The Oslo Accords and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process
On September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Negotiator Mahmoud
Abbas signed a Declaration of Principles on Interim
Self-Government Arrangements, commonly referred to as the “Oslo Accord,” at the
White House. Israel accepted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians,
and the PLO renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace.
Both sides agreed that a Palestinian Authority (PA) would be established and
assume governing responsibilities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a
five-year period. Then, permanent status talks on the issues of borders,
refugees, and Jerusalem would be held. While President Bill
Clinton’s administration played a limited role in bringing the Oslo
Accord into being, it would invest vast amounts of time and resources in order
to help Israel and the Palestinians implement the agreement. By the time Clinton
left office, however, the peace process had run aground, and a new round of
Israeli-Palestinian violence had begun.
President Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasir Arafat at the signing ceremony
for the Oslo Accord, September 13, 1993. (William J. Clinton Presidential
Library)
The Clinton Administration and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process,
1993–1996
The Clinton administration did not initially make Israeli-Palestinian peace a
priority. Clinton and his advisors believed that a diplomatic breakthrough on
the Israeli-Syrian track would be more likely, and that Israel’s leaders would
find it politically easier to pull back from the Golan Heights than to withdraw
from the West Bank. An Israeli-Syrian agreement, they reasoned, would also lead
to an Israeli-Lebanese agreement, and help isolate Iraq and Iran, the principal
regional opponents of the peace process. U.S. officials were briefed on secret
negotiations that the Israelis and Palestinians had begun in Oslo in December
1992, but made little effort to get involved in them.
The United States did not play a major role in the negotiations that led to the
Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty of October 1994, though Clinton lent his support
by hosting King Hussein and Rabin in Washington and urging Congress to forgive
Jordan’s debts. Nor did the United States play a critical part in the
negotiations leading up to the May 1994 Cairo Agreement, which finalized
Israel’s withdrawal from most of Gaza and Jericho, or the Taba (or "Oslo II")
Agreement of September 1995. The latter agreement divided the West Bank into
separate areas under Israeli control, Palestinian control, and Israeli military
responsibility with Palestinian civil administration, respectively. Oslo II aslo
spelled out provisions for elections, civil/legal affairs, and other bilateral
Israeli-Palestinian cooperation on various issues. Since the Oslo Accord did not
give the United States monitoring responsibilities, the Clinton administration
found itself largely confined to defusing crises and building up the Palestinian
Authority with economic aid and security assistance.
On the Israeli-Syrian track, the administration exerted itself more forcefully,
but with few results. Clinton, Secretary of State Warren
Christopher, and Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis
Ross tried to build on Rabin’s August 1993 promise to withdraw
fully from the Golan if Syria agreed to full peace and necessary security
arrangements. By 1994, these talks stalled over Israel and Syria’s different
definitions of “full withdrawal.” The Syrians insisted that the Israelis should
withdraw to the line of “June 4, 1967,” when they had controlled a pocket of
land on the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s principal source
of water. The Israelis wanted to pull back to the 1923 international border,
which would have left the Sea of Galilee under their sovereignty. That July,
Rabin indicated to Christopher that Israel would withdraw to the June 4 line if
Syria met its other needs, paving the way for talks between Israeli and Syrian
military officers. However, these negotiations eventually bogged down over
whether Israel could retain early warning stations on the Golan, and also became
politically controversial in Israel. Rabin thus chose to suspend them until
after Israel’s elections in 1996.
Oslo’s Collapse, 1996–2000
In November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an
Israeli who opposed the Oslo Accords on religious grounds. Rabin’s murder was
followed by a string of terrorist attacks by Hamas, which undermined support for
the Labor Party in Israel’s May 1996 elections. New Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu hailed from the Likud Party, which
had historically opposed Palestinian statehood and withdrawal from the occupied
territories.
Worried that the peace process might collapse, the Clinton administration
involved itself more actively in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In January
1997, following intensive U.S. mediation, Israel and the PA signed the Hebron
Protocol, which provided for the transfer of most of Hebron to Palestinian
control. In October 1998, Clinton hosted Netanyahu and Arafat at the Wye River
Plantation, where they negotiated an agreement calling for further Israeli
withdrawals from the West Bank. Infighting over the implementation of the Wye
Memorandum, however, brought down Netanyahu’s government in January 1999.
In Israel’s May 1999 elections, the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak
decisively defeated Netanyahu. Barak predicted that he could reach agreements
with both Syria and the Palestinians in 12 to 15 months, and pledged to withdraw
Israeli troops from southern Lebanon. In September, Barak signed the Sharm
al-Shaykh Memorandum with Arafat, which committed both sides to begin permanent
status negotiations. An initial round of meetings, however, achieved nothing,
and by December the Palestinians suspended talks over settlement-building in the
occupied territories.
Barak then focused on Syria. In January 2000, Israeli, Syrian, and U.S.
delegations convened in West Virginia for peace talks. These negotiations
foundered when Barak refused to reaffirm Rabin’s pledge to withdraw to the June
4, 1967 line, arguing that none of the concessions offered by the Syrian
delegation in return could be considered final, since Syrian President
Hafiz al-Asad was not present. A subsequent meeting
between Clinton and Asad in Geneva failed to produce an Israeli-Syrian
accord.
Barak then withdrew Israeli forces unilaterally from Lebanon and returned to the
Palestinian track. At the prime minister’s insistence, Clinton convened a summit
at Camp David in July 2000, where he, Barak, and Arafat attempted to reach a
final agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Accounts differ as to why
Camp David failed, but it is clear that despite additional concessions by Barak,
the Israelis and Palestinians remained strongly at odds over borders, Jerusalem,
and whether Israel would recognize Palestinian refugees’ “right of return.” The
summit ended without a settlement; Clinton would blame Arafat for its
failure.
On September 28, riots erupted following a visit of Likud Party leader Ariel
Sharon to the Temple Mount, and soon escalated into a wave of
Israeli-Palestinian violence that became known as the al-Aqsa Intifada. In
December 2000, Clinton put forward his own proposals for an Israeli-Palestinian
agreement. By this point, however, the president was leaving office, Barak faced
electoral defeat, and Israeli-Palestinian violence continued unabated.
Thus, by the end of 2000, the prospect of ending the Arab-Israeli conflict looked
more distant than it had eight years earlier. The Clinton administration had
helped facilitate Israeli-Jordanian peace and lay the foundations for
Palestinian self-rule. More broadly, the negotiations of the 1990s helped
Israel, the Palestinians, and Syria break with numerous diplomatic taboos and
establish a basis for what a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace might look like.
But a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict remained elusive.
No comments:
Post a Comment