Dianne Feinstein: “on Camp David, let me quote Dennis Ross, President Clinton's Middle East envoy and a person who literally carried out…”

“on Camp David, let me quote Dennis Ross, President Clinton's Middle East envoy and a person who literally carried out thousands of hours of negotiation. He said: Let me give you the sequence [of events], because I think it puts all this in perspective. Number one, at Camp David we did not put a comprehensive set of ideas on the table. We put ideas on the table that would have affected borders and would have affected Jerusalem. Arafat could not accept any of that. In fact, during the 15 days there he never himself raised a single idea. His negotiators did, to be fair to them, but he didn't. The only new ideas he raised at Camp David was that the temple didn't exist in Jerusalem, it existed in Nablus . . . So he was denying the core of the Jewish faith there. On the eruption of the Intifada: After the summit, he immediately came back to us and he said, ``We need to have another summit,'' to which we said, ``We just shot our wad. We got a no from you. You're prepared actually to do a deal before we go back to something like that.'' He agreed to set up a private channel between his people and the Israelis, which I joined at the end of August. And there were serious discussions that went on, and we were poised to present our ideas the end of September, which is when the intifada erupted. He knew we were poised to present the ideas. His own people were telling him they looked good.…”