HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011801.jpg

/ BARAK / 44 Western envoys who had seen the Syrian president, that Assad’s many years of health problems had left him almost skeletally frail, even at times disoriented. Even my own negotiating team urged me to concentrate on the Palestinians instead. President Clinton kept stressing the importance of showing Arafat at least some movement on the Oslo front. In September 1999, I took a first, significant step in that direction. I agreed to a timetable that would deliver the Wye redeployments by the end of January 2000, while also committing us to negotiating a framework agreement, on the model of the Begin-Sadat Camp David accords, on the “~permanent-status” peace issues. In early November, I joined Clinton and Arafat for talks around an event in Oslo — a deliberate echo of the optimism with which the peace process had begun, held on the fourth anniversary of Rabin’s assassination. Both Leah Rabin and Peres came with me. Its centerpiece was a memorial service, at which Leah spoke very movingly of the need for both sides to finish the work Yitzhak had begun, a responsibility I pledged that we would do everything in our power to fulfill. Only Arafat struck a discordant note. He paired a tribute to Rabin with a polemic call for an end to “occupation, exile and settlements.” After the ceremony, he, President Clinton and I met at the American ambassador’s residence. I was still struck by Arafat’s public comments: by his apparent desire, or need, to play to hardliners back home in what was supposed to be a time to remember and honor Yitzhak. I didn’t raise his remarks directly, but I told him that each of us was approaching a moment of truth for the future of our people. The decisions required wouldn’t be easy politically, for either of us. “But if we don’t have the courage to make them, we’ll be burying thousands of our people.” Worse, I said, those deaths would not advance his people’s position, or mine, by a single inch. When future Palestinian and Israeli leaders did finally prove equal to the challenge of making peace, they’d be looking at the same conflict, requiring the same compromises. “The only difference will be the size of our cemeteries.” Arafat nodded occasionally. But he said little, beyond saying that he considered Rabin to have been a friend, and repeating his now-familiar, nonspecific, pledge to “do what is necessary” for peace. “The hardest part won’t be the tough decisions in negotiations,” I continued. “It wont be facing each other. It will be facing our own people.” We would need to make the case openly, honestly, strongly that the peace agreement we reached was in the interest of both Israelis and Palestinians. And in this, each of us had a 330 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011801