This picture is accurate as far as it goes, but it omits one other salient feature of the landscape in 2002. The year also witnessed a host of new plans, initiatives, and schemes for fixing the situation. None of these ideas came from the Palestinian side—hardly surprising, given that Yasir Arafat seems to see violence against Israelis as the solution to all his problems. Instead, they issued from various parties in Israel and the United States, with an echo or two from Europe and the Arab states.
[S]haron’s tough policies have established that terrorism damages Palestinian interests even more than it does Israeli ones. This has led some analysts deeply hostile to Israel to recognize that the “second intifada” was a grievous error. Violence “just went haywire,” says Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University. An “unmitigated disaster,” journalist Graham Usher calls it. A “crime against the Palestinian people,” adds an Arab diplomat.
Ordinary Palestinians, too, are drawing the salutary conclusion that murdering Israelis brings them no benefits. “We wasted three years for nothing, this uprising didn’t accomplish anything,” says Mahar Tarhir, 25, an aluminum-store owner. “Anger and disillusionment have replaced the fighting spirit that once propelled the Palestinian movement,” finds Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, a reporter for Knight Ridder.
And so we are arrived at the ideal moment to impose statehood on the Palestinians, a people fed up with the violence advocated by their "leadership" and desperate to get on with life. In retrospect, the President's declaration that the eventual map would contain two states, not just one, was obviously the beginning of the end of the conflict, not its low point at all.