Clinton to Arafat - It's all your fault
Former US president Bill Clinton has revealed that he told Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat last January that he, Clinton, was, "a colossal failure," and that Arafat was to blame.
Reporting for Newsweek’s Internet edition, Michael Hirsh said that Clinton made the surprisingly blunt remarks at a party at former US ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke's Manhattan apartment last Tuesday evening.
Clinton told his fellow guests about a phone conversation he had had with Arafat three days before vacating the White House last January, adding that Arafat had telephoned him to say good-bye.
"You are a great man," Arafat told Clinton.
"The hell I am," Clinton said he replied, "I'm a colossal failure, and you made me one."
Clinton told fellow party-goers that he had warned Arafat that by turning down the generous peace deal that former prime minister Ehud Barak had offered him at the July 2000 Camp David summit, he was guaranteeing the election of Ariel Sharon, Israel's current prime minister.
Clinton described Arafat as an aging leader who relishes his own sense of victimhood and seems incapable of making a final peace deal. "He could only get to step five, and he needed to get to step ten," Clinton said.
The ex-president told his fellow guests that, "I'm just sorry I blew this Middle East thing, but I don’t know what else I could have done."
Clinton revealed that the issue that ultimately torpedoed the Camp David summit was not the division of Jerusalem, but rather Arafat’s insistent demand that large numbers of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars be allowed to be return to Israel even though all concerned knew that the numbers were unacceptable to Israel.
Clinton said that he had sharply contradicted Arafat when the latter suggested that the remains of the First and Second Temples might not be under Al-Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. "I know it’s there," the ex-president said he had told Arafat.
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