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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (18618)	12/26/2002 1:20:03 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Are you suggesting that the main motivation of US policy makers is to gain Kudos? Not at all, but the long-standing American policy of "evenhandedness" in the Mideast certainly had the keeping the good opinion (or at least a not-too-bad opinion) of both sides as one of its goals. Not pissing everybody else off too badly can be quite a self-interested foreign policy goal. Why else are we now mucking about with the UNSC and the UNMOVIC inspectors? You are ignoring Sharon's hostilities, not the least of which is to continue expanding the settlements into Palestinian territories. Sharon was not in office and was considered unelectable at the the time, remember? Ehud Barak was the Prime Minister of Israel, leading a dovish Labor government. I saw a post today on the AMZN thread on why the proposal was not acceptable to Palestinians. Oh yes, the whole Camp David and Taba issue was beaten to death on FADG. The Palestinians say "we were offered four lousy cantons", and the Israelis say, "no you weren't. That was from an earlier map from May 2000. You were offered 95% of the territories plus land swaps to make 100% of the area". You had a running debate, mostly between Malley and Agha on the Palestinian side, and Dennis Ross and Shlomo Ben Ami on the Israeli side about what was offered when. You can look up the articles in New York Review of Books and Foreign Affairs if you're interested. Since I followed reports of the negotiations closely in 2000 and since, I can confirm something that MEMRI has documented -- the Palestinians did not complain about the land offers at Camp David or Taba at the time the negotiations took place. On the contrary, Saeb Erekat said that the two sides were extremely close on land issues; the talks fell apart over Jerusalem and "right of return". It was only when Arafat came back to the West Bank and talked proudly about how "he had turned the table over on Clinton" that the Palestinians slowly came to realize that they had a PR disaster on their hands. So by mid 2001 we started hearing about "cantons", "bantustans", and unacceptable land offers. Not before. And everybody acknowledges that Barak made offers, and Clinton made offers, but Arafat never made any counteroffer.