2
I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the
valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my
people(ISRAEL) and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered
among the nations, and parted my land.(UPROOTED ISRAELIS AND DIVIDED
JERUSALEM)(THIS BRINGS ON WW3 BECAUSE JERUSALEM IS DIVIDED,WARNING TO
ARABS-MUSLIMS AND THE WORLD).
27 Fulfil her week, and we will give thee this also for the service which thou shalt serve with me yet seven other years.
28 And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week: and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife also.
29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid.
21
And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not
give the honour of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and
obtain the kingdom by flatteries.
23 And after the league made with
him he shall work deceitfully: for he shall come up, and shall become
strong with a small people.
24 He shall enter peaceably even upon the
fattest places of the province; and he shall do that which his fathers
have not done, nor his fathers' fathers; he shall scatter among them the
prey, and spoil, and riches: yea, and he shall forecast his devices
against the strong holds, even for a time.
26
And after threescore and two weeks(62X7=434 YEARS+7X7=49 YEARS=TOTAL OF
69 WEEKS OR 483 YRS) shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and
the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the
sanctuary;(ROMAN LEADERS DESTROYED THE 2ND TEMPLE) and the end thereof
shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are
determined.(THERE HAS TO BE 70 WEEKS OR 490 YRS TO FUFILL THE VISION AND
PROPHECY OF DAN 9:24).(THE NEXT VERSE IS THAT 7 YR WEEK OR (70TH FINAL
WEEK).
27 And he ( THE ROMAN,EU PRESIDENT) shall confirm the covenant
(PEACE TREATY) with many for one week:(1X7=7 YEARS) and in the midst of
the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease,(3 1/2
yrs in TEMPLE SACRIFICES STOPPED) and for the overspreading of
abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and
that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.
14 They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
11 For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
3
For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction
cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not
escape.
8 The highways lie waste, the wayfaring
man ceaseth: he hath broken the covenant,(7 YR TREATY) he hath despised
the cities, he regardeth no man.(THE WORLD LEADER-WAR MONGER CALLS
HIMSELF GOD)
14 Wherefore hear the word of the LORD, ye scornful men, that rule this people which is in Jerusalem.
15
Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell
are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through,
it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under
falsehood have we hid ourselves:
16 Therefore thus saith the Lord
GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a
precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not
make haste.
17 Judgment also will I lay to the line, and
righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge
of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.
18 And your
covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell
shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then
ye shall be trodden down by it.
19 From the time that it goeth forth
it shall take you: for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and
by night: and it shall be a vexation only to understand the report.
Between 1993 and 2001, the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) signed
six agreements with Israel and conducted countless meetings and summits
to bring about a lasting peace between them.Each
Israeli concession was met with Palestinian non-compliance and
escalating violence. Six times, Palestinians failed to honor their
commitments and increased their anti-Israeli aggressions. Finally, they
broke every promise they made and began an all-out guerrilla war against
Israel and its citizens.
The failure of the
Palestinian leadership to be earnest and trustworthy stands in stark
contrast to the statesmanship exhibited by Israel’s peace partners in
the region: the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the late
Jordanian King Hussein, both of whom honored their agreements.Although
Israel succeeded in reaching historic peace agreements with Egypt and
Jordan, when the time came to negotiate
with the Palestinians in the territories, the Israelis discovered the
Palestinian Arabs were unable or unwilling to choose peace or honor
their given word.Despite numerous agreements, the
pattern has always been the same: The Palestinian Arabs violate the
conditions and commitments of virtually every agreement they sign.
The Camp David Accords
The
1979 Camp David Accords brought peace between Israel and Egypt. Because
of Egypt’s key leadership role in the Arab world and the clauses in the
peace treaty relating to Palestinian autonomy, the Camp David Accords
were a breakthrough which offered a framework for a comprehensive
settlement. The Palestinian Arabs, however, failed to respond positively
to this window of opportunity.On March 26, 1979,
Israel and Egypt took the first step toward a peace agreement between
the Arab world and Israel when they signed the historic Camp David
Accords on the White House lawn. The name of the peace treaty reflected
the fact that the breakthrough between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat
and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin took place in September 1978
at the U.S. presidential retreat, Camp David. They were guests of U.S.
President Jimmy Carter, who acted as the facilitator. The summit took
place less than a year after Sadat made his historic trip to Israel and
addressed the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) in Jerusalem. That
symbolic act made Sadat the first Arab leader to recognize the Jewish
state’s right to exist, 30 years after Israel declared its independence.Peace
with Egypt consisted of two accords. One was the peace treaty between
Egypt and Israel, which finally ended the 1948 War with Egypt and
normalized diplomatic relations. In exchange, Israel withdrew from the
Sinai Peninsula captured during the Six-Day War, a war that begun when
Egypt imposed a blockade of the Straits of Tiran, dismissed the UN
forces serving as a buffer between Egypt and Israel, and moved its
troops into Sinai, massing on the Israeli border.The
second accord – and the more complicated of the two – dealt with
prospects for a comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East with
other parties – including ‘representatives of the Palestinian people.’
It established a ‘framework’ designed to settle such issues as the
future of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza, based on limited autonomy for the Palestinian Arabs living in the Territories.
By agreeing to conclude a separate peace with Israel, Sadat exhibited
tremendous courage and leadership by breaking with other Arab states, a
step that ultimately cost him his life.Despite the promise of self-rule proffered by the Camp David Accords – the first concrete
offer in decades – the PLO denounced them because they failed to call
for an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Other
Arab nations blasted the treaty and branded Sadat a traitor to the Arab
world. They imposed economic and political sanctions against Egypt,
suspended it from the Arab League, and ousted Egypt from the
Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The Madrid Conference
The
1991 Madrid Conference marked an important step forward: Israelis and
Arabs met face-to-face. For decades, the Arabs had refused to meet with
Israelis, their sworn enemies, in face-to-face negotiations. Little real
progress was made, except that negotiations with Jordan, renewed at a
later point, led to the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan.The
conference was sparked by the 1991 Gulf War. The U.S. Department of
State reasoned that cooperation between the United States and Arab
countries during that war signaled a change in the Middle East and
sought to use it as leverage to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. After
the Gulf War, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker pressed Israel and
its Arab neighbors to agree to an international conference to launch
direct negotiations between Israel and each of its Arab neighbors.Held
at the royal palace in Madrid, Spain, between October 30 and November
1, 1991, all parties accepted the 1979 Camp David Accords and two UN
resolutions: 242 – which set forth the principle of “land for peace,”
and 338 – which called for “direct negotiations” as the framework for
talks.Delegations from Israel, Syria, Lebanon and
Jordan attended. The Jordanian delegation included Palestinian Arab
representatives from the West Bank and Gaza who had not been involved in
terrorist activities (that is, they were not from
the Tunis-based PLO). The talks were to follow three ‘tracks’ – Syrian,
Lebanese, and Jordanian, culminating in peace treaties that would
resolve the issues, including the future boundaries of Israel, the status of the Territories and the populations – Jewish and Arab – living in them.The
Madrid Conference put in motion the process that led to a peace treaty
between Jordan and Israel, but it ultimately failed to produce results
on the Lebanese, Syrian, or Palestinian tracks. Talks with Syria led
nowhere. Talks with Lebanon, which put an Israeli withdrawal from the
security zone in southern Lebanon on the table in exchange for Lebanon’s
assurance of peace along Israel’s northern border, also failed. Those
peace efforts were undercut by Syria’s interference in Lebanese affairs
and its support of Hizbullah extremists, who continued to attack Israeli
forces in southern Lebanon. Although Israel was willing to discuss
limited self-rule for the Palestinians in the Territories, Palestinian
Arab delegates demanded full sovereignty over all of Judea, Samaria and
Gaza. However, they lacked authorization to speak for all Palestinian
Arabs and were given no latitude to deviate from the PLO’s hard-line
positions.
The Oslo Accords
The
1993 Oslo Accords marked a potential turning point, which dead-ended
when the Palestinian Arabs refused to live up to their commitments and
held to their zero-sum hard line, rejecting the very notion of
compromise.When attempts to reach a
live-and-let-live solution with Palestinians in the Territories failed
to produce results at Madrid, Israel decided to try the ‘PLO track’ as a
default option. Most Palestinians at the time and others in the Arab
world regarded the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian
people. It remained unclear whether the PLO could transform itself from a
terrorist organization into a responsible political body. Secret
negotiations culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords. In retrospect, it
is evident that the PLO was not earnestly seeking compromise; it was
only seeking a better base from which to continue attacking Israel.The
agreement signed by Israel and the PLO known as the Oslo Accords was
named for the secret talks held between the PLO and the Israeli envoys
in Oslo, Norway. The official agreement was titled the Declaration of
Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (the DoP is also
called “Oslo I” and the second was dubbed ‘Oslo II,’ though those
negotiations took place elsewhere).
At the time,
the Oslo Accords were viewed as a historic breakthrough in the
Arab-Israeli conflict, perhaps even more so than the agreement between
Egypt and Israel, because of its potential it held for a comprehensive
peace between Israel and the Arab world. Arab leaders had long
maintained that peace hinged on accommodations between Israelis and
Palestinian Arabs.The agreement was signed on the
White House lawn on September 13, 1993 by Israeli Foreign Minister
Shimon Peres and PLO Executive Council Member Abu Abbas in front of
almost 3,000 dignitaries and ended in the famous handshake between PLO
Chairman Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.After
three years of secret talks in Oslo, on August 31, 1993, the Israeli
government approved, in principle, a plan for interim self-rule in
Palestinian Arab communities in the West Bank and Gaza. On September 9,
Arafat sent a letter to Rabin stating for the first time that the PLO
recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and security. In his letter,
Arafat also renounced terrorism and other acts of violence, pledging to
repeal clauses in the PLO National Charter that called for Israel’s
destruction. In return, Rabin signed a letter recognizing the PLO as the
representative of the Palestinian people, accepting the PLO as a
negotiating partner.The Oslo Accords called for a
five-year interim period of Palestinian self-governance at the
municipal level, with the scheduling of negotiations on the permanent
status of the Territories to begin no later than the third year of the
interim period. Permanent status arrangements were to take effect at the
end of the five-year period. During that interim period, elections were
to be held in a newly established Palestinian Council or legislative
body. The Israeli military was to withdraw gradually from populated
Palestinian areas, while continuing to protect Israeli settlements in
the Territories. Israeli military control and civil administration in
Palestinian areas was to be transferred to authorized Palestinian Arabs
who would become responsible for a variety of functions, including
municipal services and the machinery to combat Palestinian terrorism
through a strong Palestinian police force and special counterterrorism
units. In short, Palestinian Arabs would take control of all their own
internal affairs. In the New York Times, the agreement was heralded as “a triumph of hope over history.”Two
more agreements intended to implement the Accords followed. The first –
the May 4, 1994 Gaza Jericho Agreement signed in Cairo - allowed Arafat
and the PLO to travel from Tunis to establish Palestinian autonomy in
two limited areas. This was designed to test the Palestinians’ and the
PLO’s intentions and set up a program for step-by-step extension of
autonomy under a Palestinian Authority that the PLO would establish. The
second – the August 29, 1994 Agreement on the Preparatory Transfer of
Powers and Responsibilities signed at the checkpoint between Gaza and
Israel - extended Palestinian self-rule over health, education, welfare
and additional fiscal affairs for all Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.The
first challenge Arafat faced was reining in Palestinians who refused to
abide by the agreement. Despite his pledge to crack down on terrorists,
Arafat failed the first test of leadership as a peace partner. In
retrospect, we can see it is a role he never planned to play. Instead of
confronting terrorists, he concluded a series of hudnas, or
tactical truces, with rival Islamic elements to prevent a showdown. That
led to a tacit division of labor where the PA covered the diplomatic
front and radical Islamic groups continued to carry out terrorist
attacks.Israel faced a “Trojan Horse,” an ancient
metaphor borrowed by PLO leaders while still in Tunis. The
Palestinians’ real intention was to destroy Israel, stage-by-stage,
using the Palestinian Authority to establish a platform from which they
could attack Israel. The scope of Palestinian terrorism following Oslo
escalated to unprecedented levels including systematic targeting of
civilians in wave after wave of suicide bombings. Incredibly, the number
of Israelis killed by terrorists in the two years following the signing
of “Oslo I” was equal to the number of casualties from terrorism in the
preceding decade.Israeli peace architects clung
to the hope that these were only temporary setbacks, birth pangs in a
breakthrough peace process. Jewish victims of suicide bombings, drive-by
shootings and other terrorist acts were labeled ‘victims of peace’ (korbanot hashalom
in Hebrew) by Israeli doves. Such Orwellian terminology could not mask
or change realities. The window of opportunity opened at Camp David and
Oslo, intended to demonstrate the Palestinians’ political maturity and
ability to self-govern, was slowly closing. The Palestinians’
perversions and outright violations of commitments, in spirit and
substance, grew steadily. Among the most blatant Palestinian violations
during the first two years of self-rule under “Oslo I” were:
· Failure to accept Israel’s existence: Constantly
referring (in Arabic) to a “phase strategy” designed to use
self-administered areas as a base of operations to destroy Israel;
comparing Oslo to a historic treaty made and broken by the Prophet
Mohammed once it was expedient; continuing to use maps, insignia, and
terminology presenting Israel proper as “Occupied Palestine”;
disseminating inflammatory and fallacious material that denied Jewish
nationhood and Jewish historic roots in the Land of Israel.
· Failure to take ‘all measures necessary against terrorism’:
Refraining from disarming lawless militias or even closing their
training camps; refusing to outlaw organizations that championed and
carried out terrorist acts (including Hamas and Islamic Jihad); seeking
reconciliation with such rivals who openly aided, abetted and carried
out terrorist acts - in essence, adopting a modus operandi that allowed some Palestinians to attack Israel while others negotiated.
· Failure to change the PLO Covenant: Using
a string of excuses and provisos to postpone the vote time and again so
that the pledge to remove from the PLO Covenant clauses denying
Israel’s right to exist was never fulfilled; likewise, failing to annul
clauses calling for an armed struggle to destroy Israel and the denial
of Israel’s right to exist.
· Failure to repudiate terrorism and violence and refrain from anti-Israeli propaganda: Constantly calling for a jihad (holy
war), praising terrorists as heroes and Hamas leaders as brothers,
while vilifying Israel in demonic, antisemitic terms on Palestinian
media channels; under self-governance, transforming public schools into
factories that inculcate hatred of Israel and Jews and nurture a ‘cult
of death’ in children, instead of promoting peace education as they
promised.
· Failure to extradite or discipline terrorists: Procrastinating
in arrest of suspected terrorists who found asylum in Palestinian
Authority areas; or apprehending them and then refusing to extradite
them to Israel; abusing the terms of the agreement that allowed the
Palestinian Authority to prosecute and sentence perpetrators by
conducting bogus ‘quickie trials’ and establishing jails with revolving
doors.
· Failure to abide by limitations placed on the Palestinian Authority’s police force: Failing
to provide Israel with a full list of police personnel and register all
weapons as required; accepting former terrorists into the force who
were specifically barred from serving under the terms of the agreement.
· Failure to respect human rights and the rule of law: Creating
a police state where the number of security personnel per capita
(police, preventive security personnel, etc.) was frightening in scope
and where strong arm tactics, torture, and intimidation of citizenry was
rampant and where lack of due process and lack of freedom of the press
for Palestinians was endemic.
· Failure to adopt transparent methods of funding and honest governmental procedures: Ignoring
the norms of honest governance they promised to uphold, misusing
foreign aid, resulting in widespread corruption and graft among
Palestinian Authority officials and governing institutions. Far from
improving average Palestinians’ standard of living, standards plummeted
under self-rule as Arafat and his cronies grew rich: Forbes magazine’s 17th
annual survey (2003) of the richest people in the world shows Arafat
has used his position to amass a personal fortune estimated at $300
million, stashed away in Swiss banks. Ranked among heads of state,
Arafat’s personal fortune was reported to be one notch below that of the
Queen of England.
The Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty
The
1994 Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty was made possible by the sense of
optimism created by Oslo. But the momentum did not carry over into peace
agreements with Syria, Lebanon … or the Palestinians.
Just
over a year after the historic Oslo Accords were signed, on October 26,
1994, Israel and Jordan signed a full peace treaty. As with the Oslo
Accords, secret talks were held beforehand between the two heads of
state, Israel’s Prime Minister Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein, who met
in Washington that summer and agreed to reopen bilateral negotiations
which had been suspended since the 1991 Madrid Conference.
The
primary drive behind Jordan’s overture was the hope for a peace
dividend. Jordan’s port on the Red Sea, Aqaba, had served as a primary
port for Iraqi imports and exports, but the international embargo on
trade with Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War dealt a crushing blow
to the Jordanian economy. Jordan hoped peace with Israel would bolster
its economy by increasing trade with Israel. It also anticipated that a
peace agreement would bring additional American aid (which it did). The
agreement meant peace along Israel’s longest border. In some respects,
it was the one agreement with an Arab state that could have been
predicted. Jordan remained neutral during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and
for most of its history had earnestly tried to prevent incursions into
Israel from Jordanian soil.King Hussein would no
doubt have made peace earlier if not for Jordan’s weak position in the
Arab world and Jordan’s problematic demographics. Palestinians, at
various junctures, have constituted 60 percent to 80 percent of the
Jordanian population, and many opposed peace with Israel. Indeed, a
Palestinian extremist assassinated Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah
in 1951, and two Jordanian prime ministers were assassinated for
favoring peace with Israel. Hussein and Rabin had developed a warm
relationship and a deep trust over the course of numerous unpublicized
meetings. To a large extent, peace with Jordan was a question of timing.Peace
with Jordan has been the most normalized and the warmest peace, despite
the fact that it was signed during an upsurge in Palestinian terrorism
and met considerable opposition by Jordan’s intelligentsia. Unlike
Arafat, Hussein boldly stood up for peace against the sentiments of many
of his own Palestinian subjects, personally making a condolence call to
the parents of children killed by a Jordanian soldier to ask
forgiveness, while Arafat vacillated between remaining mum and praising
the perpetrators of similar acts. Although dying of cancer, the king
even left his sickbed in a last attempt to use his good auspices to save
the fate of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Taba Agreement (“Oslo II”)
Despite
the Palestinian Authority’s failure to honor its commitments in “Oslo
I,” Israel decided to give the Palestinians a second chance in 1995 in
Taba, with an additional agreement (“Oslo II”) to concede territory and
move the peace process forward. The Palestinians responded by escalating
terrorism and adding new violations to a mounting list of unfulfilled
promises.The 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim
Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is often referred to as
“Oslo II” because it revised and reiterated a host of obligations set
forth in “Oslo I” that had never been fulfilled. It took the concept of
Palestinian autonomy forward by transferring more authority and land to
Palestinian rule. Despite growing uneasiness with Palestinian
non-compliance in honoring both the spirit and substance of the “Oslo I”
terms, Israel made a leap of faith by offering self-rule to the
overwhelming majority of Palestinians, assuming that once the PLO had
more territorial control (and more to lose), their dedication to peace
would improve.Also known as the Taba Agreement,
because it was signed in Taba, Egypt, on September 24, 1995, “Oslo II”
established a detailed schedule for further redeployment of Israeli
troops beyond the ‘Jericho and Gaza First’ enclaves – a process set in
motion by the 1993 Declaration of Principles.The agreement divided the
West Bank and Gaza into three zones, classified as Areas A, B and C:
· Area A:
Gaza and Jericho, as well as seven major Palestinian cities on the West
Bank, for which the Palestinian Authority took full responsibility,
including internal security and public order.
· Area B: 450
Arab towns and villages in the West Bank where the Palestinian
Authority took over civic functions, while Israel continued to control
security.
· Area C: Rural and
unpopulated areas of the West Bank that Israel considered strategically
important to its own defense; Israeli settlements in the Territories
also remained the exclusive responsibility of Israel, as set forth in
previous agreements.
The Palestinian Authority,
however, failed to comply with the terms of “Oslo I” listed above –
violations compounded by its non-compliance with the terms of ‘Oslo II,’
including major new violations:
· Failure to revise the Palestinian National Covenant: Arafat
made a travesty of his obligation in Gaza, when he pretended to annul
the Covenant in the presence of President Bill Clinton, in a manner
contrary to the process stipulated in the Covenant itself, by merely
staging a spectacle without legal validity.
· Failure to prevent terrorist attacks: Non-compliance
continued parallel to terrorist attacks. Failing to act, Palestinian
forces began to express openly their support of terrorists at
demonstrations by firing weapons in the air, then using those weapons to
threaten and even kill members of joint patrols. The most memorable
case was a two-day rampage in September 1996 when Palestinian police
turned their weapons against Israeli soldiers, leaving 13 members of the
Israel Defense Force dead.
· Failure to guarantee religious freedom:
Despite pledging to respect their integrity and provide free access to
Jewish holy sites in areas transferred to the Palestinian Authority,
Palestinians burned down the ancient Shalom al Yisrael (“Peace
Upon Israel”) synagogue in Jericho and smashed to rubble Joseph’s Tomb
on the outskirts of Nablus, declaring that a mosque would be built on
the site.
· Failure to limit the size and firepower of the Palestinian Authority police force: The
Palestinian Authority equipped its police force with massive quantities
of ammunition and contraband weaponry, the quantity and quality of
which was prohibited under the agreement. Between 1995 and 2000, the PA
violated the terms of the treaty by increasing the size of the force
from 36,000 to 40,000, vastly more than the 12,000 originally envisioned
as a ‘strong police force,’ and far above the 24,000 ultimately agreed
upon in “Oslo I” or the 30,000 Israel acquiesced to retroactively in
October 1995 in ‘Oslo II,’ hoping that a greater force would fight
terrorism. In essence, the Palestinian Authority built an infantry force
larger than that maintained by the IDF, a genuine military force (which
the Accords clearly prohibited) rather than a police force.
· Failure to halt terrorism: The
Palestinian Authority police force did not prevent terrorist acts
launched by Hamas and others. In September 2000 when Arafat launched
all-out guerrilla warfare against Israel, PA police turned into
combatants and Palestinian preventive security forces became terror
management operators, secretly directing and funding attacks on Israel
with money funneled from senior Palestinian Authority leaders.
Ultimately, the Palestinian police became perpetrators. In November 2000
an Israeli officer was murdered when Palestinian officials planted a
bomb against a wall separating joint Palestinian and Israeli offices,
used for synchronizing cooperative security details and transferring
essential goods and commodities to Palestinian civilians in the Gaza
Strip.
Five More Attempts to ‘Make Oslo Work’
From
January 1997 through August 2000, five more attempts to make Oslo work.
They included an Israeli withdrawal from 80 percent of Hebron, an
unprecedented offer of statehood and a proposal to give the Palestinians
about 95 percent of the West Bank in an attempt to hammer out a final
status agreement at Camp David.
Attempt #1: The 1997 Hebron Agreement
Hebron
was the last city in the West Bank to be turned over to Palestinian
control. It required a special arrangement because a major Jewish holy
site (the Tomb of the Patriarchs) is in the heart of the city and
because it is the only city on the West Bank where there is a modern
Jewish community (all seven other West Bank cities are purely
Palestinian). Hebron, along with Jerusalem, Safed and Tiberias, was one
of the four holy cities where religious Jews have lived from time
immemorial. That distinction changed in 1929 when Arab residents
massacred the Jewish community, killing 70, including entire families.
The British evacuated the 700 survivors to Jerusalem for safety and
never allowed Jews to rebuild the Hebron Jewish community. Four decades
later, after the 1967 Six-Day War, Jews resettled in Hebron. While most
of the returnees (approximately 5,000) live in a separate Israeli
community called Kiryat Arba just outside Hebron, 450 Jewish settlers
live in the center of the city – the site of the ancient Jewish
community near the Tomb of the Patriarchs – surrounded by some 150,000
Arab residents.Hebron required special
arrangements to mitigate tension caused by the city’s history of
violence and religious conflict. That included a massacre of 29 Muslim
worshippers in Hebron by a lone Israeli terrorist in 1994. Protocols
under the Hebron Agreement included temporarily stationing European
observers in Hebron on the seam between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods.
The provision for further negotiation and redeployment of Israeli
troops, included in the 1995 “Oslo II” Accords, was spelled out in the
Protocol Concerning Redeployment in Hebron signed on January 17, 1997.
It called for three phases to be carried out over a year’s time,
including an Israeli withdrawal from 80 percent of Hebron - though the
Palestinian Authority wanted a full withdrawal.Despite
a change of government in Israel as a result of the 1996 elections,
Israel’s commitment to withdraw from 80 percent of Hebron was honored by
the newly elected Likud-led government, despite continued Palestinian
violence and their continued non-compliance with previous obligations.Violence
erupted again when Palestinians protested the groundbreaking of a
Jewish housing project in Har Homa, overlooking East Jerusalem. Another
Palestinian suicide bombing in Tel Aviv became the last straw, and the
new Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, postponed further
withdrawals beyond Hebron. Among the added Palestinian violations to
earlier agreements was the PA’s release of Hamas terrorists from PA
prisons. Arafat had ordered Palestinian Authority police to stop
cooperating with their Israeli counterparts.
Attempt #2: 1998 Wye River Memorandum
The
Wye River Memorandum – so named because it was convened at the Wye
River Plantation in Maryland – was an effort by U.S. President Bill
Clinton to restart the peace process. Signed on October 23, 1998 by
Netanyahu and Arafat, it was intended to resolve issues of size and
timing of Israeli redeployment, which Israel had postponed due to the
Palestinian Authority’s failure to combat terrorism and comply with the
terms of earlier agreements. Netanyahu introduced the concept of
‘reciprocity’ at Wye River, refusing to offer more concessions until the
Palestinian Authority honored its commitments and stopped the violence.
The reciprocity principle was reflected in a ‘trade-off’ – restriction
of Jewish construction in West Bank settlements to accommodate only
natural growth in exchange for a Palestinian Authority pledge to defer
its threat to unilaterally declare statehood on May 4, 1999, the date
set by “Oslo I” set for concluding the peace process. Wye
called for a graduated 12-week exchange of ‘territory for security.’ The
Palestinian Authority promised to comply with past commitments and
rectify violations in exchange for a phased Israeli withdrawal from
another 13 percent of the West Bank. Yet the conditions of Wye were
never fully implemented.
Attempt #3: 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum
The
Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum, signed in Egypt on September 4, 1999, was
yet another effort to move the peace process forward by using pressure
from leaders of Arab countries that had already made peace with Israel.
Succeeding Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Arafat
signed the Memorandum in the presence of the new monarch of Jordan, King
Abdullah II and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in the presence of
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.The
peace process launched with the Oslo Accords in September 1993 had
ground to a halt, due largely to Palestinian non-compliance. That led to
the Israeli refusal to continue scheduled redeployments as long as its
Palestinian partners refused to abide by the agreements, particularly on
security issues. Final-status talks, originally scheduled to be
completed by May 4, 1999, were rescheduled under the Sharm el-Sheikh
Memorandum. The new date for completion was September 13, 2000. Both
sides agreed that a framework for a final status agreement would be
established by March 13, 2000, but that date came and went with a series
of working-level meetings and shuttle diplomacy that fell short of real
expectations.
Attempt #4: August 2000 Camp David ‘Final Status’ Summit.
When
Clinton summoned Barak and Arafat to Camp David in August 2000 for
final status talks, Israel made dramatic, unprecedented concessions on
virtually every point ever raised in the peace process, including all
the major stumbling blocks that had repeatedly defied solutions because
of Palestinian refusal to compromise.According to media reports, Barak made the following offer:
· Establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state on some 92 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip.
·
Dismantlement of most Jewish settlements; uprooting settlers from
isolated communities to concentrate the bulk of the settlers inside 8
percent of the West Bank along the Green Line, and annexing this area to
Israel in exchange for a transfer of 3 percent of land in Israel proper
adjacent to Gaza.
· Establishment of a
Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and sovereignty over half the Old
City of Jerusalem (the Muslim and Christian quarters) and ‘religious
custodianship’ over the Temple Mount; some Arab neighborhoods in
Jerusalem would become sovereign Palestinian territory, while others
would enjoy ‘functional autonomy.’
· A return of
Palestinian refugees to the prospective Palestinian state, although no
Right of Return to Israel proper would be allowed; generous
international assistance to help settle the refugees would be
encouraged.
In return, all Israel asked for were two ‘concessions’:
· An end to violence, and
·
A public declaration that the terms of the final settlement marked an
‘end of the conflict’ and that there would be no more Palestinian claims
or additional demands on Israel in the future.
The
offer went beyond long-standing Israeli ‘red lines,’ particularly with
regard to Jerusalem and a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.
Barak made it clear this was a one-time, now-or-never offer
that neither he nor any future Israeli leader would offer again. Yet
Arafat walked out, effectively shutting the door on permanent status
negotiations.According to a post-mortem analysis
of the Camp David summit conducted by the Jerusalem Center for Public
Affairs, the negotiations were governed by three attributes: They were hypothetical (pending agreement in other areas), oral, and conducted through a third party.
“Together, these attributes made Camp David more a ‘brainstorming’
session than formal negotiations in which the parties move from
paragraph to paragraph until they reached complete agreement.” Even Abu
Mazen admitted the proposals were no more than ‘test balloons.’ As
President Bill Clinton stated on July 25 (the day after the summit
closed), negotiations under such conditions could not bind either party
or be construed as a ‘starting point’ for future negotiations: “Under
the operating rules that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,
they are, of course, not bound by any proposal discussed at the summit.”
Arafat was aware of the rules of the game and the ‘now-or-never’
quality of the Israeli offer. Yet Arafat walked out, his actions
underscoring Palestinians’ refusal to seek compromise or reconciliation.Shortly thereafter, in September 2000, the al-Aqsa Intifada erupted. Subsequently, it became evident that this guerrilla war, launched by the Palestinians, was in the planning stages prior to
Camp David. It was accompanied by escalation of violence on all fronts,
including waves of suicide bombers, ambushes of civilian traffic on the
roads, shootings into Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and rocket
attacks from Gaza into civilian settlements in the Negev.
Michael
Oren, an Israeli scholar of the Six-Day War and other aspects of modern
Israeli history, summed up Camp David and the Palestinian position in
an article in the December 2001 issue of Harper’s magazine: Why did the Palestinians constantly ‘lose ground?’ Oren asked.The
peace process collapsed not over land but because of the Palestinians’
refusal to accept Israel’s existence. Historically, it has been that
refusal rather than Israel’s resistance to compromise that has led to
the Palestinians ‘losing ground.’ Cleaving to it will only cost them
more.Oren’s assessment of responsibility is backed up by Palestinian
pronouncements.In January 1996, Nabil Sha’ath, a
senior member of the PA leadership, considered a ‘moderate’ by Western
observers, told a gathering in Nablus:"We
decided to liberate our homeland step-by-step. Should Israel continue
[to make concessions] – no problem. If and when Israel says 'enough' we
will return to violence. But this time it will be with 30,000 armed
Palestinian soldiers…”On November 28, 1996, in an
official communiqué, Muhammad Dahlan, at that time the PA’s security
chief responsible for enforcing the 2003 hudna, reiterated:
“The Palestinian Authority does not exclude the return to the armed struggle, and it will use its weapons.”The term hudna
in Arabic refers to a temporary breather for tactical reasons, not a
peace pact. Should negotiations ever resume in earnest, the Arabs will
no doubt claim that negotiations should begin ‘from the point where
negotiations broke off,’ but there is absolutely no foundation for such a
claim.
Attempt #5: 2001 Taba Conference
In 2001 – in the midst of Arafat’s War, the al-Aqsa Intifada,
a last-ditch attempt was made to end hostilities, renew security
cooperation and at least theoretically, re-open negotiations. Yet the
Palestinians balked again. Against the backdrop of continued Palestinian
violence from the Intifada and with Israeli elections only a
few weeks away, Israeli and Palestinian delegations met one last time at
the Egyptian Red Sea resort at Taba between January 22 and January 28,
2001. The Clinton administration had tried unsuccessfully to end the
Arab violence and bridge the gaps between the two sides with talks in
Washington in December 2000.With Clinton out of
office and George W. Bush just days into his presidency, marathon talks
were held at Taba. Israeli PM Barak hoped for a breakthrough peace
agreement that would boost his election chances against Ariel Sharon.
Four committees were created to discuss Jerusalem, refugees, territory,
and security, the key aspects of the peace negotiations. The Barak
government offered more concessions to the Palestinian Arab
delegation, but the Palestinians failed to budge from an
‘all-or-nothing’ stance. Negotiations centered on these issues:
· Jerusalem:
Israel proposed creating an international regime in an area of
Jerusalem that included the Old City, but the Palestinian Arabs rejected
this, saying they wanted sovereignty over the entire city.
· Territories: Israel proposed giving the Palestinian Arabs 97 percent of the land area of the West Bank, yet no agreement was reached.
· Refugees:
The two sides discussed the Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 and
the Jews who left Arab countries in the aftermath of the 1948 War of
Independence. Palestinians insisted on the Right of Return of all
Palestinian Arabs to Israel – a non-starter that would demographically
liquidate the Jewish state.
· Security:
In return, Israel asked for: 1) an end to violence, and 2) a public
declaration that the final status agreement would mark an ‘end of the
conflict’ and there would be no more claims on Israel in the future.
The
Palestinians preferred armed struggle. A Palestinian state in the West
Bank was viewed as a prelude to a Palestinian state from the Jordan
River to the Mediterranean Sea. Violence continued, despite American
efforts to mediate a truce.
What Can be Learned from a Post-Mortem of the Oslo Peace Process?
In
the two decade that passed since the historic handshake between Arafat
and Rabin in 1993, optimistic expectations turned out to be unfounded.The
idea that negotiations, gradual empowerment, and a transfer of
territory - ‘hope’ and ‘something to lose’ - would prompt the
Palestinians to opt for reconciliation and abandonment of such unbending
principles as the Right of Return never translated into reality.
Israeli concessions only hardened Palestinian positions.In
the wake of Israel’s last-ditch effort to save the peace process, and
24 hours after Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Ben-Ami tried to
mitigate the gap by optimistically announcing that peace was
nevertheless within the parties’ grasp, Arafat responded with a speech
at the Davos World Economic Forum on January 28, 2001 that symbolically
buried the Oslo Accords for good.In a bellicose
diatribe filled with lies and venom, he accused Israel of “fascist
aggression” while the Palestinians continued their massive onslaught on
Israeli civilians and service personnel. For Barak, this was the last
straw: the Prime Minister announced he would not meet with Arafat again
before elections (which he lost to Sharon, anyway).Barak’s
political fate was reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s response when Arafat
called the outgoing president to thank him for his efforts on behalf of
peace: "You are a great man," Arafat told Clinton, three days before the
U.S. president left office, according to Newsweek. "The hell I
am,” Clinton replied. “I'm a colossal failure and you made me one." The
exchange was reportedly described at a New York dinner party where
Clinton went on to characterize Arafat as an aging leader who relishes
his own sense of victimhood and his incapability to sign a final peace
deal. "He could only get to step five, and he needed to get to step 10,"
Clinton said, laying the blame entirely at Arafat's door.
Refusal to Negotiate in Good Faith
The
Palestinians’ refusal to negotiate in good faith shows that they are
more interested in perpetuating war with Israel than in finding a way to
peacefully live with their Jewish neighbors.The
leaders of Egypt and Jordan took bold steps toward peace, transcending a
history of refusal to recognize Israel. Their brethren living in the
West Bank and Gaza, however, have refused to exhibit similar courage.
Given repeated chances to return to the negotiating table, offered
unprecedented tangible concessions by Israeli governments, both Right
and Left, the Palestinians refuse to live in peace with Israel. Instead
they create obstacle after obstacle and adopt terror as their means of
communication with their Israeli neighbors.Failing
to make political gains through three years of guerrilla warfare and a
decade of violence, Palestinians, under the short-lived premiership of
Abu Mazen, seemed to have returned to a more subtle form of their
phase-strategy. They demanded Israel release all Palestinians
apprehended for terrorist activities - as if terror never happened. This
behavior is reminiscent of Palestinian demands in 1948 - that Israel
ignore the war of aggression launched by Palestinians. The change of
tactics did not mean acceptance of Israel and abandonment of the Right
of Return, only a reversal to that strategy by a different and longer
route.This moderate Munich-style view – to
achieve an independent state and then continue to make further demands –
was expressed by the late Faysal al-Husseini (considered by many
Israeli doves to be a moderate), who, several months after the outbreak
of the Intifada, told a forum of Arab lawyers in January 2001 in Beirut:“There
is a difference between the strategic goal of the Palestinian people,
who are not willing to give up even one grain of Palestinian soil, and
the political [tactical] effort that has to do with the [present]
balance of power and with the nature of the present international
system. The latter is a different effort from the former. We may lose or
win [tactically], but our eyes will continue to aspire to the strategic
goal, namely, to Palestine from the river to the sea. Whatever we get
now cannot make us forget this supreme truth.”Dr.
Boaz Ganor, executive director of the International Policy Institute
for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, stresses that Palestinian acceptance
of the 2003 “road map” (proposed by the United States, the UN, the
European Union and Russia) amounted to part of the ‘strategy of stages’
meant to lead to the eventual elimination of Israel, though not
necessarily by violent means alone. That strategy, according to Ganor,
is built on a three-phase approach, starting with the establishment of
an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip;
followed by the overthrow of the Hashemite regime in Jordan whose
population consists of a vast Palestinian majority; and ending with the
unification of both banks of the Jordan River. The third stage would be
“a change of rhetorical tacks” from claiming that Israel is a conquering
colonialist state to branding Israel a racist ‘apartheid’ state that
must become ‘a state of all its citizens,’ eliminating Israel as a
Jewish state.
Others believe the last stage will
be a wholesale military assault on Israel, once the Arabs have gained a
strong enough foothold in western Palestine. In either case, the result
is not peace, but rather a recipe for policide or the death of the only
free, democratic state in the Middle East.
Palestinian Arab leaders lack the courage, the integrity and the political maturity required for statehood.
Scrutiny of Palestinian behavior
prior to
the 1993 Oslo Accords indicates that this impasse is not a quirk or
temporary stumbling block. Unfortunately, the Palestinians’ current
behavior, the Palestinian Authority’s failure to live up to its promises
and its insistence on a winner-take-all solution using indiscriminate
terrorism to achieve its objectives, rests on a long tradition of
rejectionism that has stymied countless attempts to find a
live-and-let-live solution. A philosophy of rejectionism has been played
out through a combination of uncompromising diplomacy and repeated use
of violence, time and again,
over a period of more than 90 years.The
process set in motion by the Camp David Accords with Egypt, that
ultimately led to the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, never did
bring an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict through face-to-face
negotiations.Palestinians’ dogged pursuit of a
winner-take-all solution designed to destroy Israel, using violence and
rejecting any form of compromise, have stymied all attempts to solve
substantive issues between the parties.The
Palestinians have consistently failed to ‘walk the walk’ – breaking
commitment after commitment as well as promise after promise and
draining agreement after agreement and memorandum after memorandum of
meaning.Only the late Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat and the late Jordanian King Hussein had the courage and
earnestness to pursue peace. Palestinian Arab leaders lack the courage,
the integrity and the political maturity required for statehood,
employing the same rejectionism Palestinian Arabs have exhibited for
over 90 year.For article with complete footnotes and sources, see the
author's website.
