WI: Arafat agrees to the Camp David offer

Towelie

Banned
I've always been a bit curious about why Arafat did not even give a counter offer at Camp David. I think that resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was made significantly harder because of that, as it basically enshrined the idea that a Palestinian peace partner did not exist in Israeli politics, which quickly became an agreed upon concept among all parties from the centre left to the far right.

If there was to be an agreement to the Camp David offer, for whatever reason, on the part of the Palestinians, would implementation have worked out?

There seemed to be an idea that Barak was giving up way more than he had any right to, and the risk of the government falling apart as a result was possible. If Sharon wins the election as OTL, would things have stopped? Is there a risk that even without a visit to the Temple Mount, violence would have still broken out?
 
The problem is that Arafat never truly believed in peace. For him the settlements weren't the problem, because for him even Tel Aviv was an illegal settlement. If the Palestinians had a leader with a true passion for peace, the camp david offer could have worked. As shown by his later actions , sharon would have supported a deal.
 

Towelie

Banned
The territorial issue might eventually have been resolved, as it later came close to being resolved at the Taba Summit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taba_Summi The right of return was the real sticking point.
I've actually always thought that it was Jerusalem that was the biggest issue. Water and demilitarization aren't hard to agree on if push comes to shove, and the more time goes on, the more that the return issue is less of an issue, and the more that NGOs and international organizations can pony up the reparative compensation. As for borders, the idea of a highway from Gaza to the West Bank through the desert and from a small settlement near Hebron to Jerusalem seems not to be a huge issue either. Israel in the end will need to militarily uproot deep settlements and it will cause issues, but I cannot imagine that they won't be allowed to keep the biggest settlement blocs that are contigious with the green line that are basically all Jewish anyways or behind the separation wall.

But as for Jerusalem, they are worlds apart on this and getting worse about it.

Israel has across the political spectrum basically agreed that giving up Eastern Jerusalem and the Western Wall are out of the question. They don't consider Jews in East Jerusalem to be settlers, either. The Clinton idea of having inside East Jerusalem, Jewish neighborhoods have Israeli autonomy and Arab ones have Palestinian autonomy may make sense, but consider that the Lieberman plan, which also makes policy based off of ethno-nationalist grounds, is widely considered racist and unworkable, and it it tough to see how Clinton's plan was any different. The outskirts of East Jerusalem which are basically all Arab probably will be up for discussion however, and Netanyahu has been flexible on that front interestingly enough.

Jewish religious demands for access to the Temple Mount have long been suppressed for a variety of reasons, but it is getting harder and harder to keep that up because of the fundamental injustice of that policy. Jews should be allowed to pray there if they want. The fact that it was this that set off the 2nd Intifada and almost set off a third one last year, with Abbas using language like "we won't allow Jews to defile al-Aqsa with their filthy feet" (I shit you not, he said this), means that there is a beserk button there that is based off of a deeply injust form of religious intolerance that afflicts even moderate Palestinians.
 
I've actually always thought that it was Jerusalem that was the biggest issue. Water and demilitarization aren't hard to agree on if push comes to shove, and the more time goes on, the more that the return issue is less of an issue, and the more that NGOs and international organizations can pony up the reparative compensation. As for borders, the idea of a highway from Gaza to the West Bank through the desert and from a small settlement near Hebron to Jerusalem seems not to be a huge issue either. Israel in the end will need to militarily uproot deep settlements and it will cause issues, but I cannot imagine that they won't be allowed to keep the biggest settlement blocs that are contigious with the green line that are basically all Jewish anyways or behind the separation wall.

But as for Jerusalem, they are worlds apart on this and getting worse about it.

Israel has across the political spectrum basically agreed that giving up Eastern Jerusalem and the Western Wall are out of the question. They don't consider Jews in East Jerusalem to be settlers, either. The Clinton idea of having inside East Jerusalem, Jewish neighborhoods have Israeli autonomy and Arab ones have Palestinian autonomy may make sense, but consider that the Lieberman plan, which also makes policy based off of ethno-nationalist grounds, is widely considered racist and unworkable, and it it tough to see how Clinton's plan was any different. The outskirts of East Jerusalem which are basically all Arab probably will be up for discussion however, and Netanyahu has been flexible on that front interestingly enough.

Jewish religious demands for access to the Temple Mount have long been suppressed for a variety of reasons, but it is getting harder and harder to keep that up because of the fundamental injustice of that policy. Jews should be allowed to pray there if they want. The fact that it was this that set off the 2nd Intifada and almost set off a third one last year, with Abbas using language like "we won't allow Jews to defile al-Aqsa with their filthy feet" (I shit you not, he said this), means that there is a beserk button there that is based off of a deeply injust form of religious intolerance that afflicts even moderate Palestinians.

Yeah I've recently come to the opinion that there isn't a feasible solution to the Israel/Palestine issue. Manage to finagle a deal for everything else and Jerusalem is just a big giant fuck you to any attempt at peace.
 
Arafat takes the Camp David compromise with some variation. Six months later world leaders gather for the funeral of Yassir Arafat. Successors to the Palestinian leadership renounce the settlement. "Every family including descendants displaced during the Nakba deserves to be returned and their land and property restored to them. The colonial settlers who arrived after the British Mandate was establish and began the displacement of the true inhabitants and their descendants must leave Palestine. If they were displaced by Europeans, then it is the responsibility of those Europeans to make it right, not the oppressed Palestinians."

Unfortunately the Palestinians are not interested in a two-sate solution, that was possible multiple times starting in 1947/48. In particular the "right of return" is a deal killer. I'm not sure but the number of those who left what became Israel plus their descendants have become somewhere between one and two million. As a matter fact, without saying right or wrong, the number of Jews expelled from Arab countries within a few years after the establishment of the State of Israel was over 800,000 and roughly equal to the number of Arabs who left. This is called a population exchange - right/moral not saying, but not the only one of the 20th century...
 

Towelie

Banned
Arafat takes the Camp David compromise with some variation. Six months later world leaders gather for the funeral of Yassir Arafat. Successors to the Palestinian leadership renounce the settlement. "Every family including descendants displaced during the Nakba deserves to be returned and their land and property restored to them. The colonial settlers who arrived after the British Mandate was establish and began the displacement of the true inhabitants and their descendants must leave Palestine. If they were displaced by Europeans, then it is the responsibility of those Europeans to make it right, not the oppressed Palestinians."

Unfortunately the Palestinians are not interested in a two-sate solution, that was possible multiple times starting in 1947/48. In particular the "right of return" is a deal killer. I'm not sure but the number of those who left what became Israel plus their descendants have become somewhere between one and two million. As a matter fact, without saying right or wrong, the number of Jews expelled from Arab countries within a few years after the establishment of the State of Israel was over 800,000 and roughly equal to the number of Arabs who left. This is called a population exchange - right/moral not saying, but not the only one of the 20th century...
The issue of the Mizrahi Jews forced from Arab countries frequently gets overlooked, and in peace agreements, it has been only touched upon with a recognition that it exists but statements that it is part of the Israeli-Arab conflict rather than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of course, when Israel made peace with Egypt, Jordan, and some other Arab nations, this issue did not pop up. The areas in which things were the worse for Mizrahi Jewish refugees were probably Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, and probably Algeria. Well, good luck getting Iraq and Yemen in their current states, not to mention how bad things likely will be going forward in both nations, to fork over reparations, or for Algeria, who judging by their association of Jews with the Pied Noirs, who also got nothing, to do very much. Of course, many Mizrahi Jews reject the refugee narrative because they believe that it undermines their personal narratives of Zionism, and many left because of a choice rather than because they were forced to. So it gets a bit complicated in regards to the notions of reparations or property restitution.

I think right of return might have been a bigger deal for those of Arafat's generation than those who came after, and in that regard, you are probably right that it would tank future negotiations if for some reason he accepted Camp David.

To be honest, I also wonder about how good of a state an independent Palestine would be. We all know what happened to Gaza in the first post-withdrawal elections. The choices of rule would be between Hamas, who are ridiculous terrorist bigots who literally quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their charter, and Fatah, who probably are somewhere in between FIFA and Boss Tweed in terms of egregious and grotesque corruption. Maybe I am wrong, but nothing convinces me that a Palestinian state would be some kind of shining beacon of justice or democracy. At worst, they would be like modern day Hamas ruled Gaza, and at best, they would be like a less stable form of an average kleptocratic Arab nation.
 
Well...as far as the Israelis are concerned as long as the Palestinian state leaves them alone whatever happens in Palestine stays in Palestine. Just like their deals with Egypt and Jordan, as long as they are not invading or supporting an intifada. The other reality is that there are quite a few governments in that part of the world that, in the case of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement would have to find something else to divert their populations from the real problems in their countries that the governments do nothing about.
 

Deleted member 1487

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clinton_Parameters#Acceptance_and_reservations
On 3 January 2001, the White House released an official statement which stated that both sides had accepted the President's parameters with reservations.[8][9][10] According to Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross, Barak's reservations were "within" the Parameters, while Arafat's reservations were "outside" them.[3][11] According to Jeremy Pressman, however, the Israeli reservations were in contradiction with the Parameters, notably Barak's rejection of Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Moreover, the Israelis demanded a route between East Jerusalem and the Jordan River[1] (to pass by a tunnel or bridge, providing "contiguous" territory[12]) and probably an additional one from Ariel, which would cut the West Bank into pieces. On the other hand, from the Palestinian reservations, only the refugee point seemed fundamental.[13][14]

On 2 January 2001, at a meeting in the White House, Arafat gave his qualified agreement to the Parameters with reservations. In a memorandum, his Negotiations Support Unit (NSU) had warned him "that the proposals in general are too vague and unclear to form an acceptable framework for an agreement".[25] The negotiation team opposed the use of percentages. First, the Israelis were to make clear which reasonable needs they had in specific areas; without a map, the percentages given were also ambiguous, as the Israelis did not include all disputed land or part of the Dead Sea, and it was unclear where the 80% proportion of settlers would remain. All Israeli settlers taken together occupied around 1.8% of the West Bank. The Palestinian concerns about lack of contiguity were largely related to Israeli control over large swaths of land in key development areas such as Jerusalem and Bethlehem, due to the large settlement blocs. Palestinians would be unable to move without restriction within their own state.[25]

Additional attempts to reach a compromise at the Taba Summit were unsuccessful, although some progress was made. In Israel, the Prime Minister's opponents claimed that his government lacked the support of the Israeli public, the Knesset (Israeli parliament) and the polls, and that he was submitting Israel to a "liquidation sale".[/QUOTE]

The Palestinians and Israelis both tacitly agreed to peace, they just couldn't agree on terms; it is just as likely that the Israelis would never have accepted even if Barack and Arafat agreed. Politically though the Clinton deal was unacceptable to the Palestinian people even if the Right of Return issue was removed. Effectively though neither side could actually agree and the only way to get peace would have been to have an outside power (the US is the only one with that) force both sides to accept imposed terms that both would hate.
 
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