Dennis Ross, Clinton’s chief negotiator in the Israeli-Palestinian talks, has written a sobering piece (subscriber only) for the Wall Street Journal candidly discussing the mistakes he and others made in dealing with Yasser Arafat. Key grafs:

[W]e should have asked Arafat and Ehud Barak to condition their publics for compromise by announcing simultaneously and repeatedly that neither side would get 100% of what it wanted on Jerusalem, refugees or borders. This would not only have conditioned their respective publics to what would be coming, but also prepared the leaders for what would be required of them. It would also have subjected both leaders to withering criticism from parts of their own constituencies — and the readiness to weather such criticism would have been one of the best measures of their seriousness for tackling these core issues.
Had Arafat been unwilling to take such a step, as I believe we would have soon discovered, we could have adjusted our objective. Rather than trying to resolve issues like Jerusalem and refugees, we would have focused on expanding the scope of Palestinian independence from Israeli control, developing and investing in the Palestinian economy, and expanding the connections between the Israeli and Palestinian societies. In other words, we would have worked intensively to create the conditions for peace-making after Arafat left the scene.

Very interesting. The problem with this analysis is that it presumes Arafat would have negotiated any of these points — he didn’t care a whit about developing the Palestinian economy except as a means of personal enrichment, he didn’t want expanded connections between the Israeli and Palestinian societies, and he had no interest in expanding Palestinian independence short of a state.

All these goals were Israeli goals, or more specifically, the goals of Israeli Labour politicians indulging in dreams about the Palestinian readiness to join the community of civilized peoples. No matter how you slice it, the reason there could be no deal with the Palestinians then or now is that the Palestinians with whom you have to negotiate are utterly uninterested in improving the daily lives of ordinary Palestinians. They have an ideological and geopolitical aim, which is the destruction of Israel and (in the case of Hamas) the extension of Iranian power to the Mediterranean.

The sad truth is that you can have peace processes all you like, but if one side is committed to war, then it’s war.