From agreement to the second intifada of Yasser Arafat

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On October 30, 1991, following the Persian Gulf War, the Madrid Conference—a peace conference including Arab countries, Palestinians, and Israel—opened under the joint presidency of the United States and the Soviet Union. There the Palestinians were represented not through the PLO—which the Israeli government refused to deal with—but through a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation led by Palestinians from the occupied territories. Although the Madrid talks themselves failed to achieve a substantive agreement, they were valuable in paving the way for additional negotiations. Among these was a secret channel of negotiations in Oslo, held beginning in January 1993 between PLO and Israeli officials, which produced an understanding known as the Oslo Accords. In September 1993 Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin exchanged letters in which Arafat, as head of the PLO, formally recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” while Rabin recognized the PLO as the “representative of the Palestinian people” and made clear Israel’s intention to begin negotiations with the organization. On September 13, 1993, Arafat, Rabin, and U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton signed the Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self-Rule in Washington, D.C. The Israeli-PLO accord, also known as Oslo I, envisioned the gradual implementation of Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for a transitional period not exceeding five years and leading to a permanent settlement based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. The following year Arafat returned to the Gaza Strip and began implementing Palestinian self-rule.

The provisions of the Declaration of Principles were enacted on May 4, 1995, by a pact signed by Arafat and Rabin in Cairo. Several months later, in September 1995, Rabin, Arafat, and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres—all newly named winners of the Nobel Peace Prize—signed the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (often called Oslo II). The agreement established a schedule for Israeli withdrawals from the Palestinian population centers (to be implemented in several stages) and created a complex system of zones that were divided between areas fully controlled by the Palestinians, those under Palestinian civil authority but Israeli military control, and those exclusively under Israeli control. It also set elections for a president and council of the Palestinian Authority, which would govern the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, and on January 20, 1996, Arafat was elected president of the PA. With a turnout of close to 80 percent, Arafat won 88 percent of the vote.

Relations with Rabin had remained respectful, even if they were sometimes difficult—especially on the sensitive subject of Israel’s ongoing settlement activity. But with Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish extremist in November 1995 and the election in May 1996 of Benjamin Netanyahu—leader of the Likud, a right-wing political party, and an opponent of the Oslo Accords—as prime minister, relations grew strained. Negotiations became deadlocked, even after an intervention by Clinton, who arranged a summit meeting with the two leaders at the Wye Plantation in eastern Maryland in 1998. Negotiations were revived after the election of Israel Labour Party leader Ehud Barak as prime minister in 1999, but in a very tense context. The unabated continuation of settlement activity—some 100,000 more settlers arrived in the West Bank between 1993 and 2000 (without taking Jerusalem into account)—created great discontent among the Palestinians and strengthened the Hamas opposition to the Oslo Accords. For his part, Arafat proved unable to create the structures of an independent state (for reasons linked with his own shortcomings and with the fact that most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were still occupied).

In July 2000 Clinton convened a summit at Camp David in northern Maryland, where the historic Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt had been negotiated in 1978. The aim was to find a final agreement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after five years of Palestinian self-rule. The summit was hastily prepared, however, and, since the most contentious issues—the question of the right of return for Palestinian refugees, control of Jerusalem, borders, and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—were being discussed for the first time, it was unlikely that these sensitive and complex matters would be resolved quickly. From the beginning, Arafat was suspicious of the summit and its timing, and although some progress was made, in the end there was no final settlement.

Negotiations continued after the failure at Camp David, but a visit by Likud leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in September 2000 sparked the second intifada, and the dwindling talks ground to a halt. A spiral of harsh repression by the Israeli army and violence by different armed Palestinian groups subsequently led to both sides’ total loss of confidence in the peace process. In spite of the January 2001 negotiations at Ṭābā, Egypt, which were held independently of the United States and made important progress, the Barak government lost the February 2001 general elections and Sharon—a strong opponent of both the Oslo Accords and the creation of a Palestinian state—was elected prime minister. “We have no partner for peace” was once more the general sentiment of many Israeli political parties.

Arafat lost much of his diplomatic credibility with the West after the election of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush in November 2000 and the launch of the “war on terror” in 2001, which followed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. In 2001, following suicide attacks in Israel that Sharon blamed Arafat for instigating, Arafat was confined by Israel to his headquarters in Ramallah. In October 2004 Arafat fell ill and was transported to Paris for medical treatment, where he died the following month. Fatah later passed a unanimous resolution that held Israel responsible for Arafat’s death.

Many of Arafat’s supporters doubted that he had died a natural death, their suspicions being fueled in part by the doctors’ inability to identify the origin of his illness and the lack of an autopsy, and rumors circulated that he had died from poisoning. These suspicions surfaced again in July 2012 when a Swiss laboratory announced that it had discovered elevated levels of polonium-210 on some of Arafat’s clothes and personal belongings. French prosecutors launched a murder investigation later that year in response to a request by Arafat’s widow. In November 2012 Arafat’s remains were exhumed so that teams of Swiss, Russian, and French experts could test for signs of poisoning.

The results of the separate investigations, released in late 2013, were contradictory. The Russian report was released first and found no traces of polonium-210. The Swiss and French results both found abnormally high levels of polonium-210 but disagreed on how it got into his remains: the Swiss study concluded that poisoning could not be ruled out, while the French study concluded that the presence of polonium-210 could be explained as environmental in origin.

No report went without controversy, moreover. There were claims of outright interference in the Russian investigation, including claims that the Russian scientists were instructed on what the outcome should be. The Swiss report cited a number of intervening factors that effected uncertainty in the interpretation of the results, including the length of time since the death and the incomplete “chain of custody” of Arafat’s clothes and belongings studied in the earlier investigation. Palestinian officials and Arafat’s widow dismissed the French conclusions as “politicized.”

Legacy

An assessment of the personality of Yasser Arafat must take into consideration both his deep religiosity and his fierce nationalism (even if he tended to equate Palestinian nationalism with himself). He often said that he was married to the Palestinian cause, and indeed he had no other bride—at least until he married Suhā al-Ṭawīl, a Sorbonne-educated Palestinian woman of Christian origin, in 1990. He customarily worked late into the night, sometimes receiving leaders and journalists well after midnight. He lived in modest fashion—even as he provided supporters with money and costly favors, purchased influence, and accepted the corruption of many of those around him—and, in spite of criticism of his authoritarian style of governing, he managed to gain a wide popularity among his people. His opponents—both in Israel and in the Arab world—were numerous, however, and Arafat escaped so many assassination attempts through the years that his intuition and resilience became a sort of legend.

To assess Arafat’s life as a whole is no easy task. He succeeded in putting the Palestinians back on the political map after their disastrous uprooting in the middle of the 20th century. He was also able to maintain the unity of a cohesive Palestinian organization in spite of interference from neighboring Arab states. But Arafat’s shortcomings in building solid state institutions after 1993 were matched by his shortcomings in understanding the Israeli public and its fears. At the end of his life he had reached a state of complete diplomatic isolation—and yet, as Hamas and Fatah continued to vie for influence in the occupied territories in the years after his death, it looked as though history might find that he was the last Palestinian leader able to sign a peace agreement and impose it on the Palestinian community as a whole.