CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In 1989 the Berlin wall was torn down. Communism collapsed in Europe and the Soviet Russian empire disintegrated. This was seen as the end of the Cold War and something that had been achieved by the diplomacy of individuals and negotiation. The reunification of Germany followed. In the early 1990s the Whites in South Africa abdicated, and the ending of apartheid was marked by what was described as a miracle, the peaceful election of a government based on one man one vote. The Arab–Israeli conflict looked increasingly like a relic from a past era.
The American-Israeli special relationship
On 11 September 1990, in a speech before Congress, President George Bush called for a ‘new world order’. With the conclusion of the Gulf War, it seemed that the bedrock of that order was a world guided by only one superpower, the United States, and that the experience of leading the coalition during the Gulf War might lead the United States to impose solutions on other conflicts and implement the pax Americana. This could include the Arab–Israeli conflict. Bush’s insistence, on 6 March 1991, on the principle of territory for peace was seen as even-handed, particularly in view of the perceived special relationship that had evolved between the United States and Israel going back to Truman’s role in the creation of the state of Israel, and a strategic connection initiated by the Kennedy administration that had evolved during the Nixon incumbency to a principle that Israel served American strategic interests in the Middle East and was a bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence. Reagan had formalized and institutionalized the military, economic and political aspects of the strategic relationship between Israel and the United States.1 From 1967 to 1998 American financial aid to Israel amounted to $82 bn: from 1976 Israel annually received more foreign aid from the United States than any other recipient; it was also the largest cumulative recipient since the Second World War. For most of the 1990s, in the estimate of the Congressional Research Service, Israel received from the United States a further $1 bn every year from tax-free contributions from Jewish sympathizers, another $1 bn from short- and long-term commercial loans, and another $1 bn from Israel bonds proceeds. The Congressional Research Service acknowledged that there was no means of establishing how Israel used American aid. In the late 1990s American aid to Israel amounted to $5,500 per head while the equivalent amount of aid to the Palestinian Authority was $41.60.2
Although the American Jewish community numbered only around 6 million, or around 2.4 per cent of the population of the United States, the pro-Israeli establishment in the United States continued to exercise a disproportionate and decisive influence through the electoral process in the 1990s. In the 1992 presidential election, for instance, nine states with large Jewish populations – California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania – held 202 presidential election votes of the 270 required for victory. The successor to the American Palestine Committee of the 1940s, the body which had used the electoral process to blackmail successive American administrations to further the Zionist cause, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), originally a small organization which discreetly lobbied congress, had expanded in the 1980s, against the background of a Likud government in Israel, to become an organization with a mass membership of 55,000. The Zionist lobby in the United States continued to be assisted by a sympathetic mass media, an evolving coalition between pro-Israeli activists and the right-wing Christian evangelical movement to which many Republican congressmen belonged, and a perception of Islamist militancy as presaging an attack by Islam on the West. The Palestinians in the United States were concentrated in Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles, and by the 1980s only numbered around 200,000.3
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, at the time of Bush’s suggestions for conditions for peace between Israel and the Arab states, the increasing importance of the United Nations and the possibility that the Security Council might impose a solution on the Middle East were thought by some to move Israel towards considering peace. But the United States remained Israel’s loyal ally and continued to exercise its veto. Israel continued to establish Jewish settlers on the West Bank. The number of settlers, excluding those in East Jerusalem, rose from 80,000 in 1990 to around 140,000 in 1998.4 At the same time there was a dramatic change in the population of Israel itself. It is estimated that nearly a million Jews emigrated to Israel from Soviet Russia from the late 1980s onwards. While some observers felt that these immigrants added new vitality to the Zionist state, others remarked on the difficulties created by their lack of inclination to identify with Israeli culture, and according to the psephologists they were responsible for the election of Benjamin (Binyamin) Netanyahu of the Likud to power in May 1996. The Russian immigrants reversed the depopulation of Israel evident in the 1980s as many Israelis left to settle in the United States.5 This immigration helped to reverse a demographic trend: some Israeli authorities suggest the greater birth rate of the Israeli Arabs and the falling birth rate of the Israeli Jews could lead within a few decades to an Arab majority within the boundaries of Israel; others argue that if Israel retains the occupied territories, by early this century the number of Palestinian Arabs under Israeli rule will be greater than the number of Israeli Jews.6 The mass immigration of Russian and other Jews to Israel has aroused Palestinian fears that Israeli development requirements mean that Palestinians will lose their fair share of water, as well as presaging further land expropriations.7
Israeli commentators, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, have pointed to the strategic lesson that if an Arab ruler wanted to start a war, an Israeli deterrent might not be enough.8 Some have argued that it was Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons that brought the Arabs to the peace table. Israel’s nuclear capability was internationally acknowledged, and in November 1994 Jane’s Intelligence Review revealed locations of Israel’s nuclear facilities.9 Israel’s security was referred to specifically by Netanyahu in a speech to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel in 1998: ‘If we are to have peace, then Israel must have secure and defensible boundaries. And these are things that we will never, ever give up.’10 The 1980s and 1990s, however, saw the rise of a group of ‘new historians’ or ‘revisionist’ Israeli historians who challenged what they saw as the ‘Zionist narrative’ of Israeli history, and in particular singled out Israeli security as ‘a central “myth” to be debunked’. A critic of this school has, however, asserted that ‘the Palestinian tragedy was not an inevitable outcome of the Zionist dream but primarily a self inflicted disaster by their own extremist and short-sighted leadership which consistently rejected all compromise solutions’. Furthermore the Palestinians and Arabs, in the view of this critic, ‘do bear responsibility for the extermination of Jews in Nazi Europe … because their outright hostility to Jewish return to their ancestral homeland cowered the British authorities into imposing severe restrictions in Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine … when the scope of the European Jewish tragedy was becoming increasingly evident’.11
In the post Cold War era, the Nazi extermination of the Jews continued to be used to justify the existence of the State of Israel.12 Netanyahu, in a speech marking Israel’s fiftieth anniversary, said that ‘if the State of Israel had not been founded after the Holocaust, the Jewish future would have been imperilled’.13 Herut and later Likud’s emphasis on the traumas of the Holocaust, even though the survivors had been treated with suspicion and even contempt on their arrival in Israel (as Netanyahu acknowledged by implication when he spoke at Auschwitz death camp in Poland in April 1998), gave Israel a prominence in Western consciousness stimulated by a possible guilt over actions and inactions taken during the Holocaust.14 At the time the peace process was being negotiated, a film directed by Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List, gave emphasis yet again to the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis.15 This film probably bolstered the Zionist cause as much as the film Exodus had in the lead-up to the June 1967 War.
Islamism, the Arab states, and the aftermath of the Gulf War
Edward W. Said, the American academic and spokesman for the Palestinian cause, has observed that ‘probably the most serious psychological obstacle preventing close and fair political scrutiny of Palestinianism is … the heavy emotional pressure of the Holocaust’. Said concedes that every civilized person has to submit to this pressure, but argues that it should not ‘inhibit anyone’s political rights, particularly those of people who are absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity’, and insists that ‘no Arab feels any of the sort of guilt or shame that every Westerner (apparently) feels, or is impelled to show he is feeling, for that horrible chapter in history’. For Arabs it is acceptable to make comparisons between the Israeli and German occupations. Said, himself, makes comparisons between Israel’s ‘practice of apartheid on the West Bank and Gaza’ and Nationalist South Africa, and points out that liberal and socialist intellectuals did not apply the same criticism to Israel as they did to South Africa. Possibly, partly because of the Holocaust, Israel has always been regarded as a special case.16
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Palestinians on the West Bank found that the little financial support that had come from the PLO, and the Arab world generally, dwindled to nothing. Saudi Arabia reduced its payment to the PLO after Arafat’s embrace of Saddam Hussein, and made resumption of aid conditional on a public apology.17 Increasing numbers moved away from the PLO towards supporting HAMAS, and this change of allegiance alarmed not only Israelis, who possibly thought it might be better to try to reach an accord immediately with the PLO rather than face the prospect of having to negotiate later with the fundamentalist or Islamist (the word increasingly supplanting ‘fundamentalist’) HAMAS, but also the sheikhs and ruling classes in the Arab world. The latter saw a ruined Iraq, shaken states in the Gulf, Libya attacked by the Western powers, a disintegrating Lebanon, and Algeria, Yemen, Egypt and even possibly Tunisia threatened by Islamism. Pan-Arabic aspirations, shattered by the June 1967 War, seemed to have been completely eclipsed and replaced by individual Arab leaders attempting to impose hegemony. It has been claimed that Islamists were emboldened by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and saw Allah’s hand in the collapse of an ungodly and materialist order. Arafat was deserted by previous allies who had supported the coalition against Iraq. The PLO lost its main financial and political backing from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states. As Palestinian workers were expelled from these states, sources of revenue for those living on the West Bank diminished. The intifada acquired a new complexion with the increasing number of executions of Palestinians by other Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. But Arab countries continued to point to the disparity of the enforcement of United Nations resolutions against Iraq, and the lack of any serious efforts to ensure Israeli compliance to Resolutions 242 and 338. The United States was also conscious of its debts to Arab countries for their support during the Gulf War.18
The Madrid Conference
This combination of factors led to the convening of a peace conference at Madrid on 30–31 October 1991. Initially, on 18 July, President Asad of Syria, weakened in the post Cold War situation in that he could no longer rely on his Russian ally, agreed to direct negotiations with Israel on the basis of a comprehensive peace settlement based on Resolution 242 after a meeting with James A. Baker, the American Secretary of State. Washington and Moscow then announced on 31 July that they would act as joint chairmen of a Middle East peace conference to be scheduled for October 1991, which United Nations and European Community representatives would attend as observers. The Russian role was largely symbolic as its empire was due to crumble with the collapse of communism. Israel, on 4 August, agreed to attend, but on the condition that it had a veto over the composition of any Palestinian negotiating team. At the same time as the acceptance by Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon of the American proposals, Israel inaugurated a new settlement on the West Bank. The Israeli threat to veto a Palestinian delegation that included residents of East Jerusalem led to disputes amongst the Palestinians. The solution was a compromise that the Palestinian delegation should include an advisory body made up largely of East Jerusalem residents. The invitation to the peace conference envisaged an opening session to be followed by direct talks between Israel and the Jordanian–Palestinian delegation, aimed at achieving a five-year interim period of Palestinian self-government, and between Israel and its other neighbours, Syria and Lebanon.
Baker headed the American diplomatic team. The chief American diplomat was Dennis Ross of the State Department’s policy department: a Democrat and Jewish, he was regarded as capable of standing up to Israel. Bush’s personal adviser was Richard N. Haass, an American academic, later renowned for his view that the Arab–Israeli conflict was not yet ready for solution. The Palestinians presented a more acceptable image to those in the West suspicious of Arafat with one of their representatives, Hanan Ashrawi, a Professor of English Literature at Birzeit University. Ashrawi, articulate, urbane, photogenic and eminently reasonable, was also a Palestinian Christian. She could have been selected by a media company to improve the Palestinians’ standing and acceptability. Together with another Palestinian representative, Feisal Husseini, the grandson of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, she became a media star.
In effect little was achieved at Madrid. Shamir offered no prospect of withdrawal from the occupied territories, and the Arabs insisted that there could be no peace without territorial compromise. But the Palestinians did have the same time as the other Arab delegations to make representations, and so achieved a procedural victory. The Palestinians also accepted that a period of autonomy could precede self-determination in the occupied territories.19
Immediately after the Madrid conference, President F. W. de Klerk of South Africa visited Israel: it was thought that Israel had jointly tested a nuclear weapon with South Africa.20 Israel’s international standing was also enhanced when, on 16 December 1991, the General Assembly repealed its Resolution 3379 of 1975 which had denounced Zionism as ‘a form of racism and racial discrimination’. This was on the initiative of Bush who, on 23 September 1991, had asked the General Assembly to repeal its denunciation of Zionism: ‘Zionism is not a policy; it is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people, to the state of Israel. And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history. To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself – a member of good standing of the United Nations.’ The Arab states opposed the repeal and argued that it would encourage Israel to continue settlement in the occupied territories.21
Following an American initiative further negotiations started in Washington on 4 December 1991. The Israeli delegation arrived late, and refused to negotiate on Palestinian issues other than with a team under Jordanian auspices. At this conference it was leaked that the Israeli government had approved a programme of Jewish settlement in the Arab areas of East Jerusalem, continuing the 1991 programme of building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the largest programme for twenty-five years. The Palestinians thought that the Israeli delegation was trying to revive what Peres had called the Jordanian option, a policy of territorial compromise over the West Bank negotiated with King Hussein under which most of the West Bank would come under Jordanian control under a sort of condominium between the West Bank and Jordan following a redrawing of Israel’s eastern borders.22 This also had overtones of the assertion that Jordan constituted Arab Palestine, which had been made by Golda Meir, Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin amongst others.23 At renewed talks on 16 January 1992, Israel dropped its objections to separate Palestinian representation, and insisted that Jewish settlements in the occupied territories did not affect the autonomy talks and could only be negotiated when the final status of the territories was decided. At the end of January eleven states attended multilateral regional talks in Moscow. As the Americans issued invitations to the plenary sessions only to Palestinians who came from Gaza and the West Bank and excluded those from Jerusalem and the Diaspora, the Palestinian delegation refused to attend. In February, however, Baker made a complete halt to Israeli settlement in the occupied territories a condition for an American guaranteed loan of $10,000m for the settlement of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
A fifth round of bilateral talks took place in Washington in the shadow of an Israeli election campaign initiated by the resignation of the far-right Moledet and Tehiya parties from the Israeli government over the discussion of Palestinian autonomy in the occupied territories. The proposal made by the Israelis at these talks of phased municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza was later described by a Palestinian delegate, Hanan Ashrawi, as ‘a dead end’.
In the Israeli elections held on 23 June the Likud was defeated; Labour made unexpectedly large gains. The Russian immigrants punished Likud for its failure to secure the American loan guarantees; it was estimated that 47 per cent of the immigrants voted for Labour, and only 18 per cent for the Likud. Yitzhak Rabin became Prime Minister and Shimon Peres was chosen as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Labour victory was welcomed in the West as it was thought that it would accelerate the peace process. It was also received with some optimism in Arab capitals. Islamic and left-wing Palestinian factions, however, feared that the autonomy proposals might be successful, and divisions between Al-Fatah and Hamas led to internecine fighting. In October, Washington, in a sign of support for Rabin, granted the $10,000m to house the immigrants from the former Soviet Union. This followed Rabin’s cancellation of 6,000 houses and flats which had been planned for construction in the occupied territories. Work, however, continued on another 10,000 homes already under construction. The eighth round of bilateral Israeli negotiations in Washington was interrupted on 16 December by the deportation by Israel of 415 alleged Hamas members to Lebanon in response to the deaths in the occupied territories of five members of the Israeli security forces and the murder by Hamas of an Israeli border policeman. Lebanon refused to accept them, and the deportees were left in freezing conditions in no-man’s land. Two days later the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved Resolution 799 demanding the return of those deported. For the following few months Palestinians insisted on the full implementation of this resolution as a condition of resuming negotiations.24
Bush and his officials were seen as having exerted more pressure on Israel than any previous American administration. In the run up to the presidential election of November 1992, Bush seemed to dismiss pressure from the Zionist lobby, which he thought anyway was composed mainly of Democratic voters. His linking of an American loan to the freezing of settlements helped the Democrat candidate, Bill Clinton, to win overwhelming Jewish support. Bush’s share of the Jewish vote fell to less than half of the 37 per cent he had received in the 1988 election.25 Many of the administration’s Middle East officials stayed on in the new administration; many were Democrats anyway. At the outset, Clinton continued Bush’s Middle East policy. Israel was put under pressure again, and Warren Christopher, the new Secretary of State, was able to announce on 12 February 1993 that the deported Palestinians would be allowed to return by the end of 1993. Madeleine Albright was appointed as United States ambassador at the United Nations. Of Czechoslovakian-Jewish origin, she has explained that her ‘mind-set is Munich’ and that the defining event of her political life was what she considered Neville Chamberlain’s betrayal in 1938. While ambassador, she distinguished herself by taking pro-Israeli stances and repeatedly exercized the American veto to protect Israel.26 In February 1993 she warned that Washington would veto any move to impose sanctions on Israel. The following month Israel sealed off the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after outbursts of violence between Palestinians and Israeli security forces in the occupied territories. On 27 April the ninth round of bilateral Middle East negotiations resumed in Washington. The Palestinians agreed to attend under pressure from Arab governments, and only after Israel allowed Feisal Husseini from East Jerusalem to take part. But Husseini resigned following a testimony by Edward Djerejian, the Assistant Secretary of State, to the Congressional foreign affairs subcommittee on the Middle East that there was no objection to Israel using the American loan guarantees to finance the ‘natural growth’ of existing Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.27
The Oslo Accords
While the resumed Middle East negotiations were taking place in Washington, secret talks were under way near Oslo, Norway, between the Israelis and the PLO. Following contacts between Israeli academics and the PLO, and mooted before the Israeli general election at a meal in Tel Aviv between Yossi Beilin, an Israeli Labour politician and Deputy Foreign Minister, and a Norwegian, Terje Larsen, the founder of the Norwegian Institute for Applied Science, an organization involved in alleviating Gaza’s chronic social problems, these communications developed from January 1993 into secret talks between a Palestinian delegation under Ahmed Kore’i, better known as Abu El Ala, and Beilin.28 The Palestinian delegation proposed an interim accord based on the idea that Israeli withdrawal should begin with Gaza. Peres claimed credit for originating the idea of ‘Gaza first’ in 1980. Arafat, after his plane crash on 20 April 1992, was apparently consumed with fears of mortality. Dreading that he would die before he saw his dream of Palestine fulfilled, the Palestinian leader had become a man in a hurry. He was also worried that the Americans might want to replace his leadership with that of the more congenial and acceptable Hanan Ashrawi. Edward Said has criticized the PLO for negotiating in complete secrecy and in English, a language in which Arafat and his negotiators were not proficient, and also for having no legal adviser present. Arafat and his subordinates faced Israeli Foreign Ministry experts. Arafat, however, did insist that the agreement should be checked by Taher Shash, an Egyptian ambassador and legal expert who had been a member of the Egyptian team at the Camp David talks, and also had been assigned to the Palestinian delegations at the Madrid conference and the Washington talks. Shash found that the legal language needed only minor corrections, but observed that although the document was Camp David or worse, Arafat was unlikely to have been able to get any more.
Agreement was reached at Oslo for staged Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and for mutual recognition. On 30 August 1993 the Israeli Cabinet unanimously approved the Oslo Accords, but Likud warned that they constituted the foundation of a Palestinian state, and that when in power it would not honour the agreement. Addressing the Knesset, Netanyahu compared the Oslo agreement to Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. The Al-Fatah Central Committee supported the Oslo Accords, but they were rejected by Hamas and by many Palestinians in the Diaspora.29 Said publicly condemned this transformation of the PLO from a national liberation movement to a municipal council. By early September, however, Arafat had secured the support of Mubarak and King Hussein for the Oslo Accords. The Gulf Co-operation Council also gave them a qualified endorsement. Asad, however, objected that the Accords would make an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon less likely; President Rafik Hariri of Lebanon warned that Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to settle permanently in Lebanon.
In Tunis, on 9 September, without the necessary two-thirds majority of the Palestine National Council needed for any change to the Palestine National Covenant, Arafat signed a letter formally renouncing those provisions which denied Israel’s right to exist. The same day Rabin signed a letter to the effect that Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.
The Oslo Accords, or Declaration of Principles as they were officially known, were signed by Peres, the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Mahmud Abbas, the PLO spokesman on foreign policy, in Washington on 13 September. Orchestrated by Clinton, Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn. The Declaration of Principles outlined the provisions for Palestinian self-rule for the Gaza Strip and Jericho on the West Bank, and for Israeli sovereignty over the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, as an interim stage, with negotiations on permanent settlement to follow after two years. The talks on permanent settlement, including the status of East Jerusalem, were scheduled to start by 13 December 1995 and the permanent settlement was to take effect from 13 December 1999.
Following this, on 15 September, Israeli and Jordanian representatives in Washington signed an agreement on an agenda for negotiations. A PLO–Israeli joint liaison committee met for the first time on 13 October, and agreement was reached to meet frequently to monitor the implementation of the Declaration of Principles. Developments stalled, however, on 13 December with the failure to negotiate details of Israel’s military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho: Israel refused to give in to PLO insistence that Palestinians should control border crossings as that could imply recognition of Palestinian sovereignty. Following the resumption of bilateral negotiations in Washington between Syria and Israel in January 1994, seen by Washington as the key to Middle East peace, Israel and the PLO, under the Cairo Declaration of February 1994, agreed to share control of two future international border crossings, but with Israel controlling access routes to Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.30 It had become increasingly obvious that the proposed Palestinian Authority would be made responsible for protecting Israel against acts by Palestinians. Doubts were expressed as to whether the Declaration of Principles had obscured any reality of a Palestinian state that had been proclaimed in 1988.31
The Hebron massacre
On 25 February 1994 Baruch Goldstein, a member of Kach, massacred twenty-nine worshippers in the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron. This was followed by widespread unrest in the occupied territories, and among Israeli Arabs: a further thirty-three Palestinians were killed. Jordan, Lebanon and Syria suspended participation in the peace process. Palestinians demanded the disarming of Jewish settlers and the dismantling of settlements. The Security Council, on 10 March, adopted Resolution 904, which condemned the Hebron massacre and urged protection for the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Washington, however, abstained from approving two paragraphs which referred to Jerusalem and the territories seized in 1967 as ‘occupied Palestinian territory’. This abstention was justified by Madeleine Albright on the grounds that Washington did not want to prejudice the course of the final status negotiations. It was, however, viewed by the Palestinians as a departure by the Clinton administration from previous American assurances that Washington regarded all of the 1967 territories as ‘occupied’.
On 6 April seven Israelis were killed by a car bomb in Afula, and a week later five were killed in Hadera. Hamas claimed responsibility for these killings as a retaliation for the Hebron massacre. Al-Fatah and Hamas also agreed to stop clashes between their factions for a month in Gaza. Hanan Ashrawi and Feisal Husseini demanded that all the settlers should be disarmed. A beleaguered Arafat was forced to continue to negotiate a settlement with Israel. The signing in Cairo on 4 May by Israeli and Palestinian officials of an autonomy agreement for Gaza and Jericho was marked by confusion over the size of the Jericho enclave, and led to renewed criticism of Arafat as an autocratic leader. Between 10 and 17 May the Israeli Defence Force handed over to the Palestinian forces in Jericho and Gaza.
That month Israel once again also offered to withdraw from the Golan Heights over a period of between five and eight years if peace and normal relations could be established with Syria. Warren Christopher talked extensively to Asad in Damascus about this possibility. But it seemed that the Rabin government was moving towards the right: on 25 May Israelis kidnapped Mustafa al-Dirani, a leader of the Hezbollah resistance organization in Lebanon supported by Iran, and later attacked an Hezbollah camp in the Bekaa valley.
At the international donors’ conference held in Washington in October 1993 countries had pledged $2,300m to the Palestinians. During June 1994 these donors agreed to release $42m to help establish a Palestinian administration. This move came against the background of financial chaos in the autonomous territories, and difficulties experienced by Arafat in making appointments to the Palestinian Authority, at a time when Israel was limiting the admission of workers from Gaza.
Arafat’s return to Gaza
Arafat finally kissed the soil of Gaza on 1 July. He spoke of the Gaza and Jericho enclaves being a move towards an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. The reality was perhaps different. The areas he was taking over resembled more a South African style Bantustan or ‘homeland’, over-populated, with sparse water resources, hardly any industry, no finance, and limited autonomy. Arafat’s speech was followed by attacks in East Jerusalem by Israeli settlers on Palestinians, as well as on Israeli security forces trying to keep the peace. On 17 July, at the Eretz checkpoint, Palestinian labourers rioted and clashed with units of the Israeli Defence Force over documentation checks. Random killings of Israelis continued: members of Hezbollah ambushed Israeli troops in south Lebanon; terrorists believed to be members of Hezbollah destroyed a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires and blew up a plane in Panama carrying Jewish businessmen. Rabin spoke of Israel facing a wave of extreme Islamic radical terrorist movements.32
The Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty
With Arafat established in Gaza, and any ‘Jordanian option’ involving Jordanian control of the West Bank no longer being viable as a solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict, Israel moved towards normalizing relations with Jordan. On 18 July King Hussein and Rabin had a secret meeting in a tent beside the Dead Sea. This was followed by a meeting in Washington, on 25 July, when the two men ended the state of belligerency between their two nations. Clinton facilitated this by moving to waive Jordan’s $900m debt to the United States, offering military assistance to Hussein, and urging Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to end their boycott of Jordan. The paragraph referring to Jordan’s role as the guardian of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem aroused Palestinian fears about Palestinian political sovereignty over East Jerusalem. Palestinian fears were further aroused by Rabin’s approval on 26 September of the construction of 1,000 new housing units at a Jewish settlement inside the West Bank, apparently defying the freeze on new construction in return for the American loan guarantees. Indeed at the end of 1994 it was reported that the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank had increased by 10 per cent during that year.
Rabin and Hussein, after settling disputes over territory and water, signed a peace treaty on 26 October 1994 in the presence of President Clinton. The treaty established the Jordanian–Israeli border along the lines demarcated at the time of the British mandate in 1922. In return for financial aid from the United States, Jordan conceded that the Palestinian refugees would be settled where they were in Jordan, in effect denying the right of the Palestinian refugees in Jordan to return home.33 Jordan’s custodianship of the Muslim holy places in East Jerusalem was recognized. At a special meeting of the Arab League the Jordanians gave the assurance that they had no intention of challenging the PLO’s claim to sovereignty.34
The second phase of the Oslo Accords
In the Palestinian autonomous regions on the West Bank economic decline and frustration meant that an increasing number of Palestinians deserted the Plo for Hamas. In October and November 1994 a series of terrorist incidents mounted by Hamas and Islamic Jihad against Israelis in Israel led to Arafat detaining Hamas activists, Israeli reprisals, and counter-reprisals by the Islamic organizations. Attacks by HAMAS suicide bombers helped to move Israeli public opinion further to the right. Rabin was conscious of the need to sustain Arafat, and on 8 November 1994 agreed to implement previous agreements and to transfer responsibility for taxation, health, transport and social services throughout the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority. But in the middle of December Rabin said that Palestinian elections would have to take place with Israeli armed forces present or be postponed for a year. Then, on 22 January 1995, a suicide bomb attack at Beit Lid in Israel, for which Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility, killed twenty-one Jews, mostly soldiers. After that the Israeli Cabinet closed the borders with Gaza and the West Bank, and postponed the release of 5,500 Palestinian prisoners. Support for the Likud increased.
Moves towards implementing the second stage of the Oslo Accords took place against the background of terrorist attacks on Israelis and further Israeli settlement programmes in the occupied territories, including plans to seize Arab-owned land in East Jerusalem to construct Jewish neighbourhoods and facilities. Although, in early May 1995, this expropriation of Arab land was condemned by the Arab states and the Security Council, the United States vetoed a resolution demanding that Israel rescind the decision. Madeleine Albright insisted that the Security Council was an inappropriate forum. This was the thirtieth time since 1972 that Washington had exercised its veto to protect the Zionist state. But Israel suspended its plan after a threatened no confidence motion drafted by Hadash and the Democratic Arab Party which Likud was likely to support.
Following talks at Taba on the Red Sea, Israel and the PLO on 28 September 1995 signed the Israeli–Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This provided for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Nablus, Ramallah, Jenin, Tulkaram, Kakilya and Bethlehem, and a partial redeployment away from Hebron; national Palestinian legislative elections to an 82-member Palestinian Council, and for a Palestinian Executive President; and the release in phases of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. In the middle of October the Israeli Defence Force started its phased redeployment on the West Bank.
On 4 November Rabin was murdered by Yigal Amir, a Jewish nationalist opposed to the peace process, as he was leaving a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Rabin’s widow said that the Likud leader, Netanyahu, was morally responsible for her husband’s death as he had not opposed verbal attacks by Jewish settlers on Rabin. The Israeli withdrawals on the West Bank went ahead, overseen by Peres as acting Prime Minister. Israel withdrew from Tulkaram, Nablus, Kakilya, Bethlehem and Ramallah.
In late January 1996 Palestinian presidential and legislative elections were held. Some 676 candidates contested eighty-eight seats. Arafat secured 88 per cent of the vote for his position as President of the Palestinian Authority. Al-Fatah won fifty seats in the Legislative Council, with some others going to independent activists like Hanan Ashrawi.
On the second anniversary of the Hebron massacre, 25 February 1996, Palestinian suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Ashelon killed twenty-five Israelis. This was followed on 3 and 4 March by bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem which killed 32 Israelis. The military wing of Hamas, the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades, claimed responsibility, and there was speculation about a possible split in the organization between the Gaza leadership and political radicals abroad. On 3 March the Palestinian Authority outlawed the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades and arrested many Islamists. At the same time Israel closed the West Bank indefinitely and restricted commerce and travel between the autonomous areas on the West Bank. Palestinian security forces co-operated with the entry of Israeli Defence Forces into Palestinian villages with the aim of arresting suspects.
In April Peres mounted ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’, an attempt to restrict Hezbollah’s military capabilities in south Lebanon. The Israeli attack extended beyond Beirut, but it was evident that ground troops would be needed. As part of this operation Israeli shells hit a United Nations base at the village of Qana in Lebanon, killing 105 civilian refugees as well as wounding soldiers serving with the United Nations. A subsequent United Nations report rejected Israeli claims that the shelling was a technical and procedural error. A cease-fire was negotiated following an attempt by Warren Christopher, the American Secretary of State, to implement a six-point plan, to be implemented by a Multinational Monitoring Group, which outlined what military action was permissible by both sides in south Lebanon, and included a guarantee of Israel’s northern border by Lebanon and Syria, but which was dismissed as being pro-Israeli.35 When Peres visited Washington at the end of April Clinton endorsed ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’, provided technological and military aid to Israel, and hinted at a formal defence treaty between Israel and the United States. This was seen as an attempt to bolster Peres’s election campaign.
After the Palestinian National Council had formally revoked those articles of the Palestinian Charter denying Israel’s right to exist, on 5 May Palestinian and Israeli negotiators started what were supposed to be final talks on issues such as settlements, Jerusalem, refugees and borders.36
Netanyahu as Israeli Prime Minister
In the Israeli general election on 29 May 1996 Netanyahu won by a margin of 1 per cent. Leader of the Likud since 1993, his book A Place among the Nations: Israel and the World (1993) outlined his credo: Israel needed to retain the occupied territories, which he referred to as ‘Judea’ and ‘Samaria’, and to resist all calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank. He asserted that a Palestinian state already exists: ‘The land of Palestine comprises the modern states of Jordan and Israel. It is large enough to accommodate both a small Jewish state, Israel, and a substantially larger state for the Arabs of Palestine which is today called Jordan.’ Like his predecessors, Begin and Shamir, he attempted to equate ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘anti-Zionism’. In 1993, when there were hints of a deal between the PLO and Israel, Netanyahu described the Arabs as Nazi Germany, the Palestinians as the Sudeten Germans, and Israel as Czechoslovakia. Like Madeleine Albright, his emotional reference was Munich.37
Netanyahu, despite his repeatedly stated opposition to Palestinian self-determination and a commitment to treble the number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, pledged to continue the peace process, but initially declined to meet Arafat. Against the background of the Likud leader’s election, the Arab summit meeting held in Cairo between 21 and 23 June resolved that if Israel reneged on the Oslo Accords, the Arab states would reconsider their support of the peace process. King Hussein agreed to support Syrian demands for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Ariel Sharon, renowned for supporting settlement in the occupied territories, was appointed Minister of Infrastructure, responsible for infrastructural development on the West Bank after threats of resignation that could have endangered the Likud alliance. Subsequently, in July, Israel announced plans to establish eight new settlements on the West Bank, seen as a move towards fulfilling Likud’s election promises to increase the Jewish population there to 500,000 by the year 2000. That same month, when he addressed the Congress in Washington, Netanyahu dismissed the land for peace formula and stated that Middle East peace had to be based on security, reciprocity and democracy. But Netanyahu and Arafat did meet on 4 September at the Eretz crossing between Israel and Gaza and confirmed their commitment to the interim agreement.
The stalling of the peace process
It appeared to the Palestinians and the Arab states that Netanyahu, and what seemed to them his ally, the United States, stalled the peace process, and defied the Oslo Accords. Israel’s opening of the north end of the Hasmonean tunnel in the Arab quarter which ran beneath the al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem near the Western (Wailing) Wall in September 1996 was a sign of this. The Muslims thought the opening of the tunnel a threat to their holy sites and feared that it meant the eventual ‘Judaization’ of Jerusalem. In the ensuing violence between Palestinian security forces, Palestinian civilians and the Israeli forces, around sixty-one Palestinians and eighteen Israelis were killed.
Then, on 26 February 1997, the Israeli government approved the construction of a 6,500-unit Jewish settlement at Har Homa, known to the Palestinians as Jabal Abu Ghneim, in Arab East Jerusalem. Washington vetoed a draft resolution in the Security Council which called for Israel to reconsider its plans to build at Har Homa. But on 18 March the Israeli government ordered the start of construction work at Har Homa, and Israeli troops protected the site which was declared a closed military zone. Netanyahu stated that ‘There is no good time to build in Jerusalem because there are always objections to such building. We intended to build. We promised to build. And we are building.’
Against a background of breach of trust charges against Netanyahu, suicide bombings in Jerusalem, and an Israeli humiliation in Lebanon when twelve Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush in southern Lebanon on 12 September,38 Madeleine Albright, now Secretary of State, asked Israel to take ‘time-out’ from settlement activity: ‘Israel should refrain from unilateral acts including what Palestinians perceive as the provocative expansion of settlements, land confiscation, home demolitions, and confiscation of IDs [Identity Cards].’ In response to the priority given by Albright to Israeli security and dealing with terrorists, Leah Rabin, the widow of Yitzhak Rabin, referring to the campaign of the Irgun against the British in the Mandate, commented: ‘I have doubts about how much terrorism can be uprooted. We were also terrorists once and they didn’t uproot us and we went on dealing in terrorist activities. Despite all the efforts of the British army in the land we went on with terrorism.’39
Adjustments in settlement policy were seen by Arafat as ‘a trick’ rather than a compromise. This is how the Palestinian leader described, on 19 September, a compromise under which eleven Jewish settlers sponsored by the American millionaire, Irving Moskowitz, in the previously Palestinian district of Ras al-Amoud in East Jerusalem were to be replaced by ten seminary students who would guard and renovate the largest villa that the settlers had occupied. Moskowitz observed: ‘This is the first time in millennia that Jews come to the Mount of Olives not to be buried but to live there.’ Netanyahu, in effect, had changed the status quo in East Jerusalem. As the settlers explained, by establishing the start of a new Jewish settlement at Ras al-Amoud, they had ringed Jerusalem and broken up the continuity of Palestinian districts in the city with the intention of making it impossible for the Palestinians to base their capital in East Jerusalem.40 On 23 November, in response to criticism from British and American Jews of the impasse he had helped to create in the peace process, and threats by Clinton and Albright of a possible rupture with Washington, Netanyahu promised that Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas would continue to grow. Hanan Ashrawi, in January 1998, admitted that it was a waste of time for Palestinians to keep waiting for American pressure on Israel as Washington’s policies were often modified to suit Israeli policies on settlement issues.41
Israel consolidated its presence on the Golan Heights. Against the background of the Israeli–Syrian peace talks, the number of settlers in the thirty-two Jewish settlements increased between 1991 and 1998 from 12.000 to 17,000, and many of these came from the former Soviet Union.42 The Israeli settlement issue came before the world’s attention again when the British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, visited the site of the Har Homa settlement on 17 March 1998, and spoke of Jerusalem being the ‘two capitals’ of a Palestinian and an Israeli state. Cook then met Feisal Husseini, and was seen to lay a wreath to commemorate Palestinian victims of the massacre of Deir Yassin of 9 April 1948.43 When the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, visited Israel the following month he restored Anglo-Israeli relations, initiated an unsuccessful shuttle diplomacy to try to revive the Oslo process in London between 4 and 5 May 1998, but did not contradict his Foreign Secretary on the issue of Jerusalem.44
When in Washington between 13 and 14 May, Netanyahu remained obdurate in his talks with Albright. On 17 January 1997 Israel had withdrawn most of its troops from Hebron, although around 2,500 had remained to guard Jewish settlers. Washington wanted Israel to hand over 13.1 per cent of the remaining occupied territory to the Palestinians in a second Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Netanyahu insisted on a smaller area for security reasons. Troop ‘pullbacks’ were supposed to be completed by the middle of 1998, in an agreement signed in January 1997, and guaranteed by Washington. The Republican leader of the House, Newt Gingrich, whose wife had been employed since 1994 as vice-president of an Israeli company, criticized the Secretary of State for becoming the agent for the Palestinians: it was Washington’s job to get the two parties to a table, not to pressure Israel into making an agreement.
At the time of Israel’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, Netanyahu courted Congress and New York.45 This coincided with demonstrations organized by the Palestinian Authority to mourn the ‘nakba’, or ‘catastrophe’, of 1948, and the flight or expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. A two-minute siren wailed across all Palestinian areas, a gesture modelled on Israel’s remembrance day for the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Arafat broadcast: ‘We are asking for the return of the exiled to the homeland and to build an independent Palestinian state on our land … and to celebrate in our eternal capital al-Quds al-Sharif [Jerusalem].’ Israeli troops killed eight Palestinians in the ensuing violent protests.46
On 13 July 1998 a State Department spokesman singled out Israel as the sole culprit responsible for the delay in furthering the American proposal that Israel withdraw from 13.1 per cent of the West Bank over a twelve-week period, during which time the Palestinian Authority would take specific actions against terrorism. The final status negotiations on issues such as Jerusalem and borders would then start immediately47.
The Arab world, however, was increasingly disillusioned by what it saw as an American reluctance or even refusal to exert pressure on Israel. This was evident in the collapse of the coalition that had fought Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War of 1990–91. Between October 1997 and February 1998, Saddam Hussein challenged the West over the issue of the United Nations inspection team. But while Britain and the United States prepared for war against Iraq, this time only Canada and Australia offered ‘undefined support’. When in August 1998 Iraq again challenged the United Nations’ inspection and monitoring team, Washington stated that the crisis was between Saddam Hussein and the Security Council. The American missile strikes against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan on 21 August, in retaliation for the bombing of American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam on 7 August attributed to the inspiration of an Islamist network under the tutelage of Osama bin Laden, a Saudi exile sheltered in Afghanistan, aroused debates in Arab countries hostile to Islamic extremists about the domestic dangers of continuing a relationship with the United States, increasingly viewed by the Arab press, even in the Gulf states, as an arrogant state with no respect for international law. The missile strikes appeared to end the already moribund alliance that had expelled Iraq from Kuwait. They only increased the widespread hostility to the United States, already evident as a result of Washington’s inability to unfreeze the deadlocked Middle East peace process.48
The Wye Memorandum
Madeleine Albright, however, persuaded Netanyahu and Arafat to speak to one another. The protagonists lunched with her, and from this came a meeting between them starting on 15 October 1998, at Wye Mills in rural Maryland in the United States, talks which American officials and King Hussein of Jordan, who was seriously ill, often attended. Before the meeting Netanyahu appointed Ariel Sharon, renowned for promoting Israeli settlements on the West Bank but said to acknowledge the existence of a Palestinian state, as Foreign Minister. During the nine days of negotiations Clinton’s charm and imprecise language helped to bring the antagonists together. Sharon refused to shake hands with Arafat, while Arafat sent Netanyahu flowers for his birthday. When Netanyahu asked for the release of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American navy analyst who had spied for Israel, presumably as a sweetener for the Israeli right wing, Clinton gave the impression that Pollard would be released immediately. But the release was presumably vetoed by intelligence officials on the grounds of the damage that had been done to American security by Pollard. King Hussein pleaded at a crucial moment.
On Friday 23 October the Wye Memorandum was signed at the White House by Arafat and Netanyahu, and Clinton signed as a witness. Israel agreed to pull back its troops from an additional 13 per cent of the West Bank, in a phased withdrawal, in effect trading land for security over a period of twelve weeks, and to release, initially, 750 Palestinians whom it would select from the 3,000 in question, from jail. The Palestinian airport would be allowed to operate in Gaza prior to the achievement of a comprehensive Israeli–Palestinian settlement, and Israel agreed to renew negotiations on safe passage for Palestinians between Gaza and other Palestinian areas immediately. The American Central Intelligence Agency was to supervise a security plan for Palestinians to arrest alleged terrorists and to confiscate their weapons. From 1996, George Tenet, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had conducted a shuttle diplomacy between Israel and the West Bank, mediated disputes between Israelis and Palestinians, and made arrangements to train Palestinian security officers at base in North Carolina to increase Israeli confidence in their capabilities. Central Intelligence Agency personnel would settle disagreements over the arrest of suspected terrorists, manage border checkpoints and other security issues. An American–Palestinian committee would meet every two weeks ‘to review the steps being taken to eliminate terrorist cells’. The Israeli demand for the full Palestine National Council to remove the twenty-six clauses from the Palestine Charter calling for the destruction of Israel was finessed, as there was concern that this particular body could vote Arafat out of offices49.
Washington hoped that the land for security peace deal, scheduled to go into force on 2 November, would be backed by its friends in the Middle East, but encountered a ‘standoffish’ attitude from the North African and Gulf states, former proponents of the peace process. Albright indicated that she understood Arab scepticism over Israel’s intentions to keep its new promises. Arafat rounded up scores of HAMAS activists, and campaigned to secure support for the accords from Arab leaders, most of whom viewed them in the words of Elias Hrawi, the President of Lebanon, as ‘a great disappointment’. Israel, however, contended that Arafat had not given details of his plan for arresting thirty alleged terrorists named by Israel, and delayed the Cabinet meeting scheduled to endorse the Wye Memorandum. Protesting Jewish settlers on the West Bank clashed with Israeli forces.
On 26 October Netanyahu vowed to continue building the Jewish settlement at Har Homa in East Jerusalem. He insisted that Israel’s policy of ‘building throughout the Land of Israel [the West Bank] and also in Jerusalem’ had not changed. The same day the Vatican announced that Jerusalem was too sacred for its future to be decided only by Israelis and Palestinians50. A suicide car bomb attempt on a bus load of Jewish school children on 29 October led to Arafat placing the spiritual leader of HAMAS, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, under house arrest. Netanyahu told Arafat that the test of the Wye accords would be ‘in the complete mobilisation of the Palestinian Authority against the terrorist elements in Judea and Samaria and Gaza’.51
At a time when Netanyahu had convened his Cabinet to continue a debate on the implementation of the Wye agreement, on 6 November, two people were killed and twenty-five injured in a suicide car bomb attack on Jerusalem’s main food market. Islamic Jihad, rather than HAMAS, was seen to be responsible for this. Albright warned Netanyahu that further delay in implementing the Wye accords would encourage the extremists.52 Less than a week later the Israeli Cabinet did endorse the Wye Memorandum subject to conditions. Shortly afterwards, in response to Saddam Hussein’s posturing over United Nations armaments inspectors, with an Anglo-American attack on Baghdad being threatened, gas masks were issued to Israeli citizens and Washington offered Israel further Patriot anti-missile batteries for defence against Iraqi Scud missiles.53
The link between Iraq and the Arab–Israeli conflict strengthened: for Washington progress on the Arab–Israeli front helped to mollify Arab criticism of its policy towards Baghdad, sanctions against Iraq being seen as directly responsible for deaths. Arab criticism pointed out that Israel, as well as Saddam Hussein, defied the Security Council. Israeli invasions of Lebanon had also preceded the attack by Iraq on Kuwait. At a time when Saddam Hussein was stopping all co-operation with the United Nations inspectors in Iraq, Clinton warned Netanyahu in a telephone conversation on 10 November that Israeli delays in the implementation of the Wye Memorandum were embarrassing Washington in the Middle East on the eve of a military strike at Iraq. On 11 November the Israeli Cabinet endorsed the Wye Memorandum.53
Saddam Hussein’s third challenge to the United Nations in a year on the issue of weapons inspection led to the United States and Britain initiating bombing attacks on Iraq, called off at short notice on 14 November with the apparent surrender of Saddam Hussein. The first belated implementation of the Wye agreement took place on 20 November: a mini-redeployment of troops around the Jenin area which meant the transfer of a further 2 per cent of the West Bank to Palestinian rule. At the time of Clinton’s visit to Israel and Gaza, when the American President, as part of the Wye accords, addressed a gathering of Palestinian representatives in Gaza on 14 December at which they reaffirmed their support for the peace process and nullified those provisions of the Palestine National Charter inconsistent with Israeli–Palestinian mutual recognition, the Israeli Cabinet confirmed that the redeployment scheme scheduled for 18 December in terms of the Wye Memorandum had been postponed indefinitely. Observers commented that Clinton’s visit to Gaza had conferred on the Palestinian Authority the trappings of statehood. The American President showed empathy with Palestinian aspirations.54
On 16 December, Clinton and Tony Blair initiated a four day punishment bombing of Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, in retaliation for reported Iraqi transgressions in refusing United Nations inspectors access to certain sites. This resulted in the House of Representatives deciding to delay Clinton’s impeachment debate scheduled for 17 December. On 22 December, Israel launched its deadliest attack on Hezbollah sites in Lebanon since Operation Grapes of Wrath in April 1996. Hezbollah guerrillas responded with Katyusha rocket attacks that injured sixteen people in northern Israel. The Knesset deposed Netanyahu, dissolved itself, and announced an election for 17 May 1999. Late in December, the Palestinian Authority released Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from house arrest along with several hundred other HAMAS activists who had been rounded up with the implementation of the Wye Memorandum. Iraq continued to challenge the legitimacy of the post-Gulf War settlement by sending its aircraft into the ‘no-fly zones’.
In January 1999, the European Union established itself as the principal financial backer of the Palestinian Authority by pledging $2 billion in new aid over five years. This compared with Washington’s commitment of $500 million over the same period, with a possibility of Congress voting a further $400 million. Washington’s commitment to Israel remained at $3 billion plus a year in aid, with a supplementary grant of over $1 billion to cover Israel’s ‘redeployment costs’, such as the building of bypass roads and other security measures to reinforce Israeli settlements in the West Bank.55
Israel occupied the territories at issue during the June 1967 War at a time when it was sympathetically viewed in the West. At the end of that war, Daniel Barenboim and his cellist wife, Jacqueline du Pré, had celebrated the Israeli victory by giving concerts in Israel. In January 1999 Barenboim, hosted by Edward Said, gave a recital at Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution on the West Bank. After King Hussein’s death on 6 February, international leaders, including four American presidents, as well as Asad, Netanyahu and Shamir, paid their respects in Amman.56
References
1Bernard Reich, Securing the Covenant: United States-Israel Relations After the Cold War (Westpoint, Conn. 1995), pp. 35–64.
2See Reich, op. cit., pp. 6–8; Howard Rosen, ‘Economic relations between Israel and the United States’, in Robert O. Freedman (Ed.), Israel under Rabin (Boulder, Colo. 1995), pp. 205–216; Middle East International (30 Jan. 1998), pp. 16–17.
3Ritchie Ovendale, ‘The United States, Zionism, and Arab Nationalism’, Digest of Middle East Studies, 6, 3 (Summer 1997), pp. 38–42; Walid Khalidi, ‘The American factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Middle East International (16 Jan. 1998), pp. 19–20; Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969–1994 (London 1994), p. 52.
4Walid Khalidi, ‘The American factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict’, Middle East International (30 Jan. 1998), p. 16.
5See the pioneering study of this by Clive Jones, Soviet Jewish Aliyah 1989–1992: Impact and Implications for Israel and the Middle East (London 1996); Dov S. Zakheim, ‘Economic security after a settlement: the prospects for Israel’, in Efraim Karsh (Ed.), Between War and Peace: Dilemmas of Israeli Security (London 1996), pp. 13–31 at p. 27; Neill Lochery, The Israeli Labour Party: In the Shadow of the Likud (Reading 1997), pp. 255–261.
6Naji Abi-Aad and Michel Grenon, Instability and Conflict in the Middle East: People, Petroleum and Security Threats (London 1997), pp. 149–163.
7Hillel I. Shuval, ‘Towards resolving conflicts over water: the case of the Mountain Aquifer’, in Karsh (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 215–238 at p. 223; Abi-Aad and Grenon, op. cit., pp. 140–142.
8Aharon Levran, Israeli Strategy after Desert Storm: Lessons of the Second Gulf War (London 1997), p. 94.
9Efraim Karsh and Martin Navias, ‘Israeli nuclear weapons and Middle East peace’, in Karsh (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 75–92 at p. 87; Dilip Hiro, ‘Nuclear arms in the Middle East: the south Asian dimension’, Middle East International (19 June 1998), pp. 16–17; Taysir N. Nashif, Nuclear Weapons in Israel (New Delhi 1996).
10Independent, The Wednesday Review, 19 Aug. 1998.
11Karsh (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 1–2; Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ (London 1997); see also Ritchie Ovendale, ‘Revisionism and Israeli history’, Digest of Middle East Studies, 5, 3 (Summer 1996), pp. 20–25.
12Robert Wistrich and David Ohana describe ‘the current Israeli fixation on the collective Jewish trauma of the Holocaust’. See Robert Wistrich and David Ohana (Eds), The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory and Trauma (London 1995), p. xiii.
13Independent, The Wednesday Review, 19 Aug. 1998.
14See S. Ilan Troen and Noah Lucas (Eds), Israel: The First Decade of Independence (Albany, N.Y. 1995), pp. 195–228; Don Peretz and Gideon Doron (Eds), The Government and Politics of Israel, 3rd edn (Boulder 1997), p. 2; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York 1993), pp. 513–517; The Times, 24 Apr. 1998.
15Schlinder’s List, United States, 1993, directed by Steven Spielberg.
16Said, op. cit., pp. 22, 83, 170; see also Michael N. Barnett, ‘The politics of uniqueness: the status of the Israeli case’, in Michael N. Barnett (Ed.), Israel in Comparative Perspective: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom (Albany, N.Y. 1996), pp. 3–25.
17Clive Jones, ‘Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War: the internal-external security dilemma’,International Relations, XII, 6 (1995), pp. 31–52 at pp. 49–50.
18R. Hrair Dekmejian, Islam in Revolution: Fundamentalism in the Arab World, 2nd edn (Syracuse, N.Y. 1995), p. 174; Bernard Lewis, The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (New York 1994), pp. 97–98; Heikal, op. cit., pp. 428–429, 404–405.
19Heikal, op. cit., pp. 400–411; John King, Handshake in Washington: The Beginning of Middle East Peace? (Reading 1994), pp. 60–78; Richard N. Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World (Washington, D.C. 1994); Yitzhak Shamir, Summing Up: An Autobiography (London 1994), pp. 237–242.
20King, op. cit., p. 146; Shyam Bhatia, Nuclear Rivals in the Middle East (London 1988), p. 45.
21Ritchie Ovendale, The Longman Companion to the Middle East since 1914, 2nd edn (London 1998), p. 336.
22Ahron Bregman and Jihan El-Tahri, The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs (London 1988), p. 182; Shimon Peres, Battling for Peace: Memoirs (London 1995), pp. 347–365.
23For a history of the ‘Jordan option’ see Colin Shindler, Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream: Power, Politics and Ideology from Begin to Netanyahu (London 1995), pp. 221–223.
24Heikal, op. cit., pp. 412–425; King, op. cit., pp. 79–102.
25George E. Gruen, ‘American Jewish attitudes toward Israel: continued support in the face of dramatic change’, in Robert O. Freedman (Ed.), Israel Under Rabin (Boulder 1995), pp. 53–70 at p. 54.
26James Bone, ‘Mother Courage’, The Times Magazine, 22 Feb. 1997.
27King, op. cit., pp. 102–104; Heikal, op. cit., pp. 426–432; Hanan Ashrawi, This Side of Peace: A Personal Account (London 1995), pp. 174–230.
28Bregman and El-Tahri, op. cit., pp. 226–227.
29Meir Litvak, ‘The Islamization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: the case of Hamas’, Middle Eastern Studies, XXXIV (1998), pp. 148–163 at p. 160.
30Jane Corbin, Gaza First: The Secret Norway Channel to Peace between Israel and the PLO (London 1994); Shimon Peres with Arye Naor, The New Middle East (Shaftesbury, Dorset 1993), p. 20; Said, op. cit., p. xlii; Heikal, op. cit., pp. 433–491; King, op. cit., pp. 104–147; Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Through Secret Channels (Reading 1995), pp. 111–183 contains extracts from the minutes of the meetings in Norway; Connie Bruck, ‘The wounds of peace’, New Yorker (14 Oct. 1996), pp. 64–91 at pp. 64–76.
31Contra John V. Whitbeck, ‘The Palestinian state exists’, Middle East International (5 June 1998), pp. 20–21.
32Heikal, op. cit., pp. 508–530; Burton I. Kaufman, The Arab Middle East and the United States (New York 1996), p. 179.
33See Rashid Khalidi, ‘Observations on the right of return’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXI, 2 (1992), pp. 29–40.
34Heikal, op. cit., pp. 526–529.
35Clive Jones, ‘Israeli counter-insurgency strategy and the war in south Lebanon 1985–97’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, VIII (1997), pp. 82–108 at pp. 97–101.
36Beverley Milton-Edwards, Islamic Politics in Palestine (London 1996), pp. 163–179; Ovendale, The Longman Companion to the Middle East, pp. 108–111; Bruck, op. cit., pp. 73–80.
37Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place among the Nations: Israel and the World (London 1993), pp. 343, 88; Ilan Peleg, ‘The Likud under Rabin II: between ideological purity and pragmatic readjustment’, in Freedman (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 143–167 at pp. 155–156.
38Independent, 17 Sept. 1997.
39Independent, 12 Sept. 1997.
40Independent, 20 Sept. 1997.
41Middle East International (30 Jan. 1998).
42The Times, 9 Mar. 1998.
43Middle East International (27 Mar. 1998), p. 3.
44Middle East International (24 Apr. 1998), p. 3; (8 May 1998), pp. 4–5.
45Middle East International (22 May 1998), p. 3; (5 June 1998), p. 6.
46Financial Times, 15 May 1998; The Times, 15 May 1998.
47Middle East International (17 July 1998), pp. 10–11.
48The Times, 16 Feb. 1998; Middle East International (21 Aug. 1998); Financial Times, 22/3 Aug. 1998.
49Guardian, 15 Oct. 1998; The Times, 15 Oct. 1998; International Herald Tribune, 23 Oct. 1998; 24–25 Oct. 1998; 26 Oct. 1998; Time, 2 Nov. 1998, pp. 26–32; The Economist, 31 Oct. 1998, pp. 73–74.
50International Herald Tribune, 28 Oct. 1998; 29 Oct. 1998; 4 Nov. 1998; Observer, 25 Oct. 1998; Sunday Times, 25 Oct. 1998; Times, 26 Oct. 1998; Financial Times, 27 Oct. 1998; Guardian, 27 Oct. 1998.
51Guardian, 30 Oct. 1998; Daily Telegraph, 30 Oct. 1998.
52The Times, 7 Nov. 1998; Financial Times, 7–8 Nov. 1998.
53The Times, 14 Nov. 1998; The Economist, 14 Nov. 1998.
54The Economist, 12 Dec. 1998; 19 Dec. 1998; Independent, 14 Dec. 1998; Guardian, 16 Dec. 1998.
55The Economist, 19 Dec. 1998; 2 Jan. 1999; 9 Jan. 1999; Guardian, 24 Dec. 1998; 2 Jan. 1999; 6 Jan. 1999; Independent, 12 Jan. 1999; Middle East International, 15 Jan. 1999.
56BBC ‘Today’, 1 Feb. 1999; International Herald Tribune, 10 Feb. 1999.