An Obituary for “The Middle East Peace Process”

By Richard H. Curtiss

Obituaries celebrate the life of the departed and remind readers of what’s been lost. In the case of the “Middle East peace process” so casually killed by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the losses are a decade of intensive international cooperation focused upon making the entire Middle East prosperous and secure, the best chance in this generation for Israeli-Arab reconciliation, and any likelihood of the long-term survival in Palestine of a “Jewish State,” as distinguished from a “democratic secular state” or an “Islamic state.”

It’s worthwhile, therefore, to review first “the conception” and then “the birth” and “the death” of the process that came so close to a Middle East peace that all parties were prepared to accept.

Part I. Conception of the Peace Process

“The Peace Process” was conceived in November 1988 as the result of political changes within the United States and among the Palestinians. That was the month that George Bush was elected president of the United States.

In the same month, the Palestine National Council, meeting in Algiers, endorsed U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for negotiations, thus replacing a long-standing commitment to a “democratic secular state in all of Palestine” with endorsement of a “two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.”

The Soviet Union also had a major hand in this reversal of Palestinian policy. Soviet diplomats assured PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat they would stop funding any leftist elements within the PLO that tried to use this concession to weaken his leadership.

In the same month, Swedish diplomats took a hand by arranging a meeting in Stockholm between Arafat and five liberal American Jews which resulted in a joint statement meeting U.S. government conditions for a U.S.-PLO dialogue. When George Shultz, who along with Henry Kissinger was one of the two most pro-Israel secretaries of state in U.S. history, balked at accepting the Stockholm declaration, Arafat called a press conference in Geneva. There he read what had come to be called “the magic words” from a typescript in English accepting the two Security Council resolutions, recognizing Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, and “renouncing” terrorism. This put the ball squarely in the court of the incoming Bush administration.

During Bush’s first months in office signals were mixed. He appointed as secretary of state his long-time personal friend and supporter James Baker, who had been the single most effective member of the preceding Reagan administration. Their initial statements seemed excessively solicitous of Israel, but their actions indicated otherwise.

The Israeli coalition cabinet was made up equally of Labor and Likud party elements, with hard-line Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir serving as prime minister. Right after Bush took office Shamir visited the U.S., but when he wanted to visit Washington a second time, he was told he would not be welcome unless he arrived with a plan to end the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Shamir borrowed a vaguely worded plan devised by Labor party rival Yitzhak Rabin, who was serving as defense minister in the Israeli coalition government. The plan called for holding elections in the occupied territories among the Palestinians, who were in the second year of their “intifada.”

Although the clearly impractical purpose of the election was to cut the Palestine Liberation Organization and diaspora Palestinians out of ensuing peace negotiations, Baker seized upon it as if it were written on golden tablets. Only then did Shamir realize that if the Israelis did not fill in the details to, among other things, make the elections free and also to include the Arabs of East Jerusalem, Baker would supply those details himself.

Baker’s policies became even clearer on May 22, 1989, when he called upon Israel to accept Resolution 242, forswear annexation of Arab territories, stop Jewish settlement activity, allow the reopening of Palestinian schools closed during the intifada, “reach over to the Palestinians who deserve political rights,” and “lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel.”

In the same speech, however, Baker also called upon Palestinians to convince Israelis of their peaceful intentions, and he called upon the other Arabs to stop boycotting Israel and challenging Israeli membership in international organizations.

The timing was not coincidental. Arab League heads of state were about to meet in Casablanca, where they would hear Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi charge that Arafat’s concessions for peace had given away bargaining chips while eliciting nothing in return. Baker’s speech, however, cut the ground out from under the Arab hard-liners. The 19 other Arab League member states endorsed Arafat’s embrace of a two-state solution.

The following months were filled with attempts by friends of Israel within the U.S. Congress to halt the U.S.-Palestinian dialogue and attempts by the Israeli government both to break the intifada and to assure that no Palestinian election would be held unless it was designed solely to produce new and pliable Palestinian leaders with whom the Israeli government could deal.

With Shamir refusing to negotiate with the PLO directly, the Israeli cabinet rejected, by a six-to-six vote, an Egyptian plan for Israelis and Palestinians to meet in Cairo to discuss how elections could be held to select Palestinian negotiators. The six votes for the meeting were by the Labor members of the cabinet who, in the absence of a majority, lost to the negative votes of the Likud members.

Still stalemated, Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Tunis asked Bush and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to put Middle East peace high on the agenda of their Dec. 2, 1989 summit meeting in Malta. Then in Malta it became evident that the U.S. had reversed its long-standing policy of trying to keep the now-weakening Soviet Union out of Middle East affairs. Instead, it appeared that, with the U.S. prodding Israel, the Soviets prodding Syria, and the Arab petroleum-producing states prodding Arafat, the Bush administration was prepared to challenge the Israel lobby and its congressional supporters in Washington in hopes of moving toward an Israeli-Palestinian settlement in 1991, a full year before the next U.S. election.

Bush then linked $400 million in U.S. aid that Israel was requesting to help settle Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union to a halt in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This ignited a full-scale battle between Bush and Israel’s U.S. supporters.

Meanwhile, Shamir sought to sabotage his own coalition government’s plan to hold Palestinian elections by agreeing to enter talks with Palestinians only if his Labor party coalition partners pledged support for two deal-breaking conditions: undivided Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and exclusion of the PLO from the negotiations.

When Labor party leader Shimon Peres, who was deputy prime minister in the coalition government, refused, Shamir dismissed him, bringing down the government. After Peres failed to form a new government, Shamir formed a right-wing cabinet.

Middle East peace efforts, therefore, already were in a state of disarray when they were halted altogether by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. For the next six months all energies were consumed by the buildup, under the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, of the coalition that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

When he announced the “suspension of allied offensive operations” against Iraqi forces on Feb. 27, 1991, U.S. President George Bush had lost seven precious months in his carefully planned timetable to settle the Palestinian-Israeli dispute well before he had to run for re-election. On the other hand, the war that had resulted in fewer than 300 coalition combat casualties had left Bush with extraordinarily high approval ratings among U.S. voters.

Working in favor of Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, although they were not yet fully aware of it, was PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s urgent need for a settlement as the result of a miscalculation of his own. Forced, like other Arab leaders, to choose between Saddam Hussain and the Saudi-led campaign to liberate Kuwait, Arafat overruled the advice of his deputies and made it clear that he would have no part of the effort to expel Iraqi forces.

His decision cut all ties with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, who had long been his principal financial backers. Unable to meet his many financial obligations after the war ended, Arafat grew increasingly desperate with each passing month.

Meanwhile, as Israelis increased their settlement activity, the U.S. began quiet moves to select Palestinian negotiators from the West Bank and Gaza, ignoring Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s insistence that he, too, must approve the Palestinian participants. Shamir also initially rejected an invitation from the U.S. and the Soviet Union to a Middle East peace conference in October in Madrid.

The conflict between Shamir and Bush came to a head in September 1991, when Israel’s Washington, DC lobby sent 1,000 Jewish supporters to urge their representatives in Congress to support Israel’s demand for an annual aid package of $3.2 billion plus $2 billion in U.S. loan guarantees every year for the next five years. Bush balked, calling upon Congress to delay consideration of the loan guarantees for 120 days. This effectively made the loan guarantees conditional upon Israeli attendance at the Madrid conference.

The conference initiated a series of frequently interrupted Israeli bilateral talks with Syrians, Lebanese and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. In the course of the talks Palestinian members made it clear that they would only operate with the consent of the PLO leadership in Tunis. By the time of the second regional Mideast peace session in Moscow on Jan. 27, 1992, the Palestinian delegation included representatives from East Jerusalem and the Palestinian diaspora, and was operating separately from the Jordanians.

But when Palestinian autonomy came up for discussion at the peace talks, two right-wing parties defected from the Shamir government, bringing it down. Israeli elections were called for June 23, 1992, and the peace process again went on hold.

The Bush administration, with support in Congress, remained adamant, however, against approving loan guarantees so long as Israeli settlement activity continued in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. After a narrow election victory made Labor party leader Yitzhak Rabin prime minister, Shamir said on television that had he been re-elected, “I would have conducted negotiations on autonomy for 10 years and in the meantime we would have reached half a million” Jews in the West Bank.

Then Bush, who by this time was feeling severe election-year pressures of his own from the Israel lobby, announced his agreement in principle to Israel’s request for $10 billion in loan guarantees during a Rabin visit to the U.S. on Aug. 11, 1992. Renewed peace process activity was aborted, however, by Bush’s Nov. 3 election defeat, partly as a result of the determined efforts of Israel’s supporters in the U.S. media. The intensity of this anti-Bush media campaign was best illustrated by the public endorsement of Bush’s opponent by New York Times columnist William Safire, one-time Nixon White House speech writer and long-time advocate of Republican causes and candidates.

The first appointments by newly elected President Bill Clinton gave the clear impression that his Middle East policies would be governed by his election campaign promises to American Jewish leaders. When peace talks resumed on April 27, 1993 in Washington, it became increasingly evident that, in the absence of U.S. pressure on Rabin, who was using increasingly brutal methods to suppress the intifada, the peace talks had become a slow train on a circular track to nowhere.

Part II. Birth of the Peace Process

At the end of August 1993, however, it was revealed that after 14 secret meetings over a period of nine months in Oslo, Israeli and PLO negotiators had reached an agreement for mutual recognition and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho in return for an end to the intifada.

The agreement was signed on Sept. 13 with pomp and ceremony at the White House in the presence of President Clinton, after which Arafat and Rabin shook hands.

Disputes continued, however, and a Dec. 13 deadline for Israeli withdrawal passed. Finally, after more killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces and settlers, and of Israelis by suicide bombers, the first contingent of the new Palestinian Authority forces entered the Gaza Strip on May 10, and Jericho on May 13, 1994.

Gulf Cooperation Council states announced they would end the secondary and tertiary aspects of the Arab League boycott of Israel. Some went further. Morocco, Tunisia, Qatar and Oman began quietly arranging the exchange of economic liaison offices with Israel. On Oct. 14, 1994, Arafat, Rabin and Peres were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and 10 days later Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan formally signed a peace treaty between their countries in a border ceremony attended by President Clinton.

However, bloodshed continued and on May 17, 1995 the Clinton administration cast the first U.S. veto in five years to kill a resolution supported by all 14 other members of the U.N. Security Council calling on Israel to reverse plans to expropriate Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. In retaliation, the Palestinian Authority urged Arab states to reverse their normalization of ties with Israel.

Finally, after months of negotiations, Arafat and Rabin signed another agreement on Sept. 28, 1995 at the White House, again in Clinton’s presence, extending the areas of Palestinian self-rule to the seven most populous West Bank towns.

However, in early November as he was leaving a peace rally, Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish religious law student. One day after Rabin’s funeral, attended by Presidents Clinton and Hosni Mubarak and King Hussein along with other world leaders, acting Israeli Prime Minister Peres announced that Israeli troop withdrawals from the West Bank would continue on schedule.

On Dec. 27, Israeli forces completed their withdrawal from six cities and more than 400 villages in the West Bank. Then, on Jan. 20, 1995, in elections marked by a heavy turnout despite a boycott by leftist rejectionist parties and the right-wing Hamas, West Bank and Gaza voters elected Yasser Arafat president of the Palestinian Authority and also elected an 88-member Palestinian legislature.

On Feb. 11, 1996, Peres announced that Israeli national elections would be held in May rather than October, as required by law. However, the buildup to elections took place in a paroxysm of violence as Palestinian Islamists responded to Israeli assassinations of two prominent Islamic Jihad and Hamas leaders with deadly suicide bombings, and Israeli armed forces responded to attacks on their “security zone” in Lebanon with air, sea and land attacks all over southern Lebanon that killed 162 people.

Part III. Death of the Peace Process

On May 31, 1996, Binyamin Netanyahu won election as Israeli prime minister with a razor-thin 50.4 percent majority of the vote compared to 49.6 percent for Shimon Peres. Upon taking office, Netanyahu, who had vowed while campaigning to replace “land for peace” with a meaningless “peace for peace,” set out to fulfill his promise and, if possible, blame the death of the peace process on “Palestinian terrorism.”

Although the process had been conceived nearly eight years earlier, it took less than two years to kill it. Netanyahu ended any serious negotiations with Syria by refusing to resume where commitments by Labor government negotiators with Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad had left off. Netanyahu said Israeli commitments by his predecessors were no longer valid.

Finally, under some U.S. pressure, Netanyahu followed through on the Labor government’s commitment to withdraw from Hebron, keeping one-fifth of the city of 100,000 under Israeli occupation to protect some 400 Jewish settlers living there, and withdrawing from the rest, while exacting further U.S. concessions for even this limited withdrawal.

Killing the rest of the Oslo accords was simpler. Before he signed the initial agreement, the financially desperate Arafat had declined to have Palestinian lawyers examine it. It didn’t take a lawyer to observe however, that the loosely worded accords depend totally on Israeli goodwill.

But the goodwill was removed with Netanyahu’s election. The accords also presupposed some U.S. pressure on Israel not to interpret their provisions too narrowly. However, this kind of “honest brokering,” if it ever existed, disappeared with Clinton’s election.

After the Hebron withdrawal three more withdrawals were supposed to be completed by the scheduled May 1998 beginning of one year of final status talks. There were no such withdrawals. Instead Netanyahu offered one withdrawal from “9 percent of the West Bank” which would bring the total Israel withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza to about 40 percent. Arafat, however, had indicated he could not start final status talks until the Israelis had withdrawn from at least 90 percent of the occupied territories which, after all, comprised only 22 percent of the original mandate of Palestine.

The U.S. reaction was to urge Israel to withdraw from a negligible 13 percent of the West Bank. Netanyahu refused to do even that. This set up tension within the Clinton administration. Second- term Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Martin Indyk wanted to call Netanyahu’s bluff. National Security Adviser Samuel Berger and Vice President Al Gore successfully urged Clinton to back down from the “U.S. plan.”

Thus, as throughout its short lifetime, the fate of the peace process remained dependent upon U.S. domestic politics. Clinton, in deep political trouble at home, wanted only to serve out his remaining two years in office while avoiding impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives.

He reasoned that taking on Netanyahu—no matter how unpopular he might be with some Jewish leaders in the U.S. and with Israelis who saw Israel’s best hope for long-term integration into the Middle East fading—would be more dangerous to Clinton’s domestic political health than turning away as the Israeli leader administered the coup de grace to the land-for-peace process.

Logic says that someday there has to be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. However, it is not going to happen while Netanyahu and Clinton are in office. And when and if another such opportunity ever arises, conditions in the Middle East may be very different than they are today.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.