November 4, 2005

2. The 2000 Al Aqsa or Second Intifada

Gary D. Keenan

During the two months following the collapse of the Camp David Summit on 25 July 2000, little violence occurred in the occupied territories despite the fact that Israel reneged on its earlier commitments regarding territorial withdrawals and continued with illegal settlement expansion.

"On July 28, Prime Minister Barak announced that Israel had no plans to withdraw from the town of Abu Dis, as it had pledged to do in the 1995 Oslo II agreement ( Israel Wire , 7/28/00.)

In August and early September, Israel announced new construction on Jewish-only settlements in Efrat and Har Adar [occupied West Bank], while the Israeli statistics bureau reported that settlement building had increased 81 percent in the first quarter of 2000.

Two Palestinian houses were demolished in East Jerusalem, and Arab residents of Sur Bahir and Suwahara received expropriation notices; their houses lay in the path of a planned Jewish-only highway." ( Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories , 12 November 2000, cited in " The Myth of the Generous Offer; Distorting the Camp David Negotiations ," by Seth Ackerman)

Palestinian and Israeli negotiators continued to meet for more than fifty mostly secret negotiating sessions during August and September, usually in Jerusalem's King David Hotel. At the same time Clinton and his team were back at work in Washington putting together another peace proposal.

Then out of the blue, in late September, in apparent complete reversal of his uncooperative behaviour at Camp David, Prime Minister Barak invited Arafat and his closest advisors to meet with him for discussions. They had an "unusually congenial dinner meeting" at the Prime Minister's private home in Kochav Yair. (Deborah Sontag, " Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why It Failed," New York Times, 26 July 2001)

So bizarre was the evening that "[a]t one point [during the dinner] Mr. Barak even called President Clinton and, two months after the Camp David peace talks had failed, proclaimed that he and Mr. Arafat would become the ultimate Israeli-Palestinian peace partners. Within earshot of the Palestinian leader, according to an Israeli participant, Mr. Barak theatrically announced, 'I'm going to be the partner of this man even more so than Rabin was,' referring to Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israeli prime minister." (Deborah Sontag)

While Barak appeared upbeat after their meeting, Arafat and his associates were despondent and extremely alarmed at what had transpired. "[They] drove away from that dinner with something else on their minds: Mr. Sharon's coming visit to what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews know as the Temple Mount.

Mr. Arafat said in an interview that he huddled on the balcony with Mr. Barak and implored him to block Mr. Sharon's plans. But Mr. Barak's government perceived the planned visit by Mr. Sharon, then the opposition leader, as solely an internal Israeli political matter, specifically as an attempt to divert attention from the expected return to political life by a right-wing rival Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister." (Deborah Sontag)

On 28 September 2000, with Barak's approval, Ariel Sharon made what can only be described as a deliberately provocative visit to the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount in the occupied Old City accompanied by 1000 armed guards. Although his stated reason for doing so was to inspect the site, it was clear to Palestinians that in utter contempt for international law and the peace process, Sharon was laying claim to Islam's holy shrine and all of the Old City as part of Israel.

It is hardly a stretch to conclude that Barak must have known how Sharon's visit would be perceived by Palestinians and what its consequences would be. One can only wonder what his motivation might have been in not opposing it.

What is known as the Al Aqsa intifada began the next day when four unarmed Palestinian protesters were shot dead and 200 wounded by Jewish occupation forces in East Jerusalem/the Old City.

Once again, a cycle of violence began that would go on for years with Israel using its massive U.S. financed military might, including helicopter gun ships, tanks, missiles, F-16 fighter jets, bulldozers, one tonne bombs, large scale army incursions, house and olive grove demolitions, collective punishments, mass arrests, imprisonment without charge, and extra-judicial assassinations to suppress the Palestinian uprising. Virtually defenceless, Palestinians struck back with deadly ambushes, primitive Kassem rocket attacks and suicide bombers.

Between the outbreak of the Al Aqsa intifada on 29 September 2000, and the signing of a cease-fire by Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and newly-elected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on 8 February 2005, 3,579 Palestinians were killed and 28,457 wounded. ( Palestinian Red Crescent Society )

During the same period 1,042 Israeli Jews, including 315 soldiers, were killed and 7,054 wounded, including 2,112 soldiers. ( Israel Defence Forces )

For the record: B'Tselem, Israel's human rights group, has determined that from December, 1987, when the first Palestinian uprising or intifada began, until 15 May 2005 (3 months after the Sharon/Abbas cease-fire agreement), a total of 4,857 Palestinians were killed by Israeli Jews, the vast majority unarmed civilians, of whom 949 were under the age of 18. In the same period, Palestinians killed 1,382 Israeli Jews, of whom 928 were civilians and 131 were children.

Predictably, Israel and it supporters abroad blamed Arafat for starting the Al Aqsa intifada. He was accused of instigating violence as a means of achieving what he could not through negotiations at Camp David.

A key Israeli figure at the 2000 Camp David Summit disagrees: "An Israeli expert on the conflict, Joseph Alpher, who was an adviser to Mr. Barak at Camp David, argues that the [second] Palestinian uprising, or [Al Aqsa] intifada, was provoked by the failures of the seven-year interim period [i.e., since the 1993 Oslo accords] rather than by the Camp David impasse. 'Postponing the discussion of the contradictions between the most fundamental Israeli and Palestinian narratives allowed the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic to be invaded by a virus that has now paralyzed it,' he wrote in a recent study for the Bertelsmann Foundation." (Deborah Sontag)

On 30 April 2001 (following the election of Ariel Sharon as Israel's prime minister on February 6/01), the Mitchell Report or Report of the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee headed by Senator George Mitchell presented its findings to President George W. Bush who had taken office on January 20/01. The report held neither Ariel Sharon nor Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) responsible for the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada:

"In their submissions, the parties traded allegations about the motivation and degree of control exercised by the other. However, we were provided with no persuasive evidence that the Sharon visit [to the Noble Sanctuary or Temple Mount] was anything other than an internal political act; neither were we provided with persuasive evidence that the PA planned the uprising.

"Accordingly, we have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the GOI [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.

"However, there is also no evidence on which to conclude that the PA made a consistent effort to contain the demonstrations and control the violence once it began; or that the GOI made a consistent effort to use non-lethal means to control demonstrations of unarmed Palestinians. Amid rising anger, fear, and mistrust, each side assumed the worst about the other and acted accordingly."

Importantly, the Mitchell Report concludes that "[t]he Sharon visit did not cause the 'Al-Aqsa Initifada.' But it was poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been foreseen; indeed it was foreseen by those who urged that the visit be prohibited. More significant were the events that followed: the decision of the Israeli police on September 29 to use lethal means against the Palestinian demonstrators; and the subsequent failure, as noted above, of either party to exercise restraint." ( The Mitchell Report or Report of the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee )

For the record: Despite its obvious shortcomings, the Mitchell Report did call for Israel to "freeze all settlement activity, including the 'natural growth' of existing settlements." Needless to say, Sharon and his government did precisely the opposite.

My next and final article in this series will deal with the failure of the 2001 Taba II negotiations and subsequent events.

This is the second of three articles I have written for Canpalnet-Ottawa to expose the lie that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was responsible for the disintegration of the peace process. The first article is entitled " The Truth Regarding the 2000 Camp David Summit "