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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/9/2014, SPi

xxxviii The Crooked Course

Resolution at the Khartoum Summit, which is referred to as the “Three Noes Document” due to its clause that states: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it”. On 6 October 1973, Syria and Egypt launched a war against Israel that ended in a political stand-off between Israel and its Arab adversaries.

In November 1977, Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat broke Arab unity when he—in a move which stunned the world—flew to Israel and addressed the Knesset in a bid for a peaceful resolution of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Subsequently, in 1978, he signed the Camp David Accords that established a separate bilateral peace agreement with Israel.

Camp David highlighted the importance of a third-party broker. When President Sadat and his counterpart, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, reached a stalemate, US President Jimmy Carter invited the parties to his presidential estate for trilateral discussions on 5 September 1978. Three scheduled days of negotiations turned into thirteen days of frustrating and intense talks. Since these tripartite discussions were unable to break the impasse, President Carter decided to work separately with both sides. The result was an American proposal which incorporated the requirements of both parties into a single text. After lengthy negotiations on this document, President Carter’s shuttle diplomacy resulted in the Camp David Accords of 17 September 1978.

In 1993, PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat followed the precedent of President Sadat and broke ranks with fellow Arab leaders by secretly and bilaterally recognizing the State of Israel and signing the Oslo Accords. The year after, building on the agreements between Israel and the PLO, King Hussein of Jordan followed suit by negotiating a bilateral peace treaty with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel. This culminated in a spectacular signing ceremony at the desert border crossing of Wadi Araba in August 1994. In the agreement, Israel acknowledged Jordan’s historical role over Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem and agreed to recognize this role in future permanent status negotiations with the Palestinians. The two leaders also agreed on steps such as the opening of border crossings and economic cooperation.

In 1999, Labor Party leader Ehud Barak defeated incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As has been described above, the new Prime Minister broke radically with the concept of gradualism that had been the hallmark of negotiations between Yasir Arafat and three Israeli Prime Ministers, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Benjamin Netanyahu, favoring a more comprehensive approach to the peace process. For the first half of 2000, Arafat and the Palestinians were left to wait for a Syrian peace deal that was not to come. Despite Barak offering Syrian President Hafez al-Assad 99 per cent of the Golan Heights, it still fell short of Assad’s demand for a return to the 4 June 1967 lines, and the Syria track subsequently crumbled. This put Arafat on the spot: how could he now, in front of the Arab world, accept less for the Palestinians than Assad had demanded for the Syrians?

The Lebanon track fared better. It began in late 1999 with a dialogue between Prime Minister Barak and me, as the newly appointed UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East peace process. The Prime Minister confided to me that, as a part of his comprehensive quest for resolving all the conflicts that Israel had with its neighbors, he wanted to end Israel’s occupation of Southern Lebanon that had started in 1978. Eventually, he

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