Summary
The agreements whose trend in U.S. thinking, in Said’s account, climaxed a policy of gradualism and bilateralism that shrank the unit of political attention, and whose Palestinian autonomy plan he calls not even a deception but an overt plan to put the Palestinians under Israeli military authority forever in a Bantustan.
Details
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The essence of the trend in U.S. thinking revealed in the Interim Agreements of 1975, whose climax was the Camp David agreements, has been to shrink the unit of political attention and importance, encouraging regimes to see things frozen in their present discreteness and rupturing the continuity between things and the coherence of human life (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.192 / printed p.171).
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Camp David failed to deal with, failed even to mention, the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights; during the Knesset debate on Camp David, Begin’s presentation was made explicitly to depend on an exchange, a deal, better for Israel than for Egypt and the Arabs: Sinai would be returned to Egypt while Israel would keep the other territories (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.213 / printed p.192).
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The so-called autonomy plan was not even a deception, but an overt plan to put the Palestinians under Israeli military authority forever in a Bantustan, the whole principle of which in Africa the United States had denounced as inconsistent with self-determination; the suggestion that autonomy was the first step in an irreversible process leading ultimately to Palestinian self-determination appears not in the text of the agreements but only in a set of letters adjunct to the accords, letters canceled out by Israeli letters nullifying the West Bank and Palestinian hopes for independence (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.213 / printed p.192).
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One road to peace begins at Camp David and ends with an autonomy over which Israel, Egypt and the United States will rule indefinitely, premised on the hope that power is persuasive enough to break the Palestinian will to self-determination; in return for compliance, Palestinians are being promised their continued national nonindependence (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.216 / printed p.195).
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On the day peace was being signed, Israel announced twenty new settlements on the West Bank, which was already dotted with seventy-seven such settlements (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.214 / printed p.193).
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The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was signed in Washington on March 26, 1979, with Carter, Sadat and Begin standing together, hands clasped jubilantly (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.218-219 / printed p.197-198).
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By the end of 1978, Said records, Israel had seventy-seven settlements on the West Bank alone and had confiscated approximately 27 percent of the land, and Begin had left the post-conference settlements project in the hands of Arik Sharon; the framework specified a reduction in Israeli troops during the five-year transitional period, while the settler population grew (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.228 / printed p.207).
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Said gives the ground-level design in Chapter Four II-III: a double-backbone of north-south and east-west military roads dividing the West Bank into quadrants concentrating the Palestinian population, water sources secured for Israel (approximately 30 percent of Israel’s water supply comes from the West Bank), and, as Zeev Schiff foresaw, Israeli security control of intelligence, arrests and interrogation continuing indefinitely under the autonomy (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.228-233 / printed p.207-212).
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Autonomy in the framework, in the formula of an unnamed distinguished Palestinian writer quoted by Said, promises a fraction of the Palestinian people a fraction of its rights in a fraction of its homeland, through a process in which Israel is to exercise a decisive veto power over any agreement (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.233 / printed p.212).
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In Chapter Four IV Said calls Camp David, to Palestinian partisans, the political design lending credence to the pessimistic view that a final solution for the Palestinians was being seriously thought of, and the separate treaty a pact shutting the Palestinians out completely (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.251, p.257 / printed p.230, p.236).
Related pages
The Question of Palestine, Anwar al-Sadat, Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin, Self-determination, Arik Sharon, Gush Emunim, Zeev Schiff