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Lost Opportunities for Peace in the Arab- Israeli Conºict

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Lost Opportunities for Peace in the Arab- Israeli Conºict Lost Opportunities for Jerome Slater Peace in the Arab- Israeli Conºict Israel and Syria, 1948–2001 Until the year 2000, during which both the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian negotiating pro- cesses collapsed, it appeared that the overall Arab-Israeli conºict was ªnally going to be settled, thus bringing to a peaceful resolution one of the most en- during and dangerous regional conºicts in recent history.The Israeli-Egyptian conºict had concluded with the signing of the 1979 Camp David peace treaty, the Israeli-Jordanian conºict had formally ended in 1994 (though there had been a de facto peace between those two countries since the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war), and both the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian conºicts seemedLost Opportunities for Peace on the verge of settlement. Yet by the end of 2000, both sets of negotiations had collapsed, leading to the second Palestinian intifada (uprising), the election of Ariel Sharon as Israel’s prime minister in February 2001, and mounting Israeli-Palestinian violence in 2001 and 2002.What went wrong? Much attention has been focused on the lost 1 opportunity for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, but surprisingly little atten- tion has been paid to the collapse of the Israeli-Syrian peace process.In fact, the Israeli-Syrian negotiations came much closer to producing a comprehen- Jerome Slater is University Research Scholar at the State University of New York at Buffalo.Since serving as a Fulbright scholar in Israel in 1989, he has written widely on the Arab-Israeli conºict for professional journals such as the Jerusalem Journal of International Relations and Political Science Quarterly. He also serves on the advisory board of Tikkun and writes regularly for the magazine.At present, he is at work on a book about the United States and the Arab-Israeli conºict. 1.There are a number of analyses of the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2000/01 that challenge the conventional view that an intransigent and radically revanchist Yasser Arafat turned down a far-reaching and fair Israeli offer of a two-state compromise that would have given the Palestinians a genuinely independent and viable Palestinian state.See especially Akiva Eldar, “On the Basis of the Nonexistent Camp David Understandings,” Ha’aretz, November 16, 2001; Akram Hanieh, “The Camp David Papers,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol.30, No.2 (Winter 2001), pp.75–97; Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” New York Re- view of Books, August 9, 2001; “The Palestinian Response to the Clinton Proposal,” December 30, 2000, reprinted in Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories (Washington, D.C.: Founda- tion for Middle East Peace, January–February 2001); Ron Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?” Survival, Vol.43, No.3 (Autumn 2001), pp.31–45; William B.Quandt, “Clinton and the Arab-Israeli Conºict,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol.30, No.2 (Winter 2001), pp.26–40; Yezid Sayigh, “Arafat and the Anatomy of a Revolt,” Survival, Vol.43, No.3 (Autumn 2001), pp.47–60; Jerome Slater, “What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol.116, No.2 (Summer 2001), pp.171–199; and Deborah Sontag, “And Yet So Far: A Special Report,” New York Times Magazine, July 26, 2001. International Security, Vol.27, No.1 (Summer 2002), pp.79–106 © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 79 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228802320231235 by guest on 27 September 2021 International Security 27:1 80 sive peace treaty than did the Israeli-Palestinian process.Their eventual failure is the latest in a long series of lost opportunities for peace, both between Israel and Syria and in the overall Arab-Israeli conºict. On some occasions, opportunities for peace were missed when one side in the conºict presented genuine and fair compromise proposals that took into account the vital interests of its adversary, only to be rejected when the other side either refused to enter into a negotiating process or conditioned its entry on maximal demands that effectively ended the chances for a settlement.On other occasions, serious negotiations for comprehensive settlements did take place, with the result that the distance between the two sides was so reduced that the remaining issues seemed to require only relatively small compromises. Yet in the end, because of the stubbornness of one or both sides, no agreement was reached. Which side has been most responsible for the failure of efforts to end the conºict? The assigning of historical responsibility is not an exercise in moral- ism, empty ªnger-pointing, or hindsight reasoning devoid of contempo- rary relevance; most of the issues are still central to the ongoing conºict, the resolution of which is critical not only to Arabs and Israelis but to the entire world. In this article I argue that although both sides in the Arab-Israeli conºict have often been inºexible, ideological, and prone to maximal demands, most observers—at least in Israel and the United States—have overstated Arab ri- 2 gidity while understating Israeli inºexibility. Because these perceptions are so widespread and harmful to the prospects for peace, this article emphasizes the Israeli rather than the Arab responsibility for the remaining deadlocks. I begin with a brief overview of the conventional mythology about the over- all Arab-Israeli conºict, and the challenges to it by the Israeli “new history” movement.The rest of the article reviews and analyzes the mythology of the Israeli-Syrian conºict.The main topics are the 1948 war and its immediate af - termath; the 1951–67 period; the 1967 war and the Israeli capture of the Golan Heights; the relationship between Syrian President Haªz al-Asad and the Is- raeli leadership, especially in the 1990 negotiations; Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the Israeli-Syrian negotiations; and the current situation.The conclusion recapitulates the overall argument and suggests what conditions might make a settlement feasible. 2.Of course, in most of the rest of the world (including to a considerable extent Europe), the con - ventional Israeli-U.S. views are not accepted. This was true even before the current disenchant- ment with Israel’s present policies toward the Palestinians. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228802320231235 by guest on 27 September 2021 Lost Opportunities for Peace 81 Myth versus Reality in the Arab-Israeli Conºict Among the most enduring Israeli/U.S. myths about the Arab-Israeli conºict is that the Arabs bear the overwhelming responsibility for the conºict because of their refusal to accept the existence of the state of Israel and to reach a negoti- ated settlement with it.Because of this implacable Arab hostility and rejectionism (the mythology holds), there has been no one with whom Israel can discuss a settlement, the exceptions being Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt in the late 1970s and King Hussein of Jordan in the 1980s and 1990s.Furthermore, ev - ery Arab-Israeli war was unavoidable, forced on Israel by the rejectionism of its Arab neighbors. This view, however, does not stand up to serious examination.In the past ªfteen years, there has been a remarkable burst of historical scholarship, mostly by Israeli academics and journalists, on the origins and dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conºict.The Israeli new history movement is based on earlier crit- ical scholarship and contemporary accounts; declassiªed Israeli, American, British, and United Nations archives; the private diaries and public memoirs of Israeli political leaders, including David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Rabin, and Moshe Sharett; and interviews with Israeli 3 policymakers. 3.The leading Israeli new history works are Uri Bar-Joseph, The Best of Enemies: Israel and Transjordan in the War of 1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1987); Mordechai Bar-On, The Gates of Gaza: Is- rael’s Road to Suez and Back (New York: St.Martin’s, 1994); Michael Bar-Zohar, Facing a Cruel Mirror: Israel’s Moment of Truth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990); Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Land- scape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Simha Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians (London: Croom Helm, 1979); Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon, 1987); Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel’s Fateful Decisions (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988); Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Beyond the Uprising: Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians (New York: Greenwood, 1989); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Inªltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Ox- ford University Press, 1993); Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conºict, 1948–51 (London: Macmillan, 1988); Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conºict, 1947–51 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1992); Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986); Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); Gershon Shaªr, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conºict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1989); Gabriel Sheffer, Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Political Moderate (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1996); Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); and Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Is- rael: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
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