In January 2001, just three days before he was about to leave office, former president Bill Clinton received a farewell phone call from the then chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat. Arafat flattered “you are a great man.” Clinton did not mince his words, “The he-- I am. I am a colossal failure, and you made me one.”
Clinton was referring to the Camp David peace talks of July 2000 held under his administration’s auspices, and the subsequent Clinton Parameters in which he expended so much effort, energy, and time. King Abdullah II of Jordan has written that “Prime Minister Ehud Barak showed great courage” at Camp David in terms of the steps he was prepared to take to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and put a finality to the respective claims.
The problem was that this was never reciprocated on the Palestinian side; the only person who could take things forward, Arafat, failed to cross the Rubicon from leading a national movement to statesmanship. Arafat undermined his own negotiators’ positions at Camp David, with his consistent no to any of the American proposals put to him – not even willing to discuss them as a basis for negotiations. As Clinton told him at the time, Arafat was making an error on the scale of 1947 when the Palestinians had rejected the partition plan and the creation of an Arab state next to a Jewish one.
The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
