Palestinian President Yasser Arafat told President Clinton last week he would resign rather than bow to U.S. pressure to accept Israeli proposals on a West Bank pull-back, PLO officials said on Wednesday.
Briefing his cabinet on last week's White House talks, Arafat told ministers that Clinton twice tried to persuade him to accept insignificant Israeli troop withdrawals, the officials said."When pressed to accept Israeli proposals on further redeployment from the West Bank, President Arafat told Clinton: `I am not a traitor, I will not be a traitor, you can't force me to do that, I will resign,' " a senior PLO official said.
"Arafat told Clinton that he would resign and if the peace process fails and chaos erupts after that, the U.S. will have to face its responsibilities for that," another PLO official told Reuters.
In a proposal rejected on Tuesday by Arafat, Clinton has suggested that the Israeli withdrawal take place in phases, with each step matched by a new Palestinian action to improve security.
Palestinians have said they want Israel to pull back from at least another 30 percent of the West Bank under interim peace deals but Israeli news reports signal Netanyahu refuses to go beyond 9.5 percent.
PLO officials who attended the Washington talks with Arafat said the meetings failed to achieve any progress in the 10-month-old deadlocked PLO-Israeli peace process.
"But the Palestinians succeeded in preventing the Americans from adopting Israel's extremist positions which were aimed at destroying the Oslo accords," a PLO official said, referring to interim peace deals signed since 1993.
PLO officials said they felt the sex scandal plaguing Clinton had harmed U.S. efforts to break the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.
"President Clinton was distracted and the U.S. was paralyzed when we were in Washington," a senior adviser to Arafat said.