Shortly after declaring the Middle East peace talks had collapsed in failure, President Clinton announced early Thursday that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators would remain at Camp David to continue their excruciating negotiations while he travels this weekend to an international economic summit in Japan.
A weary Clinton said substantive differences remained between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, but that the two leaders and their delegations agreed to stay and resume their talks with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright until he returns Sunday.
“Nobody wanted to give up,” Clinton said. “As hard as these issues are, nobody wanted to give up.”
At the same time, the president cautioned against underestimating the difficulties that remained ahead even though both sides decided not to walk away, at least for now, without an agreement. “This is really hard,” he said. “[But] we must all be prepared to go the extra mile.”
Earlier, the White House had announced that the Camp David peace talks, called by Clinton with hope and optimism, had failed as Israeli and Palestinian leaders pulled back from the brink of a historic peace agreement. Mutual recriminations began to fly even before the talks on a cloud-shrouded mountain northwest of Washington ended Wednesday evening. Barak accused Arafat of refusing to compromise, while the Palestinians complained that the Israelis were dictating terms.
Unable to get the two leaders to speak directly to each other for the past several days, Clinton huddled with each separately and placed calls to other Middle East leaders seeking their help in winning public support for a peace deal that remains elusive after seven years of high-level, U.S.-brokered negotiations.
“The summit has come to a conclusion without reaching an agreement,” White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said in a statement read to reporters by his deputy, P.J. Crowley, two hours before Clinton appeared to announce the talks would continue. “For the last three hours, the president has been shuttling between the two leaders but unfortunately was unable to reach an agreement.”
The parties remained deadlocked on the stubborn issue of control over Jerusalem. Israel seized East Jerusalem in the 1967 war and more recently declared the ancient city its eternal capital. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as their capital, but Barak came to the talks insisting he would never agree to such divided sovereignty. Arafat, for his part, refused to accept proposed Israeli compromises that gave the Palestinians civil control over East Jerusalem and sections of the walled Old City while retaining Israeli sovereignty.
The final hours of talks focused not on the possibility of a deal but on Clinton’s efforts to persuade the two leaders to refrain from public statements that could make it difficult to revive the talks. Clinton was intent at least on consolidating the agreements Barak and Arafat had reached even if a final accord could not be decided.
But that outcome was politically difficult, especially for Barak, whose hold on power has been shaken by votes of no-confidence in the Israeli Knesset and by a rupture in his governing coalition.
The mood among White House aides was grim approaching Clinton’s scheduled departure early Thursday for an economic summit in Japan. Clinton had delayed the trip a day hoping to broker an end to 52 years of blood enmity between Israelis and Palestinians over conflicting claims to the same territory. Clinton apparently was unwilling to delay his departure again, suggesting that he felt more time would not bring the parties closer to peace.
“There comes a time when you have to get on with other business that’s before you,” Lockhart said.
At stake for Palestinians was their quest for statehood and for Israeli and international recognition of their sovereignty. For Israelis, the possibility loomed of an escalation in violence between Palestinians and Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For Clinton, there was risk of leaving office in January without achieving the comprehensive peace that seemed at hand in 1993, his first year in office.
Lockhart insisted “there is no subject that is further from [Clinton’s] mind” than his legacy as a peacemaker. His focus, he said, was on the task at hand, not the verdict of history.
The final push for peace came after an extraordinary day in which Israeli and Palestinian delegations threatened to walk out on the talks, and in which Barak and Arafat wrote letters to Clinton, each giving his assessment of the disagreements that remained.
The day’s work actually began well before dawn as Clinton labored into the wee hours with his team of aides, seeking to tweak a U.S.-drafted peace accord in ways that could win Arafat’s and Barak’s approval. After a few hours’ sleep, they resumed work in a cool drizzle amid the cabins built during the Roosevelt administration for use by presidents as a retreat.
Almost immediately, the Palestinian and Israeli sides began what appeared to be a public-relations campaign to ensure that, should the talks fail, the other side would bear the brunt of the blame.
Israeli media reported the text of a letter from Barak to Clinton delivered Wednesday, accusing the Palestinians of “lacking a true commitment” to peace.
“To my sorrow, I have reached the conclusion that the Palestinian side is not conducting negotiations in good faith and is not prepared to discuss in a serious fashion achieving a permanent peace between us,” Barak wrote. “Unless there are last-minute changes, the Palestinians will have to envision the tragic consequences of squandering such an opportunity.”
Hassan Abdel Rahman, the Palestine Liberation Organization envoy to Washington, retorted that Arafat came to Camp David “to achieve a just and lasting peace that the Israeli and Palestinian people can live with for generations.” He said Israel should “not attempt to dictate terms to the Palestinians.”
Arafat also wrote Clinton a note, but Lockhart would not describe its contents.
The London-based Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Arafat told Clinton, “The Arab leader has not been born who will give up Jerusalem.”
Palestinian Cabinet minister Freih Abu Meddein said Barak “did not go to the summit to make peace. He went there to prove to his people that he thought he could stick to Israeli red lines.” Red lines are a euphemism for negotiating positions beyond which one side or the other will not go.
Intent on avoiding deeper political trouble from the Israeli right, which accuses Barak of giving too much to the Palestinians, Barak made sure to get the word out even during a summit shrouded in secrecy that he wasn’t giving in on Jerusalem.
The Palestinians were prepared to accept a land swap proposal brokered by Clinton in which some Jewish settlements in the West Bank near Jerusalem would come under Israeli control while the Palestinians would end up with sovereignty over most of the West Bank and all of Gaza. Israel was prepared to accept about 100,000 Palestinian refugees under a one-time family reunification program, and to express sorrow for the plight of the Palestinians who lost their homes in the 1948 and 1967 wars.
The Israelis also were ready to allow the Palestinians to raise their flag over the Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. A majority of the estimated 170,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza would be allowed to stay, although the territory would be under Palestinian control.
In the centerpiece to the proposed deal, Israel would recognize Palestinian statehood, with the proviso that the Palestinians not form an army. The Palestinians would declare an end to their 52-year-old conflict with the Israelis.
