Responding to Michael Kazin and Julian Zelizer, James writes:

Well, they did have a clear strategy for ’solving’ the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But when Clinton offered it to Arafat, Arafat rejected it.

Up to a point, yes, but a strategy that is “clear” may also be clearly unacceptable to the other side for reasons that go beyond stubborn rejectionism.  But then the “clarity” of the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict has been exaggerated.  In the case of the 2000 Camp David deal, we were regularly told about how generous and extensive the deal offered to the Palestinians was, and everyone already took for granted that Arafat was awful, so when he rejected it most of us (at least those of us in America) accepted the official story that the deal was excellent and rejecting it was “proof” that there was simply no use in negotiating with the Palestinians.  One of the reasons why it was supposed to be controversial for Obama to have Robert Malley as an advisor (regardless of how peripheral or minor he was) before the Hamas business was that Malley had once had the poor taste to argue publicly that the 2000 deal wasn’t necessarily very good and rejecting it wasn’t so unreasonable:

The Palestinians saw acceptance of the US ideas, even as “bases for further negotiations,” as presenting dangers of its own. The Camp David proposals were viewed as inadequate: they were silent on the question of refugees, the land exchange was unbalanced, and both the Haram and much of Arab East Jerusalem were to remain under Israeli sovereignty. To accept these proposals in the hope that Barak would then move further risked diluting the Palestinian position in a fundamental way: by shifting the terms of debate from the international legitimacy of United Nations resolutions on Israeli withdrawal and on refugee return to the imprecise ideas suggested by the US. Without the guarantee of a deal, this was tantamount to gambling with what the Palestinians considered their most valuable currency, international legality. The Palestinians’ reluctance to do anything that might undercut the role of UN resolutions that applied to them was reinforced by Israel’s decision to scrupulously implement those that applied to Lebanon and unilaterally withdraw from that country in the months preceding Camp David. Full withdrawal, which had been obtained by Egypt and basically offered to Syria, was now being granted to Lebanon. If Hezbollah, an armed militia that still considered itself at war with Israel, had achieved such an outcome, surely a national movement that had been negotiating peacefully with Israel for years should expect no less.

And then later the updated form of this offer did not appear much more attractive:

Unlike at Camp David, and as shown both by the time it took him to react and by the ambiguity of his reactions, Arafat thought hard before providing his response. But in the end, many of the features that troubled him in July came back to haunt him in December. As at Camp David, Clinton was not presenting the terms of a final deal, but rather “parameters” within which accelerated, final negotiations were to take place. As at Camp David, Arafat felt under pressure, with both Clinton and Barak announcing that the ideas would be off the table—would “depart with the President”—unless they were accepted by both sides. With only thirty days left in Clinton’s presidency and hardly more in Barak’s premiership, the likelihood of reaching a deal was remote at best; if no deal could be made, the Palestinians feared they would be left with principles that were detailed enough to supersede international resolutions yet too fuzzy to constitute an agreement [bold mine-DL].

So ambiguity and uncertainty seemed to define the process in 2000, at least as the Palestinians saw it, and there was not nearly enough clarity.  In the case of Israel and Palestine, it does not mean much to say that so-and-so doesn’t have a “clear strategy” for resolving it, since that criticism might be applied to just about everyone.