CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Second Palestinian Uprising

On 28 September 2000 Ariel Sharon, the leader of the opposition Likud party, accompanied by Likud members of the Knesset and over one thousand Israeli police officers, visited the al-Aqsa compound in the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Sharon had bought two properties in Arab old Jerusalem from which he flew the Israeli flag. At this time he was viewed by Palestinians as the man who in 1953 had been in charge of ‘Unit 101’ that had killed sixty-six Jordanians in the retaliatory Qibya raid, the commander of a division who had handled resistance in the Gaza Strip after the June 1967 War, the man censored by the Israeli Kahn commission for his role in the massacres in the Palestinian camps at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon on 18 September 1982, and who as Housing Minister had initiated a rapid and extensive expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Sharon’s rival in the Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, had just been freed from prosecution for corruption charges, and possibly Sharon’s motive was to distract attention from a right-wing challenger. The actual visit of Sharon was seen by many Palestinians as an attempt to assert Israeli sovereignty over an Islamic shrine, but only resulted in scuffles and the throwing of stones. Ehud Barak, the Israeli Prime Minister, had ignored the pleas of Palestinian and American officials to stop Sharon’s visit: Barak possibly saw the visit as a challenge to his own credibility. On 29 September, after Friday prayers, in response to Palestinian demonstrations in the al-Aqsa compound, Israeli forces shot seven Palestinians and wounded over 200. Television cameras picked up the death of a twelve-year-old Palestinian at Gaza’s Netzarim road junction from forty-five minutes of continuous Israeli fire. This sparked what Palestinians saw as a mass revolt, led by the Tanzim, an organization of Arafat’s Al-Fatah movement. The Israeli leadership viewed the response as one orchestrated by Arafat as the first stage in a Palestinian war of independence. Israeli helicopter gunships and anti-tank missiles struck apartment blocks in Gaza and snipers singled out individual Palestinians: by the end of October 127 Palestinians had been killed and 5,000 injured.¹

The roots of the al-Aqsa intifada

What became known as the ‘al-Aqsa intifada’ had its roots in Palestinian frustration over the peace process. To Palestinians it increasingly seemed that Israel, with the connivance of the United States, had used the Oslo Accords to consolidate its occupation of the West Bank, and even to institute South-African-style apartheid measures through its considerable increase in settlement activity, both with the building of further settlements as well as the expansion of existing ones, with Jewish-only bypass roads that cut through areas of Palestinian population and which served to isolate one Palestinian section from another.² The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, excluding Jerusalem and environs, rose from 110,000 in 1993 to 195,000 in 2000, an increase of 77 per cent. Between 1994 and 2000 Israel, to construct bypass roads as well as expand its settlements, expropriated around 35,000 acres (14,175 hectares) of mainly agricultural Arab land in the West Bank, valued at more than US$1bn.

The Oslo Accords also accelerated the Palestinian economic decline. Unemployment increased, the gross national product decreased, and the economy fragmented, largely as a result of Israel’s policy of closing off the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Israel, from each other and from external markets. This situation was not helped by the policies of the Palestinian Authority, which while establishing a banking and tax system, failed to attract significant foreign investment with its hostility to economic reform, its mismanagement and bureaucratic corruption. But, in effect, under the Oslo arrangements, that authority controlled only small enclaves separated from each other. As well as the indirect control achieved by this fragmentation of Palestinian lands, by the middle of 2000 Israel retained direct control over more than 20 per cent of the Gaza Strip and 59 per cent of the West Bank. The Israeli policy of ‘closure’ was increasingly seen as a means of separating Israelis from Palestinians, with Israeli control of Palestinian boundaries and crossings. Ehud Barak’s successful election campaign of 1999, run on the platform of ‘Peace through Separation: We Are Here; They Are There’ envisaged a political and ethnic boundary line between the Palestinian Authority and Israel with checkpoints, walls, fences, bridges and trenches, canals and tunnels.³

Before the Israeli elections of 17 May 1999 the PLO agreed to defer a declaration of Palestinian statehood. Ehud Barak, the Labour leader, was elected with his One Israel alliance, and Sharon took over as caretaker of the Likud. Barak was known as Israel’s most decorated military officer, and renowned for his role in the commando operation that assassinated three PLO leaders in Beirut in 1973. At the outset he spoke of withdrawing Israeli troops from the Lebanon within a year, and also of making a deal with Syria over the Golan Heights. When Barak met Arafat on 11 July it was evident that the new Prime Minister would not withdraw from any West Bank lands before the final status negotiations.⁴ Feted in the United States by the Clinton White House, Barak, that same month, made new agreements with Washington to bolster Israel’s indigenous defence and deterrent capabilities. Clinton agreed to an increase of the annual military aid to Israel from $1.8bn to $2.4bn over the following decade.⁵

The final status negotiations, envisaged under the Oslo Accords, opened on 13 September 1999. On 14 September Barak reassured the Israeli Cabinet that the four to five million Palestinian refugees would never be allowed to settle within Israel’s borders. That day Barak also visited Ma’ale Adumim, a settlement of 25,000 Jews, the largest on the West Bank, and promised its leaders that the settlement was part of Greater Jerusalem, and that every tree planted there, and every house and stone was ‘part of the State of Israel forever’.⁶ The Barak administration saw a considerable increase in the number of permitted settler units under the ‘natural growth policy’, allowed most of the forty-two settler outposts established in the last months of the Netanyahu administration to stay, and in November Barak told his Cabinet that Resolution 242 could not be applied to the West Bank and Gaza because it applied only to sovereign states. On 6 December, at a time when Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, was touring the Middle East, the Palestinians suspended the final status negotiations; Arafat had said that the Israeli settler activities were ‘a killer blow to the peace process’.⁷

Following Albright’s tour, talks were resumed between Syria and Israel on 15 December 1999, Asad possibly understanding that these would be based on the agreement apparently reached with Rabin over Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. But, faced with a public opposed to a withdrawal from Golan, and by a break in the governing coalition over the issue, Barak postponed discussion of the border issue, and the talks broke down in January 2000. When Clinton met the ailing Asad at Geneva in March the American President conveyed a proposal that meant that Israel would retain and annex a strip of Syrian territory on the shore of Lake Tiberias/the Sea of Galilee, and control the waters of the Jordan river. The Syrians had indicated a willingness to be flexible over the shore line, but rejected the Israeli insistence on a road around the shore that would enable Israel to control the lake. The Syrians broke off negotiations, claiming that the Geneva meeting had been staged to enable Barak to save his government.⁸

Barak, with the assistance of Clinton, then pursued a policy based on a strengthened Israeli hold on the Golan Heights, a withdrawal from south Lebanon, and an offer of a Palestinian state that would consist of something more than fragmented enclaves, as a trade-off against Palestinian rights with regard to refugees, Jerusalem and control of certain resources. One of Arafat’s aides, Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), wanted Arafat to show flexibility on these issues, and operate along the lines of ‘take what you are offered and ask for more’. Following a decision of the Israeli Cabinet on 6 March, Israeli forces were withdrawn from Lebanon by 24 May. Asad died on 10 June 2000 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Bashar. In the middle of May, following demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza in support of a hunger strike by Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails, the situation exploded. On 15 May, the day kept as the Nakba, marking the expulsion of the Palestinians from their lands with the creation of the state of Israel, there were scenes reminiscent of the intifada.⁹

Clinton wanted a Middle East settlement before the presidential elections. Against the background of Palestinian threats to declare a state, and Israeli indications that they would annex settlements on the West Bank if that happened, Clinton facilitated negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, initially in Stockholm, and then on 5 July invited Barak and Arafat to Camp David. Washington saw Arafat as a serious partner and as a man who might be prepared to compromise on the refugee issue to achieve a Palestinian state. There were also signs that Barak might even break his campaign pledges on issues such as Israeli control of Jerusalem. At Camp David, between 11 and 25 July, Barak maintained his policy of going directly to the final status talks. His government was disintegrating and some thought that he went to the summit intending it to fail. Possibly Barak, the head of a minority government, hoped that if he achieved agreement with Arafat he could call a snap election and undermine the opposition of religious and nationalist parties in the Knesset. Arafat had not prepared his constituency for concessions on the refugee issue. Within a year of the Camp David meeting a myth had emerged, endorsed by Clinton and most of the American media, that Arafat discarded an unprecedentedly generous offer by Barak of a Palestinian state incorporating much of the West Bank and part of Jerusalem.

It seems that the negotiations broke down over Israeli settlements, the refugee issue – particularly the return of the refugees inside the pre-1967 border of Israel – and the status of Jerusalem. Preliminary work had been done in Stockholm over the refugee question and Israel hoped that Arafat would agree to forego the rights, repeatedly upheld by United Nations resolutions, of the refugees to return. In 1998 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency had 3.6 million refugees on its register from the depopulated Palestinian villages, and there was estimated to be a further 1.3 million that had lived in Palestinian cities. Israel offered, with family reunification as the rationale, to accept a few thousand refugee families from the Lebanon back over a period of fifteen years, and suggested the formation of an international fund of $20bn to provide compensation for the refugees and to help resettlement in those countries in which they lived, or in other countries prepared to accept them. Clinton regarded the apparent Israeli offer of Palestinian Authority control over some areas of East Jerusalem, including a concept seemingly aired of ‘shared sovereignty’ ‘vertically divided’ over the Haram al-Sharif compound in which the Palestinians would control the surface area, and the Israelis that beneath, as one of great generosity. The annexation to Israel of three settler blocs, housing 250,000 Israelis but including 80,000–100,000 Palestinians, would encircle East Jerusalem, split the West Bank in half, and cut off Jerusalem from the Palestinian hinterlands.¹⁰

On 24 July one of Arafat’s aides said that the Israelis had not acknowledged the principles of withdrawal, Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem, and the right of return of the refugees, as governed by United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 and General Assembly Resolution 194. The next day the talks broke down, each side blaming the other for the failure. Clinton openly accused Arafat. Washington probably had too high expectations of what Arafat could or was prepared to concede. The Palestinian leader, if he wished to maintain his domestic legitimacy and sustain his rule, was not really in a position to make the concessions asked of him. Indeed over the succeeding months he was either not prepared, or able, to make counter proposals to those of the Israelis. Barak, also, was threatened domestically, and Sharon, as opposition leader, increasingly campaigned on the platform that he would reject Barak’s apparent concessions to the Palestinians. Clinton tried to bolster Barak’s position in Israel by hinting that he might move the American embassy in Israel from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. The Palestinians, on 10 September, postponed the declaration of a state. Washington started to move away from the position of viewing Arafat as the natural Palestinian leader who could achieve a settlement.¹¹

The al-Aqsa intifada, sparked off by Sharon’s visit to Haram al-Sharif on 28 September 2000, erupted against increasingly intransigent Israeli and Palestinian positions. Israel, and in particular Israeli intelligence, increasingly doubted Arafat’s ability to control factions within his movement and even his willingness to do so. In May 1994, in a Johannesburg mosque, Arafat had compared the Oslo Accords with the prophet Muhammad’s truce with a tribe that he had broken after he had secured his power base. Israel’s apparent ability to dictate terms, helped by pressure from the United States, possibly convinced Israeli politicians that, in the aftermath of Oslo, Palestinians would have to accept a united Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel, the Jordan valley controlled by Israel for security reasons, that most of the Jewish settlements would survive under Israeli sovereignty, and that Israel would not accept moral or historical responsibility for the Palestinian refugees. It was increasingly evident to Palestinians that the Oslo agreements would not end the Israeli occupation and indeed were merely aiding further Israeli settlement that would prevent any integral Palestinian state. Repeated closure of Palestinian areas by Israel and the restrictions on freedom of movement that followed the seven years since Oslo had seen a fall in the Palestinian gross domestic product of 21 per cent, a considerably lower standard of living, and a threefold increase in unemployment.¹²

As the al-Aqsa intifada raged, the stances of the protagonists hardened. Even though the Palestinians were divided, it was evident that all factions were united in agreeing that there could be no return to the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians who had remained in Israel after 1948, commonly referred to as Israeli Arabs, were involved in the uprising, and these 900,000 citizens, around 19 per cent of the population of Israel, were increasingly referred to as ‘Palestinian citizens of Israel’ and identified with their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank, in Gaza and in the Palestinian Diaspora. Palestinians and most Arabs insisted on the right of return of the 1948 refugees and their descendants. From the Palestinian point of view the moral basis of a state that had been based on the eviction of its original inhabitants, and repopulated even within the previous two decades by almost one million new settlers from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Somaliland and elsewhere, over 300,000 of whom were not Jewish anyway, needed to be seriously questioned.¹³

Israel attacked Palestinian Authority property following the lynching on 12 October by Palestinian mobs of two Israeli soldiers being held in a police station at Ramallah. At a summit held at Sharm el Sheikh between 16 and 17 October Barak did agree to an inquiry into the reasons for the violence, but refused to lift the siege of the West Bank and Gaza, which had been sealed off since 6 October. There appeared to be growing cooperation between Al-Fatah militias and HAMAS and Islamic Jihad, reflected in the activities of the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces (PNIF), an umbrella organization similar to the unified leadership of the 1987 uprising; Israeli settlers were targeted, possibly with the aim, according to a Tanzim leader, of persuading them that they would be safer within the boundaries of Israel, and of the international community that peace was not possible while there were settlements in the occupied territories. Arafat was seen as being in overall control of the direction of the revolt, but not of each individual act. From the Palestinian point of view it signified the end of the humiliations of the Oslo process. Using a car bomb, Islamic Jihad killed two Israelis in Jerusalem. On 20 November a bus of settler school children was attacked and two were killed; Israel retaliated with an assault on Gaza. Barak resisted suggestions of an international force in the area, effectively rejecting any Arab or Palestinian attempt to internationalize the conflict.

Barak decided to go to the polls. In the previous election he had had the support of the Israeli Arabs/the Palestinian citizens of Israel. They were alienated by the al-Aqsa intifada. With Sharon leading in the polls, Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state, but on terms less generous than those of Camp David. Arafat confirmed that his people would continue their revolt against the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza. Clinton, shortly to leave office, on 19 December in Washington placed before Israeli and Palestinian officials a plan envisaging a non-militarized Palestinian state. But the Palestinians argued that Clinton’s proposals would ‘cantonize’ the envisaged state, and in any case rejected the proposal that the refugees should forswear their right of return. Israel had closed off the West Bank and Gaza in October 2000, and by January 2001 this move had virtually bankrupted the Palestinian Authority and led to a loss of US$2,900m to the Palestinian economy. Between 21 and 27 January 2001 at the Red Sea resort of Taba, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met, and the Israelis moved beyond the positions taken at Camp David, but the talks were called off by Barak on the eve of the Israeli elections.¹⁴

By this time Israel was concerned about signs that sections of the American media, particularly the television news station, CNN, were becoming more sympathetic to the Palestinians. On the whole, however, the American press maintained a pro-Israeli bias. This bias was also seen by the Palestinians as marking Clinton’s presidency, which, until late in the second term, reflected the policy of the advisers Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk that the United States should merely play the role of a facilitator.¹⁵

Sharon as Prime Minister

On 6 February 2001 Sharon won the Israeli election held to choose a Prime Minister. He pledged to maintain sovereignty over Jerusalem and increase the number of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Sharon’s campaign advisers, American, projected the image of an affable grandfather rather than that of a warlord. But to many he was seen as a war criminal and attempts were later made in Belgium to secure his prosecution as such.¹⁶

The new American administration under George W. Bush immediately reaffirmed American support for Israel. At first it was thought that George W. Bush might revert to his father’s policy in the Middle East, which had not always favoured Israel, and for a while it seemed that the new president might also follow a non-interventionist foreign policy. He appointed General Colin Powell as his Secretary of State.

Palestinian suicide bombings

In March Hamas instituted a policy of using suicide bombers to strike within Israel’s heartland: three Israelis were killed in an attack on the coastal town of Netayna and many were injured. Following Arafat’s demand for a settlement based on international legitimacy, Sharon encircled Palestinian centres with trenches and earth barricades. Settlers reacted to Palestinian attacks, and Palestinians responded with suicide bombers. On 29 March Israel attacked Arafat’s presidential guard in Gaza and at Ramallah. Against the background of a daily litany of reports of violence in the occupied territories, and efforts by Jordan and Egypt to institute talks on the basis of a revision of the plan drawn up at Sharm el Sheikh the previous October, an American policy emerged outlined by Powell to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) based on the ‘special relationship’ binding the two countries, as well as their unwavering strategic alliance, and Washington’s determination to assist Israel to maintain military superiority over the Arab states. Powell supported Sharon’s position that before negotiations could start terrorism had to be reduced or ended. The Israeli policy of assassination was not condemned, nor that of bombardment by helicopter gunships supplied by the United States. The Secretary of State went on to say that Washington would not support any United Nations resolution that proposed international protection for the Palestinian people in the occupied territories. The policies of the United States and Israel converged on the subject of the threat of ‘international terrorism’, and specifically of ‘Islamic terrorism’. Much of this rhetoric marked a reversion to that of the pro-Israeli Reagan administration.¹⁷

The international commission initiated at the Sharm el Sheikh summit to look into the reasons for the al-Aqsa intifada, headed by the former American senator George Mitchell who had had experience in Eire and Ulster, absolved Sharon from direct responsibility, though it did describe his tour of al-Aqsa as ‘provocative’. The Mitchell report referred to excessive and lethal use of force by Israel against Palestinian demonstrators, condemned Palestinian ‘terrorism’ and the shooting of Israeli troops and settlers from Palestinian Authority positions, and concluded that the Israeli settlements were an obstacle to peace and should be frozen. The Palestinian leadership endorsed Mitchell’s draft recommendations, but Sharon refused a freeze on settlement activities as that could be seen as a reward for terrorism. Israeli attacks during the following two weeks killed seventeen Palestinians. On 19 May HAMAS retaliated with a suicide bomb attack at Netanya which killed five Israelis. Israel used jet fighters against the West Bank for the first time since the June 1967 War, attacking Palestinian Authority positions in Ramallah and Nablus. Then Powell elaborated on the American interpretation of the Mitchell report: he denied a link between the ending of violence and a moratorium on settlement construction. After this assurance Sharon offered to stop pre-emptive operations against Palestinians except in cases of extreme danger. Arafat toured Europe and the Far East to stress the need for a freeze on settlement activity as a precondition. On 1 June a HAMAS suicide bomber killed twenty young Israelis, mainly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and injured over 100 others at a Tel Aviv night club. Israel benefited from international sympathy, and Arafat abandoned his preconditions for a cease-fire. Arafat, however, did not risk the Palestinian unity achieved by the intifada by arresting militants, since he feared a possible civil war. Instead he appealed to Al-Fatah leaders. But some factions said that they would continue to attack anywhere.

Bush sent George Tenet, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to settle terms. Tenet outlined these on 12 June: there needed to be a cease-fire for a considerable period before negotiations could be resumed or a freeze on Israeli settlement imposed; the Palestinian Authority had to arrest and incarcerate terrorists; Israel could maintain its buffer zones in the occupied territories. Palestinian arrests seemed token. Israel resumed targeted killings. Powell appeared at the end of June and proposed a period of ‘quiet’.¹⁸

On 1 July the Israelis gunned down two members of HAMAS, and admitted the assassination of three Islamic Jihad adherents in a helicopter gunship attack in the Jenin area. The Palestinians retaliated with a suicide bombing which killed two Israeli soldiers in Tel Aviv. As the violence escalated, the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations urged that third parties should monitor the situation. Arafat favoured this suggestion, but it was resisted by Israel. Increasingly Israel resorted to political assassination to crush the intifada, and a helicopter attack on 31 July on the HAMAS media office in Nablus killed two prominent HAMAS leaders. Palestinian militias attacked settlers. On 9 August a suicide bomber killed fifteen Israelis in a restaurant in West Jerusalem. Arafat was reluctant to arrest those whom his followers thought of as heroes. Sharon’s military retaliation was less than expected, but he seized Orient House in East Jerusalem, the PLO’s unofficial headquarters, and an Israeli flag flew over the symbol of the Palestinian claim to the city. On 12 August Islamic Jihad, in a suicide bombing, wounded twenty young Israelis near a cafe in Haifa. Sharon on 14 August sent tanks into Jenin. Palestinian Authority buildings were demolished. The Palestinians regarded this as a breach of their sovereignty. The assassination of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leader on 27 August evoked Palestinian responses, and on 11 September Israeli tanks surrounded Jenin with the aim of cleansing an area that had become a ‘terrorist nest’ in the most sustained attack of the year-old intifada.¹⁹

The day of the renewed Israeli attacks on Jenin, Osama bin Laden and his Al-Queda organization flew hijacked aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, killing over 3,000 people. The attack on these imperial edifices of the United States, according to an opinion poll taken early in October, was viewed by 58 per cent of Americans as having been motivated by their country’s ties to Israel and its policies towards the Palestinians. The same survey suggested that 46 per cent of those polled thought that the United States should consider changing its policies in the Middle East to reduce the backlash.²⁰ The attack Israel initiated on Jenin lasted a further week, and during that time the Israeli army mounted eighteen incursions into the West Bank and Gaza, killing twenty-eight Palestinians and wounding 200. Cameras caught Palestinians celebrating the Al-Queda success. Arafat tried to counter this image by donating blood, and Palestinians, some of whom had relatives in New York and Washington, were shown praying.²¹

George W. Bush’s administration, like that of his father’s during the Gulf War of 1991, anticipated the need for Arab allies, and even bases, from which to attack Al-Queda in Afghanistan. Washington apparently even expected that the Sharon government might restrain its operations against the Palestinians to help create a favourable climate. With Anglo-American preparations underway, the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, aroused Israeli ire with an observation that a factor that helped to breed terrorism in the Middle East was the anger many people felt ‘at events over the years in Palestine’. The Israeli government objected to the word ‘Palestine’, and to the implication that Israel was responsible. When in Jerusalem the Foreign Secretary apologized.²² On 26 September Arafat and Shimon Peres, who had joined the Sharon government as Foreign Secretary, agreed to a cease-fire, but that same day Palestinian guerrillas attacked an Israeli army base near Rafah, and a few hours later Israeli tanks rolled into the city. Washington appeared to be slighting its client state in the Middle East. Powell asked the pro-Israeli lobby in Congress to put on hold its proposed legislation against the Palestinian Authority. Washington ignored Sharon’s requests for the Palestinian Islamist organizations and Hezbollah in Lebanon to be placed on the American list of terrorist targets, and appeared to woo Iran and Syria. Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary of Defence, omitted Israel from his tour of regional allies in the Middle East. Joint American–Egyptian military exercises took place. Three days before Britain and the United States attacked Afghanistan, Sharon on 4 October, using the Munich analogy and the mythology of the ‘sacrifice’ of Czechoslovakia,²³ demanded that Washington should not appease the Arab states at Israel’s expense: ‘Israel won’t be another Czechoslovakia. Israel will fight terrorism. … From this day on, we can rely only on ourselves.’ Sharon, by implication, cast Bush as Neville Chamberlain. The State Department proclaimed Sharon’s statement ‘unacceptable’, and insisted that Israel had no stronger friend than the United States. After some agitated exchanges Sharon accepted the friendship of the Bush administration, which Powell said was putting this ‘small cloud’ behind it.²⁴

On 17 October the PFLP, in retaliation for the assassination of their leader on 27 August, shot Israel’s Minister for Tourism, Rehavam Ze’evi, on the eighth floor of the Hyatt Hotel in West Jerusalem. Ze’evi, who had demanded the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel and the occupied territories, had been due to resign from Sharon’s administration as a protest against the Prime Minister’s statement that Palestinian sovereignty over parts of the West Bank was inevitable. Sharon, on 17 October, outlined his new strategy: Arafat was to be identified with Osama bin Laden. The Israeli leader proclaimed a ‘new era’: the killing of Ze’evi was ‘Israel’s own Twin Towers’. He demanded that Arafat hand over Ze’evi’s assassins, or risk the Palestinian Authority being defined as an ‘entity that supports terror’, drawing the obvious parallels with the Taliban in Afghanistan. On 18 October Israeli armoured personnel carriers invaded Ramallah, the main West Bank base of the PFLP, and Jenin, seen as the ‘terrorist nest’ of the suicide bombers. Atef Abayat, the leader of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, was blown up in a jeep near Bethlehem. In retaliation, members of his clan killed an Israeli hiker, and Palestinian mortars fired from Bethlehem and Beit Jala on to the Israeli settlement of Gilo on the West Bank. Israeli tanks besieged Bethlehem in the largest operation since the outbreak of the intifada; fourteen Palestinians were killed in Bethlehem.

Arafat asked for the Security Council to meet, and called on Palestinians to ‘resist the invaders’. Risking a Palestinian backlash, Arafat arrested some members of the PFLP and outlawed its military wing. On 22 October the State Department demanded that Israel withdraw from Palestinian areas. Sharon refused, and laid out his terms: not only had Arafat to extradite Ze’evi’s assassins, but the Palestinian leader had to dismantle the ‘terrorist infrastructures’ of HAMAS, Islamic Jihad and Al-Fatah’s Tanzim, and end ‘terrorism, violence and incitement’ in the Palestinian areas.²⁵ Mediation by the European Union, battles shown on television around the Christian sites in Bethlehem, combined with pressure from Washington, led to an announcement on 4 November that there would be a phased Israeli military withdrawal. Seventy-nine Palestinians had been killed. The withdrawal was dependent on local security arrangements, and it was increasingly evident that Arafat could not control the local population in many areas where support for Hamas and the Islamist organizations was growing.

The Bush plan

Early in November President Bush told the General Assembly of the United Nations that Resolutions 242 and 338 should still form the basis of a settlement, and that he was ‘working towards a day when two states, Israel and Palestine, live peacefully within secure and recognized borders’. Powell, on 19 November, elaborated an American policy for achieving a just and lasting peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. If the Palestinians ended the intifada, Washington would become more involved in negotiations to end Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Secretary of State asked that the closures be lifted in the occupied territories, that settlement activity end, and that there be a halt to the military activities that were killing innocent Palestinians. The Palestinian leadership had to make a 100 per cent effort to end violence and terror, and ensure a cease-fire. The Assistant Secretary of State, William Burns, and a new American envoy, Anthony Zinni, were to travel to the Middle East with the aim of achieving a cease-fire ‘in place’.²⁶ It looked as if Arafat, against the background of rising dissatisfaction in the territories with what looked to many like an alliance with the Central Intelligence Organization and the Israeli Defence Force against the Islamists, was faced with an increase in popularity among the Palestinian population for those organizations he was obliged to oppress, and appeared to have less and less control in the Palestinian territories. With the collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the United States no longer needed Arab support, and Sharon was able to dictate terms to the Zinni mission: ‘seven days of peace and quiet’ would be necessary before formal talks on a ceasefire could start.

On 22 November a booby-trap device planted by Israeli forces near a primary school in Khan Yunis killed five Palestinian schoolchildren. Initially the Israelis claimed that the device had been let off by a Palestinian who made bombs, but later admitted culpability. On 23 November Israeli helicopters killed a Hamas military leader and his two escorts travelling to Nablus. Hamas vowed revenge. In the next few days four other Palestinians died in violent incidents, including a fifteen-year-old boy in the funeral cortege of the Khan Yunis schoolchildren shot by Israeli army fire. Hamas struck with two suicide bombings in West Jerusalem and Haifa on 1 and 2 December: twenty-five Israelis were killed and many injured. Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, Hamas’s spiritual leader, blamed the Israelis for this cycle of violence: ‘It was Sharon who started this by killing more than 20 Palestinians, including five children on their way to school. Does the world expect us to remain idle when our children are murdered by the Israeli occupiers?’

Palestinian Authority officials, while denouncing the bombings as senseless murder, asserted that Sharon had intended to foment Palestinian anger in the days before the intended visit of the American delegation. The Palestinian Authority arrested 110 activists. In doing this, many thought that Arafat was risking civil war. Sharon, just back from the United States, held Arafat responsible for the bombings, and between 3 and 4 December Israeli forces destroyed the runway of Gaza International Airport, restricting the Palestinian leader’s movement, surrounded Palestinian towns, and fired on Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. European and American leaders demanded that Arafat end the intifada and dismantle the terrorist networks. As if in response, Palestinian gunmen killed ten West Bank settlers in an ambush of a convoy. The Israeli Defence Force arrested and killed many in the occupied territories, and Sharon declared that Arafat was ‘irrelevant’. This was at a time when the idea of ‘regime change’, with particular reference to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, was becoming fashionable in Washington. In the first fifteen months of the al-Aqsa intifada over 1,000 Palestinians, and almost 200 Israelis had been killed.²⁷

Against the background of the Israeli seizure of a freighter in international waters of the Red Sea – containing weapons that Israel claimed were being shipped from Iran to the Palestinian Authority in Gaza – early in 2002, Zinni demanded that the ‘terrorist infrastructure’ in Gaza and the West Bank be dismantled. Arafat did convince HAMAS to stop terrorist attacks inside Israel, and to join the Palestinian militias in concentrating the armed resistance in the occupied territories. A HAMAS assault on an Israeli army base near Rafah was followed by devastating Israeli moves into Palestinian cities and an attack by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade at a Bar Mitzvah in the Israeli town of Hadera which killed six people. Sharon faced domestic criticism for his role in ending the ceasefire. Rhetoric from the Bush administration suggested that in its war against terror it was increasingly blaming Arafat for the situation. As the situation worsened, the Palestinian public became more sympathetic to suicide bombing. While the peace movement revived in Israel, the ‘transfer’ of the Palestinian population outside the borders of the old British mandate was supported by more and more Israelis. In February Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia advanced a peace plan whereby the Arab states would normalize their relations with Israel within its pre-1967 borders, provided a Palestinian state was established with East Jerusalem as its capital.²⁸ As Arafat’s popularity declined in the occupied territories, the Al-Aqsa Brigade launched attacks within Israel. The carnage inflicted by Palestinian suicide bombers within Israeli cities outraged American opinion.

Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, condemned Palestinian suicide killings as ‘morally repugnant’, and while saying that Israel had the right to live within internationally recognized borders, demanded that Israel end its illegal occupation. On 12 March 2002 United Nations Resolution 1397 was passed. This resolution affirmed the vision of a Palestinian state. At a time when the United States was trying to canvass Arab support for its envisaged regime change in Iraq, Washington refrained from vetoing a measure loosely based on the Saudi peace initiative.

Operation Defensive Shield

On 20 March an Israeli newspaper quoted Israeli Defense Force (IDF) intelligence reports to the effect that the American-backed IDF actions in the occupied territories had prevented the Palestinian Authority from taking action against terrorists, and that the IDF assassinations and bombings were the reason for the suicide bombings against Israelis, and had led senior Palestinian Authority leaders to co-operate with the terrorist groups. The Israeli attacks prevented Arafat from cracking down on the terrorists, and the Palestinian terrorist reprisals provided Sharon with the excuse to delay peace negotiations and mount assaults on centres of Palestinian population. On 27 March twenty-nine Israelis were killed at Passover celebrations in a HAMAS suicide bombing. On 29/30 March Sharon launched an offensive that had been planned for some months, ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, and occupied most of the major towns, cities and refugee camps on the West Bank. Arafat was besieged in his compound at Ramallah. Over 100 Palestinian police and militiamen took refuge in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Nablus surrendered to the IDF, but there was strong resistance in Jenin and Israel lost 28 men while taking over the refugee camp.

The Palestinians claimed that there had been a massacre in Jenin. Powell went to Jerusalem and demanded a statement from Arafat condemning attacks against civilians; he did not ask for a similar one from Sharon. To many Palestinian analysts it seemed that the United States was giving Israel unconditional support. Sharon, in the middle of April, proposed an international peace conference to be chaired by the United States, and to include Palestinian representatives and others from Arab states, but not Arafat. Having razed much of the Palestinian Authority infrastructure in the central and northern areas of the West Bank, the IDF moved south. American intervention protected Israel from a United Nations Committee investigating Palestinian claims as to what had happened in Jenin; instead there was a report compiled by United Nations staff. At the end of April Sharon lifted the siege of Arafat in return for an agreement whereby those convicted of killing Ze’evi would serve their terms supervised by American and British warders. American and European diplomats negotiated an end to the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and Israel allowed some of the gunmen to return to the Gaza Strip, while other ‘senior terrorists’ were exiled to states within the European Union.²⁹ The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, holding its annual conference in the Washington Hilton between 21 and 23 April, had as a dominant theme the title of the opening video: ‘America and Israel Standing Against Terror’.³⁰

Arafat faced calls for reform of the Palestinian Authority from Al-Fatah, the Palestinian public and the United States. Bush insisted Arafat had let his people down; there could be little progress towards negotiations until the Palestinian Authority had been reconstructed on democratic lines, was financially sound, and free from corruption. Sharon supported Bush with a statement on 14 May that Israel could not make peace with ‘a corrupt terror regime’. Arafat said that he would institute reforms. Then on 7 May a further HAMAS suicide attack in the town of Rishon Le Zion, which killed fifteen Israelis, brought into question the effectiveness of Operation Defensive Shield. Sharon’s rival in the Likud, Netanyahu, secured his party’s backing to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. There was a spate of suicide bombings, some claimed by Islamic Jihad, some by Al-Fatah, others by HAMAS. Arafat reconstituted his Cabinet but the ministries were allocated to his followers. Between 18 and 20 June a series of suicide bombings and gun attacks led Sharon to announce Operation Determined Path, in effect the indefinite re-occupation of any territory that Israel thought necessary for its security. Israeli troops occupied much of the West Bank and curfews were imposed on the local population. The Ministry of Defence announced that the families of suicide bombers would be deported to the Gaza Strip. This period also saw the completion of part of a security wall designed by the Israelis to extend along the whole of the West Bank with the intention of stopping Palestinian bombers.

In a speech on 24 June Bush affirmed as American policy two of the main planks of Sharon’s platform: Arafat had to go; Palestinian resistance had to stop before negotiations could take place. The American President also endorsed the Israeli Prime Minister’s interpretation of Resolution 242: Israel had to withdraw within, but not from, the territories it had occupied in the June 1967 War. Dennis Ross, the former American special envoy to the Middle East, observed that the Palestinians were not entitled to a state, they had to earn it. Bush effectively said that the Palestinians had to end the intifada before Israel would be required to stop its ‘settlement activity’ and withdraw its troops. The American President hoped that Palestinian elections would be held in a year’s time and, depending on what sort of leadership they produced, a ‘provisional Palestinian state’ could be declared. Three years of negotiations would follow to decide the geographic area of this state and the extent of its sovereignty. Observers noted that the Bush plan, which effectively buried the earlier Saudi plan, marked a victory for the hawks – Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President – within the American administration. They had overridden Powell’s case that a solution to the Palestinian problem would place the United States in a better position to win its war against terrorism. The Bush plan appeared to align the United States with the Israeli position and foresee this solution forced on the Palestinians and on other Arab countries. Bush also demanded that Syria choose ‘the right side in the war on terror by closing terrorist camps and expelling terrorist organizations’.³¹

Arafat responded, perhaps tactically, by welcoming Bush’s call for a Palestinian state, and interpreting the mention of the need for a new leadership as approval for the reforms within the Palestinian Authority. HAMAS, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade continued their attacks in July, though after one on 16 July that killed ten Israelis travelling on a settler bus outside Nablus, HAMAS offered to stop attacks on civilians inside Israel in return for the IDF’s withdrawing from Palestinian cities, the release of prisoners and an end to the Israeli assassination policy. On 23 July the Israeli air force destroyed an apartment block in Gaza city, killing an HAMAS military leader and fourteen other Palestinians, including nine children. HAMAS took revenge with attacks that killed seven students in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, nine Israelis in a suicide bombing on a bus in northern Israel, and three in a gun battle outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel banned Palestinians from travelling in the northern sector of the West Bank. On 1 August the United Nations report into Israel’s invasion of the West Bank between 1 March and 7 May 2002 stated that there was no evidence to support the Palestinian claims of a massacre in the Jenin camp: it confirmed the Israeli figure of fifty-two dead. During that period 497 Palestinians had been killed, over 1,400 wounded and over 17,000 had lost their homes. Over 100 Israelis had died in attacks within Israel.³²

Washington prepared to oust Saddam Hussein, and, as in the Gulf War of 1991, the Anglo-American special relationship was the foundation of the planned operation. London, however, believed that progress towards a Palestinian state was a necessary precursor to war with Iraq. Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, told the Labour Party conference that the Israeli–Palestinian peace process had to be revitalized: ‘By this year’s end, we must have revived final status negotiations and they must have explicitly as their aims an Israeli state free from terror, recognized by the Arab world, and a viable Palestinian state based on the boundaries of 1967.’³³ But Britain was sensitive to its defence relationship with the United States, which it saw as fundamental to its national security. On 8 July 2002 the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, had justified Britain’s continued supply of parts for Israel’s F-16 war planes, one of which was later used on 23 July in the execution of an HAMAS commander in an attack that also killed fourteen other Palestinians. On 26 July Blair justified British arms sales to Israel, which had doubled in 2001 from £12.5m to £22.5m, on the grounds that if Britain did not sell Israel the arms every other defence industry in the world would rush to take the place that Britain had vacated. Straw acknowledged that to continue to export parts for Israeli F-16s would violate European Union arms export criteria, but said that Britain would continue the practice: ‘any interruption to the supply of components would have serious implications for the UK’s defence relations with the United States’.³⁴

Amidst the preparations for the war to unseat Saddam Hussein the intifada continued. Sharon needed $12bn of American aid since Israel was experiencing its worst economic crisis in its history, and indicated to Washington that he would not inflame the situation in the occupied territories. Suicide bombings and Israeli reprisals continued. Within Israel the idea of resolving the Arab–Israeli conflict by transferring or expelling the Arabs from the areas of the British mandate was gaining more and more support. After a HAMAS bomber killed eleven Israelis on a bus in West Jerusalem on 21 November, Israel lay siege to Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah and the IDF moved into most towns on the West Bank. On 5 January 2003 two Palestinians detonated themselves in Tel Aviv, killing twenty-two. Israeli spokesmen pressed for a new Palestinian leadership. Sharon was returned in elections in January 2003.³⁵

The road map

What became known as the Middle East Quartet – the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia – and a plan described as the ‘road map’, seen by the Americans as an elaboration of Bush’s pronouncements of 24 June 2002, came to the fore. This was evident at a conference in London held in January 2003 and hosted by Blair to discuss Palestinian reform. The Israeli government prevented Palestinian delegates from attending.³⁶ From the American point of view the situation was improved when, on 9 March, the PLO’s Central Council endorsed the establishment of the post of a Palestinian Prime Minister. Arafat nominated the Secretary-General of the PLO, Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen). While Arafat controlled foreign policy, Abbas assumed responsibility for internal security and public order.³⁷

The Anglo-American attack on Iraq started on 20 March 2003. With this in progress the Israeli government feared that Blair could influence Bush more than Sharon. The Israeli Foreign Ministry complained to the British ambassador, Sherard Cowper-Coles, about Blair’s ‘worrying and outrageous’ comments linking the war in Iraq to a settlement of the Palestinian conflict, and also referred to Straw’s observation that there was ‘real concern that the west has been guilty of double standards – on the one hand saying that the United Nations security council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented, on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine’. Debate at this time focused on Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction, and the stance of the United Nations to the issue. Shortly after the start of the war on Iraq, the BBC screened a documentary on Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s nuclear arsenal, estimated to number between 100 and 300 warheads, had been developed at Dimona in the Negev from the 1950s onwards with assistance from France, the United States and South Africa. It had been exposed by Mordechai Vanunu in 1986. The crash of an El Al plane in the Netherlands on 4 October 1992 with a cargo of chemicals and depleted uranium had also raised the issue of Israel’s manufacture of chemical and biological weapons at Nes Ziona. The Pentagon would only discuss Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction with the BBC, and not those of Israel. It was against this background of the disclosure of the different standards applied to Israel that the British ambassador assured the Israelis that, while Britain would not do anything to endanger their security, it thought that Israel’s security would best be guaranteed by an equitable settlement for the Palestinians.³⁸

On 26 March Straw referred to his vision of an end to Israeli settlements, and a Palestinian state with its capital inside Jerusalem. But at the meeting at Camp David on 27 March Blair was not rewarded with the road map.³⁹ Instead Sharon had announced that he was extending Israel’s security fence east, cutting Palestinians off from the Jordan Valley. Palestinians warned that this barrier, between 200 and 330 feet (60 and 100 metres) deep, if extended along the Green Line that separated the West Bank from the 1948 borders of Israel, could mean the incorporation of over 10 per cent of the West Bank into Israel, and that Sharon wanted to ensure that the provisional Palestinian state, due according to the road map by the end of 2003, would be restricted to the 42 per cent of the West Bank, mostly in the central region, once nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority.⁴⁰ Between 1997 and 2002 official aid from the United States to Israel had totalled $24,073m. Over the previous twenty-five years American policies in the Middle East, most of which derived from Washington’s support for Israel, had cost more than $2.6 trillion.⁴¹ Bush, having confirmed a $9bn loan guarantee to Israel, together with a military grant of $1bn, at the Azores summit made promises to Blair on the subject of the road map.⁴²

With victory in Iraq assured, Bush told Blair in Belfast, on 8 April, that once Abbas had installed his Cabinet the road map would be released. Five hours later Israeli F-16 fighter jets killed a senior HAMAS military leader in Gaza city; forty-two hours later there were seventeen Palestinian and two Israeli dead. Abbas said that the ending of the armed intifada would hasten the fall of the Sharon government; there should be a unilateral Palestinian cease-fire. He had difficulty being heard. With Abbas’s Cabinet in place, on 13 April Sharon said that in exchange for the establishment of a provisional Palestinian state the Palestinian Authority would have to renounce the right of return for Palestinian refugees.⁴³

By the end of May the thirty-two months of the al-Aqsa intifada had claimed 762 Israeli and 2,274 Palestinian lives. Some observers saw both sides succumbing to battle fatigue.⁴⁴ Sharon, by speaking of the Israeli ‘occupation’, was seen by some as endorsing a two-state solution. It seemed that the Israeli Prime Minister was even prepared to make gestures that could be seen as confronting the settler movement. Washington heeded Israel’s reservations about the road map. The lobbying of Christian fundamentalists and the official Jewish establishment was considerable. On 23 May Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, released a statement: ‘The United States shares the views of the government of Israel that these are real concerns and will address them fully and seriously in the implementation of the road-map to fulfil the president’s vision of 24 June 2002.’ Powell, however, blocked Israel’s demands that Palestinians immediately concede the right to return.⁴⁵ Early in June, Abbas embraced the road map at summit meetings held at Sharm el Sheikh and Aqaba and announced that the armed intifada had to end. Arafat said that the Palestinians had achieved ‘nothing tangible’ at either summit. HAMAS and other Palestinian factions were so horrified at Abbas’s failure to mention Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, the right of return of 4 million Palestinian refugees and the release of prisoners, and found so unacceptable Abbas’s acknowledgement of ‘Jewish suffering throughout history’ while ‘ignoring Palestinian suffering as a result of Zionist occupation’, that they ended cease-fire talks with the Palestinian Authority. Five Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush in Gaza and Hebron; on 10 June Israeli helicopters tried to kill an HAMAS leader in Gaza.⁴⁶ By the end of June, two months after the presentation of the road map, there had been 170 deaths, 130 of them Palestinian.

Powell, on 20 June, secured an agreement from the Israelis to restrain their offensive for three to four weeks to allow Abbas to achieve his security commitments in Gaza and Bethlehem.⁴⁷ By the beginning of July, HAMAS, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Brigade had declared a three-month truce with the Israeli occupation army.⁴⁸ On 19 July, however, Sharon at a meeting with Abbas in West Jerusalem refused to release Palestinian prisoners and to withdraw the Israeli army from Palestinian population centres. At this time a United Nations envoy spoke of the ‘catastrophic humanitarian situation’ in Gaza. By the end of May 2003 1,134 homes had been demolished by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip.⁴⁹ On 19 August a bomb attack in Jerusalem killed twenty people and injured around 100. Both HAMAS and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. Abbas ordered his security forces to hunt down the organisers of the bombing. On 21 August an Israeli missile killed an HAMAS leader in Gaza city. HAMAS and Islamic Jihad ended the three-month-old truce that had started on 29 June, and vowed revenge. Crowds in Gaza city shouted: ‘No to Abbas and no to his road map.’ Israel killed a number of HAMAS activists in a number of attacks, and on 6 September unsuccessfully attempted to kill Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of HAMAS, in a laser-guided bomb attack on Gaza city. Two suicide bombings killed fifteen Israelis. Abbas resigned as Palestinian Prime Minister and the Israeli Cabinet agreed that Arafat should be ‘removed’.⁵⁰

The second Palestinian uprising was more extreme than the first. Fanatical suicide bombers terrorized the population in cities and towns within the borders of Israel. The Israelis applied vicious punishments in the occupied territories. Palestinian schools, hospitals and homes were razed. Palestinian movement was restricted, curfews imposed, and ordinary citizens found themselves without fresh food, water, education and work. It seemed that Israel was only paying lip service to the road map. Israeli raids on Palestinian towns and arrests of Palestinian activists continued. Israel maintained more than 125 road blocks in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians and their goods could not move. Although Sharon had dismantled a few recently established settlements, he seemed to look the other way as the settlers returned. Palestinians could have understood the road map to mean an ‘independent, viable sovereign Palestinian state’ with the border following the 225 mile (360km) Green Line that marked Israel’s pre-1967 frontier. The Israeli understanding looked like envisaging only ‘provisional borders’, ‘attributes of sovereignty’, and a minuscule Palestinian state, divided into two and surrounded by 630 miles (1,000km) of concrete walls and electrified fences. In 1947 the United Nations partition vote had awarded the Palestinians 47 per cent of their ‘homeland’; the Oslo Accords of 1993, with the offer of the West Bank and Gaza, offered 22 per cent of the ‘homeland’; at Camp David in 2000 the Palestinians were offered 80 per cent of the 22 per cent of the 100 per cent of their original homeland. The comfortable lives of Israelis, cushioned by official and private aid from the United States, were seriously disturbed after Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa mosque in September. Not only were there suicide bombers operating successfully in Israeli buses, restaurants and shopping malls, but the economy was in dire straits.⁵¹

References

1Ahron Bregman, Israel’s Wars: A History since 1947, 2nd edn (London 2002), pp. 204–205; Adhaf Souief, ‘Under the gun: a Palestinian journey’, in Roane Carey (Ed.), The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid (London 2001), pp. 45–66 at p. 48; Graham Usher, ‘The al-Aqsa intifada’, Middle East International (13 Oct. 2000), pp. 4–6; ‘Going up in Flames’, Middle East International (27 Oct. 2000), pp. 4–5.

2Khalid Amayreh, ‘Roots of the al-Aqsa uprising’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXXII, 1 (2002), pp. 109–110; Edward W. Said, ‘Palestinians under siege’, in Carey (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 27–42; Nadav Morag, ‘“Unambiguous ambiguity”’: the opacity of the Oslo peace process’, Israel Affairs, 6, 3+4 (Spring/Summer 2000), pp. 200–220; Neill Lochery, ‘The Netanyahu era: from crisis to crisis: 1996–99’, Israel Affairs, 6, 3+4 (Spring/Summer 2000), pp. 221–237; ‘Middle East apartheid’, Independent, 21 Apr. 2001.

3Mouin Rabbani, ‘A smorgasbord of failure: Oslo and the al-Aqsa intifada’, in Carey (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 70–89 at p. 76; Sara Roy, ‘Decline and disfigurement: the Palestinian economy after Oslo’, in Carey (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 91–109; Hussein Sirrihey, ‘Democratization and the Palestinian National Authority: from state-in-the-making to statehood’, Israel Affairs, 7, 1 (Autumn 2000), pp. 49–62; Gerald M. Steinberg, ‘Foreign policy in the 1999 Israeli elections’, Israel Affairs, 7, 2+3 (Winter/Spring 2001), pp. 173–198; Barry Rubin, ‘External factors in Israel’s 1999 elections’, Israel Affairs, 7, 2+3 (Winter/Spring 2001), pp. 199–222.

4Middle East International, Editorial (21 May 1999), p. 3; Patrick Seale, ‘The Syria-Israel negotiations: who is telling the truth?’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXIX, 2 (2000), pp. 65–77; ‘Window of opportunity for Syria and Israel’, Middle East International (2 July 1999), p. 6.

5Graham Usher, ‘How new is the road?’, Middle East International (16 July 1999), pp. 5–6; Donald Neff, ‘Staking all on Barak’, Middle East International (30 July 1999), pp. 8–10.

6Tom Abowd, ‘“The land without the people”: contesting Jerusalem on the eve of the millennium’, Middle East Report, 213 (Winter 1999), pp. 34–37; Graham Usher, ‘Oslo Mark III’, Middle East International (1 Oct. 1999), pp. 14–15.

7Donald Neff, ‘America into the breach’, Middle East International (10 Dec. 1999), pp. 6–7.

8Michael Jansen, ‘Another impasse’, Middle East International (28 Jan. 2000), pp. 6–7; ‘The peace process flounders in Geneva’, Middle East International (7 Apr. 2000), pp. 4–6.

9Augustus Richard Norton, ‘Hizballah and the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXX, 1 (2000), pp. 22–35; Lamis Andoni, ‘The American-Israeli gameplan’, Middle East International (21 Apr. 2000), pp. 4–5; Khaled Amayrah, ‘The territories erupt’, Middle East International (19 May 2000), pp. 4–5.

10Rema Hammami and Salim Tamari, ‘Anatomy of another rebellion’, Middle East Report, 217 (Winter 2000), pp. 2–15; John Lister, ‘“Middle” politics: looking again at the peace process’, Middle East Policy, IX, 3 (Sept. 2002), pp. 22–33; ‘The Palestinian-Israeli Camp David negotiations and beyond’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXXI, 1 (2000), pp. 62–85; Kathleen Christison, ‘The mythology of a summit’, Middle East International (31 Aug. 2001), pp. 22–24; Graham Usher, ‘The “make or break” summit?’, Middle East International (14 July 2000), pp. 4–5; Avnon Golan, ‘Jewish settlement of former Arab towns and their incorporation into the Israeli urban system (1948–1950)’, Israel Affairs, 9, 1+2 (Autumn/Winter 2003), pp. 149–164; Eldar Akiva, ‘What went wrong at Camp David – the official PLO version’, Haaretz, 5 July 2001.

11Naseer Aruri, ‘Failure at Camp David’, Middle East International (18 Aug. 2000), pp. 18–21; Mick Dumper, ‘Talking about Jerusalem’, Middle East International (18 Aug. 2000), pp. 21–22; Kathleen Christison, ‘Taking Israel’s side’, Middle East International (18 Aug. 2000), p. 19; Donald Neff, ‘The US piles on the pressure’, Middle East International (18 Aug. 2000), pp. 4–5; Richard W. Murphy and Muhammad Muslih, ‘The right of return for Palestinians has to be taken seriously’, International Herald Tribune, 4 Jan. 2001; Shavit Uriya and Bana Jalal, ‘Everything you wanted to know about the right to return but were too afraid to ask’, Haaretz, 5 July 2001.

12Clive Jones, ‘“One size fits all”’: Israel, intelligence, and the al-Aqsa intifada’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 26 (2003), pp. 273–288 esp. pp. 277–278; Ghassan Andoni, ‘A comparative study of intifada 1987 and intifada 2000’, in Carey (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 209–218 esp. pp. 210–211; Allegra Pacheco, ‘Flouting convention: the Oslo agreements’, in Carey (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 181–206 esp. pp. 196, 202.

13Allegra Pacheco, ‘Flouting convention: the Oslo agreements’, in Carey (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 181–206; Omar Barghouti, ‘Palestine’s tell-tale heart’, in Carey (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 165–178; ‘The Palestinians of Israel: an interview with Azmi Bishara’ in Carey (Ed.), op. cit., pp. 139–157; Khalid Amayreh, ‘Pushing the right of return’, Middle East International (9 Feb. 2001), p. 7; James Ron, ‘The second Palestinian uprising: cause for optimism?’, Middle East Policy, VIII, 1 (March 2001), pp. 73–88; Alexander Bligh, ‘Israeli members of the 15th Knesset: between Israeli citizenship and their Palestinian national identity’, Israel Affairs, 9, 1+2 (Autumn/Winter 2003), pp. 3–15; Vladimir Khanin, ‘Israeli “Russian” parties and the new immigrant vote’, Israel Affairs, 7, 2+3 (Winter/Spring 2001), pp. 101–134 at p. 101; Dvora Hacohen, ‘Mass immigration and the demographic revolution in Israel’, Israel Affairs, 8, 1+2 (Autumn/Winter 2002), pp. 177–190.

14Paul Cossali, ‘Arab-Israeli relations, 1967–2002’ in Joanne Maher (Ed.), The Middle East and North Africa 2003, 49th edn (London 2003), pp. 3–36 at pp. 21–22; Graham Usher, ‘Going up in flames’, Middle East International (27 Oct. 2000), pp. 4–5; Graham Usher, ‘“No; yes, but” – Arafat answers Clinton’, Middle East International (12 Jan. 2001), pp. 4–6; ‘The Taba negotiations (Jan. 2001)’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXXI, 3 (2002), pp. 79–89.

15Rema Hammami and Salim Tamari, ‘The second uprising: end or new beginning?’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXX, 2 (2001), pp. 5–25; Seth Ackerman, ‘Al-Aqsa intifada and the U.S. Media’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXX, 2 (2001), pp. 61–74; William B. Quandt, ‘Clinton and the Arab–Israeli conflict: the limits of incrementalism’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXX, 2 (2001), pp. 26–40; Donald Neff, ‘Quixotic swan-song’, Middle East International (12 Jan. 2001), pp. 9–10.

16Haim Baram, ‘An emotional affair’, Middle East International (21 Feb. 2003), p. 18; ‘The worst man won’, Middle East International (23 Feb. 2001), p. 7; Colin Shindler, ‘Likud and the search for eretz Israel: from the Bible to the twenty-first century’, Israel Affairs, 8, 1+2 (Autumn/Winter 2002), pp. 91–117; Haim Baram, ‘The BBC – Israel’s new enemy’, Middle East International (29 June 2001), p. 7; Editorial, ‘War crimes’, Middle East International (13 July 2001); Rosemary Sayigh, ‘Sabra and Shatila revisited’, Middle East International (13 July 2001), pp. 21–24; Chris Doyle, ‘Belgian trials’, Middle East International (7 Dec. 2001), pp. 12–13; Peretz Kidron, ‘No alternative to Sharon’, Middle East International (22 Aug. 2003), pp. 14–16; David Hirst, ‘Villains and heroes’, Guardian, 19 Feb. 2001.

17Kathleen Christison, ‘Who’s behind US Middle East policy?’, Middle East International (8 Mar. 2002), pp. 21–23; Naseer Aruri and Samih Farsoun, ‘Bush and the Palestinians’, Middle East International (20 Apr. 2001), pp. 21–23.

18Stephen Zunes, ‘The United States and the breakdown of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process’, Middle East Policy, VIII, 4, 2001, pp. 66–85; Graham Usher, ‘Raising the military stakes’, Middle East International (18 May 2001); Graham Usher, ‘Arafat besieged’, Middle East International (15 June 2001).

19Derek Brown, ‘Israel raises the stakes in bloody confrontation’, Guardian, 1 Aug. 2001; Graham Usher, ‘Israel’s burgeoning hit list’, Middle East International (10 Aug. 2001), pp. 4–5; Graham Usher, ‘Israel’s message: bleed or surrender’, Middle East International (14 Sept. 2001), pp. 4–5; Alan Philips, ‘Sharon sets tough terms for Arafat’, Daily Telegraph, 17 Sept. 2001.

20Ian Williams, ‘Israel’s uncertain American front’, Middle East International (9 Nov. 2001), p. 16.

21Graham Usher, ‘The invasion of Jenin’, Middle East International (28 Sept. 2001), p. 16; ‘Arafat takes the initiative’, Middle East International (28 Sept. 2001), pp. 14–16.

22Chris Doyle, ‘Britain’s role’, Middle East International (12 Oct. 2001), p. 6.

23See Ritchie Ovendale, ‘Appeasement’ and the English Speaking World. Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the Policy of ‘Appeasement’, 1937–1939 (Cardiff 1975).

24Peretz Kidron, ‘To Kabul, via Prague’, Middle East International (12 Oct. 2001), pp. 15–18; Haim Baram, ‘Gloom and distraction’, Middle East International (12 Oct. 2001), p. 17.

25Graham Usher, ‘Sharon’s red dawn’, Middle East International (26 Oct. 2001), pp. 4–5.

26Graham Usher, ‘Visions and realities’, Middle East International (23 Nov. 2001), pp. 11–12.

27Khalid Amayreh, ‘Pushing Arafat into a corner’, Middle East International (7 Dec. 2001), pp. 4–6; Editorial, ‘Thinking the unthinkable’, Middle East International (21 Dec. 2001), p. 3.

28‘US needs to act neutrally’, The Economist, 4 Feb. 2002; Graham E. Fuller, ‘The Saudi peace plan: how serious?’, Middle East Policy, IX, 2 (June 2002), pp. 27–31.

29Graham Usher, ‘Zero-sum game in Palestine’, Middle East International (8 Mar. 2002), pp. 4–5; Stephen Zunes, ‘The swing to the right in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine’, Middle East Policy, IX, 3 (2002), pp. 45–64; Rema Hammani, ‘Interregnum: Palestine after Operation Defensive Shield’, Middle East Report, 223 (Summer 2002), pp. 18–27; Avi Shlaim, ‘Sharon’s dangerous design: a career of terror’, International Herald Tribune, 5 Apr. 2002; Anton La Guardia, ‘Israelis compare Arafat to Hitler’, Daily Telegraph, 10 Apr. 2002; Alan Friedman, ‘World Bank chief decries economic toll on Palestinians’, International Herald Tribune, 19 Apr. 2002; Toby Harnden, ‘Israel wins support on Christian Right’, Daily Telegraph, 8 May 2002; ‘Opinion: right wing Americans and Israelis dream of a new regional order’, International Herald Tribune, 8 July 2002.

30Dana Hearn, ‘AIPAC Policy Conference’, Journal of Palestine Studies, XXXI, 4 (2002), pp. 66–70.

31Lamis Andoni, ‘A declaration of war’, Middle East International (28 June 2002), pp. 27–28; Henry Siegman, ‘Sharon rewrites the peace script: Resolution 242 reinterpreted’, International Herald Tribune, 13 June 2002; Toby Harnden, ‘Powell and Bush drift apart on Middle East’, Daily Telegraph, 13 June 2002.

32Ian Williams, ‘The Jenin report’, Middle East International (16 Aug. 2002), pp. 26–27.

33Chris Doyle, ‘A matter of influence’, Middle East International (25 Oct. 2002), p. 7.

34Neil Sammonds, ‘Britain and Israel: a thriving trade in arms’, Middle East International (27 Sept. 2002), pp. 24–25.

35Robert Blecher, ‘Living on the edge: the threat of “transfer” in Israel and Palestine’, Middle East Report, 225 (Winter 2002), pp. 22–29; Benny Morris, ‘A new exodus for the Middle East?’, Guardian, 3 Oct. 2002; Ian Katz, ‘Radical Israeli in u-turn on Palestinians’, Guardian, 3 Oct. 2002; Avi Shlaim, ‘A betrayal of history’, Guardian, 22 Feb. 2002; Graham Usher, ‘Palestine – back to the future’, Middle East International (10 Jan. 2003), pp. 4–5.

36Chris Doyle, ‘Conference controversy’, Middle East International (24 Jan. 2003), p. 6; Graham Usher, ‘Necessary steps’, Middle East International (24 Jan. 2003), pp. 5–7.

37Graham Usher, ‘The other war’, Middle East International (21 Mar. 2003), pp. 19–20.

38Chris McGreal, ‘Israelis fear Blair’s influence over Bush’, Guardian, 28 Mar. 2003, p. 20; see Neil Sammonds, ‘Time for a dossier on Israel’, Middle East International (11 Oct. 2002), pp. 26–27; Shlomo Aronson, ‘Israel’s nuclear programme, the Six Day War and its ramifications’, Israel Affairs, 6, 3+4 (Spring/Summer 2000), pp. 83–95; Edward S. Cochran, ‘Israel’s nuclear history’, Israel Affairs, 6, 3+4 (Spring/Summer 2000), pp. 129–156; ‘Israel ignored the United Nations and has weapons of mass destruction. So why all the fuss about Iraq?’, Economist, 12 Oct. 2002.

39Chris Doyle, ‘Air of despair’, Middle East International (4 Apr. 2003), p. 16.

40Graham Usher, ‘Walls and bridges’, Middle East International (4 Apr. 2003), pp. 23–24; Peter Lagerquist, ‘Fencing in Palestine’, Middle East International (18 Apr. 2003), pp. 28–30; Michael Brown, ‘A lie for a lie’, Middle East International (25 July 2003), p. 16.

41Thomas R. Stauffer, ‘The cost of Middle East conflict, 1956–2002: what the U.S. has spent’, Middle East Policy, X, 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 45–102.

42Ian Williams, ‘Road-map all at sea’, Middle East International (4 Apr. 2003), p. 24.

43Graham Usher, ‘Enter Abbas’, Middle East International (18 Apr. 2003), pp. 18–19.

44Eric Silver, ‘Most Israelis say they back an end to occupations’, Independent, 31 May 2003, p. 17.

45Michael Brown, ‘Cover for Sharon’, Middle East International (30 May 2003), pp. 9–10; Henry Siegman, ‘Bush and Sharon draw a map of their own’, International Herald Tribune, 16 Apr. 2003.

46‘Abbas, Sharon proclaim interest in living in peace’, International Herald Tribune, 5 June 2003; Graham Usher, ‘Blood on the road in Gaza’, Middle East International (13 June 2003), pp. 4–5.

47‘Islamic militants in Gaza accept three month truce’, International Herald Tribune, 29 June 2003; Graham Usher, ‘The road-map lives on’, Middle East International (27 June 2003), pp. 10–11.

48Khalid Amayreh, ‘Truce at last’, Middle East International (11 July 2003), pp. 11–12.

49Peter Hansen, ‘Picking up the pieces in Gaza: Israel’s demolition policy’, International Herald Tribune, 24 June 2003; Khalid Amayreh, ‘Sharon stalls’, Middle East International (25 July 2003), pp. 15–16.

50Georgina Littlejohn, ‘Israel to strike Hamas’, Metro, 21 Aug. 2003, p. 5; Stephen Condron, ‘Hamas tears up Israeli ceasefire’, Metro, 22 Aug. 2003, p. 7; Stephen Hull, ‘Israel’s bomb attack “opens gates of hell”’, Metro, 8 Sept. 2003, p. 11; Adam Blenford, ‘Arafat defies Israel expulsion threat’, Evening Standard, 12 Sept. 2003, p. 6.

51Pat Lancaster, ‘Road map to peace: destination unknown’, The Middle East, 336 (July 2003), pp. 8–9; Marwan Bishara, ‘Israel is turning the road map into a road block’, International Herald Tribune, 14 Aug. 2003; Jonathan Cook, ‘A cage for Palestinians: a 1,000 kilometer fence preempts the road map’, International Herald Tribune, 27 May 2003.