http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/28_07_00_b.htm
Camp David Exposes `Final Status' Fallacy
By David Hirst, Daily Star, 07/28/2000
At one fraught moment during Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
reportedly warned Yasser Arafat: "If we don't finish the job now, at the next
meeting I will no longer be prime minister." To which the Palestinian leader
retorted: "If I give in on Jerusalem, I will be killed and then you will have to
negotiate with Ahmad Yassin," leader of Hamas, his militant, Islamist opposition.
There was only one way that Camp David II was ever going to succeed, and it was
the same way that Camp David I did: through the virtual surrender of the Arab
participant. That is what President Sadat did in 1978 -- and he fell to an Islamist
bullet three years later. There had clearly been Israeli and US expectations that,
like Sadat, Arafat would "rescue" the marathon parley in extremis: hence the
blame which Clinton reserved primarily for him after it was over. But the "rescue"
required of him would have dwarfed what Sadat had done, and, as his retort made
clear, this one-time "liberator" of his people had no desire to go down in history as
their great betrayer.
To be sure, as in 1978, there would have to have been compromise on both sides,
reciprocal retreats from the so-called "red lines" which, before this summit of
summits, both leaders swore they would never cross. But those expected of Yasser
Arafat far outstripped those expected of Barak, just as Sadat's far outstripped
Menachim Begin's.
That fundamental disparity was embedded in the history of the 100-year struggle
which Clinton, with amazing audacity, had presumed to end in one climactic
confabulation. It is a struggle from which, on any true historical reckoning, the
Israelis have long since emerged as overwhelming victor; and the balance of
power at the negotiating tables has always reflected that. Barak drew his red lines
from a position of overweening strength and superiority, territorial and strategic
advantage. They marked limits on what, as the victor, he was prepared to disgorge.
Arafat strove, by contrast, merely to palliate the extent of Palestinian defeat, loss
and humiliation.
The Israelis sought a fundamental, existential gain, the completion of what Camp
David I -- and the subsequent Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty -- had begun. They
wanted a solemn renunciation of the Palestinian struggle, and all the claims it
embodied. Only Arafat, Mr. Palestine himself, had the power and prestige to
"legitimize" in his people's name such a dismal outcome of all their strivings. They
would have permitted it to be enshrined in a Palestine state, symbol of permanence
and finality. Arafat had been ready to oblige, to accept a state on a mere 22 percent
of original Palestine, and to acquiesce, no doubt, in any other concessions he felt he
could somehow squeeze past his people.
But none of it was enough for the Israelis. The state they would accept was, in
Palestinian eyes, a state virtually stripped of the basic ingredients of statehood,
without true sovereignty, without an army, without control of frontiers, without
Arab East Jerusalem as its capital, without most of the land on which illegal Israel
settlements had arisen.
Nonetheless, a Sadat-style surrender was never an entirely fanciful expectation.
Arafat's entire career had been one long tale of retreat from original goals. And
since the Oslo agreement of 1993, with the "interim" negotiations supposedly
paving the way for "final status" ones, he had made concession upon painful
concession simply to keep the negotiations in being at all. Even as Camp David
dragged into its fifteenth day, many a Palestinian was as fearful that he would go
the whole, desperate hog as Israelis and Americans were hopeful of it. But, in the
end, he didn't. Evidently he decided that it was one thing -- though bad enough, and
tactically ruinous, Palestinians have long been warning -- to cede historic goals
temporarily; quite another to cede them for all time, in the context of a final
settlement. He may well be Mr. Palestine but, as the exile Palestinian newspaper
Al-Quds al-Arabi put it, he had "no Palestinian, Arab or Islamic mandate for
ceding sovereignty over Jerusalem or abandoning the rights of four million refugees
for a fistful of dollars." It was exceedingly unlikely that he could have pulled it off
anyway. Inside the occupied territories, not just Hamas would have been gunning
for him. Members of his own organization, Fatah, have been demonstrating against
any retreat.
In the Palestinian diaspora, refugees have begun to mobilize at grassroots level
against Arafat's leadership, and its would-be sell-outs, in much the same way
that, a generation ago, he did against an entirely discredited, earlier leadership. In
pushing Arafat down his capitulationist course, Israelis and Americans might have
ended up with a beautiful document -- but one that would have destroyed the very
instrument on which they counted to implement it.
The Camp David collapse is a mighty blow to the peace process. A notion has
grown up, especially in the US, that the process is irreversible, that, starting with
Camp David I, one achievement leads in the fullness of time to the next. But that
notion is rooted in the highly dubious methodology of peace-making which Camp
David I pioneered and which has sustained it ever since: the deferral all the most
intractable issues to the end. At Camp David II all the protagonists came face to
face, at last, with the stratagem in which they had all connived, but none more
self-defeatingly than Arafat; face to face with all those fundamental, "final status"
issues which earlier breakthroughs had pushed into the indefinite future. With its
collapse, the fallacy has been definitively exposed.
As a result, the Middle East to which Barak and Arafat have returned is one where
a much greater number of people, in Israel, Palestine and the Arab world, now
believe that peace simply is not possible -- or at least not without another, and
presumably massive, outbreak of violence. The Palestinians in the West Bank and
Gaza are in such a state of agitation that violence will certainly erupt. And many
are the very credible forecasts that it will eventually take on the dimensions of a
new intifada, an armed one this time, and that it will have contagious effect outside
Palestine -- in the refugee camps of Lebanon, first of all.
If so, Arafat will face a stark choice: either to suppress the violence, in conjunction
with the Israelis, or, reverting to the role of "liberator," to join, and thereby attempt
to manipulate it. The Israelis have made little secret of the ferocity with which they
would strike back if he did. As the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat put it
yesterday: "he is not worried about going back empty-handed because that is not
enough to earn him a lynching or a bullet through the head." Far from it, in fact, he
has returned home to a hero's welcome, his flagging prestige enormously
enhanced. But he surely has to worry about something else: the impact on public
opinion, of the Hamas leaders' insistence that "the only solution, now, is for Arafat
and his negotiators to announce the failure and futility of the peace talks and return
to the path of struggle and jihad."
David Hirst, a veteran Middle East correspondent, wrote this commentary for The
Daily Star
