I see the tu quoque is your fallacy of choice.
If you'd actually clicked the link and read it, you'd seen that B'Tselem tallies statistics of
both Israeli and Palestinian casualties. No "tu quoque" there.
And Taba actually
was the successor conference to Camp David; and they came closer then ever to a solution. Too bad the Barak government was already dead in the water by then.
As to Camp David, it's also been said that Clinton convened the conference with too little preparation, and there have also been endless streams of maps that Barak di or didn't present as his offer. It's pointless to continue arguin who exactly is to blame for the failure of the conference.
But 10 years later, where are we now? FireGarden's post #7 is the most interesting in this thread. After Taba, the peace process has basically been put on ice, and GWB has done nothing about it for 7 years. In the end, he didn't want to go down in history as the president who had done nothing about the conflict and organized Annapolis - which was nothing more than a dog-and-pony show, only the severely deluded or eternal optimist would have thought that anything would come out of that.
Olmert spoke in 2008, still PM but IIRC already dead in the water, bravely of the consequences of further failure of the peace process, and I agree with his analysis. However, nothing has been achieved since either. Obama has made some critical remarks to Netanyahu, but Netanyahu has made long nose and got away with it. And Obama can't risk being too critical of Israel for the consequences of the November midterm elections; or further down the line, in two years his own re-election - if he's too critical, AIPAC will do everything to destroy his or other Democrats' chances.
Shlomo Ben-Ami's remarks make clear why a US president needs to be "too critical". If there is to be a peace treaty, both Israelis and Palestinians have to move out of their "comfort zone" and do concessions they're at heart not willing to make. The US president, as the "honest broker", is the one whose job it is to arm twist the Israeli negotiators into doing concessions beyond what they had in mind - and likewise the Palestinian ones, but there's no Palestinian equivalent of AIPAC to worry about.
So, for a successful peace conference, the stars have to be just right. As argued above, the US president must be in a second term and not have to fear for his reelection. The Israeli government likewise has to have a solid support in the Knesset, and that task has only become more cumbersome with the rise of Kadima. The rift between Fatah and Hamas has made the task for a Palestinian government to negotiate more difficult too.
Meanwhile, the matter to negotiate about becomes ever more difficult too. Netanyahu works on "facts on the ground". A cursory look at the map shows how Arab East Jerusalem is virtually surrounded by Jewish West Jerusalem and Jewish settlements to the east. How to untangle that mess?
When it comes to the point that indeed, the only option seems to be four or five Palestinian enclaves, isolated from each other, in the West Bank, then indeed, no other sensible alternative exists for Palestinian negotiators than to say: "just annex us". With a single country with roughly 50-50 Jewish and Arab inhabitants, and the consequences Olmert painted.
