Camp David was a great step backward for the Palestinians aspirations, and they have no one else to blame except their own leadership. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak obviously returned weakened from the Camp David summit, while Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat received a hero’s welcome in Gaza.
Yet the true losers of the failure at Camp David are the Palestinian people.
The unprecedented thing that happened at Camp David was that for the first time an Israeli leader was ready to discuss openly concessions that until now have been taboo.
Imagine what would have happened if Arafat had accepted what Barak appeared ready to offer him. The unimaginable would have happened: Arafat would have returned from Camp David with an Israeli — and U.S. — recognition of a Palestinian state. Palestinian villages around Jerusalem, incorporated within Israeli sovereignty in l967, would have been annexed to a Palestinian state.
Some Palestinian presence would have been acknowledged within the Arab quarters of Jerusalem itself. Some Jewish settlements would have been dismantled, with 80 percent of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza included in the territory of Palestine. And Israel, for the first time, would be ready seriously to consider the return, albeit in a very limited numbers, of l948 refugees.
Such steps would have been totally unprecedented, and it certainly would not have been easy for Barak to ensure a parliamentary majority for such generous proposals. However, it is more than conceivable that a referendum would have supported such a deal in return for a final Palestinian renunciation of any future claims against Israel.
Because Arafat rejected those offers, he came back empty-handed, and no military parades in Gaza or rhetorical flourishes can obliterate the fact that a state has been in Arafat’s reach — and he let this opportunity slip through his hands because of his basic unwillingness to consider serious compromises.
All this evokes echoes of l947, when the Palestinians could have achieved a state of their own, as envisaged in the U.N. decisions, as well as of l977, when they could have joined the late Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s courageous initiative. Palestinian autonomy, and later a state, would have been established decades ago.
Of course, Arafat and the Palestinian leadership have a different calculus: They imagine that by upping the ante toward Sept. 13, they will be able to create a context in which Israel would be ready to make further concessions. Yet this seems to be a serious, if not a tragic, miscalculation.
Does the Palestinian leadership seriously imagine that they will get an Israeli partner more generous than Barak was, at great risk to his political survival, at Camp David? Do they seriously think that, by brinkmanship and the threat of violence, they will make Barak to be the first to blink in such a dangerous game of chicken?
One of the tragedies accompanying the Palestinian-Israeli conflict over decades is a totally unrealistic Palestinian approach to the power realities of the region. Blinded by what they consider their absolutist moral claim to the land, the Palestinians have missed, time and time again, historical windows of opportunity to achieve a place in the sun — albeit in a part, and not the whole, of what they consider as their homeland.
The last few years gave hope to many Israelis, like myself, who began to discern for the first time a measure of realism, pragmatism and a will to live with ambiguities, which led the PLO leadership under Arafat to Oslo. Yet Camp David suggests that the Palestinian leadership may once again slip into utopian dreams.
Moral self-righteousness was never a good guide to historical and political achievements: When Golda Meir said there “are no Palestinians,” she equally condemned the Israeli political discourse to futility and failure.
All Israelis who support, in principle and on moral grounds, the Palestinian claim for self-determination and sovereignty, hoped that Barak’s willingness to go the extra mile would enhance a historical compromise that would finally give the Palestinians the political realm they deserve.
It is a Palestinian tragedy, a tragedy for those Israelis who have always supported the Palestinian claim to statehood — and a great tragedy to the chances of peace and reconciliation in the area.