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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (2528)	10/4/2001 12:08:09 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Well, not exactly. If the Palestinians were to be be left with 20% of the settlements as you claim (which leaves lots of holes in that rotten cheese), they thought that they would at least be given something elsewhere (therefore, the refugees, etc.). But Barak wanted to force the Palestinians with a non viable state (by keeping some/most of the settlements and all the movement restrictions in place) AND not budge an inch on the refugees/Jerusalem issue. In other words, the Palestinians would be allowed to exist in economic misery and not at least get a "win" anywhere else...sorry, no go. All I can say is a) this is not what Shlomo Ben-Ami, in a long recent interview with Haaretz, said that the Israelis offered ('movement restrictions' were never even a point of contention that I heard about, and I was listening carefully) and b) if they didn't like the offer, the Palestinians could have made a counter proposal. They never did. Barak was willing to negotiate a certain number of refugees, but Arafat refused to negotiate. Our government can solve this problem in a second. It will require balls and a political cost but it can bring peace. Whose cost? We could do to Israel what the Western powers did to Czechoslovakia in 1938, is that what you mean? What kind of peace did that bring? Faisal Husseini, the noted Palestinian 'moderate', said in his last interview that Oslo was a Trojan Horse, and the intifada 'the coming down [of the warriors] from the horse'. Does that sound like someone who was just holding out for a better deal? This is not a border dispute. In the 90's, Israel hoped that the Arabs (really, the Palestinians are just a small piece of the problem) had become resigned to the reality of Israel and were ready to deal. Instead, the Arabs just figured that Israel was weak and demoralized and their hopes of destroying Israel rose. This is why we have seen a massive PR campaign to deligitimize Israel as a state, which culminated in Israel-is-the-only-racist-state hate festival we saw in Durban.