Who should know better than Dennis Ross and Anthony Zinni? Ross, the former special American Ambassador to the Middle East under then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, was heavily and deeply involved in the almost-"successful" negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat in Camp David in 2000. In a speech earlier this month at Georgetown University, Ross accused Arafat of both wrecking the peace process and lying about it. Ross then concluded that the PA has specific goals: to ensure that Israel ceases existing as a Jewish state.
Excerpts from Ross' talk (as provided by AIPAC's Near East Report):
"On the Palestinian track, we put on the [Camp David] table ideas that were extremely far-reaching, which at the time the Israeli Prime Minister [Ehud Barak] was prepared to accept, which Chairman [Yasser] Arafat was not prepared to accept.
"If the ideas that were put on the table were so bad, why did Chairman Arafat totally lie about them? … Why did he say, when he was offered 97% of the territory, that he was never even offered 90%, and he was only offered these little cantons, these Palestinian islands in the Israeli sea, which was in fact not the case? Why did he say, when he was offered Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of the [PA] state, that he was never offered Arab East Jerusalem? Why did he say, when he was offered in fact his own borders with Jordan and Egypt and the Israelis - the IDF would be out of the Jordan Valley - why did he say that he was never going to be permitted to have his own borders?…
"Israelis want… to know that Israel is going to be accepted as a Jewish state, because the one thing that… the violence and the rejection of the Clinton ideas did, is convince the Israeli public that the Palestinians were not engaging in a tactic; this [was their] strategy - [the Palestinians] basically want[ed] to do away with Israel.
"The [PA] insistence on the right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel when you’re talking about a two-state solution [indicated that] this was about making sure that Israel became a bi-national state, no longer a Jewish state… On September 9, 1993, Arafat, in a letter to Rabin which made it possible to engage in mutual recognition, renounced violence. But the truth is, he never gave it up. So, it’s got to be more than just a statement about giving it up and it’s got to be more than just arrests."
Zinni, too, has said explicitly that the PA Arabs were to blame for the collapse of his three peace missions in 2001-2002. AIPAC reports that on Feb. 6, Zinni said the first mission was ruined by a “series of maybe eight [Palestinian] attacks,” and the second mission by the PLO's Karine-A arms ship, which Israel captured before it could do harm.
During the third mission, Zinni said, he presented his own “bridging proposals,” regarding which the Israelis originally “had something like 13 objections,” but then waived them all. The PA started with “maybe three” objections, and then left “one, maybe two,” pending. Then came "the Passover massacre [when Palestinian terrorists killed 29 Israelis in Netanya], which then had the effects of 9/11, the only thing I could compare it to, and everything broke down.”
Excerpts from Ross' talk (as provided by AIPAC's Near East Report):
"On the Palestinian track, we put on the [Camp David] table ideas that were extremely far-reaching, which at the time the Israeli Prime Minister [Ehud Barak] was prepared to accept, which Chairman [Yasser] Arafat was not prepared to accept.
"If the ideas that were put on the table were so bad, why did Chairman Arafat totally lie about them? … Why did he say, when he was offered 97% of the territory, that he was never even offered 90%, and he was only offered these little cantons, these Palestinian islands in the Israeli sea, which was in fact not the case? Why did he say, when he was offered Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of the [PA] state, that he was never offered Arab East Jerusalem? Why did he say, when he was offered in fact his own borders with Jordan and Egypt and the Israelis - the IDF would be out of the Jordan Valley - why did he say that he was never going to be permitted to have his own borders?…
"Israelis want… to know that Israel is going to be accepted as a Jewish state, because the one thing that… the violence and the rejection of the Clinton ideas did, is convince the Israeli public that the Palestinians were not engaging in a tactic; this [was their] strategy - [the Palestinians] basically want[ed] to do away with Israel.
"The [PA] insistence on the right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel when you’re talking about a two-state solution [indicated that] this was about making sure that Israel became a bi-national state, no longer a Jewish state… On September 9, 1993, Arafat, in a letter to Rabin which made it possible to engage in mutual recognition, renounced violence. But the truth is, he never gave it up. So, it’s got to be more than just a statement about giving it up and it’s got to be more than just arrests."
Zinni, too, has said explicitly that the PA Arabs were to blame for the collapse of his three peace missions in 2001-2002. AIPAC reports that on Feb. 6, Zinni said the first mission was ruined by a “series of maybe eight [Palestinian] attacks,” and the second mission by the PLO's Karine-A arms ship, which Israel captured before it could do harm.
During the third mission, Zinni said, he presented his own “bridging proposals,” regarding which the Israelis originally “had something like 13 objections,” but then waived them all. The PA started with “maybe three” objections, and then left “one, maybe two,” pending. Then came "the Passover massacre [when Palestinian terrorists killed 29 Israelis in Netanya], which then had the effects of 9/11, the only thing I could compare it to, and everything broke down.”