The brilliant offer Israel never made

The Guardian (U.K.) ^ | 04/10/2002 | David Clark

[Pokey78]

To get peace talks started again means confronting a few myths

Yesterday's carnage in the West Bank provided a bloody illustration of the limits of Ariel Sharon's military strategy. Armed force cannot provide his people with the security they crave because the terrorist infrastructure he has set out to destroy consists of little more than the willingness of ordinary Palestinians to kill themselves while taking as many Israelis with them as possible. This week, the hatred on which it is built burns deeper than ever. In the absence of a meaningful peace process, further atrocities are inevitable, and when they happen, the consequences may be far worse than anything we have so far seen.

Israeli leaders are trapped in a mindset in which further military escalation appears to be their only option. Yet it is difficult to see how much further they can go without triggering a wider regional conflagration that might threaten the state of Israel itself. The "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians from large tracts of the occupied territories? The murder of Arafat? The consequences are unthinkable. Left to his own devices, Ariel Sharon may yet turn out to be the ultimate suicide bomber.

Into the maelstrom steps Colin Powell on a mission that could represent the best hope of avoiding such a catastrophe. His task is clear: to secure a ceasefire and persuade both parties to return to the negotiating table. To succeed, however, he will need to do more than indulge in hand-wringing. He will need to come armed with some harsh truths and some even harsher consequences.

With Israel, it will be necessary to challenge some deeply held illusions about the peace process and why it broke down. Chief among these is the assertion that the Palestinians rejected a "generous" Israeli offer at Camp David two years ago. It is a view that spans the Israeli political spectrum, uniting the hard right with born-again rejectionists like Ehud Barak, confirming all in their belief that political dialogue has been exhausted and that Arafat is an inveterate terrorist. It is time for some constructive revisionism.

Barak's proposal for a Palestinian state based on 91% of the West Bank sounded substantive, but even the most cursory glance at the map revealed the bad faith inherent in it. It showed the West Bank carved into three chunks, surrounded by Israeli troops and settlers, without direct access to its own international borders.

The land-swap that was supposed to compensate the Palestinians for the loss of prime agricultural land in the West Bank merely added insult to injury. The only territory offered to Palestinian negotiators consisted of stretches of desert adjacent to the Gaza Strip that Israel currently uses for toxic waste dumping. The proposals on East Jerusalem were no better, permitting the Palestinians control of a few scattered fragments of what had been theirs before 1967.

Barak offered the trappings of Palestinian sovereignty while perpetuating the subjugation of the Palestinians. It is not difficult to see why they felt unable to accept. The only surprise is how widely the myth of the "generous offer" is now accepted.

For this, Bill Clinton must accept responsibility. With the end of his presidency in sight, Clinton saw time running out along with the hope that he might be remembered in history for something more dignified than blow jobs in the Oval Office. He needed a quick deal rather than a just deal and chose to attempt to bounce Arafat into accepting Israel's terms. When this failed, Clinton vented his wrath at the Palestinian leader.

Maladroit diplomacy played its part, but the failure at Camp David was the product of a deeper problem for which the Palestinians must also accept their share of blame. With the benefit of hindsight, the 1993 Oslo agreement that embodied the land-for-peace compromise was a mirage. Although both sides signed up to a two-state solution, neither was completely sincere in accepting its implications. The Palestinians clung to maximalist demands on refugee returns in the hope that demographics would allow them to rewrite the past. The Israelis insisted on territorial demands that made a mockery of the idea of a viable Palestinian state.

It is here that the Saudi peace initiative has come to play such a critical role in getting the peace process back on track. In calling for Israel's withdrawal from all of the occupied territories and holding out the prospect of a compromise on the refugees that would meet Israeli concerns, it forces both sides finally to come to terms with each other's existence.

Tony Blair's call for the Saudi plan to be enshrined in a new UN resolution is a tacit acceptance that Camp David was a botched job. Progress will now depend on Colin Powell's willingness to spell that out to Sharon and Arafat this week.

· David Clark was a special adviser at the Foreign Office until May 2001.
dkclark@aol.com

[liberalism=failure]

The Guardian--the Pravda of England

We didn't defeat communism in the cold war, we just relocated it to Europe

[goldstategop]

ROFLMAO!!! This is the kind of advice one can expect from an ex Arab hand at the British Foreign Office! David Clark thinks Israel's 91% --- later revised to 96% offer, wasn't generous enough for the Palestinians. The truth which he fails to alert readers to, is the Palestinians NEVER even made a COUNTER-OFFER. They just rejected Israel's proposal and proceeded to launch a war. And now he thinks they should be rewarded for something they balked at all along? Its no wonder Israel doesn't take anything the Eurotrash say seriously. This deluded article's proof of it.

[liberalism=failure]

As to a comment on the, ahem, "content" its just so typical of liberals to tell us we had better do it their way to avoid horrible calamities, even though their way has been a miserable failure all along.

The "peace process" has failed. It's time to GIVE WAR A CHANCE!

Liberalism=failure

[Cyber Liberty]

Just think of how much better off the world would be if we would just put these left-wingnuts in charge of everything.

[Lent]

It is here that the Saudi peace initiative has come to play such a critical role in getting the peace process

Doesn't matter how many times it is said and in the many multicolored ways it is said this "plan" is just a lot of horse manure.

[Chi-townChief]

Maybe the British and French should give Czechoslovakia to Germany as a first step to show how it's done.

[irishjuggler]

With the end of his presidency in sight, Clinton saw time running out along with the hope that he might be remembered in history for something more dignified than blow jobs in the Oval Office. He needed a quick deal rather than a just deal and chose to attempt to bounce Arafat into accepting Israel's terms.

There is a kernel of truth in this statement, though. Clinton's approach to the "peace process" was pretty darned idiotic and it continues to be. Heck, just last week he tried to say that the Marc Rich pardon was part of the "peace process."

[dennisw]

FINAL JANUARY 2001 PROPOSAL

 

 

 

[Shermy]

David Clark was a special adviser at the Foreign Office until May 2001

On whose dole is he now?

[dennisw]

Clark is on the internet a bit. Seems to be a Brit labor leftist>

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,9061,627400,00.html

He prolly is never out of work but just on the revolving door going from government to private employ then back again. I'll bet he's a lawyer of some stripe.

[xm177e2]

The Israelis are operating under NO ILLUSIONS, they have a free and fair media, and what this creep is saying in the Guardian has been said over and over and over and over ad nauseum in the left-wing Israeli press.

Arafat will have to accept a smaller offer than he wants--a smaller offer than constitutes a just peace--because the Israelis need security guarantees. If the Palestinians can manage their state peacefully, and crackdown on terror, and ask politely for more land, they can have it. If they prove they can live peacefully with Israel, they should even be granted some sort of control over East Jerusalem. But these anti-Israel idiots want Israel to give the Palestinians EVERYTHING, RIGHT NOW. If Israel gave the Palestinians what they wanted, they would just use the international border for smuggling and the proximity to Jerusalem to carry out terror attacks there.

[Always A Marine]

Yep. With that logic, Britain would have surrendured to Hitler at the start of the Blitz. Nobody in the West today knows what real war is like. But it is coming, and all are in for the shock of their lives...

[alex]

Regardless of anything else, this was a true "Clinton" plan in all its mindlessness - a peace without continious border between sworn enemies, the only good it could produce was a Nobel Prize for Bill Clinton.

[Wonder Warthog]

"David Clark was a special adviser at the Foreign Office until May 2001."

While in the Foreign Office, he was a "cheese-eating surrender monkey" like his greatly admired predecessor--Neville Chamberlain.

[Kay Soze]

I Disagree with the statement "Armed force cannot provide his people with the security they crave because the terrorist infrastructure he has set out to destroy consists of little more than the willingness of ordinary Palestinians to kill themselves while taking as many Israelis with them as possible."

Israel has its guys our in the open when it could easily fight the battle from armor and the air- but this would incur the kind of civilian causality rates that we usually incur or the nations we battle.

The Israelis are not willing to harm so many innocents.

What Israel did in the one week 1967 war would have taken several months as we would have to position a much larger force- Israel could take all the Middle east if it had to.

[thoughtomator]

That 'prime agricultural land' was barren, forsaken desert until the Israelis moved there, planted trees and made it fertile.

[dennisw]

Well said!!