STRUCTURE OF NEGOTIATIONS: A MILITARY–BUREAUCRACY COMPLEX

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process, also known as the Oslo Process, was officially declared with the signing of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on September 13, 1993. The agreement was designed as a gradual process to achieve a two-state solution by 1999. Although the Oslo Process had produced a series of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), the parties were unable to reach a shared understanding regarding the nature of the Final Status Agreement (FSA). Consequently, the Camp David Summit (August 2000), followed by the outbreak of the Al-Aksa Intifada, marked the collapse of the peace process and a return to violence.

The “Rashomon” story that appeared immediately after Camp David entertained two contending narratives to explain the “failure to achieve peace” after almost a decade of ongoing, multilevel, bilateral negotiations (Rubinstein et al. Reference Rubinstein, Malley, Agha, Barak and Morris2003). The “orthodox school,” identified with public versions presented by U.S. and Israeli officials, maintained that it was Yasser Arafat's refusal to accept the “Clinton Plan” that prevented a historical compromise. According to the “revisionist school,” however, the former narrative “ignores history, the dynamics of the negotiations, and the relationships among the three parties. In so doing, it fails to capture why what so many viewed as a generous Israeli offer, the Palestinians viewed as neither generous, nor Israeli, nor, indeed, as an offer” (Malley and Agha Reference Malley and Agha2001).

A decade later, it is impossible to read backwards the history of official Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without acknowledging the paradigmatic shift and tragic disillusionment that followed Camp David. The pragmatic neoliberal “New Middle East” vision, which was to be achieved through economic development, Israeli gradual redeployments, and Palestinian self-governing institutions, never materialized. Instead, belligerent antagonisms, fueled by religious ideological claims, cultivated the idea of an “all-or-nothing” comprehensive deal (Dowty Reference Dowty2008). Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel's minister of foreign affairs and a member of the Israeli delegation, went as far as to describe the post–Camp David period as a “purgatory,” stating that “[t]he beginning of a solution cannot be envisaged unless the parties have gone through a defining national trauma that exposes both the limits of power of the supposedly superior side and the ultimate impotence of the weaker” (Ben-Ami Reference Ben-Ami2005, 202).

Yet canonizing the 2000 summit as “an inevitable moment of truth” obscures the complicated dynamic of conflict and peace negotiations. As Golan (Reference Golan, Nachmais and Bard2009) points out, the implementation issue was itself tied to critical structural flaws in the Accords. One such flaw may have been their very interim nature that provided an opportunity for opponents to make every effort either to prejudice or prevent the final agreement. Another possible flaw, to be further explored in this study, was the developing disconnect between policymakers and lower-level bureaucrats. Indeed, Kleiman (Reference Kleiman and Wittes-Cofman2005, 81) identified an ongoing internal struggle between diplomacy-oriented and security-oriented Israeli subcultures, asserting that although “the diplomatic culture and its mindset did gain short lived ascendance during the 1990s,” national security interests prevailed when leading “defense actors” succeeded in positioning themselves in all political negotiations undertaken by Israelis and Palestinians.

Israeli bureaucrats were to play a vital role in drafting and implementing the Accords. Born of a “constructive ambiguity” paradigm, the Oslo Process was implemented by slicing peace into small pieces that were to be negotiated separately by civil–military negotiating teams and delegations. The 1994 Gaza-Jericho agreement and Protocol on Economic Relations, which established for the first time a self-governing Palestinian entity, included detailed maps and annexes providing arrangements for withdrawal, security, civil affairs, and economic provisions. Shortly after the signing, Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza and Jericho and transferred certain governing responsibilities to the new PNA. More than a year later, the Interim Agreement (1995) defined a second phase of Israeli redeployments and secured other important signs of sovereignty for the Palestinians, notably by establishing elections and self-governing institutions. Negotiated for months by more than a hundred delegates, the Interim Agreement was detailed and lengthy; it was comprised of hundreds of pages and seven annexes specifying security arrangements, civil affairs, and Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. The Hebron Protocol (1997), the Wye River Memorandum (1998), and the Sharem Al-Sheikh Memorandum (1999) were drafted in a similar manner to include even more specific descriptions of redeployment, security cooperation, and civil and religious affairs (Watson Reference Watson2000). These detailed written agreements were produced by various negotiating teams incorporating executive and professional capacities from the Israeli military, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister's Chamber, and other governmental agencies, such as the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, and the Water Authority.

Consequently, professional approaches to peace negotiating came to depend increasingly on bureaucratic expertise, practices, and discourses. For example, between 1995 and 2000, more than two hundred Israeli and Palestinian midlevel negotiators met regularly under the auspices of the Joint Liaison Committees (JLC) to negotiate various subagreements defining rules and regulations relating to economic, legal, and civil affairs. These joint committees dealt with telecommunications, transportation, electricity, population registry, water, environment, postal issues, employment, and agriculture. For the Palestinians, bureaucratic and military expansionism manifested the “practical transformation of the PLO's bureaucratic and military institutions into the quasi-state apparatus of the PNA” (Parsons Reference Parsons2005, 109). In 1994, the PLO established the “Negotiations Affairs Department” (NAD), which was divided in late 1998 into a comprehensive bureaucratic structure to include the “Negotiation Support Unit” (NSU). The NSU was designed to supply legal support, political consultation, media services, and technical assistance to Palestinian delegations. It also negotiated “softer issues,” like economic, water, and civil affairs, in conjunction with Israeli midlevel official negotiators.

In Israel, however, the various governmental negotiating capacities did not evolve into a separate bureaucratic administration for planning and leading peace negotiations. Furthermore, a comprehensive approach based on a long-term vision of Israel's national interest was never officially presented in public. Exacerbated by domestic political instability and frequent changes in government, Israel's inability to create a clear bureaucratic mechanism to plan, coordinate, facilitate, and implement the Oslo Accords resulted in “conceptual confusion” and self-contradictory approaches toward their essence and implementation.

This conceptual confusion was camouflaged by the gradual formation of a military–bureaucracy complex, a semistructured professional negotiating mechanism that was highly dependent on the security sector (Savir Reference Savir1998; Sher Reference Sher2006). In this amorphous structure, various military units were in charge of gathering data, preparing fallback positions, writing political analyses, and providing recommendations to high-level negotiators. Much of the preparation work was performed by the Strategic Planning Unit of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), accompanied by ongoing assessments provided by “Information and Intelligence” divisions of the General Security Services (Shabak) and of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations (Mossad). Also, a large share of professional and technical support was supplied by the IDF, as was the case of the “Interim Agreement Administration” (1994–95), established as part of “Rainbow Operation II” and coordinated by the military's Central Command (Arieli Reference Arieli1999).

Attempts to minimize the involvement of generals in face-to-face negotiations from 1996 to 1999 were generally counterproductive because security considerations continued to be represented by recently retired generals (Peri Reference Peri2006). Moreover, during this period, the IDF's “International Law Department” became one of the most influential advisory bodies, providing ongoing legal advice to joint committees and bilateral negotiations. An audit published in 1999 by the Israeli State Comptroller noted the depleted situation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which could have possibly led the peace talks, concluding that: “[i]n actual reality, the army intelligence took upon itself to lead the research assignments regarding the peace process as a whole, including civil, economic and social issues, which are not part of its core mandate—i.e. to supply strategic assessments regarding the risks of war and the chances of peace” (1999, 283). The direct involvement of military personnel was moderated only in 1999, with the establishment of the National Security Council and the short-lived Peace Administration in the Prime Minister's Office. Yet even in these newly established administrative sections, which were meant to coordinate the negotiations leading to the FSA, the dominance of specialized security professionals remained unchallenged (Sher Reference Sher2006).

As the failure to reach the FSA in 2000 shifted the struggle back to active warfare, direct bilateral talks were halted, civilian cooperation decreased, and the involvement of regular midlevel negotiators was drastically minimized. As a result, attempts to establish an independent civilian administration to coordinate Israeli peace negotiation efforts came to an end.

GENDER, PEACE, AND BUREAUCRATIC MEMORY

Given the limited access to official documents, little is known about the institutionalization of new governance capacities or the emerging web of apolitical and professional interactions among Israeli and Palestinian officials during the 1990s. The main sources of public knowledge about Israeli intentions, perceptions, and interpretations of the Oslo Accords emphasize the viewpoint of high-ranking negotiators and policymakers.

For example, a significant body of unofficial documentation, exhibiting a mixture of detailed historical facts, daily-life anecdotes, personal impressions, political opinions, and emotional experiences, is found in “peace memoirs” published in large, popular editions as authentic reports from the “political front.” Written exclusively by Israeli Jewish men (inter alia, Beilin Reference Beilin1999; Ben-Ami Reference Ben-Ami2005; Hirschfeld Reference Hirschfeld2000; Peres Reference Peres1995; Savir Reference Savir1998; Sher Reference Sher2006), these memoirs reveal the role played by military generals, state officials, and politicians in negotiating and drafting the Accords. But like war memoirs, published Israeli peace memoirs derive their authority from firsthand witnessing and sometimes exhibit overt heroic tendencies, invoking a political culture of militaristic masculinity. This is why, despite the importance of professional bureaucratic capacities and skills in the gradual formation of the Oslo Accords, little is known about the roles and perspectives of low-level negotiators, technical assistants, and specialists.

Yet “bureaucratic memories”—that is, the events as remembered by state bureaucrats—are central for understanding the unsystematic and sometimes chaotic structures of Israeli negotiating bodies and approaches toward peace. Unlike published peace memoirs, the bureaucratic memories I explore in this article are based on personal, oral accounts of professional and technical support providers, mostly Jewish women who were employed in the broad organizational structure of official Israeli negotiating bodies. In contrast to early theories of bureaucratic politics that stressed state bureaucrats' secret influence and interests in shaping foreign policy (Halperin Reference Halperin1974), my case study does not refer to bureaucratic memory as a path for discovering hidden sources of power. Rather, by applying a gendered analytical framework, I recognize fragmented stories of silence, lack of influence, invisibility, and helplessness as valid sources of knowledge in narrating the failed Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

The immediate theoretical context from which this case study has developed is found in recent debates concerning gendered dimensions of formal peace negotiations. From the point of view of feminist theory, “gender-blind” approaches that ignore women's war experiences and active political participation perpetuate the social marginalization and political invisibility of women (Elshtain Reference Elshtain1987; Enloe Reference Enloe1990). Since the late 1970s, feminist scholars and activists have argued that women's global involvement in informal processes of peacebuilding can promote democracy and gender equality. According to Ruddick (Reference Ruddick1989, 223), “Women's politics of resistance” is a transformative social force since whatever their reasons are, “the fact that women organize, direct, and enact a politics enables them to explore their culture's symbols of femininity.” Hence, resistance, community work, and grassroots activism have been perceived as enabling women to formulate new priorities and challenge existing concepts of security, human rights, justice and reconstruction. Notably, the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition and the African National Congress's gender parity policy in South Africa serve as empirical examples of success.

The adoption of UNSCR 1325 (2000), which was followed by a global campaign to secure “women's equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security,” generated a broader theoretical interest in gender-based exclusion from official decision-making roles during armed conflict (see for example, Pratt and Richter-Devroe Reference Pratt and Richter-Devroe2011). But since official peace negotiations are framed by security concerns and negotiating teams are drawn from government, diplomatic, or military ranks, it has been noted that a large gap remains between the community-based activities of women's nongovernmental organizations and their incorporation into formal peace negotiations. Recent examples from Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and East Timor reveal that despite their activity in informal peacebuliding, local women are typically excluded and remain largely absent from formal negotiations. As Chinkin (Reference Chinkin2003, 871) points out, the problem is deeper than under-representation in local politics since “even when they are not deliberately excluded, women's activities are not seen as political and/or even engaging with public welfare.”

The Israeli case exhibits a similar paradox. Women's peace movements in Israel started to form in small numbers during the first Lebanon War in 1982 when Jewish mothers began to use motherhood as a legitimate resource for political protest (Zuckerman-Bareli and Benski Reference Zuckerman-Bareli and Benski1989). They gained widespread public attention during the first Palestinian Intifada (1987–93) with the establishment of “Women in Black” (Helman and Rapoport Reference Helman and Rapoport1997; Sharoni Reference Sharoni1995). After the signing of the DOP in 1993, Israeli women's peace activism shifted from overt public protest against the Israeli occupation to community-based activities, like Jewish–Palestinian dialogue, which promoted ideas of social justice and a “culture of peace” (Cockburn Reference Cockburn1998; Hermann Reference Hermann2009). The collapse of the Oslo Process in 2000 ended almost all Israeli-Palestinian cooperation among women and marked the emergence of a second cycle of feminist/women's organized resistance, one that was associated with global campaigns concerning gender, human-rights, justice, and equality (Benski Reference Benski2008; Herzog Reference Herzog2008).

Scholarly works about Israeli women's peace politics started to appear in the late 1980s, offering significant explanations for their formation, political power, and strategic goals. Gender inequality, underrepresentation of women in formal governing structures, and their exclusion from the political-security discourse have been identified as the main triggers for Jewish women's grassroots peace activism (Chazan Reference Chazan, Swirsky and Safir1991). In addition, social changes, such as the gradual liberalization of Israeli society since the 1980s and the growing exposure to feminism, enabled alternative paths of political participation for local women leaders at the civil-society level (Herzog Reference Herzog1999). In an attempt to pose a civil alternative to the “nation in arms” Zionist model, women's organizations in Israel promoted a political vision linking feminism, democracy, and antimilitarism (Helman Reference Helman1999).

Yet Israeli women's widespread and diverse involvement in peace-related activities during the 1990s did not translate into formal political power. Women's informal activism was reified as natural and powerful, leaving their systematic absence from official negotiations relativity unquestioned. A paragraph from a report submitted by the Israeli government to the UN's Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in 2000 reveals the firm division of formal/informal women's peace activities as a direct consequence of gendered military roles:

An attempt to explain this gap is found in Sharoni's work (Reference Sharoni and Kandiyoti1996), which identified the invisible status of non-Israeli women who played a crucial role in the early phase of the Oslo negotiations: Hannan Ashrawi, the spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation; Marianne Heiberg, of the Norwegian FAFO Institute (and wife of Johan Joren Holst); and Mona Yoll, top advisor to the Norwegian foreign minister (and wife of Terje Rod Larsen). Sharoni argues (1998, 111): “Gender was a major factor in the process which led to the signing of the Oslo Accord; it determined who would remain invisible, whose services would get credit and whose would be taken for granted. The active role these two prominent women played [e.g., Heiberg and Yoll] in the pre-negotiation stage, remains the best kept secret of the history of the backstage negotiations.”

Interpreting gender as a social, cultural, and political force that determines visibility, credit, and relevancy may explain why Israeli women's actual roles in formal negotiating bodies have been neglected, while women's unofficial peacebuilding activities were celebrated as a sign of their agency and power. The “double-bind” neglect—by mainstream political scientists on the one hand, and by gender and peace scholars on the other—reveals the powerful assumptions concerning feminine/masculine constructions of gender roles in Israeli peace politics. The following case study attempts to fill this void by supplying a complementary description of peace, security, and bureaucracy from the perspective of Israeli women

ISRAELI WOMEN IN FORMAL NEGOTIATING BODIES: RESEARCH GOALS AND METHODS

The participation of Jewish Israeli women in formal peace negotiations during the Oslo Process was documented in qualitative research, conducted from 2005 through 2007. Originally, the research attempted to use gender as an analytical category through which a coherent alternative description of the Oslo peace negotiations would emerge. The first stage of the research included a survey of various written sources, including memoirs, newspaper reports, official documents, and parliamentary protocols in order to gather initial information about women's names, roles, activities, and images. Due to the paucity of information found in the survey of written texts, a second phase of open-ended interviews was conducted with Israeli women and men who participated in official negotiating teams and joint committees from 1991 through 2000.

Participants were located by two methods. The first was based on a detailed list of Israeli women whose names appeared in written documents (regardless of their role). This method provided access to nine women, mainly members of parliament, secretaries, and spokeswomen. The second was a snowball method based on personal connections and networks. This method provided 17 participants, mainly midlevel professionals, including legal advisors, diplomats, and economists. An additional nine women refused to participate or withdrew at the last minute. Most were executive secretaries still employed in governmental agencies who chose to remain silent due to loyalty and professional discretion.

Eventually, 31 women from a diverse professional and institutional background agreed to share their personal stories from the backstage of Israeli negotiating bodies. The sample consisted of five secretaries, four spokeswomen, four diplomats, six legal advisors, two academic researchers, six women in managerial positions, and four economists. All the women were Israeli Jews, sharing a common executive profile in Israeli public administration during the 1990s: secular, residing in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, mainly of European or U.S. origin. Their average age at the time of the interviews was 54 (the oldest was 76 and the youngest 31). Therefore, 15 years prior to the interviews, most of the women were between 30 and 50 years of age. Accordingly, many (23 women) were married with children.

Although the research was not designed as a comparative study, additional information was gathered through interviews with 10 Israeli men, whose experiences varied according to chronology, role, profession, and rank. This series of interviews was meant mainly to gather information about decision-making processes that determined the composition of the peace delegations and, to a lesser extent, to gain initial evidence concerning attitudes of Israeli men toward gender roles in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The initial attempt to introduce an alternative historical description of the Oslo Process by using subjective reports of Israeli women and men proved ineffective, however. A thematic and a phenomenological analysis of the data produced only fragmented, inconsistent narratives that seemed disconnected from the larger political debate over the failure to reach a FSA. Paradoxically, the inability to introduce a coherent, alternative “feminine” narrative became the focal point of interoperations and was not only understood to reflect the small number of Israeli women in official negotiating bodies at the time but was also seen as a manifestation of two structural characteristics of Israeli approaches toward the Oslo Accords. First, it indicated the symbolic power of security-related explanations that render all “nonsecurity” narratives, themes, and activities invisible. Second, it reinforced the claim that the absence of a clear political long-term vision concerning Israeli-Palestinian negotiations fostered ambiguous and sometimes contradictory expectations and interpretations among members of negotiating bodies, which are still reflected in historical accounts.

The following three sections include a brief presentation of these major findings. The first section examines the gendered consequences of Israel's military dominance in the negotiation structure by identifying three patterns of exclusion: ambiguous criteria in selecting negotiators, preference for security concerns over civil affairs, and the construction of a gendered image of the “good negotiator” as a military man. The second section examines the division of labor inside Israeli negotiating structures, suggesting that patterns of professional segregation that were based upon traditional gender roles became a mark of the relative power of Israeli male negotiators in relation to Palestinian men and other women in the peace delegations. The third section interprets the “double otherness” of professional women who served as midlevel negotiators as a manifestation of the overall Israeli conceptual confusion and self-contradictory approaches toward the Oslo Accords and their implementation.

LINKING “PEACE,” “NATIONAL SECURITY,” AND “MASCULINITY”

The predominant explanation for the paucity of women in official Israeli negotiating structures during the 1990s lies in the centrality of what Barak and Sheffer (Reference Barak and Sheffer2006) identified as the informal “Israeli Security Network” in professional negotiating bodies. Historically, official U.S-Israeli perceptions of a negotiated solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict were founded on a traditional realist or power-based conviction that Israel's military superiority against any plausible coalition of Arab parties should be maintained throughout the process (Quandt Reference Quandt2005). Concurrently, the analysis of written sources and interviews revealed that the “peace and security” linkage was central to maintaining official peace negotiating as a dominant masculine sphere.

Sasson, an ex-general who participated in various high-level rounds of negotiations, tried to provide a rational justification for the exclusion of women as an “incidental” or “unintentional” consequence of the Oslo Accords' focus on territory and security:

Sasson admitted that he did not know many of the women negotiators who served as professional advisors in midlevel and lower-level rounds of negotiations. Furthermore, he and other military personnel perceived their contribution as marginal and unimportant. For example, the Israeli delegation appointed to negotiate the Paris Economic Protocol (1994) incorporated among its 30 delegates five women, three of whom were negotiators. The following citation, from an interview with Sam, an ex-general, reveals a common discursive practice, which tended to dismiss the value of women's work by stressing the relatively marginal status of “civil affairs” in the Oslo Process:

These citations reveal that Israeli women's participation as negotiators was understood by members of the security network not as a sign of “empowerment through peacebuilding” (as suggested by feminist peace theorists) but as an indication of the relatively less important status of economic and civil affairs in relation to the centrality of security and territory.

In a discussion held by the Committee on the Status of Women of the Israeli Parliament (July 3, 1995), Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin tried to settle the apparent contradiction between Israel's modern, liberal ideas about gender equality, peace, and democracy and women's actual exclusion from formal negotiations by calling attention to their underrepresentation in high military ranks:

According to this line of argument, Israeli Jewish women can gain more visibility in official peace politics by combining the liberal struggle for equal status in the military, which has become a mark of their equality (Barak-Erez Reference Barak-Erez2007), with feminist peace activism. The following citation, however, taken from an interview with Irit, a female military expert who participated in the Joint Civil Affairs Committee, reveals that gender was an informal selection criterion even within the military: “This is a security system in which men in senior positions promote men who ate from the same combat food ration [Manat Krav].”

Positioning the experience of combat (combat food rations are only used in active warfare) as an informal criterion for selection and appointment of participants to peace delegations and negotiating teams raises immediate questions concerning the role of militarized masculinity in the Oslo Process. Various descriptions of “best practices” in memoirs, articles, and interviews reveal that personal qualifications for “good” or “appropriate” professional negotiators were often tailored to fit images of militarized masculinity. In a written summary of the Second Redeployment Phase (1996), Shaul Arieli, the head of the project's administration in the Central Command, provided a list of essential qualities for a military peace project coordinator. The list included, among other qualities, references to leadership, aggressiveness, persuasion skills, personal strength, ambition, and authority (Arieli Reference Arieli1999, 22). By portraying masculine qualities such as bravery, determination, rationalism, persistence, loyalty, responsibility, and authority as essential to peace negotiations and implementation, “peace” was continuously maintained primarily as a security affair.

Within Israeli public media, the Oslo Accords were treated at the start as a heroic transition from war to peace. Yet from the point of view of chiefly male negotiators, the necessary linkage between peace and national security was to define various aspects of ongoing interactions among Israeli and Palestinian men. In contrast to the heroic “Peace of the Brave” façade (an idiom coined in 1993 by Yasser Arafat), actual face-to-face encounters involving male negotiators sometimes resulted in overt expressions of what was interpreted by many as a form of masculine power struggle. Sara, an English secretary who was placed as a typist in the first round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in late 1993, shared her personal observations of militarized masculinity and peace negotiations:

The asymmetrical power structure inherent in the Israeli-Palestinian case was, in part, exacerbated by the fact that high-ranking generals from occupying forces negotiated with ex-prisoners. Or, as explained by Saul, an ex-general who participated in high-level negotiations from 1996 through 2000: “Since they all were men, many of the Palestinians had been imprisoned in Israeli jails, so the Israelis used to say ‘I put that man in jail’ or ‘I freed that one from imprisonment.’ It was arrogant. It was all about mastership.”

It seems that Israeli negotiators acknowledged the possible negative effects of this all-male dynamic, since from a very early stage in the planning, certain rules and practices had been officially introduced. Ariel, a military legal advisor, described a discussion held in 1994 with the deputy chief of staff, Amnon Shahak, when the military delegation decided to wear suits, not uniforms, to the talks. This was an attempt to promote a semblance of normalization and minimize possible tension: “The start was very hard for the Palestinians. The occupier has come to sit at the table. . . . We called it the ‘high boots syndrome’ and decided it wouldn't be right to put them through that.” Hence, the strategic decision to wear suits was mainly symbolic, since the Israeli delegates were in active military service, and was meant to reduce some of the inequalities between men negotiators.

Personal memoirs also unconsciously reveal the complex connections of masculinity, war, and peace. For example, Gilead Sher, one of Israel's chief negotiators at Camp David, revealed his core motivation for seeking peace as an outcome of traumatic experiences of war and combat (2006, 8):

These personal, public, and bureaucratic narratives reveal how masculinity and combat, though presented by Israeli state officials as a technical or unintentional matter, played a significant role in shaping the core interaction around which the peace talks were structured.

NEGOTIATING BODIES AS GENDERED ORGANIZATIONS

Throughout the Oslo period, face-to-face negotiations were dominated and defined by militarized masculinity. Nevertheless, as indicted by Michal, women had a significant presence among the dozens of workers in charge of technical and logistical support. In large delegations organized by the Israeli government to negotiate multilateral and bilateral agreements, such as in Washington (1992), Cairo (1994–45), Taba (1995), and to a smaller extent at Camp David (2000), the gendered division of labor played an important role in shaping the social dynamic of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Ms. Behira Bardugo, spokesperson for Shimon Peres, Israel's foreign minister between 1992 and 1995, described the technical management center's routine during the early period of the talks:

Positioned mainly as executive secretaries, personal aids, typists, and translators, women were in charge of various technical and logistical issues: from computers and telecommunication to coordinating meeting halls, arranging meals, writing protocols, passing notes, answering phone calls, photocopying, and typing drafts. Jane, an English secretary from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, described her everyday work during the Interim Agreement negotiations (1995):

Other stories echoed the somewhat alienated and mechanical tone of Jane's narrative, as the functions provided by support systems were described in ambivalent language. On the one hand, the secretaries “loved to come to work,” “were excited,” and “were proud of their work.” They also explained the importance of administrative assistance by reflecting on the manner in which it minimized chaos and maintained a sense of order in a highly unstable environment. Mrs. Marit Danon, personal secretary to Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, recalled how administrative capacities were another important component in maintaining a semblance of normalcy, even though they were not always visible:

Yet bureaucratic memories reveal that female secretaries' invisible status in the internal hierarchy of “peace work,” as well as their overall marginalization, were linked to their working conditions, low pay, and lack of credit. Words such as “tool” or “object” were frequently used in the interviews to indicate the instrumental nature of administrative unskilled work as opposed to “professional” or “heroic” face-to-face negotiations. Sara concluded that: “I think I felt a bit like a robot toward the end, like a machine. Not like a human being. And it was very, very hard for me.”

In theories of gendered organizations, ambivalent expectations, experiences, and discourses are treated as a manifestation of the structural placement of women and men in segregated work environments, such as the business sector and public administration (Acker Reference Acker1990; Pringle 1989). Moreover, as Kanter (Reference Kanter1977) has shown, the mere presence of female secretaries in the labor market is an essential symbol of masculine executive power and authority.

Since Israeli negotiating structures that emerged in the Oslo period were based upon a mixture of military and civil bureaucracy, part of the administrative work was regularly performed by personal military secretaries (Pekidot). The Hebrew word for “woman clerk,” Pekida, is a widely used term used to describe the most common work assigned to Jewish women during their mandatory military service. The noun Pekida is sometimes used in a derogatory way not only to describe the lowest rank of among regular soldiers but also to imply a whole set of sexual connotations.

Bureaucratic memories indicate that the presence of military clerks, or “the girls,” as they were frequently referred to, intensified the symbolic dimensions of feminine administrative capacities. The girls did administrative and technical work, which was evaluated as “minor”—making coffee, running errands, photocopying, faxing, or typing memos. Their presence was noticed mainly due to their physical beauty. As described by Nadav, who served as a military personal aide: “They were beautiful young women amidst the gray reality of generals and ex-prisoners.” Leslie, an Israeli legal advisor who was born abroad and had not served in the military herself, disclosed her uncomfortable impressions from Cairo (1995), which she interpreted as “humiliating”:

In a recent survey of Israeli women's military service, the semimatrimonial relationship between secretary and commander was identified as a key element in the IDF's gender regime. According to Orna Sasson-Levy (Reference Sasson-Levy2007, 497), “The secretary symbolizes the location and power of the officer in the system—the more secretaries an officer has, the more important he is.” Hence, the mere ability to control an organizational structure that was based upon women's service capacities could be interpreted as a mark of the relative power of Israeli male negotiators in relation to Palestinian men and other women in the peace delegations.

This finding calls for a broader reassessment of the informal practices by which Israeli bureaucratic agencies generated and maintained their symbolic power and authority in relation to their Palestinian counterparts. In the specific historical and cultural context of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, technical roles and their symbolism were interconnected with the asymmetrical power structure that overshadowed the talks. Nevertheless, from a bureaucratic perspective, the fact that, until 1997, Palestinian delegations depended on Israeli bureaucracy meant that Israeli secretaries and legal advisors were to type and draft many of the written agreements and non-papers for both sides. A seemingly unimportant anecdote from the negotiations in Paris (1994) serves to demonstrate how this structure was consciously maintained by Israeli negotiators to secure their interests. According to David, from the Ministry of Finance:

Thus, understanding the feminine sphere of peace work not only conveys the material reality in which bureaucratic narratives of the Oslo Process were (and still are) constructed; it also discloses the way that feminine administrative work was identified as a natural mode of political participation for Jewish women, extending matrimonial relationships and militarized gendered roles into official peace negotiations.

REDEFINING PEACE WORK: MIDLEVEL NEGOTIATORS

Expanding definitions of “peace delegation” or “negotiating team” to include informal sectors of peace work challenges the ideal image of Israeli negotiators as detached, independent, or self-sufficient politicians/managers. Moreover, it complicates the unproblematic status of militarized masculinity in peace negotiations by uncovering men's technical and symbolic dependence on feminine assistance. But exposing women's administrative responsibilities also risks the danger of reconstructing a rigid, binary picture of a gendered division of labor in which only “men” negotiated the agreements on behalf of Israel, while women were backstage “making coffee.”

Therefore, the full historical and theoretical contribution of “bureaucratic memory” for understanding the Oslo Process is found beyond the dichotomy of negotiators/technical assistants, as presented in personal narratives of midlevel professional Israeli women: attorneys, economists, diplomats, media advisors and analysts. No more than 30 women were incorporated into the incoherent Israeli negotiating structures over a decade; they were professionals recruited from the military and other governmental ministries to perform managerial or professional tasks. Their main responsibilities included preparing prenegotiations, drafting non-papers, providing legal or professional recommendations, assisting in complicated technical or logistical issues, and updating the media.

Identifying themselves as part of a male-dominated environment, these professional women negotiators and experts referred very clearly to their unique status by using such phrases as: “I was the only woman,” “I was quite lonely in that environment,” “I think I was the only woman ever to be in that room,” or “I was the only woman, except for the secretary.” Professional narratives also disclosed a strong sense of entitlement, excitement, and even a feminist “revolutionary” consciousness. Several women described themselves as “pioneers,” acknowledging not only the irregularity of their active participation in the peace talks but also the broader social implications of being a model for younger women.

Since negotiating teams were structured according to practical needs, however, professional identities (“diplomat,” “general,” “lawyer”) were pivotal in defining Jewish women's sole path to participation. By stressing the importance of specialized negotiating skills, organizational abilities, and personal qualities, women bureaucrats disclosed different interpretations of the linkage between professional expectations and gender identities.

For example, Israeli legal advisors whose main responsibility was described as “searching for common understandings and compromises through written text,” identified their unique feminine contribution by using “translation” metaphors: “We had to translate the directive:” “we had to turn it into a legal document,” or “we translated the understandings into specific arrangements.” Media advisors, who had to translate the complex reality of peace negotiations into a simple picture for the press, expressed similar concerns. The task of organizing press conferences and producing daily updates for local and international media was often understood to benefit from a feminine aesthetic sensitivity. Ariela, a media advisor, said that her work was “all about cosmetics . . . thinking outside, how it will look outside.” She also associated femininity with “emotional work,” namely, the ability to express emotions openly and help others process unfamiliar social interactions:

Yet the most ambivalent descriptions of professional feminine experiences appeared in narratives of back-office assistants and members of various advisory teams appointed by the government to prepare working papers on economic, civil, and security affairs. Although back-office professionals did not usually meet Palestinian representatives, they were very much involved in designing optional frameworks for negotiation and “fallback” positions, sometimes with no public credit. Irit described her role in designing one of the early proposed models for Palestinian sovereignty after 1993:

These examples imply that although many women felt personally empowered and professionally satisfied, their incorporation into the peace negotiations was, to a large extent, consistent with traditional definitions of gender roles and stereotypes. Furthermore, like in many other organizational settings, the rigid gendered division of labor and the invisible status of administrative roles resulted in a “spillover” effect. Women who did not perform administrative work became invisible and unnoticed, automatically tagged as secretaries. For midlevel professional women, everyday reality involved a constant confrontation with the secretary stereotype. Lily, a deputy director general in a governmental ministry, recalled: “Many times it happened that they didn't know who I was, so they'd immediately presuppose that I'm the secretary or the administrative assistant of the delegation.”

The organizational placement of midlevel female negotiators could be understood as constructed in the “borderlands”—sites where professional and gender identities are in flux, unstable, dynamic, and transformative. Being insiders and outsiders simultaneously was not easy. In the words of Meira, a media advisor:

The double otherness of professional women, constructed and reinforced by both gender and rank, can explain why so little is known about their participation. Yet the gendered meaning of visible and invisible agreements and negotiators serves as another indication of the existence of inconsistent approaches toward peacebuilding in Israeli negotiating capacities and policymakeing.

According to the women interviewed, the ability of state bureaucracy to prepare negotiations, conduct them in a professional manner, and control the public image had a critical effect on the success of the talks, especially on civil affairs among low-level representatives. Also, unlike the confrontational discourse that characterizes mainstream security-territory accounts of the high-level negotiations, these historical narratives reveal patterns of ongoing cooperation and communication between Israeli and Palestinian officials. For example, in an attempt to reframe the common notion that only men were involved in the peace talks, a legal advisor from the Joint Telecommunication Committee reported that much of the Israeli-Palestinian cooperation concerning postal services from 1996 to 2000 was led by Israeli women. Cynically, she explained that these agreements were never publicly recognized: “The talks were conducted on a lower level, but the agreements were very comprehensive. And we reached these agreements without ceremonies or festivals.”

Although postal issues might be perceived as marginal compared to security concerns, the ability of the PNA to issue stamps and supply postal services carried a symbolic meaning of sovereignty, independence, and governance, and enabled direct connections with the Arab world. Bureaucracy was needed not only for good governance but also as a means of constructing national institutions and national identity. This is why many of the interests debated in the sub–Civil Affairs Committees could be framed as part of a larger attempt to negotiate the identity and institutional structure of the future Palestinian state.

As such, although women's participation as midlevel negotiators and professionals was possible for negotiating civil affairs, their contribution was seen as secondary compared to that of security and territorial experts. Taking into account the ambiguous framework of the Oslo Accords and lack of a coherent negotiations structure, it is not surprising that women's stories from the “borderlands” have never gained recognition. The limited understanding of “peace work” as “negotiating security” has minimized the ability to decode the crucial role played by proximate actors, such as legal and professional advisors, whose official status was often unstable, constantly negotiated, and reinterpreted.