The New York Review of Books
June 13, 2002
Exchange
Camp David and After: An Exchange (2. A Reply to Ehud Barak)
By Hussein Agha, Robert Malley
2. A Reply to Ehud Barak
Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian war have several targets in
mind, and public opinion is not the least of them. The Camp David
summit ended almost two years ago; the Taba negotiations were
abandoned in January 2001; Ariel Sharon has made no secret of his
rejection of the Oslo process, not to mention the positions taken by
Israel at Camp David or in Taba; and the confrontation between the two
sides has had disastrous consequences. Yet in the midst of it all, the
various interpretations of what happened at Camp David and its
aftermath continue to draw exceptional attention both in Israel and in
the United States.
Ehud Barak's interview with Benny Morris makes it clear why that is
the case: Barak's assessment that the talks failed because Yasser
Arafat cannot make peace with Israel and that his answer to Israel's
unprecedented offer was to resort to terrorist violence has become
central to the argument that Israel is in a fight for its survival
against those who deny its very right to exist. So much of what is
said and done today derives from and is justified by that crude
appraisal. First, Arafat and the rest of the Palestinian leaders must
be supplanted before a meaningful peace process can resume, since they
are the ones who rejected the offer. Second, the Palestinians' use of
violence has nothing to do with ending the occupation since they
walked away from the possibility of reaching that goal at the
negotiating table not long ago. And, finally, Israel must crush the
Palestinians-"badly beat them" in the words of the current prime
minister-if an agreement is ever to be reached.
The one-sided account that was set in motion in the wake of Camp David
has had devastating effects-on Israeli public opinion as well as on US
foreign policy. That was clear enough a year ago; it has become far
clearer since. Rectifying it does not mean, to quote Barak, engaging
in "Palestinian propaganda." Rather, it means taking a close look at
what actually occurred.
1.
Barak's central thesis is that the current Palestinian leadership
wants "a Palestinian state in all of Palestine. What we see as
self-evident, two states for two peoples, they reject." Arafat, he
concludes, seeks Israel's "demise." Barak has made that claim
repeatedly, both here and elsewhere, and indeed it forms the crux of
his argument. His claim therefore should be taken up, issue by issue.
On the question of the boundaries of the future state, the Palestinian
position, formally adopted as early as 1988 and frequently reiterated
by Palestinian negotiators throughout the talks, was for a Palestinian
state based on the June 4, 1967, borders, living alongside Israel. At
Camp David (at which one of the present writers was a member of the US
administration's team), Arafat's negotiators accepted the notion of
Israeli annexation of West Bank territory to accommodate settlements,
though they insisted on a one-for-one swap of land "of equal size and
value." The Palestinians argued that the annexed territory should
neither affect the contiguity of their own land nor lead to the
incorporation of Palestinians into Israel.
The ideas put forward by President Clinton at Camp David fell well
short of those demands. In order to accommodate Israeli settlements,
he proposed a deal by which Israel would annex 9 percent of the West
Bank in exchange for turning over to the Palestinians parts of
pre-1967 Israel equivalent to 1 percent of the West Bank. This
proposal would have entailed the incorporation of tens of thousands of
additional Palestinians into Israeli territory near the annexed
settlements; and it would have meant that territory annexed by Israel
would encroach deep inside the Palestinian state. In his December 23,
2000, proposals-called "parameters" by all parties-Clinton suggested
an Israeli annexation of between 4 and 6 percent of the West Bank in
exchange for a land swap of between 1 and 3 percent. The following
month in Taba, the Palestinians put their own map on the table which
showed roughly 3.1 percent of the West Bank under Israeli sovereignty,
with an equivalent land swap in areas abutting the West Bank and
Gaza.[*]
On Jerusalem, the Palestinians accepted at Camp David the principle of
Israeli sovereignty over the Wailing Wall, the Jewish Quarter of the
Old City, and Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem-neighborhoods
that were not part of Israel before the 1967 Six-Day War-though the
Palestinians clung to the view that all of Arab East Jerusalem should
be Palestinian.
In contrast to the issues of territory and Jerusalem, there is no
Palestinian position on how the refugee question should be dealt with
as a practical matter. Rather, the Palestinians presented a set of
principles. First, they insisted on the need to recognize the
refugees' right of return, lest the agreement lose all legitimacy with
the vast refugee constituency-roughly half the entire Palestinian
population. Second, they acknowledged that Israel's demographic
interests had to be recognized and taken into account. Barak draws
from this the conclusion that the refugees are the "main
demographic-political tool for subverting the Jewish state." The
Palestinian leadership's insistence on a right of return demonstrates,
in his account, that their conception of a two-state solution is one
state for the Palestinians in Palestine and another in Israel. But the
facts suggest that the Palestinians are trying (to date,
unsuccessfully) to reconcile these two competing imperatives-the
demographic imperative and the right of return. Indeed, in one of his
last pre- Camp David meetings with Clinton, Arafat asked him to "give
[him] a reasonable deal [on the refugee question] and then see how to
present it as not betraying the right of return."
Some of the Palestinian negotiators proposed annual caps on the number
of returnees (though at numbers far higher than their Israeli
counterparts could accept); others wanted to create incentives for
refugees to settle elsewhere and disincentives for them to return to
the 1948 land. But all acknowledged that there could not be an
unlimited, "massive" return of Palestinian refugees to Israel. The
suggestion made by some that the Camp David summit broke down over the
Palestinians' demand for a right of return simply is untrue: the issue
was barely discussed between the two sides and President Clinton's
ideas mentioned it only in passing. (In an Op-Ed piece in The New York
Times this February Arafat called for "creative solutions to the right
of return while respecting Israel's demographic concerns.")
The Palestinians did insist that Israel recognize that it bore
responsibility for creating the problem of the refugees. But it is
ironic that Barak would choose to convey his categorical rejection of
any such Israeli historical responsibility to Benny Morris, an Israeli
historian called "revisionist" in large part for his account of the
origins of the displacement of the Palestinians and for his conclusion
that, while there were many reasons why the refugees left, Israeli
military attacks and expulsions were the major ones.
The Palestinians can be criticized for not having presented detailed
proposals at Camp David; but, as has been shown, it would be
inaccurate to say they had no positions. It also is true that Barak
broke a number of Israeli taboos and moved considerably from prior
positions while the Palestinians believed they had made their historic
concessions at Oslo, when they agreed to cede 78 percent of mandatory
Palestine to Israel; they did not intend the negotiations to further
whittle down what they already regarded as a compromise position. But
neither the constancy of the Palestinians' view nor the unprecedented
and evolving nature of the Israelis' ought to have any bearing on the
question of whether the Palestinian leadership recognized Israel's
right to exist as a Jewish state. It is the substance of the
Palestinian positions that should count.
Those Palestinian positions may well have been beyond what the Israeli
people can accept, particularly on the refugee question. But that is
no more the question than it is whether the Israeli position was
beyond what the Palestinian people can accept. And it is not the
question that Barak purports to address in his interview. The question
is whether, as Barak claims, the Palestinian position was tantamount
to a denial of Israel's right to exist and to seeking its
destruction. The facts do not validate that claim. True, the
Palestinians rejected the version of the two-state solution that was
put to them. But it could also be said that Israel rejected the
unprecedented two-state solution put to them by the Palestinians from
Camp David onward, including the following provisions: a state of
Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very
large majority of its settlers; the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the
city's history; preservation of Israel's demographic balance between
Jews and Arabs; security guaranteed by a US-led international
presence.
Barak's remarks about other Arab leaders are, in this regard,
misplaced. Arafat did not reach out to the people of Israel in the way
President Sadat did. But unlike Sadat, he agreed to cede parts of the
territory that was lost in 1967-both in the West Bank and in East
Jerusalem. The reference to President Assad-whose peace efforts are
characterized as "genuine and sincere"-is particularly odd since Assad
turned down precisely what Arafat was requesting: borders based on the
lines of June 4, 1967, with one-for-one swaps.
Barak claims that "Israel is too strong at the moment to defeat, so
[the Palestinians] formally recognize it. But their game plan is to
establish a Palestinian state while always leaving an opening for
further 'legitimate' demands down the road." But here Barak
contradicts himself. For if that were the case, the logical course of
action for Arafat would have been to accept Clinton's proposals at
Camp David, and even more so on December 23. He would then have had
over 90 percent of the land and much of East Jerusalem, while
awaiting, as Barak would have it, the opportunity to violate the
agreement and stake out a claim for more. Whatever else one may think
of Arafat's behavior throughout the talks, it clearly offers little to
substantiate Barak's theory.
2.
In his account of why the negotiations failed, Barak focuses only on
the Palestinians' deficiencies, and dismisses as trivial sideshows
several major political decisions that are crucial to the
understanding of that failure. When he took office he chose to
renegotiate the agreement on withdrawal of Israeli forces from the
West Bank signed by Benjamin Netanyahu rather than implement it. He
continued and even intensified construction of settlements. He delayed
talks on the Palestinian track while he concentrated on Syria. He did
not release Palestinian prisoners detained for acts committed prior to
the signing of the Oslo agreement. He failed to carry out his
commitments to implement the third territorial redeployment of Israeli
troops and the transfer of the three Jerusalem villages.
Barak is equally dismissive of the importance of his holding a
substantive meeting with Arafat at Camp David- though here one cannot
help but be struck by the contradiction between Barak's justification
for that decision (namely that "the right time for a meeting between
us was when things were ready for a decision by the leaders") and his
conviction that a leaders' summit was necessary. If he felt things
were not ready for a decision by the leaders meeting together, why
insist on convening a leaders' summit in the first place?
More broadly, from a Palestinian perspective, the issues concerning
the timing of the talks were dealt with in ways that were both
damaging and exasperating. The Palestinian leaders had called for
negotiations on a comprehensive settlement between the two sides as
early as the fall of 1999. They had asked for an initial round of
secret talks between Israelis and Palestinians who were not officials
in order to better prepare the ground. They had argued against holding
the Camp David summit at the time proposed, claiming it was premature
and would not lead to an agreement in view of the gaps between the two
sides. They later asked for a series of summit meetings following Camp
David so as to continue the talks. Each of their requests was denied.
In the fall of 1999, Barak was not ready for talks with the
Palestinians and chose to focus on Syria. He had no interest in
discussions between nonofficials. When, by the summer of 2000, he
finally was ready (the negotiations with Syria having failed), he
insisted on going to Camp David without delay. And at Camp David he
reacted angrily to any suggestion of holding further summit
meetings. Barak, today, dismisses those Palestinian requests as mere
pretexts and excuses. But it is not clear why they should be taken any
less seriously than the ones he made, and on which he prevailed.
All these external political events surrounding the negotiations, in
fact, had critical implications for the negotiations themselves. The
US administration felt so at the time, seeking on countless occasions
before, during, and after the Camp David meetings to convince Barak to
change his approach, precisely because the administration feared his
tactics would harm the prospects for a deal. As has since become
evident, the mood among critical Palestinian constituencies had turned
decidedly sour-a result of continued settlement construction, repeated
territorial closings that barred Palestinians from working in Israel,
and their humiliation and harassment at checkpoints. Confidence in the
possibility of a fair negotiated settlement was badly shaken. Israeli
actions that strengthened those trends further narrowed the
Palestinian leaders' room to maneuver and accentuated the sense of
paralysis among them.
Barak's failure to recognize this is peculiar coming from a leader who
was so sensitive to the role of Israeli public opinion. As so many
examples from both the Syrian and Palestinian tracks illustrate, he
was convinced that poor management of domestic public opinion could
scuttle the chances for a deal. In his approach to the Israeli-Syrian
negotiations, he went so far as to counsel Clinton against moving too
quickly toward agreement during the Sheperdstown summit between the
US, Israel, and Syria in January 2000, arguing that prolonged talks
were required to show the Israeli public that he had put up a tough
fight. In December, he had invoked the harsh statement of the Syrian
foreign minister on the White House lawn as a reason why he could not
show flexibility in their subsequent discussions at Blair House,
arguing that the Israeli public would feel he had displayed
weakness. He repeatedly insisted on (but rarely obtained) Syrian
confidence-building measures in advance of the negotiations to help
him sell his proposals back home.
When dealing with the Palestinians, likewise, Barak evidently felt the
pressures of Israeli public opinion. He adamantly refused to discuss
the issue of Jerusalem prior to the Camp David summit, claiming that
to do so would have "torpedoed" the prospects for success. Settlement
activity, to which both the Palestinians and the US objected,
nonetheless proceeded at an extraordinary pace-faster than during
Netanyahu's tenure, with over 22,000 more settlers. This was done, as
Barak concedes in his interview, in order to "mollify the Israeli
right which he needed quiescent as he pushed forward toward peace."
In short, Barak understood all too well how political developments
surrounding the negotiations could affect Israeli public opinion and,
therefore, his own ability to make agreements. Yet he showed no such
comprehension when it came to the possible effects of his policies on
Arafat's own flexibility and capacity to make compromises. That Arafat
was unable either to obtain a settlement freeze or to get Israel to
carry out its prior commitments Barak views as inconsequential. In
reality, the cards Barak was saving to increase his room to maneuver
during the negotiations were precisely those the Palestinians needed
to expand their own room to maneuver. Ultimately, the Palestinian team
that went to Camp David was suspected by many Palestinians and other
Arabs of selling out-incapable of standing up to Israeli or American
pressure.
Barak's apparent insensitivity to how his statements might affect the
other side is revealed in his interview with Benny Morris. He
characterizes Palestinian refugees as "salmons" whose yearning to
return to their land somehow is supposed to fade away in roughly
eighty years in a manner that the Jewish people's never did, even
after two thousand years. When he denounces the idea that Israel be a
"state for all its citizens" he does not seem to realize he risks
alienating its many Arab citizens. Most troubling of all is his
description of Arabs as people who "don't suffer from the problem of
telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as
an irrelevant category." It is hard to know what to make of this
disparaging judgment of an entire people. In the history of this
particular conflict, neither Palestinians nor Israelis have a monopoly
on unkept commitments or promises.
3.
By now, some of those who said that the Palestinians' rejection of the
American proposals at Camp David was definitive proof of their
inability to make peace have shifted their argument. Instead, they
concentrate on President Clinton's proposals of December 23, 2000,
along with the Israeli- Palestinian talks that took place at Taba, in
January 2001, which Barak takes the so-called "revisionists" to task
for ignoring.
First, the facts. There is little doubt, as we described in our
earlier article for The New York Review of Books, that the ideas put
forward by President Clinton in December 2000 were a significant step
in the direction of the Palestinians' position. It is also beyond dis-
pute that while the Israeli cabinet accepted Clinton's "parameters,"
Arafat took his time, waiting ten days before offering his response-a
costly delay considering the fact that only thirty days remained in
Clinton's presidency.
When he finally met with Clinton, on January 2, 2001, Arafat explained
that he accepted the President's ideas with reservations and that
Clinton could tell Barak that "[I] accepted your parameters and have
some views I must express. At the same time, we know Israelis have
views we must respect." His attitude, basically, was that the
parameters contained interesting elements that should guide but not
bind the negotiators. It is clearly an overstatement to claim that
Arafat rejected "every one" of the President's ideas, and it certainly
is not the message Clinton delivered to Barak.
On a more specific point, Arafat did not reject Israeli sovereignty
over the Wailing Wall but over the much larger Western Wall (of which
it is a part), which encroaches on the Muslim Quarter of the Old
City. A few days later, Barak presented his own reservations about
Clinton's proposals in a private communication.
Again, however, it is the conclusion Barak draws from this episode
that is questionable. The Palestinians undoubtedly were not satisfied
with Clinton's parameters, which they wanted to renegotiate. They were
not responding with the same sense of urgency as the Americans or as
Barak, who was facing elections and knew the fate of the peace process
could decide them. But unlike what had happened at Camp David, there
was no Palestinian rejection. On the contrary, the two sides, which
had engaged in secret meetings during the autumn, agreed to continue
talks at Taba. Indeed, the intensive talks that subsequently took
place there ended not for lack of an agreement but for lack of time in
view of the impending Israeli elections. In January Prime Minister
Barak campaigned seeking a mandate to continue those talks. He went so
far as to authorize his delegation at Taba to issue a joint statement
with the Palestinians asserting that
the two sides declare that they have never been closer to
reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the
remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of
negotiations following the Israeli elections.
If we assume that Barak meant what the Taba statement said, that
statement simply cannot be reconciled with his current assertion that
the Palestinians are out to achieve the destruction of Israel. That
statement also contradicts the constantly made claim that Arafat
simply rejected a historic chance to negotiate a settlement.
4.
The failure at Camp David and the start of the second Palestinian
intifada are directly linked in accounts by Barak and others to argue
that Arafat's response to the unprecedented offers was to scuttle
negotiations and seek to achieve his goals through terror.
Clearly, the Palestinian Authority did not do what it could to stop
the uprising, which some of its leaders felt might well serve its
interests. It is equally true that Palestinians initiated many acts of
violence. Later on, as the conflict continued and intensified,
cooperation between the Palestinian Authority and militant groups
became much closer, and Palestinians engaged in repeated attacks with
the clear and deeply deplorable intent of killing as many Israeli
civilians as possible. But the charges against Arafat make another
claim as well. He is said to have unleashed a wave of terrorist
violence in the aftermath of Camp David as part of a grand scheme to
pressure Israel; and Israel, it is said, had no choice but to act
precisely as it did in response to a war initiated by others against
its will. This assessment cannot be squared with the facts stated in
the Mitchell report, which describes an uprising that began as a
series of confrontations between largely unarmed Palestinians and
armed Israeli security forces that resorted to excessive and deadly
use of force.
Barak entirely rejects the notion that Ariel Sharon's visit to the
Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif on September 28, 2000, played any part in
setting off the subsequent clashes. To support his case, he asserts
that the visit was coordinated with Palestinian security
officials. But that is hardly the point. The point is that when we
consider the context in which the visit was taking place-the intense
focus on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif at Camp David and the
general climate among Palestinians-its impact was predictable. As
Dennis Ross, Clinton's special Middle East envoy, said: "I can think
of a lot of bad ideas, but I can't think of a worse one."
The Mitchell report says:
On the following day, in the same place, a large number of
unarmed Palestinian demonstrators and a large Israeli police
contingent confronted each other. According to the US
Department of State, "Palestinians held large demonstrations
and threw stones in the vicinity of the Western Wall. Police
used rubber-coated metal bullets and live ammunition to
disperse the demonstrators, killing 4 persons and injuring
about 200." According to the Government of Israel, 14 Israeli
policemen were injured.
>From then on, the numbers of Palestinian deaths rose swiftly: twelve
on September 30, twelve again on October 1, seventeen on October 2
(including seven Israeli Arabs), four on October 3, and twelve
(including one Israeli Arab) on October 4. By the end of the first
week, over sixty Palestinians had been killed (including nine Israeli
Arabs). During that same time period, five Israelis were killed by
Palestinians.
According to the Mitchell report, for the first three months of the
intifada, "most incidents did not involve Palestinian use of firearms
and explosives." The report quotes the Israeli human rights
organization B'Tselem as finding that "73 percent of the incidents
[from September 29 to December 2, 2000] did not include Palestinian
gunfire. Despite this, it was in these incidents that most of the
Palestinians [were] killed and wounded." Numerous other organizations,
including the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human
Rights Watch, and Physicians for Human Rights, criticized the
excessive use of force by the Israel Defense Forces, often against
unarmed Palestinians.
Barak suggests that Arafat had planned as his response to the Camp
David summit a campaign of violent terror. That is a curious assertion
in view of the fact that the Palestinians had argued that the parties
were not ready for a summit and that Camp David should be understood
as merely the first of a series of meetings. In contrast, as he knows
well, Barak conceived of Camp David as a make-it-or-break-it
summit. Defining the summit as a test of Arafat's true intentions, he
early made clear that he foresaw only two possible outcomes: a
full-scale agreement on the "framework" of a settlement, or a
full-scale confrontation.
Some things appear beyond dispute. The mood on the Palestinian street
had reached the boiling point, as the May 2000 violence had shown and
as both American and Israeli official reports had confirmed. Sharon's
visit on the Haram was both a pretext and a provocation, a case of the
wrong person being at the wrong place at the wrong time. A large
number of Palestinians had lost patience with the peace process and
felt humiliated by their experience with the settlements and at
checkpoints; and many were impressed by the success of Hezbollah in
Lebanon, where Israel was believed to have decided to withdraw in the
face of armed resistance.
At a tactical level, the Palestinians may have seen some advantage to
a short-lived confrontation to show the Israelis they could not be
taken for granted. The Israeli security forces, for their part, were
still affected by the bloody experiences of September 1996 and of May
2000, during which Palestinian policemen confronted Israelis. They
were determined to stop any uprising at the outset, using far greater
force to subdue the enemy. Hence the Israeli decision to use lethal
weapons, and hence the very heavy (and almost entirely Palestinian)
toll of death and grave injury in the early days of the
intifada. That, in turn, made it, if not impossible, at least very
difficult for the Palestinian leadership to bring things under
control; rather, it increased pressure to respond in kind. Some among
the Palestinian leaders may have hoped that the uprising would last a
few days. The Israelis expected their strong reaction to stop it in
its tracks. Instead, in this tragic game, in which both sides were
reading from different scripts, the combination of the two may have
led to an outcome that neither ever intended.
Again, it is worth recalling the Mitchell report:
The Sharon visit did not cause the "Al-Aqsa Intifada." But it
was poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been
foreseen; indeed it was foreseen by those who urged that the
visit be prohibited. More significant were the events that
followed: the decision of the Israeli police on September 29 to
use lethal means against the Palestinian demonstrators; and the
subsequent failure...of either party to exercise restraint.
The report concluded: "We have no basis on which to conclude that
there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of
violence at the first opportunity."
5.
Barak's broad endorsement of Israel's current military campaign is
cause for perhaps the greatest dismay. Of course Israel must deal with
breaches of its security and look after its people's safety. Israel
cannot be expected to sit idly by as Palestinians target civilians and
engage in suicide attacks. The question, however, is not whether
Israel should respond, but how. One might have hoped for a wise
response -one that combined strong security measures with a genuine
attempt to end the conflict-and that Ariel Sharon would have imitated
his predecessor in continuing the political talks. Short of that, one
might have hoped for a response that was driven principally, and
understandably, by security concerns. But what has occurred can be
deemed neither wise nor understandable. The wanton destruction on the
West Bank of basic infrastructure, of civilian ministries, of
equipment and documents, including school records, that have no
security value-these are acts of revenge having little to do with
security and everything to do with humiliating and seeking to break
the will of the Palestinian people and undoing its capacity for
self-governance.
The recent military action is directly related to the question of what
can now be done. Barak appears to have given up on the current
Palestinian leadership, placing his hopes in the next generation-a
generation that has not lived through the catastrophe, or nakba, of
1948. But what of the catastrophe of 2002? Is there any reason to
believe that today's children will grow up any less hardened and
vengeful after the indiscriminate attacks of the past few months?
Barak also appears to have given up on what was his most important
intuition-that the time for incremental or partial moves was over, and
that the parties had to move toward a comprehensive and final
settlement. While in office, he frequently made the point that Israel
could not afford to make tangible concessions until it knew where the
process was headed. Yet the unilateral withdrawal he now has in mind
would have Israel-in the absence of any agreement or reciprocal
concession-withdraw from Gaza and some 75 percent of the West Bank. It
would concentrate the struggle on the remaining 25 percent and on
prevailing on outstanding issues, such as Jerusalem and the
refugees. Worst of all, it would embolden those Palestinians who are
ready to subscribe to the Hezbollah precedent and would be quick to
conclude that Israel, having twice withdrawn under fire, would
continue to do so.
6.
Ehud Barak came into office vowing to leave no possibility unexplored
in the quest for peace and departed from office seeking a renewed
mandate to complete the talks begun at Taba. Since he left, he has in
effect branded the Taba discussions as a sham and hinted broadly that
his goal throughout was to "unmask" Arafat and prove him an unworthy
partner for peace. As one reads his interview with Benny Morris, it is
hard to tell which is the true Barak. Certainly, his wholesale
indictment of the Palestinian leaders, his unqualified assertion that
they seek the end of Israel, his pejorative reflections on Arab
culture, and his support of Sharon's methods are at odds with the
goals he once professed.
The interpretation of what happened before, during, and after Camp
David -and why-is far too important and has shown itself to have far
too many implications to allow it to become subject to political
caricature or posturing by either side. The story of Barak is of a man
with a judicious insight-the need to aim for a comprehensive
settlement-that tragically was not realized. The Camp David process
was the victim of failings on the Palestinian side; but it was also,
and importantly, the victim of failings on Israel's (and the United
States') part as well. By refusing to recognize this, Barak continues
to obscure the debate and elude fundamental questions about where the
quest for peace ought to go now.
One of those questions is whether there is not, in fact, a deal that
would be acceptable to both sides, respectful of their core interests,
and achievable through far greater involvement (and pressure) by the
international community. Such a deal, we suggest, would include a
sovereign, nonmilitarized Palestinian state with borders based on the
1967 lines, with an equal exchange of land to accommodate demographic
realities, and with contiguous territory on the West Bank. Jewish
neighborhoods of Jerusalem would be the capital of Israel and Arab
neighborhoods would be the capital of Palestine. Palestinians would
rule over the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), Israeli would rule over
the Kotel (Wailing Wall), with strict, internationally backed
guarantees regarding excavation. A strong international force could
provide security and monitor implementation of the agreement. A
solution to the problem of the refugees would recognize their desire
to return while preserving Israel's demographic balance-for example by
allowing unrestricted return to that part of 1948 land that would then
be included in the land swap and fall under Palestinian sovereignty.
Barak closes his interview with the thought that Israel will remain a
strong, prosperous, and Jewish state in the next century. In order to
achieve that goal, there are far better and more useful things that
Barak could do than the self-justifying attempt to blame Arafat and
his associates for all that has gone awry.
-Mr. Barak and Mr. Morris will reply in the next issue of The New York
Review, and Mr. Malley and Mr. Agha will then reply in turn.
Notes
[*]For further details, see our article "Camp David: The Tragedy of
Errors," The New York Review, August 9, 2001.
-- We are guilty of the grossest, and most narrow partiality, and make ourselves the model of the universe ... What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole Universe. - David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
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