ROBERT THE WRONG: Belatedly, Robert Wright joins the school of the Camp David revisionists and defends Arafat's behavior there. He credits his main source: this article in the New York Review of Books by Robert Malley (a former assistant to the President for Arab-Israeli affairs) and Hussein Agha (a professor at Oxford who, according to the NYRB article, " has been involved in Palestinian affairs for more than thirty years and during this period has had an active part in Israeli-Palestinian relations.")
Wright's article is wide-open to the following critiques:
1) First, the ad hominem point: Bill Clinton, Dennis Ross and Shlomo Ben-Ami (the ultra-dovish foreign minister in Barak's government) have all defended the conventional wisdom laying the blame for the Camp David failure at Arafat's feet. Somehow, I think they might be in a better position to judge than a hitherto anonymous White House staffer. And more seriously, since the article was co-written by a Palestinian activist, it should be treated with at least as much skepticism as the conventional account. Yet Wright assumes the truth of the article's assertions without further comment.
More substantively, the following two points:
2) Wright assumes the reasonableness of Arafat's refusal to budge from 100% of the pre-1967 borders. But if that is all that the Palestinians wanted, then how does that betray any willingness to compromise on their part? The only way it does is if you assume that they wanted more than the pre-1967 borders - which means Israel's suspicions suddenly look much more reasonable.
3) Most importantly, Wright mischaracterizes the situation between Camp David and Taba:
[B]y the time of Taba, the whole political environment had changed. In September, Barak had allowed Ariel Sharon to make his famous visit to Haram al-Sharif, which many observers consider the spark that ignited the current intifada. Given the only deepening mistrust between Arafat and Israel, America was, more than ever, a vital guarantor of any deal. Yet President Clinton was by then a lame duck, and comments from President-elect Bush had made clear his limited enthusiasm for Middle East peace brokering.
Arafat may also have been troubled by the fact that Barak seemed doomed to lose upcoming elections to Ariel Sharon, who probably wouldn't honor a Barak-negotiated deal.
Did anything happen in the interim to change the situation? Oh yes - the second intifada, only referred to by Wright in a manner which blames Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount for the whole thing. For those who do not remember, the time between Camp David and Taba included innumerable riots, shootings of Israelis, and the grisly lynching of two Israeli soldiers who got lost in Ramallah.
Wright and his fellow revisionists point to the near-deal at Taba as proof that the Palestinains were ready to make a deal. Well, what if there was reason to think that the Palestinians would sign the deal, take their state, and then launch another war against Israel (ostensibly) over the few millimeters of disputed territory remaining? By Taba, there was two months of evidence for that scenario. Notice that Wright, as Deborah Sontag did in a similar magnum opus of revisionism, glosses over the intifada and does not mention any reason why Barak was likely to lose by the time of Taba - drawing any connection between the two would make Israeli suspicions seem justified. As Robert Satloff noted regarding Sontag's article:
The uprising so transformed the Israeli-Palestinian political context that by the time the two sides were, in Sontag's telling, agonizingly close, it no longer mattered. By January's Taba talks, Barak had the support of just one-third of his people and an even smaller fraction of his parliament. Arafat, for his part, had forged an alliance between his Fatah movement and the radical Hamas opposition. But to discuss the intifada, its roots, and its impact would complicate Sontag's tale of imminent peace gone awry, so she sets it aside.
Hence, Sontag makes not a single reference to how violence--any violence--on the part of the Palestinians violated the founding accord of the Israel-PLO relationship, an exchange of letters between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin four days before the signing of the Oslo understandings in September 1993. (Israel's recognition of the PLO was premised on the organization's written commitment to forswear terrorism and violence and to pursue diplomacy as the only means to achieve its objectives.) Sontag makes no reference to Arafat's nine-month-long rejection of American pleas for a cease-fire or his flouting of understandings reached with Clinton at Sharm al-Sheikh on October 16 and 17, 2000, and with Shimon Peres in Gaza on November 1. She ignores Arafat's speech in Davos on January 28, 2001, when, the day after the Taba talks had ended and with Peres at his side, he lambasted Israel for using "fascist military aggression." Nor does Sontag mention the sacking of Joseph's Tomb, the terrorist exploits of Tanzim leader Marwan Bargouti, or the repeated denials by Palestinian officials, from Arafat on down, of any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. Any of that would have marred her portrayal of Arafat as a cooperative partner in peace.

While Wright's article is shorter and can thus be excused from citing as many details, it suffers from the same overall fault: the willful blindness to the ramifications of the intifada. Looking at Taba outside of that context is reductionist in the extreme.