Walt & Mearsheimer have responded to some of their critics in a long reply published in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. In their reply, they acknowledge not a single error in their paper. Instead, they have repeated and compounded their factual mistakes. So, unfortunately, here we go again.
In both their formal paper and their LRB abridgment, Walt & Mearsheimer asserted that:
“[N]o Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Even Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David in July 2000 would only have given the Palestinians a disarmed and dismembered set of ‘Bantustans’ under de facto Israeli control.”
In his formal response on the Harvard website, Dershowitz wrote that their description was “demonstrably false,” citing both Dennis Ross’s extensive account of Camp David and Ehud Barak’s 2002 interview in which he called the Bantustan accusation “one of the most embarrassing lies” Arafat told about Camp David.
Walt & Mearsheimer have responded to Dershowitz in the LRB as follows:
There are a number of competing accounts of what happened at
Camp David, however, and many of them agree with our claim. Moreover, Barak himself acknowledges that ‘the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem . . . to the Jordan River.’ This wedge, which would bisect the West Bank, was essential to Israel’s plan to retain control of the Jordan River Valley for another six to twenty years. Finally, and contrary to Dershowitz’s claim, there was no ‘second map’ or map of a ‘final proposal at Camp David’. Indeed, it is explicitly stated in a note beside the map published in Ross’s memoirs that ‘no map was presented during the final rounds at Camp David.’ Given all this, it is not surprising that Barak’s foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was a key participant at Camp David, later admitted: ‘If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David as well.’
I’ve previously shown that Walt & Mearsheimer took the Barak quote egregiously out of context and that they completely ignored Ross’s day-by-day account of
Put aside the question of how many “many” of “a number” is, or who wrote the allegedly contrary accounts; the more important point is there are no eyewitness accounts of
It takes a special kind of scholarship to cite Shlomo Ben-Ami for the proposition that the Israelis did not offer the Palestinians a contiguous state at
“The
Camp David proposals . . . might perhaps not have been the best deal the Palestinians could have expected. But nor was this the humiliating deal of ‘ Bantustans’ and ‘enclaves’ they kept saying it was. How can a Palestinian state that includes the entire Gaza Strip, 92 per cent of the West Bank and a safe passage, under full and unconditional Palestinian control, to link them be defined as a state of Bantustans?”
In an extensive interview published in Haaretz in 2002 (which Walt & Mearsheimer have likewise ignored), Ben-Ami called the
As for the “Map Reflecting Actual Proposal at Camp David” that Dennis Ross published in his book (which clearly shows no “dismembered set of ‘Bantustans’”), the full text of the note relied on by Walt & Mearsheimer reads as follows:
While no map was presented during the final rounds at Camp David, this map illustrates the parameters of what President Clinton proposed and Arafat rejected: Palestinian control over 91% of the West Bank in continguous territory and an Israeli security presence along 15% of the border with
Jordan. This map actually understates the final Camp David proposal because it does not depict the additional territorial sway of 1% that was offered from Israeli territory.
Both Ross and Ben-Ami also published maps in their books illustrating the December 2000 “Clinton Parameters” that were accepted by Israel and then rejected by Arafat in a face-to-face meeting in the Oval Office: 100% of Gaza, 95% of the West Bank, and an additional 1-3% land swap from within Israel (for a total of 96-98%), including a safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, with the entire area “clean of Jewish settlements” (in Ben-Ami’s phrase).
Ben-Ami can understand why the Palestinians might not have been able to accept the deal at Camp David (it has nothing to do with “
Though never abandoning wider territorial dreams, it would not have occurred to Ben-Gurion to delay the establishment of the Jewish state because he would not have access to the Western Wall or the
Temple Mount. The positive ethos of building a new society was supposed to compensate for the poverty of the territorial solution. . . . The Palestinian national movement has been more about vindication and justice than about finding a solution. It therefore never possessed the capacity to make a positive decision. . . . The Palestinians have consistently fought for the solutions of yesterday, those they had rejected a generation or two earlier. This persistent attempt to turn back the clock of history lies at the root of many of the misfortunes that have befallen the peoples of the region.
Ironically, the result has been no Palestinian state (despite offers in 1937, 1947, 1978, and 2000) and expanded Israeli territorial claims instead. On the last night at Camp David, in the presence of Bill Clinton and the entire
“We are going from here into a catastrophe. You will forge an alliance with Hamas and we shall go into a paralyzing national unity government with the Israeli Right. When we meet again this will be with the
West Bank replete with settlements.”
The West Bank “replete with settlements” consists of 250,000 Jews wishing to live in their historic homeland of Judea and
The Palestinians’ priorities have repeatedly prevented them from accepting a contiguous state, even when it has been formally offered multiple times. To explain their latest decision, they resorted to a big lie about “
Once again, Walt & Mearsheimer’s reply on this point is indicative of the rest of their reply. As Jeff Weintraub (a self-described “democratic socialist” who teaches at the University of Pnnsylvania) indicates, the entire Walt& Mearsheimer response is “surprisingly thin” and “does not actually offer any significant or convincing responses to the most serious criticisms of their analysis.”
See also Ivan Koridornih’s “Florscheimer und Walt” at the Middle East Discussion Board.