By Mohamad Bydon '01
In American media circles and across Israel, last summer's Camp David peace summit between Israel and the Palestinians is seen through a narrow lens, one which contends that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinians the moon (or 97 percent of the moon) and they rejected it because of their unwillingness to compromise.
This narrative has been pushed most vigorously by Mr. Barak and his negotiating team as well as American officials like Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk (both of whom had previously been lobbyists for Israel in Washington, DC). Nearly a year later, we now know enough about the Camp David negotiations to realize that the story is not so simple.
Mr. Barak made a significant and worthwhile offer at Camp David. He showed political and personal courage in discussing the status of Jerusalem and in making a bold attempt to resolve once and for all a conflict that is over a century old. But his offer at Camp David was far from being the "height of generosity." As far-reaching an offer as it may have been, it was ultimately flawed in both content and presentation.
First and foremost, Mr. Barak did not present the Israeli offer as a basis for negotiation, but rather as a "take it or leave it" package. He felt that this ultimatum would help pressure the Palestinians into accepting his deal. Through Dennis Ross, the Israeli team also convinced the American team to present a united front with them against the Palestinian negotiators.
In a Harry Kreisler interview last month, Ian Lustick -- a Clinton advisor and member of the American negotiating team at Camp David -- described the course of events: "[President Bill] Clinton, uncharacteristically, made serious tactical mistakes at Camp David ... He literally went to the Palestinians and said, 'This is the American position,' when the position he presented them was exactly the Israeli position that had been secretly transmitted to the Palestinians. So he delegitimized his own position. It's not surprising at all that Camp David, itself, failed."
This American failure to be a true honest broker almost broke the summit apart. After the incident, the Palestinian team was convinced that the American and Israeli negotiators had teamed up against them and wanted to leave immediately. Arafat threatened to walk out unless the U.S. offer was withdrawn, which it was with prompt apologies.
Similar errors on the part of all three parties led to a hostile and embittered atmosphere at the summit, which was highly detrimental to resolving a conflict as volatile as the one in the Middle East. At Camp David, Mr. Barak would not meet personally with Mr. Arafat (though this would change afterwards) and refused to leave his cottage for the last two days of negotiations. All sides are to blame for the failure of Camp David.
While the presentation of Mr. Barak's offer was considerably twisted even by Middle Eastern standards, the question remains: Was the Israeli offer "generous?"
The situation here is not one of generosity, but one of viability and justice. The more appropriate question should focus on whether the Israeli offer would have allowed the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Unfortunately, it would not. The Palestinian state would have lacked control of its own water supply, borders or airspace, and would have had no territorial continuity in the West Bank.
At Camp David, Mr. Barak did agree ultimately to withdraw from 91 percent of the West Bank. But this territory would have been divided into three separate sections (or cantons) with Israeli territory in between them. Additionally, a majority of settlers (80 percent) would have remained under Israeli sovereignty -- including many in settlement blocs that spread across the heart of the West Bank -- with Israeli soldiers and special security roads to connect them to Israel. Thus the Palestinian state would have been divided into a handful of cantons and numerous "islands" of Palestinian population surrounded by Israeli-only roads, Israeli military checkpoints and Israeli troops. This would have meant a continued, de facto occupation of the Palestinian people.
Israeli professor and activist, Jeff Halper has challenged the myth of Barak's "generous" offer at Camp David, insisting that the Palestinians require real territorial continuity in the West Bank. Referring to Israel's proposed withdrawal from 95 percent of the West Bank, he makes the following analogy: "In a prison, the prisoners live in about 95 percent of the space, and the guards control 'only' about 5 percent. But this 5 percent includes all of the corridors between the cells, and therefore the guards control the entire prison." One can argue that Israel has a right to maintain the occupation or that it should "imprison" and cantonize the Palestinian people. But one cannot expect the Palestinians themselves to agree to such an arrangement, especially if it is in the form of a permanent "peace" offer.
Many others have spoken out against the myth of Barak's "generous" peace offer, including Ron Pundak, a member of Barak's own negotiating team at Camp David, and Ami Ayalon, the head of Israel's security service under Barak. When asked about Camp David, Ayalon told the French daily Le Monde that the Israeli notion of " 'We have been generous, and they refused!' is ridiculous, and everything that follows from this misperception is skewed."
According to Robert Malley, who was special assistant for Arab Israeli affairs to Bill Clinton and a part of the American team at Camp David, the Palestinians made quite a few compromises of their own at Camp David. After listing these compromises, he writes: "No other Arab party that has negotiated with Israel -- not Anwar el-Sadat's Egypt, not King Hussein's Jordan, let alone Hafez al-Assad's Syria -- ever came close to even considering such compromises."
With Prime Minister Ehud Barak visiting campus this Wednesday, he will undoubtedly claim that his offer to the Palestinians was the "height of generosity." But as with every major event in the Arab-Israeli conflict, there is another side to the accepted narrative of Camp David.
