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

To: Ilaine who wrote (25722)	4/16/2002 11:59:10 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

HUME: Now, they also say that the offer would have divided Palestinian territory into four separate cantons and entirely surrounded and therefore controlled by Israel. ROSS: Untrue, completely untrue. There were going to get a net 97 percent of the territory. In the West Bank, it would have been 95 percent of the West Bank. There was going to be a swap that would have added onto the size of Gaza. They were going to have their own border with Jordan. There was not going to be an Israeli presence there. There were not going to be cantons. There were not going to be divisions. They were getting contiguous territory in the West Bank. When they say that, they're referring to a map the Israelis showed to them first in May, and a map the Israelis presented at Camp David in July. That was not what the United States presented in December. HUME: Which Barak accepted? ROSS: Which Barak accepted. HUME: So this idea that there was a nine-to-one land swap in Israel's favor is bogus? ROSS: That's bogus. That is what Camp David was. It's not what the Clinton ideas were. When you hear this, this is part of the mythology. They have never yet to this day honestly presented to their own public what it is that was presented because when you hear it as we just described it, you say it looks like a pretty good deal. CB, re: I simply don't see a peaceful resolution without a separate, independent Palestinian state with contiguous bordersYou have often argued that this would not be sufficient, but the problem with that is that you admit that the Israelis have multiple reasons for not wanting to give the above solution to the Palestinians. Now either Dennis Ross (quoted above) is lying through his teeth, or the Palestininians have already been offered, and refused, a separate, independent state with contiguous borders. I believe that Dennis Ross is not lying through his teeth, which is why I believe that the offer of an independent state on contiguous territory would not be sufficient. Not that ANY Israeli (Yossi Beilin excepted) would now repeat the offer to Yasser Arafat. I read an interesting column the other night in the Gulf News, which I can try to dig up if you're interested. It was by a Syrian, who after sighing over the attractiveness of the proper, romantic course -- a war of extermination on Israel -- ruefully admitted that the Arabs couldn't win. So he predicted that Ariel Sharon intended to crush the Palestinians and then impose on them the ultimate degradation, the final humiliation: he intended to make them take the Taba offer. See the point? An independent, contiguous state, with billions of dollars in reparations and limited return of refugees = the ultimate humiliation. I believe this Syrian commentator was expressing the common Arab attitude.