Judging from the advance coverage we’ve seen so far, former President Bill Clinton’s memoirs paint an unflattering portrait of Yasser Arafat. It also debunks the Camp David II revisionist claims by Clinton’s assistant, Robert Malley, who tried blaming the summit’s failure on allegedly inadequate Israeli concessions. After an exclusive interview with Clinton, The Guardian wrote:
Clinton’s version is that Israel’s Ehud Barak was ready to make enormous concessions but that Arafat was not able to “make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman … he just couldn’t bring himself to say yes”.
We already debunked such revisionism by Malley and AP, but the memoirs provide an opportunity to clarify the historical record once and for all.
