Left-winger BenAmi was the foreign minister present at the 2000 Camp David peace summit between then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. The dismal failure of these “peace talks” resulted in 1,137 dead and 8,341 wounded Israelis.
The far-right Smotrich and his faction introduced a plan diametrically opposed to that of Ben-Ami, who basically tried to give the Palestinians the entire West Bank, Gaza and the Temple Mount.
In the interview, Ben-Ami finally admits that “it is nearly impossible to sustain here one state, let alone two. Ending the occupation is an empty slogan [because] for the Palestinians it means a mini-state, a sandwich between two states [Israel and Jordan] that don’t particularly like them.” The Palestinians under Arafat, the only leader who could have signed the deal, Ben-Ami acknowledged after 17 years, rejected the most generous peace proposal Israel could possibly offer.
Commenting on Ben-Ami’s late awakening from his leftist delusions, Uzi Rabi, a respected teacher from the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, wrote: “The architects of the ‘New Middle East’ [Shimon Peres and his followers]...
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