Arafat’s
Rejection of Camp David
By Ahmad Faruqui,
PhD
Danville, California
The world mourned the loss
of Yasser Arafat. For many, he personified the
struggle against oppression not only of the Palestinian
people but of oppressed millions around the globe.
But for others he was a terrorist, even when he
denounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s
right to exist, as he did when he signed the Oslo
Accords in September 1993.
Thus, at
his funeral in Cairo, Israel sent no representative
at all and the US sent merely an assistant secretary
of state while other countries sent foreign ministers,
prime ministers, presidents, princes and kings.
For the past two years, the “roadmap”
to peace developed by the Bush administration
had been put aside, because the US did not want
to deal with Arafat. Ever since he rejected the
Camp David accords in 2000, suspicion about his
motives had been rampant in Washington and Tel
Aviv. From then on, he was known as the man in
uniform who single-handedly killed the peace process.
Did Arafat commit a blunder at Camp David? The
creation of a Palestinian state would have been
the crowning achievement of his career, so how
could he have let that slip away?
A myth has grown about the generosity of the offer
that was made to him by Ehud Barak, then the prime
minister of Israel. It supposedly contained more
concessions than any previous Israeli leader had
ever offered the Palestinians. But how generous
was that offer?
Contrary to characterizations in the media, Barak
did not offer to give up 96 percent of the West
Bank. Rather, he offered Arafat a dysfunctional
state that would have consisted of five cantons
— four in the West Bank and one in the Gaza
Strip. According to an Israeli peace group, Gush
Shalom, the state would have consisted of two
million Palestinians living in 200 scattered areas
around the West Bank, consolidated into three
cantons. The Israeli army would have controlled
the eastern border, the Jordan Valley. A fourth
canton would have been created around East Jerusalem
but the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine
in Islam, would have remained under Israeli control.
Robert Malley, a member of the American team at
Camp David, wrote in the New York Review of Books
that no Palestinian leader could have justified
a compromise of this magnitude to his people.
In the Barak proposal, Israel would have annexed
69 of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank,
containing 85 percent of the 200,000 Israeli settlers
still living in the West Bank — a violation
of the 1993 Oslo Accords. The settlement blocs
would have continued to intrude into the existing
road network, severely disrupting Palestinian
traffic in the West Bank.
To compensate the Palestinians for the loss of
prime agricultural land, representing about 9
percent of the West Bank, Israel offered stretches
of desert adjacent to the Gaza Strip that it currently
uses to dump toxic wastes.
The Palestinian state designed at Camp David would
have resembled the Bantustans of South Africa
under apartheid. Arafat may have been an inept
administrator but when he signed the Oslo Accords,
he accepted Israel’s right to exist and
conceded to Israel 78 percent of historic Palestine.
In February 2002, Arafat wrote in the New York
Times that Palestinians were ready to end the
conflict, and to sit down with the Israelis to
discuss peace. “But we will only sit down
as equals,” he said, “not as supplicants;
as partners, not as subjects; not as a defeated
nation grateful for whatever scraps are thrown
our way.” The Camp David plan was one such
scrap, and no Palestinian leader — even
one who had won the Noble Peace Prize in 1994
— could accept it.
No one can doubt Arafat’s devotion to the
Palestinian cause. He married very late in life
for that reason. Back in March 1972, Italian journalist
Oriana Fallachi asked him whether he wanted to
be like Ho Chi Minh, or whether the idea of living
with a woman at his side was repugnant to him.
Arafat replied, “Ho Chi Minh...No, let’s
say that I’ve never found the right woman.
And now there’s no more time. I’ve
married a woman called Palestine.”
By rejecting Camp David, he prevented a blunder
from being committed. It is unfortunate that during
the first Bush administration, the US adopted
a very pro-Israeli tilt. When Ariel Sharon visited
the White House, after having re-occupied the
West Bank militarily, he was greeted by Bush as
a “man of peace.” With Sharon at his
side, Bush blamed the violence on Yasser Arafat,
saying he “had let his people down,”
ignoring Israel’s failure to comply with
US demands to withdraw immediately from the West
Bank and to allow UN inspectors into the battle-ravaged
refugee camp of Jenin.
The American Congress did no better. After Sharon’s
chief rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited Capitol
Hill and talked about Israel’s war against
Palestinian terror, Congress overwhelmingly passed
resolutions supporting Israel, further rousing
Arab and Muslim ire against the US.
When US President George W. Bush traveled to the
Middle East in 2003, he personally pledged to
work for an independent Palestinian state by 2005.
Commenting on the death of Yasser Arafat, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “Peace in
the Middle East must be the international community’s
highest priority,” stressing that the goal
of “a viable Palestinian state alongside
a secure Israel is one that we must continue to
work tirelessly to achieve.”
However, in his subsequent meeting with Bush at
the White House, peace between Israel and the
Palestinians became the third international priority,
after Iraq and Afghanistan. The emphasis shifted
to bringing democracy and the rule of law in the
Palestinian territories rather than bringing peace
to the Israelis and Palestinians.
With Arafat out of the picture, President Bush
has a historic chance for coming up with a new
peace plan, based on the principles enshrined
in the Oslo Accords. It is time for Palestinians
to unite behind a new leadership and stop the
campaign of terror and suicide bombings that has
caused them and innocent Israelis immense harm.
And it is time for a brave new Israeli leadership
to step forward and to greet the Palestinian people
with the warm words of Yitzhak Rabin, spoke, on
the White House lawn in 1993, “We wish to
open a new chapter in the sad book of our lives
together—a chapter of mutual recognition,
of good neighborliness, of mutual respect, of
understanding. We hope to embark on a new era
in the histo ry of the Middle East.”
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