HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027861.jpg

Bibi is right about one thing. The negotiating challenges have become more difficult since Arafat’s refusal of our offer at Camp David. Arafat is no longer alive. Palestinian politics have become ever more fragmented and messy, not least as a result of the Hamas takeover of Gaza. But Churchill once said that the difference between a pessimist and an optimist was that the pessimist always saw difficulties in every opportunity. The optimist saw opportunities in the difficulties. I, of all people, do not look at such opportunities without hard-headed analysis, even a dose of scepticism. But the opportunities are undeniably there, and never has Israel risked paying a higher price for failing to see and at least to try to act on them. The first port of call should still be the Palestinians. I have repeatedly asked Bibi, and the right-wing rivals that seem often to loom large in his political calculations: “If you’re so sure you don’t have a negotiating partner in the Palestinians, who not at least try? Seriously. What do you have to lose?” But beyond this, there is a whole range of relatively moderate countries — and, as Sunni states, strongly anti-Iranian countries — which share with Israel a real, practical interest in putting in place a new political arrangement in the Middle East. So does the United States, Russia, even China. Each, in their own ways, is threatened by a terror threat that will require international action, and many years, finally to defeat. A Saudi “peace plan’, for instance, has been on the table for years. Formally endorsed by the Arab League, it proposes a swap: Israeli withdrawal for full and final peace and Arab recognition. Successive Israeli governments have dismissed it out of hand, arguing that the withdrawal which the Saudi proposal demanded — every inch of territory, back to the borders before the Six-Day War — would be not only politically unacceptable, but practically impossible. In the final days of the Camp David summit, as our failure was becoming inescapably clear, a disheartened Bill Clinton said to me that he could understand, just about, why Yasir Arafat had not accepted the unprecedentedly far-reaching proposals I had presented. But what he couldn’t grasp was how the Palestinian leader could say no even to accepting them as a basis for the hard, further work which we all knew a final peace agreement would entail. Wasn’t Arafat capable of looking beyond the political risks, of understanding the greater risks of inaction. Of seeing the rewards? Of looking ahead? 13 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027861