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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Clinton to Arafat: It’s All Your Fault
The former president says the Palestinian leader squandered a chance for
Mideast peace
Clinton and Arafat at Camp David last July
By Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
June 27 — Nearly a year after he failed to achieve a deal at Camp David,
former president Bill Clinton gave vent to his frustrations this week over
the collapse of peace in the Mideast. And Clinton directed his ire at one
man: Yasir Arafat. On Tuesday night, Clinton told guests at a party at the
Manhattan apartment of former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke and his wife,
writer Kati Marton, that Arafat called to bid him farewell three days before
he left office. “You are a great man,” Arafat said. “The hell I am,”
Clinton said he responded. “I’m a colossal failure, and you made me one.”
Clinton described Arafat as an aging leader who relishes his own sense of
victimhood and seems incapable of making a final peace deal.
CLINTON SAID HE TOLD Arafat that by turning down the best peace
deal he was ever going to get—the one proffered by Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Barak and brokered by Clinton last July—the Palestinian leader was only
guaranteeing the election of the hawkish Ariel Sharon, the current Israeli
leader. But Arafat didn’t listen. Sharon was elected in a landslide Feb. 6
and has gradually escalated his crackdown on the Palestinians despite a shaky
ceasefire negotiated two weeks ago by CIA chief George Tenet.
Clinton has refused most interview requests since he left office Jan.
20. But at the party—which was held jointly by Holbrooke and the
International Crisis Group to celebrate a new book, “Waging Modern War,” by
former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark—Clinton captivated guests for nearly
an hour with an insider’s tale of the Camp David talks. Among the listeners,
who gathered around the former president as he cheerfully downed Diet Cokes
and hors d’oeuvres, were Holbrooke, Clark and John Negroponte, who has been
nominated by President Bush to replace Holbrooke as U.N. ambassador.
Clinton said, somewhat surprisingly, that he never expected to close
the deal at Camp David. But he made it clear that the breakdown of the peace
process and the nine months of deadly intifada since then were very much on
his mind. He described Arafat as an aging leader who relishes his own sense
of victimhood and seems incapable of making a final peace deal. “He could
only get to step five, and he needed to get to step 10,” the former president
said. But Clinton expressed hope in the younger generation of Palestinian
officials, suggesting that a post-Arafat Palestinian leader might be able to
make peace, perhaps in as little as several years. “I’m just sorry I blew
this Middle East” thing, Clinton said shortly before leaving. “But I don’t
know what else I could have done.”
Clinton also revealed that, contrary to most conventional wisdom
after Camp David ended on July 25, 2000, the key issue that torpedoed the
talks in their final stages was not the division of East Jerusalem between
Palestinians and Israelis, but the Palestinian demand for a “right of
return” of refugees to Israel. On Jerusalem, he said, the two sides were down
to dickering over final language on who would get sovereignty over which part
of the Western Wall. But Arafat continued to demand that large numbers of
Palestinian refugees, mainly from the 1967 and 1948 wars, be allowed to
return—numbers that Clinton said both of them knew were unacceptable to the
Israelis.
Clinton said he bluntly contradicted Arafat when, in one of their
final conversations, the Palestinian leader expressed doubts that the ancient
Jewish temple actually lay beneath the Islamic-run compound in Jerusalem
containing the holy Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. This was a
critical point of dispute, since the Western Wall, a remnant of the temple’s
retaining wall, is the holiest site in Judaism and one the Israelis were
intent on maintaining sovereignty over. “I know it’s there,” Clinton said he
told Arafat. The so-called Al Aqsa intifada began after Ariel Sharon made a
controversial visit to the disputed compound on Sept. 28, 2000.
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