What’s going on in Israel? | Stephen M. Walt (Foreign Policy)
►http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/07/12/the_veil_falls
One of the more enduring myths in the perennial debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict is the claim that Israel has always been interested in a fair and just peace, and that the only thing standing in the way of a deal is the Palestinians’ commitment to Israel’s destruction. This notion has been endlessly recycled by Israeli diplomats and by Israel’s defenders in the United States and elsewhere. Of course, fair-minded analysts of the conflict have long known that this pernicious narrative was bogus. They knew that former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who signed the Oslo Accords) never favored creating a viable Palestinian state (indeed, he explicitly said that a future Palestinian entity would be “less than a state.”) The Palestinians’ errors notwithstanding, they also understood that Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offers at Camp David in 2000 — though more generous than his predecessors’ — still fell well short of a genuine two-state deal. But the idea that Israel sought peace above all else but lacked a genuine “partner for peace” has remained an enduring “explanation” for Oslo’s failure. Source: Foreign (...)