The Camp David II Negotiations: How Dennis Ross Proved the Palestinians Aborted the Peace Process

This article, excerpted from a longer essay deconstructing Dennis Ross’s book on the Palestinian-Israeli peace process from 1993 to 2000, focuses on the Camp David summit. In particular, it examines the assumptions informing Ross’s account of what happened during the negotiations and why, and the distortions that spring from these assumptions. The article demonstrates that, judged from the perspective of Palestinians’ and Israelis’ respective rights under international law, all the concessions at Camp David came from the Palestinian side, none from the Israeli side. In reflecting on Ross’s narrative, the author explores what he considers its “main innovation”: the subordination of the normative framework of rights to the arbitrary and capricious one of “needs.”

NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN, professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago, is the author of numerous books, most recently Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California Press, 2005). He would like to thank Maren Hackmann, Jeremy Pressman, and Feroze Sidhwa for their comments on an earlier draft of the extended essay from which this article is drawn. The full text is being published by IPS as a monograph titled Subordinating Palestinian Rights to Israeli “Needs.”