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Why Did the Camp David Peace Talks Fail 20 Years Ago?
(Project Syndicate) Shlomo Ben-Ami - 20 years ago this month, U.S. President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to a peace summit at Camp David, in which I participated. Arafat's decision to reject Barak's proposals at Camp David as well as the more generous Clinton Parameters offered in December can be explained less by a particular demand or concession than by the overarching, delusional, and self-defeating worldview to which many Palestinians cling. This was a devastating mistake, the consequences of which Palestinians suffer every day. As the late Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, wrote in 2001, the Palestinians suffer from "an innate refusal to surrender to the logic of things, a belief that a mysterious higher power will always come to their rescue, as if the laws of history did not apply to them." The writer, a former Israeli foreign minister, is Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace.