Barak Offered 100% of Yesha. (July 26/01)
Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a 100% withdrawal from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Former Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami confirmed this two days ago in a closed forum in Jerusalem.
Arutz-7's Ariel Kahane reports that Ben-Ami disclosed that during the Camp David talks, Israel offered a limited withdrawal that would leave only three Jewish settlement blocs in place. When
Arafat rejected this, Barak decided to go "all the way" during the Taba talks, and offered 100% of Judea and Samaria, including the division of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount - except for the
Holy of Holies. Ben-Ami said that when even this offer was rejected, he became convinced that there is no chance for a peace agreement between the sides, and that the only arrangement
possible would be one forced on them by the international community.

Palestinian violence did not explode because Israel refused to give up the settlements. It exploded because Israel agreed to do so.
Moral Compromise: Why There is No Peace in Palestine
By Jeff Jacoby (July 17, 2001)

[CAPITALISMMAGAZINE.COM] The Palestinians, you may have noticed, have changed their tune. When the current orgy of violence against Israelis began last fall, the explanation out of Gaza City
-- faithfully echoed by most of the Western media -- was that it was all Ariel Sharon's fault. His visit to the Temple Mount on September 28, it was said, outraged and infuriated Palestinians. That,
apparently, was why they took to hurling rocks, firing guns, demolishing Jewish shrines, lynching Israeli drivers, and bombing children taking the bus to school.
There were always a few problems with this explanation, such as the fact that the violence began before Sharon's visit. But it is especially untenable now: Even Palestinians admit it isn't true.

"Whoever thinks that the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong," Imad al-Faluji, the Palestinian minister of communications, declared in March.
"This Intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat's return from the Camp David negotiations."

So the party line has been updated. The real cause of the violence, Palestinians now claim, is the growth of Israeli communities in Gaza and the West Bank.

"A cessation of settlement activities is part of a cessation of violence," says Faisal Husseini, a prominent Palestinian official. Jibril Rajoub, one of Arafat's top militiamen, seconds the motion.
"Everybody should know," he announced, "that those settlements are the cancer and the reason at all times for tension."

This excuse, too, has found a ready reception in the media -- especially since the international fact-finding committee headed by George Mitchell recommended, as a "confidence-building
measure," that Israel declare a moratorium on expanding the settlements. When Secretary of State Colin Powell briefed the press on the Mitchell Committee report, he was repeatedly asked what
Washington would do to compel Israel to freeze its settlements. No reporter seemed to wonder what Washington would do to compel Arafat to stop his murderous offensive.

It hasn't taken long for the Palestinian line -- Jewish settlements justify Arab violence -- to become conventional wisdom. "Stop those settlements," commands The Economist in its leading article
this week; it asserts that Jewish neighborhoods in the territories "negate all chance of Palestinian-Israeli peaceful coexistence." The Chicago Tribune editorializes: "There is little incentive for the
Palestinians to return to the table without an Israeli freeze on settlements."

Nonsense.

Eight months ago, Israel offered not only to freeze its settlements but to dismantle most of them and pull out of 98 percent of the territories altogether. Ehud Barak laid on the negotiating table
nearly everything the Palestinians had demanded: all of Gaza and the West Bank, a sovereign state, power-sharing in Jerusalem, control of the Temple Mount. Arafat responded by kicking the
table over and starting a war.

In other words, Palestinian violence did not explode because Israel refused to give up the settlements. It exploded because Israel agreed to do so.

The Arab rocks, bullets, Molotov cocktails, and suicide bombs of the past eight months are no different from the Arab rocks, bullets, Molotov cocktails, and suicide bombs of the past eight years --
the years of the Oslo "peace" process. The more Israel has agreed to give, the more enraged and uncompromising the Palestinian reaction has been. A paradox? Only to those who have never
mastered the fundamental lesson of Appeasement 101: Give a dictator the sacrifice he demands and you inflame his appetite for more.

To insist that Israel "stop those settlements" in exchange for an end to Arab violence is to insist that Oslo be upended. The Israeli-Palestinian accords have never barred Israel from building or
expanding settlements in the territories; the ultimate fate of those communities has always been one of the "permanent status" issues to be decided at the end of the process.

By contrast, the starting point of the peace process -- the foundation on which it was built -- was that Palestinian violence had ended. "The PLO commits itself ... to a peaceful resolution of the
conflict between the two sides," reads the document that Arafat signed on September 9, 1993, "and declares that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through
negotiations.... *The PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence*."

That was the promise that earned Arafat his invitation to the White House, his handshake from Rabin, his Nobel peace prize. That was the promise in exchange for which Israel gave Arafat land
and power, money and weapons, diplomatic recognition and the status of a peace partner. The Palestinians did not retain the right to resort to rocks and bullets and bombs whenever they find it
useful. They did not promise to end the violence only if Israel agreed to their every demand. They promised to end the violence for good.

If that promise was a lie, the entire peace process is a lie. Is it? Look at the Middle East and draw your own conclusion.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.




http://aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/Yes3_Blame_Arafat.asp
by: Gary Rosenblatt
Courtesy of The Jewish Week.

The new revisionist view of last summer's Camp David Mideast summit - perhaps best described as a "don't blame Arafat" campaign - is upon us with a vengeance, literally. But the logic of the
Arab public relations effort is deeply flawed, the "facts" don't hold up and the attempt to vindicate the Palestinian leadership at the expense of Israeli officials is morally and historically false.

One need not deconstruct the thousands of words in Deborah Sontag's analysis in The New York Times ("Quest For Mideast Peace: How and Why It Failed; Many Now Agree That All the Parties, Not
Just Arafat Were to Blame," July 26) to see that the front-page post-mortem makes the same fatal mistake as the Mitchell Report (on the cause of the renewed intifada), the new touchstone of
Mideast peace efforts. Both accounts try so hard to be fair to all parties that they equalize unequal truths, invoke symmetry when there is none, and refuse to cast proportional blame. The result is
not only to make a mockery of reality but to distort history in dangerous ways.

The Sontag report and a Times editorial three days later ("Looking Back At Camp David"), which asserts the summit "fell short because of insufficient preparation and a lack of trust and chemistry
between the two leaders," are partial truths that add up to a misleading conclusion.

It may well be that Ehud Barak was less than congenial in dealing with Yasir Arafat or that the U.S. pressured the Palestinian leader to come to the summit, but those matters hardly compare to the
fact that Arafat rejected Barak's generous offer to create a Palestinian state on more than 90 percent of the contested land, including Jerusalem. What is more, even Sontag acknowledges that the
Palestinians never wavered from their refusal to accept any territorial compromise and made no counter offers. (As Daily News columnist Zev Chafets put it this week, "in other words, all Israel
needed to do to save the summit, and make the peace, was to give the Palestinians 100 percent of what they wanted - and then drop dead.")

What Sontag does not mention is that the Palestinians violated the most basic premise of the Oslo accords from Day One, eight years ago, by resorting to violence after pledging to solve all
differences through negotiations. That, and praising the Palestinian killers, as well as ignoring Oslo's insistence on ending vicious anti-Semitism in textbooks, the media and public talks, are not
mentioned in the analysis of what doomed the peace effort.

Perhaps most disturbing, the Times report lends credence to the notion that the renewed intifada began last fall after Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount; the Mitchell Report disputes this and
a number of high-ranking Palestinian officials have since acknowledged that the violence was planned, and indeed had begun, before the visit.

The Sontag "special report," which never supports its contention that Arafat did not turn down 97 percent of the West Bank, is being viewed by some in the context of a new attempt on the part of
the Palestinian camp to counter what it calls "the myth" of Camp David.

Until recently, the Palestinians did not aggressively challenge the American and Israeli versions of what sabotaged the summit last July - namely, Yasir Arafat's complete rejection of Barak's
generous offer and the Palestinians' decision to use violence as a means of achieving their goals.

In recent weeks, though, the Palestinians struck back on several fronts. With the help of Edward Abington, a Washington-based former U.S. Mideast diplomat who is now a consultant to the
Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians issued a slick document on Capitol Hill asserting Arafat did not reject Israel's offer, which wasn't all that generous.

Robert Malley, a member of the U.S. Mideast peace team at Camp David, published an op-ed piece in the Times several weeks ago (based on a longer piece in the New York Review of Books),
making similar claims, and noting that Arafat was forced into the summit showdown and was faced with a "take it or leave it" offer from Barak.

Just last week, Ahmed Queria, a top Palestinian negotiator at Camp David known as Abu Ala, gave a rare press conference in which he asserted that the U.S. and Israeli accounts of what
transpired at Camp David are a lie.

But none of these efforts disprove the tragic but overwhelming evidence that the Palestinian goal has been and remains to destroy the Jewish state, not make peace with it. Only that awareness
and acknowledgment accounts for the ongoing effort to deny any Jewish historical ties to the land, the preaching of anti-Semitic hate in the schools and media, the insistence on a law of return
that would make Jews a minority in Israel, the glorification of suicide bombers as martyrs, the persistent call for "the liberation of all of Palestine," and the daily attacks on Israeli civilians.

Maybe diplomats are trained to place hope above reality, but the rest of us cannot ignore the facts. It is true that in the end, the Israelis and Palestinians, fated to live side by side forever, will have
to negotiate in good faith if there is ever to be an end to the violence. But the last 10 months have shown us all too vividly that one side is not ready to bury the sword.

Courtesy of The Jewish Week.

Author Biography
Gary Rosenblatt is the editor of the Jewish Week.

Copyright © 2001 Aish.com