Camp David
As with 1937 and 1947, the year 2000 represented a milestone in the Palestinian approach to a solution to the conflict. But, in a sense, it was a more defining milestone than its predecessors. For in 1937 and 1947, in rejecting the two-state solutions proposed, respectively, by the Peel Commission and the UN General As- sembly, the Palestinian Arabs had merely been expressing their consistently held and publicized attitude toward a resolution of the conflict; only a one-state solution, a Palestinian Arab state with a minuscule, disempowered Jewish minority, was accept- able. In rejecting the two-state solution offered, in two versions, in 2000, they were also—so it seemed—reneging on a process and on a commitment they had made, and repeated, in the course of the 1990s. And whereas in 1937 and 1947 they had rejected merely a two-state vision, a possibility, as it were, in 2000 they were also rejecting a reality, denying the legitimacy and right to life of an existing state, subverting a principle on which the inter- national order rests. Hence the surprise and shock of peace- mongering Israelis and well-meaning Westerners—a surprise and shock that had been completely absent in 1937 and 1947 among Arab, Zionist, and British observers.Attachment (file not included in this release)
<span class="fg-file-unavailable">Attachment <small>(file not included in this release)</small></span>
- <span class="fg-file-unavailable">Attachment <small>(file not included in this release)</small></span>: The Camp David II Negotiations: How Dennis Ross Proved the Palestinians Aborted the Peace Process - Norman Finkelstein
- Israel offered up to 95% of the 1967 borders—3% land swaps
- A Summit meeting between Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat.
- This summit failed to produce any actual agreements.
- Israel was offering in 10-25 years 91% of the current West Bank along with a 1% land swap (from the Negev), maintaining an enclave of settlers in Kiryat Arba (near Hebron), linked with a bypass road.
- The West Bank would be split by an Israeli controlled road from Jerusalem to the Dead See, with free passage for Palestinians, with Israeli right to road closure.
- An elevated railroad and highway running through the Negev would link the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
- Airspace would still be controlled exclusively by Israel.
- US claim about what was offered - [http://www.mideastweb.org/lastmaps.htm](http://www.mideastweb.org/lastmaps.htm)
- Palestinians claim they were offered Bantustans, a loaded word coming from South African apartheid divisions.
- East Jerusalem was the center-focus for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
- Israel refuses the broad Right of Return for Palestinian peoples to the country of Israel, but proposes instead a maximum of 100,000 refugees be allowed to return to Israel on the basis of humanitarian consideration or family reunification, while also contributing to a $30b fund to compensate Palestinian refugees for property lost.
- Israel wanted to push for an aggressive security arrangement that would heavily favor Israeli security concerns, including access to all Palestinian airspace, troop presence on the Jordanian border, the demilitarization of Palestine, and Israeli radar installations within Palestine.
- Negotiations continued through the Clinton Parameters, though no final agreement was reached, despite both sides claiming they were closer than they ever had been after the Taba negotiations in January of 2001.
- Responsibility for failure
- The Americans, including Clinton and several observers, claim that the failure of the talks hinged on Arafat and the Palestinians refusal to give up on future negotiations relating to the Right of Return, which the Americans believed would ultimately result in the Palestinians fighting for a return to a one state solution in Historic Palestine.
- A Clinton special advisor complains that Israel was not willing to concede a reasonable amount to the Palestinians, considering how much they were already willing to give up, including Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and trading favorable parts of the West Bank to Israel.
- Some argue that the lack of religious consideration hindered discussion around Jerusalem.
- Finkelstein argues that Israel really was giving up nothing at all that made the Palestinian concessions worth considering.
- Polling data around the time from Palestinians and their attitude towards Israel.
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20110607135527/http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2000/p1a.html](https://web.archive.org/web/20110607135527/http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2000/p1a.html)
- More reading
- [Lost in the Woods: A Camp David Retrospective](https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/07/13/lost-in-woods-camp-david-retrospective-pub-82287)
Why did the 2000 Camp David Summit Fail?
- In the final offers at Camp David, the offer was for 92% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and the Jerusalem split described. When asking an Egyptian advisor to Mubarak what went wrong in a post-mortem, one who had confided in Ross that the Palestinian “dream” was to “get 91% of the territory”, Ross asked why they said no to an offer of 92%. The response: “They raised their expectations.”
- Notably, at Taba, the offer on the table was for 94%, and a swap of 3%. This was a “mid-90s” number, what Arafat’s negotiators said they would accept without a swap, but it was also presented with a swap. It was rejected nevertheless. That is because the Palestinian position hardened; at Camp David it was not a 1-1 swap at first, and it was hardened to that over the course of negotiations. At one point, Ross recounts that the President stormed out of a meeting with all sides after accusing Arafat of walking back a provision he had already agreed to. And the Palestinians, speaking after to Ross, indicated Arafat supported a proposal of 92% with a 3% swap. However, this was rejected even with better terms at Taba. And while Palestinian negotiators and Arafat repeatedly indicated a willingness to accept offers that were not 1-1, they refused the offers that did meet their ever-rising requests.
Clinton Parameters
23 December Clinton met Palestinian and Israeli representatives and handed them and published his “Parameters” or proposals for an Israeli-Palestinian peace. He stipulated that the parameters must be accepted or rejected as a package—they included trade-offs in concessions by both sides— and in principle within four days. Each side could then negotiate details “within” the bounds of the parameters; but regarding the principles, it was a take it or leave it offer. The parameters were nonnegotiable. The Clinton proposals, offering a two-state settlement, stipu- lated that Israel must withdraw from between 94 and 96 percent of the West Bank and, implicitly, 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, in which the Palestinian Arab state would then be established. Israel would compensate the Palestinians for the loss of the 4–6 percent of the West Bank that they would be “ceding” with a patch of Israeli territory amounting to “1 to 3 percent” of the West Bank as well as allowing the Palestinians a “safe passage” corridor between Gaza and the West Bank through Israeli terri- tory. The 4–6 percent of the West Bank retained by Israel would include the large settlement concentrations, such as the ‘Etzion Bloc, which held some 80 percent of the territory’s settlers. Attachment (file not included in this release)
The Clinton Parameters proposed a Palestinian state comprising between 94–96% of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip. Israel would annex the remaining land, which would include Israeli settlements, containing 80% of the settler population, mainly in major settlement blocs.
- The Clinton Parameters - Wikipedia
- Palestinians were to get a state comprising the Gaza Strip, 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank (with the lost 4 to 6 percent to be offset by Israeli territory to be ceded to the Palestinians), half of Jerusalem, and half, or more, of Jerusalem’s Old City—and their acceptance by Israel and rejection by Yasser Arafat
Taba
Three weeks later, Israeli and Palestinian teams met for one fur- ther bout of negotiation, in Taba, on the Sinai Gulf of ‘Aqaba coast. But the talks, held over 21–27 January 2001, were meaningless. Clinton was no longer president, his successor, George W. Bush, had withdrawn support for the parameters, and Barak was facing general elections, on 6 February, that all knew he would lose by a landslide to Ariel Sharon, as in fact occurred. Barak’s aides were, politically, in no position to negotiate any- thing and nothing, in fact, was concluded. Taba was an abortive academic exercise by despondent Israeli doves and powerless Palestinians (Arafat did not attend), no more. Attachment (file not included in this release)
- Ecstasy and Amnesia in the Gaza Strip »
- As for 2000 and the Camp David peace negotiations, the usual story tends to focus on Yasir Arafat himself, his calculations and, depending on the perspective, his shortcomings. Arafat’s refusal to accept a Palestinian state on all of the Gaza Strip and nearly all of the West Bank was indeed tragic and misguided. On its own, though, this isn’t remarkable. Lots of leaders make poor choices. In the annals of history, the list of nations that have missed opportunities for peaceful settlements of disputes only to end up with less isn’t short, and neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are the worst offenders.
- What is striking about Arafat’s refusal to accept the deal offered at Camp David—a state on all of Gaza and more than 90 percent of the West Bank, including a capital in East Jerusalem—and his subsequent turn to violent confrontation is just how popular it was and remains. There was not anywhere within Palestinian politics a minority camp that opposed this move, that warned against the possible consequences, that organized protests and galvanized opposition parties. Neither was there, in the broader Arab world, any real pushback from governments or the public. In the wider pro-Palestinian community of NGOs, activists, and intellectuals, there were no voices calling the decision a mistake, just as there were no anguished letters at the back of this or that Review of Books from lifelong supporters of the Palestinian cause who couldn’t bear to see it go astray.
- As happened 30 and 50 years before, in the months after Camp David and well into the second intifada, the rhetoric was as militant as ever, and triumphalist too. An official communiqué from August 2000, after Camp David and before the intifada, hailed the unanimity of Palestinian factions regarding the rejection of a peace deal at Camp David and the “sense of exaltation and victory” which it engendered.
- Moderates held that a controlled outbreak of violence could improve the Palestinian position in any future negotiation, a wrong but somewhat understandable conclusion to be drawn from the experience of the so-called Tunnel Riots of 1996, when a fabricated claim that Israel had dug a tunnel under the Al-Aqsa Mosque served as the pretext for three days of violence in which the armed forces that Palestinians had been allowed to build under the Oslo peace agreements turned their guns on Israelis; the result was an improved Palestinian position in negotiations. (Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah leader most identified with the turn to violence in 2000, explicitly referenced this earlier event as a lesson for what could be achieved by combining violence with negotiations.) Less-moderate voices, meanwhile, hoped that a turn to violence after Camp David could replicate what was seen as the success of Hizballah in forcing a full Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon earlier in 2000 without Israel receiving any kind of peace agreement in return.
- It’s important here to pause and consider what exactly was at stake in 2000 and the years immediately following. Over the seven years of the Oslo process, from 1993 to 2000, the Palestinian Authority was established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians had, for the first time, an elected government, a representative assembly, passports, stamps, an international airport, an armed police force, and other trappings of what was in every sense a state in the making. What was foregone at Camp David was all that plus what stood to be gained afterward: statehood, Jerusalem, a massive evacuation of settlements. (The expansion of the Authority’s territorial footprint and its sovereign powers occurred despite its failure to live up to even the most basic requirements of the peace deals it signed with Israel, including preventing terrorist attacks against Israelis and the symbolic but evidently impossible act of revoking the founding charter of the PLO so as not to call for the destruction of Israel.)
- What happened instead was a wave of Palestinian violence during which suicide bombing became the totemic means of and metaphor for the whole endeavor, in line with the hierarchy of goals—eliminating Israel over freedom—that has been the preference of generations of Palestinian leaders. A people on the cusp of liberation instead suffered more than 3000 war deaths and the moral rot caused by the veneration of suicide and murder.
- The Palestinian airport is no more, as is the Palestinian airline. The two Palestinian territories are cut off one from the other. One lies behind a fence whose path was decided unilaterally by Israel and not in a negotiated agreement; the other lies behind a blockade. West Bank settlements that could have been evacuated in a peace treaty twenty years ago are bigger than ever.
- One might expect some further reckoning with this third Palestinian disaster. But once more, loss turned to victimhood so quickly that didn’t happen.
Destiny Notes
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U.S. President Bill Clinton convened a summit between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. No agreement was reached; Clinton later proposed the Clinton Parameters, but talks at Taba also ended without agreement【17†source】.
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100-250k right to return
- “And even though Arafat’s reservations, involving fundamental issues such as the right of return, the Temple Mount, and territorial percentages, all largely outside the parameters, amounted to a big no—Dennis Ross defined them as “deal-killers”—he still could claim that we were on equal footing in that we too had our own reservations, though they were mostly inside the parameters. In our defense I should say that Barak’s reservations were for all practical purposes eventually dropped and would not prevent us from defending the letter and spirit of the parameters when we went a few weeks later for a last-ditch attempt to save the peace in Taba. Taba did not produce an agreement precisely because we wanted to translate the parameters into a peace treaty and the Palestinians addressed them as a straitjacket they refused to work with.” Attachment (file not included in this release)
- “for the first time the Palestinians themselves, and not some third party, spelled out their reservations on the parameters. “We don’t want Clinton’s boxes: we want a free-wheeling debate,” was the underlying motif in Saeb Erekat’s presentation. The document he presented us was a radical amendment to each and every single chapter of the parameters. It practically annulled them” Attachment (file not included in this release)
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- Was shot for this letter
Arafat didn’t negotiate - he just kept saying no | Benny Morris | The Guardian