The Myth:

The Palestinians were offered 97% of the West Bank by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000, and turned it down, choosing to resort to terrorism instead.

The Reality: from Tinderbox: US Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, Stephen Zunes, Common Courage Press, 2002

http://www.usfca.edu/politics/zunes.htm
http://www.commoncouragepress.com/

For an excellent Flash presentation, see:
http://www.gush-shalom.org/media/barak_eng.swf
Initial reports, encouraged by US officials and repeated in the American media, indicated that Barak was willing to hand over a full 95% or more of the West Bank back to the Palestinians.

Yet Israel presented no maps to show precisely what lands they were including in the offer.
It now appears that this widely quoted percentage did not include greater East Jerusalem, which includes not just the Palestinian-populated eastern half of the city, but also encompasses a series of Palestinian villages and rural areas well to the north and east.

(Israel effectively annexed the area in 1967 and no longer considers it as part of the West Bank, though the United Nations and virtually the entire international community insists that is indeed part of the occupied territories.)

Nor did this figure include much of the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea coast and parts of the Judean desert, which Barak insisted be leased to the Israeli military for exclusive use for an indefinite period. Taking these additional areas into account, this offer totaled not the 95% claimed but only slightly more than 80% of the West Bank, forcing the Palestinians to relinquish land needed for their development and absorption of refugees.

Barak also insisted on holding on to 69 Jewish settlements in the West Bank, where 85% of the settlers live. Therefore, even though Israel is legally required--under the Fourth Geneva Convention and two UN Security Council resolutions--to completely evacuate the settlements, Barak offered to remove only 15% of the settlers.
Furthermore, under Barak's U.S.-backed plan, the West Bank would have been split up by a series of settlement blocs, bypass roads and Israeli roadblocks, by some interpretations dividing the new Palestinian "state" into four non-contiguous cantons.

This would require Palestinians to go through Israeli checkpoints to go from one part of their state to another and allow the Israelis to restrict the movement of both people and goods.

In addition, Israel would have supervision of border crossings between the new Palestinian state and neighboring Arab states. Israel would also control Palestinian airspace, its seacoast and its water resources. Altogether, these restrictions would make a viable independent Palestinian state impossible.

The Israelis also rejected the right of Palestinian refugees expelled from what is now Israel in the 1948 war to return to their homes, despite international treaty obligations concerning the right of refugees to return.

According to Barak's plan, the Palestinians would have only very limited administrative authority over Arab neighborhoods and Muslim holy sites in occupied East Jerusalem, which would be cut off from the rest of the Palestinian state.

In response to Palestinian demands that they be allowed to establish their capital in East Jerusalem, the Israelis agreed only to allow them to set up their government in Abu Dis, a West Bank village not far from the city's outskirts that could be annexed into greater Jerusalem, thereby allowing the Palestinian Authority to also claim Jerusalem as their capital.

In return, the Palestinians would be required to recognize Israel's annexation of virtually the entire remainder of the city.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Arafat rejected the offer. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any national leader accepting peace under conditions that would have effectively put an end to their aspirations for self-determination.

 

The claims by Clinton's team of negotiators that the parties were "so close" at Camp David failed to acknowledge the substantial gap between the two parties and seemed more designed to discredit the Palestinian side than to be an accurate reflection of what actually transpired at the negotiations. Even if Clinton had forced Arafat to capitulate, lack of support among Palestinians would have prevented the agreement from being viable.

An unsustainable peace would have been even worse than no peace.