Special Report

Is Arafat to Blame for Sharon’s Victory? Or Was Defeat “Barak’s and Barak’s Alone”?

By Rachelle Marshall

The problem is, when you know the truth it is far too much to describe, far too cruel... —Alison Weir of San Francisco, reporting from Gaza by e-mail, Feb. 18, 2001.

As usually happens with events in the Middle East, the truth about the breakdown of peace talks, the continuing intifada, and the subsequent election of Ariel Sharon has been largely obscured by the tendency of American opinion makers to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through Israeli eyes. As Palestinian protests and Israeli retaliation intensified, and the Barak government collapsed, former President Bill Clinton, news analysts and media commentators all agreed that the Palestinians were largely responsible for whatever had gone wrong. Absent from their comments was any reminder that Israel is occupying illegally another people’s land.

A New York Times editorial of Feb. 7, the day after the Israeli election, praised Prime Minister Ehud Barak for his “energetic pursuit of peace,” and charged that “Yasser Arafat unwisely spurned Mr. Barak’s proposals and encouraged a Palestinian uprising against Israel. That revolt doomed Mr. Barak’s peace policy and assured Mr. Sharon’s electoral victory.” Times columnist Thomas Friedman insisted that Barak had offered the Palestinians virtually all they had demanded, including “94 percent of the West Bank, half of Jerusalem, and restitution for refugees.”

The notion that Arafat’s rejection of Barak’s proposals meant the Palestinians would not be satisfied with even the most generous peace terms, and that the Palestinian uprising had caused Israeli voters to reject Barak for Sharon, was pure myth. The map presented by Israel last December and published by the Israeli magazine Challenge, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, and the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, reveals that what Barak offered the Palestinians was far short of what they could accept. The map (see p. 8) shows the settlement blocs that Barak insisted on annexing to Israel extending like thick fingers across the West Bank from Jerusalem to Jericho, and curving north and south in a broad pincer movement. A wide swath of land along the Jordan River would remain under Israeli military control for at least six years more, if Israel decided its security required it. What remained to the Palestinians would be three segments of land, each one surrounded by Israeli settlements and roads. Travelers between Palestinian cities such as Nablus and Ramallah would have to take long and circuitous detours, and Palestinians going to Jerusalem would still face Israeli roadblocks—a nightmare vividly described by Samar Jabr and Betsy Mayfield (see the March issue of the Washington Report).

In a formal document issued on Dec. 30 the Palestinian negotiating team expressed three major objections to the proposals made by Barak and President Clinton: Palestinians would be forced to give up the right of Palestinian refugees to return; Israel’s annexation of the settlement blocs—“recognized as illegal by the international community”—would deprive the Palestinian state of territorial contiguity; and Palestinian Jerusalem would be divided into a number of unconnected islands separate from each other and from the rest of Palestine. The Palestinians also complained that more than 80,000 Palestinian villagers would end up in areas annexed to Israel.

As for Clinton’s proposal that a parcel of land in Israel near Gaza be turned over to the Palestinians in compensation for parts of the West Bank that Israel would keep, the Palestinians pointed out that the land near Gaza was currently being used by Israel as a toxic waste dump. “Obviously, we cannot accept trading prime agricultural and development land for toxic waste dumps,” their statement said.

Although Barak was hailed in America for putting his job on the line for the sake of peace, it was not Arafat’s rejection of his peace offer but Barak’s own shortcomings that caused his defeat after less than two years in office. Two major groups that had previously supported him—Arabs and Israeli leftists—this time stayed home. Sharon won by a record 62 percent of the vote, but the number of voters was the lowest in Israel’s history. Only 62 percent of Israelis went to the polls compared to 80 percent in 1999, when Arabs turned out in large numbers and gave Barak 96 percent of their vote. This time only 13 percent of Arabs in Israel voted, and many who did cast blank ballots. In several Arab neighborhoods no one voted.

Arab voters had good reason to desert Barak. Despite their support in the last election and the presence of 10 Arab members in the Knesset, the Israeli prime minister named no Arab ministers to his government and excluded Arab parties from his coalition. Barak’s government continued to shortchange Arab towns when it came to funding basic public services such as sanitation and schools. Last October, when Arabs in Nazareth and the Galilee demonstrated in support of the Palestinian uprising and were attacked by Israelis, Israeli police shot to death 13 Arabs. The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights called the slayings a violation of “the minimal rules of human rights.” During the election campaign Barak expressed regret but did not apologize.

According to David Landau, correspondent for the Jewish Telegraph Agency, the loss of Arab support was a crucial factor in Barak’s defeat. “Perhaps if the Arab community had been less determined to boycott Barak...the Jewish left would have been prepared to swallow its distaste and support him again,” he wrote in a Feb. 9 dispatch to the Northern California Jewish Bulletin. “Without the Arab votes Barak was pretty much doomed.”

In the same article Landau also pointed to Barak’s loss of support among his own government colleagues, who regarded him as “an insensitive autocrat and ineffective diplomat.”

Barak first alienated secular Jews by currying favor with the far-right Shas Party, only to have Shas desert him when he came out for secularizing Israel’s marriage laws and tried to cut the budget of religious schools. Barak quickly backed down on both measures.

As prime minister he almost immediately assumed the style of military commander, making decisions without consulting his colleagues and then just as suddenly reversing himself. Haim Ramon, a Labor Party official who had once been close to Barak, complained that “he snubbed all the ministers and the entire party in the course of his term as leader.”

Ramon said later on Israeli television that the election defeat was “Barak’s and Barak’s alone. I don’t believe anything he says.”

Sharon’s policies can hardly prove more damaging than his predecessor’s.

When Barak’s peace proposals failed he found himself out on a political limb, then failed in his attempt to climb back. Immediately after Sharon’s overwhelming victory on Feb. 6, Barak resigned as party leader and said he would leave public life. On Feb. 15 he did an about-face and agreed to join with Sharon as defense minister in a unity government. Less than a week later he changed his mind again and said he was resigning from politics for good. According to an account in Ha’aretz, Barak was forced to withdraw “by a roaring rebellion in his own Labor Party.”

Over the protests of several leftist members, the Labor Party voted on Feb. 26 to join in a unity government led by Sharon but drew the line at including Barak. The most ardent advocate of the alliance was Shimon Peres, who was expected to become either foreign minister or defense minister. Peres is generally labeled a peacemaker, but as prime minister in 1994 he sealed the borders of the occupied territories and launched devastating air attacks on Lebanon. Labor’s willingness to join Likud and other far-right parties in a unity government gives Sharon a solid majority in the Knesset and helps to assure there will be no general election until 2003. The opposition will consist only of the Arab parties, along with Meretz and one or two other tiny left-wing parties.

Sharon’s policies can hardly prove more damaging to the Palestinians than his predecessor’s. It was Barak who speeded up construction of the settlements and highways that Sharon designed years ago with the aim of carving up Palestinian territory. And it was Barak who trapped Palestinians behind impassable concrete barriers and military roadblocks so that they are unable to get to work or to school or to a clinic. His policy of collective punishment—what Challenge magazine has called “a scorched earth policy”—has in a few months resulted in the destruction of more than 35,000 olive trees, 22,000 grapevines, and hundreds of homes. In a Feb. 19 interview on National Public Radio, members of one homeless family in Gaza told how army bulldozers arrived without warning earlier that week and pushed down a barn with their mule still inside before going on to demolish their house. The family, like several others in their village, had barely enough time to get out.

The full extent of the Barak government’s violations of human rights may never become known, since Israel refused to cooperate with the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights and with an international fact-finding commission on human rights headed by former Sen. George Mitchell. Members of the U.N. group were shot at by soldiers when they tried to visit Gaza in early February. On the day Barak announced suspension of the Mitchell commission, an Israeli settler who kicked a Palestinian boy to death in 1996 was sentenced to six months in jail. A few weeks later a right-wing settler who had shot to death a shackled and blindfolded Palestinian prisoner was released from prison. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem called his release “one of dozens of examples where the legal authorities discriminate between Jewish murderers and Palestinian murderers.”

Israel’s nightly bombardment of populated neighborhoods—including the “preventive” shelling of buildings the army claims could harbor snipers—not only causes large numbers of casualties, it also damages homes, water tanks and other facilities. The destruction of property and crops, along with the border closings, has so far cost the Palestinian economy at least $1.5 billion, with a resulting increase in poverty of 50 percent. Israel also has refused to turn over the $57 million that it owes to the Palestinian Authority in tax revenues, so that PA employees cannot be paid and the Authority itself is threatened with collapse.

During his visit to Israel on Feb. 25, Secretary of State Colin Powell urged that Israel pay what it owes to the Palestinian Authority and ease the border closings as a way of reducing the violence, only to have Sharon refuse. Sharon in fact may see no particular benefit in stopping the violence. Palestinian attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers do relatively little damage and are largely confined to the occupied territories, but they provide an excuse for Israel to respond with force against the entire Palestinian population and to assassinate many of its key leaders. By killing off leaders and depriving the Authority of the funds it needs to survive, Sharon may be intending to finish what he set out to do with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982: destroy the Palestinians’ political structure and leave them without a voice in the international community.

Sharon has stated his intentions clearly: to keep Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, to expand existing settlements, and retain the Jordan Valley. He has urged American Jews to help fight any proposal to share control over Jerusalem. Sharon says he will ignore what was proposed in previous peace talks and from now on aim reaching only interim agreements rather than a final settlement. He insists that Arafat publicly renounce violence before talks can resume.

It is not clear how much help the Palestinians will get from the Bush administration. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has announced that responsibility for future negotiations will be left to the Israelis and Palestinians themselves, with the United States remaining “studiously neutral.” But there has been no talk so far of reducing the $6 billion-plus that the United States gives Israel in aid every year, or canceling shipments of the toxic gas and Apache attack helicopters that Israel is using against the Palestinians.

Although Bush is apt to be less responsive to the pro-lsrael lobby than Clinton, he may be more sympathetic to those who argue for Israel’s importance as a strategic ally. Aware that Bush intends to crack down harder on Saddam Hussain, Sharon sent three high-ranking Likud Party members to Washington to discuss the containment of Iran and Iraq and the development of a global missile defense. After meeting with Secretary of State Powell, Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, predicted, “We will see a continuation and actual upgrading of the relationship between our two countries.”

A closer relationship with Israel, however, would undercut the administration’s desire to gain Arab cooperation in isolating Iraq and possibly arming opposition groups. As Powell found on his visit to the Middle East in late February, Arab opposition to U.S. support for Israel is far greater than the fear of Saddam Hussain. Back in Washington, the AP reported on Feb. 23 that, in response to a letter from Arab American Institute president James Zogby, the State Department is “looking into” charges that Israel’s policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders violates the Arms Export Control Act.

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is still the central issue in the Middle East, and Bush will find it hard to remain aloof. As their casualties mount and conditions worsen, Palestinians seem ever more determined to get rid of the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza and to secure the return of refugees. For the Palestinians to accept less than their rights under international law would mean a peace agreement dictated by Israel and imposed by force.

Henry Siegman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently pointed to what is still the only workable solution to the conflict. “What will end Palestinian violence,” he wrote in a Feb. 15 dispatch in Le Monde, “is nothing less than the actual removal of Israel’s occupation and an end to the stranglehold that Israel continues to exercise over every aspect of their existence.”

ènce Israel is out of the occupied territories, Siegman suggests, negotiations could continue on other outstanding issues such as sovereignty over Haram al-Sharif, water rights and the return of refugees—“but this time between two sovereign states, not between an occupying power and its subject population.”

In other words, first the Palestinians must be able to live as free people in their own state. Then, and only then, can the two sides negotiate a lasting peace.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.