Israel and Palestine: Back to the Future

Ahmad S. Khalidi is currently a senior associate member of St Antony’s College, Oxford. He served as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid–Washington peace talks in 1991‑3 and as senior adviser on security affairs at the Cairo–Taba PLO–Israel peace talks in 1993. A French translation of this article appeared in the 3/2002 edition of Politique Étrangère.

Thirty-three years after United Nations Resolution 242 set up the formula “land for peace”, nine years after the Madrid conference launched the search for a comprehensive Arab–Israeli settlement, seven years after the Oslo agreement and the Arafat–Rabin handshake on the White House lawn, and a full year and a half after the Oslo process was to have delivered an end to occupation and a final, equitable resolution of the conflict, the cumulative erosion of Palestinian faith in the fruits of peace in early autumn 2000 was complete.

The reasons for this are not hard to find. Throughout the period 1994–2000, the Palestinian Authority (PA) had been grudgingly handed separate parcels of territorially discontinuous areas, punctuated by Israeli civilian settlements and lacerated by security zones, military roads and checkpoints. On the ground, the net territorial result of the Oslo process was full Palestinian control of less than 18 per cent of the West Bank (known as Area A), representing a miniscule 5 per cent of Palestine as it was under the British Mandate. East Jerusalem, the largest and most vital of Arab cities, had been closed off to the Arab population of the West Bank by Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 before Oslo, and remained so throughout the succeeding period.

The inhabitants of the Gaza Strip (representing about a third of the total Palestinian population in the occupied territories) remained largely severed from their brethren in the West Bank. The ghettoised Gazans were subject to endless Israeli closures and constraints, waived or reimposed as Israel saw fit. Twenty per cent of Gaza’s 360 square kilometres remained exclusively allocated for 6,500 Jews, coddled in separate security zones among one million indigenous Arabs.

Israeli Actions and Attitudes

But most galling of all was the relentless and unyielding expansion of Israeli civilian implantations on Palestinian soil. Between September 1993, when the Oslo agreement was signed, and late 2000, the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories doubled, rising to around 200,000 in two hundred settlements in the West Bank and approximately 6,500 in sixteen settlements in the Gaza Strip. The total number of settlers packed into the Israeli “neighbourhoods” built on occupied Arab land in East Jerusalem also doubled, reaching 200,000. Between 1967 and 1999, at least forty thousand housing units for Jews were built in East Jerusalem. A few dozen were allowed for Arabs. As the Palestinians sat and ostensibly sought to negotiate the future of their land, the outcome was being determined by unilateral Israeli “fact-creating” on the ground, nourished by governments of left and right alike. Ultimately, the sense was that the Israelis were simply taking the Palestinians for a ride.

Concurrent with these unilateral changes on the ground, the Israeli style of negotiations was less than reassuring. The Oslo “Declaration of Principles” of September 1993 had set the grand framework for the interim period before “final-status” talks. But this was followed by a series of renegotiated agreements as each successive Israeli government tried to improve the terms of Oslo as it saw fit. Rabin renegotiated Oslo in the Cairo agreement of 1994 and in “Oslo-2” (also known as Taba) in 1995. In 1996, his Labour party successor, Shimon Peres, only partially implemented Oslo-2, leaving his Likud successor Benjamin Netanyahu to renegotiate it as part of the Hebron agreement of 1997. Netanyahu then sought to renegotiate Oslo-2 in the Wye agreement of 1998, which he did not implement. Ehud Barak came to power in May 1999, seeking to renegotiate Wye. This was done in the Egyptian town of Sharm-el-Sheikh in September 1999. Rabin’s “no sacred dates” (nor apparently “sacred” texts) had become the guiding principle of Israeli negotiations.

Throughout the post-Oslo period, most Israelis remained blissfully ignorant of or indifferent to the corrosive effects of the occupation on the prospects for peace. Despite many notable and honourable exceptions—some deep within the Israeli establishment—the Israeli public generally neither saw nor cared to see the impact of the myriad harassments and humiliations inflicted on Palestinians of all walks of life. Israelis were also oblivious to the manner in which the free reign granted to Jewish settlers disrupted the fabric of Palestinian daily and national existence.

A taste of the real meaning of the occupation can be garnered from a poll released by the West Bank’s Birzeit University in February 2002, which covered the entire occupation experience since 1967 in both the West Bank and Gaza: 63 per cent of all respondents said their homes had been entered and searched by Israeli forces; 51 per cent said they had been verbally abused and humiliated at Israeli checkpoints; 42 per cent said they had been subjected to physical abuse; 18 per cent—almost one-fifth of the adult population—said they had been detained by security forces for varying periods of time; 15 per cent reported actual injury at the hands of occupation forces. Yet for most Israelis, “peace” seems to have been equated with “quiet”, or worse, Palestinian quiescence. As long as they were neither seen nor heard, the Palestinians—a short distance away across the 1967 borders—were hardly visible as a people with national aspirations.

Although an increasing proportion of Israelis were slowly coming to accept the inevitability of Palestinian statehood, both the general public and the Israeli establishment persisted in the belief that this could be realised at relatively little cost and at maximum advantage for Israel itself. For much of the interim period, and most visibly after the return of Labour to power in 1999, the various final-status issues seemed to be more a matter for domestic Israeli haggling than Palestinian–Israeli agreement.

Enter Mr Barak

Ehud Barak came to power in May 1999 on the crest of unprecedented Palestinian, regional and international goodwill (in the aftermath of the bleak Netanyahu years). His declared intent to reach a comprehensive and final settlement on all fronts was initially very well received. For his part, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat provided Barak with a breathing space by agreeing to postpone a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood in May 1999, postponed again for a year at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit of September 1999.

However, Barak proved incapable of translating this goodwill into practice. Instead of giving full attention to the impending end of the interim period, he sought to keep the Palestinian issue off the agenda while he pursued the “Syrian option”. For almost a full year, the Palestinian side was kept waiting. By May 2000, Barak had failed to reach a deal with President Hafez al-Assad of Syria about the Golan Heights and had unilaterally pulled his troops out of Lebanon. Concurrently, he was seeking to reactivate the talks with the Palestinians. But Barak’s previous prevarication had already alienated the Palestinian side, which had little clue as to what he had in mind as a final-status agreement.

And there was worse: notwithstanding all former negotiations and agreements, some basic items agreed in 1993 as part of the interim process were still unfulfilled seven years later, and a full year and a half after the interim period was supposed to have ended. Thus, despite his declared commitment to peace, Barak quickly made it clear that he would not:

1. implement the third “further redeployment” (FRD)—a vital part of the agreed, phased Oslo approach—on the grounds that it would adversely affect Israel’s position on final-status borders. Barak’s insistence on merging the third FRD with final-status talks had a major corrosive effect on the Palestinian leadership’s good faith in the Israeli side;

2. release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners belonging to Arafat’s own Fatah movement, who had been jailed before 1993, on the grounds that they had “Jewish blood on their hands”. And while Arafat and his senior lieutenants (who had given the orders to those in prison) were recognised and legitimised by Israel, those who implemented these orders languished in jail. This was impossible to explain or justify to Palestinian public opinion;

3. finalise arrangements agreed at Oslo for “safe passage” between Gaza and the West Bank. Although a southern route had been opened by late 1999, it remained subject to many Israeli restrictions, and the more important and direct northern passage was still being debated seven years after its nominal designation at the talks in the Egyptian town of Taba in late 1993. Thus, the one million residents of Gaza still felt enclosed and suffocated by the Israeli side and had little sense of a new freedom from occupation;

4. make a serious move towards engaging Arafat or the Palestinian leadership directly, or convey an impression of readiness to deal with them honourably or on an equal footing.

Camp David Fiasco

Playing his cards very close to his chest, Barak had come to the conclusion by early summer 2000 that a final-status deal was only achievable in a three-way, US-sponsored summit with himself and Arafat at the helm. Despite serious reservations, and a clear understanding of what failure would entail, the Palestinian side reluctantly agreed to meet the Israelis at Camp David. President Bill Clinton of the United States wanted a major Middle East achievement and believed that the time for it had come, before the US congressional and presidential elections in November. July 2000 also seemed to afford an opportunity to Barak, as his much‑weakened government could operate with relative freedom during the Knesset summer recess. Arafat was thus put in a position where he had to respond to political agendas determined by domestic considerations in both the United States and Israel that did not correspond to his own needs. At the same time, the Palestinians had no clear sense of what Barak was willing to offer. For months he had suggested that the Palestinians had to “lower their expectations” and that Israeli territorial/security demands on the West Bank would be quite stringent.

As of early 2000, the best estimates of the Palestinians (based on what they had heard from various Israeli interlocutors) were that Barak was willing to offer 50–60 per cent of the West Bank as a final deal. For his part, Arafat wanted to agree on the basic principles in advance; the summit would thus have been a tool for concluding the negotiations, not commencing them. But Barak would brook no further delay, and pushed his negotiators to the talks without sufficient preparation. At the same time, Barak hinted that he had much to say but only in a summit such as Camp David.

In truth, Barak’s strategy at Camp David was simple. He would intimate to the Americans the general contours of what was acceptable, leaving the United States to do the selling to the Palestinians. If the latter accepted, they would have agreed to a “US” position that would not necessarily be binding on Barak himself. If the Palestinians refused, they could be blamed for “rejecting a generous Israeli offer”. The general thrust was that the Palestinians had a stark choice: either Barak’s way, or war; either they accepted what he believed they deserved, or they were to be branded the villains. Barak’s goal was as much to delegitimise and “expose” Arafat as it was to reach a deal.

An Ambiguous Process

The result was that there was little direct negotiation of substance between the two sides at Camp David, despite the prevailing image of an intense political encounter. The Palestinians and Israelis formed working groups but these were largely formalistic and insubstantial. No common texts were presented and nothing was put down in writing. Nothing was binding and “nothing was agreed until everything was agreed”. Most peculiar was the behaviour of Barak himself. Having demanded the summit and pushed the Americans and Palestinians to attend, he shut himself in and refused to meet Arafat even once, to the intense irritation even of the United States It was Clinton himself who played a leading role, with senior US aides shuttling between the two sides. The unstructured process at Camp David has meant that the substance of what was debated is still in dispute by the different sides. Each side has its own interpretation of what was offered, who made the offer, what the status of the offer was, and how this offer was received.

Whatever the ultimate truth, what the Palestinians saw was hardly the mother of all compromises by the Israeli side. As has been argued elsewhere, what they saw was neither an offer, nor Israeli, nor particularly generous.¹ Taking into account areas earmarked for outright annexation and those retained for long-term security (but not necessarily annexed), some 18 per cent of the West Bank would remain under Israeli control. In return for the annexed areas a very limited land-swap centring on Gaza could be considered at a ratio of 9:1 in Israel’s favour (the very notion of a land-swap having been prised out of Barak by Clinton’s incessant dentistical drilling). Israeli annexation demands effectively trisected the Palestinian state and dominated its internal north/south communications as well as its east/west access to the Arab hinterland. Barak’s proposals also meant that tens of thousands of Arabs would be annexed to Israel or forced to vacate their homes.

On other issues the results were mixed. As regards security, progress was generally good, but the vital refugee issue was hardly touched. However, the single most explosive issue was Jerusalem. Under the impression that a “Jerusalem first” approach would help facilitate movement on all other issues, Clinton and his advisers made the fateful decision to focus on the Holy City. The result was catastrophic. What the United States believed was unprecedented Israeli flexibility regarding a Palestinian sovereign presence in Jerusalem (albeit very limited and symbolic), the Palestinian side saw as an attempt to finalise Israeli control over the vast majority of East Jerusalem. In fact, US proposals were confused and confusing. The main element seemed to be that of separating the one square kilometre of the Old City from the tangled sovereign, municipal and administrative issues relating to the rest of the seventy-one square kilometres of occupied East Jerusalem. Various options were drawn up that gave the Palestinians either a bit more land outside the Old City walls and a bit less inside the Old City, or vice versa.

Much worse, focusing on the Old City immediately raised the explosive issue of sovereignty and control of the holy places, and in particular of their epicentre, the Haram-as-Sharif/Temple Mount complex. From that moment on, all other issues became secondary. Far from facilitating movement, the debate about Jerusalem quickly descended into an atavistic contest of conflicting religious claims, with both sides asserting the incontestable primacy of their own. The Palestinian side was appalled to hear that Israel was insisting on maintaining political sovereignty over the Haram (or in one formulation, under it), and that unprecedented Jewish congregational prayer rights were being sought on the Haram compound. The Israelis for their part were appalled that the Palestinian side seemed unwilling or unable to recognise the importance of the Temple Mount as a Jewish religious site.

Arafat Cornered

For Arafat, the grand picture that was emerging at Camp David was that the Israeli side was seeking to delegitimise him by forcing him to accept that which was not at his sole disposal (a) before the international community as a valid peacemaker and (b) before his own natural Arab/Muslim constituency. But although the two sides remained far apart, the Palestinians saw Camp David as the beginning of the process of negotiating a final-status agreement, not its apocalyptic end. It was Barak who decided that this was do or die, and then that because the Palestinians had not welcomed his ambivalent and not-so-evident generosity with open arms, it had to be the latter.

For its part, the United States severely undermined its own credibility by putting the blame for the failure of the Camp David talks directly onto Arafat’s shoulders despite clear pre-summit promises not to do so. Indeed, two other important pre-summit Israeli–US assurances were also broken, (1) that the third FRD would be implemented, and (2) that three Jerusalem villages would be transferred to Area A status regardless of the outcome at Camp David (a Barak promise). There was no acknowledgement of the unprecedented Palestinian readiness to do the following: recognise West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; accept that Israel’s illegal “neighbourhoods” in East Jerusalem would remain under Israeli rule; transfer the Wailing Wall and adjoining plaza to Israeli sovereignty; meet Israeli concerns on security, partly by accepting a remarkable (by regional standards) degree of non-militarisation; accept border modifications (minor and mutual) so as to facilitate a resolution of the settlement issue; and accept significant qualifications of the right to return of Palestinian refugees. All of these Palestinian concessions should be measured against the unwavering insistence of Egypt, Jordan and Syria on a return to the pre-1967 status quo.

It was against this tense and uncertain backdrop that Barak made the inexplicably unwise decision to allow Likud leader Ariel Sharon to assert his “right” to visit the Haram-as-Sharif complex. No other national Israeli leader had ever felt it necessary to assert his religiosity in this manner. But courting Sharon’s goodwill, on the one hand, and worried about Netanyahu’s rising star, on the other, Barak seems to have totally failed to understand the depth of provocation this one single step constituted from the Palestinian point of view. Sharon is the man with most Palestinian “blood on his hands”, the overseer of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the architect of settlement expansion. To give him the go-ahead to visit the Haram at a time when Palestinian suspicions regarding Israeli designs on the holy site bordered on paranoia can only be seen as an act of supreme and unforgivable folly. In typical Israeli fashion, the protests that erupted the next day were met with brute force. On 29 September 2000, six unarmed Palestinian protesters were shot to death and 150 wounded in Jerusalem. The fuse for the new intifada had been lit. Within three days some twenty-eight Palestinians had been killed across the occupied territories and five hundred wounded.

Intifada 2

The second intifada was the result of a combination of factors working at different levels. At the deepest level is a feeling (cutting across all segments of Palestinian society, inside and outside the PA) of being cheated by Oslo and let down by Camp David. Neither the interim period nor the final-status talks seemed to be delivering an end to Israeli occupation and unilateral fact-creating. The Israelis were apparently raising previously unheard demands regarding the holy places (exemplified by Sharon’s “walk” on the Haram) that gave the conflict a new and extremely dangerous religious complexion—all of this under the aegis of a prime minister who had only weeks before declared his readiness to launch a “secular revolution” in the Hebrew state.

At another level, Palestinian violence was seen as a reactive response to Israeli brutality. Israeli violence naturally led to Palestinian counter-violence. From there on the cycle of violence continued, fuelled by the Israeli army’s killing of twelve-year-old Mohammad al-Durra in Gaza live on television and the subsequent lynching of two Israeli soldiers by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah. A detailed list of casualties by name, age and place of engagement provided by the Palestinian ministry of information puts Palestinian losses up to 30 October 2024 at 155 killed and 7,000 wounded. Of those killed, 36 were less than eighteen years old. In addition, 500 Palestinians were arrested during October alone. Palestinian casualties in the first month of the second intifada should be compared with a total of 1,087 killed by Israeli forces and settlers over the six years of the first intifada between 1987 and 1993.

From the perspective of the Palestinians, it thus seemed that it was they who had made an unprecedentedly generous offer, and they who had been met by provocations and excessive violence. But the sustained post–September 2000 violence did not stop the talking. Throughout the last months of the Barak/Clinton era, the Palestinians and Israelis kept up an intensive dialogue, prompted and coddled by the United States. By late December, the US president waded in with his own definitive “parameters” for resolving the conflict. These were a marked improvement on the Camp David “offer”, and both sides debated them in some detail in the Taba talks of December 2000 and January 2001. But Taba was too late to make a real difference. Barak was not going to be seen as having “submitted to Palestinian violence”, and the Palestinians were not going to sign a deal with an Israeli leader who had little chance of being re-elected.

The period 1999–2000 was undoubtedly a moment for peacemaking: both sides were ready, and the parameters of a solution were acknowledged by those who ought to know. Had the substance debated at Taba been raised by Barak six months earlier (and there was no real reason why he should not have done so), the prospects of a final settlement would have been good indeed. The descent into violence was neither necessary nor preordained, but once it had taken hold, its grip was fast and tragically hard to break. The failure of Camp David and the inconclusive finale at Taba were more the product of human foible than ill will, more of hubris than malevolence. And it was Barak himself who wittingly or unwittingly prepared the path for the worst bout of Israeli–Palestinian violence since 1947. On the one hand, his demand that the talks produce a definitive “end of conflict” can be seen as his most positive legacy, and it is the one that the Palestinians paradoxically seek and need the most. For an end of conflict is what will give them a final, irrevocable end of occupation and get the Israelis out of their daily lives. It will equally give the Israelis the certitude that they seek and need: no more war and bloodshed, and a chance to live a normal life. On the other hand, there is little doubt that Barak was instrumental in paving the way for Sharon by convincing the Israeli public it had no partner for peace.

Sharon’s Strategy

The process of delegitimising Arafat begun by Barak has been remarkably successful and now extends to the entire PA. Sharon has not only carried Barak’s mantle well, but has adeptly exploited both the excesses of the Palestinian opposition and the shortcomings of the PA to strengthen his position. Some of the consequences of this are already apparent: Israeli right-wing triumphalism is in full cry, and its appetite for colonial expansion and a “greater Israel” has been whetted once more. Even before Israel’s April 2002 assault on the PA, thirty-four new settlement outposts had been established by Sharon on the West Bank (to add to the two hundred–odd settlements already in place), and plans are afoot to expand Jewish settlement into densely populated Arab areas of Hebron and East Jerusalem.

Indeed, the apparent defeat of the PA can only serve to fire the Israeli right’s enthusiasm for yet more radical solutions, including a return to the basics of “transfer” or ethnic cleansing as practised in 1948 and now supported by approximately 60 per cent of the Israeli electorate, according to recent opinion polls.² The future of Israel’s Arab population (about 20 per cent of the total) is being debated in Israel with an unprecedented candour that has seen the formal adoption of apartheid-like land laws (the Israeli government voted in July 2002 in favour of a law banning Israel’s Arab citizens from access to state lands, which would be preserved for Jews only). Today, the right seems to have decisively set the Israeli political agenda and is leading it in both tone and substance.

With unambiguous support from the United States, Sharon’s ultimate goal is no less than the total subjugation and dissolution of the Palestinian national movement. But Sharon appears to have learnt something from his more direct and brutish approach in the past. During a visit to Washington in early May 2002, he capitalised on the US administration’s visceral antipathy towards Arafat to suggest that the moment was ripe to reconfigure the entire PA to Washington’s and Israel’s liking. In other words, the Palestinians would now not only have to demonstrate peaceful intent and behaviour, but also devote themselves to a process of internationally supervised democratisation that would eventually rehabilitate them as potential partners in peace.

Sharon has consequently sought to capture what could have been a legitimate domestic Palestinian issue and transform it into a tool to buy time and subvert any prospects for progress towards a political settlement. In effect, Sharon and the United States are not only demanding Arafat’s political (perhaps physical) elimination, but are holding the whole peace process hostage to some indeterminable definition of Palestinian democracy—an issue that is neither Sharon’s nor anybody else’s business to rule on in the first place.

Consequently, and with US connivance or indifference, the outlines of the solution that has served as the underpinning of the peace camp on both sides since the mid-seventies are beginning to recede. As “Sharon’s way” has moved to occupy the Israeli centre, the very notion of a viable two-state solution is being called into question by a combination of US ignorance and inertia and Israel’s creation of new facts on the ground. While the US administration and its Republican party extensions echo Sharon in deciding for the Palestinians what form of leadership and governance best serves Israel’s interests, Sharon has been busy decreeing new fences and buffer zones across the occupied territories, a system that will effectively designate the de facto boundaries between the two sides.

Prognosis

Far from eliciting an Israeli return to anything like the 1967 borders, the coming politico-diplomatic tussle is likely to centre on forcing Israel’s retreat from the April 2002 lines. Although in deep debate with his own right wing, led by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over whether Likud should concede the ideological principle of Palestinian statehood, Sharon may well still offer a political solution, even a Palestinian “state”, as some kind of sop to international public opinion and the US administration’s current espousal of a “viable” Palestine. But this will be nothing near the minimum required for a fair and sustainable peace, and Sharon has already declared his refusal to dismantle a single settlement, now or in the future.

Despite some brave voices in Israel, and the faint stirrings of its unsteady and inconsistent peace camp, the only apparent successor to Sharon—Netanyahu—is even further to the right. The Israeli Labour party, tainted by its association with Sharon’s enterprise, and unwilling or unable to suggest a viable alternative, has lost all credibility with the Palestinians—and its own electorate.

For the foreseeable future, therefore, it looks as if the notion of a return to the Clinton parameters and a comprehensive final-status package incorporating an internationally sponsored two-state solution is sheer illusion. The two sides will simply not get there on their own, and the international community (for which read the United States) will not take upon itself the task of making them—and Israel in particular—an offer they cannot refuse. Given this, the current conflict will continue, sometimes on a low flame, sometimes at full blast. For most Israelis, every act of Palestinian resistance now merely seems to confirm that the Palestinians cannot be trusted as political partners, and every Palestinian concession seems to be proof that the only thing the Palestinians understand is the language of force. In such an environment there has to be a question as to how long the Israeli public will continue to believe that there is any hope for a negotiated solution at all.

Similar ominous trends have also begun to emerge on the Palestinian side. As long as military force remains Sharon’s prime means of engagement with the Palestinians, and as long as settlement expansion continues unabated, there is a near consensus among Palestinians that military resistance against occupying Israeli troops and settlers is both morally and politically justified. There is, however, a growing realisation of the cost and disutility of suicide bombings. But the long-term dilemma facing the PA—whatever future shape it takes—is that it cannot be seen to act primarily as a security force in the service of the occupation rather than its own people. Conversely, without demonstrating its firm grip on security it will not be given a chance to “rehabilitate” itself on the international (i.e., US) scene. Caught in this trap, the PA, with or without Arafat, may have no choice but to hope to continue muddling through without making a decisive move in either direction.

At the same time, the issue of “reform” has indeed come to the fore, but its chances of success are inversely proportional to the fervour with which Israel and the United States cling to the hope of sponsoring a Palestinian leadership alternative to and more amenable than that of Arafat. For although much has been made of the old guard–young guard split within Fatah and the PA, neither the current nor the upcoming generation of leaders can claim any real legitimacy as Arafat substitutes while under the Israeli boot and in the face of a US diktat. There clearly will have to be an eventual successor to Arafat, but this is not the moment for an alternative leadership to seek to assert its legitimacy against that of Arafat himself.

In the longer term, and given that the PA may prove unable to deliver on either good governance or freedom and independence, two further transformations may be anticipated. First, the centre of Palestinian political gravity may well shift back to the diaspora, i.e., outside Palestine. In the refugee camps and elsewhere in the diaspora, different Palestinian factions will seek to draw upon the vast groundswell of popular sympathy felt by a new generation of Arabs touched once more by the drama of Palestine. Just as happened in the fifties, the trauma of 2002 will revive the hopes for Palestinian armed struggle from outside. Indeed, and in response to Israeli tactical “innovations”, Palestinian militancy is likely to develop its own “innovative”, more dangerous and possibly unconventional tools of violence. Sharon’s lasting legacy may well be the recreation of the chronic crossborder instabilities of previous decades, laced with the ever-present danger of new and unprecedented regional confrontations.

Second, Israel’s Arab citizens are likely to feel more alienated than ever from the Jewish state. As a significant minority (20 per cent of the population), the Israeli Arabs will remain bound to the rules of Israeli democracy so long as this democracy appears to safeguard their communal interests. The real danger arises from a growing recognition that the new forces in Israel are less interested in democracy than in the maintenance of the “Jewishness” of the state. In this context, the fears of Israeli Arabs will create new bonds and a tendency to greater radicalism in support of their Palestinian brethren outside Israel.

Summer 2002 seems to have brought us back to basics, back to where we all started in 1948, an all-out existential war for the land of Palestine. Only this time the way forward will be harder and more hazardous than ever before—not least for Israel itself.

Endnotes

1. See Robert Malley and Hussein Agha’s groundbreaking account of the talks, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors”, New York Review of Books, 9 August 2001, and the subsequent exchange of views with Barak and Benny Morris in the same publication on 13 and 27 June 2002.

2. See the Haifa University poll cited in Yediot Ahronot, 11 July 2002. According to the poll, 61 per cent of Israelis support the “peaceful transfer” from Israel of its Arab citizens.