"I don't think you're racist to be concerned that they lie."

-- Nancy Hansen

My Mom made that pronouncement when I timidly and tentatively wondered aloud if there might be a cultural thing with the Palestinians whereby they don't respect the truth quite as much as we do.

I just finished The Natural by Joe Klein, subtitled The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. It's a fascinating book in many ways, but I was greatly struck by the discussion of his final push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

There are those who argue that the failure of Camp David was valuable in itself: It demonstrated the fundamental intransigence of the Palestinans and ended a dangerous period of Israeli delusion that began when Yitzhak Rabin shook Arafat's hand on the White House lawn. But that seems an unduly cynical view. Camp David also ended the happiest six years Israel had known as a nation, a time of prosperity and increasing contact with the rest of the world. The failure to make peace burst a precious, if precarious, status quo. An argument can be made that what Israel and the Palestinians needed most was the appearance of a peace process, rather than a forceful effort to close the deal.

It is obvious, in retrospect, that Arafat wasn't prepared to accept any deal -- a Palestinian "state" composed of Gaza and the detritus of the West Bank was hardly a state at all. Far more important, a peace agreement would have forced the Palestinians, and Arafat personally, to abandon the only true national identity every shared by the ill-defined Arab peoples who lived on the territory designated a Jewish state in 1948. They would no longer be stateless victims (and it would have ratifed the tragic reality that the Arabs who left in 1948 had no legal claim to their former homes; Clinton later said that the "right of return" was the real sticking point for the Palestinians). Furthermore, with peace far less exciting and far more troublesome, occupation than dashing around the world harvesting money and sympathy from guilty Arabs and mortally squishy Europeans.

And Little Green Footballs points out today that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has tacked another teensy little detail onto his peace plan. Care to guess what it is?

"A withdrawal is not enough, there must be a return to the pre-1967 aggression lines and an end to the occupation of Jerusalem so that it becomes the capital of Palestine," said Prince Abdullah, the architect of a Middle East peace initiative that won Arab and international backing.

"The return of refugees is also a must," he told the London-based paper.

Funny, but I don't remember that in the original version of the plan. Seems I'm not the only one:

The central committee of Arafat’s Fatah movement called Abdullah’s initiative a new stab in the back for “the Palestinian struggle and its legitimate rights”. The statement it issued asks the Saudis if they were willing to bargain and give up their own rights in border disputes with brotherly Arab states. Why then do they propose initiatives for giving up “territories occupied since 1948, so serving Zionist and American schemes” and ignoring the right of return of expelled Palestinian refugees.

11:36:17 PM  comment []