VII.

The Intifada and the Peace Process

In the late 1980s Palestinians began the intifada (uprising), a widespread campaign against the continuing Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The campaign combined elements of mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, riots, and terrorism. The intifada put the Israeli army on the defensive and forced them to devote significant resources to patrolling the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a police force. Along with Israeli civilian casualties, many soldiers, including civilian reservists, were injured or killed, and the army in turn often used brutal tactics against Palestinians.

As a result of the intifada, pressure grew within Israel to broaden the peace process. The opportunity to do so was provided in 1991 by the Persian Gulf War. In this war, a multinational coalition of Western and Arab armies expelled Iraq from Kuwait, which Iraq had invaded in 1990. One of the coalition’s chief partners was the United States, a strong ally of Israel. Following the Western-Arab victory, the United States, along with its one-time enemy the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), pressed Arabs and Israelis to pursue peace in the Madrid Conference of 1991. For the first time, all sides sat together to discuss bilateral and region-wide peace talks. Although little progress was made, the conference paved the way for future agreements.

In 1993, while the official negotiating teams of the Palestinians and Israel were engaged in deadlocked negotiations in the United States, the two sides achieved a major breakthrough with the Oslo Accords, which were secretly negotiated in Oslo, Norway. The Oslo Accords and the resulting Declaration of Principles set the stage for a gradual transfer of power to the Palestinians. Further agreements in 1994 and 1995 gave the Palestinians autonomy over most aspects of life in the Gaza Strip and in urban areas of the West Bank through a new administrative body, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). In the first elections for the PNA in 1996, PLO chairman Yasir Arafat was chosen as its president. Finally, the agreements stated that soon after these elections Israel would conduct further withdrawals from rural areas of the West Bank, after which talks addressing the final status of the Palestinian areas would begin.

Meanwhile, with the initial progress on the Palestinian issue, many Arab states felt freer to engage Israel openly and formally, though still with caution. On the heels of the 1993 agreements, Israel and Jordan took steps to negotiate a cooperative relationship. Despite opposition from other Arabs that Jordan’s King Hussein, like Egypt’s Sadat before him, was abandoning Palestinian interests in pursuit of a treaty with Israel, Hussein was undeterred. Jordan and Israel signed a peace agreement in 1994. By the mid-1990s Israel had also achieved diplomatic relations with Arab countries in North Africa and the Persian Gulf.

Despite these accomplishments toward peace, some terrorism and bloodshed continued. Palestinians conducted terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens, and on a number of occasions Israeli extremists responded in kind. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli student opposed to the peace process. Under Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the peace process stalled in 1997. While Netanyahu completed some elements of the peace agreements, such as removing Israeli troops from the West Bank town of Hebron, some of his policies, including building Israeli settlements in Arab East Jerusalem, angered Palestinians and earned rebukes from many nations.

In October 1998 Netanyahu and Arafat signed an accord by which Israel would withdraw from additional West Bank territory in return for Palestinian security measures against terrorist attacks on Israel. The Palestinians also agreed to remove articles that called for Israel's destruction in their national charter. In November Israel completed the first of three scheduled withdrawals, but froze the implementation of the accord the following month. Israel claimed that the Palestinians had not carried out their part of the accord and placed new conditions on further withdrawals. These developments again stalled the peace process and delayed negotiations on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1999 elections Netanyahu was defeated by Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, who vowed to move the peace process forward.

Negotiations between Barak and Arafat were encouraging at first, but foundered over expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the issue of how Israelis and Palestinians could share the city of Jerusalem. Despite the active participation of U.S. president Bill Clinton, the two sides were unable to come to agreement after marathon negotiating sessions held at Camp David, Maryland, in the summer of 2000. The failure generated bitter frustration among both Israelis and Palestinians.

The volatile situation erupted in September with the outbreak of a second intifada. It was known as the Al Aqsa intifada because it was triggered by a decision by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to permit an archaeological excavation near a Muslim holy site, the Al Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem. Palestinian militants resumed widespread resistance to Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, along with a string of devastating terrorist attacks in Israel proper. At the same time, the Israeli army increased its restrictions on the Palestinian population and stepped up its military tactics. During the second intifada, loss of life was heavy on both sides and peace negotiations broke down. In the absence of meaningful diplomacy, the situation was marked by increased use of force by the Israeli side and frequent suicide and ambush attacks by the Palestinian side.

In a February 2001 election Likud party leader Ariel Sharon defeated Barak and became prime minister of Israel. In late 2001 Sharon asserted that Arafat was either unwilling or unable to represent the Palestinian people adequately and was therefore irrelevant to the peace process. Sharon disengaged from the peace process and announced that Israel would withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip. With mounting pressure from both Palestinian and Israeli extremist groups, the subsequent period was marked by pessimism and bitterness on both sides of the conflict.

In December 2001, in response to a surge in Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, Israeli forces surrounded and severely damaged Arafat’s compound in the West Bank town of Râm Allâh, also known as Ramallah. Israeli forces kept Arafat confined to the compound until he traveled to France for medical care shortly before his death there in November 2004. Arafat was succeeded as leader of the Palestinian National Authority by Mahmoud Abbas.

In September 2005 Israel evacuated Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip after the Israeli parliament had approved Sharon’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from the territory. Although Palestinians welcomed the departure, the PNA still sought a negotiated settlement with Israel over the future of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Despite the withdrawal, Israel retained control of Gaza’s air space and coastal waters and the border crossings between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

In November, Sharon called an election for the following March. He resigned from Likud and formed a new party called Kadima. In January 2006 Sharon suffered a stroke from which he failed to recover. He was succeeded in Kadima and as prime minister by Ehud Olmert. The peace process was thrown into turmoil by the Hamas victory in the Palestinian Legislative Assembly elections. Although Israel had originally encouraged the growth of the Islamist group as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas became more than just a religious and social service organization. It grew increasingly political and emerged as a force during the intifadas. Hamas’s charter fails to recognize Israel’s right to exist. As a result of the Hamas victory, international aid, upon which the PNA depended for its economic welfare, was restricted.

Kadima’s victory in the Israeli election failed to ease the crisis. Low-level skirmishes between Gaza-based militias and the Israeli forces erupted into a full-scale Israeli offensive in June when Hamas killed two Israeli soldiers and abducted a third in an incursion from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory. From June to August 2006 more than 200 Palestinians were killed in the offensive that also saw the destruction of much of Gaza’s infrastructure, with the Olmert government refusing to bargain for the release of the soldier.