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Camp David--The US-Israeli
bargain
by Bruce Riedel
In the two years since former United States President Clinton convened
a summit meeting in Camp David, Maryland, to try to bring a just and
lasting peace to Israelis and Palestinians, much has been published
about what happened there and why the summit failed to reach an
agreement between the two parties. But one aspect of the summit has
been neglected in the analysis--the bilateral discussions between
Israelis and Americans over how to assist Israel in managing the risks
of a peace agreement should one have been concluded. As the
President's Special Assistant for Near East and South Asian Affairs at
the National Security Council, one of my responsibilities at Camp
David was to oversee these discussions and in particular to conduct
them with my Israeli counterparts in Prime Minister Ehud Barak's
office. It is important to understand these discussions to better
assess the proposals Barak put on the table in their full perspective
and to understand the kind of peace agreement !
he and President Clinton were trying to build.
The Prime Minister's office had done considerable work preparing for
Camp David on the subject of how to minimize the risks to Israel,
through a deal which would accompany the proposals Barak would make to
the Palestinians on a final status agreement. This work flowed from
earlier preparations for an agreement with Syria, which had been the
subject of intense diplomatic effort in the winter of 1999-2000, but
the new proposals Israel put on the table at Camp David were framed to
deal with the specifics of a Palestinian settlement. The Israeli
effort was led by Barak's chief of staff, Danny Yatom, and his foreign
policy advisor, Zvi Shtauber.
At the core of the proposals Barak's team suggested to the American
side at Camp David was a transformation of the Israeli-American
security partnership. That relationship is deep and rich in practice,
built on years of close and effective partnership, but it has always
lacked a formal commitment based on treaty. Barak suggested at Camp
David that the US and Israel conclude a formal mutual defense
agreement including a commitment by the US to come to the assistance
of Israel in the event of attack in the future, enshrined in a treaty
to be ratified by the Congress and the Knesset. This treaty would be
fully like the American treaty relationship with its NATO allies, and
thus include a nuclear umbrella commitment by the US, i.e., an
American promise to respond to a nuclear attack on Israel with
American nuclear forces.
This idea had been floated by the Israeli side during the discussions
on a Syrian agreement before and after the Shepherdstown, West
Virginia, peace conference in January 2000, but not in the detail that
was presented at Camp David. In July the Israeli team put a draft
treaty on the table and began detailed discussions with us on the
modalities of treaty ratification in the Senate.
Equally important to the proposed formal codification of the
US-Israeli defense partnership, Barak also asked for an enormous new
US financial package to help buttress the chances an
Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement would endure. Barak asked for a
commitment from Clinton to fund, either through US money or money
solicited from other partners like the Europeans and Japanese, a
financial aid package amounting to almost $35 billion over several
years. The US would continue its existing financial aid packages for
Israel and Egypt (amounting to almost $5 billion annually), and take
on the burden of providing most of the new assistance. The
Palestinians would be the beneficiary of the majority of the money.
About $10 billion would be money for compensating the Palestinian
refugees from the 1948 war who have lived in exile for over a half
century. The US would agree to try to elicit donations from countries
around the world to help compensate these refugees in lieu of their
return to their homes. The money would be distributed in various means
to be negotiated as part of the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
Our own internal US estimates were that this amount was too little for
the job but was a reasonable basis to begin the process of raising
funds.
Another $10 billion would be used to develop water desalination plants
to increase the usable water available to Israel, the Palestinians and
Jordan. A number of the expensive desalination plants would be
constructed to increase the water supply for the three states. The
Palestinians would be the principal beneficiaries of this development
project. Again the US would take on the burden of trying to elicit the
donations needed to make up the $10 billion.
A further $15 billion would be money for Israel's exclusive benefit.
About $3-5 billion would be used to upgrade and modernize the Israel
Defense Forces, particularly in the area of new early warning
aircraft, attack submarines, helicopters and the deployment of the
Arrow anti-tactical ballistic missile defense system. Another $2.5
billion would go to assisting the redeployment of IDF units from bases
in the West Bank to new bases to be constructed inside the Green Line,
and another one billion dollars to construct new training facilities
to compensate for those lost in the transfer of the Judean Desert to
the Palestinian Authority. Two billion would be spent on building new
roads and fences to delineate the new borders between Israel and the
PA and about $3 billion would go to help pay for the expenses of
removing Israeli settlers from settlements to be abandoned in the West
Bank and Gaza.
Barak also asked for Israeli access to some of America's most advanced
defense technology; in particular the Tomahawk cruise missile and the
F22 advanced fighter aircraft. Both requests raised potential
problematic issues. The transfer of cruise missile technology could be
seen as a violation of the missile technology transfer control regime
which the US was a major sponsor of, and the F22 is a
still-to-be-produced aircraft which Congress had been very jealous of
exporting. (Clinton did commit the US to providing F22s to Israel,
subject to congressional approval, at the end of his administration.)
The details of the Israeli requests were very closely held in
Washington during and after the summit. There was considerable
opposition to some elements of the package, particularly the
technology transfers and the new treaty commitments. It is fair to say
there was also a fair degree of sticker shock at the size of the
package. Some aides wondered whether the Congress would balk at a
request of this magnitude.
The president's view was simple; if it would help Barak sell a
controversial and painful series of compromises to the Israeli public
and to resolve the outstanding refugee and water issues, then he would
do all he could to get the treaty and the money. He told Barak during
the summit that he would do so and Barak operated on the assumption of
full American support, subject of course to the Congress. Barak and
Clinton obviously assessed that the friends of Israel on the Hill
would mobilize to support such a deal if the peace agreement was
reached with the Palestinians. Clinton was very clear, however, that
the US-Israel deal was entirely contingent on conclusion of an
Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
Unfortunately that was not to be. Interestingly, Chairman Arafat made
only one request from the President for direct American help. Arafat
asked if American military personnel would form the core of a
peacekeeping force to be deployed in the Jordan Valley to replace the
IDF deployment there. This request came in the middle of the night
when Saeb Erekat woke me up at 3 am to ask this key question. I called
Sandy Berger and the president immediately. Again, Clinton was
positive and said yes.
The logic behind Barak's requests is best explained by Israelis. At
Camp David we understood the Israeli thinking to turn on two key
points. First, only a massive effort at economic reconstruction would
make a complex deal with the Palestinians work. That is, a major
refugee compensation program and new water resources would be
essential to creating the peace dividend that would encourage peoples
on both sides to see peace as benefiting their lives. Second, any
deal--no matter how generous to the Palestinians--would face violent
opposition from some in the region, probably including both Iran and
Iraq and maybe others like Usama bin-Ladin who oppose the very
existence of Israel and would thus pose long range security threats,
maybe even nuclear ones, to Israel. Thus a deal for peace would still
require a large security dimension for the long term. President
Clinton fully appreciated the logic of Barak's argument.
Obviously these discussions all hinged on getting an
Israeli-Palestinian deal. They were overtaken by the failure of the
summit but they provide a unique insight into what a deal may require
from the US to be sustainable. Clearly no future administration is
bound by Clinton's promises at Camp David, but the discussions there
illustrate the magnitude of what needs to accompany a deal to ensure
its survival and effectiveness.
These discussions were self-evidently important to those of us
involved in them. The reshaping of Israeli-American relations they
suggested would have been fundamental and profound. They also had
their light moments, however, such as when the president suggested the
delegations watch a movie one night to relax. The movie chosen dealt
with the capture of a German U-boat in World War Two. The next day the
Israeli team told me they had forgotten their navy's need for two
additional submarines to add to those the US had already helped fund
from Germany. I suggested to the President that night that we show
romantic comedies from then on to the delegations.
Two years after Camp David the tragedy of the missed opportunity the
summit presented is clearer than ever. Imagine a Middle East without
the Intifada and with a peace agreement buttressed by an enormous
reconstruction fund, akin to the Marshall Plan that President Truman
used to rebuild Europe after World War Two. Imagine how the lives of
the peoples of the region would be better, especially those in refugee
camps. That missed opportunity is what one sees more and more
clearly.-Published 15/0702(c)bitterlemons.org
Bruce Riedel served for over eight years in the White House as an
advisor on Middle East issues to three presidents.
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