The Other Sides

There are weeks when history is written, and there are weeks, like this past one, when it is rewritten.</

[additional-authors]

Rob Eshman

August 2, 2001

There are weeks when history is written, and there are weeks, like this past one, when it is rewritten.

On Thursday, July 26, The New York Times carried a two-page investigation into the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Three days later, the Los Angeles Times ran its own story, “Blame for Camp David Talks’ Failure Takes a Twist.”

These stories reverberated in magazines, op-ed sections and, to a lesser extent, on television. They portrayed a much more complicated narrative — or multiple, conflicting narratives — contradicting the party line promoted since September by Jewish leaders and organizations. That narrative goes something like this: The Palestinians are to blame. Period. End of story.

The July 26 account, by Deborah Sontag, asserted that U.S. mediators, then-President Bill Clinton, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat made “political and diplomatic miscalculations” that sank the talks.

Clinton, facing the end of his presidency, pushed forward to Camp David despite indications that the parties were unprepared. Barak rode roughshod over Palestinian concerns and failed to develop rapport with his partner, Arafat. Arafat and the Palestinian team rejected Barak’s historic final offer, but failed to present counter-proposals that might have broken the impasse.

In a later editorial in The New York Times, Barak lashed out at the Palestinian spin, and stressed again that Arafat’s intransigence, combined with his propensity to resort to violence as a negotiating tool, caused the current cyclone of death and destruction.

But even Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was Israel’s foreign minister at the time, argued the Palestinians made significant concessions at Camp David: “They agreed to Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem,” he told Sontag. “They agreed to the idea that three blocs of settlements they so oppose could remain in place and that the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter could be under Israeli sovereignty.”

U.S. negotiators, as well as Israelis like Yossi Beilin, apportion blame to the Israelis for continuing settlement expansion and land confiscation, and to the Palestinians for continuing to foment hate against Israel. “If the fundamental equation had to be land for peace,” former National Security Council Middle East expert Rob Malley told Sontag, “how can it have any meaning and any relevance when, on the one hand, land was being taken away on a daily basis and, on the other hand, the peace was being maligned on a daily basis?”

But what’s as telling as Sontag’s piece is the Jewish communal over-reaction to it.

The Times’ William Safire derided his paper’s report as a whitewash of Arafat’s guilt, but it wasn’t.

Sequestered in his cabin, jealous of attention paid more able lieutenants, rejecting Barak’s proposals without offering his own, Arafat’s behavior leads me to suspect that peace will come only over his dead body.

But if Arafat has no new ideas, neither do those who have dismissed Sontag’s piece as pro-Oslo propaganda. As negotiator Dennis Ross told an audience of the Jewish Community Relations Committee here last month, it is not Sontag, The Times, the international media, the peaceniks or altruism that has led every Israeli government, Labor, Likud or unity, to pursue negotiations with the Palestinians. Israeli prime ministers don’t need Bill Safire or American Jewish boosters to tell them that the ultimate aim of the Palestinians is an end to the Jewish state. They know there may be no short-term diplomatic solutions to Palestinian violence, but neither are there any long-term military solutions to Israeli occupation. Thus, Oslo.

Given the death toll of this past week, such nuanced, retrospective reporting as Sontag’s seems like a luxury, but it is a critical step toward understanding how to go forward. As Sontag reveals, between the Camp David meetings and Israeli and Palestinian negotiations in Taba, Egypt, six months later, “remarkable progress was made in narrowing differences between the two sides.” When the violence wears itself out, such progress can be the basis for a return to the inevitable peace talks.

In the meantime, it’s time for Jewish leaders and organizations to stop oversimplifying the complex equation that must eventually work itself out in the Middle East.

FURTHER READING