Israeli intelligence and the 'no partner' theory
How IDF and Shin Bet chiefs believed a deal was achievable at the 2000 Camp David Summit
Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this post with the button below.
Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat at the Camp Davis Summit in 2000 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).
As I noted last week, today’s student protests in the US have a number of resonances with those of 1968, which sparked some fateful episodes in intelligence history. There are certainly echoes in the tone of the debate between the students and political leaders.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday, Hillary Clinton argued that a lot of young people ‘don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country.’ As an example, she cited a key historical moment during her time as First Lady of the United States, the Camp David Summit of July 2000.
They don't know that under the bringing together of the Israelis and the Palestinians by my husband, the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the then head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, An offer was made to the Palestinians for a state on 96 per cent of the existing territory occupied by the Palestinians, with 4 per cent of Israel to be given to reach a 100 per cent of the amount of territory that was hoped for. And this offer was made and if Yasser Arafat had accepted it, there would have been a Palestinian state now for about 24 years.1
Clinton’s account accords with an interpretation that has long been widespread. In a 2004 column for Haaretz, Israeli political analyst Akiva Eldar called it the 'no Palestinian partner’ theory.’
The basis of this theory: Barak made a generous offer to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, and when the latter refused to accept it, his real face was exposed: that of a terrorist who aims at the destruction of Israel. This theory - which has earned the well-known epithet konseptzia ("conception" - harking back to mistaken assessments prior to the Yom Kippur War) in the intelligence community - is believed by most Israelis today and has also won many fans abroad.2
As Eldar recounts, an alternative view comes from a surprising source. Senior Israeli officials who rejected the no partner theory included the head of IDF intelligence in 2000, Amos Malka, and the head of the Shin Bet security service, Ami Ayalon.
Writing a few months before Arafat’s death, Eldar recorded that ‘Malka is convinced that today too, if Israel offers Arafat a state in 97 percent of the territories, with Jerusalem as the capital, exchanges of territory and the return of 20,000-30,000 refugees - he will sign the agreement and an order to lay down arms.’
After leaving the IDF, Malka went in to private business. Veteran intelligence journalist Yossi Melman reported his involvement in security ventures in the United Arab Emirates in 2019, as part of a wider survey of the ‘The Israel-Abu Dhabi Connection.’
This is the kind of quiet rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf states that has fuelled American hopes of a regional ‘deal of the century.’ Yet, as Melman noted, Palestinian issues remained a complicating factor in Israeli relations with Abu Dhabi ruler Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who is a strong opponent of Hamas, which is the Palestinian extension of the Egyptian branch of the Muslim brotherhood, considers MBZ a strong ally. In that sense so does Israel, although Israeli policy, as designed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in regard to Hamas, is not straightforward rivalry but rather more complicated.
For Netanyahu, Hamas is a sort of “frenemy” – a combination of enemy but also friend. This is because Hamas, which controls Gaza and challenges the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), unwittingly serves Netanyahu’s ultimate goal: to undermine Palestinian national aspirations, and along the way “kill” the notion of two states, Israel and a united Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank.3
This makes stark reading in hindsight, as an account of the strategy which has been shown to be catastrophically bankrupt after the October 7 attacks. Yet while Israeli security chiefs have paid the price for intelligence failures, there has so far been no accountability for the wider policy failure, rooted in a rejectionist approach enabled by the ‘no partner’ theory.
Akiva Eldar, Popular Misconceptions, Haaretz, 5 August 2004, archived at the Internet Archive.
Yossi Melman, Intelligence Report: The Israel-Abu Dhabi connection, Jerusalem Post, 14 June 2019.