| Camp David 2000 Summit |
Article Index for Camp |
Website Links For Camp David |
Information AboutCamp David 2000 Summit |
|
THE SUMMIT President Clinton announced his invitation to Barak and Arafat on July 5 , 2000 , to come to Camp David to continue their negotiations on the Middle East peace process. Building on the positive steps towards peace of the earlier 1978 Camp David Accords where President Jimmy Carter was able to broker a peace agreement between Egypt , represented by President Anwar Sadat , and Israel represented by Prime Minister Menachem Begin . The Oslo Accords of 1993 between the later assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organisation Chairman Yasser Arafat had provided that agreement should be reached on all outstanding issues between the Palestinians and Israeli sides - the so-called final status settlement - within five years of the implementation of Palestinian autonomy. However, the interim process put in place under Oslo had not fulfilled Palestinian expectations, and Arafat argued that the summit was premature. On July 11 , the Camp David 2000 Summit convened. The summit ended on July 25 , without an agreement being reached. At its conclusion, a Trilateral Statement was issued defining the agreed principles to guide future negotiations. Trilateral statement (full text)
REASONS FOR IMPASSE Both sides blamed the other for the failure of the talks: the Palestinians claiming they were not offered enough, and the Israelis claiming that they could not reasonably offer more. In the USA and Israel, the failure to come to an agreement was widely attributed to ''Shattered Dreams'', Tony Klug {Link without Title} ). There were three principal obstacles to agreement:
Territory The Palestinian negotiators indicated they wanted full Palestinian sovereignty over all the West Bank and the Gaza Strip , although they would consider a one-to-one land swap with Israel. As a starting point, Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the Six-Day War and at the 1993 Oslo Accords the Palestinian negotiators accepted the Green Line borders for the West Bank . The proposal offered by Barak and Clinton at Camp David would have meant the Israeli annexation of 9-10% more of the West Bank. Another 9-10% of the West Bank would be placed under indefinite "Temporary Israeli Control", including a narrow strip comprising 15 % of the length of the border along the Jordan River . The West Bank would be separated by a road from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea , with free passage for Palestinians although Israel reserved the right to close the road for passage in case of emergency. The Palestinian position was that the annexations would block existing road networks between major Palestinian populations. In return, the Israelis would cede 1-3 % of their territory in the Negev Desert to Palestine. Arafat rejected this proposal and did not make a counteroffer. Clayton Swisher, who was present at the summit, rebuts the conventional wisdom about it in The Truth About Camp David (http://www.mepc.org/public_asp/journal_vol12/0503_csbkr.asp). Swisher, a young scholar based in Washington, approaches Camp David objectively and concludes that the Israelis and the Americans were at least as guilty as the Palestinians for the collapse. MJ Rosenberg of Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel think-tank in Washington, calls Swisher's book "the single best volume we are likely to have on the Camp David failure." Alternative points of view are offered in books by Dennis Ross and by President Clinton himself. Jerusalem and the Temple Mount A particularly virulent territorial dispute revolved around the final status of Jerusalem . Although offered much of East Jerusalem, the Palestinians rejected a proposal for "custodianship," though not sovereignty, over the Temple Mount , demanding complete sovereignty, which for Jews would have meant losing a bond with both the Mount and the attached Western Wall . According to both Ambassador Dennis Ross and Robert Malley , key American participants in the Camp David summit, Yasser Arafat claimed at one point in the negotiations that the holy Jewish Temple was not in Jerusalem at all, but in the West Bank city of Nablus. Refugees and the right of return The Palestinians stated that the proposed solution did not adequately address the issue of the Palestinian refugee problem. While realizing not all refugees could return, the Palestinians argued that any meaningful peace settlement would have to take the future of these people into account. In particular, they called for a right of return and an Israeli acknowledgment that they too had been responsible for the creation of the refugee problem (see also New Historians ). The Israelis countered that similar numbers of Jewish refugees had been pushed out of Arab countries since 1948 , and were not compensated, and that most of them ended up in Israel. They also asserted that allowing a right of return to Israel proper, rather than the newly created Palestinian state, would mean an influx of Palestinians that would fundamentally alter the demographics of Israel, jeopardizing Israel's Jewish character. AFTERMATH Soon after the collapse of the 2000 summit, Ariel Sharon and a delegation of Likud politicians took a tour of the Temple Mount to demonstrate Israel's control. The next day, a demonstration by a Palestinian crowd broke out of control and Israeli police opened fire on the protesters. From this point, an escalation in violence culminated in an uprising called the Al-Aqsa Intifada , which continues to this day (see ''Shattered Dreams'', Charles Enderlin ). A wave of Suicide Bombings were unleashed by Palestinian extremist movements on Israeli civilians. In reprisal Israel sent in the Israel Defence Force to seal off the Gaza Strip and re-occupy the West Bank , which were brought under strict military rule. The leaders of Palestinian Terrorist Organizations were targeted for assassinations by Israel. The continuing violence has claimed the lives of over one thousand Israelis and three thousand Palestinians. Calls for peace In a last attempt to bring Middle East peace, Clinton wrote a proposal to Barak and Arafat, laying down the parameters for future negotiations. {Link without Title} Barak accepted the parameters (with some reservations that were within those parameters) and Arafat, after a delay, accepted, but with questions and reservations that went outside the parameters, according to Ambassador Dennis Ross, the special Mideast envoy. Clinton's initiative led to the was defeated by Ariel Sharon in 2001 . Sharon refused to negotiate until the suicide bombings ceased. Clinton's successor, President George W. Bush , along with the European Union , Russia , and the United Nations , put forward a "Road Map" For Peace which calls for a fully democratic Palestinian state as early as 2005 , on the condition of the cessation of Terrorist attacks, Arafat's resignation, and democratic Election s in the Palestinian territories. In 2002 , Yasser Arafat told a newspaper he was ready to fully accept the Clinton parameters. On , unofficial moderates from both sides agreed on a peace proposal, the Geneva Accord s. Arafat cautiously welcomed the document, but Sharon rejected its terms. The Israeli government has since taken a number of unilateral steps in relation to the territories, by constructing the West Bank Barrier and Disengaging From Gaza as well as four West Bank settlements. Since leaving the Presidency , Clinton has publicly stated his belief that Arafat was primarily to blame for the failure of the talks, and that the Palestinian leader gravely erred in refusing to cut a deal. However many political commentators, especially Palestinians and those on the left, point to the fact that peace negotiations continued at the Taba Summit in 2001 and that it was the Israeli leader Ehud Barak that pulled out of the talks to campaign in the Israeli elections. The Palestinian leader called on Barak to come back to the negotiating table but to no avail. SEE ALSO
ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE DIPLOMACY AND TREATIES
EXTERNAL LINKS General
Books The following links reference an extended exchange in the pages of the New York Review of Books on Camp David 2000. Presented here in chronological order.
On Barak A critique of Barak's performance at Camp David and of Barak's version of events as given in the Morris-Barak piece in the New York Review of Books.
Palestinian offer A newspaper article stating that the Palestinians made an implicit, unstated "peace offer" at Camp David.
Further Readings
|
|
|