The biggest prize of all, he added, was that President Bill Clinton would shortly travel to Gaza to formally address a large conclave of Palestinians – a visit ostensibly tied to an understanding that Arafat would convene the Palestine National Council for the purpose of excising the anti-Israel clauses in the PNC charter, though it was always unclear how serious the Palestinians were about the undertaking.
What was clear, wrote Krauthammer, “is that an American president will come to Palestine to bless its Congress, address a Palestinian festival celebrating coming independence, and launch it on that road.”
A road, it should be said, that Clinton fully supported. Krauthammer made the point, downplayed or ignored by Jews who loved to contrast Clinton so favorably with the first President Bush, that at the 1991 Madrid peace talks the Bush administration “explicitly declared that it would not support a Palestinian state.”
No such declarations were ever heard from Clinton, or, for that matter, from Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush – who, while exhibiting a warmth toward Israel that was hard to discern in his father, became the first sitting U.S. president to champion, in unambiguous terms, an independent Palestinian state.
In the end, Krauthammer feared, Wye would be seen to have set the groundwork for the creation of a Palestinian state and the outbreak of war. (Proving that even the most prescient of mortals will not get everything right, Krauthammer predicted that Arafat in a few months would fulfill his pledge to declare a Palestinian state on May 4, 1999.)
It was only a matter of time, Krauthammer was convinced, before one side or the other would be forced, most likely by cataclysmic events, to surrender its chief claims.
“That,” he concluded, “is the crisis waiting to happen. For now, Wye is the bridge to that crisis, the last agreement between Israel and the Palestinians we are likely to see before the fateful showdown.”
So wrote Krauthammer two years before Arafat launched the Second Intifada in September 2000, ushering in one of the bloodiest eras in Israeli history and in the process wrecking the delusions of Israel’s so-called peace camp.