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Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-miller-mideast-peace-20100707,0,98880.story
Lessons for an Israeli-Palestinian Summit
(Los Angeles Times) Aaron David Miller - Ten years ago this month, a risk-ready Israeli prime minister persuaded a risk-ready American president to convene a historic summit at Camp David with a risk-averse Palestinian leader. The descent into violence and terror that followed traumatized the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Barack Obama can't afford to ignore the lessons of the last serious American effort to address the core issues that drive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2000, we didn't really know where the Israelis and Palestinians stood, because if we had better understood their positions, we would have known that the gaps were too big. We foolishly calculated possibilities when we should have been dealing in probabilities, and we should have had more realistic goals. The writer, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, served as an advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations to Democratic and Republican secretaries of state.