Sources
- ”2000 Camp David Summit” Wikipedia. Accessed April 27th, 2024.
- Miller, Aaron David. “Lost in the Woods: A Camp David Retrospective” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. July 13th, 2020.
- Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. Cary: Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2007.
Parties
- Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Barak
- Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat
- United States, President Bill Clinton (mediator)
Location
- Camp David, in the United States
Causes
Facts
- A Summit meeting between Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat.
- This summit failed to produce any actual agreements.
- Israel was offering in 10-25 years 91% of the current West Bank along with a 1% land swap (from the Negev), maintaining an enclave of settlers in Kiryat Arba (near Hebron), linked with a bypass road.
- The West Bank would be split by an Israeli controlled road from Jerusalem to the Dead See, with free passage for Palestinians, with Israeli right to road closure.
- An elevated railroad and highway running through the Negev would link the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
- Airspace would still be controlled exclusively by Israel.
- US claim about what was offered - http://www.mideastweb.org/lastmaps.htm
- Palestinians claim they were offered Bantustans, a loaded word coming from South African apartheid divisions.
- East Jerusalem was the center-focus for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
- Israel refuses the broad Right of Return for Palestinian peoples to the country of Israel, but proposes instead a maximum of 100,000 refugees be allowed to return to Israel on the basis of humanitarian consideration or family reunification, while also contributing to a $30b fund to compensate Palestinian refugees for property lost.
- Israel wanted to push for an aggressive security arrangement that would heavily favor Israeli security concerns, including access to all Palestinian airspace, troop presence on the Jordanian border, the demilitarization of Palestine, and Israeli radar installations within Palestine.
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 248)
‘And as to the swaps,’ he said to the President, ‘I trust you and I accept your judgement. You decide.’ Arafat later reversed his position, but this moment in the summit clearly reflected his view of the peace process as not being about a mundane bargaining over real estate. Land mattered to him far less than emotional, legendary and Islamic values such as Jerusalem, the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif for the Muslims), and the core of the Palestinian national ethos, namely refugees.
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 250)
‘Instead of repeatedly rejecting the Israelis’ proposals, make counter proposals,’ Clinton would tell the Palestinians at Camp David. Rob Malley, in the analysis of the summit he co-authored with Hussein Agha, repeated this remark: ‘Indeed, the Palestinians’ principal failing is that from the beginning of the Camp David summit onward they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own.’
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 251)
To my remark in the speech that Israel had come to the limits of her capacity for compromise with the Palestinians, the ambassador rightly and cunningly responded, ‘Why should we believe you when everybody remembers that you started your voyage into the Palestinian question with Golda Meir denying that a Palestinian people existed at all, and at Camp David you agreed to give away the bulk of the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state and divide Jerusalem? These certainly cannot be the outer limits of your concessions.’
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 252)
We made enormous progress at the secret channel in Stockholm between Abu-Ala and Hassan Asfour on the Palestinian side and myself and Gilead Sher on the Israeli side. But the exposure of the channel by the Palestinians themselves–as part of an internal political struggle within the Palestinian camp, Abu-Mazen’s people leaked the talks to Al-Hayat–destroyed any possibility for further progress. The channel stopped because it was not producing any longer. Exposed by his political rivals back home, who leaked imaginary details about his ‘irresponsible’ concessions, Abu-Ala quickly retreated to the safety of old, unyielding positions.
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 256)
America was not there, as some Palestinians might have thought, just to deliver Israel to a passive and rejectionist Arab side that was unwilling to engage in a serious negotiating process, nor would Israel allow herself to be delivered unconditionally. By failing to advance clear proposals and counter-proposals, that is, by refusing to engage in a real negotiating dynamic, the Palestinians deprived the Americans of the vital tools they needed to be able to put pressure on the Israelis. The President and his team could never ascertain whether the Palestinians were at all serious and genuine in their commitment to reach a settlement. As the President repeatedly told Arafat, he was not expecting him to agree to US or Israeli proposals, but he was counting on him to offer something, to produce a new idea that he could take back to Barak in order to convince him to make more concessions. ‘I need something to tell him,’ he implored. ‘So far I have nothing.’ … To no avail. Arafat would not budge from his position and would not agree to a qualified Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount–he was offered in the site a ‘sovereign custodianship’ that was free of any Israeli interference–or to anything that was not the unequivocal partition of the city. He was offered a capital in Arab Jerusalem (not just Abu-Dis, as all kinds of non-official back channels had suggested in the past) that would include some Palestinian quarters under full Palestinian sovereignty and the others under a more qualified Palestinian sovereignty. Arafat demanded the sovereignty of three-quarters of the Old City and rejected out of hand any bridging ideas such as a special regime, which I had the opportunity to defend throughout the summit, or the President’s proposal, accepted by the Israelis, to divide the holy basin into two equal parts, the Christian and Muslim quarters to the Palestinians and the Jewish and Armenian quarters to the Israelis.
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 262)
‘I don’t even know what is exactly my mandate in these negotiations,’ the Israelis were once told by Saab Erakat, the Palestinian chief negotiator at the summit.
Outcome
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 246)
Addressing the Camp David summit, as some commentators do, separately from the entire negotiating process–that is, independently of the negotiations that were conducted for many subsequent months in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Bolling air base on the outskirts of the American capital, where on 23 December 2000 President Clinton presented his final parameters for a settlement, and finally Taba–distorts, of course, the picture as to what exactly were the proposals that Arafat refused to accept. To his last day, the Palestinian leader was still reluctant to acknowledge the real nature of the deal he was offered, and he obstinately kept repeating that he had no option but to reject the ridiculous map of enclaves and ‘Bantustans’ that was presented to him by an American–Israeli conspiracy.
- Negotiations continued through the Clinton Parameters, though no final agreement was reached, despite both sides claiming they were closer than they ever had been after the Taba negotiations in January of 2001.
- Responsibility for failure
- The Americans, including Clinton and several observers, claim that the failure of the talks hinged on Arafat and the Palestinians refusal to give up on future negotiations relating to the Right of Return, which the Americans believed would ultimately result in the Palestinians fighting for a return to a one state solution in Historic Palestine.
- A Clinton special advisor complains that Israel was not willing to concede a reasonable amount to the Palestinians, considering how much they were already willing to give up, including Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and trading favorable parts of the West Bank to Israel.
- Some argue that the lack of religious consideration hindered discussion around Jerusalem.
- Finkelstein argues that Israel really was giving up nothing at all that made the Palestinian concessions worth considering.
- Polling data around the time from Palestinians and their attitude towards Israel.
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 249)
Refugeeism, Jerusalem and Islamic values more than land and real estate were the insurmountable obstacles that prevented an agreement at Camp David and later at Taba. … Akram Hania, one of Arafat’s closest men at Camp David, put it this way: ‘At Camp David we intended to make the Israelis face the tribunal of history, face the victims of their crime and sin. Israel wanted to silence for ever the voice of the witnesses to the crime and erase the proof of the Naqbah.’
Ben-Ami, Shlomo. Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. (p. 260)
Nabil Amr, a minister in Arafat’s Cabinet, was courageous enough to spell out his criticism in an article in Al-Hayat-el-Jadida, a mouthpiece of the Palestinian Authority, two years into the Al-Aqsa Intifada, that is, when it was becoming tragically clear that Arafat’s abandonment of the political path had brought about the destruction of the very backbone of Palestinian society: Didn’t we dance when we heard of the failure of the Camp David talks? Didn’t we destroy the pictures of President Clinton who so boldly presented us with proposals for a Palestinian state with border modifications? We are not being honest, for today, after two years of bloodshed we ask exactly that which we then rejected. … How many times did we agree to compromises, which we later rejected in order to miss them later on? And we were never willing to draw the lessons from our behaviour. … And then, when the solution was no longer available, we travelled the world in order to plead with the international community for what we had just rejected. But then we learnt the hard way that in the span of time between our rejection and our acceptance the world has changed and left us behind. … We clearly failed to rise up to the challenge of history.