The Palestinians’ absurd situation, being restrained from negotiating for an end to Israel’s occupation while Israel reinforced it, was strikingly revealed over nearly a decade of intensive negotiations. These negotiations started with the shuttle diplomacy of secretary of state James Baker in the spring of 1991 in preparation for the convening of the Madrid conference, and went on until the Camp David summit in July 2000, with no significant progress made on the core issues that separated the two sides. This impasse was inevitable because of the nature of the ground rules that were adopted for these negotiations. These were originally imposed on the Palestinians by the United States at the insistence of the Shamir government. They indefinitely froze dealing with any of the issues of substance between the two sides (the final status issues: occupation, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, water , and permanent borders), while there was no concomitant freeze on the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. During this decade their population rose from about two hundred thousand to over four hundred thousand. Instead of focusing on resolving final status issues, Palestinian-Israeli negotiations until the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000 (and the Washington and Taba talks that followed) were limited by these restrictive rules to dealing with transitional administrative arrangements. This left untouched the expansion of settlements and the matrix of control of the Israeli occupation. The practical effect of these Israeli-inspired and American- imposed ground rules was to lighten the moral, political, and security burden for Israel of its military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem for a decade, while allowing it not only to maintain, but indeed to reinforce, its presence in most of the occupied territories. Israel, which appeared to the world as if it was negotiating peace with the Palestinians, was simultaneously expanding not only its settlements but also the extensive infrastructure of roads, electricity, water, and phone lines needed to sustain them. Thus it has been argued by some observers that the lasting fruit of this nearly ten-year “peace process,” which resulted in the Oslo Accords and subsequent Palestinian-Israeli accords that produced the Palestinian Authority (PA), has been the hardening of Israel’s occupation regime, and a considerable expansion of its illegal settlements. This happened in part because the United States failed to respect its own commitments in the joint U.S.-Soviet letter of invitation to the Madrid Peace Conference, and particularly in the U.S . letter of assurance to the Palestinians, both dated October 18, 1991. 32 The latter set out the U.S. position regarding actions by either side that would prejudge, preempt, or predetermine the outcome of the deferred final status negotiations. Described as “U.S. understandings and intentions” regarding the negotiating process, which it said was aimed , among other things, to provide “an end to the Israeli occupation,” the letter stressed that nothing done in this phase should “be prejudicial or precedential to the outcome of the negotiations.” It affirmed: “We encourage all sides to avoid unilateral acts that would exacerbate local tensions or make negotiations more difficult or preempt their final outcome.” The letter further stated: “The United States has long believed that no party should take unilateral actions that seek to predetermine issues that can only be resolved through negotiations. In this regard the United States has opposed and will continue to oppose settlement activity in the territories occupied in 1967, which remains an obstacle to peace.” 33 If these statements meant anything, they meant that Israel could not unilaterally decide the fate of the territory that was subject to negotiations, which in fact Israel was engaged in doing by the continued building of settlements and the infrastructure to support them. The United States did nothing about these developments, its letter of assurance to the Palestinians notwithstanding. The Palestinians were unable to find the means through diplomacy, public advocacy, peaceful protest, or coalition building in Israel, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to show the dangers of what Israel was doing, or to obstruct it effectively. This was not for want of efforts: Dr. Haidar ‘Abd al-Shafi, the head of the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid and Washington negotiations, conveyed to the PLO leadership in Tunis the unanimous recommendation of the entire delegation that they be authorized to break off these talks once it became clear that the United States would not do anything to halt Israeli actions that predetermined the outcome of the negotiations, notably settlement expansion. 34 This recommendation was ignored, and prime responsibility for negotiations with Israel was eventually surreptitiously moved by the PLO from the hard-nosed Palestinian delegation in Washington to the more “flexible” group that negotiated the Oslo Accords, with ultimately disastrous consequences for the Palestinians. Over time , a sort of resigned passivity fell over the previously highly mobilized Palestinians in the occupied territories and abroad. It is worth recalling that the Madrid Peace Conference and the Palestinian-Israel negotiations that followed were in a sense the fruit of the first intifada, which had galvanized Palestinian society and revealed to many Israelis after two decades that the occupation was untenable. After Madrid, most Palestinians assumed that securing a state through negotiations was only a matter of time. In effect, however, nothing of the kind was happening, as Israel was allowed by the United States, in spite of solemn pledges to the Palestinians by the first Bush administration, to help itself to huge bites of the pie that the two sides were supposed to be negotiating about. During the over nine years of negotiations from the lengthy lead-up to the 1991 Madrid conference, until President Clinton belatedly convened the Camp David conference in late 2000 , 35 while the Palestinians were barred from discussing any of the real problems between them and Israel, these problems grew worse. Occupation continued, as did seizures of Palestinian land for new settlements and the expansion of old ones, and the concomitant growth of the settler population. As a result of Israeli policies and the peculiar arrangements for Palestinian self-government that defined the prerogatives of the PA, there was no contiguous body of territory under PA jurisdiction, indeed there was no territory under its full and absolute control and jurisdiction, even the 17 percent of the West Bank that it nominally controlled. New bypass roads were constructed to enable settlers to travel between settlements without passing through Palestinian-populated areas. The building of this network of roads— designed exclusively for the use of Israelis and from which Palestinians were barred— involved the seizure of yet more Palestinian land. These roads helped encircle the Palestinian population ever more tightly in small cantons within the West Bank, isolated from one another and subject to “closures” (meaning in effect imprisonment within each canton) as and when Israel desired. The most rigorous closures blocked off access to Israel proper and to occupied Arab East Jerusalem. There, limitations on building by Palestinians combined with Israel’s settlements in the eastern sector of the city dimmed hopes that it could ever become the Palestinian capital. Meanwhile, nothing was done to address the plight of those Palestinians who lived in exile or the critical issue of Israel’s control of West Bank aquifers. All of these changes on the ground— occurring while peace negotiations were supposedly taking place— made the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state with defined borders grow ever more distant. Each of these gradually worsening chronic problems undermined the legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership engaged in negotiations with Israel, and stoked Palestinian popular frustration. Over time, the leadership’s popularity declined precipitously in consequence. This affected the image of the PLO and the PA generally, and even that of the preeminent symbol of Palestinian nationalism, Yasser ‘Arafat, who according to one set of opinion polls went from being “trusted” by as much as 46.4 percent of those polled in the mid-1990s (several times more than his closest competitor) to numbers in the low- to mid-20s from December 2000 onward. 36 As seemingly fruitless negotiations dragged on for a decade, many Palestinians came to perceive that vital segments of the 22 percent of historic mandatory Palestine composed of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem on which they had hoped to establish a sovereign state were being inexorably absorbed into Israel by this creeping process of settlement and de facto annexation. They thus came to feel that any peace based on a two-state solution was impossible to achieve. The situation continues to deteriorate: while by 2000 the settler population in these two areas had more than doubled to over 400,000, five years later it stood at nearly 450,000, in spite of the dismantling of the small settlements in the Gaza Strip.
Khalidi, Rashid (2006-09-01). The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Kindle Locations 3769-3836). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.