The Myth of the "Myth of the Generous Offer"

Rather than hijack shergald’s diary on this subject, I offer this account for your consideration. I welcome reasoned, fact-based comments.

Focusing particularly on the Clinton Peace Parameters of December 2000, I’ve contended that Yasser Arafat should have responded more constructively during the period from the Camp David summit of July 2000 through the Taba negotiations in January 2001. In opposition, some invoke “the myth of the generous offer,” a meme that generally refers to Camp David. My requests for attention to the Clinton proposals, and for explanations and evidence, largely go unanswered.

Here I set out my understanding and interpretation of the facts together with supporting references. I invite those who disagree to offer their own substantive interpretations and supporting evidence.
Perhaps I should begin by saying that I have opposed Israel’s colonization project in the West Bank from its outset as a folly that, in my understanding, violates of international law, even though the occupation itself is the legitimate result of Israel’s success in a defensive war, and is accepted by the United Nations for the time being. In United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, the Council called for the “[w]ithdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories [not “the territories”] occupied in the recent conflict” in conjunction with the “[t]ermination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force”. Unfortunately, we still lack the necessary agreement on the Palestinian front.

The United Nations confirmed its acceptance of the occupation, along with the necessity for “a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict” based on a “two state solution,” by welcoming a Performance-Based Roadmap. The goal is

“the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors.  The settlement will resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and end the occupation that began in 1967, based on the foundations of the Madrid Conference, the principle of land for peace, UNSCRs 242, 338 and 1397, agreements previously reached by the parties, and the initiative of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah – endorsed by the Beirut Arab League Summit – calling for acceptance of Israel as a neighbor living in peace and security, in the context of a comprehensive settlement.”

Introducing Shlomo Ben-Ami

In general, I accept the analysis of Shlomo Ben-Ami, a dove who was Israel’s Foreign Minister in 2000-2001. Ben-Ami, who also conducted secret talks with Abu-Ala (Ahmed Qurei) in Stockholm, received his D. Phil. from St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University, and was the Chairman of the History Department at Tel-Aviv University. He is the author, among other works, of  Origins of the Second Republic in Spain (Oxford, 1978), Fascism from Above: The Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain, 1923-1930 (Oxford, 1983), and Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (Oxford, 2006).

Both sides have done wrong and made mistakes

In particular, I share Ben-Ami’s assessment that both Israelis and Palestinians have done wrong and made bad choices:

“No one in this conflict has a monopoly on suffering and martyrdom; nor is the responsibility for war atrocities exclusive to one party. In this tragic tribal dispute, both Jews and Arabs have committed acts of unpardonable violence, and both have succumbed at times to their most bestial instincts. What is no less grave is that they have both too frequently chosen the wrong course, refusing to see the changing realities and adapt their policies accordingly.” (Scars of War, p. 332.)

The Clinton Peace Parameters: the major lost opportunity.

I also agree with Ben-Ami that, while the Palestinians may not have been able to accept the Camp David offers, “the real lost opportunities came later” (whether they should have responded constructively at Camp David being another matter):

“Admittedly, however, Camp David might not have been the deal the Palestinians could have accepted. The real lost opportunities came later on. The negotiations continued after Camp David. More than fifty meetings between the parties and the American mediators, both in Israel and in the United States, took place throughout the summer and autumn of 2000. This was a sequence of round tables that culminated on 23 December in a meeting in the Cabinet room adjacent to the Oval Office, where President Clinton presented to an Israeli delegation presided over by this author and a Palestinian team headed by Yasser Abd-Rabbo his final parameters for a peace treaty between the parties. The parameters were not the arbitrary and sudden whim of a lame-duck president. They represented a brilliantly devised point of equilibrium between the positions of the parties as they stood at that particular moment in the negotiations.” (Scars of War, p. 270.)

As Ben-Ami summarizes them, in their territorial aspects, the Clinton Peace Parameters, included a “sovereign” Palestine state containing all of the Gaza Strip, 97% of the West Bank, and the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, a safe passage, docks in the ports of Ashdod and Haifa, “so as to wrap up a deal that for all practical purposes could be tantamount to 100 per cent [of the] territory,” i.e., of the West Bank plus the Gaza Strip. ((Scars of War, p. 270.) Fortuitously, after I had first nearly completed this diary, the New York Times published an op-ed article by President Clinton’s chief envoy to the Middle East, Dennis Ross, entitled Don’t Play With Maps. (Available at no charge here.) In this article, Ross summarizes the Clinton Peace Parameters, of which he was the principal author, as follows:

Put simply, the Clinton parameters would have produced an independent Palestinian state with 100 percent of Gaza, roughly 97 percent of the West Bank and an elevated train or highway to connect them. Jerusalem’s status would have been guided by the principle that what is currently Jewish will be Israeli and what is currently Arab will be Palestinian, meaning that Jewish Jerusalem — East and West — would be united, while Arab East Jerusalem would become the capital of the Palestinian state.

The Palestinian state would have been “nonmilitarized,” with internal security forces but no army and an international military presence led by the United States to prevent terrorist infiltration and smuggling. Palestinian refugees would have had the right of return to their state, but not to Israel, and a fund of $30 billion would have been created to compensate those refugees who chose not to exercise their right of return to the Palestinian state.

In Scars of War, Ben-Ami includes a map illustrating his understanding of the proposed borders. You can see that, among other things,

• The Jordan Valley is part of Palestine

• There are no Israeli settlements outside the settlement blocs near the Green Line to be annexed to Israel

• Hence there is geographic contiguity — and no Bantustans — within the West Bank

• In compensation for annexing the settlement blocs, Israel gives Palestine territory from within the Green Line, i.e., the pre-June war border

• The two parts of Palestine — the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — are connected by a “safe passage” across Israel:

If you have difficulty making out all the details, you may want to look at Dennis Ross’s illustration of the Clinton Peace Parameters. It is substantially similar to the Ben-Ami map, except that Ross does not show either the safe passage or areas to be transferred from Israel to Palestine. As Ross explains in his NYT op-ed article:

When I decided to write the story of what had happened in the negotiations, I commissioned maps to illustrate what the proposals would have meant for a prospective Palestinian state. If the Clinton proposals in December 2000 had been Israeli or Palestinian ideas and I was interpreting them, others could certainly question my interpretation. But they were American ideas, created at the request of the Palestinians and the Israelis, and I was the principal author of them. I know what they were and so do the parties.

Israel accepts the Clinton Peace Parameters; Arafat rejects them.

President Clinton, Ben-Ami tells us, “presented his parameters as a ‘take it or leave it deal’. . . . It was not supposed to be the basis for further negotiations but a set of principles to be translated by the parties into a peace treaty.” (Scars of War, p. 272.)

President Clinton said at the time that Israel had accepted his proposals:

“‘Israel has said that they would agree to try to close the remaining gaps within the parameters of the ideas I put forward if the Palestinians will agree,’ [Bill Clinton] said, throwing the ball into the Palestinians’ court. ‘And I think that this latest violence only reminds people of what the alternative to peace is.’

“Clinton is almost certain to invite Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat to Washington early next week for separate talks if the Palestinians answer affirmatively. Those talks could pave the way for a three-way summit.

“Clinton has been on the phone daily, speaking to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s King Abdullah and Saudi King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah to ask them to pressure Arafat into accepting the suggested compromises, primarily the idea that the Palestinians would largely have to give up the right of return to Israel.”

Ben-Ami writes: “Our decision, at the height of the Palestinian Intifada . . . was a daring decision of a government (then already a minority government) of peace that stretched itself to the outer limits of its legitimacy in order to endorse positions its [domestic] opponents labeled as suicidal and as being an affront to Jewish values and history.” (Scars of War, p. 272.)

Yossi Beilin, another dove, then Minister of Justice and now leader of Meretz-Yachad,  confirms that, “On December 28, [2000], at a meeting of the government [i.e., the cabinet,] the [Clinton] plan was endorsed in principle . . . From that moment, the Clinton Plan embodied Israel’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israel, which had said no to the Rogers Plan in 1969 and no to the Reagan Plan in 1982, said yes to the Clinton Plan in 2000.” (Yossi Beilin, The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004 , Page 223.)

By the way, former president Jimmy Carter has said of Yossi Beilin: “I have had an opportunity to deal with a few individuals whose commitment to peace merit special recognition. Yossi Beilin is one of those people. He has dedicated a significant amount of his personal and professional life to the proposition that a durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians requires principled and mutually beneficial compromise from both sides. I was honored to present the keynote speech . . . at the formal launching of the Geneva Initiative, an example of his leadership. His recollections of the years 1996-2004 should be required reading for anyone interested in the search for peace in the Middle East.” (From a blurb on the dust jacket of Beilin’s book.)

Robert Malley, a junior member of the U.S. team who, with Hussein Agha has written critically of American, Israeli, and Palestinian conduct in the peacemaking process (see below), observes: “Arafat had the best deal he could ever get. He could not get more and he had hit the proverbial wall. At the time, this was quite clear to American and to Israeli leaders. And in hindsight, it is now painfully clear to many more, including Palestinians.”

Although the Clinton Peace Parameters “gave Arafat almost everything he wanted,” as Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., “recognized” when Dennis Ross “showed Bandar the President’s talking papers” (Elisa Walsh, The New Yorker, March 24, 2003, p. 55), Yasser Arafat did not accept them. Ahmed Querei, (Abu Ala) who has served as both Speaker of the Palestinian parliament and Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), told the Guardian, as reported on January 8, 2001, in Palestinians Reject Peace Plan:”We can’t accept Clinton’s ideas as a basis for future negotiations or a future settlement.”

Walsh’s New Yorker article describes the efforts of Bandar and Egypt’s ambassador to the U.S. to persuade Arafat to accept the Clinton Peace Parameters. Arafat assured them that he would do so. When Bandar met with Arafat and learned that he had rejected the offer, “Bandar believed that . . . Arafat . . . was committing a crime against the Palestinians – in fact, against the entire region. If it weren’t so serious, Bandar thought, it would be a comedy.” (p. 57)

And yet, about eighteen months later (and after helping Ariel Sharon defeat Ehud Barak), Arafat told veteran Ha’aretz correspondent Akiva Eldar that he was ready to accept the Clinton Peace Parameters:

“Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat yesterday issued a call for “no more war,” declaring that he accepts the proposal first made by former U.S. president Bill Clinton as a framework for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. . . . Yesterday’s interview was the first time Arafat has declared his acceptance of the Clinton proposal.” (Ha’aretz, June 21, 2002)

Arafat’s belated acceptance of the Clinton Peace Parameters should put paid to the myth, as Ross describes it in his op-ed article, “that seeks to defend Mr. Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton ideas by suggesting they weren’t real or they were too vague or that Palestinians would have received far less than what had been advertised.”

The unhappy conclusion, in Ben-Ami’s words, is that “Three times in their history the Palestinians were offered statehood — in 1937 [when the Peel Commission recommended partition], in 1947 [when the UN General Assembly voted partition] and through the Clinton Parameters in 2000 — and three times they have rejected it.”

What about Camp David?

We thus see that it is not a myth to say that the Palestinians missed a real opportunity for statehood at the end of 2000 by rejecting the Clinton Peace Parameters. In this context, at least, the so-called myth of the generous offer is itself a myth. Accordingly, it might be thought unnecessary to consider what happened at Camp David the preceding July, and whether the Palestinians missed another real opportunity. On the other hand, it is at least strongly likely that, had the Camp David summit not ended in public failure, the second intifada would not have occurred, and both the Palestinians and Israelis would have been spared the last six plus years of bloodshed and hardship.

As I understand the “myth of the generous offer” meme, the proponents of the alleged myth are said to claim that:

• at Camp David, “Israel offered the Palestinians extraordinary concessions”

• but “Arafat walked away from generous Israeli peacemaking proposals without even making a counteroffer”.

The conclusion the supposed myth-makers are said to want us to draw is that “There is nothing Israel can do to make peace with its Palestinian neighbors.” In contrast, the would-be debunkers of the so-called myth maintain that Israel was “far from generous,” leaving Palestine in the West Bank with only disconnected “Bantustans” (in the word commonly used by a prominent DKos member of this school).

In fact, as I hope to persuade you, whether or not one chooses to call the ultimate Israeli position at Camp David “generous” — an irrelevant question, I think — the offer to the Palestinians was substantial enough to have warranted a constructive response in the form either of a counter-proposal or negotiations to modify and improve the offer. Having said that, I reiterate my belief that Arafat’s failure in this regard does not relieve Israel from the need to continue to seek peace with the Palestinians, nor does it justify Israel’s settlements policies or all the ways in which the occupation is maintained.

While Barak surely can be criticized for his handling of the peace process both before and at Camp David, efforts to exonerate Arafat of responsibility for the ultimate collapse of the peace process, leading to the election of Sharon, are without merit.

One of Barak’s failings was his failure to carry out an agreement to transfer to the Palestinian Authority three Arab villages near Jerusalem.  Barak reasoned that, from a domestic perspective, it would be easier for him politically to bundle all his concessions to the Palestinians in the comprehensive peace settlement he expected to achieve at Camp David.  While he may have reasoned well about Israeli politics, his conduct fed Palestinian mistrust of his intentions.

At Camp David, Barak went significantly beyond any prior Israeli government, including

• withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip

• withdrawal from 92% of the West Bank, including complete withdrawal (in stages) from the Jordan River

• retaining and annexing settlement blocs only near the Green Line, which did not cut up the West Bank into cantons

• a Palestinian state that, although demilitarized would have had full sovereignty over its natural resources

The two maps presented side-by-side below illustrate, on the left, the PLO version of the ultimate Camp David offer and, on the right, the actual offer. They are taken from Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. Although it is fashionable for some people to dismiss Ross out-of-hand, readers may want to bear in mind that President Clinton has called Ross’s book “definitive” and praised Ross, saying, “No one worked harder for peace than Dennis. He gave it everything he had and served our nation very well.” Reviewing Ross’s book for The Washington Post, Glenn Frankel noted that Ross had criticisms of both sides:

While Ross is withering in recounting the miscalculations and tantrums on both sides, he holds Arafat most responsible for the failure: “Only one leader was unable or unwilling to confront history and mythology: Yasser Arafat.”

Still, when Ross steps back and reviews the trail of tears that the peace process became, he argues that both sides failed to live up to their commitments. Palestinian leaders failed to stop, and even gave support to, the suicide bombers, while Israelis never really eased the grip of their military occupation or stopped building and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

And Robert Malley, reviewing Ross’s “meticulous narrative” for the New York Review of Books, although he disagrees with some of Ross’s interpretations, also recognizes that “Ross attended every significant meeting; he has a prodigious memory and his note-taking was legendary. All of which makes his book important to read, his factual account difficult to dispute . . .”

Here are the maps. The actual last Camp David offer is on the right; the PLO’s misrepresentation is on the left:

At least three observations are readily apparent:

• the last Camp David offer does not separate the West Bank into Bantustans, but

• even though the Camp David offer marked a substantial advance beyond any prior Israeli position, it did not meet the Palestinians’ fundamental needs in Jerusalem and took too much land, without compensation, from the West Bank,

• thus Arafat had good reason not to accept the Israeli offer as it stood when the Camp David summit ended.

But the Camp David summit need not have ended when or how it did, and that is Arafat’s responsibility. He is the one who chose not to present a counter-offer and not to use the Israeli offer as a basis for negotiating something better. Arafat did not engage substantively with President Clinton and the American delegation. Toward the end of the summit, an irate Clinton would tell Arafat: ‘If the Israelis can make compromises and you can’t, I should go home. You have been here fourteen days and said no to everything.” (Quoted by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha in Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors [see below].)

To the extent Barak would have retained too much of the West Bank, did not give Palestinians control of all Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and failed to settle the status of Har ha-Bayit/the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, his proposal was inadequate.  But inadequate is not the same as meaningless.

These facts also emerge from Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s New York Review of Books article Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors (August 9, 2001), which is critical of all three parties (the Americans, Barak, and the Palestinians), and their letter in Camp David: An Exchange, in  the New York Review of Books for September 20, 2001. In their second offering, Agha and Malley stated that their original article “describes how the Palestinians’ actions–and inaction–contributed to the breakdown in the negotiations.” In that original article, Agha and Malley wrote:

“Indeed, the Palestinians’ principal failing is that from the beginning of the Camp David summit onward they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own. In failing to do either, the Palestinians denied the US the leverage it felt it needed to test Barak’s stated willingness to go the extra mile and thereby provoked the President’s anger. When Abu Ala’a, a leading Palestinian negotiator, refused to work on a map to negotiate a possible solution, arguing that Israel first had to concede that any territorial agreement must be based on the line of June 4, 1967, the President burst out, ‘Don’t simply say to the Israelis that their map is no good. Give me something better!’ When Abu Ala’a again balked, the President stormed out: ‘This is a fraud. It is not a summit. I won’t have the United States covering for negotiations in bad faith. Let’s quit!’ Toward the end of the summit, an irate Clinton would tell Arafat: ‘If the Israelis can make compromises and you can’t, I should go home. You have been here fourteen days and said no to everything. These things have consequences; failure will mean the end of the peace process…. Let’s let hell break loose and live with the consequences.'”(Ellipses by Agha and Malley.)

Nor do Agha and Malley use the word “myth” to characterize the view that, at Camp David, Israel made Arafat a “generous offer.” Rather, they call it a “perception.” They ask, “Had there been, in hindsight, a generous Israeli offer?” But they never answer the question. Rather, they write:

“Ask a member of the American team, and an honest answer might be that there was a moving target of ideas, fluctuating impressions of the deal the US could sell to the two sides, a work in progress that reacted (and therefore was vulnerable) to the pressures and persuasion of both. Ask Barak, and he might volunteer that there was no Israeli offer and, besides, Arafat rejected it. Ask Arafat, and the response you might hear is that there was no offer; besides, it was unacceptable; that said, it had better remain on the table.

“Offer or no offer, the negotiations that took place between July 2000 and February 2001 make up an indelible chapter in the history of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. . . .”

By way of a conclusion

If you have stayed with me this far, thank you. I hope you now are persuaded that:

• the Palestinians, unfortunately, missed a real opportunity for statehood by rejecting the Clinton Peace Parameters, which, as Robert Malley acknowledges, offered Arafat “the best deal he could ever get.”

• the “myth of the generous offer” itself is a myth because, even though Arafat had reason not to accept the final Camp David offer, that offer was “final” only in the sense that the summit ended due to Arafat’s refusal either to agree to use it as general bases for negotiation or to make his own counter-proposal.

Having cleared away this historical underbrush, I hope we may now see more clearly the shape of the final two state, “end of conflict” peace settlement to which people of good will should aspire. In this regard, I recommend both the Geneva Initiative, a detailed, model treaty negotiated by unofficial, senior Israeli and Palestinian figures, and The People’s Voice, also a joint Palestinian-Israeli effort, setting forth a set of principles for an end-of-conflict peace settlement.  The People’s Voice statement, about which I diaried in March 2006, has the virtue, as I related in my Daily Kos diary The shergald-another American I-P Peace Plan, of having been independently offered last Sunday by a frequent, harsh critic of Israel.

Two states for two peoples.