|
..though of course hopes of peace were fading before his input, Sharon made sure the nails went in the coffin of the peace process with his deliberate provocation in taking a big bunch of troops with him to do a nice, 'innocent' visit to the Temple Mount. Then after he was elected PM, Sharon was the one who refused to continue the negotiations with the Palestinians that were looking promising and instead chose to opt for bloodshed and violence...
The old PM? Yr referring to Barak at Camp David with his so-called 'generous offer'? What exactly is it that Arafat was demanding that he was offered 98% of? Here's some facts. There was no offer on the table, and even the verbal (nothing was in writing, as you'd expect with offers of that sort of importance) 'offer' wasn't 98%. Considering Israel was going to annexe 9% of the West Bank, the maths isn't adding up. And Israel was going to retain control of the Jordan Valley and settlements, including Ariel. That would have broken up what territory there was left in the West Bank into two or three unconnected areas. At Camp David, there was no progress made at all on the right of return, and the 'generous offer' on Jerusalem was not sovereignty, but merely autonomy, where the Palestinians get a Palestinian local government, but Israel still retains sovereignty.
While Baraks negotiators (he refused to meet with Arafat while he was at Camp David) went much further than Israel had gone before when it came to offers, there was nothing generous about the 'generous offer' at Camp David. In fact, what came out of Taba was much more in the way of 'generous' (of course there's nothing generous about an occupier returning occupied land to the people who live there), but Ariel Sharon refused to be involved with negotiations, no matter how promising they were looking...
Violet...
|