One of the last, most serious efforts of the Israelis, to finally conclude an agreement with the PLO, and to come to the finalization of all elements of the Oslo Accords, took place in the negotiations in the summer of 2000 at Camp David near Washington, under the auspices of President Clinton of the United States. The negotiations at the summit of Camp David in the summer of 2000 that continued for a few months thereafter as well until, early 2001, were essentially negotiations that took place between the newly elected Labor Government in Israel, headed by Ehud Barak that came into office in 1999, and the PLO headed by Yasser Arafat. Briefly after his election, Barak tried to achieve an agreement with Syria actually putting the PLO on the back burner for a moment. But the negotiations with Syria did not result in any kind of success. And consequently, Barak returned to the Palestinian track. There was a sense of urgency on the Israeli side, that the time had to be exploited as long as President Clinton was still in office. By a, a dramatic move like the Camp David summit to finally conclude the historical agreement between Israel and the PLO, then the Palestinian people. Ehud Barak therefore came to Camp David with the territorial offer. More generous than any Israeli government had made to the Palestinians, it was, in the Israeli mind, very far reaching. But from the Palestinian point of view it fell far short. And this difference of perceptions related to the different points of departure that the Israelis and the Palestinians came from in their negotiations at Camp David. The Israeli offer initially started off with a willingness to withdraw from about 80% of the West Bank. This was a lot more than the Israeli's had offered the Palestinians at any time before, but it was far less than what the Palestinians expected, and what they regarded as the bare minimum. The Palestinians expected Israel to withdraw from all of the West Bank, not from 80% of it. From the Israeli point of view, this was a, a Palestinian all-or-nothing argument, an unwillingness to compromise. But from the Palestinian point of view, it was a very different reality. What the Palestinians argued was that Israel already had 78% of historical Palestine. That is, Israel within the boundaries that existed until 1967. The West Bank and Gaza were just the 22% of Palestine that remained. And the Palestinians did not want to concede on that only 22%. The Israeli point of departure was 1967. The Palestinians however, were coming from 1948. This made agreement very difficult indeed. So if that wasn a major problem on the territorial issue, there were equally difficult problems on Jerusalem. It was understood by the parties at Camp David that Jerusalem would be divided. This, from the Israeli point of view was a very significant departure from the Israeli traditional position as it had been since 1967, that all of Jerusalem should belong to Israel as Israel's undivided capital. Here the Israelis were willing to concede that the city ought to be divided and the idea was, and acceptable to the Palestinians too, that the city of Jerusalem should be divided on an ethnic basis. That is, Jewish residential areas would remain the state of Israel, and Arab-Palestinian residential areas would become part of the state of Palestine. The problem however, that proved to be intractable, was what was to be done with the holy sites of Temple Mount? Those that are for the Jewish people the holiest of holy, and those that are the third holiest place on earth for the Muslims after Mecca and Medina. The Muslim religious sites on the mount and the Israeli Jewish Wailing Wall one side of it, and holy remains of the Second Temple beneath the Muslim holy places on the mount. The parties were unable to agree on how the mount ought to be divided, if divided at all. From the Palestinian point of view, Temple Mount had to be under Palestinian Muslim sovereignty. That was unacceptable to the Israelis who regarded the, the area as part of the most holy of places to the Jewish people. And therefore the issue of sovereignty remained one over which there was no agreement. But perhaps even more difficult than the issue of Temple Mount, was the issue of Palestinian refugees and the question of the right of return. The Israelis would not accept the right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel proper. That, in the Israeli mind, would change the nature of the Israeli state from the state of the Jewish people into something very different which they could not possibly accept after the war of 1948 for which they, in their own view, were only partly responsible. On the Palestinian side, the argument was that for the right of return to be of any value at all, it was not the Israelis who should decide on who returned to Israel. The right of return was not really a right, the Palestinians argued, unless the Palestinian refugees had a free choice of whether to return to Israel or not. That, the Israelis could not accept. And therefore you have this unbridgeable gap on the issue of free Palestinian choice. The Palestinians demanding a free choice for the refugees to return to Israel, and Israel demanding the right of a sovereign state to admit only who it wished to admit to its territory. The failure on this issue was therefore inevitable.
