Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo

by Seth Anziska

On the fortieth anniversary of the Camp David Accords, a groundbreaking new history that shows how Egyptian-Israeli peace ensured lasting Palestinian statelessness

For seventy years Israel has existed as a state, and for forty years it has honored a peace treaty with Egypt that is widely viewed as a triumph of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. Yet the Palestinians--the would-be beneficiaries of a vision for a comprehensive regional settlement that led to the Camp David Accords in 1978--remain stateless to this day. How and why Palestinian statelessness persists are the central questions of Seth Anziska's groundbreaking book, which explores the complex legacy of the agreement brokered by President Jimmy Carter.

Based on newly declassified international sources, Preventing Palestine charts the emergence of the Middle East peace process, including the establishment of a separate track to deal with the issue of Palestine. At the very start of this process, Anziska argues, Egyptian-Israeli peace came at the expense of the sovereignty of the Palestinians, whose aspirations for a homeland alongside Israel faced crippling challenges. With the introduction of the idea of restrictive autonomy, Israeli settlement expansion, and Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the chances for Palestinian statehood narrowed even further. The first Intifada in 1987 and the end of the Cold War brought new opportunities for a Palestinian state, but many players, refusing to see Palestinians as a nation or a people, continued to steer international diplomacy away from their cause.

Combining astute political analysis, extensive original research, and interviews with diplomats, military veterans, and communal leaders, Preventing Palestine offers a bold new interpretation of a highly charged struggle for self-determination.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Middle East, Israel, World History

464 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2018

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The one other review for this book is correct in that it offers a fairly narrow focus on the dynamics of diplomacy in the period mostly between the US and Israel in regards to the key diplomatic structure of autonomy for individuals in the West Bank and Gaza introduced by Begin and which was codified in the Camp David Accords, with some discussion of the role of other national presences such as Egypt, the Soviet Union, and Jordan. Although a more in depth look at Arab sources would add more nuance to this history, especially in regards to the struggles of the PLO to articulate a unified base for leadership, the author never purports to give a comprehensive history of each and every nation's role in the negotiations surrounding the diplomatic process of Palestinian national aspirations. This book provides a good starting point for a broader discussion on the influence of the diplomatic process and apparent 'successes' in the peace process in the Middle East through the second half of the 20th century, and how those have influenced the trajectory of the diplomatic process of the Palestinians in trying to achieve their national aspirations.

[Elka]

Don't write a book like this if you can't use Arabic sources.

This is an interesting look at American policy in the Middle East, but from a very narrow perspective

[Jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic, thorough political history of Israel/Palestine peace negotiations from the 70s to 2000. This is a serious academic book. It deeply analyzes both sides’ narratives and extensively documents primary source material, including recently unclassified information. His major thesis is that the Israelis’ insistence on their initial plan for Palestinian “autonomy” as opposed to statehood — as first introduced as part of the Camp David negotiations — had waterfall effects that essentially predetermined this outcome by setting a basis for negotiations that severely limited the PLO’s room for maneuver.

Like me, Anziska had a standard pro-Israel Jewish upbringing before later beginning to develop a more complex relationship with Israel. FWIW, I think this book is relatively “unbiased” in that (1) it offers support and critiques for each side and (2) it does not present any major overarching thesis about who the bad guy is. Instead, Anziska paints a picture where you can see just how dynamic and contingent these events were.

Rating: 4.5, torn but VERY hesitantly rounded down because I’m trying to deflate my ratings and I guess this just didn’t smack me in the face. To his credit, it’s probably because Anziska was such a responsible narrator: he was strict with facts and analysis, and didn’t add drama or flourish or neatly package everything into a tight argument. Very responsible…. but sometimes I want to get smacked!

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was a young socialist in college, we had to explain why Israel wasn’t “socialist,” and we toured a member of the Israeli socialist group best known by the name of its newspaper, ‘Matzpen.’ Today we’d have to explain why it’s not “fascist,” and even the most radical critique by an Israeli would be rejected by many without hearing it.

There is a lot of useful information in this book, and I agree that the Egyptian-Israeli truce was a blow to the Palestinians. And that there were all kinds of useless meetings that went nowhere because the US and Israel were unwilling to talk to the PLO--the only essential people who needed to be talked to. But the PLO itself when it was talked to, rejected the division of Palestine. They viewed themselves as the only victims, but that wasn't true. The Jews who survived the Holocaust had nowhere else to go. And when Israel was formed, practically all the Arab-speaking Jews in the region were expelled from where they had lived, sometimes for centuries.

When I first wrote this review, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement was well underway. It was anti-Semitic from the beginning, with its claim that Israel had no right to exist. But we didn't know at the time that it had close ties to Hamas, a group that proudly announces that its goal is to kill all the Jews

We’re told that this was the way apartheid was brought down, but that involves a whole series of lies. Israel isn’t an apartheid state, although one can clearly make comparisons between the occupied territories and the Bantustans. In South Africa you had a giant mass movement, which involved people of all nationalities, and you had the presence of Cuban troops in the former Portuguese colony of Angola, to prevent South Africa from continuing to play an aggressive role throughout Southern Africa, and to make sure Namibia won its independence (see Nelson Mandela Speaks: Forging a Democratic, Nonracial South Africa) and Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own. South Africa could see the writing on the wall when they freed Mandela and unbanned the ANC.

When the PLO was most like the African National Congress, with mass support among Palestinians, and sympathy among some of the Jewish population of Israel, most of the “left” in the US avoided the question. This Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement doesn’t come about amidst a rise of the Palestinian national movement, but amidst its decline. Once promising leader Hanan Ashrawi today rejects the “Trump plan” without bothering to see what it is. She says she’ll never recognize Israel because it’s not “secular,” without mentioning that the entire region has an absence of secularism, and they supposedly want to be in a government with Hamas, which would never accept anything but Islamic rule, by themselves.

It also comes about because of a decline in the standard of living in much of the world, precisely when anti-Semitism arises. Jew-hatred is a form of racism, but it’s a very specific form, which is why people who when asked, say “I’m against all forms of racism” are really avoiding the issue. To Marxists, anti-Semitism has always been known as “the socialism of fools,” since it protects the capitalists during crisis by encouraging people to thinks of Jews as their enemy. Most capitalists are not Jewish, and most Jews are not capitalists. See The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch.

During the Middle Ages in Europe Jews constituted a “people class,” performing various functions Christians didn’t perform, of which moneylending (quite different from modern banking) is simply the best known (see The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation). This made them hated by the peasants and plebeians, and the kings and nobles, when they got too deeply in debt to Jews would encourage pogroms. In Russia, originally pogroms were officially called by the tzars (and the tsarist political police—the Okhrana—created the forgery known as the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ The Russian Revolution washed this away, although anti-Semitism was making a comeback under Stalin. But the mythology didn’t die with the social forces that brought it into being.

During World War II, thousands of Jews were looking for countries to escape the genocide, and after the war there were still many thousands with no homes. Not all of them were Zionists—regardless of their political or religious beliefs, they needed a place to live. The political current I support had fought for the US to open the borders to Jews fleeing death (see Founding of the Socialist Workers Party: Minutes and Resolutions, 1938-39, but Roosevelt refused to budge, even sending the ship the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees back to Europe (see While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy).

While the formation of Israel in 1948 had more in common with a colonial-settler state than with a national liberation movement, the refugees didn’t have lots of choices. And countries don’t stay colonial-settler states forever, or else we’d consider the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries as such. The Socialist Workers Party and its co-thinkers in Palestine and elsewhere did not support either side in the war that created Israel—we stood for solidarity between Jewish and Arab workers. Because of the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Arab armies, we couldn’t consider it a genuine national liberation movement. But this was before the formation of the PLO.

Prior to the period covered in this book, Israel had at first claimed that there was no such thing as a Palestinian; They were just generic Arabs. Then they recognized their existence but said that they already had a homeland—Jordan. As the PLO was recognized by more and more governments and gained observer status at the United Nations, Israel and the US were forced to bend their position, but not much. The PLO, despite many limitations was a revolutionary nationalist movement, and for a time my political current adopted its slogan of a democratic secular Palestine as our goal. But they did little to implement this program, and today the Arab revolution is aimed at the Arab reactionary regimes, not at Israel. We should have called for a contiguous Palestine including the West Bank and Gaza, which at time the PLO was willing to accept. It was really the only viable option, and it remains so.

The big majority of the world, including probably most Jews, are on record in favor of a “two-state solution,” but to most of them it’s just a catchphrase. Admittedly it’s a big improvement over a “greater Israel.” And it’s a big improvement that today most American Jews don’t think that any criticism of Israel equals supporting a second Holocaust. But there still is, among all concerned a high level of hysteria, as if you can only show you’re serious about something by how loud you shout.

This is a highly useful book, but its limitations are set by the fact that it’s pegged around negotiations, which to me are simply a dim reflection of the struggles going on in the world. The US is hardly a neutral party to the dispute, and if you take the US presidents at their word, Israel was leading them by the nose. But the most powerful country on earth is not led by the nose by a small country. Israel said from the beginning that it would not accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Perhaps the US thought that was just their starting point in negotiations, but it was their starting, ending, and everything in between position. And with few exceptions the US just let the settlements, which it considered illegal, to continue.

There really no such thing as neutrality (although there are countries that sit out wars so they can sell weapons to both sides).

The world was in revolution, and the US needed Israel as a bulwark against revolution; as a country that would usually side with the US, whatever it did. For example, Israel always votes with the US at the UN as one of the shameful tiny group of countries that support the US embargo of Cuba, but they do this despite the fact that Israel and Cuba have trade relations—it was greatly scaled down after the 1967 War, but it was never ended, and at present seems to be expanding again. But don’t expect Israel’s vote to change. The relationship between the US and Israel doesn’t exist fundamentally because of a “Jewish lobby,” but because of common interests. There’s no “British lobby” to speak of in the US, but they still have their “special relationship” although it gets less special all the time (which is tied to Britain’s economic decline, not to lack of a lobby—and now the US is declining as well). The US ruling class less and less has need of Israel, and the rise in Jew-hatred is a sign of that.

Cuba doesn’t let Israel’s vote on the embargo affect its principled position. In the interview that Fidel Castro gave to ‘The Atlantic’ journalist [now editor] Jeffrey Goldberg in 2010, “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews,” Fidel Castro told Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.”
In the interview, Goldberg wrote, Castro criticized Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then-president of Iran, for denying the Holocaust and “explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the ‘unique’ history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.”

Cuba’s revolutionary government has strongly opposed Tel Aviv’s assaults and discrimination against Palestinians. But Castro responded, “Yes, without a doubt,” when Goldberg asked if he thought Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.

A few days after the interview appeared, Castro spoke at a presentation of his book The Strategic Counteroffensive at the University of Havana. The Cuban leader responded to criticism he had received for meeting with Goldberg, praising Goldberg’s journalism and reconfirming his statements condemning Jew-hatred.

Obviously, the US rarely even made threats against Israeli military funding. “U.S. aid to Israel soared from $230 million per year before 1973 to 2.3 billion annually. By 1973 all aid was in the form of grants requiring no repayment. The Israeli armed forces had grown to nearly half a million.” To supplement the portions on Israel’s war in Lebanon I also suggest ‘LONGEST WAR V471 by Jacobo Timerman, which gives the feel for the mood in Israel where elements of the left-wing of the Labor Party and other groups called mass demonstrations against the war--The book says that after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila,

“Internally in Israel, public anger at the government’s involvement in Lebanon and role in Sabra and Shatila brought four hundred thousand demonstrators to rally in Tel Aviv on September 25 [1982].”

Again, the First Intifada gained support from many Israelis, and few Americans. But then the PLO leadership undermined its own authority when Arafat supported the Saddam Hussein reactionary landgrab in Kuwait. The Cubans showed it was possible to reject Iraqi aggression without giving an inch to the US imperialist war drive—the preparations, for starvation and slaughter! See U. S. Hands Off the Mideast!: Cuba Speaks Out at the United Nations.

The Palestinians deserve a better leadership, one that is willing to compromise based on an understanding of Jew-hatred. As a Marxist I support Israel's right to exist as a refuge for Jews, but in the long run, only socialism will be able to save the Jews. I am not a Zionist, which is a form of Jewish nationalism. I am for working class solidarity between Jews, Arabs, and all the many nationalities that make up the Middle East. I also support independence for the largest single nationality on the planet without its own country--The Kurds! Think about why there isn't a genuine solidarity movement with them.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent book that greatly enhanced my understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian (IP) conflict. It is critical but even-handed, which is a rarity in this field of scholarship. The main argument is that Camp David 1978 agreement, while touted as a major accomplishment for creating peace between Egypt and Israel, actually set back the Palestinian cause immensely by locking in the Israeli vision of an autonomous but not separate Pal entity rather than a real state as the baseline position of future negotiations. Oslo, most notably, did not deviate all that much from this vision; the Israelis made some concessions about the nature of Palestinian autonomy but did not actually promise a Pal state. Camp David, therefore, was therefore more important to the history of this conflict than normally portrayed.

SA starts with Carter's attempts to create meaningful Palestinian self-determination in a break with Kissinger's efforts to squeeze out the Palestinians completely. Carter wanted to push the Israelis on this point, but he faced an absolute stone wall from the extremist Likud Party and Menachim Begin's vision of Palestinian autonomy rather than statehood. Believing that the West Bank was Israel's by divine right (he called it Judea and Samaria), Begin argued that the Palestinian people should be an autonomous minority with full citizens' rights under the Israeli state, including the right to vote in the Knesset. Settlements would continue no matter what, Begin demanded, and Palestinians could relocate to Jordan if they wanted to be in a purely Arab state. This vision was predicated on the belief that the Palestinians were not a real nation but simply Arabs. It would never accept the idea of a Palestinian state, which Begin and most Israeli leaders believed would constitute an existential threat to Israel. The Israeli right still embraces this position, which is basically a form of apartheid and which the Palestinians vehemently reject. The Labor Party hasn't really deviated all that much from it either.

Carter tried to push the Israelis toward a more accommodating policy for the Pals, but he failed because of domestic political pressures and the fact that the Israelis simply had the whip hand, for lack of a better term. Egypt under Sadat, meanwhile, initially wanted to champion the Palestinian cause but prioritized its own interests in accepting the Camp David accord and recognizing Israel, for which it took a huge hit of credibility at home and in the larger society. Meanwhile, the Palestinian movement under the PLO floundered. It leaned toward accepting UN Res 242 but kept up a drumbeat of terrorist attacks on Israel as it also pursued and largely gained recognition at the UN and in much of the world. But its continued terrorism, and failure to police renegade Pal groups that did even more terrorism, played into the hands of US and Israeli hard-liners. In the 1980s, Israel largely destroyed the PLO as a military entity in its attempt to crush Palestinian nationalism via the Lebanon War, but ultimately this strategy failed and gave birth to even more extremist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. In 1988, the 2nd Intifada showed that Palestinians were not going to give up on their dreams of independent statehood, and it compelled the US to recognize the PLO after it pressured Arafat to accept Res. 242 and effectively recognize Israel.

This was the setup for Madrid and Oslo, which SA argues were much more constrained attempts at peace than normally portrayed. Things are so bad now that we pine for Oslo as probably the best chance for peace, and we spend a lot of time deciding whom to blame for its failure. But SA asks us to look at how Israel's autonomy plan shaped Oslo: Israel didn't actually grant statehood but a 5-year trial period of land swaps, security cooperation, recognition of a Palestinian Authority (not a state), all in exchange for an end to . Both sides failed to fully deliver, and events like the assassination of Rabin doomed the Oslo Process. I think SA underrates that Oslo was probably the most the Israelis ever gave up in return for peace, and he doesn't discuss the 2000 Camp David offer of something very close to a state for Palestine, which Arafat rejected. But this book shows that we should not romanticize Oslo, as it was still constrained by Begin's vision.

This book is also very well written and easy to follow, which is no mean accomplishment for anyone writing on the intricacies of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. He gives you a sense of who all these people were and how they thought, and there's just enough detail to follow the argument without getting lost. I also understand Begin much more than I used to. This book is a must-read for people who wanted a serious academic treatment of the IP conflict.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seth Anziska’s 'Preventing Palestine' offers a compelling and focused exploration of the diplomatic efforts surrounding Palestinian national aspirations, particularly during the late 20th century. The book examines the key frameworks introduced in the Camp David Accords, such as the concept of autonomy for individuals in the West Bank and Gaza, while also shedding light on the roles of the U.S, Israel, Egypt, and other nations.

Continued reading for those with some background in the Israel-Palestine conflict, as it dives deep into the intricacies of diplomacy. A great starting point for understanding how "successes" have shaped the ongoing struggles for Palestinian self-determination.

[Joshua Pechthalt · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read about the history on Israel-Palestine. Seth Anziska chronicles the behind the scenes negotiations that began with Camp David and culminated with the Oslow Accords. This book reaffirms Israel's refusal to negotiate in good faith and how the Israeli governments be the Labor or Likud have never really intended to accept a Palestinian state.

My one criticism of the book is that the author seems committed to show the reader he is a learned academic rather than write in such a way that average readers will understand.

[Free Palestine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another Middle Eastern book on Palestine by a western author who looks more into archives than the correct history of Palestine, the genocide, tortures camps, and the lack of truth on Camp David. His writing is in full display of a Zionist 'white supremacist'.

I could not finish as the writing was just a lot of lies, and almost assumptions he's made up.

Appalling, I would not recommend, 1 star is too many!

[Preston Pfau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great history of Palestinian national aspirations and the failings of diplomacy to resolve them. Don't read unless you have a semi-decent understanding of Israel-Palestine political history -- you will get lost

[Diana Kullman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of history