Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat makes a last-minute trip to Washington to clarify a Clinton-proposed peace deal with Israel.
Jan 3, 2001 | In an 11th-hour attempt to restore peace to the Middle East before President Clinton leaves office, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat flew Tuesday to Washington to clarify with Clinton the details of an American proposal outlined by the president 10 days ago.
After two hours of negotiations that focused on reducing terrorism and violence in the region, the leaders took a break and scheduled further talks for late Tuesday night. As of Tuesday evening, it was too early to say how talks were progressing.
More than 350 people have died in three months of chaos in Israel and the Palestinian territories -- some shot for throwing stones, some for driving with the wrong license places, others still blown up in car bombs, hit by helicopter rockets or killed by sniper fire in their homes.
The imminent departure of Clinton, the chief wonder-worker of the faltering Mideast peace process, adds a note of urgency to the task of ending the bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians. But peace agreements rarely cooperate with deadlines, and Clinton's exit from office on Jan. 20 may pass without any progress in negotiations.
While Clinton's Middle East team battles to preserve its legacy and save some of the historical breakthroughs accomplished since Arafat and Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin first shook hands on the lawn of the Rose Garden in 1993, both the Israeli and Palestinian public seem to have given up on repairing the mess just now.
Indeed, Clinton's far-reaching proposal repeats most of the solutions that were raised and rejected by the two parties at Camp David this summer. If anything, Clinton's latest proposal is seen as even less likely to succeed.
"Theoretically this deal would be very hard to swallow under the best of circumstances," said Yossi Klein-Halevi, an Israeli journalist based in Jerusalem. "Now, under the worst circumstances, it amounts to willfully agreeing to the destruction of Jerusalem. For the Palestinians and Israel to jointly govern Jerusalem in the middle of a war is ludicrous."
According to Israeli minutes made public on Sunday in the Israeli press, the American proposal aims to end grievances on both sides by requiring that the Israelis hand over to the Palestinians Gaza and about 95 percent of the West Bank, seized from Jordan in 1967. It would also put Palestinians in control of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem including the Islamic shrines on the esplanade known by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount. In return, Palestinians would accept the Israeli annexation of major Jewish settlements and forego the collective right of approximately 3.5 million Palestinian refugees to return to the lands they were forced to abandon in Israel's 1948 War of Independence.
"The question is whether Arafat can sell this to his public," said Edward Abington, a former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, now a Washington-based political consultant to the Palestinian Authority, in a phone interview Tuesday. "And the same is true with regard to the Israelis."
The details of Clinton's proposal, which would work as a framework for a final peace plan if both sides accept it this week, smack of treason in the eyes of both Palestinians and Israelis.
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