Department of Defense, news briefing, August 6, 2002
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld: What do I think the U.S. policy ought to be with respect to the settlements in the occupied areas? Question: Yes, sir. Rumsfeld: Former Prime Minister Ehud] Barak made a proposal that was as forthcoming as anyone in the world could ever imagine, and Arafat turned it down. If you have a country that's a sliver and you can see three sides of it from a high hotel building, you've got to be careful what you give away and to whom you give it. If you're giving it to an entity that has some track record, that has a degree of accountability, that has the ability to enforce security that's promised in whatever arrangements are made, it seems to me that's one thing. If you're making a deal and yielding territory to an entity that cannot or will not do that, and there is no question but that the Palestinian Authority [has] been involved with terrorist activities, so that makes it a difficult interlocutor.
My feeling about the so-called occupied territories are that there was a war, Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved in it once it started, they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in various parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won. They have offered up, successive prime ministers have offered up various portions of that so-called occupied territory, the West Bank, and at no point has it been agreed upon by the other side.
I suspect it will be, even in my lifetime, that there will be some sort of an entity that will be established. Maybe it will take some Palestinian expatriates coming back into the region and providing the kind of responsible government that would give confidence that you could make an arrangement with them that would stick. It may be that the neighboring countries, Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and others, will have to assist in providing a degree of accountability.
But certainly everyone has to hope and pray that there will be something that could be an effective interlocutor so that they could make a deal.
The settlement issues--it's hard to know whether they're settlements in portions of the real estate that will end up with the entity that you make an arrangement with or Israel. So it seems to me focusing on settlements at the present time misses the point. The real point is to get an effective interlocutor. The real point is to get a condition so that you can have a peace agreement. And those are exactly the things that President [George W.] Bush and Secretary [of State Colin] Powell have been working on, and indeed, working particularly with Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
PING
Just another neocon.