When Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election with a whopping 80 percent of the Jewish vote, it provided him with a kind of permission to aggressively pursue a peace agenda that asked far more of Israel than any previous president had. It appeared to work for a while. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat met on the White House lawn on a beautiful mid-September afternoon in 1993, shook hands, and signed the Oslo I Accord, named after the city in Norway where the negotiations for the peace agreement began. Countless Jewish tears were shed on the White House lawn that day, your author’s included, when, during his speech, the usually blunt, unsentimental ex-general, Rabin—he of the “might, power, beatings” order during the First Intifada—cried out to the Palestinian people, “We say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough. We have no desire for revenge. We harbor no hatred towards you. We, like you, are people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you in dignity, in empathy, as human beings.” Oslo II, signed two years later, would supplement Oslo I (together they are known as the “Oslo Accords”). To those assembled, Rabin spoke words that sounded as if they could have fallen out of the Old Testament. One could be forgiven for believing that it was all taking place inside a dream. In a way, it was: one that lasted roughly seven years—and cost Rabin his life—before the world woke up to a reality of Palestinian terrorism, asymmetric Israeli military retaliation, a return to power of Israel’s right wing, and never-ending fusillades of accusation and recrimination from all sides during the final days of the second Clinton administration.1
In Israel, the philosopher and scholar of Hebrew literature Menachem Brinker was in the process of concluding that “the task of Zionism is very nearly completed. That is to say, the problem that Zionism set out to address is just about solved. Soon we will be living in a post-Zionist era, and there will no longer be a good reason for a Zionist movement to exist alongside the State of Israel.” Given the central role that the movement had played in the creation of American Jews’ identity, this presumed a radical reorientation that few, if any, were now prepared to accept. With the traditional agenda apparently a thing of the past, American Jewish leaders turned inward. The 1990–1991 National Jewish Population Study had shocked them with the finding that each year, more than half of the American Jews who got married were marrying gentiles—and these marriages rarely resulted in children who considered themselves to be members of the Jewish community. (The 1957 figure had been 3.5 percent.) This news caused panic among Jewish leaders and moved them to recommit themselves to prioritizing a “Jewish continuity agenda” that had been brewing for nearly four decades. (Both Commentary and Look, as early as 1963 and 1964, respectively, had claimed that Jews in America were “vanishing.”)2
But now the frog’s kettle was boiling. “American Jewish life is in danger of disappearing, just as most American Jews have achieved everything we ever wanted: acceptance, influence, affluence, equality,” warned Alan Dershowitz on the first page of his 1997 book, The Vanishing American Jew. In 1996, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the rising American intermarriage rates, spoke of “a Silent Holocaust.” By this time, Zionism had come to dominate Jewish leaders’ thinking so profoundly that they had chosen to look to Israel, and especially to its military, to rescue American Jewry from the dangers of assimilation. The “Project Birthright” program—nicknamed “Project Hook-Up”—which offered young Jews a free ten-day group trip to Israel (and maybe the opportunity to find a Jewish mate)—had its origins in this moment.3
The theologian Mordecai Kaplan had warned in 1948 that “Eretz Israel–centered education [was] bound to have a ruinous effect on the happiness and character” of Jewish children. But secular American Jews had long ago failed to heed Kaplan’s warning. Instead, they had embraced the twin poles of the defense of Israel and the sacralization of the Holocaust as the near sum-total of Jewish identity. (One senses that in 1976, when the “godfather” of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, explained that his connection to Judaism consisted entirely of “the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel,” he was likely speaking for countless American Jews of his and subsequent generations.) And with the transformation of Israel’s popular image from the mythical nation portrayed in Exodus to the nation that was occupying the West Bank and Gaza, and the gradual natural fading of the memory of the Holocaust, that identity grew too weak to sustain itself. Young Jews were marrying gentiles in numbers that alarmed their parents and grandparents, to say nothing of the resulting demographic threat that their non-Jewish offspring might pose to future Jewish political power. The result was a significant shrinkage in the number of people who remained passionately and politically engaged with the Israel/Palestine issue, and the subsequent domination of the discourse by those most devoted to their respective causes: ultra-religious Jews, neoconservatives, and evangelical Christian Zionists, who virtually all sought to undermine the fragile peace process then underway.4
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee also joined in, albeit behind the scenes, and usually beneath the camouflage of pro-peace rhetoric. Its leaders had no doubt felt humiliated by the Rabin government’s desire to shut them out of its relations with its American counterpart. Nor were they at all comfortable with what was now being asked of them by that same government—to lobby for aid to the new, post-Oslo “Palestinian National Authority” made up of people they had previously referred to as “PLO terrorists.” What’s more, AIPAC’s key funders, and therefore its staff and board of directors, were by this time dominated by Republicans, and most of them had forged personal relationships with Likud politicians during the party’s decade and a half in power. Its executive director, Neal Sher, previously head of the Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations in the US Justice Department, would describe soliciting support from his organization for the peace agreements as being “like pulling teeth.” AIPAC board members and staffers did not throw tomatoes or scream obscenities at Israel’s US ambassador, the historian Itamar Rabinovich, when he appeared in public. But right-wing American Jewish protesters sometimes did, and it often became a trial for him to appear anywhere, whether in a synagogue or a public gathering, to argue on behalf of Israeli/Palestinian peace. These events always threatened to become another (literal) food fight.5
Ironically, the news of the agreement worked out by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators caught the Clinton team by surprise. The Americans had not been privy to the secret Oslo talks, which had begun in 1993 with the participation of Palestinian and Israeli academics and negotiators. The Clinton administration, in fact, was invited into the process just in time to arrange the celebration in Washington and assume its funding. It was to be a cold, almost frigid peace. Waiting backstage for the White House ceremony to begin, Clinton was anxious about the possibility that Arafat might try to kiss him (as this was a typical greeting among Arab leaders). To prevent that from happening, Tony Lake, the president’s national security adviser, suggested that he hold Arafat’s shoulders when greeting him, and drive his thumbs into them should the PLO leader seek to move in for a kiss. This turned out not to be necessary, but it spoke to both the fraught quality and the initial euphoria the accord excited, together with its political fragility, given Arafat’s continued identification with terrorism in the eyes of the US public.6
The first major battle of the post–Oslo I era occurred in 1995 when AIPAC decided to push through legislation designed to force the Clinton administration to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Israel had declared Jerusalem as its capital in 1950, but only two nations—Costa Rica and El Salvador—recognized it as such. Jordan asserted in 1953 that East Jerusalem had the status of amana, or trusteeship, making it essentially a second capital of Jordan. When the AIPAC tried to push the 1995 legislation through, Israel’s leaders privately opposed the move, realizing that preempting negotiations over Jerusalem would be taken as bad faith, possibly undermining any hopes they had to work out their myriad disagreements with the Palestinians over the future shape of Palestine. No issue—not even the Palestinian “right of return”—would be more complicated to address than how to handle the future of Jerusalem, and everyone involved understood that it needed to be saved for last. But no Israeli government could take a public position against AIPAC’s move, and almost no one in Congress saw much profit in opposing it. As Rabinovich would later write, the “embarrassing” legislation came about because “elements of the Israeli and Jewish right saw a golden opportunity to strengthen, so they thought, Israel’s hold on Jerusalem, to earn political dividends and cause political damage to the Clinton administration, Rabin and the Oslo process, which they vehemently opposed.”7
The law passed with only token opposition and with veto-proof majorities in both houses. Just three weeks afterward, on November 5, 1995, a right-wing religious zealot, Yigal Amir, murdered the prime minister at a Tel Aviv peace rally—ironically, the first time Rabin had ever openly embraced the movement. Rabin’s murder inspired a brief moment of retrospection and temporary respite from the Oslo-related acrimony, and, at the same time, a rise in concern about the increasing turn to violence on the part of Israel’s radical right. This period soon ended, however, as violence (and counterviolence) emanating from the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon erupted in its wake. Usually these conflicts were between Israelis and Palestinians, but tensions rose as well between right-wing Israelis, especially settlers, who opposed the peace agreement, and its supporters, violence that led eventually to Rabin’s murder. Following a failed 1996 election campaign by Rabin’s Labor Party successor and longtime political rival Shimon Peres, Israel voted in yet another narrow, right-wing Likud government. It was led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a hardline opponent of the peace process who enjoyed close ties to US neoconservatives and evangelicals. Indeed, he had been assiduously working with them to undermine Rabin before the assassination.
Just as Begin and Shamir had done to Clinton’s predecessors, Netanyahu drove his American counterparts crazy—only more so. After their first meeting—after listening to the young Israeli leader lecture him about the alleged realities of the region—Clinton, described as finding Netanyahu to be “nearly insufferable,” turned to an aide and asked, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?” He vowed that he would no longer “put up with [his] bullshit,” but of course he would end up putting up with plenty more. Netanyahu often went out of his way to demonstrate his contempt for the Democratic president. Immediately before one meeting with the president, in January 1998, for instance, Netanyahu joined Jerry Falwell—a man who regularly accused Clinton of literally being a murderer and a sex criminal—as Falwell led an assembled crowd to chant, “Not One Inch!”8
For all his bluster and occasional overreach, Netanyahu would turn out to be a remarkably canny politician. He did not want to formally renounce the peace process. He wanted the Palestinians to kill it for him. Much as Richard Nixon had done with his pretend-support for civil rights as president in the 1970s, the Israeli leader sought to find ways to inspire anger—even rioting—by Palestinians while speaking platitudes of peace in the process. Netanyahu consistently insisted that Arafat arrest Palestinians whom Israel deemed “terrorists” to demonstrate his fealty to the peace process, and then pretended to be shocked when his demands were rejected. When the riots and resistance arrived, frequently in the form of new terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, both in the territories and inside Israel proper, Netanyahu reneged on the promises made by his predecessor and launched retaliatory attacks on heavily populated targets. This destructive dynamic returned the debate in the United States to the familiar footing of the pre-peace era. American Jews—particularly the younger ones—may have been “distancing” themselves from Israel, and some were even beginning to organize on behalf of the Palestinians, but the middle-aged and elderly folk who ran the venerable community organizations were now back at work doing what they did best: lionizing Israel and demonizing the Palestinians.9
Meanwhile, a spirited debate on almost every aspect of the increasingly beleaguered peace process took place in the New York Times op-ed pages. Anthony Lewis led the peace camp, Thomas Friedman and James Reston occupied the middle ground, and William Safire and former executive editor A. M. “Abe” Rosenthal formed an implacable right flank. The AIPAC-inspired Jerusalem Embassy Act had set a deadline of May 31, 1999, for the Clinton administration to complete the embassy’s move to Jerusalem, but it also contained an escape clause allowing the president to waive it for six-month intervals, in order “to protect the national security interests of the U.S.”—something every president would do every six months until it was Donald Trump’s turn (he moved the embassy on May 14, 2018, the seventieth anniversary of the day Israel had declared itself into existence). But after the bill’s November 8, 1995, passage, just weeks after the White House handshake, Safire and Rosenthal were hammering Clinton endlessly for refusing to make the move right away. The former attacked Clinton three years before the deadline for embracing the notion of a “P.L.O. beachhead in Jerusalem,” and for attempting “to circumvent” the law since its signature. Returning to an old theme of the pro-Israel pundits, he insisted that “by deferring to Arabs who insist that Israel’s claim to Jerusalem is invalid, generations of State Department Arabists have been unevenhandedly insulting our ally.” In a later column, titled “Gun to the Head,” Safire announced, “This generation’s battle for Jerusalem has begun. With two attacks on Israeli civilians punctuated by the public ‘kiss of death’ bestowed by Yasser Arafat on a terrorist leader, militant Arabs have shown that they intend to make Jerusalem their capital at the point of a gun.” So, naturally, Safire added, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the face of Arafat’s 10 major broken security promises, has stopped letting Israel be the salami under the Palestinian knife.”10
Safire, a former advertising executive who had served as Nixon’s speechwriter before being given a column on the Times op-ed page, was at least a skilled writer and a canny, albeit often dishonest, practitioner of the pundit’s profession. He could make a strong case so long as he was able to determine the premises of his argument. This was not the case, however, with Abe Rosenthal, who, when eased out of the job of executive editor of the paper, was given a column on its op-ed page as consolation. According to his son, the Times journalist Andrew Rosenthal, his tenure as the paper’s executive editor had, by this time, “turned him into a crazy person,” and this was nowhere more evident than in his obsession with criticism of Israel. Rosenthal, born in 1922, had been traumatized as a youth—as had so many other Jews of his generation—upon learning of America’s and the world’s failure to respond effectively to Hitler’s Holocaust, and he viewed virtually all news from the Middle East from this psychological prism, much as Menachem Begin had professed to see Hitler in Arafat’s bunker. A comically clumsy writer, Rosenthal more than once saw fit to quote parts of his previous columns in which he had also quoted himself from yet another column. In this manner, he achieved the unique journalistic achievement of literally quoting himself quoting himself. Rosenthal rarely convinced anyone who did not already agree with him, but his arguments provided a valuable window into the not uncommon neuroses that continued to drive many older American Jews when confronted with what they understood to be threats to Israel. His opinion columns also can provide insight into the paper’s prejudices during his twenty-six-year reign in top Times editorial positions (managing editor from 1969 to 1977 and executive editor from 1977 to 1986).11
Like Leon Uris, Rosenthal described a world in which Israel behaved in morally flawless fashion; literally every problem in the Middle East arose from the evil inclinations of its adversaries, with an assist from their feckless and frequently dishonest supporters in the United States. In September 1996, for instance, Rosenthal authored a column in defense of a badly bungled Mossad assassination operation in Jordan aimed at a visiting Hamas leader; the attempt had infuriated King Hussein, who was Israel’s ally, and inspired worldwide condemnation. The problem here, according to Rosenthal, was not Israel’s violation of the sovereignty and laws of one of the only two Arab countries with whom it had made peace; rather, it was, as it always was, the Arabs and their irrational hatred of the Jewish state in their midst. Employing a defense that might have been published on any day during his twelve-year tenure as a Times pundit, Rosenthal wrote, “One day, terrorism may end—a still-distant day when the Arab world ends its half-century war against Israel, permanently.” But until then, he argued, Israel was within its rights to do whatever it pleased wherever it pleased. The rest of the world may not approve, but it was Rosenthal’s view—one that the Times was willing to regularly publish on the most prestigious page in all of American journalism—that “every time Israeli citizens are murdered by Palestinian terrorism, the world’s leaders respond by spitting on their graves.”12
Safire and Rosenthal were balanced by the other writers on the page, with Anthony Lewis being the most passionate defender of the Palestinians, and Thomas Friedman likely being the most influential among both readers and government officials. (Though he was still writing, James “Scotty” Reston was by this time long past his prime.) Lewis addressed the conflict in largely idealistic terms, speaking as an archetypal liberal Jew who was constantly disappointed with what he saw as Israel’s political intransigence and moral insensitivity. Friedman favored the common journalistic tactic of always seeking to apportion blame to “both sides,” or what might be termed “ontheonehandism.” On the one hand, “there are Palestinian extremist groups that are nourished by terrorism against Jews—and it doesn’t matter who’s in power in Israel, how active the U.S. is, or whether peace talks are moving or stalled.” But on the other, “Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership has been incompetent. Yes, he has floated the idea of a Palestinian mini state in the West Bank and Gaza. But while Mr. Netanyahu has leaked those ideas to the Israeli press, he has never shared them with the Palestinians or developed any realistic strategy for working with Palestinians to achieve his ends.” Friedman was a congenital optimist as well as a liberal Zionist, and his columns often illustrated the frequent contradictions these two positions increasingly entailed.13
Friedman saw his train leaving the station and felt hopeless to stop it, much less turn it around. And his coverage, however unwelcome by “pro-Israel” partisans, nevertheless embraced far more of their version of the narrative than it did that of the Palestinians—indeed, far more, as well, than the hard-nosed coverage in Israel’s counterpart to the Times, Haaretz. True, Israel was no longer immune to strong criticism in the mainstream media, and the unsigned editorials in places like the Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times now echoed many of these same concerns. But only on the rarest of occasions was a writer or thinker associated with a straightforward pro-Palestinian perspective of the kind preached by Edward Said or Noam Chomsky ever invited to their pages. There were not even any voices as critical of Israel as those being published in Haaretz at the time, such as those of the paper’s regular columnists Tom Segev, Orit Shochat, Akiva Eldar, Uzi Benziman, Danny Rubinstein, Gideon Levy, Gideon Samet, and Amira Hass.14
Bill Clinton shared the deep scriptural connection to Israel that Democratic presidents Truman, Johnson, and Carter had demonstrated before him. He would later recall how, when he was the governor of Arkansas, his “old pastor and mentor” W. O. Vaught had said to him, “Bill, I think you’re going to be President someday.… [T]here’s one thing above all you must remember: God will never forgive you if you don’t stand by Israel.”15
As president, he had been deeply moved by what he felt was the visionary leadership of Yitzhak Rabin, and he desperately wanted to carry out the agreements that had been negotiated to ensure what he understood to be their collective political legacy. He saw the conflict in much the way Thomas Friedman described it and proved remarkably tenacious in trying to bridge the gap between the two sides. Clinton brought Netanyahu and Arafat together with King Hussein in October 1998 for a summit in Wye River, Maryland, to try to save the peace process, and they managed to hammer out a deal reviving the promises the two sides had made five years earlier. They negotiated as well a clear timetable for their respective trade-offs. Clinton even traveled to Gaza—the first president ever to do so—and was met with enthusiastic crowds. There, he watched (with Arafat and Netanyahu) as the PLO officially eliminated the twenty-six clauses in its charter calling for Israel’s destruction.
All of these debates came to a head in dramatic fashion in July 2000, as Clinton tried, one last time, to convince both sides to make the painful compromises necessary to turn the Oslo Accords into a genuine “two-state solution.” He chose Camp David to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together, no doubt for the symbolism it held as the location where Jimmy Carter had brought Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin together twelve years earlier. The Israelis had replaced Netanyahu’s far-right government with one led by Labor’s Ehud Barak, former chief of staff of the IDF and its most highly decorated officer. Like Rabin, he appeared to enjoy sufficient legitimacy on security-related issues with the Israeli public to be able to deliver on promises of peace, however painful the compromise involved. But as Clinton’s adviser Aaron David Miller would admit twenty years after the fact, “The Camp David summit—ill-conceived and ill-advised—should probably never have taken place.” By that time Barak’s coalition was already teetering on the brink of collapse. The Israeli leader looked to a summit as a potential path to saving his government. Clinton was initially skeptical, but tended, eventually, to go along with everything Barak wanted. Arafat, meanwhile, was dead set against it, seeing an Israeli/American trap. He expected to be ganged-up on by Clinton and Barak to make a bad deal and then be blamed by both when he refused. He agreed to attend only if Clinton promised in advance that there would be “no finger-pointing” in the event of no final deal. Clinton made the promise and then proceeded to break it. He supported Barak at virtually every turn—acting, in Miller’s words, not as an honest broker but as “Israel’s lawyer.” When the talks failed, Clinton then proceeded to point his finger exclusively at Arafat.16
It is literally impossible to accurately summarize what was agreed to during this summit given the Rashomon-like conflicting accounts offered by its participants following its failure. Much of the most energetic disputation it inspired was dedicated to picking apart the media accounts intended to answer these questions. Broadly speaking, there’s no question that Clinton eventually succeeded in cajoling Barak into making the Palestinians a serious offer of statehood, one that not only surpassed anything any Israeli leader had publicly suggested in the past, but also anything the Israeli public had been prepared to accept in advance of the talks. Barak broke his own campaign promise, which he had made just a year earlier, by agreeing to a division of Jerusalem. But as Miller pointed out, Barak’s proposals were still “nowhere close to what Arafat needed, even if the Palestinian leader had been interested in closing a deal.” Arafat could not accept permanent Israeli sovereignty over significant sections of the Arab parts of Jerusalem, including the third-holiest site in Islam, the “Haram al-Sharif” (Noble Sanctuary) where Al-Aqsa Mosque is located (and where the prophet Muhammed is said to have ascended to Heaven in the seventh century CE). Alas, to Jews the same spot is known as Har Habayit, or the “Temple Mount,” where, allegedly, Solomon’s Temple stood. Hence, as the location of that temple’s “Western Wall,” it symbolizes to many Judaism’s holiest place. According to a New York Times report, the leaders of both Saudi Arabia and Egypt had “all but threatened Mr. Arafat with political excommunication” if he agreed to accept Israel’s proposals for the city, and he had every reason to fear for his life if he resisted these warnings. The Palestinian “right of return” issue remained unsolved as well, a particularly important point given the fact that the United Nations classified fully 3.6 million Palestinians as “refugees” at the time.17
Notwithstanding the weaknesses of the Israeli/American offer—and there were many, as I describe below—Palestinian negotiators were handicapped by a set of structural contradictions that, as a people, they had historically been free to ignore when peace remained a distant dream. The problem lay in the radically different circumstances of the now millions of refugees and descendants of refugees, as well as the demands of other Arab nations regarding sovereignty of the Holy Land. There are Palestinians who live in Israel proper as semi-citizens. Others live under an increasingly brutal occupation on the West Bank and what is frequently termed—with only some exaggeration—an “open-air” prison in Gaza. There are also countless Palestinians who live in fetid, unsanitary refugee camps in Israel and across the Arab world. Still others live as stateless residents, often exploited workers with few rights elsewhere in the world. Some are settled into comfortable professional lives as businessmen, academics, and the like. These groups all have different interests that cannot be easily adjudicated—to say nothing of the Arab leaders who insist that any agreement must include complete Arab sovereignty over the religion’s many holy sites. These leaders really don’t mind if the Palestinians remain a convenient focus of anger against Israel and the West among their own undemocratic, badly served populations.
The problem of these complicated, conflicting interests was independent of the more obvious one of factionalism, which in the past had sometimes led one group within the PLO to plot bombings and assassinations aimed at another, and in more recent years had led Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to nearly go to war with one another. So long as peace remained impossible, these differences were merely rhetorical. If an actual peace agreement had been placed on the table, they would have had to be addressed—and addressed in a way that satisfied, or at least placated, all the interests involved. This was, alas, impossible then, and it is likely impossible now. It is much simpler to continue to demand justice for Palestinians and the return of their lands to the descendants of the families who lost them in 1948, 1967, and since then. Coincidentally, this alternative also frees Israel from having to face its own responsibilities in solving the conflict, allowing it instead to rely on its military prowess to “manage” the conflict and maintain what is a remarkably favorable status quo for its citizens.
The deadly Second Intifada began in September 2000 and helped to ensure that Arafat and the Palestinians would receive the lion’s share of the blame when the negotiators went home empty-handed. In President Clinton’s estimation, Israeli prime minister Barak “showed particular courage, vision, and an understanding of the historical importance of this moment,” in contrast to Arafat, who persisted in stubborn rejectionism. The pro-Israeli US negotiator Dennis Ross blamed the failure to reach an agreement on “a mindset that has plagued the Palestinians throughout their history,” a tendency to “fall back on blaming everyone else for their predicament” that “perpetuates the avoidance of responsibility.” Barak insisted that it was the result of the fact that the Palestinians were “products of a culture in which to tell a lie… creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category.”18
Many conservatives were relieved that the talks failed. In a column filled with falsehoods, the Times’ William Safire complained that Barak had not only broken his election pledge, by agreeing to a divided Jerusalem, but had also “offered Arafat virtually all the West Bank, including the vital Jordan Valley, requiring the uprooting of 40,000 Israeli settlers. He offered what amounts to right of return of thousands of Palestinians to Israel, backed up by a reported huge commitment by Clinton to pay Palestinians around the world to not return. ‘Not enough,’ smiled Arafat. He went home to the cheers of intransigent Palestinians in Gaza and the praise of Egypt’s unyielding Hosni Mubarak.” The Arabs, Safire announced, were “delighted at the one-way flow of concessions because they now see Jerusalem ‘in play.’” Safire’s scorn was to be expected, but Thomas Friedman’s analysis was hardly less one-sided. Barak, he wrote, had offered Arafat the “unthinkable” and the “unprecedented.” It had been “a historic compromise proposal that would have given Palestinians control of 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank and Gaza—with all the settlements removed, virtually all of Arab East Jerusalem, a return to Israel of a symbolic number of Palestinian refugees and either the right of return to the West Bank and Gaza or compensation for all the others.”19
Unfortunately, everyone involved had been asked to ensure that no written records would be kept regarding the various proposals made and which parts had achieved tentative agreement from either side, lest they be used as political weapon against Barak in the event of the talks’ failure—as, in fact, they were anyway, albeit without written evidence. And because the Palestinian perspective was absent from the mainstream debate, the many caveats contained in Barak’s allegedly unthinkable and unprecedented offer went unacknowledged and therefore undiscussed. But, of course, the truth was a far more complicated manner. Yes, after refusing for a week even to engage in negotiations while at Camp David and ostentatiously snubbing Arafat at every turn, Barak did appear to tentatively agree to terms that went well beyond what Israel had offered in the past or where most observers expected him to go in the talks. And, in retrospect, there is no doubt that, given the wisdom of hindsight based on events that have since transpired, the Palestinians should certainly have swallowed their objections, secured their statehood, and begun to build from there (just as they should also have at countless intervals since the 1917 Balfour Declaration). Here was yet another Palestinian “missed opportunity.” Yet examined carefully, the deal in question, which was crafted by Clinton and tentatively accepted by Barak with significant caveats—rather than “offered” by Israel—left a great deal to be desired if Palestine was to be expected to survive as a sovereign independent state, leaving aside the complicated question of “justice.”20
The problems with the proposed Camp David deal went far deeper than just the fact that the Israelis were to retain sovereignty over key parts of Arab East Jerusalem. While Barak proposed giving the Palestinians 91 percent of West Bank lands, he was also insistent about Israel being able to keep and expand its settlements on the remaining 9 percent that it chose to keep. (Recall that 100 percent of the West Bank would still have left the Palestinians with what amounted to just 22 percent of what had been pre-1948 Palestine.) Israel also insisted on retaining direct military control over significant parts of what was to be Palestine. According to Ahmed Qureia (known as “Abu Ala”), the Palestinians’ top negotiator and the Speaker of its parliament, the plan “would have carved Israeli-controlled cantons out of the West Bank and dashed any hopes for a viable, territorially contiguous Palestinian state.” It looked to the Palestinians like a plan for a South African–style “Bantustan.” Israel’s foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a member of Israel’s negotiating team, drafted a number of Barak’s responses to Clinton’s suggestions. He nevertheless concluded, “If I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David, as well.” Barak made much the same point in defending his record as an unreconstructed hawk to the Israeli public. He titled one op-ed, published in Hebrew, “I Did Not Give Away a Thing.” And finally, Barak had a poor record of keeping to previous agreements and had backed off of even elements of the Oslo agreements that Netanyahu had agreed to; he also backed out at the last minute from a separate Israeli/Syrian peace agreement negotiated between 1992 and 1996, once he discovered the concessions Israel would have made under it to be deeply unpopular with voters, infuriating Bill Clinton at the time.21
Given the hegemony of the Barak/Clinton narrative in America’s Israel/Palestine debate, it should not surprise anyone that when the Palestinian perspective was finally given voice, it would shake up the consensus considerably. The corrective came almost a year later in the form of a one-two punch of extremely lengthy reconsiderations published in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. The former was a 5,681-word retrospective by Jerusalem bureau chief Deborah Sontag, the latter a 7,834-word autopsy cowritten by Clinton’s (Jewish) National Security Council Middle East expert, Robert Malley, together with Hussein Agha, a member of the Palestinian negotiating team. Both articles emphasized that both sides had made mistakes during the talks. As Sontag put it, she sought to upend the belief that “Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat the moon at Camp David last summer,” and that “Mr. Arafat turned it down, and then ‘pushed the button’ and chose the path of violence.” Rather, she said, “there were missteps and successes by Israelis, Palestinians and Americans alike.” Malley and Agha both criticized Arafat’s failure “to present a cogent and specific counterproposal,” but they devoted the bulk of their essays to providing evidence to dispute the monochromatic picture of what Malley and Agha called “Ehud Barak’s unprecedented offer and Yasser Arafat’s uncompromising no.”22
The reaction was swift but volcanic. William Safire denounced his own newspaper. “Do not swallow this speculative rewriting of recent events,” he warned readers. “The overriding reason for the war against Israel today is that Yasser Arafat decided that war was the way to carry out the often-avowed Palestinian plan. Its first stage is to create a West Bank state from the Jordan River to the sea with Jerusalem as its capital. Then, by flooding Israel with ‘returning’ Palestinians, the plan in its promised final phase would drive the hated Jews from the Middle East.” The New Republic ran a forensic analysis of the Sontag piece by Israeli writer (and former Begin government spokesman) Yossi Klein Halevi that ran roughly as long as the Sontag article itself. He accused her of “lazy reporting, errors of omission, questionable shading, and an indifference to the basic fact that the Palestinian decision to wed diplomacy with violence, not American and Israeli miscues, damned the search for peace.” He then lay literally every flaw in the negotiations, as well as 100 percent of the responsibility for the violence that followed, at the feet of the Palestinians. Clinton himself was quoted complaining about Sontag’s emphasis as well. “What the hell is this? Why is she turning the mistakes we made into the essence?” he was reported to have asked an aide.23
The Malley/Agha article was more authoritative than Sontag’s, but likely less influential, as it ran in the New York Review rather than on the front page of the New York Times. This was a shame, as it was more detailed, allowed for greater subtlety, and was written by two longtime participants in the process, people who had actually witnessed the events in question. The complexity of their argument, coupled with their undeniable knowledge of both what took place and how it fit into the recent history of the region, left critics with little but ad hominem attacks to maintain their one-dimensional narrative of Israeli beneficence and Palestinian rejectionism. Accusing Malley of having written “revisionist history” without any apparent understanding of the meaning of the term, Mortimer Zuckerman, then both publisher of the New York Daily News and chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, also joined in the attack. “Rob Malley was the most pro-Arab member of the National Security Council,” he wrote in his article with a Palestinian adviser, and he was in Camp David only in a junior capacity. Moreover, he asserted, “There is one truth, period: The Palestinians caused the breakdown at Camp David and then rejected Clinton’s plan in January.” The ADL’s Abe Foxman resorted to McCarthyite tactics: having no evidence with which to contest the authors’ arguments, he accused Malley of “playing someone’s agenda”; then he followed up with the all-but-perennial complaint, “I don’t think this is the right time to cast doubts over Israel’s intentions.” Meanwhile, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, who tended to occupy the right-most position among the Jewish community’s leadership, this time spoke for its consensus: “Whether their account is accurate or not is irrelevant.… I reject any discussion of what happened.”24
In January 2001, just as Bill Clinton was preparing to turn the White House over to George W. Bush, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators made one final attempt to square the circle. Meeting in the Red Sea resort town of Taba, the Israelis sweetened the deal with more generous land swaps, greater control over Arab East Jerusalem, and an explicit Israeli recognition of the “right” (but not the practice) of return. Unfortunately, negotiations were suspended owing to the fact that Barak’s government was poised to fall. By the time of these talks, polls had demonstrated that Barak only had the support of one-third of the Israeli voting population, and an even smaller fraction of the seated members of the Knesset. He had no chance of receiving the popular mandate he would have needed to move forward with a painful peace agreement. Moreover, here, again, exactly what was agreed to remains highly contentious, as none of it was ever put down on paper. All the conversations and concessions were floated in purely hypothetical terms in order to protect both sides in the event of failure. The only written record we have are notes taken by an observer from the European Union.25
The fact that the talks in Taba took place at all implied a significant triumph of hope over experience. Things were already falling apart. On September 28, 2000, Israel’s provocative right-wing opposition leader Ariel Sharon paid a visit to the Temple Mount (or Haram al-Sharif, to Muslims) in Jerusalem’s Old City, accompanied by an estimated 1,000-person security detail. The frustration of the Palestinians in the territories in the wake of Camp David’s failure had reached a boiling point, as Sharon well knew. Yet another cycle of violence began as protesters threw rocks at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall, directly below the Mount, and Israeli police responded with live ammunition, killing four and wounding as many as two hundred. Later in the day, three more Palestinians and one Israeli were killed. Next, a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy was killed in crossfire in Gaza, and this was filmed and broadcast to the world. Over the next few days, an Israel Border Police officer—a Druze, as it happened—was shot by a Palestinian gunman and left to bleed to death at Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, and two IDF reservists were brutally beaten to death by a mob in the West Bank Palestinian city of Ramallah after accidentally taking a wrong turn. The mood in Israel shifted, in the eyes of foreign ministry official Shlomo Ben-Ami, “from the belief that peace was possible into the mindset of bloody retribution, a religion-based war of murder, blood and vengeance.”26
The Second Intifada that arose in response to Sharon’s visit, and the accompanying violence on both sides to which it ultimately led, would be fought not with rocks but with automatic weapons, and it included assaults on Jews during prayer services, a suicide bombing on a school bus, and other suicide bombers blowing themselves up amid crowds of teenagers in a Tel Aviv disco as well as in a Jerusalem pizza parlor. During the four-plus years that followed Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, 1,038 Israelis and 3,189 Palestinians lost their lives, according to the calculations of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem (In the Image of God). Israeli forces arrested some 6,000 Palestinians and demolished 4,100 Palestinian homes during this same period. As the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy would observe on the twentieth anniversary of these events, “For Israel, the second intifada morphed into the nightmare of exploding buses and suicide bombers, years of unremitting horror and dread for the country’s citizens. For the Palestinians, these were years of brutal suppression, extensive bloodshed, sieges, closures, lockdowns, checkpoints, mass arrests, and also combat and sacrifices that got them nowhere.” In February 2001, in the midst of this escalating violence, Israelis chose Ariel Sharon—now politically rehabilitated following the censure he had experienced for his role in helping to enable the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila—as their prime minister. With Republican George W. Bush about to replace Bill Clinton in America’s own deeply contested 2000 presidential election, peace between Israel and the Palestinians suddenly appeared to be a more distant goal than ever before.27