A pragmatic negotiating strategy that fails to take international legitimacy on board is a surefire recipe for failure, writes Ayman El-Amir* After freezing the Middle East peace process for seven years the Bush administration has invited representatives from more than 40 nations and relevant organisations to Annapolis, Maryland, for dinner and a largely ceremonial talk about how to revive defunct peace efforts. The sheer number of participants, including 16 Arab countries and one-half of the Palestinian Authority, is beguiling. It might suggest at least the appearance of an international peace conference, an idea that Israel has always opposed. Or it could be a last-ditch public relations exercise by a failed US administration whose term expires in 13 months' time, and which leaves behind one of the most dismal records in the history of US presidency since Lyndon B Johnson and the Vietnam War era. The Arab pack of the "rejection front" of 1978, who vilified Anwar El-Sadat for signing the Camp David Framework for Peace accords, are flocking to Annapolis for some tidbits of what Camp David accomplished almost 30 years ago. It would be very rewarding for them, as they meet in Annapolis, to reflect on the lessons, the triumphs and tribulations of that unique experience in the history of the Middle East conflict. The conference is being convened under President Bush's slogan of a two-state solution. How the Israelis and the US administration will interpret this remains to be seen. Since Camp David, and the subsequent 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the US has abandoned the role of honest broker to which it had once been committed, leaving the divided Palestinians to negotiate under the gun of the merciless Israeli occupation while the Israelis, supported by the Bush administration, refuse to discuss any of the key issues, the borders of a Palestinian state, the return of refugees, the status of Jerusalem and the settlements in the West Bank, within a framework of international legitimacy, that is according to the norms of international law, UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions and the rulings of the International Court of Justice. At Camp David, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin fought tooth and nail to delete from the text of the accords any reference to the overarching sentence in Security Council Resolution 242 that provides for "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war". He fought equally hard, and suggested different formulas, that would keep Israeli settlements, as well as two Israeli airfields, in Sinai. For 13 days of negotiations Sadat was adamant: no compromise on the territorial integrity of Sinai or Egyptian sovereignty over the entire peninsula. Sadat also insisted that whatever territorial arrangements were made for Israeli withdrawal from Sinai should equally apply to the Golan Heights. After 10 days of tense negotiations and mostly sleepless nights at Camp David Sadat instructed his staff to get his helicopter ready to take him back to Washington DC and then fly to Cairo because he believed the negotiations were going nowhere. He accused Begin, face to face, of wanting "peace with Egypt and Egyptian territory too". President Jimmy Carter pleaded with Sadat to give him "one or two more days" to try and get Begin and the Israelis to change their intransigent positions. Carter told Begin the US reserved the right to introduce its own ideas to help narrow differences between the two sides while Bush told President Abbas, up front in the Oval Office where they met on Monday, that the US did not intend to impose its own vision on the parties. The Arabs are going to Annapolis in solidarity with the Palestinians in their quest for negotiations based on the land-for-peace Arab peace initiative that is embedded in international resolutions. It is doubtful that this is the US- Israeli approach. Where the Palestinian Authority comes from is the 1993 Oslo Accords that allowed the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to return from exile and establish the Authority in the West Bank and Gaza strip as a transitional administration for parts of these occupied territories. The secret Oslo accords did not provide any framework for negotiations on Israeli withdrawal to the borders of a future Palestinian state, the status of occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli settlements or the right of return for the estimated four million Palestinian refugees. Arafat and the PLO leaders were anxious to come back to the occupied territories where the Hamas-led Palestinian Intifada was undercutting their leadership. The setting up of the Authority was also conceived as the first step towards the establishment of a Palestinian state, with widely varying interpretations by the Palestinians and the Israelis of what that state would be. The parties directly involved with the Palestinian question are going to Annapolis from a position of weakness. Palestinian Authority president Abbas comes to the conference against a background of serious divisions that have pitted Palestinians against each other. Despite all the meetings and hugs, Abbas could not persuade Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to suspend Israeli attacks or the murder of civilians in the West Bank, now almost a daily occurrence. Olmert himself is hounded by at least two corruption scandals. He claims to lead a strong coalition government but does so with feet of clay. Olmert is not Begin, nor does Abbas have the historic stature of Arafat, let alone Sadat. It is difficult to compare George W Bush to Jimmy Carter or anyone else possessed of a sense of leadership or a vision beyond marshalling troops to destroy countries and kill civilians. The Arab coalition, weak and divided, is going to Annapolis comfortably wrapped in the maximalist position of the Arab initiative, which is not inconsistent with the provisions of international legitimacy but increasingly seems like Never Never Land. The Israeli maximalist response, particularly to the question of the right of return of Palestinian refugees, is to insist Israel, as it now stands, is the "homeland of the Jewish people". When Sadat went to Camp David he wanted to conclude a framework for a peace incorporating the basic principles that would govern future peace agreement(s), starting with Egypt, self-rule for the Palestinians and open city status for Jerusalem -- all under the principle that land conquered in war could not be retained in circumstances of peace. Total return of land, with no Israeli settler presence under any guise whatsoever, and complete sovereignty by Egypt were his two, non-negotiable principles. Begin wanted a piecemeal approach: technical committees to negotiate each and every issue, big and small, which after reaching agreement would present their conclusions to senior leaders for approval and signing, or disapproval and return to the negotiating team. If Sadat had accepted this approach Egypt would now be standing in line at Annapolis, hat in hand, waiting for its turn to start yet a new round of negotiations about the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Sinai, or parts of it. Despite the best face and high hopes placed on the Annapolis conference some fundamental and worrisome changes have taken place since the signing of the Oslo accords and the agreements reached between former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Bush. It would seem that in the past 10-15 years the multi-track Middle East conflict has gradually shifted from the domain of the fundamentals of international legitimacy to the dead end choices dictated by the brutal realities of military occupation. The Palestinian Authority was quickly established on shaky foundations without reference to the basic principles of international law and UN resolutions. Under the naked power of military occupation Israel, with Bush's blessing, was allowed to violate every conceivable international law governing armed conflicts: it built and expanded settlements, it constructed an apartheid wall, it confiscated Palestinian land, changed the demographic nature of the occupied territories, ringed occupied East Jerusalem with a series of settlements, strangled the government of Hamas that was elected in accordance with the best traditions of Western liberal democracy, carried out countless incursions into the Palestinian Authority's areas of jurisdiction in the West Bank and Gaza and actively pursued a policy of political assassination. As Menachem Begin insisted at Camp David 29 years ago that Security Council Resolution 242 did not apply to the West Bank, which he called by the biblical name of Judea and Samaria, and that there were no "Palestinian people" but " Palestinian Arabs" (who could be integrated into Jordan), Israel and US have equally changed the paradigm for peace. The internationally acknowledged "occupied territories" in the 1967 War are now being increasingly referred to by US and Israeli officials as "disputed territory". Jerusalem is the "unified capital of Israel", Israel is "the homeland of the Jewish people", precluding the right of return of Palestinian refugees, who can now have a symbolic return to a pocket of Israeli territory that could be exchanged for hundreds of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and around Jerusalem. Both Israeli leaders and negotiators have a time- honoured practice of reinterpreting, or even denying, whatever they have committed themselves to in negotiation. At Camp David in 1978 Begin pledged to suspended settlement activities. As soon as he returned to Israel settlement activities were resumed at a feverish pace to create new facts on the ground and Begin denied that he had made any such a commitment, saying he had pledged suspension of construction activities only for the 13-day duration of the negotiations at Camp David. But president Jimmy Carter confronted him with his meticulously drafted notes of meetings. Similarly, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has announced that "no new settlements" would be constructed but no one knows for how long. If Abbas wants to be the first president of a Palestinian State to be created within the remaining life-span of the Bush administration, he can do so but at a cost. There is, of course, the example of the autonomous Kwazulu- Natal Bantustan that was created and headed by Mangosuthu "Gatsha" Buthelezi under South Africa's apartheid regime. However, one doubts this would be the Palestinian, Arab, PLO or even Abbas's vision of a Palestinian state. The Annapolis conference may represent a revival of the peace process. It will be a difficult and bumpy ride for all that requires the provisions of international legitimacy be acknowledged more than the need for what the Israelis repeatedly call "painful concessions". There is no guarantee of success and the Arabs, and the Palestinian delegation in particular, should not be intimidated by the consequences of failure. After all Sadat, following 10 days of intensive negotiations, was prepared to pack, leave and announce failure, come what consequences may. The Palestinians, after so much suffering, so many sacrifices and tolerance of the humiliation of Israeli occupation, should not be less courageous. * The writer is a former correspondent for Al-Ahram in Washington, DC. He also served as director of UN Radio and Television in New York.
