By David Kimchi -Feb. 4, 2007
I had the good fortune to attend both the Madrid peace conference fifteen years ago and the second Madrid conference earlier this month. The difference between the two was dramatic. Back then the North Pole would have been termed a warm place in comparison to the icy atmosphere that existed between the Israeli and the Arab delegations. The heads of the Syrian and Lebanese delegations hurled insults at Prime Minister Shamir who led the Israeli team. There was virtually no contact between Israelis and Arabs. I had to meet an old acquaintance from previous years – a member of one of the Arab delegations – in the dark recess of a café late at night where he could be sure that none of the delegates would see him speaking to an Israeli.
The second Madrid conference could not have been more different. The Syrians, it is true, refused to speak to Israelis, but they were the exception. In the dining room and in the hotel lobby Israelis mingled with Lebanese, Saudis, Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians. There were, of course, arguments – how could it be otherwise? – but they were friendly. Business cards were exchanged; promises were made to follow up on new friendships. As one of the delegates put it, “the psychological barriers have come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho”.
The great achievement of the first Madrid conference was that, for the first time, the Arab world accepted Israel as a negotiating partner for peace. The issue ceased to be whether to make peace with Israel; it became the price Israel would have to pay for peace – a complete withdrawal from the occupied areas back to the 1967 lines. Since then we have been bargaining over the price and not anymore over whether there could be peace between Israel and the Arab world.
The second conference was, in contrast to the first one, non-governmental and unofficial. Yet the delegations reflected the great interest the conference created in the participating countries. The Syrians were, of course, sent by their government, but other delegations too, had a close affinity to their respective governments. The Egyptians, for example, sent their former Foreign Minister as well as that veteran negotiator with Israel, Osama el-Baz, in addition to others. The Jordanians did even better, with three former Prime Ministers and a former Foreign Minister on their team. The Lebanese had a former President, while even we had, inter alia, four former Ministers, of which two served as Likud Ministers, as well as a far right Israel Beitenu Knesset member. Four European Foreign Ministers, in addition to Javier Solana, the European Union sharpshooter on foreign affairs, and teams from the U.N., U.S. and Russia, also participated.
Not surprisingly the Syrian speech aroused most curiosity. We responded to the invitation to come to this conference because the solution to the Israeli-Syrian conflict cannot be by force, the Syrian representative, Riad Daoudi, declared. “The meeting today can confirm the basis of Madrid 1 and put the peace process back on track”, he told his surprised audience, and he continued: “We decided to participate to show that we want to resume negotiations with Israel. We need to go back to the basics of Madrid. One must not set any prior conditions for that”. Later, he elaborated: “What Israel wants us to give up – Iran, Hezbollah etc – we can discuss at the negotiating table, but not as a pre-condition. If we have to clear our positions before negotiations, then we can also demand such things from Israel”.
Whereas at the first Madrid conference it had been we who had been demanding peace from a recalcitrant Arab world, at the second conference the peace offensive against us came from all sides. “I invite Israel not to be afraid of peace. It should become a member of the Middle Eastern community”, Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the Arab League and no friend of Israel, declared in a surprisingly moderate speech, while former Jordanian Premier Abdel Salam Majali declared that “Israel’s wish to be accepted in the region and live among friendly neighbors can be better served not through building a wall around itself but by allowing people to live in freedom and having twenty two Arab flags fly over Israel”. The Saudi representative stressed that “the Arabs have chosen peace as a strategic option,” and, indeed, the Saudi inspired Arab peace initiative assumed center stage at the conference.
In return for a return to the 1967 lines with a possible swap of territories the Arab peace initiative offers in return:
• A collective offer to end the conflict with Israel;
• Security guarantees for all states in the region, including Israel;
• A collective peace treaty with normal relations with Israel;
• An agreed solution to the refugee problem.
The Arab delegates at the conference could not understand why Israel has failed to respond to this offer. “When we prepared it we decided also to address Israeli needs” Dr. Marwan Muashar, former Foreign Minister of Jordan, explained. That was why “we inserted the word ’agreed’ with regard to the refugee problem”. No Arab state, he said, expects Israel to agree to the return of four million refugees. The word ‘agreed’, indeed, negates any possibility of having the ‘Right of Return’ rammed down our throats. No Arab state has withdrawn its signature from the initiative since it was first propounded, Marwan Muasher stressed.
There was, indeed, a virtual consensus of the Arab – and most of the non-Arab - participants at the conference that the Arab peace initiative should serve as a basis for a renewed effort to return to the negotiating table in order to make peace not only with the Palestinians, or the Syrians, but with the entire Arab world. There was a similar consensus that any proposed solution of an interim or provisional nature would be a non-starter. The Palestinians were particularly adamant on that score. Nabeel Shaath, Mustapha Bargouti, Hanan Ashrawi and the other Palestinians present stressed, time and again, that they would oppose any idea of a provisional state leaving the end game open, both time wise and with respect to the final formula for the end of the conflict. The Europeans present agreed with them. As Jordan’s Abdel Salam Majali put it, “this gradual process (of Oslo) did not work mainly because it gave too much time to the detractors of the peace process to operate. They were able to destroy peace as quickly as it was built…… it did not specify what a final settlement should look like”.
The one player in the Middle Eastern conundrum that was not present was, of course, Iran, but its long shadow was strongly felt. As Lebanon’s former President Amin Jemayyel put it, “the increasing radicalization of the situation comes as a result of Iran’s effort to play a role in the Israeli conflict and to export its religious revolution, while another Lebanese speaker, Roger Edde, declared that the real challenge comes from Iran’s effort to recreate the nation of believers in place of existing nation states in the region.
The organizers of the Madrid conference are now working out the details for its continuation through the establishment of a permanent steering committee. Their hope is that the Spanish Government that gave its blessing for the conference, together with the Foreign Ministers, Solana, the Americans, the Russians, the U.N. and the numerous personalities from the Middle East who participated will together be able to prevail upon the United States and the other Quartet members to call for an international conference, similar to the one held in Madrid fifteen years ago, as a means to jump start renewed negotiations for peace. If that happens, then the efforts made in Madrid earlier this month will have been well worth their while.
