Israel-PLO Peace Process: Interview with Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer

Abstract

Israel-PLO Peace Process:Interview with Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer Raphael Cohen-Almagor (bio) INTRODUCTION Over the past few years, I have been researching the failed peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), from Oslo 1993 until present time. I have examined how the conditions of peace were advanced and promoted via third-party mediation. This research is important, as the Americans continue to fail in their mediation attempts. The Oslo channel was opened at a time when formal, non-secretive negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians were stalled in Washington, D.C. Despite considerable political, economic, and diplomatic investments in the peace process, the United States has been unable to bring the Israelis and the Palestinians to sign a comprehensive peace pact and to settle their bloody conflict. While some progress has been made, peace is still a distant prospect. The Kurtzer interview unearths the historical processes constituting the peace process from an American perspective. In his 29-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, Daniel Kurtzer served as ambassador to Israel (2001–2005) and to Egypt (1997–2001). He is the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East Policy Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, and has published important books about the peace process.1 Evidence from people who were part of the process can help identify the factors that move history forward. The interviews I conducted with Kurtzer and some thirty others reveal that there is not one history, but many histories. People who were in the same room perceive the same situation in different ways. A classic Rashomon. The Kurtzer interview begins with Oslo 1993. The Intifada, which erupted in 1987, constituted a threat to Yasser Arafat's leadership.2 He was surprised by the scale of the uprising, which brought thousands of [End Page 126] protesters to the streets to fight against the Israeli occupation. The rise of Hamas further threatened his position in Gaza and the West Bank. Arafat was anxious to do something that would bring him to the center of attention. Moreover, his alliance with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War undermined his position in the moderate Arab world. Arafat needed to reinforce his leadership among the Palestinian people. Arafat was also well-aware of the warming relationship between Israel and Jordan.3 He understood that King Hussein was interested in signing a peace treaty with Israel. Egypt had signed a peace treaty with Israel without the Palestinians, and Arafat had no illusions that Hussein would insist on waiting for him, or would coordinate steps leading to peace with him. He thought another peace pact between Israel and an Arab country would further isolate him. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the arms race, technological deficiency, the rise of the former Soviet national republics, and the inner power struggle in Moscow, left the international arena with only one powerful actor, the United States, which aligned itself with Israel.4 Arafat could no longer count on the Soviet Union to serve as a counterbalance against U.S. interests and understood the need to create new opportunities for himself, inter alia, by establishing ties with the West and, especially, the United States. The return of Israel's Labor Party to power in the summer of 1992 signaled a moment of change. In his second term as prime minister, a more experienced Yitzhak Rabin5 wished to move away from containment to signing peace treaties with Israel's neighbors, first and foremost Syria. He was also prepared to address the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the occupation. His foreign minister, Shimon Peres, explained that "We were not going to rule the Palestinians against their will. We were always looking for a way to liberate them from our occupation and to liberate ourselves as occupiers."6 At the time, negotiations with the PLO were illegal for Israelis, as it was deemed a terrorist organization. Israel refused to officially negotiate with Arafat, although it was clear that he was still the person most capable of striking a deal, and the only true representative of the Palestinian people. Bilateral negotiations began in...