Camp David 2000 Summit

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The Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David of July 2000 took place between United States President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. It was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to negotiate a "final status settlement" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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The summit

President Clinton announced his invitation to Barak and Arafat on July 5, 2000, to come to Camp David to continue their negotiations on the Middle East peace process. Building on the positive steps towards peace of the earlier 1978 Camp David Accords where President Jimmy Carter was able to broker a peace agreement between Egypt, represented by President Anwar Sadat, and Israel represented by Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The Oslo Accords of 1993 between the later assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organisation Chairman Yasser Arafat had provided that agreement should be reached on all outstanding issues between the Palestinians and Israeli sides - the so-called final status settlement - within five years of the implementation of Palestinian autonomy. However, the interim process put in place under Oslo had not fulfilled Palestinian expectations, and Arafat argued that the summit was premature.

On July 11, the Camp David 2000 Summit convened. The summit ended on July 25, without an agreement being reached. At its conclusion, a Trilateral Statement was issued defining the agreed principles to guide future negotiations.

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Trilateral statement (full text)

President William J. Clinton - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak - Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat. Between July 11 and 24, under the auspices of President Clinton, Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat met at Camp David in an effort to reach an agreement on permanent status. While they were not able to bridge the gaps and reach an agreement, their negotiations were unprecedented in both scope and detail. Building on the progress achieved at Camp David, the two leaders agreed on the following principles to guide their negotiations:
  1. The two sides agreed that the aim of their negotiations is to put an end to decades of conflict and achieve a just and lasting peace.
  2. The two sides commit themselves to continue their efforts to conclude an agreement on all permanent status issues as soon as possible.
  3. Both sides agree that negotiations based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 are the only way to achieve such an agreement and they undertake to create an environment for negotiations free from pressure, intimidation and threats of violence.
  4. The two sides understand the importance of avoiding unilateral actions that prejudge the outcome of negotiations and that their differences will be resolved only by good faith negotiations.
  5. Both sides agree that the United States remains a vital partner in the search for peace and will continue to consult closely with President Clinton and Secretary Albright in the period ahead.
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Reasons for impasse

Both sides blamed the other for the failure of the talks: the Palestinians claiming they were not offered enough, and the Israelis claiming that they could not reasonably offer more. In the USA and Israel, the failure to come to an agreement was widely attributed to Yasser Arafat, as he walked away from the table without making a counter-offer. Clinton later stated "I regret that in 2000 [Arafat] missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being and pray for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace." [1] Arafat was also accused of scuttling the talks by Nabil Amr, a former minister in the Palestinian Authority. [2] However, it was widely believed in Europe and the Arab world that both parties shared responsibility for the deadlock (Charles Enderlin Shattered Dreams, Tony Klug [3]). There were three principal obstacles to agreement:

  • Territory
  • Jerusalem and the Temple Mount
  • Refugees and the 'right of return'
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Territory

The Palestinian negotiators indicated they wanted full Palestinian sovereignty over all the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, although they would consider a one-to-one land swap with Israel. As a starting point, Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the Six-Day War and at the 1993 Oslo Accords the Palestinian negotiators accepted the Green Line Israel borders for the West Bank.

The proposal offered by Barak and Clinton at Camp David would have meant the Israeli annexation of 9-10% more of the West Bank. Another 9-10% of the West Bank would be placed under indefinite "Temporary Israeli Control", including a narrow strip comprising 15 % of the length of the border along the Jordan River. The West Bank would be separated by a road from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, with free passage for Palestinians although Israel reserved the right to close the road for passage in case of emergency. The Palestinian position was that the annexations would block existing road networks between major Palestinian populations. In return, the Israelis would cede 1-3 % of their territory in the Negev Desert to Palestine. Arafat rejected this proposal and did not make a counteroffer.

Clayton Swisher, who was present at the summit, rebuts the conventional wisdom about it in The Truth About Camp David (http://www.mepc.org/public_asp/journal_vol12/0503_csbkr.asp). Swisher, a young scholar based in Washington, approaches Camp David objectively and concludes that the Israelis and the Americans were at least as guilty as the Palestinians for the collapse. MJ Rosenberg of Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel think-tank in Washington, calls Swisher's book "the single best volume we are likely to have on the Camp David failure." Alternative points of view are offered in books by Dennis Ross and by President Clinton himself.

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Jerusalem and the Temple Mount

A particularly virulent territorial dispute revolved around the final status of Jerusalem. Although offered much of East Jerusalem, the Palestinians rejected a proposal for "custodianship," though not sovereignty, over the Temple Mount, demanding complete sovereignty, which for Jews would have meant losing a bond with both the Mount and the attached Western Wall. According to both Ambassador Dennis Ross and Robert Malley, key American participants in the Camp David summit, Yasser Arafat claimed at one point in the negotiations that the holy Jewish Temple was not in Jerusalem at all, but in the West Bank city of Nablus.

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Refugees and the right of return

The Palestinians stated that the proposed solution did not adequately address the issue of the Palestinian refugee problem. While realizing not all refugees could return, the Palestinians argued that any meaningful peace settlement would have to take the future of these people into account. In particular, they called for a right of return and an Israeli acknowledgment that they too had been responsible for the creation of the refugee problem (see also New Historians). The Israelis countered that similar numbers of Jewish refugees had been pushed out of Arab countries since 1948, and were not compensated, and that most of them ended up in Israel. They also asserted that allowing a right of return to Israel proper, rather than the newly created Palestinian state, would mean an influx of Palestinians that would fundamentally alter the demographics of Israel, jeopardizing Israel's Jewish character.

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Aftermath

Soon after the collapse of the 2000 summit, Ariel Sharon and a delegation of Likud politicians took a tour of the Temple Mount to demonstrate Israel's control. The next day, a demonstration by a Palestinian crowd broke out of control and Israeli police opened fire on the protesters. From this point, an escalation in violence culminated in an uprising called the al-Aqsa Intifada, which continues to this day (see Shattered Dreams, Charles Enderlin). A wave of suicide bombings were unleashed by Palestinian extremist movements on Israeli civilians. In reprisal Israel sent in the Israel Defence Force to seal off the Gaza Strip and re-occupy the West Bank, which were brought under strict military rule. The leaders of Palestinian terrorist organizations were targeted for assassinations by Israel. The continuing violence has claimed the lives of over one thousand Israelis and three thousand Palestinians.

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Calls for peace

In a last attempt to bring Middle East peace, Clinton wrote a proposal to Barak and Arafat, laying down the parameters for future negotiations.[4] Barak accepted the parameters (with some reservations that were within those parameters) and Arafat, after a delay, accepted, but with questions and reservations that went outside the parameters, according to Ambassador Dennis Ross, the special Mideast envoy. Clinton's initiative led to the Taba negotiations in January 2001, where the two sides published a statement saying they had never been closer to agreement, but Barak, facing elections, suspended the talks.[5] The increased violence led to a sharp swing to the right in Israeli politics; Ehud Barak was defeated by Ariel Sharon in 2001.

Sharon refused to negotiate until the suicide bombings ceased. Clinton's successor, President George W. Bush, along with the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations, put forward a "Road Map" for peace which calls for a fully democratic Palestinian state as early as 2005, on the condition of the cessation of terrorist attacks, Arafat's resignation, and democratic elections in the Palestinian territories. In 2002, Yasser Arafat told a newspaper he was ready to fully accept the Clinton parameters.

On March 28, 2002 the Arab League held a summit in Beirut, Lebanon where they drafted a declaration for peace. Israel officially welcomed[6] this proposal, which called for a return to the 1967 borders and mutual peace and recognition,[7] but in practice has ignored it. In 2003, unofficial moderates from both sides agreed on a peace proposal, the Geneva Accords. Arafat cautiously welcomed the document, but Sharon rejected its terms. The Israeli government has since taken a number of unilateral steps in relation to the territories, by constructing the West Bank Barrier and disengaging from Gaza as well as four West Bank settlements.

Since leaving the Presidency, Clinton has publicly stated his belief that Arafat was primarily to blame for the failure of the talks, and that the Palestinian leader gravely erred in refusing to cut a deal.

However many political commentators, especially Palestinians and those on the left, point to the fact that peace negotiations continued at the Taba Summit in 2001 and that it was the Israeli leader Ehud Barak that pulled out of the talks to campaign in the Israeli elections. The Palestinian leader called on Barak to come back to the negotiating table but to no avail.

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See also

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Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy and treaties

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External links

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General

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Books

The following links reference an extended exchange in the pages of the New York Review of Books on Camp David 2000. Presented here in chronological order.

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On Barak

A critique of Barak's performance at Camp David and of Barak's version of events as given in the Morris-Barak piece in the New York Review of Books.

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Palestinian offer

A newspaper article stating that the Palestinians made an implicit, unstated "peace offer" at Camp David.

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Further Readings

de:Camp David II fr:Sommet de Camp David II

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