Why was it that, just two months after the Camp David summit of July 2000, with its happy talk about an "end of conflict," a Palestinian campaign of violence erupted, now underway for exactly two years?
Reacting against Prime Minister Ehud Barak's jaw-dropping offers to the Palestinian Authority, the leader of the opposition, Ariel Sharon, the next day visited the Temple Mount, the holiest of Jewish sites, to re-affirm Israeli sovereignty over the spot.
Palestinians responded to Sharon's visit with instant and sustained violence that still continues two years later. Why so?
The initial answer focused on Ariel Sharon's provocative appearance on the Temple Mount incensing Palestinians. With time, though, this explanation disappeared because it was self-evidently too flimsy. The outing had been meticulously choreographed with the Palestinian security services as well as the waqf, the Islamic authority which oversees the Temple Mount and the Israelis were told "there was no reason for concern" (The Jerusalem Post, Oct. 4, 2000) so long as Sharon did not step foot in the Islamic sanctities. He followed the agreement exactly, spending an hour atop the site in tourist mode, gazing at Jewish antiquities.
Then came a second explanation: Barak and President Bill Clinton made major errors at the Camp David summit that caused the negotiations to collapse and Yasir Arafat to leave the negotiations in a fury. This explanation also collapsed, again partly due to its flimsiness and largely to convincing rebuttals by others who took part in the summit.
Then a third, final, and convincing explanation: Israelis had feebly defended their own interests, and this inspired the Palestinians to assault them. Palestinians refrained from violence so long as Israeli power intimidated them. But the Oslo accords of 1993 and the next seven years, culminating in a unilateral retreat from Lebanon in May 2000, convinced the Palestinians that Israel had weakened.
So they struck, using Sharon's stroll as pretext, fitting a long-standing pattern. (September 28, 2002)
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