Friday, May 10, 2024

The "generous" offers Arafat rejected

None of the offers made to Arafat at Camp David or Taba included real state sovereignty for Palestinians.  They stipulated:

1) There would be no Palestinian military

2) Israel would retain control of the airspace

3) Israel would retain control of a central highway, not useable by Palestinians, that Palestinians would not be allowed to cross.

Nor were they ever offered pre-1967 borders:

1) Palestinians would relinquish 9% of the west bank (6% was offered at Taba) in exchange for 3% unspecified land elsewhere.

2) The 6-9% that Palestinians would give up were of very great importance to Palestinians, including East Jerusalem and the water resources for the entire region.  The 3% that they would get in return would not be of remotely comparable value.

And there would be no Right of Return for Palestinian Refugees.

Finally, by the time of Taba, where the best offers were made, the execution of any deal was highly unlikely.  George W Bush was already President-Elect, and he was already saying he would not honor any deal made by Clinton.  Ehud Barak, who had negotiated all the deals, was also going down, respectively, to Ariel Sharon.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/04/was-arafat-the-problem.html

Also this:

https://mneumann.tripod.com/pundak.pdf


Actually, all the Peace Offers from Israel since 1967 amounted to essentially the same thing: Israel would take enough land and resources so that a viable Palestinian state would be impossible.  Key points always include:

a) Severing East Jerusalem, which would be both the spiritual and economic powerhouse of any Palestinian state, from Palestine.  Israel quickly built settlements surrounding East Jerusalem and counted those as not subject to negotiation.

b) Annexing the Jordan Valley, so the proposed state of Palestine has no borders with a country external to Israel.  In effect, "Palestine" is a reservation inside Israel.  The Jordan Valley is also the agricultural powerhouse of the West Bank, and without it Palestinians would have to rely on Israel for food.

c) Annexing the water supplies

d) Annexing enough of the rest that Palestinians have no meaningful territorial contiguity.  To go from one part of Palestine to another you have to pass through Israel, which might not let you.

The bottom line (as described in link above) is this:

Israel has, and has only ever had for the past 40 years, one plan for the Occupied Territories. The plan is to control permanently the whole West Bank, but to avoid annexing the people who live there (and who would simply vote Zionist control over them out of existence if they ever enjoyed equal rights) by forcing them to leave or - for the really stubborn ones - by confining them in impoverished reservations and calling this "Palestine". 

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