Can Israel Still "Make a Deal" With Arafat? Bill Says So, Gene Says No... posted by Richard Seymour

Hot, flustered and red-palmed from reading the Clinton interview and even a bonus one with the Chief Rabbi, Gene at Harry's Place would like us all to know that even if the President is remiss enough to think a deal can be struck with Arafat after all his waywardness, he is not. What a cynic! How he mocketh his elders and betters!

Harry's Place is always good for a laugh. When its contributors aren't busily concocting eye-popping liberal excuses for imperial violence, or belittling those who don't see the light in their leaders' gloriole, they do an excellent service to power. Gene quotes the following from Clinton's latest interview , without irony:

Clinton's version is that Israel's Ehud Barak was ready to make enormous concessions but that Arafat was not able to "make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman ... he just couldn't bring himself to say yes".

Just before Clinton left office, Arafat thanked him for all his efforts and told the president he was a great man. "'Mr Chairman,' I replied, 'I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.'"

Yes, Clinton was a "failure" on account of Arafat and not, say, himself. But the only flaw with that logic is that Arafat was being offered diddly-squat. These "huge concessions" at Camp David amounted to Israel finally reaching the moral level of Apartheid South Africa by offering the Palestinians a few miserable crumbs of their land back - bantustans heavily circumscribed by armed Israeli settlements, not a continuous state.

Israel doesn't have to "make a deal" with Arafat. It has to cease its occupation and allow the Palestinian refugees their full right of return - in exchange for absolutely nothing. The onus is on the occupier and on noone else. Gene also excerpts from an interview with Chief Rabbi sacks arguing - well, suggesting - the same thing. Hmmm.

I recall Ehud Barak protesting that the Arabs didn't suffer from the Judeo-Christian guilt complex about lying - consequently, nothing they said was to be trusted, especially from that egregious towel-wearer, Yasser Arafat:

"They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie ... creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as 'the truth.'"

No hint of racism in that, oooooh no. Anyway, I note that he's been loving up to former left-wing historian Benny Morris on the subject, and he says this on the subject of the bantustans:

I ask myself why is he [Arafat] lying. To put it simply, any proposal that offers 92 percent of the West Bank cannot, almost by definition, break up the territory into noncontiguous cantons. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are separate, but that cannot be helped [in a peace agreement, they would be joined by a bridge].

I won't call Barak a liar just because he has got his own lies wrong - he means to say that Israel was offering 96% of Palestinian occupied territories - but in fact, 96% represents the percentage of the occupied territories that the Israelis were even willing to discuss. Still, since no map of the proposals were ever officially released, it is perhaps understandable why Barak's imagination should be so stunted. However, maps based on information supplied both by the Palestinians and by the Israelis reveals precisely that - a discontinuous mass of land broken up by vast Israeli inroads and sprinkled with numerous armed settlements. The final status Taba Map looks even better. At any rate, former Clinton aide Robert Malley has exploded the myths surrounding Camp David's allegedly magnanimous gestures to the Palestinian side:

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Robert Malley, who was Mr Clinton's special adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs, claims that Mr Barak failed to honour previous Israeli agreements – assurances which Mr Clinton had been personally guaranteed to Mr Arafat. Mr Barak, the author writes, failed to fulfil promises to withdraw from three villages around Jerusalem and to release Palestinian prisoners – provoking an angry confrontation with Mr Clinton.

And after all, wasn't this at a time when Israeli settlements were escalating rapidly, spreading even more widely and purposefully than under Netanyahu? During the final Barak-Clinton year (2000), the rate of settlement was the highest since 1992, before Oslo. Still, I won't resort to calling those who insist on peddling tired old cliches about "the self-inflicted wounds of Israel's enemies" (yeah, the Palestinians ethnically cleansed themselves) and so on liars. However, I will call the good Rabbi on this:

If, for instance, Israel takes defensive action against an organiser of suicide bombings, that is called 'genocide'.

Oh really? When Israeli helicopters strike Palestinian towns, this is called "genocide"? By whom? When? Where? Ubiquitously, or just by a few nutters in caves? No, forget the questions, Rabbi Sacks, you are a fucking liar.