PROCESS AND REALITY

Benny Morris and Dennis Ross Puts the Blame for the Intafada on Arafat's Lap

Benny Morris has a good review in the current TNR. (or, as the Renegade Rebbetzin might put it, in her typical breathless prose: "it is a HEARTBREAKING Beautiful FACINATING article by a REALLY COOL reformed revisionsit historian" ) ...Ahem, cough. Sorry.

The review discusses The Missing Peace, a new book on Camp David by Dennis Ross. Click on this link to read it. (You'll need to scroll to page 30 after the PDF opens)

SPECIAL OFFER: If you buy me the book (tell me you are interested in the comment section) I will write my own review. Take advantage! Buy me the book!

In the meantime, here is the money quote from Morris' review:

"Without doubt, the Palestinian rejection of peace at Camp David and after—coupled with their unleashing in the West Bank and Gaza a war, known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, against the Jewish state—was a milestone in the history of the Middle East, and will be regarded by future generations as one of the most catastrophic mistakes in this long history of catastrophic mistakes, right up there with the Palestinian rejection of the recommendations of the Peel Commission in 1937 and ending with the stalemate in which we now find ourselves…. The Palestinians who were at Camp David have held their peace, perhaps because they wish to perpetuate anti-Israeli and anti-American propaganda, or because they want to cover for their leader, or because they fear the retribution of Arafat and his henchmen; but the truth cannot be forever denied. And The Missing Peace will certainly help to set the record straight.
...

It is noteworthy that no Palestinian participant at Camp David in July 2000, or in the negotiations that followed, has published a detailed account of what transpired..., Arafat and his colleagues were greeted as returning heroes who had steadfastly rejected humiliating Israeli-American diktats, and they have lied about Camp David and the Clinton proposals ever since. So Ross’s book affords an extremely important corrective. It will serve scholars of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a major source of information and analysis."