Reviewed Book:
          Shamir, Shimon, and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, eds. The Camp David Summit - What Went Wrong?: Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians Analyze the Failure of the Boldest Attempt Ever to Resolve the Palestinian-Israeli Question. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. NIS 130, 267 pgs. (English)

              With the end of Oslo, Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans rushed to disseminate their own versions of what happened from Camp David to Taba 2000-01.  It's no surprise that the Israelis blame the Palestinians, the Palestinians blame the Israelis, and the United States feels sheepish for hosting a failed summit and returned to their safety zone to help tow the Israeli line.

       The three common narratives spring from their separate autopsies performed after the peace process expired.  These postmortem analyses have been published, proselytized, and canonized, each offering an individual's view with only slight deviations from their camp's official line. 

       The problem is that the three versions do not tell the whole story.  "The Camp David Summit - What Went Wrong?" takes a different approach.

       In June 2003, Tel Aviv University joined Al-Quds University to host an international conference entitled, "The Camp David Summit 2000: What Went Wrong - Lessons for the Future."  It brought together Camp David participants, experts, and academia from the three sides in order to dig beyond the crystallized rhetoric.  This book is the product of the papers presented and viewpoints shared.

       The contributors include Ehud Barak; Danny Yatom; Gilead Sher; Itamar Rabinovich; Zeev Maoz; Ron Pundak; Yossi Beilin; Sari Nusseibeh; Munther and Mohammad Dajani; Samih al-Abed; Martin Indyk; Aaron Miller; Robert Malley; and the list goes on.

       The book is interesting not because of the three common narratives - which certainly appear for those seeking details regarding, "what happened?" - it is interesting because of the differences within each camp and viewpoints of the experts. 

       "The Camp David Summit - What Went Wrong?" smashes the three narratives and explains that the causes, effects, and lessons from Camp David to Taba 2000-01, are not as clear as waving one side's rhetorical banner.

       The book contains its share of eye-opening moments among the Camp David participants.  For instance, regarding the widely held notion that at the summit the Palestinians failed to make a counter-proposal, during the conference Samih al-Abed of the Palestinian National Authority asserts, "The Israelis and the Americans never mentioned it, but the Palestinian counter-proposal was expressed in a map.  I have it and you can inquire about it."  He then went on to list all members of the Israeli team and most of the American delegation, including President Clinton. 

       Al-Abed contends that they all saw the Palestinian map and counter-proposal.  In a conversation with one of the book's editors, Bruce Maddy-Weitzman explained, "There was a bit of an uproar from the crowd when Samih al-Abed said there was a map, and someone asked to see it.  It wasn't presented."

       This work contains many viewpoints that are frequently at odds with each other.  Itamar Rabinovich breaks them down into four categories: orthodox, revisionist, deterministic, and eclectic. 

       The "orthodox" group is detail-oriented and lays the blame squarely on Arafat's shoulders; Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton, and Dennis Ross are his examples.  The "revisionist" group, espoused by Robert Malley, Hussein Agha, and Ron Pundak, seeks to reexamine and contradict the convictions held by the orthodox narrative. 

       The "deterministic" group holds that an 'end-of-conflict' solution between Israelis and Palestinians is essentially unachievable so to expect a summit to solve all remaining issues is not only foolish, but is sure to lead to a larger crisis.  Many in the academic world belong to this category, as do many in Israel's security establishment and several former American secretaries of state including Henry Kissinger. 

       The "eclectic" viewpoints come from those who describe what happened at Camp David in detail, but "in a way that does not present a clear-cut thesis...there is no finger-pointing or over-arching themes" and there's little attempt to assign responsibility.  Yossi Beilin and Gilead Sher are his examples.

       At this point, four years after the patient named Oslo collapsed, most Israelis and Palestinians are familiar with their respective, orthodox autopsies.  More recently, they have heard from the Israeli revisionists who have a stake in discrediting the orthodox view; after all, if the orthodox claim is true that Arafat and the Palestinian leadership are essentially to blame, then the Ron Pundak's, Yair Hirschfeld's, Yossi Beilin's, and the others on the left who hatched the effectively flawed Oslo process, are themselves discredited.^[1] 

       There is, however, some merit to their exercise in that like the Israeli revisionist authors of the late 1980s - the "new historians," as they liked to be called (Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and others) - they sought to challenge the established Israeli narrative and the ensuing debate broadened our understanding of Israel's modern history.

        Since understanding what happened is different from understanding why it happened, the Israeli and Palestinian academia and experts carry this book.  They provide something more to think about than who is at fault by making the reader carefully examine their previously held notions.  This is imperative when considering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

        Reuven Merhav from the Jerusalem Institute for Israeli Studies explains that Moshe Dayan's decision to return the Temple Mount to the Islamic endowment following the June 1967 war made the Jerusalem issue easier to solve.  He recommends leaving the Old City "with no political affiliations and no political institutions," pointing out that "nowhere in the Islamic world, neither Iran, Saudi Arabia nor anywhere else, is there a combination of a religious shrine and a political capital."  Additionally, the Israelis have built no secular political institutions in the Old City since it came under their control in 1967.  The Knesset and Supreme Court are located in West Jerusalem, and are not part of any final status negotiation.

       Merhav explains that the options for the Old City presented at Camp David were not in the interest of any party: "One could live with the question of sovereignty left open.  This will be the only basis on which an agreement may be reached."

 

       "When things became really messy, what emerged was a clash of narratives," Merhav observes, "The Palestinian position was to deny any Jewish link to the Temple Mount in history."  Indeed, Arafat's comments that the Jewish Temple never existed and if it did, it was in Nablus, helped poison the negotiating atmosphere, and this is discussed by many Israeli and American participants both within this book and in other accounts. 

       Ehud Barak explains that such comments during final status negotiations reflected a conceptual disagreement.  To this he adds the issue of refugees' right of return and concludes that the summit did not fail because of details; it failed because Arafat fundamentally does not accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. 

        There are no bridges long enough to cover the gap of conflicting historical narratives.

        Many have heard the phrase, "the time was not ripe."  Yaakov Bar-Siman-Tov, head of the Lenord Davis Institute for International Relations, explains that when moving from war to peace, there are three kinds of "ripeness: " Negotiations, de-escalations, and conflict resolution.  A situation is ripe for negotiation when two sides are ready to talk instead of using force; a de-escalation occurs when the two are not ready to solve the conflict but to "alleviate it."  In this stage, violence can stop and security arrangements can be made. 

       A situation is only ripe for conflict resolution when the parties realize that resolving the conflict is the only way to achieve some of their goals, and that it will necessitate "painful concessions." 

       Bar-Siman-Tov holds that the Oslo process represented a readiness for negotiations, perhaps at times a ripeness for de-escalation, but certainly never for conflict resolution.

       Unlike most of Camp David's political participants, Bar-Siman-Tov believes that focusing most of the blame on Arafat "shifted the attention from the fundamental question of whether the Palestinian people at large were ripe for peace, with or without Arafat."  Clearly, from an Israeli and American orthodox perspective, they were not.  From a Palestinian perspective, however, after the 1948 war they were left with only 22 percent of Mandate Palestine and the fact that they accept this number as a basis for territorial negotiations "reflected complete ripeness."  As Danny Yatom writes, "We understood this, but did not accept it.  It was not a matter of misunderstanding, but of disagreement."

       Asher Susser, director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, believes it is crucial to understand 1948 and 1967 as the two separate but formative events in Palestinian identity and history.  The issues of land, security, and Jerusalem, are 1967 issues that are difficult but possible to resolve.  According to Susser, Israel should not have brought up the 'end-of-conflict' and the 'end-to-all-claims' during the negotiations because it is  "seeking a solution that goes beyond a simple rational balance of interests...but rather the unbridgeable historical narratives." 

       1967 is not the formative event of the Palestinian narrative; 1948 is.

       "From the Palestinian perspective, there is no way to discuss an 'end-of-conflict' without first going back to where it all began, which is when they lost their homeland in 1948, and not when Israel took the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967," Susser writes.  The refugee issue and Palestinian identity are products of 1948, so by declaring that the summit's final agreement must include an 'end-to-all-claims' meant "all of the implications of the historical conflict, from its very beginning, were dragged into negotiations."

       The Israelis and Palestinians should not have focused on ending the conflict at the summit.   Instead, they should have focused on "a practical political arrangement that would allow for peace and coexistence, without any declarations about the way parties understand their histories," Susser explains.