Today at TAP Online Gershom Gorenberg recounts the recent hounding of Barack Obama for the supposed anti-Israel stance of his informal adviser Robert Malley, a story that stretches back to the close of the Clinton administration:
There's more at work here than the usual, nearly boring, attempts to slime a liberal candidate as anti-Israel for the "sin" of supporting what Israel needs most -- determined diplomatic efforts to achieve peace. Lurking in the background is another of the battles over how Israel-Palestinian history is told. In that fight, the original furious critic of Barack Obama's adviser is former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. There's also a lesson about Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy: Besides settling the practical questions, it requires resolving the conflicting narratives about the past. To approach this task, the next president will need not just hard work, but a gift with rhetoric, with words.
The Malley story actually goes back to 2001, when the former Clinton foreign policy staffer began writing about what went wrong at the Camp David summit the summer before. First in the New York Times, then in a joint article with Hussein Agha in the New York Review of Books, Malley described mistakes made by Israel and the United States, not just by the Palestinians, that led to the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. ...
As Malley wrote in the Times, by 2001 the accepted story of the long summit was that "Camp David is said to have been a test that Mr. Barak passed and Mr. Arafat failed." While rejecting that simplistic account, he and Agha did not spare criticism of the Palestinian side. "The Palestinians principal failing is that ? they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own," they wrote in their detailed New York Review article. Even more telling is their assertion that for the Palestinians "Oslo ... was not about negotiating peace terms but terms of surrender." This was hardly an attitude likely to lead to creative diplomacy.
But Malley and Agha also described the mistakes of Clinton and, particularly, of Barak. As prime minister, Barak first tried to negotiate with Syria, treating the Palestinians as second priority. More concerned with not upsetting Israeli settlers than with addressing Palestinian concerns, he allowed rapid settlement construction to continue. He prevented any progress in preliminary negotiations, insisting that a peace deal would have to be put together at the conclusive summit. To the Palestinians, these moves radiated arrogance and were an attempt to force them into a corner. Once at Camp David, Barak did go beyond what Israel had offered earlier, yet kept his position ambiguous. The Palestinians did make concessions, but neither side went far enough to bridge the chasm between their positions. As for Clinton, his errors began with pushing Arafat into an ill-prepared summit.
Read the whole story and comment here.
--The Editors
