Barak's generous offer

It's remarkable that, after four years, people are still repeating the myths surrounding the breakdown of the "peace" talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. Among Zionists, talk of "Ehud Barak's generous offer" is common currency as if it's true. Among anti-Zionists it's a joke. In fact put "Barak's generous offer" into Google and 934 sites come up (today anyway). I haven't checked them all but the first ten are incredulous about the idea that Barak was somehow being generous about the land that isn't his. Just recently I was told by a fellow blogger that he believes AIPAC's Dennis Ross on the question of what was on offer by Barak. In fairness to the "generosity" argument I have linked to Dennis Ross's article in Facts of Israel. Please read it. The problem with it is, it doesn't state any facts; it just makes some bland assertions that any reader of the mainstream media will have seen many times before. The Arab Media Watch article by Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish linked in the headline above states specific verifiable facts.

Here are some quotes from AMW. I can't juxtapose concomitant myths because the Zionists haven't actually gone into any detail, possibly because no-one ever asks them to prove their point.

"It was Israel that broke off the negotiations, and the committee headed by former US Senator George Mitchell found no evidence to back the Israeli claim that the Palestinian Authority had planned or launched the Intifada."

Barak's "generous" offer

* no territorial contiguity for the Palestinian state,
* no control of its external borders,
* limited control of its own water resources, and
* no full Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory as required by international law.

In addition, the Barak plan would have :

* included continued Israeli military control over large segments of the West Bank, including almost all of the Jordan Valley;
* codified the right of Israeli forces to be deployed in the Palestinian state at short notice;
* meant the continued presence of fortified Israeli settlements and Jewish-only roads in the heart of the Palestinian state; and
* required nearly 4 million Palestinian refugees to relinquish their fundamental human rights in exchange for compensation to be paid not by Israel but by the "international community."

Barak himself wrote in a New York Times Op-ed on 24 May 2001 that his vision was for

"a gradual process of establishing secure, defensible borders, demarcated so as to encompass more than 80 percent of the Jewish settlers in several settlement blocs over about 15 percent of Judea and Samaria, and to ensure a wide security zone in the Jordan Valley."

I'm no mathmetician but 100% of the occupied territories less 15% makes, not Dennis Ross's 97% but 85%.

Just an aside here, this is the most irritating thing about people, particularly in the mainstream media, who are so accepting of Zionist mythology when the truth is nearly always in the public domain and often from the mouths or pens of Zionists themselves.

Anyway to continue for people who can't work the arithmetic:

"In other words, if Barak intended to keep 15 percent of "Judea and Samaria" (the West Bank), he could not have offered the Palestinians more than 85 percent.

No one can seriously talk about Israel being willing to end its settlement policy if 80 percent of its settlers would have remained in place.".......

"Robert Malley who was Clinton's special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs, participated in the Camp David negotiations. In an important article entitled "Fictions About the Failure At Camp David " published in the New York Times on July 8, 2001, Malley added his own, insider's challenge to the Camp David myth. Not only did he agree that Barak's offer was far from ideal, but made the additional point that Arafat had made far more concessions than anyone gave him credit for. Malley wrote:

"Many have come to believe that the Palestinians' rejection of the Camp David ideas exposed an underlying rejection of Israel's right to exist. But consider the facts: The Palestinians were arguing for the creation of a Palestinian state based on the June 4, 1967, borders, living alongside Israel. They accepted the notion of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory to accommodate settlement blocs. They accepted the principle of Israeli sovereignty over the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem -- neighborhoods that were not part of Israel before the Six Day War in 1967. And, while they insisted on recognition of the refugees' right of return, they agreed that it should be implemented in a manner that protected Israel's demographic and security interests by limiting the number of returnees. No other Arab party that has negotiated with Israel -- not Anwar el-Sadat's Egypt, not King Hussein's Jordan, let alone Hafez al-Assad's Syria -- ever came close to even considering such compromises."

Malley rightly concluded that, "If peace is to be achieved, the parties cannot afford to tolerate the growing acceptance of these myths as reality."

Now this is strange. Why on earth did Clinton appoint some people to attend the talks who were not in thrall to Zionist goals? I mean this Malley chap flatly contradicts Dennis Ross. Why did he put Ross and Malley in the same team? I think it was because he needed Dennis Ross to establish what was acceptable from a Zionist point of view and Malley to report back on the actual truth. Since leaving office Clinton has run with the Ross version but then he was prosecuted for perjury so maybe the truth isn't so important to him. Ok the perjury was over sex but what's more important, geopolitics or sex?

Anyway, back on track:

"On 19 December 2000, six months after Camp David, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators returned to Washington and continued with negotiations. These negotiations were based on a set of proposals by President Clinton which went beyond Barak's offer of July 2000, but still fell short of minimum Palestinian expecations. Nevertheless, the Palestinians went on with the talks."...
...
"In January 2001, the talks moved to Taba, Egypt, where they reportedly continued to make progress. They broke off at the end of January, and were due to resume but Barak canceled a planned meeting with Arafat. Shortly thereafter, Barak lost the election to Ariel Sharon, and the talks have never resumed."

So where is the blow-by-blow refutation of the above in a Zionist source and why would anyone prefer to believe AIPAC's Dennis Ross?