In July 2000 Clinton convened a summit at Camp David in northern Maryland, where the historic Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt had been negotiated in 1978. The aim was to find a final agreement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after five years of Palestinian self-rule. The summit was hastily prepared, however, and, since the most contentious issues—the question of the right of return for Palestinian refugees, control of Jerusalem, borders, and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—were being discussed for the first time, it was unlikely that these sensitive and complex matters would be resolved quickly. From the beginning, Arafat was suspicious of the summit and its timing, and although some progress was made, in the end there was no final settlement.
Negotiations continued after the failure at Camp David, but a visit by Likud leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in September 2000 sparked the second intifada, and the dwindling talks ground to a halt. A spiral of harsh repression by the Israeli army and violence by different armed Palestinian groups subsequently led to both sides’ total loss of confidence in the peace process. In spite of the January 2001 negotiations at Taba, Egypt, which were held independently of the United States and made important progress, the Barak government lost the February 2001 general elections and Sharon—a strong opponent of both the Oslo Accords and the creation of a Palestinian state—was elected prime minister. “We have no partner for peace” was once more the general sentiment of many Israeli political parties.
Arafat lost much of his diplomatic credibility with the West after the election of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush in November 2000 and the launch of the “war on terror” in 2001, which followed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. In 2001, following suicide attacks in Israel that Sharon blamed Arafat for instigating, Arafat was confined by Israel to his headquarters in Ramallah. In October 2004 Arafat fell ill and was transported to Paris for medical treatment, where he died the following month. Fatah later passed a unanimous resolution that held Israel responsible for Arafat’s death.
Alain Gresh
Many of Arafat’s supporters doubted that he had died a natural death, their suspicions being fueled in part by the doctors’ inability to identify the origin of his illness and the lack of an autopsy, and rumours circulated that he had died from poisoning. These suspicions surfaced again in July 2012 when a Swiss laboratory announced that it had discovered elevated levels of polonium-210 on some of Arafat’s clothes and personal belongings. French prosecutors launched a murder investigation later that year in response to a request by Arafat’s widow. In November 2012 Arafat’s remains were exhumed so that teams of Swiss, Russian, and French experts could test for signs of poisoning.
The results of the separate investigations, released in late 2013, were contradictory. The Russian report was released first and found no traces of polonium-210. The Swiss and French results both found abnormally high levels of polonium-210 but disagreed on how it got into his remains: the Swiss study concluded that poisoning could not be ruled out, while the French study concluded that the presence of polonium-210 could be explained as environmental in origin.
No report went without controversy, moreover. There were claims of outright interference in the Russian investigation, including claims that the Russian scientists were instructed on what the outcome should be. The Swiss report cited a number of intervening factors that effected uncertainty in the interpretation of the results, including the length of time since the death and the incomplete “chain of custody” of Arafat’s clothes and belongings studied in the earlier investigation. Palestinian officials and Arafat’s widow dismissed the French conclusions as “politicized.”
