Shlomo Ben-Ami
TEL AVIV – U.S. President Joe Biden’s Middle East peace plan, which reportedly involves re-establishing a path to a two-state solution and full normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world, offers Israelis and Palestinians a chance to salvage their respective national projects from the wreckage of their own self-defeating policies.
Biden recognizes that progress toward Israeli-Arab peace has historically followed major wars and strategic shifts. The same logic, he appears to believe, could be applied to the ongoing war in Gaza, the region’s most devastating since the 1948 war. But the prospects for a diplomatic resolution remain bleak, given Israel’s security concerns and territorial ambitions, along with what Israelis view as the Palestinians’ inflexible demands.
While former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has expressed support for Biden’s plan, albeit with several caveats that the United States might find difficult to accept, Biden’s proposal could pose even greater political challenges for the Palestinians.
In December 2000, Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Fatah leader often likened to a Palestinian Nelson Mandela, categorically rejected the peace parameters proposed by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton. These parameters, which Clinton cited in 2016 as the moment when he “killed” himself to offer the Palestinians a state, included the dismantling of most Israeli settlements and establishment of a Palestinian state encompassing the entire Gaza Strip and 97 percent of the West Bank. Today, there is no conceivable Israeli government willing to offer more than these terms.
At the time, Barghouti vehemently opposed Clinton’s proposals, stating, “Show me one Palestinian who dares to accept these American ideas or even thinks of........