Gidi Grinstein was intimately involved in the negotiations during the Oslo years and served as secretary of the Israeli delegation for the Camp David negotiations. Since then he has written extensively about the structure of the peace process, most recently in his book (In)Sight: Peacemaking in the Oslo Process Thirty Years and Counting.
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Calev Ben-Dor: Gidi, I first ‘discovered’ you when I was doing a thesis at Leeds University in 2001 on the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit. There was a debate in the New York Review of Books. On one side was Rob Malley and Hussein Agha, and on the other side was Dennis Ross and someone called Gidi Grinstein. Malley and Agha talked about the failure of the Summit being a tragedy of errors. It could have worked, but there were mistakes by Israelis and Palestinians and Americans. You and Dennis admitted that everyone made mistakes, but it was important for you to emphasise that the greatest factor was Arafat’s inability to compromise or to make tough decisions, to transform himself from a revolutionary leader into a statesman. Can you reflect on your experiences at the summit, or even in the years beforehand that led you to that conclusion?
Gidi Grinstein: Thank you very much for having me. And it’s really a great pleasure to be interviewed, coming in the footsteps of giants such as Elliott Abrams, Dennis Ross, and Yair Hirschfeld who was my first boss. He taught me a lot of what I know and understand about negotiations. Yair was a visionary in the whole space of track two and backchannel negotiations. He is actually one of the only people in the world that could tell you a story where you begin with a track two, that turns into a back channel, that matures into a comprehensive history making agreement.
I’m talking about the Oslo Accords which began with Hirschfeld meeting Palestinians who started a track two that was taken over by the governments a few months later, became a backchannel, and eventually led to an agreement. Very few people can tell you that story. He was my boss. This is the person I learned from. So a lot of what I will share comes from standing on the shoulders of giants in the field of diplomacy, back channeling, track two and stuff like that.
The other thing is that perspective obviously matures and evolves over time. We’re 24 years after the Camp David Summit, which was a pivotal moment in what I call ‘the Camp David negotiations’. You could say that the Camp David negotiations began in September 1999 with negotiations on the permanent status agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. The talks were stalling until April or May 2000, because Ehud Barak the Prime Minister was focused on negotiations with Syria, and eventually on a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. But beginning in April we got serious with the Palestinians. In July we went to the Camp David Summit.
The summit did not lead to an agreement. Then there was another period of about 7 to 8 weeks of back channel negotiations, a lot of discreet meetings, which led to a massive moment where we came out in bilateral direct negotiations in Washington, which is during the week of 24 September. Sadly, during that week, while we were negotiating an agreement, we also negotiated with the Palestinians the visit of then member of the Knesset, Ariel Sharon, on Temple Mount, which happened on 28 September and led to the eruption of basically an Israeli Palestinian war [the 2nd Intifada].
During that war we resumed negotiations after a few weeks, which led to what we called the Clinton ideas. So to me, ‘the Camp David negotiations’ is the period that began September 1999, maybe as late as April 2000, and continued all the way until January 2001. And the major negotiation highlights were the Camp David Summit in July and the Clinton ideas in December.
When we came into the Camp David Summit, Ehud Barak spent a long time trying to understand the character of Arafat. And his conclusion was that Arafat is a person that will only make decisions under pressure; only when faced by extreme internal and external pushes to make a decision will there be a ripeness to do the kind of historical concessions required for an agreement with Israel. So Barak tried to engineer this moment in the Camp David Summit. Those of you will take time to read about the Camp David Summit, which began on 11 July and ended on 25 July, will see that the first few days were actually wasted in futile exchanges. It was toward days seven and eight, when President Clinton was supposed to leave Camp David – the original summit was supposed to take just eight days – that Barak really raises the stakes. And in this incredibly orchestrated moment in the cabin of President Clinton, Barak on one side and Arafat on the other side with significant factions within the Palestinian side, who are in support of an agreement.
Barak basically puts forward a historic proposal on Jerusalem. His logic was that if we solve Jerusalem, we will be able to solve all other issues. If we don’t have an agreement on Jerusalem, we won’t have any agreement on final status. So effectively, Barak kind of corners Arafat into this moment of truth, where Arafat will have to say, according to this logic, ‘yes’ or ‘no’. And Arafat ends up saying ‘no’.
For a lot of people that were involved in this process, our conclusion was that Arafat actually was not interested in a permanent status agreement.
But I have to say that from the very beginning, meaning already in April / May, before we went to Camp David, I felt that the Palestinians were actually being pushed to negotiate an agreement that they could not agree to, one on Finality of Claims and End of Conflict. But I believed it was better for us to try to seek a long-term interim agreement that would be between Israel and the Palestinian state. Which is why in April 2000 when the Palestinians threatened to unilaterally declare statehood, I thought that Israel should allow them to declare. And once they actually declare a state, instead of negotiating a comprehensive agreement with the PLO, we could have negotiated state to state agreements with the Palestinian Authority.
CBD: You were basically told to keep your smart ideas to yourself.
GG: Exactly. You read the book.
No Partner for Peace?
CBD: We will get to the structure of negotiations in a bit. But I wanted to ask you, Barak comes back from Camp David and many Israelis misquote him because they remember him coming back from the summit and saying, ‘we have no partner for peace’. And that, together with the extremely violent intifada, helps to decimate the Israeli left, and it gets used by the right-wing
GG: This was the exact prediction of Professor Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was at the time the Minister of Internal Security, later to become Minister of Foreign Affairs. That was his exact prediction. He said that the outcome of Camp David will decimate the peace camp and will give the right-wing control of the government in Israel for about 20 years. What is important was that Barak said ‘we have realised that we don’t have a partner for peace at this time’.
CBD: And then you think he should have then added some additional words, which is ‘we don’t have a partner for peace for a permanent status, End of Claims agreement at this time’. So can you explain your thinking?
GG: The Israeli delegation was looking at the goal of the negotiations and what kind of an agreement are we negotiating. Barak was informed by extensive polling that showed that the Israeli public in general was willing to pay a very high price for a comprehensive agreement, meaning making historical concessions to the Palestinians in the context of a historical agreement that brings peace. But the Israeli public was very hesitant and rejected the notion of another long term interim agreement. So this is why we were looking at a comprehensive agreement.
We also realised that the word ‘peace’ was something that we, the Israeli side, really wanted. And the moment we wanted it very badly, the Palestinians were going to extract a price for it. So the idea was that there are other layers, lower thresholds, beneath peace, that serve Israel’s interests, without giving the Palestinians the kind of leverage that they could have if we said that our goal was a peace agreement. That’s how the idea of End of Conflict and Finality of Claims came into being. End of Conflict because, legally speaking, the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is defined as conflict. So End of Conflict actually meant that when Israel and the Palestinians sign a comprehensive agreement that will be the end of the phase of conflict, and the beginning of something new, something different. It could be permanent status, it could be transition to permanent status, it could be peace, it could be a transition to peace. But the agreement itself only ends the conflict, it doesn’t establish what is the end state of the relations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The second goal was to reach Finality of Claims. What do we mean by Finality of Claims? It means that we expected the Palestinians to bring all their claims to the table in the negotiations and we would negotiate those claims. We would arrive at an agreement, and after that agreement, the only demand between the two parties would be to implement the agreement. Meaning after we sign an agreement, the Palestinians can no longer bring all sorts of demands that emanate from UN General Assembly resolutions, UN Security Council resolutions, all sorts of grievances that they have. No, they had to bring everything to the table, discuss it, and whatever we agree is within one text. This represents Finality of Claims.
So what I thought when we came out of Camp David, when Barak said ‘we don’t have a partner for peace at this time’, I said ‘no, we don’t have a partner for a permanent status agreement that establishes finality of claims and end of conflict at this time’.
We could have negotiated a long-term interim agreement. Arafat was ready to do it. The Egyptians wanted to back it. We knew from the intelligence that it was possible, meaning it was almost, in my view, kind of tragic what happened there, where the only agreement that Barak could go for, Arafat could not sign. And the agreement that Arafat could sign, Barak could not pursue. That is the diplomatic and political tragedy of 2000 between Israelis and Palestinians.
Barak’s Strategy
CBD: What I found particularly fascinating in your book is that you set out a very clear strategy that Barak had. When a lot of people talk about that era, they say Barak mishandled things – he prioritised Syria over the Palestinians, he didn’t create a warm relationship with Arafat, and he strong-armed Clinton into calling a summit when the sides weren’t ready. But in your book you actually detail a very strategic vision that Barak had, and note in quite a comprehensive way the steps he took to try to achieve it. Can you explain what he was trying to achieve?
GG: We should remember that Barak was elected at the height of the constitutional and political crisis in Israel, following the electoral reform of 1992 in which we moved from voting with one ballot (proportional representation) to two ballots. So now people could vote directly for the premiership, for the top executive position, and separately for the parliament.
The original logic was that this was going to consolidate the political system, but the effect was the opposite. So when Barak was elected, it was the most dismembered Knesset in many years. And he needed to bridge between three urgent national security goals: ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to an agreement with Syria; unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon; and an agreement with the Palestinians, because the [post-Oslo] interim period between Israel and the Palestinians ended in May 1999; Barak came into office in July 1999; and therefore the situation with the Palestinians was very volatile. He had a very ambitious foreign policy agenda, but a very weak parliament, one which was very hard to work with. He barely had a coalition that he could lead there. Barak, whose Labor Party was the largest left / centre-left party, had three options. He could build a national unity government with Likud. But he thought that a national unity government with the Likud would actually really constrain him, and he would not be able to move forward on his diplomatic agenda. Option two was to create what was then referred to as left-wing / Arab coalition, meaning that the majority the left wing parties had would be preserved through a coalition with Arab parties. And Barak thought that historical agreements in which Israel, and effectively the Jewish people, were making historical compromises with the Palestinians should not be legitimised by a vote of the Arab constituency in the Knesset, (meaning that the 61st hand being raised in support of an agreement needed to be what he called a ‘Zionist hand’, a member of a Zionist party that supports this). Ideally, he wanted a Jewish majority and, in the best circumstances, he wanted a Zionist majority in the Knesset, but he didn’t want to have a majority that depended on Arab parties.
Which led him to the third possible approach – one unprecedented at the time – which was to build a coalition that brought together a lot of small parties from the far-right to the far-left. These parties could not substantively agree on anything, but they could agree on a process. And he basically pledged that whatever agreement he would reach with the Palestinians or the Syrians he would bring to a referendum. That allowed them to all sit in government while he negotiated with the Syrians and then with the Palestinians, knowing that if an agreement would be reached, it would be brought to a referendum.
Which meant that for almost a year, he had a government and coalition without an agreement, and then there needed to be a kind of meltdown moment in which he hoped he would move from having a coalition without an agreement, towards what he called clarity. What did he mean by clarity? If he had an agreement, he then loses his coalition, he goes to a referendum, and then hopefully the public supports his agreement. He believed that it would, because the directive to the negotiation team that I was the secretary of was always aligned with what the polls said that the public could digest. The other option is that he would come out of this moment of clarity, the meltdown moment, which was the Camp David Summit, with knowledge that the Palestinian side is not ready for an agreement, and that we have to go for other options.
Readers can imagine the architecture of that year-long tenure. There is a coalition without an agreement, and then there is this meltdown moment where one comes out with clarity (meaning hopefully an agreement, but without the coalition). This is why Camp David had to happen in July, after the Knesset session disbanded, because from July to November there was basically no Knesset, so you could not disband the government. So Camp David had to be in July in terms of his political planning. So yes, I think he was very thoughtful about this whole process. And he gave it much more thought than he gets credit for it.
Architecture of Negotiations
CBD: You spent a lot of time in the pre and post Camp David world thinking about the architecture of negotiations. So in your book, you say that most initiatives – Oslo, Camp David, the Geneva initiative, Olmert’s ideas to Abbas, even the Trump Plan –push for a kind of ‘all or nothing’ permanent agreement. And the roadmap of the Bush and Ariel Sharon era had a different architecture. Could you please explain the main difference between these models and why you prefer the roadmap model, and that also links back to what you were saying about 1999 and Arafat’s unilateral threat to declare a state.
GG: Basically, I think all breakthroughs in the Middle East happened because of gradualness, because of being very realistic about the goals you’re trying to achieve. This is also true about Sadat and Egypt and Israel, in 1977 leading up to 1979. For context, some of your readers may want to read the last book of Henry Kissinger on leadership, he described this very clearly.
It was actually the Carter administration which was trying to push for a comprehensive Israeli Arab agreement. But Sadat understood that there will never be a comprehensive Israeli-Arab agreement, and he wanted an Israeli-Egyptian agreement. And that’s why he goes to Jerusalem, November 1977. He wanted to basically circumvent an American initiative that went for this ‘all or nothing’ approach. I really believe in very realistic goals in the diplomacy of the Middle East.
Fast forward to Oslo, which basically outlined a process, which began in a very pragmatic approach, which was the 1993 Declaration of Principles. The parties were not ready. There was no ripeness for detailed agreements about peace, if you want to call it like that, between Israel and the Palestinians. So the first Oslo accords was actually an agreement on process about establishing a five-year interim period during which the Palestinian Authority would come into being. The hope was that during those five years, the parties would move closer and closer in terms of their readiness, in terms of ripeness, to reach an agreement. The first Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993, and then in May 1994 there was the Gaza-Jericho Agreement that led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in July 1994. Then we had negotiations until the interim agreement of September 1995. So it’s kind of a step by step approach. It’s a very intense period, but also every step builds on the previous step, very aligned with the characteristic of Prime Minister Rabin who was this kind of leader, who really wanted to move gradually, consolidate every step. And it reflects scepticism.
But the second phase of Oslo was supposed to be kind of this ‘all or nothing’ moment. We had this interim period, and then at some point, which was supposed to be May 1999, we have this agreement that was to bring together three incredible endeavours. The first is resolving all of the outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinians since 1948 – this means refugees, security, Jerusalem, etc. Second, it brings into being a Palestinian state, which is a uniquely complicated political effort. Just for context, with the exception of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, all other countries in Europe that were formed following the collapse of the Soviet Union involved war. Almost always when you extract one country from another, there is war. And the third goal was that after resolving all the outstanding issues and bringing into being a Palestinian state, the permanent status agreement would outline the relationship moving forward in all key areas security economics, movements of goods and services, and so on.
Three huge goals in one agreement, which made it in my view, insurmountable. We needed a dramatic miracle to succeed. That architecture had been the architecture of the all of the Camp David negotiations of 1999 to 2001. It was also the architecture of the negotiations between Ehud Olmert and Abu Mazen from 2007-2009 – again a comprehensive agreement resolving all outstanding issues, bringing into being a Palestinian state, and laying out the relations between Israel and the Palestinian state; and it was also the negotiations that Netanyahu led between 2011-2014 with Obama and Kerry.
In 2003, the Bush administration suggested the Quartet Roadmap. The Roadmap spoke about a different architecture in which a Palestinian state would come into being with provisional borders and provisional powers. And once that state was there, Israel and the Palestinian state would basically design permanent status together.
So if Oslo spoke about a comprehensive agreement that leads to a Palestinian state, the Roadmap spoke about a Palestinian state that would lead to permanence status.
If Oslo spoke about a Palestinian state coming into being, in permanent borders and permanent powers, the roadmap said the Palestinian state will come into being in provisional powers and provisional borders, and then over an extended period of time, it will shape permanent status through its relations with Israel. And I thought that the approach of the Roadmap was much healthier than the approach of Oslo. Which means that whenever there was an opportunity to bring into being a Palestinian state in provisional borders with provisional powers etc., I always supported it ever since. The one big kind of question that I would have, and I actually asked Prime Minister Olmert about it, is in 2007, when Olmert begins to negotiate with Abu Mazen, there’s already the roadmap. And I asked him, why did you shift back to the architecture of Oslo? Why didn’t you go with the architecture of the roadmap? You had Abu Mazen controlling the West Bank, Hamas was controlling Gaza. The Palestinian Authority was anyway bifurcated. It was just screaming for a long-term interim agreement with Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. I think one of the biggest ‘what if’ questions of the last 20 years is, what if Olmert would have focused on the structure of the roadmap, and not going back to the structure of Oslo.
CBD: It’s not just you who wonders, because in Elliot Abrams’ book he also wonders this. He says, we did step one and at a certain stage, him and Condoleezza Rice have this tension. Abrams thinks Rice is very much pushing for the third final stage. And Abrams doesn’t understand why they’ve jumped over stage two. For me, the question would then be, based on Barak’s idea that the Israeli public is willing to sacrifice if it ends in final status, if it just ends in another long term agreement, then the feeling could be, we’re giving up ‘assets’, and the conflict is still on.
GG: Which is why I thought that allowing the Palestinians to declare a state was so much in our interest. Because you’re right, the Israeli public did not want an agreement on a long term interim agreement. But if the Palestinians declare statehood, then it’s a reality we have to face, it’s totally different. It was kind of imposed on us, and I thought we should welcome that imposition. And by the way, I know based on the intelligence that I had access to at the time, the Palestinians had no clue about the political implications of the UN declaration. It was kind of ‘we’ll stick a finger to the Israelis’. They didn’t understand that for example, there was no reflection in the understanding that if a Palestinian state is established like that, the PLO, as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, is immediately marginalised, because now you have a Palestinian state. Second, now you have a Palestinian refugee in a Palestinian state, we can begin to withdraw UNRWA. So many things that we could do if they if they would have established themselves as a state. And by the way, a situation in which Israel controls the entire security perimeter, which is something that now we’re fighting for, but then we had. I think, a very big missed opportunity.
Defying Gravity
CBD: The last question really looks ahead. We’re almost a year since the horrors of 7 October, the war in Gaza continues as, increasingly, do military operations in the West Bank. It’s now four years since the Abraham Accords. Looking ahead, what principles do you think are useful to trying to bring this entire area into a more stable place?
The current government of Israel – Netanyahu’s sixth government with the far-right, national religious, Ben-Gvir and Jewish Power –is a government that is trying to defy gravity. And that’s why, sadly, I believe it will fail. What do I mean by defying gravity? Today, in the area under the direct and indirect control of the State of Israel, there are 7 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews (2 million are Israeli Arabs, 3 million are Palestinians in the West Bank).
The Israeli government speaks about extending Israeli sovereignty over the entire West Bank, meaning, in one form or another, taking 3 million Palestinians into the Israeli domain under Israel’s control. Yes, they’re saying that there will be different political rights, but I just don’t think that we will be able to hold on to that kind of distinction in political rights between people that are subject to the state of Israel. Plus, a lot of them want to also extend Israeli sovereignty in sections of Gaza. So what we’re looking at is an extremely ambitious political vision that is overstretching Israel and therefore will lead, sadly, to major setbacks. When that is the direction that Israel is going, I think that inevitably will go back to the vision that was reflected by the Oslo process, that there has to be a political separation between Jews and Arabs in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Now, there are all these huge nuances – we can’t even call them nuances, like 2 million Israeli Arabs and many other things – but generally speaking, Jews and Arabs do not want to share a society. We don’t want to be part of the same country. The Palestinians have their own national identity, we have our national identity, etc. and that’s why this is where I think gravity is heading.
I also want to highlight that the success of Zionism in moving toward establishing a Jewish state in 1948 with the recognition of the world is far from trivial. It wasn’t a given. We were one third of the population in Mandatory Palestine. Logic should have said that the Arabs are in control of the whole area. Why is it that the world gave us the right to establish a Jewish state alongside an Arab state, as opposed to giving all the power to the majority of the population, which would have been an Arab state? The answer is because the Zionist leadership was pragmatic. And in 1936, the Jewish leadership accepted the principle of two nation states for two people. This is when we accepted the Peel Commission. And then consistently until November 1947, we were for a separation of the land, two states, for two people. And because we were the pragmatic side that was willing to compromise, the world eventually went with us.
Fast forward: Israel won the war in 1948, went from having, according to the partition plan, 52 per cent of the land, to controlling 78 per cent of the land. And then after the 1967 war comes another huge moment for Israel, which is UN Security Council Resolution 242, which effectively means that all the areas that were conquered by Israel in 1948 will stay Israeli forever. And there’s only a debate between the French version and the English versions of 242, where the English version says that Israel can withdraw from some of the territories, the West Bank and Gaza, and the French version says that we need to withdraw from all of the territories. But both of them agree that everything that Israel acquired in 1948 will remain as part of Israel. This was one of the greatest moments of Zionism.
Fast forward to the 1978-79 peace accords with Egypt, which acknowledged 242 as a cornerstone of the entire diplomatic process. The annex to these agreements basically outlined Oslo. So the Oslo Accords are actually an attempt to implement the logic that has guided Zionism from 1936, from success to success, from strength to strength. And that’s why I believe that, eventually, the political process will come back to the same logic. We have to divide the land and the principles of dividing the land. My forecast, my bet, is we will go back to the logic of Oslo. The logic of the Oslo Accords is the logic that will define the political separation between Jews and Arabs in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean: two nation states and two nation states for two people. This is the logic of the Zionist movement since 1936 and its current manifestation is the Oslo process.
