- Henry Kissinger writes in his memoirs that when, upon
entering the Nixon administration as national security adviser in 1969,
he first heard the phrase "a just and lasting peace within secure
and recognized borders", he thought the incantation so platitudinous
that he accused the speaker of pulling his leg. But Kissinger quickly learned
that this central tenet of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which calls
for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied during the
1967 war in return for an Arab pledge of full peace and recognition, was
deadly serious. The resolution had been adopted more than a year before
Kissinger arrived on the scene, but he played a key role in setting it,
and the land-for-peace doctrine that is its centerpiece, into concrete
as the basis for U.S. policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict. For 25 years,
the resolution remained the bedrock of all efforts to forge a peace agreement
through every subsequent U.S. administration--until President Bill Clinton
arrived on the scene and until, ironically, the peace process revved up
in earnest.
-
- Although Clinton and his team of negotiators paid lip
service to Resolution 242, in fact they consistently, throughout seven
years of peacemaking, undermined it by abandoning the land-for-peace concept
that was fundamental to it. President George W. Bush and his policymakers
also occasionally mention the resolution, but the Bush administration is
demonstrably ignorant of the history and background of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, and it can fairly be said that, by now, Resolution 242 and the
approach to peace that it outlined have basically been forgotten, consigned
to the filing cabinets of history and remembered only by Palestinians for
whom the U.S. memory loss constitutes a grave breach of contract.
-
- This is a story of remarkable foreign policy duplicity.
When Resolution 242 was negotiated and finally adopted in November 1967,
a few months after Israel captured territory from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan
in the 1967 war, President Lyndon Johnson and his policymakers were anxious
primarily to ensure that Israel not be required to withdraw from captured
territory, as had happened in 1956 following the Sinai campaign, without
an explicit, guaranteed promise from the Arabs of peace and an end of belligerency.
The resolution stipulated this exchange, calling unequivocally for "termination
of all claims or states of belligerency" and explicit acknowledgement
of all states' (meaning in particular Israel's) territorial integrity and
"right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free
from threats or acts of force"--all in return for Israel's withdrawal
"from territories occupied in the recent conflict".
-
- The extent of Israel's required withdrawal was deliberately
not specified in the resolution--an example of "creative ambiguity"
made possible by omitting the definite article in front of the phrase "territories
occupied in the recent conflict". Internal documents and the rare
public pronouncement, however, make it clear that, although U.S. policymakers
never definitively spelled out the exact boundary envisioned between Israel
and any Arab entity, the basic assumption of successive administrations
was that Israel would not keep the occupied territories. Johnson said publicly
in 1968 that whatever borders were finally agreed to "should not reflect
the weight of conquest". The U.S. envisioned a virtually full withdrawal
on all fronts, excepting only some possible "minor border adjustments"
in the 1967 lines to straighten and rationalize boundaries. In fact, on
the Egyptian front, under the 1979 peace treaty, Israel withdrew totally
from the occupied Sinai Peninsula--a point not lost on other Arabs still
negotiating their own agreements.
-
- With respect specifically to the occupied West Bank,
U.S. policymakers gained Jordan's acceptance of Resolution 242 on the promise
that the U.S. would seek an Israeli withdrawal from the entire territory
except for minor border changes. When in 1988 Jordan formally relinquished
its claim to the West Bank in favor of the Palestinians (Egypt had previously
relinquished any claim to Gaza), Palestinians assumed that the promise
reverted to them and that the U.S. remained pledged to work for a virtually
total Israeli withdrawal. This is in fact the basis on which the U.S. proceeded.
-
- For years, a succession of U.S. administrations demanded,
as a precondition for Palestinian entry into the peace process, that the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) formally accept the UN resolution
and recognize not only Israel's existence but its "right to exist".
In negotiating the 1975 Sinai II accord, the agreement for a second partial
Israeli withdrawal in the Sinai Peninsula, Henry Kissinger, responding
to Israel's fear that it would be forced to deal with the PLO as the next
step in the negotiating process, added a codicil promising that the United
States would not negotiate with the PLO unless it met these conditions.
Two years later, President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance
made a serious attempt to gain PLO acquiescence to the conditions in order
be able to bring the Palestinians into negotiations, but the effort ultimately
failed, largely because the PLO felt unable at the time to make these major
concessions without any expectation of concessions from Israel. Palestinians
specifically objected to 242 because it did not address them in national
terms, referring to them only as "the refugee problem".
-
- It would be another decade before the PLO, buoyed by
the political successes of the first intifada, made what it considered
to be a major compromise and finally accepted Resolution 242. In November
1988, the PLO formally relinquished all Palestinian claim to territory
inside Israel's 1967 borders and, in the belief that the resolution required
Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories and that the United States
supported such a withdrawal, declared its goal to be the establishment
of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, existing
alongside Israel, with a shared capital in Jerusalem. In a formal public
statement, PLO leader Yasir Arafat recognized Israel's "right to exist"
at the same time. The Palestinians thus relinquished claim to 78 percent
of Palestine, demanding independent statehood only in the remaining 22
percent. Three years after this, and only because of their acceptance of
242, Palestinians were included for the first time in peace negotiations,
participating as part of the Jordanian delegation to the Madrid peace conference
in October 1991.
-
- The principal point that should be emphasized throughout
these two decades of fitful negotiations is that the United States, through
six administrations from Johnson to George H. W. Bush, consistently adhered
to Resolution 242, explicitly endorsed its central land-for-peace thesis,
and therefore explicitly led the PLO to believe that Palestinian adherence
to the resolution and an expressed willingness to live in peace with Israel
would bring U.S. support for the other half of the deal--land for the Palestinians,
in the form of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital
in Jerusalem, following a virtually complete Israeli withdrawal.
-
- This is not to say that all U.S. administrations supported
the idea of trading land for peace to the same degree. The Reagan administration,
for instance, was notably unenthusiastic about working for an end to the
Israeli occupation and missed several opportunities to move forward on
the basis of Resolution 242. Most notably, the Reagan team rejected as
a non-starter the Fez Plan of September 1982, an initiative originated
by Saudi Arabia and based on land for peace that was adopted at an Arab
summit by all heads of state except one, as well as the PLO. Nonetheless,
even the Reagan administration insisted on PLO adherence to Resolution
242 and agreed to open a formal U.S. dialogue with the PLO when the organization
accepted the resolution in 1988.
-
- As late as the first Bush administration, policymakers
regularly reaffirmed Resolution 242 as the basis for a peace settlement
and specified U.S. support for an end to Israel's occupation. In an official
letter of assurance given to the Palestinians in advance of the 1991 Madrid
peace conference, Secretary of State James Baker asserted the U.S. belief
that "a comprehensive peace must be grounded in" Resolution 242
and "the principle of territory for peace". Baker further pledged
that "the United States believes that there should be an end to the
Israeli occupation". Bush senior himself, in a rare instance of a
president venturing publicly into the political minefield of the occupied
territories, affirmed in 1990 that the U.S. did not support the establishment
of Israeli settlements in either the West Bank or East Jerusalem.
-
- The long and the short of this extended chapter in U.S.
diplomacy is that, after being beaten about the head and shoulders for
years about the need to accept the UN resolution and recognize Israel's
right to exist, Palestinians had every reason to expect that the U.S. would
follow through with its part of the bargain when they did finally accede
to these demands--first in 1988, then again in 1991 when they accepted
the terms for entering peace talks at Madrid, and yet again in 1993 when
they negotiated and signed on to the Oslo accords. In fact, the terms of
the Oslo agreement, signed on the White House lawn with much pomp and ceremony
under the complacent eye of President Bill Clinton (who in reality had
had nothing to do with negotiating the agreement), specified that negotiations
would "lead to the implementation of" Resolution 242.
-
- It soon became clear, however, that Clinton and his team
of negotiators--led by Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis Ross and
Martin Indyk, who served at different times during Clinton's terms on the
National Security Council staff, as ambassador to Israel, and as deputy
assistant secretary of state--had dramatically altered the game plan. Having
obtained a Palestinian commitment to full peace, including not simply recognition
of Israel's existence inside its 1967 borders, but recognition of its "right"
to exist, the U.S. dropped any requirement for full or nearly full Israeli
withdrawal. The decades-long U.S. commitment to the concept of land for
peace changed from a promise made to both sides to work for what each most
wanted--for the Palestinians, the return of all occupied territory with
the exception of minor border adjustments; for Israel, full peace and the
right to live within secure borders--to a promise instead to Israel that,
now that the Palestinians had already committed to full peace, Israel's
virtually full withdrawal would no longer be necessary.
-
- The backgrounds of Ross and Indyk are relevant to the
policy they developed during the Clinton years. Before entering government,
both had been connected with the pro-Israeli think tank, the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off from the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the principal pro-Israel lobby organization.
Ross was a senior fellow at the institute in the mid-1980s, was an adviser
to the Bush presidential campaign in 1988, and served as James Baker's
senior State Department adviser on both Soviet and Middle East affairs.
He stayed on as principal Middle East negotiator throughout Clinton's years
in office and since then has returned to the Washington Institute as a
senior counselor. Indyk, an Australian citizen who came to the U.S. in
the 1970s and had worked for AIPAC, was the Washington Institute's director
from its creation in 1984 until he moved into the Clinton administration
in 1993, an appointment that necessitated his rapid acquisition of U.S.
citizenship.
-
- Both men had lived in Israel in the 1970s, and Indyk
has told interviewers that he moved to the United States after the 1973
war because he came to believe during that war that the U.S. was the key
to Israel's defense, an objective clearly of surpassing importance to him
personally. Although both men prided themselves on being able as Jews to
understand Palestinians better than most, it was clear that they approached
Middle East policymaking from an Israel-centered focus that did not in
fact permit as clear an understanding of Palestinian concerns as of Israeli
interests. One can get an idea of the perhaps unconsciously skewed perspective
from which they operated by imagining the policy approach of a chief mediator
who was of Palestinian descent, had lived in the West Bank, and unabashedly
proclaimed that his primary aim in life was to ensure the defense of Palestine.
-
- The Clinton policy approach, formulated largely by Ross,
quickly became clear when the United States drafted a proposed Israeli-Palestinian
declaration of principles in mid-1993, before the Oslo agreement was adopted.
The draft U.S. declaration essentially abandoned the principles behind
Resolution 242. It stated as one of its fundamental points that "the
two sides concur that the agreement reached between them on permanent status
will constitute the implementation" of Resolution 242 in all its aspects.
-
- Although written in the legalistic language of a diplomatic
brief, the meaning of the Ross draft was clear: whatever Israel as the
overwhelmingly stronger power could force the Palestinians to accept would
constitute the "implementation of Resolution 242" as far as the
United States was concerned. In other words, the Clinton administration
now intended to treat the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem not as occupied
territories but only as territories under dispute. The United States no
longer regarded these areas as occupied territories from which Israel was
required to withdraw, but now regarded the territories as disputed lands
whose almost full retention Israel had the right to negotiate if it could
get away with it. The United States, for its part, would leave the two
sides--one overwhelmingly stronger militarily and in total possession of
the land in question--to negotiate a disposition of the land without any
intervention by an honest broker or mediator.
-
- The quarter-century-old bedrock U.S. policy of supporting
the exchange of full peace for full withdrawal had thus been reshaped by
Clinton administration policymakers to supporting the exchange of full
peace for a mere partial withdrawal. The promise to the Palestinians that
had always been part of the demands on them to accept Resolution 242 was
abandoned without a by-your-leave by a team of U.S. negotiators whose main
interest lay in guaranteeing Israel's security and seeing to the furtherance
of Israel's interests, and by a president who may not have understood and
apparently did not care about the nuances of decades of U.S. policymaking.
-
- This failure of understanding is the primary reason the
peace process collapsed at the Camp David summit in July 2000. The myth
of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's "generous offer" has created
the widespread misapprehension that Yasir Arafat rejected out of hand,
without even offering a counterproposal, an extremely good deal that he
should clearly have accepted. Arafat's rejection supposedly proved, according
to the prevailing wisdom, that the Palestinians were unwilling to conclude
any deal that would allow Israel to live in peace and that they were still
irreconcilably opposed to Israel existence.
-
- According to the myth, Barak's proposal would have given
the Palestinians, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is fond of
repeating, "95 percent of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem, with
all the settlements gone". In fact, what Barak actually offered at
Camp David was to withdraw from 89-90 percent of the West Bank, not 95
percent; to give the Palestinians sovereignty in a few non-contiguous neighborhoods
of East Jerusalem, not half of Jerusalem; and, far from assuring that all
the settlements would be gone, to annex to Israel settlements housing fully
80 percent of the 200,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and 100 percent
of the 170,000 settlers in East Jerusalem.
-
- The resulting Palestinian "state" would have
been broken up in the West Bank into three almost completely non-contiguous
sections, each connected only by a narrow thread of land and each surrounded
by Israeli territory, plus Gaza. This so-called state would have been a
colony, not a state--with no real independence, no ability to defend itself,
no control over its borders, no control over its water resources, no easy
way even for its citizens to reach one section from another, and a capital
made up of separate neighborhoods not contiguous to each other or to the
rest of the state. Israel would never have agreed to live in a disjointed,
indefensible state like this, but Israel and the United States thought
it fine to offer this to the Palestinians. This Israeli offer, made with
U.S. support and participation, turned the promise of Resolution 242 on
its head.
-
- The myth of Camp David has been almost impossible to
overturn, largely because Clinton spawned it himself, blaming Arafat, and
Arafat alone, for the summit's breakdown. The U.S. media and particularly
leading media commentators quickly took a cue from Clinton, stridently
piling on Arafat, and it has now become an automatic, almost casual part
of the media's mantra to observe that Arafat rejected a remarkably forthcoming
Israeli offer at Camp David. Clinton and his negotiators, no doubt unwilling
to assume any of the responsibility themselves for years of misguided policymaking,
have continued to put out the line that everything was Arafat's fault.
-
- Should Arafat and Palestinian negotiators have seen this
betrayal coming and better prepared themselves to counter it? Should Arafat
have made it clear at Camp David that Resolution 242, along with a quarter
century of U.S. policy supporting land for peace, constituted his counterproposal
and that, although Palestinians were prepared to negotiate minor border
adjustments in the 1967 lines, they were not prepared to concede Israel's
right to trisect the West Bank and render it indefensible? When U.S. officials
began to say, in the run-up to Camp David, that neither side could expect
to get 100 percent of its demands, should Arafat have reminded those officials,
and Israel, that the Palestinians had already formally compromised 78 percent
of their demands by repeatedly recognizing Israel's right to exist and
that compromise on the remaining 22 percent would necessarily be minimal?
Should Arafat have been a better negotiator?
-
- The answer is yes to all of these questions. But the
fact that Arafat is not a skilled negotiator, or an adequate communicator,
or even a decent leader cannot negate the right of a Palestinian nation,
as laid out in Resolution 242, to "live in peace within secure and
recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force".
-
- The word "occupation"--and the concept that
lay behind it, that Israel is a foreign military conqueror in temporary
possession of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem--disappeared entirely
from the diplomatic lexicon of the Clinton administration. President Bush
has reintroduced the word and made occasional references to Resolution
242--most notably in his June 24 speech calling for a truncated, ill-defined,
"provisional" Palestinian state--but neither in this speech nor
in previous iterations of his so-called vision of a Palestinian state has
Bush given an indication that he has any appreciation of the reality of
occupation or what to do about it, or any depth of understanding of what
occupation means to Palestinians. He never mentions the notion of trading
land for peace.
-
- As has so often been the case with U.S. policymakers,
Bush appears to be taking his cue from Israel on this issue. Just before
his arrival in Washington for a meeting with Bush in early June, Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon authored an op-ed article in the New York Times praising
the wisdom of Resolution 242, hailing its call for "secure and recognized
boundaries" and claiming that the resolution "established that
these were disputed territories where Israel had legitimate rights to defensible
borders." Implying that Israelis had already carried out all of their
obligations under the resolution, he observed that Israel "withdrew
its military government over the Palestinian population" under the
Oslo agreement in accordance with 242. In view of the disdain in which
Sharon and his Likud party have always held Resolution 242, this praise
for the resolution is an audacious and highly cynical turnaround. But it
apparently worked on Bush, for although his new "peace plan"
mentions the long-term goal of a peace settlement based on Resolution 242
and calls for Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the start of
the intifada in September 2000, it does not deviate from Sharon's revisionist
interpretation of the resolution. Neither man bothered to mention that
the resolution is premised on the "inadmissibility of the acquisition
of territory by war", which removes any justification for Israel's
retention of the captured territories. Bush echoed Sharon in explicitly
mentioning only one of the resolution's several provisions--that endorsing
the idea of secure and recognized borders for Israel. Furthermore, Bush's
only mention of the need for Israeli withdrawal was to pre-intifada positions--a
territorial configuration that saw Israeli in full control of 60% of the
West Bank and Palestinian autonomous areas covering the remaining 40% broken
up into more than 200 separate, non-contiguous areas.
-
- Once again, an Israeli prime minister has skewed the
original intent of Resolution 242 to suit Israel's interests, and an uninformed
and uninterested American president has willingly followed along. The real
import of the resolution has long since been discarded and forgotten. If
mentioned at all, the idea of land-for-peace now tends, in political discourse
throughout the U.S., to be treated as a quaint anachronism, as when many
commentators dismissed the significance of the recent Arab peace proposal
based on Resolution 242 and land-for-peace. Only historians and Palestinians
truly remember the significance of the 35-year-old resolution.
-
- We hear much these days about how Israelis have lost
trust in the Palestinians since the beginning of the intifada in September
2000. This loss of trust is undeniable, but in the usual one-sided, Israel-focused
approach of U.S. media commentators and policymakers, the fact that this
sense of betrayal goes both ways has been almost totally ignored. Palestinians
have also experienced a betrayal--not only a loss of trust in Israel because
it has done nothing, despite seven years of a so-called peace process,
to end decades of settlement building, land confiscation, checkpoints,
and house demolitions, but more significantly a loss of trust in the United
States as an honest and reliable mediator prepared to address the concerns
of both Israelis and Palestinians equally and prepared to carry through
with long-standing diplomatic obligations. The land-for-peace betrayal
stands as a shameful example of diplomatic double-dealing and is the primary
reason for the perpetuation of the tragic conflict between Israelis and
Palestinians. ___
-
- Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political
analyst with the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle
East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning in 1979.
Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer, dealing primarily
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her book, "Perceptions of Palestine:
Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy," was published by the
University of California Press and reissued in paperback with an update
in October 2001. A second book, "The Wound of Dispossession: Telling
the Palestinian Story," was published in March 2002. Both Kathy and
her husband Bill, also a former CIA analyst, are regular contributors to
the CounterPunch website.
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