21

1999–2000

‘Israel … was not yet ready for real peace. The colonialist, militaristic mentality – the occupier’s mentality, nourished by myths – still predominated and shaped their vision of peace.’

Akram Hanieh1

‘MR SECURITY’ – MARK II

Ehud Barak became Israel’s prime minister in May 1999 after winning an election by promising to continue the legacy of Yitzhak Rabin. The new resident of Balfour Street was the most decorated soldier in the country’s history. Like Rabin, this latter-day ‘Mr Security’ was not a natural party leader. Labour was re-branded as ‘One Israel’ for a campaign that was designed to win over the middle ground. Supporters even chanted ‘Rabin won, Rabin won’ when Barak gave his victory address and proclaimed that Israel had ‘returned to sanity’. Barak, a pianist, systems analyst and chess player with an unusual ability to pick locks, was famous for his analytical mind – and was sometimes described as arrogant. But his martial qualities were striking too in a country that was still impressed by them: as a young IDF officer in the elite Sayeret Matkal (general staff reconnaissance unit) he had taken part in a celebrated hostage rescue mission, as well as the assassination of PLO leaders in a raid on Beirut in 1973. In 1988, at the height of the intifada, he had commanded the operation to kill Abu Jihad in Tunis. As IDF chief of staff he was unhappy with the Oslo agreement, not least because he had not been privy to the secret negotiating channel. In his final days in uniform in 1994 he had overseen the Gaza–Jericho redeployment. In 1995, as Rabin’s interior minister, he very noticeably opposed ratification of Oslo II. Still, the PLO leadership was initially cheered by Barak’s victory, remembering that he had called for Palestinian statehood and warned of ‘apartheid’ unless separation took place. He had even once given an interview where he combined both empathy and hostility and said that if he had been a young Palestinian he would have joined ‘a terrorist organization’ (irgun mehablim). It reminded some of the speech made in the 1950s by another famous soldier-turned-politician, Moshe Dayan, showing rare understanding for Palestinians’ hatred of Israel as they sat ‘in the refugee camps in Gaza, watching us transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt, into our property’.2 Ahmed Qurei saw ‘a glimmer of hope’ that the flame of Oslo could be revived after being all-but extinguished by Netanyahu. Others were dubious. Farouk Qaddumi, an opponent of Oslo who had stayed in Tunis rather than accompany Arafat back to Gaza, agreed that Labour was more ‘flexible’ than the Likud but predicted that nothing would unblock the peace process without US and European pressure. The Palestinian media gave blanket coverage to the Israeli election campaign. The stakes, after all, were unusually high.

Barak won 56 per cent of the vote for prime minister, against 44 per cent for Netanyahu. He put together a broad coalition of right-wing and religious parties, the Orthodox Shas as well as the left-wing Meretz, but eschewed the support of Arab political parties even though many Arabs had voted for him,³ and thus left them feeling betrayed. Barak however also made clear that he had distinct ‘red lines’ that were not compatible with minimal Palestinian demands: Jerusalem would remain Israel’s ‘eternal capital’; there would be no withdrawal to the 1967 borders; the West Bank would have to be demilitarized while Israeli sovereignty would be extended to accommodate Jewish settlers; and no right of return could be granted to Palestinian refugees. Immediately after the election the prime minister visited Ofra and Bet-El, calling the settlers ‘my dear brothers’. Palestinian hopes – tinged by a strong element of wishful thinking by the leadership – appeared to have been quickly dashed.

On the ground there was no discernible improvement: settlement building continued apace, as did blockades and other restrictions that took their toll on the Palestinian economy. Barak moved rapidly, at least going through the motions of a return to negotiations. In his first meeting with Arafat at the Erez border crossing to Gaza in July, he explained that he intended to integrate talks on the contentious final status issues with implementation of the 1998 Wye agreement on outstanding interim commitments and Israeli redeployments, prisoner releases and a safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank. Barak’s fear was that by the time the parties reached permanent status negotiations, Israel would have had to surrender all its cards; his alternative was to move directly to the end point while keeping his cards off the table. Piecemeal was out; take-it-or-leave-it was in.

Arafat, who was anxious to see brisk progress after the frustrations and evasions of the Netanyahu years, was publicly polite but privately furious.4 In September 1999 he and Barak signed yet another agreement in Sharm el-Sheikh, watched over by Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan, who had come to the throne on the death of his father Hussein a few months earlier. Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, helped to mediate despite the approaching end of Bill Clinton’s second term in office. Both sides reaffirmed their commitment to implement all outstanding agreements, and to work to end the conflict within twelve to fifteen months. Talks got under way but they proved tense and difficult – one meeting between Arafat and Barak involving a ‘painful and personal clash’.⁵

It was around this time that Barak lurched suddenly towards Syria, hoping to make peace with Israel’s most hostile Arab neighbour and use that, like the treaties with Egypt and Jordan, to weaken and isolate the Palestinians – as the PLO suspected.⁶ Reaching out to Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian president, formed part of the prime minister’s strategy for a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon – a popular campaign pledge. Palestinians were left reeling as Barak pursued Assad, with American help, meeting the Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa at Shepherdstown, near Washington, in January 2000. ‘Barak’, Arafat warned, ‘shouldn’t take me for granted.’⁷ Barak’s background predisposed him to dealing with the Syrian president, ‘a military man at the helm of an orderly state, rather than with a terrorist and guerrilla fighter at the head of a revolutionary movement like Arafat’, as the internal security minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, reflected later. To the dismay of the Palestinians, though, the focus on Syria marked a reversion to the pre-Oslo period. Arafat was ‘restless, alienated and hostile’. Assad, in declining health, eventually lost interest in bargaining over the Golan Heights as the Israeli offer fell short – though by only a few hundred yards on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee – of a full return to the 1967 border. Barak lost his nerve due to opposition at home, where the defence establishment and most ministers advised him to forget the ‘Sphinx of Damascus’ and to concentrate instead on the Palestinians, the more familiar enemy in Israel’s backyard.8 In May 2000 the Israelis went ahead with the withdrawal from Lebanon. Hizbullah celebrated a great victory while Palestinian refugees flocked from their camps to the border fence to gaze at their lost homeland from close up. Most Israelis welcomed the pullout as finally drawing a line under the ‘war of choice’ that had been launched by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon to destroy the PLO eighteen years earlier.

RESISTANCE WORKS

The Palestinians’ disenchantment with Barak, preoccupied with Syria, grew with every meeting. Accusations of bad faith multiplied; they felt cheated and humiliated.⁹ In January the PLO declared that 13 September 2000, the seventh anniversary of the Oslo agreement and the date on which final status negotiations were scheduled to be completed, would be the date of the establishment of the Palestinian state. Israel denounced this as a provocative move. Yet that April, on the eve of another negotiating session, Barak announced plans to build 174 new housing units in Maaleh Adumim, the big settlement east of Jerusalem overlooking the road to Jericho which was by now seen by many Israelis as an ordinary suburb and a natural extension of their capital. Talks broke down, resumed, and were again suspended. In an echo of what had happened back in 1993, another Nordic ‘backchannel’ was established, this time in Stockholm. It was intended to provide a respite from the ‘spotlight of publicity, from the scrutiny of the media and intelligence services, and from the baleful gaze of opponents of the peace process, especially on the Israeli side’. News of it leaked on the second day of talks, coinciding uncomfortably with big demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza in solidarity with hunger-striking prisoners in Israeli gaols and around a ‘day of rage’ chosen to coincide with the annual commemoration of the Nakba. Six Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded, the streets strewn with stones and smouldering tyres.10 A long-delayed agreement to hand over Abu Dis and two other Arab villages on the outskirts of East Jerusalem to the PA only passed after a stormy debate in the Knesset, but Barak suspended implementation because of the violence – the worst in four years. Fatah activists led by Marwan Barghouti, head of the movement’s Tanzim (‘organization’) militia, fired weapons behind demonstrators gathering at IDF checkpoints, taking the initiative on the streets in the way that the PA rarely did. Palestinian policemen, facing social pressure and accusations of collaboration with Israel, took part in the demonstrations – an ominous new development. Yasser Abed-Rabbo, chief PLO negotiator in the official talks, resigned in protest when news broke of the Swedish track. But Stockholm was unable to narrow the gaps between the parties on the extent of an Israeli withdrawal or on refugee returns. The magic of Oslo – which had in any case long lost its original sparkle – could not be repeated. And in the aftermath of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, its enemies, including Hamas, compared the PLO unfavourably with Hizbullah: why could the Palestinians not also defeat Israel? Resistance worked; negotiation did not. Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, exhorted the Palestinians to emulate the Lebanese and renew their armed struggle. The lesson was apparently not lost on Arafat. Israeli security forces quietly monitored Palestinian preparations for acts of violence.¹¹

In June 2000, Clinton and Barak agreed on a new summit. Arafat was firmly opposed, and said so, suspecting a trap in which he would either be forced to accept an American-Israeli diktat or be blamed for rejecting it, but he still felt unable to refuse the invitation. Clinton, the Palestinians feared, was anxious for a foreign policy success before leaving office when his second term ended in a few months. Barak’s coalition in the Knesset began to disintegrate, while Arafat faced internal dissent as well.

Camp David had been a resonant name in the annals of Israeli–Arab diplomacy since the negotiations that produced peace with Egypt in 1978. But an ambitious encounter designed to address the hard core of the conflict was fatally ill-prepared. Palestinians, Americans and many of the Israelis involved understood that before the summit began on 11 July: most knew how wide the gaps were and how very hard it would be to bridge them. ‘What you are offering is more like a guillotine hanging over our necks’, Arafat warned Shlomo Ben-Ami at a preparatory meeting in Nablus.12 It felt like watching a disaster unfold. Fifteen days in the pressure cooker of the Maryland retreat were not enough to overcome the familiar obstacles to a final and comprehensive peace settlement. It is debatable, however, whether more time and better preparation would have made any difference.

CAMP DAVID, AGAIN

The summit had to tackle the toughest, ‘permanent status’ issues that had been left for the end by the Oslo accords’ interim structure. These had been barely touched on in earlier rounds of negotiations. Finding common ground on Jerusalem, refugees, borders and settlements was as difficult as ever, despite the fact that since 1993 Israeli and Palestinian officials had had more direct contact than ever before. Thousands of hours of meetings in committees and working groups had woven personal relations that created a strangely cordial atmosphere in the bucolic atmosphere of the presidential retreat, with its echoes of the Begin–Sadat–Carter talks two decades earlier. Madeleine Albright invited negotiators to watch a film and to take part in a basketball game, but only the Israelis turned up so they played against the Marine security detachment. The most memorable image was of Ehud Barak playfully pushing a smiling Arafat through the door of Laurel cabin – forcing him, deferentially but impatiently, to go first. Personal chemistry could help in theory, though there was precious little between the two; it could not be remotely decisive at what Albright called ‘a single make-or-break summit’. As Arafat’s aide Akram Hanieh put it: ‘The Americans did not seem to realise that the reality of the conflict was stronger than the unreal world they had created at Camp David.’¹³

The talks began unpromisingly. The map the Israelis submitted proposed annexing 14 per cent of the West Bank, with a long-term lease on a further 10 per cent in the Jordan Valley, leaving the Palestinians with 76 per cent of the territory. That would have left 80 per cent of Israeli settlers under Israeli control, but around 50,000 would still be living in Palestinian areas. Two corridors were to run from west to east, giving the Israelis access to the Jordan river in the event of an attack from there. That would have meant the Palestinian territory being divided into three non-contiguous blocks – including Gaza. The Palestinians rejected this outright, insisting that a full return to the 1967 borders could be the only basis for negotiation: that would give them 22 per cent of historic Palestine against the 78 per cent held by Israel on the eve of the Six Days war – the grand compromise that the PLO had, in their view, already made. A later, amended offer, involving Israeli annexation of 10.5 per cent of the West Bank, was also rejected, although the Palestinians did agree to a land swap which would allow the Israelis to retain the big settlements of Maaleh Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzion. The final Israeli offer was for 92 per cent of the West Bank.14 Both sides rejected a US proposal for the Palestinians to have sovereignty over East Jerusalem; the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount was an entirely predictable sticking point.¹⁵ Towards the end of the summit, however, Barak moved, for the first time accepting Palestinian sovereignty over some parts of East Jerusalem, and Palestinian custodianship of the Haram al-Sharif with Palestinian security to protect it, though crucially it would still be under Israeli sovereignty. US bridging proposals failed because they did not deal with the Palestinian claim that the holy places were the concern of all Muslims. ‘I cannot concede sovereignty over East Jerusalem’, Arafat told Clinton on the final day, as tension filled the air. Barak said: ‘I don’t know a prime minister who would be willing to sign his name to the transfer of sovereignty over the First and Second Temple, which is the basis of Zionism.’¹⁶

The refugee question was even tougher. Israel treated it as a humanitarian issue under which a token number would be allowed back under the rubric of family reunification. That was a far cry from the passionately held Palestinian demand for Israel’s recognition of its responsibility for creating the problem in 1948 – the Nakba. Ben-Ami had told Arafat in Nablus: ‘I am not denying the morality of your demand for the right of return. However, we must together seek a formula whereby the right of return becomes symbolic.’17 Palestinian leaders did in fact distinguish between Israel’s recognition of the right of return as a moral question and its implementation. But that did not mean it was easy to agree on practicalities, given Israel’s deep-seated fears about its Jewish character, demographics and security and being ‘swamped’ by Palestinians. ‘Israel wanted to gain a historic compromise without dealing with history, and wanted to uproot the causes of the conflict without exposing these roots’, argued the Palestinian-Israeli commentator Raef Zreik.¹⁸ Overall, Palestinians felt that Barak’s offer – which was repeatedly described as ‘generous’ – did not constitute a viable, sovereign state, and nor did it create the conditions necessary for ending the conflict.

Unsurprisingly, the failure at Camp David generated angry claims and counter-claims about who was responsible. Little had been written down for fear of leaks that would be used by critics, especially in Israel, which made it hard to sort out the truth at the end. Barak had avoided contact with Arafat for fear of pressure from him to confirm concessions. Israel blamed him directly for intransigence and for refusing to engage. Clinton, though less directly, did the same, and helped the process of delegitimizing the Palestinian leader. ‘Arafat’, Barak declared,

was single-handedly responsible for the summit’s failure because he was afraid to make the historic decisions needed at this time to bring an end to the conflict. We did not find a partner prepared to make decisions. We did what we could, we left no stone unturned, we exhausted every possibility to bring about an end to conflict and a secure future for Israel.

The official view, endlessly repeated, was that Israel’s ‘magnanimity was being spurned by an Arafat who was psychologically incapable of making the grand historical compromise necessary’.¹⁹ In the most extreme interpretation, the PLO leader was not objecting to the crucial details of the Israeli offer, but to the underlying principle of a two-state solution.²⁰ Tragically, reconciliation seemed impossible. Clinton compared the experience of the talks to having teeth extracted without painkillers.

The Palestinians complained about a ‘venomous propaganda campaign’ even before Barak had left Maryland.21 They emphasized the close co-ordination between Americans and Israelis and the inadequacy of Israeli offers, though some of them did represent genuine progress. Barak’s offer on Jerusalem broke a taboo, though it came late. Significantly he went beyond both his own previously declared red lines and beyond what any Israeli leader had ever proposed before, despite mounting pressure on the right at home. Israel’s concessions still fell short of minimum Palestinian demands though: the contiguity of the Palestinian state, full sovereignty in Arab areas of East Jerusalem and a compromise on refugees. ‘Camp David made clear that the Israeli establishment was not yet ready for real peace’, Hanieh concluded. ‘The colonialist, militaristic mentality – the occupier’s mentality, nourished by myths – still predominated and shaped their vision of peace.’²²

Informed outsiders blamed both sides. ‘If you were Barak, offering 90 per cent was plenty risky politically, and, given Rabin’s murder, even personally; if you were Arafat, accepting it would have been fatal’, concluded one US official.²³ But a close and independent examination of the evidence found the Palestinian narrative of Camp David (and the subsequent Taba talks) to be ‘significantly more accurate than the Israeli narrative’.²⁴ The disastrous results were produced by ‘mutual and by then deeply entrenched suspicion’, Clinton’s aide Rob Malley argued afterwards.

Barak’s strategy was predicated on the idea that his firmness would lead to some Palestinian flexibility, which in turn would justify Israel’s making further concessions. Instead, Barak’s piecemeal negotiation style, combined with Arafat’s unwillingness to budge, produced a paradoxical result. By presenting early positions as bottom lines, the Israelis provoked the Palestinians’ mistrust; by subsequently shifting them, they whetted the Palestinians’ appetite. By the end of the process, it was hard to tell which bottom lines were for real, and which were not.²⁵

It was not quite the end of the road. In the few weeks before the date set for the promised declaration of Palestinian statehood in September, contacts intensified again, once more with close US involvement. Arafat signalled flexibility over timing. After all, as one aide put it: ‘He has many of the elements of a state. We have 36,000 military men with weapons. We have flags, radio, television, ministries, and a legislative council.’26 Ben-Ami was appointed foreign minister instead of David Levy, who resigned as the prime minister’s support faded away. Barak and Arafat met again at the United Nations’ Millennium Summit in New York. In late September the two had a ‘warm’ meeting at Barak’s private residence at Kochav Yair, just inside the green line. Further talks in Washington narrowed more gaps as the Americans considered, for the first time, setting out their own view – which they had so far refrained from doing. By now the clock was ticking loudly towards the end of Clinton’s term, adding to pressure for agreement despite all the difficulties.

SHARON PAYS A VISIT

Only a few days later, the Likud leader, Ariel Sharon (he had replaced Netanyahu after Barak’s election victory), requested permission to visit the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. Ostensibly his purpose was to inspect archaeological sites. His real point, he would insist later, was to highlight how Ehud Barak had been prepared to negotiate Israel’s sovereignty away at Camp David.²⁷ Ben-Ami got assurances from Jibril Rajoub that there would be no trouble as long as Sharon did not enter the mosques. The Americans were nervous too. ‘I can think of a lot of bad ideas, but I can’t think of a worse one’, was the response of Dennis Ross, Clinton’s Middle East co-ordinator. Still, the Americans told the Palestinians they did not want to feed the Israeli right’s paranoia about US pressure.²⁸ On 28 September, guarded by more than 1,000 police, Sharon and a handful of Likud politicians spent 45 minutes on the esplanade, leaving a trail of fury as young Palestinians threw chairs, stones, rubbish bins and whatever missiles came to hand at the escorting forces, who retaliated with tear gas and rubber bullets. Protesters followed Sharon off the site, chanting ‘Murderer’, and only narrowly escaped clashing with Orthodox Jews who shouted ‘Go back to Mecca’. No one was killed. But the symbolism of the visit – and close to the anniversary of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres – was unmistakable. Arafat condemned it but Sharon was unrepentant: ‘The Temple Mount is in our hands and will remain in our hands,’ he declared – repeating the famous phrase from the 1967 war.

The Israelis got wind of more trouble being planned for the next day, after Friday prayers: messages were sent to Arafat but he did not respond. Four Palestinians were killed and two hundred wounded as Israeli forces switched from rubber bullets to live fire after the Jerusalem police commander was knocked unconscious by a stone. ‘Sharon’s visit’, Ross would argue later,

gave [Arafat] a perfect pretext to allow violence to erupt, and it also had the benefit of demonstrating that on the Haram his hands were tied – there could be no flexibility. In this sense, Arafat countenanced violence as a tactical move to gain advantage, but underestimated how uncontrollable the ensuing events might be.29

Popular anger was directed at the PA, and especially at security personnel, whose children were taunted at school for their fathers’ failure to defend their own people. Some changed sides: at one demonstration shortly after Sharon’s visit, an armed Palestinian policeman sat at the edge of a crowd of demonstrators watching passively as ambulances evacuated the wounded. But a couple of days later he was seen running alongside protesters with his rifle.³⁰ Arafat’s confidant Mamdouh Nofal later described an internal Fatah directive calling on its men to ‘use weapons sparingly, economise on munitions and preserve the clandestinity of actions’.³¹ It was the beginning of what became known as the second intifada – the al-Aqsa intifada.

Unrest spread. On 30 September in the Gaza Strip attention focused on an Israeli command post at Netzarim junction on the main north–south road. Twelve-year-old Mohammed al-Durrah, who was sheltering with his father, died in what appeared to be crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security forces, and became the subject of a long propaganda war about who was responsible. Footage of the incident showed the boy crying and the father waving, then a burst of gunfire and dust, after which the boy is seen slumped across his father. This scene was viewed by millions of people across the world on al-Jazeera TV and other channels and generated controversy to match the horror. ‘All Palestinians see the Israelis as guilty in this,’ as the BBC reported. ‘Even if Mohammed al-Durrah was killed by a Palestinian bullet, if it hadn’t been for the Israeli occupation in Gaza he would be still alive today.’32

Over the following few days thirteen Israeli-Arab citizens, mostly youngsters, were killed by police when protests spread across the green line. These incidents were especially shocking because they showed how, despite cautious hope of improvement in the 1990s, the Israeli authorities appeared to view the country’s Palestinian minority not as citizens to be protected, but as an enemy population to be suppressed. It was the highest death toll since the Kafr Qassem massacre in 1956; it had happened under a left-wing government and it looked like a glaring example of double standards. Trouble erupted in Nazareth and Jaffa and in other places where Jews and Arabs lived in close proximity. Some incidents seemed to draw on deep reserves of animosity and prejudice: on 9 October hundreds of Jews from Kfar Shalem, a working-class neighbourhood on the edge of Tel Aviv, used metal bars and hammers to tear down the walls of a derelict mosque in the heart of the neighbourhood, a relic of what had been Salama village until 1948. The ‘events of October 2000’ came to be seen as a turning point in Arab–Jewish relations inside Israel, the biggest shock since Land Day in 1976, and one that underscored fundamental inequalities.³³ Budgets for the Arab sector were frozen, went one complaint, ‘and the minister of education demands that our children sing … Hatikvah’.³⁴ Earlier that year the High Court had ruled in favour of an Israeli-Arab couple who had faced discrimination by not being allowed by buy a home in a new Jewish neighbourhood. The Kaadan case was a landmark in the quest for equality.³⁵ Now though, the hopeful atmosphere of the Oslo years gave way to dark fears about the future. It no longer seemed impossible to imagine that the proponents of ‘transfer’ – forcibly removing Palestinians from Israel en masse – would get their way.³⁶ The Or Commission, which investigated the events, identified a pattern of official ‘prejudice and neglect’ towards the minority and blamed anti-Arab discrimination for the ‘combustible atmosphere’ that led to the riots. No one, however, faced prosecution.

Yet more terrible images and stories were soon making the rounds. In mid-October two Israeli soldiers who had lost their way were stopped and lynched by a mob at the police station in Ramallah, one of their killers waving his bloodstained hands from the window. Horrified Israelis heard how another Palestinian rang the wife of one of the victims on his cell phone to tell her: ‘I have just killed your husband.’ PA policemen were unable or unwilling to intervene. ‘We are in a very complex situation where our own people are concerned,’ the station commander explained. ‘Our police is coming to be deeply hated. The crowd believes we are protecting the Israelis, not them.’ The incident was filmed by an Italian TV crew and broadcast internationally. The Palestinian rumour mill said the soldiers were members of an IDF undercover squad, though in fact they were ordinary reservists. The lynching was often cited by Israelis as a turning point in the second intifada, but it did not happen in a vacuum: in the preceding two weeks IDF forces had killed eight Palestinian children under the age of sixteen, and nine between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.37 IDF regulations for opening fire had been relaxed. ‘You don’t shoot at a child who is 12 or younger,’ explained an army sniper, adding that ‘12 and up is allowed. He is not a child any more; he is already after his bar mitzvah.’³⁸ In the first three weeks of the intifada the IDF fired 1 million bullets in the occupied territories: 700,000 in the West Bank and 300,000 in Gaza.

AL-AQSA INTIFADA

US diplomatic efforts intensified as the violence escalated. Clinton brought Barak and Arafat together for another summit, this time at Sharm el-Sheikh, although the two did not hold direct talks. The only significant result was the appointment of George Mitchell, the respected former Democratic senator who had helped the Northern Ireland peace process, to investigate the causes of the unrest and get the post-Camp David talks back on track. In November 2000 the Israelis began carrying out ‘targeted killings’ – assassinations – using Apache helicopter gunships. ‘Down with the olive branch, up with the gun,’ chanted mourners at the funeral of Hussein Abayat, a Fatah activist from Beit Sahour who had died in a Hellfire missile strike on his Mitsubishi 4x4. The Israelis held Abayat responsible for killing three soldiers and for the nightly gunfire aimed at Gilo, the Jewish settlement built on confiscated land nearby, just beyond the Jerusalem district boundary.39 Similar attacks were mounted against Psagot, a settlement close to Ramallah. Tanzim attacks forced the evacuation of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus. Israeli gunboats fired into Gaza after a mortar attack on a bus carrying Jewish settler children. Clashes took place every day that month, by the end of which 112 Palestinians and 22 Israelis had been killed. In December the Israelis sent tanks into Jenin and settlers occupied a Palestinian home in Hebron.

The goal of the al-Aqsa intifada was to achieve what Oslo had manifestly failed to do: end the occupation. Palestinians who supported Arafat refrained by and large from attacking targets inside the 1967 borders; when Islamic Jihad planted a bomb in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market, Arafat condemned it – though many Israelis dismissed that as disingenuous. This was to be the longest and bloodiest phase in relations between Israelis and Palestinians since the epochal events of 1948 – a war by any other name; a Hebrew book about it was entitled The Seventh War.⁴⁰ Ghassan Andoni, another Beit Sahour activist, made a different point from a Palestinian perspective: if the first intifada had been born of hope, the second one was driven by desperation.⁴¹

In late November 2000, Barak had announced early general elections – his response to pressure from the right for being too soft on the Palestinians while he was being pilloried from abroad for using excessive force. He still believed it was possible to reach a peace agreement with Arafat, on an interim basis that excluded Jerusalem for the moment on the grounds that it was simply too difficult. Sharon immediately accused him of seeking to do a deal at any price. Clinton persevered. On 23 December, with just two weeks left in the White House, the president tried to bridge the gap by issuing what he called ‘general parameters’ for an Israeli–Palestinian peace settlement, based on everything the Americans had heard from the two sides: a ‘fair and lasting agreement’, he believed, would require Israel to surrender 94–96 per cent of the West Bank, with the Palestinians obtaining 1–3 per cent compensation for areas that were annexed by Israel. Eighty per cent of the settlers would be in blocs, with contiguity of territory for each side. Israel’s withdrawal would be carried out in phases over three years while an international force was deployed. There would be three Israeli early warning stations on the West Bank, and liaison arrangements with the Palestinians. Agreement would be needed on access for Israeli forces in an emergency and on Israeli flights through Palestinian air space. The Palestinian state would be ‘non-militarized’. In Jerusalem, sovereignty would be divided – though exactly how would need working out. Al-Quds was to be the Palestinian capital; special arrangements would be made for the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. Refugees would be able to return to the Palestinian state. Israel might accept some but would not be required to do so. It would be asked to recognize the suffering of the Palestinian people as a result of the 1948 war and assist international efforts to address the refugee problem. This was to lead to the formal end of the conflict and to all claims anchored in a UN Security Council resolution. ‘This,’ said the president, ‘is the best I can do … I want to be very clear on one thing. These are my ideas. If they are not accepted now they are not just off the table. They go with me when I leave office.’42

Mutual tolerance was tested to destruction: one high-level meeting was delayed because Yasser Abed-Rabbo called Barak a war criminal and the Israelis demanded an apology before resuming talks. Time pressed again as a final round of negotiations began in the Egyptian resort of Taba on 21 January 2001. President George W. Bush, who was expected to be far less engaged in the peace process, had replaced Clinton in the White House and new Israeli elections were looming in just two weeks. No US officials were present. ‘Just go,’ Arafat ordered a reluctant Ahmed Qurei, ‘take your colleagues, and do whatever you find suitable. I shall endorse anything you and your colleagues agree to.’⁴³ But Sharon had already threatened that he would not honour an agreement reached by Barak. Over six days the two sides returned to the final status issues as laid out by Clinton’s ‘parameters’, though both of them had reservations. The Palestinians rejected Israeli maps – and objected to their plans for annexation. The Israelis accused the other side of wanting Israel to make all the concessions. On the third day the talks were broken off when two Israeli civilians, restaurateurs from Tel Aviv, were shot dead by masked gunmen in Tulkarem. On the last day both sides declared that they had ‘never been closer’ to agreement. US diplomats were much more sceptical about how near they actually were.44 The Palestinian delegates declined an Israeli offer to fly them back to Gaza by IDF helicopter, fearing ‘adverse comment’. Qurei told one Israeli official: ‘The boss does not want an agreement’,⁴⁵ and then reported back to Arafat on what had been achieved and what prospects might be after the imminent Israeli election. ‘Agreement may be possible if we talk to the same Israeli negotiators in the future and if we resume from where we left off’, he wrote. ‘Otherwise God help us.’⁴⁶ It felt like the end of a chain of events that had begun a dozen years earlier with the first intifada, through Madrid and Oslo, with all its flaws and disappointments. Ehud Barak’s legacy, as hopes for diplomacy evaporated and violence raged, was despair, mistrust and hatred.