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6. Endgame or Endless Game? Permanent Status and Crisis Negotiations, 1999 to 2008
- Syracuse University Press
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198 6 Endgame or Endless Game? Permanent Status and Crisis Negotiations, 1999 to 2008 We had to maintain a delicate balance between secrecy of the content and the need to consolidate public opinion that would support the results of the negotiations. —Gilead Sher1 Overview of the Endgame By May 1999, the interim phase of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process was officially over. Both Interim and Permanent Status Agreements should have been reached, but only an Interim Agreement had been signed. The Interim Agreement , signed on September 28, 1995, should also have been completely implemented long before the end of this period. Instead, the Interim Agreement was only partially implemented, much delayed, and sorely tested. The core trade-off in that lengthy agreement was the staged redeployment of the Israel Defense Force from the West Bank and Gaza, in exchange for Palestinian cooperation on security matters, including joint Palestinian-Israeli patrols and prevention of acts of terrorism. The scope and timing of those withdrawals (the “further redeployments,” or FRDs) were heavily renegotiated by Israel after the Interim Agreement was signed. New extended timetables for the FRDs had been mediated by the United States and memorialized in two different agreements , first the Wye River Memorandum (see chapter 5) and later in the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum, discussed in this chapter, following. Nevertheless, the FRDs were still only partially implemented by late 1999, four years later. Also as recounted in chapter 5, permanent status negotiation issues had been explored in a deep back channel in Stockholm in 1995 just prior to Israeli End Game or Endless Game? 199 prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, but then they were left aside in the political climate that followed his death and throughout the years that Binyamin Netanyahu was prime minister of Israel. Netanyahu spent his premiership trying to disown the peace process begun by his predecessors but then found himself frantically renegotiating the Interim Agreement, which in the end he failed to implement. Netanyahu—responsible for so much antipeace process rhetoric and delays— had himself fallen out of favor with his own coalition partners on the extreme right. Netanyahu also succeeded in alienating the U.S. administration of president Bill Clinton. The United States under Clinton had invested ever increasing amounts of political capital in the peace process but without realizing significant political dividends. Clinton’s Middle East peace team worked hard during the Netanyahu years to provide some forward momentum for the commitments made under the 1995 Interim Agreement. This chapter provides an analysis of the three kinds of substantive negotiations that took place from 1999 onward: interim status, permanent status, and the several crisis management negotiations. In continuation of the pattern established throughout this study, both front and back channels were in use. During the period covered in this chapter, negotiations were renewed between the PLO and Israel’s Labor government under Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his One Israel coalition, which incorporated interim and permanent status negotiations, a high-stakes Camp David summit sponsored by the United States, and tantalizing follow-on negotiations that came very close to reaching agreement on the permanent status. The unique nature of the permanent status issues inclined the parties to approach the permanent status negotiations differently: on each issue, Israel holds all or most of the cards as a result of the 1967 War and its consequent policies regarding the occupied territories. Israel occupied all of the West Bank and Gaza, including East Jerusalem; Palestinian refugees have long been prevented from returning to what is now Israel; the major Israeli settlements in the West Bank (and at the time, Gaza) were being expanded and connected to Israel, not dismantled. Given this massive asymmetry between the parties, the Israelis appeared to be making incremental concessions that did not violate the spirit of Barak’s electoral victory promises, while the Palestinians essentially were asking for the reversal of the occupation. Neither party believed that the opening [44.220.59.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:51 GMT) 200 Back Channel Negotiation positions of the other were their bottom-line preferences and that concessions would be made by the other side. These large gaps in the negotiation positions would elude resolution by even the most skillful and persuasive mediator. From the Palestinian perspective, Israel, as the party with all the cards, needed to make substantial concessionary moves. And the PLO’s recognition of Israel, signifying that there is no claim to recreate pre-1948 Palestine, is seen as...