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| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
And Israel offered them virtually every square foot of that territory under Barak, but Arafat refused. What's your point? Even if I were to concede that the "Palestinians" have been there for the past 4000 years, it still does not take away from the fact that they never had their own state, they were offered their own state, and they refused under Arafat. You can't logically say that they lay claim to the land as a separate country because they lived there in the past as individuals, as scattered pieces of other larger nations - by that logic, we Canadians might as well say that Quebec should be its own country because the province has a historical French ancestry.
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Baraks offer was soooooooo "generous"
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Barak's "generous" offer
What Barak offered at Camp David was a formula for continued Israeli military occupation under the name of a "state."
The proposal would have meant:
no territorial contiguity for the Palestinian state,
no control of its external borders,
limited control of its own water resources, and
no full Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory as required by international law.
In addition, the Barak plan would have :
included continued Israeli military control over large segments of the West Bank, including almost all of the Jordan Valley;
codified the right of Israeli forces to be deployed in the Palestinian state at short notice;
meant the continued presence of fortified Israeli settlements and Jewish-only roads in the heart of the Palestinian state; and
required nearly 4 million Palestinian refugees to relinquish their fundamental human rights in exchange for compensation to be paid not by Israel but by the "international community."
At best, Palestinians could expect a kind of super-autonomy within a "Greater Israel", rather than independence, and the devolution of some municipal functions in the parts of Jerusalem inhabited by Palestinians, under continued overall Israeli control.
See maps showing what the Israeli proposals would have looked like in reality on this site.
John Mearsheimer, professor in the department of political science at the University of Chicago, recognized the limitations of what Palestinians were being asked to accept as a final settlement, concluding that
"it is hard to imagine the Palestinians accepting such a state. Certainly no other nation in the world has such curtailed sovereignty."
[Source: "The Impossible Partition," New York Times, January 11, 2001]
The reality was far from the wild claims routinely made on the editorial pages of American papers that Barak had offered the Palestinians, 95, 97 or even 100% of the occupied West Bank. Barak himself wrote in a New York Times Op-ed on 24 May 2001 that his vision was for
"a gradual process of establishing secure, defensible borders, demarcated so as to encompass more than 80 percent of the Jewish settlers in several settlement blocs over about 15 percent of Judea and Samaria, and to ensure a wide security zone in the Jordan Valley."
[Source: "Building a Wall Against Terror," New York Times, 24 May 2001].
In other words, if Barak intended to keep 15 percent of "Judea and Samaria" (the West Bank), he could not have offered the Palestinians more than 85 percent.
No one can seriously talk about Israel being willing to end its settlement policy if 80 percent of its settlers would have remained in place.
Robert Malley who was Clinton's special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs, participated in the Camp David negotiations. In an important article entitled "Fictions About the Failure At Camp David " published in the New York Times on July 8, 2001, Malley added his own, insider's challenge to the Camp David myth. Not only did he agree that Barak's offer was far from ideal, but made the additional point that Arafat had made far more concessions than anyone gave him credit for. Malley wrote:
"Many have come to believe that the Palestinians' rejection of the Camp David ideas exposed an underlying rejection of Israel's right to exist. But consider the facts: The Palestinians were arguing for the creation of a Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967, borders, living alongside Israel. They accepted the notion of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory to accommodate settlement blocs. They accepted the principle of Israeli sovereignty over the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem -- neighborhoods that were not part of Israel before the Six Day War in 1967. And, while they insisted on recognition of the refugees' right of return, they agreed that it should be implemented in a manner that protected Israel's demographic and security interests by limiting the number of returnees. No other Arab party that has negotiated with Israel -- not Anwar el-Sadat's Egypt, not King Hussein's Jordan, let alone Hafez al-Assad's Syria -- ever came close to even considering such compromises."
Malley rightly concluded that, "If peace is to be achieved, the parties cannot afford to tolerate the growing acceptance of these myths as reality." |
Nice state eh??
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"This place isn't big enough for me to blow it up."
-MARCO V
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