The offer at Camp David

Israel & Palestine Forum

"Arafat was offered at Camp David a deal that no Israeli leader had presented in the past"

This is the statement. And from various sources (neutral or not, I'm using them) I will discredit this.

Let us begin by assuming for a moment that Ehud Barak presented Arafat with an offer that no other Israeli leader has offered in the past. IS THIS REALLY SUCH A BIG DEAL?? For any peace process to take place, it is expected from any Israeli leader to give up more than his or her predecessors. For example, in 1978 it was Menachem Begin who offered Egypt more than any other Israeli leader offered before, then it was Yitzhak Rabin in 1993, and lately it was Ehud Barak during the failed Camp David summit. In other words, if Barak moved one inch more than any other Israeli leader, the above statement is still valid!

So, already you can see that this statement is an exaggeration - just because it's the best deal they've had doesn't mean it's fair.

Let us remember how much land the Palestinians lived in BEFORE 1948. Once we do this, we see what was fundamentally wrong about the negotiations at Camp David. The plain truth was the Israelis were conceding inches, while Arafat was conceding in miles. Let us not forget that the Palestinian people owned and operated 93% of Palestine's land before al-Nakba in 1948, and Jews owned under 7% of the total land! It was clear that Arafat was ambushed at Camp David because he was presented with a deal which was much more favourable to Israel than to Arafat. Arafat was put on the spot with a take it or break it deal, either Palestinians give up sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian holy places in Jerusalem and to relinquish the Palestinian Right of Return in favor of a Palestinian State in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip (which is under 22% of historic Palestine), or to reject the whole American offer outright, which he did.

In other words, the offer at Camp David was UNACCEPTABLE.

Also when you take into effect that:

1) The Palestinians had to give up all of Jerusalem. This, yet their third holiest site is here! Mohammed rose up with the angles and saw the quran in jerusalem! Ishmael nearly got sacrificed here! This is very important to the muslims.

2) The Palestinian areas would have been cut from East to West and from North to South, so that the Palestinian state will consist of a group of "islands", each surrounded by Israeli settlers and soldiers. No sovereign nation would accept such arrangement that could hinder its strategic national security and interests. Why should "Palestine" be any different?

3) Palestine was to have no real freedom. It is not only that the future Palestinian state would have been completely demilitarized and Israeli early warning radar installation would have been installed in the Palestinian areas, also its economical, social, and political relations with neighboring Arab states would have been severely scrutinized by Israel.

So as it is clear, Arafat made a very good choice by rejecting this "outrageous" plan.

The Palestinians leave Jerusalem? That will never happen, we arabs are loyal to our religions ( Islam and Christianity ) and well will never let go of Jerusalem, if Israel destroys the AlQasa Mosque and the Church of Nativity , Israel will disapear from the earth, this is guarranteed.

Exactly. Although you must remember that there are thousands of Jewish Arabs as well !!

Jewish Arabs? I admit i never knew that, i learned something new today, its pretty cool, atleast we all pray to the same God.

It is hard to find unbiased sources of the information out of the Camp David offer. The details of the offer was never made public and it's due to leaks that information has gotten out about it in the first place.

However, antizion's information is not accurate in any source I've come across so far. Most sources on the web about this offer seems to be from Arab, Mid East, or Muslim sites. They start out so ridiculously biased from the opening statements, I just stopped half way through the documents. I found a few sites too from some Jewish sites. Although their rhetoric isn't as forth coming, I tend to shy away from their accounting as well because they are reporting info that is biased as well.

This much I come to believe about the negotiations although I'm not 100% convinced of any real version of this event. However in none of them have I read that Israel wanted Palestinians to give them all of Jeruselum and TWBR's assertion that Israel somehow wants to destroy AlQasa Mosque and the Church of Nativity sounds like more hate propeganda to me. Here's how I understand the offer.

1. Israeli redeployment from 95% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip

2. The creation of a Palestinian state in that area

3. The removal of isolated settlements that would be transferred to Palestinian control

4. Slices of Israeli land to be included in the Palestinian state to compensate for the percentage of the West Bank to become Israeli

5. Palestinian control over parts of Jerusalem including most of the Old City
"Religious Sovereignty" over the Temple Mount (rather than Israeli sovereignty, which had been in effect since 1967)

Israel wanted the west part of Jersuleum as their capital, and Palestine would have control of the rest. So far nothing I've come across gives the total clear picture, but I believe that Arafat's out right refusal has not made it better for Palestinians in their land. At least there should have been some sort of concession if not for everything and the door should have been left open.

Israel wanting to destroy the Al'Qasa mosque is not propaganda, i also heard that they are making tunnels under it so it can fall, and i can give you a list of numbers of attempts to damage the mosque. Biased Sources my ASS.

Was Arafat the Problem?
By Robert Wright
Posted Thursday, April 18, 2002, at 4:14 PM PT



One thing nearly all pundits seem to agree on is that Yasser Arafat's rejection of the land-for-peace offer made by Ehud Barak at Camp David in the summer of 2000 was indefensible. This conventional wisdom has been a great asset to Ariel Sharon. Its implication—that Arafat was never really interested in a two-state solution to begin with—has helped turn many former peaceniks in both Israel and America into hard-liners.

An example is Rabbi Martin Weiner of San Francisco, president of the Rabbinical Association of Reform Judaism. "For most of us Prime Minister Barak's proposals seemed so generous," he explained on NPR's All Things Considered. He can't understand how Arafat could have "rejected the Palestinian state that was offered to him in the summer of 2000." Given this rejection, and Arafat's subsequent sponsoring of terrorism, Weiner is "sadly coming to believe" that Yasser Arafat's goal "is now and may have always been the destruction of Israel."

In this week's Nation, political scientist Richard Falk contests the standard view that Israel's offer at Camp David was eminently fair. But Falk's argument, embedded in a larger critique of American foreign policy, doesn't get deeply into the nuts and bolts of the issue. If you want to see Camp David from Arafat's point of view, a better place to look is a New York Review of Books piece that appeared back in August and was co-authored by Robert Malley, special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton administration. Malley was at Camp David and found Arafat's behavior there intensely frustrating, but he doesn't buy the interpretation that is favored on the right—that Arafat's rejection of the deal amounts to rejection of a two-state solution.

So, are Falk and Malley right? Is Arafat's Camp David behavior even remotely defensible?

There were actually two Barak offers to Arafat—one at Camp David, and a more generous one that took shape over ensuing months, culminating in failed negotiations in Taba, Egypt, in January of 2001. Most Arafat critics, like Rabbi Weiner, focus on Camp David. So, let's look at Camp David first and Taba second.

David Horowitz, editor of the Jerusalem Report, recently said on the NPR show To the Point that Barak offered "basically all the territory the Palestinians were purporting to seek." This is a widely repeated claim—that Israel offered something like the "pre-1967 borders" that had long been the mantra of Palestinians who favored a two-state solution. But for Palestinians to get all the territory that had been under Arab control before the war of 1967 would mean getting a) all of what we now think of as the West Bank; b) all of East Jerusalem (which some consider part of the West Bank); and c) all of the walled "Old City" that lies between East and West Jerusalem. Barak never offered any of those things—not at Camp David, not at Taba.

As a practical matter, he couldn't. The problem wasn't just the famously provocative settlements that Israel's government had long been sponsoring in the West Bank. Barak was willing to dismantle some of those and consolidate others. But there had also been more organic, more "innocent" settlement, in the greater Jerusalem area and elsewhere. Further, for political reasons, Barak couldn't possibly surrender control of the part of the Old City that contains the Western Wall of the Second Temple—the wall you see Jews praying at in file footage.

So, Barak hung on to key parts of the Old City and proposed that, before surrendering the West Bank, Israel would annex 9 percent of it, leaving 91 percent for the Palestinians. That was his last, best offer, at Camp David.

But wait. Didn't Barak, as his defenders say, offer Arafat land from Israel proper in return for the annexed 9 percent?

Yes. But the terms of the trade bordered on insulting. In exchange for the 9 percent of the West Bank annexed by Israel, Arafat would have gotten land as large as 1 percent of the West Bank. And, whereas some of the 9 percent was choice land, symbolically important to Palestinians, the 1 percent was land whose location wasn't even specified.

I'm trying to imagine Yasser Arafat selling this 9-to-1 land swap to Palestinians—who, remember, are divided into two camps: the "return to 1967 borders" crowd and the "destroy the state of Israel" crowd. I'm not succeeding. And Arafat would have had to explain other unpalatable details, such as Israeli sovereignty over Haram al-Sharif (site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque), which had been under Arab control before 1967 and is the third-holiest site in Islam.

The Camp David offer also had features that kept it from amounting to statehood in the full sense of the term. The new Palestine couldn't have had a military and wouldn't have had sovereignty over its air space—Israeli jets would roam at will. Nor would the Palestinians' freedom of movement on the ground have been guaranteed. At least one east-west Israeli-controlled road would slice all the way across the West Bank, and Israel would be entitled to declare emergencies during which Palestinians couldn't cross the road. Imagine if a mortal enemy of America's—say the Soviet Union during the Cold War—was legally entitled to stop the north-south flow of Americans and American commerce. Don't you think the average American might ask: Wait a minute—who negotiated this deal?

I'm not saying any of these things aren't defensible from an Israeli point of view. I'm just saying it takes very little imagination to see why Palestinians might balk, after three decades of nursing a grievance centered on—at the very minimum—the right to have their very own state defined by pre-1967 borders.

Another big issue was the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees. The Israeli fear is certainly understandable: If all Palestinians who once lived in Israel—and all of their descendants—were allowed to return, Israel might wind up with an Arab majority. Accounts differ on how hard a line the Palestinians have taken on this issue at various negotiations. Malley and his co-author, Hussein Agha of Oxford University, say Arafat showed unprecedented flexibility at Camp David. In any event, by early 2001 Arafat was showing flexibility, advocating in a New York Times op-ed "creative solutions to the plight of the refugees while respecting Israel's demographic concerns."

Malley and Agha do a good job of illuminating Arafat's psychological state at Camp David, notably his lack of trust of the Israelis and his sense that the Israelis and Americans were ganging up on him. The portrait at times borders on the patronizing—Arafat comes off as almost childish in his insecurity and pride compared with the cool, linear-thinking Barak. But this is the kind of portrait Arafat's harshest critics have been known to paint when they're not busy depicting his Camp David demurral as the coolly rational act of an evil mastermind.

Arafat's complex psychology may help explain the most valid criticism of his conduct in the summer of 2000, routinely cited even by his defenders: the failure to offer a distinct counterproposal, or, after Camp David, to tell the larger world exactly what was wrong with the Israeli offer. Certainly the latter failure was a public-relations disaster, and it is one reason Arafat has been depicted as the problem ever since. (An aide to Arafat has said that he kept quiet after Camp David out of respect for Clinton's interests. )

As for the failure to be clearer at the negotiations themselves: In the Malley and Agha account, this reticence—which Malley found maddening—emerges as a product not just of Arafat's peculiar psychology, but of a specific Palestinian concern. In any event, depicting the Palestinian silence at Camp David as signifying opposition to a two-state solution doesn't mesh well with subsequent events. In the ensuing months, Palestinian negotiators got quite explicit about their position. By the time of the Taba negotiations, they were drawing maps and talking numbers: Israel could annex 3 percent of the West Bank and compensate Palestine with the same amount of land from Israel proper.

The Israelis, for their part, had sweetened the pot considerably by the time they got to Taba—most notably in accepting Palestinian sovereignty over Haram al-Sharif. They also made the land offers more generous. But they didn't really offer "97 percent of the West Bank," as has been asserted not just in such right-wing outlets as National Review and the Fox News channel, but in Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. The Israelis offered 94 percent of the West Bank—a 6-percent annexing—and then offered to compensate the Palestinians with land from Israel proper equaling 3 percent of the West Bank. That is, they offered a total land mass as large as 97 percent of the West Bank.

Taba was a big step forward. A 2-to-1 land swap sure beats a 9-to-1 swap. But it still left Arafat having to answer the obvious question: Um, why not 1-to-1? If Israel really accepts the principle that pre-1967 borders are a valid goal except where rendered impractical by demographic "facts on the ground," then shouldn't it offer fair recompense for the land being withheld—especially since it created those facts on the ground, in some cases cynically? Israel's Taba position also left in place some details—no Palestinian military, for example—that made the term "statehood" a bit misleading.

More important, by the time of Taba, the whole political environment had changed. In September, Barak had allowed Ariel Sharon to make his famous visit to Haram al-Sharif, which many observers consider the spark that ignited the current intifada. Given the only deepening mistrust between Arafat and Israel, America was, more than ever, a vital guarantor of any deal. Yet President Clinton was by then a lame duck, and comments from President-elect Bush had made clear his limited enthusiasm for Middle East peace brokering.

Arafat may also have been troubled by the fact that Barak seemed doomed to lose upcoming elections to Ariel Sharon, who probably wouldn't honor a Barak-negotiated deal. Maybe Arafat can be blamed here. Assuming he realized that a deal at Taba was the only thing that could save Barak's government, thus keeping Sharon out of office, maybe he should have decided that, for the sake of his people, he would seize the moment, notwithstanding the shaky foundation of an America-less deal. But the question before us isn't whether Arafat is a humane, creative, visionary leader—he's roughly the opposite along all three dimensions. The question is whether Arafat's behavior at Camp David and afterward are incomprehensible unless we assume he never really wanted a two-state solution. This is the interpretation favored by Ariel Sharon and many others on the right—as well as such former peaceniks as Rabbi Weiner. And, in my view, this interpretation just doesn't survive close scrutiny of the facts.

So, how did it arise?

In late 1988, during the first (and essentially nonviolent) intifada, I was in Israel. One afternoon I had a drink with the legendary Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem. I asked Kollek what he thought the Palestinians would accept in the way of territory. He looked at me with a conspicuous lack of concern and said knowingly, "Whatever they can get."

Ideologically, Kollek was no Ariel Sharon. So, I'm guessing that he was reflecting a mainstream Israeli view: that Israel was in the catbird seat and could eventually cut a nearly painless deal with the Palestinians. That would explain why, when Camp David hit the airwaves, the papers were full of stories about how a taboo had been broken in Israel: There was now serious discussion of ceding parts of Jerusalem! Never mind that the parts of East Jerusalem Barak was willing to cede didn't constitute nearly what had been under Arab control before 1967. The idea of actually returning to anything like the much-discussed "pre-1967 borders" simply hadn't been taken seriously in Israel before.

So, it's natural that many Israelis would share Rabbi Weiner's view of Barak's offer as "so generous." They had never looked at things from the Palestinian point of view. Barak's proposals were, in the context of Israeli politics, path-breaking and courageous. But, as Malley wrote in a New York Times op-ed that is a CliffsNotes version of his NYRB piece, "[T]he measure of Israel's concessions ought not be how far it has moved from its own starting point; it must be how far it has moved toward a fair solution."

Of course, the bias was symmetrical. Palestinians, by and large, had never looked at things from Israel's point of view. One of many valid criticisms of Arafat is that he had never tried to change that—never paved the way for the various compromises that would ultimately be necessary; he had never really been a leader. Still, if many Israelis were shocked in the summer of 2000 to hear that parts of Jerusalem were on the bargaining table, it would seem that Israel's succession of leaders hadn't done much road-paving, either.

You can call Yasser Arafat many bad things and can use the Camp David negotiations to justify a number of them. But so far as I can tell, these negotiations don't justify what they're now being used to justify: the claim that the Palestinians will never accept a two-state solution, so Ariel Sharon's search-and-destroy policy is the only option Israel has left. If it's true that negotiations are now hopeless—and I genuinely don't know if it is—that is largely due to things that have happened since the beginning of the second intifada. And here, as with Camp David, it would be naive to place the blame on either side alone.


Robert Wright runs the Web site meaningoflife.tv and is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.

You've made it clear what you think of TW's thoughts about the Mosque. What is your thought about the Robert Wright editorial?

TWBR, yes you have learnt something new. There are many Jewish Arabs. I myself know 4!

But what may shock you more is that there are STILL JEWISH PALESTINIANS!!!

Yes, you heard me right: there are Jewish Palestinians! Take the example of Esther Ramahi, who prefers to live in a refugee camp with her muslim palestinian family rather than with her Israeli daughter and all the comforts of Israel.

Or maybe you didn't know that among the Sabra and Shatila massacres 9 JEWISH palestinians were killed (or that in the bombing of the King David Hotel 17 JEWS were killed).

Have fun learning, TWBR.

So did you read my post about the Robert Wright editorial?

No what are you talking about?

And did you know about the Jewish Palestinians?

I posted an editorial by Robert Wright, he was talking about the subject of this thread, just scroll up in this page and ull see it, and i never knew that there where Jewish Arabs, i knew that there were Israeli Arabs but now Jewish Arabs.

Yes but I mean did you know that there were JEWISH PALESTINIANS? That's a lot more significant than just Jewish Arabs. There are actually Jews living in the refugee camps with Palestinians, out of CHOICE.

No i never knew that there were Jewish Palestinians, only Israeli Palestinians.

I wouldn't!! I mean, COME ON! Ye, I agree with the Palestinian cause but no way am I going to put my life on the line, move out of my comfortable house in London and trael to some death-trap in a refugee camp.

NO BLOODY WAY!!

I would, simply because im Palestinian, and when they suffer, i suffer, when they are hurt, im hurt, and if they are going to fight for freedom, then hell yes im going to fight for their freedom.

Yes exactly so it's more personal for you, but for me I could never do what Esther Ramahi did, no way.

It's not at all personal to me, but that's how I feel.

On my recent visit to Viet Nam, the Communists were rather concerned that an American was living with a Vietnamese family rather than staying in a hotel. They sent police to enquire. In the end (my guess is a $20 bill settled it) I was permitted to stay with the family. If I'd been forced to stay in a hotel, two things would have been likely. 1, I would likely have caught a disease and lost most of my money to one or more prostitutes, and 2, I would have probably returned to the US much sooner.

If I win my free trip to Israel, I would definitely not want to stay in some luxurious hotel and ride in tour buses. Perhaps if an Israeli family invited me to stay with them, I'd spend some time there, but I wouldn't want that to be my whole trip. I would definitely spend most of my time in the Palestinian Territories, preferably guests of a family rather than of a hotel. And if the Israeli Terrorists were to destroy the home I was living in, I can think of worse ways to die.