TITLE: US Indulged Israel Too Much

AUTHOR: Janine Zacharia

PUB: The Jerusalem Post

DATE: March 11, 2001

The US failed to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians in part because it allowed former prime minister Ehud Barak to dictate the terms of the negotiations, and often greeted his proposals on final status issues with "unwarranted enthusiasm," Robert Malley, a former senior US negotiator, said. In the most critical assessment yet by a former American official of the US failure to broker a deal, Malley, former director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council, said the US also miscalculated by barring outside parties from the process and by failing to take a tougher stance toward Israeli settlement expansion, demolition of Palestinian homes, and Palestinian incitement. Malley outlined his criticisms of how the US handled the negotiations in a speech to the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine on Wednesday. Malley, who also served as special assistant to the president for Arab-Israeli affairs, was part of the peace team coordinated by former special Middle East envoy Dennis Ross. While he said the US may have had an "excessive indulgence for Israeli positions," Malley dismissed some Arab suspicions that the entire negotiation was a "grand conspiracy of [president Bill] Clinton and Barak hatched behind [Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser] Arafat's back." "We relied heavily, far too heavily on Prime Minister Barak's timetable and tactics," Malley said. "Syria had to come first, so it did. Camp David had to occur now, and so it was. Obviously the original mistakes, the impetus came from Barak, but the enabler has to stand as guilty as the enabled." Malley was critical of "Barak's ability to influence the process through his direct and routinized contacts with president Clinton," a conduit that often led to the exclusion of other US officials from the decision-making process. He said when Barak had made a new Israeli offer regarding Jerusalem or another final-status topic, US negotiators mistakenly gauged the proposal based on how far the Israeli position had progressed, rather than by whether the change would be enough for the Palestinians to accept. "Each successive Israeli proposal on the subject of Jerusalem, refugees, territory, settlements, was greeted by the US team too often with unwarranted enthusiasm, measured by the distance that Israel had gone from the original position rather than the distance that remained to be walked to reach an acceptable compromise," Malley said. He added that the US peace team was "overly distrustful... of third-party interlopers, be that Arab or European." "To be the main player is one thing. To be the only player is something quite different, and I think we came to realize that fully only after Camp David and only after it was too late," he said. He said by neglecting what was happening on the ground in terms of settlement expansion and Palestinian incitement, the US had essentially undermined its efforts to strike a wider deal. "If the fundamental equation had to be land for peace, how can it have any meaning and any relevance when, on the one hand, land was being taken away on a daily basis and, on the other hand, the peace was being maligned on a daily basis," he said. He added that there was largely a consensus among former senior US officials that their policy toward settlement expansion had been too lax. Malley said the US had allowed itself to be dragged into infighting in the Palestinian camp, dissension that ultimately paralyzed the Palestinian leadership when it came time to make decisions. The Palestinians, he suggested, had missed an opportunity by treating the final Clinton proposal issued in December with suspicion, rather than greeting it with at least "distant interest." He said the Palestinians at Camp David often retreated into a "bunker mentality," and throughout the process at times seemed to be operating without a strategy. He faulted the Palestinians for not trying harder to influence decision-makers in Washington "by putting forward clear, coherent, logical, not sell-out...Palestinian counteroffers." Under the Clinton proposal, the Palestinians would have had statehood on all of the Gaza Strip and 95 percent of the West Bank and would have made up the difference through territorial swaps with Israel. A Palestinian capital would have been established in Arab parts of Jerusalem, and the Palestinians would have had sovereignty over the Temple Mount. "That may not have been enough," Malley said. "But it is in my view a failure of vision not to appreciate the evolution this stance represented." He also disputed the notion that the Camp David summit broke down largely over Jerusalem, saying the sides had disagreements on all of the final-status issues by the time the two-week summit ended. END top