The more time that goes by, the more sorry I am about the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit. It was the last chance for even a minimal chance at Middle Eastern peace and a Palestinian state. Instead we got another intifada on one side and a reinvigorated dismantling of the West Bank on the other.
It's a damn shame, and everything happening today is a result of it. That is all.
I am sad too. It seems like that was the last best chance for a two state solution. I can't see how it ever happens now. Israel doesn't want it. The Palestinians seem more interested in wiping Israel off the map. And the other Arab counties want nothing to do with the Palestinians. A really bad situation all around.
When you got nothing, you got nothing left to lose. Unfortunately, that aptly describes like 98+% of Gaza residents and increasingly a vast majority of West Bank residents too. Creating an underclass of millions of youth just miles away from all your population centers - an underclass that both hates your guts AND has absolutely no prospect of a brighter future sounds like a really bad idea to me - but that's precisely what Israel has managed to do over the last few decades in its occupied territories.
While Israel may be responsible to whatever degree for the economic conditions in Gaza, the creation of millions of youth is entirely on the Gazan's. With nearly half the population under 18 it seems the main occupations of Gaza the last couple decades have been the production of rockets and babies.
They had something else they could do?
Also, look at the reproductive rate of the Fundamentalist Jews in Israel. Also off the charts.
Fundamentalist Jews in Israel. Are they also known as squatters, er, "THE" settlers?
Well, if they had jobs to go to … Hamas certainly bears some responsibility, but the Israeli-Egyptian blockade was a big contributor to the crippled economy.
It doesn’t matter whose fault it is why there are millions of hopeless youth within Israel’s zone of control. You don’t want millions of people who hate you to be living and seething right adjacent to your cities, even if you’re completely blameless for the hatred they hold. It’s just an untenable situation in the long run. How does a country guarantee security with that kind of threat right next door? It seems like Israel just assumed they could suppress the youth forever, which has been exposed as a fantasy. What now?
"When you got nothing, you got nothing left to lose."
Pretty much describes the sum total of Netanyahu's (and by extension the state of Israel's) efforts over the last fifteen years to deal with the situation. Few heroes on either side, but numerous victims on both sides.
I couldn’t agree more. My take at the time was that it was by far the most workable proposal that had been made, but in the end Arafat couldn’t bring himself to sign it.
I think I've read that Madeline Albright even chased him down as he was leaving to make one last ditch appeal for him to sign. What a missed opportunity.
I don't know how this bad memory of history comes about, but Barak's offer to Arafat was not something that could be signed. It wasn't an actual peace deal. It left Israel not only in control of all borders (that is what has been true of Gaza since the settlements were removed) but also left scattered settlements throughout the West Bank, and roads connecting those settlements to Israel, and soldiers making sure that the roads are secure, and checkpoints in case the Palestinians want to cross those roads. This was not a mystery at the time. The point of the Clinton Parameters was to make clear that Barak's offer was not a serious peace offer. It was a serious offer on Jerusalem, and if the Palestinians responded with a serious offer on the right of return, the Clinton Administration was convinced Israel would then offer peace (or agree to peace if Arafat offered it).
It was an odd assumption that Israel would give up the settlements for nothing since Israel has spent the 7 years between Oslo and the Barak-Arafat negotiations building up those settlements to make it harder to pull them out, an odd thing to do if they wanted peace.
The Palestinians looked at Israel's behavior and concluded they didn't want peace. The US looked at Israel's behavior and concluded that Israel's behavior didn't matter they must really want peace.
I don’t believe I am misbelieving the past. This is was my honest impression at the time, so by your argument I was mistaken then. Fair enough. I appreciate your analysis and I don’t have the expertise or knowledge to argue all of the details, but at the time I thought that the shortcomings of the peace offer vis-a-vis the Palestinians could have been rectified by subsequent demonstrations of good faith by both sides. Naive or uninformed, I still agree with Kevin that this was the closest we have been to a desired and potentially lasting agreement. I do not believe that there is any acceptable solution that does not result in two sovereign, secure independent states. To me, the greatest tragedy is that the Israeli and Palestinian peoples are two incredibly talented and accomplished peoples who could achieve great things in peaceful collaboration.
In your comment you talked about Arafat simply signing the deal. That is the historical inaccuracy. Arafat can certainly be criticized for not making a counteroffer. The US can be criticized for acting as Israel's lawyer instead of an impartial peace broker. (The Clinton Parameters basically made the Palestinians concession for them while leaving it up to Israel whether it was going to actually offer peace. It is not surprising that the Israelis signed on to it since it asked for nothing additional from them, and that the Palestinians did not since it asked for everything from them).
It is also the case that the negotiations in 2008 came closer to a deal. Olmert's offer was better, albeit not necessarily good. And Abbas was offering everything Israel could reasonably want. All side issues seem to have been worked out. The only difference at the end were two settlement blocks that Olmert insisted on keeping even though they would have disrupted the Palestinian state (assuming one every came about, Abbas was willing to accept less than a state to start).
Unfortunately the two state solution seems dead right now. And it seems dead for the same reason that the Olmert-Abbas negotiations ultimately failed, Israel's settlement policies make it hard to imagine ever being able to give the Palestinians a workable state. (All negotiations begin with the fact that the 50% of the population that is Palestinians would control 22% of the territory. That is baked in. Israel's contention has been that that is unfair to them and the Palestinians need to give them more). That is why I don't assign the failure of these negotiations equally. Israel spent the 90s making peace more difficult, and arguably this killed Oslo. It spend the '00s making peace more difficult, and that killed the actual best negotiations between the two sides. And it spend the 10s making peace more difficulty effectively killing the two state solution. That is has received so little criticism for it shows how slanted discussion of the region is.
If you listen to Ezra Klein's latest podcast, his guest explains that we've misunderstood Camp David -- that Yasser Arafat never had the support of all Palestinians to lend credence to any deals he'd sign and Ehud Barak's own power was tenuous at best, making an accord impossible.
Over the years, that wasn't the last chance, but it was understood to be the best chance. Opinions split on whether or not the 2-state solution can be moved forward at this point, if ever. IMHO, you can see by Israel's reaction that the paradigm shifted and within this shift lies the greatest possibility of pushing the 2-state solution through. I think both Palestinians and Israelis are tired of this war.
. . . Yasser Arafat never had the support of all Palestinians to lend credence to any deals he'd sign . . .
Maybe, someday, it will occur to someone to try letting the Palestinian population choose their own leaders, rather than telling them that they must accept corrupt authoritarians because it makes everyone else's life easier.
I'll bite - how would you describe the elections in 2006?
I would describe them as consisting of awful choices, conducted in horribly suboptimal conditions for a free election, and also entirely irrelevant, since the U.S. and Israel made it clear that they were going to keep the PA in power no matter who won.
And yet, the Palestinians largely selected Hamas as their representatives. I rather doubt the U.S. or Israel were telling them to do that.
And half the people now living in Gaza or the West Bank weren’t alive when the vote was held. Do we now hold people responsible for their ancestors’ choices?
Not to not pick, but that is exactly the state of affairs...
True that
44% of the Palestinians selected Hamas as their representatives. This became a majority only when parties that didn't reach the threshold for representation were eliminated from the count.
You are correct that the Americans and the Israelis didn't want the Palestinians to elect Hamas. They had made it perfectly clear that they didn't think it was acceptable before the elections were even held. Given the justified animosity that the Palestinians felt towards the U.S. and Israel, that likely increased the number of votes that Hamas got.
The Americans and the Israelis need to get out of the business of telling the Palestinians who should be their representatives, and accept the fact that any legitimate representatives of the Palestinian population is going to hate them. That's the only place that genuine negotiations can start from.
The Ezra Klein interviews are really excellent -- just search NYT for Ezra Klein.
This column, interviewing seven people who really know what was going on with the peace negotiations is also good:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/20/magazine/israel-gaza-oslo-accords.html
One thing that I learned was that the Israeli offers after Oslo really didn't propose a Palestinian state, but rather an area of territory where Palestinians would more or less self rule.
The other thing I learned is that despite recognizing Israel's right to exist, no Palestinian negotiator ever gave up on a full right of return for Palestinian refugees and all of their descendants. So, you'd start off with Israel and Palestine, and in a few years you'd have Palestine1 and Palestine2 after perhaps 4-5 million descendants of Palestinian refugees returned to Israel proper. There has never been a Palestinian leader who recognized Israel's right to exist as a primarily Jewish state.
There were things I already knew: when Arafat decide to start the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada as a way of pressuring Israel in 2000, all it did was turn Israelis to the right, deciding that the pro-peace Labor party was just a bunch of fools.
The other thing that I already knew was that Israel never stopped building settlements in the West Bank from 1973 to today. The settler population is pretty much a straight line up and to the right, no matter who was in power, left or right.
I came away from Klein's interviews and the NYT article above more pessimistic than ever. Yes, Israel and the Palestinians were probably closer to a settlement in 2000 than any time before or after.
But they just weren't that close then, and today they seem even further apart. The years after Oslo were supposed to increase trust between the parties, with Israel pulling out of the West Bank and Gaza, and responsible non-violent parties governing the Palestinian areas. Instead suicide bombings and settlement building showed that neither side really wants peace all that much. That's still how it looks to me.
If you want to mourn something mourn the lost chance in 1978. According to Carter, Sadat was balking at an agreement until they addressed the Palestinian issue. Carter put the pressure and promised that we would ‘soon’ address the Palestinian issue. That was almost 50 years ago and tying a Palestinian deal to peace with the largest Arab nation was really the last best chance.
As per Wiki:
"Although most Israelis supported the Accords of 1978, the Israeli settler movement opposed them"
and the settler movement has been aggressively opposing any sort of peace settlement ever since.
An Israeli hard liner assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for supporting the Oslo Peace Accords. In the weeks before the assassination, Netanyahu and other senior Likud members attended a right-wing political rally in Jerusalem where protesters branded Rabin a “traitor,” “murderer,” and “Nazi” for signing the peace agreement.
Everything about the present condition of the Palestinians (except their universal and persistent friendlessness) was baked into the Balfour Declaration. But this is only one of the incredibly destructive and long-lasting consequences of the desperate measures that Great Britain took to avoid being defeated in World War I -- some before the war even started. (If Churchill and Fisher had not thought it existential to convert the Fleet from coal to oil in 1911, we would today have only passing, distant, and inessential relations with the Middle East.)
As for A. J. Balfour himself, he was the ultimate lightweight. If Fisher coined the acronym "OMG", Balfour might as well have originated "LOL nothing matters". He was a lackadaisical failure as Prime Minister and should never have been brought back as Foreign Secretary (echoes of last week's headlines!).
Referencing the above comment, I also just listened to the most recent Ezra Klein podcast. I do not recall the guest (Miller) saying that Arafat didn't have enough support. Instead saying that Arafat had more authority than anyone that came after him and that Arafat never tried to use that to get an agreement. I also remember Miller saying that no one who disagreed with Arafat could speak truthfully to him. Arafat had the power and that was it.
I also don't remember him saying that about Barak. It would have been a tough fight, but I don't recall Miller saying anything about it being impossible to reach an accord at that time. Ezra has not posted a transcript and I'm going to listen to it again tonight.
The thing that stood out to me was him saying neither Arafat or Abbas or anyone else ever made a counter offer. In fact, no Palestinian leader has ever made a counter offer during any of the negotiations. Never once laid out in any document saying if Israel agrees to these terms there will be a permanent peace. Not even giving terms that they knew Israel would never agree to - just an opening bid. They never did it.
On Arafat:
Miller: "Arafat came to Camp David to survive [...] He came to Camp David determined to defend Palestinian positions. [...] No Palestinian leader could've accepted [Barack's proposal] and survived."
Klein: "Arafat, it sounds like -- and you can tell me if you think this is true or false -- didn't really have the authority to make the deal. He could not, himself, he did not have the power the control over Palestinian society, the institutions to make a counter-offer, sell it, and enforce it."
On Barak:
(GZERO Ian Bremmer interview with Ehud Barak)
Bremmer: "Barak was also feeling a different kind of pressure at home, given his increasing domestic unpopularity. His own government, in fact, began to unravel just as the summit was underway."
(Excerpt from The Guardian, July 9, 2000)
I guess you agree that he didn't say that about Barak. I'm not sure why you are quoting Klein and I'm not sure what was omitted by the ellipses. In any case, I still feel quite sure that one of Miller's main theses was NOT that Arafat did not have enough support to sign a peace treaty. And therefore there was no chance for peace in 2000. The fact that he and other American diplomats were spending so much time and effort trying to finish a treaty indicates that they did think he had enough support. Seriously. That's why they were all at Camp David.
No one was naïve about this. Sadat was assassinated and Arafat would have faced the same threat. I'm sure he would have had to fight a civil war with Hamas and other groups. But Arafat was the guy. There were limits on what he could agree to, but the Palestinians were expecting him to bring peace. Him signing a peace treaty would not have been shocking.
As for Barak, yeah. He had to face elections. It was obvious at the time that without a peace treaty a rightwing government would be elected. I remember being amazed that Arafat and the Palestinians really seemed in no hurry to finish this. Just as obvious, if Barak had gotten a peace agreement with Arafat then he would have run on that. It would have been a referendum on the peace agreement. No one knows what would have been the outcome.
My bad, I was conflating existing history and different sources with Klein's interview w/ Miller to express that Camp David was set up to fail from the beginning if the goal was to get a deal.
We know from the leaked Palestinian papers that Abbas was offering a serious peace, something that is not true of any Israeli offer since Oslo. Is the work there being done by the claim about setting out a document? After all Olmert put his last offer in a document that he showed to the Palestinians as a take it or leave it offer and then took the document back so the Palestinians had to try to recreate it from memory. Olmert clearly did not want there to be an available document of his offer if it was not accepted.
But they may have all been silly to think that having a document matters. After all, Barak made a documented offer that left Israel in complete control of the occupied territory and it hasn't stopped people from believing that he offered a peace that Arafat could have just signed.
Um, sure. I choose to believe the Americans who were there. You choose to believe fantasy.
If I am understanding the part on which we disagree then you are not believing the Americans in the room since Miller was not in the room for the Abbas negotiations. His comment there is very odd since the offer to which Abbas supposedly did not make a counteroffer to was a take it or leave it offer that was made shortly before Olmert left office.
I was looking at the transcript that you are apparently basing your comment on, and to Miller's credit he is clear that Barak's offer was not something that could seriously be signed, contrary to the myth that has grown up about it. Neither Barak nor Arafat offered peace. He even seems to be clear about the fact that Arafat saw that they were not close enough to get to peace and tried to avoid pushing a meeting that would end in failure, while the US and Israel seemed to think they could strongarm him into signing something short of peace.
But the weird part of Miller's comment is how much emphasis he puts on percentages rather than what land is involved. What doomed the talks between Olmert and Abbas was that Olmert insisted on keeping a ring of settlements separating East Jerusalem from the West Bank. It is hard to imagine the Palestinians accepting a deal that left the Israeli military between the Palestinian capital and its major territory. And Miller's response, while not actually acknowledging what land Israel was insisting on keeping, is that it shouldn't matter that Israel wanted to keep land kept in war since it was willing to give up almost as much land in trade. Of course the land Israel wanted to keep was very disruptive to the idea of peace, while the land it was willing to trade was desert land that was the least desirable in Israel. It is far from a mystery why Abbas would not make such a deal, and the only counteroffer is for Israel to not keep its settlements. Does anybody believe that if Abbas pointed that out there would be peace?
Miller at least acknowledges that the Palestinians, who make up around 50% of the population are being asked to settle for 22% of the land. (This is a little sloppy in that 20% of Palestinians are Israeli citizens who would stay in Israel. But outside of Israel are the refugees who would presumably mostly move back to that 22% of the land). And yet in that section of the transcript Miller seems to be saying that having accepted that they are only getting 22% of the land they should accept that there be a landswap so that more of their territory is uninhabitable. And that in trade for land that is disruptive to the Palestinian's ability to rule themselves. That is an odd comment that Miller makes on a negotiation that he wasn't actually in the room for.
It is true that I never read memoirs from all the participants or anything, but I did pay attention when all this happened. Like Kevin, the original 2000 Camp David talks really made an impression on me. It really looked like this was it. That they were finally going to do what, let's be honest, everyone basically had been expecting them to do. Offer land for peace. The Palestinians would get an actual independent state and Israel would get peace. Talk of stealing Palestinian land would be replaced with a fixed, immutable border.
Obviously there would be lots of fights and deaths and politics, etc. But this was the historic moment. I assumed that the Israelis basically knew what the final agreement would look like, but had to go through the motions of having the US kick them in the ass over and over to get them to make it a real binding offer. It never really occurred to me that after getting a real offer like that the Palestinians would just shrug and walk away. But apparently that is what they did. They would talk, but in the end were no more likely to agree to a final peace than Netanyahu.
It felt then, and has felt more like it every year, like a modern day version of Munich 1938. Here was the moment when evil could have been averted. Instead nothing.
Something else I remember about the time. There was always turmoil on both sides, but people did seem ready for the final agreement. I remember articles about common Palestinians thinking that a permanent agreement would be made and they were looking forward to it. I remember a lot of Israelis saying they didn't want to give up East Jerusalem, but when the news broke about that being given to Palestine, many people just accepted it as the price for peace.
There were many hardliners on both sides who did their best to whip up opposition, and maybe they would have won and an agreement would have been torn up. Maybe. But my impression at the time was that the common people just wanted a permanent peace.
When I listened to that Ezra Klein podcast this morning, the guest (Miller) said a few more things that I hadn't heard before. He said that the agreement they'd hammered out in 2000 just had the basic outlines. Just had the number of percent to land swap. No locations. I don't know if that was true. In fact, Miller then said something about negotiations continuing or something, so I'm not sure what he was referring to.
I remember Dennis Ross, the US head negotiator at the time, talking about the negotiations. He never specifically said that they had talked about specific plots of land being swapped, but he did mention a meeting with Arafat where Arafat reluctantly agreed to the principle of land swaps. He quoted Arafat as saying something like the Israeli land had to be good land or valuable land. Something like that. So I find it a little hard to believe that no actual locations were discussed. But maybe I'm wrong.
I had thought that maybe Miller was contradicting Ross's account, but at the end of the podcast, when the guest is always asked for 3 book recommendations, Miller recommended Ross's book. So I guess he tends to agree with Ross's account.
At one point in the podcast, Miller talks briefly about the 2008 negotiations. I had basically given up hope by then and had assumed the 2008 talks had no chance, but Miller used it as another example of the Palestinians never coming back with a counter offer (this time Abbas). Implying that this really had a chance. A quick google search mentions several specific areas of Israel that would be offered in land swaps. I find it strange that specific areas would be talked about in 2008 but not 2000. But I wasn't there.
One final point about Ross and the 2000 talks. I remember Ross saying that they'd finished a round of negotiations and it was time to hear from Arafat. Was Arafat going to agree or disagree or at least make a counter offer. Arafat comes in and starts talking about how the Jews weren't a distinct people and had never been on the land in ancient times. Basically clown level conspiracies. That was what it was like to talk to Arafat. About as serious as negotiating with Trump.
The 2008 negotiations were held in secret. That allowed for a degree of openness that the more public negotiations in 2000 did not allow for. Oslo was also worked out in secret.
The major US negotiators for the 2000 talks were all Jewish. That is true of Ross, Indyk, and Miller. That was a good thing to the degree that they all desperately wanted peace, but it was a bad thing in that they read the actions of the two sides through a different lens. Ross was the most extreme in this. I remember an article in which he blames Arafat for the failures, maybe the one you are referring to, in which he points to behaviors by Barak that seem detrimental to reaching a peace and argues that this shows how much Barak wanted peace that he was working to keep the settlers happy. He then points to a similar action by Arafat and concludes that it shows that Arafat did not want peace.
To get at the extremity this took. Arafat spent the 7 years between Oslo and the 2000 negotiations working on giving Israel the kind of security needed to make a deal. Except for the Hamas attacks designed to get Netanyahu elected terrorism falls steadily and to zero during the period from a year after Oslo is signed to 2000. By contrast, Israel spends that 7 year period building up its settlements in a way that makes peace more difficult. Despite this, the US negotiators go into the negotiations assuming that Israel wants peace and doubtful that Arafat does.
Barak offers something that falls far short of peace, precisely because it holds on to settlements built during the peace process and that is still taken as proof that he is eager for peace.
Miller's account is actually more balanced than you suggest. He notes that Israel did not make an offer that any Palestinian could accept. (This should not be read as saying that there are no unreasonable Palestinians. His point was that it was not a serious offer of peace). He also notes that Arafat understood that they were not close enough to making a deal for a final push to make sense. Arafat is blamed for not making a counteroffer. Of course part of the reason is that Arafat only had one thing to offer, namely a waving of the right to return. And his belief was that if he waved the right to return without getting peace, then Israel would just say, good the Palestinians have admitted they have no right to return we can continue with our occupation free of that threat. But a braver man than Arafat would have made a counteroffer. At least it would have made Israel look bad if it did not accept it.
But there is something cartoonish about ignoring the fact that Israel has spent every year since Oslo was signed changing facts on the ground to make peace more difficult. And yet it gets the built in assumption that it is OK that it has never actually offered peace since we all know they want peace and would accept it if the Palestinians offered it.
Of course as I noted, the Palestinian papers, leaked to make Abbas look bad to the Palestinians, make clear that Abbas was ready to accept peace if Israel would offer it.
Not every year since Oslo. Israel has spent every year since *1976* changing facts on the ground to make peace more difficult.
And no US administration has ever threatened meaningful consequences if settlement activity continued, even though it is clearly illegal.
https://www.statista.com/chart/20001/number-of-israeli-settlers-living-in-the-west-bank-by-year/
It never really occurred to me that after getting a real offer like that the Palestinians would just shrug and walk away.
Since it wasn't a real offer, your hypothesis remains untested.
Um, sure. I choose to believe the Americans who were there. You choose to believe fantasy.
Sorry, but every Israeli proposal included the following four elements:
1) The Israelis would have retained control of the borders of the Palestinian entity, deciding what could and could not be imported or exported, and who could or could not enter or leave;
2) The Palestinian entity would have been forbidden to conduct its own foreign and security policies;
3) Israeli security forces would have been allowed to enter the Palestinian entity at their own discretion and make arrests;
4) Israel would have owned all of the water beneath the Palestinian entity and decide how much of it to give back.
With these four conditions, the result would have fallen far short of a state. It would more closely have resembled the bantustans created by apartheid South Africa.
You may think that these demands were justified, but what is not arguable is that Israel never offered the Palestinians an actual state.
No. The negotiations in 2000 did not include any of those. Even the border control would have been turned over in, I think it was 9 years. Even Arab pundits at the time agreed with the basic story that came out. The Palestinians would be able to go every day without ever having to have to pass an Israeli checkpoint.
And, of course, if those had been in the offer, the Palestinians could have made a counter offer that excluded all those conditions. They never did.
You are, quite simply, wrong. The Israeli offer included a permanent military presence along the border with Jordan. It demanded that the Palestinian entity be demilitarized, except for paramilitary police forces. It demanded that the Palestinian entity be forbidden to form any alliances without Israeli approval. Israel insisted on the right to deploy its military into Palestinian territory in an emergency. And it demanded that all of the water in the aquifers under the Palestinian territory remain under Israeli management.
That's not a real state.
It never really occurred to me that after getting a real offer like that the Palestinians would just shrug and walk away. But apparently that is what they did
I've seen this claim made numerous times. And for all I know it's completely valid. On the other hand, it seems to assume the deal on the table was fair or acceptable to both sides. Do we know this is the case? Is it possible it simply fell short of what the Palestinians regarded as the minimum acceptable agreement? Usually when a negotiation falls, we don't automatically assume only one side is to blame. But that's exactly how the 2000 situation is presented in the US media.
Maybe there is a reason it is presented that way. You are acting like there is no way of knowing what happened. When the people who were there discussed what had happened, a lot of long time observers of the region were shocked that the terms were not only unacceptable, but that the Palestinians would just walk away.
So you think Clinton in his last months in office got some senior diplomats together so they could be part of not offering the Palestinians a state, then lie about it (and continue lying about it for 20 years) - all so Clinton could leave office looking like he had failed? Really?
I didn't assume anything. I listened to the Americans who were there. I also recall at the time that a lot of Arab sources and pundits verified most of the story. And 20 years later, when I heard yet another diplomat say there were never any counter offers, that told me that yes, the story that came out at the time was true. If you want to make excuses for Arafat, feel free.
Note that Miller, in the interview you are basing your comments on, makes clear that the offer was not one that anyone could have reasonably accepted as peace. If you want to believe the people in the room, they do not agree with your point here. (OK Ross might, but that is only because he was the most clearly pro-Israel of the negotiators).
If a two-state solution were ever realistically attempted Palestinians would probably reject it because they really have no interest at all in such a thing, their only interest is destroying Israel,
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-773791
It's the only thing that gives them a sense of who they are and why they are. Palestinians are a death cult.
A death cult of a couple of million people. What do you do with that, give them their own country? What could possibly happen?
I see your point. After all, why have the Palestinians filled the West Bank with settlers killing the two state solution unless it was a death cult with no interest in a two state solution. Oh wait, no that was Israel.
But you have to admire the cleverness of the Israelis to never offer the Palestinians an actual state and to then take the fact that they have lost hope of ever getting an actual state as a justification to abuse them.
No, that's the action taken by the Israeli far right that Israel was dense enough not to give itself the ability to prevent leading to it's degeneration into just another Middle Eastern country, which they now have to live with.
But why do you think this has happened at all? Even if they could have prevented it or proceeded in a less awful way the Palestinian occupation of the West Bank, where they famously have never wanted to be, is impossible for Israeli security, particularly where Palestinians are nationally devoted to Israeli extermination and nothing else. It can't happen simply because of the outline on the map, the area is too small to allow for it.
If there is a two-state solution, what is theirs? It can't be the West Bank, so Palestinians will require some other territory, --where is it?
It is hard to understand most of the points you are trying to make here. Your first point seems to be that Israel is not a real country with laws, so there is nothing they can do to prevent settlers from moving into occupied territory. I have heard this before, but it is inane. One of the jobs of an occupying power is to protect the occupied people. Israel keeps a lot of soldiers in the West Bank. If Israel wanted there to be no settlements, there would be no settlements. Instead the army protects the settlements. (This understates things a bit because some of the settlements were filled by the government subsidizing Israelis moving into settlements).
Your second paragraph seems largely incoherent. Who does not want to be in the West Bank? The West Bank Palestinians are a mix of people who have lived in the area since before the founding of Israel, and refugees from Israel. Is the point that the refugees would rather return home? Clearly there are both Palestinians and Israelis who want to be in the West Bank. That is part of the problem.
Why could the two state solution not involve a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Admittedly that is not very fair to the Palestinians who represent half of the population but would be getting less than a quarter of the land.
Sadly both Hamas and the Israeli government think that the whole territory should go to their side despite their side only having about half of the population there. But why do you see this as a dehumanizing factor about the Palestinians, but not the Israelis?
But I am not really disagreeing about the wrongness of Israel in allowing extremist wingnuts to entirely control their policy in such an area.
As you recall when the Palestinians fled en masse in 1948 the population that fled to the West Bank considerably outnumbered the population who were already there, and now, after all these decades, I think probably all of the people now living there are descended from just those people who never wanted to be there at all.
As I've tried to say before, a two-state solution where one state is divided in parts, composed of a people who have no experience of operating a real government and whose one principal defining who they are is the elimination of Israel by any means necessary, Israel being stuck between their two parts --is really not a recipe for success.
We saw briefly a provisional outline for how it might happen and it just as quickly ended up in two parts, just as East Pakistan declared it's autonomy at the first opportunity.
If you want the Palestinians to have their own country they have to be brought together, where they can all be together, in one place.
It won't work in any other way.
(and why would they want to stay in the West Bank, anyway? It's cutoff, surrounded by enemies on whom it's economy would be entirely dependent and rapidly dessicating).
I would say the only conversation anyone should have is how to acquire enough space adjacent to Gaza to make it work. Otherwise it's all just pissing in the wind.
Wow that was oddly coherent given the previous comment. That is not to say that any of it is right. But it was much better written.
The Palestinians are human beings, much like the Israelis, and like the Israelis they design themselves by a piece of land. It is also true that the Palestinians have been screwed from the outset by being offered less and worse land despite the fact that they were the majority population when the British chose to partition. I am not sure how you get from that that they would be better off accepting the desert next to Gaza over the West Bank.
Your India comparison doesn't work because it misses the difference in scale between India with its billion people and Israel with its 6 million (and the land distances involved). The British Raj was a subcontinent of different people that the British identified only by what religion the local ruling caste had. The result is that Bangladeshis do not have much in common with Pakistanis other than both being Muslim. (Even many groups inside of Pakistan have little in common besides being Muslim and thrown together by the British). By contrast, the Palestinians are a people whose culture formed on an area the size of New Jersey.
Additionally, linking the two territories is not actually the hurdle that linking Pakistan and Bangladesh would be. In fact the issue of how to allow people to go between the two territories was one of many issues worked out between Olmert and Abbas. In fact pretty much the only thing not worked out in those negotiations is why Israel was insisting on keeping settlements largely cutting off East Jerusalem from the West Bank. (The other issue was the settlement of Ariel).
I would say it's the small size of the territory that is the entire issue.
Palestinian control of the West Bank is untenable for Israeli security and at bottom that's really the settler activities are tolerated. Imagine if the Palestinians had a true internationally recognized country in the West Bank. What would happen? They would import every weapon and armament they could find and eventually they would attack Israel with it. Look at the map. The West Bank is like a knife at Israel's throat.
Real Palestinian control of the West Bank can never happen from Israel's point of view, and I don't understand why that isn't more generally talked about. Probably because the prospect of moving that many people all over again at this late date seems horrendous, but it's that or just more of the same for the rest of time.
Or someone finds a method of generally dispersing them throughout the world.
One of those two things are the only end of conflict states for the Palestinians.
This is of course the excuse given. But the idea that Israel cannot defend its territory is rather offset by the fact that it repeatedly has defended its territory and the military advantage to Israel has only increased over time. What weapons are the Palestinians going to sneak into the West Bank that will overpower the Israeli army, but would not be effective from Jordan or Egypt?
When Olmert and Abbas had their negotiations they did not break down over expanding Israel at its thinnest point, it broke down over Olmert not wanting to dismantle well established populations that did nothing to defend Israel.
That is to say people who want to find an excuse to abuse another ethnic group will find their excuses, as you do here. And if the people can sufficiently teach themselves to not care about the humanity of the other group this can apparently be quite effective. But it is still racist garbage.
No, it's the shape of the West Bank, the border outline relative to the shape of Israel that makes it a strategic issue.
A key part of a settlement would be to minimize the border and interaction between the two groups and there is nothing racist about it.
And from the Palestinian point of view, they would have hostile Israelis on three sides, and be backed against a river — an obviously untenable situation, strategically. But you are incapable of seeing any point of view other than Israel’s …
Yes, I don't know why they would want to remain there.
I would say the 'pro-Palestinian' view demonstrates every chance it gets that it will see nothing else and dismisses any concern however serious of Israels' with a self-righteous contempt that leaves an impression it isn't much about the Palestinians, either.
You’ve made this claim several times. Arabs have lived in the West Bank for well over a millennium. Odd that it has taken so long for them to realize they don’t want to be there.
It's a mystery how people don't know this.
When the Palestinians fled in a panic in 1948 a huge part of them, I don't remember if it was a majority of them or not, fled to the West Bank, massively outnumbering the population who were already there.
It's literally correct to say they never wanted to be there.
There are Palestinians with roots in Israel proper who would rather be there. There are also long established Palestinian cities in the West Bank whose people want to be there. Just like the Jews, the Palestinians associate with all of the land from the river to the sea. Just as settlers who are forced to leave the West Bank would likely move back to Israel rather than head to the US or somewhere else, the Palestinians who were kicked out of Israel proper tend to prefer the West Bank to exile. (Abbas is an example of such a person and has said he accepts that there is no going back).
It is literally inane to pretend that the Palestinians do not care about the West Bank and so would be fine with being moved somewhere else outside of historic Palestine.
That is why people don't know that the Palestinians don't want to be in the West Bank. To the degree that people don't know the history is that the west tends to downplay the role that ethnic cleansing played in giving Israel a Jewish majority. But that is not the lesson you are trying to teach is it? Your lesson is that more ethnic cleansing is called for.
What started this whole thing was the failure an ethnic cleansing and there is obviously only two solutions to it, they can be dispersed or brought together, and if they're brought together real effort have to be made to limit all but entirely interaction between the invariably combustible elements.
Abbas actually stated his idea of the perfect outcome would be something that looks like Lebanon! Obviously the perfect state!
They had their own country - Herzl spoke of it as if it were uninhabited, much as the European colonizers of the "New World "" viewed the land we now call ours.
I also have been fortunate in knowing some gracious Palestinians who are US citizens, & have viewed their photos of their lost ancestral homes due to the creation of Israel without regard for the existing inhabitants of that very land.
Hamas is not reprentative of all Palestinians. However, Netanyahu's horrendois disavowal of the proportionate response to wrongdoing demanded by Lex Talionis sounds more like the Code of Hammurabi on steroids,, & given that it is also enshrined in the Israeli military planning (as recently published by The Washington Post) only the replacement of the current coalition government might avoid future conflicts as disastrous as this one. The likelihood is that it will now take even more generations to ameliorate the situation.
And having married into a Lebanese family with a connection to AL Quds/Yerushalayem, I have known not only that some Lebanese are more favorable than many think, even though they may not join the Hezbollah forces.
I also have been friends with some people who have been residents or citizens of both the US as and Israel, and know that there are others who have had good relationships with the Muslims & Druze citizens in Israel ; to keep my own hopes up for a cessation of the conflict & a solution to its causes, keep several websites bookmarked to remind me of those who are not like either Netanyahu or Hamas.
Their own country was the Ottoman Empire, which fell apart and then they lost the conflict in the reorganization of it's territory.
It was no longer in Ottoman hands when others decided to create the state of Israel. And of course I understand the reasons behind that decision: the same Europeans who invented the term "antisemitism" in the late nineteenth century as a positive word and held the first conference on promoting it in the 1870s, if my memory is accurate, wouldn't have cared as much about helping Europeans Jews return to their ancestors' land as to relieve Europe of its remaining Jewish population after Hitler's genocidal worst. Outsiders set the stage for the pain of both the Palestinians & the Ashkenazi Jews who became Israelis
You're thinking about this from a completely Eurocentric frame, which is entirely misleading.
It's as if you pick up a cog from a machine you don't recognize and try to imagine the machine, but it's completely alien.
You have to think about the Ottoman Empire and nothing else, or nothing else will make any sense. It's a medieval empire filled with disparate people living in regions that, for the most part, have never had anything like autonomy, having existed in one or another form of imperialism for all of history; but that sovereignty is distant, mostly because of the sheer size of it all, and village feuds are internecine with little that authorities can do about it. And the Empire fades and falls away over the course of a century or more, which everyone is clear about and knows it's happening and that something else is going to be able to happen, and every one of them are working hard to make sure that whatever happens they end up on top. Most borders are ill-defined or non-existant.
In the 20th century this is still a medieval world populated with people who are basically medieval, and time here works differently than it does for everyone else. What's going on now is just the latest stage of the same fight that was happening a hundred years ago, flailing into it's most absurd extremity.
Why is the Ottoman Empire particularly relevant? The area has been under distant rule for millennia. Moreover, even if the area was under a feudalist system, the Palestinians did own and live on most of the land taken in 48 and 67. Those land titles, however derived, were recognized such that the early Zionists were buying much of the property that became part of the original mandate.
The Palestinian complaint is that Israel took large swaths of their land, pushed a large percentage of the residents into Gaza and Syrian refuge camps and has refused to allow them to return. The taking and occupation of land and the expulsion of prior residents are crimes.
Bullshit.
Arafat said the following in his letter to Clinton:
" Mr. President, please allow me address you with all the sincerity emanating from the close friendship that ties us, and the historical importance of what you are trying to do. I want to assure you of my will to continue to work with you to reach a peace agreement. I need your help in clarifying and explaining the basis of your initiative.
I need clear answers to many questions relating to calculation of land ratios that will be annexed and swapped, and the actual location of these territories, as well as the basis for defining the Wailing Wall, its borders and extensions, and the effect of that on the concept of full Palestinian sovereignty over al-Haram al-Sharif.
We understand that the idea of leasing additional territory is an option we have the right to reject, and is not a parameter of your bridging proposals. We also presume that the emergency Israeli locations are also subject to negotiations and to our approval. I hope that you have the same understanding.
I have many questions relating to the return of refugees to their homes and villages. I have a negative experience with the return of displaced Palestinians to the West Bank and Gaza during the Interim Period. Because the modalities remained tied to an Israeli veto, not one refugee was allowed to return through the mechanism of the interim agreement, which required a quadripartite committee of Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Palestine to decide on their return. Equally, I don't see a clear approach dealing with compensation of the refugees for their land, property and funds taken by Israel under the aegis of the Israeli custodian of absentee property.
I feel, Mr. President, that the period for Israeli withdrawal specified in your initiative is too long. It will allow the enemies of peace to exploit the time to undo the agreement. I wonder if the "Period" is one of the fixed parameters of your proposal; a "basis" that cannot be changed.
Mr. President, I have many questions. I need maps, details, and clarifications that can help me take the necessary decisions with my leadership and people.
I would like you to appreciate that I do not want to procrastinate or waste time.
We need a real opportunity to invest once more your determination and creativity to reach a fair and lasting peace with you efforts and during your presidency.
I remain, Mr. President, ready to pay you a visit at the White House, in the shortest possible time if you find this visit appropriate, to discuss with you the bridging proposals and to exchange views on ways to develop them further.
Please accept my highest regards and best wishes,
Yasser Arafat
Ehud Barak, for his part, declared that Israel had accepted Clinton's proposals, but would not accept the Palestinian right of return to Israel and sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Although he chose to accept the plan, Barak sent Clinton a 20-page letter of "reservations". The two main points were that he "would not sign any document that transfers sovereignty on the Temple Mount to the Palestinians", and that "no Israeli prime minister will accept even one refugee on the basis of the right of return." Minor reservations were also made with regard to security arrangements, deployment areas, and control over passages. In a phone conversation with Clinton, Prime Minister Barak also demanded that Israel be allowed to retain sovereignty over the "sacred basin"—the whole area outside the Old City that includes the City of David and the Tombs of the Prophets on the road to the Mount of Olives, which was not mentioned in the Parameters.
So Arafat asked for some legitimate clarifications and an accelerated timeline in the interest of preventing violence. Barak "accepted" the parameters while rejecting some of their primary tenets outright, and making a major territorial demand that had not been part of the negotiations.
So yeah. It's all Arafat's fault. Yep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clinton_Parameters
Yeah. Arafat. Smooth.
Meanwhile Barak is stuck having to keep his own wingnuts in line behind him, which will never work, so of course it dragged out as long as it could until it failed.
But, mostly it was Arafat to whom it was obvious this would inevitably happen because waiting out everyone else was always his standard move.
Since Menachem Begin in 1979 “colonists” have been seizing land and building their obscene Israeli islets on the West Bank. Many Israeli’s believe they deserve it all—river to the sea. And on the other side Hamas and PLO wishing that the Israelis would go away so they could have it all. The river to the sea business is the goal of both.
In fact neither side has been willing to accept a true two state solution. And unless they somehow are convinced it’s the only way out of their mutual death trap, the hatred and killings will continue. Israel’s apartheid and slow colonization is no more a viable plan than Hama’s periodic explosions. Neither side wins.
Actually in his negotiations with Olmert, Abbas was offering to accept, at least temporarily less than peace for his side and full peace for the Israelis with threat of the refugees removed, he just insisted on the Palestinian territory being one that could evolve into a state. And that was too much for Olmert. And sadly that is the closest Israel has come to offering a two state solution.
Arafat did not offer peace, possibly because he thought Israel would not accept and that offering to give up the right of return without getting peace would hurt the Palestinians. Abbas offered everything that Clinton wanted Arafat to offer and it was not accepted. And Abbas was weakened by it. So Arafat may have been right about what would have happened.
I never thought the 2000 Camp David Summit had the least chance of succeeding in anything at all.
Arafat simply dragged it all out until it got to a point where he could plausibly claim it's failure was someone else's fault.
Could Arafat have done anything else? No.
Because the Palestinian negotiating position is 'you have to kill me or surrender to me', and there is never anything else, as they have been demonstrating for a hundred years.
Actually less than 3 years into the 5 year process Israel called a halt to negotiations. Arafat obviously could have plausibly claimed that the failure at that point was Israel's abandonment of the process. Instead he kept the Palestinian side of the process going until he got a more plausible partner for peace in Barak.
So your analysis doesn't actually fit with what happened. That may explain how you get to the ridiculous conclusion at the end. But I suspect it is really that you start with the ridiculous conclusion at the end and that leads you to misunderstand what happened during the Oslo process.
Yes, that would be completely concomitant with the history of the PLO and the disastrous condition Palestinians have been manipulated into by every party who's ever taken an interest in them until this point where they are left hanging for the edification of whomever might care to admire it.
Your comment does not seem to contradict any factual claim I made. It seems you think that it contradicts your perception of the PLO as evil and so can't be right. This is a point where you might see that the evidence does not fit with your preconceptions and so you should change them. In the mid-90s Arafat had a chance to get out of the negotiations where the blame would fall primarily on Netanyahu. Instead he stayed in the negotiations and got out at a point where the blames was mainly affixed to him. So it does not seem accurate to say that he waited until the blame would be affixed to the Israelis.
I expect this will create no dissonance in your mind. You start with the assumption that Palestinians bad, and simply do not accept any evidence that doesn't fit with that.
You certainly work to ascribe any seeming sense of virtue to the people who tried to seize Jordan and then started the Lebanese civil war.
Why can't you simply say Israel called off negotiation when it was obvious no resolution could be achieved and then Arafat kept up a pretense for show?
Above you had an fairly coherent comment. And here you are back to Palestinians ugh.
So earlier the idea was that Arafat was looking for a point that he could get out without getting blamed. That turned out not to make sense. Now you seem to be saying that Arafat staying in was the bad thing.
You are kind of a parody of blaming Palestinians regardless of the facts. I am not sure how you could make it more obvious that you simply start with the assumption that Palestinians are evil and can find a way to make the facts fit that narrative whatever they are.
It is like the old Marx brothers song, whatever they did you're against it. Arafat left the negotiations, that shows he didn't want peace. The Israelis left the negotiations, that shows they knew Arafat didn't want peace. Sadly you are not alone in this reasoning, just more clownish in how obvious you are about it.
Well, I think your comments are simply lost in the weeds.
I do not start with the point that Palestinians are evil, I start with the point that they have been externally manipulated into a circumstance where they're more wrong.
Israel is like the anvil that every force in the Middle East has smashed them against and the result is a population that has been able to do nothing at all but react violently against the only target Arab popular opinion thinks they should have.
Wow the assumption you start with is even stupider than the one I attributed to you. Of course it has the same effect of allowing you to ignore facts that don't fit with your beliefs and to justify things that would be moral atrocities without your assumptions.
OK replace my assumption with your admitted assumption. It equally well explains how you became a parody of defense of Israel.
It is remarkable how given your clear interest in the topic you yet manage to know not one thing about it, or the modern history of the Palestinians.
I think we should leave it at that and note it would be wrong if you and I tried living together. How would that work out?
No, 2000 wasn't the last chance. It was a negotiation. Both sides just had to keep at it until they agree on something. You fail, you try, repeat until something gives.
We are farther from a two-state solution today than 23 years ago because of Israeli settlements. Settlements made a solution hard in 2000, with every new settlement the solution recedes. Israel did not need to make more settlements, they chose to do so, in fact they subsidized and encouraged settlements. The US could have made aid contingent on no new settlements, we chose not to.
Israel thought they could "manage" the Palestinian problem indefinitely as settlements changed the facts on the ground. Google Israel with "mow the grass" or "control the height of the flames". That policy has failed. Given time it will always fail.
My guess is Israel will go back to 'management' because the settlers are too politically powerful, and antipathy toward the Palestinians is too strong. An increasingly oppressive apartheid state will try to control things, but like a pressure cooker on heat another horrible terroristic eruption will come.
Over decades people (like me) who were once inspired by Israel will die out, and young people increasingly see Israel as an awful apartheid state. At some point Israel will be a despised international pariah and even the US alliance will break. Netanyahu's foolish embrace of the Republican Party sped this up, but it was fated in any case.
Non-fundamentalist Jewish Israelis will increasingly emigrate, in any case the birthrate among Jewish fundamentalists is far higher, so Israeli demographics will move inexorably to the right.
It is unsustainable in the long run. We could see a real move to peace, like Mandela and de Klerk. We could see genocide or forced displacement in either direction. Both sides can look to their history and find nightmares.
IMHO the 'S. African increasing international pressure and sanctions' model is the most hopeful path, but it will take decades to play out.
This is what will happen. Except for the part about losing the US as an ally. Our own Christian fundamentalists looking forward to WWIII breaking out in the Middle East and their stranglehold over one of our only two political parties capable of wielding power here will keep us on Israel’s side. Israel could literally nuke Gaza and the West Bank and we’d still be their ally.
No two state deal offer has ever been fair to Palestinians. The best could be summarized as:
Israel gets:
1: Palestinians cede their claims to 75-80% of the land they held at the beginning of the Mandate era
2: Palestinians cede their right to return
3: Palestinians cede financial claims to the harms they endured during the Nakba, seventy five years of apartheid, and around 60000 deaths and many times that many injuries
4: Palestinians get some but not all the settlements back, but cede that they will receive little or no compensation for having the land stolen for years
Palestinians get:
5: Most but not all of the settlements back.
6: Partial sovereignty
If this sounds reasonable to you, you are failing to see that #5 is something Israel should get no credit for and #6 is not Israel’s to give: the Palestinian’s rights are inalienable as yours and mine.
These deals are much closer to the “deal” a gangster offers you for his window protection services than a free and fair trade.
As long as Israel is not willing to sacrifice something of its own for peace, it can’t gripe when the other side won’t make huge concessions.
Why was it "the last chance"?
What prevents the two sides from restarting negotiations on the basis of that offer?
One word: settlements.
In which case the problem isn't that Arafat made a mistake in 2000. The problem is settlements.
Yes. Exactly.
Really good history in NYT yesterday
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/20/magazine/israel-gaza-oslo-accords.html
Recall the glee Democratic liberals experienced when Trump assassinated Qasem Soleimani and the mourning becomes Electra.