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- [00:02]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens. August 18, 2026. What happened at Camp David?
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Mark Levine
As all of you know, I am
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Narrator/Host
now leaving for Camp David to join Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat in their effort to reach agreement on the core issues that have divided Israelis and Palestinians for half a century. Now.
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Mark Levine
If the perceptions, Israeli perceptions of a state as being a mini state, internally fragmented, surrounded by Israel externally, with no sovereignty, and with no sovereignty over Jew Jerusalem. Barak is a traitor.
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Martin DeCaro
Just think what will happen if Jerusalem
- [00:47]
Mark Levine
will be divided as Barak agrees to do already the visit of Sharon to our very important and religious place.
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Narrator/Host
After 14 days of intensive negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, I have concluded with regret that they will not be able to reach an agreement at this time.
- [01:07]
Martin DeCaro
One summer, a quarter century ago, Israeli and Palestinian leaders held a summit where they tried to resolve their most difficult differences. The failure of diplomacy then gave way to violence from which the Oslo peace process never recovered. Today, each side continues to blame the other for blowing it at Camp David as Gaza has now been destroyed, as Israel attempts once and for all to eliminate Palestinian national aspirations. That is next as we report History as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
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Narrator/Host
The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We'll own it. And I don't want to be cute, I don't want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle east, this could be something that could be so bad, this could be so magnificent, To resolve competing claims, to give their children the gift of peace.
- [02:03]
Martin DeCaro
July 2000. With the peace process stalled and the clock ticking on his presidency, Bill Clinton announces. Israel's new prime minister, Ehud barak and then 70 year old Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO, would all get together at Camp David, the site of Jimmy Carter's historic summit in 1978.
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Narrator/Host
The two leaders face profound and wrenching questions. And there can be no success without principled compromise. The road to peace, as always, is a two way street. Both leaders feel the weight of history, but both, I believe, recognize this is a moment in history which they can seize.
- [02:43]
Martin DeCaro
After 14 days, on July 25, the summit ended without a resolution, which might have been expected given the difficulty of the issues on the table. One of the fatal flaws of the Oslo peace process was waiting till the end to deal with the toughest issues. As Ian Black wrote in his book Enemies and Neighbors, the Haram Al Sharif Temple Mount was an entirely predictable sticking point. Towards the end of the summit, however, Barak moved for the first time accepting Palestinian sovereignty over some parts of East Jerusalem and Palestinian custodianship of the Haram Al Sharif, with Palestinian security to protect it, though crucially it would still be under Israeli sovereignty. US bridging proposals failed because they did not deal with the Palestinian claim that the holy places were the concern of all Muslims. I cannot concede sovereignty over East Jerusalem, Arafat told Clinton. On the final day. As tension filled the air, Barak said, I don't know a prime minister who'd be willing to sign his name to the transfer of sovereignty over the first and Second Temple, which is the basis of Zionism. The refugee question was even tougher, says Black. Israel treated it as a humanitarian issue under which a token number would be allowed back under the rubric of family reunification. That was a far cry from the passionately held Palestinian demand for Israel's recognition of its responsibility for creating the problem in 1948 of the British Mandate.
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Mark Levine
Palestine is wrought by full scale war and both sides mobilize. Arab captives are held for evacuation to Acre. Women flee with what belongings they can carry.
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Narrator/Host
And as Palestine struggles for national existence, the conflict catches.
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Martin DeCaro
After the summit, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had this to say.
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Mark Levine
Jerusalem was the hardest issue. There's no question about it. And it's hard because it hasn't been resolved for thousands, you know, hundreds of years. And it's a very unique place.
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Martin DeCaro
Prime Minister Barak said Arafat hesitated to make the historic decisions that were required at this time in order to bring about the end of the conflict. Arafat's positions, he said on the subject of Jerusalem, prevented the achievement of an agreement.
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Mark Levine
It has a gut.
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Martin DeCaro
Plo spokesman Hassan Abdel Rahman sought to deflect criticism from Arafat.
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Mark Levine
I don't think that President Clinton blames President Arafat. I think we do not expect from Barak to praise Arafat and it is obvious that he will lay the blame on President Arafat. But the reasons are that Israel wanted to continue its occupation of some of Palestinian territories. It refused to accept Palestinian sovereignty on East Jerusalem and would not accept the right of return for the Palestinian refugees.
- [05:32]
Martin DeCaro
But back in Israel, in the occupied Palestinian territories, the situation was simmering dangerously. This was when Likud party leader Ariel Sharon thought it was wise to visit the Temple Mount of the Haram Al Sharif in Jerusalem accompanied by hundreds of riot police.
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Mark Levine
I cannot see any possibility for real peace if Jews were not allowed to go to the holiest place that belonged to them, the visit of Sharon to our very important and religious place for the whole Muslims. And I was trying before this visit with Barak in His house, in his house. And I asked him please not to let Sharon go to visit.
- [06:35]
Narrator/Host
Now is the time to stop the bloodshed, to restore calm, to return to dialogue and ultimately to the negotiating table.
- [06:46]
Martin DeCaro
Sharon's provocation helped spark the second intifada, or uprising, one of the bloodiest periods in the history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. But it was not the end of the peace process. Yet Clinton kept trying with his so called parameters in the weeks before his term ended, which led to the Taba talks early in 2001. The dominant narrative that emerged from this well intended stab at diplomacy was that Arafat turned down a Palestinian state. And in view of what's happening right now, Camp David looks like a missed opportunity of historic proportions. Clinton himself continues to blame Arafat. Here he is a couple of years ago at the New York Times Dealbook
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Narrator/Host
summit when I tell the young people, for example, who are understandably in America, they are, let's say they're super sympathetic with the Palestinians. Well, they've been killed. A lot of those Palestinians have. And they had. All they know is a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. And I tell them what Arafat walked away from and they like, can't believe it. I said, oh yeah, he walked away from a Palestinian state with the capital in East Jerusalem, 96% of the West Bank, 4% of Israel to make up for the 4% that the settler was occupied that were beyond the borders in the 67 more. And I go through all the stuff that was in the deal and they like, it's not on their radar screen. They can't even imagine, does that happen?
- [08:34]
Martin DeCaro
Is it true? Did Arafat say no to a Palestinian state or something less than that? Didn't all sides share in the responsibility? Today, President Trump's Board of Peace is struggling to implement his Gaza peace plan. Whatever one thinks of the problems built into the Oslo process, it was far better than this sham.
- [08:54]
Narrator/Host
Well, you know how I feel about the Gaza Strip.
- [08:56]
Martin DeCaro
I think it's an incredible piece of important real estate. Writing from Gaza for New York Magazine, Mohammad Mawish says Gaza as planned, will be a peripheral appendage to Greater Israel. A captive population toiling for low wages and a meager existence following a pattern that has long been established in the West Bank. I asked Sarah Roy, an associate at the Harvard center for Middle Eastern Studies, what the US And Israel hope to accomplish with their development plan. It is about eliminating a Palestinian presence in Gaza, she said, eliminating Gaza as the center of resistance and about ending the whole Palestinian political project to Which Gaza is the key Again, that is from an article in New York magazine. So it is not possible to go back in time to Camp David to tell everyone who is there. You've got to get this right or else. But we can try on this podcast to recover what actually happened. With historian Mark Levine at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Impossible Israel, Palestine since 1989, which is an exhaustive account of the Oslo peace process. Mark Levine, welcome back.
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Mark Levine
Thanks so much for having me.
- [10:08]
Martin DeCaro
What does Camp David still have to teach us? Camp David and what followed immediately after the Clinton parameters and then the early 2001 negotiations that also failed. Why is this still relevant?
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Mark Levine
There's a huge difference to begin with between, let's say these so called peace terms or accords that are being proposed by the Trump administration in Gaza today and camp David of 2000. The first is that that meeting was the culmination of a six year, seven years of peace process that at least offered the chance for what, remember, could never be said openly, but everyone understood to be the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, a two state solution. Whereas this is basically parameters, not covering the entirety of historic Palestine, Israel and the occupied territories, but simply what would happen with Gaza after the commission of a genocide and vis a vis those who remain them remain in subhuman, in human conditions. So even though there was a huge imbalance of power during Oslo that led up to Camp David and led to its inevitable failure, it still was a radically different moment than today. So at some level we can't really compare them other than just they're two markers in history. But why did they go to camp David in 2000? The reason they went to Camp David is because when the Oslo peace process began in 1993, when the implementation began, and then in 1994, there was this idea that of a land for peace solution whereby Israel would, over the next five years, six years and most of a peace process, withdraw more and more settlers from the occupied territories in return for peace, in return for the end of any kind of armed resistance negotiations, and then at the end, by 99, there should be a final agreement reached again. It couldn't be said thus, but that was what everyone knew. A Palestinian state, a contiguous, territorially contiguous Palestinian state being established alongside Israel, more or less fully sovereign, albeit probably demilitarized, and it would end the Palestinian problem. Of course, even that process more or less left out refugees. But I think from the very beginning, everyone understood that Palestinians would not be able to force Israel to accept more than maybe 100,000 refugees as a gesture back into Israel, which at that point wouldn't be that many people, given the demographics within Israel. And the rest would settle, who wanted to return would settle within the borders of a Palestinian state. So that was where we were supposed to be in 1999, especially when Barak, Ehud Barak, who was a Labour Party politician who, by the way, opposed the Oslo process. He was not a peacenik in any. He was not like Yossi Beylin. He was not someone who supported the whole peace process with all his every fiber of his being. But he understood when he defeated Netanyahu in 1999 that they had to start moving towards some kind of final status negotiations. The problem was that he also knew the minimum requirements that Palestinians will be willing to accept at that final status negotiations were not where the Israeli establishment nor the Israeli public was, which was getting out of the vast majority of the territories, dismantling the vast majority of the settlements, and allowing a truly sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, to come into being. Something not too far from those terms would come in the Taba talks in early 2001, after the failure of Camp David and the eruption of the Al Aqsa intifada in September of 2000. But that's where we begin. We begin this moment where the peace process should have ended. By 2000, there should have been a Palestinian.
- [14:03]
Martin DeCaro
Yes. And they were waiting until the end to get to the thorniest issues.
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Mark Levine
And that's one of the problems of Camp David, of the whole Oslo peace process. You can't really negotiate that way. Yes. You always think if you save the hard stuff for last, you've established a set of relations and networks in place that make it very hard for both sides not to make the difficult decision. And see, the clear indication that Oslo was a mirage was what I call stillborn, was impossible. As I titled the book I wrote about an impossible peace. The settlements kept growing throughout the Oslo process. The number of settlers, Israeli settlers in the west bank and Gaza then doubled, which means the constituency for leaving was even smaller in Israel than before. The whole, what Jeff Halper, the Israeli American geographer Jeff Halper would call the matrix of control, the control of every aspect of geography, with bypass roads and checkpoints and strategic settlements and military bases and tunnels and restrictions on Palestinian movement and land and access to land that had only grown more intense. This idea that you would be led to a moment where, okay, there's some hard things, but we've established trust. No, it was even harder at the end, which is not supposed to be the way it goes.
- [15:18]
Narrator/Host
At Camp David, both sides engaged in comprehensive discussions that were really unprecedented because they dealt with the most sensitive issues dividing them. Profound and complex questions that long had been concerned considered off limits.
- [15:31]
Martin DeCaro
Let's pick away at these layers one at a time. 1999, near the end of Clinton's presidency, the backdrop to Ehud Barak's 1999 victory over Benjamin Netanyahu, who had won in 1996 following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist. The Netanyahu period of 96 to 99 was a setback for the peace process. The economic plight of Palestinians had been worsening under the Oslo arrangement. So even before they get to Camp David, this process is not improving the lives of the Palestinian people. And because of the PLO's association with the peace process, it is being discredited. Hey, you said diplomacy was going to work. Look where it's leaving us. So they're being discredited by more radical elements, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, who are saying, no, it's violent resistance is the way forward. Why were things getting worse for Palestinians in the mid to late 1990s?
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Mark Levine
Well, because they were meant to get worse. What does this reflect? The logic behind it is, specifically there is, as Shimon Peres called it, a new Middle east emerging. This is a neoliberal Middle East. As Peres said at one point, what do you really need a state for? States don't matter. Borders don't matter anymore. In the new Middle east, it's economics that matter. So there was a kind of switcheroo that happens, which is, listen, yes, we'll get to sovereignty eventually, don't worry. But what's really important is an economic framework that allows for a new Middle Eastern economy to emerge where all of us would be totally engaged and wrapped up in. And that would give you far more freedom than just a traditional state where you'd be landlocked and, you know, you'd be locked in and have no real freedom. And that's the birth of Oslo. It's an economic framework for integration of the Palestinian economy, such as it was a colonized economy, de developed, as Sarah Roy of Harvard University famously put it, vis a vis Gaza, but also the West Bank. And then now that was de developed, like every colonial territory redeveloped within a system which never would allow Palestinians to have actual power other than a small
- [17:41]
Martin DeCaro
comprador elite, because it instantiated the occupation. Right.
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Mark Levine
Let's say Israel got out of most of the territory per se, economically, there would still be A neoliberal occupation, where you basically have Israeli and Jordanian and Egyptian and other businesses going into the occupied territories along what they call the seam lines, the Green Line, 67 Green Line. They would go in, the Palestinians would come from their side, and in these kind of factories, which would be qualified industrial zones and so on, they would be able to make things cheap enough. And this would sort of, as happened in Mexico, allow Palestinians to begin to have a middle class. But it would be done under conditions that actually would give them less rights than they might have had without any unions to support them. It would basically be a neoliberal thing, like China, like Mexico, like Vietnam. But that was sold as the thing that was going to free them even more than land. But it didn't even come with the land. The land never came. So it was twice as bad.
- [18:42]
Martin DeCaro
So I'll introduce some Rashid Khalidi here from his book the Hundred Years War on Palestine, because the scales have fallen away from my eyes when it comes to Oslo. I used to have a more romanticized view of it. It was still meaningful. It was historic. It did open an opportunity for something that had never been there before. But long before Camp David, the seeds were already sown for failure. So here's Khalidi. He says, in fact, conditions grew much worse for all but a very small number of individuals whose economic or personal interests were intertwined with the new Palestinian Authority and who benefited from normalized relations with Israel. For everyone else, he says, there were consistent denials of permission to travel and move goods from one place to another as a labyrinthine system of permits, checkpoints, walls and fences was created. He goes on to say, in a conscious Israeli policy of separation, Gaza was severed from the west bank, which was itself severed from Jerusalem. Jobs within Israel did not return. The settlements and settler only roads between them proliferated, fragmenting the west bank to devastating effect. Between 1993 and 2004, Khalidi says in GDP per capita declined despite promises of a prosperity that was just around the corner. And we know through history when you raise people's hopes is when all hell breaks loose. When that does not happen. Khalidi says the post Oslo confinement was most constricting in the Gaza Strip. And here's referring to restrictions on movement in the decades following 1993, the strip was cut off from the rest of the world in stages, encircled by troops on land and the Israeli navy by sea. Essentially, the Palestinian economy was in ruins when Ehud Barak wins his victory in 1999.
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Mark Levine
Ruins might be a bit strong, but it was certainly worse off than it was intended to be. And material I was living there then was definitely getting materially worse. And I think you need to take it back to one thing that Professor Khaledi doesn't mention, which is very important to the context of this whole process. By the late 80s, Palestinians had been under Israeli occupation for 20 years. Right? The first intifada was sparked by the deaths of four Palestinians in December 1987.
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Narrator/Host
They have to stop all this nonsense
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Mark Levine
of the riots, of throwing stones. Palestinian workers were beginning to get integrated into the Israeli system, especially the hysterical which wanted to organize them. Palestinian workers, however underpaid they are. You know, Mexican workers here are badly underpaid, but they're not still coming here for no reason. They're coming here because it's better than the alternatives at home. You had enough Palestinians who were earning enough income, getting health insurance and so on through the histidroot that they actually were starting to do the one thing no one wanted them to do. They were starting to buy land. So you had Palestinians in the west bank buying land with good title, that Israeli forces couldn't just come and say, nah, this isn't real, this is some old Ottoman deed. We can this land for a military base or something. Now you had good deed, good title on good land. That was strategically. They weren't dumb. They knew where Israel wanted to take and they were starting to buy land increasingly that would secure their hold. And this was a huge development. So one of the things that also led to this and was so fortuitous for neoliberal reforms, Palestinians were starting to get enough money to secure their hold on their land, which is one thing Israelis didn't want. So how to stop that is to get them out of Israel. How do you get the Palestinian workers out of Israel so they're no longer able to earn all this money? Right? Well, this is what the neoliberal world order is. You bring in ties you. Suddenly there's all these people from the Philippines, in Israel and the west bank, there's people from Thailand, Africans, sub Saharan Africans, all these people from totally outside the region started to come in and work in Israel and much more cheaply than Palestinians who are now integrated into the his Jedut, some of them who had certain minimum labor standards, et cetera. So all of a sudden they were becoming superfluous. That radically weakened them before Oslo takes place. This is in the wake of the Intifada, especially Israel realized it could just bring in people. And Thai workers didn't care about land. All these farm workers who had no Ties to the land were much more politically malleable because they didn't care about politics and they didn't know any of it. And so they were happy to come in and work. And so Palestinians are replaced. So this new Middle east is already being set up in a way of confinement, even at a moment where you're supposed to have sovereignty, which in a way, sovereignty is a confinement because it means you have borders, you can't theoretically move past anymore. Palestinians are being confined, farm workers are coming, their economic position is weakened. And then you come in and say, but look, we have this magic thing now called the Oslo peace process, which will get you to, we can't say what, but everyone knows it's a state. And during that time, as Professor Havadi pointed out, the economic system just got worse and worse at the same time that the territorial situation got worse and worse. So nothing got better. And that was the problem leading up to 2,000.
- [23:58]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, the settlement expansion continued apace. So Barack wins in 1999. Ehud Barak, he is the most decorated soldier in Israeli military history. I have Ian Black's book in front of me here. Enemies and neighbors and listeners can hear me flipping through the pages here. So 1999, Barak wins 56% of the vote, Netanyahu 44%. He put together a broad coalition of right wing and religious parties as well as the left wing merets, but eschewed the support of Arab political parties, even though many Arabs had voted for him. So, key point here, question I need to ask you. Palestinians were optimistic about Barak's victory, but they quickly became disenchanted with him.
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Mark Levine
Well, they became disenchanted with him because he didn't make any moves. Again, this is why Camp David became necessary. Once he was Prime Minister, he didn't actually move to end the settlements, you know, and the constant build out of settlements and movement of people in there.
- [24:59]
Martin DeCaro
Minimal Palestinian demands.
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Narrator/Host
Right.
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Martin DeCaro
He couldn't meet even minimal Palestinian.
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Mark Levine
Not even minimal. He wasn't going to change the economic structure of Oslo because that was the only quote, unquote, success. It was also producing a comprador Palestinian wealthy elite, which was wonderful for Israel and the US because those were the people who were now running the PA and they had interests. You know, they had the VIP plates, they wouldn't get stuck at checkpoints. I remember going past Abu Mazen, the current and ever forever Prime Minister President of Palestine. Now his house once in Ramallah and someone had scribbled in Arabic, spray painted, this is your prize for selling out Palestine. Mahmoud Yeah, One of these McMansions in the road leading into Ramallah. So there was a loss of faith in the Palestinian elite, which is of course crucial to then a revolt because you don't think you can trust them. You had the settlements growing more and more. The red roofs, as they call them, were popping up in more and more places. The number of settlers were increasing. The number of checkpoints were not diminishing. And also the closure. You got to remember the first 20 years, Palestinians, however colonial it was, all the problems, Palestinians were still moving back through their entire historic homeland without much trouble at all.
- [26:13]
Martin DeCaro
That's right.
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Mark Levine
Were completely closed off into a very small area. Never mind Gaza, but even the west bank. You know, something that normally I remember early on, before all the checkpoints and everything, you know, it could take you half hour to go from Ramallah to Nablus or Jenin, something. It could take three to seven hours.
- [26:30]
Martin DeCaro
You can't do that. And you know what? Also I learned, Mark, from interviewing Dan Efron, who wrote a terrific book called Killing a King about the assassination of Rabin. In the early days after Oslo, highways were built from Israel into the West Bank. I can't remember the initial purpose of the highways, but what they did was allow ordinary middle class, lower middle class Israelis who are looking for inexpensive real estate to go into the west bank, inhabit a settlement, and then they could commute on highways that were restricted to Palestinians and go back and forth from their new job to their new home, vice versa. These were not religious maniacs who we now equate with the Satan movement today. These are just ordinary people. But it had such a perverse and enduring negative consequence. Go ahead, I interrupted you.
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Mark Levine
Well, this is known as the bypass road.
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Martin DeCaro
Yes, the bypass.
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Mark Levine
And they were these giant, you know, we think of roads. These were these giant roads. They were also there for troop movement if they ever needed to. So they were very wide. You could move columns of tanks. So first of all, they carved out. It was like just wounds in the body of Palestine. Right. They were ugly, they were horrible. They were always somehow managed to cut through Palestinian land. Like if there was a Palestinian farm, you know, because they had all the maps, the Israelis, if they could go around the farm and maybe, you know, take an existing older Palestinian road and just make it bigger, you know, to handle more traffic. No, they would just say, oh, here's a Palestinian farm. Boom, right through the farm. And then the farmer couldn't get from one side of their farm to the other. So, I mean, this was the kind of Pettiness involved in these roads. But, yes, it institutionalized the occupation and the settlement system. It normalized it so that average Israelis, who might even vote for the Labour Party, they began to see this as normal and to see living in a settlement 10 minutes by car, 15 minutes from Jerusalem, or even if you go up in the northern west bank from major towns in Israel as normal. And what's the problem? Why is this bad? You know, how do you get rid of those people? Because there's no way five years later you're going to get them moved into a place in Israel that was this lovely with a pool and nice kindergarten. You know, really nicely designed. Kind of looked a lot like Orange County. Affordable, too affordable, because they had special loans. So, yeah, this created the perverse incentive. I remember sitting in a cafe in Tel Aviv once. I don't know, 98, 99. I was sitting there drinking what they call the cafe, which is basically a cafe au lait or something like that, or a cappuccino in my morning. It cost I don't remember how many shekels, but it was a little bit under three bucks, right? $3 to have your. Israelis love to sit at cafes and Tel Aviv and drink their coffee in the morning and smell the beach here and so on. And I just started calculating, okay, this costs $3 a day, let's say. And then I looked at the defense budget, the entire security budget of Israel at the time, and basically the entire occupation was being run. The cost to the averages, really, of the entirety of the occupation was about a cup of coffee. The cost to ending the occupation would be civil war. Now, it doesn't matter what your politics are, if your choice is to keep paying for an extra cup of coffee a day or civil war with the other half of the country heavily armed and very ideologically committed. Half of the country, what are you gonna choose? You're going to choose the cup of coffee? It just. There was no incentive for Israel to stop what it was doing. It would have meant, literally a civil war if they actually withdrew from 90% of the settlements. So the structure just got deeper and deeper, and Palestinians had no power to impact it in any way.
- [30:03]
Martin DeCaro
The conversation with Mark Levine continues in a moment. Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads. Okay, it's the summer of 2000. There's been violence, which is complicating things. Some of the worst violence in years. Of course, during the Oslo process. This is when Hamas starts doing suicide bombers. Because Hamas is opposed to the Oslo process. Bill Clinton decides He wants to try to save this process because there was a timeline, right? There was a calendar, if you will, that they were supposed to keep that after the signing of Oslo 2 in 1995, which actually was a detailed plan, unlike the initial Oslo agreement, within five years, the two sides were supposed to move on to final status agreements, status of Jerusalem, refugees, a whole number of things. We can get into the weeds because the weeds are important here. So tell us, what happens in the middle of 2000. Why does Clinton want to call this summit? What is Barack's attitude and what is Arafat stance?
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Mark Levine
I'm sorry to say, as a historian, I have to go back a bit.
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Martin DeCaro
Of course.
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Mark Levine
Another line connecting July 2000 to the the earlier era in Oslo is the Goldstein massacre in Hebron, in the mosque in Hebron. Now, why is this so important? Because it showed the fallacy of the Oslo process from the start and the lack of actual goodwill by Israelis. Baruch Goldstein kills, I don't know, two dozen worshippers in the holy mosque in Hebron as they were worshiping.
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Martin DeCaro
An Israeli Jew goes into a mosque daily.
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Mark Levine
Jew settler, doctor. Just a crazy situation. Now, what does Rabin and Michael Earner, the late Rabbi Michael Earner, who ran Tikkun magazine, pointed this out very quickly. One of the first people to point this out. What does Rabin do? That was the moment he could have said, the settlers are crazy and we need to stop this process. We need to stop all the settlements. We need to start moving. He had the goodwill of the whole world and the public to have done something at that point. Instead, what did he do? He initiated intense closures across. Across the occupied territories, precisely to prevent retaliation. While that might have been understandable, but we're also going to start evacuating settlers because you did this. We're going to get rid of all the Jewish settlers in Hebron, for example. He didn't do that. He actually intensified the settlements around Hebron and he intensified the closure of Palestinian territory. So what happens two months later? That was in February of 94. Two months later, the first suicide bombing occurs somewhere in April, which was carried out by Hamas. So again, even the suicide bombings, one could say, well, it's Hamas resistance that makes it sound like it's somehow irrational. It occurred because of the worst massacre in decades in a mosque in the fourth holiest city in Islam, perhaps, if Jerusalem's the third, certainly it's one of the top five or six that was responded to by the Israeli government as if it was Palestinians who had massacred Jews there. And Their situation became even worse. So that's the root of the first of the wave of suicide bombings that start 94 to 98, 99, and then again with Al Aqsa. Right. So fast forward now to July 2000. And let us remember the single most important thing of the whole Camp David episode is that the Israelis never presented a map. They kept saying lovely things about what was going to happen. And Palestinians kept saying, please show us the map so we can negotiate.
- [33:33]
Martin DeCaro
It's a strange summit where nothing's written down. There are no written proposals.
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Mark Levine
Right. You have secret meetings when no one's ready to write things down. You have summits when people are ready to sign documents.
- [33:44]
Martin DeCaro
That's right, because there's two things here. As you said, they weren't really prepared going in. And then during the talks themselves, proposals were not written down. So it's been left to people who were there at the time to try to reconstruct what actually was proposed and why. And I asked you about why Clinton wanted to call the summit. I mean, the clock's ticking down on his presidency. He wants.
- [34:06]
Mark Levine
And he had dropped the ball. I think there was a realization again, we have to understand who's running Clinton's negotiations with Palestinians. Dennis Ross, There's a huge influence of people who are very pro Israel. Some were Jewish, some weren't. But there was a general reflexive support of Israel. There were very few people who were in any way representing on a daily basis, a pushback from the Palestinian perspective. These were nice, good Democratic liberals, but Democratic liberals also ran the Vietnam War, right? I mean, liberal Democrats do not have a good record historically vis a vis decolonization. In fact, quite the opposite. So these people just couldn't see. I don't know why, because if you're living there at the time, it was pretty darn obvious they couldn't see that this was. Was going in the exact opposite way that it was supposed to go. Everyone in the world could see it, especially Palestinians and of course, all these new settlers who were like, well, this is nice. We're not going to leave this anytime soon. We don't care what anyone says.
- [35:02]
Martin DeCaro
Well, Arafat, Arafat didn't want to go to Camp David.
- [35:05]
Mark Levine
No, he did not, because he knew that the dynamics had changed. And he said, I will only go, said to Clinton, if you promise me you will not blame me if and when this fails. And Clinton said in his lovely Arkansas draw, I guess, don't worry, I'll take care of you. Of course, he lied through his teeth, or maybe he didn't lie. Maybe he really felt like he would do that. But when the push came to shove, he was never going to allow any blame. At the end of his presidency, when he had his friend running for president after him, Gore, he wasn't going to start blaming Israel at that point. He would have alienated the entire American Jewish electorate. Arafat understood the situation, but I don't think Arafat understood that he was going to show up somewhere and again, like the entirety of Oslo, go through days and days of empty talk. It's empty because in the end, the only thing that matters is here's the map, here's what we are gonna keep, what we wanna keep, and here's what you get to have. There was never a map. Everyone agrees to that. There was never a map.
- [36:00]
Martin DeCaro
And I need to point out how Arafat and Barak had a history already of negotiations. Camp David is not the first time they sat down with each other and
- [36:10]
Mark Levine
they'd been completely frustrated.
- [36:11]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, throughout 1999, it did not go well. But. Go ahead.
- [36:14]
Mark Levine
Did not go well because there was a push to expand the settlement in advance of final status talk. To expand. Well, to further populate existing settlements to make them harder so they would be permanently retained by Israel, but also economically as well. See, Israel was doing great. This whole new economy where Palestinians who are then using all that money to secure their land are gone. And now we have all these cheap farm workers that we can exploit horribly. They have no political power or interest in anything. So Israel was in a manifestly, and it was the original dot com boom in Israel, all the tech companies. Israel was doing great. And the world said, oh, Israel's making peace. Things were looking good for Palestinians. It was quite the opposite. But there was no reason for Barak to make any difficult decisions because things were going well without it. He just didn't figure out, even though it was only a decade earlier, that eventually, if you keep doing this, Palestine is going to explode. And this time it'll be even worse because you just armed the entirety of the population with light arms, AKs and so on, but still enough to cause a lot of trouble. And that is, in fact what happens, of course, in September of 2000. But Camp David comes together because of Clinton's weakness, because of the Palestinian weakness. But no matter how weak Palestinians are, and this is the difference between Palestine to this very day, even after Gaza, the horrors of the. The genocide in Gaza and everything that's happening in the West Bank, Palestinians will not go away. They are not, tragically, what happened to Indigenous Americans or indigenous Australians or indigenous Tibetans or anyone else. The balance of power, while humongous between Israel and Palestine is not enough to finish the job of successful settler colonial enterprises, which is to reduce the indigenous population to something small enough to be easily managed as kind of archive of what was once there, like we have in America.
- [38:07]
Martin DeCaro
So I'm going to get into the weeds a little bit here because it is important for people to know what was on the table at Camp David after all. This podcast is called what Happened at Camp David? Reading from Ian Black's Enemies and Neighbors. The initial Israeli proposal in the summer of 2000 was for annexing 14% of the west bank with a long term lease on a further 10% in the Jordan Valley.
- [38:31]
Mark Levine
That's the Elon Plan, by the way. The famous Elon Plan that comes already in 1970 goes back 30 years by then.
- [38:37]
Martin DeCaro
Wow. That would leave the Palestinians with 76% of the territory and that would have left 80% of Israeli settlers under Israeli control. But 50,000 Israeli settlers will be living in Palestinian areas. Two corridors would have run from west to east, giving Israelis access to the Jordan river in the event of an attack from from there. That would have meant the Palestinian territory being divided into three non contiguous blocks, including Gaza. Palestinians rejected their first plan, insisting that a full return to the 67 borders could be the only basis for negotiation. That would give them 22% of historic Palestine against the 78% held by Israel on the eve of the Six Day War in June of 1967. That was the grand compromise the PLO had in their view already made. A later amended Israeli offer involving Israeli annexation of only 10.5% of the West bank relative to that first one of 14% was also rejected. Although the Palestinians did agree to a land swap which would allow the Israelis to retain the big settlements of Malah Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzio, the main
- [39:48]
Mark Levine
Jerusalem settlement block at that point.
- [39:50]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, my poor pronunciation there. In the end, the final offer I believe was for 91 or 92% of the West Bank. That means Israel would have annexed less than 10% of it. And this is the deal. I want you to address this. This is the deal that people still point to today. Arafat turned down a great offer.
- [40:09]
Mark Levine
Yeah, well, let's just start with the 14% original offer, which sets the tone of the negotiations. That would have left Palestinians with about 16% of historic Palestine. So they would have gone from 22 down to 16. That they would control the security corridor that goes back to the Elon plan, which was a security plan which in 1970, I believe by general alone, which set out how Israel was going to settle the West Bank. These specific areas that had religious historical importance and were tied would sort of erase the green line on the western side and then this security corridor around, down the Jordan Valley that would make it impossible for Jordan or anyone else to move tanks into the west bank again. So they were still operating under those conditions, which was ridiculous by then because Israel and Jordan were at peace and there was no chance ever that Jordan was going to push its troops to the border. That would have been the end of the King. That would have been the end of the. They could have taken out the Jordanian leadership if they tried to do that. So it was a joke. It was just. They didn't want to give it. And certainly again, the Palestinian state was always going to be demilitarized. So there could have had international observers. That whole security argument was ridiculous. But the settlement argument, this is absolutely key. For 150 years, from the very first Jewish settlements in Palestine in the late 19th century, settlement and security were inseparable. All settlements, like every frontier settlement, anyone who knows the US west, the history of history of the settlement of the west and the savage Indians attacking the settlers and so on, every settlement poses a security question. So the farmer and the soldier were always one in Israeli ideology and security and land was always inseparable. So there was just this Israeli political but also national psyche that land controlling the land equals ensuring the security. And since the whole point of Zionism is to control the land from for settlement, settling the land, especially the historic religious homeland, all the names in the Bible is crucial for the future security. That was something that neither Rabin nor Barak nor Peres, the three labor prime ministers, more secular people could change because they didn't try. They never had that conversation. If you never had that kind of national conversation, you can never actually make the hard choices because no one understands why they're there and why they have to be made. All of this is the background to Camp David. And then a non map, non specific set of numbers, multiple ones are being given out. And Arafat was very confused. He's like, just show us the map so we can negotiate this. Show us a map that you're willing to sign. And then we'll say no. But then we can organize, you know, we can negotiate rather and eventually we'll get to, to something. Land swaps was becoming key. Definitely Palestinian negotiators had agreed, yes, you could keep the majority of the settlement Blocks, you'll expand the southern west bank,
- [43:06]
Martin DeCaro
but we can get land in Israel in exchange for Palestinians.
- [43:10]
Mark Levine
Right? Exactly. If Israel was going to keep 6 or 8% of the land of the west bank, then they would give Palestinians that equivalent in the southern west bank into the Negev. Not the best land, but whatever. And then also potentially Gaza would be expanded a bit.
- [43:25]
Martin DeCaro
It's unthinkable today.
- [43:28]
Mark Levine
Right. We're so far, but that was the key. But again, no map. So how. There's nothing to sign. What could Arafat sign? And so he said, I can't do this now. The problem was he was so ill advised and he was so, I'm sorry to say, inept as a negotiator, which he had shown many times, which is also probably why Barak figured, and in fact said before he left, he would just run around him.
- [43:51]
Martin DeCaro
Sure. He was older at this point too, and fading.
- [43:54]
Mark Levine
Right? Older, fading, Very bad advisors. Because who were all the advisors? All his advisors at this point were people who were earning from Oslo, who were part of the Oslo system. They all had a vested interest. He had no one that Faisal Husseini, I think had died by then. All the real important intellectuals, Hari Nusseiba, Anana Shrawi, all the people who knew what was really happening were not really able to be there and forcefully.
- [44:17]
Martin DeCaro
Advocate, can I, can I ask you about Jerusalem? Because again, this is one of the thorniest issues left to the end. How are you supposed to settle this on a short timeline? And Ehud Barak told Arafat, no Israeli Prime Minister, none is going to allow for Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem.
- [44:35]
Mark Levine
Well, that wasn't true. And not that what you said isn't true. It wasn't true that it was impossible to do. It was already clear. And again, this is at a moment where Jerusalem was already rung by Jewish settlements. East Jerusalem, but Jews had not moved so forcefully into the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to settle. Now they have. I used to go, dear friends who lived in Sheikh Jarrah, up the hill from the Old City, which was leading to the right into the West Bank, Abu Dhees in these areas. And it was still Palestinian. Today they're, I don't know, upwards of half Jewish. I haven't been there in a few years. But settlements have now taken apart what remains of Arab East Jerusalem or Palestinian East Jerusalem. But at the time, Palestinian East Jerusalem within its old municipal borders was still somewhat coherent. It could easily have been said, okay, the formula they ultimately agreed to. What's Jewish stays Jewish, what's Arab stays Arab. They would say Arab instead of Palestinian, but they meant Palestinian. What's Jewish stays Jewish. So all the Jewish neighborhoods, including the ones in the enlarged municipality of Jerusalem, which was on occupied land, but never mind, would remain Jewish Male Adumim, for example. And then what is still Palestinian will be Palestinian, and that will be the capital of East Jerusalem, along with enlarging its municipal boundaries to include villages like Abu Dhabi, which were very, you know, which used to be literally from the old city. At Abu Dhabi would be 7, 8 minutes to go by car before the Waldo provided it. So this was the dynamic that everyone knew was going to happen. Why he went in saying, we can't do this, when four months, five months later, they were willing to do it. It was probably a negotiating tactic because of course, everyone knew and most Israelis didn't care if Salahuddin street in East Jerusalem was now the most important street in Palestine. No one cared. But Arafat couldn't figure out because of all of the years of Israeli duplicity and not fulfilling the agreements they already signed, which is very important. The only Israeli prime minister who ever fulfilled the terms of any agreement was Netanyahu with the agreement to remove most of the Jewish settlers from Hebron. None of the Labor Peace people actually fulfilled any of their terms of the agreement. So he doesn't trust anyone. Rightly so. And they're just suddenly saying things which say, what are you talking about? We all know what has to happen. But no, no, we, we can't do that. And then, oh, we're not offering you a map. So of course Arafat's going to say no. Except he can't say no. This was the disaster. The disaster was that he said no. All he should have said was, this is really interesting. We're just waiting for a map. We're happy to stay as long as Israel wants, or we'll come back at any point. As soon as you have a map, we can do the negotiations. We'll come. Please give us the map. Instead. Arafat said the single worst word in the history of diplomacy. No, especially because it goes back to the 3 nos of the Arab League after 1967. No negotiation, no recognition, no peace. I think whatever they were, someone could look them up. So it just immediately echoed Arab rejectionism.
- [47:35]
Martin DeCaro
But it's not the end of the story. There are the Clinton parameters in 2000 and then the Taba talks in early 21 with a new president, George W. Bush. But I have to bring up what happens immediately between little things. Yes. The second intifada breaks out in September. I've discussed this with other historians in past episodes. What, in your view, is the connection between the breakdown at Camp David and the start of the second uprising in September?
- [48:03]
Mark Levine
Obviously, there's Ariel Sharon's visit to the Haram Al Sharif, which now seems quaint given what just happened a few weeks ago with, you know, Israel is going and praying, then talking about how they're going to rebuild everything. But at that moment, it was a huge provocation for Sharon, of all people, to go to the Haram Al Sharif, clearly to say, this is ours now. Under every possible scenario in which the conflict would have come to an end. The Haram Al Sharif and that whole plaza and then the Holy Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, we're never going to be under Israeli sovereignty. The wall would remain, the Western Wall would be under Israeli sovereignty, that would be under Palestinian, with Eastern International Force, etc. But for him to do this was. Was a huge provocation. But it was also a provocation in. After the huge failure of Camp David. Every Palestinian knew that Arafat was screwed by Clinton. Everyone knew that Clinton had promised, this was in the papers, not to blame him. So there was a sense of utter betrayal. Six years where the economic situation had gotten worse, you had the NGO effication, as we call it, of resistance, resistance inside the West Bank. So the educated Palestinian cadre people were living a very different occupation from the majority of Palestinians. We used to call Ramallah the five star occupation, because inside Ramallah you lived like you were in Dubai or it was very easy for the most part. And there was no horizon because no one was talking. There was no horizon of anything. And then Sharon makes this move proposing.
- [49:34]
Martin DeCaro
So that's the spark, right?
- [49:36]
Mark Levine
It was a spark that no one had done anything to get rid of the kindling by doing concrete things to make people's lives better.
- [49:42]
Martin DeCaro
At first, though, there's mass demonstrations that are cracked down on by the Israeli military. And then that's when you start to see, unlike the first intifada, a militarized battle between the two sides. Here I do recall during this latter portion of 2,000 members of the Clinton administration coming out and calling for restraint on both sides. We need to get back to the negotiating table and we can't do that as long as there's violence. So it sounds like you're saying that we can draw a direct line between the failure of Camp David and the start of the intifada, or as you say, the Al Aqsa uprising.
- [50:18]
Mark Levine
Absolutely. It was the main, but not the only cause of the violence that began. And once it erupted, then you erupted in a very different circumstance in 1987 because there was a completely colonized people. You know, an intifada erupting to have their most basic humanity and rights recognized, which had never been done. In some ways this was more intense because now you had a kind of recognition. There was the handshake on the lawn in the White House, right. You had negotiations, you had movement, you were constantly being told things were getting better when it gradually became clear they were getting worse. And now after Camp David, it seemed like this was never going to happen and that Israel was just going to stay and keep digging in and digging in and pushing out. Boom.
- [51:14]
Martin DeCaro
The conversation with Mark Levine continues in a moment. Tap. Subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads. Sure. But yet we have the Clinton parameters at the end of 2000, and then the Taba talks under George W. Bush, who wasn't that interested in all of this, the Taba talks, which were really the final chapter in this part of the story. What were they and why did they not succeed where Camp David failed?
- [51:38]
Mark Levine
Well, the Clinton parameters, I don't know how important they are in the end. I mean, they're basically, I think it goes down to 94 to 96% of the west bank comes Palestinian. The Israelis annexed the settlement blocks. That's problematic, that the entire blocks, because they cut through Palestinian land. But whatever that could have been worked out with roads and, you know, laissez passes for roads and so on. 80% of the settlers are in those settlement blocks on about 4 to 6% of that land. East Jerusalem, the key advance was that it goes back to the what's Arab is Arab, what's Jewish is Jewish in East Jerusalem. So it's the beginning of accepting that East Jerusalem would become, at least in some way functionally, the capital of a Palestinian state. And even though the parameters don't mention Gaza, because Gaza, everyone knew that Gaza, Israel was going to have to get the settlement. There were still three settlement blocks. I think in Gaza they would have to go. So it was clear that Israel would get out of Gaza and then a Palestinian state would be declared and it would be demilitarized. No one really mentions, of course, the refugees at all. It's one thing if there had been a lead up where there were negotiations, where people understood, look, this is the reality. We don't have the power to get the refugees to return mostly to Israel. Here's a symbolic number they're offering. The rest can return to us and with open borders gradually, maybe people can move back, the borders will in fact disappear, as Shimon Peres promised, and we could slowly have a whole country where we are at least able to move through and be somewhat part of. But again, what credibility did Clinton have at this point?
- [53:16]
Martin DeCaro
Point the clock is running out on his presidency and this is his last stab at trying to get something.
- [53:22]
Mark Levine
Yes. From the standpoint of 25 years later, would you, as a. However unjust they were to Palestinians, could someone have made the case, you know, coming in a time machine back there, you really should accept something like this deal because it's not going to get any better and in fact it's going to get worse. But that doesn't exist in reality. At the time, there was no goodwill. The Israelis had done nothing to make any of this possible. They hadn't withdrawn from any specific territory. They were increasing their presence the whole time. So how could Palestinians conceptually lock onto this? How could in the midst of a full on intifada, a full on revolt, an anti colonial revolt, could an already badly discredited Arafat and his team tell the Palestinian people, especially the ones who were most affected, young, angry, completely marginalized, that you need to trust me, we are now much closer thanks to your revolt and we can actually get a deal when the deal itself, under the best circumstances, would have been extremely difficult to sell to Palestinians and would have taken years of building towards it so that they could see that this was actually worth sacrificing so much more of their patrimony for the idea of a state. The counterfactual, counter historical question which always comes to my mind is what would have happened if Clinton would have prepared the top Taba or his parameters in Camp David in July of 2000 or June and said, this is the terms you guys are going to work off of. These are the terms I'm imposing. What would have happened if Israel, which more or less agreed to the Taba parameters, if that's what they were willing to agree to, why didn't they just come to Camp David with that? They had a map in Taba. They had a very detailed map which got into the nitty gritty. Had they brought that map to Camp David, we might be living in a very different world today.
- [55:12]
Martin DeCaro
So Barak, though, at Taba In January of 2001, he calls off the talks despite some progress, apparently because there's an upcoming Israeli election. I mean, why didn't he stick with it?
- [55:25]
Mark Levine
Because again, once the intifada started, once Israelis felt they were now under siege by an entire occupation engaged in anti colonial revolt against them. The idea of somehow showing compromise was simply an anathema. Barak did not have, or at least he didn't think he had the power to in that situation of intense violence, the most intense violence Israelis had been part of since either the Gulf War, which was more just a few missiles here and there, but really since even worse than the first intifada. So going back to 67 to say, okay, let's call stop, we need to give up more. Most Israelis are going to say, no, we're not giving up anything. They want to kill us. We don't, we don't want, we're not.
- [56:11]
Martin DeCaro
The suicide bombers were getting into Israel proper.
- [56:14]
Mark Levine
Killing it was horrible. You know, bus I was on blew up a municipal bus and I happened to not be there at that time taking it, but it was a bus I took. You know, shopping malls were being blown up. I was there once when a friend of mine was just walking in when it exploded. I was just leaving and she had glass all over them, you know, it was horrible. So. But this is the situation that in some sense Israel wanted. Remember, Barak was opposed to Oslo. He was not a labor politician who in his heart was willing to, he never really wanted to give up territory. He was much closer to Sharon, who after all was a godfather of the labor movement, than he was to Rabin and Peres. So if you know that he was as Defense Minister, opposed to Oslo from the beginning, it's easy to see why he would feel he couldn't do the actual deal, which was the only deal that was ever plausible, which was the deal at Taba, which should have been the deal that was there from the beginning. So at least they could spend five years negotiating over the defined parameters.
- [57:14]
Martin DeCaro
That's right. Sharon wins the election in February of 2001 and the understandings reached at Taba were never implemented. So final question, we'll fast forward 25 years, a quarter century and the so called Gaza Board of Peace and this peace plan. Many observers, including Omer Bartov in his most recent book, have pointed out this is not a peace plan or really has no future for the Palestinians of Gaza in it that it could wind up being if implemented, the Palestinians who remain being shunted into a small part of Gaza to work as wage laborers and in real estate development, oceanside resorts, nice beaches though.
- [57:56]
Mark Levine
Gaza has beautiful beaches. But yeah, that's why everyone wants it. By the way, this is not new. Gaza was going to be Dubai on the Mediterranean 30 years ago. I mean, there's always been plans floating around the Gulf states. Dubai had been eyeing Gaza for a very long time as a site of development. This would have happened if the peace process would have come to fruition. Gaza was going to be the new Dubai for sure because of its location. It's beautiful. So this is always a fantasy of what Gaza could be, if only there's peace. Now it's like essentially it's finishing the job of the settler colonial genocide of Palestinian people. We're going to cram the millions of you that are there, although we're going to try to push more and more of you out and we'll give enough money to Egypt to take a few hundred thousand more and we'll disperse others. So maybe there'll be well under a million Palestinians, less in half the territory because we've killed, they say, up to. And I'm sure it's true, given I was in Iraq when the Lancet did its famous Iraq report. And I know that those numbers were far more accurate than the numbers put out by the Americans. Lancet says upwards of 600,000 Palestinians have died in this war, not just from direct being killed by Israeli weapons, but sickness, disease, all of that. So Gaza will go from, I don't know, two point something million to, let's say a million people, right? Half the population they can be crammed into. Well, they're half the population. Give them half the land, what's the difference, right? Well, there's a huge difference, obviously. No farmland, no way to survive. Well, you'll survive as low wage workers. This is basically the reservation. This is what happened in the United States to Native Americans. This is the completing the job of settler colonialism where you get to the point where there is no more resistance, there's no more people left to resist. And you basically impose your, and I'm using this word very directly, your final solution to the Palestinian problem, which is the end of Palestinians as an organized people who are recognized as having any rights to life or dignity or sovereignty. Those who remain are in a state of social death. They have no rights to speak of and their only possibilities to have low wage work in these beautiful hotels that are going to be built by Kushner and Dubai and Abu Dhabi and the Saudis and the U.S. just what they're imagining for Cuba, just what they're imagining in Venezuela, all these different places. And that's the way history goes, right? But Palestinians rightly are not going to allow that to happen if they can help it. So what's going to happen now? The key thing is that Palestinians are not just dying and they're not leaving. They refuse to go. And even after a genocide, which is really unprecedented in half a century, at least in its furor and its intensity, in the number of children killed, the number of women killed, the number of non combatants killed, it's really unprecedented, especially for anyone who knows Gaza and knows what it was like to see what it is. Now they are even. Despite that, they refuse to go and they refuse to just leave. They will stay. They will stay no matter what. And Israel is now under such a spotlight, it can't just force them out. It can't finish the job of ethnic cleansing. No one's going to support that other than Trump. But Trump's quickly losing power. We're just in this stasis. So we got to think of the next five years. Let's say, how do Palestinians survive the next few years under the most horrible. It's like one giant Stalingrad in winter, you know, in World War II, that's the conditions Palestinians are living under. How do they survive? How does Palestinian society maintain its position in a world that increasingly cares little about them at the higher level, or anyone else, for that matter? I mean, Europe couldn't care less. No one cares because no one cares about anyone, as things are getting worse everywhere. So in that situation, the real question is, how do Palestinians somehow continue with Samud, continue to survive, continue to fight? When they can't fight, they can't fight with arms. This was always the stupidity of Hamas that they imagined there was a balance of power that was similar to Algeria or something like that, where they could kill enough Israelis and take enough territory that Israel would leave. It's just never going to happen. So with all these other options, how do you survive? Maintain yourself enough till hopefully an international dynamic changes which allows for a democratic solution for all of Palestine, Israel to come into being? That's the real question that everyone's trying to figure out at this point.
- [62:29]
Narrator/Host
The path ahead builds on the journey already taken. From the first Camp David summit to Madrid to Oslo, to the first handshake on the lawn between Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat, to the peace between Israel and Jordan and the agreement at Y River, the parties have proven that peace is possible when they are determined to make it. In the process, they have passed the point of no return. The only way forward now is forward. Both sides must find a way to resolve competing claims to give their children the gift of peace.
- [63:05]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History. As it happens, President Trump has talked about the United States taking over Canada, Greenland, maybe Cuba. There was a time when US Expansion was the norm. There are also many instances where the United States did not get the territory it had its eyes on. That is next as we report history as it happens. Make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for the name of this podcast.