Palestinian statements on
“Peace negotiations”
A memorandum released by the
Palestinian Negotiating Team
MEMORANDUM
Lessons learned
concerning US involvement in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process over the
last seven years
January 21, 2001
No third party has
been as involved and influential in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process over
the last seven years as the United States and, in particular, its Special
Middle East Coordinator, Dennis Ross. In view of the United States’ inability
to facilitate the realization by Palestinians and Israelis of a just and
lasting peace in accordance with Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338
and other sources of
international law, it seems prudent, at the close of the Clinton
Administration, to assess US involvement and to identify some of the reasons
the United States’ involvement has not yielded better results.
Process over
Substance Under US supervision, the Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” has
become a goal in and of itself. A false sense of normalcy has been created
because of the on-going process of negotiations. The
lack of visible
resistance to Israeli occupation from the Palestinian side, except for
temporary flare-ups, and Israel’s ability to continue negotiations while
continuing to build settlements in occupied Palestinian Territory has created
the false impression that the “process” of achieving peace could substitute for
peace itself. Thus, the difficult substantial issues at the core of the
conflict, including
acceptance that Israel’s occupation of Arab territory it conquered in the 1967
Israeli-Arab War is illegal, have been constantly deflected in order to
maintain talks without requiring Israel to face up to its obligations. In fact, the United States advocacy of
“constructive ambiguity” has had disastrous consequences for the peace process.
Both parties to the conflict have mistakenly assumed at different times that
either the Israelis had accepted to end the occupation or that the
Palestinians had
agreed to forego some of their fundamental rights as a result of vaguely worded
agreements. Whereas such ambiguity made it possible for both sides to sign
agreements that they could interpret in diametrically opposed manners to their
domestic constituencies, the facts on the ground of implementing opposing
interpretations have led to very little implementation at all. This lack of implementation, combined with
the ever-increasing number of Palestinian-Israeli agreements brokered by the
United States, has caused Palestinians to become increasingly wary
of US involvement in
a process that has brought some normalcy to Israel but none to Palestinians.
The resulting lack of faith in the peace process and the consequent distrust of
US promotion of process over substance has made securing a just peace all that
more difficult.
Normalization
Before an End to the
Occupation of Arab Lands US policy over the last seven years appears predicated
on the need to help Israel normalize its relations with the Arab and Muslim
world at large, as well as with many other nations around the world sympathetic
to the plight of Palestinians dispossessed by Israeli conquest. The peace
process was used as an excuse to encourage states that had foregone normal
relations with Israel to begin the process of normalization, with the argument
that peace was just around the corner.
Had the United
States promoted the implementation of already signed agreements between
Israelis and Palestinians with the same zeal with which it promoted new Israeli
arrangements with Arab and other states, it may have succeeded in actually
promoting normalization.
Unfortunately, the
US emphasis on process over substance has led the domestic constituencies of
many governments in the region to conclude that the peace process was only a
mirage designed to trick their governments into prematurely establishing
economic ties that would help Israel break out of its regional isolation. This
has had the added repercussion of promoting not only anti-Israeli sentiment in
countries that have established economic ties with Israel, but has also
promoted anti-American sentiment in all countries of the region, as
demonstrated by the grass-roots popular boycott of American products in many
states.
US negotiators in
recent years never appeared to recognize that normalcy was a state that existed
between two free and equal peoples. As long as the occupation of Arab lands,
including the Palestinian Territories, continues, there can never be true
normalization between Israel and its neighbors.
Adoption of Israeli
Perspective v. Acting as an Honest Broker The two bases for US involvement in
the Palestinian-Israeli peace process have been 1) the physical fact that the
United States is the primary power in the Middle East and 2) that the United
States has promoted itself to the parties in the region as an honest broker
wishing to promote Israel’s security as well as Palestinian national
aspirations.
Unfortunately, over
the last seven years in particular, the US has become increasingly identified
with Israeli ideological assumptions. Dennis Ross, for example, and some other
members of his negotiating team, have acknowledged having an emotional
commitment to Israel and have said they cannot distinguish between their
personal and professional involvement with it. This has had a number of legal
ramifications that have affected the peace process negatively:
1. The United States began the peace
process based on the goal of implementing UN Security Council Resolutions 242
and 338. These Resolutions, as repeatedly interpreted by the international
community, simply mean that Israel must withdraw from the Arab territories it
occupied in 1967 if it wants to have peaceful relations with its neighbors.
After seven years of negotiations, the US negotiating team now effectively
advocates the position that the West Bank
and Gaza are Israeli
territories, or at best disputed territories, for which the Palestinians must
bargain. Settlements, for example, opposed by Presidents Carter, Reagan, and
Bush, have been tacitly endorsed by recent US policy in the region.
2. Palestinian concessions to Israel have
been made up front, as demanded by Israel and the United States, for talks to
take place between the two sides. However, those concessions were always viewed
by Israel as the starting point for negotiating further concessions. This view
appears to have been adopted by the United States of late. US negotiators have
implicitly blamed the Palestinians for not making the same extent of
“concessions” that Israel was offering. Thus, whereas Palestinians gave up
their rights to all but 22% of historic Palestine as early as 1988,
they are chastised
by the US negotiators for wanting all of the Occupied Territories whereas
Israelis have been lauded for offering to dismantle only 20% of illegal
settlements. Israel’s desire to continue occupying significant areas of
Palestinian territory is seen as a reasonable need by
the US negotiating
position - morally and legally equating the illegal settlement of Palestinian
territory with the Palestinian right to reclaim that same territory.
3. US negotiators have accepted the Israeli
world-view concerning the primacy of Israel’s security needs while ignoring the
long-term development of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the
improvement of the Palestinian quality of life. The result has been that while
Israel’s security, including the security of its occupation forces, have been
the focus of each agreement, the quality of life of Palestinians has continued
to decline. The dichotomy between the comfort of Israelis, including those
occupying Palestinian land in settlements with green lawns and swimming pools,
and the poverty and misery of Palestinians, has only further inflamed an already
volatile
situation.
Public support for
one side over the other can also have negative unintended consequences. US
negotiators’ public criticism of the Palestinian side at last summer’s Camp
David talks were intended to provide domestic political support for the Israeli
prime minister. Instead, it allowed
right wing
extremists in Israel opposed to peace all together to challenge the Israeli
prime minister for having offered “too many” concessions. US inability to see
past Israel’s own narrow perceptions of the conflict have further delayed
concluding a just and lasting peace.
US/Israeli Domestic
Political Concerns Overrode the Goal of a Lasting Peace Palestinians obviously
have every interest in concluding a comprehensive, just and lasting peace
with Israelis as
soon as possible. The original Oslo Accords had mandated that the peace talks
be concluded three years ago with a Palestinian state and an Israeli state
living in freedom, security, and equality side by side. Yet, as Israel
attempted to colonize as much of the West Bank and Gaza as possible before
beginning final status talks, the Palestinians were compelled to focus on
Interim issues in
negotiations, rather than addressing the key permanent status issues.
Once mandated by
domestic political considerations in Israel and the United States, Palestinians
have been placed under tremendous, and sometimes unconscionable, pressure to
sign weak and vague agreements that could be used by political leaders to show
progress to their constituencies. Rather than place a matter of such great
existential importance to both Palestinians and Israelis above the fray of
domestic politics, the timetable for reaching
agreements has been
based on immediate domestic concerns even when the necessary background work on
substantive issues has not been done.
A comprehensive
peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis must not only be considered a
valuable photo opportunity, but a matter of great strategic importance for all
the states of the region as well as for those states that believe they have
interests in the Middle East. It has been obvious, especially over the course
of the last year, that the importance of a just and lasting peace has been
overshadowed by the need for yet another temporary or interim agreement that
would provide only short-term political gain to some of those involved - at the
risk of creating tremendous problems for the long-term stability of the area.
Conclusion
US policy has not
been static over the last decades. It was the United States that helped force
Israeli, British, and French occupation troops from Egypt in 1956. President
Jimmy Carter has strongly advocated Palestinian rights, even during the Camp
David talks between Egypt and Israel, and repeatedly emphasized the illegality
of Israel’s settlement policy. President George Bush used the position of the
United States as a global leader to force Israel to sit with Palestinians in
negotiations for the first time and also expended tremendous political capital
to keep US aid to Israel from being used to promote settlement building. There
is much the United States can contribute to encouraging justice, peace, and
stability in the Middle East, but only if it can learn from the mistakes and
failures of the last seven years. There remains much at stake, and for every
day that the Israeli occupation continues and settlements continue to expand,
peace becomes that much harder to achieve.
On March 22, 2001
On behalf of the
Palestinian people, I would like to welcome the members of the Sharm el-Sheikh
Fact-Finding
Committee: Senator Mitchell, President Demirel, Foreign Minister Jagland, High
Representative
Solana and Senator Rudman. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank
the Committee and
its staff for the hard work and perseverance they have demonstrated since
the Committee was
formed in October.
You, the members of
the Committee are charged with the important task of investigating the
causes of the
current violence and providing recommendations as to how to prevent its
recurrence. But your
investigation cannot simply be a question of what, it must be a question of
why-- violence is
only a symptom, you are charged with identifying the disease. As a longtime
sufferer of this
disease, please permit me to offer my humble suggestion that the disease you
are
looking for is
called military occupation.
With Oslo, we
believed that Israel's military occupation would end, that we would live as a
sovereign people,
that we would share Jerusalem as an open city, that the ongoing confiscation
of our property and
our dignity would end. We believed that in the end, we would live in freedom,
as a free people
entitled to no more, but certainly no less, than our neighbors. But our hope
steadily gave way
first to disbelief, and ultimately to despair. Israel refused to withdraw its
troops; it refused
to free our political prisoners and, most tellingly, despite Oslo's prohibition
on
unilateral actions
which would prejudice a final agreement, Israel relentlessly expanded its
settlements in an
effort to create demographic facts on the ground that the Palestinians would be
forced to accept.
It would be easy to
recite a list of grievances: we have watched our children murdered only to
hear their parents
accused of sending them out to die. We have witnessed entire towns
blockaded,
preventing people from working, children from attending school and the sick
from
reaching medical
care. We watched in horror as helicopter gunships fired into civilian
populations.
And of course, we
were forced to watch as Israel confiscated more land, built more settlements
and encouraged more
armed settlers. All this, and yet we are the ones told to "stop the
violence".
But our challenge
now is not to review grievances, it is how to revive
confidence in a
dialogue which has not brought the Palestinians any closer to
freedom, how to move
from a process of desperate confrontation to a process
of trust. To do
this, we need more than a "cease-fire" between Israelis and
Palestinians. For
there to be true revival of the peace process, there must
be understanding and
acknowledgment of the concerns and the injustices that
have plagued this
conflict. Yes, there must be an end to the killing of
civilians and to
other illegal uses of violence against Palestinians. Yes,
Palestinians must be
allowed freedom of movement and all forms of collective
punishment must
immediately end. Yes, the Palestinian economy must be freed
from Israeli
control. But do not make the mistake of believing that the peace
process can be
revived simply by granting the Palestinian people basic human
rights which never
should have been denied them to begin with.
Israel must take its
place as a responsible member of the international community. It must agree
to abide by United
Nations Resolutions and international law, including the Fourth Geneva
Convention to which
Israel is a signatory. It must agree to abide by agreements it has signed with
the Palestinian
National Authority, particularly the third troop withdrawal which is now more
than
2˝ years overdue; it
must allow international protection to enforce Israel's compliance with
international law
and to protect civilians.
Without such
international support, any agreement reached with Israel has no guarantee of
implementation, as
we have painfully learned.
But most
importantly, and this cannot be overemphasized, there is no
greater obstacle to
peace, there is no issue more corrosive to Palestinian
confidence in the
peace process than the ongoing construction and expansion
of Israeli
settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. Israel must fully
and decisively
abandon the policy of land confiscation and settlement
building that it has
relentlessly pursued for the past 34 years. Instead of
encouraging more
settlers, Israel should terminate economic incentives meant
to lure Israelis to
the occupied territories, it should implement economic
incentives for the
settlers to move back to Israel. But instead, just this
week, Israel
announced plans to build settlements in the Abu Dis neighborhood
of Arab East
Jerusalem. I can assure you that it is very difficult, if not
impossible, to
convince the Palestinian people that Israel is serious about
peace while it
continues to confiscate land.
We have reached a
point where symbolic diplomatic efforts that only dash the
hopes of the
Palestinian people become flashpoints for an intensification of
the conflict. I am
confident that this Committee, under the leadership of
Senator George
Mitchell, can recommend a path that will end the institutional
injustices that have
plagued this conflict and created so much instability
both here and
throughout the region. I am sure this Committee, based on an
honest and thorough
investigation of facts, will suggest a mechanism by which
a fair, just, and
moral peace in accordance with international law can be
achieved.