OSLO CONTINUED:
FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE INTIFADA
TO CLINTON'S DECEMBER INITIATIVE:
by
Arthur Bierman

INTRODUCTION:

On September 29, 2000 violence erupted on the Temple Mount Plaza and spread within days to the rest of the territories. Named Intifada II, or the al -Aqsa Intifada, it dealt a serious blow to the Oslo Peace Process. The by then seven year old venture at peacemaking might well have ended at this point, had it not been for President Clinton's strenuous efforts to salvage the negotiations. His efforts culminated three months later in a proposal specifying the parameters which would most likely characterize a mutually acceptable compromise. As it turned out, he was mistaken. The proposed settlement was effectively rejected by the Palestinian leadership.

Much happened during that three months period. Let me list some of the undisputed facts: The intifada persisted unabated, though it changed from mass demonstrations to low level warfare; Israel responded with significant, some say excessive, force, exacting heavy Palestinian casualties; attempts by the U.N. to intervene in the conflict failed, mainly due to U.S. opposition; and finally, Clinton's compromise proposal failed to be accepted.

But these undisputed facts do not answer the following questions: Why did the intifada not only persist but escalate in severity? And why did Clinton's diplomacy fail, despite America's power and the president's most valiant efforts? To answer these questions required a more detailed examination which, it turned out, demonstrated the crucial role played by those same Palestinian demands that had doomed the Camp David summit. To be more specific, I claim that the intifada persisted because of Arafat's expectation that sustained violence combined with severe international pressure would compel Israel to agree to his otherwise unacceptable demands. By the same token, I contend that Arafat rejected Clinton's proposal because it did not live up to his package of non-negotiable demands.

This article is devoted to supporting these claims.

THE TWO STRATEGIES OF THE SECOND INTIFADA

As discussed in a previous article, the second intifada erupted, not only because of long standing Palestinian grievances -- anger at a decades long Israeli occupation, disillusionment with a diplomatic process, which, after seven long years, had neither delivered the promised independence nor improved living conditions -- but also because of a number of accidental factors. (1) Among these latter contributions we can identify the failure of Camp David, the intense, anti-Israeli propaganda campaign in the post-summit Palestinian media, Sharon's Temple Mount visit and finally, but not least, the PA's incendiary incitement to violence in the days immediately after Sharon's visit.

There is no mystery why the Palestinian Authority encouraged the violence, and why, once begun, the Authority went to great length to maintain it. As its leaders explained in numerous statements, articles and broadcasts, before September 29th as well as afterwards, Camp David's failure had proved that the Oslo peace process, with its insistence upon peaceful negotiations and reliance upon a pro-Israeli (as they believed) U.S. administration, would never be able to compel Israel's agreement to a set of demands they saw as non-negotiable. As example, let me cite a paragraph from an October 6 article by Taysir Qu'bah, Deputy Speaker of the Palestinian National Council:

"The all-out intifada that erupted was expected by everybody. It was only a question of time. This is because the causes of its eruption in 1987 and now are still there, since the Israeli occupation still exists in all its unrestrained, aggressive embodiments and policies. All appeals and demands to acknowledge the Palestinian national rights and constants, based on international terms of reference and the resolutions of international legitimacy proved useless with these policies. This made it necessary to break this vicious circle , impose a crisis on Israel, and demand the world to assume its role and responsibility and obligate it [Israel] to implement the resolutions of international legitimacy." (2)

The reader will note the great significance ascribed to some unspecified "resolutions of international legitimacy" upon which the "Palestinian national rights" were supposedly based, and which Israel should be compelled to implement. In fact, these "resolution of international legitimacy" were code words for three U.N. resolutions, namely Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and General Assembly resolution 194 which, at least as interpreted by the Palestinians, obliged the Jewish state to retreat to the June 4, 1967 borders, abandon all settlements beyond the green line, transfer all of east Jerusalem, including its holy sites to Palestinian sovereignty, accept the return of all Palestinian refugees who so desire, and pay restitution to all refugees for losses suffered during the intervening fifty years.

While the Palestinians described Barak's refusal to accept these obligations as proving Israel's aggressive designs, two of its provisions, Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem's holy sites, and the unlimited right of return of refugees, rendered them unacceptable to even the most accommodating Israeli government. The reasons are not difficult to comprehend. Abandoning all claims to the Western Wall and Temple Mount would deny the validity of Jewish historical memory, with its passionate attachment to the land of Israel and, in particular, to Jerusalem -- a point painfully illustrated by Arafat's repeated denials that a Jewish temple had ever existed on the Temple Mount. As to the unlimited right of return, it should be self-evident that the entry of three to four million Palestinians into a land already containing over one million Arabs and only five million Jews would lead to an Arab majority, and hence the destruction of the Jewish state, within a few generations.

Given Israel's predictable rejection of its non-negotiable demands, the Palestinian leaders had a choice: Either acknowledge (sincerely) Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, and therefore abandon, or at least substantially modify, the two unacceptable provisions, or continue to insist upon these demands but develop strategies which might compel Israel to accept a settlement so contrary to its fundamental national interests. This article will try to demonstrate that the Palestinians chose the latter course.

Let me begin by citing a number of contemporary statements by Palestinian officials and Palestinian newspapers.

The aforementioned Taysir Qu'bah wrote on October 6th, that "there will be no peace or stability in this region unless this people (the Palestinians) obtain their full rights to an independent, sovereign state, with Jerusalem as its capital and unless the refugee issue is resolved in line with Resolution 194." (3) On November 27, the PLO and its affiliated organizations, issued a statement which insisted that the intifada continue until the occupation ended and the "resolutions of international legitimacy be implemented". (4) And on December 10, an editorial in a PA newspaper stated: "All we seek is Israel's recognition of our legitimate national rights, including our rights to establishing a state with Jerusalem as its capital and the refugees right to repatriation. Also, we do not want to see settlements in our territories." (5)

Given this Palestinian insistence upon their non-negotiable demands, and given also Barak's predictable rejection of same, the Palestinians had little choice but to repudiate the peaceful process prescribed by Oslo and take up arms to achieve their otherwise unrealizable objectives. It would seem like a difficult project, to force Israel, the region's most powerful country, to accept a settlement so contrary to its interests --except that recent history provided the Palestinians with some encouraging examples: There had been France's abandonment of Algeria, with its one million or so French settlers driven from their homes. There were the Rhodesian and South African apartheit regimes which had capitulated to sustained guerilla warfare and international ostracism. There was also Kosovo from which Serbian troops had been expelled by a U.S. led international army and finally there was southern Lebanon which the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) had only recently abandoned to Hezbollah's guerilla fighters. While none of these quite matched the contemporary West Bank and Gaza situation-- still, what they all had in common was the fact that a well equipped and modern army had been defeated, sometimes by the sustained resistance of an oppressed people alone, and sometimes by the combined pressure of an indigenous uprising and the punitive actions of an aroused international community.

The Palestinian leadership was aware of these two different strategies and used the terms "internationalization" and "Lebanization" to describe them. The first referred to various hoped for measures of foreign intervention and presupposed an international community thoroughly outraged by Israeli misdeeds. What actions did the Palestinians expect from such outside intervention? In the previously cited article, Taysir Qu'bah listed the following objectives. From the Islamic world: Closure of Israeli embassies and other Israeli offices, expulsion of their employees and financial and military assistance to the PA. From the international community: Creation of an international fact-finding mission to investigate the situation in the territories; international condemnation of the Israeli occupation and its repressive machinery; indictment and trial of Israeli leaders by an international tribunal for the "premeditated murder of children and women." (6) On October 8, a memorandum signed by a number of prominent Palestinians added a few more desired punitive actions: "Fast international intervention to .. ensure protection for the Palestinian people", an end to joint economic and cultural projects with Israel" and a boycott of Israeli products. (7)

Lebanization, on the other hand, required the creation of a military resistance movement which would imitate Hezbollah's successful guerilla tactics in Southern Lebanon -- that is, inflict such sustained and painful losses upon Israel as to cause a serious diminution of its national morale. This strategy was advocated by the PLO movement Fatah in an October 8th statement which called on Palestinians to "train in the use of arms and the people's war tactics." The objective? "To attack the Israeli settlements and the settlers in retaliation for the crimes the settlers are committing against the Palestinian people..." (8)

The implementation of these two strategies obviously required somewhat different policies. Since internationalization presupposed an outraged international community, the Palestinians had to been seen as a victims of unacceptable Israeli brutality. This demanded an intifada producing a large number of Palestinian casualties, especially of women and children. Lebanization, on the other hand, required inflicting heavy losses of life and property upon Israel. As originally practiced by Hezbollah, it was used only against the IDF -- there were no Israeli civilians in Lebanon. But the West Bank and Gaza did contain about 200,000 settlers, and they were fiercely hated by the local residents. They, as well as their IDF protectors, were therefore logical targets for guerilla attacks. As to the Israeli population inside the green line -- Hamas had already discovered in the mid 1990's that suicide bombing in heavily populated areas was a most effective procedure for terrorizing a population. And since the whole object of Lebanization was to break Israeli morale, there was a strong incentive to extend terror attacks to Israel proper.

Of course, the two strategies were sometimes incompatible. For example, a successful terror campaign against largely civilian targets might well frighten the Israeli population, but would also repel Western sensibilities and encourage therefore a plague on both of your houses attitude. While not much of an issue in the early months of the intifada, this became a significant problem in the spring of 2001 when terror bombing inside Israel became a prominent feature of the uprising. Arafat dealt with this difficulty by placing all blame for this terror campaign upon Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two armed opposition groups presumably beyond his control.

In any case, in the early months of the intifada the Palestinian leadership had to decide whether to pursue only one of the two strategies, and if so, which one. To see how this question was answered, let us examine the Palestinian strategy as it actually developed between the beginning of the intifada on September 30, 2000 and January 2nd, 2001, when Arafat officially responded to the Clinton initiative.

The second intifada started very much like the first, that is, as a series of country wide demonstrations where large numbers of young men, many less than eighteen years of age, marched against Israeli roadblocks or other military centers, and assaulted them with rocks and Molotov cocktails. But two differences were evident from the very beginning: Whereas the first intifada had been a spontaneous eruption of popular rage, surprising not only the Israeli government but also the PLO, then still ensconced in Tunis, the second intifada demonstrated a good deal of organization by the Palestinian authorities. Secondly, whereas the participants in the first intifada had limited their weapons to rocks and Molotov cocktails, the second intifadah witnessed the presence of gunmen from the very beginning. Largely recruited from the ranks of the Tanzim, Arafat's mainstream militia, the gunmen would place themselves either in the rear of the advancing demonstrators or inside inhabited dwellings. It was a tactic which protected them somewhat from Israeli retaliation but endangered also the lives of innocent bystanders.

From all evidence, the IDF was determined to subdue the uprising with all necessary force. It immediately blocked all roads connecting the Palestinian urban centers, thus effectively cutting Area A -- that is, that part of the West Bank completely controlled by the Palestinian Authority -- into isolated segments. It ordered also its soldiers to respond to stones with teargas and rubber bullets and to Molotov cocktails and live fire with real bullets.

As a consequence, the Palestinians suffered many more casualties than Israel. For example, between September 29 and October 31, 117 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces, while only 11 Israelis lost their lives to Palestinian violence. Of these 117, 32 were less than 18 years of age and the death of one of them, 12 year old Mohammed al-Dura, happened to be caught on film by a French television crew, making his case an international cause celebre'. (9)

The Palestinian masses responded to the growing list of casualties with fury, leading to the recruitment of more demonstrators and combatants. The Arab masses outside the West Bank and Gaza expressed their outrage with large demonstrations, and their governments issued statements sharply critical of Israel. The Europeans were appalled by the bloodshed and reacted to the disproportionate number of Palestinian casualties, and, in particular, to the large number of juvenile casualties, with ever greater sympathy for the Palestinian cause. In short, during the first few weeks, the intifada seemed to be implemented in a manner conducive to internationalizing the conflict.

The PA did not hesitate to take advantage of this upsurge of sympathy for its cause and focused much of its energy upon two demands:

-- That the international community investigate the causes of the intifada as well as Israel's "excessive response."

-- That the international community dispatch a military force to the West Bank and Gaza to protect the Palestinians against the IDF.

We find these two demands repeated over and over again in the Palestinian media. The PA transmitted them also to the Arab League, to Islamic countries and to various United Nations bodies, such as the General Assembly and the Security Council.

These appeals for help found a sympathetic international hearing. Thus, on October 1, the Arab League's Secretary General announced that his organization would ask the UN Security Council to investigate the "crimes and carnage committed by Israeli troops" and six days later an almost unanimous Security Council, with only the United States abstaining, condemned Israel's "excessive use of force" and asked for a speedy inquiry into the causes of these tragic events. On October 19, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights adopted resolution S-5/1 which, by a startling inversion of normal judicial procedures, first charged Israel with "war crimes, flagrant violations of international humanitarian law and crimes against humanity" and then voted to establish a committee to investigate the situation on the ground. On October 21, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution (ES-10/7) which stressed " the urgent need for providing protection for the Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory;" two days later the Arab League Emergency Summit gave strong (verbal) support to the intifada and urged the Security Council to protect the Palestinian population and on November 13, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) voted to send a Ministerial Committee to the UN Security Council to urge the same protective intervention upon that international body. Finally, on November 10 th, Arafat met privately with the Security Council, informed them about the "suffering of the Palestinian people as a result of the intensifying Israeli aggression..." and called for the establishment of an "international protection force" under U.N. supervision. (10)

These Palestinian inspired demands might well have been implemented had they not encountered sustained opposition from the Clinton administration. Having invested a great deal of effort in the Oslo Peace Process, Washington was greatly dismayed by the violence and blamed primarily Arafat, first for encouraging its outbreak and secondly, for maintaining it. It therefore used its not inconsiderable diplomatic influence to counter all attempts to internationalize the dispute. This American effort was helped by the fact that most Arab and Islamic governments, while sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, distrusted Arafat and the revolutionary impulses he represented. They therefore restricted their support of the Palestinian cause largely to the symbolic and rhetorical level. Thus, neither the Arab League nor the OIC volunteered significant financial assistance to the intifada. Nor, for that matter, did the two summits demand that Egypt and Jordan break diplomatic ties with Israel nor did they propose reinstating the now abandoned anti-Israel boycott. As for the General Assembly and the Human Rights Commission, neither organization had the authority to create an armed protective force -- which was the reason why both the Arab League and the OIC petitioned the one body which did have that power, namely the Security Council. But here the United States had veto power, and, in fact, threatened to use it against any contemplated action which would seriously restrict Israel's response to the Palestinian uprising.

Washington was therefore able to sidetrack the demand for an international investigation by helping establish the Mitchell Commission, whose findings turned out to be predictably bland and so composed as to lay no blame on either of the parties. As for the Security Council, on December 18th the US managed to defeat a resolution which called for sending a "U.N. force of military and police observers" to the West Bank and Gaza. One can gauge, however, the extent of pro-Palestinian sentiment from the fact that this resolution failed by only one vote, gaining 8 out of the required 9. (There were no nays and 7 abstentions.)

In short, even though Arafat managed to generate significant international sympathy, by the middle of December his attempt to internationalize the conflict had been decisively defeated by the Clinton Administration.
***

As noted earlier, the intifada, as initially implemented by the Palestinian leadership, resulted in many Palestinian casualties, particularly of young men and male adolescents. While lending itself well to generating international sympathy for the Palestinian cause, these losses must also have created some domestic opposition, especially from parents and other members of the older generation. The PA may also have realized from early on that US opposition -- an opposition it bitterly ascribed to Clinton's pro-Israeli bias -- might well succeed in frustrating their diplomatic offensive in the UN Security Council.(8)

Whether it was for these or other reasons, the fact is that by the second half of October the Palestinian leaders started to modify the character of the uprising. For one, they began to discourage the daily practice of mass demonstrations at Israeli checkpoints. Thus the New York Times reported on October 19, that "Palestinian leaders began publicly urging an end to the street battles with Israeli troops that have left more than a hundred Palestinians dead in three weeks;" (12) and on October 26, Arafat's Fatah issued a statement which, while urging the intifada to continue, also "called on citizens to refrain from opening fire from within angry crowds and from inhabited houses in order to reduce the number of wounded and martyrs." (13) But ending mass demonstrations was not meant to terminate the intifada. It was rather a prelude to the adoption of a second strategy of organized violence, namely the so called Lebanization. Thus, the New York Times reported on October 17, that "for many people here (in Ramallah), the model of resistance is now Hezbollah; " (14) and on October 25, an IDF spokesman described the conflict as changing "from street battles to low level warfare ...involving roadside bombings, nighttime shootings and more accurate shootings." (15) And not long afterwards, terror attacks resumed inside Israel proper. The first such incident occurred on November 2nd when a car bomb exploded in a Jerusalem market, killing two Israeli civilians; and on November 22nd, two more Israelis were killed in a car bomb explosion on Hadera's main street.

These changes in the character of the Intifada affected also the number and type of casualties. (16) Whereas 110 Palestinians had been killed by the IDF in November, there were 51 such victims in December and only 18 in January 2001. As to Israeli casualties, while the monthly death toll did not change very much -- 11 in October, 22 in November, 8 in December and 6 in January -- the number of wounded increased dramatically. Just the two November car bombings mentioned earlier resulted in 70 injured civilians.

**

What have we demonstrated? First, that the intifada was intended to implement that same package of Palestinian demands which had caused the Camp David summit to fail. And secondly, that the intifada was guided by two different strategies, internationalization and Lebanization, whose combined pressure would presumably compel Israel to accept demands it would otherwise have rejected out of hand.

CLINTON'S "BRIDGING PROPOSAL" OF DECEMBER 23RD:

Having become thoroughly familiar with the complexities of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, and despairing of the ability of the two parties to achieve a peaceful resolution on their own, a month before his term ended President Clinton decided to present them with the outlines of what he believed to be a realistic compromise proposal. For the Palestinians this would mean gaining a viable and independent state in all of Gaza and almost all of the West Bank and an internationally financed effort to resettle the Palestinian refugees everywhere except in Israel proper. For Israel it would mean an end to the interminable conflict, annexation of those settlements immediately adjacent to the green line and containing 80% of all settlers -- and for both parties some sort of shared sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the holy sites.

This proposal, also known as Clinton's "bridging proposal" for attempting to bridge the gap between the two parties, was offered to them on December 23rd as the President's final effort at peace making. What Clinton hoped for was that that both Israel and the PA could be persuaded to accept this compromise proposal essentially as presented, thus avoiding further lengthy negotiations and permitting Barak and Arafat to ratify a peace treaty before the President's term had ended. He therefore asked both leaders to give him essentially yes or no answers, and, to sweeten the enticement, promised substantial financial help if his proposal were accepted. As it turned out, however, Clinton's last minute attempt failed, -- mainly, I contend, because of Arafat's unwillingness to compromise his package of demands.

***

Before discussing the actual proposal, consider some of the political developments which led up to this unprecedented step.

The outbreak of the second intifada had dealt a second and most serious blow to the Barak government, the first blow having been inflicted by Camp David's failure only two months earlier. Whereas the first intifada had strengthened that section of Israeli public opinion which favored ending the occupation, the second intifada, coming on the heels of what most Israelis perceived as Barak's "generous" offer of statehood, seriously weakened both the Israeli peace movement and the Barak government.

Barak's first reaction to the intifada was to suspend all contact with the Palestinians on the grounds that violence must not be rewarded. It was a position, however, which ran counter to Washington's intentions. Having invested a large amount of time, energy and prestige in his pursuit of a Mideast peace, Clinton was not willing to abandon it so easily. Dismayed by the outbreak of violence, his administration immediately tried to persuade both Israel and the PA to return to the status quo ante. This meant, specifically, that the Palestinians end their intifada, that the Israelis stop their blockade of Palestinian urban centers and that both parties resume the interrupted Oslo negotiations under US auspices. As it happened, both Barak and Arafat opposed some elements of the American effort. Determined not to negotiate under fire, Barak was reluctant to meet Arafat face to face; nor was he willing to lift the blockade until he was assured that the intifada had truly ended. As for Arafat, having helped launch the intifada, and placing high hopes on its ultimate success, he opposed terminating it so early. He was also opposed continuing the US monopoly of the peace process. What he hoped for was to involve more sympathetic European or U.N. mediators.

But neither leader could resist the American pressure. Both, therefore, accepted Secretary Albright's invitation to meet with her in Paris on October 4th and both accepted Clinton's invitation to attend a mid-October summit in Sharm el-Shaikh together with Mubarak and Kofi Anan. But Arafat was a most unenthusiastic participant, if for no other reason than that the summit had been greeted with great hostility by the Palestinian "street." Marwan Barghouti denounced the meeting for trying to end the intifada and Ramallah demonstrators chanted "Sharm el-Shaikh is treason" and "Mubarak is an American agent. " As to the summit's outcome, while it did produce a document promising an end to the violence and a resumption of the negotiations, neither provision was implemented. In fact, it was precisely at this time that the uprising took on more and more the character of low level warfare. Thus, only five days after Sharm el-Shaikh had ended, Palestinian gunmen began to fire at Gilo, an outlying Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem, on an almost nightly basis.

Undeterred by Sharm el-Shaikh's failure, Clinton continued to pursue his mediation efforts. He thus arranged for a series of meetings, some between Secretary of State Albright and Israeli and Palestinian negotiators and two, in mid-November, when he met separately with Barak and Arafat. From all accounts, however, none of these managed to advance the peace process -- if anything, they only confirmed the wide gap which existed between the two adversaries.

Barak, meanwhile, facing an increasingly hostile Knesset as well as an increasingly alarmed public, first tried to negotiate a coalition with Likud but failed. A few weeks later he promised to hold new parliamentary elections in the spring of 2001 and finally he resigned his premiership on December 10th. This last maneuver gave him an additional two months in office, but at the price of having to commit himself to new elections for prime minister on February 6, 2001.

***

At the beginning of December the prospects for resuming the Oslo peace process looked decidedly gloomy. For not only was the intifada still continuing and the American sponsored talks leading nowhere, but time was running out, certainly for Clinton whose term was set to expire on January 20, 2001 and most likely also for Barak, who was trailing Sharon substantially in all pre-election polls. It was under these circumstances that Clinton made one last attempt, not only to help the two parties settle their dispute, but also to achieve such a breakthrough before his term had ended. He therefore summoned the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams to Washington, and on December 23rd took the unprecedented step of presenting them with an outline of what he thought a mutually acceptable peace settlement might look like. The president acknowledged that such a settlement required "painful concessions" from both sides - neither Israelis nor Palestinians would gain all they wanted nor even all they thought they deserved --rather each party would only gain what it absolutely needed.

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