Report of the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee

Summary

The report of the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, chaired by George J. Mitchell and dated 30 April 2001, answers the October 2000 Sharm el-Sheikh summit’s questions about the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (Second Intifada) — what happened, why it happened, and how recurrence can be prevented — and finds no persuasive evidence of a deliberate PA plan to initiate violence or a deliberate GOI plan to respond with lethal force, while finding no evidence either that the PA consistently tried to contain the violence or that the GOI consistently used non-lethal means against unarmed demonstrators; its recommendations are an unconditional cessation of violence, immediate resumption of security cooperation, a PA 100 percent effort against terrorism, a GOI freeze of all settlement activity including natural growth, non-lethal IDF responses and restored military police investigations, lifted closures and transferred revenues, and resumed negotiations on the basis of the 1999 and 2000 Sharm el-Sheikh agreements (Report of the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, lines 62-102, 168-174, 334-408).

What the file is

The Avalon Project reproduction headed “The Mitchell Plan; April 30, 2001”, 11,213 words in the text copy, lines 1-561: a cover letter to President George W. Bush, a Summary of Recommendations, the report body (Introduction, Discussion, What Happened?, Why Did It Happen?, End the Violence, Rebuild Confidence, Resume Negotiations, Recommendations), closing signatures with titles, and 41 numbered notes citing the parties’ submissions and other sources. The statement and presidential letters that notes 1-2 say are attached are not reproduced in the file. Text quality is good; the newspaper name in the body Settlements discussion prints with a mojibake character in place of the apostrophe in Ha’aretz (note 28 prints it cleanly), the cover-letter signature prints “George J Mitchell” without a full stop where the closing signature prints “George J. Mitchell”, and note 27’s CIA URL ends “gz.aspl” as printed. Avalon navigation and footer occupy lines 1-23 and 520-561.

Section by section

• Cover letter (lines 25-60). Dated April 30, 2001, addressed to President George W. Bush at the White House, enclosing the report; information and advice were received from a wide range of individuals, organizations and governments, but the conclusions and recommendations are the Committee’s alone. Signed by Suleyman Demirel, Thorbjoern Jagland, Warren B. Rudman, Javier Solana and George J. Mitchell as Chairman.
• Summary of Recommendations (lines 62-102). The GOI and PA must act swiftly to halt the violence, then rebuild confidence and resume negotiations; the principal recommendation is recommitment to the Sharm el-Sheikh spirit and implementation of the 1999 and 2000 decisions. The detailed items are those set out under Recommendations below.
• Introduction (lines 104-126). At the 17 October 2000 Middle East Peace Summit at Sharm el-Sheikh, the U.S. President, speaking for the GOI, the PA, Egypt, Jordan, the United States, the United Nations and the European Union, announced a committee of fact-finding on the recent events and how to prevent their recurrence, its report to be shared before publication and submitted under the U.S. President’s auspices. The President asked the five members to serve on 7 November 2000 and, by letter of 6 December 2000, directed that the Committee not be a tribunal determining guilt or innocence but a fact-finding body determining what happened and how to avoid recurrence, guided by ending the violence, preventing recurrence and finding a path back to the peace process. The Committee urged an end to all violence after its first meeting. The Introduction records mutual incomprehension — Israeli incomprehension of Palestinian humiliation under occupation, settlements and military presence, Palestinian incomprehension of Israeli fear of terrorism — warns that the culture of peace nurtured over the previous decade is being shattered, and recites the record from Madrid 1991 (peace based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338) through Oslo 1993 and the Declaration of Principles of 13 September 1993 to the parties coming very close to a permanent settlement the previous year.
• Discussion (lines 128-142). The summit participants had hoped the outbreak, then under a month old, would soon end; the violence has worsened. The concern heard from Israelis and Palestinians alike, and conveyed by President Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan and UN Secretary General Annan, is to end the violence and return to shaping a sustainable peace. The report therefore answers what happened and why, and elaborates prevention under ending the violence, rebuilding confidence and resuming negotiations.
• What Happened? (lines 144-174). The Committee is not a tribunal, could not compel testimony or documents, and received information mostly from the parties that largely supported their own arguments; it discusses only events shedding light on underlying causes. Member of the Knesset Ariel Sharon visited the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount on 28 September 2000 accompanied by over 1,000 Israeli police officers, after Palestinian and U.S. officials urged Prime Minister Ehud Barak to prohibit the visit and Barak, believing it an internal political act directed against him, declined. On 29 September a large number of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators and a large Israeli police contingent confronted each other there; the report quotes the U.S. Department of State that police used rubber-coated metal bullets and live ammunition, “killing 4 persons and injuring about 200”, and records the GOI figure of 14 Israeli policemen injured (note 5 records B’Tselem reporting 70 police injured). Demonstrations over the following days began the “Al-Aqsa Intifada”. The GOI asserts the immediate catalyst was the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations on 25 July 2000 and international appreciation of Palestinian responsibility for the impasse, and that Palestinian violence was planned by the PA leadership to provoke Palestinian casualties and regain the diplomatic initiative; the PLO denies the Al-Aqsa Intifada was planned and claims Camp David was an attempt to extend force on the ground to negotiations. The PLO’s emblematic case is the killing of 12-year-old Muhammad al Durra in Gaza on 30 September, shot huddling behind his father; the GOI’s is the lynching of reservists First Sgt. Vadim Novesche and First Cpl. Yosef Avrahami in Ramallah on 12 October. Confrontations and closures evolved into exchanges of fire between built-up areas, sniping, settler-Palestinian clashes, terrorist acts and Israeli reactions, killings, property destruction, economic measures, mortar attacks and IDF ground incursions. Findings: no persuasive evidence the Sharon visit was other than an internal political act, and none that the PA planned the uprising; no basis to conclude a deliberate PA plan to initiate a campaign of violence or a deliberate GOI plan to respond with lethal force; likewise no evidence the PA consistently contained the violence or the GOI consistently used non-lethal means against unarmed demonstrators. The Sharon visit did not cause the Al-Aqsa Intifada but was poorly timed, its provocative effect foreseeable and foreseen; more significant were the Israeli police decision on 29 September to use lethal means and each party’s subsequent failure to exercise restraint.
• Why Did It Happen? — Divergent Expectations (lines 176-188). The roots extend deeper than an inconclusive summit: mutual disillusionment over unmet Oslo expectations. The Oslo premise of deferring permanent status issues has come under pressure, because the step-by-step process assumed each step would build trust through implemented commitments and abstention from acts predetermining the outcome. The GOI places primacy on a Permanent Status Agreement reached in a nonviolent atmosphere and on steady progress since Madrid 1991. The PLO holds that delays were an Israeli attempt to prolong and solidify the occupation: Palestinians believed Oslo would end the occupation in five years, and at Camp David, in the PLO’s summary, Israel proposed to annex about 11.2% of the West Bank (excluding Jerusalem) and offered unacceptable proposals on Jerusalem, security and refugees, including return of fewer than 1% of refugees to their homes. Both sides read non-compliance as bad faith, eroding trust before permanent status talks began.
• Why Did It Happen? — Divergent Perspectives (lines 190-208). The Palestinian perspective: Madrid and Oslo heralded a state and an end to occupation within an agreed timeframe; anger at settlement growth and daily humiliation; settlements as both a breach of Oslo’s spirit and an application of force sustained by military superiority. The PLO argues from the Interim Agreement (West Bank and Gaza as a single territorial unit whose integrity and status are preserved in the interim period, and the bar on steps prejudicing permanent status) and from customary international law including the Fourth Geneva Convention that Israel has no right to continue settlement expansion, alleges an Israeli design to segregate Palestinians in non-contiguous enclaves surrounded by military-controlled borders, and gives figures: the West Bank settler population, excluding East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, doubled to 200,000 in the seven years since the Declaration of Principles, the East Jerusalem settler population rose to 170,000, and Israel constructed approximately 30 new settlements and expanded existing ones; it also claims GOI failure on further West Bank withdrawal and prisoner release, alongside refugee impasse and deteriorating economic circumstances. The Israeli perspective: settlement expansion and settler convenience and safety measures do not prejudice permanent status; settlements are an agreed outstanding issue, with significant concessions offered at Camp David and after in an overall agreement. Security is the overriding GOI concern: the PLO is said to have breached its commitments through institutionalized anti-Israel, anti-Jewish incitement, release of detained terrorists, failure to control illegal weapons, and violent operations from riflemen in demonstrations to attacks on civilians, in explicit violation of its renunciation of terrorism.
• End the Violence (lines 210-226). The violence is personal to virtually everyone in both societies; the Committee met victims’ families whose grief was expressed in virtually the same words, giving the murdered Israeli physician’s widow and the parents of a Palestinian child killed in his bed by an errant .50 caliber bullet as mirror examples. Cessation needs no reinvention: the parties committed to nonviolence in every agreement since 1991, most recently at Sharm el-Sheikh in September 1999 and October 2000. Security cooperation collapsed in early October on each side’s belief the other had chosen violence; Palestinian officials said reasserting control over armed elements would take perhaps several weeks, which Israeli officials did not dispute; resumption is mandatory for a 100 percent effort standard, though the report acknowledges the PA’s reluctance to be seen as facilitating the work of Israeli security services absent an explicit political context (i.e., meaningful negotiations) and under the threat of Israeli settlement expansion, and sets conditions for outside assistance (mutual consent, no tribunal role, the U.S. good offices and indirect EU support of the pre-2000 cooperation noted).
• Rebuild Confidence (lines 228-322). Terrorism is defined as the deliberate killing and injuring of randomly selected noncombatants for political ends, condemned as immoral and self-defeating; against GOI accusations of PA support for terrorism, which the PA vigorously denies, the PA must demonstrate through concrete action that terrorism is reprehensible and unacceptable. Settlements: a cessation of Palestinian-Israeli violence “will be particularly hard to sustain unless the GOI freezes all settlement construction activity”; the report presents the policy Secretary of State James A. Baker III described on 22 May 1991, on behalf of the Administration of President George H. W. Bush, as in essence the policy of every American administration over the past quarter century, citing Baker’s testimony and the statements collected in note 25 (Vance 1980, Reagan 1982, Clinton 1996, a State Department spokesman on 5 April 2001), notes Turkish, Norwegian and EU criticism, records Israeli settlement-expansion announcements on each of its two visits, and gives the observed ratios of 6,400 settlers to 140,000 Palestinians in Hebron and 6,500 settlers to over 1,100,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, against the GOI’s no-new-settlements but natural-growth policy and the Palestinian position that no such distinction exists. Reducing Tension proposes a limited cooling-off period away from friction points. Actions and Responses records a staff-witnessed stone-throwing incident in Ramallah marked by absent senior leadership on both sides; rejects the GOI’s blanket characterization of the uprising as an armed conflict short of war as overly broad — of some 9,000 Palestinian attacks the GOI counts, some 2,700 (about 30 percent) involved firearms or explosives, and B’Tselem reports that 73 percent of incidents from 29 September to 2 December 2000 did not include Palestinian gunfire, yet most Palestinian deaths and wounds occurred in those incidents; nearly 500 people were killed and over 10,000 injured in seven months, the overwhelming majority Palestinian — and links the characterization to the IDF’s suspension of mandatory military police investigations, which the report urges be re-instituted, alongside senior personnel at friction points and withdrawal of metal-cored rubber rounds. The targeted-killings controversy is recorded in the parties’ own terms (GOI targeting of individual enemy combatants; PLO extra-judicial executions and assassination policy). Fire from Palestinian populated areas is condemned and maximum IDF restraint urged; PA chain-of-command and accountability defects are called very troubling; incitement by both sides is condemned. Economic and Social Impact gives the three forms of closure, Palestinian unemployment estimated at 40 percent, some 140,000 Palestinians prevented from working in Israel, about one-third of Palestinian GDP stripped away, suspended tax and customs transfers, destruction of tens of thousands of olive and fruit trees, and blocked medical access and schooling, against the GOI’s security rationale and its figures of $1.2billion(USD)costtotheIsraelieconomyinthelastquarterof2000andabout$150 million per month since; the report recommends lifting closures and transferring revenues notwithstanding the security concerns. Holy Places urges joint protection of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. International Force records the PA’s strong support and the GOI’s adamant opposition and holds that such a force needs both parties’ support, noting the Temporary International Presence in Hebron briefing in Hebron as an agreed presence that might help manage other friction points if the parties agree. Cross-Community Initiatives commends groups such as the Parent’s Circle and the Economic Cooperation Foundation and urges joint GOI-PA endorsement of NGO initiatives.
• Resume Negotiations (lines 324-332). Neither side wishes to be seen rewarding violence or rewarding occupation; a new bilateral relationship must join security cooperation to negotiations, each party again regarding the other as a partner, concluding the Madrid road map rather than declaring the peace process dead, with mutual strategic reassurances — PA reassurance on security, GOI reassurance on political matters.
• Recommendations (lines 334-408). End the Violence: reaffirm existing agreements and implement an unconditional cessation of violence, with a complete effort by both parties; immediately resume security cooperation, with the caveat that cooperation cannot long be sustained if negotiations are unreasonably deferred, security measures on the ground are seen as hostile, or provocative steps are taken. Rebuild Confidence: a meaningful cooling-off period and the confidence measures proposed in the October 2000 Sharm el-Sheikh Statement and offered by the U.S. on 7 January 2001 in Cairo; renewed action against incitement; PA 100 percent effort against terrorism including apprehension and incarceration; GOI freeze of all settlement activity including natural growth, consideration of friction-point settlements, and a possible clarification that a future peace poses no threat to the territorial contiguity of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; IDF withdrawal to positions held before 28 September 2000, non-lethal responses, re-instituted military police investigations, abandonment of the blanket armed-conflict characterization, crowd-control tactics including withdrawal of metal-cored rubber rounds, seasoned personnel at friction points, and instilling the duty of care in the IDF Ethical Code; lifting of closures, transfer of tax revenues, return of Palestinian workers to jobs in Israel with PA vetting cooperation, and an end to destruction of homes, roads, trees and agricultural property; PA prevention of fire from populated areas and IDF responses minimizing danger to Palestinian civilians; GOI steps against settler violence; observance of the provisions of the Wye River Agreement (Wye River Memorandum) prohibiting illegal weapons; a clear PA chain of command and standards of conduct and accountability; joint protection of holy places; joint support for cross-community NGOs. Resume Negotiations: meet to reaffirm signed agreements and mutual understandings as the basis for full and meaningful negotiations, not unreasonably deferred and in a spirit of compromise, reconciliation and partnership; the parties are at a crossroads and face fighting for years if they do not return to the table.
• Signatures and Notes (lines 410-518). The members sign with their titles: Demirel, 9th President of the Republic of Turkey; Jagland, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway; Mitchell, Chairman, former Member and Majority Leader of the United States Senate; Rudman, former Member of the United States Senate; Solana, High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, European Union. The 41 notes cite the GOI First Statement (28 December 2000) and Second Statement (20 March 2001), the PLO Preliminary Submission (8 December 2000), Second Submission (30 December 2000) and Third Submission (3 April 2001), the U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2000 for Israel and for the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem’s Temple Mount interim report and Illusions of Restraint (December 2000), Baker’s 1991 testimony and the four U.S. settlement-policy statements, TIPH’s introduction to Hebron, the CIA World Factbook 2000, Ha’aretz of 10 April 2001, and the IDF Ethical Code.

Key passages

• “There is only one way to peace, justice, and security in the Middle East, and that is through negotiation.” (Introduction, lines 104-126)
• “we have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity” (What Happened?, lines 168-174)
• “Terrorism involves the deliberate killing and injuring of randomly selected noncombatants for political ends.” (Rebuild Confidence, lines 232-238)
• “I don’t think there is any bigger obstacle to peace than the settlement activity that continues not only unabated but at an enhanced pace.” (James A. Baker III, quoted in Rebuild Confidence, lines 244-248)
• “The sanctity of human life in the eyes of the IDF servicemen will find expression in all of their actions” (The Ethical Code of the Israel Defense Forces, quoted in Rebuild Confidence, lines 276-278)
• “Anything less than a complete effort by both parties to end the violence will render the effort itself ineffective” (Recommendations, lines 342-344)

Evidence the work relies on

• The parties’ written submissions, credited throughout to their authors: GOI First Statement (28 December 2000) and Second Statement (20 March 2001); PLO Preliminary Submission (8 December 2000, titled in note 9 as addressed to the International Commission of Inquiry), A Crisis of Faith: Second Submission (30 December 2000) and Third Submission (3 April 2001), with paragraph and page locators in notes 5, 7-23, 29-37 and 40-41.
• U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2000 (Israel) for the 29 September 2000 killings and injuries, and (Occupied Territories) on lethal force against demonstrators (notes 4 and 39).
• B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories): Events on the Temple Mount - 29 September 2000: Interim Report (70 police injured, note 5) and Illusions of Restraint: Human Rights Violations During the Events in the Occupied Territories, 29 September-2 December 2000 (December 2000), for the 73 percent no-gunfire figure, the military police investigation policy and rubber-bullet practice (notes 31, 32, 39).
• Testimony and statements on U.S. settlement policy: James A. Baker III before the House Committee on Appropriations, 22 May 1991 (note 24); Cyrus Vance, 21 March 1980; the Reagan Plan, 1 September 1982; Bill Clinton, 16 December 1996; a State Department spokesman, 5 April 2001 (note 25).
• Temporary International Presence in Hebron, “An Introduction to the City of Hebron”, for the Hebron settler figures (note 26), and Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook 2000, for the Gaza population figure (note 27).
• Ha’aretz, English Language Edition, editorial of 10 April 2001 (note 28); Israel Defense Forces, The Ethical Code of the Israel Defense Forces (note 38); Jane Perlez, “US Envoy Recalls the Day Pandora’s Box Wouldn’t Shut”, The New York Times, 29 January 2001, for Ambassador Dennis Ross’s warning about the Sharon visit (note 3); Alex Fishman, Yediot Aharonot, 19 January 2001, cited in note 32.
• The Committee’s own observation: two visits to the region, meetings with victims’ families, a staff-witnessed stone-throwing incident in Ramallah, a TIPH briefing in Hebron, and an IDF officer’s statement at the Ministry of Defense on 23 March 2001.

Analysis

The report is a fact-finding and recommendation document, not a tribunal record: it states at the outset that it could not compel testimony or documents and that most information came from the parties and largely supported their arguments, and its central findings are framed negatively — an absence of persuasive evidence for the two deliberate-plan claims, paired with an absence of evidence of consistent restraint by either side. Its causal account rests on divergent expectations built into the Oslo step-by-step structure rather than on the Sharon visit, which it expressly says did not cause the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Its figures are attributed throughout (GOI attack counts, B’Tselem incident percentages, PLO settler counts, TIPH and CIA population figures, GOI economic-loss figures) and, where the parties’ sources conflict, both are printed, as with the 14 (GOI) and 70 (B’Tselem) police injured on 29 September 2000. Its recommendations are addressed symmetrically to the GOI and the PA but are specific in content — a total settlement freeze including natural growth, withdrawal of metal-cored rubber rounds, re-instituted military police investigations, lifted closures and transferred revenues on one side; a 100 percent effort against terrorism, a clear chain of command and an end to fire from populated areas on the other. The limits the file itself shows are that the founding statement and presidential letters are referred to as attached but not reproduced, and that the Committee’s mandate excluded the disturbances within Israel’s Arab community in which thirteen people died (note 6).

People, organizations, places and events

Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, George J. Mitchell, Suleyman Demirel, Thorbjoern Jagland, Warren B. Rudman, Javier Solana, Arik Sharon, Ehud Barak, Muhammad al Durra, Palestinian Authority, Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel Defense Forces, B’Tselem, Temporary International Presence in Hebron, Second Intifada, Camp David Summit, 2000, Temple Mount, Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, West Bank, East Jerusalem, Dennis Ross, Shlomo Ben-Ami, James Baker, Cyrus Vance, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Yasir Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin

Concepts

Closure system, Interim Agreement, Wye River Memorandum, Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum

How it relates to other sources

The report is the inquiry the October 2000 summit created after the outbreak Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: Part V (1989-2000) records, and it re-states as its principal recommendation the implementation of the two Sharm el-Sheikh texts already ingested, The Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum on Implementation Timeline of Outstanding Commitments of Agreements Signed and the Resumption of Permanent Status Negotiations (4 September 1999) and the October 2000 statement it cites, together with the Wye River Memorandum weapons provisions. On Camp David it prints the two parties’ rival summaries — the GOI’s catalyst account and the PLO’s annexation summary with the 11.2% and fewer-than-1% figures — without adopting either, where Trilateral Statement on the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David (25 July 2000) records only the commitment to continue negotiating and The Moratinos Report on the Israeli-Palestinian Talks at Taba (27 January 2001) and The Clinton Parameters (23 December 2000) carry the post-outbreak negotiations the report seeks to revive. On the Sharon visit it agrees with The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation that the visit sparked the uprising’s opening confrontations, but differs in causation: the visit “did not cause” the Al-Aqsa Intifada, whose roots it places in the Oslo process’s divergent expectations, and it records no persuasive evidence for the planned-uprising claim that the GOI submission advances. Its settlement-freeze recommendation restates the U.S. policy line it quotes from Baker, Vance, Reagan and Clinton, and its closure and casualty figures are the parties’ and B’Tselem’s contemporary counts, to be read alongside the later accounts in the ingested histories.

Open questions

• Note 5 gives two figures for Israeli policemen injured on 29 September 2000 — 14 according to the GOI (First Statement, para 187) and 70 according to B’Tselem’s interim report — with no reconciliation in the text.
• Note 9 titles the PLO’s Preliminary Submission of 8 December 2000 as addressed “to the International Commission of Inquiry”, while notes 10 and 12 title the later PLO submissions as addressed to this Committee; the file does not explain the difference.
• Note 26’s Hebron components (400 settlers in H2 and 6,000 in Kiryat Arba) sum to the 6,400 settlers the body text gives for Hebron (computed from the note). The other settler and population figures in the report describe different areas — the PLO submission’s 200,000 in the West Bank excluding East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip and 170,000 in East Jerusalem, and the 6,500 settlers on over 1,100,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (note 27) — and do not conflict with the Hebron figures.
• The October 17, 2000 summit statement and the President’s letters of appointment, said in notes 1-2 to be attached, are not in the file, so their full texts cannot be checked from this source.
• The body text spells the former prime minister “Yitzak Rabin” in the Settlements discussion; the spelling is as printed.
• The Settlements discussion describes the GOI policy as permitting “expansion of exiting settlements” (line 252); “exiting” is as printed, for existing.
• Whether the parties acted on the recommendations is outside the file, which closes on 30 April 2001.

Coverage

lines 1-561 of 561, read in full