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Book Notes

Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy

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Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy

Ben-Ami, Shlomo

Citation (APA): Ben-Ami, S. (2006). Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

I. Prelude: The Birth of an Intractable Conflict

Page 10 · Location 291

Nor were the restrictions on land acquisition an obstacle the Zionists could not overcome. Throughout, the Arabs’ incompetent leadership, their lack of purpose and national cohesion, proved to be a major ally of the Zionist enterprise. White Papers notwithstanding, Arab landowners ready to sell land to the Jews and to betray their own national cause were never in short supply. As no other than King Abdullah of Transjordan observed in his memoirs, ‘The Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in … weeping [about it].’

Page 20 · Location 507

The war for Palestine in 1948 was lost by the Arab community ten years before it even began. The Arab Revolt had, of course, an understandable rationale behind it, namely, to force Britain to reverse her policies in favour of the National Home for the Jews, stop immigration and curtail the land acquisition by the Zionists. But the method and the evolution of the Revolt reflected rage and blind despair more than organisation or careful strategy. The result would be a resounding defeat for the Palestinian Arabs that would bring them to the ultimate débâcle of 1948 in a state of fatalistic disarray. The years between the Arab Revolt and the Naqbah of 1948 witnessed the dismemberment of the Palestinian community and the loss of their political autonomy to the extent that when they had to face the challenge of partition and war in 1947–8, they were no longer the masters of their own destiny. By then their cause would be usurped by the neighbouring Arab states. It was not until the emergence of the Fatah movement and Yasser Arafat’s PLO in the mid 1960s that the Palestinians recovered the control of their own cause.

II. Bisecting the Land or Zionism’s Strategy of Phases?

Page 34 · Location 754

The paradox of the winter of 1947 was that the Jews, who accepted Resolution 181–the Jewish public acclaimed its endorsement by the UN with genuine outbursts of jubilation–were ready and well deployed to face a war should this be the outcome, and the Arabs, who rejected the Resolution out of hand and made no secret of their intention to subvert it, were not at all prepared for war. Ben-Gurion, who upon his appointment as the ‘defence minister’ of the Jewish Agency in 1946 made it clear that the time had now arrived for ‘a showdown of force, a Jewish military showdown’, had been for some time meticulously preparing for a war he was convinced, at least ever since the Arab Revolt, was inevitable. The Palestinians, who on 1 December 1947 made their views clear when the Arab Higher Committee declared a general strike, were totally unprepared and poorly equipped for an armed conflict. Arab society had been crumbling from within ever since the brutal repression of the 1936–9 Revolt. Leaderless and decapitated of their traditional elites, deeply fragmented, respectful and frightened of the Yishuv’s military power, and disorientated as to their real or achievable objectives, the Palestinians approached the imminent conflict and, as it turned out, their second catastrophe in a decade, in a state of disarray and fatalistic despair.

III. The Early Years: A Missed Opportunity for Peace?

Page 50 · Location 1075

On moral grounds one could of course convincingly defend the case for the repatriation of refugees. But this was out of the question in a historical and political context, where a clash existed between an emergent Jewish state and its defeated enemies, for whom the repatriation of refugees was one way of hampering the growth and development of the newborn, yet intimidating, state against which they harboured understandable intentions of revanche. At the Lausanne Peace Conference Israel eventually agreed to the repatriation of 100,000 Palestinian refugees, but this was almost by force of habit rejected out of hand by the Arabs as too little. Too little it might have been, but Israel made the offer only with the hope of getting relief from American pressure. The Arabs clearly missed an opportunity to call Israel’s bluff.

Page 62 · Location 1312

The Israelis might have been tough negotiators, but the dysfunctionality of the Jordanian political system was now the major obstacle to a settlement. A situation was emerging in Jordan where the King’s legitimacy for striking a deal with Israel was being seriously undermined by a supposedly patriotic, pan-Arab, philo-Palestinian and pan-Islamic government. As it turned out, the annexation of the West Bank extended the borders of the Hashemite kingdom but, by Palestinising the kingdom and shifting the emphasis of Jordanian politics to a pan-Arab sensibility towards the plight of the Palestinians, it diminished the King’s power and capacity to continue being the undisputed autocratic leader he had been thus far. On 17 February 1950 the King made a last-ditch attempt to salvage something from the wreckage of his peace strategy with Israel by proposing a non-aggression pact. This was a brilliant move, for it could unleash a dynamic leading to a possible peace deal in the future. It also implicitly meant Israel’s recognition of Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank. The agreement could likewise allow Israel to claim her first political breakthrough with an Arab state and a crack in the Arab economic boycott. There were even some provisions in Abdullah’s proposal that could satisfy the Palestinians by opening judicial channels for refugees to reclaim their abandoned property in Israel. The Israeli Cabinet ratified the agreement at its meeting of 22 February, with Foreign Minister Sharett praising the ‘psychological’ importance of the document. But it was again the Jordanians, not the Israelis, who failed to deliver. Abu al-Huda’s government got cold feet and unilaterally changed both the title and the content of the agreement. It was now becoming clear that the Palestinisation of the kingdom and the rift between the King and a no longer docile political class had emerged as an insurmountable obstacle to an Israeli–Jordanian settlement, however modest its provisions. Abdullah could not allow himself the political luxury of being exposed as a yielding king in conflict with a patriotic pan-Arab government.

IV. The Rise and Fall of the Third Kingdom of Israel

Page 78 · Location 1595

It is true that the conflict existed before superpower competition and, as we can see today, it still persists after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the struggle for mastery in the Middle East by the two big powers blocked the possibility of a major peace breakthrough for years. Conspicuously, Egypt’s peace with Israel in 1979 started as a bold bilateral move behind the back of the superpowers. The Madrid Peace Conference of 1991, the Oslo accords of 1993 between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel’s peace with Jordan a year later, and the most serious attempts to reach an Israeli–Syrian settlement throughout the 1990s were all possible only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

V. The Jewish Fear and Israel’s Mother of all Victories

Page 87 · Location 1767

By pushing Palestine to the forefront of the struggle against the Jewish state, Nasser radically changed the parameters of the conflict. Now it was no longer just a border dispute between sovereign states, and one that was susceptible to a rational solution, but a conflict of an almost mythological nature over the plight of the Palestinians and their ‘inalienable’ rights, where hardly any room for compromise could exist. It is from this perspective that Sadat’s peace initiative, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, needs to be understood. To make peace he needed to extricate Egypt’s conflict with Israel from the paralysing hold of the Palestinian dilemma into which Nasser had locked it and bring it back to the realm of rationality as a solvable border dispute between two sovereign states.

Page 93 · Location 1877

Lack of superpower guarantees, an almost apocalyptic fear of physical annihilation, the threat of a Nasserite Middle East bent on the destruction of Israel, a fatalistic pessimism as to the chances that the Arab world would ever reconcile itself to the existence of a Jewish state in its midst and the ever-present Holocaust complex, was the context for Ben-Gurion’s quest for a credible nuclear option. The nuclear option could also be seen as a protest against, or an alternative to, America’s reluctance to accord solid and unequivocal conventional guarantees to Israel’s existence and incorporate it into an organic regional alliance. Indeed, there were those in the Israeli political system who wanted to use the Dimona nuclear reactor as a way of pressuring America into securing Israel’s conventional capabilities.

Page 94 · Location 1900

Ben-Gurion oscillated frantically from a strategy of deterrence to the politics of hysteria. He bombarded world leaders with dramatic appeals for an international commitment to the independence and territorial integrity of all the states in the Middle East. Whatever territorial dreams he might have harboured in the past, he was now a keen champion of the status quo. To him, the territorial phase of Zionism was over and the safety of Israel within the borders of 1949 was his exclusive concern. Only the full demilitarisation of the West Bank and a formal defence treaty with America could set his mind at rest.

Page 96 · Location 1946

Nor was Jordan spared Israel’s policy of swift and disproportionate retaliations. Such was the case of the Samu Operation in November 1966. After insistently pointing at Damascus as the source of all evil, Israel suddenly and massively retaliated against Jordan in response to a local, relatively minor incident. A typical case of the feebleness of the politicians when confronted with the army’s tendency to dictate the scope and nature of military operations in a way that sometimes created new and unplanned political realities, Samu was a disproportionate operation that stood in stark contradiction to Israel’s official commitment to the stability of Hussein’s regime. Israel publicly humiliated and betrayed an Arab leader so far careful to stay aloof from the war rhetoric and practices of his Syrian neighbours in the north, and pushed him into the fold of the Arab war camp.

Page 97 · Location 1956

The Arab League summit of January 1964 in Cairo went down in history as the first official all-Arab gathering to call for Arab military preparations in order to create the conditions ‘for the final liquidation of Israel’. The decision to divert the headwaters of the River Jordan in Syria and Lebanon–a United Arab Command was created to protect the project and prepare for war–and create the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under Ahmad al-Shuqayri’s chairmanship were understandably perceived in Israel as part of an overall Arab war strategy against the Jewish state. The task of liberating Palestine from ‘Zionist imperialism’ was reiterated in the Alexandria Arab League summit later that winter, and pledges were made by the League’s members to mobilise their resources against the Zionist enemy.

Page 98 · Location 1994

King Hussein’s predicament proved to be even more serious than that of Nasser. In his case it was the very existence of his kingdom that was at stake. He did not want to be dragged into war, but was too weak to resist the tide. As much as the supposed threat posed by Israel, it was actually the pressure of Fatah and the PLO that put in jeopardy the stability of the Hashemite kingdom. For the PLO, liberating Palestine also meant overthrowing the Hashemites’ ‘colonialist rule’. The King harboured no illusions as to the ultimate rationale of the PLO’s presence in Jordan, namely, as he explicitly wrote to Nasser, ‘the destruction of Jordan’.

Page 100 · Location 2026

And when retaliations and verbal threats failed to deter the Syrians, Rabin made it clear that his intention was to provoke the Syrians into an all-out war. In December 1966 he wrote to General Zvi Zamir, Israel’s military attaché in London: ‘an escalation with Syria is not against Israel’s interest, and in my view there is no better time than now for a confrontation with Syria. I prefer to go to war rather than allow this continuous harassment, especially if the Syrians persist in their efforts to facilitate the activity of Fatah on our border.’

Page 104 · Location 2115

Nor was the restless General spared Ben-Gurion’s ire. From his seclusion in the Negev desert, the Old Man had been following the evolving crisis with awe. Precisely because he shared the military’s assessment that the closure of the Straits threatened to vitiate all the achievements of the Sinai Campaign and could soon turn into a question of ‘national survival’–this was Rabin’s expression–Ben-Gurion saw all his old fears coming true: Israel was now surrounded by an all-Arab coalition aggressively supported by the Soviet Union, without being able to rely on an alliance with, or security guarantees from, a Western superpower.

VI. Sedanlaghen – The Sin of Hubris and its Punishment

Page 126 · Location 2512

There is, of course, much reason to doubt whether, even if formalised as an official peace proposal, the Arabs would have accepted the government’s peace guidelines as the platform for a full-fledged peace agreement with Israel. Israel’s shortcomings notwithstanding, the Arabs were by all accounts not yet ready for such a deal. The proof is that a more unequivocal American overture along the same lines as the Israeli Cabinet’s decision would soon be turned down by the Arabs and their Soviet patrons.

Page 128 · Location 2565

And it was only when this euphemism was embedded in the language of a UN Security Council Resolution that Israel was ready to endorse it. The constructive ambiguity of the November 1967 Security Council Resolution Number 242, which called for peace based on the restitution of ‘territories’ instead of ‘the territories’, allowed Israel to claim that the borders would have to be modified on all fronts as a condition for peace and gave manoeuvring space to her post-war diplomacy. Resolution 242 was the result of the need to find a formula that would reconcile Israel’s unrealistic expectation to have full peace for less than all the territories, and the Arabs’ drive for a full restitution of land in exchange for a watered-down state of non-belligerency.

Page 129 · Location 2585

Neither of the parties to the conflict was especially happy with Resolution 242’ s oblique and foggy formulas, least of all the Palestinians, whose problem was reduced in the Resolution to that of the humanitarian plight of refugees. The PLO’s outright rejection of 242 was an additional manifestation by the Palestinians that their struggle would from now on be independent of the Arabs’ diplomatic strategy. The Palestinians were about to disengage from the status of a tool in the hands of the Arab states to that of an independent subject in the history of the Middle East. As from the Palestinian débâcle of 1936–9 and later the 1948 Naqbah, the Palestinians had lost their independence as a national movement. They disappeared from the regional arena as autonomous players. The 1967 war, the defeat of the Arab armies with their consequent loss of a credible military option in the foreseeable future, and the relegation by Resolution 242 of the Palestinian problem to the margins of peacemaking in the region, signalled the beginning of a new phase in the history of Palestinian nationalism.

VII. Begin’s ‘Capsule Theory’ and Sadat’s ‘Separate Peace’

Page 154 · Location 3090

Begin was thus positioning himself as the most eloquent and committed exponent of what could perhaps be defined as the ‘capsule theory’, namely the drive to reach a settlement with the surrounding Arab states that would ‘capsulate’, as it were, the West Bank and with it the Palestinian problem in an environment of binding peace agreements between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. This, Begin believed, would allow Israel to exercise her full control of Eretz-Israel, yet deny the Palestinians the possibility of again triggering an all-Arab war against her.

Page 155 · Location 3107

Sadat did not believe that a Soviet–American co-sponsorship of the peace process would bear the political fruits he wanted. He could see his fears vindicated already in a joint declaration of the superpowers that, to his dismay, endorsed the Israeli interpretation of Security Council Resolution 242 when it spoke of ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in 1967’. And as to Begin, he was not yet ready to digest the concept of ‘the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people’, one of the central premises upon which the Geneva Conference was to be convened.

Page 158 · Location 3170

One lesson and legacy of Sadat’s initiative is that in highly protracted conflicts where deep emotions and historical hatred are involved, when almost every conceivable diplomatic formula has been tried, the shock of a visionary, generous and imaginative step is likely to open new and untold paths to peace. For the major problem in the Arab–Israeli conflict, as in many other intricate collisions throughout history, has always been the incapacity or unwillingness of leaders to conduct a peace policy that is not supported by what looked at the time like the legitimate, and frequently paralysing, consensus prevailing in their respective societies and polities. Leaders, more frequently than not, act as the hostages of the socio-political environment that produces them instead of shaping it. Anwar Sadat gained a privileged place in history and achieved immortality the moment he fled from the comfortable prison of inertia, and from the pseudo-solidarity and hollow rhetorical cohesion of Arab summits.

Page 164 · Location 3276

Very few in the Arab world had much love for Arafat or for the PLO, ‘the cancer in our midst’, as King Hassan of Morocco defined it in his December meeting with Dayan and Tuhami. Years later this author would personally hear from the King, in his meeting with him in his Rabat palace in January 1993, similar harsh descriptions of Arafat and the PLO, an organisation he then confided to me had outlived its historical role and was becoming an obstacle to peace that needed to be dismantled. The King also related to me the advice he had given to Arafat’s deputy, Abu-Mazen, that the PLO should disband and allow the local Palestinian leadership in the territories to assume the responsibility for dealing directly with Israel. When I later reported my conversation with the King to Prime Minister Rabin he could not conceal his embarrassment, for it was precisely at that time that an Israeli team was negotiating in Oslo with a PLO delegation what later became known as the Oslo accords.

Page 164 · Location 3283

Sadat had no higher regard for Arafat and the PLO than King Hassan. His weariness with the Palestinians exploded into open rage when in February 1978 the chief editor of Al-Ahram and a personal friend of the President, Yusuf al-Sibai, was assassinated in Cyprus by a Palestinian squad, admittedly belonging to Abu Nidal’s splinter group, not to the PLO. To Sadat this was one more proof that Egypt was mortgaging its future for the sake of a people–‘pygmies’ and ‘hired killers’, as he put it to Israel’s Defence Minister Ezer Weizmann–who did not deserve Egypt’s sacrifices.

Page 168 · Location 3360

But it took the almost Messianic commitment of President Carter and the most assertive and robust involvement of the United States to save the process from collapse and to force the parties to shoulder the formidable price of peace. ‘None of us believe we have much of a chance to succeed,’ confided Carter to his advisers when he invited the parties to the Camp David presidential retreat for a peace summit.

Page 170 · Location 3394

It was Menachem Begin, not a left-wing radical, who subscribed at Camp David to such non-Jabotinskian concepts as these: ‘a recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements’, ‘the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects’ and ‘the Palestinians will participate in the determination of their own future’. Moreover, not only did Begin agree to discuss the return to the territories of the displaced Palestinians who left the West Bank during the Six Day War, but he also consented to reopen the 1948 chapter, that is, to negotiate ‘the resolution of the 1948 refugee problem’. And if all this were not enough, Begin succumbed to Carter’s pressure and agreed to ‘Resolution 242 in all its parts’, thus implicitly also endorsing the Resolution’s preamble about ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’, and its possible applicability to other Arab fronts as well.

Page 170 · Location 3405

It was a capital sin that the Palestinians should have rejected such a golden opportunity to join the Camp David process at a time when the West Bank was still practically free of Israeli settlements. This was a major missed opportunity by the Palestinian leadership. What was proposed to the Palestinians at Camp David, to use Oslo terms, was to turn the whole of the West Bank into Area B, that is, an area of Palestinian administrative rule and Israeli responsibility for security. Today, twenty-five years after Camp David and twelve years into the Oslo process, the Palestinians have hardly 20 per cent of the West Bank as Area B.

Page 170 · Location 3410

In the aftermath of the Camp David accords, the Palestinians failed to do what they wisely did in 1988, namely call Israel’s bluff and join the peace process before Israel’s occupation of the West Bank had created an irreversible reality.

Page 170 · Location 3413

At Camp David he fought for every word in the text. That the Palestinians did not call his bluff and instead engaged in a struggle against what Arafat himself called ‘the Camp David conspiracy’ only facilitated the putting into practice of Begin’s grand designs on the West Bank.

Page 172 · Location 3439

Menachem Begin did not make life easier for the American President now desperately shuttling between Cairo and Jerusalem. The Israeli Prime Minister did not have insurmountable opposition at home. But he, or rather his conscience, was his own opposition. In order to calm it down he now had to prove that he, who had betrayed his pledge not to dismantle settlements, would not allow this to become a precedent for the West Bank. He would enhance the building of new settlements in Judaea and Samaria and he would block any possibility of the Palestinian autonomy ushering in a Palestinian state.

VIII. The Road to Madrid

Page 175 · Location 3495

Begin would not bargain over Judaea and Samaria. But Israeli rejectionism, as was frequently the case throughout the Arab–Israeli conflict, when not triggered by the Palestinians in the first place was certainly encouraged by them. The National Guidance Committee, a council of Palestinian notables in the territories, was created with one exclusive purpose, that of undermining and boycotting the autonomy talks, whatever their final objective might have been. The narrow window of opportunity that existed in 1967 for Israel to reach a deal with a local Palestinian leadership was now closed and sealed. In 1967, with Israel’s stunning victory still fresh in their mind and with the PLO still too weak to dictate the Palestinian agenda in the occupied territories, the local Palestinian leadership was eager to engage in peace talks with Israel. But Israel then preferred the politics of confusion and ambiguity. Now, thirteen years later, the PLO held the unchallenged monopoly of Palestinian politics and there was no chance whatever that any local leadership would be allowed to negotiate with Israel a watered-down autonomy plan, or any peace plan for that matter.

Page 176 · Location 3513

it is important to note that the fundamentalist officer who assassinated Sadat during a military parade on 6 October 1981, the eighth anniversary of the 1973 war, did not do it because of Sadat’s peace with Israel but because of his Western tendencies; the assassin did not once mention Israel during his trial

Page 178 · Location 3557

Begin’s intention was to signal through his move on the Golan the limits of the peace process, namely that Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai should not be seen by her neighbours as a precedent for other fronts. By pulling out from Sinai, Begin intimated, Israel had fulfilled the territorial aspects of Resolution 242 and no more withdrawals could be contemplated in future peace deals. From now on it would have to be ‘peace for peace’, not ‘peace for land’. Likewise, the annexation of the Golan was Begin’s way of testing the commitment of Egypt’s new President, Hosni Mubarak, to Israel’s concept of a separate peace.

Page 189 · Location 3773

The political void created by the collapse of the London agreement–and now also by the evaporation of the Shultz initiative and the threat that the Intifada posed to the stability, and perhaps even to the very existence, of the Hashemite kingdom–encouraged King Hussein to take a dramatic step. He cancelled the Act of Annexation of the West Bank to Jordan and cut all administrative links to the West Bank. His attempts so far to reconcile Jordan’s historical claims to the West Bank, his commitment to the Arab consensus on the predominant role of the PLO, and his search for a settlement with Israel was an exercise in diplomatic juggling that was no longer sustainable. He left the stage to the PLO and in one stroke eliminated for ever the so-called Jordanian option from the diplomacy of peace. From now on, if the PLO wanted the territories back it had to change its policies and come to terms directly with Israel and the United States. Jordan would no longer serve as a diplomatic buffer or bridge.

Page 190 · Location 3796

In the Intifada, as Amos Elon succinctly put it, the Palestinians discovered the power of their weakness and the Israelis the weakness of their power. The PLO was also in dire straits. Like Israel, it was taken by surprise by the Palestinian uprising. It suddenly realised that the real showdown with Israel was taking a totally different course from that preached and executed for years by an organisation of professional revolutionaries and terrorists. It was an irony of history that the biggest revolt by the Palestinians since the 1930s had begun without PLO direction. Its supremacy was now being effectively undermined by grass-roots revolutionary committees and a non-PLO United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) that emerged throughout the territories and succeeded in establishing areas of Palestinian self-rule in different parts of the occupied lands. The PLO was also challenged by the dramatic surge of Islamic fundamentalist organisations like Hamas and Jihad, especially in Gaza.

Page 192 · Location 3844

In a declaration of Palestinian independence the Palestinian National Council (PNC) accepted the existence of the State of Israel and endorsed ‘all relevant UN Resolutions’, paradoxically including two mutually exclusive Resolutions, namely 242 and 181.

Page 196 · Location 3912

Yasser Arafat’s and the PLO’s support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was certainly a major strategic blunder of the Palestinian leadership. Once again, as so often in the past, one could watch with stupor and bewilderment the self-defeating nature of Palestinian nationalism. The PLO’s failure to join a coalition based on the same key principle on which the Palestinians had built their case–a principle that was, moreover, embedded in SCR 242, about the ‘inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force’–was a sad display of political stupidity which, moreover, morally spoiled the Palestinian case. This was how Arafat misunderstood and misrepresented to his people the coalition’s war to undo the Iraqi aggression against another Arab country: These are days of glory and pride and steadfastness of our Arab nation…. The real aim of the treacherous American aggression is not to enforce compliance with UN resolutions but to destroy Palestine and the Arab nation and make way for three million Russian Jews in a greater Israel stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Page 199 · Location 3981

But the Americans would not let him sleep for long. Without prior consultation with Israel and to Shamir’s dismay, they summoned the parties immediately after the conference to bilateral talks in Washington. The Prime Minister was forced against his will and judgement to send his delegations to the American capital, but this did not mean that he had any intention of budging from his known positions. The talks were a sheer waste of time, and the gap between the parties was simply unbridgeable. Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai was the implementation of SCR 242 and Israel would not execute any additional withdrawals on the other fronts.

IX. Oslo: The Glory and the Agony

Page 206 · Location 4106

At that momentous crossroads, Arafat and the PLO misjudged the post-Cold War opportunities and failed to appreciate the far-reaching shift in the structure of international relations at the end of the Cold War. By supporting Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait they isolated themselves from the international and Arab worlds, especially from their wealthy patrons in the Gulf States, and lost their major sources of income without which, rhetoric apart, the PLO simply could not exist. Arafat’s miscalculations were of historic proportions, and they brought the Palestinian cause to the verge of financial and political bankruptcy. How could he not realise that by supporting the occupation of Kuwait he was morally spoiling his case, based since 1967 on the principle inherent in Security Council Resolution 242 about ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of land by force’? Arafat’s miscalculation in supporting Saddam Hussein can only be compared with the Mufti’s colossal blunder in throwing in his lot with Nazi Germany in World War Two. The crisis of the PLO boosted the chances of their rivals in the territories, especially the Islamic organisations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which suffered no financial problems. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia continued to lavish budgets and gifts on them.

Page 210 · Location 4188

Arafat’s strategy was based on permanent negotiations, the desired outcome of which was never clear to him, nor was he ever able to spell it out so that the Israelis could weigh the final price they would have to pay to reach the end of the conflict. Arafat never managed, nor did he ever try, to convey to the Israelis that he had a sense of the finality of the conflict. Terror, including that perpetrated by Hamas, was to him a strategic weapon he used to soften the resistance of the Israelis. The Oslo accords had made available to him the conditions for waging a total war against Israel, and he would use them at the proper moment. At a Palestinian meeting in the West Bank town of Nablus in January 1996, just before an unprecedented wave of suicide terrorism brought about Shimon Peres’s electoral defeat to Benjamin Netanyahu, Nabil Shaath, a close associate of Arafat, explained the deeper meaning of Oslo from the PLO’s perspective. If the terms of the Palestinians for a settlement with Israel were not accepted, he said, We shall return to violence. But this time this will be done with 30,000 Palestinian soldiers at our disposal and while we control a territory of our own, and enjoy freedom and liberty … If we reach a dead end, we will resume the war and struggle exactly as we did forty years ago.

Page 213 · Location 4255

Hardly had the ink on the agreements dried when a Palestinian opposition of Islamic and secular Rejectionists, some from within Fatah itself, started to work against them. In his rush to sideline the local leadership and stem the upsurge of Hamas, Arafat, his critics would say, agreed to turn the PLO from a national movement into the sheriff of a small, destitute ghetto in Gaza. Hamas and Jihad lost no time in unleashing a campaign of terror in the hope that this would lead to the radicalisation of Israeli public opinion and, consequently, to a shift to the right, which they expected would undermine and cripple Rabin’s peace policies. On the very eve of the signing of the DOP, three Israeli soldiers were slaughtered by a Hamas squad in Gaza. Suicide terrorism was not the invention of the second Intifada. It had already started in the euphoric days of Oslo. The day after the DOP was signed, on 14 September 1993, a Palestinian terrorist blew himself up in an Israeli police station in Gaza. But the bad omens for the future of Oslo did not come only from the Islamic opposition. On 11 May 1994, a week after he had signed the Cairo agreement establishing the modalities for Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho and a few days before he himself returned to an ecstatic reception in Gaza, Arafat called, in a speech behind closed doors in Johannesburg, for a Jihad to recover Jerusalem. He went to the extreme of comparing Oslo with the Prophet’s tactical Hudaybiyya agreement of AD 625 with the Qurayish tribe, an expedient peace that could be broken when the circumstances would warrant it. Though he liked to position himself as a Palestinian Mandela, or as the leader of a modern secular movement of national liberation, Arafat remained essentially loyal to his youth as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and, as such, his real hero and model was the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Huseini, as he himself recognised in an interview with the Palestinian daily Al-Kuds of 2 August 2002.

Page 214 · Location 4269

As it turned out, the Johannesburg speech was not an isolated incident where Arafat simply got carried away. He uttered similar notions on other occasions. One such was a speech in Gaza’s al-Azhar University on the day celebrating the ascension of the Prophet to heaven, where he spoke again of Hudaybiyya as a ‘despised peace’. On another occasion, a meeting with an Arab audience in Stockholm as quoted by Yedidia Atlas from the Norwegian newspaper Dagen, Arafat presented the right of return and the demographic weapon as his way to subvert the spirit of the Oslo accords: ‘We of the PLO will now concentrate all our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps. … We will make life unbearable for the Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion.’ 1 This was to be Arafat’s mode of behaviour throughout the Oslo years. His was always the language of battle and Jihad. ‘We stand by our oath to pursue the battle,’ he promised in his speech at al-Azhar, where he also embraced the memory of Izzedin al-Qassam, the icon of Hamas’s struggle against the ‘Zionist entity’. He would never convey a clear message of peace and reconciliation to the Israeli public. A born master of double talk, he always preferred the language of ambiguities. Throughout his life as a terrorist and guerrilla leader, Arafat avoided an open confrontation with his rivals in the movement. He preferred to co-opt them. Holding the national movement together at all costs, shunning clear-cut divisive decisions, forever looking for leadership through consensus even when this meant not curbing the terrorist activities of those he had pledged to discipline in the Oslo accords–such was his disastrous and eventually self-defeating way of government throughout. An autocrat with no interest whatever in a modicum of good government or in policies of welfare and economic development, he was unable to create the necessary popular, democratic legitimacy for cracking down on Hamas.

Page 215 · Location 4289

A few days before he was gunned down, on 28 September 1995, Oslo II, an agreement practically ending Israel’s coercive control over the Palestinians, was signed in Washington.

Page 216 · Location 4302

Israel’s annexationist policies further undermined Arafat’s legitimacy for making concessions and reinforced his instinct that he could not be seen as openly collaborating with the Israelis in fighting terrorism. This, in its turn, limited Rabin’s capacity to move forward in the process. Caught between the terror of the fundamentalists, Arafat’s passivity, and the inevitable ascendancy of the peace sceptics and the Israeli far right, Rabin was marching to his political demise. The frivolous oxymoron coined by Peres that the Israelis killed in terrorist attacks–between 1993 and 1996 about 300 Israelis were assassinated by suicide squads–were the ‘victims of peace’ was utterly rejected by the public. Terrorism undermined the legitimacy and the moral foundations of the peace process. Neither Arafat nor Rabin was now in a position to give the other the minimum required to keep Oslo alive. When Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic as a traitor who sold out Eretz-Israel, he was already severely crippled politically by a series of devastating suicide terrorist attacks, notably in Tel Aviv and Beit Lid, and by Arafat’s failure to face the enemies of peace in his own camp.

Page 217 · Location 4321

Netanyahu’s victory was bad news for the peace process which, admittedly, was in very poor health when he inherited it. But conspicuously, two Arab leaders, Mubarak and Hussein, did not exactly mourn the defeat of Peres. Peres’ persistent belief in a ‘warm’ peace and a ‘New Middle East’ of economic integration–he even launched the bizarre idea of having Israel join the Arab League–was anathema to Mubarak. He preferred a more controlled, slower, perhaps even reasonably tense peace with Israel, better suited to his domestic concerns and his regional aspirations. As to King Hussein, he was so taken aback by Peres’s moves towards a quick deal with Syria and so worried that Oslo under his leadership might usher in a Palestinian state that would not respect Jordan’s domestic and regional concerns that he even ventured to make public his preference for Netanyahu.

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Paradoxically, Assad was indirectly responsible for the Oslo agreement. It was the failure of his Syrian enterprise that brought Rabin to the White House lawn in Washington for his historic handshake with Arafat. It was precisely when the Oslo agreement was almost ready in early August 1993 that Rabin made his last and most dramatic attempt to stick to the capsule theory and to reach a deal with Assad. He conveyed to him a hypothetical readiness to accept Syria’s territorial claims if Syria would in turn accept Israel’s demands on security and normalisation. Assad’s disheartening response–he utterly rejected Israel’s concept of ‘normalisation’, and insisted on symmetrical and reciprocal security arrangements that would also affect the Israeli side of the new border–prompted Rabin to give the green light to the completion of the Oslo accords later that month. Israel’s chief negotiator with Assad’s men, Itamar Rabinovich, later recalled how Rabin expounded his rationale to Secretary of State Warren Christopher: ‘If Assad were to come forward and an Israeli–Syrian deal were to be made, then this would be supplemented by a small Palestinian deal. If Assad’s response is disappointing, there would be no Israeli–Syrian breakthrough, so then there would be a major Israeli–Palestinian agreement.’

Page 220 · Location 4385

The hysteria in Jordan was such that the moment he knew of the Oslo accord, the King ordered the closure of the bridges linking the West and the East Banks for fear of a mass exodus of Palestinians that would end up subverting the Jordanian state. The May 1994 Israeli–PLO economic agreement was an additional threat to Hussein, who now saw his kingdom’s economic ties with the West Bank seriously undermined. To the King a common Israeli–Palestinian economic space meant unemployment and political instability in Jordan.

Page 221 · Location 4398

Arafat’s handshake with Rabin was the alibi and legitimisation that Hussein had been looking for ever since he ascended the throne, in order openly to pursue the legacy of his grandfather’s peace policy with Israel. Now it was no longer the Jordanian option at the expense of the Palestinians, as both Israel and Jordan wanted it in the past, but a desperate rush to save Jordan’s interests and perhaps its very existence as an independent Bedouin kingdom, at a moment when the Palestinian option was picked up by Israel. It became vital for Hussein to make peace with Israel if he wanted to make sure that his nemesis, Arafat, would not have an exclusive say about the future of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Page 221 · Location 4403

It is an interesting reflection on the nature of the peace process as it developed in the Rabin years that, notwithstanding the high degree of commitment of the Clinton administration to the process, whatever was achieved–Oslo and the peace with Jordan–was done bilaterally with very little, if any, American involvement. The Americans were throughout sceptical that Hussein would dare to depart from his traditional policy of sitting on the fence. They did not realise how imperative the Oslo agreement made Jordan’s necessity to reach a settlement with Israel. Clearly, however, a much needed debt relief that the Clinton administration offered as a lure to the King if he made peace with Israel was a crucially important bonus that Hussein could not afford the luxury of ignoring.

Page 222 · Location 4417

Netanyahu stalled the peace process with the Palestinians, exhibited an indifferent attitude towards Jordan’s economic expectations and even irresponsibly humiliated the King by taking the liberty of allowing an attempt–abortive, as it turned out–by the Mossad against the life of a Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal, in Amman in broad daylight.

Page 232 · Location 4622

Arafat ruled over one of the most expensive power machines in the world and certainly one that was utterly disproportionate to the ridiculously small slices of territory it was supposed to govern.

Page 233 · Location 4639

Rabin, who in his inaugural speech at the Casablanca economic summit lashed out against Arafat in the most extreme and harshest terms for daring to challenge Israel’s monopoly over Jerusalem, would have by no means agreed–as indeed his widow was to ascertain when she later in her turn criticised Ehud Barak’s excessive concessions at Camp David–to the kind of compromises that the Barak government was ready to make on Jerusalem and on the other core issues of the conflict.

Page 234 · Location 4659

Probably one of the deficiencies of the Oslo accord–at the same time the reason for its initial success–was that it started as an agreement on the lowest common denominator possible in Israeli society: the idea of getting rid of Gaza did not entail any national trauma.

Page 234 · Location 4662

Both Arafat and the Israeli leadership would still have to break in a more profound and dramatic way the internal consensus in their respective societies. Arafat would have to fight the extremist organisations in a more frontal and resolute way, and he would have to make concessions on refugees and other sensitive issues he was clearly unwilling to contemplate. As to Israel, she would have to conceive solutions on settlements and Jerusalem no relevant Israeli leader, including Rabin, had ever dreamed he would have to envisage.

Page 235 · Location 4675

The truth of the matter was, moreover, that by the time Rabin was murdered the peace process was, for all practical purposes, in a state of political coma. Rampant Palestinian terrorism, an uninterrupted expansion of settlements, and Israel’s practice of reprisals in the form of closures and collective punishment had already brought the process to a stalemate.

Page 236 · Location 4710

Israel has no foreign policy, as Henry Kissinger used to say, it only has domestic political constraints.

Page 239 · Location 4757

By signing the Wye agreement that gave the Palestinians additional land in Judaea and Samaria (13 per cent of it) Netanyahu sealed his political fate and saw his coalition rapidly melting away.

X. The Barak Phase: On Freedom and Innocence

Page 242 · Location 4801

Assad was a tough negotiator, but one whose conditions for a settlement were clear and well known. With Syria it was essentially a territorial dispute, a ‘real estate’ affair. In the case of Arafat and the Palestinians the conditions for a settlement were never clearly enunciated, nor was the dispute an exclusively territorial one.

Page 243 · Location 4823

A proof of the surprising determination of the Sphinx of Damascus to strike a deal with Israel was the dramatic gesture, which he had never agreed to make to Rabin, of sending his Foreign Minister to direct negotiations with Barak even before receiving from him an unequivocal commitment to Rabin’s deposit. But instead of seizing the opportunity and assuming the inevitable price for peace, Barak risked losing a vital asset, Assad’s trust, and avoided making the necessary commitment on the border. He conveyed to the Americans and the Syrians a sense of urgency, but at the moment of truth and decision he got cold feet and engaged in tactical manoeuvres with the hope of wresting a better deal from Assad.

Page 243 · Location 4831

Shepardstown peace conference

Page 245 · Location 4859

There might have been a chance for a peace deal with Assad in December 1999 and January 2000 on terms that were not at all easy for the Israeli public to accept. But when in early February Barak finally signalled, in a Cabinet meeting, his readiness for a settlement based on the 4 June 1967 lines, it was already too late. A terminally sick man, Assad had by then lost interest. His priority now was managing the succession of his son, not the agonising complexities of a peace deal with Israel.

Page 245 · Location 4862

Clinton–Assad Geneva summit

Page 246 · Location 4877

The Syrian track ended with no deal, but with a twofold legacy that Arafat was both forced and happy to embrace. Assad taught him that it was perfectly possible to say ‘no’ to America, and even publicly humiliate her President, without paying a price, and that, regardless of the ambiguities of the Oslo agreement, the 1967 borders were sacrosanct and therefore needed to be a categorical requirement in any future peace negotiations with Israel. Peace, Assad taught the Palestinians about to start their negotiations with Israel for a final settlement, needs to be based on one unyielding condition: full and unequivocal withdrawal from the occupied territories.

Page 246 · Location 4882

Addressing the Camp David summit, as some commentators do, separately from the entire negotiating process–that is, independently of the negotiations that were conducted for many subsequent months in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Bolling air base on the outskirts of the American capital, where on 23 December 2000 President Clinton presented his final parameters for a settlement, and finally Taba–distorts, of course, the picture as to what exactly were the proposals that Arafat refused to accept. To his last day, the Palestinian leader was still reluctant to acknowledge the real nature of the deal he was offered, and he obstinately kept repeating that he had no option but to reject the ridiculous map of enclaves and ‘Bantustans’ that was presented to him by an American–Israeli conspiracy.

Page 248 · Location 4916

Israel also contemplated the risk that Palestinian belligerency might be expressed in the future as part of an all-out confrontation by an Arab or Islamic coalition against the Jewish state. The demilitarisation of the future Palestinian state had therefore been, throughout, a standard, primary Israeli requirement.

Page 248 · Location 4934

‘And as to the swaps,’ he said to the President, ‘I trust you and I accept your judgement. You decide.’ Arafat later reversed his position, but this moment in the summit clearly reflected his view of the peace process as not being about a mundane bargaining over real estate. Land mattered to him far less than emotional, legendary and Islamic values such as Jerusalem, the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif for the Muslims), and the core of the Palestinian national ethos, namely refugees.

Page 249 · Location 4942

As it turned out, Arafat’s ‘deposit’ became the deathtrap in which the summit was eventually consumed.

Page 249 · Location 4946

Refugeeism, Jerusalem and Islamic values more than land and real estate were the insurmountable obstacles that prevented an agreement at Camp David and later at Taba.

Page 249 · Location 4955

Akram Hania, one of Arafat’s closest men at Camp David, put it this way: ‘At Camp David we intended to make the Israelis face the tribunal of history, face the victims of their crime and sin. Israel wanted to silence for ever the voice of the witnesses to the crime and erase the proof of the Naqbah.’

Page 250 · Location 4963

In a long meeting I had with him in Nablus through the night of 25 June 2000, that is, a fortnight before Camp David, he was careful to remind me, when our conversation moved to the chapter on Jerusalem, of the Umar Treaty of AD 638, signed between the Khalif Umar, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and the Byzantine Patriarch Sopronius, where, so Arafat instructed me, the conditions of the capitulation of the Christians included a prohibition on the Jews living in Jerusalem. Arafat’s ambition to emulate Umar el-Kutab was no mere anecdote.

Page 250 · Location 4969

‘Instead of repeatedly rejecting the Israelis’ proposals, make counter proposals,’ Clinton would tell the Palestinians at Camp David. Rob Malley, in the analysis of the summit he co-authored with Hussein Agha, repeated this remark: ‘Indeed, the Palestinians’ principal failing is that from the beginning of the Camp David summit onward they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own.’

Page 251 · Location 4985

To my remark in the speech that Israel had come to the limits of her capacity for compromise with the Palestinians, the ambassador rightly and cunningly responded, ‘Why should we believe you when everybody remembers that you started your voyage into the Palestinian question with Golda Meir denying that a Palestinian people existed at all, and at Camp David you agreed to give away the bulk of the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state and divide Jerusalem? These certainly cannot be the outer limits of your concessions.’

Page 252 · Location 4999

We made enormous progress at the secret channel in Stockholm between Abu-Ala and Hassan Asfour on the Palestinian side and myself and Gilead Sher on the Israeli side. But the exposure of the channel by the Palestinians themselves–as part of an internal political struggle within the Palestinian camp, Abu-Mazen’s people leaked the talks to Al-Hayat–destroyed any possibility for further progress. The channel stopped because it was not producing any longer. Exposed by his political rivals back home, who leaked imaginary details about his ‘irresponsible’ concessions, Abu-Ala quickly retreated to the safety of old, unyielding positions.

Page 252 · Location 5004

And if this were not enough, by 15 May, the day of the Naqbah, the Palestinians, with Arafat’s connivance (he ignored advance warnings by both Israelis and Secretary Madeleine Albright), unleashed throughout the territories days of violent disturbances that ended in the inevitable clashes with Israel’s security forces.

Page 252 · Location 5016

From the moment the Swedish channel was dissolved it became clear that Arafat’s insistence that the summit be ‘better prepared’ was just a euphemism which meant that Israel should come closer to his positions under the threat of war without him having to budge from them.

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Elusive, non-committal, the master of double talk, Arafat turned the negotiations with him, to use Lloyd George’s description of a similar occasion with De Valera, into a futile exercise of ‘trying to pick up Mercury with a fork’.

Page 255 · Location 5062

It is therefore unfair to claim, as Rob Malley and Hussein Agha did in their New York Review of Books article, that Barak’s all-or-nothing approach was a corridor leading either to an agreement or to confrontation. If this is true, the blame should clearly be shared with Arafat. But the truth of the matter is that at key moments at Camp David, when it was clear that a final settlement was impossible to reach, both the Israelis and the Americans tried fall-back plans for interim or partial settlements that were rejected out of hand by the Palestinians.

Page 256 · Location 5082

America was not there, as some Palestinians might have thought, just to deliver Israel to a passive and rejectionist Arab side that was unwilling to engage in a serious negotiating process, nor would Israel allow herself to be delivered unconditionally. By failing to advance clear proposals and counter-proposals, that is, by refusing to engage in a real negotiating dynamic, the Palestinians deprived the Americans of the vital tools they needed to be able to put pressure on the Israelis. The President and his team could never ascertain whether the Palestinians were at all serious and genuine in their commitment to reach a settlement. As the President repeatedly told Arafat, he was not expecting him to agree to US or Israeli proposals, but he was counting on him to offer something, to produce a new idea that he could take back to Barak in order to convince him to make more concessions. ‘I need something to tell him,’ he implored. ‘So far I have nothing.’

Page 256 · Location 5092

Arafat preferred to die as a defeated hero who did not give in, like Nasser, than be slain as a man of peace like Sadat.

Page 256 · Location 5097

To no avail. Arafat would not budge from his position and would not agree to a qualified Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount–he was offered in the site a ‘sovereign custodianship’ that was free of any Israeli interference–or to anything that was not the unequivocal partition of the city. He was offered a capital in Arab Jerusalem (not just Abu-Dis, as all kinds of non-official back channels had suggested in the past) that would include some Palestinian quarters under full Palestinian sovereignty and the others under a more qualified Palestinian sovereignty. Arafat demanded the sovereignty of three-quarters of the Old City and rejected out of hand any bridging ideas such as a special regime, which I had the opportunity to defend throughout the summit, or the President’s proposal, accepted by the Israelis, to divide the holy basin into two equal parts, the Christian and Muslim quarters to the Palestinians and the Jewish and Armenian quarters to the Israelis.

Page 257 · Location 5104

Members of the Palestinian delegation at Camp David used to say to their Israeli counterparts that Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, the issues that more than any others wrecked the summit and prevented an agreement, were ‘Arafat’s personal obsession’, which they did not necessarily share.

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Saladin,

Page 258 · Location 5119

‘Alissra Day’)

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Hence Arafat would not accept a solution to the Palestinian problem that was strictly temporal and exclusively political. It needed to include, for example, the full and unconditional sovereignty over the holy places, first and foremost the Haram al-Sharif, where the Dome of the Rock is the architectural expression of Islam as a religion that supersedes and is superior to all other religions. The Jews’ claim to a sovereign right in the Temple Mount on the basis of historical and religious links to the site was, as far as he was concerned, to be utterly excluded.

Page 259 · Location 5152

At Camp David Arafat destroyed with his own hands the unique, even intimate, relationship that he had developed with the American administration in recent years. I personally had the opportunity to warn Mr Arafat, in the course of a meeting at his residence at Camp David, where I came, together with General Amnon Shahak, to make up for Barak’s obstinate refusal to meet the Palestinian leader.

Page 260 · Location 5168

Nabil Amr, a minister in Arafat’s Cabinet, was courageous enough to spell out his criticism in an article in Al-Hayat-el-Jadida, a mouthpiece of the Palestinian Authority, two years into the Al-Aqsa Intifada, that is, when it was becoming tragically clear that Arafat’s abandonment of the political path had brought about the destruction of the very backbone of Palestinian society: Didn’t we dance when we heard of the failure of the Camp David talks? Didn’t we destroy the pictures of President Clinton who so boldly presented us with proposals for a Palestinian state with border modifications? We are not being honest, for today, after two years of bloodshed we ask exactly that which we then rejected. … How many times did we agree to compromises, which we later rejected in order to miss them later on? And we were never willing to draw the lessons from our behaviour. … And then, when the solution was no longer available, we travelled the world in order to plead with the international community for what we had just rejected. But then we learnt the hard way that in the span of time between our rejection and our acceptance the world has changed and left us behind. … We clearly failed to rise up to the challenge of history.

Page 261 · Location 5189

But the Israeli leader nevertheless left the summit a different man, one who had the courage to depart from his old archaic beliefs. Arafat, however, would confine himself to rejecting American and Israeli proposals without ever advancing his own counter-proposals. Unlike both Begin and Sadat, Arafat acted throughout the summit more like a politician than a statesman bent on looking for a solution and seeking a historical breakthrough. Sadat in Camp David I and Barak in Camp David II were more restless, far more creative.

Page 261 · Location 5197

Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weizmann and Aharon Barak would always look for new ideas and possible compromises. And when the moment of truth arrived and Begin was required to take an agonising decision on the settlements in northern Sinai, he received a vitally crucial telephone call from the most hawkish of his ministers back home, Ariel Sharon, which encouraged him to dismantle them. The only telephone calls Ehud Barak would receive from Israel during the summit were those with the disheartening news about the disintegration of his coalition and the collapse of his home front.

Page 262 · Location 5205

‘I don’t even know what is exactly my mandate in these negotiations,’ the Israelis were once told by Saab Erakat, the Palestinian chief negotiator at the summit.

Page 263 · Location 5221

Carter had a bulldog-like persistence about him that was absent in Clinton’s performance. Clinton did not lack Carter’s Messianic zeal; but he lacked his capacity to intimidate, nor were he and his team capable of employing the kind of brutal manipulative tactics that the Nixon–Kissinger team had used in launching the peace process in the aftermath of the 1973 war, or those that would be used by the Bush–Baker tandem in the diplomatic arm twisting leading to the Madrid Conference in 1991. At Camp David, America looked like a diminished and humbled superpower, unable to assert its will.

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As early as 4 March 2000 Marwan Barghouti, the head of the Fatah militias (‘ Tanzim’) in Ramallah and a future leader of the Intifada, could not have been more specific when he made it clear to a Palestinian newspaper, Akhbar-el-Khalil, that: Whoever thinks it is possible to resolve issues such as the refugees, Jerusalem, the settlements and the borders through negotiations is under a delusion. On these issues, we have to wage a campaign on the ground alongside the negotiations. I mean armed confrontation. We need dozens of campaigns like the Al-Aqsa Tunnel Campaign.

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But it was Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in June 2000 that served as a major incentive for the Palestinian Intifada.

Page 265 · Location 5263

The same evening and in the same city, Nablus, driven and inspired by the example of the Hezbollah, Arafat would say to a grand gathering of Fatah youth, ‘We are fighting for our land and we are prepared to erase the peace process and restart the armed struggle.’ ‘I am a general who never lost a battle,’ he told me at the same meeting in Nablus, where I tried to convince him of the need to go to a negotiating summit at Camp David. He rejected the possibility that anybody, even the President of the United States, would expect him to engage in negotiations. ‘I am a decision maker, not a negotiator,’ he told me. In retrospect, I am not sure he was a decision maker either.

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And, most important, rather than controlling or stemming the tide of a spontaneous uprising he preferred to ride on it, thus practically turning it into official policy. It was he who had encouraged the outburst of violence on the Naqbah Day of May 2000, thus undermining the Swedish secret channel of negotiations, and he later gave more than one indication that he would welcome a return to armed struggle if Camp David failed.

Page 266 · Location 5280

Mamduh Nufal, an adviser of his, quoted him to this effect in the Nouvel Observateur of 1 March 2001. His Minister of Posts and Communications, Imad Faluji, declared in a speech in a refugee camp in south Lebanon that the Intifada against Israel was carefully planned after the failed Camp David talks in July 2000 ‘by request of President Yasser Arafat, who predicted the outbreak of the Intifada as a complementary stage to the Palestinian steadfastness in the negotiations, and not as a specific protest against Sharon’s visit to Al-Haram Al-Quds. … The Palestinian Authority instructed the political forces and factions to run all materials of the Intifada.’

Page 267 · Location 5295

He gave an implicit green light to the uprising by doing what he frequently liked to do in such conditions: he left the country in the very first days of the Intifada in order not to have to assume responsibility. Only through the Intifada could he restore his and the Palestinians’ international standing that had been so seriously eroded by the worldwide perception after the Camp David summit–a perception strongly enhanced by Clinton’s finger-wagging at Arafat as chiefly responsible for the collapse of the summit–of an Israeli government ready for a far-reaching compromise facing obstinate Palestinian rejectionism. Arafat knew that Palestinian casualties played in his favour in world opinion and helped increase the international pressure on Israel.

Page 268 · Location 5319

The Israelis were left to assume the worst about Palestinian intentions, such as that they had never really intended to reach a settlement and that Oslo was for the Palestinians nothing but a strategic ploy aimed at doing away with the State of Israel altogether. Which is why opinion polls showed that two years into the Intifada only 20 per cent of Israelis believed that not even a signed peace agreement with the Palestinians would bring with it the end of violence and conflict.

Page 268 · Location 5332

As it turned out, the Intifada could not usher in a negotiated settlement precisely because, lacking attainable objectives, it raised the expectations of the Palestinians to unrealistic heights. Not an Israeli negotiator, but Hani al-Hassan, an old-time associate of Arafat, was forced to acknowledge that not only was the Intifada devoid of clear strategic objectives, it also raised the expectations of the Palestinian masses to such heights that it became impossible for their own leaders to meet. The Intifada, he wrote, ‘obliges our negotiators to raise the level of demands in the negotiations’ in a way that made it out of the question for Israel to accept them.

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Arguably, since he always identified the cause of his people with his own person as the embodiment of their national will, he believed that safeguarding the interests of the PLO and his own personal rule was tantamount to promoting the national cause.

Page 269 · Location 5348

Although there were plenty of indications that he had been for some time pushing for a shift of strategy from negotiations to violence, he probably did not initiate the uprising with specific orders.

Page 269 · Location 5353

Again, as in the first Intifada, leading the uprising was for Arafat a move of political survival, not the insight of a statesman with a clear strategic objective.

Page 270 · Location 5364

–A Palestinian sovereign state on 97 per cent of the West Bank and a safe passage, in the running of which Israel should not interfere, that would link the Gaza Strip, all of which, clean of Jewish settlements, would be also part of the Palestinian state, to the West Bank. Additional assets within Israel–such as docks in the ports of Ashdod and Haifa–could be used by the Palestinians so as to wrap up a deal that for all practical purposes could be tantamount to 100 per cent territory. Needless to say, the Jordan Valley, the mythological strategic asset sanctified by generations of Israeli generals, would be gradually handed over to full Palestinian sovereignty.–Jerusalem would be divided to create two capitals, Jerusalem and Al-Quds, along ethnic lines. What is Jewish would be Israeli and what is Arab would be Palestinian.–The Palestinians would have full and unconditional sovereignty on the Temple Mount, that is, Haram al-Sharif. Israel would retain her sovereignty on the Western Wall and a symbolic link to the Holy of Holies in the depths of the Mount.–With regard to refugees, it was stated that the Palestinians would have the right ‘to return to historical Palestine’ but with ‘no explicit right of return to the State of Israel’. They could be admitted to Israel in limited numbers and on the basis of humanitarian considerations, but Israel would retain her sovereign right of admission. Refugees could be settled, of course, in unlimited numbers not only in the Palestinian state, but also in those areas within Israel that would be handed over to the Palestinians in the framework of land swaps (the Palestinians were supposed to receive an Israeli territory equivalent to 3 per cent of the surface of the West Bank). In addition, a multibillion-dollar fund would be put together to finance a comprehensive international effort of compensation and resettlement that would be put in place.

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Clinton’s peace plan, 2000–In matters of security the President endorsed the Palestinians’ rejection of the concept of a completely ‘demilitarised state’ and proposed instead the concept of a ‘non-militarised state’ whose weaponry would have to be negotiated with Israel. A multinational force would be deployed along the Jordan Valley to replace the IDF. (The President recognised the need of the Israeli air force to co-ordinate with the Palestinians the use of their air space, as well as the IDF’s necessity to have three advance warning stations for a period of time.)

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The Israeli government met the deadline. Our decision, at the height of the Palestinian Intifada, in the midst of sweeping opposition on the part of the army–it was almost tantamount to a coup d’état that the Chief of Staff, General Mofaz, should have gone public to criticise the government’s endorsement of the parameters as an ‘existential threat to Israel’–and strong reservations from the opposition and public opinion, was a daring decision of a government (then already a minority government) of peace that stretched itself to the outer limits of its legitimacy in order to endorse positions its opponents labelled as suicidal, and as being an affront to Jewish values and history. But Arafat lingered. He refused to respond. As usual, he resumed his journeys throughout the world as if he were the travelling Emperor Hadrian, in the hope of evading any decision: another meeting with Mubarak, one more trip to Ben-Ali, another trip to Jordan, a further meeting of the Arab foreign ministers, dozens of calls from world leaders from the President of China to the Grand Duke of Luxembourg urging the Palestinian leader to seize this last opportunity, to grab the historic moment.

Page 273 · Location 5399

Both the Saudi and the Egyptian ambassadors in Washington, Bandar Bin Sultan and Nabil Fahmi, who came to encourage Arafat, in the name of their respective governments, to accept the President’s parameters as a last opportunity for peace that should not be missed, were dismayed at the behaviour of the Palestinian leader. And so was the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. He was said to be shocked that Arafat had wasted such an opportunity and that he had lied about the President’s offer on Jerusalem. Arafat’s rejection of the peace parameters was a ‘crime’ not only against the Palestinians but against the entire region, concluded the Saudi ambassador in a long interview published in the New Yorker on 24 March 2002.

Page 274 · Location 5422

Barak’s attitude to Taba was genuinely expressed on two occasions. One was when he allowed me to open, in Taba, a secret channel with Abu-Ala in order to explore freely the possibility of bridging the gaps and come to a last-moment breakthrough. The second occasion was when he made a radical shift in his position and virtually agreed to the concept of equal swaps of land.

Page 274 · Location 5431

Israel proposed in Taba physically to dismantle, or hand over to the Palestinians for the use of returning refugees, more than one hundred settlements. But those that formed coherent blocs adjacent to the 1967 line were supposed to remain as such under Israel’s sovereignty. However, as the maps that the Palestinians produced at Taba showed, our interlocutors totally rejected the very concept of blocs and referred to the settlements more as isolated outposts that would have to be linked separately from each other to Israel. Israel could not accept such an approach for it contradicted her entire peace strategy, and the Palestinians not only knew it but have always accepted it. All the back-track channels, either official or freelance, ever conducted by Israelis and Palestinians before Taba and after, were based on the acceptance by the Palestinians of the principle of settlement blocs.

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The Palestinians’ lack of interest in a deal in Taba was made patently clear when Yossi Sarid, probably the most emblematic ‘dove’ of Israeli politics and now a member of the Israeli delegation, proposed a Solomonic solution to the differences still pending between the parties on Jerusalem: the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the Old City and the holy belt leading from the Old City to the Mount of Olives. Had the Palestinians agreed to stick to the letter and the spirit of the Clinton parameters there should have been no reason for such differences to exist, but Mr Sarid thought nevertheless that an attempt should be made to reach a compromise by going the extra mile towards meeting the reservations of the Palestinians. ‘Let us split the burden between us,’ he suggested; ‘two of the four issues pending will be solved according to your position, and two according to ours, which is, as you know, respectful of the Clinton parameters.’ But to no avail. The Palestinians remained unimpressed.

Page 275 · Location 5453

Mythologies apart, Taba did not allow an agreement, not because of the fact that the Israelis’ qualitative political time was a desperately diminishing asset, but because the Palestinians treated the parameters as non-committal, and insisted on changing and challenging them on each and every point.

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One needs to recall in this context that Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996 amid a virulent campaign against the illegitimacy of the suicidal Oslo accords, but was eventually forced to endorse them once in office.

Page 277 · Location 5474

The weakness of the Barak government was of course due in great part to its own political blunders. But Arafat should also have wondered whether he would ever be able to reach an agreement with a ‘strong’ Israeli government when he so much excelled in weakening and eventually destroying his peace partners. Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life when he went for a dramatic breakthrough while Palestinian terrorism continued unabated, exposing him to Jewish extremists. In 1996 Shimon Peres was defeated amid an unprecedented wave of Palestinian suicide terror. And Ehud Barak suffered the greatest electoral débâcle in Israel’s political history because the voters saw the Intifada as Arafat’s counter-proposal to his peace initiative. To weaken and undermine Israeli left-wing governments, as he consistently did, and then refuse to make an agreement with them because they were ‘weak’ is a pattern that might keep the Palestinians in a permanent impasse. Ariel Sharon’s policies of scorched earth in the territories have been proof for Arafat that he who sows a wind ends by reaping a whirlwind. Arafat was a victim of his own illusions. He had a tendency to attribute to himself characteristics of a brilliant strategist and distinguished military man, ‘a general who never lost a war’, as he liked to introduce himself. But the truth is that as a strategist, of all people he proved his failure again and again. He always pushed his luck to the point where he lost all his achievements and what appeared to be a chance for reasonable victory ultimately became a disgraceful defeat. With Arafat, brinkmanship had no brakes; it was the art of bringing both his people and the Israelis to the edge of the abyss and beyond.

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Zionism, at least up to 1948, would never have functioned this way when faced with what is always and inevitably an imperfect settlement. It always acted with its back to the wall, which is why it was blessed with the capacity for pragmatic decision making. There are two essential reasons that can explain the pragmatic wisdom of Zionism at decisive crossroads. One is the fact that, in contrast to the anti-Semitic cliché about ‘Jewish power’, Zionism was always the national movement of a weak Jewish people lacking support, a persecuted people decimated by holocaust and genocide, a people that in case of failure at the time of taking a decision might be annihilated. The Palestinians, the presumed weak side of the conflict, never acted out of lack of choice as Zionism did. Until 1948 the Zionists certainly excelled in their capacity to mobilise international support and market their case. The Palestinians, however, stumbled on every road block, avoided no mistake and displayed no savoir faire in the field of diplomacy and public relations. They always seemed to take the wrong option.

Page 278 · Location 5499

After the Six Day War, however, the balance of forces in the war on public opinion clearly changed. Rarely–if ever–is history familiar with a similar case of a disparity between the high degree of international support enjoyed by a national movement and the poor results of such a support. In fact, after that war the overwhelming international support for the Palestinian cause almost became a handicap to the degree that it could be said that the Palestinians very nearly ‘suffered’ from an excess. At every junction of historical decision making, the international community gave them–and this is certainly true with regard to the Arab world–the sense that they were entitled to expect more and could therefore avoid a decision. The international pampering of the national Palestinian movement is unparalleled in modern history and, no less important, was at vital crossroads of the conflict an obstacle to a settlement. For it was frequently interpreted by the Palestinian leadership as an implicit encouragement to persist in its almost built-in incapacity to take decisions and find instead satisfaction in Israel’s decline into the position of a state put in the dock of the tribunal of international opinion.

Page 279 · Location 5519

The history of the Jews’ modern national movement, again mainly up until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, had been characterised by realistic responses to objective historical conditions. The Palestinians have consistently fought for the solutions of yesterday, those they had rejected a generation or two earlier.

Page 280 · Location 5535

A major reason for his incapacity to reach a reasonable compromise with Israel was precisely that the Palestinian Authority under his leadership was unwilling to develop a positive ethos of democracy, civil society, economic development and education. Instead, an old-style autocracy based on a negative ethos of confrontation was created. National cohesion was built around constituent values of radical ‘Palestinianism’, ‘refugeeism’ and Islam that left no room for compromise.

Page 280 · Location 5545

Peace for Arafat, if it were to respond to vital Israeli requirements, could automatically mean a civil war. In fact, Fatah understood that particular dilemma only too well, by explicitly admitting that that was exactly the reason they had rejected the Clinton parameters. To them, as they put it when trying to explain their rejection on the organisation’s website, ‘the parameters [were] the biggest trick’ and one that meant moving the conflict from a Palestinian–Israeli dispute to ‘an internal Palestinian–Palestinian conflict that will destroy the Intifada’.

Page 282 · Location 5581

The loose control of politicians over the army is a built-in weakness and inconsistency in Israel’s political system.

Page 283 · Location 5596

Sharm el Sheikh international summit of early October,

XI. The Politics of Doomsday

Page 285 · Location 5628

With regard to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the principle of compromise was now gone, the middle ground had been fatally wounded, and the so-called peace camp in Israel had been severely diminished and morally undermined by Arafat’s rejection of its peace platform.

Page 286 · Location 5639

Zionism’s major strategic success to date was that it forced its enemies to agree to make peace; but it could not force the terms of peace on them.

Page 287 · Location 5651

Such was the case with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when an entire nation followed him into an adventure that all were led to believe was inevitable, the last resort. His gamble ended by sinking Israel into a quagmire of blood, bereavement and destruction for more than eighteen years. And such was the situation when he embarked on an initiative to dismantle the settlements in the Gaza Strip that he himself had created in the first place. He was directly responsible for the calamitous network of settlements spread throughout the territories and in the midst of the dispossessed Palestinian population.

Page 287 · Location 5669

Sharon is the first prime minister since Oslo who did not aspire to solve Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, something that in his own twisted and tortuous way even Netanyahu had tried to do with the Hebron and the Wye agreements.

Page 288 · Location 5680

But Labour preferred to go, without any soul searching, from being part of the most daring political voyage since Oslo–the voyage we undertook as a government–to battling over portfolios in the Sharon government, which, in advance, assumed that the Barak team, as Mr Peres himself had claimed, ‘went too far in its concessions’. The Labour Party turned its back on its own political audacity while in office and now endorsed the groundless political assumption of Ariel Sharon that the volcanic eruption of rage among the Palestinians could be calmed down by another interim settlement.

Page 289 · Location 5695

And in any case he regarded Hamas’s violence as a major strategic tool of the Palestinian cause he would not undermine, so long as it did not directly challenge his personal rule.

Page 289 · Location 5698

shelling of the Altalena,

Page 289 · Location 5704

Abu-Mazen acknowledged that for an orderly Palestinian national movement to inspire vital international trust there should be, as he put it in a speech to the Palestinian parliament upon assuming the office of prime minister, ‘one authority, one law and one democratic and national decision that applies to us all’.

Page 290 · Location 5719

The government is incapable of responding to the popular yearnings for peace. For, regardless of party loyalties and according to most studies, the overwhelming majority of Israelis would support a peace settlement that is based on the Clinton parameters–two states, withdrawal from territories, massive dismantling of settlements, two capitals in Jerusalem–but they trust neither their political system nor, of course, the Palestinian leadership to come to an accommodation on that basis. Which may explain the results of a poll conducted in 2002 by the Steinmetz Centre for Peace at Tel Aviv University indicating that, convinced of the incapacity of their political system to produce solutions, 67 per cent of Israeli Jews would support an American effort to recruit an international alliance that would coax the parties into endorsing such a settlement.

Page 291 · Location 5733

ABC–‘Anything But Clinton’–seemed to have been President Bush’s attitude to the legacy of the Clinton administration on most domestic and international issues. This was particularly the case with the Israeli–Palestinian track. Probably nothing expresses better this change of attitude than Colin Powell’s instruction to the officials in the State Department, as soon as the new administration took over in January 2001, no longer to make use of the term ‘peace process’.

Page 292 · Location 5750

Democracy is not a project one devises and implements with rigid timetables; democracy is a process and the Arab world will have to go through it with hardly any short cuts. For short cuts may lead to abrupt transitions from the secular dictatorships now prevailing throughout the entire Arab world to Islamic democracies.

Page 292 · Location 5760

It would be dangerously naïve to believe that the exercise of power and the capacity to intimidate are unnecessary. But they will always need to be backed by reasonable compromises, to be reached through diplomacy and negotiations.

Page 293 · Location 5780

road map

Page 294 · Location 5797

Daily Israeli incursions into the Hamas strongholds in Gaza with their appalling toll of civilian casualties, the targeted killing of Hamas leaders from Sheikh Yassin to his successor at the head of the movement, Abd-el-Aziz Rantisi, and Palestinian terrorist suicide attacks against the civilian population in Israel were all the reflection of a macabre alliance between two sides for which a ceasefire would have meant facing political choices they were unwilling or unable to make.

Page 294 · Location 5810

The Palestinian case is one more reminder of an important fallacy to which Mr Bush has subscribed. The real, and certainly the immediate, choice in the Arab world is not between dictatorship and democracy but between secular dictatorship and Islamic democracy.

Page 295 · Location 5831

Neither Israelis nor Palestinians even started to implement the road map’s most primary provisions. The Palestinians did not crack down on terrorism and the Israelis dragged their feet when it came to removing the so-called ‘illegal’ outposts, let alone when addressing the need to stop the expansion of the ‘legal’ settlements. The fatal symmetry between terrorism and settlements that was born with the Oslo accords and was eventually to wreck them was the same that subverted the road map from the first moment.

Page 296 · Location 5839

The road map, just like Oslo, thus became a standing invitation for the parties to dictate the nature of the final deal through unilateral acts, such as the expansion of settlements by the Israelis and the wild campaign of suicide terrorism and armed uprising by the Palestinians.

Page 296 · Location 5849

It is inconceivable that the Palestinians would agree to repeat the experience if the parameters of the final settlement were not agreed upon in advance.

Page 296 · Location 5852

A ‘temporary state’ could not, in any case, offer the popular legitimacy needed for an uncompromising war on Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Such legitimacy can emerge only if and when the Palestinians are convinced that Islamic terrorism is no longer a response to Israel’s strategy of occupation but an obstacle that needs to be removed on the way to a final settlement with dignity.

Page 297 · Location 5855

Sharon’s hidden agenda, which he has been harbouring for years, remains unchanged. The sterilisation of the Palestinian national movement, which he has always seen as a major strategic, even existential, threat to Israel, and the confinement of a Palestinian homeland within scattered enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements, strategic military areas and a network of bypass roads for the exclusive use of the Israeli occupier, remain, in broad lines, his grand design.

Page 299 · Location 5894

For many years Damascus has been host to a plethora of terrorist organisations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad to Hezbollah. And during the war in Iraq there were indications that not only did the Syrians facilitate the passage of Arab volunteers to Iraq, but they also transferred military equipment from their territory to Saddam’s forces. In a deliberate disregard of America’s request, Damascus refused to seal her border with Iraq. If this were not enough, ‘Tishrin’, the Syrian regime’s mouthpiece, asked that the International Criminal Court should judge the American leaders ‘as war criminals, equal in rank to the Nazi war criminals’.

Page 299 · Location 5906

The Israelis and the Americans knew throughout that he actively supported Hezbollah attacks against Israel, but Assad would never admit it publicly.

Page 300 · Location 5914

Until very recently, the Syrian regime seemed to be engaged in a double strategy that did not preclude an accommodation with Washington. If Bashar was doing everything to irritate the Americans, he was at the same time showing bursts of co-operation that signalled to them that he could be a valuable ally for the US in the region. In the aftermath of 9/ 11 the Syrians helped locate and even arrest key figures in Al-Qaeda. It was the Syrians who arrested Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a German citizen of Syrian descent, who had recruited Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/ 11 hijackers. The Syrians co-operated in additional ways with the American war against terror, seemingly even helping to foil an Al-Qaeda-planned attack on American forces in the Gulf. And there was, of course, also Syria’s vital vote for Security Council Resolution 1441 that allowed the US a much needed diplomatic achievement on the way to its onslaught on the Iraqi regime.

Page 301 · Location 5933

The Syrians were clearly taken aback by the way both Prime Minister Sharon and President Bush brushed aside their call for the resumption of negotiations for a settlement with Israel. There even seem to be indications, as Israel’s former military Chief of Staff General Yaalon has hinted recently, of their readiness for a deal based on the international border, rather than on the 1967 lines that Hafez al-Assad so adamantly insisted upon to the extent of making impossible a settlement with Israel.

Page 301 · Location 5945

But neither on the Palestinian front nor in the Syrian track was this philosophy being vindicated. Both Israel and America were clearly hesitant to seize the opportunity created by the neutralisation, even if temporary and still precarious, of the strategic threats in the outer Middle East in order to pacify the inner Middle East. On the contrary, they seemed to be overlooking them.

Page 302 · Location 5952

Nor is his dilemma an easy one. He knows he cannot tackle and absorb two major political earthquakes at one time, one that would emanate from his disengagement plan from Gaza and another that would inevitably emerge from the pull-out from the Golan. A coalition of the Golan settlers with those of Gaza and the West Bank is a politically lethal alliance that had already contributed to doom Rabin’s peace efforts. Ever the tactician, rather than the bold visionary statesman, Ariel Sharon prefers not to tempt fate or to court political disaster.

Page 304 · Location 5998

Israel’s march of folly in the occupied territories represented by her absurdly adventurist policy of settlements has created a reality on the ground that can no longer be solved only through traditional diplomatic means.

Page 304 · Location 6009

In the Israeli–Palestinian conflict the possibility of peace without agony was missed years ago. From now on nobody can spare the parties their Calvary. Both Palestinians and Israelis rightly earned it with their political short-sightedness and sometimes sheer human stupidity.

Page 305 · Location 6023

General Yaalon provided proof of a political resourcefulness of sorts. But by trying to rescue from oblivion such an anachronistic, and indeed obsolete, concept as the capsule doctrine, he displayed his failure to understand the most fundamental lessons of history. National movements that cannot be suppressed by military means cannot be obliterated by simply ignoring them, or by changing the identity of the occupier.

Page 307 · Location 6054

track II plans such as Geneva,

Page 308 · Location 6071

The fate of any Israeli leader who has tried to withdraw from the territories, either through an agreement like Rabin and Barak, or in a violent way, like Sharon, has been to face political defeat and in Rabin’s case even assassination. Israeli politics defy the rule that stability and equilibrium are only maintained by pedalling the bicycle. It is precisely by pedalling, moving and initiating that a leader paves the way for his political demise. Rabin, Peres and Barak were defeated because they tried to break the old, paralysing inertia of war and conflict.

Page 308 · Location 6079

What is refreshing, though, is that Sharon, the unscrupulous and ruthless man of action, has finally realised the limits of force. No one who knew his personal and political history would have imagined him delivering a speech like the one he gave on the day the Knesset approved his plan. Addressing the settlers, those whom he had spoiled and cultivated for years, he said, You have developed among you a dangerous Messianic spirit. We have no chance to survive in this part of the world that has no mercy for the weak if we persist in this path. I have learnt from my own experience that the sword alone offers no solution. We do not want to rule over millions of Palestinians who multiply every year. Israel will not survive as a democratic state if she continues being a society that occupies another nation. The withdrawal from Gaza will open the gates of a new reality.

Page 309 · Location 6101

There can be little doubt that Hamas, the dominant power in Gaza, would claim–as Hezbollah did in Lebanon–that Israel’s pull-out represents a victory for its campaign and a vindication of suicide terrorism. If Hamas is allowed to become the governing authority in the Gaza Strip, this could usher in the establishment of a mini-Taliban state at permanent war against Israel.

XII. Conclusions

Page 312 · Location 6152

The army has also opposed most of the political breakthroughs in Israel’s history. Chief of Staff General ‘Motta’ Gur misread Sadat’s peace initiative and was against it; his successor in 2000, General Shaul Mofaz, fiercely opposed Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon as well as the Clinton Peace Parameters, and more recently the army again resisted the Gaza disengagement, which had to be practically imposed on it by the Prime Minister.

Page 313 · Location 6173

More important, however, the history of peacemaking between Israel and her Arab neighbours showed that it was the change of mind of the hawks and the shift in their positions, not the preaching of the doves, that allowed Israel to exploit chances of peace at vital crossroads.

Page 314 · Location 6203

It was Abba Eban who said that the Palestinian leadership never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. In the aftermath of the 1967 war this could just as well be said of Israel’s leaders who rejected one after another Sadat’s peace overtures. Neither in 1948 nor in 1967 was Israel subjected to irresistible international pressure to relinquish her territorial gains because her victory was perceived as the result of a legitimate war of self-defence.

Page 315 · Location 6217

Sadat laid down the fundamental truths of any Arab–Israeli peace in the future: Israel cannot expect to have both territories and peace; but nor can the Arabs get away with their territories, as Nasser expected, without offering full peace and recognition to the Jewish state.

Page 317 · Location 6259

This persistent attempt to turn back the clock of history lies at the root of many of the misfortunes that have befallen the peoples of the region. But, eventually, it was the Arab side that led the strategic shift from war to political accommodation.

Page 318 · Location 6277

PLO’s 1988 Algiers declaration.

Page 318 · Location 6288

‘The best of enemies’ since at least 1946, Israel and Jordan would nevertheless only come to a peace agreement in 1994, and even then only because Israel had reached an accommodation with the Palestinians through the Oslo accords.

Page 322 · Location 6351

The Middle East is a cemetery of missed opportunities.

Page 322 · Location 6355

Three times in their history the Palestinians were offered statehood–in 1937, in 1947 and through the Clinton parameters in 2000–and three times they have rejected it.

Page 324 · Location 6393

The Israeli Left is bound to admit that its policy of fighting terrorism and negotiating peace at the same time was a resounding failure, and that it was Ariel Sharon’s ruthless crackdown on Palestinian terrorism that brought the Palestinians to their knees and forced even Hamas to plead for a truce. But the Right was, and continues to be, equally wrong in its far-fetched assumptions about the price of peace and its capacity to impose it on the Palestinians.

Page 325 · Location 6418

The Arabs of Jerusalem, and maybe even those of the State of Israel proper, might be asked in a future final settlement to vote in the Palestinian state without the territories they live in being part of the State of Palestine, just as the settlers throughout the West Bank could remain in their settlements, be citizens of the State of Israel and vote in the elections for the Israeli parliament. Sharon, who is so surprisingly sanguine in allowing the Palestinians of Jerusalem to vote, may believe that this is the best way to reconcile his demographic worries with his territorial ambitions.

Page 327 · Location 6457

special Security Council resolution that will view the plan as the authoritative international interpretation of Resolution 242 on the Palestinian issue.

Page 327 · Location 6467

An orderly Palestinian polity is crucial if it is to meet Israel’s elementary security requirements.

Page 328 · Location 6490

It is vital that the Israelis realise that no change in the international system, however radical, will spare them hard and painful choices.

Page 328 · Location 6492

Internationally legitimised borders will offer Israel more deterrence power than F-16 raids on terrorist targets that end up killing innocent civilians without deterring the terrorists.

Page 329 · Location 6494

But, as the United States has learned the hard way in Iraq, this is an era where power without legitimacy only breeds chaos, and military supremacy without legitimate international consent for the use of force does not offer security.

Page 329 · Location 6502

But the past is frequently the enemy of the future, and nothing in the Arab past has prepared them for the idea of a Jewish sovereign state in their midst.

Page 330 · Location 6520

Israel even managed to force the entire Arab world, and the international community as well, to accept the legitimacy of the 1948 borders even though these went far beyond the borders that were approved for the Jewish state in 1947.

Page 330 · Location 6523

accepts that the territorial phase of Zionism has come to its end, Zionism’s victory can still be finally sealed.

Page 330 · Location 6526

This should serve as a lesson to the Palestinians and their leaders who throughout their history have preferred the dangerous inertia of national myths and unrealistic dreams, rather than choosing a wise and prudent political course.

Page 330 · Location 6531

Democracy is the key for Arab leaders to be able to end the historically destructive pattern of government whereby they were constantly forced to placate and control an ‘Arab street’ which they had themselves incited with bellicose rhetoric against the Jewish state and its American ‘imperialist’ patrons. It was when trapped in that insoluble conundrum of their own making that the Arab leaders manoeuvred themselves against their own will into the 1956 Sinai Campaign and the 1967 Six Day War.

Page 331 · Location 6540

But forcing Israel’s Arab enemies to accept her existence and make peace with her is one thing; imposing on them the territorial terms of a settlement is quite another. Demography and territory, the two pillars of the Zionist enterprise, cannot be reconciled unless Israel abandons her territorial ambitions and departs from the unrealistic, and morally corrupting, dream of possessing the biblical lands of Eretz-Israel.

Page 331 · Location 6544

‘Transfer’ and ‘separation’ were, one should recall, important concepts that were advocated from the early days of the Zionist enterprise.

Page 331 · Location 6551

Israel’s leaders and her civil society bear a heavy responsibility to conceive bold and generous solutions precisely because of the high ideals upon which the Jewish state was built, and because of the noble values of Jewish civilisation that cannot be reconciled with the denial of the natural right of an occupied people to a life of freedom and dignity.

Staging notes WIP

Debate Notes...

Norman Finkelstein
https://www.youtube.com/live/Zzjicdi3O0o?si=BYiNn9-bahsPqlyK Claims Gaza has been illegally annexed by Israel according to international law. has it been? Does the IC say that? Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth, more densely populated than Tokyo. is it so dense? In 2006, Hamas participated in elections and won. Bush pressured them to have elections. People hated the PA because they were corrupt. what was Hamas up to before that? Why did people hate the PA? Where did election pressure come from? Day after elections, Jimmy Carter declared them fair, then Israel put up a blockade. why did blockade go up? 50% unemployment. like U3 or? Could they even work? What about work permits? 50% has extreme food insecurity in Gaza. what is the number? Does this matter? What is the definition? The Hamas people who came out of the gates were overwhelmingly 20-23, they were born into the concentration camps. do we know their ages??? Finkelstein less than animals quote. the quote was about Hamas, from defense minister. And it actually says the exact opposite about the Palestinian people. Operation Cast Iron ceasefire was broken. it was, but let's get more information about this. Every international organization, including Goldstone, says that the blockade in Gaza is a war crime. is it? Do they? I use all the sources, they say Hamas uses no human shields. sources even from AI and the UN say they do, so do Hamas?? 47:56 Amensty International found no evidence that Hamas directed the movements of civilians to shield military objectives. this and then the cringe definition of human shields This is called "not taking precautions to shield civilians" under international law no it's not??? The Gaza ministry of health is a civilian organization is it??? "Nobody says anything about the Israeli numbers when the number changed after Oct 7th" are we saying they have the same level of accountability??? Does Hamas have their own b'tselem "We need to wait, I don't know how many were killed with crossfire." did you wait for the hospital story??? "Israel has the best first responders in the world...how did the number keep growing?" the implication being this was faked?? "A military expert called them bottle rockets." he says the Iron Done is just conspiracy/for show???? https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/palestinian-rocket-and-mortar-attacks-against-israel#2006 1:03:40 Is it a war or a genocide? What are the facts? 3 statements quotes. look up every single quote 97% of water is poisonous from the ground wells. It's not potable. is it? All three of these statements mean Israel has launched a war of genocide. intent? Any other plausible explanation for actions? 2% of food trucks are being admitted. for how long? Is this true? The NYT says they have stockpiles of food, weapons, fuel, Finkelstein says "the officials said..." so he doesn't trust the NYT officials but trusts Hamas??? He says again "they're all animals" and "they're all legitimate targets" are these quotes accurate? Half dozen quotes by Israeli officials "let's use this as an opportunity to get rid of the Palestinians from Gaza" what are they? They want to force Egypt to let them into the Sinai. where have they said this? People were trying to discredit the PLO back in the days. They did everything they could to get a two state solution under international law. black September??? Jordan/Lebanon??? Camp David??? Geneva accord??? Beginning in 2006, there were many attempts to reach a settlement of the conflict. 30 year Truce. were there??? What did they look like??? When I say Settlement, I mean based on the principals of International Law. palestinian refugee situation is unique, they go back right to their homes??? Every year the UN votes on "Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine question." what are the terms? The Palestinians feel like the IC gave up. why didn't the West Bank attack as well, then? Occam's Razor for why Oct 7th happened, because of concentration camps conditions. why don't we apply this to Israel and the genocide question, then??? They decided on October 7th to take their fate into their own hands. what about every Hamas attack since then???? Nat Turner rebellion brought up a ton. Then John Brown inspired by him, this lead to the Civil War. is slavery really comparable??? Is he justifying all civilian violence, then??? also sooo much question dodging on hard questions. What did the Jewish Fighting Organization accomplish? Nothing good, just destruction of the ghetto. is this a good comparison?? Why don't they let Palestinians out? how do you migrate out of Gaza. Let them leave and never come back??? Israel is keeping all of Gaza hostage. doesn't this directly contradict earlier when you said they wanted to drive them out to the Sinai? Maybe if there wasn't a blockade in Gaza, maybe this wouldn't have happened in the first place? just quote 2nd intifada weapon shipments When quote clarification happens he says "and what is the inference?" And he keeps saying "no distinction." but you ignore the Hamas charter, propaganda, and all the statements???? They announced their plan on October 8th, and then they've followed that plane. cite them changing over and over again from US pressure In the first week, they dropped more bombs than any year in the war in Afghanistan. what was the Afghanistan death toll??? Wouldn't their be more deaths? he DODGES again with this "facts" quote, then leads to with child quote AGAIN, this man lives in memes Why doesn't Egypt let any out to travel? dodges question and makes it about letting ALL Palestinians out They want to release them into the Sinai to rot and die. what??? Israeli settlements were popping up in the Sinai after '67, also again where is the proof for this? So many statements from Isralies saying "this is a great opportunity to resolve the Gaza question." who? Name them Does Hamas need to be dismantled? Well if Hamas needs to be dismantled, so does the Israeli government. do they really conduct themselves in the same way? Also he says he never dodges questions but this is ANOTHER DODGE. It "mows the lawn" source of this quote needed The people in Gaza were never given a chance. chance for what?! Bush forced elections, they voted Hamas, and then Israel put up the blockade. are we missing something here??? It was a dictatorship, but that dictatorship was the result of never giving the people another election. didn't Hamas toss out the Fatah and cancel all elections???? Sociologist book "Politicized" called Gaza the largest concentration camp in 2003. More mow the lawn quotes. look up this rationale They did terror bombing in WWII to get the civilians to rise up against the Germans. Over 800,000 civilians killed. did they? It's expecting something amazing for the people of Gaza to not make homicidal statements. the histories are not even remotely comparable here. Why the difference between the West Bank and the Gaza strip? Hamas attacks Egypt? Why is Hamas bad? Not democratically elected. Coup'd Fatah, no elections. Transmits propaganda to children. Inhibits any peace process, they just want war. Remember the fighting with Abbas when he wanted truce in 2005. Utilize human shields. Even IC recognizes this. Hoards and diverts money from humanitarian places. Digging up pipes, stealing money, hoarding food. Digs tunnels, fires rockets constantly. Questions for Norm Does Hamas have a moral justification for terrorism against Isralies? Are their actions taking Palestine closer to or further from peace? How should Israel respond to Hamas? Why does Israel have the blockade? Why didn't Egypt or Jordan make a Palestinian state in '48? Do you have any criticisms at all for Hamas? Is getting rid of Hamas a worthy goal? Do you support a one state or two state solution? Why doesn't the IDF "mow the lawn" in the West Bank? Why do you say consensus says blockade illegal but only cite one footnote in chapter 4 of Method and Madness. Why do you describe the Turkel report as Quasi-Official? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag7bSPFhb1Q The Blockade in Gaza Started in 2005 Incident - In May of 2010, attack on Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara Video On September 27th, 2010, a UN General Assembly report from the HRC declared (on line 53/54) the blockade in Gaza to be collective punishment, or illegal under international law. In September of 2011, a report of the Secretary-General's Panel of Inquiry on the 31st of May, 2010 Flotilla Incident claimed that the blockade followed international law. Elections in the Gaza Strip Background 2006 elections were the second set of elections for the PLC The Palestinian Cairo Declaration Called for the elections to be held using a mixed voting system. Under USAID, the US spent $2.3million in support for Palestinian elections. Some claim that this was an attempt to influence the results. Plan to overthrow Hamas Bush administration approved a plan to overthrow Hamas by funneling arms and resources to Fatah in the Gaza Strip. May 2007 - The Desoto Report of the same affair, Did Hamas moderate? 2008 Israel ceasefire breaking Tunnels are a right to self-defense Operation Cast Lead 3 times ceasefire that reduced blockade restrictions Protective Edge Future video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pka7H1aMlkQ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/TurkelCommission.pdf https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/iccdocs/otp/OTP-COM-Article_53(1)-Report-06Nov2014Eng.pdf https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/15session/a.hrc.15.21_en.pdf https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-205969 https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/18042/#:~:text=Following%20are%20the%20%22offensive%E2%80%9D%20weapons,iron%20bars%20and%20iron%20chains https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestinians-tortured-summarily-killed-by-hamas-forces-during-2014-conflict/ https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule97 https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/015/2009/en/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MDE2116432015ENGLISH.pdf

Ben Shapiro Debate...

2023.10.05 - Ben Shapiro video on Who Wants to be Speaker of the House
YouTube Link 4:50 - "Donald Trump backed a bunch of really bad candidates in Purple Districts." Giving one strong reason why Trump is a bad leader. He has bad political instincts and is not effective at choosing good candidates for either his cabinet, nor candidates for other races. 4:50 - Big Trumpy candidates also cost senate seats in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania because of how much swing voters dislike Trump. Trump is a bad pick for Republicans because of how much he galvanizes support on the other side. 8:40 - This notion that running against the entire system (like Trump did) produces good results has not been borne out. This is very true, it's the failure of ALL populist leaders, and it is EXACTLY what Donald Trump aims to repeat in the next election if he were to win. 11:50 - One norm of the house is that you don't remove members from committees just because you don't like them. Marjorie Taylor Greene was not removed from her committees simply because "Democrats did not like her." If that was the case, wouldn't there be numerous other Republicans removed from committees? What about Geatz? What about Bobbert? MTG wasn't removed from her committees because people simply didn't like her, it was because She supported 9/11 conspiracy theories. She harassed a school shooting victim, David Hogg, about using children as shields for red flag laws. She also claims that he's a paid actor in the same video. She claimed that the Parkland School Shooting was a false flag event. She supported executing Democratic leaders like Pelosi and members of the FBI before running for Congress. She mentioned Jewish space lasers causing fires in California. Spoke alongside Nick Fuentes at AFPAC. Paul Gosar was also removed from committees and censured formaking an AoT spoof with Republicans attacking Democrats (tbf the video was incredibly badass). 14:00 - He brings up AOC's tweets about Gaetz's lack of support for institutions. Ben doesn't engage with this at all. Did McCarthy deserve infinite support from the Democrats? 14:20 - Democrats suggested they could ram judicial nominees through with 51 votes. Nuclear option research on history of judicial nominees. 21:10 - Is Donald Trump going to whip votes? Is he going to fundraise on behalf of members of the house? Donald Trump is just not good for the Republican party. 32:00 - Joe Biden is running this economy into a ditch. What could he be doing better? 33:00 - Joe Biden encourages us to talk to us neighbors, Ben Shapiro claims he's a "dead president." Biden's answer here was incredibly diplomatic and exactly what we need right now. 41:10 - The reason these Kaiser strikes are happening is because Joe Biden is president of the United States. Really? Did any strikes at all happen under Trump? 41:27 - Economic stagnation is the real threat of the Biden administration. Isn't the US outcompeting the G7? 42:00 - Where's AOC crying about the border wall? Are Democrats against all border security? Or just children separated from their family? Biden wall fact check.

2023.11.01 - Oxford Union Ben Shapiro Debate with Students
YouTube Link Q: How do you excuse or explain the violence in the West Bank preceding October 7th A: A breakaway group from the Palestinian Authority called "Lions Den"are responsible for many terrorist attacks from Jerusalem and through the West Bank. Islamic Jihad is a terrorist group with wide presence in the West Bank. My Questions Does Shapiro believe all violence in the West Bank against Palestinians is justified? Is it always while targeting a terror cell? Does Shapiro believe the IDF ever commits indiscriminate violence against Palestinians in the West Bank? Does Shapiro believe in unjustified Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank? Q: What do you think about IDF enacted violence against the March of Return? A: Ben isn't familiar. Q: Do you think the IDF shoots at civilians with total impunity? A: That's not true, many of them have been arrested. "They're all currently sitting in Israeli jail." My Questions Do you believe the IDF or Settlers are generally held accountable when it comes to committing violence against Palestinians? What about the pardons given to the perpetrators of the Kafr Qasim massacre? Q: Do you think Israel is justified in killing civilians using your logic? A: There is a difference between going in and deliberately killing civilians vs attacking infrastructure and killing civilians through collateral damage. My Questions What about Lavon Affair Deir Yassin massacre Kafr Qasim massacre Samu Incident Sabra and Shatila massacre Q: A question about the political climate in the United States. A: "We should nominate somebody who's sane...on one hand, we have a geriatric old guy, on the other hand, we have Donald Trump." My Questions If we were truly looking to nominate someone based on their sanity, do we feel like Donald Trump's behavior is truly a better reflection of sanity than Joseph Biden's? Q: Why not support Biden over Trump? Trump's call for a suspension of the Constitution and Trump's incitement of January 6th. A: In Trump's imagination, he's a serious threat to Democracy, but since Democracy survived he must not have been a serious threat. A: January 6th was not a threat to American Democracy. There is no point in time on January 6th that a military coup had been launched and that Donald Trump would retain the presidency. A: Joe Biden has used the power of the executive branch in new and exorbitant ways. For example, when he tried to use OSHA to enforce vaccination policies. A: "I think Donald Trump only cares about Donald Trump." A: Joe Biden doesn't believe in the Supreme Court. He's attacked the Supreme Court with alacrity. His party has talked about packing the Supreme Court. My Questions Does someone need to always have a clear chance at thwarting Democracy to be considered a threat to Democracy? Does a failure to be anti-Democratic mean that you are, by definition Democratic? During Jan 6th, is it inconceivable that a few more people could have caused substantial damage to the actual members of government? Were protestors at one point not a single hallway away from lawmakers? What would have happened if they were caught? Did Trump's constant election denialism not fuel this riot? Did Donald Trump not flex incredibly executive power? What about in regards to restricting immigration, enacting tariffs, doing border policy, doing executive actions, etc..? Isn't Donald Trump's obsession with himself a danger to all of us when he's supposed to be representing the American people instead of his own ego? The Democrats literally lost a Supreme Court pick to the Republicans. Biden has explicitly refused to consider packing the Supreme Court.

Ben Shapiro Material
Reference Material 2023.11.01 - Oxford Union Ben Shapiro Debate with Students 2023.10.05 - Ben Shapiro video on Who Wants to be Speaker of the House 2023.08.28 -"The great irony here is that Biden is getting off easy. Corrupt and dishonest are far more applicable to Biden than Trump. Broad Political Narratives I'd like to Outline Ben Shapiro contributes to one-sided historical analysis. The Trump leadership's downstream effects can be seen across all of the Republican leadership. The Speaker of the House fiasco is a great example of this. Donald Trump is not healthy for the Republican party or for the conservative movement. He attacks conservative leadership, "dividing Republican against Republican." He's inconsistent on his values and beliefs (are they even conservative?). He chooses poor candidates to back in races. He doesn't fundraise for candidates. (Do presidents normally do this?) Donald Trump's record on any of the large issues he ran on is not good. Foreign wars, he ended none. Border security he failed on. Balanced budget he failed on. Gun control increased under Donald Trump. Two large strains of argumentation Donald Trump is a bad candidate to support if you are truly a conservative. Joe Biden is a better candidate for the overall health of America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVLIm8LrAgg https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1696231419868020892 Hi Destiny, Listening to your talk with Pisco about potential Ben Shapiro debate topics. A couple items I think that would be good to brush up on ahead of time, if it ends up being Trump vs Biden's record / foreign policy. Trump \| Afghanistan https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/donald-trump-joe-biden-afghanistan My thoughts: Not only did Trump negotiate the withdrawal and pushed it to Biden's administration, but Trump BRAGGED about how Biden couldn't have stopped the process even if he wanted to. Trump clip in June 2021, 2 months prior to withdrawal: https://twitter.com/theNuzzy/status/1427051039404957697 Trump \| refusal to pull us out of Yemen, against rare bipartisanship in Congress https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/politics/trump-veto-yemen.html My thoughts: I bring this up as an example to MAGA family whenever they say Trump is against foreign wars. Trump \| Yemen raid https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/02/02/512490365/yemen-aftermath-trumps-first-military-raid-continues-to-raise-questions My thoughts: I recalled this while watching your talk with Tim Pool when he was obsessed with Obama's "extrajudicial killings". Immediately upon taking office, Trump called on a military raid in Yemen (one that the Obama administration didn't do because it was considered too risky), resulting in the deaths of women, children, and an American SEAL. Trump \| Drone Program https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/us/politics/trump-drone-strike-rules.html My thoughts: Not only did Trump expand America's drone program, but made it harder to account for civilian casualties. 2018-19 Government Shutdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_United_States_federal_government_shutdown My thoughts: Trump had one of the longest government shutdowns while Republicans controlled BOTH houses. Insane. If I recall, the Democrats were even going to give Trump all the border wall funding he wanted so long as he saved DACA. But Stephen Miller (arguably one of the actual racists in Trump's cabinet) stopped it, receiving criticism from Lindsey Graham. Good luck! https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/17lvdgv/ben_shapiro_says_trump_is_not_a_threat_to/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 Hey Steven, Thought I share this timestamped video with you from Ben Shapiro's Oxford Union QA this week (5 minutes max). One of the audience members asks Ben why he would support Trump over Biden. Ben goes into his rational and reasons for disliking Biden more, I think it's an excellent starting place for formulating your arguments and research for the upcoming debate. https://youtu.be/-1NFirxhXWE?si=OvtivJbZiuF4ap-w&t=1761 That said I think debating the legitimacy of settlements or Zionism seems more interesting since its a more unique view Ben holds. Thanks, REPUBLICANS CAN'T RULE FIRST TIME EVER MAJORITY LOSES HOUSE SPEAKER SEAT??? What legislation have Republicans brought to the House floor? Under Pelosi, it was a record amount of legislation. (fact check) https://www.apricitas.io/p/are-real-wages-rising In April 2009, a Novel H1N1 influenza A (genetically distinct from seasonal flu virus) strain of swine origin was identified. Unlike previous seasonal influenza viruses, this pandemic influenza virus disproportionately infects a wider age-range of people. Based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) recommendations, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has guidelines for employers to assist them in the development of a framework in preparing their workplaces in order to minimize transmission of a pandemic virus. OSHA does expect facilities providing healthcare services to perform a risk assessment of their workplace and encourages healthcare employers to offer both the seasonal and H1N1 vaccines. It is important to note that employees need to be properly informed of the benefits of the vaccinations. However, although OSHA does not specifically require employees to take the vaccines, an employer may do so. In that case, an employee who refuses vaccination because of a reasonable belief that he or she has a medical condition that creates a real danger of serious illness or death (such as serious reaction to the vaccine) may be protected under Section 11(c) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 pertaining to whistle blower rights. Source: https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/2009-11-09 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch "As Hitler controlled the masses support for the political right, the conservative elite believed that they could use Hitler and his popular support to ‘democratically’ take power. Once in power, Hitler could destroy the political left. Destroying the political left would help to remove the majority of political opponents to the ring-wing conservative elite. Once Hitler had removed the left-wing socialist opposition and destroyed the Weimar Republic, the conservative elite thought they would be able to replace Hitler, and appoint a leader of their choice." Read this and thought it might be a useful line of attack for the biden/trump debate. Beyond policy, what about character, values, and real leadership? https://ryanholiday.net/letter/ Some quotes: "Was it stupid that, in February, Trump was tweeting about how Covid-19 was like the flu and that we didn’t need to worry? Yes, but it takes on a different color when you listen to him tell Bob Woodward that in January he knew how bad it was, how much worse it was than even the worst flu, and that he was deliberately going to downplay the virus for political purposes." "I guess I just always thought you believed in the lessons you taught me, and the things we used to listen to on talk radio on our drives home from the lake. All those conversations about American dignity, the power of private enterprise, the sacredness of the Oval Office, the primacy of the rule of law." "If Donald Trump were even half-competent, one elected official told me, he could probably rule this country for 20 years. I have trouble figuring what’s worse—that he wants to, or that he wants to but isn’t competent enough to pull it off. Instead, Washington is so broken and so filled with cowards that Trump just spent the last four years breaking stuff and embarrassing himself." "Or is it worse, that my own father cares more about his retirement accounts—and I’ll grant, the runup of the market has been nice for me, too—than the future he is leaving for his children? Are you so afraid of change, of that liberal boogeyman Limbaugh and Hannity and these other folks have concocted, that you’d rather entrust the country to a degenerate carnival barker than anyone else? I see all this anger, what is it that you’re so angry about? You’ve won. Society has worked for you. My own success is proof." "So what is it? Because it can’t possibly be that you think this guy is trustworthy, decent, or kind. It’s definitely not about his policies… because almost every single one is anathema to what Republicans—and you—have talked about my entire life." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOryDXS4skQ&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOryDXS4skQ DON'T LET THE "trump is just dumb lol" ARGUMENT EVER FLY

Jones and Greenwald Debate...

Jones Greenwald Debate Strategy
Quotes Ronald Sandlin, who threatened police officers in the Capitol saying, “you’re going to die,” posted on December 23, 2020: “I’m going to be there to show support for our president and to do my part to stop the steal and stand behind Trump when he decides to cross the rubicon. If you are a patriot I believe it’s your duty to be there. I see it as my civic responsibility.” Garret Miller, who brought a gun to the Capitol on January 6th, explained: “I was in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, because I believed I was following the instructions of former President Trump and he was my president and the commander-in-chief. His statements also had me believing the election was stolen from him.” John Douglas Wright explained that he brought busloads of people to Washington, DC, on January 6th “because Trump called me there, and he laid out what is happening in our government.” Lewis Cantwell testified: If “the President of the United States . . . is out on TV telling the world that it was stolen, what else would I believe, as a patriotic American who voted for him and wants to continue to see the country thrive as I thought it was?” Likewise, Stephen Ayres testified that “with everything the President was putting out” ahead of January 6th that “the election was rigged . . . the votes were wrong and stuff . . . it just got into my head.” “The President was calling on us to come” to Washington, DC. 14 Ayres “was hanging on every word he President Trump was saying” 15 Ayres posted that “Civil War will ensue” if President Trump did not stay in power after January 6th. There are hundreds of other statements similar to those above.

January 6th Insurrection

Background
COVID Lockdowns

BLM Riots
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Third party planning from outside groups
Q-Anon Theories

Republican "Centipede"
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Media Complicity
Tucker Carlson

Dominion Voting Machine Scandal
Dominion Case Tucker Carlson Whitmer Kidnapping Attempt Comparison to BLM stuff Donald Trump Speech Transcript https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial Donald Trump Speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBH7ql34Ex0

Amplifying anti-election claims
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Republican Lawmakers
Certification of the Electoral Votes Support for Donald's Election-denial https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/12/politics/liz-cheney-gop-conference-vote/index.html Punishing members who speak against Trump Cheney was ousted from the Republican leadership from the third highest position in the House for her intense criticisms of Donald Trump's claims about election rigging. Cheney had one of the most conservative voting records in Congress, and voted in line with Trump's agenda 92.9% of the time. Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) were censured by the Republican party for participating in the J6 House Select Committee. Cheney would go on to get crushed in her election, Kinzinger had already announced he would not be running again.

Donald Trump
Demeanor towards political opposition Attacks on Institutions "The Big Lie" Trump has knowingly spread false information despite being informed multiple times exactly how election night would go down. In the weeks before election day 2020, Donald Trump’s campaign experts, including his campaign manager Bill Stepien, advised him that the election results would not be fully known on election night. Prior to the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien, along with House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, urged President Trump to embrace mail-in voting as potentially beneficial to the Trump Campaign. Presidential advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner recounted others giving Donald Trump the same advice. Donald Trump won in numerous States that allowed no-excuse absentee voting in 2020, including Alaska, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming. People knew ahead of time that Trump was going to attempt to claim victory early. Steve Bannon: And what Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner . . . The Democrats—more of our people vote early that count. Theirs vote in mail. And so they’re gonna have a natural disadvantage, and Trump’s going to take advantage of it—that’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner. So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm . . . . Also, if Trump, if Trump is losing, by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right there and say “They stole it. I’m directing the Attorney General to shut down all ballot places in all 50 states.” It’s going to be, no, he’s not going out easy. If Trump—if Biden’s winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit. Roger Stone: I really do suspect it will still be up in the air. When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. No, we won. Fuck you, Sorry. Over. We won. You’re wrong. Fuck you. On election day, Vice President Pence’s staff, including his Chief of Staff and Counsel, became concerned that President Trump might falsely claim victory that evening. The Vice President’s Counsel, Greg Jacob, testified about their concern that the Vice President might be asked improperly to echo such a false statement. 45 Jacob drafted a memorandum with this specific recommendation: “It is essential that the Vice President not be perceived by the public as having decided questions concerning disputed electoral votes prior to the full development of all relevant facts.” On election night Stepien: You know, very, very, very bleak. You know, I—we told him—the group that went over there outlined, you know, my belief and chances for success at this point. And then we pegged that at, you know, 5, maybe 10 percent based on recounts that were—that, you know, either were automatically initiated or could be—could be initiated based on, you know, realistic legal challenges, not all the legal challenges that eventually were pursued. But, you know, it was—you know, my belief is that it was a very, very—5 to 10 percent is not a very good optimistic outlook. Miller: I was in the Oval Office. And at some point in the conversation Matt Oczkowski, who was the lead data person, was brought on, and I remember he delivered to the President in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose. President Trump refused, and instead said this in his public remarks that evening: “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election . . . . We want all voting to stop.” And on the morning of November 5th, he tweeted “STOP THE COUNT!” Halting the counting of votes at that point would have violated both State and Federal laws. William Barr: "Right out of the box on election night, the President claimed that there was major fraud underway. I mean, this happened, as far as I could tell, before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence. He claimed there was major fraud. And it seemed to be based on the dynamic that, at the end of the evening, a lot of Democratic votes came in which changed the vote counts in certain States, and that seemed to be the basis for this broad claim that there was major fraud. And I didn’t think much of that, because people had been talking for weeks and everyone understood for weeks that that was going to be what happened on election night . . . ." In one of the Select Committee’s hearings, former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt was asked what the chance President Trump had of winning the election after November 7th, when the votes were tallied and every news organization had called the race for now-President Biden. His response: “None.” After the election As the Committee’s hearings demonstrated, President Trump made a series of statements to White House staff and others during this time period indicating his understanding that he had lost. President Trump also took consequential actions reflecting his understanding that he would be leaving office on January 20th. For example, President Trump personally signed a Memorandum and Order instructing his Department of Defense to withdraw all military forces from Somalia by December 31, 2020, and from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021.51 General Keith Kellogg (ret.), who had been appointed by President Trump as Chief of Staff for the National Security Council and was Vice President Pence’s National Security Advisor on January 6th, told the Select Committee that “an immediate departure that that memo said would have been catastrophic. It’s the same thing what President Biden went through. It would have been a debacle.” Barr: And I repeatedly told the President in no uncertain terms that I did not see evidence of fraud, you know, that would have affected the outcome of the election. And, frankly, a year and a half later, I haven’t seen anything to change my mind on that. Exchange between Staff and Stepien Committee Staff: How did he react to those types of conversations where you told him that an allegation or another wasn’t true? Stepien: He was—he had—usually he had pretty clear eyes. Like, he understood, you know—you know, we told him where we thought the race was, and I think he was pretty realistic with our viewpoint, in agreement with our viewpoint of kind of the forecast and the uphill climb we thought he had. Trump Campaign Senior Advisor Jason Miller told the Committee that he informed President Trump “several” times that “specific to election day fraud and irregularities, there were not enough to overturn the election.” Pence: There was never evidence of widespread fraud. I don’t believe fraud changed the outcome of the election. But the President and the Campaign had every right to have those examined in court. But I told the President that, once those legal challenges played out, he should simply accept the outcome of the election and move on. The General Counsel of President Trump’s campaign, Matthew Morgan: What was generally discussed on that topic was whether the fraud, maladministration, abuse, or irregularities, if aggregated and read most favorably to the campaign, would that be outcome determinative. And I think everyone’s assessment in the room, at least amongst the staff, Marc Short, myself, and Greg Jacob, was that it was not sufficient to be outcome determinative. A group of prominent Republicans have more recently issued a report—titled Lost, Not Stolen —examining “every count of every case brought in these six battleground states” by President Trump and his allies. The report concludes “that Donald Trump and his supporters had their day in court and failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case.”84 President Trump and his legal allies “failed because of a lack of evidence and not because of erroneous rulings or unfair judges . . . . In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims.” Indeed, eleven of the judges who ruled against Donald Trump and his supporters were appointed by Donald Trump himself. One of those Trump nominees, Judge Stephanos Bibas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, rejected an appeal by the Trump Campaign claiming that Pennsylvania officials “did not undertake any meaningful effort” to fight illegal absentee ballots and uneven treatment of voters across counties. Judge Bibas wrote in his decision that “calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” Another Trump nominee, Judge Brett Ludwig of the Eastern District of Wisconsin, ruled against President Trump’s lawsuit alleging that the result was skewed by illegal procedures that governed drop boxes, ballot address information, and individuals who claimed“ indefinitely confined” status to vote from home. Judge Ludwig wrote in his decision, that “this Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits” because the procedures used “do not remotely rise to the level” of breaking Wisconsin’s election rules. Nor is it true that these rulings focused solely on standing, or procedural issues. As Ginsberg confirmed in his testimony to the Select Committee, President Trump’s team “did have their day in court.” Indeed, he and his co-authors determined in their report that of these post-election cases were dismissed by a judge after an evidentiary hearing had been held, and many of these judges explicitly indicated in their decisions that the evidence presented by the plaintiffs was wholly insufficient on the merits. Not a single witness ever provided proof to the J6 committee that fraud existed on any reasonable scale in any state. Undermining the Electoral Process "Beginning election night and continuing through January 6th and thereafter, Donald Trump purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 Presidential election in order to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions. These false claims provoked his supporters to violence on January 6th." "Despite knowing that such an action would be illegal, and that no State had or would submit an altered electoral slate, Donald Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress’s joint session on January 6th." "Donald Trump sought to corrupt the U.S. Department of Justice by attempting to enlist Department officials to make purposely false statements and thereby aid his effort to overturn the Presidential election. After that effort failed, Donald Trump offered the position of Acting Attorney General to Jeff Clark knowing that Clark intended to disseminate false information aimed at overturning the election." "Without any evidentiary basis and contrary to State and Federal law, Donald Trump unlawfully pressured State officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their States." "Donald Trump oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives." "Donald Trump pressured Members of Congress to object to valid slates of electors from several States. Plan to Overturn Election Results "Knowing that he and his supporters had lost dozens of election lawsuits, and despite his own senior advisors refuting his election fraud claims and urging him to concede his election loss, Donald Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election. Rather than honor his constitutional obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” President Trump instead plotted to overturn the election outcome." Speech on January 6th "Based on false allegations that the election was stolen, Donald Trump summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for January 6th. Although these supporters were angry and some were armed, Donald Trump instructed them to march to the Capitol on January 6th to “take back” their country." Donald Trump Impeachment

The Protest
Timeline Deaths on January 6 Actions of coordinated groups Police allowed protestors in Potential FBI Involvement Donald Trump's failure to act Aftermath Prosecutions

2022.12.02 - FINAL REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE THE JANUARY 6TH ATTACK ON THE UNITED STATES CAPITOL
Formation - Wikipedia On May 19th, 2021, the House voted to form an independent bicameral commission to investigate the Jan 6th insurrection. Vote passed 252-175 with 35 Republicans joining in favor. Senate Republicans blocked the bicameral commission, leading to House Speaker Pelosi to appoint a select committee using only House members. On June 30th, 2021, House Resolution 503 "Establishing the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol" passed the House 222-190. All Democrats and only two Republicans, Kinzinger and Cheney, voted in favor. On July 1st, Pelosi appoints eight members, with Cheney being the sole Republican. On July 19th, McCarthy suggests Jim Banks, Jim Jordan, Rodney Davis, Kelly Armstrong and Troy Nehls. Banks, Jordan and Nehls voted to overturn the EC results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Banks and Jordan signed onto the Supreme Court case Texas v. Pennsylvania to invalidate the ballots of voters in four states. On July 21st, Pelosi announced that she would reject Jordan and Banks, but would accept the other three recommendations. McCarthy said it was all or nothing, costing Republicans almost all of their representation on the January 6th Select Committee. On July 25th, Pelosi announced her appointment of Adam Kinzinger to the committee. Notably, Kinzinger was one of only ten House Republicans to vote for Trump's second impeachment. Members BENNIE G. THOMPSON (D) Mississippi, Chairman LIZ CHENEY (R) Wyoming, Vice Chair ZOE LOFGREN (D) California ADAM B. SCHIFF (D) California PETE AGUILAR (D) California STEPHANIE N. MURPHY (D) Florida JAMIE RASKIN (D) Maryland ELAINE G. LURIA (D) Virginia ADAM KINZINGER (R) Illinois Majority of the witnesses involved in the J6 Select Committee Report were Republicans. Two of President Trump’s former Attorneys General, his former White House Counsel, numerous members of his White House staff, and the highest-ranking members of his 2020 election campaign, including his campaign manager and his campaign general counsel.

Isreal Palestine Conflict...

1936-1939 - Arab revolt in Palestine
Popular uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against British mandate due to increasing flow of Jewish immigrants. Sparked by back and forth killings of two Jews by a Qassamite band, followed by the retaliatory killing of two Arab workers. First part of movement was seized upon by the urban and elitist Arab Higher Committee, which made the revolt focus on strikes and other political forms of protest. Second phase in 1937 lead to violent conflict between British Army and Palestine Police Force against the peasant-led resistance movement. Walid Khalidi estimates 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead, 3,832 killed by the British and 1,200 dead due to intracommunal terrorism, and 14,760 wounded. Several hundred Palestinian Jews were killed.

1937 - The Peel Commission
Published on July 7th, 1937 First time declaration that Mandatory Palestine was becoming unworkable and needed to be partitioned.

1944-1948 - Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine
The Haganah, Irgun, Lehi all joined together to form the Jewish Resistance Movement. Insurgent activities in the area were in response to the proposed 1939 White Paper. On the 22nd of July, 1946, the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, leading to the deaths of 91 people of various nationalities. This hotel was the headquarters for Mandatory Palestine. Was the deadliest attack against the British during the entire Mandate era (1920-1948)

1947.11.29 - The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, or Resolution (II)
The UN Partition Plan A four-part document, the Partition Plan, was attached, that provided for the termination of the Mandate, the withdrawal of British armed forces, and the delineation of boundaries between the two States and Jerusalem. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League rejected this proposal due to the fact that 56% of the land would be allocated to the Jewish state, despite the Palestinian Arab population numbering twice that of the Jewish population. The Jewish Agency for Palestine and most Zionist factions accepted. Vote list for the plan

1948 - Palestine War
Known to Israel as the War of Independence, and to the Palestinians as the Nakba Israel declares [independence](- Israel declares independence at Tel Aviv on May 14th, 1948.) at Tel Aviv on May 14th, 1948. War had two main phases, the first began on November 30th, 1947. First phase mainly fought between Jewish and Palestinian Arab militias, supported by the Arab Liberation Army and the surrounding Arab states. Escalated at the end of March 1948, when Jews went on the offensive. After Arabs fled Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, the US pulled out of the Partition Plan while the British supported the annexation of the Arab part of Palestine by Transjordan. Funds raised by Golda Meir and Stalin's support allowed Israel to purchase weapons from Eastern Europe. May 14th, 1948, the last British troops and personnel departed Haifa, and the Jewish leadership declared the establishment of the state of Israel. Second phase of the war began in May of 1948, the Arab-Israeli War, when invasion happens after Jewish leadership declares independence. Invading countries were Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan and Syria, supported by the Arab Liberation Army and corps of volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen Plan Dalet Forced expulsion and control of areas that extended beyond the proposed partition borders. Some (Zionists) claim that this was a defensive action to secure the future safety and borders of the new country, Israel, others claim this was purely an offensive territorial conquest aimed to ethnically cleanse the surrounding lands of Arabs to make it fertile for future Jews to settle. In 1949, Israel signed separate Armistice agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria to establish these temporary military borders. Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip and had a demilitarized zone around 'Uja al-Hafeer. Lebanon agreed to international boundary between Lebanon and Mandatory Palestine. Jordanian forces remained in East Jerusalem and other positions held by them. Also allowed to take over positions previously held by Iraqi forces. Syria maintained 66 square kilometers in the Jordan Valley, designated as DMZs. Iraq had no formal agreement as they withdrew their forces. The new military borders, as set by the agreements, encompassed about 78% of Mandatory Palestine. Israel lost 6,373 people (4,000 soldiers), about 1% of its population. The exact number of Arab losses is estimated between 4,000 and 15,000. Over 700,000 displaced Palestinians that fled or were expelled from their land as a result. Over 700,000 Jews exodus from Arab and Muslim lands in the 3 years following the war, fleeing into Israel. Established Israel as an independent state (founded by David Ben-Gurion), recognized immediately by Truman (U.S.) and Stalin (USSR).

1956.10.29-1956.11.07 - The Second Arab-Israeli War, or the Suez Crisis
Lead-up Suez Canal Company formed in 1858 by French Ferdinand de Lesseps to build the Suez Canal from 1859 to 1869, opening on 1869 to allow trade. Baghdad Pact in 1955, created compromising Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Iraq and the United Kingdom Tripartite Declaration was a way for the US, France and the UK to limit the amount of arms sales in the Middle East, hopefully preventing an arms race. Egypt was responsible for establishing multiple Palestinian fedayeen camps inside Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon. Israel was willing to work with Egypt in direct negotiations in 1956, regardless of Egypt's aggressive demand to resettle Palestinian refugees and the annexation of the southern half of Israel. Nasser (leader of Egypt) built reputation of extreme anti-Zionism in attempt to unify and be the leader of the Arab states. On July 26th, 1956, Nasser nationalized and purchased all assets of the Suez Canal Company, closed the canal to Israeli shipping, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba. Contravention of the Constantinople Convention of 1888 and most likely a violation of the 1949 Armistice Agreements. Different countries had different positions on what to do Eden from Great Britain wanted war, though opposition parties cautioned that doing so without UN approval would not be supported. Guy Mollet from France and the rest of the nation was eager for military action. Eiseinhower from DC did not really care. Canada didn't care. Australia kind of cared. New Zealand cared. Initial proposal would have allowed Egyptian "sovereignty" to be recognized while maintaining an international operation of the Canal. Nasser rejected. British and French hungry for military intervention to solve potential Canal problems, despite Eisenhower's disapproval. Israel was interested in partaking in military conflicts. Israel's interest in war was weakening a hostile state. Egypt-held Gaza Strip (+ surrounding countries, via Egyptian supported Palestinian Fedayeen) was responsible for attacks injuring approximately 1,300 civilians. Israel was also scared about Egypt's large procurement of weapons, and feared they'd forged a secret alliance with Jordan and Syria. Ben-Gurion's "grand plan" involved Israel taking territory north into Lebanon, having the West Bank run as a semi-autonomous state attached to Israel, and having Iraq claim everything on the East Bank because Israel believe Jordan to be an unstable state. They also encouraged the taking of the Sinai Penisula. The Protocol of Sèvres was agreed to by Israel, France and the UK. On October 29th, Israel would invade the Sinai. On October 30th, Anglo-French ultimatum to demand both sides withdraw from canal zone. On October 31st, Britain and France would begin Revise. The Kafr Qasim massacre Took place in Israeli Arab village of Kafr Qasim during the war, where Israel Border Police illegally killed Arab civilians returning from work during a curfew they were unaware of. 48 people died. The border policemen who were involved in the shooting were trialed and jailed for 7-17 years. All sentences were later reduced, with some of the convicted receiving presidential pardons. Every convicted person was eventually released by November 1959. Total casualties British 22 dead, 96 wounded French 10 dead, 33 wounded Israel 172 dead, 817 wounded Egypt 1,500-3,500 dead, 4,900 wounded, with 1,000 Egyptian civilians estimated dead International Reaction Eisenhower was very upset with Israel/Britain/France, because the US could not reasonably oppose Soviet actions in Hungary while remaining silent on European plans to seize territory from Egypt. 300,000 protestors in Pakistan chanting anti-British slogans. Syrian government blew up the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline to punish Iraq and Britain. Saudi Arabia imposed a total oil embargo on Britain and France. US calls for security council and UN meetings/resolutions Resolution 997, a call for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of all forces behind the armistice lines, an arms embargo and the reopening of the Suez Canal, which was currently blocked. Passes with a vote of 64-5 West Germany was furious with the US and supported France and Britain. Israel originally wanted to maintain indefinite control over the Sinai, but was eventually forced out due to international pressure lead heavily by Eisenhower. November 6th, 1956 British announced a ceasefire. Anglo-French Task Force was fully withdrawn by December 22nd, 1956. Israeli forces were fully withdrawn from the Sinai and Gaza in March of 1957 after destroying and stealing Egyptian infrastructure and villages on the way out. Eisenhower asked Congress for authorization to use military force and set aside $200 million to help Middle Eastern countries that desired aid from the US. The Soviet Union was given all the credit due to nuclear sabre rattling from Nasser, though it was almost assuredly US diplomatic and financial pressure that brought the conflict to a swift end. Jews had their civil liberties infringed upon in Egypt following the war, resulting in some 25,000 (almost half) of the Jewish population leaving Egypt. Final summary In 1956 Egyptian leader Nasser, driven by his desire to be neither a puppet to the US nor USSR, nationalized the Suez canal (in defiance of the Constantinople Convention of 1888) while simultaneously acquiring large amounts of weapons from the USSR. Worried that trade would be interrupted, Britain and France approached Israel, who was worried that the anti-Zionist Egypt was amassing a massive military, to devise a covert plan, the Protocol of Sèvres, in order to stage an Israeli military invasion that would be disrupted by Anglo-Franco forces, which would then give way to an international ownership of the Suez Canal. Despite military success by all three parties, intense international pressure, especially from the United States, pressure from revolting colonies, and intense domestic pressure at home, combined with nuclear sabre-rattling from the USSR, forced the Anglo-Franco forces to immediately withdraw, suffering an international humiliation. Israel would withdraw its forces sometime later, having re-established trade through the Straights of Tiran. Egypt, and namely, Nasser, would emerge feeling as though they had single-handedly defied European imperialistic aims, and saw itself as an emerging unaligned leader of the Arab World.

1967-1970 - War of Attrition
Ongoing border conflict between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and the PLO and their allies. No territorial changes during this time. In 1968 the PLO deploys suicide bombers for the first time. Israel engaged in an air battle, Rimon 20, to directly target Soviet fighter pilots to drive the USSR from the conflict. In August of 1970, Israel, Jordan and Egypt agreed to an "in place" ceasefire under the Rogers Plan, though Egyptians and Soviet allies violated the agreement shortly thereafter. Battle of Karameh 1968 Battle of Karameh involved IDF forces crossing into Jordan to attack Karameh and the village of Safi, purportedly to eliminate PLO forces and fedayeen camps staging attacks against Israel, and to capture Yasser Arafat, including a school bus full of children running into a mine. Israel dropped leaflets to warn the Jordanian army not to intervene, but Jordan decided to assist the PLO regardless. In the aftermath, though Israel had achieved its tactical aims, they came at international political cost, with the US condemning Israel's actions. Nearly 20,000 fedayeen in Jordan due to surging recruits after the psychological victory over the IDF. Iraq and Syria offered training programs for several thousand guerillas, the Persian Gulf States and Kuwait raised money through taxes on Palestinian workers, and a fund drive in Lebanon raised $500,000 from Beirut alone. The PLO began to guarantee a lifetime support for the families of guerillas killed in action. Fatah had branches in about 80 countries after the conflict.

1967.06.05 - The Six-Day War, or the Third Arab-Israeli War
Summary May 1967, Nasser mobilizes Egyptian military into defensive lines along the Israeli border and closes the shipping lanes through the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels, despite Israel warning this would be a casus belli. Nasser also orders the removal of all UNEF personnel. Israel would capture the Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt. Military: 20,000 Arab deaths vs 1,000 Israeli deaths Civilian: 20 Israeli Civilians killed in Arab forces air strikes on Jerusalem, 15 UN peacekeepers killed by Israeli strikes in the Sinai, and 34 US personnel killed in the USS Liberty incident. Background Following the 1956 Suez Crisis, Syria and Egypt signed a mutual defense agreement. PLO activity and attacks against Israel from Arab countries continued. In May, 1967, Nasser received bogus intel from the USSR that Israel was massing on the Syrian border, so he gathered troops in the Sinai Peninsula, ejected UNEF personnel, and once again denied passage of Israeli vessels through the Straits of Tiran. On the 30th of May, Jordan an Egypt signed a defense pact. Iraq and Egypt began deploying troops and armored units in Jordan. The United States did not believe at the time that Egypt was preparing for an offensive war against Israel, as per the Watch Committee. Nasser's speech towards the Arab Trade Unionists in May 26th, 1967, claimed "The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel." Statements made by Nasser leading up to the war “The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel to face the challenge, while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation. This act will astound the world. Today they will know that the Arabs are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived. We have reached the stage of serious action and not of more declarations.” Gamal Abdel Nasser May 30th 1967 Nasser May 26 "The Arab people wants to fight. We have been waiting for the right time when we will be completely ready. Recently we have felt that our strength has been sufficient and that if we make battle with Israel we shall be able, with the help of God, to conquer Sharm el-Sheikh implies a confrontation with Israel. Taking this step makes it imperative that we be ready to undertake a total war with Israel." Involved Forces Egypt amassing 100,000 troops in the Sinai. Syria deploying 75,000 along their border with Israel. Jordanian Armed Forces totaled 55,000 troops. 100 Iraqi tanks and an infantry division readied near the Jordanian border, along with two squadrons of Iraqi fighter-aircraft. Saudi Arabia mobilized a few forces for deployment to the Jordanian front. Arab air forces were also reinforced by aircraft from Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to make up for the first day losses of the war. Volunteer pilots also came from the Pakistan Air Force. Noteworthy Battle Things Surprise attack on Egyptian airfield guaranteed all but certain victory in the Sinai for Israel. IDF originally was to avoid Gaza strip/city, but attacks from that area forced the IDF to take over that territory. Jordanian Army was instructed to lay a two-hour barrage against military and civilian settlements in central Israel itself. Eshkol promised Israel would not initiate any action against Jordan if it stayed out of the way, but King Hussein refused. Jordanian shelling of Jerusalem resulted in 20 dead and 1,000 wounded civilians. Dayan ordered troops not to capture the Old City due to potential international backlash plus potential outrage of being forced to give back holy sites after capturing them. After hearing about the impending UN ceasefire, he changed his mind and captured it. "Fearful that Israeli soldiers would exact retribution for the 1929 massacre of the city's Jewish community, Hebron's residents flew white sheets from their windows and rooftops."" Syria entered the war on the assumption that Israel was losing dramatically to Egyptian forces. Nasser exaggerated/lied about Egyptian victory. Dayan, after hearing of the Syrian acceptance of a cease-fire, clears an invasion/occupation on his own into the Golan Heights. Conclusion Israel seizes the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula (from Egypt), the West Bank of the Jordan River, including East Jerusalem (from Jordan), and the Golan Heights (from Syria). Casualties - ~850 Israelis killed, 4,500 wounded. 10k-15k Egyptians killed, 4,300 capture. 700 Jordanian soldiers killed, 2,500 wounded. Syrians lost between 1k-2.5k, and about 450 captured. 1967 Palestinian exodus. 280k-325k Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, mostly resettled in Jordan, the other 700k remained. 100k fled in the Golan Heights. Israel granted full citizenship only to those in East Jerusalem (1967) and the Golan Heights (1981). Most Palestinians in territories declined to take citizenship. Jews immigrating en masse out of the Soviet Union, and Jews leaving en masse from Arab countries (continued from 1948), and Jews leaving en masse from other Communist countries. Extra links 2017.05.17 - The Secret Transcripts of the Six-Day War, Part I 2017.06.07 - Israeli Security Cabinet Secret Transcripts Part II, The Accidental Occupation

1970.10.01 - Black September, or the Jordanian Civil War
Background Jordan's population right now consisted 2/3rds of Palestinians, and only 1/3rd of Jordanians. Nasser's political support also strengthened the Palestinians position. Palestinian fedayeen enclaves in Jordan began to set up "independent republics" where they attempted to set up checkpoints and tax citizens. In September of 1970, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four airliners bound for New York City and one for London. Explosives were used to destroy the empty planes for the press. King Hussein saw this as the last straw, and threat to his rule, and decided to take action against the PLO presence in Jordan. Jordan allowed the fedayeen to relocate to Lebanon via Syria, where four years later they would become involved in the Lebanese Civil War. The Palestinian Black September Organization was founded afterwards to punish Jordan for its expulsion, resulting in the assassination of Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tal in 1971 due to his command of the military during operations against the fedayeen. This organization also carried out a terrorist attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, with 8 members killing 11 Israeli coaches and athletes, as well as 1 West German police officer. By 1970, different factions within the PLO called for the overthrow of Jordan's king, Hussein. Hussein attempted to appease the fedayeen with an edict, and with the support of Nasser, though this failed and the fedayeen continued to grow in opposition. Libya, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait openly supported the fedayeen. Israel guaranteed Jordan that they would not push territorial boundaries if Jordan withdraw troops from the border for a PLO confrontation. On the 7th of June, Hussein's motorcade came under heavy fire by fedayeen soldiers while attempting to visit the mukhabarat headquarters. A ceasefire was attempted to be called after retaliation, though the PFLP did not abide by it and instead held 68 foreign nationals hostage in two Amman hotels, threatening to blow them up if Jordan did not dismiss their Special Forces and some military leaders. By August, Arafat seemed to have wanted to stage a revolution in Jordan. The PFLP began hijacking planes to bring attention to the Palestinian problem. In September, Hussein begins to capture his capital and attempts to push the fedayeen out of Jordanian cities and refugee camps. Syrian forces, 10,000 strong, with PLA markings marched towards Irbid to support the fedayeen. 17,000 Iraqi troops remained in Jordan after the 6-day war, causing concern that they may intervene. The US stationed a navy fleet to be positioned off the coast of Israel, near Jordan. Israel mobilized troops to begin to support Jordan, readying its air force to discourage Syrian troops with sonic booms. Arafat and Hussein signed a peace deal on the 27th of September, brokered by Nasser. Iranian leftist guerilla organizations sided with the PLO during the conflict, bombing the Jordanian embassy in Tehran during King Hussein's state visit in revenge of the events of Black September. Casualties Palestinians between 2,000-3,4000, Syrians with 600 casualties, and Jordanian Armed Forces with 537 dead. In 1972, the 3 surviving PLO terrorists from the Munich massacre were traded in exchange of the hostages taken on the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615.

1973 - The Yom Kippur War, or the Ramadan War, or the October War, or the Fourth Arab-Israeli War
Lead-up After the 1967 6-day war, the Israeli government voted to return captured territory to Syria and Egypt in exchange for peace and demilitarization, but these proposals were never proven to have been transmitted to either Arab state. In the Khartoum Arab Summit, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait and Sudan all agreed to the "three no's," no peace, no recognition and no negotiation with Israel. The War of Attrition takes place from 1967-1970, across the Egyptian and Jordanian borders, including both their militaries and the PLO, with Arafat coming to the head of the PLO in 1969. in December of 1970 in an article to the New York Times, Anwar Sadat agreed to recognize Israel as an independent state in exchange for a full withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula along with other occupied Arab territories. Golda Meir put together a committee to examine the Egyptian peace proposal, but rejected said proposal feeling as though it would not ensure Israel's security, despite the committee unanimously concluding that Israel's interests would be served. US was supplying Israel with military force since the 1960's and considered it an ally during the Cold War. Resolution 242 called for Israel to abandon all of its 6-day war territorial gains and for every state in the region to have an official recognition of their boundaries and right to exist. In October of 1972, facing mounting domestic pressure, Sadat declared his intention to go to war against Israel, even absent Soviet support. In February of 1973, Sadat made a final peace overture towards Israel via Kissinger, which Meir rejected, most likely with the understanding that war was invetiable. Israel did not think war was coming, despite multiple repeated credible warnings, including a warning from King Hussein himself. Israeli Preparation Meir, the Chief of General Staff, opted not to attack Syria hours before the war began because he recognized the importance for not being blamed as starting any conflict in order to recruit American or other international assistance. Kissinger and Nixon warned Meir not to begin a pre-emptive war. Battle in the Sinai October 6th was the initial attacks from Egyptian aircraft. The US held back on supplies for Israel in order to encourage them to accept a ceasefire once hostilities began, but Sadat refused. The Soviets began supplying arms to Egypt and Syria while the US then resumed supplying arms to Israel. Israel refrained from attacking economic and strategic infrastructure in response to Egyptian threats to fire Scud missiles onto Israeli cities. Israel managed to set up bridges and break through to the other end of the Suez canal, pushing into Egypt. Ceasefire On October 22nd, 1973, the UNSC passed a 14-0 resolution calling for a ceasefire, negotiated mainly between the US and the USSR. For the first time, three Scud Missiles were fired at Israeli targets by either Egyptian forces or Soviet personnel in Egypt, which was the first combat use of Scud Missiles. All three targets were in the Sinai. Ceasefire claims to have been broken by both sides during the night, and Israel capitalized on the ceasefire break to advance beyond the UNSC ceasefire lines. Egypt's Third Army The US, seeing an opportunity to bring Egypt closer to its sphere of influence, exerted heavy pressure on Israel to refrain from destroying the trapped Third Army. Kissinger told the Israeli ambassador, Simcha Dinitz, that the destroying of the Egyptian Third Army "is an option that does not exist." Post-war Battles The ceasefire wasn't followed closely by either side, with the fighting not stopping until January 18th, 1974. The Israeli Army was 100 km from Cairo after their advancement from the west bank. Initial Syrian Attacks The Syrians began their attacks with an airstrike against Israeli positions in the Golan Heights. Syrians pushed Israeli military lines back to the Southern Golan Heights. Dayan discussed the possible arming of nuclear weapons in response to Syrian military gains. Meir rejected this option. Syrian mechanized brigades did not advance into Israel as they had feared an Israel nuclear response. Missiles from Syrian offensive lines struck civilian settlements in Israel, and in retaliation, seven Israeli F-4 Phantoms flew into Syria and attacked the Syrian General Staff Headquarters in Damascus. Israeli Advance towards Damascus Israeli troops advanced towards Damascus and began shelling the outskirts of the city from 30km away. Arab Military Intervention Syria and Iraq sent expeditionary forces into Syria to defend from further Israeli military advancement. Israel was able to launch strikes all across Syria, attacking power plants, petrol supplies, bridges and main roads. Ceasefire On the 22nd of October, UNSC Resolution 338 called for a ceasefire. The war would finally come to a close on the 26th of October. Israel and Egypt signed a formal ceasefire on 11th of November, and the disengagement agreement happened on the 18th of January, 1974. There was a secret agreement that Jordan and Israel would not heavily engage with each other. Hussein was pressured to enter the war to maintain his position of leadership and respect in the Arab world. Naval Operations Egyptian missile boats bombarded Israeli positions on the Sinai coast on the first day of the war. Israeli missile boats decisively won these battles at sea. Two Egyptian destroyers enforced a blockade, preventing oil from Iran being shipped to Israel through the straights of Bab-el-Mandeb. Participation by other states The US intelligence community, including the CIA, failed to predict the Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel. Most officials in the Defense and Statement Departments opposed financing Israel, but Kissinger argued heavily in favor of supporting Israel so they would confirm to American views in postwar diplomacy. Meir authorized the assembly of thirteen 20-kiloton-TNT tactical nuclear weapons for Jericho missiles, done in an easily detectable way to signal to the United States. This was done on the 8-9th of October after previously rejecting this idea on the 7th. On the 9th of October, after Kissinger learned of the nuclear alert, Nixon ordered the beginning of Operation Nickel Grass. The US, over 32 days, airlifted 22,325 tons of tanks, artillery and ammunition to Israel. In later interviews, Kissinger, Schlesinger and William Quandt suggested that the nuclear aspect was not a major factor influencing re-supply. They cite Soviet re-supply efforts and Sadat's rejection of early ceasefires as being the primary motivators. The Soviet Union supplied around 80,000 tons of supplies, mainly to Syria, and also to Egypt. Soviet advisors were reportedly involved in all areas of the war. 2,000 personnel in Syria, with 1,000 serving in Syrian air defense units. They also repaired damaged tanks, SAMs and radar equipment and assembled fighter jets. Soviet in advisors were reportedly present in all areas of Syrian command posts. Israel may have captured and traded Soviet officers who were captured from the Syrian front, though Israel and the USSR denies this. In Syria, a Soviet cultural center in Damascus and a merchant ship, Ilya Mechnikov, was sunk by the Israeli Navy. This all occurred during the apex of the Watergate Scandal. Nixon was so agitated and discomposed that there were times with Kissinger and Haif didn't bother to wake him for consultation. Arab countries added up to 100,000 troops to Egypt and Syria's frontline ranks. Algeria, East Germany, North Korean, Pakistan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon and Sudan all sent forces, ammo, tanks, pilots, etc... Response in Israel Israel was shaken due to initial military difficulties and how unprepared they were in the beginning of the conflict. Golda Meir resign along with her entire cabinet, including Dayan. Response in Egypt General Shazly angered Sadat for advocating the withdrawal of Egyptian forces from Sinai and was kicked out of the army, would go into political exile and then was placed under house arrest upon his return. The commanders of the Second and Third Armies, Khalil and Wasel, were also dismissed from the army. Response in Syria In Syria, Colonel Rafik Halawi, the Druze commander of an infantry brigade, was executed for his military performance. Response from Soviet Union They mad, gave lots of stuff to the Arabs and were upset that they still lost. Arab Oil Embargo Saudi Arabia declared an embargo against the US, later joined by other oil exporters and extended against the Netherlands and other countries, causing the 1973 energy crisis. Casualties Israel - 2,521-2,800 KIA, 7,250-8,800 wounded, 293 captured Arab casualties - 8,000-18,500 killed, ~35,000 wounded? Official numbers never released. Syrian atrocities Many Israeli POWs were tortured or killed. Syrian Defense Minster Mustafa Tlass addressed the National Assembly in 1973 stating that he had awarded one solder the Medal of the Republic for killing 28 Israeli prisoners with an axe, decapitating three of them and eating the flesh of one of his victims. (Did this actually happen???) The original Jewish Telegraphic Agency article quotes and says the soldier from Aleppo killed 28 Israeli soldiers, 3 with an axe and devoured the flesh of one of them in hand to hand combat. A soldier from the Moroccan contingent fighting with Syrian forces was found to be carrying a sack filled with the body parts of Israeli soldiers which he intended to take home as souvenirs. Syrian soldiers removed dog tags from bodies. Syria did not even officially acknowledge holding any prisoners to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Egyptian atrocities Multiple Israeli claims of prisoners being shot and killed. Photographic evidence of the torture/killings of Israeli POWs also exists. The order to kill Israeli prisoners came from General Shazly, who, in a pamphlet distributed to Egyptian soldiers immediately before the war, advised his troops to kill Israeli soldiers even if they surrendered.

1978 - Camp David Accords
Carter Initiative Carter's goal was to rejuvenate the Middle East peace process. The Egyptians and Israelis secretly worked towards bilateral talks. Participating Parties Carter met with Sadat of Egypt, Hussein of Jordan, Hafez al-Assad of Syria, and Rabin of Israel. Only Sadat and Rabin were interested in negotiations. Sadat Initiative Sadat seemed eager to make peace with Israel, even traveling to Jerusalem and speaking in front of the Knesset about potential peace. Egypt wanted to secure a future more in line with its own interests, rather than fixating on being part of the broader Arab collection of countries. There was also a belief that a bilateral peace agreement with Israel would cause a cascade of other peace agreements to happen in following. Egyptian-Israeli talks Carter pushed both leaders in Camp David for a broad peace agreement between the two. Partial agreements The first part of the agreement focused on UN Resolution 242. Wanted to establish self-governing authorities in the West Bank and Gaza strip. Deliberately left out talks about Jerusalem, and neglected the Golan Heights, Syria or Lebanon. The second part of the agreement dealt with Egyptian-Israeli relations. A 5 year plan was given to have the West Bank and Gaza rule themselves autonomously. Again, Jerusalem was not mentioned nor was the Palestinian Right of Return. UN Rejection The UN General Assembly rejected the Framework for Peace in the Middle East due to lack of participation of the UN and PLO. It did not comply with the Palestinian right of return, of self-determination and to national independence and sovereignty. The part of the Camp David accords regarding the Palestinian future and all similar ones were declared invalid.

1982 - The 1st Lebanon War
text here

1987.12.08-1993.09.13 - The First Palestinian Intifada
General Causes Israel opened up low and semi-skilled labor markets to Palestinians in occupied territory. By the time of the Intifada, over 40% of Palestinian workers were working in Israel daily. Palestinian populations were growing, but work and other opportunities were heavily restricted in the occupied territories. The Jewish settler population in the West Bank grew from 35,000 in 1984 to 130,000 by the mid 1990's. The occupied Palestinians likely felt themselves humiliated in a variety of ways as indefinite occupation by Israel continued. Background Two potential causes that sparked the Intifada The army tank transporter truck incident in which 4 Palestinians were killed by an Israel truck crashing into them. The IDF failure in late November 1987 to stop a Palestinian guerrilla operation, the Night of the Gliders, in which six Israeli soldiers were killed. Mass demonstrations occurred a year earlier after 2 Gaza students were shot by Israeli soldiers on campus on December 4th, 1986. The Arab summit in Amman in November of 1987 focuses heavily on the Iran-Iraq war, sidelining the Palestinian issue for the first time in years. Leadership and Aims The Intifada was mainly lead by independent community councils and advocated for a non-violent approach so that the Palestinians would not lose support from liberal Israelis. For the first time Palestinians are calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, notably departing from the standard rhetorical calls for the "liberation" of all of Palestine. The Intifada Israel had assumed that its oppressive actions against the Palestinians would cause their resistance to collapse early, though this was a mistaken assumption. On December 8th, 1987, an Israeli army tank transporter crashed into a row of cars, killing four Palestinians. They were residents of the Jabalya refugee camp, the largest of the eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. 7 others were seriously injured. Assumptions about the crash lead to demonstrations, which caused back and forth violence between Israelis and Palestinians. In the beginning of the Intifada, no Israeli settlements were attacked nor were there any Israeli fatalities. The IDF used every crowd control measure available, though disturbances continued to gain momentum. Israel engaged in mass arrests and the closure of Palestinian schools and businesses, utilities and confinement to homes, as well as damage to farms and blockage from selling agricultural produce. Settlers also engaged in private violence against Palestinians. Casualties ~1,200 Palestinians killed, 57k-120k arrested, 481 deported, 2,532 houses destroyed. 179-200 Israelis killed, 3,100 Israelis (1,700 soldiers vs 1,400 civilians) suffered injuries. Between 1988 and 1992, intra-Palestinian violence claimed the lives of nearly 1,000, mainly due to the PLO killings of suspected collaborators. Foreign reaction The UN (including the US) drafted a resolution condemning alleged Israeli violations of human rights. Israel declared it would not abide by SCR672 because it did not pay attention to attacks on Jewish worshippers. Israel also blocked a delegation of the Secretary-General for investigating Israeli violence. Outcomes The Intifada broke the image of Jerusalem as a united city, and the increase in international coverage was heavily critical of Israel. Arafat and his followers moderated their political programme; at the meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers in November of 1988, Arafat won a majority for the historic decision to recognize Israel's legitimacy, to accept all relevant UN resolutions going back November 29th, 1947, and to adopt the principle of a two-state solution. Arafat's support for Sadam Hussein's invasion into Kuwait essentially lead to a mass exodus of 300,000+ Palestinians fleeing Kuwait, mostly to return to Jordan. It also lead to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia cutting off financial support to the PLO.

1993 - Oslo I Accord
Secretly conducted in Oslo, Norway. Israel and the PLO reached a mutual peaceful agreement This called for the withdrawal of the IDF from parts of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank Remaining issues needed to be settled, including Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlements, security and borders. Letters of Mutual Recognition between the Israeli Government and the PLO were signed. Israel recognized the PLO as the governing body of the Palestinians, the PLO renounced terrorism and other violence and its desire for the destruction of the state of Israel. Reactions In the Knesset a strong debate emerged between the left and right wing over support for the Oslo accords. Fatah, the Palestinians present at the negotiations, accepted the accords, but Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), all objected to the accords. Israelis were nervous that this peace process would simply be a part of the PLO's Ten Point Program, which essentially calls for escalating steps until all of historic Palestine is liberated from Israel. Palestinians feared that Israel was not serious about dismantling their settlements in the West Bank, especially around Jerusalem. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Netanyahu, in a secret recording, claims that his plan was to define "specified military locations" in the broadest possible sense according to the Oslo Accords, which could theoretically encompass the entirety of the Jordan Valley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhMF30VLZCA Arafat speech https://iris.org.il/arafats-johannesburg-speech/

2000 - Camp David Summit
A Summit meeting between Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat. This summit failed to produce any actual agreements. Israel was offering in 10-25 years 91% of the current West Bank along with a 1% land swap (from the Negev), maintaining an enclave of settlers in Kiryat Arba (near Hebron), linked with a bypass road. The West Bank would be split by an Israeli controlled road from Jerusalem to the Dead See, with free passage for Palestinians, with Israeli right to road closure. An elevated railroad and highway running through the Negev would link the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Airspace would still be controlled exclusively by Israel. US claim about what was offered - http://www.mideastweb.org/lastmaps.htm Palestinians claim they were offered Bantustans, a loaded word coming from South African apartheid divisions. East Jerusalem was the center-focus for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Israel refuses the broad Right of Return for Palestinian peoples to the country of Israel, but proposes instead a maximum of 100,000 refugees be allowed to return to Israel on the basis of humanitarian consideration or family reunification, while also contributing to a $30b fund to compensate Palestinian refugees for property lost. Israel wanted to push for an aggressive security arrangement that would heavily favor Israeli security concerns, including access to all Palestinian airspace, troop presence on the Jordanian border, the demilitarization of Palestine, and Israeli radar installations within Palestine. Negotiations continued through the Clinton Parameters, though no final agreement was reached, despite both sides claiming they were closer than they ever had been after the Taba negotiations in January of 2001. Responsibility for failure The Americans, including Clinton and several observers, claim that the failure of the talks hinged on Arafat and the Palestinians refusal to give up on future negotiations relating to the Right of Return, which the Americans believed would ultimately result in the Palestinians fighting for a return to a one state solution in Historic Palestine. A Clinton special advisor complains that Israel was not willing to concede a reasonable amount to the Palestinians, considering how much they were already willing to give up, including Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and trading favorable parts of the West Bank to Israel. Some argue that the lack of religious consideration hindered discussion around Jerusalem. Finkelstein argues that Israel really was giving up nothing at all that made the Palestinian concessions worth considering. Polling data around the time from Palestinians and their attitude towards Israel. https://web.archive.org/web/20110607135527/http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2000/p1a.html More reading Lost in the Woods: A Camp David Retrospective

2000.09.28-2005.02.08 - The Second Intifada
Background Violence continued on both sides after the Oslo accords were signed in 1993. Israel engaged in regimental level exercises that were in preparation for peace talks to fail, so it could conquer towns in Area C. The failure of the Camp David Summit lead to a significant fracturing of the PLO as many Fatah factions abandoned it to join Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Netanyahu's government pushed for the construction of a new neighborhood, Har Homa, in East Jerusalem, and continued construction within existing Israeli settlements. Construction in the years following the Oslo Accords was still significantly less than prior, however. Barak secured an agreement for the dismantling of 12 new outposts in 1998, but continued expansion was occurring in existing settlements in the West Bank. This continued to hurt the Palestinian peace process. Sharon visits the Temple Mount on September 28th, 2000. Sharon visits the Temple Mount, without stepping inside, but this still angers local Palestinians living in Jerusalem. Violence breaks out. Multiple senior Palestinian officials encouraged Sharon not to visit. Sharon was determined to make a show of Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount. In 1982, the Kahan Commission found that Ariel Sharon was found to bear personal responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacre that occurred against Palestinians in the Lebanese Civil War. Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount 10 days after the annual memorial day for said massacre is said to have been the inciting moment for the beginning of the Second Intifada. First days of the intifada Violence broke out heavily in the days following, with losses on the Palestinian side far outweighing Israeli losses. The broadcasted killing of Muhammad al-Durrah, caught by a French news crew, was initially assumed to be the responsibility of the IDF, which they promptly apologized for, though much controversy remains over who actually shot and killed the boy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUz55tLLXUg&t=1019s The October 2000 events Several clashes occurred within Israel and the Gaza Strip, followed by a general strike, more escalations with police, thousands of Jews participating in violent acts in Tel Aviv, and a recommendation from the Or Commission to dismiss Shlomo Ben-Ami from Minister of Public Security. The Ramallah lynching The PA police arrested two Israeli reservists who had accidentally entered Ramallah, where a hundred Palestinians had been killed in the preceding weeks. An Italian television crew captured and broadcasted the killings, where both soldiers were beaten, stabbed and disembowelled, with one body being set on fire. November and December Clashes continue. Israel settlements in Gilo come under Palestinian heavy machine gun fire from Beit Jala. Palestinian deaths continue to outnumber Israeli deaths. 2001 The Taba Summit failed to produce results by the end of January. On January 17th, an Israeli teenager, Ofir Rahum, was murdered after being lured into Ramallah by a 24-year-old Palestinian, a member of Fatah's Tanzim, after an online relationship had sparked. After Sharon's election in 2001 over Barak, he refuses to meet with Yasser Arafat. More violence occurs through March, with 8 Israelis and 26 Palestinians dying. In Hebron, a Palestinian sniper is reported by the IDF to have intentionally targeted and shot/killed a 10 month old Israeli baby. In May of 2001, the IDF captured a vessel carrying $10m of weapons from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was destined for the Gaza coast. On June 1st a suicide bombing killing 21 Israeli civilians, most high schoolers, by the Islamic Jihad, hampered the American attempts to negotiate a cease-fire. 2002 The IDF captured Karine A, a freighter carrying weapons from Iran, believed to be intended for Palestinian militant use against Israel. It was claimed that top officials in the PA were involved in the smuggling. On the 28th of March the Arab Peace Initiative, endorsed by Arafat, encourages a two state solution, with Israel withdrawing all troops to the pre 1967 borders, with a full Right of Return for every Arab Palestinian. On the 29th of March, Operation Defensive Shield has the IDF making incursions throughout the West Bank. The UN estimates 497 Palestinians killed and 1,447 wounded, with 4,258 arrested. In April, the Battle of Jenin takes place. This was a huge battle seeing fierce urban combat by the IDF to clear out the refugee camp of the city of Jenin. 2003 Israeli intelligence report claimed Arafat had paid $20,000 to the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. US pressure caused the PA to appoint Mahmoud Abbas as the Palestinian prime minister. Mahmoud Abbas has a thesis that the early Zionist leaders and Nazi leaders collaborated to encourage Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine. On June of 2003, a temporary armistice was unilaterally declared by Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Fighting continues. After an August 19th Hamas suicide bus attack, the IDF were ordered to kill or capture all Hamas leadership in Hebron and the Gaza Strip, with at least all of the bus suicide bombing plotters being captured or killed, and Hamas leadership in Hebron being badly damaged. In later 2003, the Israeli West Bank barrier is constructed. Israel claims its necessary to prevent terrorists from entering Israeli cities, while Palestinians claim it separates their communities and acts as a de facto annexation of their territory. 2004 The IDF operates heavily in Rafah, to search and destroy smuggling tunnels used by militants to obtain a variety of weapons and supplies. Between 2000-2004, 90 tunnels connecting Egypt and the Gaza Strip were found and destroyed. 16,000 Palestinians are displaced as the IDF demolishes what they are claim are empty or militant homes. In February, Ariel Sharon announced a plan to withdraw all Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. Yossi Beilin, a peace advocate and the architect of the Oslo Accords and the Geneva Accord, rejected the proposed withdrawal plan and claimed that without a peace agreement in place, it would reward terror. After announcing the declaration plan, two subsequent Hamas leaders, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and his successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi were killed. 2005 Palestinian presidential elections were held on the 9th of January, with Mahmoud Abbas winning the election. Abbas was a platform of peaceful negotiation with Israel and non-violence to achieve Palestinian objectives. Sharon froze all diplomatic and security contacts with the PNA until Abbas shows a real effort to stop the terror. Abbas ordered Palestinian police to deploy in northern Gaza to prevent Qassam rocket and mortar shelling over Israeli settlements. Attacks would decrease sharply soon after. On February 8th, Sharon and Abbas declared a mutual truce. Hamas and Islamic Jihad said the truce doesn't affect them. 25-50 Qassam rockets and mortar shells were fired into an Israeli Gaza settlement, Neve Dekalim. Abbas ordered the PA security forces to stop such attacks in the future, and fired senior commanders in the PA security apparatus. IDF forces arrested Maharan Omar Shucat Abu Hamis, a Palestinian resident of Nablus, who was about to launch a suicide bus attack in the French Hill in Jerusalem. On February 13th, Abbas engages Islamic Jihad and Hamas in talks to respect the truce. Ismail Haniyah, a senior leader of the group Hamas, s aid its position will remain unchanged and Israel will bear responsibility for any new violation of aggression. Palestinian factions continued to attack settlements in Gaza and cities in Israel, until July 15th, when Israel resumed its targeted killing policy. Hamas militants are battling PA policemen in the streets. Aftermath On February 8th, 2005, Sharon and Abbas reach a truce, with Sharon releasing 900 Palestinian prisoners, withdrawing from West Bank towns, and finishing the Gaza withdrawal. Abbas reached an agreement 5 days later with Hamas and the PIJ to ensure the truce remains as long as Israeli violations did not happen. A number of people from Hamas leadership and a former military commander of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine all claim that Arafat had pre-planned the Second Intifada after realizing he would not get the concessions he wanted in the Camp David Accords. His widowed wife, Suha Arafat also claimed the same. Israeli's unilateral pullout from Lebanon was seen by the PLO as "optimistic", and an "example for other Arabs seeking to regain their rights." Israeli's military response in 2001 destroyed much infrastructure that was involved in the arming of Palestinian forces; some 90 paramilitary camps had been set up to train Palestinian youths in armed conflict. Some 40,000 armed and trained Palestinians existed in the occupied territories. Marwan Barghouti, the leader of the Fatah Tanzim, claimed he was attempting to instigate a second intifada leading up to the al-Aqsa visit by Sharon, contacting all Palestinian factions throughout Palestine. He also claimed that Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon was a factor which contributed to the Intifada. Casualties 1,053 Israelis were killed, 4,745 Palestinians were killed by the IDF, and 44 by Israeli civilians, and 577 by Palestinians. 69% of Israeli fatalities were male, while over 95% of Palestinian fatalities were male. More Aftermath On January 25th, 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian elections with an unexpected majority of 74 seats, compared to 45 for Fatah. In the 2001 and 2002 Arab League Summits, the Arab states pledged support for the Second Intifada just as they had pledged support for the First Intifada in two consecutive summits in the late 1980s. Noteworthy things for modern conflict History of huge employment of suicide bombers explicitly targeting civilians. History of shipments of weapons via ocean into Gaza Strip. History of hiding militants inside "refugee" camps/cities. History of one-sided military capability of Israel vs the Palestinians. History of Israel denying UN or Human Rights groups to investigate after battles. Israeli government explicit support for settler camps and refusal to remove them (Netenyahu and Sharon).

History of Israel and Palestine...
Timeline Mid-1919 - July 1922 - The Mandate for Palestine Civil administration began in Palestine and Transjordan in July 1920 and April 1921, respectively, and the mandate was in force from 29 September 1923 to 15 May 1948 and to 25 May 1946 respectively. Map of Mandatory Palestine The White Paper of 1939 enacted until the end of British Mandated rule Called for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in an independent Palestinian state within 10 years. Limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 for five years, and allowed Arab majority to determine future Jewish immigration. Jews were restricted from buying Arab land in all but 5% of the Mandate. The Palestinian Arab parties, acting under Haj Amin Effendi al-Husseini, rejected this proposal, but probably should have accepted. The Arab counter offer wanted independence, no Jewish national home in Palestine, replacement of the Mandate by a treaty, and the end of Jewish immigration. 1936-1939 - Arab revolt in Palestine 1937 - The Peel Commission 1944-1948 - Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine 1947.11.29 - The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, or Resolution (II) 1948 - Palestine War May 11th, 1949 - Israel admitted as a member of the United Nations Over the next few years, lots of Jews (over 700,00) came from all over the Middle East/world to live in Israel. Between 1948 and 1958, the population of Israel rose from 800,000 to 2,000,000. 1953-1956 - Intermittent clashes along all of Israel's borders Terrorist attacks attempted to infiltrate Israel by sea, multiple times from Jordan (West Bank) and other surrounding Arab countries, and from Egypt (occupied Gaza) https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000496350.pdf 1956.10.29-1956.11.07 - The Second Arab-Israeli War, or the Suez Crisis 1963-1969 - Eshkol In 1964, Egypt, Jordan and Syria developed a unified military command. Israel completed work on a national water carrier, Arabs responded by attempting to divert the headwaters of the Jordan, leading to growing conflict between Israel and Syria Until 1966, Israel's weapons came from France, though Charles de Gaulle ceased supplying Israel with arms post Algerian withdrawal. The US stepped in to replace the flow of weapons. The Samu incident 1967.06.05 - The Six-Day War, or the Third Arab-Israeli War The 1967 Arab League summit Famous for the Khartoum Resolution, known as the "Three No's" No Peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. Other oil-rich Arab states will help other Arab states who lost the war and to rebuild their military. The final note of the meeting asserted Palestinians rights to the whole of Palestine, meaning the total eradication of Israel. 1967-1970 - War of Attrition 1969 - The Cairo Agreement Gave the PLO a free hand to attack Israel from South Lebanon. 1970.10.01 - Black September, or the Jordanian Civil War May 1972 - Lod Airport massacre Terrorist attack that occurred when three members of the Japanese Red army were recruited by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - External Operations, to attack Lod Airport, resulting in 26 people being killed and 80 others injured. 1973 - The Yom Kippur War, or the Ramadan War, or the October War, or the Fourth Arab-Israeli War 1973 oil crisis Began due to massive US support for Israel, ended once Israel pulled its troops from the west bank. May 14th-15th, 1974 Ma'alot Massacre Palestinian terrorist attack that involved hostage-taking of 115 Israelis, mainly school children, which ended with 25 hostages and 6 other civilians dead. Began with three armed members of the DFLP, or the Democratic Front for he Liberation of Palestine. They infiltrated from Lebanon. The DFLP demanded the release of 23 Palestinian militants and 3 others from Israeli prisons, or else they would kill the students. The Israelis agreed, but the hostage-takers did not receive an expected message in time from Damascus. In response, Israel bombed DFLP and PFLP training bases. The BBC reported that the bombings inflicted damage in seven Palestinian refugee camps and villages in southern Lebanon, killing 27 and injuring 138. The DFLP tried a second time to take hostages at a hotel in Ma'alot in 1979, but were killed by Israeli soldiers. November 1974 - The PLO was granted observer status at the UN and Yasser Arafat addressed the General Assembly. 1974 - Gush Emunim was formally established This group attempted to begin settling the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. After six removals from the IDF, an agreement was reached for the Israeli government to allow 25 families to settle in the Kadum army camp southwest of Nablus/Shechem. This would go on to become the municipality of Kedumim, one of the major settlements of the West Bank. This model was copied for future settlements. Gush Emunim radicalized and formed the Jewish Underground, a terrorist organization conducting terror attacks and plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock. Once this was uncovered, the Yesha Council took over the settler movement. 1976 - Land Day On March 30th, Arab citizens of Israel and Palestine protested to object to the Israeli government expropriating thousands of dunams (acres) of land for state purposes. This was done through general strikes and marches. The Israeli army and police would kill 6 unarmed Arab citizens, with hundred being wounded and hundreds of others being arrested. The protests leading up to this would lead to more Arabs in Israel protesting for rights and engaging in civic action with future Israeli governments. The protests did little to stop the 1975 land expropriation plan. 1976 - Operation Entebbe An operation that resulted in rescuing Israeli passengers kidnapped on an Air France flight hijacked by PFLP militants and Germany revolutionaries flown to Uganda. 1977 - Sadat addresses the Knesset. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsQ0bikGkXg&t=3s https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6861044 March 1978 - Coastal Road Massacre Palestinian militants coming in from Lebanon hijacked a bus on the Coastal Highway and murdered 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, with 76 more wounded. This attacked was planned by Abu Jihad, and carried out by Fatah. The goal of the attack was to disrupt Israeli-Egyptian peace talks. Israeli response was Operation Litani After 1968, Palestinian militant groups formed a quasi-state in southern Lebanon and used it to attack civilian targets in Israel. Israel entered Lebanon and began hunting PLO infantry and armor forces, though they did not succeed in engaging large numbers of them. Many Lebanese civilians were killed by heavy Israeli shelling and air strikes. The IDF military operation killed approximately 1,100 people. The IDF claims at least 550 of the casualties were Palestinian militants. 1978 - Camp David Accords March 26, 1979 - Framework Peace Treaty Egypt and Israel Israel agreed to withdraw both its armed forces and 4,500 civilian inhabitants from the Sinai, including the return of Egypt's Abu-Rudeis oil fields in western Sinai. Egypt agreed to normal diplomatic relations with Israel. Egypt guarantees freedom of passage through the Suez Canal and other nearby waterways, such as the Straits of Tiran, and a restriction on forces Egypt would place on the Sinai. Israel would also agree to limit its forces from the Egyptian border. Egypt guarantees free passage between Egypt and Jordan. Consequences Egypt suspended from the Arab League from 1979-1989. Hussein was upset that Sadat volunteered his perspective concerning the Palestinians as it continued to weaken his support in the Arab world. Sadam Hussein in Iraq looked to fill the Arab vacuum left by Egypt. Syria informed Egypt it would not reconcile with the nation unless it abandoned the peace agreement with Israel. Israeli settlers were upset, and though they attempted to prevent the government from dismantling their settlements, they failed. Anwar Sadat was assassinated on October 6th, 1981, by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad for his participation in the Camp David Accords. Following the agreement, Israel and Egypt became the two largest recipients of US military and financial aid 1978-1981 1978 the Merkava battle tank entered use with the IDF. In 1979, over 40,000 Iranian Jews migrated to Israel escaping the Islamic Revolution there. On June 30th, 1981, Israeli air force destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Operation Opera that France was building for Iraq. Israel stated it would pre-emptively attack all attempts to work towards perceived nuclear weapons. In 1981, after Begin wins again, the new government annexed the Golan Heights. June 1982 There is an attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov, ordered by Baghdad and carried out by a Palestinian splinter group (that was hostile to the PLO) in London. This was the pretext by which Israel began the Lebanon War. 1982 - The 1st Lebanon War 1983-1992 - Shamir I, Peres I, Shamir II In 1985 Israel withdraws most of its troops from Lebanon, leaving a small Israeli force and Israeli-supported militia in Southern Lebanon to fight in the coming years against Shia organization Hezbollah. 1987.12.08-1993.09.13 - The First Palestinian Intifada 1991 - The Madrid Conference Hosted by Spain and co-sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union Involved Israel and the Palestinians, as well as Arab countries, including Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. US Secretary of State James Baker told an AIPAC audience that Israel needs to abandon its expansionist policies. Bush and Baker attempted to pressure Israel off of using any loan guarantees for settlement expansion, pushing heavily against them. Shamir believed he could simply influence via the Israeli lobby politicians and the US public against Bush's wishes, but Bush's approval rating was too high, and eventually all parties agreed to convene in Madrid. Feelings internationally were hopeful from this, with two successful bilateral agreements following this, namely the Oslo I accords, and the Israeli-Jordanian negotiations after. 1993 - Oslo I Accord 1992-1996 July 25th, 1993, Israel carried out a week-long military operation in Lebanon to attack Hezbollah positions, dubbed Operation Accountability. In February of 1994, Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians and wounded 125 at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The Kach party has been barred from participation in the 1992 elections, and then subsequently made illegal and designated a terrorist organization. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-733523 The first suicide bombing in Israel would happen in retaliation for this by Hamas. On May of 1994 the Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers and Responsibilities is signed, beginning the transferring of authority to Palestinians. On the 26th of October, 1994 the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace is signed. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement is signed on the 28th of September, 1995 in DC between Arafat and Rabin. Palestinians were on the precipice of obtaining statehood, and the Palestinian National Covenant language was changed from calling for the expulsion of Jews who migrated after 1917. In July of 1995, opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu took part in two demonstrations where Netanyahu walked at the head of a mock funeral procession featuring a fake black coffin. On November 4th, 1995, a far-right religious Zionist opponent of the Oslo Accords assassinates Rabin. In April of 1996, Israel launches Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon in response to Hezbollah's Katyusha rocket attacks. 1996-2001 Netanyahu continued the implementation of the Oslo Accords, though his prime ministership saw a marked slow-down in the Peace Process. Hamas continues suicide bombing throughout this time period in 1996. September 24th, 1996 were the Western Wall Tunnel riots First conflict between the IDF and the newly created Palestinian National Security Forces. The protests overall resulted in the deaths of 59 Palestinians and 16 Israelis, along with hundreds more being wounded. On January 17th of 1997, Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat signed the Hebron protocol. Partial redeployment of Israeli military forces from Hebron in accordance with the 1995 Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip ("Oslo II"), while Area H-1 (80%) would come under Palestinian control. On May 25th, 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew its remaining forces from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah retained control of the Sheba'a Farms in southern Lebanon. 2000 - Camp David Summit 2000.09.28-2005.02.08 - The Second Intifada 2005 Gaza-Israel Conflict Disengagement from the Gaza Strip 2006 - Second Lebanon War 2007 - The Battle of Gaza 2008 - The Gaza War 2023 - Israel-Hamas War General Info America Pressure on Israel to limit Gaza casualties Delay in the ground invasion Pressure on Israel to admit aid into the Gaza Strip Bombing of Jabil is causing Israel to pause its offensive. Pressure to supply water to Southern Gaza Opinions on the Conflict Pro-Zionist This Time, the Loser Writes History Israeli Settlements Are Not Illegal 2004.01.09 -Survival of the fittest 2020.10.05 -Exclusive interview - Part 1 \| Prince Bandar bin Sultan on Israel, Palestine and Washington Pro-Palestinian The War of the Israeli Historians IDF bars settler suspect linked to killing of Palestinian from West Bank for 6 months Suspect in Burqa killing cites 'collective punishment' as legitimate means against enemy Israeli settler, far-right activist: 'Spitting on Christians is a Jewish custom' 1999.12.24 -[ Israel and Syria: Correcting the Record] Neutral Israel claims it is no longer occupying the Gaza Strip. What does international law say? Video Evidence of Stuff Pro-Zionist Benny Morris: Ilan Pappe's New Book Is Appalling Reply: Benny Morris's Lies About My Book West Bank medic takes weapon from downed militant, passes it to another militant to continue shooting at IDF. Today. Jenin. Anti-Zionist Palestinian father sends child to throw rocks at IDF soldiers Big Questions for Israel vs Palestine Did Jewish people have a right to settle Palestine? Was there immoral activity when they began moving in from Europe? In 1948, was the Nakba unavoidable? Was it always part of the Zionist agenda to expel all Arabs from Israeli controlled lands? In the 1967 6-day War, did Israel truly believe the neighboring Arab countries were preparing for war? Was a pre-emptive attack justified? Has Israel and Palestine made any meaningful progress towards a 2-state solution (Oslo Accords and Camp David Summit)? Where does the responsibility lie for the lack of solution follow-through? What are reasonable peaceful resolutions to the conflict in the future? What would have to happen for any of these things to come to fruition? Does either side even agree on what a peaceful resolution looks like? Is Israel proportionate in their response? Is the killing of civilians in Gaza justified? What does a proportionate response look like? Is there any justification for settlers in the West Bank? Why does Israel push these so harshly? Is the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees a reasonable request?

International Law...
General notes Addressing the legality of a blockade Three Sources of International Law Treaties Agreements ratified between two or more countries. Customary Law A group of people across time engage in a practice that is not codified into law, essentially common law? They do this because they have a subjective belief that this is compulsory General Principles The permanent court of international justice in the league of nations was the first international court Case laws by international courts and writing by international publicists Big International Courts lol there's a lot Who even has jurisdiction? Considerations Applicable Law What pieces of international law are applicable to this situation? Jurisdiction What courts can decide whether a law has been broken or not? ICJ or the ICC ICC litigates between individuals and the ICJ litigates between countries The ICC - In Hague The ICC recognizes essentially four crimes Genocide Intentional destruction of a group of people. Crimes against humanity Widespread or criminal activity by a de facto authority that grossly violate humans, usually by or on behalf of a state. Includes things like apartheid War crimes Essentially referencing the Geneva Conventions. Crimes of aggression Aggressive or large-scale act of aggression using state military force, holds accountable leaders of war. People or nationals who are signatories to the Rome Statue of the ICC are capable of bringing cases to this court. The ICJ Random Facts Exists under the UN, if you become a member of the UN, you automatically a member of this court. Litigates issues between nations. Jurisdictions Three ways to establish jurisdictions Special agreement Two states go before the court and sign a special agreement for the purpose of the court having jurisdiction. Not valid if... Coercion exists, corruption exists, bribery, etc... Imperative law could be violated, meaning some international norm or law is violated. Incompatibility with other agreement Compromissory clause The parties can bring something to the ICJ if there's a violation to another treaty. Optional clause declaration Article 38 says states can make unilateral declaration allowing anyone to submit cases to them against the ICJ. This is subject to reciprocity, for this clause States can carve out exceptions relating to other issues, say the law of the sea ICJ Advisory Opinion https://web.archive.org/web/20200913105418/https://www.icj-cij.org/files/case-related/131/131-20040709-ADV-01-00-EN.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/24/uk-seeking-block-icj-ruling-israeli-occupation-palestine Annex Cuba Roosevelt???

Blacklist...
Nick Fuentes November 1st, 2023 - indefinite Supporting a mass flagging/banning campaign Fuentes Deplatforming.jpg Sam Seder November 11th, 2023 - indefinite Unbelievably stupid summary of prior conversation we had + unbelievably stupid understanding of Rittenhouse case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O__JRZODn-A&t=4188s

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-<font size="3px"face="Georgia">'''Obsidian Notes:'''</font>
 [[File:2023 Obsidian logo.svg|right|100px]]
+Obsidian is a note taking application that [[Destiny]] currently uses to aggregate and [https://publish.obsidian.md/destiny|publish his research and readings] on a wide variety of topics, as well as post other miscellaneous things such as his current [[#blacklist|blacklist]] or [[#Things_to_reseach_in_the_future|future topics to research]].
+ '''NOTE:''' This article was last updated on March 16, 2023. It is probable that this article no longer contains the most up to date entries. The most up to date entries can be found [https://publish.obsidian.md/destiny| here].
+ It is recommended that you use the built-in wiki table of contents due to the large volume of content within the article.
+= Book Notes =
+== Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy ==
+Notebook Export
-[https://publish.obsidian.md/destiny Currently Published Notes]
+Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy
+Ben-Ami, Shlomo
+Citation (APA): Ben-Ami, S. (2006). Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
+===I. Prelude: The Birth of an Intractable Conflict===
+=====Page 10 · Location 291=====
+<blockquote>Nor were the restrictions on land acquisition an obstacle the Zionists could not overcome. Throughout, the Arabs’ incompetent leadership, their lack of purpose and national cohesion, proved to be a major ally of the Zionist enterprise. White Papers notwithstanding, Arab landowners ready to sell land to the Jews and to betray their own national cause were never in short supply. As no other than King Abdullah of Transjordan observed in his memoirs, ‘The Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in … weeping [about it].’</blockquote>
+=====Page 20 · Location 507=====
+<blockquote>The war for Palestine in 1948 was lost by the Arab community ten years before it even began. The Arab Revolt had, of course, an understandable rationale behind it, namely, to force Britain to reverse her policies in favour of the National Home for the Jews, stop immigration and curtail the land acquisition by the Zionists. But the method and the evolution of the Revolt reflected rage and blind despair more than organisation or careful strategy. The result would be a resounding defeat for the Palestinian Arabs that would bring them to the ultimate débâcle of 1948 in a state of fatalistic disarray. The years between the Arab Revolt and the Naqbah of 1948 witnessed the dismemberment of the Palestinian community and the loss of their political autonomy to the extent that when they had to face the challenge of partition and war in 1947–8, they were no longer the masters of their own destiny. By then their cause would be usurped by the neighbouring Arab states. It was not until the emergence of the Fatah movement and Yasser Arafat’s PLO in the mid 1960s that the Palestinians recovered the control of their own cause.</blockquote>
+===II. Bisecting the Land or Zionism’s Strategy of Phases?===
+=====Page 34 · Location 754=====
+<blockquote>The paradox of the winter of 1947 was that the Jews, who accepted Resolution 181–the Jewish public acclaimed its endorsement by the UN with genuine outbursts of jubilation–were ready and well deployed to face a war should this be the outcome, and the Arabs, who rejected the Resolution out of hand and made no secret of their intention to subvert it, were not at all prepared for war. Ben-Gurion, who upon his appointment as the ‘defence minister’ of the Jewish Agency in 1946 made it clear that the time had now arrived for ‘a showdown of force, a Jewish military showdown’, had been for some time meticulously preparing for a war he was convinced, at least ever since the Arab Revolt, was inevitable. The Palestinians, who on 1 December 1947 made their views clear when the Arab Higher Committee declared a general strike, were totally unprepared and poorly equipped for an armed conflict. Arab society had been crumbling from within ever since the brutal repression of the 1936–9 Revolt. Leaderless and decapitated of their traditional elites, deeply fragmented, respectful and frightened of the Yishuv’s military power, and disorientated as to their real or achievable objectives, the Palestinians approached the imminent conflict and, as it turned out, their second catastrophe in a decade, in a state of disarray and fatalistic despair.</blockquote>
+===III. The Early Years: A Missed Opportunity for Peace?===
+=====Page 50 · Location 1075=====
+<blockquote>On moral grounds one could of course convincingly defend the case for the repatriation of refugees. But this was out of the question in a historical and political context, where a clash existed between an emergent Jewish state and its defeated enemies, for whom the repatriation of refugees was one way of hampering the growth and development of the newborn, yet intimidating, state against which they harboured understandable intentions of revanche. At the Lausanne Peace Conference Israel eventually agreed to the repatriation of 100,000 Palestinian refugees, but this was almost by force of habit rejected out of hand by the Arabs as too little. Too little it might have been, but Israel made the offer only with the hope of getting relief from American pressure. The Arabs clearly missed an opportunity to call Israel’s bluff.</blockquote>
+=====Page 62 · Location 1312=====
+<blockquote>The Israelis might have been tough negotiators, but the dysfunctionality of the Jordanian political system was now the major obstacle to a settlement. A situation was emerging in Jordan where the King’s legitimacy for striking a deal with Israel was being seriously undermined by a supposedly patriotic, pan-Arab, philo-Palestinian and pan-Islamic government. As it turned out, the annexation of the West Bank extended the borders of the Hashemite kingdom but, by Palestinising the kingdom and shifting the emphasis of Jordanian politics to a pan-Arab sensibility towards the plight of the Palestinians, it diminished the King’s power and capacity to continue being the undisputed autocratic leader he had been thus far. On 17 February 1950 the King made a last-ditch attempt to salvage something from the wreckage of his peace strategy with Israel by proposing a non-aggression pact. This was a brilliant move, for it could unleash a dynamic leading to a possible peace deal in the future. It also implicitly meant Israel’s recognition of Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank. The agreement could likewise allow Israel to claim her first political breakthrough with an Arab state and a crack in the Arab economic boycott. There were even some provisions in Abdullah’s proposal that could satisfy the Palestinians by opening judicial channels for refugees to reclaim their abandoned property in Israel. The Israeli Cabinet ratified the agreement at its meeting of 22 February, with Foreign Minister Sharett praising the ‘psychological’ importance of the document. But it was again the Jordanians, not the Israelis, who failed to deliver. Abu al-Huda’s government got cold feet and unilaterally changed both the title and the content of the agreement. It was now becoming clear that the Palestinisation of the kingdom and the rift between the King and a no longer docile political class had emerged as an insurmountable obstacle to an Israeli–Jordanian settlement, however modest its provisions. Abdullah could not allow himself the political luxury of being exposed as a yielding king in conflict with a patriotic pan-Arab government.</blockquote>
+===IV. The Rise and Fall of the Third Kingdom of Israel===
+=====Page 78 · Location 1595=====
+<blockquote>It is true that the conflict existed before superpower competition and, as we can see today, it still persists after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the struggle for mastery in the Middle East by the two big powers blocked the possibility of a major peace breakthrough for years. Conspicuously, Egypt’s peace with Israel in 1979 started as a bold bilateral move behind the back of the superpowers. The Madrid Peace Conference of 1991, the Oslo accords of 1993 between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel’s peace with Jordan a year later, and the most serious attempts to reach an Israeli–Syrian settlement throughout the 1990s were all possible only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.</blockquote>
+===V. The Jewish Fear and Israel’s Mother of all Victories===
+=====Page 87 · Location 1767=====
+<blockquote>By pushing Palestine to the forefront of the struggle against the Jewish state, Nasser radically changed the parameters of the conflict. Now it was no longer just a border dispute between sovereign states, and one that was susceptible to a rational solution, but a conflict of an almost mythological nature over the plight of the Palestinians and their ‘inalienable’ rights, where hardly any room for compromise could exist. It is from this perspective that Sadat’s peace initiative, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, needs to be understood. To make peace he needed to extricate Egypt’s conflict with Israel from the paralysing hold of the Palestinian dilemma into which Nasser had locked it and bring it back to the realm of rationality as a solvable border dispute between two sovereign states.</blockquote>
+=====Page 93 · Location 1877=====
+<blockquote>Lack of superpower guarantees, an almost apocalyptic fear of physical annihilation, the threat of a Nasserite Middle East bent on the destruction of Israel, a fatalistic pessimism as to the chances that the Arab world would ever reconcile itself to the existence of a Jewish state in its midst and the ever-present Holocaust complex, was the context for Ben-Gurion’s quest for a credible nuclear option. The nuclear option could also be seen as a protest against, or an alternative to, America’s reluctance to accord solid and unequivocal conventional guarantees to Israel’s existence and incorporate it into an organic regional alliance. Indeed, there were those in the Israeli political system who wanted to use the Dimona nuclear reactor as a way of pressuring America into securing Israel’s conventional capabilities.</blockquote>
+=====Page 94 · Location 1900=====
+<blockquote>Ben-Gurion oscillated frantically from a strategy of deterrence to the politics of hysteria. He bombarded world leaders with dramatic appeals for an international commitment to the independence and territorial integrity of all the states in the Middle East. Whatever territorial dreams he might have harboured in the past, he was now a keen champion of the status quo. To him, the territorial phase of Zionism was over and the safety of Israel within the borders of 1949 was his exclusive concern. Only the full demilitarisation of the West Bank and a formal defence treaty with America could set his mind at rest.</blockquote>
+=====Page 96 · Location 1946=====
+<blockquote>Nor was Jordan spared Israel’s policy of swift and disproportionate retaliations. Such was the case of the Samu Operation in November 1966. After insistently pointing at Damascus as the source of all evil, Israel suddenly and massively retaliated against Jordan in response to a local, relatively minor incident. A typical case of the feebleness of the politicians when confronted with the army’s tendency to dictate the scope and nature of military operations in a way that sometimes created new and unplanned political realities, Samu was a disproportionate operation that stood in stark contradiction to Israel’s official commitment to the stability of Hussein’s regime. Israel publicly humiliated and betrayed an Arab leader so far careful to stay aloof from the war rhetoric and practices of his Syrian neighbours in the north, and pushed him into the fold of the Arab war camp.</blockquote>
+=====Page 97 · Location 1956=====
+<blockquote>The Arab League summit of January 1964 in Cairo went down in history as the first official all-Arab gathering to call for Arab military preparations in order to create the conditions ‘for the final liquidation of Israel’. The decision to divert the headwaters of the River Jordan in Syria and Lebanon–a United Arab Command was created to protect the project and prepare for war–and create the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under Ahmad al-Shuqayri’s chairmanship were understandably perceived in Israel as part of an overall Arab war strategy against the Jewish state. The task of liberating Palestine from ‘Zionist imperialism’ was reiterated in the Alexandria Arab League summit later that winter, and pledges were made by the League’s members to mobilise their resources against the Zionist enemy.</blockquote>
+=====Page 98 · Location 1994=====
+<blockquote>King Hussein’s predicament proved to be even more serious than that of Nasser. In his case it was the very existence of his kingdom that was at stake. He did not want to be dragged into war, but was too weak to resist the tide. As much as the supposed threat posed by Israel, it was actually the pressure of Fatah and the PLO that put in jeopardy the stability of the Hashemite kingdom. For the PLO, liberating Palestine also meant overthrowing the Hashemites’ ‘colonialist rule’. The King harboured no illusions as to the ultimate rationale of the PLO’s presence in Jordan, namely, as he explicitly wrote to Nasser, ‘the destruction of Jordan’.</blockquote>
+=====Page 100 · Location 2026=====
+<blockquote>And when retaliations and verbal threats failed to deter the Syrians, Rabin made it clear that his intention was to provoke the Syrians into an all-out war. In December 1966 he wrote to General Zvi Zamir, Israel’s military attaché in London: ‘an escalation with Syria is not against Israel’s interest, and in my view there is no better time than now for a confrontation with Syria. I prefer to go to war rather than allow this continuous harassment, especially if the Syrians persist in their efforts to facilitate the activity of Fatah on our border.’</blockquote>
+=====Page 104 · Location 2115=====
+<blockquote>Nor was the restless General spared Ben-Gurion’s ire. From his seclusion in the Negev desert, the Old Man had been following the evolving crisis with awe. Precisely because he shared the military’s assessment that the closure of the Straits threatened to vitiate all the achievements of the Sinai Campaign and could soon turn into a question of ‘national survival’–this was Rabin’s expression–Ben-Gurion saw all his old fears coming true: Israel was now surrounded by an all-Arab coalition aggressively supported by the Soviet Union, without being able to rely on an alliance with, or security guarantees from, a Western superpower.</blockquote>
+===VI. Sedanlaghen – The Sin of Hubris and its Punishment===
+=====Page 126 · Location 2512=====
+<blockquote>There is, of course, much reason to doubt whether, even if formalised as an official peace proposal, the Arabs would have accepted the government’s peace guidelines as the platform for a full-fledged peace agreement with Israel. Israel’s shortcomings notwithstanding, the Arabs were by all accounts not yet ready for such a deal. The proof is that a more unequivocal American overture along the same lines as the Israeli Cabinet’s decision would soon be turned down by the Arabs and their Soviet patrons.</blockquote>
+====Page 128 · Location 2565====
+<blockquote>And it was only when this euphemism was embedded in the language of a UN Security Council Resolution that Israel was ready to endorse it. The constructive ambiguity of the November 1967 Security Council Resolution Number 242, which called for peace based on the restitution of ‘territories’ instead of ‘the territories’, allowed Israel to claim that the borders would have to be modified on all fronts as a condition for peace and gave manoeuvring space to her post-war diplomacy. Resolution 242 was the result of the need to find a formula that would reconcile Israel’s unrealistic expectation to have full peace for less than all the territories, and the Arabs’ drive for a full restitution of land in exchange for a watered-down state of non-belligerency.</blockquote>
+=====Page 129 · Location 2585=====
+<blockquote>Neither of the parties to the conflict was especially happy with Resolution 242’ s oblique and foggy formulas, least of all the Palestinians, whose problem was reduced in the Resolution to that of the humanitarian plight of refugees. The PLO’s outright rejection of 242 was an additional manifestation by the Palestinians that their struggle would from now on be independent of the Arabs’ diplomatic strategy. The Palestinians were about to disengage from the status of a tool in the hands of the Arab states to that of an independent subject in the history of the Middle East. As from the Palestinian débâcle of 1936–9 and later the 1948 Naqbah, the Palestinians had lost their independence as a national movement. They disappeared from the regional arena as autonomous players. The 1967 war, the defeat of the Arab armies with their consequent loss of a credible military option in the foreseeable future, and the relegation by Resolution 242 of the Palestinian problem to the margins of peacemaking in the region, signalled the beginning of a new phase in the history of Palestinian nationalism.</blockquote>
+===VII. Begin’s ‘Capsule Theory’ and Sadat’s ‘Separate Peace’===
+=====Page 154 · Location 3090=====
+<blockquote>Begin was thus positioning himself as the most eloquent and committed exponent of what could perhaps be defined as the ‘capsule theory’, namely the drive to reach a settlement with the surrounding Arab states that would ‘capsulate’, as it were, the West Bank and with it the Palestinian problem in an environment of binding peace agreements between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. This, Begin believed, would allow Israel to exercise her full control of Eretz-Israel, yet deny the Palestinians the possibility of again triggering an all-Arab war against her.</blockquote>
+=====Page 155 · Location 3107=====
+<blockquote>Sadat did not believe that a Soviet–American co-sponsorship of the peace process would bear the political fruits he wanted. He could see his fears vindicated already in a joint declaration of the superpowers that, to his dismay, endorsed the Israeli interpretation of Security Council Resolution 242 when it spoke of ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in 1967’. And as to Begin, he was not yet ready to digest the concept of ‘the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people’, one of the central premises upon which the Geneva Conference was to be convened.</blockquote>
+=====Page 158 · Location 3170=====
+<blockquote>One lesson and legacy of Sadat’s initiative is that in highly protracted conflicts where deep emotions and historical hatred are involved, when almost every conceivable diplomatic formula has been tried, the shock of a visionary, generous and imaginative step is likely to open new and untold paths to peace. For the major problem in the Arab–Israeli conflict, as in many other intricate collisions throughout history, has always been the incapacity or unwillingness of leaders to conduct a peace policy that is not supported by what looked at the time like the legitimate, and frequently paralysing, consensus prevailing in their respective societies and polities. Leaders, more frequently than not, act as the hostages of the socio-political environment that produces them instead of shaping it. Anwar Sadat gained a privileged place in history and achieved immortality the moment he fled from the comfortable prison of inertia, and from the pseudo-solidarity and hollow rhetorical cohesion of Arab summits.</blockquote>
+=====Page 164 · Location 3276=====
+<blockquote>Very few in the Arab world had much love for Arafat or for the PLO, ‘the cancer in our midst’, as King Hassan of Morocco defined it in his December meeting with Dayan and Tuhami. Years later this author would personally hear from the King, in his meeting with him in his Rabat palace in January 1993, similar harsh descriptions of Arafat and the PLO, an organisation he then confided to me had outlived its historical role and was becoming an obstacle to peace that needed to be dismantled. The King also related to me the advice he had given to Arafat’s deputy, Abu-Mazen, that the PLO should disband and allow the local Palestinian leadership in the territories to assume the responsibility for dealing directly with Israel. When I later reported my conversation with the King to Prime Minister Rabin he could not conceal his embarrassment, for it was precisely at that time that an Israeli team was negotiating in Oslo with a PLO delegation what later became known as the Oslo accords.</blockquote>
+=====Page 164 · Location 3283=====
+<blockquote>Sadat had no higher regard for Arafat and the PLO than King Hassan. His weariness with the Palestinians exploded into open rage when in February 1978 the chief editor of Al-Ahram and a personal friend of the President, Yusuf al-Sibai, was assassinated in Cyprus by a Palestinian squad, admittedly belonging to Abu Nidal’s splinter group, not to the PLO. To Sadat this was one more proof that Egypt was mortgaging its future for the sake of a people–‘pygmies’ and ‘hired killers’, as he put it to Israel’s Defence Minister Ezer Weizmann–who did not deserve Egypt’s sacrifices.</blockquote>
+=====Page 168 · Location 3360=====
+<blockquote>But it took the almost Messianic commitment of President Carter and the most assertive and robust involvement of the United States to save the process from collapse and to force the parties to shoulder the formidable price of peace. ‘None of us believe we have much of a chance to succeed,’ confided Carter to his advisers when he invited the parties to the Camp David presidential retreat for a peace summit.</blockquote>
+=====Page 170 · Location 3394=====
+<blockquote>It was Menachem Begin, not a left-wing radical, who subscribed at Camp David to such non-Jabotinskian concepts as these: ‘a recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements’, ‘the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects’ and ‘the Palestinians will participate in the determination of their own future’. Moreover, not only did Begin agree to discuss the return to the territories of the displaced Palestinians who left the West Bank during the Six Day War, but he also consented to reopen the 1948 chapter, that is, to negotiate ‘the resolution of the 1948 refugee problem’. And if all this were not enough, Begin succumbed to Carter’s pressure and agreed to ‘Resolution 242 in all its parts’, thus implicitly also endorsing the Resolution’s preamble about ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’, and its possible applicability to other Arab fronts as well.</blockquote>
+=====Page 170 · Location 3405=====
+<blockquote>It was a capital sin that the Palestinians should have rejected such a golden opportunity to join the Camp David process at a time when the West Bank was still practically free of Israeli settlements. This was a major missed opportunity by the Palestinian leadership. What was proposed to the Palestinians at Camp David, to use Oslo terms, was to turn the whole of the West Bank into Area B, that is, an area of Palestinian administrative rule and Israeli responsibility for security. Today, twenty-five years after Camp David and twelve years into the Oslo process, the Palestinians have hardly 20 per cent of the West Bank as Area B.</blockquote>
+=====Page 170 · Location 3410=====
+<blockquote>In the aftermath of the Camp David accords, the Palestinians failed to do what they wisely did in 1988, namely call Israel’s bluff and join the peace process before Israel’s occupation of the West Bank had created an irreversible reality.</blockquote>
+=====Page 170 · Location 3413=====
+<blockquote>At Camp David he fought for every word in the text. That the Palestinians did not call his bluff and instead engaged in a struggle against what Arafat himself called ‘the Camp David conspiracy’ only facilitated the putting into practice of Begin’s grand designs on the West Bank.</blockquote>
+=====Page 172 · Location 3439=====
+<blockquote>Menachem Begin did not make life easier for the American President now desperately shuttling between Cairo and Jerusalem. The Israeli Prime Minister did not have insurmountable opposition at home. But he, or rather his conscience, was his own opposition. In order to calm it down he now had to prove that he, who had betrayed his pledge not to dismantle settlements, would not allow this to become a precedent for the West Bank. He would enhance the building of new settlements in Judaea and Samaria and he would block any possibility of the Palestinian autonomy ushering in a Palestinian state.</blockquote>
+===VIII. The Road to Madrid===
+=====Page 175 · Location 3495=====
+<blockquote>Begin would not bargain over Judaea and Samaria. But Israeli rejectionism, as was frequently the case throughout the Arab–Israeli conflict, when not triggered by the Palestinians in the first place was certainly encouraged by them. The National Guidance Committee, a council of Palestinian notables in the territories, was created with one exclusive purpose, that of undermining and boycotting the autonomy talks, whatever their final objective might have been. The narrow window of opportunity that existed in 1967 for Israel to reach a deal with a local Palestinian leadership was now closed and sealed. In 1967, with Israel’s stunning victory still fresh in their mind and with the PLO still too weak to dictate the Palestinian agenda in the occupied territories, the local Palestinian leadership was eager to engage in peace talks with Israel. But Israel then preferred the politics of confusion and ambiguity. Now, thirteen years later, the PLO held the unchallenged monopoly of Palestinian politics and there was no chance whatever that any local leadership would be allowed to negotiate with Israel a watered-down autonomy plan, or any peace plan for that matter.</blockquote>
+=====Page 176 · Location 3513=====
+it is important to note that the fundamentalist officer who assassinated Sadat during a military parade on 6 October 1981, the eighth anniversary of the 1973 war, did not do it because of Sadat’s peace with Israel but because of his Western tendencies; the assassin did not once mention Israel during his trial
+=====Page 178 · Location 3557=====
+Begin’s intention was to signal through his move on the Golan the limits of the peace process, namely that Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai should not be seen by her neighbours as a precedent for other fronts. By pulling out from Sinai, Begin intimated, Israel had fulfilled the territorial aspects of Resolution 242 and no more withdrawals could be contemplated in future peace deals. From now on it would have to be ‘peace for peace’, not ‘peace for land’. Likewise, the annexation of the Golan was Begin’s way of testing the commitment of Egypt’s new President, Hosni Mubarak, to Israel’s concept of a separate peace.
+=====Page 189 · Location 3773=====
+The political void created by the collapse of the London agreement–and now also by the evaporation of the Shultz initiative and the threat that the Intifada posed to the stability, and perhaps even to the very existence, of the Hashemite kingdom–encouraged King Hussein to take a dramatic step. He cancelled the Act of Annexation of the West Bank to Jordan and cut all administrative links to the West Bank. His attempts so far to reconcile Jordan’s historical claims to the West Bank, his commitment to the Arab consensus on the predominant role of the PLO, and his search for a settlement with Israel was an exercise in diplomatic juggling that was no longer sustainable. He left the stage to the PLO and in one stroke eliminated for ever the so-called Jordanian option from the diplomacy of peace. From now on, if the PLO wanted the territories back it had to change its policies and come to terms directly with Israel and the United States. Jordan would no longer serve as a diplomatic buffer or bridge.
+=====Page 190 · Location 3796=====
+In the Intifada, as Amos Elon succinctly put it, the Palestinians discovered the power of their weakness and the Israelis the weakness of their power. The PLO was also in dire straits. Like Israel, it was taken by surprise by the Palestinian uprising. It suddenly realised that the real showdown with Israel was taking a totally different course from that preached and executed for years by an organisation of professional revolutionaries and terrorists. It was an irony of history that the biggest revolt by the Palestinians since the 1930s had begun without PLO direction. Its supremacy was now being effectively undermined by grass-roots revolutionary committees and a non-PLO United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) that emerged throughout the territories and succeeded in establishing areas of Palestinian self-rule in different parts of the occupied lands. The PLO was also challenged by the dramatic surge of Islamic fundamentalist organisations like Hamas and Jihad, especially in Gaza.
+=====Page 192 · Location 3844=====
+In a declaration of Palestinian independence the Palestinian National Council (PNC) accepted the existence of the State of Israel and endorsed ‘all relevant UN Resolutions’, paradoxically including two mutually exclusive Resolutions, namely 242 and 181.
+=====Page 196 · Location 3912=====
+Yasser Arafat’s and the PLO’s support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was certainly a major strategic blunder of the Palestinian leadership. Once again, as so often in the past, one could watch with stupor and bewilderment the self-defeating nature of Palestinian nationalism. The PLO’s failure to join a coalition based on the same key principle on which the Palestinians had built their case–a principle that was, moreover, embedded in SCR 242, about the ‘inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force’–was a sad display of political stupidity which, moreover, morally spoiled the Palestinian case. This was how Arafat misunderstood and misrepresented to his people the coalition’s war to undo the Iraqi aggression against another Arab country: These are days of glory and pride and steadfastness of our Arab nation…. The real aim of the treacherous American aggression is not to enforce compliance with UN resolutions but to destroy Palestine and the Arab nation and make way for three million Russian Jews in a greater Israel stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.
+=====Page 199 · Location 3981=====
+But the Americans would not let him sleep for long. Without prior consultation with Israel and to Shamir’s dismay, they summoned the parties immediately after the conference to bilateral talks in Washington. The Prime Minister was forced against his will and judgement to send his delegations to the American capital, but this did not mean that he had any intention of budging from his known positions. The talks were a sheer waste of time, and the gap between the parties was simply unbridgeable. Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai was the implementation of SCR 242 and Israel would not execute any additional withdrawals on the other fronts.
+===IX. Oslo: The Glory and the Agony===
+=====Page 206 · Location 4106=====
+At that momentous crossroads, Arafat and the PLO misjudged the post-Cold War opportunities and failed to appreciate the far-reaching shift in the structure of international relations at the end of the Cold War. By supporting Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait they isolated themselves from the international and Arab worlds, especially from their wealthy patrons in the Gulf States, and lost their major sources of income without which, rhetoric apart, the PLO simply could not exist. Arafat’s miscalculations were of historic proportions, and they brought the Palestinian cause to the verge of financial and political bankruptcy. How could he not realise that by supporting the occupation of Kuwait he was morally spoiling his case, based since 1967 on the principle inherent in Security Council Resolution 242 about ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of land by force’? Arafat’s miscalculation in supporting Saddam Hussein can only be compared with the Mufti’s colossal blunder in throwing in his lot with Nazi Germany in World War Two. The crisis of the PLO boosted the chances of their rivals in the territories, especially the Islamic organisations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which suffered no financial problems. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia continued to lavish budgets and gifts on them.
+=====Page 210 · Location 4188=====
+Arafat’s strategy was based on permanent negotiations, the desired outcome of which was never clear to him, nor was he ever able to spell it out so that the Israelis could weigh the final price they would have to pay to reach the end of the conflict. Arafat never managed, nor did he ever try, to convey to the Israelis that he had a sense of the finality of the conflict. Terror, including that perpetrated by Hamas, was to him a strategic weapon he used to soften the resistance of the Israelis. The Oslo accords had made available to him the conditions for waging a total war against Israel, and he would use them at the proper moment. At a Palestinian meeting in the West Bank town of Nablus in January 1996, just before an unprecedented wave of suicide terrorism brought about Shimon Peres’s electoral defeat to Benjamin Netanyahu, Nabil Shaath, a close associate of Arafat, explained the deeper meaning of Oslo from the PLO’s perspective. If the terms of the Palestinians for a settlement with Israel were not accepted, he said, We shall return to violence. But this time this will be done with 30,000 Palestinian soldiers at our disposal and while we control a territory of our own, and enjoy freedom and liberty … If we reach a dead end, we will resume the war and struggle exactly as we did forty years ago.
+=====Page 213 · Location 4255=====
+Hardly had the ink on the agreements dried when a Palestinian opposition of Islamic and secular Rejectionists, some from within Fatah itself, started to work against them. In his rush to sideline the local leadership and stem the upsurge of Hamas, Arafat, his critics would say, agreed to turn the PLO from a national movement into the sheriff of a small, destitute ghetto in Gaza. Hamas and Jihad lost no time in unleashing a campaign of terror in the hope that this would lead to the radicalisation of Israeli public opinion and, consequently, to a shift to the right, which they expected would undermine and cripple Rabin’s peace policies. On the very eve of the signing of the DOP, three Israeli soldiers were slaughtered by a Hamas squad in Gaza. Suicide terrorism was not the invention of the second Intifada. It had already started in the euphoric days of Oslo. The day after the DOP was signed, on 14 September 1993, a Palestinian terrorist blew himself up in an Israeli police station in Gaza. But the bad omens for the future of Oslo did not come only from the Islamic opposition. On 11 May 1994, a week after he had signed the Cairo agreement establishing the modalities for Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho and a few days before he himself returned to an ecstatic reception in Gaza, Arafat called, in a speech behind closed doors in Johannesburg, for a Jihad to recover Jerusalem. He went to the extreme of comparing Oslo with the Prophet’s tactical Hudaybiyya agreement of AD 625 with the Qurayish tribe, an expedient peace that could be broken when the circumstances would warrant it. Though he liked to position himself as a Palestinian Mandela, or as the leader of a modern secular movement of national liberation, Arafat remained essentially loyal to his youth as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and, as such, his real hero and model was the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Huseini, as he himself recognised in an interview with the Palestinian daily Al-Kuds of 2 August 2002.
+=====Page 214 · Location 4269=====
+As it turned out, the Johannesburg speech was not an isolated incident where Arafat simply got carried away. He uttered similar notions on other occasions. One such was a speech in Gaza’s al-Azhar University on the day celebrating the ascension of the Prophet to heaven, where he spoke again of Hudaybiyya as a ‘despised peace’. On another occasion, a meeting with an Arab audience in Stockholm as quoted by Yedidia Atlas from the Norwegian newspaper Dagen, Arafat presented the right of return and the demographic weapon as his way to subvert the spirit of the Oslo accords: ‘We of the PLO will now concentrate all our efforts on splitting Israel psychologically into two camps. … We will make life unbearable for the Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion.’ 1 This was to be Arafat’s mode of behaviour throughout the Oslo years. His was always the language of battle and Jihad. ‘We stand by our oath to pursue the battle,’ he promised in his speech at al-Azhar, where he also embraced the memory of Izzedin al-Qassam, the icon of Hamas’s struggle against the ‘Zionist entity’. He would never convey a clear message of peace and reconciliation to the Israeli public. A born master of double talk, he always preferred the language of ambiguities. Throughout his life as a terrorist and guerrilla leader, Arafat avoided an open confrontation with his rivals in the movement. He preferred to co-opt them. Holding the national movement together at all costs, shunning clear-cut divisive decisions, forever looking for leadership through consensus even when this meant not curbing the terrorist activities of those he had pledged to discipline in the Oslo accords–such was his disastrous and eventually self-defeating way of government throughout. An autocrat with no interest whatever in a modicum of good government or in policies of welfare and economic development, he was unable to create the necessary popular, democratic legitimacy for cracking down on Hamas.
+=====Page 215 · Location 4289=====
+A few days before he was gunned down, on 28 September 1995, Oslo II, an agreement practically ending Israel’s coercive control over the Palestinians, was signed in Washington.
+=====Page 216 · Location 4302=====
+Israel’s annexationist policies further undermined Arafat’s legitimacy for making concessions and reinforced his instinct that he could not be seen as openly collaborating with the Israelis in fighting terrorism. This, in its turn, limited Rabin’s capacity to move forward in the process. Caught between the terror of the fundamentalists, Arafat’s passivity, and the inevitable ascendancy of the peace sceptics and the Israeli far right, Rabin was marching to his political demise. The frivolous oxymoron coined by Peres that the Israelis killed in terrorist attacks–between 1993 and 1996 about 300 Israelis were assassinated by suicide squads–were the ‘victims of peace’ was utterly rejected by the public. Terrorism undermined the legitimacy and the moral foundations of the peace process. Neither Arafat nor Rabin was now in a position to give the other the minimum required to keep Oslo alive. When Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic as a traitor who sold out Eretz-Israel, he was already severely crippled politically by a series of devastating suicide terrorist attacks, notably in Tel Aviv and Beit Lid, and by Arafat’s failure to face the enemies of peace in his own camp.
+=====Page 217 · Location 4321=====
+Netanyahu’s victory was bad news for the peace process which, admittedly, was in very poor health when he inherited it. But conspicuously, two Arab leaders, Mubarak and Hussein, did not exactly mourn the defeat of Peres. Peres’ persistent belief in a ‘warm’ peace and a ‘New Middle East’ of economic integration–he even launched the bizarre idea of having Israel join the Arab League–was anathema to Mubarak. He preferred a more controlled, slower, perhaps even reasonably tense peace with Israel, better suited to his domestic concerns and his regional aspirations. As to King Hussein, he was so taken aback by Peres’s moves towards a quick deal with Syria and so worried that Oslo under his leadership might usher in a Palestinian state that would not respect Jordan’s domestic and regional concerns that he even ventured to make public his preference for Netanyahu.
+=====Page 219 · Location 4365=====
+Paradoxically, Assad was indirectly responsible for the Oslo agreement. It was the failure of his Syrian enterprise that brought Rabin to the White House lawn in Washington for his historic handshake with Arafat. It was precisely when the Oslo agreement was almost ready in early August 1993 that Rabin made his last and most dramatic attempt to stick to the capsule theory and to reach a deal with Assad. He conveyed to him a hypothetical readiness to accept Syria’s territorial claims if Syria would in turn accept Israel’s demands on security and normalisation. Assad’s disheartening response–he utterly rejected Israel’s concept of ‘normalisation’, and insisted on symmetrical and reciprocal security arrangements that would also affect the Israeli side of the new border–prompted Rabin to give the green light to the completion of the Oslo accords later that month. Israel’s chief negotiator with Assad’s men, Itamar Rabinovich, later recalled how Rabin expounded his rationale to Secretary of State Warren Christopher: ‘If Assad were to come forward and an Israeli–Syrian deal were to be made, then this would be supplemented by a small Palestinian deal. If Assad’s response is disappointing, there would be no Israeli–Syrian breakthrough, so then there would be a major Israeli–Palestinian agreement.’
+=====Page 220 · Location 4385=====
+The hysteria in Jordan was such that the moment he knew of the Oslo accord, the King ordered the closure of the bridges linking the West and the East Banks for fear of a mass exodus of Palestinians that would end up subverting the Jordanian state. The May 1994 Israeli–PLO economic agreement was an additional threat to Hussein, who now saw his kingdom’s economic ties with the West Bank seriously undermined. To the King a common Israeli–Palestinian economic space meant unemployment and political instability in Jordan.
+=====Page 221 · Location 4398=====
+Arafat’s handshake with Rabin was the alibi and legitimisation that Hussein had been looking for ever since he ascended the throne, in order openly to pursue the legacy of his grandfather’s peace policy with Israel. Now it was no longer the Jordanian option at the expense of the Palestinians, as both Israel and Jordan wanted it in the past, but a desperate rush to save Jordan’s interests and perhaps its very existence as an independent Bedouin kingdom, at a moment when the Palestinian option was picked up by Israel. It became vital for Hussein to make peace with Israel if he wanted to make sure that his nemesis, Arafat, would not have an exclusive say about the future of Jerusalem and the West Bank.
+=====Page 221 · Location 4403=====
+It is an interesting reflection on the nature of the peace process as it developed in the Rabin years that, notwithstanding the high degree of commitment of the Clinton administration to the process, whatever was achieved–Oslo and the peace with Jordan–was done bilaterally with very little, if any, American involvement. The Americans were throughout sceptical that Hussein would dare to depart from his traditional policy of sitting on the fence. They did not realise how imperative the Oslo agreement made Jordan’s necessity to reach a settlement with Israel. Clearly, however, a much needed debt relief that the Clinton administration offered as a lure to the King if he made peace with Israel was a crucially important bonus that Hussein could not afford the luxury of ignoring.
+=====Page 222 · Location 4417=====
+Netanyahu stalled the peace process with the Palestinians, exhibited an indifferent attitude towards Jordan’s economic expectations and even irresponsibly humiliated the King by taking the liberty of allowing an attempt–abortive, as it turned out–by the Mossad against the life of a Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal, in Amman in broad daylight.
+=====Page 232 · Location 4622=====
+Arafat ruled over one of the most expensive power machines in the world and certainly one that was utterly disproportionate to the ridiculously small slices of territory it was supposed to govern.
+=====Page 233 · Location 4639=====
+Rabin, who in his inaugural speech at the Casablanca economic summit lashed out against Arafat in the most extreme and harshest terms for daring to challenge Israel’s monopoly over Jerusalem, would have by no means agreed–as indeed his widow was to ascertain when she later in her turn criticised Ehud Barak’s excessive concessions at Camp David–to the kind of compromises that the Barak government was ready to make on Jerusalem and on the other core issues of the conflict.
+=====Page 234 · Location 4659=====
+Probably one of the deficiencies of the Oslo accord–at the same time the reason for its initial success–was that it started as an agreement on the lowest common denominator possible in Israeli society: the idea of getting rid of Gaza did not entail any national trauma.
+=====Page 234 · Location 4662=====
+Both Arafat and the Israeli leadership would still have to break in a more profound and dramatic way the internal consensus in their respective societies. Arafat would have to fight the extremist organisations in a more frontal and resolute way, and he would have to make concessions on refugees and other sensitive issues he was clearly unwilling to contemplate. As to Israel, she would have to conceive solutions on settlements and Jerusalem no relevant Israeli leader, including Rabin, had ever dreamed he would have to envisage.
+=====Page 235 · Location 4675=====
+The truth of the matter was, moreover, that by the time Rabin was murdered the peace process was, for all practical purposes, in a state of political coma. Rampant Palestinian terrorism, an uninterrupted expansion of settlements, and Israel’s practice of reprisals in the form of closures and collective punishment had already brought the process to a stalemate.
+=====Page 236 · Location 4710=====
+Israel has no foreign policy, as Henry Kissinger used to say, it only has domestic political constraints.
+=====Page 239 · Location 4757=====
+By signing the Wye agreement that gave the Palestinians additional land in Judaea and Samaria (13 per cent of it) Netanyahu sealed his political fate and saw his coalition rapidly melting away.
+===X. The Barak Phase: On Freedom and Innocence===
+=====Page 242 · Location 4801=====
+Assad was a tough negotiator, but one whose conditions for a settlement were clear and well known. With Syria it was essentially a territorial dispute, a ‘real estate’ affair. In the case of Arafat and the Palestinians the conditions for a settlement were never clearly enunciated, nor was the dispute an exclusively territorial one.
+=====Page 243 · Location 4823=====
+A proof of the surprising determination of the Sphinx of Damascus to strike a deal with Israel was the dramatic gesture, which he had never agreed to make to Rabin, of sending his Foreign Minister to direct negotiations with Barak even before receiving from him an unequivocal commitment to Rabin’s deposit. But instead of seizing the opportunity and assuming the inevitable price for peace, Barak risked losing a vital asset, Assad’s trust, and avoided making the necessary commitment on the border. He conveyed to the Americans and the Syrians a sense of urgency, but at the moment of truth and decision he got cold feet and engaged in tactical manoeuvres with the hope of wresting a better deal from Assad.
+=====Page 243 · Location 4831=====
+Shepardstown peace conference
+=====Page 245 · Location 4859=====
+There might have been a chance for a peace deal with Assad in December 1999 and January 2000 on terms that were not at all easy for the Israeli public to accept. But when in early February Barak finally signalled, in a Cabinet meeting, his readiness for a settlement based on the 4 June 1967 lines, it was already too late. A terminally sick man, Assad had by then lost interest. His priority now was managing the succession of his son, not the agonising complexities of a peace deal with Israel.
+=====Page 245 · Location 4862=====
+Clinton–Assad Geneva summit
+=====Page 246 · Location 4877=====
+The Syrian track ended with no deal, but with a twofold legacy that Arafat was both forced and happy to embrace. Assad taught him that it was perfectly possible to say ‘no’ to America, and even publicly humiliate her President, without paying a price, and that, regardless of the ambiguities of the Oslo agreement, the 1967 borders were sacrosanct and therefore needed to be a categorical requirement in any future peace negotiations with Israel. Peace, Assad taught the Palestinians about to start their negotiations with Israel for a final settlement, needs to be based on one unyielding condition: full and unequivocal withdrawal from the occupied territories.
+=====Page 246 · Location 4882=====
+Addressing the Camp David summit, as some commentators do, separately from the entire negotiating process–that is, independently of the negotiations that were conducted for many subsequent months in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Bolling air base on the outskirts of the American capital, where on 23 December 2000 President Clinton presented his final parameters for a settlement, and finally Taba–distorts, of course, the picture as to what exactly were the proposals that Arafat refused to accept. To his last day, the Palestinian leader was still reluctant to acknowledge the real nature of the deal he was offered, and he obstinately kept repeating that he had no option but to reject the ridiculous map of enclaves and ‘Bantustans’ that was presented to him by an American–Israeli conspiracy.
+=====Page 248 · Location 4916=====
+Israel also contemplated the risk that Palestinian belligerency might be expressed in the future as part of an all-out confrontation by an Arab or Islamic coalition against the Jewish state. The demilitarisation of the future Palestinian state had therefore been, throughout, a standard, primary Israeli requirement.
+=====Page 248 · Location 4934=====
+‘And as to the swaps,’ he said to the President, ‘I trust you and I accept your judgement. You decide.’ Arafat later reversed his position, but this moment in the summit clearly reflected his view of the peace process as not being about a mundane bargaining over real estate. Land mattered to him far less than emotional, legendary and Islamic values such as Jerusalem, the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif for the Muslims), and the core of the Palestinian national ethos, namely refugees.
+=====Page 249 · Location 4942=====
+As it turned out, Arafat’s ‘deposit’ became the deathtrap in which the summit was eventually consumed.
+=====Page 249 · Location 4946=====
+Refugeeism, Jerusalem and Islamic values more than land and real estate were the insurmountable obstacles that prevented an agreement at Camp David and later at Taba.
+=====Page 249 · Location 4955=====
+Akram Hania, one of Arafat’s closest men at Camp David, put it this way: ‘At Camp David we intended to make the Israelis face the tribunal of history, face the victims of their crime and sin. Israel wanted to silence for ever the voice of the witnesses to the crime and erase the proof of the Naqbah.’
+=====Page 250 · Location 4963=====
+In a long meeting I had with him in Nablus through the night of 25 June 2000, that is, a fortnight before Camp David, he was careful to remind me, when our conversation moved to the chapter on Jerusalem, of the Umar Treaty of AD 638, signed between the Khalif Umar, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and the Byzantine Patriarch Sopronius, where, so Arafat instructed me, the conditions of the capitulation of the Christians included a prohibition on the Jews living in Jerusalem. Arafat’s ambition to emulate Umar el-Kutab was no mere anecdote.
+=====Page 250 · Location 4969=====
+‘Instead of repeatedly rejecting the Israelis’ proposals, make counter proposals,’ Clinton would tell the Palestinians at Camp David. Rob Malley, in the analysis of the summit he co-authored with Hussein Agha, repeated this remark: ‘Indeed, the Palestinians’ principal failing is that from the beginning of the Camp David summit onward they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own.’
+=====Page 251 · Location 4985=====
+To my remark in the speech that Israel had come to the limits of her capacity for compromise with the Palestinians, the ambassador rightly and cunningly responded, ‘Why should we believe you when everybody remembers that you started your voyage into the Palestinian question with Golda Meir denying that a Palestinian people existed at all, and at Camp David you agreed to give away the bulk of the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state and divide Jerusalem? These certainly cannot be the outer limits of your concessions.’
+=====Page 252 · Location 4999=====
+We made enormous progress at the secret channel in Stockholm between Abu-Ala and Hassan Asfour on the Palestinian side and myself and Gilead Sher on the Israeli side. But the exposure of the channel by the Palestinians themselves–as part of an internal political struggle within the Palestinian camp, Abu-Mazen’s people leaked the talks to Al-Hayat–destroyed any possibility for further progress. The channel stopped because it was not producing any longer. Exposed by his political rivals back home, who leaked imaginary details about his ‘irresponsible’ concessions, Abu-Ala quickly retreated to the safety of old, unyielding positions.
+=====Page 252 · Location 5004=====
+And if this were not enough, by 15 May, the day of the Naqbah, the Palestinians, with Arafat’s connivance (he ignored advance warnings by both Israelis and Secretary Madeleine Albright), unleashed throughout the territories days of violent disturbances that ended in the inevitable clashes with Israel’s security forces.
+=====Page 252 · Location 5016=====
+From the moment the Swedish channel was dissolved it became clear that Arafat’s insistence that the summit be ‘better prepared’ was just a euphemism which meant that Israel should come closer to his positions under the threat of war without him having to budge from them.
+=====Page 253 · Location 5034=====
+Elusive, non-committal, the master of double talk, Arafat turned the negotiations with him, to use Lloyd George’s description of a similar occasion with De Valera, into a futile exercise of ‘trying to pick up Mercury with a fork’.
+=====Page 255 · Location 5062=====
+It is therefore unfair to claim, as Rob Malley and Hussein Agha did in their New York Review of Books article, that Barak’s all-or-nothing approach was a corridor leading either to an agreement or to confrontation. If this is true, the blame should clearly be shared with Arafat. But the truth of the matter is that at key moments at Camp David, when it was clear that a final settlement was impossible to reach, both the Israelis and the Americans tried fall-back plans for interim or partial settlements that were rejected out of hand by the Palestinians.
+=====Page 256 · Location 5082=====
+America was not there, as some Palestinians might have thought, just to deliver Israel to a passive and rejectionist Arab side that was unwilling to engage in a serious negotiating process, nor would Israel allow herself to be delivered unconditionally. By failing to advance clear proposals and counter-proposals, that is, by refusing to engage in a real negotiating dynamic, the Palestinians deprived the Americans of the vital tools they needed to be able to put pressure on the Israelis. The President and his team could never ascertain whether the Palestinians were at all serious and genuine in their commitment to reach a settlement. As the President repeatedly told Arafat, he was not expecting him to agree to US or Israeli proposals, but he was counting on him to offer something, to produce a new idea that he could take back to Barak in order to convince him to make more concessions. ‘I need something to tell him,’ he implored. ‘So far I have nothing.’
+=====Page 256 · Location 5092=====
+Arafat preferred to die as a defeated hero who did not give in, like Nasser, than be slain as a man of peace like Sadat.
+=====Page 256 · Location 5097=====
+To no avail. Arafat would not budge from his position and would not agree to a qualified Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount–he was offered in the site a ‘sovereign custodianship’ that was free of any Israeli interference–or to anything that was not the unequivocal partition of the city. He was offered a capital in Arab Jerusalem (not just Abu-Dis, as all kinds of non-official back channels had suggested in the past) that would include some Palestinian quarters under full Palestinian sovereignty and the others under a more qualified Palestinian sovereignty. Arafat demanded the sovereignty of three-quarters of the Old City and rejected out of hand any bridging ideas such as a special regime, which I had the opportunity to defend throughout the summit, or the President’s proposal, accepted by the Israelis, to divide the holy basin into two equal parts, the Christian and Muslim quarters to the Palestinians and the Jewish and Armenian quarters to the Israelis.
+=====Page 257 · Location 5104=====
+Members of the Palestinian delegation at Camp David used to say to their Israeli counterparts that Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, the issues that more than any others wrecked the summit and prevented an agreement, were ‘Arafat’s personal obsession’, which they did not necessarily share.
+=====Page 257 · Location 5112=====
+Saladin,
+=====Page 258 · Location 5119=====
+‘Alissra Day’)
+=====Page 259 · Location 5147=====
+Hence Arafat would not accept a solution to the Palestinian problem that was strictly temporal and exclusively political. It needed to include, for example, the full and unconditional sovereignty over the holy places, first and foremost the Haram al-Sharif, where the Dome of the Rock is the architectural expression of Islam as a religion that supersedes and is superior to all other religions. The Jews’ claim to a sovereign right in the Temple Mount on the basis of historical and religious links to the site was, as far as he was concerned, to be utterly excluded.
+=====Page 259 · Location 5152=====
+At Camp David Arafat destroyed with his own hands the unique, even intimate, relationship that he had developed with the American administration in recent years. I personally had the opportunity to warn Mr Arafat, in the course of a meeting at his residence at Camp David, where I came, together with General Amnon Shahak, to make up for Barak’s obstinate refusal to meet the Palestinian leader.
+=====Page 260 · Location 5168=====
+Nabil Amr, a minister in Arafat’s Cabinet, was courageous enough to spell out his criticism in an article in Al-Hayat-el-Jadida, a mouthpiece of the Palestinian Authority, two years into the Al-Aqsa Intifada, that is, when it was becoming tragically clear that Arafat’s abandonment of the political path had brought about the destruction of the very backbone of Palestinian society: Didn’t we dance when we heard of the failure of the Camp David talks? Didn’t we destroy the pictures of President Clinton who so boldly presented us with proposals for a Palestinian state with border modifications? We are not being honest, for today, after two years of bloodshed we ask exactly that which we then rejected. … How many times did we agree to compromises, which we later rejected in order to miss them later on? And we were never willing to draw the lessons from our behaviour. … And then, when the solution was no longer available, we travelled the world in order to plead with the international community for what we had just rejected. But then we learnt the hard way that in the span of time between our rejection and our acceptance the world has changed and left us behind. … We clearly failed to rise up to the challenge of history.
+=====Page 261 · Location 5189=====
+But the Israeli leader nevertheless left the summit a different man, one who had the courage to depart from his old archaic beliefs. Arafat, however, would confine himself to rejecting American and Israeli proposals without ever advancing his own counter-proposals. Unlike both Begin and Sadat, Arafat acted throughout the summit more like a politician than a statesman bent on looking for a solution and seeking a historical breakthrough. Sadat in Camp David I and Barak in Camp David II were more restless, far more creative.
+=====Page 261 · Location 5197=====
+Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weizmann and Aharon Barak would always look for new ideas and possible compromises. And when the moment of truth arrived and Begin was required to take an agonising decision on the settlements in northern Sinai, he received a vitally crucial telephone call from the most hawkish of his ministers back home, Ariel Sharon, which encouraged him to dismantle them. The only telephone calls Ehud Barak would receive from Israel during the summit were those with the disheartening news about the disintegration of his coalition and the collapse of his home front.
+=====Page 262 · Location 5205=====
+‘I don’t even know what is exactly my mandate in these negotiations,’ the Israelis were once told by Saab Erakat, the Palestinian chief negotiator at the summit.
+=====Page 263 · Location 5221=====
+Carter had a bulldog-like persistence about him that was absent in Clinton’s performance. Clinton did not lack Carter’s Messianic zeal; but he lacked his capacity to intimidate, nor were he and his team capable of employing the kind of brutal manipulative tactics that the Nixon–Kissinger team had used in launching the peace process in the aftermath of the 1973 war, or those that would be used by the Bush–Baker tandem in the diplomatic arm twisting leading to the Madrid Conference in 1991. At Camp David, America looked like a diminished and humbled superpower, unable to assert its will.
+=====Page 264 · Location 5252=====
+As early as 4 March 2000 Marwan Barghouti, the head of the Fatah militias (‘ Tanzim’) in Ramallah and a future leader of the Intifada, could not have been more specific when he made it clear to a Palestinian newspaper, Akhbar-el-Khalil, that: Whoever thinks it is possible to resolve issues such as the refugees, Jerusalem, the settlements and the borders through negotiations is under a delusion. On these issues, we have to wage a campaign on the ground alongside the negotiations. I mean armed confrontation. We need dozens of campaigns like the Al-Aqsa Tunnel Campaign.
+=====Page 265 · Location 5256=====
+But it was Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in June 2000 that served as a major incentive for the Palestinian Intifada.
+=====Page 265 · Location 5263=====
+The same evening and in the same city, Nablus, driven and inspired by the example of the Hezbollah, Arafat would say to a grand gathering of Fatah youth, ‘We are fighting for our land and we are prepared to erase the peace process and restart the armed struggle.’ ‘I am a general who never lost a battle,’ he told me at the same meeting in Nablus, where I tried to convince him of the need to go to a negotiating summit at Camp David. He rejected the possibility that anybody, even the President of the United States, would expect him to engage in negotiations. ‘I am a decision maker, not a negotiator,’ he told me. In retrospect, I am not sure he was a decision maker either.
+=====Page 266 · Location 5277=====
+And, most important, rather than controlling or stemming the tide of a spontaneous uprising he preferred to ride on it, thus practically turning it into official policy. It was he who had encouraged the outburst of violence on the Naqbah Day of May 2000, thus undermining the Swedish secret channel of negotiations, and he later gave more than one indication that he would welcome a return to armed struggle if Camp David failed.
+=====Page 266 · Location 5280=====
+Mamduh Nufal, an adviser of his, quoted him to this effect in the Nouvel Observateur of 1 March 2001. His Minister of Posts and Communications, Imad Faluji, declared in a speech in a refugee camp in south Lebanon that the Intifada against Israel was carefully planned after the failed Camp David talks in July 2000 ‘by request of President Yasser Arafat, who predicted the outbreak of the Intifada as a complementary stage to the Palestinian steadfastness in the negotiations, and not as a specific protest against Sharon’s visit to Al-Haram Al-Quds. … The Palestinian Authority instructed the political forces and factions to run all materials of the Intifada.’
+=====Page 267 · Location 5295=====
+He gave an implicit green light to the uprising by doing what he frequently liked to do in such conditions: he left the country in the very first days of the Intifada in order not to have to assume responsibility. Only through the Intifada could he restore his and the Palestinians’ international standing that had been so seriously eroded by the worldwide perception after the Camp David summit–a perception strongly enhanced by Clinton’s finger-wagging at Arafat as chiefly responsible for the collapse of the summit–of an Israeli government ready for a far-reaching compromise facing obstinate Palestinian rejectionism. Arafat knew that Palestinian casualties played in his favour in world opinion and helped increase the international pressure on Israel.
+=====Page 268 · Location 5319=====
+The Israelis were left to assume the worst about Palestinian intentions, such as that they had never really intended to reach a settlement and that Oslo was for the Palestinians nothing but a strategic ploy aimed at doing away with the State of Israel altogether. Which is why opinion polls showed that two years into the Intifada only 20 per cent of Israelis believed that not even a signed peace agreement with the Palestinians would bring with it the end of violence and conflict.
+=====Page 268 · Location 5332=====
+As it turned out, the Intifada could not usher in a negotiated settlement precisely because, lacking attainable objectives, it raised the expectations of the Palestinians to unrealistic heights. Not an Israeli negotiator, but Hani al-Hassan, an old-time associate of Arafat, was forced to acknowledge that not only was the Intifada devoid of clear strategic objectives, it also raised the expectations of the Palestinian masses to such heights that it became impossible for their own leaders to meet. The Intifada, he wrote, ‘obliges our negotiators to raise the level of demands in the negotiations’ in a way that made it out of the question for Israel to accept them.
+=====Page 269 · Location 5339=====
+Arguably, since he always identified the cause of his people with his own person as the embodiment of their national will, he believed that safeguarding the interests of the PLO and his own personal rule was tantamount to promoting the national cause.
+=====Page 269 · Location 5348=====
+Although there were plenty of indications that he had been for some time pushing for a shift of strategy from negotiations to violence, he probably did not initiate the uprising with specific orders.
+=====Page 269 · Location 5353=====
+Again, as in the first Intifada, leading the uprising was for Arafat a move of political survival, not the insight of a statesman with a clear strategic objective.
+=====Page 270 · Location 5364=====
+–A Palestinian sovereign state on 97 per cent of the West Bank and a safe passage, in the running of which Israel should not interfere, that would link the Gaza Strip, all of which, clean of Jewish settlements, would be also part of the Palestinian state, to the West Bank. Additional assets within Israel–such as docks in the ports of Ashdod and Haifa–could be used by the Palestinians so as to wrap up a deal that for all practical purposes could be tantamount to 100 per cent territory. Needless to say, the Jordan Valley, the mythological strategic asset sanctified by generations of Israeli generals, would be gradually handed over to full Palestinian sovereignty.–Jerusalem would be divided to create two capitals, Jerusalem and Al-Quds, along ethnic lines. What is Jewish would be Israeli and what is Arab would be Palestinian.–The Palestinians would have full and unconditional sovereignty on the Temple Mount, that is, Haram al-Sharif. Israel would retain her sovereignty on the Western Wall and a symbolic link to the Holy of Holies in the depths of the Mount.–With regard to refugees, it was stated that the Palestinians would have the right ‘to return to historical Palestine’ but with ‘no explicit right of return to the State of Israel’. They could be admitted to Israel in limited numbers and on the basis of humanitarian considerations, but Israel would retain her sovereign right of admission. Refugees could be settled, of course, in unlimited numbers not only in the Palestinian state, but also in those areas within Israel that would be handed over to the Palestinians in the framework of land swaps (the Palestinians were supposed to receive an Israeli territory equivalent to 3 per cent of the surface of the West Bank). In addition, a multibillion-dollar fund would be put together to finance a comprehensive international effort of compensation and resettlement that would be put in place.
+=====Page 271 · Location 5379=====
+Clinton’s peace plan, 2000–In matters of security the President endorsed the Palestinians’ rejection of the concept of a completely ‘demilitarised state’ and proposed instead the concept of a ‘non-militarised state’ whose weaponry would have to be negotiated with Israel. A multinational force would be deployed along the Jordan Valley to replace the IDF. (The President recognised the need of the Israeli air force to co-ordinate with the Palestinians the use of their air space, as well as the IDF’s necessity to have three advance warning stations for a period of time.)
+=====Page 272 · Location 5387=====
+The Israeli government met the deadline. Our decision, at the height of the Palestinian Intifada, in the midst of sweeping opposition on the part of the army–it was almost tantamount to a coup d’état that the Chief of Staff, General Mofaz, should have gone public to criticise the government’s endorsement of the parameters as an ‘existential threat to Israel’–and strong reservations from the opposition and public opinion, was a daring decision of a government (then already a minority government) of peace that stretched itself to the outer limits of its legitimacy in order to endorse positions its opponents labelled as suicidal, and as being an affront to Jewish values and history. But Arafat lingered. He refused to respond. As usual, he resumed his journeys throughout the world as if he were the travelling Emperor Hadrian, in the hope of evading any decision: another meeting with Mubarak, one more trip to Ben-Ali, another trip to Jordan, a further meeting of the Arab foreign ministers, dozens of calls from world leaders from the President of China to the Grand Duke of Luxembourg urging the Palestinian leader to seize this last opportunity, to grab the historic moment.
+=====Page 273 · Location 5399=====
+Both the Saudi and the Egyptian ambassadors in Washington, Bandar Bin Sultan and Nabil Fahmi, who came to encourage Arafat, in the name of their respective governments, to accept the President’s parameters as a last opportunity for peace that should not be missed, were dismayed at the behaviour of the Palestinian leader. And so was the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. He was said to be shocked that Arafat had wasted such an opportunity and that he had lied about the President’s offer on Jerusalem. Arafat’s rejection of the peace parameters was a ‘crime’ not only against the Palestinians but against the entire region, concluded the Saudi ambassador in a long interview published in the New Yorker on 24 March 2002.
+=====Page 274 · Location 5422=====
+Barak’s attitude to Taba was genuinely expressed on two occasions. One was when he allowed me to open, in Taba, a secret channel with Abu-Ala in order to explore freely the possibility of bridging the gaps and come to a last-moment breakthrough. The second occasion was when he made a radical shift in his position and virtually agreed to the concept of equal swaps of land.
+=====Page 274 · Location 5431=====
+Israel proposed in Taba physically to dismantle, or hand over to the Palestinians for the use of returning refugees, more than one hundred settlements. But those that formed coherent blocs adjacent to the 1967 line were supposed to remain as such under Israel’s sovereignty. However, as the maps that the Palestinians produced at Taba showed, our interlocutors totally rejected the very concept of blocs and referred to the settlements more as isolated outposts that would have to be linked separately from each other to Israel. Israel could not accept such an approach for it contradicted her entire peace strategy, and the Palestinians not only knew it but have always accepted it. All the back-track channels, either official or freelance, ever conducted by Israelis and Palestinians before Taba and after, were based on the acceptance by the Palestinians of the principle of settlement blocs.
+=====Page 275 · Location 5446=====
+The Palestinians’ lack of interest in a deal in Taba was made patently clear when Yossi Sarid, probably the most emblematic ‘dove’ of Israeli politics and now a member of the Israeli delegation, proposed a Solomonic solution to the differences still pending between the parties on Jerusalem: the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the Old City and the holy belt leading from the Old City to the Mount of Olives. Had the Palestinians agreed to stick to the letter and the spirit of the Clinton parameters there should have been no reason for such differences to exist, but Mr Sarid thought nevertheless that an attempt should be made to reach a compromise by going the extra mile towards meeting the reservations of the Palestinians. ‘Let us split the burden between us,’ he suggested; ‘two of the four issues pending will be solved according to your position, and two according to ours, which is, as you know, respectful of the Clinton parameters.’ But to no avail. The Palestinians remained unimpressed.
+=====Page 275 · Location 5453=====
+Mythologies apart, Taba did not allow an agreement, not because of the fact that the Israelis’ qualitative political time was a desperately diminishing asset, but because the Palestinians treated the parameters as non-committal, and insisted on changing and challenging them on each and every point.
+=====Page 276 · Location 5472=====
+One needs to recall in this context that Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in 1996 amid a virulent campaign against the illegitimacy of the suicidal Oslo accords, but was eventually forced to endorse them once in office.
+=====Page 277 · Location 5474=====
+The weakness of the Barak government was of course due in great part to its own political blunders. But Arafat should also have wondered whether he would ever be able to reach an agreement with a ‘strong’ Israeli government when he so much excelled in weakening and eventually destroying his peace partners. Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life when he went for a dramatic breakthrough while Palestinian terrorism continued unabated, exposing him to Jewish extremists. In 1996 Shimon Peres was defeated amid an unprecedented wave of Palestinian suicide terror. And Ehud Barak suffered the greatest electoral débâcle in Israel’s political history because the voters saw the Intifada as Arafat’s counter-proposal to his peace initiative. To weaken and undermine Israeli left-wing governments, as he consistently did, and then refuse to make an agreement with them because they were ‘weak’ is a pattern that might keep the Palestinians in a permanent impasse. Ariel Sharon’s policies of scorched earth in the territories have been proof for Arafat that he who sows a wind ends by reaping a whirlwind. Arafat was a victim of his own illusions. He had a tendency to attribute to himself characteristics of a brilliant strategist and distinguished military man, ‘a general who never lost a war’, as he liked to introduce himself. But the truth is that as a strategist, of all people he proved his failure again and again. He always pushed his luck to the point where he lost all his achievements and what appeared to be a chance for reasonable victory ultimately became a disgraceful defeat. With Arafat, brinkmanship had no brakes; it was the art of bringing both his people and the Israelis to the edge of the abyss and beyond.
+=====Page 277 · Location 5491=====
+Zionism, at least up to 1948, would never have functioned this way when faced with what is always and inevitably an imperfect settlement. It always acted with its back to the wall, which is why it was blessed with the capacity for pragmatic decision making. There are two essential reasons that can explain the pragmatic wisdom of Zionism at decisive crossroads. One is the fact that, in contrast to the anti-Semitic cliché about ‘Jewish power’, Zionism was always the national movement of a weak Jewish people lacking support, a persecuted people decimated by holocaust and genocide, a people that in case of failure at the time of taking a decision might be annihilated. The Palestinians, the presumed weak side of the conflict, never acted out of lack of choice as Zionism did. Until 1948 the Zionists certainly excelled in their capacity to mobilise international support and market their case. The Palestinians, however, stumbled on every road block, avoided no mistake and displayed no savoir faire in the field of diplomacy and public relations. They always seemed to take the wrong option.
+=====Page 278 · Location 5499=====
+After the Six Day War, however, the balance of forces in the war on public opinion clearly changed. Rarely–if ever–is history familiar with a similar case of a disparity between the high degree of international support enjoyed by a national movement and the poor results of such a support. In fact, after that war the overwhelming international support for the Palestinian cause almost became a handicap to the degree that it could be said that the Palestinians very nearly ‘suffered’ from an excess. At every junction of historical decision making, the international community gave them–and this is certainly true with regard to the Arab world–the sense that they were entitled to expect more and could therefore avoid a decision. The international pampering of the national Palestinian movement is unparalleled in modern history and, no less important, was at vital crossroads of the conflict an obstacle to a settlement. For it was frequently interpreted by the Palestinian leadership as an implicit encouragement to persist in its almost built-in incapacity to take decisions and find instead satisfaction in Israel’s decline into the position of a state put in the dock of the tribunal of international opinion.
+=====Page 279 · Location 5519=====
+The history of the Jews’ modern national movement, again mainly up until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, had been characterised by realistic responses to objective historical conditions. The Palestinians have consistently fought for the solutions of yesterday, those they had rejected a generation or two earlier.
+=====Page 280 · Location 5535=====
+A major reason for his incapacity to reach a reasonable compromise with Israel was precisely that the Palestinian Authority under his leadership was unwilling to develop a positive ethos of democracy, civil society, economic development and education. Instead, an old-style autocracy based on a negative ethos of confrontation was created. National cohesion was built around constituent values of radical ‘Palestinianism’, ‘refugeeism’ and Islam that left no room for compromise.
+=====Page 280 · Location 5545=====
+Peace for Arafat, if it were to respond to vital Israeli requirements, could automatically mean a civil war. In fact, Fatah understood that particular dilemma only too well, by explicitly admitting that that was exactly the reason they had rejected the Clinton parameters. To them, as they put it when trying to explain their rejection on the organisation’s website, ‘the parameters [were] the biggest trick’ and one that meant moving the conflict from a Palestinian–Israeli dispute to ‘an internal Palestinian–Palestinian conflict that will destroy the Intifada’.
+=====Page 282 · Location 5581=====
+The loose control of politicians over the army is a built-in weakness and inconsistency in Israel’s political system.
+=====Page 283 · Location 5596=====
+Sharm el Sheikh international summit of early October,
+===XI. The Politics of Doomsday===
+=====Page 285 · Location 5628=====
+With regard to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the principle of compromise was now gone, the middle ground had been fatally wounded, and the so-called peace camp in Israel had been severely diminished and morally undermined by Arafat’s rejection of its peace platform.
+=====Page 286 · Location 5639=====
+Zionism’s major strategic success to date was that it forced its enemies to agree to make peace; but it could not force the terms of peace on them.
+=====Page 287 · Location 5651=====
+Such was the case with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when an entire nation followed him into an adventure that all were led to believe was inevitable, the last resort. His gamble ended by sinking Israel into a quagmire of blood, bereavement and destruction for more than eighteen years. And such was the situation when he embarked on an initiative to dismantle the settlements in the Gaza Strip that he himself had created in the first place. He was directly responsible for the calamitous network of settlements spread throughout the territories and in the midst of the dispossessed Palestinian population.
+=====Page 287 · Location 5669=====
+Sharon is the first prime minister since Oslo who did not aspire to solve Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, something that in his own twisted and tortuous way even Netanyahu had tried to do with the Hebron and the Wye agreements.
+=====Page 288 · Location 5680=====
+But Labour preferred to go, without any soul searching, from being part of the most daring political voyage since Oslo–the voyage we undertook as a government–to battling over portfolios in the Sharon government, which, in advance, assumed that the Barak team, as Mr Peres himself had claimed, ‘went too far in its concessions’. The Labour Party turned its back on its own political audacity while in office and now endorsed the groundless political assumption of Ariel Sharon that the volcanic eruption of rage among the Palestinians could be calmed down by another interim settlement.
+=====Page 289 · Location 5695=====
+And in any case he regarded Hamas’s violence as a major strategic tool of the Palestinian cause he would not undermine, so long as it did not directly challenge his personal rule.
+=====Page 289 · Location 5698=====
+shelling of the Altalena,
+=====Page 289 · Location 5704=====
+Abu-Mazen acknowledged that for an orderly Palestinian national movement to inspire vital international trust there should be, as he put it in a speech to the Palestinian parliament upon assuming the office of prime minister, ‘one authority, one law and one democratic and national decision that applies to us all’.
+=====Page 290 · Location 5719=====
+The government is incapable of responding to the popular yearnings for peace. For, regardless of party loyalties and according to most studies, the overwhelming majority of Israelis would support a peace settlement that is based on the Clinton parameters–two states, withdrawal from territories, massive dismantling of settlements, two capitals in Jerusalem–but they trust neither their political system nor, of course, the Palestinian leadership to come to an accommodation on that basis. Which may explain the results of a poll conducted in 2002 by the Steinmetz Centre for Peace at Tel Aviv University indicating that, convinced of the incapacity of their political system to produce solutions, 67 per cent of Israeli Jews would support an American effort to recruit an international alliance that would coax the parties into endorsing such a settlement.
+=====Page 291 · Location 5733=====
+ABC–‘Anything But Clinton’–seemed to have been President Bush’s attitude to the legacy of the Clinton administration on most domestic and international issues. This was particularly the case with the Israeli–Palestinian track. Probably nothing expresses better this change of attitude than Colin Powell’s instruction to the officials in the State Department, as soon as the new administration took over in January 2001, no longer to make use of the term ‘peace process’.
+=====Page 292 · Location 5750=====
+Democracy is not a project one devises and implements with rigid timetables; democracy is a process and the Arab world will have to go through it with hardly any short cuts. For short cuts may lead to abrupt transitions from the secular dictatorships now prevailing throughout the entire Arab world to Islamic democracies.
+=====Page 292 · Location 5760=====
+It would be dangerously naïve to believe that the exercise of power and the capacity to intimidate are unnecessary. But they will always need to be backed by reasonable compromises, to be reached through diplomacy and negotiations.
+=====Page 293 · Location 5780=====
+road map
+=====Page 294 · Location 5797=====
+Daily Israeli incursions into the Hamas strongholds in Gaza with their appalling toll of civilian casualties, the targeted killing of Hamas leaders from Sheikh Yassin to his successor at the head of the movement, Abd-el-Aziz Rantisi, and Palestinian terrorist suicide attacks against the civilian population in Israel were all the reflection of a macabre alliance between two sides for which a ceasefire would have meant facing political choices they were unwilling or unable to make.
+=====Page 294 · Location 5810=====
+The Palestinian case is one more reminder of an important fallacy to which Mr Bush has subscribed. The real, and certainly the immediate, choice in the Arab world is not between dictatorship and democracy but between secular dictatorship and Islamic democracy.
+=====Page 295 · Location 5831=====
+Neither Israelis nor Palestinians even started to implement the road map’s most primary provisions. The Palestinians did not crack down on terrorism and the Israelis dragged their feet when it came to removing the so-called ‘illegal’ outposts, let alone when addressing the need to stop the expansion of the ‘legal’ settlements. The fatal symmetry between terrorism and settlements that was born with the Oslo accords and was eventually to wreck them was the same that subverted the road map from the first moment.
+=====Page 296 · Location 5839=====
+The road map, just like Oslo, thus became a standing invitation for the parties to dictate the nature of the final deal through unilateral acts, such as the expansion of settlements by the Israelis and the wild campaign of suicide terrorism and armed uprising by the Palestinians.
+=====Page 296 · Location 5849=====
+It is inconceivable that the Palestinians would agree to repeat the experience if the parameters of the final settlement were not agreed upon in advance.
+=====Page 296 · Location 5852=====
+A ‘temporary state’ could not, in any case, offer the popular legitimacy needed for an uncompromising war on Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Such legitimacy can emerge only if and when the Palestinians are convinced that Islamic terrorism is no longer a response to Israel’s strategy of occupation but an obstacle that needs to be removed on the way to a final settlement with dignity.
+=====Page 297 · Location 5855=====
+Sharon’s hidden agenda, which he has been harbouring for years, remains unchanged. The sterilisation of the Palestinian national movement, which he has always seen as a major strategic, even existential, threat to Israel, and the confinement of a Palestinian homeland within scattered enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements, strategic military areas and a network of bypass roads for the exclusive use of the Israeli occupier, remain, in broad lines, his grand design.
+=====Page 299 · Location 5894=====
+For many years Damascus has been host to a plethora of terrorist organisations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad to Hezbollah. And during the war in Iraq there were indications that not only did the Syrians facilitate the passage of Arab volunteers to Iraq, but they also transferred military equipment from their territory to Saddam’s forces. In a deliberate disregard of America’s request, Damascus refused to seal her border with Iraq. If this were not enough, ‘Tishrin’, the Syrian regime’s mouthpiece, asked that the International Criminal Court should judge the American leaders ‘as war criminals, equal in rank to the Nazi war criminals’.
+=====Page 299 · Location 5906=====
+The Israelis and the Americans knew throughout that he actively supported Hezbollah attacks against Israel, but Assad would never admit it publicly.
+=====Page 300 · Location 5914=====
+Until very recently, the Syrian regime seemed to be engaged in a double strategy that did not preclude an accommodation with Washington. If Bashar was doing everything to irritate the Americans, he was at the same time showing bursts of co-operation that signalled to them that he could be a valuable ally for the US in the region. In the aftermath of 9/ 11 the Syrians helped locate and even arrest key figures in Al-Qaeda. It was the Syrians who arrested Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a German citizen of Syrian descent, who had recruited Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/ 11 hijackers. The Syrians co-operated in additional ways with the American war against terror, seemingly even helping to foil an Al-Qaeda-planned attack on American forces in the Gulf. And there was, of course, also Syria’s vital vote for Security Council Resolution 1441 that allowed the US a much needed diplomatic achievement on the way to its onslaught on the Iraqi regime.
+=====Page 301 · Location 5933=====
+The Syrians were clearly taken aback by the way both Prime Minister Sharon and President Bush brushed aside their call for the resumption of negotiations for a settlement with Israel. There even seem to be indications, as Israel’s former military Chief of Staff General Yaalon has hinted recently, of their readiness for a deal based on the international border, rather than on the 1967 lines that Hafez al-Assad so adamantly insisted upon to the extent of making impossible a settlement with Israel.
+=====Page 301 · Location 5945=====
+But neither on the Palestinian front nor in the Syrian track was this philosophy being vindicated. Both Israel and America were clearly hesitant to seize the opportunity created by the neutralisation, even if temporary and still precarious, of the strategic threats in the outer Middle East in order to pacify the inner Middle East. On the contrary, they seemed to be overlooking them.
+=====Page 302 · Location 5952=====
+Nor is his dilemma an easy one. He knows he cannot tackle and absorb two major political earthquakes at one time, one that would emanate from his disengagement plan from Gaza and another that would inevitably emerge from the pull-out from the Golan. A coalition of the Golan settlers with those of Gaza and the West Bank is a politically lethal alliance that had already contributed to doom Rabin’s peace efforts. Ever the tactician, rather than the bold visionary statesman, Ariel Sharon prefers not to tempt fate or to court political disaster.
+=====Page 304 · Location 5998=====
+Israel’s march of folly in the occupied territories represented by her absurdly adventurist policy of settlements has created a reality on the ground that can no longer be solved only through traditional diplomatic means.
+=====Page 304 · Location 6009=====
+In the Israeli–Palestinian conflict the possibility of peace without agony was missed years ago. From now on nobody can spare the parties their Calvary. Both Palestinians and Israelis rightly earned it with their political short-sightedness and sometimes sheer human stupidity.
+=====Page 305 · Location 6023=====
+General Yaalon provided proof of a political resourcefulness of sorts. But by trying to rescue from oblivion such an anachronistic, and indeed obsolete, concept as the capsule doctrine, he displayed his failure to understand the most fundamental lessons of history. National movements that cannot be suppressed by military means cannot be obliterated by simply ignoring them, or by changing the identity of the occupier.
+=====Page 307 · Location 6054=====
+track II plans such as Geneva,
+=====Page 308 · Location 6071=====
+The fate of any Israeli leader who has tried to withdraw from the territories, either through an agreement like Rabin and Barak, or in a violent way, like Sharon, has been to face political defeat and in Rabin’s case even assassination. Israeli politics defy the rule that stability and equilibrium are only maintained by pedalling the bicycle. It is precisely by pedalling, moving and initiating that a leader paves the way for his political demise. Rabin, Peres and Barak were defeated because they tried to break the old, paralysing inertia of war and conflict.
+=====Page 308 · Location 6079=====
+What is refreshing, though, is that Sharon, the unscrupulous and ruthless man of action, has finally realised the limits of force. No one who knew his personal and political history would have imagined him delivering a speech like the one he gave on the day the Knesset approved his plan. Addressing the settlers, those whom he had spoiled and cultivated for years, he said, You have developed among you a dangerous Messianic spirit. We have no chance to survive in this part of the world that has no mercy for the weak if we persist in this path. I have learnt from my own experience that the sword alone offers no solution. We do not want to rule over millions of Palestinians who multiply every year. Israel will not survive as a democratic state if she continues being a society that occupies another nation. The withdrawal from Gaza will open the gates of a new reality.
+=====Page 309 · Location 6101=====
+There can be little doubt that Hamas, the dominant power in Gaza, would claim–as Hezbollah did in Lebanon–that Israel’s pull-out represents a victory for its campaign and a vindication of suicide terrorism. If Hamas is allowed to become the governing authority in the Gaza Strip, this could usher in the establishment of a mini-Taliban state at permanent war against Israel.
+===XII. Conclusions===
+=====Page 312 · Location 6152=====
+The army has also opposed most of the political breakthroughs in Israel’s history. Chief of Staff General ‘Motta’ Gur misread Sadat’s peace initiative and was against it; his successor in 2000, General Shaul Mofaz, fiercely opposed Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon as well as the Clinton Peace Parameters, and more recently the army again resisted the Gaza disengagement, which had to be practically imposed on it by the Prime Minister.
+=====Page 313 · Location 6173=====
+More important, however, the history of peacemaking between Israel and her Arab neighbours showed that it was the change of mind of the hawks and the shift in their positions, not the preaching of the doves, that allowed Israel to exploit chances of peace at vital crossroads.
+=====Page 314 · Location 6203=====
+It was Abba Eban who said that the Palestinian leadership never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. In the aftermath of the 1967 war this could just as well be said of Israel’s leaders who rejected one after another Sadat’s peace overtures. Neither in 1948 nor in 1967 was Israel subjected to irresistible international pressure to relinquish her territorial gains because her victory was perceived as the result of a legitimate war of self-defence.
+=====Page 315 · Location 6217=====
+Sadat laid down the fundamental truths of any Arab–Israeli peace in the future: Israel cannot expect to have both territories and peace; but nor can the Arabs get away with their territories, as Nasser expected, without offering full peace and recognition to the Jewish state.
+=====Page 317 · Location 6259=====
+This persistent attempt to turn back the clock of history lies at the root of many of the misfortunes that have befallen the peoples of the region. But, eventually, it was the Arab side that led the strategic shift from war to political accommodation.
+=====Page 318 · Location 6277=====
+PLO’s 1988 Algiers declaration.
+=====Page 318 · Location 6288=====
+‘The best of enemies’ since at least 1946, Israel and Jordan would nevertheless only come to a peace agreement in 1994, and even then only because Israel had reached an accommodation with the Palestinians through the Oslo accords.
+=====Page 322 · Location 6351=====
+The Middle East is a cemetery of missed opportunities.
+=====Page 322 · Location 6355=====
+Three times in their history the Palestinians were offered statehood–in 1937, in 1947 and through the Clinton parameters in 2000–and three times they have rejected it.
+=====Page 324 · Location 6393=====
+The Israeli Left is bound to admit that its policy of fighting terrorism and negotiating peace at the same time was a resounding failure, and that it was Ariel Sharon’s ruthless crackdown on Palestinian terrorism that brought the Palestinians to their knees and forced even Hamas to plead for a truce. But the Right was, and continues to be, equally wrong in its far-fetched assumptions about the price of peace and its capacity to impose it on the Palestinians.
+=====Page 325 · Location 6418=====
+The Arabs of Jerusalem, and maybe even those of the State of Israel proper, might be asked in a future final settlement to vote in the Palestinian state without the territories they live in being part of the State of Palestine, just as the settlers throughout the West Bank could remain in their settlements, be citizens of the State of Israel and vote in the elections for the Israeli parliament. Sharon, who is so surprisingly sanguine in allowing the Palestinians of Jerusalem to vote, may believe that this is the best way to reconcile his demographic worries with his territorial ambitions.
+=====Page 327 · Location 6457=====
+special Security Council resolution that will view the plan as the authoritative international interpretation of Resolution 242 on the Palestinian issue.
+=====Page 327 · Location 6467=====
+An orderly Palestinian polity is crucial if it is to meet Israel’s elementary security requirements.
+=====Page 328 · Location 6490=====
+It is vital that the Israelis realise that no change in the international system, however radical, will spare them hard and painful choices.
+=====Page 328 · Location 6492=====
+Internationally legitimised borders will offer Israel more deterrence power than F-16 raids on terrorist targets that end up killing innocent civilians without deterring the terrorists.
+=====Page 329 · Location 6494=====
+But, as the United States has learned the hard way in Iraq, this is an era where power without legitimacy only breeds chaos, and military supremacy without legitimate international consent for the use of force does not offer security.
+=====Page 329 · Location 6502=====
+But the past is frequently the enemy of the future, and nothing in the Arab past has prepared them for the idea of a Jewish sovereign state in their midst.
+=====Page 330 · Location 6520=====
+Israel even managed to force the entire Arab world, and the international community as well, to accept the legitimacy of the 1948 borders even though these went far beyond the borders that were approved for the Jewish state in 1947.
+=====Page 330 · Location 6523=====
+accepts that the territorial phase of Zionism has come to its end, Zionism’s victory can still be finally sealed.
+=====Page 330 · Location 6526=====
+This should serve as a lesson to the Palestinians and their leaders who throughout their history have preferred the dangerous inertia of national myths and unrealistic dreams, rather than choosing a wise and prudent political course.
+=====Page 330 · Location 6531=====
+Democracy is the key for Arab leaders to be able to end the historically destructive pattern of government whereby they were constantly forced to placate and control an ‘Arab street’ which they had themselves incited with bellicose rhetoric against the Jewish state and its American ‘imperialist’ patrons. It was when trapped in that insoluble conundrum of their own making that the Arab leaders manoeuvred themselves against their own will into the 1956 Sinai Campaign and the 1967 Six Day War.
+=====Page 331 · Location 6540=====
+But forcing Israel’s Arab enemies to accept her existence and make peace with her is one thing; imposing on them the territorial terms of a settlement is quite another. Demography and territory, the two pillars of the Zionist enterprise, cannot be reconciled unless Israel abandons her territorial ambitions and departs from the unrealistic, and morally corrupting, dream of possessing the biblical lands of Eretz-Israel.
+=====Page 331 · Location 6544=====
+‘Transfer’ and ‘separation’ were, one should recall, important concepts that were advocated from the early days of the Zionist enterprise.
+=====Page 331 · Location 6551=====
+Israel’s leaders and her civil society bear a heavy responsibility to conceive bold and generous solutions precisely because of the high ideals upon which the Jewish state was built, and because of the noble values of Jewish civilisation that cannot be reconciled with the denial of the natural right of an occupied people to a life of freedom and dignity.
-== Staging notes WIP ==
+=Staging notes WIP=
 {| class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed wikitable"
 |+ style=white-space:nowrap | Debate Notes...

Obsidian Notes: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:42, 17 March 2024

Book Notes

Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy

I. Prelude: The Birth of an Intractable Conflict

Page 10 · Location 291

Page 20 · Location 507

II. Bisecting the Land or Zionism’s Strategy of Phases?

Page 34 · Location 754

III. The Early Years: A Missed Opportunity for Peace?

Page 50 · Location 1075

Page 62 · Location 1312

IV. The Rise and Fall of the Third Kingdom of Israel

Page 78 · Location 1595

V. The Jewish Fear and Israel’s Mother of all Victories

Page 87 · Location 1767

Page 93 · Location 1877

Page 94 · Location 1900

Page 96 · Location 1946

Page 97 · Location 1956

Page 98 · Location 1994

Page 100 · Location 2026

Page 104 · Location 2115

VI. Sedanlaghen – The Sin of Hubris and its Punishment

Page 126 · Location 2512

Page 128 · Location 2565

Page 129 · Location 2585

VII. Begin’s ‘Capsule Theory’ and Sadat’s ‘Separate Peace’

Page 154 · Location 3090

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VIII. The Road to Madrid

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IX. Oslo: The Glory and the Agony

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X. The Barak Phase: On Freedom and Innocence

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