2000 Camp David Summit - Reasons For Impasse

Reasons For Impasse

Both sides blamed the other for the failure of the talks: the Palestinians claiming they were offered little more than cantons of territory, and the Israelis claiming that they could not reasonably offer more territory.

According to The Continuum Political Encyclopedia of the Middle East, "most of the criticism for failure was leveled at Arafat". Ehud Barak stated that he offered Arafat an eventual 91% of the West Bank, and all of the Gaza Strip, with some Palestinian control over Eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods as a capital of the new Palestinian state; in addition, all refugees could apply for compensation of property from an international fund to which Israel would contribute along with other countries. The Palestinians wanted the immediate withdrawal of the Israelis from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and only subsequently the Palestinian authority would dismantle the Palestinian terror organizations. The Israeli response as stated by Shlomo Ben-Ami, then Israel's Minister of Foreign Relations who participated in the talks, was "we can't accept the demand for a return to the borders of June 1967 as a pre-condition for the negotiation."

Clinton blamed Arafat after the failure of the talks, stating, "I regret that in 2000 Arafat missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being and pray for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace." The failure to come to an agreement was widely attributed to Yasser Arafat, as he walked away from the table without making a concrete counter-offer and because Arafat did little to quell the series of Palestinian riots that began shortly after the summit. Arafat was also accused of scuttling the talks by Nabil Amr, a former minister in the Palestinian Authority.

Although in U.S. media Barak's offer was often portrayed as being "generous," the Israeli group Gush Shalom stated that "the offer is a pretense of generosity for the benefit of the media", and included detailed maps of what the offer specifically entailed. Among Gush Shalom's concerns with Barak's offer were Barak's demand to annex large settlement blocs (9% of the West Bank) with no Israeli land given to a proposed Palestinian state in return, the lack of contiguity that the settlement blocs would cause for a Palestinian state, lack of trust in the commitment and/or ability of the Israeli government to evacuate the thousands of non-bloc Israeli settlers in the 15-year timeline, limited sovereignty for Palestinians in Jerusalem (the historically important Arab neighborhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan,and At-Tur would remain under Israeli sovereignty, while Palestinians would only have sovereignty over the outer Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem), the lack of Palestinian sovereignty over holy sites in Jerusalem (Palestinians would only receive "administrative control" over their holy sites, and the Old City's Muslim and Christian Quarters, however Israel was to receive complete sovereignty over Jewish holy sites, and the Old City's Jewish and Armenian Quarters).

Two books published in 2004 placed the blame for the failure of the summit on Arafat. They were The Missing Peace by longtime US Middle East envoy Dennis Ross and My Life by Clinton. Clinton wrote that Arafat once complimented Clinton by telling him, "You are a great man." Clinton responded, "I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you made me one." During a lecture in Australia, Ross suggested that the reason for the failure was Arafat's unwillingness to sign a final deal with Israel that would close the door on any of the Palestinians' maximum demands, particularly the right of return. Ross claimed that what Arafat really wanted was "a one-state solution. Not independent, adjacent Israeli and Palestinian states, but a single Arab state encompassing all of Historic Palestine".

Clayton Swisher wrote a rebuttal to Clinton and Ross's accounts about the causes for the breakdown of the Camp David Summit in his 2004 book, The Truth About Camp David. Swisher, the Director of Programs at the Middle East Institute, concluded that the Israelis and the Americans were at least as guilty as the Palestinians for the collapse. M.J. Rosenberg praised the book: "Clayton Swisher's 'The Truth About Camp David,' based on interviews with Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross and Miller himself provides a comprehensive and acute account – the best we're likely to see – on the Miller describes."

Norman Finkelstein published an article in the winter 2007 issue of Journal of Palestine Studies, excerpting from his longer essay called Subordinating Palestinian Rights to Israeli "Needs". The abstract for the article states: "In particular, it examines the assumptions informing Ross’s account of what happened during the negotiations and why, and the distortions that spring from these assumptions. Judged from the perspective of Palestinians’ and Israelis’ respective rights under international law, all the concessions at Camp David came from the Palestinian side, none from the Israeli side."

Alan Dershowitz, an Israel advocate and a law professor at Harvard University, said that the failure of the negotiations was due to "the refusal of the Palestinians and Arafat to give up the right of return. That was the sticking point. It wasn't Jerusalem. It wasn't borders. It was the right of return." He claimed that President Clinton told this to him "directly and personally."

In 2006, Shlomo Ben-Ami stated on Democracy Now! that "Camp David was not the missed opportunity for the Palestinians, and if I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well. This is something I put in the book. But Taba is the problem. The Clinton parameters are the problem" referring to his 2001 book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. .

In his book, The Oslo Syndrome, Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry and historian Kenneth Levin summarized the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit in this manner: "espite the dimensions of the Israeli offer and intense pressure from President Clinton, Arafat demurred. He apparently was indeed unwilling, no matter what the Israeli concessions, to sign an agreement that declared itself final and forswore any further Palestinian claims." Levin argues that both the Israelis and the Americans were naive in expecting that Arafat would agree to give up the idea of a literal "right of return" for all Palestinians into Israel proper no matter how many 1948 refugees or how much monetary compensation Israel offered to allow.

Berkeley political science professor Ron Hassner has argued that it was the failure of participants at the negotiations to include religious leaders in the process or even consult with religious experts prior to the negotiations, that led to the collapse of the negotiations over the subject of Jerusalem. "Both parties seem to have assumed that the religious dimensions of the dispute could be ignored. As a result, neither party had prepared seriously for the possibility that the Temple Mount issue would come to stand at the heart of the negotiations." Political Scientist Menahem Klein, who advised the Israeli government during the negotiations, confirmed that "The professional back channels did not sufficiently treat Jerusalem as a religious city... It was easier to conduct discussions about preservation of historical structures in the old city than to discuss the link between the political sanctity and the religious sanctity at the historical and religious heart of the city."

According to a newspaper report of a lecture given by one of the leaders of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, at the Islamic University in Gaza City, when Yasser Arafat realized that peace talks with Israel weren’t going anywhere, he ordered Hamas to launch terror attacks against Israel. Zahar did not specify when and how Arafat instructed Hamas to launch the “military operations”. However, it is believed that the reference is to Arafat’s response to the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000.