The Tragedy of the Peace Process

Mario Loyola, NRO:

When the right-wing Benyamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel the first time round in 1996, Clinton-administration officials barely disguised their bitter disappointment. For the next three years, relations between the U.S. and Israel would be dominated by tempests-in-teapots such as what an Israeli bulldozer might have been doing in a particular neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

[...]

After Labor came back to power at the end of Clinton’s term, Yasser Arafat was able to secure almost every concession that Palestinians could ask for at Camp David in 2000 — and promptly rejected the deal. Weeks later, Arafat unleashed the “second intifada” — not a popular uprising like the first, but an organized campaign of suicide bombings that would kill a thousand Israeli civilians in just a few years. The concessions Israel had made for peace, including withdrawal from 90 percent of the West Bank, had proven suicidal.

Many of these same Clinton hands are back at the helm of the “peace process” now, but they hardly seem to have learned from its failures. The Israeli decision to build hundreds of new housing units in a heavily Jewish area of East Jerusalem was “condemned” by the Obama administration. The reaction revealed the personal animus that Obama’s advisers feel toward Netanyahu, a hostility that is a relic of the Clinton administration and an extension-by-proxy of U.S. partisan politics. The reaction also demonstrated that U.S. officials still don’t understand what they themselves have done wrong.

[...]

MORE