Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 41 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

That first exchange initiated six months of negotiations between the Americans and the Palestinians that ultimately framed the agenda for the peace conference held in Madrid in October 1992. The Americans moved between the Israelis and Palestinians, trying to bridge nearly irreconcilable positions to ensure a successful conference. The Israeli government proved a far greater impediment to American peace plans than the Palestinians. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir headed a right-wing Likud coalition that was committed to retaining all of the Occupied Territories, especially East Jerusalem. With the end of the Cold War, Soviet Jews enjoyed the liberty to emigrate to Israel, and the Israeli government was determined to reserve its options on all the land under its control to accommodate the new wave of immigrants. Israel was stepping up its settlement activity both to extend its claim to West Bank territory and to provide new housing for Russian immigrants. For the Palestinian negotiators, East Jerusalem and the settlements were red line issues: If the Israelis retained all of Jerusalem and allowed continued construction on occupied land in the West Bank, there would be nothing left to discuss. The Palestinians saw the two issues as inextricably linked. “It couldn’t have been an accident that the Israelis wanted to bracket out the settlements and East Jerusalem,” Sari Nusseibeh reflected. “Of the two, the issue of East Jerusalem bothered me most. The fight over Jerusalem was existential, not because it is a magical city but because it was, and is, the center of our culture, national identity, and memory?things the Israelis had to extirpate if they were to have their way throughout what they called Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank]. As long as we held on to Jerusalem,? Nusseibeh concluded, ?I was certain we could resist them everywhere else.?³⁶ The Bush administration showed sympathy for the Palestinian position, and was clearly irritated by the intransigence of Shamir and his Likud government in the lead-up to the Madrid Conference. Nevertheless, in many ways, the United States continued to privilege Israeli demands over Palestinian arguments. The Israelis insisted on the total exclusion of the PLO from the process, that the Palestinians only be allowed to attend the conference as junior partners in a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, and that no resident of East Jerusalem be accredited to the negotiations. This meant that some of the most influential Palestinians, like Faisal al-Husseini, Hanan Ashrawi, and Sari Nusseibeh, were barred from an official role in the Madrid negotiations. Instead, on Arafat’s suggestion, Husseini and Ashrawi accompanied the official Palestinian delegation, headed by Dr Abdul Shafi, as an unofficial “Guidance Committee.” In spite of the restrictions, the Palestinian delegation that accompanied the Jordanians to Madrid were the most eloquent and persuasive spokespeople ever to represent their national aspirations on the international stage. Hanan Ashrawi was designated the official spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation. Ashrawi had studied at the American University of Beirut and took her doctorate in English literature from the University of Virginia before returning to teach at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. A brilliant woman of great eloquence from a Christian family, Ashrawi was the antithesis of the stereotype of a terrorist that many in the West associated with the Palestinian cause. Once in Madrid, Ashrawi devoted herself to wooing the media, so as to swing coverage in the Palestinians’ favor. Strategically, she knew how important it was for the Palestinian delegation to win over the international press to compensate for their weak position at the negotiating table. Ashrawi showed great ingenuity at putting the Palestinians’ message across in Madrid. When denied access to the official press center, Ashrawi created chaos by convening impromptu press conferences in public spaces that attracted more journalists than any other delegation at Madrid. When Spanish security measure proved too stringent, she took over a municipal park where camera crews could set up beyond the restrictions of the security forces. In one day alone she gave twenty-seven extensive interviews to international television networks. The Israeli delegation’s spokesman, Benjamin Netanyahu, struggled to keep up with the charismatic Palestinian woman who consistently stole the show. Ashrawi’s most enduring contribution to the Madrid conference was the speech she drafted for Haidar Abdul Shafi to deliver on behalf of the Palestinian delegation on October 31, 1991. With his grave demeanor and deep, rich voice, Abdul Shafi matched in dignity what Ashrawi?s text conveyed in eloquence. He began with greetings to the assembled dignitaries before launching into the heart of his text, fixing the global audience with his penetrating gaze. ?We meet in Madrid, a city with the rich texture of history, to weave together the fabric which joins our past with the future,? he intoned before the assembled Israelis, Arabs, and members of the international community. ?Once again, Christian, Moslem, and Jew face the challenge of heralding a new era enshrined in global values of democracy, human rights, freedom, justice, and security. From Madrid we launch this quest for peace, a quest to place the sanctity of human life at the center of our world and to redirect our energies and resources from the pursuit of mutual destruction to the pursuit of joint prosperity, progress, and happiness.?³⁷ Abdul Shafi took care to speak on behalf of all Palestinians, in exile as well as under occupation. “We are here together seeking a just and lasting peace whose cornerstone is freedom for Palestine, justice for the Palestinians, and an end to the occupation of all Palestinian and Arab lands. Only then can we really enjoy together the fruits of peace: prosperity, security and human dignity and freedom.” It was a brilliant debut performance for the Palestinian delegation, making their first appearance on the stage of world diplomacy. Abdul Shafi’s speech provoked divided reactions from Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The Islamist Hamas movement, unreconciled to a two-state solution, had announced its opposition to participation in the conference from the outset. Secular Palestinians were fearful that their delegation might come under such pressure from the United States and Israel as to make concessions inconsistent with Palestinian national aspirations. After four years of the Intifada, all Palestinians wanted to see some concrete results for their years of struggle and sacrifice.

As the Palestinians had most to gain from Madrid, their speech was the most forward-looking. The other delegations paid lip service to the historic nature of the conference but otherwise used the occasion to review past grievances. The Lebanese focused on the ongoing Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, the Israeli premier catalogued Arab efforts to destroy the Jewish state, and the Syrian foreign minister provided a list of “inhuman Israeli practices” to make clear his distaste at having to meet with the Israelis at all. After three days together, the delegates took off their gloves and openly brawled in their closing speeches. Prime Minister Shamir set a vituperative tone; he lambasted the Syrians, offering to “recite a litany of facts that demonstrate the extent to which Syria merits the dubious honor of being one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world.” He patronized the Palestinians, claiming Abdul Shafi “made a valiant effort at recounting the sufferings of his people,” though he accused the Palestinian of ?twisting history and perversion of fact.? At his speech?s conclusion, Shamir stormed out of the conference hall with his delegation, ostensibly to observe the Jewish Sabbath. Abdul Shafi responded angrily, addressing his words to the empty seats vacated by the Israeli delegation. “The Palestinians are a people with legitimate national rights. We are not ‘the inhabitants of territories’ or an accident of history or an obstacle to Israel’s expansionist plans, or an abstract demographic problem. You may wish to close your eyes to this fact, Mr. Shamir, but we are here in the sight of the world, before your very eyes, and we shall not be denied.” The exchange of insults reached its climax when the outraged Syrian foreign minister pulled out a British “Wanted” poster for Yitzhak Shamir dating back to his days in the Stern Gang fighting the British mandate in Palestine. “Let me show you an old picture of Shamir, when he was 32 years old,” Farouk al-Shara‘a said, brandishing the poster and pausing to note Shamir’s diminutive stature—“165 cm,” he sneered. Warming to his theme, Shara’a continued: “This picture was distributed because he was wanted. He himself confessed he was a terrorist. He confessed he . . . participated in murdering U.N. mediator Count Bernadotte in 1948, as far as I remember. He kills peace mediators and talks about Syria, Lebanon, terrorism.”³⁸ Shara’a’s tirade was an unedifying spectacle that bode ill for the prospect of Arab-Israeli peace. On that sour note, the Madrid conference came to an end. Yet with the conclusion of the formal conference, a new phase of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations opened under American auspices: bilateral negotiations to resolve the differences between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and multilateral talks involving over forty states and international organizations to address issues of global concern such as water, the environment, arms control, refugees, and economic development. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the Madrid process initiated the most extensive peace negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors in over forty years of conflict. The bilateral negotiations were intended to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict by returning occupied land in exchange for peace, in line with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. But the divergent ways in which the Arabs and Israelis interpreted these resolutions bedeviled negotiations from the outset. The Arab states seized on the principle of the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” set out in the preamble of the resolution to argue for a full Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territory occupied in the June 1967 War as a prerequisite for peace. The Israelis, in contrast, claimed that the resolution only required “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied” in the 1967 War—not all territories, just “territories”—and insisted they had already fulfilled their commitments to Resolution 242 by withdrawing from the Sinai Peninsula following the peace treaty with Egypt. The Israelis argued that the Arab parties had to sue for peace for its own sake and negotiate a mutually acceptable territorial solution without preconditions. No progress was achieved in talks between Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Talks between Israel and the Palestinians had a different focus. The two sides agreed to negotiate the terms of a five-year interim period of Palestinian self-rule, after which they would enter into final negotiations to conclude the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But once the negotiations began, the Shamir government did everything in its power to prevent meaningful progress with the Palestinians, and it stepped up settlement activity to deepen Israel’s hold over the West Bank. In an interview after his electoral defeat in 1992, Shamir confirmed his government had obstructed negotiations to prevent Palestinian statehood and retain the West Bank for Israeli settlements. “I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria.”³⁹ Shamir’s stonewalling came to an end when his government was defeated at the polls. The Israeli elections of 1992 brought Yitzhak Rabin to power at the head of a left-leaning Labor coalition. Rabin’s reputation as the man who had authorized physical violence against Intifada demonstrators gave the Palestinian negotiators little grounds for confidence that “Rabin the bone-breaker” could “become Rabin the peacemaker.”⁴⁰ In his first months in office, Rabin delivered more continuity than change in the deadlocked bilateral negotiations. In December 1992, Hamas activists kidnapped and murdered an Israeli border guard. Rabin retaliated by ordering the roundup and deportation to Lebanon of 416 suspects without charge or trial. All Arab delegations suspended negotiations in protest. If anything, Rabin appeared to be even more of a hard-liner than Shamir. Bill Clinton’s surprise defeat of George H. W. Bush in the American presidential elections in 1992 raised concerns among the Arab negotiation teams. During the presidential campaign, Clinton had made clear his unconditional support for Israel. The Arab delegations did not believe the change in presidents bode well for them. Although negotiations did resume in April 1993, the Clinton administration took a hands-off approach to the negotiations, and in the absence of strong American leadership the framework launched by the Madrid conference reached a dead end. The breakthrough in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations came from a change in Israeli policy. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his deputy, Yossi Beilin, were convinced that a settlement with the Palestinians was in Israel’s national interest. They also recognized that a settlement could only be reached through direct negotiations with the PLO. Yet since 1986, Israelis had been forbidden by law to meet with members of the PLO. By 1992, the number of Israeli journalists and politicians who had violated the ban had grown to such an extent as to make the law irrelevant. Yet the Israeli government could not knowingly break Israeli law. Rabin was not enthusiastic about dealing with the PLO, but he agreed to overturn the law banning contact between Israeli citizens and the PLO in December 1992. The following month, Yossi Beilin gave the green light for two Israeli academics, Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak, to meet in secret with the PLO treasurer, Ahmad Qurie, in Oslo, Norway. It was the beginning of an intense and fruitful negotiation conducted through fourteen meetings under the auspices of the Norwegian foreign ministry. The Norwegians were impartial brokers who provided the neutral terrain and discretion to allow the Palestinians and Israelis to work out their differences with minimal interference. The Norwegian facilitator, Terje Roed Larsen, set out his country’s role as the Palestinians and Israelis began the first round of secret diplomacy. “If you want to live together, you have to solve your own problems,” Larsen insisted. “It is your problem. We are here to give you the assistance you might need, the place, the practicalities, and so on. We can be facilitators . . . but nothing more. I will wait outside and will not interfere unless you come to blows. Then I will interfere.” Larsen’s humor helped break the ice between the two delegations. “This made us all laugh,” PLO official Ahmed Qurie recalled, “as it was meant to.”⁴¹ Qurie, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Ala, had never met an Israeli prior to his first encounter with Professor Yair Hirschfeld, and he brought to the table all of the dread and mistrust accumulated over years of mutual hostility between Palestinians and Israelis. Yet in the isolation of the Norwegian winter, the five men—three Palestinians and two Israelis—began to break down barriers. “The atmosphere in the house became more relaxed, and though we still felt on our side some mistrust of the Israelis, we nonetheless began somewhat to warm to them.” In their first meeting, the delegates set a pattern they were to follow through future rounds. Putting recriminations over the past behind them, Abu Ala recalled, “we focused our attention on the present and the future, trying to gauge the extent to which we had common ground, to identify such points of agreement as we might reach, and to estimate the distance which separated us on the various issues.”⁴² Behind closed doors, in total secrecy, Palestinians and Israelis discussed their differences and secured their governments’ backing for a framework to resolve them—in eight brief months. They experienced breakdowns, and the Norwegians occasionally had to play a more active role. Foreign Minister Johan Joergen Holst even engaged in a bit of discrete telephone diplomacy between Tunis and Tel Aviv to help overcome deadlocks. Yet by August 1993, the two sides had concluded an agreement they were willing to take public. When Israel and the PLO announced their agreement on Palestinian interim self-rule in Gaza and Jericho, they caught the world by surprise—and faced predictable criticism. The Clinton administration was nonplussed to see the Norwegians succeed where the Americans had failed in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. In Israel, the opposition Likud Party accused the Rabin government of betrayal and promised to annul the accord when it returned to power. The Arab world criticized the PLO for breaking Arab ranks to conclude a secret deal with the Israelis, and Palestinian dissident groups condemned their leadership for extending recognition to Israel. Oslo was a desperate gamble for Yasser Arafat, but the PLO chairman was running out of options. The Palestinian movement faced imminent financial and institutional collapse in 1993. The oil states of the Gulf had severed all financial support to the PLO in retribution for Arafat’s support of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf crisis. By December 1991 the PLO’s budget had been halved. Thousands of fighters and employees were made redundant or went months without pay; by March 1993, up to one-third of all PLO personnel received no pay at all. The financial crisis led to charges of corruption and maladministration that split PLO ranks.⁴³ The PLO as a government in exile would not long survive the pressures. A peace deal with Israel stood the chance of opening new sources of financial support and would give the PLO a toehold in Palestine on which it could realize the elusive goal of a two-state solution. The Oslo Accords offered the Palestinians little more than a toe-hold. The deal provided for a provisional Palestinian authority over the Gaza Strip and an enclave surrounding the West Bank town of Jericho. For many Palestinians these seemed small territorial gains for such important Palestinian concessions to Israel. Arafat confided his strategy to Hanan Ashrawi shortly before the Oslo Accords were announced: “I will get full withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho as the first step of disengagement, and there I will exercise sovereignty. I want Jericho because it will get me to Jerusalem and link up Gaza with the West Bank.” Ashrawi looked unconvinced. “Trust me, we will soon have our own telephone country code, stamps, and television station. This will be the beginning of the Palestinian state.”⁴⁴ The “Gaza-Jericho First” plan became a reality with the signing of the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993. Before a global television audience, Yitzhak Rabin overcame his reluctance and shook Yasser Arafat’s hand, sealing the deal. “All Arab television stations carried the ceremony live,” Abu Ala recalled. “Many people around the Arab world could scarcely believe what was happening.”⁴⁵ The PLO and Israel had agreed to what was effectively a partition plan for Palestine. The document called for the withdrawal of Israeli military administration from Jericho and the Gaza Strip and its replacement with a Palestinian civil administration for a five-year interim period. It also provided for the creation of an elected council so that the people of Palestine would be governed “according to democratic principles.” The Palestinian Authority would gain control over education and culture, health, social welfare, taxation, and tourism. Palestinian police would provide security for the areas under Palestinian control. The agreement deferred discussion of the most controversial issues. The future of Jerusalem, the rights of refugees, the status of settlements, borders, and security arrangements were all to be addressed in final status negotiations set to begin three years into the interim period. The Palestinians expected more from the permanent settlement than the Israelis were likely to concede: an independent Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Israelis anticipated a disengagement from unessential Arab territory leading to a demilitarized Palestinian entity. Leaving such fundamental disagreement to future negotiations, the Israeli Knesset ratified the Declaration of Principles with a comfortable majority, and the eighty-member Palestinian Central Council gave its overwhelming approval (sixty-three in favor, eight opposed, with nine abstentions) on October 11. By May 1994 the technical details surrounding the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the establishment of Palestinian rule in Gaza and Jericho had been ironed out. Yasser Arafat made his triumphant return to Gaza to oversee the running of the Palestinian Authority on July 1. In September, Arafat and Rabin returned to Washington to sign the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known as Oslo II. Middle Eastern politics had entered the Oslo Era.

The Oslo Accords gained Israel unprecedented acceptance in the Arab world. Once the Palestinians had struck a unilateral deal with the Israelis, the other Arab countries felt free to pursue their own interests toward the Jewish state without risking accusations of betraying the Palestinian cause. For the most part, the Arab world had grown weary of the Arab-Israel conflict and was pragmatic in its views of Israel. The Jordanians were the first to respond to the new realities. Once the Oslo Accords had been announced, the Jordanians did not hesitate. King Hussein saw peace with Israel as the best way for Jordan to break from the isolation it had suffered since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. King Hussein also believed that Jordan would be rewarded for making peace by substantial U.S. aid and international investment into his country. The day after the White House signing of the Declaration of Principles, representatives of Israel and Jordan met in the offices of the U.S. State Department to sign an agenda for peace that the two sides had worked out over the course of bilateral negotiations in Madrid. On July 25, 1994, King Hussein and Prime Minister Rabin were invited back to Washington to sign a preliminary peace agreement, ending the belligerency between the two states, agreeing to settle all territorial issues in accordance with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and recognizing a special role for the Hashemite monarchy in the Muslim holy places of Jerusalem. The final Jordan-Israel peace treaty was signed on the border between the two countries in the Araba Desert on October 26, 1994. Jordan became the second Arab state after Egypt to exchange ambassadors and normalize relations with the Jewish state. The deals with the PLO and Jordan paved the way for other Arab governments to establish ties with Israel. In October 1994, Morocco and Israel agreed to open liaison offices in each other’s capital, and Tunisia followed suit in January 1996. Both countries have significant Jewish minority communities with long-standing ties to Israel. Mauritania, a member state of the Arab League in northwest Africa, established formal relations with Israel and exchanged ambassadors in November 1999. Two of the Arab Gulf states established trade offices with Israel—the Sultanate of Oman, in January 1996; and Qatar in April of the same year. Confounding those who had long argued that the Arab world could never live in peace with the Jewish state, the Oslo Era demonstrated widespread Arab acceptance of Israel from North Africa through the Gulf. Yet the Oslo process continued to face strong opposition in some quarters—nowhere more intensely than in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Extremists from both Israel and the Palestinian territories resorted to violence in a bid to derail the peace agreements. Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a number of lethal attacks on Israelis in the immediate aftermath of the signing of the Declaration of Principles in September 1993. Israeli extremists stepped up their own attacks on Palestinians as well. In February 1994 Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron dressed in his Israeli army reserves uniform and opened fire on the worshipers gathered for dawn prayers, killing 29 and wounding 150 before being overwhelmed and killed by survivors of the attack. Goldstein was a medical doctor and resident of Kiryat Arba, a militant settlement neighboring Hebron that posthumously honored Goldstein for his act of mass murder with a graveside plaque reading: “To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah and the nation of Israel.” The gulf between Palestinian and Israeli extremists was growing wider. Outrage over the Hebron massacre led to an escalation of Palestinian attacks and an increase in suicide bombings designed to inflict maximum casualties. In April 1994, suicide bombings on buses in Afula and Hadera claimed thirteen lives, and twenty-two people were killed by a suicide attack on a bus in Tel Aviv in October 1994. The Israelis responded by assassinating Islamist leaders. Israeli agents killed Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shiqaqi in Malta in October 1995 and used a booby-trapped mobile phone to kill Hamas leader Yahya ’Ayyash in January 1996. Israelis and Palestinians found themselves locked in a cycle of violence and retaliation that gravely undermined confidence in the Oslo process. One murder presaged the end of the Oslo process. On November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin addressed a mass peace rally in downtown Tel Aviv. The Israeli premier was visibly moved by the sea of faces 150,000-strong, united by their common belief in Palestinian-Israeli peace. “This rally must send a message to the Israeli public, to the Jews of the world, to the multitudes in the Arab lands and in the world at large, that the nation of Israel wants peace, support[s] peace,” Rabin intoned, “and for this I thank you.”⁴⁶ Rabin then led the crowd in a peace song before taking his leave. One man came to the rally to put an end to the peace process. As Rabin was escorted from the podium back to his car, an Israeli law student named Yigal Amir broke through a gap in the prime minister’s security cordon and shot him dead. In his trial, Amir openly confessed to the assassination, explaining that he had killed Rabin to put a stop to the peace process. Convinced of the Jewish people’s divine right to the whole of the Land of Israel, Amir believed it his duty as a religious Jew to prevent any exchange of land for peace. In an instant, a process that had withstood many acts of violence between Palestinians and Israelis fell to a single act of violence between Israelis.

Rabin was the indispensable man for the Oslo process. His immediate successor as prime minister was his old rival Shimon Peres. Though an architect of Oslo, Peres did not enjoy the same degree of public confidence as Rabin. The Israeli voters did not place the trust in Peres that an enduring land-for-peace settlement required. Deemed weak on security, Peres tried to confound his critics by launching a military campaign against Hizbullah in retaliation for its attacks on Israeli positions in South Lebanon and missile attacks on northern Israel. The April 1996 initiative, Operation Grapes of Wrath, confirmed voters’ doubts about Peres’s judgment on security issues. The massive incursion into Lebanon displaced 400,000 Lebanese civilians and provoked widespread international condemnation when the Israeli air force bombed a UN base in the southern Lebanese village of Qana, killing 102 refugees who were seeking shelter from the assault. The operation was brought to an ignominious end by American mediation, with no visible benefit to Israel’s security. Peres was punished by voters in the May 1996 election, when Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu won the premiership by the slenderest of margins. Netanyahu’s election set Israel on a collision course with its Oslo commitments. Netanyahu and his party had consistently opposed the principle of exchanging land for peace. Although he did succumb to American pressure to conclude a redeployment scheme from the West Bank town of Hebron, Netanyahu’s minor land for peace deal left Israel in full control of more than 71 percent of the West Bank, and in control of security over 23 percent of the other territories. This was a far cry from the 90 percent transfer the Palestinians expected from the Oslo II agreement. In his battle for Jerusalem, Netanyahu used the settlement movement to create unalterable facts on the ground. He commissioned 6,500 housing units on Jabal Abu Ghunaym to create a new settlement called Har Homa, which would complete the encirclement of Arab East Jerusalem with Israeli settlements. By encircling Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, Netanyahu intended to preempt any pressure to surrender the Arab parts of the city occupied in June 1967 to the Palestinian Authority. Har Homa was the latest of an escalating settlement policy that, more than any other factor, led to the collapse in Palestinian confidence in the Oslo process. After three years in office, Netanyahu lost the confidence of his own party and, dogged by corruption scandals, was forced to call for new elections in May 1999. He was defeated, and the Labor Party returned to power under another retired general, Ehud Barak. One of Barak’s campaign promises had been to end Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon and withdraw all Israeli troops within one year if elected. The occupation of South Lebanon had grown increasingly unpopular in Israel, as persistent attacks by Hizbullah inflicted regular casualties on Israeli forces. Having won a landslide victory over Netanyahu, Barak made the Lebanon withdrawal one of his first priorities. However, efforts to effect a smooth transfer of power from the departing Israeli forces to their local proxies of the South Lebanon army collapsed as the collaborators surrendered to Hizbullah units. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal degenerated into an unseemly retreat under fire, leaving Hizbullah to claim victory in its eighteen-year campaign to drive the Israelis from Lebanon. Israel’s top brass chafed, eagerly awaiting the next opportunity to settle the score with the Shiite militia. The opportunity for future conflict was preserved in a territorial anomaly. Israel withdrew from all of Lebanon except the disputed “Shiba’ Farms” enclave, a strip of land 22 square kilometers (8 square miles) in area along Lebanon’s frontier with the occupied Golan Heights. Israel claims to this day that it is occupied Syrian territory, whereas Syria and Lebanon insist it is Lebanese territory. Hizbullah takes Shiba’ Farms as a pretext for continuing its armed resistance against Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory. Once out of Lebanon, Prime Minister Barak resumed negotiations with the PLO. In view of Israel’s actions under Netanyahu, there was little trust or goodwill between the two sides. Yasser Arafat accused the Israelis of failing to meet their treaty obligations under the Oslo Accords and pressed Barak to respect unfulfilled commitments under the interim agreements. Barak, in comparison, wanted to proceed directly to discuss a permanent settlement. The Israeli premier believed that negotiations with the Palestinians had been undermined through endless disputes over interim details, and he wanted to take advantage of the closing months of the Clinton presidency to secure a permanent settlement. Bill Clinton invited Barak and Arafat to a summit meeting at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland. The three leaders met for two weeks in July 2000, and though bold new ideas were put on the table, the summit ended without any substantive progress toward a settlement. A second summit was held in the Egyptian resort of Taba in January 2001. There, the Israelis offered the most generous terms yet tabled; even so, the Taba proposals still left too much of the proposed Palestinian state under Israeli control to serve as a permanent settlement. The failure of the Camp David and Taba summits led to bitter recriminations and finger pointing, as both the American and the Israeli teams wrongly placed the blame for failure on Arafat and the Palestinian delegation. The trust and goodwill necessary for Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking had evaporated.