Searching for Peace
I recently read Ehud Olmert’s memoirs written while serving jail time on corruption charges. This autobiography highlights the political struggle between the defenders of the two-state solution and those in favor of building settlements in the Palestinian territories, or simply put, the peace camp versus the status quo camp on the Israeli political scenes.
In Searching for Peace – A Memoir of Israel, Ehud Olmert first describes his family background, then his career as a politician, and later his political demise that led to serving jail time. Olmert as Israeli prime minister made a detailed offer for a peace settlement to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. I wanted to understand the terms of the peace settlement and why it failed to materialize. Shortly after he presented his offer to the PA, Olmert was accused of corruption and decided to step down as prime minister to focus on his defense. Although the peace negotiations and the corruption charges appear unrelated, Olmert claims in his book that the unrelenting legal attacks against him were driven by the political forces, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, that were trying to put an end to the peace negotiations at all costs, and that is exactly what the status quo camp achieved.
The Olmert-Abbas Peace Negotiations
Ehud Olmert became caretaker prime minister after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke in January 2006 and was elected prime minister in March. He engaged in peace negotiations with the PA until July 2008, when he stepped down.
Today, 14 years after those secret negotiations took place, thanks to multiple leaks and interviews, the public has a pretty good idea of the content of Olmert’s peace offer. His biography makes it explicit. Olmert describes a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in May 2008, corroborated in her own memoirs1, during which Olmert presented to her his peace proposal.
The Agreement
In Olmert’s peace plan, the border between the two states roughly followed the 1967 border (the 1949 Armistice line) with land swaps. Specifically, the three main, highly populated Jewish settlement areas remained Israeli: The Ariel bloc, the Ma’ale Adumim bloc, and the Gush Etzion bloc. Their combined area represented about 6.3% of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Olmert proposed to compensate the Palestinians by handing over portions of Israeli territory along the border of the West Bank and Gaza that were roughly the same size and by building tunnels underneath the protruding settlements to connect the north and south of the West Bank.
Israel would accept up to a thousand Palestinian refugees per year over 5 years on an individual humanitarian basis and they would be entitled to become Israeli citizens. Olmert was willing to increase this to 15,000 refugees as part of negotiations. In addition, he proposed the establishment of an international fund to compensate those who had lost their homes in the conflict, both Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees from the Arab world.
Regarding Jerusalem and the Holy Basin, the Arab neighborhoods would belong to the Palestinian state and the Jewish ones to Israel. No side would have sovereignty over the Holy Basin. Olmert proposed the creation of a special committee with representatives from five countries – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, the United States, and Israel – to administer the sensitive area, based on a UN resolution. Olmert also proposed building a territorial link (by road or railway) between the West Bank and Gaza, under Palestinian control yet under Israeli sovereignty, as well as a road that would connect Bethlehem with Ramallah, bypassing East Jerusalem.
Professor Alan Dershowitz once said3: “No country has offered statehood more often to those seeking to destroy it than Israel: the Palestinians could have had an independent state in 1947, 1948, 1967, 2000, 2001, 2005, and 2008.” Still, I have often heard the comment that every peace offer from Israel to the Palestinians was, at best, insulting. During this round of negotiations, world leaders from the United States, Europe, and some Arab states encouraged Abbas to take the deal. Prior to that, at the Camp David Summit in 2000, world leaders had also encouraged Yasser Arafat to take the deal offered by Ehud Barak which Arafat declined4. When a nation has been yearning for an independent state for over 60 years and receives an offer from a military superpower like Israel, the offer deserves to be seriously considered. It is now 2022, and the Palestinians still have no state.
Olmert’s legal challenges kept growing, and eventually he had to step down. Tzipi Livni became head of the caretaker government and kept negotiating the peace plan details with Abbas’s cabinet until new elections were organized.
Legal Attacks on Olmert and the Peace process
Olmert became prime minister on a political platform in which he clearly stated his intention to negotiate a two-state solution. He claims that the camp opposed to peace negotiations, specifically the Likud led by Benjamin Netanyahu, immediately tried to get him ousted. They gathered an army of legal experts and scrutinized every one of Olmert’s actions to find something illegal. In Olmert’s words:
“A media-hungry state comptroller was willing to do anything, including things that struck me as quite illegal, to bring me down. At the same time, an obsessive state attorney, an inhibited, unbridled self-appointed purist, apparently had made his life’s mission to indict me. They were being helped by an attorney general who saw my justice minister, the renowned legal scholar Daniel Friedmann, as an enemy of the rule of law. They teamed up with a string of sitting and retired judges, all of whom wanted my head.”
As a result, Olmert was summoned to court time and time again, presented his defense, and was acquitted. However, the accusations kept piling up at an increasing pace, taking a toll on his capacity to govern, eventually pushing Olmert to step down to spend his energy constructing his defense. How did the status quo camp obtain the funding to run this legal campaign? Much of the “lawfare” (legal warfare) was financed by Republicans aligned with the pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Olmert also describes the outstanding contribution of millionaire Sheldon Adelson to this effort to bring him down. Adelson created5 the pro-Likud newspaper Yisrael Hayom, freely distributed on the streets, to paint Olmert as a traitor.
The End of the Peace Process
Soon after Olmert presented his peace offer to Condoleezza Rice, she conveyed the plan to Mahmoud Abbas. Even though Olmert knew that he was a lame duck prime minister, he wanted Abbas to consider his offer seriously and endorse it quickly. Olmert’s vision was for both of them to sign the agreement and make a public announcement of the deal at a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council, to be followed weeks later by successive presentations at the UN General Assembly, the U.S. Congress, and the European Parliament to obtain support from the majority of world leaders. The dramatic presentations would create “enormous” momentum to sell the deal to the Palestinian and Israeli populations, so that the next Israeli prime minister would have no choice but to continue the process with the PA based on the original draft agreement. However, Mahmoud Abbas requested more time to peruse the information and present it to his cabinet.
The reasons why Abbas never got back to Olmert6 are unclear. Olmert quotes Abbas’ first reaction to the offer as: “How am I supposed to tell 4 million refugees they’ll never be going back?” Indeed, few Palestinian refugees (from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, etc.) would be going back to Israel under the plan, but Abbas had the option of taking them as Palestinian citizens to the new Palestinian state. Abbas knew that a massive influx of Palestinians inside Israel was a deal breaker for the Israelis, with a population of around 7 million at the time. In fact, he had told Olmert at the start of the negotiations: “I need something symbolic on the subject of refugees […] I don’t want to change the nature of the State of Israel.”
However, Abbas understood the historical significance of Olmert’s plan as he discussed it with his team of negotiators headed by Saeb Erakat, but with the resignation of Olmert and a new round of fighting in the Gaza Strip, the momentum was lost and the peace negotiations died following the elections, when Livni failed to put together a coalition and Netanyahu assumed the premiership. Olmert puts the blame squarely on Netanyahu for this turn of events.
Netanyahu Killed the Peace Process Twice
According to Olmert’s memoirs, Netanyahu used his political might to throw Olmert in jail in order to put an end to the peace process at all costs. Olmert also believes that, in 1995, as part of a prior election campaign, Netanyahu had laid the groundwork for the assassination of Rabin, by running a campaign claiming Rabin was putting the country in danger. This certainly had an influence on ultranationalist Yigal Amir who made it his mission to assassinate Rabin on November 4, 1995. This is no different from Donald Trump creating an atmosphere of hate around Vice-President Mike Pence on January 6, 2021, encouraging a mob to lynch Pence7.
Netanyahu must be blocked for the peace process to restart
In this vicious confrontation between two political leaders, Ehud Olmert will probably be remembered as the prime minister of Israel who made the most generous peace offer since the Oslo agreement and Netanyahu as the one who prevented the two-state solution from materializing. This episode of peace negotiations illustrates the lengthy and tedious effort that is required for the two nations to reach a peace agreement. It also highlights the importance of having a stable political majority in favor of bringing peace efforts to a successful conclusion rather than having them undermined by an opposition that doesn’t support them.
This is where national elections play a major role. As New York Times’ Thomas Friedman suggests8, Arab-Israeli voters have an essential role to play by embracing the Israeli electoral system rather than boycotting it, and by supporting a pro-negotiations coalition. Indeed, Palestinians having Israeli citizenship represent twenty percent of the entire population. If they exercised their right to vote, they could help to maintain the continuity of Israeli governments in favour of peace negotiations and bring about a two-state outcome.
Alternatively, if right-wing coalitions win the elections for multiple terms, the State of Israel is at risk of becoming a society where the Jewish majority dominates and exploits the Arab minority rather than an inclusive society focused on power-sharing and the well-being of all its citizens. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explain that, ultimately in such inequal societies, internal turmoil combined with external pressure leads to a failed state9.
The peace camp has been shrinking, and with it, hopes for a two-state solution. It must rally the Arab voters to create a strong coalition working towards peace.
Endnotes
1 https://www.newsweek.com/condoleezza-rice-memoir-peace-process-anguish-68179
2 http://www.passia.org/maps/view/78
3 https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/5/6/dershowitz-bds/
4 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/23/israel3
5 https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-aide-testifies-netanyahu-enlisted-sheldon-adelson-to-take-down-rival-paper/
6 http://www.thetower.org/exclusive-olmert-i-am-still-waiting-for-abbas-to-call-will-abbas-ever-say-yes/
7 https://nationalpost.com/news/world/jan-6-hearing-how-did-trump-respond-when-mob-chanted-hang-mike-pence
8 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/opinion/israel-saudi-arabia-biden-trip.html
9 https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-why-nations-fail-by-daron-acemoglu-and-james-a-robinson/2012/04/20/gIQAcHs8VT_story.html