WASHINGTON, 19 July — According to a former key White House adviser, although former President Bill Clinton publicly blamed the Palestinians for the collapse of the Camp David talks last July, he privately blamed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Robert Malley, (Clinton’s special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs) in an upcoming Aug. 9 article in the New York Review of Books, challenges the well-published opinion that Yasser Arafat was responsible for the collapse of the Camp David peace summit, which was soon followed by an upsurge of violence in the Middle East.
According to yesterday’s Washington Post, which received an advance copy of the article, Malley and his co-author Hussein Agha, who serves as advisor to the Palestinian Authority, say Barak “helped set the stage for failure by refusing to carry out some earlier agreements with the Palestinians, including a commitment to turn over West Bank land, expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and then pushing Arafat to reach an all-or-nothing peace deal.”
Malley says that this fed into the Palestinian teams’ suspicions of Israelis motives, which heightened their unwillingness to agree to a permanent accord.
One of the most interesting parts of the article is the wrath that, behind the scenes, Clinton aimed on his Israeli counterpart. According to the authors, Clinton shared Arafat’s “aggravation over what they both saw as Israel’s failure to keep its commitments.”
“When Barak reneged on a vow to transfer three villages in the Jerusalem area to Palestinian control, a commitment Clinton personally conveyed to Arafat, the president was ‘furious.’”
According to the Post, the article quotes Clinton as saying that never before had been made out to be “a false prophet” to a foreign leader.
Malley also narrates an “extraordinary moment” at Camp David when Clinton vented his accumulated frustrations after Barak retracted some negotiating positions. The Post quotes the article when Clinton said to Barak: “I can’t go see Arafat with a retrenchment!... This is not real. This is not serious.”
Clinton then chided the Israeli leader for failing to be up front in earlier negotiations with the Syrians. Clinton said that for a meeting with Syrian President Hafez Assad, “I went to Geneva and felt like a wooden Indian doing your bidding. I will not let it happen here.”
Clinton also advised Barak to show some flexibility and take into account Palestinian sensitivity: “You are smarter and more experienced than I am in war. But I am older in politics, and I have learned from my mistakes.”
The article says that Clinton was also upset by the Palestinians inability to offer counterproposals to the Israelis, but that Arafat and his advisers were paralyzed by their fear of being tricked.
According to the Washington Post, the article says Clinton also lashed out at Abu Alaa, a chief Palestinian negotiator, for refusing to bargain over a map proposed as a part of a solution: “Don’t simply say to the Israelis that their map is no good. Give me something better!” When Abu Alaa did not, Clinton exploded: “I won’t have the United States covering for the negotiations in bad faith. Let’s quit!”
In the weeks prior to the summit, Arafat had been looking for the Israelis to carry out their interim agreements before taking up a permanent settlement, notes the Post, and he had agreed to go to Camp David on several conditions. One was that he would not be blamed for the possible failure of what he believed was a premature summit. Malley and Agha say Clinton volunteered that the United States would remain neutral in the case of failure. “Yet when the talks collapsed, Clinton put top priority on helping Barak, whose considerable concessions had undercut his political standing at home,” says the Post.
