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Zionist FAQs: Why did Arafat reject Barak's "generous" offer at Camp David?
למאמר בעברית
"I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism. These are historical facts that cannot be altered", Moshe Sharett wrote in his diaries on Nov. 16th, 1956, the 1st Israeli Foreign Minister & 2nd Israeli PM (Simha Flapan, p. 52-53)

At the failed Camp David summit, Arafat was ambushed by Clinton and Barak when both presented him with a deal that was much more favorable to Israel than to Palestine. Because of domestic U.S. political reasons, a sitting U.S. president could never propose a deal that is unfavorable to Israel. Yes, US Presidents always put Israel First and behaved as its lawyer. What was fundamentally wrong at Camp David was that Arafat was negotiating in miles while Barak was negotiating in inches. It's worth taking note that it's the Palestinian people who owned and operated 93% of Palestine's land as of 1948 who made up 92% of the citizens (but 67% of the population); click here for a breakdown of Palestinian vs. Zionist land ownership as of 1946.

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In a nutshell, Arafat was presented with "a take it or leave it deal"; either Palestinians had to give up their claims to most of East Jerusalem and forfeit their Right of Return. In return, Palestinians would "gain" a non-contiguous state on parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or the whole Clinton-Barak offer had to be rejected outright, which he did. If you have the time, we urge you to watch Daniel Levy (one of the founders of the Geneva Accord) articulating what we have concluded, and as you watch, please pay attention to how he implied that what Arafat accepted was a "big deal" (shrinking Palestine to 22%) and Israeli leaders kept pushing for more and more concession (he called it "YES" +++), and if you have the time hear Rashid Khalidi articulating our points of view to FP (start from 8:00).

Remind us, please: who shall push who into the sea? Jaffa May 1948, Palestinians were being pushed into the sea by Zionist Jewish forces

One CENTRAL FACT, which is usually suppressed in the Western media, is that the Israeli government has previously offered most of the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip to King Hussein (except for occupied East Jerusalem). However, the king of Jordan rejected the "generous" offer outright. In an interview with H.M. King Hussein, he stated:

"... I was offered the return of something like 90 plus percent of the territories, 98 percent even, excluding [occupied East] Jerusalem, but I couldn't accept. As far as I am concerned, it was either every single inch that I was responsible for or nothing." (Iron Wall, p. 264)

So to claim that:

"Barak went further than any other Israeli leaders for peace"

Just Imagine someone sitting in your chair for over seven decades. Again, imagine this person was sitting in your house and eating from your trees!

It is a BIG LIE because other Israeli leaders were willing to hand over more occupied lands and sovereignty to King Hussein in return for the Israeli version of "peace," but that wasn't enough. Click here if you are interested to know why the so-called two-state solution was dead for several decades! In our opinion, it was never live, especially on the Israeli side!

All Israelis, Zionists, and Americans must understand that no Arab leader could entertain the thought of such an offer, not even King Hussein himself when he was alive. From our point of view, anything is negotiable except for the Right of Return and East Jerusalem. What was offered at the failed Camp David summit is unacceptable to many Palestinians for the following reasons:

  • Implementing the Palestinian Right of Return, based on UN Resolution 194, is THE KEY to ending the conflict. So, any peace process not addressing the R.O.R. is a temporary cease-fire, and the conflict would eventually flare up again. It should be emphasized that the majority of the Palestinian people are refugees, and for any agreement to be held, it must neutralize this vital political block.
  • To even think that King Hussein and his grandfather, King Abdullah, refused to relinquish sovereignty over Jerusalem to the Israelis and to expect the Palestinian people to do the exact opposite is LUDICROUS. Keep in mind that it's a well-known fact that the Hashemites have been a central factor in protecting Israel's interests even before its inception in 1948, This fact is rarely disputed among historians, click here to read more about the Hashemites' role during the 1948 war.
  • Jerusalem is extremely important from an Islamic point of view because it was the first Qibla before Mecca and the third holiest site for Muslims after Mecca and Medina. Even if you disagree with this assessment, from a political point of view, Jerusalem is the most unifying factor amongst Arabs and Muslims.
  • UN map (updated Aug. 1950) showing Palestinians still own 94% of the lands
    Most Arabs cannot comprehend the thought that Arabs and Muslims fought so bravely to cleanse Jerusalem from the Crusaders and to give it up on a silver platter to the Israeli Jews. It should be noted that hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims died battling the Christian Crusaders between the 11th and 13th centuries for the sole purpose of cleansing the Holy Land from the Crusaders. Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims often wonder where the Zionist Jews were when the Holy Land needed their assistance during the Crusade genocide! Was Palestine a "Promised" or "non-promised" Land, that is the question?
  •  Pre-Nakba picture of a Palestinian Christian girl from Bethlehem who "didn't exist," Zionists say!
    According to Barak's offer, the proposed Palestinian areas would have been cut from East to West and from North to South so that the Palestinian state would have consisted of a group of islands, each surrounded by Israeli settlers and soldiers. No sovereign nation would accept such an arrangement that could hinder its strategic national security and interests; click here for a map illustration.
  • It's not only that the future Palestinian state would have been completely demilitarized, and Israeli early warning radar installation would have been installed deep in the Palestinian areas, but also its economic, social, and political relations with its neighboring Arab states would have been severely scrutinized by Israel as well.
Palestinian women harvesting cotton in the village of Kafr Saba in 1937

It is not in Arafat's defense, however, that it's worth noting that he made a risky political decision when he signed the Oslo Agreement in 1993, even before receiving assurances that no UN resolution concerning Palestine would be implemented. Consequently, over seven years after Oslo, Arafat has little to show his people, especially after giving up so much upfront and in the Wye River Agreement. For example,

  • The occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have more Israeli Jewish colonies and bypass roads than ever,
  • Palestinian Arab Jerusalem is continuously being ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population, and its Palestinian Arab identity is being stripped day by day,
  • Unemployment has tripled, and above all
  • Arafat appears increasingly to be an Israeli and American stooge whose primary job is to control the Palestinian people the way Americans and Israelis see fit.
June 17, 1967. Note the Israeli officer to the left directing Palestinians out of their village 'Imwas

It's fundamentally wrong and very misleading to blame Arafat for the outbreak of resistance against the Israeli Occupation Forces in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Zionists often prefer to blame Arab leaders rather than tackle the core issues of the conflict, this is usually done to buy time hoping that Palestinians would lose hope. The Oslo Agreement's fundamental flaw was that it had attempted to scratch the surface of the core issues of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not necessarily solve them. Any agreement, similar to the Oslo Agreement, is destined for failure if it doesn't address the conflict's core issues, such as the Palestinian Right of Return, the status of Jerusalem, water allocations, and the borders of the emerging states.

Shukri al-Jamal's Palace in the Talibiya neighborhood in Jerusalem two days after its completion and just before Zionist Jews looted it from him and his family

It is possible that Palestinians and Israelis are not yet ready for a final peace settlement. However, that is no excuse for accepting any interim "peace agreement" that compromises critical Palestinian national interests. Until a fair and just peace agreement that addresses the core issues is reached, both communities have to start educating themselves about the conflict and hope for the best.

We urge you to watch Gideon Levy (a renowned Israeli journalist) for ten minutes, only making the case that Israel NEVER wanted the so-called two-state solution. Israel NEVER had the critical mass for "peace":

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Post Your Comment

said on December 30, 2017 #158805
My question is: What do Palestinians have in their hands to negotiate a deal that suits them? The answer is NOTHING. It's is sad to say that they lost everything today.
Brent on January 27, 2016 #157516
In response to 'orit'. The Palestinian refugee community is too large to be ignored, and they have shown they refuse to be ignored. They are part and parcel of the Palestinian struggle, just as they need to be.
orit on July 21, 2014 #154801
How can we move forward when the right of return is still presented as non- negotiable? Everyone knows this means the eventual end of the Jewish State. Its got to make you question the sincerity of Palestinian commitment to the two-state solution...fueling right wingers in Israel to back illegal settlements, fueling extremists on the other side, and on and on and on. Dump the right of return, remove the settlers from the settlements, and move on! I hope that 50, 70 years from now we'll all get along and be able to live together in one peaceful state, but its not gonna happen now, its a process, so let's stop the bloodshed and move forward.
Brent on January 27, 2014 #153620
A relevant quote from Zionist entity scholar Asher Susser:

"The Palestinian state that the Israelis were willing to endorse was never a fully sovereign and independent member of the family of nations, but an emasculated, demilitarized, and supervised entity, with Israeli control of its airspace and possibly of its borders too, and some element of Israeli and/or foreign military presence."
Hans on September 12, 2013 #152519
The Palestinians say they want to negotiate, but aren't prepared to accept anything less than 100% (pre '67). Well - that position negates the claim that they want to negotiate. Furthermore, it seems totally detached from the realities in the balance of power.

The demand for a rigt of return affirms this again and again. Forfeiting this position no longer enables the Palestinians to continue their fight against Israel after peace accords - as a demographic battle within Israel.

sr5452 on August 22, 2013 #152326
Arafat should have taken the deal and moved on. We need to move on. It's ridiculous to bring up incidents from the 11th-13th century. the past is dead. People need to worry about the now. I'd rather something instead of nothing. Lets just make peace
Brent on July 28, 2013 #152141
"kara" you are a Khazar moron.

Johns Hopkins University geneticist Dr. Eran Elhaik "The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses"

Dr. Eran Elhaik, PhD writes: "Our findings support the Khazarian hypothesis"

The Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine as the scholarship proves you vapid ziofascist propagandist:

"'Palestinians are an indigenous people who either live in, or originate from, historical Palestine. .Although the Muslims guaranteed security and allowed religious freedom to all inhabitants of the region, the majority converted to Islam and adopted Arab culture.' Bassam Abu-Libdeh, Peter D. Turnpenny, and Ahmed Teebi, ‘Genetic Disease in Palestine and Palestinians,’ in Dhavendra Kumar (ed.) Genomics and Health in the Developing World, OUP 2012 pp.700-711, p.700."
OUP is Oxford University Press you Khazar troll.

As for your "migration" nonsense, those propaganda myths and lies of the fraudster and clown joan peters (from the 1980s) were long ago completely and entirely refuted. From the New Yorker magazine, journalist David Remnick (himself a zionist) "The book (of joan peters) was thoroughly discredited by an Israeli historian, Yehoshua Porath, and many others who dismantled its pseudo-scholarship."

You might want to see the scholars like Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Anthony Lewis ("There Were No Indians"), and the aforementioned Zionist entity historian Professor Yehoshua Porath and there total refutation of joan peters lies. Which is why joan has never been heard from since the 1980s, due to the exposure of her as a total FRAUD and liar!

You didn't supposedly "drain the swamps" you pathetic Khazarian thieving colonialist. You literally are spewing the most debunked, easily refuted old zionist nonsense propaganda.

According to Paul Masson, a French economic historian, "wheat shipments from the Palestinian port of Acre had helped to save southern France from famine on numerous occasions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."(8)

The simple wikipedia article "Demographics of Palestine" itself completely refutes retarded ziofascist trolls like you. Literally your nonsense wouldn't even make it in a Zionist entity university today (after the masterful work of the New Historians back in the 1980s itself, using primarily "Israeli" documents themselves from the archives you pathetic, lying Khazar tool).

You didn't "buy" any land you clown; Historian Ilan Pappe "They (the Zionist colonialist) exploited a certain land regime, in which you could buy land from people who did not really own it and expel the people who really cultivated it. But even that was not really successful. As you probably know, by the time the British Mandate ended, the Zionist movement succeeded in purchasing less than seven percent of Palestine"

See the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, there you buffoon.

The international law is completely against you zionist criminals:

UN General Assembly Resolution 194 has been affirmed by the UN over 110 times since its introduction in 1948 with universal consensus except for Israel and the U.S. This resolution was further clarified by UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 which reaffirms in Subsection 2: "the inalienable right of Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return."

So to conclude you basically just spewed some of the dumbest and most easily refuted, old pieces of zionist propaganda nonsense and lies. You are pathetic.
Kara drew on July 24, 2013 #152117
Arafat was a murderer of babies and children Noam Chomsky is a self hating Jew who should stick to linguistics. Many Arabs migrated to israel after the Jews drained the swamps many were squatters who didn't own land and many sold land to the Jews. Hey guys we won the war you didn't since when do the losers make up the rules?
lill on March 14, 2013 #149120
It seems to me that the palestinians are the ones offereing a "take it or leave it" deal. By husseins own words he was offered 98% but it was "every single inch" or nothing.
Brent on February 14, 2013 #148797
It should be added here another big lie the Zionists will usually tie into this myth of the "generous offer" from Ehud Brog (aka Barak) is then turning around and claiming the Second Intifada was supposedly started right after this (they are implying because of Arafat "rejecting" their myth of the supposed "generous offer" refuted in this article to start with). When in reality the Al-Aqsa Intifada began a few months later, following Ariel Sheinerman (aka Sharon)'s provocations at Al-Haram Al-Qudsi Ash-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) in Al-Quds.
Brent on December 8, 2012 #147737
Noam Chomsky and all legitimate (non-Zionist) analysts show "ibn Ezra"s claims to be lies to try to excuse an illegal occupation.
Ibn Ezra on December 7, 2012 #147721
A simple look at the Clinton proposal and indeed the Geneva Initiative for example, easily disproved the notion that the state of Palestine would have no contiguity. Under the Clinton proposal - the one in question - there would be a corridor of land ranging east of Ma'aleh Adumim roughly 15-20km in size which to put into perspective, is the same width as some parts of Israel under the 67 borders.
Brent on August 1, 2012 #145421
The true generous offer was given by the Arab League, in the form of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative announced at the 2002 Arab League Summit in Beirut and then reaffirmed and re-offered at the 2007 Arab League Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In this landmark offer the entire Arab League came together and offered to recognize and open full relations with the Zionist entity if the Zionist occupation withdrew from ALL the land occupied since 1967 (the entire Palestinian West Bank including the capital of Palestinian East Jerusalem/Al-Quds, the Syrian Golan Heights, Shebaa farms region of Lebanon, etc). The Zionist entity's regime did not even bother responding at all to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and this landmark Arab League offer (which was simply calling for the bare minimum under international law, which notes and declares that ALL the Zionist occupation and illegal settlements on the 1967 lands are just that entirely ILLEGAL and must be removed entirely see UN Security Council Resolutions 242 the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war", Resolution 446, 478 on the illegal Zionist occupation of Al-Quds/Jerusalem, etc.)

Also Al-Jazeera revealed in the Palestine Papers, that the Zionists were still rejecting every offer made by the blackmailed and Western/Zionist occupation controlled Palestinian Authority itself! This was even as the Palestinian Authority was literally betraying the Palestinians and doing everything they could to bend over in submission to the Zionist Khazar colonizers! But even still the Zionist occupation criminals were simply like "that is still not good enough for us".

Also Norman Finkelstein has discussed in lectures how even serious academics in the Zionist entity itself have admitted that EVERY serious peace offer or move towards peace has ALWAYS come from either the Arab side (Egypt and Jordan, and the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative) or was started by an outside third party: NEVER the "Israeli" regime whatsoever (other than the Zionists again trumpeting, in their hasbara propaganda, this FAKE pathetic Bantustan "offer" at Camp David in 2000 that this article deals with and refutes thoroughly above).
Brent on May 23, 2011 #134615
Some more facts from the main academic sources (refuting Zionist) lies. Showing that before 1948 CE the Palestinians owned the majority of the land of Palestine: that is from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea (today's Gaza Strip, illegal "state of Israel", and West Bank) so meaning what was the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948. "it is estimated that by the end of the Mandate not more than 6 to 7 per cent of the total area of Palestine was sold voluntarily to the agency (Jewish Agency for Israel), and more important, the sale was not initiated by Palestinian peasantry; rather it was primarily absentee landlords and local landowners, in addition to foreign interests, who co-operated with the settlers." and also: "In 1944 the Jewish population, determined to be 553,600 (32%) out of 1,739,624 (including the never increasing nomads), held 1,731,300 dunums. 'This total area of Jewish land represents 6.6% of the total area of Palestine.'" So the Palestinian Arabs (as Dr. Ariella Oppenheim's genetic research proves are related to the indigenous Canaanites that were on the land before any tribe of "Israel" that today's white Khazar European "Jews" are not related to anyway) possessed around 93.4% of the land of Palestine (again from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea). And this small 6.6% of the land of Palestine the Zionist Jewish colonialists "owned" was illegally "purchased" from absentee "landlords" not living on the land as a result of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858.
Brent on October 2, 2010 #122751
Also Dany (and anyone else interested) I would definitely recommend the work of academic Ted Swedenburg; who supports the just plight of the oppressed Palestinian people. One of the most interesting things I read from Professor Swedenburg regards the 1858 Ottoman land law. In this law the Ottomans attempted to make the Palestinian fellah (or farmers, sometimes called "peasants") "register" their land with the official Ottoman government bureaucracy. The Palestinian fellah resist this because it would've made them pay higher taxes and be available for conscription into the Ottoman Empire's military. Palestinian ayans (notables, elites) took advantage and often registered Palestinian fellah (peasants) land in their names and misused the trust of the poor fellah.
Brent on October 2, 2010 #122750
Dany the data is clear that the Palestinians owned the vast majority of the land before the 1948 war. The main reason the Palestinians didn't support the UN (European colonialist tool at that time) was because it called for splitting the land in half; when Palestinians were way more than half the population compared to the much smaller population of Jews. Jews from around the world would later flood into Palestine in "immigration"; but even till this day if you take the people of Gaza, modern day "Israel", and the West Bank and combine them into one population Palestinian Arabs easily outnumber Jews. Zionists against the one state solution often bring this up in their racist support of Zionist apartheid policies.
Dany on August 17, 2010 #119827
I like the article but i believe there is a small mistake in your data. According to the Survey of Palestine Palestinians owned about half of the lands in Palestine before 1948 and not 93% as you mentioned. Also there is no evidence that Palestinians operated 93% of the lands. That would be technically impossible.

I am anti Zionist and pro Palestinian by the way
Brent on August 4, 2007 #18825
Great work!!!! The Zionists constantly claim that Barak offered this great deal to Arafat. As usual the Zionists are lying! Barak offer was crap, Palestinian wouldn't even have control of their own borders, airspace, or water under what Barak offered. The only acceptable offer is a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 borders, Israelis dismantling ALL settlements that are over the 1948 borders, Palestinian state with a capitol of East Jerusalem (with complete control of the Haram al-Sharif, Masjid al-Aqsa, and the Dome of the Rock, and refugees right to return to their original homes. Of course the Palestinian also must have control of their own borders, airspace, and water as well!
 
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