If you take US Route 77 out of Thurmont, Maryland, a small town nestled in the eastern foothills of the Catoctin Mountains, five miles or so up the road you will find yourself very near Camp David. It is not visible from the road and very easy to get lost. It gets dark in a way it does not get in Washington, DC, and the road is winding and narrow. And one cool night in July 2000, travelling to a historic Israeli-Palestinian presidential summit, we had clearly missed a turn somewhere.
We stopped at a park ranger station, only to find it closed. There was a pay phone, so I called the U.S. Department of State’s Operations Center and we finally got both our bearings and good directions. I am not superstitious by nature, but I kidded my colleague, the U.S. lead negotiator Dennis Ross, that if we could not find Camp David, how would we even know what to do once we got there? Indeed, as the State Department’s deputy Middle East coordinator for negotiations, I would later think about our lost-in-the woods experience more than once as we struggled to find a successful U.S. negotiating strategy at the summit.
Twenty years ago this week, former U.S. president Bill Clinton brought then Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat and then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to Camp David in search of a conflict-ending accord. It was only the second time in forty years of U.S. peacemaking that a U.S. president would take such a risk.
The first summit—former U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s September 1978 meeting with former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin—laid the groundwork for their historic peace treaty six months later. Yet any optimism would soon fade. Our summit would not only fail but would be followed by a second intifada and a hellish descent into terror and violence far removed from the promise of what we hoped to achieve diplomatically that summer. Indeed, today the so-called peace process lies broken and bloodied, trapped between U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan, which is clearly not ready for prime time, and the very real possibility of an Israeli annexation that might bury the peace process for good.
The Camp David summit—ill-conceived and ill-advised—should probably never have taken place. It did only because Barak, fresh from repeated failures in negotiations with Syria, wanted to use the last six months of Clinton’s term either to reach a deal with Arafat or expose him as an unreliable partner. Clinton initially resisted, but in truth, ever since the assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had handed him a piece of history with the signing of the Oslo accords, the then-president was determined to redeem Rabin’s legacy and his own. Arafat, who was in no hurry to reach any kind of agreement, had warned us in June that a premature summit might lead to an explosion. But Clinton promised he would not be blamed if things did go kaput. Accompanying U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright to the helipad, the PLO leader looked like he had swallowed the canary. “I am at Camp David,” he said proudly as he rode off on a golf cart, his kafiyyah flapping in the breeze.
The presidential retreat at Camp David was clearly the right place to hold a momentous summit. It was beautiful, secluded (we blocked cell phone use) and informal. Jackie Kennedy had described the rustic cabins’ décor as “early Holiday Inn.” Unlike in the frigid atmosphere of many of the Israel-Syria negotiations, the Israeli and Palestinian delegations ate and socialized together. There were movies—why we showed Gladiator and the World War II submarine movie U-571 at a peace summit I do not know—bowling, ping pong, and wild rides on golf carts. There were comedic moments, such as when Arafat, watching the Major League Baseball All Star Game, asked in the fifth inning when the game would start. And there was even a crisis when Barak nearly choked to death on a peanut and was saved by the youngest member of his delegation.
We had everything we needed at Camp David—except the key ingredients to make the summit succeed. Clinton, who was at this point in his presidency looking for legacy, realized the odds of success were very long. Indeed, during the second briefing before the summit he made clear that whatever the outcome, trying and failing was better than not trying at all. I was moved at the time, though I have since come to realize that failure costs. The old college try mantra is more appropriate for the University of Michigan football team than for the foreign policy of the world’s greatest power.
The author (far left) with Clinton and his advisers at Camp David in July 2000
In preparing Clinton for his Camp David rendezvous, we had spent considerable time focusing on Carter’s earlier attempt. But nobody was really interested in history. Had we taken those lessons of the 1978 summit to heart, we would have seen that our summit had absolutely no chance of success. Carter succeeded for three reasons: he had strong leaders who were in a hurry, a doable agreement, and, as a strong mediator, he ran the summit. We lacked the first two; as for the third, the summit ran us.
First, unlike Begin and Sadat, Barak and Arafat were prisoners, not masters, of their politics. Barak worried that Arafat would pocket any concessions he made. He was constantly looking over his shoulder at the polls in Israel, and he literally saw his government begin to come apart while at the summit. Arafat came to Camp David to survive, not to make a deal. I heard him say several times, referring to his funeral, “you will not walk behind my coffin.” He was suspicious of Barak’s capacity to deliver. Feeling resentful of being ignored for months as Barak pursued a deal with Syria, and wedded to positions he would not concede, he was in no hurry to conclude anything.
Second, the issues at Carter’s earlier Camp David were tough to resolve: withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula, evacuating settlements, and a peace treaty. But the issues at the second Camp David were mission impossibles. Issues like borders, security, refugees, and of course Jerusalem’s ownership were all dealbreakers, and the gaps between the two sides were Grand Canyon–like in scale. Barak went further than any Israeli prime minister had gone before, but his proposals were nowhere close to what Arafat needed, even if the Palestinian leader had been interested in closing a deal. On Jerusalem there was no way Arafat could have made any concessions without Arab state backing. But given Barak’s sensitivity to leaks, we ensured there was no Arab state involvement. Clinton’s short phone calls to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to brief them on U.S. proposals about Jerusalem were hardly serious substitutes.
Third, there was the matter of the U.S. role at the summit. Carter ran his summit while keeping control of a negotiating text that went through more than twenty drafts. Our summit ran us, or more precisely ran over us. We could have managed things better. After all, this was our house, our invitation, our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to score a historic breakthrough. Granted, none was possible given the positions and personae of the two main actors. But our performance would have extinguished any chance, had there been one. We really were lost in the woods.
The mistakes were numerous. We needed a comprehensive package of answers to all the issues to have any chance of making headway. But given our unwillingness to adopt independent bridging proposals, particularly those that departed from Barak’s, we were stuck. Our no-surprise policy with Israel, which in essence meant showing everything first to Israel, and Clinton’s unwillingness, in his words, to “jam” Barak, stripped away any hope of being an effective mediator. By day four—when we gave Barak a paper he forced us to amend—for all practical purposes the summit came to an end.
Without a negotiating text that we controlled, there really was no organizing road map for the summit. It was like bumper cars in an amusement park, as then Clinton special assistant Rob Malley said. Every time we encountered an obstacle, we would go off in another direction. Add to that the fact that the president left for the G8 in Japan in the middle of the summit (thanks to our unrealistic hope of forcing a deadline for decisions), no Arab state support for Palestine on Jerusalem, and totally unrealistic expectations on what the Palestinians needed to close a deal, and you have a prescription for a predictable failure.
In December 2000, shortly before leaving office, Clinton would put on the table a set of negotiating parameters far closer to what might have been a basis for a serious negotiation. Had we done this at the summit, the outcome might have been different. But given where we were in July, Clinton would never have offered such parameters; Barak would never accepted them; and more than likely—as he did that December—Arafat simply would have said no, or nothing at all.
Clinton’s summit was not a complete waste of time. Looking back two decades later, I have come to understand that Camp David was far more than just another failed U.S. effort in the elusive search for Israeli-Palestinian peace. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ever resolved—and that is a huge if—the discussions at Camp David and the December 2000 Clinton parameters might well become an integral part of the deal.
And yet, the summit was also a cruel touchstone of sorts that taught lessons about when to convene a presidential summit and, more importantly, when not to; how the US should behave as an effective mediator and what not to do; and perhaps above all, the critical importance of respecting issues such as Jerusalem’s ownership, rather than assuming they could be easily solved through clever U.S. fixes. Far from offering hope that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was ripe for resolution in the hands of a committed U.S. president, the Camp David experience showed precisely why it was not.
The politically inconvenient truth is that the three factors necessary to have any chance of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—strong leaders who are eager to get things done fast, a workable deal, and effective U.S. mediation—have never been present. Not at Camp David, not in the twenty years of subsequent peacemaking, and certainly not now. Indeed, what we have witnessed during the Trump years is a dystopic world where leaders are neither strong, nor interested, nor ready to rise to any occasion other than the keeping of their own seats. It is a parallel universe where a doable deal exists only in the minds of would-be peacemakers who will not abandon their own illusions or who propose other illusions, like one state where everyone has equal rights and lives happily ever after. In this world, the United States’ image as a credible mediator has been hopelessly blackened by an administration whose approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem is tethered to Trump’s reelection and the giving of all the honey to Israel—and nothing but vinegar and ashes to the Palestinians.
The illusions I held about peacemaking are now long gone. But somehow, an illogical, almost irrational hope in the future remains. And even that seems now as fleeting and fragile as the memories of a historic summit twenty years ago.
Comments(9)
In the latest polling of the West Bank Palestinians (David Pollack, Washington Institute), sixty-six percent want to see the eventual outcome of any "two-state peace plan" be the complete destruction of Israel! It might take the Palestinians a quarter of a century or more, but they envision that once a Palestinian State would be established on the pre-1967 armistice lines, Israel's security would be put in jeopardy. This is the reality of the so-called two-state solution. It has been a hoax from the beginning. Israel -- like all nation states -- has its own vital national interests; and a permanent position on the West Bank is central to its geopolitical security. If there is to be a partition of the West Bank, a thirty-seventy split (the Trump Plan) is far more realistic than the Obama Plan; i.e. the complete return of the entire disputed territory to Palestine. In fact, applying Israeli sovereignty to thirty percent of the West Bank is the analog to the Palestinian demand for a one hundred percent take of the same area. It is completely out of the question. The paradigm of a partitioning of the West Bank is as flawed a concept as continuing to believe that there can be a fix to geographical limitation. It's literally impossible; yet it continues to be described as the only possible solution and the best hope for peace. Of course, this is dead wrong. But once a paradigm becomes established, many have a vital professional interest in keeping it alive -- read Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It's not a question of the correct leaders or a strong mediator. It's that the plan was never about peace from the beginning. The so-called two-state solution was conceived by the PLO to be a stepping stone to victory and liberation, nothing less will suffice. That was the truth at Rabat, Morocco in October 1974, and it remains the truth today. The Palestinians are a radical nation. And unlike the majority of Iranian citizens, they don't seek true peace with Israel. They seek something far more militant than the end of the conflict with the Jewish State. In fact, they refuse to recognize the very concept of a Jewish State or that there is even a Jewish People. They say that there is only a Jewish religion and they refuse to sign any peace treaty that would have an "end to conflict clause". But true peace will remain the great hope of the Jewish People. Our Hatikvah will never die! But hope must rest on something new, certainly not an old paradigm.
This author glossed over the one item that Barak could not agree to and that Arafat used as a demand to destroy the summit: the Arab "Right of Return" to Israel. Barak was willing to give in on East Jerusalem as a Palestinian Capital, he was willing to 'trade' land along the boundaries, and he was willing to cede control of the Temple Mount. See Clinton's Memoir chapter covering the negotiations. Nothing short of the return of millions of dispersed Palestinians into Israel proper would do for Arafat. After years of promulgating Jew hatred, had he eliminated the "Right of Return", two things would have happened : 1) he would have had a deal before Clinton left the Summit, and 2) he would have been assassinated by other Palestinian factions. This is the same problem for Abbas--he inflames the people living in the occupied lands and dispersed communities without preparing them for co-existence or the need to recognize that no Right of Return to Israel for Palestinians of all generations is possible.
I believe that PA President Abbas and team (as well reflected in Saudi Peace Initiative) have expressed flexibility on the issue of refugees and the numbers of return, perhaps symbolically or whatever the number eg. Olmert suggested. But the biggest issue is that the insistence on WB settlements remaining in the majority of numbers, and secondly, since the 2000 talks, the idea that the Palestinian state would have Bantustan style of state with Israeli military surrounding enclaves. That’s stands apparently until today. The Israeli side has never been serious with regards to the later concern.
Please, allow me to pick two nits out of an excellent and insightful article. First, that the broken peace process is trapped between Trump and Bibi ignores the third crucial party - the Palestinians. Second, that the Trump years have ushered a world where leaders are - - - etc: the world is not only different from the situation of twenty years ago, but the changes that have been taking place have seen contribution by every US administration, and the changes are still happening even as we are being distracted by the virus. It is a different middle east and a different set of global relations. Thanks again.
Aaron David Miller’s presumption that “the three factors necessary to have any chance of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—strong leaders who are eager to get things done fast, a workable deal, and effective U.S. mediation” is wrong. The three factors necessary to have any chance of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are Israel’s willingness to - recognise the rights of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland, demolish all racial discrimination laws against non-Jews and end the Zionist colonial project of the greater Jewish colony in the Middle East. For Miller to say that a solution passed on “one state where everyone has equal rights and lives happily ever after” is a delusion and sickening coming from someone like him in the 21st century, and from someone who is enjoying that in the USA.
Neither a two-states solution nor a one-state solution are viable unless there are founded on TZEDEK
Great article by Aaron David Miller on the Camp David peace talks in 2000. However the main issue about this negotiation’s failure is not really the leaderships involved. It was a take-it-or-leave-it type of negotiation in the first place and it was an offer to the Palestinians of a Bantustan enclaves of a state, not a contiguous territory. The issue of the refugees return and Jerusalem would have been addressed much more easily over time as one sees that the PA currently expressed flexibility. It’s really not as complex of a resolution if indeed it is based on UNSCR 242 and being fair to the Palestinians. Israel has hijacked the whole peacemaking process with the political shenanigans of the Israeli political-right - as usual since 1947 - and what did we get, escalation of violence from the Palestinians, illegal settlements in the West Bank with 600,000 settlers and international terrorism as a consequence.
The reason the negotiations failed was that many of the negotiators were American Jews who ran to Israel and used its demands as negotiating points. There was no diversity among the negotiators, dooming talks to failure. Dennis Ross was the worst (read his books showing his bias towards Israel, as I have). Also, Israelis, then as today, insisted on controlling Palestinian air, water, and borders at the River Jordan (exactly like it is today under Trump's plan). Had Israelis presented any decent proposal in which the 1967 borders were the Palestinian border, and in which Israeli settlements were dismantled, or given to Palestinian refugees, the conflict would have ended peacefully.
Your point is correct about people like me being Jewish & Israeli having a slight bias, but on the whole I think the dovish negotiators have been more willing to make the courageous compromises on 1967 borders. For Israelis the key issue is really security, not necessarily the land itself at this point and I think when there is a imposed time limit for controlling air, water and borders jointly by Israelis and Palestinians, eg. 10 years, then that in itself is a major compromise Palestinians are also making. There should be placed a time-limit duration for the security apparatus to work in addition to the terrorist organizations renouncing totally the use of violence (only police & preventative personnel) and form a united approach with PA towards Israel. Also some settlements need to be dismantled in the West Bank. There should be continued negotiations on-going with the Quartet even with these current governments. It’s a long-term peacemaking process.
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