Of course, Ehud Barak pulled out. Of course, Mr Arafat could not accept the terms, because Israel was offering the Palestinians "control" of the surface of the mosques, it never offered "sovereignty". And by midday yesterday, Mr Barak's security adviser, Danny Yatom, was saying just that. Mr Barak, he announced, "will not sign an accord which transfers sovereignty [over the Temple Mount/ Haram al-Sharif] to the Palestinians". The result? The world believes that Mr Arafat turned down what he had always demanded, and the cancellation of the Sharm el-Sheikh summit was entirely his fault.

Having claimed in the past that Israel was offering 92 per cent of the West Bank – and then 94 per cent – to the Palestinians, the Americans insisted that the latest Clinton proposals would give Mr Arafat 95 per cent. But a careful reading of the Clinton document proves this to be untrue. With the Dead Sea waters that would become Palestinian "territory", with the Israeli army "buffer zones", with the "rental" of the Kiryat Arba settlement land, with the exclusion of the West Bank land illegally annexed into Jerusalem by the Israelis (including the massive Male Adumim settlement), Arafat was still likely to get no more than 64 or 65 per cent.

And the Palestinian Authority knows all too well what "control" would mean in Jerusalem. While Arafat's men collected garbage, supplied the traffic cops and kept their own people in order, the Israelis would continue to hold sovereign power over all Jerusalem.

Palestinian "control" of Palestinian "neighbourhoods" of Jerusalem would recreate the insanity of West Bank areas A, B and C where Israelis and Palestinians variously "control" all of an area or share parts of it. One Jerusalem street would have Palestinian policemen, the next Israelis. And the Israelis, of course, could besiege a street just as they can currently besiege a town on the West Bank.

Then there was the "swap" of Palestinian land on the West Bank that Israel would keep in return for "some land outside the Gaza Strip in the south of our country", as one Israeli journalist put it on Wednesday night. The only small detail about this piece of generosity that was not mentioned was that the "land" Israelis would hand over happens to be desert. In return for keeping settlements illegally built on occupied territory, Mr Arafat would be the recipient of a patch of sand.

For Mr Arafat's millions of refugees, there would be no more "right of return" – goodbye to UN General Assembly resolution 194 – merely a profound hope that some could go to the new "Palestine" where they never had their home, or go to Israel as part of a family "reunion" agreement. In reality – and with tens of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon or settled in northern Europe and America – this is probably what will, one day, happen.

But bundled in with the rest of the Clinton proposals, Mr Arafat and Mr Barak were never going to make a deal. That much is certain. Along with the fact that the ever-more humiliated Mr Arafat is going to be blamed yet again for turning down that infamous "last chance for peace".

© 2000 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

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