Saturday, July 14, 2012

Stephen M. Walt : What's going on in Israel?

Stephen M Walt (Foreign Policy)

One of the more enduring myths in the perennial debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict is the claim that Israel has always been interested in a fair and just peace, and that the only thing standing in the way of a deal is the Palestinians' commitment to Israel's destruction. This notion has been endlessly recycled by Israeli diplomats and by Israel's defenders in the United States and elsewhere.

Of course, fair-minded analysts of the conflict have long known that this pernicious narrative was bogus. They knew that former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who signed the Oslo Accords) never favored creating a viable Palestinian state (indeed, he explicitly said that a future Palestinian entity would be "less than a state.") The Palestinians' errors notwithstanding, they also understood that Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offers at Camp David in 2000 -- though more generous than his predecessors' -- still fell well short of a genuine two-state deal. But the idea that Israel sought peace above all else but lacked a genuine "partner for peace" has remained an enduring "explanation" for Oslo's failure.

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