The 2000 Camp David Summit appears in Noam Chomsky’s discussion as a contested measure of U.S. diplomacy toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Against the reassuring U.S. account of the proposals as generous, he argues that they were unacceptable and that later U.S. positions did not even reach the terms associated with the summit. Its importance in the discussion lies not in a narrated account of negotiations, but in the contrast between the proposals’ public reception and the criticism that Chomsky says was available elsewhere.

The Summit as a disputed benchmark

Chomsky says that people in the Middle East did not share the comforting U.S. view that the proposals made at Camp David in the summer of 2000 were generous and magnanimous. He places this disagreement among the myths to which U.S. audiences remained attached, while observing that many books offered detailed information from reliable sources that was nevertheless little known. The summit therefore becomes a point where political disagreement and unequal access to information meet: the public description of the proposals, in his account, did not settle whether they were acceptable.

Later U.S. policy and the proposals

Discussing whether the United States might adopt a new approach to the Palestinian crisis after the September 11 attacks, Chomsky says that George W. Bush and Colin Powell would not go as far as the Camp David proposals made by Bill Clinton. He notes that the dominant press in the United States had applauded those earlier proposals, although, he argues, they were unacceptable for reasons debated in detail in Israel and elsewhere. His comparison makes the summit a baseline for judging the later administration: even the proposals that had drawn favorable U.S. media attention were not, in his reading, an adequate measure of what Palestinian interlocutors could accept.

Maps, coverage, and public understanding

Chomsky presents the map as a practical means of scrutinizing the Camp David proposals. He remarks that maps were difficult to find in the United States, while they were available elsewhere, including in Israel, and directs readers to reporting from the time of the summit and essays in The New Intifada, edited by Roane Carey. The contrast is part of his broader criticism of how dominant coverage shaped understanding: U.S. audiences encountered an approving account, while detailed discussion and visual information that could help evaluate the proposals were less readily available to them.

Significance in the wider argument

The summit’s role in the interview is evidentiary and comparative. Chomsky invokes it to challenge explanations that detach hostility toward the United States from its policies, and to show how U.S. and Middle Eastern perceptions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict diverged. He does not recount the negotiations or supply their terms in these passages; instead, he uses the public characterization of the proposals, the criticism of their acceptability, and their later comparison with Bush and Powell’s positions to question whose account of diplomacy becomes conventional knowledge.