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Malignant Neglect

U.S. Policy on the Palestinians from Reagan to Bush
By Rashid Khalidi

The Reagan years initiated an unprecedented American warming to Israel, with the first appearance in official positions of muscular nationalists like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and neo-conservatives like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who dominate the current administration’s foreign policy. Under such influences, America’s benign neglect of the Palestinians became increasingly malignant, as the administration turned a blind eye to aggressive Israeli settlement policies that were steadily swallowing up more and more land in the West Bank. Beyond this, the Reagan administration gave a covert green light to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and its expulsion of the PLO from Beirut, and thereafter helped Israel to create a puppet Lebanese government that was brought to sign a short-lived peace treaty on Israeli terms. The only concrete result of this ill-fated and foolish American initiative was to alienate the overwhelming majority of Lebanese, and to provoke a series of lethal attacks on American Marines, diplomatic facilities, and academics in Beirut.
Although Reagan’s last Secretary of State, George Schultz, initiated direct, open contacts between the U.S. and the PLO for the first time, once the Palestinians met a number of American conditions, this initiative did not further the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It was left to the first Bush administration, in the wake of the 1991 U.S. war with Iraq, to launch the first serious, multi-lateral effort to resolve the entire Arab-Israeli conflict, including its Palestinian dimensions.
Starting at Madrid in the fall of that year, Secretary of State James Baker managed to do something never been done before: to seat virtually all parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and all the relevant international actors, around one table. Unfortunately, the ground rules that the United States, acting under Israeli pressure, imposed on these negotiations—that went on for the next 20 months—nullified many of the advantages thereby achieved. These ground rules explicitly excluded immediate direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations over the major problems between the two sides, the so-called “final status issues,” which were left for negotiations scheduled for several years later, but that were repeatedly postponed. The Palestinians were initially obliged to accept the fiction of a Jordanian-Palestinian joint delegation, and were not allowed to choose their own representatives. Palestinians from Jerusalem, from outside the occupied territories, or identified with the PLO were all excluded.
Most seriously, the Palestinians were forced to accept what ended up being an indefinite deferment of the negotiation of all the most important “final status” issues between them and the Israelis: Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty, statehood, settlements, and water. All the Palestinians were allowed to negotiate with the Israelis was an interim accord for self-government. This accord ultimately produced the Palestinian Authority (PA), which eventually obtained extremely limited control over a fraction of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, divided into dozens of islands, all isolated from one another by swathes of Israeli-controlled territory.
In the meantime, Israel maintained its occupation and control of most of the occupied territories and of all the most important aspects of the life of the 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation. Most importantly, Israel continued expanding its illegal settlements and the strategic roads that connected them, and that at the same time divided the West Bank and Gaza Strip into scores of easily controlled and isolated parcels.
The highly respected head of the Palestinian
delegation to the negotiations, Dr. Haidar‘Abd al-Shafi, said at the time, and has repeated publicly since, that it was a grievous mistake for the Palestinians to continue to negotiate under such onerous conditions, when the unceasing expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories continued devouring the very land that was supposed to be subject to negotiation. He added that Palestinians should have withdrawn from the talks when the United States failed to insist that Israel respect the terms of reference for the entire Madrid process, the joint American-Soviet Letter of Invitation to Madrid, and when it ignored the promises contained in its Letter of Assurances to the Palestinians, which committed the United States to opposing actions that were “prejudicial or precedential,” would “make negotiations more difficult or preempt their final outcome,” or that “predetermined” final status options.
The entire Palestinian delegation took Dr. Abd al-Shafi’s position at the time, but was overruled by the PLO leadership in Tunis that was calling all the important shots throughout the negotiations. From this fatal mistake flowed much else: notably the mounting fury of ordinary Palestinians, as years of fruitless negotiations were accompanied by thousands more acres of land being confiscated and hundreds of more miles of settler-only roads being built, and as the Israeli settler population in the occupied territories doubled from 200,000 in 1991 to 400,000 in 2000.
The negotiations that started at Madrid went on fruitlessly in Washington for ten sessions, stretching from October 1991 until June 1993. Eventually, after the election of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, Israel decided to start secret negotiations with the PLO itself. While this meant that a major Palestinian demand – direct negotiations with the PLO – had been met, it had an important downside: the negotiations were no longer mainly in the hands of a well-educated and competent delegation of West Bankers and Gazans. Such a delegation alone had intimate knowledge about the situation under occupation, a popular constituency back home to whom they had to report periodically, and a certain amount of expertise in negotiating with the Israelis—and with the American “honest brokers,” who were often harder to deal with than the Israelis themselves.

While in the rest of the world most people naturally thought that peace had been achieved with the ceremony on the White House lawn, for ordinary Palestinians the Oslo accords began a process that went downhill almost from the beginning.

Instead, the negotiations were carried out in secret, mainly at Oslo, Norway, by a group of PLO officials apparently chosen primarily for their loyalty and obedience to Arafat and the PLO leadership, who had limited knowledge of English (the language of the negotiations), no legal background, no negotiating experience with Israelis, and no first-hand knowledge of how the 20 months of Madrid and Washington discussions had gone.
This proved to be another grievous Palestinian mistake, as was reflected in the appallingly bad terms for the Palestinians of the resulting Oslo accords. These accords were the basis for the Israeli-PLO Declaration of Principles signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993 in the presence of Yasser ‘Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and President Clinton. As fleshed out by a series of subsequent interim agreements, these accords eventually produced the misshapen map over which the newly established PA ruled.
While in the rest of the world most people naturally thought that peace had been achieved with the ceremony on the White House lawn, for ordinary Palestinians the Oslo accords began a process that went downhill almost from the beginning. For in keeping with the Madrid ground-rules, nothing of any importance to the two sides had even been negotiated yet, let alone agreed upon. By the Oslo accords, the PLO formally recognized the state of Israel (as it had already done once before, in 1988). While Israel now formally recognized the PLO as representing the Palestinians, it did not recognize the right of the Palestinian people to statehood, self-determination or sovereignty, or that they had the right to borders, or where those borders were. In consequence of Oslo, Israel got acceptance and recognition from the Arab world, and developed commercial, political, or indirect relations with a majority of Arab countries. The Palestinians, on the other hand, were forgotten by their supporters in the Arab world and elsewhere.
Much more seriously, the lives of most Palestinians got worse after Oslo: crippling Israeli restrictions on movement were imposed—first around Jerusalem, cutting the Arab eastern part of the city off from its West Bank hinterland (again in violation of the Madrid ground-rules, and again without provoking even a peep from the American sponsor of the “peace process”)—and then in other areas. From having virtually complete freedom of movement in and through the entirety of Israel and the occupied territories, after Oslo Palestinians found themselves in a situation where their movement was more and more restricted. A vast network of so-called “bypass roads” were built, ostensibly to connect Israeli settlements to one another, but which had two devastating effects. One was that they cut off adjacent Palestinian areas from one another. The other was that these roads showed Palestinians, with tons of newly poured reinforced concrete, that the ever-expanding Israeli settlements were there to stay, and that their dreams of statehood and sovereignty in the entirety of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem were not going to be realized.
Meanwhile, Palestinian GDP per capita continuously declined and unemployment rose as labor flows were interrupted because the movement of Palestinians was more and more restricted. Daily travel of ordinary citizens in, to, and through the occupied territories, and between the dozens of islands of territory “controlled” by the new PA set up by the Oslo accords, grew more and more difficult.
On top of these problems created by Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli accords, the newly established Palestinian Authority proved corrupt and ridden by debilitating cronyism. Its newly elected President, Yasser ‘Arafat, appointed thousands of trusted henchmen to make-work jobs in the bloated bureaucracy and security services. Little was done to create a rule of law, the elected Legislative Assembly was steadily deprived of its powers, and insufficient aid or investment arrived to improve the situation of ordinary Palestinians.
Negotiations between the two sides bogged down within a few years after Oslo, especially after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli right-wing extremist in late 1995. Tragically, little effort was made by the U.S. to resolve the basic differences between Palestinians and Israelis in this period, when the Oslo accords were perhaps still salvageable, although American diplomats, and occasionally President Clinton himself, became involved in the negotiation of minute issues separating the two sides. Instead of pressing for the final status negotiations, the Clinton administration allowed Israel to drag out and delay the negotiation and implementation of further interim self-government accords, that after nearly a decade of haggling left the Palestinians in partial control of no more than isolated pockets of territory.
The September 2000 Intifada
Not surprisingly, despair and anger spread among ordinary Palestinians as their daily life grew harder and harder and the hopes of the early 1990s evaporated. The network of Israeli settlements, strategic “bypass roads,” and the military occupation that protected them grew more and more entrenched. It was but a very short step from here to the explosion of the second Palestinian intifada of September 2000, although ignorant outside observers purported to be shocked that such a thing could have happened, and others claimed that it had been purposely ignited by Arafat.
The explosion took place after the Clinton administration let most of its eight years in office go by without making any substantive effort to begin negotiations on the basic “final status” issues between the Palestinians and Israelis such as settlements, borders, Jerusalem, refugees, water, and sovereignty. Even by the dilatory Madrid schedule, these negotiations should have been started in late 1995 or early 1996. Despite the warnings of his own advisors, the Palestinians, and others that the necessary preliminaries were not in place for dealing with these sensitive and complex issues at the highest level, Clinton succumbed to the importuning of the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and convened a summit meeting at Camp David in July 2000, just four months before the 2000 elections.
Grouping Barak, Arafat, and Clinton, and their respective top advisors, but taking place with utterly inadequate preparation, the summit was doomed to fail, and duly did so. However—after having forced the Palestinians to attend a summit they argued had been insufficiently prepared for—the two most powerful actors, Clinton and Barak, instead of sharing the blame with Arafat, wrongly placed all the blame for its failure on the Palestinian leader. Having made a stingy take-it-or-leave-it offer to Arafat (falsely described in the ensuing mythology that grew up around Camp David as “generous” ), Barak, until the end of his mandate in February 2001, seems to have exerted more effort on blaming Arafat than on attempting to salvage the failed Camp David negotiations. As elections loomed in Israel, Barak obtusely seemed to be doing the work of the Israeli right wing parties for them, decrying Arafat for being unwilling to make peace—thus raising the question of why Israeli voters should put their confidence in a man who had foolishly spent much of his mandate in negotiating with the unreliable Arafat.
Ironically, senior Palestinian and Israeli negotiators, working from modified proposals made by President Clinton in December 2000, made significant progress on many key issues between the two sides during negotiations at the Egyptian resort of Taba in January 2001. They came close to agreement on frontiers and sovereignty, and significantly narrowed the gap even on the hard issues of Jerusalem and refugees. But it was already too late: George W. Bush had “won” the November 2000 elections, and Clinton was thus well beyond being a lame duck; Barak had lost his majority in the Knesset and was about to suffer a resounding defeat in the February 2001 elections to Sharon; and ‘Arafat, who had won over 80% of the vote for the position of President of the PA in a reasonably fair election in 1995, had since then lost the confidence of most Palestinians, with his popularity according to reliable polls declining to the low 30% range.
The Last 32 months of Violence
The violence that started in September 2000 and followed almost without interruption for the next 32 months has been the subject of almost as much mythology in the United States as the nursery fable of Barak’s “generous offer” at Camp David. Those who got their information from the American mass media came to believe that the Palestinians launched the intifada at the instigation of their leadership, and that Yasser Arafat was primarily responsible for all the violence that followed.
In fact, the intifada started as a spontaneous, unarmed, popular response to the provocative visit of Ariel Sharon to the Haram al-Sharif. Sharon had been escorted onto the third most holy site in Islam by 1,000 Israeli security personnel, accompanied by the leaders of the Temple Mount Faithful, a group seeking to destroy the mosques on the Haram and replace them with a new Temple. The American media paid little attention to the horrendous casualties inflicted by Israeli troops on these unarmed demonstrators during the following several weeks, before there were any significant Israeli casualties. Nor did the American media generally report what the Israeli press freely acknowledged: that the Israeli army had been planning and training furiously for years for an all-out assault on built-up Palestinian areas that had been “ceded” to the PA.
Thereafter, American and Israeli media and political discourse emphasized suicide attacks by Palestinian militant groups on Israeli civilian targets—which started only after the intifada had been raging for many months. During that time there were horrendous Palestinian civilian casualties but on the Israeli side few casualties except soldiers. There was little mention in the U.S. of the devastating effect of Israel’s use of battlefield weapons like tanks, helicopters, and fighter-bombers in heavily built-up Palestinian civilian areas. The subsequent Palestinian civilian casualty toll received relatively little attention in the United States.
Finally, while the psychic and emotional hardship imposed by 32 months of bloodshed on Israelis was well chronicled in the U.S. and Israel, the virtual imprisonment for most of this period of the entire Palestinian population of over 3.5 million in their cities, towns, and villages—with a psychic and emotional effect that could only be guessed at—was little reported.
This lopsided and biased perception of what was happening in the Middle East was brilliantly spun by the Israeli government and Israel’s lobby in the United States, headed by the formidable American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and a bevy of affiliated “think”-tanks and other organizations, like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Not surprisingly, this spin had a profound impact on the media and on the thinking of the Bush administration. The dominant neo-conservative elements in this administration were already predisposed to accept a hard-line Likud analysis. This was not surprising, since these “Sharonistas” in official posts in Washington shared Likud views, which were grounded in willful ignorance and misinterpretation of the Middle East, and were predicated on the argument that Arafat and the PLO had revealed their true nature as terrorists.

By the spring of 2003, public opinion on both sides
was utterly weary of the mindless violence, and anyone with any sense on either side could see that their own side’s violence had failed to bring their opponents to their knees. Rather, it had more strongly unified both the Palestinians and Israelis, making them more resistant to giving in.

The logical conclusion to such a line of thinking was shared by most in the Bush administration and the Likud government: that force was the only way to deal with terrorists. This made it all the easier for the dominant elements in Washington to make their case. Enthusiastic support was given for the blind repression and obstinate refusal to negotiate exhibited by the governments headed by Ariel Sharon from February 2001 onwards. With the zigs and zags characteristic of so much Bush administration foreign policy, this eventually became the official line in Washington.
The Road Map
It was only after over two years of carnage in Palestine and Israel, tacitly sanctioned by the Bush administration—and only after the capture of Baghdad in the spring of 2003—that Washington felt the need to show the Arabs and the rest of the world that it was not totally hostile to Arabs and Muslims, and a change in policy towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict became manifest. In the spring of 2003 this took the form of belated support in the administration for the “Road Map” produced by senior representatives of the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations—the so-called “Quartet.” Originally prepared for presentation in mid-2002, the Sharon government prevailed on the Bush administration, using a variety of pretexts to delay it again and again. The Israeli government’s true objective was to gain more time for a purely military solution, in pursuit of the mirage of a “defeat” of the Palestinians.
However, the Israeli army’s aim was not just the defeat of Palestinian militant groups carrying out attacks on Israeli civilians inside Israel and Israeli troops and settlers in the occupied territories. It was rather the defeat of the entire Palestinian people, via the imposition of collective punishment on the whole population of over 3.5 million men, women and children. This was clearly evidenced by the statement of Israeli Army Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
By the spring of 2003, something had changed. However much both sides may have wanted to continue the fight, they were operating under new constraints. Public opinion on both sides was utterly weary of the mindless violence, and anyone with any sense on either side could see that their own side’s violence had failed to bring their opponents to their knees.
Rather, it had more strongly unified both the Palestinians and Israelis, making them more resistant to giving in. Moreover, the decision-makers in the Bush administration had finally decided to throw the weight of the President himself into Middle East policy-making. This was the environment in which it became possible to successfully put forward the Road Map, and for the Palestinian militant groups on June 29th to initiate a unilateral three-month cease-fire, and for Israel to agree to halt its assassinations of Palestinian militants and withdraw troops from areas of the Gaza Strip and the town of Bethlehem.
What is required for Transformation
The resulting lull was a result of all of these factors, as well as exhaustion on both sides. But it did not mean that progress would necessarily be made toward resolving the underlying issues between them, or that this would be any more than a temporary respite. For a serious transformation of the situation much more is necessary than simply halting most of the violence: as long as Israeli settlements continue to expand, as long as the basic structure of the Israeli military occupation remains in place, as long as the Israeli military and Palestinian militant groups remain committed to a military solution to the conflict, and are unrestrained by political authority on either side, no progress towards a real settlement of the conflict will take place. In keeping with the slant of U.S. policy, the Road Map does not take a dispassionate or even-handed approach to these problems, instead laying most of the stress on Palestinian violence.
If there is ever to be any substantive progress in peace making, rather than a politically convenient respite in the run-up to an election year, the entire approach of the last three American administrations must be completely reversed. Talks on the issues outlined above must be started immediately, instead of endlessly deferring negotiations on the important issues, as the Road Map is likely to do—even if against the odds it succeeds. Instead of letting Israel eat up the pie, the two sides must agree on sharing, as it is allowed to do under the Road Map. There must be an absolute and immediate freeze on any provocative actions, whether as regards settlements, Jerusalem, water, or any other issue that must be the subject of negotiations if there is to be peace. In other words, the United States must insist not just that violence is ceased, but even more importantly, that there be a halt to all actions that are “prejudicial or precedential,” or that preempt the final outcome of negotiations, to use the language of the ground rules for the Madrid negotiations. Honored only in the breach, these ground rules are the only way to level the playing field, and establish a basis in good faith for successful negotiations, rather than the brutal imposition of a fait accompli in the weaker side.
Of course in the end, only the two sides can bring serious negotiations, assuming they are ever started, to a successful conclusion. There is understandable skepticism regarding whether the current leaderships on either the Israeli or Palestinian sides are capable of providing the vision and statesmanship necessary to start the process. And it may be that the settlement since 1967 of over 400,000 Israelis in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem—a process aimed at permanently controlling most of these territories, and making the creation of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel impossible—means that a completely new approach will have to be found.
Only a dispassionate, impartial and fair arbiter can launch and facilitate such negotiations. The United States has only rarely played such a role over the past few decades. If there is to be peace between Palestinians and Israelis, it must begin to do so, or it must allow another party to do so.

Rashid Khalidi is Professor of History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Columbia University.