Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories by Ahron Bregman

Author:Ahron Bregman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781846147357
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-06-04T23:00:00+00:00

THE MADRID PEACE CONFERENCE AND AFTER

Meanwhile, President Bush, having led an international and regional coalition to victory over Iraq, was in a strong position to honour his pledge to tackle the Arab–Israeli conflict. His prestige was at its height and this was a unique opportunity to deal with it. So, soon after the war, he dispatched his Secretary of State, James Baker, to the Middle East, tasking him with arranging an international peace conference, where the direct participants would be Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians; the latter group was to be represented by Palestinian leaders from the occupied territories, rather than the PLO, with whom Israel refused to negotiate. It took Baker eight exhausting months just to persuade the parties to attend a peace conference in Spain to tackle their differences.

The Madrid peace conference from 30 October to 1 November 1991 was the most significant breakthrough in Arab–Israeli peace efforts since President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in 1977, which led to the end of the Sinai occupation and to the signing of the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab nation. Now Israelis and their Arab enemies would sit together around the same table to negotiate; all this to take place under the auspices of the United States and the Soviet Union – the latter more of a decorative ornament, as it was a superpower in decline – with the EU and Egypt as full participants and the UN – so distrusted by Israel – as a mere observer.

In his speech to the conference, Shamir declared that ‘We pray that this meeting will mark the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Middle East’, but he then qualified his words:

We know our partners to the negotiations will make territorial demands on Israel, but, as examination of the conflict’s long history makes clear, its nature is not territorial. The conflict raged long before Israel acquired Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan in a defensive war. There was no hint of recognition of Israel before the 1967 war, when the territories in question were not under Israel’s control.7

Unlike the Israeli delegation, which was led by the prime minister, who went there to protect the assets rather than compromising them, the Syrian was led by Farouk al-Shara, the foreign minister – as narrow-minded as Shamir – who repeated the basic Syrian demand for a full Israeli withdrawal from the entire Golan Heights, and from all other lands under Israeli occupation.

The Palestinian delegation, which was formally part of the Jordanian delegation, was headed by Haidar abdel-Shafi from the Gaza Strip, who called for an end to the Israeli occupation and then listed the most important matters to the Palestinians, namely, establishment of a Palestinian state with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital, and permission for Palestinian refugees who had fled their homes in what was now Israel to return to Israel proper. Although Arafat was not allowed to participate in the conference he was there in

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