Sunday, December 8, 2024

Clinton, Arafat, and a Century of Rejection

By Seth Mandel

Friday, December 06, 2024

 

Ever since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Bill and Hillary Clinton have been unable to hide their frustration with progressives’ retreat into an alternate reality, one in which Palestinian rejectionism doesn’t exist and Jewish perfidy is the only explanation for the suffering of innocents.

 

At first, Bill Clinton seemed alarmed by progressives’ dishonesty. Now he reveals that they are not pretending to be ignorant; they genuinely don’t know even the very basics of the well-established history.

 

“I tell them what Arafat walked away from” at Camp David in 2000, the former president told New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin as part of a wider interview, “and they, like can’t believe it.”

 

What happened at those negotiations is the denouement of the most public and well-documented peace process of all time. The only way to believe that Yasser Arafat wasn’t entirely responsible for the deal’s failure and the misery that followed is to not know that he was offered everything he wanted and turned it down. Arafat chose to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state so he could launch a violent intifada from which the Palestinian economy has never recovered and which resulted in a splitting of the Palestinian national movement.

 

The line from that day 24 years ago to Oct. 7, 2023, is straight, and it was drawn by Yasser Arafat. This is indisputable—unless, of course, you don’t know that it happened at all. Clinton continued: “I say [to young people] oh yeah, he walked away from a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem, 96 percent of the West Bank, 4 percent of Israel to make up for the 4 percent that … were beyond the borders in the ’67 war. I go through all the stuff that was in the deal, and it’s not on their radar screen. They can’t even imagine that happened.”

 

But here’s the thing: It had happened before Clinton, and it happened again after Clinton.

 

In its 104-year history, Palestinian Arab nationalism has had three leaders. All three were offered a Palestinian state. All three turned it down.

 

Those rejections came without counteroffers. The Palestinian leadership, it turned out, hadn’t actually been negotiating at all—not in the traditional sense, anyway. There are surely millions of Palestinians who desire self-determination and would like very much to have a state of their own. They have yet to be represented by a leader who shares those aspirations.

 

Because it was so public, and because the facts of it are incontestable, the 2000 Camp David summit understandably gets most of the attention. But it shouldn’t get all of it. Palestinian rejection of the offer of statehood is the fundamental fact of the past century of the conflict.

 

Eight years after Arafat’s Camp David rejection, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—Arafat’s successor—together looked over a proposed map of a two-state solution, the culmination of negotiations the two of them (and their top advisers) had been conducting since late 2006. Olmert would not let Abbas take the map into his possession unless he initialed it, essentially putting it into the record. Abbas made a quick trip home and sketched out the map so he could show the rest of his advisers.

 

Abbas drew his map on official PLO Office of the President stationery. We know this because five years later, Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff obtained the map and published it at The Tower. Issacharoff also had Olmert walk him through the details on the record.

 

The map showed the 6.5 percent of the West Bank that would be retained by Israel in the agreement, as well as the 5.8 percent of Israel that would be traded to the Palestinians “in the area of Afula-Tirat Zvi, in the Lachish area, the area close to Har Adar, and in the Judean desert and the Gaza envelope.”

 

On the back of the map, Abbas wrote out the rest of the details. These were, Issacharoff writes: “Safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank via a tunnel, the pentilateral committee to administer the Holy Basin, the removal of the Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley and the absorption of 5,000 Palestinian refugees, 1,000 each year over five years, inside the Green Line.”

 

The Holy Basin includes the Old City of Jerusalem, the City of David, and the Mount of Olives, which would have been overseen by a coalition of five nations: Israel, Palestine, the United States, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. It is notable that Israel’s willingness to cede sovereignty even over Jerusalem had not waned after Arafat turned his back on the offer the first time. As far as the Gaza-to-West Bank tunnel is concerned, Hamas has probably sabotaged that particular detail, which is consistent with the group’s campaign to sabotage any and all paths to peace.

 

What happened to that Israeli offer of a Palestinian state in 2008, the result of 36 in-person meetings at the highest level—which included shared custody of Jerusalem with a majority-Arab panel? Abbas simply walked away from it and never returned.

 

Jerusalem is not a “sticking point” in negotiations. Neither is territorial contiguity, or anything else. The sticking point is that Palestinian leadership will not acquiesce to Palestinian statehood.

 

Long before Arafat blew up the Middle East, the mold was set. The first Palestinian national leader, Hajj Amin al-Husseini—who would later go on to work as Hitler’s Arab propagandist during World War II—also rejected the offer of statehood. In 1917, the British Balfour Declaration called for the creation of a Jewish home within Palestine. Arabs responded, for much of the time with Hajj Amin leading the way, with pogroms and riots. In return, in 1939 the British government tried to surrender entirely.

 

The infamous White Paper was the central document in an act of genuine evil by the British, who proposed that Jews should be forbidden from buying land in most of Palestine and that the era of Jewish immigration, such as it was, was over. Instead, as Hajj Amin’s future buddies in Berlin set to work on their “Jewish Problem,” the British would drastically reduce Jewish immigration in Palestine. Finally, the British proposed a one-state solution to be shared between Palestine’s Jews and Palestine’s Arabs, and after five years, no Jew would be permitted to move to Palestine without explicit Arab approval. It was to be a state for both Jews and Arabs, you see, except Jews were not allowed to own land in it or move there.

 

The offer, then, was for a Palestinian Arab state to do with its Jews at it pleased.

 

Husseini shocked some of the British political class by rejecting this offer anyway, because it gave Jews rights on paper even if the common understanding was that the Jews would be disposed of.

 

If there is a Palestinian national leadership that shares the population’s dream of self-determination, it has yet to make its appearance. Clinton is frustrated that the progressive activist class doesn’t know this. But honestly, even if they did: Would any of them care?

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