Severity 3 — Serious🌐 foreign policy25 July 2000

Camp David Summit Collapses

A two-week summit between Barak, Arafat, and President Clinton at Camp David ended without an agreement on Jerusalem, refugees, or borders. Historians and participants dispute the reasons for the collapse — Clinton and Barak blamed Arafat's refusal to accept the final offer, while Palestinian and some Israeli and American officials have argued the offer fell short of Palestinian minimum requirements on Jerusalem and refugees.

O

Ehud Barak — One Israel (Labor-led coalition)

In power 1999–2001

What happened

The most-cited account, from Clinton and Barak, is that Israel offered roughly 90-95% of the West Bank plus Gaza, a capital in outer East Jerusalem, and some form of shared arrangement over the Old City's holy sites — and that Arafat rejected it without a counter-offer, which Clinton later said was the moment he became convinced Arafat did not want a deal at all. American negotiator Robert Malley and others present offered a more complicated account: the maps shown were never formally presented in writing, sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif compound (the summit's single hardest issue) remained genuinely unresolved rather than simply rejected by the Palestinian side, and the refugee question — the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants — was addressed in terms both sides' own historians agree fell well short of what any Palestinian leader could have accepted and survived politically.

What is not disputed is the summit's consequence: talks continued at Taba in January 2001 and came closer to a framework agreement before the Israeli election calendar and the ongoing Second Intifada (which had already begun by then) ended the process. No Israeli or Palestinian leadership since has returned to negotiations with both sides' leaders as personally invested in reaching a deal as Barak and Arafat were in the summer of 2000 — whatever the reasons for its failure, Camp David remains the high-water mark of the two-state negotiating process to date.

Source

Council on Foreign Relations — Camp David Summit

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