News

I meant the summit being the last attempt of a treaty that Arafat didnt even bother trying to negotiate.

@[email protected] has addressed this point very nicely in a post which unfortunately is no longer readable. So allow me to quote it because it shows very well how insulting, I'd say on purpose, the whole proposal of Israel was. They just wanted something so outlandish that it was refused outright so they can later say "See we tried but they don't want to talk!!!!!!". The whole tactic is very similar to Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia which they specifically worded so Serbia had to refuse it or stop being a sovereign state.

Anyway here's the post of @[email protected]. It's a bit long but definitely worth the read to get a better understanding of this very complex situation:

I am sorry to tell you this, but you definitely ought look deeper into the peace accords as they were discussed at the time. Especially the ones at Camp David which were supposed to be the most fruitious and the ones Palestinians "threw out the door". The Oslo accords were more of a guideline than a clear set of instructions. They were a very loose set of vague directions both sides were supposed to go down on. Before that there were no other concrete accords. One would argue that the Camp David Summit was the closest both sides ever got to making peace. So let's take a look at that one and use it as a good compass in this discussion.

Palestinians were supposed to:

• be completely demilitarized
• give Israel the right to send troops to Palestine in case of any emergency (what constitutes as an emergency was never defined)
• ask Israel for approval for every diplomatic alliance Palestine would ever make with other countries
• have Israeli military bases installed in Palestinian territory
• give the Israeli military complete control of their airspace
• have israeli military outposts be installed on the border between Palestine and Jordan for a temporary amount of time
• give Israel temporary control over Palestinian border crossings (without having a specified timeframe)
• give up 10% of the West Bank, the most fertile land in the West Bank, for 1% territorial gains of desert land near the Gaza strip (the land that would be conceded included symbolic and cultural territories such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque, whereas the Israeli land conceded was unspecified)
• Israel would keep parts of the West Bank under temporary occupation, without a timespan being given
• What constitutes the West Bank was to be defined by Israel and not by international law. Israel defined West Bank as being the internationally recognized West Bank minus all the settlements they had at the time.

As you can see, all of these concessions would never amount to a completely sovereign Palestinian state, and as a result of that these talks failed in the end. To me, it looks like they were designed to fail from the get-go. Nonetheless, they did spawn new discussions and as a result of said discussion the Taba negotiations were born. With that being said, these concessions were in no way, shape, or form popular in Israel (only 25% of the Israeli public thought his positions on Camp David were just right as opposed to 58% of the public that thought Ehud Barak compromised too much). The Israeli prime minister at the time, Barak, facing elections, suspended the talks since it greatly affected his popularity in Israel. As a result of trying to broker a peace deal with Palestine, even a very bad one that was meant to fail as it was, he failed to get re-elected. The highly unbalanced concessions were already considered to be too much by Israelis.

Ehud Barak was from the Labour governments you were talking about, and this is the best Israel could ever come up with.

Trying to paint this situation as it being a level field where both sides did the same amount of wrongdoing is not a fair representation of the history of the peace process.

Since the most promising talks ever, the Camp David Summit, Israel has allowed over 750k settlers to move into the West Bank. A military regime has been installed and forced upon the occupied population contrary to international law. If getting the 30k settlers out of Gaza in 2005 was hard enough and almost caused an uproar inside the IDF, getting 750k settlers out of the West Bank will be straight up impossible without a major conflict.

There will never be two states and I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that this was in majority the doing of the Palestinians. We should talk a good look at all these facts when we start discussing this conflict and use them as a compass.

You can read more on that on Wikipedia if you're interested in all the details. If wikipedia isn't a good enough source, there is a great book on this subject by a german professor specializing on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.