Clinton to Arafat: It’s All Your Fault
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek Web Exclusive
http://www.msnbc.com/news/593326.asp

June 27 —  Nearly a year after he failed to achieve a deal at 
Camp David, former president Bill Clinton gave vent to his 
frustrations this week over the collapse of peace in the Mideast. 
And Clinton directed his ire at one man: Yasir Arafat. On Tuesday 
night, Clinton told guests at a party at the Manhattan apartment 
of former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke and his wife, writer 
Kati Marton, that Arafat called to bid him farewell three days 
before he left office. “You are a great man,” Arafat said. “The 
hell I am,” Clinton said he responded. “I’m a colossal failure, 
and you made me one.” 
 
Clinton said he told Arafat that by turning down the best peace 
deal he was ever going to get—the one proffered by Israeli Prime 
Minister Ehud Barak and brokered by Clinton last July—the 
Palestinian leader was only guaranteeing the election of the 
hawkish Ariel Sharon, the current Israeli leader. But Arafat 
didn’t listen. Sharon was elected in a landslide Feb. 6 and has 
gradually escalated his crackdown on the Palestinians despite a 
shaky ceasefire negotiated two weeks ago by CIA chief George Tenet.

        Clinton has refused most interview requests since he left 
office Jan. 20. But at the party—which was held jointly by Holbrooke 
and the International Crisis Group to celebrate a new book, “Waging 
Modern War,” by former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark—Clinton 
captivated guests for nearly an hour with an insider’s tale of the 
Camp David talks. Among the listeners, who gathered around the 
former president as he cheerfully downed Diet Cokes and hors 
d’oeuvres, were Holbrooke, Clark and John Negroponte, who has been 
nominated by President Bush to replace Holbrooke as U.N. ambassador.   
 
         Clinton said, somewhat surprisingly, that he never 
expected to close the deal at Camp David. But he made it clear 
that the breakdown of the peace process and the nine months of 
deadly intifada since then were very much on his mind. He described 
Arafat as an aging leader who relishes his own sense of victimhood 
and seems incapable of making a final peace deal. “He could only 
get to step five, and he needed to get to step 10,” the former 
president said. But Clinton expressed hope in the younger 
generation of Palestinian officials, suggesting that a post-Arafat 
Palestinian leader might be able to make peace, perhaps in as 
little as several years. “I’m just sorry I blew this Middle East” 
thing, Clinton said shortly before leaving. “But I don’t know what 
else I could have done.”
        Clinton also revealed that, contrary to most conventional 
wisdom after Camp David ended on July 25, 2000, the key issue that 
torpedoed the talks in their final stages was not the division of 
East Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israelis, but the 
Palestinian demand for a “right of return” of refugees to Israel. 
On Jerusalem, he said, the two sides were down to dickering over 
final language on who would get sovereignty over which part of 
the Western Wall. But Arafat continued to demand that large numbers 
of Palestinian refugees, mainly from the 1967 and 1948 wars, be 
allowed to return—numbers that Clinton said both of them knew 
were unacceptable to the Israelis.   
 
        Clinton said he bluntly contradicted Arafat when, in one 
of their final conversations, the Palestinian leader expressed 
doubts that the ancient Jewish temple actually lay beneath the 
Islamic-run compound in Jerusalem containing the holy Al Aqsa 
Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. This was a critical point of 
dispute, since the Western Wall, a remnant of the temple’s 
retaining wall, is the holiest site in Judaism and one the 
Israelis were intent on maintaining sovereignty over. “I know 
it’s there,” Clinton said he told Arafat. The so-called Al Aqsa 
intifada began after Ariel Sharon made a controversial visit to 
the disputed compound on Sept. 28, 2000.