BEIRUT -- At one fraught moment during Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak reportedly warned Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat: "If we don't finish the job now, at the next meeting I will no longer be prime minister." To which the Palestinian leader retorted: "If I give in on Jerusalem, I will be killed and then you will have to negotiate with Ahmad Yassin," leader of Hamas, the militant Islamist group.
There was only one way that Camp David II was ever likely to succeed, and it was the same way that Camp David I did: through the virtual surrender of the Arab participant. That is what Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, with his "separate peace," did in 1978 -- and he fell to an Islamist bullet three years later. There had clearly been Israeli and U.S. expectations that Arafat, like Sadat, would "rescue" the marathon parley in extremis: hence the blame that U.S. President Bill Clinton reserved primarily for the Palestinian leader after it was over. But the "rescue" required of him would have dwarfed what Sadat did, and this one-time "liberator" of his people had no desire to go down in history as their great betrayer.
To be sure, as in 1978, there would have to have been compromise on both sides, reciprocal retreats from the so-called red lines that, before this summit of summits, both leaders swore they would never cross. But, measured against each side's historical experience and ideology, those expected of Arafat far outstripped those expected of Barak, just as Sadat's far outstripped those of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.