Camp David 2000 Summit
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The Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David of July 2000 took place between United States President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. It was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to negotiate a "final status settlement" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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[edit] The summit
President Clinton announced his invitation to Barak and Arafat on July 5, 2000, to come to Camp David to continue their negotiations on the Middle East peace process. Building on the positive steps towards peace of the earlier 1978 Camp David Accords where President Jimmy Carter was able to broker a peace agreement between Egypt, represented by President Anwar Sadat, and Israel represented by Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The Oslo Accords of 1993 between the later assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organisation Chairman Yasser Arafat had provided that agreement should be reached on all outstanding issues between the Palestinians and Israeli sides - the so-called final status settlement - within five years of the implementation of Palestinian autonomy. However, the interim process put in place under Oslo had not fulfilled Palestinian expectations, and Arafat argued that the summit was premature[citation needed].
On July 11, the Camp David 2000 Summit convened. The summit ended on July 25, without an agreement being reached. At its conclusion, a Trilateral Statement was issued defining the agreed principles to guide future negotiations.[1]
[edit] Trilateral statement (full text)
President William J. Clinton - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak - Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat. Between July 11 and 24, under the auspices of President Clinton, Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat met at Camp David in an effort to reach an agreement on permanent status. While they were not able to bridge the gaps and reach an agreement, their negotiations were unprecedented in both scope and detail. Building on the progress achieved at Camp David, the two leaders agreed on the following principles to guide their negotiations:
- The two sides agreed that the aim of their negotiations is to put an end to decades of conflict and achieve a just and lasting peace.
- The two sides commit themselves to continue their efforts to conclude an agreement on all permanent status issues as soon as possible.
- Both sides agree that negotiations based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 are the only way to achieve such an agreement and they undertake to create an environment for negotiations free from pressure, intimidation and threats of violence.
- The two sides understand the importance of avoiding unilateral actions that prejudge the outcome of negotiations and that their differences will be resolved only by good faith negotiations.
- Both sides agree that the United States remains a vital partner in the search for peace and will continue to consult closely with President Clinton and Secretary Albright in the period ahead.
[edit] Reasons for impasse
Both sides blamed the other for the failure of the talks: the Palestinians claiming they were not offered enough, and the Israelis claiming that they could not reasonably offer more. The Palestinians wanted a full withdrawal of the Israelis from the occupied territories, and in exchange the Palestinian authority would crush all Palestinian terror organizations. The Israeli response was "we can't accept the demand for a return to the borders of June 1967 as a precondition for the negotiation." See Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah. [2]
In the USA and Israel, the failure to come to an agreement was widely attributed to Yasser Arafat, as he walked away from the table without making a counter-offer. Clinton later stated "I regret that in 2000 Arafat missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being and pray for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace." [3] Arafat was also accused of scuttling the talks by Nabil Amr, a former minister in the Palestinian Authority. [4] However, it was widely believed in Europe and the Arab world that both parties shared responsibility for the deadlock. [5]. See Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams, and Tony Klug articles. [6] [7]
There were three principal obstacles to agreement:
- Territory
- Jerusalem and the Temple Mount
- Refugees and the 'right of return'
[edit] Territory
The Palestinian negotiators indicated they wanted full Palestinian sovereignty over all the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, although they would consider a one-to-one land swap with Israel. As a starting point, Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the Six-Day War and at the 1993 Oslo Accords the Palestinian negotiators accepted the Green Line borders for the West Bank.
Barak offered to form a Palestinian State initially on 73% of the West Bank (that is 27% less than the Green Line borders) and 100% of the Gaza Strip. In 10 to 25 years the West Bank area would expand to 90% (94% excluding greater Jerusalem) [8] [9]. The West Bank would be separated by a road from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, with free passage for Palestinians although Israel reserved the right to close the road for passage in case of emergency. The Palestinian position was that the annexations would block existing road networks between major Palestinian populations. In return, the Israelis would cede 1-3 % of their territory in the Negev Desert to Palestine. Arafat rejected this proposal and did not make a counteroffer. Some say it was because he thought further debate was futile at that point.
Clayton Swisher, who was present at the summit, rebuts the conventional wisdom about it in The Truth About Camp David [10]. Swisher, a young scholar based in Washington, concludes that the Israelis and the Americans were at least as guilty as the Palestinians for the collapse. MJ Rosenberg of Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel think-tank in Washington, calls Swisher's book "the single best volume we are likely to have on the Camp David failure." [citation needed] Others [11] rebut Swisher's work, stating that it is neither objective nor accurate. Alternative points of view are offered in books by longtime Middle East envoy Dennis Ross and especially by President Clinton himself. Ross and Clinton place the blame largely on Arafat. Others say that Arafat could not accept Israel's offer to keep 27% of the West Bank in the short run and 10% in the long run, in exchange for 3% of Israel's territory in the Negev desert.
[edit] Jerusalem and the Temple Mount
A particularly virulent territorial dispute revolved around the final status of Jerusalem. Although offered much of East Jerusalem, the Palestinians rejected a proposal for "custodianship," though not sovereignty, over the Temple Mount. They demanded complete sovereignty over East Jerusalem's Islamic holy sites, in particular, the Al-Aqsa Mosque. For Jews this would have meant losing sovereignty over both the Mount and the attached Western Wall.
[edit] Refugees and the right of return
Due to the first Arab-Israeli war, a significant number of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes of what is now Israel. These refugees, numbering over four million today (but 400,000 at the time), comprise about half the Palestian people.
At the summit, the Palestinian side stated that the proposed solution did not adequately address the issue of the refugee problem. The Palestinians argued that any meaningful peace settlement would have to take the future of these people into account. In particular, they called for a right of return or just compensation and an Israeli acknowledgment that they too had been responsible for the creation of the refugee problem.
The Israelis countered that a larger number of Jewish refugees had been pushed out of Arab countries since 1948, and were not compensated, and that most of them ended up in Israel.
Some pointed out though that many Jewish refugees in Israel are now living in good houses with a high living standard [citation needed] whereas many Palestinian refugees are still homeless, living in refugee camps and barely surviving. Others pointed out that this should be directed towards the Arab countries who maintain the camps for political reasons in order to have a future arrowhead against Israel.
Israelis asserted that allowing a right of return to Israel proper, rather than to the newly created Palestinian state, would mean an influx of Palestinians that would fundamentally alter the demographics of Israel, jeopardizing Israel's Jewish character and its existence as a whole.
Some Palestinians believed that this would be just, and would reverse what they called the "ethnic cleansing of 1947-1949". Others believe there was no ethnic cleansing.
[edit] Aftermath
Soon after the collapse of the 2000 summit, Sept. 28th, Ariel Sharon and a delegation of Likud politicians took a tour of the Temple Mount to demonstrate the right of Jews to visit a site that remains holy to Judaism, though still religiously Islamic. This tour, although it did not include the Al-Aqsa Mosque that currently occupies a small part of the the Temple Mount, was still seen as a provocation by many Palestinians. The next day, September 29, 2000, a stone-throwing demonstration by a Palestinian crowd broke out of control and Israeli police opened fire and killed 4 of the unarmed protesters [1]. From this point, an escalation in violence culminated in an uprising called the al-Aqsa Intifada, which continues to this day (see Shattered Dreams, Charles Enderlin). There were running street battles in the West Bank and Gaza, and many were killed [2]. There was also rioting by Arab-Israelis, and some of them were killed. On October 7, 2000, a Palestinian mob demolished Joseph’s Tomb, a Jewish holy site near the West Bank city of Nablus. On October 8 the BBC reported on the death toll up to that point, "At least 80 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed during the unrest." [3] On Oct. 12, two Israeli reservists were brutally lynched in Ramallah. Starting with the June 1, 2001 Dolphinarium suicide bombing a wave of suicide bombings was unleashed by Palestinian extremist movements on Israeli civilians. Some claim they were in retaliation for the Israeli killings of civilians. In reprisal Israel sent in the Israel Defence Force to seal off the Gaza Strip and re-occupy the West Bank, which were brought under strict military rule. The leaders of Palestinian militant organizations were targeted for assassinations by Israel. Since September 29, 2000 the continuing violence has claimed the lives of over 1000 Israelis and over 3900 Palestinians [4].
[edit] Calls for peace
In a last attempt to bring Middle East peace before his second term ended in January 2001, Clinton wrote a proposal to Barak and Arafat, laying down the parameters for future negotiations.[12] Barak accepted the parameters (with some reservations that were within those parameters) and Arafat, after a delay, accepted, but with questions and reservations that went outside the parameters, according to Ambassador Dennis Ross, the special Mideast envoy.
Clinton's initiative led to the Taba negotiations in January 2001, where the two sides published a statement saying they had never been closer to agreement (though such issues as Jerusalem, the status of Gaza, and the Palestinian demand for compensation for refugees and their descendants remained unresolved), but Barak, facing elections, resuspended the talks.[13] The increased violence led to a sharp swing to the right in Israeli politics; Ehud Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon in 2001.
[edit] See also
- Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- Proposals for a Palestinian state
- Arab-Israeli conflict
- Charles Enderlin
- Taba summit
[edit] References
- ^ "Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee Report". The George J. Mitchell (et al) report. April 30, 2001.
- ^ "Fierce clashes in Gaza and West Bank". BBC. Oct. 2, 2000.
- ^ 'Excessive' Israeli force condemned. BBC. Oct. 8, 2000.
- ^ "B'Tselem - Statistics - Fatalities". Intifada deaths since Sept. 29, 2000.
[edit] Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy and treaties
- Paris Peace Conference, 1919
- Faisal-Weizmann Agreement (1919)
- 1949 Armistice Agreements
- Camp David Accords (1978)
- Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty (1979)
- Madrid Conference of 1991
- Oslo Accords (1993)
- Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace (1994)
- Camp David 2000 Summit
- Taba summit
- Peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- Projects working for peace among Israelis and Arabs
- List of Middle East peace proposals
- International law and the Arab-Israeli conflict
[edit] External links
[edit] General
- Interview with Dennis Ross about the summit
- More recent interview with Dennis Ross about the summit
- Several articles on the summit, including interviews with Clinton and Ben-Ami at the Jewish Virtual Library
- Comparing Camp David I and II, Dr. Kenneth W. Stein, Emory University
- Camp David offer according to Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs
- "Was Arafat the Problem?" by Robert Wright
- "The Day Barak's Bubble Burst". Sept. 15, 2001 article, by Uri Avnery, a founder of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom. More of their articles about Camp David are here.
- The Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David- July 2000 Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
[edit] Maps
- Camp David proposal according to MidEastWeb. Maps explained too.
- Palestinian Maps of the Camp David 2 Proposals.
- (French) Maps: Israeli proposals, from Camp David (2000) to Taba (2001)
- Failed compromise at Camp David. December 2000 English article in Le Monde diplomatique refers to some of the above-linked French-language maps.
[edit] Books
The following links reference an extended exchange in the pages of the New York Review of Books on Camp David 2000. Presented here in chronological order.
- Robert Malley and Hussein Agha. "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors," New York Review of Books, 9 August 2001
- Dennis Ross, Gidi Grinstein, Hussein Agha, Robert Malley. "Camp David: An Exchange." New York Review of Books, 20 September 2001
- Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak, by Benny Morris, in response to "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors") 13 June 2002
- Camp David and After: An Exchange (2. A Reply to Ehud Barak) By Hussein Agha, Robert Malley, 13 June 2002
- Camp David and After—Continued Benny Morris, Ehud Barak, Reply by Hussein Agha, Robert Malley, 27 June 2002
[edit] On Barak
A critique of Barak's performance at Camp David and of Barak's version of events as given in the Morris-Barak piece in the New York Review of Books.
[edit] Palestinian offer
A newspaper article stating that the Palestinians made an implicit, unstated "peace offer" at Camp David.
- Jerome M. Segal, "The Palestinian Peace Offer," originally published in Ha'aretz, 1 October 2001
- Tawfiq Abu Baker of the Jerusalem Times details the Palestinian lost opportunity at Camp David 2000
[edit] Further reading
- Bregman, Ahron Elusive Peace: How the Holy Land Defeated America.
- Ross, Dennis The Missing Peace : The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace
