Sparks Fly in U.S. Over Middle East Blame Game
By Jonathan Wright
Tuesday August 7 11:54 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a battle for U.S. policy in the Middle East, the sparks are flying between those who blame Palestinian President Yasser Arafat for the collapse of last year's Camp David summit and those who argue that Israel and the United States contributed to the failure.
At the center of the bitter debate is Robert Malley, former special adviser to U.S. President Bill Clinton and a participant in the fateful meeting between Clinton, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in Maryland in July 2000.
Malley has challenged the conventional account, enshrined in hundreds of opinion pieces over the past year in the overwhelming pro-Israeli mainstream U.S. press, that Barak offered Arafat the best deal he will ever receive and that the Palestinians wantonly threw away the opportunity.
Deborah Sontag, Jerusalem correspondent of The New York Times, also chipped away at the standard U.S. version with a 8,000-word review on July 26 of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the last six months of Clinton's presidency.
The response from Israel's supporters in the United States has been personal and vitriolic.
Robert Satloff, executive director of the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy, accused Sontag of ''lazy reporting, questionable shading and indifference to the basic fact that the Palestinian decision to wed diplomacy with violence ... damned the search for peace.''
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, said the challenge was ``revisionist history of the worst kind, revisionist history at the expense of the Jews.''
ENORMOUS STAKES
``It makes a mockery of the truth ... I would assume that Malley's motives are to harm Israel's reputation and put even more international pressure on Israel to make unilateral concessions,'' he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Malley says he wanted to set the record straight and avoid constraints on future U.S. policy.
But why, at a time when Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other in alarming numbers and peace talks are off the table, should academics and lobbyists be arguing about something that happened more than a year ago?
``The stakes are enormous,'' said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland.
``It's an incredibly important debate for when the violence is over and people begin to discuss where we go from here,'' added Jon Alterman of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
``It has to do with key processes on the Palestinian side, the kind of cooperation that can be expected,'' he said.
Malley, writing in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, said the conventional U.S. analysis of Camp David was shallow and dangerous for U.S. policy.
``It ignores history, the dynamics of the negotiations and the relationships among the three parties,'' he said.
``Worse, it acts as a harmful constraint on American policy by offering up a single, convenient culprit -- Arafat -- rather than a more nuanced and realistic analysis,'' he added.
The 8,000-word article (www.nybooks.com/articles/14380), written jointly with Palestinian academic Hussein Agha, argues that Clinton and Barak share much of the blame for the failure of the Camp David summit, at which Clinton tried to mediate a permanent settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
His most surprising conclusion is that Barak, who negotiated solely through the Americans, never really made any offer at all during the 15-day summit.
CLINTON RENEGED ON PROMISES
``Strictly speaking, there never was an Israeli offer. Determined to preserve Israel's position in the event of failure, and resolved not to let the Palestinians take advantage of one-sided compromises, the Israelis always stopped one, if not several, steps short of a proposal,'' he said.
Malley, as the Palestinians have done, also faults Clinton for reneging on promises he made during summit preparations.
Clinton volunteered, for example, a commitment that the United States would remain neutral if the summit failed.
But within days of the end, apparently to help Barak with his domestic political problems, Clinton told Israel Television that Barak had been ``more courageous and more creative''.
Telhami, himself a pioneer in challenging the conventional version of events, said some of the hostile reaction to Malley and Sontag came from columnists whose armchair analyzes look less credible as history starts to be written.
``Some of these columnists have written a dozen articles which directly blame Arafat. They have painted themselves into a corner and it's very hard to go back,'' he said.
``I believe there will be a continuing debate and I just wish it wasn't personalized. That's very troubling,'' he added.
Alterman said the debate was an adjunct to conflicts over the future of policy, such as that between Congress and the State Department. Members of Congress tend to join in blaming Arafat for all the violence of the past 10 months.
But Israel's supporters, sticking firmly to their narrative, dismiss the debate as irrelevant or misguided.
``Even before Camp David Yasser Arafat showed he had no interest in peace. ... He was offered large amounts of land and parts of Jerusalem and I find almost amusing the argument that it was done too abruptly, that he wasn't ready for it. People are forgetting the facts,'' said Morton Klein.
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