In the Buffalo News, academic Jerome Slater posits that Sharon is — and always has been — the overriding obstacle to Mideast peace. Moreover, Slater presents himself as more knowlegable about what happened to undermine the historic Oslo peace efforts than those who were actually there:
it is a myth that Arafat “never made a counteroffer” and walked away from the bargaining table or that the negotiations broke down when the Palestinian Intifada broke out – even assuming that Arafat instigated the Intifada, a highly dubious assumption in light of the best available evidence.
The Palestinians argue that their counteroffer is their willingness to end the conflict and to fully accept Israel within its 1967 boundaries, meaning (as already indicated) that the Palestinians get only 22 percent of historic Palestine. Moreover, in reality the Palestinian negotiators at both Camp David and Taba were willing to go even further, for they made several other compromises and, in particular, they accepted that they would not get back 100 percent of the land lost in 1967, both in the West Bank and in Jerusalem.
Slater’s implying that Dennis Ross, who ran the entire negotiating process, doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he lays the blame for the Oslo breakdown on Arafat in his recent book ‘The Missing Peace’. Slater presents himself as a neutral observer, without quoting even one actual neutral observer who was present at the lengthy discussions.
As Ross writes:
If ever there was a regional conflict that has been sustained by mythologies, by avoiding the unpleasantness of reality, ignoring the need to see the world as it is, it is the Middle East.
The unpleasant reality, verified by independent sources, is that Oslo died because of Arafat’s stubbornness and unwillingness to truly commit to peace. As an effort now grows to restart talks, Slater-style falsities do nothing to help matters.
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