There are times when the best description of Arab-Palestinian'ism is ''failure''
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Twenty years ago this month, US President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to a peace summit at Camp David, in a bold effort to resolve one of the longest-running conflicts of modern times. Though no agreement was reached, the summit, in which I participated, wasn’t a failure: the framework it produced became the foundation upon which Clinton built his ‘peace parameters’—the most equitable and realistic rendition of a two-state solution ever created. Why did nothing come of them?
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But the Palestinians also resisted the parameters, arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to constrain future negotiations. During a last-ditch attempt to clinch an agreement in Taba, Egypt, Abu Ala, the chief Palestinian negotiator, admitted to us that Arafat was no longer interested in the offer. That was a devastating mistake, the consequences of which Palestinians suffer every day.
Arafat’s decision can be explained less by a particular demand or concession than by the overarching, delusional and self-defeating worldview to which many Palestinians cling. As the late Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote in a 2001 article, the Palestinians suffer from ‘an innate refusal to surrender to the logic of things, a belief that a mysterious higher power will always come to their rescue, as if the laws of history did not apply to them’.
A doomed Israeli–Palestinian peace | The Strategist
Twenty years ago this month, US President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to a peace summit at Camp David, in a bold effort to resolve ...
www.aspistrategist.org.au
Twenty years ago this month, US President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to a peace summit at Camp David, in a bold effort to resolve one of the longest-running conflicts of modern times. Though no agreement was reached, the summit, in which I participated, wasn’t a failure: the framework it produced became the foundation upon which Clinton built his ‘peace parameters’—the most equitable and realistic rendition of a two-state solution ever created. Why did nothing come of them?
...
But the Palestinians also resisted the parameters, arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to constrain future negotiations. During a last-ditch attempt to clinch an agreement in Taba, Egypt, Abu Ala, the chief Palestinian negotiator, admitted to us that Arafat was no longer interested in the offer. That was a devastating mistake, the consequences of which Palestinians suffer every day.
Arafat’s decision can be explained less by a particular demand or concession than by the overarching, delusional and self-defeating worldview to which many Palestinians cling. As the late Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote in a 2001 article, the Palestinians suffer from ‘an innate refusal to surrender to the logic of things, a belief that a mysterious higher power will always come to their rescue, as if the laws of history did not apply to them’.
