise to, and beyond, the limit.

Highlight [page 78]: Abu Ala could also see the limits of my capacity to “deliver” Barak, and he doubted that Barak could eventually assume the high price of an agreement.

Highlight [page 78]: Barak had mentioned to Secretary Albright that he might accept a Palestinian state on 90 percent of the West Bank. From the young Palestinian guard—Mohammed Dahlan and Muhammad Rashidthe Americans heard that Arafat might be satisﬁed with a state on 92 percent of the West Bank with land swaps.

Highlight [page 79]: Clinton hoped to go down in history as the president who had achieved peace in Palestine, but he was in no way a calculating cynic. His desire to leave such a historical legacy did not interfere with his rational assessments. He was basically an enlightened man who cared more about peace between Israel and the Palestinians than about any other international issue.

Highlight [page 79]: Barak came to Camp David with mistaken assumptions about what would Arafat agree to, and Arafat came in a defensive mood, highly suspicious of Israeli-American collusion.

Highlight [page 79]: Arafat was the carrier of Palestinian orthodoxy and, to his credit, he spelled it all out in a letter he sent to Clinton ahead of the summit. He wanted a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders (“I can agree to nothing less.” The settlements created by the Israelis are their problem “not mine to

Highlight [page 80]: resolve”); “a just settlement for the refugee problem” based on UN General Assembly Resolution 194; “reasonable security arrangements … with American presence”; Jerusalem as the capital of the two states, and if this proved impossible, “it could be an international city,” as envisaged by the terms of the 1947 partition resolution

Highlight [page 80]: He eventually would have such a surprise, but only on real estate issues —that is, territory and borders—not over the Palestinian national narrative, refugees and, above all, the “killing point” of Jerusalem, as Muhammad Rashid had deﬁned it to me.

7. The Promise of an American Steamroller

Highlight [page 81]: 7 The Promise of an American Steamroller

Highlight [page 81]: The Palestinians were not free of political constraints either. They were expected to represent all the factions of the Palestinian political

Highlight [page 82]: family, moderates and extremists alike, which meant they had not much leeway. Much depended on whether Arafat, instead of being a hostage of his political system, would lead it to a divisive deal which, as he always feared, could even usher in civil war. The American president Andrew Jackson once said that “one courageous man can constitute a majority.” Egypt’s Anwar Sadat was such a man. Was Arafat cut from the same cloth? Was Barak such a man? The question was, then, to what extent would the two leaders be capable of rising above the myths that were perpetuating this conﬂict and claiming so much blood? To what extent would they be prepared to clash with their political systems to the point of triggering an earthquake that would rewrite the political fabric of their respective nations?

Highlight [page 83]: I cannot discard the possibility that, deep in his mind, Ehud Barak knew that the gulf that separated him from Arafat’s position was unbridgeable. This made the American role so vitally central. If only because of the harsh legacy of the failure of the Geneva Summit on the Syrian front, Clinton, I said to myself, will not be able to take another failure. The success of the summit would depend on his aggressive leadership.

Highlight [page 83]: Also Palestine had its peace heroes, of course. PLO ofﬁcial Issam Sartawi paid with his life in 1983, when an Abu Nidal squad shot him for his peace efforts. Actually, this entire peace process would not have come about if it were not for Arafat’s historic decision to accept the two-state solution in 1988.

Highlight [page 84]: Abu Ala insisted on making distinctions between the issues and on negotiating each topic separately. This was typical of the wily old wolf. He wanted to prevent a trade-off between the issues at all costs, which was our basic approach and which was supposed to enable us, or so we expected, to concede on a given point in order to gain a Palestinian concession on another issue.

Highlight [page 85]: With Arafat, Arab leaders tiptoed on eggshells. No claims, no pressures lest the “Arab street”

Highlight [page 86]: rises up against them. More than Arafat’s patrons, they were his hostages. The burden of proof rested on Israel.

Highlight [page 86]: Dennis supposed that “dealing” with Arafat would indeed be a major task here. Clinton would work to change the Chairman’s emotional state and try to free him from his sense of being a victim dragged like a sacriﬁcial lamb to the summit, and make it clear to him that he stood to gain rather than lose from the agreement. Dennis hung much hope on some of us whom Arafat trusted to help melt the ice between Barak and Arafat. But even if there was trust, would Arafat compromise on Jerusalem? Waive the right of return? Waive his claim for full sovereignty in the Jordan Valley? And would we, the Israelis, ﬁnd the courage to reshape and moderate not a few of our positions on these very matters?

Highlight [page 86]: I concluded from his comments that Barak was still at the stage of not internalizing the depth of the compromises we would need to make. Notwithstanding the hints he had given to both Dennis and the president in the wake of the Andrews pre-summit meeting,2 his formal standpoints, which I hoped were just bargaining positions, were still utterly unrealistic.

Highlight [page 86]: One dense summit could not resolve our profound differences. The leading actors at Camp David II could not rise to the occasion as did those at Camp

Highlight [page 87]: David I, twenty-two years previously. To do Barak and Arafat justice, the issues they were asked to compromise on were weightier and more difﬁcult than giving back the Sinai Peninsula. Our negotiations, it would immediately become apparent, were not a real estate deal. They were about cracking the genetic code of the Arab-Israeli conﬂict and perhaps even the Jewish-Muslim one: holy sites, Jerusalem, the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, and the moral, not merely political legitimization of the establishment of a Jewish state in the Arab Middle East were all at stake here.

8. Inauspicious Beginnings

Highlight [page 88]: 8 Inauspicious Beginnings

Highlight [page 88]: Camp David

Highlight [page 88]: looks like a summer camp, or a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in the Bavarian Alps taken from the books of Thomas Mann. Tellingly, my Palestinian partner Abu Ala, who felt he had been dragged into an Israeli-American ambush, saw the place more as “a guarded citadel.”

Highlight [page 88]: convinced that America was in Israel’s pocket, and that negotiations sponsored exclusively by it would take him farther away from his fantasy model of an agreement, and that any international involvement would bring him closer to it.

Highlight [page 89]: I disagreed with the sequence, for breaking taboos in Jerusalem was the decisive factor for changing the Palestinian standpoint in other vital areas.

Highlight [page 89]: Clinton could gather from his meeting with Arafat that same day, the issues that truly mattered were those that lay at the core of the Palestinian narrative, Jerusalem and refugees.

Highlight [page 89]: The president confessed to not having a clue how to resolve them. But Arafat had: “It’s simple. East Jerusalem goes to us, West Jerusalem to the Israelis. It will be the capital of two states, and will have a joint committee for solving problems like water, electricity, etc.” He also hastened to mention the centrality of the Temple Mount to Islam. As for refugees, “The Israelis should recognize the right of return, and wéll then discuss the details.” Abu Mazen, unlike his boss, always more focused on refugees than on Jerusalem, added that “substantial numbers of refugees should be able to return, and that return should be implemented systematically.”

Highlight [page 90]: The American paper looked to me a reasonable basis for negotiations. It is true that it endorsed the principle of the 1967 borders, but there was no reason to disapprove of this since it came with the principle of blocs of settlements where 80 percent of the settlers could be accommodated. It was, therefore, surprising that Barak returned from his meeting with Clinton breathing ﬁre and brimstone. He had sued for “signiﬁcant” settlement blocs, attacked Arafat’s approach as that of one “who is not prepared to be ﬂexible and does not negotiate,” rejected the principle of land swaps, and claimed that the security zone in the Jordan Valley should remain under our sovereignty for many years and thereafter be divided between the parties in agreed-upon proportions.

Highlight [page 91]: There was evidently no way the Palestinians could be convinced that the document was not drafted in collusion with the Israelis. They rejected it outright. Secretary Albright, to whom the Palestinians returned the paper at 3:00 a.m., calmed her excited guests by dropping the paper altogether. No paper, no compass for the summit.

Highlight [page 91]: On the third day of the summit, for example, Clinton tried to convince Arafat that, by ceding occupied land, Israel was setting a precedent in international relations.

Highlight [page 91]: when the president invited me to his residence, he did not ask for my view on what the solutions that could produce a deal were. Rather, he wanted to know what peace parameters could gain acceptance in Israel. I mentioned three principles: settlement blocs to absorb 80 percent of the settlers, no right of return, and “non-partition of Jewish Jerusalem,” making it clear that there would have to be an Arab Jerusalem. Regarding the Temple Mount, I told the president, one could propose Israeli sovereignty and effective Palestinian jurisdiction. Bafﬂingly optimistic, Clinton believed that the principle of 80 percent of the settlers demanded an annexation of 10 percent of West Bank territory by Israel.

Highlight [page 92]: I could not help but think that, in light of what we were hearing from the Palestinians, the president was appallingly naive. He was blessed with many endearing qualities, but lacked the bulldog-like attitude that had allowed Jimmy Carter to strike an Egyptian-Israeli peace. He would not twist arms à la Bush senior, or be brutally assertive like James Baker and Kissinger. The man I was sitting next to was a pleasant, genial, smart, even brilliant, warm person.

Highlight [page 92]: The absence of American working papers throughout the entire summit was to be the most monumental blunder Clinton and his team could commit.

Highlight [page 92]: The Jimmy Carter team produced throughout their summit no fewer than twenty-three drafts and kept “cleaning” and honing them until they could come out with an agreed text.

Highlight [page 92]: We didn’t run the summit; the summit ran us,” observed Aaron Miller, 5nor did the Americans develop a strategy to maximize success, or a backup plan to minimize the impact of failure.

Highlight [page 93]: The Palestinians,” he said, “were very extreme. We are regressing as compared to what you achieved in Sweden.” It turned out that Abu Mazen insisted with Clinton that the principle of the right of return be endorsed as the basis of any further negotiation, to which the president responded that that would mean the Israelis giving a blank check on a matter that was existential to them.

Highlight [page 93]: We were at the beginning of the summit, and the atmosphere was one of a mutual digging in of heels and lack of communication between the leaders.

Highlight [page 94]: But, we still had the Americans on our side; Sandy Berger would tell me that they were furious at the “seminar of principles” that the Palestinians gave us all. “They are being abstract, while you are being practical; it can’t go on like this,” he said. For Arafat, the “seminar” focused mainly on the irrevocable “principle” of Jerusalem. He claimed to be constrained by the Muslim world’s uncompromising stance. He himself was, as he repeatedly reminded Clinton, the vice president of the Al-Quds Muslim Committee. In retrospect, one cannot resist the temptation of wondering how steadfast the Arab leaders’ commitment to Jerusalem is when they have been so stunningly sanguine about Donald Trump’s unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Highlight [page 95]: The one, Barak, made his positions more ﬂexible, that is, as compared with his previous standpoints, and saw with frustration how his counterpart refused to budge an inch. In this war of nerves Arafat was better capable of maintaining his composure, not to mention the fact that, as is normally the case in asymmetric peace processes between a cumbersome democratic government and an autocracy, Arafat enjoyed a marked political preponderance. Unlike us, he did not have to contend with popular or coalition pressures back home to deliver an agreement. He had the tactical advantage in every sense.

9 Clinton: “We Have Exhausted the Beauty of This Place”

Highlight [page 96]: 9 Clinton: “We have Exhausted the Beauty of This Place”

Highlight [page 96]: A meeting with Arafat was to Barak not an instrument for breaking the ice; it was a reward for good behaviour.

Highlight [page 97]: Elyakim Rubinstein opposed my presentation. “The State of Israel has an ethos, and it doesn’t have to divest itself of it,” he said. Barak’s reaction was music to the ears of most of us: We have to reach a decision on parting from control over another people. We all remember that it was possible to establish a smaller State of Israel (before 1967), with greater unity, and we must make the distinction between our justice and the clear perception that without a certain kind of satisfaction for the other side there will be no agreement. This Ben-Gurion-like spirit was in him, but its translation into real proposals was still hard to come by.

Highlight [page 98]: Barak was not yet willing to translate his Ben-Gurion like rhetoric into an “onion” metaphor. Nor were the Palestinians yet willing to budge from their “principled” positions. It was, therefore, no surprise that the session on territory ended in an explosion.

Highlight [page 98]: We were treading water, as Barak wrongly assumed that he would break the Palestinians by a demonstration of strong nerve. The fact that we were at too great a distance from the area of Palestinian compromise did nothing to encourage them to budge.

Highlight [page 98]: Arafat, he sat in his cabin surrounded by his people as if he were in a bunker under heavy enemy ﬁre, a replay of the battle for Beirut. But, unlike in Beirut, here he was in no rush. “I already have a state,” he said to Albright, “I do not care if Barak and the world would recognize it in twenty years from now. Our situation is like South Africa’s; the entire world supports me.”

Highlight [page 99]: Arafat’s ofﬁce was a court, and his men were courtiers, myrmidons whom he could always either overrule with an argument or bully into silence. It was not a question of paucity of talents, but of the stiﬂing of dissent even within the tiny cabal around the leader. Essentially, the intergenerational struggle was over the political succession and access to the leader, not necessarily over the nature of the agreement. The Palestinian Young Turks carried no curse of Oedipus, for not even metaphorically were they willing to slay their leader-father or challenge his unfettered power. They would always end up falling into line with him. During a heart-to-heart into the night in which our interlocutors said they were willing to get their feet wet and face Arafat, they also reiterated all Arafat’s red lines. Rashid emphasized that if he did not get Jerusalem as he demanded, Arafat would prefer to die like Nasser and remain a saint in the eyes of his people rather than follow in the footsteps of Sadat. In light of Barak’s extravagant idea of building a system of overpasses and tunnels between Atarot and the Temple Mount in order to avoid giving the Palestinians unbroken sovereignty in Jerusalem, Rashid rightly pleaded that we “stop building a peace of overpasses.”

Highlight [page 100]: We continued tediously to spin our wheels in the working groups. The only result that came out of a Saturday morning’s meeting on borders and security would be Clinton’s rage at Abu Ala’s rhetoric, which “ﬁnished off” the chief Palestinian negotiator and took him out of the game until the end of the summit.

Highlight [page 100]: Rob Malley joined us to say how stunned he was by the “unhelpful” Palestinian attitude. Surprisingly, the Palestinians came back expressing a willingness to negotiate according to our approach:

Highlight [page 101]: practical needs. The tactic was as simple as it was clever. They wanted to prove there was no salvation in our method either, for they would not accept our needs as legitimate anyway, which was exactly what happened. They charged us to come back with a more modest map.

Highlight [page 101]: Abu Ala complained about the “ﬁngers” of Israeli settlements tearing up Palestinian space.

Highlight [page 101]: Abu Ala insisted now that I leave with him the map on which we made our presentation, which prompted an angry outburst from Sandy Berger at Abu Ala: “You want the map because you are preparing for the failure of the summit and want to point your ﬁnger at the reason it failed.”

Highlight [page 102]: You Palestinians are not keeping the promise I got yesterday from Arafat. You are behaving with a lack of integrity. You are not acting in good faith. If you want to make speeches to the street or to the gallery, don’t do it here. This is not the Security Council. This is not a United Nations General Assembly. Make a summit meeting there if you want and don’t waste my time. I am the president of the United States. I am ready to pack my bags and take off. You are an obstacle to negotiation. You do not raise counterproposals. I, too, am risking a lot here. The meaning of a summit is to talk in good faith, as I concluded yesterday with Arafat. You have not come to this summit in good faith.

Highlight [page 102]: The Palestinians showed negligible room for maneuver to the point of despair. But we too were not exactly constructive.

Highlight [page 103]: The Americans had arrived at a crossroads. “We’ve exhausted the beauty of this place,” the president threw at me as we left the dining room for a staff meeting at Barak’s. Dennis Ross would tell me later that night that the president was in a state of total despair. He had lost conﬁdence that an agreement could be reached in light of Barak’s positions on Jerusalem, and was deliberating whether to put a new paper on the table or to minimize the damage already done by putting a digniﬁed end to the summit. If there was to be a paper, “it would be a hard one for Barak,” Dennis Ross warned.

10. A Game Changer (or So It Looked)

Highlight [page 104]: 10 A Game Changer (or So It Looked)

Highlight [page 106]: We proposed a Palestinian state on the entire Gaza Strip, and on 89.5 percent of the West Bank and additional territory within Israel to compensate for the annexation by Israel of 10.5 percent of the West Bank needed for the three settlement blocs; Palestinian sovereignty in the Jordan Valley, while a security area, including three warning stations, would be kept by Israel for a period of ten years. A safe passage linking Gaza to the West Bank would be under Israeli sovereignty, but with “undisturbed and unlimited use” by the Palestinians, and, together with a wide array of infrastructure facilities within Israel, would be put at the service of the Palestinian state as part of the overall calculation of land swap percentages.

Highlight [page 109]: How to explain this sudden Arafat largesse? First, he needed to get relief from Clinton’s pressure. Second, and more importantly, he wanted to shift the entire summit onto one single issue, Jerusalem. Al-Quds was predominant in the mind of the old warrior, which was the reason for his indifference during an earlier meeting that day with his team where Abu Ala, Yasser Abed-Rabbo, and Nabil Shaath supported only meager percentages of Palestinian land for Israeli blocs of settlements. Arafat then made his own historic choice, acquiescing to even 10 percent to accommodate blocs of settlements, provided he got Jerusalem. Arafat was visibly annoyed with his people “for wanting to take a tougher line than he had with President Clinton.”

Highlight [page 110]: I advised the president, though, that a no less central task for him was to see to Barak’s mood. He needed to “reprogram him,” I told him, by persuading him that Arafat was indeed ready for a real turning point. The president lost no time in going to Barak’s cabin, where I joined him a few moments later. He reported “Arafat’s concessions” and added that “Shlomo has some interesting ideas,” referring to the one I raised on the subject of the Old City, and the one about continuing the negotiations to crack issues connected to the legal status and deﬁnition of sovereignty in the city’s sacred basin.

Highlight [page 110]: At that time, I had a feeling that things were moving. The mood in the American delegation had shifted 180 degrees. You could smell the

Highlight [page 111]: big breakthrough in the air. Rob Malley, Dennis Ross, and others were practically euphoric. It was one of those moments when I believed that an agreement was within reach. The problem was less in the positions of the sides and more in the extent to which they grasped that the other side was moving, initiating, compromising. The obstacle was not the extent of the compromise, but the sense of a lack of movement and entrenchment. It seemed to me that we had managed to break this feeling. We suddenly felt that the “package” was perhaps beginning to fall into place. Clinton invited Elyakim Rubinstein for a talk.

11. Oh Jerusalem! (and Its Lies)

Highlight [page 112]: 11 Oh Jerusalem! (and Its Lies)

Highlight [page 114]: In 1967, the Palestinians were allowed by the Israeli occupying power full administrative control of the area of the mosques both because it was a sacred Muslim site and because of the Halachic prohibition against the presence of Jews on the Mount. Israeli governments were consistently careful not to impose planning and zoning regulations on

Highlight [page 115]: the Temple Mount area, or any other Israeli laws that could challenge the authority of the Muslim Waqf in the holy site.

Highlight [page 116]: While we were resisting in Camp David the division of Jerusalem with a sense of awe and concern for the domestic political backlash, the city was for all practical purposes already divided. A member of the Palestinian Council, Khatem Abdul-Kader, would later comment that “already today, our rule over East Jerusalem is bigger than what we were offered at Camp David.” There should have been, therefore, neither a municipal logic, nor a national one to insist in Camp David on Israeli sovereignty in the Arab neighborhoods in the city’s outskirts and even in the inner districts, closer to the Old City. Paralyzed by right-wing slogans about a “united and eternal capital,” we resisted offering a fair deal to the Palestinians in Jerusalem until the very last days of the process, that is, through the Clinton Peace Parameters of December 2000. This was too late, and for Arafat not enough, as it turned out.

Highlight [page 118]: Gilead also assessed that it would not be right to make concessions on Jerusalem till the last minute, and even then one should leave it for the prime minister as a last breakthrough move.

Highlight [page 118]: The State of Israel was built by practical Zionism that was prepared to make compromises all along the way,” began Amnon Lipkin-Shahak. “What is Jerusalem?” he asked. “Large parts of Jerusalem today are not my Jerusalem. I have no problem not being in (the Arab neighborhood of) Tsur Baher.” The Israeli interest was to transfer as many residents as possible to the Palestinians and to be left with fewer Arabs under Israeli control. But sovereignty on the Temple Mount must not be waived, for “we cannot give Arafat the Temple, the cradle of Jewish history.” Regarding the Old City, he believed that the Palestinians should get a demarcated area in the Muslim Quarter. He was sufﬁciently frank, however, to admit that it might not satisfy Arafat, and then, “We go back to square one.”

12. Saeb Erakat: “Arafat Is Interested in a Crisis”

Highlight [page 121]: 12 Saeb Erakat: “Arafat Is Interested in a Crisis”

Highlight [page 121]: Disappointment awaited the president. “My negotiating team moved beyond my red lines,” Barak complained at the start of our meetingBarak, Danny Yatom, and I—with him that very night. Barak downgraded my Jerusalem offer (he would only allow Palestinian sovereignty in one outer neighborhood), refused to change the status quo on the Haram al-Sharif, denied any Palestinian sovereignty in the Old City, and asked for 11.3 percent annexation instead of our 10.5 percent. There would be Palestinian “control” of the Jordan Valley “with an Israeli security zone for a period of twelve years.” As for refugees, the right of return would only apply to the Palestinian state.1 Understandably, Clinton exploded in rage: You kept us and Arafat waiting all day and you want me to present something less than what Shlomo presented as our idea? I won’t do it. I just won’t do it. I would have no credibility. I can’t go see Arafat with retrenchment. You want to present these ideas directly to Arafat, you go ahead and see if you can sell it. There is no way I can. This is not real. This is not serious. I went with you to Shepherdstown [Israeli-Syrian negotiations] and was told nothing by you for four days. I went to Geneva [a Clinton-Assad summit] and felt like a wooden Indian doing your bidding. I will not let it happen here. I will simply not do it.

Highlight [page 121]: The president also challenged Barak’s claim that Arafat had so far not made any move or concession, for he was willing, he said, to concede 8–9 percent of the land for “your settlement blocks,” and had even left the ﬁnal decision as to the proportion of land swaps in the hands of the president. 2Barak did not quite realize that the summit was now trapped in connected vessels: Arafat would concede land

Highlight [page 122]: only if he got all he wanted in Jerusalem.

Highlight [page 122]: A few hours later, at 3:30 a.m. on July 18, Barak went back to the president, this time alone. His report of the meeting was reserved and typically opaque. “I gave the president a maneuver space for his contacts with Arafat.” What happened was that Clinton drafted a more forthcoming proposal, “consistent with what Shlomo and Gilead had proposed,” to which Barak agreed. It was, then, again Palestinian sovereignty over all the outer neighborhoods, as well as the Muslim quarter of the Old City and a Palestinian “custodial role” over the holy sites.3

Highlight [page 123]: Arafat turned down each and every concession made by Barak, which were presented to him as an American proposal. “I cannot go back to my people,” he said, “without Al Quds al-Sharif; I would rather die as one that had been occupied but did not surrender.” He wanted, he said, a peace deal along the lines of the Egypt-Israel agreement as well as the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. The Egyptians insisted, he said, and got back everything to the last grain of sand in Sinai, and with Lebanon, Israel was still engaged in a discussion over the last house in a border village, Radjer; and here Clinton was asking him to give up Jerusalem.

Highlight [page 123]: The president had then to go back to the drawing board. His improved Jerusalem proposal was anticipated to me by Dennis Ross: • Palestinian custodianship of the Temple Mount; • Palestinian sovereignty in the Old City’s Muslim and Christian quarters; • Full Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem’s outer Arab neighborhoods and self-rule in the inner ones, which would include planning and zoning rights as well as policing and law enforcement.

Highlight [page 123]: there was no chance that Arafat would give us the “end of conﬂict” without a complete Jerusalem deal, nor would he stick to the territorial concessions he had made, for they were linked to a full solution to the Jerusalem question.

Highlight [page 124]: Barak presented his proposals as a “deposit,” something I had pleaded with him to do on various occasions. He offered a Palestinian state over 91 percent of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip, a security zone in the Jordan Valley that Israel would keep for less than twelve years, while the Palestinians had sovereignty over 85 percent of the border area. His offer on Jerusalem was practically a copy of the American proposal as it was conveyed to him through me: Palestinian sovereignty over seven out of nine outer Jerusalem neighborhoods, while the inner ones would be under the Palestinian civil authority, including planning and zoning, and law enforcement. On the Temple Mount, he proposed a shared custodianship to include the state of Palestine, and Morocco as the chair of the Muslim Higher Commission on Jerusalem. He also agreed to Palestinian sovereignty over both the Old City’s Muslim and Christian quarters. Regarding refugees, he spoke of a solution that could be “satisfactory to both sides.”

Highlight [page 124]: Clinton was impressed. He believed the package had the potential of a fair endgame. It certainly reconciled him with Barak’s intrepidity. “I have never met a man as courageous as Barak,” he would tell me later.

Highlight [page 124]: we both felt that Barak had given the summit its decisive test.

Highlight [page 124]: But the wings of history ﬂew only over our heads; the Palestinians remained unimpressed. Barak’s move was revolutionary only with

Highlight [page 125]: regard to his own old positions, and was not exactly the measure of Arafat’s expectations.

Highlight [page 125]: His reaction to Barak’s moveconveyed to him by Clinton as “a basis for further negotiations,” not as a take-it-or-leave-it deal—was “shitty,” as Gamal Helal conﬁded to me later in the day.

Highlight [page 125]: He would not be, he insisted, the Arab leader who would give up Jerusalem.

Highlight [page 125]: Snubbed by Arafat, Clinton did not give up. He came back to him later in the day to press, ardently I was told, an improved deal that offered a state in 92 percent of the West Bank plus 2 percent swapped land within Israel, and a Jerusalem solution based on the partition of the Old City. Arafat again ﬂippantly dismissed the offer. There was no map attached to Clinton’s last offer, but Map 1 is a reﬂection of what can be seen as the ﬁnal Camp David proposal (it understates the offer, though, for it does not show the location of the 2 percent land swap).

Highlight [page 126]: It was all to no avail. The best Clinton could get from Arafat was a demand to interrupt the summit so that he could consult his people and Arab leaders free of the suffocating pressure of Camp David. Clinton rightly saw it as an escape, and turned him down. Barak’s knee-jerk reaction to this demoralizing setback was to ask us all to get prepared for ﬂying back home. That was the worst of all scenarios, returning home empty handed when all our concessions were exposed to the public. As for the Palestinians, their recurrent pattern of behavior was truly a cause of despair. Whenever a major offer was on the table, even as just a “basis” for further negotiations, as indeed was the case with Barak’s ideas, they would ask for “clariﬁcations,” and then turn down the whole thing.

13. Albright’s Intermezzo, Clinton’s Last Push

Highlight [page 128]: 13 Albright’s Intermezzo, Clinton’s Last Push

Highlight [page 129]: Barak agreed with the paper’s approach, but he ruled out any possible use of the term sovereignty as in any way deﬁning the status of the Palestinians on the Mount, no matter how qualiﬁed it was. He refused to accept that the adjective “custodial” restricted and limited the term “sovereignty” as Frankel had suggested, and he protested that sooner or later we would have a full Palestinian sovereignty in the Mount. As usual, however, Barak did not have to worry too much. Arafat would turn down any formula that was not clear, unequivocal, adjective-free Palestinian sovereignty.

Highlight [page 130]: Arafat also wanted the Armenian quarter and full Palestinian sovereignty over the inner neighborhoods. Brilliant, and typical Arafat style. His qualiﬁed yes was always, in practical terms, a resounding no. He would repeat that very tactic when presented six months later with the take-it-or-leave-it Clinton peace parameters.

Highlight [page 132]: To this very day in 2021, although they had been battered and defeated by long years of Intifada and an extraordinarily effective Israeli occupation, there had not been even a slight crack in the positions they had been defending with such vigor at Camp David and after. It looked as if Barak was driven by resentment and anger at Arafat for having gotten the better of him tactically. The Jerusalem question had persistently gnawed at him, and now that he had ﬁnally made a proposal which he considered an unprecedented gesture of magnanimity, Arafat exposed him as a clumsy gambler, ignored the proposal, and moved on. Unlike Barak’s spasmodic attitude to the negotiating process, Arafat was remarkably consistent in his objectives and moves. His delaying tactics and his fundamentalist positions played into the hands of Barak’s other personality, the one that could not come to terms with the far-reaching compromises he had agreed to. And, indeed, minutes before Clinton’s arrival from Japan, Barak shocked the Secretary of State when he resiled from his proposals on Jerusalem in a way that downgraded the status of the Palestinian neighborhoods and also replaced his offer of partition of the Old City with a special regime under Israeli sovereignty. That was Barak’s way of punishing Arafat for his stand, but it was also his attempt to cut his political losses and avoid increasing the stakes, given that, as it

Highlight [page 133]: turned out, all his previous proposals were leaked by the Palestinians to their press back home. 3He felt that Arafat’s tactics had dragged him into a politically prohibitive drift toward surrender which he needed to stop.

Highlight [page 134]: The Palestinians insisted that their state be described as having “limited armaments” not as “demilitarized.”

Highlight [page 136]: My advice to Indyk was made in the form of an improved proposal on Jerusalem which I handed to him on my own initiative in the hope that this could bring us closer to an endgame: full Palestinian sovereignty in the outer neighborhoods and “limited sovereignty” in the inner ones, a special regime for the Old City, and Palestinian “sovereign jurisdiction” or “sovereign custodianship” on the Haram al-Sharif. I gathered that Barak, who did not oppose the ideas of the State Department’s legal adviser, Jonathan Frankel, would reconsider his rejection of an adjective being added to Palestinian sovereignty in the upper esplanade of the Temple Mount, assuming, of course, that this made a deal. Clinton would eventually see Arafat to discuss these ideas. Arafat turned them down again.

14. Our Faintest Hour

Highlight [page 137]: 14 Our Faintest Hour

Highlight [page 137]: To Clinton’s amazement, Arafat told him that the Israelis should be thankful to him, the real owner of the holy city, for conceding to them both the Western Wall and the Jewish quarter, even though the Western Wall had the status of an Islamic trust. “I cannot give them one more square meter,” said the raʾīs. “Are you asking me to sell the Christian holy places, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Via

Highlight [page 138]: Dolorosa, as well as the Islamic holy places?” The man truly saw himself as a cross between Saladdin and Richard the Lionheart. With such delusions of grandeur, the only thing left for the exasperated Clinton to do was to bring down to earth his elusive interlocutor. He had no right to speak on behalf of the Pope, he told him. Nor did he deserve an encomium for his access of generosity with assets he did not own. “Do you think you should get a medal for saying they can have the Jewish quarter?” he asked acidly.

Highlight [page 140]: Erakat really believed that Arafat would agree to concede sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Erakat then engaged in what was always the response of my Arab interlocutors whenever I mentioned Jewish millennial roots in Jerusalem, particularly on Temple Mount. In his fanciful strategy of historical manipulation, Arafat would sometimes claim that the Jewish Temple Mount was actually in Nablus, or perhaps, he once said, in Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Our learned friend Erakat claimed that the whole story of the Temple was just a Jewish invention with no historical basis. Everyone knew, I said, the basic archaeological fact that in the course of history holy places, cities, and settlements were built in successive layers, one upon the other. Hence, just as the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in that location because the Temple was underneath, the original Jewish Temple was probably built on the ruins of a pagan holy site.

Highlight [page 140]: The president then proceeded to make practical proposals: • “Qualiﬁed sovereignty” for the Palestinians in all the Arab inner-city neighborhoods. • A division of sovereignty between Israel and the Palestinians in the Old City, two quarters to each side. • The Palestinians would be accorded custodial sovereignty over the Temple Mount. • All the outlying Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem would come under full Palestinian sovereignty.

Highlight [page 141]: As to Clinton’s “qualiﬁed sovereignty” for the Palestinians in the inner neighborhoods, Barak had agreed to two such neighborhoods, and earlier in the meeting I had taken the liberty of saying that extending the concept to the rest of the neighborhoods was a possibility as well. “Qualiﬁed sovereignty” for the Palestinians for the inner neighborhoods and “custodial sovereignty” for the Temple Mount were proposals I had made earlier to Martin Indyk, and Clinton went with these to Arafat only to be rebuffed by him. 4Though they were not easy to digest, I had no doubt whatsoever that Barak would not turn these ideas down if Arafat accepted them as the ultimate breakthrough, or even as a basis for further talks.

Highlight [page 141]: Yet, when the President asked me to address his proposal, I told him that that was the time for the Palestinians to be the ﬁrst to answer. I had no right to maneuver Barak into yet another situation where he accepted a proposal, as he did with his idea of splitting the Old City, only to be rebuffed by Arafat and be exposed back home to a political lynching, while Arafat pocketed yet another Israeli move without this leading to an agreement

Highlight [page 144]: There was no agreement at Camp David because of these two fundamental issues, refugees and Jerusalem. Arafat could not move because he had entrenched himself in an uncompromising fundamentalist ethos. At times, it looked as if we were negotiating with an imam or mufti possessed by credal dogmas rather than the leader of an essentially secular national movement. “It’s hopeless,” said Dennis Ross, throwing up his hands to signify defeat. “Arafat is simply unable to make a decision on Jerusalem.” Clinton would later share with Barak his own interpretation of the Palestinian predicament: “Arafat lives in a virtual world, not in the real world where we are all forced to explore alternatives and take decisions, With the Palestinians this works differently because they had been living for so many years with a heavy sense of victimhood.”

Highlight [page 146]: Barak had been the one pushing for the summit, and it was he who now stood up to bear his responsibility with composure. “I carry the ultimate responsibility for the outcome of this summit, and for the fact that we still do not have an agreement and will have to continue to work to achieve it,” he said, leaving a hopeful opening for the future. “Arafat’s positions on the issue of Jerusalem prevented an agreement,” he concluded. Jerusalem was clearly a major hurdle, but it also turned out to be a politically convenient tree to hang all sins and blunders on, theirs and ours.

15. Arafat: “Barak Has Gone beyond My Partner Rabin”

Highlight [page 147]: 15 Arafat: “Barak Has Gone beyond My Partner Rabin”

Highlight [page 147]: The lessons of Camp David were complex, ﬁlled with inconsistencies. Our ofﬁcial post-summit discourse was untrue, for the Palestinians did make concessions. But the discourse of pundits and political opponents who denigrated Barak was likewise unfair. Arafat himself would later demythologize his supposed belief in Rabin as a peacemaker. At Camp David, he conﬁded to Dennis Ross that Barak had gone “beyond my partner Rabin.” 3A man of powerful convictions and reasoned statements, Barak had, however, no exceptional communication skills to help him prevail in the upcoming political battle, where he had to defend his concessions against the hawkish right without losing the left that blamed him for not going far enough.

Highlight [page 148]: He returned empty-handed, with no state and no promise of a life of dignity for his people; yet they saw him as the sagacious leader who had faced up to an Israeli-American conspiracy and prevailed.

Highlight [page 149]: Indefatigable and in full control of every nuance of the entire process, Gilead Sher recorded thirty-eight negotiating sessions between the parties from the end of the summit to the start of the Intifada. At the beginning, the Palestinians were uneasy and wanted to ﬁnd a way out of the impasse. Muhammad Rashid went so far as to say that “when the Arabs understand what was offered to Arafat at Camp David, they will not be able to understand how we could reject it.” Nabil Amr, a future minister of information who was to become one of the most articulate voices in opposing Arafat’s recalcitrant approach to peace, said the Palestinians “had achieved a great deal at Camp David.” Abu Ala agreed with Saeb Erakat’s view that “at Camp David 80 percent of the problems had been resolved.”

Highlight [page 149]: Arafat was in a real quandary. On the one hand, he wanted the peace talks to continue. At the same time, his acolytes were busy building his image as a modern-day Saladdin, a savior of all that was sacred to the nation of Islam. Sometimes he would pretend to be

Highlight [page 150]: ﬂexible; sometimes he would cling to a rigidly archaic fundamentalist position that Israel could never accept. Eventually he found himself stuck in a hopeless situation from which the only escape he could ﬁnd was to surf into the violence of the Intifada that erupted at the end of September 2000. Arafat’s embrace of armed resistance was also the result of the rough time he had during his tour of world capitals after Camp David. He had expected that Arab leaders would close ranks around him and tie his hands by subscribing to his red lines. He wanted a pan-Muslim summit that would arm him with a letter to Clinton stating that the Arab world would not allow him to concede the holy places. He got no such letter. The Arab leaders opted for staying on the sidelines, pleasing everyone by pleasing none. Arafat was anxious to gain the seal of approval for his maximalist positions from the guardians of anti-Zionist orthodoxy in Damascus, but Syria did not even agree to receive him.

Highlight [page 154]: The Palestinians’ behavior looked like an attempt to exploit our political distress. Our political time was clearly running out. We and the Palestinians were operating on the basis of two different timetables. Arafat did not need to make a deal until he was satisﬁed he had obtained everything he possibly could. Our political calendar was far shorter. We were also working under the threat of a possible Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence, which Barak deﬁned as the ultimate attempt by Arafat to have a state while avoiding the price. If we needed some comfort, we got it, for a change, from the international community.

Pens #### 16. Reaping the Fruits of Success
Highlight [page 155]: 16 Reaping the Fruits of Success

Highlight [page 161]: But, before the Second Intifada opened to us the gates of hell, the UN Millennium General Assembly would still allow us, for a very brief span of time, to continue savoring the ﬂavor of international support. We would even move from it into a last attempt, sadly inconclusive, to break the deadlock in the negotiations just before the lights were turned off on us.

17. Moments of Grace on the Precipice’s Edge

Highlight [page 162]: 17 Moments of Grace on the Precipice’s Edge

Highlight [page 164]: While we were in New York, Gilead Sher and I had a series of meetings with the American peace team to discuss a “package” which the president could present to the parties as a nonnegotiable set of principles for a peace agreement. Barak was now on the same wavelength as us; he also ﬁnally wanted an American peace outline.

Highlight [page 165]: And so, on September 12, we got from Dennis Ross yet another example of American misreading of Palestinian positions. He told us that the Palestinians were willing to accept a package of ideas that would make a peace deal a fair probability: on territory, a 7 percent annexation in exchange for only a 2 percent land swap; on security, three early warning stations, allowing Israeli Air Force ﬂights in Palestinian airspace, and designated areas of Israeli Defense Forces emergency deployment within the Palestinian state. They would not agree, however, to any Israeli forces being stationed in the Jordan Valley, but would accept an international force. On refugees, the Palestinians could “live without” the right of return, provided that refugees living in Lebanon were given preferential treatment in the family reunion program. They would also accept, according to Dennis Ross’s report, “qualiﬁed sovereignty” in the inner Arab districts of Jerusalem. On the crucial Temple Mount question, things remained difﬁcult. Arafat’s idea, which neither the Americans nor we could accept, was that sovereignty on the site be accorded to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Were we then to have Iran, Malaysia, and Libya sharing sovereignty in the heart of Jerusalem?

Highlight [page 167]: In his house, Barak had a truly transformative experience; he warmed up to Arafat and held out an olive branch to him. Of all the encounters between them that I had attended, this was the most pleasant and relaxed. The American-Jewish entrepreneur, Danny Abram, who orchestrated the whole occasion, moved happily among the guests like the best man at a wedding. In the middle of the dinner, a telephone call came through from President Clinton. Everything was sweetness and light. “I will be Arafat’s partner no less than Rabin was,” Barak told the president, in what I could only describe as an impressive character transformation. Barak and the raʾīs promised each other that the round of talks we were about to open in Washington would be decisive. “My delegation has a full mandate from me,” said Arafat.

Highlight [page 168]: We left for home on the morning of September 29, right into the start of the Second Intifada. The leader of the opposition, Ariel Sharon, planned to visit the Temple Mount in deﬁance not of Arafat or the Palestinians, but of the Barak government, which, he said, was conceding “the holiest of holies.” The visit was planned for Thursday, September 28, while I was still in the United States. On Wednesday, September 27, when I learned about Sharon’s plans, I telephoned Jibril Rajoub, Arafat’s security adviser. He assured me that so long as Sharon did not venture into the area of the mosques, there would be no disturbances, and events could be kept under control. Sharon never stepped into any of the mosques. Yet, that same night, an intelligent report offered evidence of a Palestinian plan to use Sharon’s visit as a trigger for violence after Friday’s prayers. Both Danny Yatom and I called Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross to contact Arafat and assure him that Sharon’s move was not aimed in any way against the Palestinians. Dennis told me later that Arafat had promised the Secretary of State “to do all he could” to prevent a violent reaction. In the event, he did not lift a ﬁnger to prevent the disturbances.

Part II. A Savage War for Peace

18. “With Our Soul and Blood We’ll Redeem Palestine”

Highlight [page 170]: 18 “With Our Soul and Blood We’ll Redeem Palestine”

Highlight [page 170]: as Friday prayers in the mosques ended, upheaval came.

Highlight [page 170]: A moment or two later his deputy, a hotheaded and impulsive ofﬁcer, ordered the police to storm the Mount. His aim was to push the rioters beyond stone-throwing range of the wall. But, his hasty decision ended with the deaths of seven of the rioters.

Highlight [page 172]: Freih Abu Madin, the Palestinian Minister of Justice, claimed that the riots of Nakba Day in May had merely been a “dress rehearsal … and if the Palestinians didn’t get their rights, South Lebanon would be small fry compared to what would happen in Palestine.” “Israel forgets,” he said, “that her security is in the Palestinians’ hands … It is not they who control us; we are those who control Israeli security, and we are willing to pay a high price for the defense of the fatherland.”

Highlight [page 173]: Arguably, the Intifada was also deeply rooted within the growing abyss between Palestinian society and its political leaders, whose guilt was compounded by their corruption and abuse of power.

Highlight [page 174]: The Intifada was, then, also an explosion of rage against the PLO’s old guard, who had been responsible for the deceits of the peace process. As such, the Intifada presented Arafat with a way to resolve what became a crucial challenge for the internal cohesion of the Palestinian national movement. He had to manage the built-in tension between his two conﬂicting positions as the head of an institutionalized entity, the corrupt and unpopular Palestinian Authority, and the supreme commander of a presumably immaculate revolutionary national movement. The Intifada allowed him to heal the Palestinian Authority’s rift with the Palestinian public and with the revolutionary armed groups which saw the conservative PA as a tool of Israel’s occupation. It became his way to reconcile the PA and its institutions, which based their legitimacy (and their claim to the massive amounts of donors’ money) on the peace process, with the revolutionary legitimacy of the militias, which, unlike the PA, were not a product of the viliﬁed peace process and would not disappear if the process evaporated. As head of the PA and leader of the PLO and of Fatah, Arafat personiﬁed all the sources of legitimacy and authority. But these had been eroding constantly. The weakening of the PA weakened Arafat as a national symbol, and by the time he arrived at Camp David, he was left with a rather slim majority of public approval. An autocrat with no institutional legitimacy, Arafat was forced to embrace the Intifada to recover his revolutionary legitimacy.

Highlight [page 175]: In truth, the Palestinian armed groups, which together with the police were at least twice as large as permitted by the Oslo Accords, did not really need Arafat’s explicit instructions in order to go to war.

Highlight [page 175]: The IDF high command was not composed of sisters of mercy, either. 7They were willing accomplices in the task of fanning the embers of violence into large ﬂames that would consume us all. Once intercepted by Israeli intelligence, all these Palestinian signals led, as Brigadier General Zvi Fogel, the deputy chief of the IDF’s Southern Command, later recalled, to disproportionately robust war preparations. A belligerent, trigger-happy IDF was eager to “teach the Palestinians a lesson they should not forget.” It was, General Fogel assumed, as if the trauma of the pullout from Lebanon could only be healed by another war.

Highlight [page 175]: The Intifada actually started not after, but before Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. As Abu Ala himself admitted, the visit lasted for only half an hour and, as agreed with the Palestinian security chief, Jibril Rajoub, Sharon refrained from entering the colonnade fronting the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Highlight [page 176]: But a day earlier, an Israeli patrol escorting a group of settlers in the Gaza Strip was attacked by a Palestinian squad, which left one Israeli soldier dead and others wounded. The perpetrator was no other than Jihad al- Amarin, the man whose return to Gaza after the Oslo Accords Rabin had vetoed, but Arafat, in a typical breach of trust with his partner in “the peace of the braves,” as he liked to boast, smuggled him in his car when he ﬁrst arrived in Gaza in 1994. Dahlan’s refusal to arrest him for the attack on the Israeli patrol was now interpreted by the Israelis as one more signal of the inevitable conﬂagration.

Highlight [page 176]: Barak allowed the taking of odious measures that had never been taken before, such as air bombardments, serial targeted killings, and disproportionate ﬁrepower, which caused unnecessary civilian losses.

Highlight [page 177]: The IDF wrongly believed that pressure on the civilian population would force the political leadership to restrain and control the militias. The opposite actually happened.

Highlight [page 178]: The claim that Arafat saw Israel as a temporary phenomenon and most self-convincingly questioned her claim to any historical or religious roots in the sacred Islamic land of Palestine is difﬁcult to challenge. But the attempt by Israel’s Military Intelligence to apply to Arafat’s behavior a modern military logic based on planning and hierarchical chains of command was fundamentally ﬂawed. If he gave instructions, it was through his silence and noninterference, and if he happened to call for restraint, his militias took it as Arafat’s lip service to international pressure and did not abide by his call.

Highlight [page 180]: The trauma of the First Intifada, a civic, essentially non-violent uprising that the IDF could not win, made the militarization of the Second Intifada an interest of the high command. A war was winnable; a civilian uprising was not.

Highlight [page 181]: The Intifada, wrote Abu Ala, “offered an opportunity to rid the Palestinian cause of the negative image it had acquired and to break out of the diplomatic isolation that Ehud Barak’s government had tried to impose on us after Camp David.”

Highlight [page 181]: Typically, in the ﬁrst days of the Intifada, instead of staying put, Arafat went to two unimportant events abroad—a public demonstration in Tunisia and a seminar in Mallorca, Spain. By absenting himself, he was both escaping direct responsibility and giving the green light for the Intifada to proceed. He believed that the international and pan-Arab support produced by the Intifada would weaken American inﬂuence in the negotiations and enable him to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States, which was to him now, in the dying days of the Clinton administration, a paper tiger he could safely challenge.

Highlight [page 182]: The prestigious Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki concurred. To him, Arafat “orchestrated and led” the Intifada “in order to gain popularity and legitimacy.” These thunderous demonstrations of support also “translated into material and ﬁnancial support as governments and peoples competed to offer assistance to the new Palestinian Intifada.” 18They all pointed the ﬁnger at Israel and gave a tailwind to Arafat’s strategy of turning Palestinian suffering into a negotiating weapon. Arafat wanted to bring home to the Americans the message that if they chose not to end their “blind support” of Israel, it was within his power to drag the Middle East into a whirlpool of violence that would go beyond the borders of the region itself. Wholly intoxicated by the effects of his war with Israel, Arafat ran amok to his own and his nation’s inexorable perdition.

Highlight [page 183]: n effect, the Intifada was an attempt to twist Israel’s arm without there being a clear objective, the achievement of which would mean the end of the ﬁghting. All that the Intifada achieved was to stir up ﬁerce popular passions and raise the embattled nation’s expectations sky high, which made it all the more difﬁcult to reach a reasonable compromise. That much was admitted by Abu Ala. 20At no time either before or after the outbreak of the Intifada did the Palestinian leadership manage to expound realistic, conceivably attainable targets that might justify the continued spilling of blood.

Highlight [page 183]: The Intifada weakened the Palestinian case in an additional sense. It underlay their leadership’s inability to strike a dialogue with the Israeli public. For the mass of Israelis had come to lose faith in the

Highlight [page 184]: Palestinians’ ability to stop the violence even if their nebulous goals were to be achieved. Poll after poll would show from then on that only a meager percentage of Israelis still believed that a signed peace agreement would mean the end of conﬂict. How could anyone in the Palestinian leadership have thought that the violence could do anything but cement a sharp swing to the right in Israel, a swing so radical and traumatic that it persists to this very day?

Highlight [page 184]: The purposeless descent into bloodshed and destruction made of the Intifada a second Nakba, one that destroyed the spinal cord of Palestinian society and doomed who knows for how long the Palestinians’ chances of redemption.

19 Diplomacy under Fire

Highlight [page 185]: 19 Diplomacy under Fire

Highlight [page 190]: The shocking pictures of the desecration of Joseph’s Tomb and the murder at the tomb of the Israeli soldier Madhat Yusef marked a turning point. Our claims were at last beginning to be heard. The UK foreign minister, Robin Cook, wanted to know, “What is Arafat trying to gain?” I answered by repeating what I had tried to explain to everyone in lengthy, tiring conversations: he was worried about the peace package President Clinton was preparing, and he wanted to destroy it before it was born lest it expose him yet again as a peace refusenik in the eyes of the international community.

Highlight [page 190]: I made it clear to all that if the violence did not stop, we could do nothing to prevent the rise of a right-wing government that would disengage altogether from the peace process. The sad fundamental fact of Israeli politics, I explained, was that political survival required not engaging in peace talks. These incidents further emboldened the Israeli right, for they ate away at the already dwindling stores of our peace policy’s legitimacy. Reaching peace agreements and pulling out from occupied lands, which was now the right-wing narrative, was only the prelude to further onslaughts on Israel. This was to be the same discourse that, following the recurrent wars with Hamas after Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, 3would sustain Netanyahu’s resistance to any peace move in the future. Hezbollah’s kidnappings and the atrocious Ramallah lynching shifted the Israeli public from the belief that peace was possible into the mindset of a tribal feud of bloody retribution, a religion-based war of murder, blood, and vengeance.

20 Trapped in No-Win Conditions

Highlight [page 192]: 20 Trapped in No-Win Conditions

Highlight [page 194]: His own aides, Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan told CIA Chief George Tenet that Arafat would not start fulﬁlling his obligations before the Arab summit that was to be held ﬁve days later. He needed to arrive there as the leader of a victimized people in the middle of a cruel war with a merciless occupying force. Only thus he would also be able to stir the passions of the Arab leaders and maintain the pro-Palestinian hysteria in the Arab streets.

21. Neither Inspiring nor Intimidating

Highlight [page 199]: 21 Neither Inspiring nor Intimidating

Highlight [page 200]: Arguably, it made tactical sense for the Americans to distance themselves from Israel ahead of the presentation of an even-handed peace plan. If only it changed Arafat’s response, but it would not. What it did was to weaken even further the domestic political standing of Barak’s government precisely when it was called upon to accept the most divisive peace plan ever presented to an Israeli government. The United States also refused to veto a UN Security Council vote censuring Israel’s use of force.

Highlight [page 201]: Our main concern remained, however, that the way the United States distanced herself from Israel was interpreted by the Palestinians as a strategic blow that would force a weakened and abandoned Israel to assume that the Intifada was a Palestinian and all-Arab victory for which Israel would have to pay with more concessions. This was not good news for America either, for it exposed her as a panicking power desperately shifting her policies to please Arab autocracies. The United States itself thus raised the expectations of the Palestinians to such heights that, however evenhanded her future peace plan might be, it would fail to convince them. If Europe inspired but did not intimidate, the United States in the dying days of the Clinton administration neither inspired nor intimidated.

Highlight [page 206]: Arafat slipped his trembling hand into his shirt pocket and took out a faded and tattered article from the English edition of the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, in which it said that over 50 percent of the immigrants coming to Israel from the former Soviet Union were not Jewish. “Them you accept,” he said, “but the Palestinians you don’t accept. What is the difference?” Many of them had Jewish roots that went beyond the narrow deﬁnition of the rabbis, I replied. They were also willing to serve the idea underlying the national Zionist project. “Do you expect that this will be the case with the refugees from Lebanon? They should be Palestinian patriots, not citizens in a predominantly Jewish state.” I also discussed with him the Temple Mount imbroglio. I assured him that we were conscious of his rights in relation to the site, and that we were seeking to maintain “our religious and historical link to this holy place, but we have no intention of doing anything of substance such as changing the status quo, building or digging.” I also explained to him in detail the distinction we made between “Jewish Jerusalem” and “Arab Jerusalem” in contrast to his demand that the city be divided between east and west along pre-1967 lines.

22. “Take It or Leave It”: The Clinton Peace Parameters

Highlight [page 208]: 22 “Take It or Leave It”: The Clinton Peace Parameters

Highlight [page 209]: Secretary of State Designate, Colin Powell, told me over the telephone that the new administration would honor any agreement we might reach as well as any commitment made by the Clinton team on behalf of the United States. But if we did not reach an agreement, “It won’t be one of our top priorities to push the matter.” I had heard much the same thing from the National Security Adviser Designate, Condoleezza Rice, during a dinner I hosted in her honor in Tel Aviv several weeks before the US elections.

Highlight [page 210]: Lately he had been using the need to have our “link,” not sovereignty, to the Mount recognized. In mid-August, he had suggested to Ambassador Indyk that he was willing to cede sovereignty on the Temple Mount to God provided Arafat would do the same. 1In fact, at Camp David, Barak did not rule out shared Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty on Temple Mount. 2I was a politician, not a civil servant. When one has power, and I had some, one cannot sit on the sidelines or simply recite the positions of one’s superiors. I had the obligation to push negotiations forward with new proposals or by a ﬂexible interpretation of the prime minister’s instructions. A possible reason he never reprimanded me was that the Palestinians did the job for him; anyway, they rejected my proposition, about which Amnon Abramovich, one of Israel’s most respected journalists, said that “had the Palestinians accepted Ben-Ami’s proposal, he would have to be protected [against Jewish attackers] by a team of bodyguards for the rest of his life.” Yisrael Hasson, a member of our team, later said that if he had had a gun, he would have drawn it to discipline me.

Highlight [page 212]: Our effective sovereignty over the Temple Mount had been limited anyway; it always hinged on the use of force, which was liable to ignite the entire region. For many years, we had been hostage to every Muslim stone thrower on the Mount. Sovereignty involves responsibility and requires judgment. Palestinian sovereignty, I believed, would ensure a more orderly regime than one based on the fear of Israeli security forces. Nor was rebuilding the Temple ever a Zionist vision; Ben-Gurion had declared independence with a divided Jerusalem and without even having access to the Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall. In proposing a solution to this pivotal issue I felt that I was putting the Palestinians to the ultimate test. Negotiating with the Palestinians was quite unlike anything we had ever experienced in our peace talks with Egypt and Syria, where no such awesome intangible categories were at stake. The question that needed to be answered here and now was whether, within the framework of a settlement, the Palestinians would be willing to recognize that our return to the land was not just a colonial conquest, but a return to age-old roots? Our Palestinian interlocutors failed the test. Their vapid reaction was that they would not admit that the reason for not conducting excavations was that the Mount contained a Jewish holy

Highlight [page 213]: site. They were willing to sacriﬁce the national dream of a sovereign state and Palestinian/Muslim sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and not accept the Jewish “link” to the Mount, namely, the Jewish ancestral roots in Eretz Yisrael.

Highlight [page 214]: This isn’t an American proposal,” Clinton stressed. “These are ideas which, if you reject them, will not be there in the future. They go with me when I leave ofﬁce.”

Highlight [page 214]: These were Clinton’s parameters for a Palestinian-Israeli peace.7 Territory: The Palestinian state would comprise the entire area of the Gaza Strip and between 94 and 96 percent of the West Bank. In other words, Israel would annex between 4 and 6 percent for the purpose of accommodating the settlement blocs. In exchange, Israel would hand over to the Palestinians between 1 and 3 percent of its sovereign territory; it would also provide them with a safe passage which, though under Israeli sovereignty, would be for Palestinian “permanent and unhindered usage.” It should be possible to adjust the ﬁgures, if these percentages did not satisfy the parties’ needs, by mutual leasing of land. Clinton repeated the principle of including “80 percent of the settlers” in blocs and the need to minimize the number of Palestinians who would remain “trapped” inside these blocs. Security: The key lay in the presence of an international force along the Jordan Valley and Israel’s phased withdrawal taking place

Highlight [page 215]: within thirty-six months. For another three years there would be a reduced Israeli presence in speciﬁed locations. Three Israeli early warning stations, with a Palestinian liaison presence, would remain in the Palestinian state, an arrangement that could be revised by mutual consent. Zones would be agreed within the territory of the Palestinian state for the deployment of IDF forces in the event of an emergency, which was deﬁned as “an imminent and demonstrable threat to Israel’s security.” And special arrangements would be made for the Israeli Air Force to use Palestinian airspace for operational purposes. The Palestinian state would be deﬁned as “nonmilitarized” rather than “demilitarized.” Jerusalem: The city would be divided into two capitals along the principle that what was Jewish would be Israeli and what was Arab would be Palestinian. The same principle would apply to the Old City. As for the Temple Mount, the status quo had to be formalized to give the Palestinians de facto control, while respecting Israel’s and the Jewish people’s needs and links to the site. These principles could be implemented by means of one of the following arrangements: (a) Palestinian sovereignty over the Mount and Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall and the holy of holies to which it is connected; (b) Palestinian sovereignty over the Mount and Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall, with shared functional sovereignty over the issue of excavation under the mountain or behind the wall. Refugees: Clinton squared the circle to the best of his ability. Israel would acknowledge the moral suffering and material damage caused to the Palestinian people. A proportion of the refugees would go to the Palestinian state, others would go to third countries, whilst still others would go to the territories which the Palestinian state would receive from Israel within the framework of territorial swaps. Many would remain in the current host countries. “There will be no speciﬁc right of return to Israel,” but the Palestinians could claim that in going back to the Palestinian state they were “returning.” Certainly that would be so when they “returned” to territory handed over to them by Israel as territorial swaps. The refugees would, in Clinton’s terms, be returning “to historic Palestine.” A certain number would be granted entry to Israel “consistent with Israel’s sovereign decision.” Any

Highlight [page 216]: solution, Clinton summed up, would be subject to the principle of “two states for two peoples.” The agreement would be signed on the basis that it meant the “end of the conﬂict and an end to all claims.”

Highlight [page 216]: It had taken him a long time, but Clinton had learned to use the tactics that President Carter had used to achieve a breakthrough at Camp David.

Highlight [page 216]: One surprising analogy between Clinton’s plan and a peace plan on Palestine that the Carter State Department had prepared as early as 1977 was that both called for Israeli control of a 15-kilometer strip along the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, a Gush Etzion and Jerusalem bloc of settlements, and even Israeli surveillance stations on high points over the Jordan Valley. We did not invent the wheel if only because the precariousness of the security conditions in the area and its geostrategic map are built-in, compelling structural realities. Also the solution to the refugees was similar: compensation, resettlement in the West Bank and Jordan, and only token repatriation to Israel. The stipulation that Jerusalem would not be divided physically, but its Jewish neighborhoods would be under Israeli control and the Arab areas left to the Palestinians, is reminiscent of Clinton’s division of the city along ethnic lines. 8Alas, a crucial difference between the two situations was not only that Clinton’s plan was an all-encompassing addressing of each and every core problem pertaining to the conﬂict, but that it was also the result of the longest and most arduous negotiations ever to have been conducted on the question of Palestine.

Highlight [page 216]: The sad reality was that Carter’s hyper peace activity, mainly focused anyway on the Israel-Egypt conﬂict, occurred during the ﬁrst half of his term in ofﬁce,

Highlight [page 217]: whereas by the time Clinton produced his parameters, he was already a lame duck. His power had withered.

23. “A Crime against the Palestinian People”

Highlight [page 218]: 23 “A Crime against the Palestinian People”

Highlight [page 218]: Sher and I ﬂew to an army base in the north to brief our inner Cabinet. This is the deal; it was now or never, we said. Everyone in the room, without exception, supported the parameters. Barak was unequivocal: “The alternative to this agreement is tragedy. If and when a peace agreement is signed the issues that are now causing us such difﬁculties will be swept away by the forward march toward peace.”

Highlight [page 218]: entire government, with two abstentions, approved the plan. Israel had now accepted a clear-cut partition of Jerusalem, and a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip. The most outspoken opponent, though, was Chief of General Staff Mofaz, whom Barak challenged caustically for assuming that Israel could not exist “unless it controls the Palestinian people.” Encouragingly, the Head of Mossad, Efraim Halevy, was supportive, but, he also passed me a note, wrong in its prediction, but right in its assessment of how unsettling for the Palestinians this entire peace adventure was: Within a year of the signing of the agreement, the violence in the Palestinian camp will reach peak levels, and there is a risk that Arafat will be assassinated by a Palestinian. What will happen then will pale in comparison with the settling of accounts that took place in 1936–39.

Highlight [page 219]: Palestinians went full tilt

Highlight [page 220]: against Clinton’s ideas. They were “worse than some of Israel’s past proposals” was the general tone.

Highlight [page 220]: Dennis Ross gave me similar assurances that day: “We won’t let them off the hook. We are being tough … the President is ﬁrm; he won’t yield. The Palestinians are very edgy; they’re asking for clariﬁcations and meetings, and we’re turning them down.”

Highlight [page 220]: But, the Americans were not as tough as they said. In telephone conversations I had with Sandy and Dennis on December 31, they already sounded more hesitant and suggested that Clinton might after all meet Arafat “to clarify certain matters,” without a prior Palestinian commitment to saying yes. Jordan’s King Abdullah would later conﬁde to Danny Yatom that if he had not stepped in at that point and put his full weight behind it, Arafat wouldn’t have done anything at all, for the Chairman was in no hurry. During that same meeting in Amman, Foreign Minister el-Khatib said that Arafat believed the deadline for an agreement was not the end of Clinton’s term on January 20, but rather the Israeli elections on February 6.

Highlight [page 221]: It was revealing that Arafat should have mentioned “the return of refugees to their homes and villages,” an assertion he would repeat a year later in a New York Times op-ed. 2He also used as a reference the return of refugees in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Timor Leste, all of them, however, cases which, contrary to the conditions in the IsraelPalestine situation, were subject to the accepted norm that return happened only when the returnees belonged to the majority ethnic group in the country they wanted to go back to. Arafat’s position on a return, as I would ﬁnd out some years later, when Al Jazeera invited me to Doha for a discussion of the Palestine Papers, an archive of leaked memos and other material pertaining to the peace negotiations, was a fundamental Palestinian standpoint. 3They made a compromise over the territory, they argued, but the sacred right of return was inalienable; it was the very “heart” of the conﬂict and the Palestinian cause. By their insistence on the right of return, they were actually, they said, doing a favor to Israel. For this would help the Jews “to get rid of the racist Zionism.”

Highlight [page 222]: The Palestinian establishment declared war on Clinton’s peace principles. A coalition of resistance organizations consisting of Fatah, the Tanzim, and Hamas known as the “Palestinian National and Islamic Forces,” announced that any solution that did not guarantee the right of return would be “invalid and unacceptable.”

Highlight [page 222]: Clinton would later say Arafat was the reason for “me having been such a colossal failure.” Even Jacques Chirac was on record that Arafat’s obsession to improve every “ﬁnal” proposal presented to him was responsible in large measure for the catastrophe that has engulfed the peoples of the region. And at a dinner party I attended in the Club of Madrid together with Bill Clinton in 2003, none other than Egypt’s then Arab League General Secretary Amr Moussa said that the opportunity missed by Arafat was not at Camp David, but in his refusal to accept the Clinton plan.

Highlight [page 223]: Eventually, the Americans succumbed to Arafat’s attrition tactics. He wanted to meet Clinton on January 2, just sixteen days before the president left ofﬁce, and after a gathering in Cairo of the Arab Foreign Ministers’ Monitoring Committee. Such a sequence would allow him to arrive in Washington in what was always his preferred bargaining position, presumably handcuffed by the support of the Arab family. With time running out, Clinton demanded that Arafat come immediately. This put the Chairman in a difﬁcult position. He needed yet another excuse. Dahaniya Airport in Gaza, he blurted out, had been closed by the Israelis. He knew that, of all the hurdles, the closure of the airport was the easiest to deal with.

Highlight [page 225]: And even though Arafat’s reservations, involving fundamental issues such as the right of return, the Temple Mount, and territorial percentages, all largely outside the parameters, amounted to a big no—Dennis Ross deﬁned them as “deal-killers”—he still could claim that we were on equal footing in that we too had our own reservations, though they were mostly inside the parameters. In our defense I should say that Barak’s reservations were for all practical purposes eventually dropped and would not prevent us from defending the letter and spirit of the parameters when we went a few weeks later for a last-ditch attempt to save the peace in Taba. Taba did not produce an agreement precisely because we wanted to translate the parameters into a peace treaty and the Palestinians addressed them as a straitjacket they refused to work with.

Highlight [page 225]: Arafat’s Washington trip was a typical exercise in diplomatic deceit, which he applied to his Arab allies as well. The Saudi Ambassador to the US, Bandar bin Sultan, had gone to Andrews Airforce Base to welcome Arafat, and both were later joined at the Ritz Carlton Hotel by the Egyptian ambassador, Nabil Fahmy. The two envoys tried to persuade Arafat to accept the parameters, telling him that they satisﬁed his own as well as basic Arab demands. Two years later, Ambassador bin Sultan gave his own account of their encounter with Arafat before and after his meeting with the president. 5Bin Sultan rhetorically asked the raʾīs:

Highlight [page 226]: How much longer are we going to continue on the same path that we have taken since 1948? Whenever a proposal is put on the table we say no. Sometime later we say yes. But by the time we have said yes, the proposal is no longer on the table. We then are forced to negotiate over a lesser offer. Isn’t it high time we said yes?

Highlight [page 226]: Arafat assured the two ambassadors that he would accept the parameters if Saudi Arabia and Egypt supported him. Bin Sultan and Fahmy promptly promised to do so. Their understanding was that Arafat would get back to them immediately after his meeting with Clinton and that the three of them would then call President Mubarak and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Arafat was a born survivor; the alley cat in him always defeated his sudden accesses of statesmanship. After his meeting with Clinton, he did everything he could to avoid the two ambassadors. They chased him for an hour, and when they ﬁnally caught up with him at the hotel, he told them a barefaced lie. “It was an excellent meeting,” he said. Yet from the expressions on the faces of the Chairman’s aides, Ambassador bin Sultan knew he had been lied to. In Arafat’s presence, he called the White House so as to hear from Sandy Berger that what he had been told was indeed a lie. Berger said that Arafat had rejected Clinton’s pleas and was admonished by the president that “The clock is ticking fast,” and that he was about to miss the best, perhaps the only chance of redemption his people would ever have. “I hope you will sremember,” bin Sultan told Arafat, “that if we miss this opportunity, it won’t be a tragedy; it will be a crime” against both the Palestinian people and the Arab nation. What it certainly was was a Palestinian mistake of historically unforgivable proportions.

Highlight [page 226]: Immediately after Arafat’s departure from Washington, Clinton was still ready to engage in an almost suicidal political exercise. Two weeks before he left the White House, he was willing to come to the region to clinch a ﬁnal agreement, provided the parties managed to bridge some of their key differences in a quick round of talks involving Arafat and his partner in the Nobel Peace Prize, Shimon Peres. Barak immediately embraced the idea. Arafat said he was too busy.

Pens #### 24. Barak in a Cage of Doves
Highlight [page 228]: 24 Barak in a Cage of Doves

Highlight [page 231]: We told Erakat that because these were not just “reservations,” but an entirely new set of parameters, a dynamic was likely to be created in which we too would be free to make substantive changes to the parameters, which would return us both to square one.

Highlight [page 231]: The Palestinians had gone along with Clinton until they had got all the concessions they could, and now they wanted yet another round of negotiations to substantively and radically change the deal in their favor. We decided it would be better to break the meeting at this stage, but before we left Erez, I telephoned Arafat. “Why don’t you say clearly that you are rejecting the parameters?” I asked him. He mumbled his standard, tepid platitudes, such as “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” which, coming from him, meant that whoever he was

Highlight [page 232]: talking to must provide both the will and the way. And when I asked him what sense it made to tell Clinton he intended to reach an agreement before the end of his presidency, he uttered a piece of typical Arafatian nonsense: “We will get there even before that.”

Highlight [page 234]: He also complained of the criticism being leveled for the concessions he had made, and oddly mentioned Edward Said’s criticism in the American press.

Highlight [page 236]: The Palestinians had their own reasons for pursuing the negotiations. In Arafat’s inner circle, voices could be heard expressing the fear that those “terror gangs,” the militias, could bring about the disintegration of the Palestinian Authority. Arafat had manipulated the Intifada as a weapon for his own use, and it was now proving a double-edged sword.

25. Taba: “The Boss Doesn’t Want an Agreement”

Highlight [page 240]: Map 2 Taba, 2001, Ben-Ami’s Initial Proposal

Highlight [page 242]: The Palestinian plan entailed the displacement of around 140,000 West Bank settlers, more than three times the number contemplated by the Clinton plan.

Highlight [page 243]: But it was clear that the Palestinians had made a substantively constructive move. Arguably, the territorial chapter with its promising dynamic looked solvable if only a similar dynamic had existed in the Jerusalem and refugees’ questions.

Highlight [page 245]: Map 3 Taba, 2001, Palestinian Proposal

Highlight [page 245]: They also discussed numbers of returnees, with Beilin offering 40,000. Shaath said that Arafat was interested in the return of 300,000 refugees, essentially the entire Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon, whom Arafat always referred to as “my brothers and beloved refugees of Lebanon.”

Highlight [page 247]: No wonder that shortly before taking ofﬁce, George W. Bush asked the Saudi Ambassador to Washington, Bandar bin Sultan: “Explain

Highlight [page 248]: one thing to me. How is it that this guy [Arafat] doesn’t close a deal with two desperate people [Clinton and Barak]?” 3Taba failed also because of the Palestinians’ belief that with Bush they would get a better deal. A born-again Christian, and one of the best friends Israel ever had in the White House, Bush was wrongly perceived by the Palestinians as worth placing their faith in, as Abu Ala would later admit.4

Highlight [page 248]: Our efforts were drowning in a sea of tears and blood. Yet another opportunity was missed. Who could tell when they and we would have another like it? A wretched people with a colossally tragic fate, they were dragging us into the abyss with them. But our plight was also the result of our own sins: the sins of arrogance and occupation, the folly of settlements and of ignoring the tragedy for so long that the way out of the imbroglio had become beyond human capability. What was shocking to me, however, was that there was no sadness in the Palestinian negotiators’ faces, no sorrow over a lost opportunity. The refugees’ right of return was a historical impossibility. Why did they themselves not encourage refugees to live in the Palestinian state? They even rejected the idea of settling hundreds of thousand refugees in areas received from us as part of the swap. This, they said, would prevent the refugees from choosing where they wanted to settle within the State of Israel. I asked myself, what kind of national movement dreams of establishing a state only in order to settle its exiles in a neighboring country? Why on earth were they willing to scatter their refugees to the four corners of the world (Canada, Australia, etc.)? How is it that a national movement does not build an ethos based on the ingathering of its exiles? They argued with us that not even one Palestinian would stay in the settlement blocs—their main argument against large settlement blocs—yet they were willing to leave their refugees dispersed all over the region and the world.

Highlight [page 249]: Arafat had already launched into his slanderous speech: “Israel is conducting a fascist war against our people. Israel is conducting a cruel, barbaric war against the Palestinians … Israel is conquering, destroying, and bombing the Palestinians with depleted uranium bombs.”

Highlight [page 250]: But the hope of convening an international summit initiative was dead. Arafat was a walking embarrassment. On top of everything else, two Israelis were murdered in the territories that day, February 1. Public opinion gave Barak no choice: he announced that there would be no summit.

Highlight [page 252]: Arafat’s ofﬁcial newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida heralded the end of the Clinton presidency as “the end of the era of the Jewish lobby,” and an unnamed senior Palestinian ofﬁcial briefed reporters that the incoming Bush administration “will be a hundred times better” than Clinton’s. 9As Ambassador Ned Walker reported after his series of meetings in Arab capitals, they all believed that Vice President Dick Cheney’s oil businesses and the presumably pro-Arab legacy of the new president’s father would lead to a radical change in America’s pro-Israel policies. Walker even assumed that the Saudis might have been those who advised Arafat to wait for a better deal from the new administration. His successors are still waiting.

26. Post-Mortem

Highlight [page 253]: The failure of the Camp David process has been the subject of heated debate. For the Israeli right, it is the ultimate vindication of its worldview; the left hangs on the contention that the two-state solution is possible, and that it was Barak who failed to produce it. Barak’s claim that the Palestinians were prisoners of the mythologies of return, refugeeism, and Islam, and thus were unable to accept a compromise that recognized the moral rights of a Jewish state was applauded by the exhilarated right and is still denounced by the now dwindling left.

Highlight [page 253]: But Camp David needs to be looked at not just in such a binary perspective. The Palestinian negotiators were right when, from the outset, they suggested that Camp David be a stage in a chain of meetings leading to an endgame. Despite the litany of errors committed by all sides, the summit and its culmination in the Clinton parameters and Taba represented a signal leap to a balanced peace outline. Even if taken alone, the summit allowed us to break the taboos that had paralyzed all previous peace seekers and educate the Israelis about the Palestinian narrative. None before us had negotiated, as we did in Sweden and later in Taba, a joint text about responsibilities for the Nakba and mechanisms for the solution of the problem of refugees. This is also the case with Jerusalem. When we went to Camp David, opinion polls taught us that only 5 percent of Israelis were ready to contemplate a division of Jerusalem (three years earlier, Netanyahu had won a general election with the slogan: “Peres will divide Jerusalem”). When we left the summit, polls showed that 41 percent of Israelis contemplated such a division for the sake of a real peace.1

Highlight [page 254]: Arafat was genuinely incapable of reconciling the cosmic tragedy of his people with the poverty of the territorial solution and the betrayal of the refugees. Arafat could not extricate himself from the trap of his nation’s core narratives. He was a complex, enigmatic ﬁgure, and this account of him should not be read as a philippic. If blame must be apportioned, Arafat would not be the sole culprit. We all faltered in that peace enterprise. Israeli settlements, the sins of occupation, and the ﬂaws and blunders of our own government are certainly no less to blame. Barak allowed the Palestinians to reject his proposals for the simple reason that they turned out not to be red lines, but tactical moves. What is a Palestinian negotiator expected to do when his interlocutor starts by proposing a Palestinian state on 66 percent of the land, and then moves to 87 percent in order to settle for 92 percent, and a few months later accepts the Clinton parameters” of 97 percent with land swaps? Among themselves, Palestinian negotiators referred to Barak as “the lemon” to be squeezed. With the Palestinians understandably keeping up the pressure for more Israeli concessions, it was clear that Barak’s grudging, piecemeal surrender of positions was ﬂawed tactics yielding dramatically diminishing returns.

Highlight [page 254]: The Clinton parameters, which were a considerable improvement on Camp David, are the best proof that Arafat was right to turn down the summit’s offers. He proved to be a shrewder negotiator than the other two leaders. I myself am on record as having said, “If I were a

Highlight [page 255]: Palestinian, I would have rejected what was offered at the Camp David Summit.” 2This book stands by this assertion. But the general preoccupation with the summit, as opposed to the entire Camp David process, seriously distorts what exactly the proposals were that Arafat refused to accept.

Highlight [page 255]: It is perfectly plausible that Arafat surfed on the fortuitous eruption of the Al-Aqsa Intifada as a way of either impacting the peace plan or blocking its presentation altogether, for he knew that, however improved in comparison with the Camp David proposals it might be, it would fall short of his expectations and only serve to expose him again as a peace refusenik. Arafat’s fatal blunder lay in his historical ﬂights of fancy into an imaginary deal that neither he himself ever lent substance to, nor could his Israeli interlocutors fulﬁll. He had an innate incapacity for stopping bargaining, in not gauging the limits of Israel’s capacity for compromise. He never accepted that in such a peace enterprise, politics and strategy were one, and a deal that would break the political spinal cord of his Israeli interlocutors was like not having a deal at all. It is there that he doomed his people’s chances for redemption. The discussion of whether or not the Camp David process was a missed opportunity derives, of course, particular relevance when seen from the perspective of the utter loss of the prospects of a Palestinian peace since then and for the foreseeable future. A common Palestinian claim was that Camp David had failed because the summit was not properly prepared. But the exposure of the secret talks in Stockholm by the Palestinians themselves made such preparation more difﬁcult. Dennis Ross, who was in the area just prior to the summit, conﬁrmed that “nothing was done on the Palestinian side to make preparing for the summit any the easier.” Arafat kept all his cards, if he had any, close to his chest.

Highlight [page 255]: The Annapolis process under George W. Bush that ended with a daring peace proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that in some key aspects went beyond the Clinton parameters and Taba was presumably better prepared, and it also failed.

Highlight [page 257]: Camp David failed because of the two sides’ conﬂicting interpretations of the terms of reference of the peace process. The Israelis came to the negotiations with the conviction inherent in the letter of the Oslo Accords that this was an open-ended process where no preconceived solutions existed and where every one of the core issues would be open to negotiation so that a reasonable point of equilibrium between the needs of the parties could be found. The Palestinians saw the negotiations as a step in a journey where they would get their rights as if this were a clear-cut process of decolonization based on “international legitimacy” and “all UN relevant resolutions.”

Highlight [page 258]: The return of refugees was, indeed, a central Palestinian demand. A Palestinian poll showed at the time that 68 percent supported Arafat’s position at Camp David that Israel recognize UN Resolution 194 and the return of “hundreds of thousands of refugees,” while 20 percent thought even this was too much of a compromise.4

Highlight [page 258]: Throughout the whole process, Arafat was in the grip of a dilemma from which there was no way out. He hated the interim agreements and the disappointments they had brought, and therefore wanted a comprehensive settlement. But he could not bring himself to end the conﬂict either because, a man of permanent struggle for whom the concept of “end” was utterly alien, he was incapable of forgoing the ultimate and inexpiable sins of the Zionist entity against his people or because Israel fell too short to meet his minimum requirements, which he had otherwise not been able to spell out in an orderly manner or as an articulate peace proposal. To the end of his life, Arafat refused to acknowledge that he was indeed offered a settlement that would have given him a state with 100 percent of the Gaza strip and 97 percent of the West Bank, a capital city in Arab Jerusalem, sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and unrestricted return of refugees to a Palestinian state and to territories transferred from Israel in territorial exchanges. The offer also included ﬁnancial compensation for every single refugee and every family in the

Highlight [page 259]: refugee camps via massive funds. Yet, to this very day, the Palestinians and their friends talk of a “humiliating settlement” and a “state of Bantustans.”

Highlight [page 259]: Arafat’s willingness to come to the negotiating table did not mean he had given up on his historic mission. Any agreement that did not conform to the core narrative of the PLO was for Arafat a surrender. The right of return, which has become these days the banner of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, is a euphemism for the end of the Jewish state which not even a fanatic critic of Zionism’s unpardonable sins such as Noam Chomsky—“sadistic,” deﬁned by “criminality” and “moral depravity” is how he describes Israeli society —would support. Neither is the right of return supported by international law, nor can Israel be forced to accept a Palestinian population it does not want, Chomsky wrote in 2014.

Highlight [page 259]: At the September 2001 anti-Israel orgy, otherwise known as the Durban World Conference against Racism, where The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 1903 notoriously fabricated antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination, was freely distributed, Arafat reminded the excited audience that Israel was nothing but the “result of the rivalry and conspiracies of the colonialist forces in the region at that time.” Given the colonial paradigm he worked with, it was understandable that he should not think that it was up to him, the head of a colonized nation, to advance creative ideas on how to end the occupation. This was why the pattern

Highlight [page 260]: throughout the entire process was one where Arafat would never make a counterproposal and Israel would go on bringing him one idea after another until he eventually could be satisﬁed. This was a pattern Arafat and his people stuck to throughout much of the peace process. When Rabin asked Arafat during the negotiations in 1995 on Oslo B to make a proposal, his answer was: “No, no, no, you are a general. I’m an engineer. You have the upper hand and therefore you should propose.”

Highlight [page 260]: Our mistakes were partly the result of the conceptual defects of the Oslo process; others were entirely of our own making. Barak pretended to solve a century-old conﬂict within a very short, rigidly restricted period of time, and with a government that was a witch’s brew of right and left. Achieving a permanent peace, which would inevitably carry a heavy price tag, was an impossible task for such a ragbag of assorted odds and ends.

Highlight [page 261]: The task was overwhelming, but Barak’s political gifts were inadequate. He had a grand strategic vision but lacked the requisite political skills of a national leader.

Highlight [page 263]: Our political predicament was mirrored on the other side of the hill. The Palestinians’ disenchantment with the peace process and their suffering under the curse of occupation partly explain why their leader never ceased to mobilize them in a campaign for Jerusalem and the right of return. Arafat never delivered an unequivocal message of peace. He never tried to prepare the Palestinians for the painful compromises that peace would require. If Barak was an awkward peace pedagogue, desperately poor in political skills, Arafat was an incorrigible warrior.

Highlight [page 264]: Indifference and aloofness were Mahmoud Abbas’s way as well. More than once he made it clear to us that he had no conﬁdence in the Palestinian negotiating team and defended throughout fundamentalist positions on the issue of refugees, whom he suspected Arafat might sell out if he got an acceptable deal on Jerusalem.

Highlight [page 265]: The head of a movement driven by an historic injustice, Arafat could never concur with Israel’s notion of a “reasonable solution.” But nor is peace about forcing the enemy into servitude, as was contemplated by our initial peace offers. Only after Arafat had lost all trust in him did Barak internalize that a crippled Palestinian state was a bad idea for Israel’s own interest in regional equilibrium.

Highlight [page 265]: Had Anwar Sadat looked for national consensus in Egypt ahead of his dramatic trip to Jerusalem, Israel and Egypt would still today be in a state of war.

Highlight [page 268]: Also, placing all the blame for the failure of the summit on Arafat, as Clinton did, was unjust and extremely counterproductive. The Palestinians, of course, saw this as further proof that the summit was nothing more than an American-Israeli plot and that Arafat had done the right thing by removing himself from it. From then on, Arafat,

Highlight [page 269]: already an unlikely leader for times of transition to peace, lost any trust in the negotiating process. But losing America proved to be strategically ruinous for the Palestinians. They were left without the support of the one power that could have helped them achieve their national aspirations. However “biased” and “unreliable,” the United States is the only external power that brought the Palestinians, through Clinton’s Camp David process ﬁrst and George W. Bush’s Annapolis process later, to the outer limits of the search for peace with dignity. From everyone else they got and will continue to get only words and declarations.

Highlight [page 269]: With all his ﬂaws and inconsistencies, Barak “proved to be the most daring and by far the most conciliatory Israeli prime minister in history.” 8With him, we deﬁned the most realistically possible outline for a two-state solution. Realistic, perhaps, but not sufﬁciently reassuring for our interlocutors. Their expectations went far beyond what any conceivable Israeli government could ever meet.

PART III 2001–20: A STORY OF PROMISE AND DECEIT

27. The Conversion of the Hawks

Highlight [page 271]: 27 The Conversion of the Hawks

Highlight [page 271]: The quest for peace did not die in Taba. But the ever unbridgeable gap between what it was necessary and what was possible for the parties to do attests to the built-in intractability of the conﬂict.

a. George W. Bush’s Roadmap (2002–4)

Highlight [page 271]: A born-again Christian who saw the world in Manichean terms of good and evil, with Israel being on the right side of the divide—his mother referred to him as “America’s ﬁrst Jewish president”—George W. Bush initially placed no priority on Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

b. Ariel Sharon’s Gaza Unilaterial Withdrawal (2005)

Highlight [page 274]: Ariel Sharon’s Gaza Unilateral Withdrawal (2005)

Highlight [page 274]: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon totally discarded direct negotiations as stipulated by the roadmap. He neither trusted the Palestinians nor wanted to be absorbed by a process that could only lead to a return to the borders of 1967 and to the partition of Jerusalem into two capitals, Clinton parameters-style. Weary of the chances of pushing ahead with the ill-fated roadmap, the Bush administration opted to unilaterally offer guarantees to Israel with regard to a future possible peace outline. It rewarded Sharon with a pledge that no negotiations with the Palestinian Authority would start before there was an end to terror. And since the chances that Palestinian terror might end without a political horizon in sight were nonexistent, this meant that the option of negotiations was, for all practical purposes, removed from the agenda. Bush went even further in compensating Sharon. In a letter he had written to him dated April 14, 2004, he pledged that in any future peace deal Israel should be guaranteed sizable blocks of settlements in the West Bank, and that the right of return should only apply to the Palestinian state, not to Israel. That was, essentially, Clinton parameters stuff, with one crucial difference. The parameters drew their legitimacy from the long and laborious negotiations that preceded them; they were not a whimsical gift. Sharon did promise his American benefactor that he would draw precise contours for the settlement blocs beyond which Israel would not build, but failed eventually to comply. Typically, the Americans did not follow up on Israel’s pledge either.

Highlight [page 275]: However spoiled and catered to, Sharon feared that, unless he did “something,” his diplomatic inaction might invite the United States to impose on him an American peace plan that he would hate.

Highlight [page 275]: Sharon preferred, anyway, his own “something,” a something for which he got the surprising backing of President Bush. In mid-August 2005, he mustered his notorious ruthlessness and penchant for bold moves to execute a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a small area in the northwestern corner of the West Bank, which meant dismantling all the settlements there, most of which he had created

Highlight [page 276]: himself, and evacuating their eight thousand settlers. That we, the peace-lovers on the left, had never had the guts to remove even one settlement is our own story of ineptitude and political cowardice. Ariel Sharon’s disengagement and the barrier he started to build between the West Bank and Israel signaled the end of his government’s pretension to pursue a negotiated settlement.

Highlight [page 276]: Unilateralism now became the expression of Israel’s national consensus precisely because it circumvented negotiations which the Israeli public, traumatized by the Intifada and the failure of the Camp David process, simply abhorred.

Highlight [page 276]: Unilateralism was to have ominous consequences, however. Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza ushered in, as some of us had warned, 4the Lebanonization of the Strip. We believed that pulling out from Gaza without coordinating it with a Palestinian or an international body that could help secure stability would open a new phase in the Israeli-Palestinian war of attrition. Nor was it that outlandish to assume that Hamas would develop, or acquire, long-range missiles which could hit targets deep in Israel.

Highlight [page 277]: No one who knew his personal and political history would have imagined him uttering a speech like the one he delivered on October 26, 2004, the day the Knesset approved his disengagement plan. Addressing the settlers, those whom he had spoiled and cultivated for years, he said:

Highlight [page 278]: As one who fought in all of Israel’s wars, and learned from personal experience that without proper force, we have no chance to survive in this part of the world that has no mercy for the weak, I have also learned from experience that the sword alone cannot decide this bitter dispute in this land … We have no desire to permanently rule over millions of Palestinians, who double their numbers every generation. Israel, which wishes to be an exemplary democracy, will not be able to bear such a reality over time. The withdrawal from Gaza will open the gates to a different reality. Sharon ended his speech addressing the agitated settlers, suggestively with a quote from late prime minister, Menachem Begin—“You have developed among you a dangerous Messianic spirit”—another rightwing hawk , who had dismantled all the settlements in Sinai as part of the peace he made with Egypt.6

c. The George W. Bush Annapolis Process (2007–8)

Highlight [page 278]: The George W. Bush Annapolis Process (2007–8)

Highlight [page 280]: Abbas deﬁnitely lacked Arafat’s incontestable stature as a leader capable of rallying behind him the disparate Palestinian political community.

Highlight [page 280]: Typically, Israel’s dysfunctional politics prevented Olmert from reining in the settlers, the traditional spoilers of the peace process.

Highlight [page 281]: Against such an uncertain background, Ehud Olmert’s perseverance and bold creativity stand out with exceptional salience. A former hard-line Likud member now imbued with an access of statesmanship, Olmert had, against all the odds, shifted to dovish positions. He now wanted to achieve, in his words, a “big bang” on Palestine. A man of real warmth and social interaction, he believed that Israel should ﬁght her “implanted DNA … the idea that we are lords of the manor.” “Without some basic humility there will not be any negotiations,” he said. 12He, therefore, disengaged from Livni’s tedious negotiating tactics and developed his own personal track with President Abbas at the end of which, on September 16, 2008, he would offer his ﬁnal peace proposal, the core of which, in essence, reshaped, and on the territorial issue upgraded, Clinton’s peace parameters.

Highlight [page 283]: Map 4 Annapolis, 2008, Israeli Proposal

Highlight [page 284]: It did not help that Olmert’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, scarred by his own failure at peacemaking, was hostile to, and uncooperative with, the entire process. And so was the army under his responsibility. “Do you want a Palestinian state or a military base?” was how the Palestinians referred to Israel’s invasive security requirements. 17But Israel’s perception of the security risks, the lessons of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, and the rise of what the Israelis labeled as a Hamastan state in Gaza increased the skepticism over the Palestinians’ ability to guarantee security, which was understandable, but counterproductive.

Highlight [page 286]: This peace process was victim of the ever unbridgeable gap between the enormity of the Palestinian tragedy and the most generous peace offer that Israel could ever make.

Highlight [page 286]: Be that as it may, once more the Palestinians got cold feet when faced with a bold peace proposal, however inevitably imperfect. How familiar to those of us who saw the Palestinians reject the Clinton parameters and then the Taba outline in the expressed hope that George W. Bush, a staunch believer in the Jews’ return to Zion, would give them a better deal. “In the end,” wrote Secretary Rice in her memoirs, “the Palestinians walked away from the negotiations” and from what she, whose childhood in segregationist Alabama had made her especially sensitive to Palestinian suffering, 25deﬁned as “extraordinary terms.” 26Excited at Olmert’s peace offer, she wrote: “This is unbelievable. Am I really hearing this? I wondered. Is the Israeli Prime Minister saying that he’ll divide Jerusalem and put an international body in charge of the holy sites? … Yitzhak Rabin had been killed for offering far less.” 27But Abbas, to whom Rice rushed to share her enthusiasm, poured cold water on it. “How would I explain to four million refugees that Israel is not willing to admit them?” he asked.28

Highlight [page 287]: At some point in the charged atmosphere, Abbas did ask Olmert to give him the map of his territorial plan, which the prime minister had drawn on a napkin but Olmert would not do it without Abbas’s prior acceptance of his peace plan. Nor was Abbas impressed by Olmert’s suggestion that they both travel to New York to present the agreement to the UN Security Council. Abbas ﬁnally promised that he would get back with an answer. He never did. He also proposed a meeting between aides, to which Olmert agreed, but he later simply canceled it. Saeb Erakat later explained that he and Abbas “forgot” they had an urgent trip to Amman, and he proposed a meeting for the following week, which did not happen. 29Olmert later sent to Abbas two of the most emblematic doves around, Ron Pundak and Yossi Beilin, after they had both endorsed the plan. They both came back empty-handed.30 Interestingly, there would be yet one more meeting, in mid-November 2008, between Olmert and Abbas, in which, according to the Israelis, answers were provided to “most of the Palestinians’ queries.” They also agreed to convene a bilateral group to discuss Olmert’s map. But the Palestinians did not show up, and Abbas’s chief of Cabinet, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, dismissed in a public announcement Olmert’s plan as a show of a “lack of seriousness.” For Saeb Erakat, accepting Olmert’s plan would have amounted to a betrayal of the Palestinian people.31

Highlight [page 287]: Abbas would later say that there was no point in striking a deal with a lame duck prime minister.

Highlight [page 288]: They were always fatally hanging their hopes on the next president.

Highlight [page 288]: Olmert’s political woes were a pretext; the real reason, as Abbas would later explain, was that the gaps were still too wide. 33After eighteen months of negotiations and three hundred meetings between the teams, Olmert’s chief negotiator also acknowledged the existence of “unbridgeable gaps.”

Highlight [page 288]: In conclusion, Olmert’s peace offer was bolder than any previous Israeli peace proposal only with regard to the territorial issue. Contrary to the Israeli perception that the Annapolis plan was a dramatic improvement on previous Israeli proposals, it remained broadly within the same box of recent Israeli offers rejected by the Palestinians. To them, it still was too pusillanimous a plan to be convincing. But according to Saeb Erakat, there was a philosophy behind the compulsive Palestinian rejectionism: “First they offered us [in Menachem Begin’s autonomy plan] the running of hospitals and schools. They were later willing to give us 66 percent of the land. At Camp David they went beyond 90 percent (and now “100 percent through territorial swaps”). Why should we then hurry after all the injustice done to us?” As for the refugees, he said, the Palestinians wanted both the right of return and compensation, not either of the two.35

28 The Impossible Triangle: Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas

Highlight [page 290]: 28 The Impossible Triangle: Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas

a. The Limits of Obama’s Engagement

Highlight [page 290]: The Limits of Obama’s Engagement

Highlight [page 291]: For Netanyahu, Olmert’s and Barak’s peace offers were null and void.

Highlight [page 291]: He grudgingly accepted the two-state concept, but he established red lines that would make it practically indigestible for the Palestinians. He stipulated that they would have to accept Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, waive the right of return, and have a state that was completely demilitarized with iron-clad security provisions that were bound to infringe on their sovereignty.

Highlight [page 292]: Netanyahu also agreed to a ten-month freeze of new housing starts in West Bank settlements, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deﬁned as an “unprecedented” move.

Highlight [page 292]: Israelis and Palestinians have a good record in the ceremonious launching of peace talks, less so in striking agreements.

Highlight [page 292]: It was hardly surprising, then, that throughout the entire eight-year Obama presidency, Israelis and Palestinians could not agree on a common platform for peace negotiations. Netanyahu inherited an intractable enough process, but his own calculated contribution to make it even more so by raising the demand that Israel be recognized as the nation-state of the Jewish people was his way of negating the Palestinian right of return. Netanyahu should have known that by focusing on Israel’s Jewish narratives, he was inviting the Palestinians to fall back on theirs.

Highlight [page 292]: But by rejecting Netanyahu’s claim that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state, Abbas vindicated a

Highlight [page 293]: key inquietude of the Israelis, and fueled the fears of a mass of skeptics about the Palestinians’ hidden grand strategy of phases leading to one Palestine with an Arab majority.

Highlight [page 293]: Netanyahu would have none of this. The 1967 borders, he said, were a suicidal line Israel could not live with.

Pens #### b. John Kerry’s Failing Bid
Highlight [page 294]: John Kerry’s Failing Bid

Highlight [page 294]: Netanyahu knew from the lessons of the past that whatever peace formula, however bold, an Israeli leader would be able to accept would be rejected by the Palestinians. When Abbas went to the White House in March 2014 to get Obama’s ﬁnal proposal for a peace framework, Netanyahu knew that, however different from traditional ofﬁcial US standpoints and however tilted toward the Palestinian positions it was, Abbas would turn down Obama’s formula.

Highlight [page 295]: John Kerry also wrongly assumed that the real problem he faced was Netanyahu’s intransigence. He then dedicated most of his power of conviction to talks with him, and hardly engaged with Abbas. The result was that the Palestinian leader would eventually dismiss the ﬁnal product as an Israeli document wrapped in an American ﬂag.

Highlight [page 296]: Netanyahu accepted that the new secure and recognized international borders between Israel and Palestine will be negotiated based on the 1967 lines with mutually-agreed swaps whose size and location will be negotiated, so that Palestine will have viable territory corresponding in size to the territory controlled by Egypt and Jordan before June 4, 1967, with territorial contiguity in the West Bank.

Highlight [page 297]: Abbas turned down the document when it was presented to him by Kerry on February 19 in Paris.

Highlight [page 297]: It was Obama in person who presented the new proposals to Abbas in a meeting at the White House on March 17, 2014. Abbas asked for time to ponder, but characteristically never got back to him.

Highlight [page 297]: The same Abu Mazen who bravely stood against the Palestinian strategy of terror was also more comfortable pivoting the public grievance than taking divisive decisions on peace. 5

Highlight [page 297]: The Palestinians would later claim that the problem was that Abbas had not been given a written proposal. But it was Saeb Erakat who had explicitly asked the Americans not to present such a written document so that Abbas could keep a degree of deniability.

Highlight [page 299]: If Netanyahu was posturing as a man of peace, then a sigh of relief and a comforting sense of déjà vu must have invaded him with Abbas’s typical non-answer to Obama’s proposed framework. That he had agreed to formulae so diametrically opposed to what he was known to believe, and which his political constituency rebelled against, can only be explained by his educated understanding that, as always, an agreement that he would barely live with would be with great certainty rejected by the Palestinians.

Highlight [page 299]: As was the case throughout the entire peace process, the domestic politics of both parties played a crucial role in defeating the chances of an agreement. Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as the Fatahafﬁliated militias, not to mention the impossible standards established by Arafat for a peace agreement, all weighed heavily on Abbas. He was always too weak and too lacking in popular appeal to make the historic leap to a divisive peace agreement

c. Text and Context in Obama’s Peace Initiatives

Highlight [page 300]: Text and Context in Obama’s Peace Initiatives

Highlight [page 301]: He dismissed as sheer lunacy the notion that the nuclear agreement with Iran that the Obama administration had reached in April 2015 opened a ten-ﬁfteenyear window for creative statesmanship to reshape regional politics. A regional system based on a Palestinian peace and a collective system of security that would include nuclear nonproliferation was, he would argue, the agenda of naive dreamers.

Highlight [page 302]: Palestine was, in any case, not central to Netanyahu’s concerns. His strategic thinking was diametrically opposed to that of his Laborite predecessors. Rabin went to Oslo and Barak to Camp David not because they believed that the Palestinians deserved a state, but because they understood that Palestine was central to the chances of a broader Arab-Israeli peace. But Netanyahu maintained that any meaningful concession to the Palestinians needed to be preceded by the neutralization of each and every existential threat emanating from the outer circle of the region, namely, Iran, Iraq, and so on.

29. An Uninviting Concept

a. The Geneva Understandings as a Parable

Highlight [page 304]: The Geneva Understandings as a Parable

Highlight [page 304]: The two-state solution, arguably the most dauntingly complex divorce in history, has now become a religion by rote for liberals and genuine peace lovers. But, as with most routine articles of faith, it lost its link to reality.

Highlight [page 304]: A recent report by Israel’s Central Statistics Bureau has shown that 80 percent of the settlers, 334,000, are still concentrated in settlement blocs adjacent to the Green Line, consisting in all of no more than 4 percent of the West Bank.

Highlight [page 306]: The Israelis in Geneva unlocked each and every part of the Clinton plan about which the Palestinians had reservations without receiving a single concession indicating that the Israeli position at Taba had been maintained, let alone improved.

Highlight [page 308]: Map 5 The Geneva Understandings: Model for a Permanent Agreement

Highlight [page 308]: Geneva document allows the right of return essentially through the front door. It endorses UN Resolution 194, which asserts that “those Palestinian refugees who want to live at peace with their Jewish neighbors are entitled to return at the earliest possible opportunity.”

Highlight [page 309]: Notwithstanding these major concessions, I am of the view that by breaking all Israel’s ofﬁcial red lines, Geneva created a peace offer based on reconciliation and healing that brilliantly addressed the core concerns and fundamental national narrative of the Palestinians without undermining Zionism’s core values.

Highlight [page 309]: Palestinian opposition groups managed to frame the whole Geneva document as a sell-out of refugees’ rights. And despite provisions such as qualitative land swaps that would allow a Palestinian state in 100 percent of the land, and full Palestinian sovereignty over Temple Mount, none in the Palestinian national leadership applauded the deal. In practice, the Geneva Understandings turned out to be the swan song of Yasser Abed-Rabbo’s political life. He left the political

Highlight [page 310]: limelight, presumably in an act of betrayal of the Palestinian national ethos.

b. Beyond the Parable

Highlight [page 313]: Beyond the Parable

Highlight [page 313]: Notwithstanding Netanyahu’s guilt, it would be wrong to dwell excessively on the weaknesses of the current leaders, for that presupposes that, with different leaders at the helm, a two-state agreement could be reached. Personalities are, of course, important, but so are also the unbeatable impersonal forces of history that have made the conﬂict into such an inextricable knot. It is not only Benjamin Netanyahu’s dishonest attitude to negotiations and the Palestinians’ fragmented and visionless polity that make a return to

Highlight [page 314]: negotiations a pointless affair; it is the entire two-state idea that needs to be revisited.

Highlight [page 314]: Arguably, the two-state solution proved not to be particularly attractive to either side even before the current regional turmoil. There has always been a sense of anguish among both Israelis and Palestinians when they approached the moment of truth of a ﬁnal decision on a peace deal.

Highlight [page 314]: As Rob Malley and Hussein Agha rightly afﬁrmed in their New York Review of Books article, the Palestinians came to Camp David “more resigned to the two-state solution than they were willing to embrace it; they were prepared to accept Israel’s existence, but not its moral legitimacy.”

Highlight [page 315]: The Israelis do not believe the Palestinians would be able to prevent Hamas from taking over the West Bank and becoming an outpost of Iran a stone’s throw from Tel Aviv. Also, the right of return question represents a major difﬁculty for ending the conﬂict and bringing about a ﬁnality of claims, two major Israeli prerequisites for acquiescing with the two-state solution. Also, neither side believes that Israel will be able to dismantle and relocate about 100,000 fanatical ideological settlers and dozens of outposts with their messianic defenders. And given the lessons of the Gaza wars, the invasive security requirements of Israel would be impossible to reconcile with the Palestinian idea of what exactly a sovereign state is.

Highlight [page 315]: Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki found a signiﬁcant rise in the Palestinians’ belief that the two-state solution was no longer feasible or even desired; support for a detailed ninepoint peace package implementing it dropped from 62 percent in 2008 to 37 percent in 2018. Another 2018 poll by Tel Aviv University’s Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research and Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found support to be the lowest in twenty years

Highlight [page 315]: mostly consistent across Palestinian generations was the rejection of permanent peace with Israel. Asked in a 2019 poll whether a two-state solution should be “the end of conﬂict with Israel,” just 34 percent of young West Bank respondents answered yes; the proportion was even lower among older residents —25 percent.

30. The Failed “Zionization” of Palestine and the Three-State “Solution”

Highlight [page 318]: 30 The Failed “Zionization” of Palestine and the ThreeState “Solution”

Highlight [page 319]: The pernicious effects of Israeli occupation have, of course, much to answer for, but the current institutional disarray in Palestine cannot be exclusively blamed on the occupation. Landrum Bolling, who served as a backchannel between US president Jimmy Carter and Arafat in 1977, described a situation that has not changed much to this very day. He described the PLO as an assortment of factions with extraordinary freedom each to go its own way. “It is a mad, mad situation,” he said. He also described the general fear among Palestinians that Arafat and his team were not up to the leadership role required for running an independent state.

Highlight [page 320]: The Palestinians, the presumed weak side of the conﬂict, never acted out of lack of choice. They stumbled over every road block, avoided no mistake, and always seemed to take the wrong path.

Highlight [page 321]: Rarely—if ever—is modern history familiar with a similar case of a disparity between the extraordinary high degree of international support enjoyed by a national movement and the poor results of such support. For it was frequently interpreted by the Palestinian leadership as an implicit encouragement to persist in its almost built-in incapacity to take decisions and instead ﬁnd satisfaction in Israel being put in the dock of the court of international opinion.

Highlight [page 321]: The Palestinian leadership failed its people primarily due to the lack of will to temper the ethos of restitution through an alternative ideology of nation-building that could enable them to assume reasonable compromises at vital crossroads throughout their clash with the Zionists.

Highlight [page 321]: Seen from the perspective of the Palestinian tragedy of the loss of a homeland, dispossession, and exile, the Palestinian ethos of restitution is fully comprehensible. Alas, justice has been frequently the enemy of peace. The tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conﬂict stemmed from discrepant historical rhythms. The history of the Jews’ modern national movement had been characterized by realistic responses to objective historical conditions. The Palestinians have consistently fought for the solutions of yesterday, those they had rejected a generation or two earlier. This persistent attempt to turn back the clock of history lies at the root of many of the misfortunes that have befallen them.

Highlight [page 322]: Zionism’s pragmatic ethos has by now been superseded by many years of rule by messianic nationalists, fanatical annexationists, and dysfunctional politics.

Highlight [page 322]: Arafat, the ultimate legitimizer of a two-state solution, gave a sense of direction to Palestinian nationalism and was capable of creating a consensus around national objectives. This is no longer the case.

Highlight [page 324]: State-building was never the main motif of Palestinian nationalism, now split between pan-Islamist dreamers of a borderless Arab nation and secular nationalists who could never settle for Israel’s optimal peace offers

Highlight [page 324]: The Israeli right’s dream is ﬁnally coming true of a shattered and fragmented Palestinian national movement. The irreconcilable divisions within its two main branches, Hamas and PLO, are not uncommon in the history of national movements, only in the Palestinian case, the split is not just about tactics and means; it is about the very purpose of the struggle.

31. The Region and the World: A Broken Reed

a. The Changing Regional Strategic Game

Highlight [page 329]: The Changing Regional Strategic Game

b. Would America Save the Two-State Solution?

Highlight [page 332]: Would America Save the Two-State Solution?

Highlight [page 332]: Israel’s international standing reﬂects an intriguing dichotomy. Increasingly condemned and denigrated by public opinion and UN agencies for her policies on Palestine, Israel enjoys these days historically unprecedented global clout and improved relations with governments across the world.

Highlight [page 332]: Nor is AIPAC, Israel’s mythological lobby in America, the unbeatable force that uneducated opinion thinks it is. Past experience shows that American presidents could force Israel to assume policies it had previously resisted. President Eisenhower forced David Ben-Gurion to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula in 1956 a few days after the Israeli prime minister had announced the birth of “the third

Highlight [page 333]: Kingdom of Israel.” Henry Kissinger threatened Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1975 with America’s “reassessment” of her links to Israel unless he assumed more accommodating positions in the negotiations on the Sinai disengagement with Egypt. Jimmy Carter threatened to use America’s leverage against both parties if an Israeli-Egyptian agreement was not reached at Camp David. The George H. Bush James Baker tandem dragged Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir against his will to the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference by withholding the $10 billion loan guarantees that Israel had requested for the absorption of a million Jewish immigrants from the disintegrating Soviet Union. President Bush did not even hesitate to denounce what he called in a press conference “a thousand lobbyists” working on the Hill against the president’s policies. Arguably, Bush eventually toppled Yitzhak Shamir and facilitated the victory of Yitzhak Rabin in the 1992 elections.

Highlight [page 333]: Presidents always prevailed when they resisted being intimidated by the myth surrounding the Israel lobby. AIPAC was defeated when it feuded with Jimmy Carter in 1978 over his selling of F-15 Eagle ﬁghters to Saudi Arabia, and again in 1981 when it challenged Ronald Reagan’s supplying of AWACS reconnaissance planes to Saudi Arabia. AIPAC also reaped a resounding defeat when it battled with George H. Bush in 1991 for the linkage he made between loan guarantees for Israel and Shamir’s opposition to the Madrid Peace Conference. Not unlike George H. Bush, President Obama won the day by publicly exposing the AIPAC lobby. In his American University speech on August 5, 2015, he called the critics of his Iran deal “people who would be opposed to any deal with Iran,” and speciﬁcally targeted AIPAC and “the 20 million dollars that’s being spent on ads on TV.” Obama even put AIPAC in the same category as those Republicans who were “responsible” for America getting into the Iraq War. AIPAC’s attempt to undo the Iran nuclear deal, an Obama central foreign policy legacy, was bound to be defeated as an insolent affront to the president in intimate complicity with his Republican enemies.

c. An Internationally Led Two-State Solution?

Highlight [page 336]: An Internationally Led Two-State Solution?

Highlight [page 337]: A robust international engagement would also be required for the creation of incentives that would encourage the parties to accept the painful compromises. The Palestinian state will require a major injection of ﬁnancial aid to allow it to absorb refugees and upgrade its infrastructures and educational system. The United States might be required to compensate Israel through upgraded strategic cooperation and a robust ﬁnancial package to facilitate massive military redeployments and the convergence of settlers into the new boundaries. Europe might also like to consider offering EU membership to Israel and upgrading its economic links with the state of Palestine, and NATO might be ready to offer membership to a democratic state ﬁnally lying behind ﬁxed borders such as Israel.

Highlight [page 337]: The logic of an international solution also stems from America’s proven failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conﬂict all by herself. Indeed, why would the Iranian nuclear showdown need a P5 + 1 (the ﬁve permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany) forum of powers to resolve it, while the Palestinian question remains an American monopoly in spite of Washington’s serial failures?

Highlight [page 340]: The question is, then, whether there is truly an international community anymore, one capable of acting collectively for the solution of global and regional conﬂicts and upholding international

Highlight [page 341]: rules of conduct. In the current age of a disintegrating world order, the demise of multilateralism, and a return to the Westphalian system of nation-states and the balance of power, one has every reason to doubt the capacity or, indeed, the will of the major international players to get together in a concert of powers to restore order to the Middle East, certainly the most dysfunctional part of the planet.

Highlight [page 341]: The faltering “international community” is now overwhelmed by an ominously changing global agenda that is triggering what George Orwell would have deﬁned as the fear of “catastrophic gradualism.”

32. The Occupation’s Traits of Permanence

a. Israel’s Quest for Lebensraum

Highlight [page 348]: That the West Bank is a subjugated colony is also expressed by the Palestinians’ lack of access to their airspace, electromagnetic sphere, sea and territorial international borders, as well as by the extra costs of transportation due to the segregation of some West Bank roads. The 1995 Israel-PLO Paris Protocol regulated economic relations between the parties in a way that practically institutionalized overwhelming Palestinian economic dependence on Israel. Israeli companies freely excavate and sell Palestine’s natural resources, and the West Bank has become one of Israel’s largest captive trade partners. Since the 1990s, Israel has been an almost exclusive destination for more than 90 percent of total Palestinian exports.

Highlight [page 349]: Israel is also the source of most Palestinian imports, though its share signiﬁcantly decreased from 75–80 percent in 2000–13 to 65–70 percent in 2014–16. Nevertheless, almost all Palestinian imports from non-Israeli markets still come through Israel, and a large part through Israeli importers. Bilateral trade is largely imbalanced in favor of Israel. Palestinian imports of goods from Israel are still 2.5–3 times higher than Palestinian exports to Israel. Also labor is a potent glue uniting the two economies. By 2016, Palestinian workers’ compensation covered about 85 percent of the Palestinian deﬁcit in bilateral trade, reducing it from around $2 billion in 2008–10, and $2.5 billion in 2013, to only $500 million in 2016. Still, with a total of close to $3.5 billion in goods exports a year between 2014 and 2016, the Palestinian market ranks fourth among Israel’s top export marketsafter the United States, China and Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom—and accounts for 6 percent of total Israeli exports of goods. 7Additional aspects of Israeli economic colonialism in Palestine are water and land. With Israel’s water consumption being almost four times that of the Palestinians, no less than 80 percent of the mountain aquifer in the West Bank is used by Israel and its settlements.

Highlight [page 349]: It is not that the occupation is free of material costs for the occupier. Military deployments in the West Bank, rounds of wars and intifadas, and the colossal investments in settlements and infrastructures to serve the occupier represent a heavy ﬁnancial burden that is difﬁcult to assess because Israel’s national budget does not distinguish the territories as separate from Israel. But according to a study conducted in 2014–15, direct and indirect associated defense costs amount to 15 percent of Israeli GDP.

Highlight [page 350]: Since the First Intifada in 1987–93, the Palestinian economy has experienced the loss of around half of its potential growth in GDP under non-conﬂict conditions. The impact of the conﬂict is best demonstrated by comparing developments in the West Bank and Gaza. Annual exports from Gaza, which were around $30–40 million in 1996–2006, halted almost entirely in 2008–9. Since 2010, despite a partial relaxation of trade restrictions on Gaza, exports remained insigniﬁcant, at an annual level of around $4 million. In the West Bank, meanwhile, an improvement in the security situation enabled an almost ﬁvefold increase in exports, from about $200 million in 2002 (the lowest point of the Second Intifada) to almost $1 billion a year in 2015–16.8

b. The Securitization of Peace

Highlight [page 350]: The Securitization of Peace

c. Israel’s Dysfunctional Polity

Highlight [page 351]: Israel’s Dysfunctional Polity

d. What is Wrong with No-Peace Anyway?

Highlight [page 354]: What Is Wrong with No-Peace Anyway?

Highlight [page 354]: To future-proof itself against mounting popular pressure in the West, Israel has been looking elsewhere for economic and, ultimately, political partners. Her exports to Asia tripled between 2004 and 2014, totaling $16.7 billion, one-ﬁfth of Israel’s total exports. Israel now does more trade with the once implacably hostile Asian giantsChina, Japan, and India, to which Israel is the second supplier of military technology—than with the United States, with which it has a free trade agreement. The election of the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi in India, a country with 160 million Muslims, allowed the lifting of the veil off India’s growing defense cooperation with Israel. This was highlighted by regular visits of Israel’s defense ministers to India, and the historic visits to Israel of both the Indian president, Pranab Mukherjee, and Prime Minister Modi. Nor are Japan and China—the latter is Israel’s third largest trading partner—linking the success of peace efforts to their economic ties with the “startup nation” anymore.

Highlight [page 356]: But Israel’s reluctance to invest in peace did not spring up overnight. It was the Al-Aqsa Intifada in the year 2000 that was the fatal watershed that destroyed Israel’s peace constituency and radically shifted popular opinion to the right and far right. Exposed to indiscriminate waves of suicide terrorism, Israelis lost any hope of a negotiated settlement and, in their despair, succumbed to a new self-defeating political religion of unilateralism. The Intifada forced Israelis to turn their backs on the Palestinians, erase them from their consciousness, imprison them behind impenetrable walls while keeping for themselves the essential parts of the land required for their settlements and rising security needs.

IV. Denouements

Highlight [page 358]: PART IV DENOUEMENTS

33. Ominous Unravelings

a. The Specter of the Single BiNational State

Highlight [page 359]: The Specter of the Single Binational State

Highlight [page 359]: Some, such as the revisionist historian Ilan Pappé, believe in reversing the course of history, undoing the Jewish state, and going back to an imaginary Arcadia, the supposedly harmonious days of Arab-Jewish coexistence in a binational community. This revolutionary romanticism about an archaic golden age is a mirage, a dream shattered by the 1936–39 Arab Revolt and by the 1948 legacy of disinheritance and refugeeism. Since then, lofty visions about coexistence have been further deﬂated by Arab-Jewish inﬁghting

Highlight [page 360]: over the same piece of land, a mercilessly effective Israeli occupation, two devastating Intifadas, and wars and blockades in Gaza.

Highlight [page 361]: It remains a delusion, though, to believe in the viability of an IsraeliJewish-Muslim-Palestinian state. Here in the Middle East, a multiethnic democracy? This is a recipe for civil war, not the introduction to multiethnic harmony.

b. Unilateral Disengagement: The Alon Plan Redux

Highlight [page 362]: Unilateral Disengagement: The Alon Plan Redux

c. Unilateral Disengagement: Ehud Olmert’s Version

Highlight [page 365]: Unilateral Disengagement: Ehud Olmert’s Version

Highlight [page 367]: Olmert’s unilateral disengagement would have triggered an Intifada of weapons with a steep trajectory, exactly the same or even worse than the one that Sharon had triggered from Gaza.

Highlight [page 370]: Olmert eventually dropped the idea. But ﬁfteen years after his unilateral delusion and with the idea of a negotiated peace all but dead, Israelis are back in a desperate search for an antidote to the doomsday scenario of a binational state. Unilateral disengagement is a revolt against the specter of the loss of Jewish demographic majority, a priority written into the genetic code of Zionism.

d. Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century”

Highlight [page 371]: Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century”

Highlight [page 372]: Trump’s use of sticks and no carrots with the Palestinians practically turned the entire process into a strictly Israeli-American affair. He offered Jerusalem to the Israelis, cut all aid to the Palestinians, and even declared Israeli settlements not to be illegal. In June 2019, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, came up with the carrots, which the Palestinians rejected as a clumsy attempt to bribe them into waiving their national aspiration for viable statehood. Kushner unveiled an ambitious Peace to Prosperity plan to strengthen the Palestinian economy with billions of dollars in investment. Essentially a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, it promised up to $50 billion to boost also the economies of Egypt,

Highlight [page 373]: Lebanon, and Jordan, all of which are directly affected by the IsraeliPalestinian conﬂict. The Palestinians remained unimpressed.

Highlight [page 373]: Israeli-Palestinian clash of national characters cannot be reconciled through economic subsidies; the discordance between the two movements is deeper than what economic peace could bring.

Highlight [page 373]: The Palestinian national movement remains in its revolutionary phase, where economic considerations always come second to national aspirations. The ofﬁces of the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, were adorned, when I visited, with images of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and maps of occupied Palestine, not with photos of John Maynard Keynes or Jean Monnet. The Palestinian national movement is driven by the struggle to end the occupation, not by dreams of economic development or of a technological revolution. Accepting an economic deal that is not an annex to a convincing political solution would be tantamount to betraying Palestine for a ﬁstful of dollars. Indeed, in 1923, none other than the founder of the Zionist right, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, denounced as a “childish fantasy” the belief that the Palestinians would “sell out their homeland for a railroad network.”

34. Exit Oslo, Enter Madrid

Highlight [page 380]: 34 Exit Oslo, Enter Madrid

Highlight [page 381]: The economic disparities between the two components of the confederation and the restless creativity of the Israeli socioeconomic system would still leave the Israelis as the dominant master race exploiting cheap Palestinian labor. In 2019, Israel’s per-capita income was above $45,000 and rising, while that of the West Bank stood at $3,000. The consumption per capita in Israel is 32,000 shekels; in the West Bank it is 4,000. Israel has practically no unemployment (less than 4 percent before the pandemic); in the West Bank it is 30 percent. The average daily salary in Israel is 470 shekels; in the West

Highlight [page 382]: Bank, 110. An OECD member, Israel ranks within the top twenty nations in the world in the latest report of the UN’s Human Development Index. Colossal disparities exist also in the quality of infrastructures, both physical and scientiﬁc. Israel has all the harbors, railroads, power plants, desalination plants, nuclear reactors, highways, industrial complexes, international trade centers, top-class universities and research institutions, and high-tech belts on a par with Silicon Valley. Israel dedicates about 5 percent of its GDP, more than any other OECD country, to research and development. She has the second largest number of startup companies in the world after the United States. High-tech giants, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple, built their ﬁrst overseas research and development facilities in Israel, and other high-tech multi-national corporations, such as IBM, Google, HP, Cisco Systems, Facebook, and Motorola, have also opened research and development centers in Israel.

Highlight [page 382]: An Israeli-Palestinian confederation would be a socially and culturally explosive merger between a prosperous Western society and millions of destitute Palestinians. Israeli cities would be ﬁlled with Palestinian ghettos of exploited cheap day laborers, and the friction between a master race of Israelis and the discriminated-against Palestinians would not be different than that which existed under South Africa’s apartheid system. In fact, even after the end of apartheid, the black population in South Africa continues to be exploited and marginalized in an economy completely dominated by the white minority. One should not expect that the Palestinians would fare better under the economic domination of the nation that presumed to be “a light unto the nations.” One has only to look at the despicable way the Israelis treat immigrants from Africa, and sometimes their own African Jews, the black Ethiopian communities. Israel would not behave with the Palestinians in the same way as West Germany met, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, her lost East German fellow citizens. And even there, thirty years after reuniﬁcation, a widening gulf in practically all socioeconomic indicators is apparent as Eastern and Western social and political tribes are drifting apart in lingering mutual incomprehension.

PART V DEFYING THE LOGIC OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION

35. Palestine: A Comparative Perspective

Highlight [page 398]: 35 Palestine: A Comparative Perspective

a. War as A Prelude to Peace

Highlight [page 398]: War as a Prelude to Peace

Highlight [page 398]: Winston Churchill’s assertion that “nothing in history was ever settled except by wars” is a sad truth borne out by the history of international conﬂicts.

Highlight [page 399]: Diplomacy has hardly ever succeeded in solving a conﬂict before war, or the threat thereof, has forced the parties to the negotiating table. It was NATO’s robust military intervention that created the conditions for the end of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Martti Ahtisaari’s success in resolving the Kosovo conﬂict would not have materialized before Serbia was militarily humbled.

Highlight [page 399]: This is also the case in struggles for self-determination. States were normally born amid dramas of blood and self-sacriﬁce. The peaceful split of Norway and Sweden and the amicable divorce of the Czech and Slovak republics have never been the norm, which is not an irrelevant message these days to Catalonia in its extravagant drive for an amicable split from Spain. The Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s strategy of getting a Palestinian state through the goodwill of the international community is ﬂawed. Equally ﬂawed was the hope of the Irish nationalists in 1919 of getting statehood on a silver platter from the Versailles peace conference.

Highlight [page 400]: Algeria’s bitter struggle for independence is another case in point; 300,000 Algerians died in one of the most savage wars of the postcolonial era. Rooted in the merciless behavior of France’s imperial army, the war conducted by the 450,000 French troops sent to quell the resistance of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) was of such cruelty and scope as the Palestinian occupied territories have never experienced. This might partly explain why the war’s outcome, just as the US defeat in Vietnam, was eventually decided by the collapse of the imperial power’s home front. “It is not their violence, but ours, turned back,” noted philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. 2The abhorrence of what their army was doing in their name was overwhelming; in a referendum, 65 percent of the French supported independence for Algeria. France’s Fourth Republic simply disintegrated under the strains of the war. The man who was placed in power by the army, General Charles de Gaulle, was eventually forced to negotiate with the FLN and, in the Évian peace settlement of March 1962, grant independence to Algeria. The agreement stipulated that a million French settlers who had conducted a scorched earth campaign in a desperate attempt to prevent the inevitable could stay in Algeria. But, being no longer the master race in a colonized country, most of them returned to France. More recently, East Timor and parts of the former Yugoslavia also achieved independence because they exhausted their occupiers or their internal rivals. And so did South Sudan, a new, now failing state that emerged out of a twenty-two year civil war that left behind more than two million dead.

Highlight [page 400]: Alas, blood and sacriﬁce are not always sufﬁcient. Ask the Kurds, the Chechens, the Tibetans, or the Palestinians.

b. Northern Ireland and Colombia

Highlight [page 403]: Northern Ireland and Colombia

Highlight [page 403]: In the cases of Northern Ireland and Palestine, they range from the parties’ competing narratives of victimhood to the role of external enablers. Irish-Americans and the Republic of Ireland supported the IRA and Sinn Fein, the Israel lobby in the US and American administrations lined up with Israel, while Arab states backed, and even went to war for the sake of, Palestine.

Highlight [page 404]: In 2016, after ﬁfty years of armed conﬂict that left behind more than a quarter of a million dead, almost double the number of casualties in the Israeli-Palestinian century-old conﬂict, and seven million displaced persons, Colombia signed a historic peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla group, the last hangover of the Cold War in the Western hemisphere. But, unlike the case of Palestine, Colombia’s conﬂict had one key “advantage”: it was a sociopolitical insurgency free of any religious, ethnic, or territorial contentions.

Highlight [page 404]: Israel-Palestine is a hybrid conﬂict that has in it the traits of a resilient civil war—the ﬁght over the same fatherland by people inhabiting the same area—that always called for the unconditional exclusion, even destruction, of the other, and a national conﬂict over borders and self-determination.

Highlight [page 404]: For the Palestinians, Israel is both an occupying power and a homeland. Their war with Zionism is a

Highlight [page 405]: uniquely powerful clash marked by the yearnings of the dispossessed nation for a lost land and for the holy shrines of Islam.

Highlight [page 405]: For the Israelis, the conﬂict is about the return to their ancestral, biblical cradle, as well as about the Zionist constituent ethos of settling the land and deﬁning the state’s political borders along the lines of its outer settlements. “We are a generation that settles the land, and without the steel helmet and the canon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home,” was how then Chief of Staff General Moshe Dayan put it in a deﬁning elegy for a murdered soldier in 1956.

c. Multidimensional Conflicts

Highlight [page 411]: Multidimensional Conﬂicts

Highlight [page 411]: India-Pakistan, Pakistan-Bangladesh, north and south Cyprus, South Africa-Namibia, Sudan and South Sudan, Morocco and Western Sahara, Kosovo, Bosnia, Ethiopia-Eritrea, and Israel-Palestine are all conﬂicts that transcend a struggle for a disputed territory; they are complex knots of intractable contentions about historic homelands and mutually exclusive national or religious narratives. They all suffered ethnic cleansing, occupation, displacements, even the creation of settlements and, inevitably, resistance to occupation by every conceivable means from diplomacy to terror and guerrilla warfare. Some of these conﬂicts, like the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum, still resist peaceful solutions, and when a solution is found, it always looks ephemeral.

d. The Colonial Paradigm

Highlight [page 413]: The Colonial Paradigm

Highlight [page 413]: Palestine is not a classic case of colonial occupation. It would, of course, be absurd to deny the colonial practices of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank—Albert Memmi’s brilliant concept of the “self denying colonizer” (le colonisateur qui se refuse) comes to mind—her exploitation of its human and natural resources, and the way she turned the Palestinian population into the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the Israeli economy. Nor can it be denied that, just like the French settlers in Algeria, the Israeli settlers in the West Bank do have a country to return to. The Palestinians have, then, sufﬁcient reasons to project globally the image of a nation occupying the moral high ground in its struggle against a merciless colonial power.

Highlight [page 414]: Since the early days of Zionism, the Palestinians have displayed a blind refusal to acknowledge the authenticity of the Jews’ drive to reclaim their spiritual and political roots. The Palestinians did not have to accept that; but, by overlooking and ignoring how compelling the driving force of the Jewish national movement was, they framed their struggle in the wrong terms, as if it were a simple colonial enterprise. In their negation of free choice and moral responsibility, and by casting all blame on the dark forces of Zionism and Western imperialism for the tragedies that had befallen them, the Palestinians trapped their cause in a paradigmatic blind alley.

Highlight [page 415]: Zionism was a social and cultural revolution, a movement that, in its beginning, believed innocently that it would not even require the use of force in order to assert itself. When the early Zionists spoke of “conquest,” they referred to “conquering” the wilderness and the desert. They wanted to redeem the Jewish people by “conquering” work, toiling on the land they had “acquired legally rather than by theft or military conquest,” and by excluding the exploitation of the Arab workforce, as none other than Maxime Rodinson—probably the most notable anti-Zionist in France —acknowledged. Rodinson, nevertheless, deﬁned Israel in a 1967 article as a “colonial reality,” but years later, in 1998, without retracting from his deﬁnition, he still thought that Israel was a special case, “not a state like all the others.” Hannah Arendt, whose attitude to the Zionist project was throughout ambivalent, was unequivocal in her rejection of the colonial comparison. What the Zionists created, she wrote in 1948, had no precedent; “it could not possibly ﬁt into the political scheme of imperialism because it was neither a master nor a subject nation.” To Arthur Koestler, another disappointed Zionist, the Zionists were no colonialists, but, yes, “the executors of the amoral working of history.” 11Nor was Israel a gift Western imperialism gave to the Jews in compensation for the Holocaust. A case unique in its kind, Israel was already a political entity with all the features of statehood—an army subject to political authority, a democratic polity with its parties and elected parliament, a system of trade unions, a vibrant economy, a welfare state system, and advanced, utopian social experiments—when the news about the Shoah started to have its international impact.

e. End of Conflict?

Highlight [page 417]: End of Conﬂict?

Highlight [page 418]: Another threat has to do with the resilience of divergent narratives. The clash of narratives is, indeed, an obstacle that is always more difﬁcult to crack than tangible differences. This is precisely the reason why in Colombia and Northern Ireland, and in many other peace processes, narratives were relegated to bilateral commissions to be dealt with after the peace agreement had been signed and the tangible issues of power-sharing, the evacuation of territories, disarmament, and so forth had been resolved. In the case of Palestine, the narrative stands at the center of the process to be addressed and resolved here and now. The Israelis wanted an end of conﬂict that is essentially based on the resolution of the problems created by the 1967 war. The Palestinians would not settle for

Highlight [page 419]: anything that did not address 1948, that is, the core of the Palestinian national narrative, here and now.

f. Refugees

Highlight [page 422]: Refugees

Highlight [page 422]: People have been forced to leave their countries since the very notion of a country was created. 22Wars, famines, failing states, and genocides moved millions of people across seas and continents.

Highlight [page 422]: The birth of India and Pakistan in 1947 produced 14 million refugees and the massacre of more than half a million people. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese arrived in Hong Kong after the 1949 Communist takeover of China. The Korean War in the early 1950s pushed 1.3 million refugees from North to South Korea. The Vietnam War moved a million refugees from the north to the south. The suppression of Chechnya’s bid for independence in the 1990s turned 600,000 Chechens into refugees; millions of Afghans were displaced in the 1980s by civil war and Russia’s intervention; the civil war in Rwanda in the 1990s produced 4 million refugees, that of Bosnia more than 800,000, Liberia’s almost 2 million, and in Central America’s civil wars in the 1980s about a million Salvadoreans and Guatemalans were made refugees. Lately, 4.8 million Venezuelans ﬂed the chaos of the Bolivarian revolution to neighboring countries, 1.6 million of whom were generously admitted by Colombia. In total, 70 million people throughout the world were deﬁned in 2020 by the UNHCR as displaced and refugees.

Highlight [page 422]: After World War I, 1.2 million Greeks were sent back home from Turkey and 600,000 Turks living in Greece went back to their homeland. A similar exchange of populations took place between Greece and Bulgaria, 50,000 Greeks for about 100,000 Bulgarians. In the wake of World War II, about 12 million Germans were expelled or ﬂed back to Germany from the Baltic States and Eastern Europe. Asia was particularly given to massive exchanges of populations. The 14 million refugees produced by the dramatic birth of India and Pakistan were split with Hindu and Sikhs going to India and Muslims to Pakistan. The end of

Highlight [page 423]: Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in 1972 brought back home 10 million Bangladeshis who had ﬂed to India during the war. The common denominator in all these cases was the principle of refugees returning to the country in which they represented the majority ethnic group, never the minority. There is, seemingly, not even one precedent of a minority return.

Highlight [page 423]: By all accounts, the Palestinian refugee problem has been treated by the international community as a singular case. The December 1948 UN General Assembly Resolution 194 opened the door to the return of Palestinian refugees. It stipulated that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” For Israel, the good news was that the resolution linked return to a peace settlement. But the Arab states wanted the resolution, which being a General Assembly resolution was anyway not binding, to be implemented through automatic repatriation and outside any peace settlement with Israel. The ethos of return was cultivated, even if unwittingly, also by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which was created in December 1949. It singled out Palestinian refugees as the only ones who would have their own separate UN agency to deal with their problem. All the other many millions of refugees were to be dealt with by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). UNRWA’s generous deﬁnition of refugees as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948,” meant that with only two years of residence, a condition that affected some of those who were attracted to emigrate from neighboring Arab countries to work in the relatively prosperous Mandatory Palestine, a person could come under the protective umbrella of UNRWA. In 1954, UNRWA decided to include in the category of Palestine refugees all the descendants of refugees forever. This is how the current number of almost 6 million refugees was reached. And so the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who might have restored their lives, made careers, and become

Highlight [page 424]: respectable property owners in Arab countries or elsewhere would still be deﬁned as refugees.

Highlight [page 424]: In the past, Israel did not rule out a sizable return of refugees and displaced persons so long as it was done in the framework of a peace agreement. During the Arab-Israeli UN-sponsored peace talks in Lausanne in the spring of 1949, Israel proposed incorporating the Gaza Strip and its entire 300,000 Palestinian population into Israel. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was even willing to compensate Egypt with land within Israel. Egypt turned down the offer.

Highlight [page 424]: The Arab side in Lausanne also rejected an Israeli offer to admit 100,000 Palestinian refugees. But by her annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel had unwittingly absorbed about 300,000 Palestinians and integrated them into her social security system. On the basis of reports from Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, Professor Menachem Hofnung of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University concluded that since 1967, hundreds of thousands of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians had settled in Israel.

Highlight [page 424]: Danny Rubinstein, a respected expert in Palestinian affairs, wrote that he could reach ministry of the interior data showing that from 1994 to 2012, 130,000 Palestinians arrived in Israel through family reuniﬁcation schemes and got full citizenship. Demographer Arnon Soffer, a serious scholar but admittedly known as an alarmist, calculated that since 1967 to 2020 about 250,000 Palestinians from the occupied territories were naturalized in Israel with full citizenship. It is, he argued, “an implementation of the right of return through the back door.” 25Even if these ﬁgures are overblown—in 2003, during the Al Aqsa Intifada, a Citizenship Entry Law was enacted banning family uniﬁcation schemes—there should be no doubt about the high number of Palestinians that “returned” to Israel before and also after the 2003

Highlight [page 425]: ban. Even without annexing the occupied territories, Israel is already practically a binational state, a reality that her Nation-State Law aims to arrest.

Highlight [page 426]: This should help explain why the Palestinians found it so difﬁcult to digest the concept of “two states for two peoples.” When I was invited to Doha by Al Jazeera in 2011 to debate the Palestine Papers, a leaked archive of memos pertaining to the peace process, I realized how deep the Palestinians’ conviction was that the right of self-determination for the two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, posed a risk to the right of return. For it could mean that the exercise of self-determination resolves the problem of return. Additionally, accepting Israel as a Jewish state was tantamount to giving up on the right of return. In internal Palestinian position papers, complaints were made about Palestinian “red lines” on the refugee ﬁle being “unclear,” which

Highlight [page 427]: obviously made Israelis imagine, or fear, the worst. Dr. Einat Wilf and Adi Schwarzman mention, indeed, some extravagant Palestinian expectations as to the number of refugees Israel could and should admit. They found that a study commissioned by the PLO, in 2008 —“Israel’s Capacity to Absorb Palestinian Refugees”—claimed that Israel was capable of absorbing between 600,000 and 2 million refugees without compromising its Jewish majority. Another document suggested that the PLO ask for a return of a million refugees. But, Palestinian position papers prepared ahead or during negotiations were deﬁnitely much more moderate. In such a paper of April 28, 2007, during the Annapolis process, they suggested 100,000 returnees spread over ten years. I can’t recall such a number being mentioned during the Barak government-led negotiations. What was then explicitly mentioned by Arafat himself were “my dear refugees in Lebanon,” whose number stood around 300,000. During the Annapolis negotiations, the Palestinians would afﬁrm that “a just solution (to the plight of the refugees) in line with Resolution 194, was a compromise position.” They would also ask Israel to compensate the refugees for both their refugeehood and for loss of property, and they called for compensation also for the Arab states that had hosted the refugees for long decades. This was not an unjust requirement, and it was addressed throughout the entire process. What the Palestinians could not accept was Israel’s refusal to make its compensation through the refugees’ “Absentee Property” in Israel. Inherent in the debate about the Absentee Property are the moral and historical origins of the conﬂict. The ﬁnancial problem is resolvable, but Israel could be more generous with regard to the moral dimension of the conﬂict. Ideally, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the origins of the Nakba and, as Israel would certainly insist, also the political responsibilities that brought it about, could serve as a moral panacea.

g. Peace and Justice

Highlight [page 428]: Peace and Justice

h. Negotiations, Trust, and Would-Be Mediators

Highlight [page 430]: Negotiations, Trust, and Would-be Mediators

Highlight [page 430]: The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is a monument to the utter inadequacy of Henry Kissinger’s negotiating technique of “constructive ambiguity.” Constructive ambiguity facilitated an agreement in Oslo at the price of creating irreconcilable misconceptions with regard to the ﬁnal settlement at Camp David and beyond. Ambiguous, full of lacunae, essentially built on the delusion that trust could be built between the occupied and the occupier, the Oslo Accords contained the seeds of their own destruction. Trust between peacemakers is highly desirable, of course. But its signiﬁcance may be overrated. Peace processes are not about making love; they are about making peace. Ask Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley in Norther Ireland, or Charles de Gaulle and Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria. A genuine peace process also requires respect for the adversary. Israel made peace with Egypt without this having been preceded by long years of trust-building. Menachem Begin was forced to give back the entire Sinai peninsula because he respected Anwar Sadat and Egypt’s power. For similar reasons, Rabin was ready to give back the whole of the Golan Heights in exchange for peace, while Syria’s President Hafez al-Assad was not even ready to meet him. Such generosity was always missing in the case of Palestine.

i. Apologia for Political Betrayal

Highlight [page 432]: Apologia for Political Betrayal

Highlight [page 433]: Most peacemakers were forced to betray their political base. “In politics, it is necessary either to betray one’s country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate,” explained Charles de Gaulle, a philosophy he certainly applied in his peace in Algeria. King Abdullah I of Jordan, Anwar Sadat, and Yitzhak Rabin paid with their lives for such a “betrayal.” Nor could have Ariel Sharon performed the single most important move against Israel’s settlements obsession—the dismantling of the entire Israeli presence in Gaza—without betraying his electorate, and indeed his own political biography. This is all about turning Machiavelli on his head. The author of The Prince praised leaders who did not keep their word to respect peace agreements. Making peace while risking one’s grip on power was to Machiavelli an exercise in unpardonable political naivete. When it comes to Palestine, the Israeli right, in power through most of the ﬁfty-four years that followed the 1967 war, would blindly second Machiavelli’s proposal.

Epilogue

Highlight [page 434]: Epilogue

Highlight [page 435]: A 2020 poll found that 72 percent and 81 percent of Palestinians and Israeli Jews respectively did not believe in the feasibility of a two-state solution

Highlight [page 437]: But Israel’s international dilemma is not conﬁned only to the corridors of power in world capitals; the case of Israel, more than that of any other country in the planet, is frequently decided in the international tribunal of public opinion. The fallout of the last Gaza war with its waves of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations may perhaps dissipate, but only temporarily.

Highlight [page 437]: Israel must reckon with the fact that Palestine represents a uniquely resonating story. Seven million refugees and close to 500,000 dead in the Syrian carnage mean far less to the Western conscience than Palestinians killed in Gaza. The Syrian hecatomb, the hundreds of thousands of casualties of the Iraq war, the obliteration of Grozny by the Russian army, and hundreds of civilians killed in NATO’s aerial bombings in Kosovo and Afghanistan have never unleashed such worldwide hatred as in Israel’s case. For years, stories about Israel focused almost exclusively on the Palestinian conﬂict. Joyce Karam, the Washington bureau chief of the pan-Arab Al-Hayat, believes that the reason is that “Muslim killing Muslim seems more acceptable than Israel killing Arabs.”4

Highlight [page 438]: Israel’s siege of Gaza is wrongheaded morally and politically unwise. But Gaza is also for all practical purposes an enemy state terrorizing its own civilian population and the Israeli villages outside its borders. And not only do Gaza’s humanitarian conditions not begin to approach other infamous humanitarian crises of recent decades, but the entire Arab-Israeli conﬂict has produced in more than a century (from 1882 to this very day) fewer than a third the number of casualties in Syria’s civil war, 5not to mention catastrophes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Gunnar Heinsohn, who compiled statistics ranking conﬂicts since 1950 for Front Page Magazine Online, ranked the Arab-Israeli conﬂict as forty-ninth in terms of fatalities.6

Highlight [page 438]: It is a despicable ﬂaw of the UN system that the application of the lofty principles of universal justice should be conditioned by the global balance of power and that the world’s most notorious abusers should be allowed to posture as the guardians of human rights in UN agencies. The United Nations Human Rights Council, where more resolutions condemning human rights abuses have been passed against Israel than against the rest of the world combined, is a unique case of political and moral obscenity. The same council would not dare put Russia in the dock for razing Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, to the ground, or China for brutally oppressing the people of Tibet and the Muslim Uighur minority. Nor have the United States or Britain ever been called to order by the council for the massive casualties they have inﬂicted on the civilian population in Iraq and Afghanistan. Forever anonymous will also remain the many thousands of Yemenis, 25 percent of them children, 7who were killed in a war involving celebrated champions of human rights, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, a war that spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in decades. The same is true of the ﬁve hundred conﬁrmed civilian deaths and six thousand wounded in NATO’s massive bombing campaign in the Balkans in the 1990s, a case that was never investigated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Highlight [page 439]: The far left’s Jewish problem in the West is the real intractable issue here, and, as Princeton’s political theorist Michael Walzer rightly observed, anti-Zionism has joined anti-Semitism to become what August Bebel brilliantly deﬁned as the “socialism of fools.” The

Highlight [page 440]: now fashionable ivory tower nonsense about a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute still draws its rationale from the old topic that religion is not a proper basis for statehood, as if the European states were not historically born as Christian republics and as if the Arab states surrounding Israel are a monument to religious diversity. Israel has much soul-searching to do, but so do her critics. Had not Zionism been put in the dock by its detractors years before the 1967 occupation? And was it not that thirty years after the Holocaust, when there were hardly any settlements in the territories and the Palestine Liberation Organization had not yet endorsed the two-state solution, an infamous UN resolution equating Zionism with racism was passed?

Highlight [page 441]: Not all of Israel’s critics are the usual suspects, though. Changes in the perception of Israel are occurring also in traditionally friendly constituencies, such as Democratic white American liberals, many of whom are Jewish. This has to do with the racial lens becoming central to the way American bien-pensants frame the Palestinian conﬂict as one between a white colonial power trampling the rights of a colonized third-world nation.

Highlight [page 442]: Behind the cynical political manipulator there lies Netanyahu the ideologue. He has survived so many years in power precisely because the two pillars of his strategy—an unrelenting war against Iran’s hegemonic ambitions and the drive to defeat and obliterate the Palestinian national movement—are shared by the overwhelming majority of Israelis and their political parties. Netanyahu is the embodiment of the Israelis’ fear of and contempt for the Palestinians, and, like them, he never truly believed that the Palestinians would

Highlight [page 443]: ever accept any Israeli peace plan or ever recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Trump’s peace plan fully coincided with Netanyahu’s vision that for the Palestinians to get a crippled state they needed to be stripped of their entire national ethos and abandon the armed struggle.

Highlight [page 446]: Nations in history hardly ever get assassinated; they commit suicide, and the occupation is cruising into Israel’s self-destruction. The real existential threat facing Israel is not nuclear Iran; rather, it is to be found in the morally corrosive effects of the oppressive occupation of the Palestinian people. Fifty-four years of occupation have taken their toll. Israel’s grip on the Palestinian territories is key to understanding the reasons for the illiberal zeitgeist that has overtaken Israel’s public life. The unlawful practices of occupation were bound to spill over into the country’s recognized boundaries and further enhance its ethnocentrist impulses. Israel’s unapologetically annexationist governments spearheaded the attack on Israel democracy’s last frontier, the Supreme Court and the free press. We saw “disloyal” artists being stripped of government subsidies, and peace-seeking NGOs being scrutinized as foreign agents while rightwing groups got lavish aid from the government, Jewish foreign donors, and casino magnates. Some time ago, a novel on a love affair between a Palestinian and a Jewish girl was banned from the school curriculum. And a bill aimed at Israeli Arabs’ representatives in Parliament has been passed that would allow the dismissal of MPs for “disloyalty” to the state. In its reckless ﬂirtation with illiberal

Highlight [page 447]: democracy, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition produced in 2018 the Nation-State Law, which stands in stark contradiction with both Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence and the 1992 Constitutional Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, both of which recognize the full and unconditional individual rights of all, Jews and Arabs, in the “Jewish and Democratic” State.

Highlight [page 447]: Signiﬁcantly, the Nation-State Law was enacted when the Israeli Arabs’ integration was progressing apace. The 2017 Israel Democracy Institute Index of Arab-Israeli relations found that 70 percent speak ﬂuent Hebrew, 77 percent are not interested in separation, and 80 percent support the two-state solution. Professor Amal Jamal of Tel Aviv University studied the consistent rise of an Arab middle class, and an empowered Arab civil society eager to share in the revolution of opportunities that Israeli governments are ﬁnally facilitating. 13There is still a long way to go. But despite the violent feuds between Jews and Arabs in Israel’s so-called mixed cities during the last war with Gaza, the process of Arab “Israelization” seems irreversible. In the last seven years, the number of Arab students in Israel’s universities increased by 80 percent, 50 percent in computing sciences, and 60 percent in postgraduate and doctoral programs. In 2019, a third of the new students matriculated in the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, ranked as the best university in the country, were Arabs. In the last decade, the number of Arabs employed in high-tech went up by 1,800 percent, with women representing 25 percent of this increase. In total, 10 percent of the start-up nation’s employees and 15 percent of Israel’s physicians are Arabs. This is partly the result of the narrowing of the budgeting gap per pupil between the Jewish and Arab sector from 27 percent in 2013 to 12 percent in 2018.

Highlight [page 449]: They will never accept the moral foundations of Zionism, but, as Israel’s peace with Egypt and Jordan and the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative indicate, they would consider accepting the political legitimacy of a Jewish state. The peace process is not supposed to deliver paradise, but its qualiﬁed promise requires superseding fatalism.

Highlight [page 451]: President Abbas asserted at the Islamic Summit in Istanbul on December 13, 2017, that “from now on” he would not accept “any role” for the United States in the peace process, and even called the world to reconsider its recognition of Israel. 19Abbas presumably is also still waiting for the United Kingdom to apologize for the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The same Abbas was heard in a Fatah Central Committee meeting on April 29, 2021, vulgarly cursing the whole world including China, Russia, the United States (which had just renewed ﬁnancial and political assistance to the Palestinian

Highlight [page 452]: Authority), and most importantly, all the Arabs. He only spared Israel.

Highlight [page 453]: Another possible cataclysmic scenario that could force Israelis and Palestinians back into the search for a diplomatic solution is the question of Jerusalem, currently the most visible vortex of instability in the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

Highlight [page 454]: We bear, then, a heavy responsibility to persist in conceiving bold and generous solutions. History teaches that interim arrangements, such as the political limbo the Palestinians are in, cannot last.