1.

The Only Language They Understand

I. American Pressure

I would be willing to lose my election because I will alienate the Jewish community.… Thus, if necessary, be harder on the Israelis.

—PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance

When Jimmy Carter entered the White House in January 1977, no one expected that he would quickly obtain two of the most significant agreements in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict: the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, and the Framework for Peace in the Middle East, which served as the blueprint for the 1993 Oslo Accord.

Essential to Carter’s success was an approach wholly unlike those of his predecessors, one that was not expected by even the closest observers of the former peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. In his presidential memoirs, Carter wrote that prior to his election he “had no strong feelings about the Arab countries. I had never visited one and knew no Arab leaders.” Announcing his candidacy in December 1974, he highlighted his support for the integrity of Israel, to which he had traveled as governor of Georgia with his wife, Rosalynn, the previous year. The trip had special significance for Carter, a devout Southern Baptist who had studied the Bible since childhood. He stood atop the Mount of Olives, worshipped in Bethlehem, waded in the Jordan River, floated in the Dead Sea, studied excavations in Jericho, toured Nazareth, walked along the escarpments of the Golan Heights, and handed out Hebrew Bibles to young Israeli soldiers at a graduation ceremony in the West Bank military outpost at Beit El. He was briefed on Israeli politics and security by future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, foreign minister Abba Eban, former chief of staff Haim Bar-Lev, and prime minister Golda Meir. “My recent trip to Israel had a profound impact on my own life,” he wrote after returning to Atlanta. “It gave me a greater insight into and appreciation for the Jewish faith and the long and heroic struggle of the Jewish people for basic human rights and freedom.”1

It came as something of a shock, then, when early in his tenure Carter displayed an unprecedented willingness to confront Israel and withstand pressure from its supporters in the American Jewish community and Congress. He was the first American president to call publicly for an almost total Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines. Of even greater concern to Israel, he was also the first to see the Palestinian issue as central to resolving the Middle East conflict and the first to speak of a Palestinian right to self-determination. Israeli nerves were rattled when, less than two months after taking office, he said publicly, “There has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered for many, many years.” Carter believed the Palestine Liberation Organization was ready for compromise. At a time when Israel boycotted the group, he used the terms “Palestinian” and “PLO” interchangeably, another cause for Israeli alarm. Among his top White House advisers were Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Quandt, two participants in a 1975 Brookings Institution study group that recommended far-reaching shifts in US policy, including a push for Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, Palestinian self-determination, and “strong encouragement” from the great powers.2

The departure from the positions of previous administrations could hardly have been clearer. Carter’s predecessor Gerald Ford had issued a written assurance that the United States would “give great weight to … Israel remaining on the Golan Heights,” Syrian territory conquered in the 1967 war; Carter, by contrast, spoke of Israel’s return to the pre-1967 lines with only minor modifications. Ford promised Israel that the United States would not deal with the PLO until that body had recognized Israel’s right to exist, whereas Carter—to the great consternation of Israel and its American Jewish supporters—shook hands with the PLO representative at the UN, reached out through intermediaries to its leader, Yasir Arafat, and sought to include it in negotiations. Ford provided a letter to Yitzhak Rabin that has since been held up as a US commitment not to coerce or surprise Israel, giving it the right to review, if not veto, any US peace initiative. The letter stated that the United States would “make every effort to coordinate with Israel its proposals,” with a view to “refraining from putting forth” plans “that Israel would consider unsatisfactory.” Carter, conversely, would seek to orchestrate what he called a “showdown” with Israel; he decided early in his administration that the United States should “put together our own concept of what should be done in the Middle East” and then “put as much pressure as we can on the different parties to accept the solution that we think is fair.”3

Carter squeezed Israel harder on the Palestinian issue than any American president before or since. He believed Israel would make peace only if forced to by the United States, and he saw the denial of Palestinian self-determination as immoral. Summarizing his approach, he wrote:

Since I had made our nation’s commitment to human rights a central tenet of our foreign policy, it was impossible for me to ignore the very serious problems on the West Bank. The continued deprivation of Palestinian rights was not only used as the primary lever against Israel, but was contrary to the basic moral and ethical principles of both our countries. In my opinion it was imperative that the United States work to obtain for these people the right to vote, the right to assemble and to debate issues that affected their lives, the right to own property without fear of its being confiscated, and the right to be free of military rule. To deny these rights was an indefensible position for a free and democratic society.4

Carter made the Arab-Israeli conflict a priority and brought to it a sense of urgency that his predecessors had felt only in reaction to a crisis or war. He spent more time on the issue than on any other during his presidency. Unsatisfied with the small, iterative steps preferred by the Israelis, he began planning for an international peace conference in Geneva that would include the PLO and aim for a comprehensive resolution. Early in his administration, Carter blocked two deals for US weapons sought by Israel, and in each case he stood his ground in the face of an intense lobbying effort. At their first meeting together as heads of state, in March 1977, Carter was tough on Rabin, telling him that the administration would hold to its position that settlements in the Occupied Territories were illegal, enjoining him to adopt a “fresh perspective” on a permanent solution, informing him that only minor modifications to the pre-1967 lines could be made, and pressing him to allow PLO leaders to attend the Geneva peace conference then being prepared. He expressed frustration at Rabin’s insistence that he would not deal with the PLO even if it accepted Israel’s legitimacy and UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for peace in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from territory occupied in 1967. Carter pointed out that the United States had talked to North Korea and that France had negotiated with the Algerian National Liberation Front, despite its use of terrorism. “It would be a blow to U.S. support for Israel,” Carter warned, “if you refused to participate in the Geneva talks over the technicality of the PLO being in the negotiations.”5 The Israeli delegation left the White House deeply distraught.

A series of warm meetings between Carter and Arab heads of state did little to allay Israel’s fears. Whereas Carter described Rabin as “very timid, very stubborn, and also somewhat ill at ease,” he wrote of Jordan’s King Hussein that “we all really liked him, enjoyed his visit, and believe he’ll be a strong and staunch ally.” Of meeting Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, Carter wrote, “It was a very interesting and enjoyable experience. There was a lot of good humor between us, and I found him to be very constructive in his attitude.” But Carter reserved his most glowing praise for the Egyptian president, who traveled to Washington on a state visit: “On April 4, 1977, a shining light burst on the Middle East scene for me. I had my first meetings with President Anwar Sadat.” In his diary, he wrote: “he was a charming and frank and also very strong and courageous leader who has never shrunk from making difficult public decisions.… I believe he’ll be a great aid if we get down to the final discussions on the Middle East.… my judgment is that he will deliver.” At the end of Sadat’s visit, Carter told his wife, “This had been my best day as President.” Several weeks later he would write, “My own judgment at this time is that the Arab leaders want to settle it and the Israelis don’t.”6

*   *   *

A severe setback seemed to have been delivered to Carter’s push for a comprehensive peace when, in May 1977, Menachem Begin’s right-wing Likud Party won an upset victory over Labor, which together with its antecedent, Mapai, had dominated Israeli politics since the state’s establishment, heading each of the country’s first seventeen governments. Begin was largely unknown in Washington. Carter’s advisers scrambled to provide him with material on the incoming prime minister’s positions, history, and outlook. Begin was haunted by the Holocaust—in his hometown of Brest, in occupied Poland, nearly all of the Jews, including his parents and brother, were executed—and he viewed the world as inherently dangerous and anti-Semitic. In 1952 he opposed Israel’s reparations agreement with West Germany, delivering a fiery speech as his supporters marched on the Knesset and stoned it. He was a disciple of the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, whom he called his master. After Jabotinsky’s death in 1940 and Begin’s release from the Soviet gulag in 1941, he arrived in Palestine and rose to command Jabotinsky’s Zionist paramilitary organization, the Irgun, for which he would spearhead the use of improvised explosives and simultaneous bombings against the British. His memoir of his time with the Irgun, The Revolt, was admired as a manual of guerrilla warfare by members of the Irish Republican Army and the African National Congress, and his writings would later be found at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and read by Osama bin Laden. In 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, site of the British Mandate’s military and administrative headquarters, killing ninety-one people, most of them civilians. In April 1948, one month before Israel declared independence as the British withdrew, the Irgun detonated grenades and dynamite in civilian homes in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, leaving more than one hundred dead. Both operations had been approved by David Ben-Gurion’s paramilitary organization, the Haganah, but Begin took most of the blame.7

Throughout his life, he was a staunch ideological opponent of Palestine’s partition. He opposed it when the British first recommended it in 1937, and again in 1947 when the United Nations endorsed it in Resolution 181. The emblem of the Irgun was a map of the territory to which it laid claim, Palestine and Transjordan, over which a rifle was superimposed, and under which appeared the words “Only Thus.” The platform of his political party, Herut—Likud’s predecessor—asserted, “The Jordan has two banks; this one is ours, and that one too.” By the time the Revisionists came to power in 1977, they no longer claimed the territory of Jordan. But the Likud’s 1977 platform left no possibility of Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, which it referred to by the biblical names Judea and Samaria:

The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is eternal, and is an integral part of its right to security and peace. Judea and Samaria shall therefore not be relinquished to foreign rule; between the sea and the Jordan, there will be Jewish sovereignty alone. Any plan that involves surrendering parts of the Western Land of Israel militates against our right to the Land, would inevitably lead to the establishment of a “Palestinian State,” threaten the security of the civilian population, endanger the existence of the State of Israel, and defeat all prospects of peace.8

Begin’s attachment to Sinai and the Golan Heights was not nearly as strong as his devotion to what he called the Western Land of Israel (that is, west of the Jordan River). Following the 1967 war, he did not oppose the government’s expression of willingness to withdraw from the Golan Heights and Sinai, but in 1970 he forced his party to leave the coalition government when the latter had accepted an American plan based on UN Resolution 242, implying Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank as well. The day after his election in 1977, he visited a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and promised to establish many more. During that visit he corrected reporters who used the terms West Bank (“The world must get used to the area’s real—biblical—name,” he said: “Judea and Samaria”) and annexation (“You annex foreign land, not your own country”). Tears nearly came to his eyes when he first described to Carter the perils of withdrawing from the West Bank. “Please,” he said, “excuse my emotions.” He considered this land to be the site of many of the most significant stories in the Bible, making it no less the divine birthright of the Jewish people than the 55 percent of mandatory Palestine allotted to the Jews by the UN in 1947, or the additional 23 percent they had conquered in the 1948 war. If Jews had no right to the land God promised them in Judea and Samaria, Begin believed, they had no right to Haifa and Tel Aviv. Begin would tell Carter that the Arab part of Jerusalem that Israel had conquered in the 1967 war was the heart of the Israeli nation: “The Eastern part is the real Jerusalem—West Jerusalem is an addition.”9

The other members of Begin’s government did not inspire more confidence in the possibility of peace. His defense minister, Ezer Weizman, a combat pilot and former deputy chief of staff who had overseen the total destruction of the Egyptian air force on the first day of the 1967 war, was a former member of the Irgun. Begin’s agriculture minister, former major general Ariel Sharon, among the most accomplished commanders in Israel’s history, was a champion of the settlement enterprise and had led the 1953 massacre of sixty-nine Palestinian residents of the West Bank village of Qibya, ordering “maximal killing and damage to property.” To allay fears that the government would adopt extremist policies and to give it a sense of continuity with its predecessors, Begin named, as foreign minister—and key interlocutor with the United States—Moshe Dayan, a hawkish member of the Labor Party and a revered former chief of staff who had been defense minister during the 1967 war. Shortly after that war, when no Jewish settlements had yet been established, Dayan said that one of his primary goals was to prevent the West Bank from continuing to have an Arab majority. On another occasion, he said that it was better for Israel to have the Sinai beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than to have peace without Sharm el-Sheikh. “The Arabs would not dare go to war against us,” Begin said, “when in the government sit military leaders like Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weizman, and Ariel Sharon.”10

The odds were stacked overwhelmingly against Carter and his aides. But rather than reassess policies and objectives in light of the new government, Carter’s team began to prepare for an inevitable confrontation. There were reasons not to abandon their strategy. It made little sense to wait indefinitely for a return to power of the Labor Party, which on many of the most important foreign policy issues was not all that different from Likud. The main difference between them concerning the West Bank was that Likud wanted to annex it or at least prevent any non-Israeli sovereignty there, whereas Labor was willing to divide it with Jordan, annexing to Israel approximately one-third, including Jerusalem.11 But both ideas were totally unacceptable to the Palestinians and the Arab states. And, in at least one important respect, Carter’s goals were more aligned with Begin’s than with Rabin’s: Begin wanted a full peace treaty with Egypt, whereas Rabin preferred to create new interim agreements.

There were, moreover, some in the administration who believed that Begin’s election was not necessarily bad for Carter. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski “seemed to think that Begin’s election would ultimately be helpful to the administration’s strategy, if only because it would be easier to pressure a government led by Begin than one in which Begin was leader of the opposition,” wrote National Security Council staff member William Quandt. “In Brzezinski’s analysis,” he wrote, “the president should be able to count on the support of the Israeli opposition, as well as the bulk of the American Jewish community, if he ever faced a showdown with Begin.”12 This was perhaps too optimistic, but it contained a kernel of truth.

Much of the American Jewish community was uncomfortable with Begin’s hard-line policies. And though Carter felt that his diplomacy was constrained by the criticisms of American Jews, some within the community encouraged him to confront Begin. Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress and former president of the World Zionist Organization, told Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that Begin was a “retarded child.” He mocked the prime minister for having told a group of American Jewish scholars that there was no need to fear an Arab majority if Israel annexed the West Bank, because within a few years the country would absorb two million new Jewish immigrants—this at a time when immigrants to Israel were few. Goldmann urged the administration to bear down on Israel. “The Jews are a very stubborn people,” he said. “That is why they have survived, but they must often be forced to do what is in their own best interest. The Bible says that God brought the Jews out of Egypt ‘with a strong arm,’ because, as the Talmud notes, if He had not used ‘a strong arm,’ the Jews would never have left their bondage.” Goldmann also pointed out that Carter had a majority in Congress and so could perhaps succeed where earlier presidents had not.13

*   *   *

Following Begin’s election, Carter’s drive toward Middle East peace was unrelenting. Days before Begin formed his government, Vice President Walter Mondale delivered a speech reasserting the administration’s positions, including the call for a “Palestinian homeland.” The next week, US diplomats launched a public campaign against Begin’s interpretation of Resolution 242, rejecting his view that the resolution excluded Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and repeating the need to create a Palestinian homeland. The United States then prepared for further confrontation. It drafted principles for negotiations to take place at a peace conference in Geneva and resolved to take those principles to Arab leaders whether Israel agreed to them or not. When, as expected, Begin rejected two of them—Israeli withdrawal on “all fronts” and Palestinian self-determination—Vance planned a trip during which he would seek their approval by Arab leaders and thus isolate Begin.14

Additional pressure came from increasing contact between the United States and the PLO. Prior to Vance’s trip, Arafat sent a message to Carter that he would publicly state the PLO’s willingness to live in peace with Israel if the United States would support the creation of a Palestinian “state unit entity.” Carter then instructed Vance to make ready for the PLO to attend the Geneva peace conference, and to welcome PLO acceptance of Resolution 242 even if it came with the PLO’s well-known reservation, which was that the text did not speak of Palestinian self-determination. “If the PLO will meet our requirement of recognizing Israel’s right to exist,” he wrote to Vance, “you may wish to arrange for early discussions with them—either in private or publicly acknowledged.” Begin pleaded with Carter not to allow Vance, in his discussions with the Arabs, to bring up Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines with minor modifications. Carter refused.15

As the United States concluded that it would not be able to obtain the necessary Israeli concessions for negotiations in Geneva, Carter turned to the idea of abandoning the principles and instead using the conference as a forum to corner Begin. On August 8, 1977, Vance sent a telegram from Saudi Arabia reporting that he had been urged to have official dealings with the PLO. That day, Carter sought to advance US-PLO dialogue by stating publicly that if the PLO accepted Resolution 242 with reservations, the United States would start discussions and be open to its participation in Geneva. As he left Saudi Arabia for Tel Aviv, Vance told the press that the United States would no longer insist on the PLO changing its charter. The Israelis were furious. Little more than two weeks after having declared that there was no confrontation between the United States and Israel, Begin compared Vance’s willingness to recognize the PLO with Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler. In a meeting with Vance, Begin read from the PLO charter, called it a genocidal organization, and said that, concerning negotiations with Israel, the PLO would be “excluded forever.”16

Tension was building, and Begin was beginning to feel trapped. Vance had asked the Israelis and the Arabs to submit draft peace treaties to the United States. He had also started to float ideas concerning Palestinian self-determination, including a transitional period of administrative self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza, to be followed by a Palestinian referendum determining the future status of the territory. The State Department announced in September that “the status of the Palestinians must be settled” and “cannot be ignored” and that the “Palestinians must be involved in the peacemaking process.” US outreach to the PLO intensified, with an unofficial White House channel, in the person of Landrum Bolling—a political scientist and Quaker peace activist trusted by Carter—communicating directly with Arafat.17

To Begin’s dismay, America seemed to be drifting away from Israel and toward the Arabs and the Palestinians. Dayan described a September meeting with Carter as “most unpleasant.” The United States would not relent on its positions, all of which were objectionable to Israel. When Begin again asked that the United States not reiterate its stance on Israel’s return to the pre-1967 lines, Carter refused once more. Adding to Begin’s sense of encirclement, Arafat welcomed a US statement on the necessity of Palestinian participation in Geneva and said that the PLO would accept Resolution 242 if the United States declared its support for a Palestinian state. The PLO political department chief, Faruq Qaddumi, went further, saying that if Palestinian rights were recognized, the PLO would acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, establish a state in the Occupied Territories, and abandon the armed struggle.18

What Begin most feared was the creation of a Palestinian state or the planting of the seed of one in the West Bank and Gaza. With each passing day, it seemed that Carter and the Arabs were colluding to make those fears come true. Begin grasped for a way out of the vise. Pleading had not worked, nor was the United States deterred or diverted by Israel’s more confrontational steps, including settlement building and the extension of social services to the residents of the West Bank and Gaza. The latter move drew a strong rebuke from the United States, which feared it presaged annexation. A few days later, Israel approved the construction of three new settlements, resulting in a stern warning to Begin that repetition of such acts would “make it difficult for the President not to reaffirm publicly the US position regarding 1967 borders with minor modifications.” By the end of August, Brzezinski felt that both Carter and Vance were fed up and in the mood for a “showdown.” The United States began drafting its own model peace treaties, including, ominously for Begin, one that would establish a new transitional regime in the West Bank.19

*   *   *

The exits were closing on Begin, with only four visible paths of potential escape. Over the next few months, he would try each one: approach Egypt secretly to strike a separate deal on Sinai that would allow Israel to circumvent the United States and avoid the Palestinian issue; initiate a battle with the PLO at its base in Lebanon in an effort to cut off any possibility of US engagement with the organization; confront Carter with US domestic opposition and threats to turn the American Jewish community against him; and make an Israeli counterproposal that would give autonomy to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza without suggesting eventual self-determination.

The first two paths he pursued in parallel. Begin tried exploring a separate peace with individual Arab states days after Carter had threatened to insist publicly on a peace settlement resulting in only minor modifications to the pre-1967 lines. Israel approached Jordan first. But Jordan’s King Hussein ruled out an agreement on anything less than full Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, and refused to make a deal with Israel that would circumvent the PLO.20

Egypt was next. For secret talks in mid-September, the bald, eyepatch-wearing Dayan put on what he called a beatnik wig, a mustache, and sunglasses and flew to Rabat for the first meeting between representatives of Begin and Sadat. But, like Jordan, Egypt showed no interest in cutting out the Palestinians and forging a separate peace. Sadat’s envoy, Dr. Hassan Tuhami, “was guided by one overriding principle: peace in exchange for our complete withdrawal from the territories we had occupied,” Dayan wrote. “Arab sovereignty should be absolute and the Arab flag should fly in all these territories, including East Jerusalem.” Tuhami insisted that the Palestinians must have nationhood, and said that Sadat would not sign a final peace agreement alone, without the participation of his Arab colleagues. These were not the answers Israel had hoped to hear. But Dayan refused to believe that the door had been entirely shut.21

*   *   *

Three days after Dayan left Morocco on September 17, Israel took its second tack, an invasion of Lebanon. The United States had seen it coming weeks in advance, since the day after Carter had so alarmed Israel with his August 8 statement welcoming PLO participation at Geneva and conditional dialogue with the United States. The morning after Carter’s statement, Dayan had called on Samuel Lewis, America’s highly popular ambassador to Israel. He told Lewis that the government wanted to “wipe out” some of the Palestinians in southern Lebanon, where Israel feared the PLO was consolidating its position. Israel had already been providing arms to Lebanese Christians fighting the Palestinians in Lebanon, and now it wished to back them up with an invasion. In a telegram entitled “Major Military Incursion by Israel Threatens in South Lebanon,” Ambassador Lewis wrote:

I have been trying to divine since leaving Dayan’s house what the Israelis are up to. One unhappy hypothesis would be that they are now indeed worried that the PLO is on the point of accepting Resolution 242, which could produce a major split between us and the Israelis. One way to make sure that does not happen might be to do something militarily against the PLO which would preclude any change in their position toward Israel.22

Days later, on August 14, Carter sent a blunt warning to Begin that military action against the PLO in south Lebanon would have the “gravest consequences” for Israel. Begin replied that Israel wouldn’t invade without first consulting the United States. But on September 20, 1977, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon with American-supplied armored personnel carriers. This was a violation of US agreements with Israel and of the 1976 Arms Export Control Act, which stated that exported American military equipment could be used only for defensive purposes. The United States confronted Israel with the charge and received the reply that the US equipment had been withdrawn. But US intelligence was able to confirm for Carter that this was not true.23

Carter was deeply offended at having been lied to. On September 24, which was the Jewish Sabbath, he had an urgent letter of warning hand-delivered to Begin. Carter demanded that Begin withdraw from Lebanon “immediately” and asked that he avoid “a serious and public difference between us over your use of American-supplied military equipment, on which our law is very explicit.” He warned that he didn’t want the situation to “develop into a major problem in US-Israeli relationships” and threatened that, if his words were not heeded, Congress would be informed of Israel’s violation of arms exports agreements, and further deliveries of US military assistance to Israel “will have to be terminated.” The pressure worked. Begin read the message in front of the American deputy chief of mission, immediately promised to withdraw his forces, and said he would convene his security cabinet that evening to determine the timing. He then pulled out a bottle of whiskey, poured two glasses, and raised his, as if to acknowledge Carter’s victory.24 The first of Begin’s invasions of Lebanon came to an end.

*   *   *

It was not long before Begin tried his third tack: levying Israel’s supporters in the American Jewish community and Congress to compel Carter to back down. With this strategy he would be more successful than with the first two. On October 1, 1977, the United States went over the heads of the regional parties and issued a joint statement of principles with the Soviet Union, the Geneva conference cochair. Much of the world was taken by surprise. The PLO welcomed the statement. Sadat called it a “brilliant maneuver.” But Israel fumed. Most upsetting were the statement’s calls for Palestinian participation in the Geneva talks, for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967, and, especially, for “the resolution of the Palestinian question, including insuring the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” Israel announced that the joint statement would “harden Arab demands and diminish the prospects of talks.” To The New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, it seemed that Israeli officials were hinting that “the growing strain between the Begin and Carter administrations would intensify.”25

The administration had done little to cover its flanks. It had not fully consulted Congress, briefed the press, or contacted the American Jewish community. “Dayan, however, had been given a draft on September 29,” wrote the National Security Council’s William Quandt, “and therefore the Israelis knew what was coming and had time to put their friends on notice.” Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, said “the American Jewish [community] went bonkers. We had a very serious political problem off that.” Jewish and neoconservative supporters of Israel in the Democratic and Republican parties attacked the administration for harming Israel and giving the Soviet Union a prominent role. The communiqué was condemned by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which called it a victory for the PLO and said that the mention of the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” was “a euphemism for the creation of a Palestinian state and the dismemberment of Israel.” Democrats in Congress said the statement put too much strain on Israel. “As a result,” Quandt wrote, “an otherwise peaceful Saturday erupted into controversy, accusations, and recriminations.”26

Israel’s campaign against the statement was effective. Carter retreated within three days, clarifying at the UN that while the Arabs insisted on the “legitimate rights” of the Palestinians, “how these rights are to be defined and implemented is … not for us to dictate.” He assured a group of Jewish members of Congress and supporters of Israel that the communiqué had not called for the PLO to participate in Geneva and that he had no intention of imposing a settlement, saying, “I’d rather commit political suicide than hurt Israel.”27

More US concessions came when Carter met Dayan in New York. Dayan declared the US-Soviet statement on Geneva “totally unacceptable” and told Carter that his government feared that the Soviet Union and the United States planned to “impose a Palestinian state” on Israel. “What I would like is your assurance,” he said, “that you will not use pressure or leverage on us to get us to accept a Palestinian state, even if it is tied to a Jordanian federation.” Carter replied that he did not want to make such a statement, but nor did he “intend to pressure” Israel. In that case, Dayan bluntly asserted, he would have no choice but to state publicly that Israel had sought assurances from Carter and had been rejected. “It is not fair,” Carter said, “to put me in this position.”28

The tables had started to turn. Dayan understood that Carter needed his help to quell domestic criticism. At nearly every press conference during the preceding days, Carter had been forced to defend himself against the charge that he had sold out Israel and broken a US commitment not to deal with the PLO. Now, in New York, Dayan didn’t shy from using tactics that Brzezinski would later refer to as “blackmail.” As Carter revealed more of his vulnerability, Dayan pressed his advantage. It would make the American Jewish community “very happy,” he said, if he and Carter were to reach the following agreement: Dayan would say that he had informed the United States of Israel’s opposition to a Palestinian state, a return to the pre-1967 lines, and the US-Soviet Geneva statement, while the United States would announce that there would be no imposed settlement, no compulsion involving the use of economic and military aid, and no demand that Israel consent to the Geneva statement. If, however, “we say anything about the PLO or about the Palestinian state, and that this is bad for Israel,” Dayan warned, “there will be screaming here and in Israel.”29

At first, Carter pushed back. “If there is a confrontation and if we are cast in a role against Israel and with the Arabs, Israel would be isolated, and this would be very serious. It would be a blow to your position.” But Dayan was not cowed, judging, correctly, that Carter feared confrontation more than he did. He “exploited the opportunity brilliantly,” wrote a US official at the meeting, playing “a weak hand with consummate political skill.” As Carter announced that he was going to bed, Dayan pushed hard. “It would be bad,” he cautioned, “if we did not say anything tonight.” Carter relented, and two hours later a joint US-Israel statement announced the reversal: Israel did not have to accept the Geneva statement in order to attend the peace conference. “For the first time,” Quandt wrote, “Carter gave clear priority to domestic political concerns.”30

*   *   *

What neither the United States nor Israel anticipated was that Begin’s third tack, the use of Israel’s American supporters, would backfire. Carter’s surrender was seen by the Israeli government and its allies, as well as by the Arab states, as a setback to his peace efforts and a sign of his susceptibility to coercion. Many concluded that he was probably too weak to further confront Israel and achieve his goals. But rather than causing inaction and despair, Carter’s retreat led to a new breakthrough.

Sadat was so deeply troubled by Carter’s capitulation that he was prompted to act on his own. After receiving a handwritten note from the US president on October 21, imploring him in a “personal appeal” to help break the impasse, Sadat concluded that the United States was helpless and that Carter’s plans were doomed. It was this note, Sadat later said, that convinced him of the need to reply to the entreaty with what he informed Carter would be a “bold step.”31

By this time Sadat had already suggested to his foreign minister that he might address the Knesset in Jerusalem. He later credited Carter for having set the historic plan in motion. “When he wrote to me, I felt the weight of the Zionist lobby in the United States,” he said. “I felt this was unfair to him.” On November 9, Sadat made his shocking announcement before the Egyptian parliament: “I am prepared to go to the ends of the earth for peace, even to the Knesset itself.”32

He arrived at Ben Gurion Airport ten days later. Not everyone was convinced that the visit heralded a breakthrough. Israel’s chief of staff, Mordechai Gur, said it might be a ruse to hide Egyptian preparations for war. Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin called for a mobilization of Israel’s reserves in order to be ready for a new Egyptian surprise attack. In case Sadat’s plane turned out to be a Trojan horse filled with terrorists, Israeli sharpshooters took aim from positions on the rooftop of the airport’s main terminal. Upon hearing a suggestion that Begin and Sadat would go on to win a Nobel Peace Prize, former prime minister Golda Meir remarked, “I don’t know about the Nobel Prize, but they certainly deserve an Oscar.”33

Sadat’s fateful speech did not please Begin. Delivered in Arabic, much of it was devoted to the Palestinian question, which Sadat called the crux of the Middle East conflict. He wasted no time in dispelling Israel’s hope of an agreement that excluded the Palestinians. “Frankness makes it incumbent upon me to tell you the following: First, I have not come here for a separate agreement between Egypt and Israel,” he announced from the dais. “Peace cannot be worth its name unless it is based on justice and not on the occupation of the land of others.” He continued, “If you have found the moral and legal justification to set up a national home on a land that did not all belong to you, it is incumbent upon you to show understanding of the insistence of the people of Palestine for establishment once again of a state on their land.” Defense Minister Ezer Weizman handed a note to Begin: “We have to prepare for war.” The entire world, Sadat went on, “even the United States of America, your first ally,” has come to acknowledge the legitimacy of Palestinian claims. Sweating profusely and drawing his speech to a close, he called on Israel to reach a peace agreement based on its withdrawal from every inch of territory occupied in 1967 and the “achievement of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination, including their right to establish their own state.”34

Sadat’s proposals were a nonstarter for Begin. But the speech succeeded in putting the onus on Israel to reply. In one dramatic move, Sadat had rescued the United States’s flailing diplomacy, neutralized much of the US domestic opposition to Carter’s initiative, obliged Israel to put forward its own proposal, and deprived Begin of the comfortable position in which he found himself after Carter’s retreat. Sadat had signaled to Israel and its American supporters that peace was possible, and he had conveyed the price of an agreement in no uncertain terms.35

US expectations added to the pressure. In the wake of Sadat’s speech, for the first time, a minority of Americans said that Israel wanted peace while a majority said that the Arabs did. On December 10, Vance met Begin in Jerusalem, delivering a personal written appeal from Carter to publicly affirm two principles demanded by Sadat: a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, including in the West Bank, and a resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects.36

*   *   *

Begin’s back was against the wall. He had tried three exits from the American and Egyptian drive toward Palestinian self-determination, and each was now closed. Sadat’s speech had put before Begin an impossible choice: peace, or Greater Israel. It was then that Begin decided to take his fourth and final tack, an Israeli counterproposal meant to avoid the choice and obtain both. Begin informed Vance that he had a blueprint for “home rule” for the Palestinians that he intended to bring to the White House the following week. “I hope the President will accept my plan,” he said. “It is not a Palestinian state but it is a dignified solution for the Palestinian Arabs.”37 Carter didn’t know it at the time, but he was about to receive from Begin the concessions that would form the basis of his historic achievement at Camp David.

The scheme Begin brought Carter had been approved by Israel’s security cabinet. For Egypt, Israel would withdraw totally from Sinai, restoring Egyptian sovereignty up to the pre-1967 lines. For the Palestinians, Israel would abolish its military government and establish a Palestinian self-governing authority in the West Bank and Gaza, with elections, local policing, and a review of all arrangements—“including perhaps sovereignty,” Begin said—after five years. Security would remain in Israel’s hands, conflicting claims to sovereignty would be left open, and Israel would not extend its own sovereignty beyond the pre-1967 lines, except in Jerusalem. Begin told Carter that Sadat was responsible for his plan: “The idea of self-rule came from his visit. He can take credit for this. For the first time in history, the Palestinian Arabs will have self-rule.”38

One of the most interesting aspects of Begin’s proposal was to give the right of Israeli citizenship—including the right to vote for and be elected to the Knesset—to every Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza, and to allow, regardless of citizenship, unrestricted purchase of land anywhere in Mandatory Palestine to all Palestinians and Jews. These rights were to be in addition to, not in place of, Palestinian self-rule. Begin’s argument for granting them was essentially a moral one. “And now I want to explain why we proposed a free choice of citizenship, including Israeli citizenship,” he declared. “The answer is: Fairness.” Referring to the predecessor of present-day Zimbabwe, which was then ruled by a white minority, he added, “We never wanted to be like Rhodesia.” Full citizenship for Palestinians “is a way to show our fairness to all men of goodwill,” he said. “Here we propose total equality of rights—anti-racialism.”39

*   *   *

To the great relief of subsequent Israeli governments, the plan for equal citizenship rights for Palestinians and Jews was dropped. It was one of the few aspects of Begin’s proposal that was not incorporated into the Camp David Accords nine months later. But the rest of Begin’s two proposals, one for Egypt and the other for the Palestinians, would form the basis of the two historic framework agreements signed at the White House on September 17, 1978.

One agreement established a framework for full peace between Israel and Egypt in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the Egyptian territory it had conquered in the June 1967 war. It ended the state of belligerency between Israel and its most powerful Arab adversary, removing the threat to Israel of another war against a united Arab front. “If you take one wheel off a car, it won’t drive,” Dayan had said to Carter. “If Egypt is out of the conflict, there will be no war.”40

The second agreement, the “Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” was not finalized or implemented in Carter’s time, but it, too, proved to be of great importance. It served as the basis for both the 1991 Madrid peace conference that launched the next quarter century of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and, more significantly, the 1993 Oslo I Accord, which is, in essence, an expanded version of the 1978 framework agreement.41 The Oslo I Accord, in turn, provided the semblance of Israeli-Palestinian conciliation that Jordan required in order to sign a formal peace treaty with Israel in 1994, after many years of tacit cooperation and alliance. And it has defined and circumscribed nearly every aspect of Palestinian-Israeli relations from 1993 until the present. It is largely the result of pressure Carter and Sadat applied to Begin in 1977 and 1978.

Oslo’s main points and those of the 1978 framework are almost identical. Both promised the establishment of a Palestinian self-governing authority in parts of the West Bank and Gaza; negotiation of an interim agreement that would outline the self-governing body’s powers and responsibilities; redeployment of Israeli forces to specified locations; withdrawal of the Israeli military government and civil administration; introduction of Palestinian national elections; creation of a local police force that would maintain liaison with Israel; prevention of immigration of Palestinian refugees to the West Bank and Gaza without Israel’s agreement; a time limitation of five years for Palestinian self-governance; commitment to a solution that would recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinians; and, no later than the third year of the interim period, commencement of negotiations on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza, leading to a solution based on Resolution 242, which emphasizes “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for a lasting peace in exchange for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent [June 1967] conflict.”42 In 1994, Yasir Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize for having committed to an agreement created sixteen years earlier by Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem Begin.

*   *   *

Between Begin’s 1977 proposal and the signing of the Camp David Accords, Carter faced numerous setbacks. To overcome them, he put tremendous strain on Israel. In February 1978, he colluded with Sadat on a nine-step plan to force an agreement on Begin. The following month, he told Begin sternly that the main “obstacle to peace, to a peace treaty with Egypt, is Israel’s determination to keep political control over the West Bank and Gaza, not just now, but to perpetuate it even after five years.” Dayan wrote, “Though Carter spoke in a dull monotone, there was fury in his cold blue eyes, and his glance was dagger sharp.” Begin admitted to his aides that the meeting was one of the most difficult moments of his life. Two days later, Carter told a group of Senate leaders, “We cannot support Israel’s policy which is incompatible with the search for peace.” He then pushed through an arms sale to the Saudis over vehement objections from Israel and its supporters in Congress. When Vice President Mondale visited Israel in July 1978, Ariel Sharon accused the administration of “sowing the seeds for war by over-pressuring Israel and over-promising the Arabs.”43 At Camp David itself, Carter squeezed the parties by putting forward his own proposals, warning Sadat of the end of their personal friendship and the relationship between their two countries, and threatening Begin with American censure and the termination of US aid.44 Israel’s former deputy national security adviser Charles Freilich wrote in his book on the country’s decision-making:

On the tenth day [of the thirteen-day Camp David summit] Carter threatened to state publicly that whereas he had reached full understanding with Sadat, Begin’s refusal to dismantle the Sinai settlements and recognize the applicability of Resolution 242 to the West Bank had prevented agreement. American pressure came to a head on the twelfth and penultimate day, as Carter threatened direct sanctions: “I will not be able to turn to Congress and say, ‘Continue providing Israel with assistance,’ when I am not sure that you really want peace.” It was at that meeting that Begin finally conceded on the settlements and Palestinian clauses. He would later tell the Knesset: “there was the possibility of saying no to President Carter and the Camp David summit would have blown up that very day.… I knew that Israel would not be able to withstand it … not in the U.S., not in Europe, not before the Jews of the United States.… Israel could not have stood … facing the entire world.”45

But most of the concessions in the Camp David Accords had been made by mid-December 1977, only six months after Begin took office the previous June. They were unprecedented for any Israeli government, and particularly striking for one so hawkish and wholly committed to Greater Israel. Begin consented to a full withdrawal from Sinai although his foreign minister had often said that he preferred keeping the territory to having peace. Begin was the first Israeli prime minister to agree even to the presence of Palestinians in official negotiations over the future of the West Bank and Gaza, and he was harshly attacked for it by the centrist Labor Party. Begin had gone from ruling out any possibility of ever negotiating with the PLO to accepting its members in negotiations. From insisting that Palestine was Jordan, he came around to proposing the establishment of Palestinian self-governance in Gaza and the West Bank.46

To many Palestinians, Begin’s concessions were mere crumbs. But they were enormous compromises in the minds not just of the Likud but of the Israeli center and left. When implemented under Oslo, they changed the conflict irrevocably and brought about, for the first time since 1967, seemingly irreversible steps toward Palestinian self-determination.

In fairly short order, Jimmy Carter succeeded in forcing one of the most right-wing, annexationist figures in Israel’s history to do precisely what he had most sought to avoid: plant the seed of a Palestinian state.

II. Israeli Withdrawals

Zionism will not evacuate a single yard of land without a political-military struggle that compels it to do so.47

—GEORGE HABASH

In the decades since the Camp David Accords, every American president has tried to finish what Jimmy Carter started. Each has failed, and these failures have led to a widespread conclusion, not just in the United States but throughout the world, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be insoluble. The parties are intransigent, the issues are intractable, the interests of political leaders are too narrow, and on each side the power of constituencies opposed to partition is too great. Palestinian leaders are paralyzed by their lack of legitimacy. Israeli governments are constrained by fractious coalition politics. American presidents are shackled by the power of Israel’s domestic supporters. Arab states are divided and distracted by more urgent concerns. The role of religion, dueling claims to sovereignty over sacred spaces, large refugee populations, demands for restitution too great to be satisfied, the smallness of the territory, Israel’s vulnerability to surprise attack, the trauma of the Holocaust, the freshness of wounds from terrible violence, the absence of trust, and the irreconcilability of conflicting historical narratives—all, it would seem, render the conflict too difficult to resolve.

Yet Carter’s experience suggests a different view. Faced with the threat of real losses—whether human, economic, or political—Israelis and Palestinians have made dramatic concessions to avert them. Through persistent coercion, both have taken steps toward accepting an international consensus around Palestine’s partition into two states along the pre-1967 lines. Carter’s achievement is but one of many examples demonstrating each party’s responsiveness to force, that is, to all forms of pressure—including violence—that threaten significant costs.

In Israel’s case, each of its territorial withdrawals was carried out under duress. Following the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Israel colluded with France and the United Kingdom to invade Egypt, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion refused to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza. At the end of the war, he wrote that the Red Sea island of Tiran, off the coast of Sinai, would now be “part of the third kingdom of Israel,” and in his victory speech he hinted at annexing Egyptian territory. International intimidation of Israel brought about a swift and complete reversal. The Soviet premier sent a letter threatening rocket attacks and the deployment of volunteer forces to assist the Egyptian army. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration issued an ultimatum: if Israel didn’t unconditionally withdraw, it would lose all aid from the United States and from American Jews, and the US would not oppose Israel’s expulsion from the UN.48 Within a day and a half of his victory speech, Ben-Gurion announced Israel’s withdrawal.

Israel’s next retreats came on the heels of the devastating October 1973 war, which alerted the country to the necessity of peace with Egypt and the effectiveness of Egyptian and Syrian forces. The war had shaken Israel, at one point causing a teary-eyed Moshe Dayan to predict the “destruction of the third temple.”49 In the wake of the conflict, Israel signed three agreements to undertake limited withdrawals, one in Syria and two in Sinai. Each was made under acute pressure by the United States, which had been subjected to a painful Arab oil embargo in response to its support for Israel.

In its first Sinai withdrawal agreement, negotiated during a war of attrition with Egypt, Israel made greater concessions than those it had refused to make previously, which was among the reasons the Egyptians called the 1973 war a victory. Stalled talks on the second Sinai withdrawal were successfully concluded thanks only to a US threat in the form of a “reassessment” of relations with Israel—the prime minister called it “one of the worst periods in American-Israeli relations”—during which the United States suspended consideration of economic assistance and refused to provide any new arms deals. The agreement to withdraw from parts of Syria in 1974 was, like the first Sinai disengagement, completed under the strain of an ongoing war of attrition, with Syrian forces striking Israeli territory and IDF positions.50

*   *   *

In Lebanon, Israel withdrew four times between its first invasion in September 1977 and the end of its occupation in 2000. The first two evacuations were undertaken as a consequence of heavy international coercion; the second two, as a result of violence. The first, in September 1977, was brought about by Carter’s fury at having been lied to about the use of American-supplied equipment in the offensive and by his threat to terminate US military aid. The second followed another Israeli incursion in response to the March 1978 Coastal Road massacre, an attack and bus hijacking carried out by PLO militants that left thirty-eight Israelis dead. Again the pullout came in reaction to strong-arming by the United States. Israel “grossly overreacted in Lebanon,” the president wrote in his diary, “destroying hundreds of villages, killing many people, and making two hundred thousand Lebanese homeless.” The United States condemned Israel’s retaliation and pushed through a UN Security Council resolution—“the Israelis did their best,” Carter wrote, “to prevent our sponsorship”—demanding Israel’s immediate withdrawal and establishing an international peacekeeping force to supplant the IDF and confirm its departure.51 After the resolution passed, Israel announced it would cooperate fully with the UN, and began to evacuate.

The next two pullouts from Lebanon were unilateral, driven by a desire to halt the growing number of fatalities among Israeli troops. The 1982 invasion quickly descended into a quagmire, with heavy Israeli losses from bombings and guerrilla attacks. By 1983, the army recommended unilateral withdrawal in order to reduce casualties. Begin was tormented by the deaths of young Jews in what he had called a “war of choice.” He announced his resignation in August 1983, telling his cabinet, “I cannot go on.” The occupation of Lebanon had tarnished Israel’s international standing. An internal commission of inquiry found that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for the massacre by Christian Phalange forces of civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in south Beirut, and declared that the state of Israel had “indirect responsibility.” Israel estimated that between seven hundred and eight hundred were killed during the two-day massacre, while the Palestinian Red Crescent put the total at over two thousand. Israel pulled out in stages: a limited withdrawal from the outskirts of Beirut in 1983, followed by a larger series of disengagements in 1985.52

The final retreat would not come until fifteen years later. It was set in motion in April 1996, when a sixteen-day conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, known to Israelis as Operation Grapes of Wrath, resulted in widespread international condemnation of Israel for its killing of over one hundred Lebanese civilians taking refuge in a UN compound in the village of Qana. The next month, the newly elected prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, took the helm of the first government to propose a withdrawal from Lebanon without a peace treaty. Israelis had become increasingly critical of the costs of occupying southern Lebanon, referring to it as “our little Vietnam.” Soldiers were losing their lives for no apparent strategic gain. Following the death of seventy-three soldiers in a crash of two helicopters on their way to Lebanon, a group of bereaved mothers began holding vigils outside the Defense Ministry each time another soldier died. Hezbollah was growing steadily stronger, and Israel’s proxy force, the South Lebanon Army, was weakening, obliging Israel to carry more of the occupation’s costs. In May 1999, Ehud Barak won the prime ministerial election after campaigning on a promise to extract Israel from the Lebanese morass within one year. Over the objections of the IDF chief of staff, who warned against sending a message of frailty by retreating under fire, Israel withdrew to the international border.53

*   *   *

In the West Bank and Gaza, too, Israel was forced to withdraw under duress. Mass protests in December 1987, the beginning of the First Intifada, convinced the government that the Occupied Territories had become ungovernable and direct military rule could not indefinitely be sustained. In the first three weeks of the uprising, the army doubled its presence in the West Bank and tripled it in Gaza, where more soldiers were deployed to suppress the rebellion than had been used to conquer the territory in 1967. The intifada frightened Israel by breathing new life into the struggle for Palestinian statehood. The strong assertion of Palestinian nationalism bolstered the PLO at the expense of two other claimants to the West Bank: Israel and Jordan. “It was the intifada,” said Jordan’s King Hussein, “that really caused our decision on disengagement [i.e., surrender of claims to the territory]” in July 1988, all but foreclosing the possibility of Jordan and Israel dividing it.54 Filling the void left by Jordan’s relinquishment, the Palestinians declared independence in November 1988. Weeks later, 104 UN member states acknowledged the proclamation of the State of Palestine, and in December 1988, the United States recognized the PLO.55

Israel’s leaders understood that containing the intifada and the Palestinian march toward self-determination required more than mere military domination. They were being pushed by the United States to accept a new peace plan and later to come up with their own. In early 1989, just over a year after the revolt began, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin introduced a proposal for the Palestinians to gain autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for aborting the uprising. Several months later, Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a vehement opponent of ceding any part of the Land of Israel, and especially to Palestinians, was compelled to put forward a plan for Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza, based on the Camp David Accords.56

To bring these ideas to fruition, however, would require additional forms of coercion, including violence. Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992, as the intifada shifted from mass protests to increased militarization. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were growing more powerful. In early 1993, Israel and the Occupied Territories descended into the worst period of violence and repression since the uprising began. In March, fifteen Israelis and twenty-eight Palestinians were killed; the next month, Hamas launched its first suicide bombing. Rabin sealed off the Occupied Territories “until further notice.” Chiefs of the security services stressed the urgency of finding a political solution. Israeli negotiators in Oslo repeatedly asked the Palestinians to stop the intifada. A debate took shape about whether to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, and a poll taken during the summer of 1993 showed 77 percent of Israelis in favor. In public, Rabin promised to separate from the Palestinians and “take Gaza out of Tel Aviv.” “It is better,” he said, “for the Arabs not to be swarming around here.” In private, he received reports on the negotiations in Oslo, where Israel would soon commit to the withdrawal of its military government and the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule.57

The intifada had not caused Israeli leaders to suddenly desire Palestinian self-determination for its own sake. The government would no doubt have preferred a return to full control over a largely quiescent Palestinian population, as had been the case for most of the two decades prior to the uprising. But the intifada had rendered that option obsolete. For Israel, the concessions of Oslo were the next best thing. That they were grudgingly made and widely seen as far-reaching did not change the fact that they fell far short of ending occupation or of guaranteeing, as the Israeli right falsely charged, the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state. The accord was based, at Rabin’s insistence, on the 1978 Camp David framework agreement, which itself was a modified version of Begin’s 1977 autonomy plan, designed for the specific purpose not of establishing Palestinian self-determination but of thwarting it. Rabin’s goal, as he told the Knesset one month before his assassination, was the establishment of “an entity which is less than a state.”58

And so pressure on the Israeli government did not abate after the signing of the first Oslo agreement in September 1993. The following months saw a sharp rise in violence against Israeli citizens. Some Palestinians believed Oslo was more likely to prevent independence than to establish it; the plan for Israeli withdrawal in “Gaza and Jericho first” seemed like a trap. “Gaza and Jericho first—and last,” went an oft-repeated quip.59

Oslo allowed Israel not to end the occupation but repackage it, from direct to indirect control. The agreement permitted Israeli forces to redeploy from populated Palestinian city centers to rural areas, where resistance was more difficult to organize and easier to contain. In the cities, the costs of Israel’s rule were greatly lessened, as Palestinians took responsibility for the suppression of protests and violence. “The Palestinians will be better at it than we are,” Rabin explained, “because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the Israeli Association for Civil Rights from criticizing the conditions there by denying it access to the area. They will rule by their own methods, freeing—and this is most important—the Israeli army soldiers from having to do what they will do.”60 Some Palestinians viewed their limited autonomy as little more than an Israeli ploy to tame the PLO and quash the intifada, but the fact remained that prior to the uprising even limited autonomy under the PLO had been unavailable to them.

Given that for Israel the driving force behind Oslo was the desire to protect soldiers and civilians from exposure to growing violence and unrest, it was only natural that the violence during negotiations and after the accord was signed would lead to further initiatives for separation and withdrawal. Between Yasir Arafat’s return from exile to Gaza in July 1994 and the September 1995 agreement for additional IDF withdrawals from Palestinian urban areas (known as Oslo II), suicide bombings killed sixty-four, more than the number taken by terrorism in any of the preceding nineteen years.61 The political rhetoric claimed that the country would not hand more territory to Palestinians until violence had ceased, but in reality Israel did not hand over territory until violence had started.

Despite all its criticism of Oslo and its vows to cancel the agreement, when the right came to power it behaved no differently, responding to unrest with further withdrawals. After Prime Minister Netanyahu formed a government in June 1996, he initially refused to honor the commitments of past governments to large parts of the Oslo agreements. This changed abruptly in late September, when he made a catastrophic decision that would lead to Palestinian violence and Israeli concessions to quell the unrest.

That month, Israel blasted open an exit to a Jerusalem archaeological tunnel that ran alongside the edge of the holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary or al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Palestinians had opposed opening the tunnel for ten years. The new exit was in the heart of the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, in territory Israel had occupied since 1967. Netanyahu claimed the tunnel had been opened merely to ease the flow of visitors to the site, but he later admitted that the act “expresses our sovereignty over Jerusalem.” Several days of riots and bloody clashes ensued, leaving fifteen Israeli soldiers and some eighty Palestinians dead. It was the worst violence since the height of the intifada, perhaps since the occupation began. Palestinians referred to it as the “tunnel uprising.”62

Within days, the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for an immediate reversal of Israel’s move. President Bill Clinton quickly convened a summit of Arab, Palestinian, and Israeli leaders, at the end of which he won from Netanyahu a promise to negotiate a withdrawal from the West Bank city of Hebron. In January, Israel signed the Hebron Protocol, which called for its withdrawal from 80 percent of the city, its release of thirty-one Palestinian women prisoners, and its commitment to three further withdrawals in the West Bank over the next eighteen months. These were negotiated in greater detail in a separate memorandum signed at Maryland’s Wye River plantation the following year. Finalized in fall 1998, during the quietist period of the Oslo years, much of the Wye memorandum was never implemented.63

*   *   *

The decision to undertake Israel’s most consequential withdrawal from the Occupied Territories was made in late 2003, during the bloodiest period of Israeli-Palestinian violence since the 1948 war. Ariel Sharon, the hard-line former general referred to as “the Bulldozer,” took power when the Second Intifada was in its sixth month and spinning out of control. Contrary to all expectations of the man known as the father of the settlement movement—who had once demanded that a general be fired for saying that the First Intifada could not be defeated by military means alone—Sharon was prepared to make immediate concessions to halt the fighting. According to then US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, “Sharon offered a freeze on all settlement activity for six months if Arafat would make a serious attempt to stop the intifada violence.”64

Sharon was under immense strain to halt the mounting death toll. The horrific violence occupied much of the world’s attention, leading to cease-fire proposals, withdrawal demands, and new support, including from the United States, for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, was so upset by American support for Israel during the intifada that he refused to visit Washington in 2001 to meet George W. Bush. Coming close to tears at a Paris hotel, he showed Secretary of State Colin Powell a stack of grisly photos of recently killed Palestinians, demanding, “How can you possibly tolerate such suffering? These are your weapons, and this is your ally.” Soon after, the crown prince “rocked the White House with a letter, held in absolute secrecy in that summer of 2001 and still secret today, that put US-Saudi relations in the balance,” wrote the deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams. The Saudis threatened to break ties unless America did something to stop the violence. “Responding to Saudi pressure,” Abrams wrote, “the United States would endorse Palestinian statehood” several days later.65 Within months, the UN Security Council followed suit, passing a resolution calling for a State of Palestine for the first time. Bending to the new consensus, Sharon, too, accepted the idea of a Palestinian state, becoming the first Israeli prime minister to do so.66

Pressure on Sharon within Israel was also growing. As the violence intensified, support for territorial compromise increased. A series of public opinion polls asked Israelis about their willingness to approve a peace settlement first proposed by President Clinton, which offered Palestinians a capital in Jerusalem and sovereignty over the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount. Peak support for the plan—79 percent—was found in a March 12–14, 2002, poll, at the height of the Second Intifada and just days after two suicide bombings in Jerusalem. “The bloodshed was so great,” wrote Abrams, that Sharon lifted his policy of demanding seven days of quiet before he would negotiate a cease-fire. In fall 2003, members of the nation’s security elite condemned the occupation with unprecedented vehemence. Sharon received two open letters protesting his policies in the Occupied Territories: one from Israeli air force pilots pledging to “refuse to continue hitting innocent civilians” and objecting to the “long occupation which corrupts all of Israeli society”; another from members of the army’s most prestigious special forces unit, Sayeret Matkal, vowing to “no longer participate in the regime of oppression in the territories [and] the denial of human rights to millions of Palestinians … [and to] no longer serve as a defensive shield for the settlement enterprise.” Similarly harsh criticisms came in a joint interview with four former chiefs of the Shin Bet, among the most authoritative security figures in the country, who called for a dismantlement of settlements and a territorial withdrawal.67

No less difficult for Sharon were the mounting plans and peace proposals put forward in response to the violence. None of them was remotely appealing to the Israeli government. In April 2001, a US-led committee submitted a report recommending a freeze of all construction in settlements, including their so-called natural growth, and in October reports of a forthcoming American plan for a Palestinian state so worried Sharon that he stridently warned the United States against appeasing the Arabs as Western democracies had done with Adolf Hitler: “Israel will not be Czechoslovakia.” In early 2002, the Saudis introduced the Arab Peace Initiative, which called for Israel’s full withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines and was welcomed by the UN Security Council. The former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon and the Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh presented the People’s Voice Initiative one year later, in June 2003, gaining a quarter million Israeli signatories and the backing of three other former heads of the Shin Bet. In December of the same year, a group of Palestinians and Israelis, among them former negotiators, government officials, generals, and ministers, issued a draft peace treaty known as the Geneva Initiative, which, to Sharon’s dismay, was greeted with official responses from Secretary of State Powell and President Bush.68

More significant than any of these was the Roadmap to Middle East Peace, a plan announced by the United States, together with the EU, UN, and Russia, in April 2003. It called for an end to the intifada, a withdrawal of Israeli forces from areas occupied since the violence began, a freeze of settlement activity, the dismantlement of all settlement outposts created since Sharon took office, and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Sharon yielded, accepting the Roadmap—albeit with fourteen reservations—and confronting his party with bitter truths about the inevitability of Palestinian independence. Speaking to a Likud conference while the intifada was raging, he said, “The idea that it is possible to continue keeping 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation—yes, it is occupation, you might not like the word, but what is happening is occupation—is bad for Israel and bad for the Palestinians, and bad for the Israeli economy. Controlling 3.5 million Palestinians cannot go on forever.” Six months later, the UN Security Council endorsed the Roadmap, and Sharon told US officials of his intention to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza. When Bush later asked why Sharon had decided to pull out, Sharon replied, “I didn’t want other people, even you with all the problems you have, to press me. It was better to take steps ourselves.”69

The unprecedented violence of the intifada had led Sharon to take two consequential measures. The first was to erect a barrier between Israel and over 90 percent of the West Bank, an idea that originated in Rabin’s 1992–1995 government and his call for separation during the First Intifada. Now the stated goal of the barrier was to contain the plague of suicide bombings. Yet it displeased Israelis and Palestinians alike. Palestinians objected because it attached East Jerusalem and roughly 8.5 percent of the West Bank to the Israeli side; settlers also objected, viewing the barrier as a major step toward partition and relinquishment of territory. Sharon confirmed the settlers’ fears in a December 18, 2003, speech, at which he announced the withdrawal from a then unspecified number of settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. “The relocation of settlements will be made, first and foremost, in order to draw the most efficient security line possible,” he said, referring to the separation barrier. “Settlements which will be relocated are those which will not be included in the territory of the State of Israel.”70

Sharon’s final maneuver was the Gaza pullout. Israeli casualties there had been rising steadily from increased use of explosives smuggled through underground tunnels connected to Egypt. Rocket attacks from the territory had increased sevenfold in the year leading up to Sharon’s decision. His goal, he said, was “to carry out an evacuation—sorry, a relocation—of settlements that cause us problems.” He wanted to “reduce as much as possible the number of Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population” and thereby lessen “friction between us and the Palestinians.”71

He completed the full withdrawal from Gaza and four northern West Bank settlements in late summer 2005. As with previous pullouts, the Gaza exit was undertaken in order to avoid something worse—in this case, the momentum building toward Palestinian statehood and the continued exposure of Israeli soldiers and civilians to attacks by Gaza militants, who were growing stronger by the day.

*   *   *

Four months later, Sharon suffered a stroke from which he would never recover. Hamas, which was seen as the first Palestinian group to have forced an Israeli territorial withdrawal, won legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza several weeks later. With Sharon incapacitated, Israel’s acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, campaigned on a promise to finish what Sharon started by evacuating soldiers and settlers from the roughly 90 percent of the West Bank that lay east of the separation barrier. But Olmert’s plan was never implemented, thanks both to the 2006 Lebanon War, which marked the beginning of the end of his political career, and to the Israeli loss of a sense of urgency with respect to the Palestinian question.72 The population of the West Bank was exhausted and went through a period of post-intifada quiescence. With resistance diminished, so too was the pressure. Serious proposals for unilateral withdrawal were not raised for the next nine years.

Predictably enough, when the West Bank once more erupted in violence in the fall of 2015, the question of withdrawing resurfaced. During the first six months of the unrest—which included Palestinian stabbing, shooting, and car-ramming attacks and Israeli fire at West Bank and Gaza protests—some thirty Israelis and more than two hundred Palestinians were killed. Politicians and pundits referred to it as a third intifada, although in scale and intensity it was nowhere near a match for the first two uprisings. To quell the attacks, the army took steps to ease restrictions on Palestinian daily life and proposed pulling Israeli forces out from some areas; but some of the most senior generals said that larger political concessions would be needed to restore calm.73

In the middle of the violence, which was initially centered in Jerusalem, public opinion polls showed a newfound willingness to divide the city, with an unprecedented two-thirds in favor of relinquishing control of neighborhoods in the Palestinian-majority east. Responding to these shifts in opinion, the Labor Party, which led the opposition, revealed a new plan to separate from West Bank and Jerusalem Palestinians. It called for giving the Palestinian Authority (PA) greater control of the 91.5 percent of the West Bank that lay east of the separation barrier, dismantling settlement outposts, and withdrawing from many East Jerusalem neighborhoods by rerouting the wall, thereby cutting off hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Jerusalemites from Israel and the rest of the city, including the al-Aqsa Mosque.74 The significance of the plan was not that it was likely to be implemented but that at a time when Israelis were frightened and under assault the party thought a proposal for unilateral withdrawal could help pave its return to power.

*   *   *

Despite the evidence that severe pressure, including violence, has repeatedly elicited Israeli compromise, many wish to deny the causal relationship, for fear that such an admission would lead to the application of still more coercive force. AIPAC, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States, promotes the idea that US interests are best achieved not only by abstaining from exertions on Israel but by ensuring, in the words of George W. Bush, that there is “no daylight” between the two countries. It is a view upheld widely in Washington, and not just by the neoconservatives who shaped policy under George W. Bush. Even the numerous Obama administration officials who were unsympathetic to AIPAC’s views felt impotent to firmly oppose them. A national security official who served in government under both Bush and Barack Obama privately compared the two experiences: “I don’t know what’s worse—working for an administration that enacts AIPAC’s policies enthusiastically, out of conviction, or working for one that does so grudgingly, out of fear.”75

Among the American officials who wielded the most influence over policy toward Israel during the sixteen years of the Clinton and Obama administrations were Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross. Both were veterans of the first and second Clinton administrations, with previous affiliation to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, originally an offshoot of AIPAC’s research department. In his memoir of his years under Clinton, written before he had become much more skeptical of Israel’s willingness to compromise, Indyk encapsulated the central idea that AIPAC has promoted over the years: “The record … suggests that American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission.”76 What the historical record in fact suggests is that something close to the opposite is true.

In 2015, Ross—an adviser to Obama and Hillary Clinton—published Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama, a book devoted to the thesis that “when the United States pressured Israel, we never benefited.” For Ross, “to simultaneously distance from Israel and move on peace contained a built-in contradiction,” since, as he believes, it is embracing Israel, not coercing it, that produces results. (Ross is usually careful to present his advocacy for US alignment with Israel as deriving from an impartial analysis of what will work to achieve peace. But at a private talk at a New York synagogue in 2016, he peeled back this veneer of objectivity, stating, “Plenty of others are advocates for Palestinians. We don’t need to be advocates for Palestinians. We need to be advocates for Israel.”)77

Describing policy differences among US officials, Ross wrote of “a long-standing split between those who saw working closely with the Israelis as the key to affecting Israeli behavior favorably, and those who did not.” Ross counts himself among the first group. This gap, he wrote, could be found within “the Truman, Kennedy, Nixon, and both Bush administrations,” but not in those of Eisenhower, Carter, or Clinton. In Clinton’s case, Ross wrote, the gap wasn’t present because “working closely with the Israelis was the norm.” In the case of Eisenhower and Carter, by contrast, “this tension did not exist because there was little serious advocacy for working closely with the Israelis.”78

In setting up this schema, Ross offered a neat test of his thesis—and inadvertently disproved it. The two presidents he faulted for threatening and keeping a distance—Eisenhower and Carter—were the only ones who succeeded in compelling Israel to undertake a full territorial withdrawal. Contrary to what most advocates for Israel try to argue, it’s hardly the case that force—including but not limited to violence—has been ineffective in advancing accommodation between Israelis and their neighbors. All too often, it has been the primary driver of compromise.

III. Palestinian Concessions

The world does not pity the slaughtered. It only respects those who fight.79

—MENACHEM BEGIN

Pressure has been no less effective on Palestinians. The results have not been as tangible, because prior to Israel’s evacuation from Gaza, the Palestinians never truly possessed any territory to give up, unless one counts the PLO bases in Jordan and Lebanon, from both of which they were forcibly expelled. Instead, repeated defeats and punishing measures exacted a series of ideological concessions, in which territorial ambitions were slowly narrowed from all of Mandatory Palestine to the 22 percent that Israel conquered in 1967. The coercion took three primary forms: military defeat, economic deprivation, and the threat of cutting off the path to a Palestinian state.80

More than any other factor, it was Israel’s overwhelming military power that convinced Palestinians they could obtain no more than 22 percent of the land on which they had lived before 1948. A series of military campaigns made that clear. By the end of the 1948 war—at every stage of which Israeli forces outnumbered the combined total of Arab forces—Israel had expanded its boundaries to 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine; prior to the war, when Jews had made up one-third of the population and owned less than 7 percent of the land, the UN’s partition plan had allotted 55 percent to Israel.81 The success was decisive enough to preclude Israel from ever being forced to return to the borders of the partition plan. But it was not so decisive that the great powers favored a settlement in which Israel would keep all 78 percent.

Israel changed that through the use of additional force. As late as 1955, the United States and the United Kingdom proposed a peace plan in which the country would give up large parts of the Negev Desert, shrinking from its 1949 area to a size in between the 55 percent of the pre-war partition plan and the armistice lines of 78 percent. But one year later, following Israel’s 1956 conquest of Sinai and Gaza, the world powers changed their view, seeing the existing boundaries as permanent. No serious partition proposals to give Israel anything less have since been raised.82

The Arabs, too, following their crushing defeat in June 1967, abandoned hope of taking any territory beyond what Israel conquered in the war. In Khartoum in September 1967, at the first Arab summit conference after the war, the Arab states famously declared the principles of “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” What received far less notice was the resolution’s preceding sentence, which affirmed not just that the Arab states sought Israel’s withdrawal from only the “lands which have been occupied since the aggression of June 5” but that they sought to regain it nonviolently, through “political efforts at the international and diplomatic level.” Following the summit, Israel’s director of military intelligence, Major General Aharon Yariv, informed the Knesset that the Arabs had decided to seek a political solution. But Israel was not eager to give up the land conquered in 1967. So it rushed to define the Khartoum Resolution as a display of intransigence, dubbing it the “three noes” when in fact it was a significant, capitulatory step toward formally accepting Israel in its pre-1967 boundaries.83

Once the Arabs had conceded Israeli control of 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine, the Palestinians, whose entire strategy at that time was premised on entangling the Arab states in a war to liberate all the land, stood no chance of gaining anything more than the remaining 22 percent—and even that they were far too weak to secure on their own. But it would take time, and considerable force, before the Palestinian national movement would come to admit the new reality.

*   *   *

The first significant step toward compromise came during the greatest defeat the PLO had yet suffered. In September 1970, the Jordanian army assaulted PLO forces that were based in the country and had challenged the monarchy’s authority. The army killed about a thousand guerrillas and pushed the rest out, mostly toward Lebanon. Thousands more Palestinian civilians were killed in the conflict, which the PLO called “Black September.” Several factions dwindled or disappeared, and one of the most hard-line groups moved to the pragmatic camp. A deputy chief of the PLO said the battles had threatened the organization with “total collapse.”84

The traumatic confrontation had two important consequences. The first, a change in PLO means, came about because the rout had exposed the organization’s weakness and thus undermined hopes of liberation through guerrilla fighting modeled on the people’s wars of China and Vietnam. A shift in strategy toward increasing terrorism began.85 The goal of this wave of hijackings, bombings, and shootings was not to pose a serious military challenge to Israel, which was far beyond Palestinian capabilities. Rather, it was to disguise the PLO’s feebleness in the wake of Black September; score tactical and symbolic victories such as large prisoner exchanges; and embarrass the Arab states for their inaction and growing accommodation with Israel. It likewise put the Palestinian issue atop the world’s agenda; asserted Palestinian identity and independence of decision-making; and mobilized a political constituency, instilling in Palestinians a sense that they were not helpless refugees but proud revolutionaries. Crucially, it also helped demonstrate that no peace could be reached without the participation of the PLO.

The second change, in PLO objectives, came swiftly too. In January 1971, three months after Jordan’s main offensive, the organization issued a statement revealing a willingness to defer the liberation of all Palestinian land and accept Israel’s withdrawal from only the territories occupied in 1967: “We are certainly not opposed to total Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories,” it said, as long as Palestinians retain the “right to struggle for the full liberation of Palestinian soil.”86

The following month, the Palestinian National Council, the PLO’s parliament in exile, made an additional move away from its maximalist goals. For years, the PLO’s charter had stated that only those Jews who had resided in Palestine prior to “the beginning of the Zionist invasion” would be considered Palestinian and therefore endowed, together with their patrilineal descendants, with “a legal right to their homeland.” The implication was that any other Jews would have to leave. But after Black September, the PNC resolved to “set up a free and democratic society in Palestine for all Palestinians, including Muslims, Christians, and Jews.” Arafat said it was “a humanitarian plan which will allow the Jews to live in dignity, as they have always lived, under the aegis of an Arab state and within the framework of Arab society.”87

*   *   *

The PLO’s next compromise came after the October 1973 war, which extended Israel’s boundaries still farther. The Arab states’ failure to recover an inch of the territory they had lost in 1967 all but obliterated what remained of Palestinian hopes of an Arab-led liberation. Worse, Arab demands were steadily narrowing, now focused on partial withdrawals from territories Israel conquered in 1967, with no mention of Palestinian rights or aspirations. In the words of one PLO leader, the 1973 war transformed the national movement “from romanticism to realism.”88

A diplomatic push to resolve the conflict without involving the PLO intensified the sense that the doors to independence were closing. Two months after the war, the United States and the Soviet Union cosponsored the Middle East peace conference in Geneva, excluding the Palestinians. This was followed by the US-brokered withdrawals from parts of Egyptian and Syrian territory. The Palestinians feared that Jordan would achieve its aim of regaining the West Bank by forging its own agreement with Israel. Secretary Kissinger argued for precisely this, telling Israel repeatedly that a deal with Jordan was the best way to sideline the PLO, which was then still fighting for influence in the Occupied Territories. Otherwise, he warned Israel’s ambassador to the United States, “within a year, Arafat will be the spokesman for the West Bank.” PLO angst was palpable. Its weekly publication declared that it regarded “the implementation of military disengagement talks on the Jordanian front as a handover of our Palestinian land from the Zionist enemy to the Jordanian regime under U.S. imperialist sponsorship.” But merely denouncing a Jordanian-Israeli deal was unlikely to stop it. The head of one PLO faction described the dilemma: “If the PLO declares that it wishes to rule the Gaza Strip and West Bank, then it will seem to have abandoned the historic rights of the Palestinian people to the rest of the Palestinian land”; if it does not, however, then it “will have officially relinquished the Bank and Strip to the Jordanian regime.”89

In June 1974, weeks after the Israeli-Syrian disengagement agreement, President Richard Nixon traveled to Jerusalem and urged Prime Minister Rabin to sign a deal with Jordan over the West Bank, leaving out the PLO. That same month, under the threat of a Jordanian-Israeli agreement, the PNC made a momentous shift away from the PLO charter’s rejection of any partition of the homeland and toward accepting a state in less than all of Mandatory Palestine. The PNC adopted a new ten-point political program that resolved to establish an “independent fighting national authority on any part of the Palestinian territory to be liberated.” The Arab League later endorsed the plan and affirmed, over Jordan’s objections, the PLO’s status as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”90

Arafat then took a further step. He joined Egypt and Syria to sign a Tripartite Communiqué that softened the PNC ten-point program with three amendments. First, it eliminated reference to a “fighting national” authority, thus intimating that a Palestinian government, once established, would not necessarily fight Israel. Second, it implied a willingness to negotiate, stating that the territory on which the Palestinian authority was established would be liberated by either military or political means. Third, it promised to work toward Israeli withdrawal “from all occupied Arab territories,” which meant, in the view of Egypt and Syria—and now, by implication of its signature, the PLO—only those Israel had conquered in 1967. Coming less than a year after the 1973 war, this was the first signal that the PLO would agree to a state in the West Bank and Gaza alone. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) withdrew from the PLO executive committee in protest, forming a Rejectionist Front with several other PLO factions and accusing the mainstream PLO of lulling the Palestinians into submitting to a negotiated settlement “drop by drop.”91

*   *   *

The PLO’s next major move toward acceptance of Israel and a two-state partition along the pre-1967 lines occurred two and a half years later, in 1977, following a series of painful military defeats in the Lebanese civil war. The conflict had begun with clashes between Christian militias and Palestinian fighters in 1975, and the Palestinians had fared well at first. But the following year, they suffered thousands of losses, first in the PLO-controlled Beirut slum of Karantina, and later, at the Palestinian refugee camp of Tel al-Zaʿtar. Fearing a Palestinian victory that could limit its ability to dominate Lebanon, Syria and its allies defeated PLO forces, turned some factions against their fellow Palestinians, and controlled two-thirds of the country by the end of 1976, imposing severe restrictions on the organization’s presence.92

Once again, the pressure was not just military but political, with the specter of a Jordanian takeover of the West Bank looming. Exploiting the PLO’s weakness, Jordan revived the idea of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. Much to the PLO’s displeasure, Egypt followed suit, telling Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that it too favored the idea. The Carter administration was eager to set up a new Middle East peace conference in Geneva, and again the PLO feared a Jordanian-Israeli deal from which it would be excluded.93

The PLO quickly took several moderating steps designed to placate the world powers, establish itself as an interlocutor with the United States, and block an agreement between Israel and Jordan. In January 1977, under the supervision of Fatah Central Committee member Mahmoud Abbas, it initiated a dialogue with several Israeli doves, including former general Mattityahu Peled. The same month, the head of the pro-Syrian PLO faction Saʿiqa stated that “in return for liberating some land we may accept a truce, for a longer or shorter period, and we may cancel the embargo on dealings with [Israel].” In February, Arafat sent a message to the United States expressing interest in a dialogue and met with Egypt’s foreign minister to discuss changing the PLO’s charter. Several days later, the PLO announced it was willing to attend the new Middle East peace conference, which would mean negotiating with Israel.94

The biggest step came the following month, when the PNC convened in Cairo and removed much of the ambiguity concerning its ten-point program of 1974. Addressing the PNC, the head of the PLO’s political department, Faruq Qaddumi, explicitly stated, for the first time, that the Palestinian national authority would be established only in the West Bank and Gaza. That summer, the PLO sent a message to the White House offering to announce publicly and unambiguously its readiness to live in peace with Israel, if the United States would commit to supporting the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Next, Qaddumi expressed willingness to approve a modified version of Resolution 242, entailing recognition of Israel, and to abandon the armed struggle.95

*   *   *

Yet the PLO’s greatest concessions were still to come. Israel’s June 6, 1982, invasion of Lebanon utterly transformed the Palestinian national movement, driving it from its last base in a country bordering Israel and putting it on the path to the historic compromise that would result in a PLO-led government in the West Bank and Gaza. During the invasion, Israel swiftly conquered the south, besieged Beirut, captured six thousand PLO guerrillas, and forced Arafat to capitulate. The PLO abandoned bases in Beirut, handed over weapons to the Lebanese National Movement and Lebanese army, and evacuated eleven thousand personnel. To facilitate the surrender, the United States gave the PLO explicit written assurances that Israel had committed itself to ensure the safety of Palestinian civilians after the retreat.96

It was a promise the US and Israel did not keep. Eleven days after Arafat sailed from Beirut, the US peacekeeping contingent also departed, leaving Palestinians vulnerable. The Israeli defense minister, Ariel Sharon, who had repeatedly told IDF officers that Christian militias should “clean out” West Beirut, now ordered the army to allow Christian militiamen to enter Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where they proceeded to massacre between seven hundred and several thousand Palestinian civilians—primarily children, women, and the elderly—with much of the killing done in plain view of Israeli soldiers on a ridge overhead. During the rampage of rape and execution, Israeli flares illuminated the darkened camps, and terrified refugees were turned back at Israeli roadblocks in Sabra.97

The PLO had reached its nadir. The defeat in Lebanon had demonstrated the futility of seeking to liberate Palestine from neighboring bases and of hoping for Arab assistance. Arab states could hardly be relied upon to liberate Palestine when they would not attempt to defend even sovereign Lebanon from Israeli attack. Deputy PLO chief Salah Khalaf, known as Abu Iyad, quipped that the bickering Arabs had finally agreed on something during Israel’s invasion: to betray the PLO. The organization had now clashed or quarreled with every Arab country bordering Palestine and was welcome in none. Its fighters were dispersed throughout the region, with no central base. Palestinians fled Lebanon in record numbers, with some seventy thousand departing from the Beirut airport in 1983 alone. The flow of funds to the organization dried up as crude oil prices dropped, the Soviet Union disengaged, and the polarized Arab world turned its attention to the Iran-Iraq War.98 The decline of Soviet-US competition marginalized the Palestinians. Arafat and the PLO leadership were forced to relocate to faraway Tunisia.

Once again, concessions came quickly—just days, in fact, after the Palestinian expulsion from Beirut. On September 1, 1982, the PLO completed its evacuation and President Ronald Reagan announced a plan for Middle East peace that was based closely on the 1978 Camp David Accords. It explicitly ruled out the possibility of Palestinian statehood, called for autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan, and excluded the PLO. Yet after the rout in Lebanon, the PLO’s desperate leaders said that Reagan’s plan, which Israel rejected, had “some positive elements” and Arafat agreed to negotiate on the basis of it several months later.99

More significant was the PLO’s acceptance of a new peace plan for two states on the pre-1967 lines, approved at the Arab summit in Fez just over a week after the last ship of PLO fighters sailed from Beirut. Previously the PLO had offered only conditional willingness to state that it would live in peace with Israel. Now that conditionality was dropped. The Fez Initiative was almost identical to a two-state plan put forward by Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia in August 1981, which Arafat had quietly helped formulate but was rejected by the PLO at the time. After Lebanon, however, two tweaks to the Saudi plan were enough to ensure Palestinian ratification: boilerplate mention of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians and naming the UN Security Council as guarantor of “peace between all States of the region.”100

The PLO took another placating step one year later. In September 1983, it endorsed the Geneva Declaration, which affirmed support for the Fez plan and for a solution based on “the relevant United Nations resolutions concerning the question of Palestine.”101 The PLO thereby dropped its insistence on modifying Resolution 242 and in doing so met the principal precondition of its inclusion in US-sponsored negotiations.

*   *   *

None of these incremental concessions extracted the PLO from its post-Lebanon predicament. Over the next several years, Palestinians would grow still more isolated and fragmented. Arafat felt he had no choice but to engage with Jordan, for fear that it would otherwise strike a deal over the West Bank without him, especially after Israel’s primary advocate of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation, Shimon Peres, became prime minister in 1984. Arafat met with Jordan’s King Hussein two months after his expulsion from Lebanon. Controversially, he persuaded his PLO faction, Fatah, to accept a peace plan that included a Jordanian-Palestinian union without any guarantee—such as making an initial step of Palestinian statehood a clear precondition of the union—that it would not amount to Jordanian domination. That same month, senior PLO officials broke the Arab boycott of Egypt launched after Camp David, another signal of the PLO’s pivot toward the Arab countries that were allied with the United States and prepared to make peace with Israel.102

The PLO’s various conciliatory steps were less successful in generating movement toward peace talks than in causing turmoil within the floundering organization. Arafat’s initiatives had generated large antagonisms, causing a split within Fatah in 1983 and a decision by two leftist factions, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to suspend their activity in the PLO. When Arafat made a high-profile visit to Sadat’s successor, President Hosni Mubarak, in December 1983, some PLO officials called for his overthrow.

By 1986, a close Arafat aide published a paper stating that the organization had fallen into such disarray that its primary aim should be mere survival. The bleak scene at Arafat’s Tunis office around this time was described by Yezid Sayigh in his authoritative history of the PLO: “Visitors to his headquarters during the summer and autumn of 1987 found little of the frenetic bustle that had long been [its] hallmark. All but absent were the PLO officials, foreign dignitaries, and journalists waiting into the early hours of the morning for brief interviews, the telephone rarely rang, and the reams of papers to be scanned and signed had dwindled.” When Arafat arrived for the November 1987 Arab Summit in Amman, he was snubbed by King Hussein, who overlooked the PLO in his opening address. Arafat couldn’t convince the other Arab leaders to make more than ritual mention of the Palestinians in the summit’s concluding statement.103

*   *   *

The Palestinian national movement could hardly have been more adrift when, one month after the Amman summit, an Israeli army tank-transport truck plowed into a line of cars and vans carrying Palestinian laborers from Gaza, killing four and leading to the unexpected outbreak of protests that marked the beginning of the First Intifada. The PLO grabbed on to the uprising as to a life preserver. Suddenly the long-sought peace talks that the past several years of concessions had failed to produce seemed like a realistic possibility. Days after the intifada began, Arafat gave an interview stressing his acceptance not just of all relevant UN resolutions on Palestine but specifically of Resolution 242. Mahmoud Abbas announced that the PLO sought an international peace conference. Like the official PLO weekly, he argued for capitalizing on the insurrection by setting up a government-in-exile, which, it was thought, could put the Palestinians on an equal footing with other states at a hoped-for peace conference and circumvent the American and Israeli refusal to deal with the PLO.104

Though the uprising indeed brought new opportunities, it generated new pressures, too. First among these were concerns about how to sustain the revolt financially and when to exploit it politically. The intifada’s primary architect, Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, worried that Arafat would seek diplomatic gains prematurely; others feared that by waiting the PLO risked missing an opportunity, as the energy of activists and the means of supporting them inevitably dwindled. A second strain was the suffering of West Bank and Gaza residents, who bore the brunt of the arrests, interrogations, economic deprivation, beatings, and killings. Speaking on behalf of the outside PLO leadership, Abu Iyad said, “Seeing children risking their lives imposed on us the need to achieve a realistic peace.”105

Third was anxiety over the possibility that Israel or the United States could try to strike a direct bargain with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, shutting out the PLO. The intifada had shifted the national movement’s center of gravity, for the first time, from the diaspora to the “inside”—the Occupied Territories. In fact, without the weakening of the outside PLO leadership, Palestinians inside might never have felt the need to take the struggle for liberation into their own hands. This was the view of Abu Iyad, who said that there would have been no uprising if the PLO had remained in Beirut, because the people would still have been waiting for outside leaders to save them. Though the PLO’s fear of a separate Israeli accommodation with local Palestinians was likely exaggerated, it was nevertheless common and made worse by the publication, one month into the intifada, of a fourteen-point political program drafted by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and delivered to the US Secretary of State. It called for a declaration of independence and the establishment of a provisional government in which local Palestinians and PLO leaders in exile would have equal representation.106

A fourth, critical form of pressure came from Jordan, but in a most unexpected manner. Less than eight months into the uprising, following a failed Jordanian attempt to reassert control in the Occupied Territories and an Arab League decision to direct all funds for the intifada to the PLO, Jordan made a dramatic decision to end its long struggle to take back the West Bank. To the shock of the PLO leadership, Jordan dissolved its West Bank organizations, stopped its development projects, cut every legal and administrative tie to the territory, and announced that it was surrendering all claims on the West Bank to the PLO. The PLO leadership could not contain its joy over one of the greatest achievements in the history of the national movement. “The Jordanian option is over,” said a gloating Arafat adviser. “Now there is the PLO, and only the PLO.”107

This satisfaction didn’t last long, for it raised two urgent questions. First, with whom would Israel and the United States now negotiate over the West Bank, given their boycott of the PLO? The scale and intensity of the intifada had generated renewed interest in Middle East peace. With Jordan out of the picture, there was a strong drive to push the PLO to make concessions in order to gain admittance to talks. The PLO’s most powerful patron, the Soviet Union, urged it to recognize Israel. The United States did so as well. Secretary of State George Shultz gave a policy speech in which he cautioned that the Palestinian uprising served as a reminder that the status quo could not continue. He called for addressing the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including political rights,” and said that Palestinians should be permitted to participate in direct negotiations if they were to renounce terrorism, recognize Israel, and accept Resolution 242. “History will not repeat itself,” he said, alluding to the unique opportunity presented by the intifada and Jordan’s disengagement. “Practical, realistic steps by Palestinians are required.”108

The second question raised by the Jordanian decision was more troubling: now that King Hussein had relinquished claims to the West Bank, would the right-wing government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir annex it? In his speech, Shultz warned both Israelis and Palestinians against unilateral moves: “Peace cannot be achieved through the creation of an independent Palestinian state,” he said, “or through permanent Israeli control or annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.” To prevent the latter, the PLO decided it had to act. Within weeks of Jordan’s disengagement, a PLO leader announced that the organization would preemptively declare a Palestinian state.109

The declaration was written mostly by the poet Mahmoud Darwish and delivered by Yasir Arafat at a PNC meeting in Algiers on November 15, 1988. Together with an accompanying communiqué, it became known as the PLO’s “historic compromise.” The Palestinians acknowledged that their right to sovereignty derived from what the PLO had for decades rejected as illegal and unjust: the 1947 UN plan that “partitioned Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish.” The PNC approved the declaration, accepted negotiations for a political settlement on the basis of Resolution 242, and consented to a state on only 22 percent of the homeland, calling for the “withdrawal of Israel from all the Palestinian and Arab territories it occupied in 1967, including Arab Jerusalem.”110

To the nations the PLO was addressing it was easy to miss the new constraints that had led to this decision. Although the organization had gained new leverage from the intifada, it had no way of knowing how long that would last. If it did not seize the moment, it risked not just Israeli annexation of the West Bank but losing the opportunity to make political gains from the uprising before it was extinguished, with hundreds of Palestinians dead and the PLO back in its old rut.111 It was easy, too, to overlook the continuity between the proclamation and the many relinquishments made over the preceding years. The declaration was in reality less a new concession than an attempt to repackage and cash in on a series of old and unreciprocated compromises, chief of which was the endorsement of a two-state solution.

Yet to the members present, the PNC’s “session of the intifada” was still understood to be momentous. Before a world audience that was now finally paying attention, they had loudly offered the biggest compromise of all: abandoning the claim of refugees to sovereignty over their lands in the state of Israel. Liberating this lost land had been the central aim of the PLO’s main factions, almost all of them founded by refugees, since their inception. It was for that reason that some Fatah dissidents rejected the PLO decision, accusing the organization of having acceded to “surrender in the guise of independence” and exchanging “a homeland for a state.”112 A PLO official, Shafiq al-Hout, described the emotional scene:

When the moment came to vote, I left my seat. I had tears in my eyes and mixed emotions in my heart. A foreign journalist asked me if I was shedding tears of joy or sadness. I had to admit that they were both, but in a moment of anger, I said, “Thank God my father did not live to witness this day. I do not know what I could say to him if he asked me what was to become of his home city of Jaffa in this state that we have just declared.”113

The following month, Arafat renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist. The United States rescinded its boycott of the PLO, and an era came to an end. Through eighteen years of defeat and incremental compromise, the Palestinian national movement had, in al-Hout’s words, abandoned what it long considered a just solution in the hope of achieving a possible one.114

*   *   *

What Palestinians saw as a historic concession, sacrificing justice for the sake of peace and consenting to a state on less than one-fourth of their homeland, Israel viewed as an unreasonable, unjust, and maximalist demand for withdrawal from every inch of the territory it had conquered in 1967. Israel bridled at the notion of giving to the feeble PLO the same total evacuation that it had granted to Egypt, the strongest Arab country. Still less was it inclined to hand over to its weakest adversary territory it had valued even more than the biblical lands of Sinai and Lebanon.115 To contain the intifada, Israel was willing to offer no more than limited self-governance. The Palestinians had refused that for over a decade, although they had no capability to obtain more.

The stalemate was broken by more pressure on the Palestinians. Under the twin strains of economic asphyxiation and political isolation, the PLO would soon do the unthinkable and compromise on the “historic compromise,” agreeing to postpone independence and accept limited autonomy under Israeli occupation.

The decisive event was Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which placed the PLO in an acute dilemma. On one hand, some four hundred thousand Palestinians lived in Kuwait, and the PLO relied on funding from Kuwait’s Gulf Arab allies, which felt threatened by Iraq and joined the US-led coalition against it. On the other hand, the PLO had forged strategic and financial ties to Iraq, and many Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion. To oppose Iraq, moreover, was to risk inviting its retaliation against those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Kuwait. And Arafat was angry with the Gulf states because they had supported his Islamist rivals, offered minimal support to the intifada, and given over seven times more aid to the Afghan mujahiddin since the early 1980s than they had provided to the PLO since its founding.116

Arafat sought at first to take a position of ostensible neutrality. But not long after the invasion, the PLO was seen as backing Iraq unmistakably. At an Arab summit it initially voted against a resolution denouncing Iraq’s threats to the Gulf states and supporting Saudi Arabia’s request for US forces to defend it against Iraq; by late August 1990, however, the PLO and its main factions were arguing that Iraq’s invasion was a preemptive, defensive move against an American conspiracy.117

It was a decision from which the PLO never recovered. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled Kuwait after the war. Many Arab states, which had been contributing less and less money to the PLO, now cut off funds altogether, putting stress both on the weakened organization and the waning intifada. Strikes in the West Bank and Gaza could not be maintained when the PLO couldn’t afford to pay the families of workers. In the summer of 1991, a leader of the PFLP remarked: “We burdened the uprising with more than it could bear.” The PLO was politically isolated—not just condemned by the Arab states but estranged from both superpowers. The United States had already cut off dialogue with the organization after guerrillas from one of its factions launched a thwarted attack at an Israeli beach in May 1990. Then, as the Soviet Union was foundering, senior PLO officials made the mistake of publicly exulting in an abortive August 1991 coup attempt.118

The Soviet collapse several months later brought new hardships. The states of the region shifted toward alliance with the United States, Israel’s closest ally. The Arabs were without a military option against Israel. The PLO lost a vital patron. And the fall of communism dealt a near fatal blow to the Marxist, Leninist, and pan-Arab factions once promoted by the Soviets. In its final two years, the Soviet Union lifted restrictions on Jewish emigration, leading several hundred thousand citizens to move to Israel by the end of 1991, with hundreds of thousands more to follow.119 These immigrants posed a twofold threat to Palestinian statehood: first, the increase in the number of Jews in Israel and the territories it occupied lessened the country’s demographic need for partition; second, Prime Minister Shamir had vowed to settle the new immigrants in the West Bank and Gaza, complicating any future withdrawal.

The PLO was quick to adapt to its weakened position. At the US- and Soviet-sponsored peace conference in Madrid in October 1991, the Palestinians accepted terms of attendance set by Israel and the United States: they would not form their own delegation but would rather be part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian group; they would be represented by neither PLO officials nor Jerusalem residents nor members of the diaspora but instead by leaders in the West Bank and Gaza not affiliated with the organization, relegating PLO heavyweights to a behind-the-scenes role outside the negotiating room; their talks with Israel would be on limited autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank, excluding Jerusalem, and not on statehood or a final peace agreement; the conference would have no power to impose a solution to the conflict; and Israeli settlements would continue to be built during the negotiations. These were largely the terms of the 1978 Camp David Accords that the PLO had adamantly refused. Explaining the reversal, Faruq Qaddumi said the Palestinians had no choice: it was either join the peace process or exit history.120

The Madrid conference led to a series of bilateral negotiations in Washington that lasted until mid-1993 and went nowhere. In large part this was because the talks offered the PLO no incentive to support an agreement from which it would have been shut out. Shimon Peres remarked that expecting the PLO to allow local leaders to reach an agreement with Israel was like asking the turkey to help prepare Thanksgiving dinner. Arafat believed the United States wanted him to approve the talks, agree to a non-PLO delegation, and disappear, like “a male bee that fertilizes once and then dies.” A member of the Executive Committee wrote, “As if Abu Ammar [Arafat] was not paranoid enough already, with his insistence on keeping all the cards in his hand and remaining the sole decision maker, some people started whispering to him about the possibility of an alternative leadership in the Occupied Territories.” Yezid Sayigh wrote that Arafat “privately resented the delegation’s access to the US administration, and feared that such recognition could presage the emergence of an alternative ‘insider’ leadership.”121 To deal with the threat, he used his influence over the Palestinian negotiators to delay and obstruct the Washington talks, in the hope of forcing the United States or Israel to engage him directly.122

The strategy worked. In January 1993, Israel launched direct negotiations with the PLO in Sarpsborg, Norway, south of Oslo, under the auspices of Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas for the PLO and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his deputy, Yossi Beilin, for Israel. The Israeli government saw an opportunity in the PLO’s predicament. Rabin correctly observed that the organization was “on the ropes” and was therefore likely to make new concessions. Israel’s head of military intelligence told Rabin that Arafat was now the best possible interlocutor, because the PLO’s situation had become so dire that it risked imminent collapse.

This was hardly an exaggeration. Beginning in March 1993, while the fateful talks were taking place in Norway, the PLO cut payments to as many as one in three of its personnel. Assistance to the West Bank and Gaza dropped over 90 percent by mid-1993. The PLO budget had been halved, the Palestinian National Fund could not meet its obligations, numerous media outlets were closed, and thousands of Fatah guerrillas had been laid off. In Lebanon, the lack of funds resulted in medical emergencies that went untreated, the deaths of Palestinians who couldn’t afford dialysis for their failing kidneys, unrest in the refugee camps, and protests in front of the PLO representative’s home.123 The leadership ranks of the national movement had thinned after senior figures like Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad were assassinated. All the while, Islamists were steadily gaining on the PLO in Gaza and the West Bank.

Under the greatest strain in its history, the PLO made its greatest concession. Insolvency, political isolation, and competition with local leaders induced compromises that even the 1982 military defeat in Lebanon had not. Less than eight months after the first meeting in Norway, the PLO agreed to what it had categorically rejected since Camp David: a plan for limited self-governance under Israeli occupation, closely based on Menachem Begin’s 1977 autonomy proposal, which had been designed for the specific purpose of forestalling Carter’s push for Palestinian self-determination. Although the plan offered real gains to the Palestinians and contained unprecedented concessions from Israel—unimaginable in the absence of severe American pressure—it fell far short of American and Palestinian goals. To Zbigniew Brzezinski, it amounted to little more than a “Basutoland for the Arabs”—a reference to a former African kingdom under British colonial administration.

When the PLO finally relented in 1993, giving up fifteen years of resistance to the plan, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz said it was a triumph surpassed only by the establishment of the Jewish state—“the second biggest victory in the history of Zionism.”124 This assessment was merited insofar as the Palestinians had taken the most concrete step yet toward giving up 78 percent of their homeland, but it ignored the fact that the victory also contained unprecedented Zionist concessions—the first post-1967 steps toward partition of Mandatory Palestine, establishment of Palestinian self-governance, and diminishment of Israeli control over large parts of the West Bank and Gaza—concessions that were not only coerced but that constituted an outcome far less desirable to the Israeli government than the status quo before the intifada: full control of the Occupied Territories, with no Palestinian autonomy and minimal resistance.

Some Palestinians overstated the benefits of the deal. Mahmoud Abbas, whom the Norwegian, Israeli, and Palestinian participants at Oslo had called the “Holy Spirit” of the talks, referred to the agreement as an “achievement” that “ended a twentieth-century conflict.” The PLO negotiator Nabil Shaʿath said the accord meant “a full peace with Israel, with totally open borders.” Arafat’s assessment was more cautious: “I know many of you here think Oslo is a bad agreement,” he said after arriving in Gaza in July 1994. “It is a bad agreement. But it’s the best we can get in the worst situation.”125

Not everyone agreed. Several in the Palestinian leadership foresaw the catastrophe they would face at the close of Oslo’s so-called interim period of five years: expansion of Israeli settlements; increased unemployment and economic dependence on Israel; greater restrictions on Palestinian movement; newfound Israeli control over PLO leaders no longer in exile; the discrediting of former strugglers for Palestinian national liberation, now regarded as the occupation’s collaborators and lowly clerks; and no end in sight to Israeli military control.126

The objection of these critics, many of them leading advocates of accommodation with Israel, was not that Oslo restricted the Palestinians to only 22 percent of their homeland. It was that the deal had not provided even that. By failing to obtain Israeli agreement just to the mere possibility of eventually establishing a Palestinian state, the PLO had consented to what risked becoming indefinite occupation. Edward Said, among the harshest critics of Oslo and also then one of the most prominent supporters of a two-state solution, wrote: “For the first time in the twentieth century, an anticolonial liberation movement had … made an agreement to cooperate with a military occupation before that occupation had ended.” Unlike Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which had refused to supply the white South African government with police officers until parity between white and black South Africans had been reached, the PLO had agreed to become Israel’s enforcer. Through Oslo, wrote Said, “the Israelis are rid of an unwanted insurrectionary problem, represented by Gaza, that Arafat must now work at solving for thеm.” The leaders of the intifada would become officers in the Palestinian intelligence services, tasked with suppressing dissent; men who had once thrown themselves as wrenches into the gears of occupation became its chief lubricants instead. Two independent members of the PLO Executive Committee, Mahmoud Darwish and Shafiq al-Hout, resigned in protest.127

On the other hand, Oslo’s proponents argued, what had the Palestinians really conceded? The PLO had already accepted a state on 22 percent of the homeland in 1988, and by the time of Oslo the organization was a spent force, with little ability to procure better terms. By signing Oslo, the PLO acquired, for the first time, recognition from Israel and the large boost in international legitimacy that went with it; return from exile; and, in the eyes of Arafat, at least the prospect of a Palestinian state. It also gave the PLO a government based in part of its homeland, the transfer of authority from Israel’s military to the Palestinians, limited Israeli withdrawals, and a major step toward partitioning Mandatory Palestine, all without renouncing the claim to a sovereign state. Though this was less than full independence, it was more than Israel had previously been willing to give. Critics maligned the modest gains of Oslo, but there was little reason to believe that refusal of it would have brought full independence within grasp.

In bringing the PLO into the West Bank and Gaza, Oslo carried risks for both sides. For Israel, the risk was that when temporary autonomy began to look permanent, after the five-year interim period had expired, Palestinian factions could turn the weapons of the authority’s security forces against Israel. For the Palestinians, the risk was that the struggle for national liberation would be replaced by the struggle for mortgages, government salaries, donor aid, reduced Israeli incursions into cities ostensibly under Palestinian control, and higher numbers of exit permits. The Palestinians would become so dependent on their self-governing authority, and that authority so dependent on Israel, that there would be little chance of confronting their occupiers in a manner that jeopardized the existence of the Oslo system. The dangers for both parties eventually materialized, but the Palestinian liability turned out to be the greater and more enduring one. Israel proved quite capable of dealing with the military threat of Palestinian security officers and their light arms. The Palestinians, by contrast, are still struggling to wean themselves from their enfeebling dependency on the Oslo apparatus.

More important than what Oslo modified was what both it and the Camp David Accords left out. Neither one offered any guarantee that the interim period would finish after five years; neither demanded a removal of settlements nor even a halt in their expansion; neither stated that Palestinians would have a capital in any part of Jerusalem; neither suggested how the refugee problem would be resolved; neither described what Israel’s borders would be or whether there would be a withdrawal to something close to the pre-1967 lines; neither indicated that the Palestinians would eventually achieve self-determination; and, most critically, neither specified what would happen if negotiations on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza did not successfully conclude.

Oslo was ostensibly meant to lead to a final agreement, but it provided Israel with little incentive to reach one. In this respect, the germ of Oslo—Begin’s 1977 plan for Palestinian self-rule—had a much better chance at ushering in a full disengagement from the Occupied Territories. By offering citizenship to all residents of Mandatory Palestine during the interim period, Begin’s plan would have given Israel a strong demographic incentive to bring that period to an end—or else accept a Palestinian majority controlling the parliament and government of the Jewish state. In Oslo, by contrast, Israel was granted indefinite control of all the land without having to give equal rights to all its residents. So long as Oslo’s so-called interim period continued, Israel could postpone choosing between the two painful options—a full partition or equal rights for Palestinians—that it most sought to avoid. Israel would have every incentive to keep Oslo going indefinitely, forestall the choice, and perpetuate Palestinian self-governance under occupation. In the meantime, it could build settlements across the Occupied Territories in order to unilaterally shape the contours of any future partition.128

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Twenty years after Oslo, the population of Jewish settlers in Jerusalem and the West Bank had reached well over half a million, and Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was advancing a boom in construction of new settlement housing while conducting still more rounds of inconclusive, US-mediated talks.129 In the years between, the Palestinians tried every method of breaking out of the Oslo trap. They conducted years of peaceful weekly demonstrations in West Bank villages where land was expropriated. They sent spokesmen and diplomats around the world to present their case. They put forward UN resolutions and gave evidence to the International Criminal Court. They joined international institutions where they could pursue their claims, and, at the behest of their financial donors, especially the United States, they refrained from joining others. They engaged in economic cooperation with Israel, and they made limited attempts at boycotts as well. They worked hand-in-glove with Israeli security forces to arrest Palestinian militants and stifle even nonviolent protests, and at other times they also looked away to let some of the militants attack. They elected as president the man who had stood most resolutely against violence, Mahmoud Abbas, and they elected as prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, a leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas.

They strengthened governing institutions, dismantled militias, and implemented a reform of their security forces under Salam Fayyad, an appointed technocrat who replaced the Hamas prime minister and was hailed in capitals across the globe. They fought multiple wars from Gaza, and they enforced years-long cease-fires in between. They launched a 2000–2005 intifada that was taken over by militias, and they initiated an “orphaned uprising” of unorganized, individual attacks in 2015. Following Abbas’s 2005 election, they provided Israel with a decade of unprecedented quiet in the West Bank. When that didn’t work, they threatened to dismantle the self-governing authority on which they had become financially dependent, and not long after that they vowed never to give it up. Above all, and with greater consistency than with any other approach, they engaged in every possible form of negotiation: international summit conferences, proximity talks, draft peace treaties, secret bilateral talks mediated by the United States, secret bilateral meetings without mediators, and high-profile official negotiations facilitated by US presidents and secretaries of state.

In all that time, Israel never presented the Palestinians with what it offered to every neighboring Arab state: a full withdrawal from occupied territory. Egypt regained sovereignty over each grain of sand in Sinai, with no Israeli settlement left standing. Jordan established peace based on the international boundary as defined under the British Mandate, forcing Israel to give back 147 square miles. Lebanon obtained disengagement to the international border without providing Israel with recognition, peace, or even a cease-fire agreement. And Syria received a 1998 proposal from Netanyahu—on which the prime minister subsequently backtracked—for full departure from the Golan Heights.130

But the Palestinians have never secured such an offer, despite being the only party to the Arab-Israeli conflict that has a legal and moral claim to more territory than that which Israel conquered in 1967. Shimon Peres was among the few Israeli officials to acknowledge the magnitude of the concession made by the Palestinians when they agreed to a state on the pre-1967 lines, 22 percent of their homeland. Before this shift, he said, “the Palestinian state’s size should have been according to the 1947 map,” in which Palestinians were to receive 44 percent. “Arafat moved from the 1947 map to the 1967 one,” giving up half the land allotted to the Palestinians. “I don’t know any Arab leader,” he said, “who would give up 2 or 3 percent.”131

Peres said Arafat’s relinquishment was Israel’s “greatest achievement.” But instead of seizing on this greatest of achievements, Israel pocketed it, taking the compromise as a starting point for negotiations on dividing the remaining 22 percent. Those talks have failed repeatedly, in no small part because Palestinians have had no leverage with which to insist that a state on the pre-1967 lines with Jerusalem as its capital was not intended as an opening bid but rather as the bare minimum of a peace agreement like those reached with Jordan and Egypt.

Palestinians have failed where other Arab nations have succeeded because they never posed a real threat to Israel and were too weak to protect their concessions from further erosion. One year before fully withdrawing from Lebanon, Ehud Barak explained the reason for prioritizing peace with the Syrians over the Palestinians and for the discrepancy in Israel’s approach to the two nations: “The Syrians have 700 war planes, 4,000 tanks, 2,500 artillery pieces, and surface-to-surface missiles that are neatly organized and can cover the country with nerve gas,” he said. “The Palestinians are the source of legitimacy for the continuation of the conflict, but they are the weakest of all our adversaries. As a military threat they are ludicrous. They pose no military threat of any kind.”132

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During the past two and a half decades of intermittent negotiations, Palestinian powerlessness has induced further compromises, from consent to Israel’s annexation of settlement blocs, to giving up large parts of Jerusalem that were conquered in 1967, to acquiescing in demilitarization and other restrictions on the sovereignty of their future state. Despite these concessions, the Palestinians remained far too weak to obtain what has been granted to them by international law, including, for example, a 1980 UN Security Council resolution calling on Israel to dismantle all settlements in the territories occupied in 1967.133 In fact, on every major issue of peace negotiations—from borders, Jerusalem, and refugees to settlements, water, and security—the Palestinians have demanded no more, and often considerably less, than what international law and the majority of the world’s nations ostensibly support. Yet Israeli governments continue to claim that Palestinian demands are unreasonable and that Israel has no partner for peace.

Through years of coercion and defeat, Palestinians have been compelled to accept the positions of the UN Security Council, Europe, and the United States. But these same parties have failed to put similar pressure on Israel to respect those positions as well. As a result, the Palestinians have been stuck in limbo: not strong enough to resist international demands and too weak to prevail upon Israel to comply. The Palestinian leadership has thus been left to engage in one round of stalemated talks after another, while its frustrated constituents cycle through bursts of violence, Israeli countеrviolence, and periods of wearied, submissive quiescence, each new capitulation strengthening the Israeli view that force is the only language the Palestinians understand.

IV. Peace Industry Illusions

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.134

—ABBA EBAN

It has now been more than a quarter century since Israelis and Palestinians first started negotiating under US auspices in Madrid. There is no shortage of explanations for why each particular round of talks failed. The rationalizations appear and reappear in the speeches of presidents, the reports of think tanks, and the memoirs of former officials and negotiators: bad timing; artificial deadlines; insufficient preparation; no agreed terms of reference; inadequate confidence-building measures; coalition politics; or leaders devoid of courage. Many blame imbalanced mediation; poor coordination among separate negotiating channels; scant attention from the US president; want of support from regional states; exclusion of key stakeholders; or clumsily choreographed public diplomacy. Among the most common refrains are that extremists were allowed to set the agenda and there was a neglect of bottom-up economic development and state-building. And then there are those who point at negative messaging, insurmountable skepticism, or the absence of personal chemistry (a particularly fanciful explanation for anyone who has witnessed the warm familiarity of Palestinian and Israeli negotiators as they reunite in luxury hotels and reminisce about old jokes and ex-comrades over breakfast buffets and post-meeting toasts). If none of the above works, there is always the worst cliché of them all—lack of trust.135

Postmortem accounts vary in their apportionment of blame; itemization of tactics mistakenly applied; and mix of frustration, hope, and despair. But nearly all of them share a deep-seated belief that both societies desire a two-state agreement and therefore need only the right conditions—together with a bit of nudging, trust-building, and perhaps a few more positive inducements—to take the final step.

In this view, Oslo would have led to peace had it not been for the tragic assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The 1998 Wye River Memorandum and its commitment to further Israeli withdrawals in the West Bank would have been implemented if only the Labor Party had joined Netanyahu’s coalition to back the agreement. The Camp David summit in July 2000 would have succeeded if the United States had been less sensitive to Israeli domestic concerns, insisted on a written Israeli proposal, consulted the Arab states at an earlier phase, and taken the more firm and balanced position adopted half a year later, in December 2000, when President Clinton outlined parameters for an agreement. Both parties could have accepted the Clinton parameters with only minimal reservations had the proposal not been presented so fleetingly, as a onetime offer that would disappear when Clinton stepped down less than a month later. The negotiations in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001 were on the brink of agreement but failed because time ran out, with Clinton just out of office, and Ehud Barak facing almost certain electoral defeat to Ariel Sharon. The two major peace plans of 2003—the US-sponsored Roadmap to Middle East Peace and the unofficial Geneva Accord—could have been embraced had it not been for a bloody intifada and a hawkish Likud prime minister in power.

And on it goes: the Annapolis negotiations of 2007–2008 came very close to a breakthrough but were thwarted by Ehud Olmert’s corruption scandals, unprecedentedly low popularity, and resignation just days after he suggested the most far-reaching proposal of the talks. Direct negotiations between Abbas and Netanyahu in 2010 could have lasted more than thirteen days if only Israel had agreed to temporarily halt construction of some illegal settlements in exchange for an extra $3 billion package from the United States. Several years of secret back-channel negotiations between the envoys of Netanyahu and Abbas could have made history if only they weren’t forced to conclude prematurely in late 2013, because of an artificial deadline imposed by separate talks led by Secretary of State John Kerry. And, finally, the Kerry negotiations of 2013–2014 could have led to a framework agreement if the secretary of state had spent even a sixth as much time negotiating the text with the Palestinians as he did with the Israelis, and if he hadn’t made inconsistent promises to the two sides regarding the guidelines for the talks, the release of Palestinian prisoners, curtailing Israeli settlement construction, and the presence of US mediators in the negotiating room.136

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Each of these rounds of diplomacy began with vows to succeed where predecessors had failed. Each included affirmations of the urgency of peace or warnings of the closing window, perhaps even the last chance, for a two-state solution. Each ended with a list of tactical mistakes and unforeseen developments that resulted in failure. And, just as surely, each neglected to offer the most logical and parsimonious explanation for failure: no agreement was reached because at least one of the parties preferred to maintain the impasse.

The Palestinians chose no agreement over one that did not meet the bare minimum supported by international law and most nations of the world. For years this consensus view supported the establishment of a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines with minor, equivalent land swaps that would allow Israel to annex some settlements. The Palestinian capital would be in East Jerusalem, with sovereignty over the al-Aqsa Mosque compound and overland contiguity with the rest of the Palestinian state. Israel would withdraw its forces from the West Bank and release Palestinian prisoners. And Palestinian refugees would be offered compensation, a right to return not to their homes but to their homeland in the State of Palestine, acknowledgment of Israel’s partial responsibility for the refugee problem, and, on a scale that would not perceptibly change Israel’s demography, a return of some refugees to their pre-1948 lands and homes.

Although years of violence and repression have led Palestinians to make some small concessions that chipped away at this compromise, they have not fundamentally abandoned it. They continue to hope that the support of the majority of the world’s states for a plan along these lines will eventually result in an agreement. In the meantime, the status quo has been made more bearable thanks to the architects of the peace process, who have spent billions to prop up the PA, create conditions of prosperity for decision-makers in Ramallah, and dissuade the population from confronting the occupying force.

Israel, for its part, has consistently opted for stalemate rather than the sort of agreement outlined above. The reason is obvious: the deal’s cost is much higher than the cost of making no deal. The damages Israel would risk incurring through such an accord are massive. They include perhaps the greatest political upheaval in the country’s history; enormous demonstrations against—if not majority rejection of—Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem and over the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary; and violent rebellion by some Jewish settlers and their supporters. There could be bloodshed during forcible evacuations of West Bank settlements and rifts within the body implementing the evictions, the Israeli army, whose share of religious infantry officers now surpasses one-third. Israel would lose military control over the West Bank, resulting in less intelligence gathering, less room for maneuver in future wars, and less time to react to a surprise attack. It would face increased security risks from a Gaza–West Bank corridor, which would allow militants, ideology, and weapons-production techniques to spread from Gaza training camps to the West Bank hills overlooking Israel’s airport. Israeli intelligence services would no longer control which Palestinians enter and exit the Occupied Territories. The country would cease extraction of West Bank natural resources, including water, lose profits from managing Palestinian customs and trade, and pay the large economic and social price of relocating tens of thousands of settlers.137

Only a fraction of these costs could be offset by a peace agreement’s benefits. Chief among these would be the blow dealt to efforts to delegitimate the country and the normalization of relations with other nations of the region. Israeli businesses would be able to operate more openly in Arab states, and government cooperation with such countries as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would go from covert to overt. Through a treaty with the Palestinians, Israel could attain the relocation of every Tel Aviv embassy to Jerusalem, and receive additional financial and security benefits from the United States and Europe. But all of these combined do not come close to outweighing the deficits.

Nor have the moral costs of occupation for Israeli society been high enough to change the calculus. Ending international opprobrium is indeed important to the country’s elites, and as they find themselves increasingly shunned, the incentive to withdraw from the Occupied Territories will likely increase. But so far Israel has proven quite capable of living with the decades-old label of “pariah,” the stain of occupation, and the associated impact on the country’s internal harmony and relations with Diaspora Jews. For all the recent fretting about decreasing American Jewish support for Israel, the conversation today is not so different than it was at the time of the first Likud-led governments decades ago. Similarly enduring—and endurable—are the worries that occupation delegitimates Zionism and causes discord within Israel. As far back as over thirty years ago, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti wrote of growing numbers of Israelis who had doubts about Zionism, “expressed in the forms of alienation, emigration of young Israelis, the emergence of racist Jews, violence in society, the widening gap between Israel and the Diaspora, and a general feeling of inadequacy.”138 Israelis have grown adept at tuning such criticisms out.

It was, is, and will remain irrational for Israel to absorb the costs of an agreement when the price of the alternative is so comparatively low. The consequences of choosing impasse are hardly threatening: mutual recriminations over the cause of stalemate, new rounds of talks, and retaining control of all of the West Bank from within and much of Gaza from without. Meanwhile Israel continues to receive more US military aid per year than goes to all the world’s nations combined and presides over a growing economy, rising standards of living, and a population that reports one of the world’s highest levels of subjective well-being.139 Israel will go on absorbing the annoying but so-far tolerable costs of complaints about settlement policies. And it will likely witness several more countries bestowing the State of Palestine with symbolic recognition, a few more negative votes in impotent university student councils, limited calls for boycotts of settlement goods, and occasional bursts of violence that the greatly overpowered Palestinians are too weak to sustain. There is no contest.

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The real explanation for the past decades of failed peace negotiations is not mistaken tactics or imperfect circumstances but that no strategy can succeed if it is premised on Israel behaving irrationally. Most arguments put to Israel for agreeing to a partition are that it is preferable to an imagined, frightening future in which the country ceases to be either a Jewish state, a democracy, or both. But these assertions contain the implicit acknowledgment that it makes no sense for Israel to strike a deal today rather than wait to see if such imagined threats actually materialize; if and when they do come to be, Israel can then make a deal. Perhaps in the interim, the hardship of Palestinian life will cause enough emigration that Israel may annex the West Bank without giving up the state’s Jewish majority. Or, perhaps, the West Bank will be absorbed by Jordan, and Gaza by Egypt, a better outcome than Palestinian statehood, in the view of many Israeli officials.

It is hard to argue that forestalling a settlement in the present makes a worse deal more likely in the future: the international community and the PLO have already established the ceiling of their demands—22 percent of the land now under Israeli control—while providing far less clarity about the floor, which Israel can try to lower. Israel has continued to reject the same Palestinian claims made since the 1980s, albeit with a few added Palestinian concessions. In fact, history suggests that a strategy of waiting would serve the country well: from the British government’s 1937 Peel Commission partition plan and the UN partition plan of 1947 to UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the Oslo Accords, every formative initiative endorsed by the great powers has given more to the Jewish community in Palestine than the previous one. Even if an Israeli prime minister knew that one day the world’s nations would impose sanctions on Israel if it did not accept a two-state agreement, it would still be irrational to strike such a deal now. Israel could instead wait until that day comes and thereby enjoy many more years of West Bank control and the security advantages that go with it, particularly valuable at a time of cataclysm in the region.

Israel is frequently admonished to make peace in order to avoid becoming a single, Palestinian-majority state ruling all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. But that threat does not have much credibility when it is Israel that holds all the power and will therefore decide whether or not it annexes territory and offers citizenship to all its inhabitants. A single state will not materialize until a majority of Israelis want it, and so far they overwhelmingly do not. The reason Israel has not annexed the West Bank and Gaza is not for fear of international slaps on the wrist, but because the strong preference of most of the country’s citizens is to have a Jewish-majority homeland, the raison d’être of Zionism. If and when Israel is confronted with the threat of a single state, it can enact a unilateral withdrawal and count on the support of the great powers in doing so. But that threat is still quite distant.

In fact, Israelis and Palestinians are now farther from a single state than they have been at any time since the occupation began in 1967. From Begin’s autonomy plan to Oslo and the withdrawal from Gaza, Israel and Palestine have been inching steadily toward partition. Walls and fences separate Israel from Gaza and over 90 percent of the West Bank. Palestinians have a quasi state in the Occupied Territories, with its own parliament, courts, intelligence services, and Foreign Ministry. Israelis no longer shop in Nablus and Gaza the way they did before Oslo. Palestinians no longer travel freely to Tel Aviv. And the supposed reason that partition is often claimed to be impossible—the difficulty of a probable relocation of over 150,000 settlers—is grossly overstated: in the 1990s Israel absorbed several times as many Russian immigrants, many of them far more difficult to integrate than settlers, who already have Israeli jobs, fully formed networks of family support, and a command of Hebrew.140

As long as the Palestinian government and the Oslo system are in place, the world’s nations will not demand that Israel grant citizenship to Palestinians. Indeed, Israel has had a non-Jewish majority in the territory it controls for several years.141 Yet even in their sternest warnings, Western governments invariably refer to an undemocratic Israel as a mere hypothetical possibility. Most of the world’s nations will refuse to call Israel’s control of the West Bank a form of apartheid—defined by the International Criminal Court as a regime of systematic oppression and domination of a racial group with the intention of maintaining that regime—so long as there is a chance, however slim, that Oslo remains a transitional phase to an independent Palestinian state.

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Contrary to what nearly every US mediator has asserted, it is not that Israel greatly desires a peace agreement but has a pretty good fallback option. It is that Israel greatly prefers the fallback option to a peace agreement. No tactical brilliance in negotiations, no amount of expert preparation, no perfect alignment of the stars can overcome that obstacle. Only two things can: a more attractive agreement, or a less attractive fallback. The first of these options has been tried extensively, from offering Israel full normalization with most Arab and Islamic states to promising upgraded relations with Europe, US security guarantees, and increased financial and military assistance. But for Israel these inducements pale in comparison to the perceived costs.

The second option is to make the fallback worse. This is what President Eisenhower did when he threatened economic sanctions to get Israel to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza. This is what President Ford did when he reassessed US relations with Israel, refusing to provide it with new arms deals until it agreed to a second Sinai withdrawal. This is what President Carter did when he raised the spectre of terminating US military assistance if Israel did not immediately evacuate Lebanon in September 1977. And this is what Carter did when he made clear to both sides at Camp David that the United States would withhold aid and downgrade relations if they did not sign an agreement. This, likewise, is what Secretary of State James Baker did in 1991, when he forced a reluctant Prime Minister Shamir to attend negotiations in Madrid by withholding a $10 billion loan guarantee that Israel needed to absorb the immigration of Soviet Jews.142 That was the last time the United States applied pressure of this sort.

The Palestinians, too, have endeavored to make Israel’s fallback option less attractive through two uprisings and other periodic bouts of violence. But the extraordinary price they paid proved unsustainable, and on the whole they have been too weak to worsen Israel’s fallback for very long. As a result, Palestinians have been unable to induce more from Israel than tactical concessions, steps meant to reduce friction between the populations in order not to end occupation but to mitigate it and restore its low cost.

Forcing Israel to make larger, conflict-ending concessions would require making its fallback option so unappealing that Israel would view a peace agreement as an escape from something worse. That demands more leverage than the Palestinians have so far possessed, while those who do have sufficient power have not been eager to use it. Since Oslo, in fact, the United States has done quite the reverse, working to maintain the low cost of Israel’s fallback option. Successive US administrations have financed the PA, trained its resistance-crushing security forces, pressured the PLO not to confront Israel in international institutions, vetoed UN Security Council resolutions that were not to Israel’s liking, shielded Israel’s arsenal from calls for a nuclear-free Middle East, ensured Israel’s military superiority over all of its neighbors, provided the country with over $3 billion in military aid each year, and exercised its influence to defend Israel from criticism.

No less important, the United States has consistently sheltered Israel from accountability for its policies in the West Bank by putting up a facade of opposition to settlements that in practice is a bulwark against more significant pressure to dismantle them. Both the United States and most of Europe draw a sharp distinction between Israel and the Occupied Territories, refusing to recognize Israeli sovereignty beyond the pre-1967 lines. When the limousine of the US president travels from West to East Jerusalem, the Israeli flag comes down from the driver-side front corner. US officials must obtain special permission to meet Israelis at the IDF’s central command headquarters in the Jerusalem settlement of Neve Yaakov or at the Justice Ministry in the heart of downtown East Jerusalem. And US regulations, not consistently enforced, stipulate that products from the settlements should not bear a made-in-Israel label.

Israel vehemently protests against this policy of so-called differentiation between Israel and the Occupied Territories, believing that it delegitimates the settlements and the state, and could lead to boycotts and sanctions of the country. But the policy does precisely the opposite: it acts not as a complement to punitive measures against Israel but as an alternative to them. Differentiation creates an illusion of US castigation, but in reality it insulates Israel from answering for its actions in the Occupied Territories, by assuring that only settlements and not the government that creates them will suffer consequences for repeated violations of international law. Opponents of settlements and occupation who would otherwise call to impose costs on Israel instead channel their energies into a distraction that creates headlines but has no chance of changing Israeli behavior. It is in this sense that the policy of differentiation, of which Europeans and US liberals are quite proud, does not so much constitute pressure on Israel as serve as a substitute for it, thereby helping to prolong an occupation it is ostensibly meant to bring to an end.

Support for the policy of differentiation is widespread, from governments to numerous self-identified liberal Zionists, US advocacy groups like J Street, and the editorial board of The New York Times. Differentiation allows them to thread the needle of being both pro-Israel and anti-occupation, the accepted view in polite society. There are of course variations among these opponents of the settlements, but all agree that Israeli products that are created in the West Bank should be treated differently, whether through labeling or even some sort of boycott. What supporters of differentiation commonly reject, however, is no less important. Not one of these groups or governments calls for penalizing the Israeli financial institutions, real estate businesses, construction companies, communications firms, and, above all, government ministries that profit from operations in the Occupied Territories but are not headquartered in them. Sanctions on those institutions could change Israeli policy overnight. But the possibility of imposing them has been delayed if not thwarted by the fact that critics of occupation have instead advocated for a reasonable-sounding yet ineffective alternative.

Supporters of differentiation hold the view that while it may be justifiable to do more than label the products of West Bank settlements, it is inconceivable that sanctions might be imposed on the democratically elected government that established the settlements, legalized the outposts, confiscated Palestinian land, provided its citizens with financial incentives to move to the Occupied Territories, connected the illegally built houses to roads, water, electricity, and sanitation, and provided settlers with heavy army protection.143 They have accepted the argument that to resolve the conflict more force is needed, but they cannot bring themselves to apply it to the state actually maintaining the regime of settlement, occupation, and land expropriation that they oppose.

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Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not so much as considered using the sort of pressure it once did, and its achievements during the past quarter century have been accordingly meager.144 US policymakers debate how to influence Israel but without using almost any of the power at their disposal, including conditioning aid on changes in Israeli behavior, a standard tool of diplomacy that officials deem unthinkable in this case. Listening to them discuss how to devise an end to occupation is like listening to the operator of a bulldozer ask how to demolish a building with a hammer. Moshe Dayan once said, “Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.” Those words have become only more resonant in the decades since they were uttered.145

Until the United States and Europe formulate a strategy to make Israel’s circumstances less desirable than a peace agreement, they will shoulder responsibility for the oppressive military regime they continue to preserve and fund. When peaceful opposition to Israel’s policies is squelched and those with the capacity to dismantle the occupation don’t raise a finger against it, violence invariably becomes more attractive to those who have few other means of upsetting the status quo.

Through pressure on the parties, a peaceful partition of Palestine is achievable. But too many insist on sparing Israelis and Palestinians the pain of outside force, so that they may instead continue to be generous with one another in the suffering they inflict.