At Camp David, Arafat turned down an astounding offer for a Palestinian state in nearly all the West Bank, Gaza, and part of Jerusalem that was put forward by then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak with the encouragement of President Clinton. Malley pioneered the practice of dismissing this offer as insignificant and rationalizing Arafat’s refusal to take yes for an answer, as well as his decision to answer that peace deal with a terrorist war of attrition, known as the second intifada.
Malley’s version of the Camp David debacle ran contrary to the facts, but it has gradually gained ground, especially on the Left. By discrediting the Israeli proposal and thereby absolving the Palestinians of blame for Arafat’s unwillingness to make peace, Malley helped set the stage for a decade of anti-Israel vituperation.
Malley, who was listed for a time as an unofficial adviser to the Obama presidential campaign, is at it again today in an op-ed in the New York Times... [snip]
But they do stumble upon a key truth about the entire peace process—they understand that what the Palestinians want isn’t merely sovereignty in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Jews want a Jewish state and are willing to let the Palestinians have their own state too in order to live in peace. The problem is that the core of Palestinian national identity is a desire not for a Palestinian state but for eradicating the Jewish one, which they view as illegitimate no matter where the borders are drawn. Agha and Malley write:
Even fewer Palestinians take issue with the categorical rebuff of [a Jewish state], as the recent Fatah congress in Bethlehem confirmed. In their eyes, to accept Israel as a Jewish state would legitimize the Zionist enterprise that brought about their tragedy. It would render the Palestinian national struggle at best meaningless, at worst criminal.
Yet instead of urging Palestinians to give up goals incompatible with peace, the authors merely say that the next step for peace processors is to go back to 1948 and revisit the issues of that era—i.e., whether there should be a Jewish state at all...
[If you've no true 'partner in peace', you're only left an adversary to be defeated.]
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