Now consider the actual content of Barak's offer. Malley criticized it for not having been a "dream offer" and the PLO Negotiations Department denounced it for containing a number of seriously objectionable features -- so objectionable, in fact, that it amounted to a "repackaging" of Israel's military occupation. How valid are these descriptions?


To answer this question we must first remember that there exist no written record of the Camp David proceedings, thus forcing us to rely on reports by various participants. What do they tell us about Barak's offer?


We must first distinguish between Barak's offer on East Jerusalem, and his "territorial" proposal which dealt with the borders of the anticipated Palestinian state. The former involved such sensitive matters as sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the Western Wall and other sacred sites while the latter required deciding about the future of Israel's West Bank settlements as well as the Jordan Valley.


Barak went into the summit publicly committed to retain all of Jerusalem, East as well as West, as "Israel's eternal capital." However, by the summit's conclusion he had agreed to Clinton's compromise proposal which divided East Jerusalem into several sections and gave each a different legal status. In particular, "Palestine would have sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian quarters" and "permanent custodianship" over Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount. (12) It was a significant concession, especially since it was guaranteed to arouse the wrath of a good part of the Israeli electorate. (Faithful to his minimum settlement, Arafat rejected Clinton's proposal )


As to Barak's "territorial" offer, let me begin by noting that the Israeli negotiators went to the summit with the same proposal they had already offered to the Palestinians during Stockholm's second tier negotiations in May 2000. It offered the Palestinians a state on the Gaza Strip and 88% of the West Bank, with the remaining 12%, containing three settlement blocs (Etzion, Ariel, the Jerusalem area), annexed to Israel. Israel would also maintain a security hold in the Jordan Rift valley for about 20 years. (13) Barak placed this proposal, text as well as map, on the Camp David table, but with the clear understanding that this was only Israel's initial offer. The map can be found on the internet and shows a Palestinian West Bank carved up into three disconnected cantons. (14)

The actual territorial negotiations were carried out by two teams, the Israeli delegation led by Ben-Ami and the Palestinian by Abu Ala. Abu Ala responded to Barak's initial offer by demanding that the discussion begin with an Israeli acceptance of the June 4, 1967 borders. Ben-Ami predictably refused to agree to this condition, but since Abu Ala refused to negotiate on any other basis, the meeting had to be adjourned. On July 16, Clinton decided to talk to Arafat about the existing impasse and persuaded him to "forego between 8 to 10% of the territory." Barak responded by decreasing the proposed annexed West Bank portion from 12% to 9%.and agreed also to transfer some Israeli territory amounting to 1% of the West Bank to the new Palestinian state. A few days later, however, Arafat retracted his concession and there were no further territorial discussions at Camp David, the summit's focus having shifted to East Jerusalem and the refugee question. (15)

What did Barak's improved map look like? We cannot be certain since no official map was ever actually produced, but Barak gave a verbal description to Benny Morris: (16) "But in the West Bank, Barak says, the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the Jordan River. Here Palestinian continuity would have been assured by a tunnel or bridge." Barak then heatedly denied that his offer had been made on a take it or leave it basis. "The Palestinians said that I [and Clinton] presented our proposal as a diktat, take it or leave it. This is a lie. Everything proposed was open to negotiations. They could have raised counterproposals but they never did."


What can we conclude? First, that Barak, in Hanan Ashrawi's phrase, "overcame his 'red lines' " concerning Jerusalem. It is true that he did not meet Arafat's demand for full Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem, but he did take a significant step towards the Palestinian position. Secondly, with respect to borders, Barak improved his offer between July 11 and July 25, thus overcoming another "red line" --Israel's earlier refusal to abandon any settlements. What should be noted is that both of these concessions were granted without any reciprocal Palestinian moves.


One could say, with Malley, that even Barak's final Camp David offer was still not very generous - it was not a "dream offer," refusing, as it did, Palestinian sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem and splitting the West Bank into two cantons. While correct as far as it goes, it is also an unfair judgment, and for the simple reason that it treats Barak's July 24th offer as if it represented his final position. We must remember, however, that it was proposed very much at the start of what Barak anticipated to be an extended negotiating process where concessions in one area would be traded for concessions in another. To properly evaluate Barak's peace proposal, one would have to know the details of his final offer, with borders, Jerusalem and refugees all wrapped up into a single package -- and that neither Malley nor Abu Mazen had any inkling of. (Israel's Taba proposal is probably a reasonable approximation of such a package.).

It follows that neither Malley, nor Abu Mazen, nor the PLO had any factual basis for rendering final judgment on Barak's offer. What can be said, and it was so affirmed by Clinton at the summit's end, is that Barak showed great courage in breaking two taboos, on Jerusalem and on the settlements -- and he did so while facing an absolutely unyielding Arafat who refused to enter into the negotiating process. (17)

**

What have we found?


-- Contrary to Malley, there had been no Palestinian concessions.


-- Contrary to the PLO Negotiations Department, the summit failed because Arafat rejected Barak's proposals on East Jerusalem and refugees.

-- Neither Malley not the PLO Negotiations Department were competent to render fair judgment of Barak's peace proposals and for the simple reason that Arafat's refusal to enter into the negotiating process prevented him from discovering Barak's true bottom line.

How to explain Arafat's summit strategy?

Having established that Arafat's intransigence had indeed been responsible for the summit's failure, it is tempting to ask why Arafat had adopted this particular strategy. In fact, this question has intrigued many observers, the reason being that Arafat's conduct exhibited certain surprising features. Let me begin my explanation by noting that Barak and Clinton behaved at the summit very much as one would have expected from their stated objectives. Thus Clinton went to Camp David trying to help negotiate a peace treaty between two long standing and bitter adversaries. To achieve this goal, he searched for compromise solutions which would yield to both parties what Clinton thought they could live with. Similarly, Barak went to Camp David prepared to negotiate a compromise solution which would give Israel its badly needed security and the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Now, Arafat went to the summit presumably to negotiate a peace treaty with Israel but then adopted a strategy which seemed to contradict that objective: For one, he rejected all compromises, a stance which made negotiations exceedingly difficult, and for another, he insisted upon two demands clearly unacceptable to Israel: Complete Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem and an unlimited right of return of Palestinian refugees. To add insult to injury, he gratuitously denied a central pillar of Jewish identity by claiming that no Jewish temples had ever existed in Jerusalem.


This puzzling feature of Arafat's behavior inspired a number of explanations. Ben-Ami ventured that Arafat had been psychologically unprepared to abandon his role as revolutionary leader for the mundane role as head of a small and impoverished nation. (18) Barak advanced the harsher judgment that Arafat had never accepted the Oslo premise of peaceful coexistence and was pursuing a long range policy of destroying the Jewish state. (19) And Clinton indirectly suggested that Arafat had been unwilling to confront the possibly lethal opposition from militant elements of Palestinian society. (20) In contrast to these explanations, all of which portrayed Arafat as either unwilling or unable to be Israel's peace partner, Malley advanced a number of relatively benign explanations for Arafat's Camp David conduct. He thus stressed that Arafat had wanted to postpone the summit -- and for at least two reasons: The Palestinian leader believed that the two parties were much too far apart to permit a successful resolution of the decades long conflict; and for another, Barak's failure to implement certain Oslo commitments (a scheduled third Israeli withdrawal had been canceled; a promised release of political prisoners had been aborted; though promised, additional settlers had been allowed into the West Bank; the Syrian track had been preferred over the Palestinian...) had made him doubt Barak's good will and reliability. (21)

How valid were Malley's observations?.

-- There had indeed existed a wide pre-summit gap between the Israeli and Palestinian positions, and it had been thoroughly exposed during the lower level negotiations in the spring of 2000. In fact, it was precisely this long standing and apparently unbridgable gap which had persuaded Barak to push for a summit where, he hoped, the impasse could be broken. However, given Arafat's uncompromising stance, and given his insistence upon provisions he must have known to be unacceptable to the Israeli government, it is difficult to believe that Arafat truly believed that additional negotiations would succeed in bringing the two parties substantially closer.

As for Barak's unreliability:

-- Barak had indeed failed to implement the enumerated provisions. And while he advanced various plausible explanations - that most of the violations had occurred in response to corresponding Palestinian transgressions; that he had committed others in the sincere belief that they would render the peace process more achievable - let me grant without further ado that they had caused Arafat to lose faith in Barak's good intentions.

But how would this development explain Arafat's strategy at Camp David? Let me be more precise -- assuming that Arafat had been sincerely committed to a peaceful resolution of the long festering conflict, why would such deep distrust of Barak's motives move the Palestinian leader to insist upon provisions which could never be accepted by even the best intentioned Israeli leader?

I confess being unconvinced by Malley's proposed "explanation" of Arafat's conduct at the Camp David summit.

Why then did Arafat pursue this provocative strategy? While I could offer some plausible suggestions, I believe it more useful to postpone that discussion for later. Specifically, let me return to it after examining Arafat's conduct between the end of July 2000 and the beginning of February 2001. The events of that period -- the outbreak of Intifada II, Clinton's "bridging proposal", the Taba conference -- will be discussed in subsequent articles.

ENDNOTES;
(1) This "minimum settlement" demanded that Israel return to its June 4, 1967 borders, abandon all claims to East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount and Western Wall, acknowledge full responsibility for having created the refugee problem, admit into Israel all Palestinian refugees who so desire, pay reparations to all refugees for lost property and suffering and reimburse all Arab countries for costs incurred for harboring these refugees since 1928..
(2) This claim of Arafat's intransigence must be qualified by noting that some Palestinian negotiators did accept a few Israeli proposals, leading Malley to speak glowingly of Palestinian concessions. As I stressed in Part I, however, these "concessions" turned out to be illusory, being subsequently rejected or ignored by Arafat.
(3) Jerusalem Al-Quds, July 27, 2000, FBIS-NES-0727;
(4)PLO Political Department Chief Faruq Qaddumi, as cited in Cairo MENA, in Arabic, July 28, 2000. FBIS-NES-2000-0728;
(5) For the "revisionist" version, see:
-- Robert Malley, "Fictions About the Failure at Camp David," The New York Times, July 8.2001; http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/opinion/08MALL.htm
-- Robert Malley and Hussein Agha; "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors"; The NY Review of Books, August 9, 2001
-- Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, "A Reply to Ehud Barak", The New York Review of Books, June 13, 2002,
-- Shibley Telhami, "Camp David II: Assumptions and Consequences", January 2001, Current History", http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/views/articles/telhami/CHjanuary2001.htm
-- Deborah Sontag, "Quest for Miseast Peace:How And Why It Failed," The New York Times", July 26, 2001
For the "Palestinian" version, see:
--Lee Hockstader, "A Different Take On Camp David Collapse," July 24, 2001; Washington Post;
--PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, Sept. 23, 2002; "Camp David Peace Proposal of July 2000 and the so-called Barak's Generous Offer," The Washington Report On Middle East Affairs"; http://www.wrmea.com/html/faq.htm
-- Uri Avnery, "The Peace Criminal," Tikkun, 07.23.2001; http://www.tikkun.org/index.cfm/action/current/article/38.html.
-- Gush Shalom, "Barak's 'generous offer' ",
http://www.gush-shalom.org/media/barak_eng.swf
(6) Robert Malley, "Fictions About the Failure at Camp David," The New York Times, July 8,2001; http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/opinion/08MALL.htm
(7) Abu Mazen, "Had Camp David Convened Again We Would Take The Same Position", Ramallah's Al-Ayyam, July 28, 2001. MEMRI, August 2, 2001, No, 250
http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP25001
(8) Ibid
(9) PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, Sept. 23, 2002;; op. cit.
(10) Abu Mazen, cited by PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, July 29, 2000;
http://www.nad-plo.org/speeches/abumazen3.html
(11) See PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, Camp David summit.
http://www.nad-plo.org/david/david.html
(12) Robert Malley and Hussein Agha; "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors"; op. cit., p.62
(13) Interview of Shlomo Ben Ami by Ari Shavit, Ha'aretz, September 13, 2001;
Part 1 at: http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=74353; Part 2 at: http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=74352
(14) See http://www.fmep.org/images/maps/map0007_2.jpg
(15) Interview of Shlomo Ben Ami by Ari Shavit, Ha'aretz, September 13, 2001;
Part 1; op. cit.
(16) Benny Morris, "Camp David and After: An Exchange. 1. An Interview with Ehud Barak." The New York Review, June 13, 2002, p.44
(17) Malley and Agha acknowledge this point indirectly when they wrote: "Even so, it is hard to state with confidence how far Barak was actually prepared to go." See their "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors"; op. cit., p. 62
(18) Ari Shavit, Interview with Shlomo Ben-Ami, Ha'aretz, September 13, 2001
(19) Benny Morris, "Camp David And After: An Exchange. 1. An Interview With Ehud Barak", The New York Review, June 13, 2002, p.42
(20) Interview of President Clinton by Israeli Television, July 27, 2000. http://www.state.gov/www/regions/nea/000727_clinton_tv.html
(21) For a discussion, see Robert Malley and Hussein Agha; "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors"; op. cit., p. 59