Our Life and Times
August-September 2000

Camp David Peace Talks Collapse

Kevin A. Barry and Mary Holmes

When the Camp David peace talks collapsed after two weeks on July 25, the situation was no clearer than before they had begun. On the one hand, the collapse exposed the fact that even the sole remaining superpower, the United States, cannot by fiat get its will everywhere. This is especially true of the Middle East where the large Muslim majority resents decades of U.S. support not only for Israel, but also for so many of its own authoritarian rulers.

On the other hand, despite the failure of these talks between Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, mediated by U. S. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, some new ground may have been broken, especially on the explosive issue of Jerusalem.

Among Israelis, there is an increasing recognition, in the words of Hebrew University Professor Edith Zertal, that "If we want Jerusalem, we have to share it" (interview on Chicago Public Radio, July 31). At Camp David, Barak reportedly agreed to a U.S. proposal for a limited form of Palestinian political control over parts of East Jerusalem. As minimal as these concessions were, they broke with decades of demagoguery by Israeli politicians, Labor as well as Likud (conservative), to the effect that continuation of sole Israeli control of the whole of Jerusalem was non-negotiable.

Not surprisingly Arafat rejected the American proposal, which reportedly would have kept West Jerusalem in Israeli hands while offering the Palestinians an official headquarters in the Old City of East Jerusalem, some type of control short of sovereignty over some of the surrounding Arab neighborhoods as well as the two major mosques, plus the bizarre idea of "a new bridge allowing Palestinians unhindered access to the Muslim holy places from areas of their control to the east of the city" (NEW YORK TIMES, July 28).

After the talks broke down over this too-limited concession on Barak's part, some Palestinians boasted that Arafat had become nothing less than a new Saladin, the general who drove the Crusaders out of Jerusalem in 1187. Publicly, Arafat promised to hold out for the whole of East Jerusalem, presumably including even Judaism's most revered site, the Wailing Wall. (It abuts the city's prime Muslim religious site, the hill on which stands Al Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.) The normally pro-U.S. Arab leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia also publicly applauded Arafat's position.

Offstage, however, there was talk that the negotiations had not ended, but in fact just begun. The Palestinian Authority's top representative in Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, acknowledged quietly that the Israelis had broken new ground: "The taboo on opening the file on Jerusalem has vanished. This file has been opened, and we hope it will generate more discussion in the Israeli community and that we can reach a solution before Sept. 13. I don't believe this is the end" (NEW YORK TIMES, July 26).

Some type of division or sharing of Jerusalem acceptable to both Arabs and Jews would not only be the key factor in an overall settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it would also undermine the pretensions of terrorist and fundamentalist groups to be fighting for "Holy Jerusalem." An equally thorny issue is some type of settlement for the more than three million Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who are for the most part stateless.

On the Israeli side, the Likud and the religious fanatics are sharpening their knives against Barak for having dared to open up the question of Jerusalem at all. They are also girding to protect the Jewish settlements within the Palestinian territories. The most extreme of these fanatics revere the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who violated all notions of human solidarity by murdering 29 Muslims as they peacefully worshipped at a mosque in 1994. One of their number murdered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 because of his land for peace policies.

On the Arab side, demagogues point to Hezbollah's successful guerrilla war in Lebanon that helped dislodge the small Israeli-occupied zone there as the key to "liberating" Jerusalem as well, also threatening Arafat's life if he compromises over it.