Prophets without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution

by Shlomo Ben-Ami

A high-level insider's history of the efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from 2000 Camp David Talks to the present, that explains why successive attempts have all failed.

The clash between Israel and Palestine has been one of the most emotionally engaging causes of modern times. Prophets without Honor tells the story of the grueling attempts to solve the conflict and examines the reasons for its resilience. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who participated at a high level in the July 2000 Camp David peace talks that almost led to a historic deal, uses his insider experience to illuminate the specific factors that impede a solution to the conflict. He finds that the occupation's traits of permanence, Israel's insatiable quest for Lebensraum, and a hopelessly fragmented and disoriented Palestinian national movement are to blame.

Ben-Ami challenges the funereal historiography that emerged in the wake of the Camp David process, when--for the first time ever--Israelis and Palestinians engaged in the Sisyphean task of breaking the taboos surrounding the conflict. The Clinton Peace Parameters that emerged out of this process eventually became the litmus test of every serious peace proposal in the future. But ill-conceived perceptions of the other party, all-or-nothing theological fanaticism, and a lack of bold and enlightened leadership have made these attempts at peace-making a defining failure of the two-state concept. Ben-Ami scrutinizes the ominous alternatives to the two-state solution, such as the binational state, a unilateral pullout from much of the West Bank, and Donald Trump's Deal of the Century. He also examines the merits of a Jordanian-Palestinian solution. In discussing Palestine from a comparative perspective, he underlines its singularity while also shedding light on the dilemmas that stand at the
center of any peace enterprise. Ultimately, his account is the most non-partisan, comprehensive, and balanced written by an insider representing one of the parties.

Genres: History, Israel, Middle East, Nonfiction, Politics

400 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 2022

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shlomo Ben-Ami is a historian, diplomat, and politician. He is also a divisive figure in Israel, especially disliked among the right. He was an essential negotiator in the 2000 Summit in Camp David, when President Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Ehud Barak tried to reach an agreement on the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. The book details the failed 2000 Camp David summit and subsequent peace attempts. In the book's third section, Ben-Ami provides a more theoretical analysis of the problems and difficulties surrounding the conflict.

In the years following the 2000 summit, many Palestinian leaders and intellectuals spoke out about how the PLO had denied them a State many times, especially in 2000. The current PLO Leader also ignored the talks with Obama and eventually signed an agreement with Hamas. It's unlikely that the move helped with peace negotiations since Hamas seeks Israel's destruction. Perhaps that was his intention. This scenario was perfect for Netanyahu because he could shift the blame without much political pressure. Israel's critics often overlook the Palestinian leadership's failures, but it too holds responsibility for the ongoing conflict alongside Israel's actions.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians do not have a leadership that represents a true promise of peace and reconciliation. The leadership constantly failed to develop a unifying rhetoric for nation-building and compromise, that ethos of state-building should be central to the PLO. After numerous setbacks, it is no surprise that the PLO has become a mere shadow of Hamas and other extremists.
Meanwhile, Israel's politics appear unpromising towards stability and peace talks. Since the intifada, Israel's public opinion has shifted rightward. Current events in 2023 are likely to further solidify this trend. Israel urgently needs political change to curb fundamentalists and forge new ideas. Palestinians need new, moderate, and more secular leadership.

One important point Ben-Ami makes is about the current state of the international order and the demise of multilateralism. Unfortunately, there has been a return of disputes between major powers, decreased confidence in international institutions, and a decline of Western leadership. As a result, major international players have become less willing and less able to address the issue.

It's uncertain whether the two-state solution is still viable or not, but we must realize that justifying any action taken by one party simply because they are at a disadvantage is not an effective approach to encouraging responsible and accountable leadership among the Palestinians. We desperately need to understand that reducing this perennial conflict to the "colonizer/colonized" narrative is as easy as it is deceptive. Among academics and intellectuals in the West, there is a tendency to adopt a simplistic worldview and theoretical approach that involves categorizing people into neat identity groups and determining how they should be treated based solely on the perceived moral status of their identity group. This approach does not consider the intricate nature of human beings and the diverse experiences that shape their realities. It's disheartening that intelligent individuals fail to comprehend this.
This fixation also blinds leaders and pundits from comprehending John Maynard Keynes' message to European leaders in 1919, that peace is not about justice and punishment, but about stability and equilibrium.

[Rajbir Bhattacharjee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Essentially an apologia of Israeli aggression and colonialism.
He portends to be fair in his criticism of Israeli and Palestenian leaders, but even cursory attention to the space devoted to criticism of Palestenians and the space devoted to criticisms of Israeli leaders would suggest that he considers Palestenians responsible for , say, 95% of their plight.
There is a whole lot of mental gymnastics in this book.
- Firstly he refuses to engage in any moral and philosophical basis of peace parameters when dealing with Israeli "concessions" to Palestenians, and only proposes a practical considerations. If the Palestenians refuse to pick up scraps from a bully, they it's their fault and they should be more practical. This is just a reiteration of gun-boat diplomacy.
However, when it comes to the opposite claim - that the Jews do not have any right to a Jewish state of their own on stolen land - he takes the moral legitimacy of a Jewish state as axiomatic, thereby invoking morality and philosophy only in favour of Israel.
- He refuses to even acknowledge that the Israel is a state that is founded on stealing of land and ethnic cleansing. That the Israelis made the "desert bloom" was a lie carefully told by generations. He repeats the same tone of "a land without people for a people without a land" that Israel has always used in its discourse, without acknowledging that the desert was already blooming before the Zionists took over.
- he criticises the Palestinian leadership for not having a state building ethos. How can the Palestinians have a state building ethos when they don’t have a state. Ireland didn’t have a state building ethos before it was a state. I can’t imagine how this convoluted thinking of putting the cart before the horse can be a serious academic position.
- He also refuses to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of more than 750000 Palestenians during the Naqba.
- He refuses to accept that Israel is a colonial state by saying "Israel is not a classic case of colonialism." He goes on to offer all sorts of justification why it is not, belying it's essential character that vast majority of Israelis are not native to the land, and are only there because they displaced the natives of the land. Israel is as much a colonial enterprise as America is - built on the theft of land and genocide.
- He completely glosses over the fact that the founders of Zionism saw it essentially as a colonial project - a Jewish colonial project, and used much of the same justifications and rhetoric that western imperialist colonial regimes had used around the world - a civilizing mission and that sort of things, Herzl very much wrote about it in explicit terms and called it a colonizing effort, as did Jabotinsky. The force of Zionist colonization was led none than by the eponymous Jewish Colonization Association. Only after the 1950s when colonization became an unpopular sentiment did the Zionism rebrand and whitewash itself as a non-colonial (in some rhetoric, preposterously, anti-colonial movement since they led some terrorist attacks on the British when the British put some modest limits on Jewish immigration for a brief period of time so that they could wash their hands off the problem as they withdrew and claim they had nothing to do with it, even though they had created the problem in the first hand with the Balfour declaraiton, and overt support of Zionsts, suppression of the Arab revolution, and trained and armed Zionist militias to carry out reprisals against the Arabs). In this, Ben-Ami repeats the same lies Israel has been repeating around the world, while, carefully, leaving out important bits of context and indulging in selective amnesia.
- Even when talking about colonialism, he only restricts the discussion to the "occupied territories". The thought never crosses his mind that all of Israel is a colonial project, including Israel proper. "Even assuming the validity of the colonial paradigm, a major difference exists between an overseas colony ... and an occupied land that is contiguous with home territory".
- Some more justification of why Israel is not a colonial occupation? Because if it was a colonial occupation, it would have disintegrated by now. "No colonial power in history, however mighty, has resisted such a long struggle of national liberation." I am sure Ben Ami knows better, and this is a calculated lie. The Irish struggle for independence stretched from the 1640s to the 1930s, and the Indian struggle for Independence lasted two centuries. Surely, Ben Ami knows this, but chooses to present a lie to somehow justify that Israel is not a colony because it hasn't been overthrown by the natives? The American colonization was never overthrown by the natives. That does not make America any less of a colony.
- His solution: Palestenians should stop thinking about a state of their own and just take whatever they get and merge with Jordan.
- He does not spend any considerable effort in dealing with the nature of Apartheid.
- The role of America in the Camp David talks have been described, even by Israeli participants, as being "Israel's lawyer". Yet, he suggests that the talks failed because America didn't do enough to pressure Arafat. Preposterous.
- Much of the book is also about personal self-aggrandization. How he went against the grain of every leader, including his own, and did the right thing, just that no one saw it that way. How are we to verify any of it? After all, it is an old tradition for participants in major disasters to write books of apologia where the blame is put on everyone but themselves. Not just in this disaster.
- he even includes a list of forced disaplacements and says that it was seen as necessary to nation state stability. There goes any human rights declaration out of the window.


In short, if this is the "progressive" Zionist, one cannot imagine what the regressive Zionist will be. This has all the hallmarks of a hallmark Hasbara operation. Appear critical of Israel, but really drive home the point - the Palestenians are responsible for their own mess, and they are all persona non grata. The best propaganda is the propaganda that hides its false narrative behind a veil of mild criticisms of the propagandists.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Continuing my Israel-Palestine history kick, I read this book to get a better grip on the 2000 Summit, which many argue was the closest this conflict ever came to a resolution. The author is a Labor Party leader who was the Foreign Minister under Ehud Barak and a lead negotiator at Camp David.

I'll get my critique out up front: the main issue with the book is the organization. It's simply too long and disorganized. A shorter book could have had more impact, as Rashid Khalidi's history of the conflict did. Also, this book spends the first 60% on Camp David, then moves into a somewhat disjointed set of essays and reflections that circles back to other periods of this conflict. If you aren't already familiar with the conflict, this can be hard to follow.

Still, I learned a ton from this book, and I thought it was wise and fair-minded. In fact, it is quite excoriating of almost everyone involved. SBA's thesis is that Camp David was nowhere near as close to success as its defenders argue. At different points in this process, Barak and/or Clinton offered a deal to Palestinians that would have offered a state (albeit one with limitations on foreign alliances and military policy) consisting of around 90% of the West Bank and Gaza, requiring a freeze on settlements and land swaps to compensate for existing settlements in Palestinian territory. The deal would also provide for a splitting of Jerusalem, although the . It would not allow for the right of return for Palestinians to Israel proper.

The main problems, SBA argues, were largely political: each actor in the Camp David summit was not in position to commit to this deal nor to deal with the political consequences of accepting it. Each was in a precarious political position. Clinton was a lame duck president. Barak was holding together a shaky coalition, and he had seen other Israeli leaders have their careers destroyed (or be assassinated) for trying to make peace. And YA was trying to maintain his standing among a fractured, radicalizing Palestinian movement; he also feared for his life if he made a deal that sacrificed key Palestinian values. So the odds were always stacked against Camp David, not because the deal didn't make sense on paper, but because it was politically untenable.

Nonetheless, SBA digs deeper than this to point out the flaws and pathologies of individual figures, as well as the movements/nations involved. YA comes across as deeply flawed, arguably the largest obstacle to a deal. Throughout CD, YA refused to actually negotiate. He didn't make counteroffers. He merely pocketed Israeli concessions, asked for more, and threatened to walk out over and over again. He never realized the profound effect that Palestinian terrorism had on the Israeli psyche. He was also somewhat addicted to his own vision of winning Palestinian statehood through armed struggle, which had been the paradigm of his whole career, rather than shifting into statesman mode and accepting 75% of what he wanted. His insistence on the right of return, and failure to realize that the ISraelis saw this (rightly) as the end of the Jewish state, was another stumbling block. He was also becoming erratic and grandiose at the time, according to many who knew him. He also embraced the Second Intifada right away, further poisoning the well with Israel.

And yet, SBA argues that the Israelis deserve a lot of the blame for CD's failure and the collapse of the peace process. Barak was inconsistent and haughty, and he struggled to keep his political coalition together. Israel post 67 was in the catbird seat geopolitically, but it clung to an outdated version of itself as always at the brink of existential elimination. The truth is that Palestinian terrorism is not an existential threat, but that the settlement movement is. It has made Israel more militaristic, less democratic, and more paranoid. If insistence on the right of return and the armed struggle are the Palestinian Achilles' Heels, then obsession with settlements is Israel's. It's literally eating the two-state solution alive. And all of this was before the current war, which has probably put the last nail in the coffin of 2-state.

SBA is also tough on the US and the Arab states. The close alignment of Likud with the GOP, and its significant influence in the US political system as a whole, makes it risky for any politician to push Israel too hard. The US, moreover, has never put the same kind of must-win attitude/leverage into this problem as it did into Camp David 78, where the US national interest compelled Carter to compel the two parties at hand to come to a deal. The truth is that the IP conflict isn't actually that important to the grand geopolitical scheme for the US, and that explains a lot of why we don't force the hands of the parties (not that we could solve this from the outside!).

So SBA's conclusion is that the 2-state solution is effectively dead. It works on paper, but it's become politically impossible. As Israel's normalization with the outside world continues, the diplomatic energy required to get them to commit to a 2-state solution is impossible. The mutual hatred and destruction ginned up by the recent post 10/7 war only makes things harder. SBA's recommendation, which I think is probably the best alternative to permanent occupation, is to pressure Jordan for a sort of fusion with the Palestinians. This may not be politically feasible, but I'm not seeing any other realistic avenue at this point.

Anyways, this was one of the more enlightening and reasonable works I've come across on this history, but it is work to get through, as a rather dense read.

[Oren Mizrahi · Rating 4 out of 5]

the good:
this is a first-person account of the 2000 oslo process by a participant who is (a surprisingly extreme) israeli leftist. this insures the narrative was critical enough of israeli mistakes.

the second half of the book remarks on the peace attemps since, and then discusses feasible solutions (ben-ami doesnt believe the 2ss is viable anymore) and comparative cases of conflict resolution.

i found the discussion of solutions, especially his defense of the jordanian-palestinian federation, particularly productive and elucidatory. unfortunately, the comparative histories were disorganized. it would have been better if he organized the stories into the different dimensions of conflict resolution and then did a subchapter for each.

it was also difficult to understand the histories seeing as i am not literate in the history of the troubles or the guerilla drug wars in colombia. i suspect most readers aren’t either; it would have been nice for him to add some background for us mere mortals.

the bad:
the writing doesn’t flow and it means it takes you twice as long to read. there are tons of grammatical errors and inconsistencies in the spelling of proper nouns.

also, ideas are a bit repetitive in the second half of the book.

[Skye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good review of the attempted peace processes from Clinton's Camp David through Trump's (first 🫡🔫) presidency.