ration in the United States of a new administration leery of getting involved in the
Middle East, and the election in February 2001 of hard-line former general Ariel
Sharon as Israel’s prime minister combined to bring an end to nearly eight years of
diplomacy aimed at settling the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, dur-
ing the early months of 2001 the Middle East reverted to the violence and political
intransigence that had shaped the conflict for decades before the Oslo peace process
began in 1993.
One tiny ray of hope for a revival of the peace process came with the publication
on May 21, 2001, of a report by an international commission that investigated the
causes of the violence that started in 2000. President Bill Clinton had appointed the
commission following a summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in mid-October 2000 that
had attempted to impose a cease-fire in the violence and restart Israeli-Palestinian peace
talks. The investigation had been requested by Palestinian leaders, apparently in the
expectation that it would pin blame for the violence on Sharon, who on September
28, 2000, had paid a provocative visit to a holy site in Jerusalem called Haram al-
Sharif by Muslims and the Temple Mount by Jews. Sharon had said he wanted to
demonstrate Jewish sovereignty over the site of historic Jewish and Muslim religious
shrines. A Palestinian demonstration at Haram al-Sharif the day after Sharon’s visit
turned violent and sparked an escalating series of attacks against one another by Israelis
and Palestinians.
Former U.S. senator George Mitchell chaired the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding
Committee in charge of investigating the situation. After visiting the region and inter-
viewing officials and ordinary people on both sides of the conflict, the committee
asserted that Israelis as well as Palestinians shared blame for the immediate outbreak
of violence and for the underlying causes of it. The panel recommended a series of
“confidence-building” measures to break the ongoing cycle of violence and to estab-
lish conditions for a resumption of long-term peace negotiations.
On the immediate causes of violence, Mitchell’s committee cited Sharon’s visit to
the holy site as provocative under the circumstances and said that it should have been
blocked by Israeli authorities. The visit, however, was not the sole cause of the vio-
lence, it said, charging officials on both sides with taking irresponsible actions that led
to the violence during the subsequent Palestinian demonstrations. “Amid rising anger,
fear, and mistrust, each side assumed the worst about the other and acted accordingly,”
the report said. Over the longer term, the panel reported, each side blamed the other
for the failure of the peace process to produce genuine peace with tangible benefits for
Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Looking to the future, the Mitchell committee called on the Israelis and Pales-
tinians to take actions to restore each other’s confidence in the peace process. It sug-
gested that the Palestinian Authority crack down on those Palestinians attacking Israelis
and prevent others from doing so and that the Israelis freeze construction of Jewish
settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Bush administration and other governments endorsed the panel’s findings, and
Israeli and Palestinian officials said the report had positive elements. Sharon announced
a unilateral cease-fire the day after the report’s publication, but he rejected the recom-
mendation for a settlement freeze, saying that it would “reward” Palestinian terrorism.
Any optimism sparked by the Mitchell commission report was short-lived, how-
ever, in the face of repeated Palestinian suicide bombings and aggressive Israeli actions.
288 ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS