A few days before the September violence that consumed Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, a group of analysts specializing in Israeli and Palestinian affairs highlighted the vulnerability of Israel’s settlement areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and wondered aloud why Palestinians had not yet marched en masse upon one of the 200 or so outposts that Israel has established in the course of its 33-year occupation.
These are momentous days in the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The July summit at Camp David and the battles that have been raging in its aftermath have opened a new chapter not only in the process begun after the 1991 Gulf War, but also in the long history of antagonism between Israel and the Arabs.
These are momentous days in the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The July summit at Camp David, conditioned by backchannel diplomacy centered in Stockholm, has opened a new chapter not only in the process begun after the Gulf War, but also in the long history of antagonism between Israel (and the Zionist movement before it) and the Palestinians.
Israelis and Palestinians are, at last, engaged in serious negotiations on the specific elements of a framework agreement on final status. In the wake of May revelations about discussions in Stockholm between Israeli minister of interior Shlomo Ben Ami and Palestinian legislative leader Abu Ala, the Israeli press was rife with reports about an unprecedented Israeli willingness to accede to the creation of a Palestinian state on up to 90 percent of the West Bank.
According to U.S. President Bill Clinton, the Israeli-Palestinian talks on final status are “working very well. They’ve got a real plan for the future.” Perhaps the plan that Clinton is referring to is the revised timetable reached between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and PA chairman Yasser Arafat calling for a still-undefined “framework agreement” in June, to be followed by a final status agreement resolving all outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinians?
Israel’s imminent withdrawal from south Lebanon is setting into motion a number of changes in the regional strategic landscape, changes with the potential to create conditions for a historic dialogue or continuing confrontation between Israel and Iran.
The on again-off again nature of formal talks between Israel and Syria raises legitimate questions about the successful outcome of efforts to arrange a peace between the long bitter enemies. What is not in dispute, however, is the degree to which Israel has reassessed long-held views of its territorial and settlement requirements on the Golan Heights–a transformation in elite military and strategic concepts, if not in public attitudes. Such views have enabled Israeli prime ministers since Yitzhak Rabin to conclude that Israel’s strategic interests in the twenty-first century will be better served by a contractual peace with Syria and without Golan settlements.
The final status negotiations now underway between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are informed by but conceptually different from the framework resulting from the Declaration of Principles initialed in Oslo in September 1993. Unlike previous discussions, which centered upon creating an interim regime regulating interaction between Israel and the nascent Palestinian self-governing authority, these “final status” talks aim at a much grander goal–the permanent resolution of all outstanding issues between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, in a speech marking the Fall 1999 opening of the Knesset, reaffirmed his intention “to maintain [Israel’s] strategic deterrent capability even in peacetime, for whatever geographical or time range is required.”
The election of Ehud Barak as prime minister has focused renewed attention on the question of an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights as part of a peace agreement with Syria.