From Camp David to the Al-Aqsa uprising
By Nadim N. Rouhana, 10/6/2000
This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 10/6/2000.
The eruption of violent confrontations between Israeli forces and
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is a direct outcome of the
Camp David negotiations and the American third-party role.
Camp David gave no hope that any final status issue between Israel
and the Palestinians would be satisfactorily resolved. Under proposed
agreements, large Jewish settlement blocs in the occupied territories
would be annexed to Israel. Israel will not acknowledge the Palestinian
refugees' right to return. It refuses to accept moral responsibility for
the refugees' dispersion, agreeing only to negotiate their resettlement
elsewhere and compensation.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's proposals on Jerusalem, hailed in
Israel and in the United States as daring and generous, expand Jerusalem
boundaries deep into the occupied West Bank - against UN resolutions and
international consensus.
Furthermore, Palestinians have long questioned American even-
handedness. The dynamics at Camp David substantiated Palestinians' fear
that the United States would exert heavy pressure on them to agree to an
unjust settlement.
President Clinton's blaming of Arafat for the failure of the meetings
and his remarks about moving the US embassy to Jerusalem if progress was
not forthcoming, were seen as a thinly veiled threat to accept a diktat.
In addition, Camp David, without apparent rationale, reduced the
conflict to the combustible issue of sovereignty over the holy places.
This dramatically transformed them into the symbol through which to
express defiance against Israeli and American pressure and to signal the
Palestinian leadership to resist the pressure.
Thus, when Ariel Sharon came with a thousand troops to demonstrate
that Israel is the master of the Moslem holy places in the Noble
Sanctuary, they instantly became the lightning rod for protest and the
symbol of resistance.
Israel reacted to popular protest in the holiest place in the country
by using brutal force. There must be some explanation for why, in less
than a week, more than 60 Palestinians were killed and more than 1,800
injured. The explanation that Israel offers - the involvement of
Palestinian police in some incidents in the West Bank and Gaza - stands
naked in Israel. The reason for using blind force lies elsewhere.
The Israelis, who have generally distinguished themselves in precise
planning of pointed security operations, are committing a major mistake
in reading the large security picture. They see the unrest as
premeditated by the Palestinian Authority in order to secure negotiation
gains. According to this analysis, the Palestinian community does not
have its own public opinion, national fears, or political will.
Israel initially explained the seven-year uprising the same way, only
later learning that the PLO was as stunned by its eruption as was the
Israeli security service. Israelis fail to grasp that Yasser Arafat,
with little to show his people under the terms of the Oslo process, is
in no position to mobilize masses, either to act or to cease acting,
even within the limited areas under his control.
He certainly does not control the Palestinian citizens in Israel or
the Palestinian refugees in the camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria
who suspect that he has abandoned their cause. In fact, the unrest is
as much a message to the Palestinian Authority as to the Israelis
themselves. Arafat, therefore, would be committing political suicide
if he doesn't embrace the unrest.
The failure of the Paris talks to reach a ''cease-fire'' without
Israeli acceptance of international investigation into Israel's use of
force reflects the constraints that the popular anger places on Arafat.
Israel is determined to show the Palestinians that they cannot
achieve any gains by using force.
But the Israelis are adding fuel to the one dispute that they should
have prevented at any price - one that because of its ostensible
religious dimension can escalate beyond the control of the leaderships
and that can transform the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
altogether. The protests are already known as ''The Al-Aqsa uprising''
all over the Arab world.
The United States should understand that pressuring the Palestinian
Authority to accept an agreement that is determined by gross power
imbalance instead of a just historical compromise based on international
legitimacy and UN resolutions provides fertile ground for eruptions. It
should review both the policy that guided the Camp David negotiations
and the dynamics of its own mediation.
As a start, the United States should demand that Israel immediately
stop violence against civilians and support establishing an
international mechanism for investigating the excessive use of force.
Nadim N. Rouhana is associate professor at UMass-Boston and an
associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at
Harvard University.
(c) Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
