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Clinton
described Arafat as an aging leader who relishes his own sense of
victimhood and seems incapable of making a final peace deal.
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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. |
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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. |
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Motherhood and
Murder
