In this week’s piece at Souciant, I look at the lessons Bill Clinton’s mistakes at Camp David II hold for Barack Obama today. Many of the conditions have changed, of course, but 
Clinton’s mis-steps, as well as what he did right, hold general lessons that Obama must keep in mind if he ever decides to seriously re-engage in this issue.
Archive for the ‘Camp David’ Category
Getting Past Blame: Present Realities and How To Move Forward
Posted in Academics, Camp David, Ehud Barak, Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Israeli land, Palestine, Peace Plans, Settlements, United Nations, United States, West Bank on August 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Virtually any article, except for unusually long ones, necessarily narrows its focus and leaves out important aspects of the broad subject it is discussing. In facile, pseudo-intellectual attacks, those who disagree with such articles often point out what is not there, as if it is possible, in just a few pages, to consider the breadth and scope of any problem, much less one as complex as the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In the new edition of the London Review of Books, there is a pair of articles, however, which, when taken together, give a fairly rounded view of the situation as it stands now in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Making them perhaps more valuable and credible, the article criticizing Israel is written by a Jewish former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, Henry Siegman; while the article criticizing the Palestinians is written by an American of Palestinian ancestry, Prof. Rashid Khalidi.
Khalidi continues a theme explored in his superb book, The Iron Cage:The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Palestinians are often portrayed, by themselves and others in very distorted ways. By pro-occupation zealots, they are depicted as far more powerful than they are, and powerful enough to constitute a substantial threat to Israel. That characterization is absurd on its face, and it is a measure of the hysteria this subject can generate that there is a significant, albeit minority, number of people who actually
believe it. But they are also often portrayed by their own supporters, and even at times by themselves, as completely helpless actors who are pure victims and have no role in creating the situation they now find themselves in. Khalidi’s valuable self-criticism paints a more realistic picture.
In “Shared Irresponsibility,” Khalidi draws careful attention to the actions of both Fatah and Hamas in creating the split that exists now in the Palestinian political body and which finds its expression in a geographical split between the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Khalidi writes, “Fatah and Hamas have been fighting for control of a Palestinian Authority that has no real authority. The behavior of both has been disgraceful…In the four decades since the founding of the PLO, there has never been such a gulf between two parts of the [Palestinian] national movement.” (more…)
Feedburner
Speaker
Follow me on Twitter
Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.
Categories
Archives
Meta
-
Recent Posts
