What if Arafat had said yes?

Plumber said:

What on earth are you referring to? No agreement was ever near enough in reach that it fell apart at the 11th hour.

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aktarian said:

There never was "opportunity to create Palestinian state". All Israeli proposals were such that Palestinians would, at best, get bantustan chopped into several pieces with Israel controlling pretty much everything important.

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Balwin said:

If that was the case wouldn't it still be better than the situation today with Israel on the verge of being a minority-majority state?

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But beyond that, it’s simply not true that Israeli leaders have offered the Palestinians everything they could reasonably want, only to see their efforts scorned. Start with the famous summit at Camp David in the summer of 2000. By the time Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak arrived at the Maryland presidential retreat, the trust that was supposed to have developed during the previous seven years of the Oslo peace process had dissipated because both sides— the Palestinians and the Israelis alike— had repeatedly violated the pledges they made. Palestinian leaders had not done nearly enough to stop the terrorism that traumatized Israel. At times, in fact, they had actively abetted it. But as several Israeli officials later admitted, Israel had not fully carried out the territorial withdrawals that Oslo required, and Barak had refused to implement the final withdrawal outright. Furthermore, although it did not violate Oslo’s terms, the dramatic growth of Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem and the West Bank— which nearly doubled, from about 200,000 in 1990 to roughly 360,000 ten years later— embittered Palestinians every bit as much as terrorism embittered Israelis. Largely because of settlement growth, notes the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, the percentage of Palestinians who believed the Oslo process would bring them a state dropped during Oslo’s final four years from 44 percent to 24 percent. Camp David failed, in other words, at least partly because the groundwork was not effectively laid, and the responsibility for that falls not only on Palestinian shoulders, but on Israeli ones as well. There remains some dispute about what exactly Barak offered Arafat at Camp David, largely because Barak’s ideas were conveyed orally, and often presented as American rather than Israeli proposals, in order to give him plausible deniability. But it is safe to say that his final offer, while courageous and far-reaching compared to past Israeli positions, was less generous than it has come to be remembered in the minds of prominent American Jews. In his final offer at Camp David, Barak proposed that Israel annex the 9 percent of the West Bank that included the largest settlement “blocs” while offering in return an area one-ninth as large inside the green line. Nine percent may not seem like much, but as some Israel officials have since conceded, annexing settlements like Ariel, which stretches thirteen miles beyond the green line, would have severely hindered Palestinian travel between the northern and southern halves of the West Bank. It also would have left Israel in control of much of the West Bank’s water supply. Moreover, Barak insisted on maintaining sovereignty for up to twelve years over part of the Jordan Valley, which comprises another 25 percent of the West Bank. No wonder Shlomo Ben-Ami, a key Israeli negotiator at Camp David, has since declared, “If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David as well.” If there is a dispute about the terms and significance of Barak’s offer, there is a dispute about whether Arafat made any offer at all. In the words of the lead U.S. negotiator, Dennis Ross, “Whether the Israelis put a generous offer on the table [at Camp David] is not the issue. The issue is, did Yasser Arafat respond at any point?” But according to Gilead Sher, who served as Israel’s co-chief negotiator at Camp David, Arafat did indeed respond . As detailed by Sher and other Israeli negotiators— along with American and Palestinian officials— the Palestinians proposed that Israel annex roughly 2.5 percent of the West Bank in exchange for an equal amount of equal-quality land inside the green line. They also reportedly accepted an international force, but not an Israeli one, in the Jordan Valley, and Israeli sovereignty over the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and the Western Wall, but not the Temple Mount that overlooks it. Although much remains shrouded in ambiguity, it is more accurate to say that Barak and Arafat had very different visions of what a Palestinian state would look like than that Barak offered Arafat a fully fledged state and the Palestinian leader refused to accept it. One area of blunt disagreement was Jerusalem. Barak offered the Palestinians sovereignty in some, but not all, of the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Arafat, in return, conceded Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods, the Jewish quarter of the Old City, and the Western Wall. But the two men clashed over the Temple Mount (which Muslims call Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary), with Barak demanding that Israel retain sovereignty over the site and Arafat saying that granting it would betray Muslims worldwide. The two parties also deadlocked on the issue of Palestinian refugees. Palestinian negotiators said that only after Israel acknowledged the right of refugees to return to pre-1967 Israel could the two sides discuss the practicalities of how many would actually return. For their part, Barak’s negotiators accepted some limited reunification of Palestinian families, but denied that there was any Palestinian right of return. At least two of Barak’s aides, Gilead Sher and Yossi Beilin, believed that if Israel conceded refugee return in principle, the Palestinians would largely abandon it in practice, particularly if they gained sovereignty over the Temple Mount. But it is impossible to know if Arafat would ultimately have made such a deal, and even if he had, whether he could have sold it to his people. He had not prepared them for that wrenching concession, and given his corrupt and tyrannical rule— which by 2000 had alienated many Palestinians —he may have lacked the moral authority to convince them to make painful compromises. When American Jewish groups say that at Camp David the Palestinian leaders wanted a Palestinian state but not a Jewish one, the refugee issue is the best evidence they have. But if the Camp David talks raise questions about the Palestinian willingness to abandon a large-scale right of return, they also eviscerate the American Jewish establishment’s oft-repeated claim that, in the words of the 2009 ADL ad, “The Problem Isn’t Settlements.” At Camp David, one of the biggest problems was, indeed, settlements. With Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination still fresh in his mind, Barak was extremely concerned about a confrontation with the settlers, and insisted that he needed to annex the land on which 80 percent of them lived in order to avoid grave domestic strife. To achieve that , he proposed an annexation that would have created serious contiguity problems for the nascent Palestinian state. Arafat reportedly countered with a land swap that would have allowed Israel to incorporate 35 percent of the settlers— not in broad settlement “blocs ,” but in thin “ribbons” that would have less significantly impeded Palestinian travel but would have proved extremely difficult for Israel to defend. The same issue bedeviled talks eight years later between Ehud Olmert and Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Olmert proposed a roughly 6 percent land swap; Abbas offered roughly 2 percent, and “kept coming back,” in Olmert’s words, to the need to dismantle Ariel. Settlements are not the only important barrier to a two-state solution. But the historical record clearly shows that, contrary to the American Jewish establishment’s twin insistences that Israel tried to give back virtually the entire West Bank, and that settlements are not a major obstacle to peace, it was precisely because Israel insisted on retaining most of the settlers that it could not offer the Palestinians virtually the entire West Bank. In the words of the former Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath, “Probably the settlement issue was the single most important destroyer of the Oslo agreement.”

Beinart, Peter (2012-03-27). The Crisis of Zionism (pp. 65-69). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

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The Palestinians’ absurd situation, being restrained from negotiating for an end to Israel’s occupation while Israel reinforced it, was strikingly revealed over nearly a decade of intensive negotiations. These negotiations started with the shuttle diplomacy of secretary of state James Baker in the spring of 1991 in preparation for the convening of the Madrid conference, and went on until the Camp David summit in July 2000, with no significant progress made on the core issues that separated the two sides. This impasse was inevitable because of the nature of the ground rules that were adopted for these negotiations. These were originally imposed on the Palestinians by the United States at the insistence of the Shamir government. They indefinitely froze dealing with any of the issues of substance between the two sides (the final status issues: occupation, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, water , and permanent borders), while there was no concomitant freeze on the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. During this decade their population rose from about two hundred thousand to over four hundred thousand. Instead of focusing on resolving final status issues, Palestinian-Israeli negotiations until the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000 (and the Washington and Taba talks that followed) were limited by these restrictive rules to dealing with transitional administrative arrangements. This left untouched the expansion of settlements and the matrix of control of the Israeli occupation. The practical effect of these Israeli-inspired and American- imposed ground rules was to lighten the moral, political, and security burden for Israel of its military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem for a decade, while allowing it not only to maintain, but indeed to reinforce, its presence in most of the occupied territories. Israel, which appeared to the world as if it was negotiating peace with the Palestinians, was simultaneously expanding not only its settlements but also the extensive infrastructure of roads, electricity, water, and phone lines needed to sustain them. Thus it has been argued by some observers that the lasting fruit of this nearly ten-year “peace process,” which resulted in the Oslo Accords and subsequent Palestinian-Israeli accords that produced the Palestinian Authority (PA), has been the hardening of Israel’s occupation regime, and a considerable expansion of its illegal settlements. This happened in part because the United States failed to respect its own commitments in the joint U.S.-Soviet letter of invitation to the Madrid Peace Conference, and particularly in the U.S . letter of assurance to the Palestinians, both dated October 18, 1991. 32 The latter set out the U.S. position regarding actions by either side that would prejudge, preempt, or predetermine the outcome of the deferred final status negotiations. Described as “U.S. understandings and intentions” regarding the negotiating process, which it said was aimed , among other things, to provide “an end to the Israeli occupation,” the letter stressed that nothing done in this phase should “be prejudicial or precedential to the outcome of the negotiations.” It affirmed: “We encourage all sides to avoid unilateral acts that would exacerbate local tensions or make negotiations more difficult or preempt their final outcome.” The letter further stated: “The United States has long believed that no party should take unilateral actions that seek to predetermine issues that can only be resolved through negotiations. In this regard the United States has opposed and will continue to oppose settlement activity in the territories occupied in 1967, which remains an obstacle to peace.” 33 If these statements meant anything, they meant that Israel could not unilaterally decide the fate of the territory that was subject to negotiations, which in fact Israel was engaged in doing by the continued building of settlements and the infrastructure to support them. The United States did nothing about these developments, its letter of assurance to the Palestinians notwithstanding. The Palestinians were unable to find the means through diplomacy, public advocacy, peaceful protest, or coalition building in Israel, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to show the dangers of what Israel was doing, or to obstruct it effectively. This was not for want of efforts: Dr. Haidar ‘Abd al-Shafi, the head of the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid and Washington negotiations, conveyed to the PLO leadership in Tunis the unanimous recommendation of the entire delegation that they be authorized to break off these talks once it became clear that the United States would not do anything to halt Israeli actions that predetermined the outcome of the negotiations, notably settlement expansion. 34 This recommendation was ignored, and prime responsibility for negotiations with Israel was eventually surreptitiously moved by the PLO from the hard-nosed Palestinian delegation in Washington to the more “flexible” group that negotiated the Oslo Accords, with ultimately disastrous consequences for the Palestinians. Over time , a sort of resigned passivity fell over the previously highly mobilized Palestinians in the occupied territories and abroad. It is worth recalling that the Madrid Peace Conference and the Palestinian-Israel negotiations that followed were in a sense the fruit of the first intifada, which had galvanized Palestinian society and revealed to many Israelis after two decades that the occupation was untenable. After Madrid, most Palestinians assumed that securing a state through negotiations was only a matter of time. In effect, however, nothing of the kind was happening, as Israel was allowed by the United States, in spite of solemn pledges to the Palestinians by the first Bush administration, to help itself to huge bites of the pie that the two sides were supposed to be negotiating about. During the over nine years of negotiations from the lengthy lead-up to the 1991 Madrid conference, until President Clinton belatedly convened the Camp David conference in late 2000 , 35 while the Palestinians were barred from discussing any of the real problems between them and Israel, these problems grew worse. Occupation continued, as did seizures of Palestinian land for new settlements and the expansion of old ones, and the concomitant growth of the settler population. As a result of Israeli policies and the peculiar arrangements for Palestinian self-government that defined the prerogatives of the PA, there was no contiguous body of territory under PA jurisdiction, indeed there was no territory under its full and absolute control and jurisdiction, even the 17 percent of the West Bank that it nominally controlled. New bypass roads were constructed to enable settlers to travel between settlements without passing through Palestinian-populated areas. The building of this network of roads— designed exclusively for the use of Israelis and from which Palestinians were barred— involved the seizure of yet more Palestinian land. These roads helped encircle the Palestinian population ever more tightly in small cantons within the West Bank, isolated from one another and subject to “closures” (meaning in effect imprisonment within each canton) as and when Israel desired. The most rigorous closures blocked off access to Israel proper and to occupied Arab East Jerusalem. There, limitations on building by Palestinians combined with Israel’s settlements in the eastern sector of the city dimmed hopes that it could ever become the Palestinian capital. Meanwhile, nothing was done to address the plight of those Palestinians who lived in exile or the critical issue of Israel’s control of West Bank aquifers. All of these changes on the ground— occurring while peace negotiations were supposedly taking place— made the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state with defined borders grow ever more distant. Each of these gradually worsening chronic problems undermined the legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership engaged in negotiations with Israel, and stoked Palestinian popular frustration. Over time, the leadership’s popularity declined precipitously in consequence. This affected the image of the PLO and the PA generally, and even that of the preeminent symbol of Palestinian nationalism, Yasser ‘Arafat, who according to one set of opinion polls went from being “trusted” by as much as 46.4 percent of those polled in the mid-1990s (several times more than his closest competitor) to numbers in the low- to mid-20s from December 2000 onward. 36 As seemingly fruitless negotiations dragged on for a decade, many Palestinians came to perceive that vital segments of the 22 percent of historic mandatory Palestine composed of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem on which they had hoped to establish a sovereign state were being inexorably absorbed into Israel by this creeping process of settlement and de facto annexation. They thus came to feel that any peace based on a two-state solution was impossible to achieve. The situation continues to deteriorate: while by 2000 the settler population in these two areas had more than doubled to over 400,000, five years later it stood at nearly 450,000, in spite of the dismantling of the small settlements in the Gaza Strip.

Khalidi, Rashid (2006-09-01). The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Kindle Locations 3769-3836). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

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wiking said:

Netanyahu sabotaged the agreements that were made at Oslo, so the whole thing falls apart when he gets power. A far better bet would be to have Rabin not be assassinated.

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LordKalvert said:

If Arafat had been so stupid as to accept the Camp David accords, he would have been gunned down as a traitor. That's what he meant when he asked Clinton "Will you walk in my funeral?"

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John Farson said:

I think he's referring to the 2000 Camp David Summit.

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Balwin said:

And Palestinians would be happy with the alternative of no state for another generation? Possibly not even the possibility of it without the trump card of another Intifada or suicide bombers? A depressed economy completely strangled by the IDF? The lunatic Islamists running everything in Gaza? Sometimes you have to accept a deal even when you don't get everything u want to get a better deal in the future when you have better leverage.

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Hrvatskiwi said:

As a person that strongly sides with the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (I'm even in the executive committee of a pro-Palestinian-rights group at my university), I just want to say that everyone should remain civil, especially given that this is a sensitive issue (let's not invite the ban-hammer).

Anyways, I'm with the likes of Pangur on this one. There was no way that Arafat could have accepted the 2000 Camp David terms. Even if they were given a 'state', which would be in name only, it would immediately descend into anarchy, given that Fatah's legitimacy would be completely and irreparably ruined.

Also, HAMAS don't really count in my book as 'Islamist lunatics'. Yes, they have some policies which seem not-great here in the West (and there are a lot of things I disagree with them about ideologically), but you have to recognise that they were voted into power in Gaza by a popular mandate, and precisely because Fatah wasn't seen as effectively resisting Israeli colonialism. IMHO, the leadership of HAMAS know that destroying Israel entirely (which I DO NOT endorse, btw) is completely out of the question. But they do have to appeal to outraged Palestinians, many of whom have never experienced life outside of a refugee camp. The Palestinians are in a pretty desperate situation everywhere, but Gaza is particularly bad. Lets not forget that it's under constant blockade, so the extreme difficulty in getting necessities into the area is a constant reminder of Israel's grip on the Palestinian territories and the Palestinian people.

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