The Palestinian Authority’s absence from policy discussions may be the final nail in the coffin for what we’ve come to simply call “Oslo”: the outlines of the conflict laid out in the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. Oslo might have been a dead letter already, but one of its key creations was still alive. Now, the Palestinian Authority has one foot in the grave.
It’s a grave the Palestinian leadership dug itself.
A video making the rounds on social media shows an old interview with longtime Saudi diplomatic figure Prince Bandar regarding Yasser Arafat’s decision to walk away from the Camp David negotiations when all that was left to do was to sign the final agreement, which itself was a product of the demands made by both sides. The segment aired on al-Arabiya, the Saudi state-owned television network.
From a historical perspective, the Camp David summit is interesting in that it is one of the few contentious events that has been immune to revisionism. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said yes, Arafat said no, and every attempt to deflect blame from Arafat has failed resoundingly. The Palestinian propaganda machine rarely has such trouble: Modern corporate media have allowed every major event from 1948 onward to be retconned into oblivion by anti-Zionist narratives developed, in some cases, long after the events they supposedly described.
But not Camp David. Not the Clinton talks. They are arguably the most well-documented failed negotiations in history.
And yet, there is still one aspect that often gets misinterpreted.
In the aforementioned interview, Bandar describes getting a call from President Clinton while Bandar was at the hotel with Arafat’s crew. Not only had the Israelis agreed to the final terms, Clinton said, but Ehud Barak had tried to make adjustments and Clinton stopped him cold. There would be no more haggling. The deal gave the Palestinians, the weaker party in the conflict, everything they said they wanted, and Arafat was letting it all die.
“I wanted to cry,” says Bandar. “My heart was burning at how the opportunity was lost again, and perhaps for the last time.”
Bandar’s phrasing is important. It wouldn’t be, in the end, the last time the Palestinians were offered all they wanted. But Bandar was acknowledging that Camp David wasn’t the first such lost opportunity and that eventually—eventually—the opportunities would stop calling.
Bandar then described the cycle (emphasis added): “An opportunity comes, and it is lost. After it is lost, we agree on what we rejected, and we put it back on the table. Then people say that there is nothing on the table, and so on over and over.”
Every so often, Israel takes actions that the Palestinians object to on specious grounds. Recently, for example, Israel repealed a Jordanian regulation that prohibited Jews from buying private land in Judea and Samaria, and proposed an extension of Jerusalem-adjacent construction. These, we are told, endanger the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state. But since the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected an offer of sovereignty over that land, we know that objection is a lie meant for public consumption.
Whatever the Palestinian leadership is after, it sure isn’t statehood on the West Bank. And that is why Bandar wanted to cry. That is why Clinton never forgave Arafat and never wavered from the truth of Camp David, despite the fact that his party became so hostile to hearing it.
What the spurned leaders realized at Camp David was not that the Palestinian leadership drives a hard bargain, but that the Palestinian leadership isn’t bargaining. It isn’t negotiating at all. It’s for show.
Looking back, among the most ridiculous excuses for Arafat’s rejection of the deal is that the deal itself was lacking. It wasn’t, but once Israel signed on, Arafat would’ve been in the driver’s seat until his dying day anyway. The world would consider Israel to be locked in, and there is no way the deal would be allowed to collapse over a square kilometer here or there. Not single person on earth believes otherwise.
The reason the Palestinian leadership turned down the offer was not because the offer was worth turning down statehood for. It was because the Palestinians would not sign a permanent record that said they had agreed to end the conflict and live in peace with Israel.
The Palestinian leadership doesn’t want a little more land here and there. It wants to be in a state of perpetual conflict in which Israel’s erasure remains on the table. Which means not only that, yes, Oslo is dead. It also means the Palestinian Authority exists in name only.
