From the Mitchell Report:
The GOI asserts that the immediate catalyst for the violence was the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations on July 25, 2000 and the “widespread appreciation in the international community of Palestinian responsibility for the impasse. In this view, Palestinian violence was planned by the PA leadership, and was aimed at “provoking and incurring Palestinian casualties as a means of regaining the diplomatic initiative.”[8]
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) denies the allegation that the intifada was planned. it claims, however, that “Camp David represented nothing less than an attempt by Israel to extend the force it exercises on the ground to negotiations,”[9] and that “the failure of the summit, and the attempts to allocate blame on the Palestinian side only added to the tension on the ground …[10]
From the “Green Prince” (via Instapundit)
As a spy, Mr. Yousef wasn’t fully activated until the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000. A few months before at Camp David, the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat had turned down the Israeli offer of statehood on 90% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital. According to Mr. Yousef, Arafat decided he needed another uprising to win back international attention. So he sought out Hamas’s support through Sheikh Yousef, writes his son, who accompanied him to Arafat’s compound. Those meetings took place before the Palestinian authorities found a pretext for the second Intifada. It came when future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Mr. Yousef’s account helps to set straight the historical record that the uprising was premeditated by Arafat.
Mr. Yousef tells me that he was horrified by the pointless violence unleashed by politicians willing to climb “on the shoulders of poor, religious people.” He says Palestinians who heeded the call “were going like a cow to the slaughterhouse, and they thought they were going to heaven.” So, as he writes in the book, “At the age of twenty-two, I became the Shin Bet’s only Hamas insider who could infiltrate Hamas’s military and political wings, as well as other Palestinian factions.”
UPDATE: Related see memeorandum and Backspin.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
