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/ BARAK/ 51 couldn’t guarantee anything. In the months ahead I would come to understand what that meant, because it would happen again. I don’t think Arafat himself orchestrated the violence. Maybe he couldn’t have stopped it completely. But I have no doubt — nor did President Clinton — that he stood aside and let it happen. Even worse — since he did have control over them — his security forces, with arms that Israel had provided as part of Oslo, fired on our troops as they tried to keep order. All of this, while I stood in the Knesset battling to get approval to give him the villages. As news arrived in the chamber of gunfire just a couple of miles away, it was not just Likud or other right-wing MKs who were furious. I certainly was. Yet I also knew that the price of losing the vote would be the fall of the government. We did win the vote, by a margin of eight, meaning that I now had full authority to return the three villages. Fuming over what had happened, however, I called President Clinton and told him I was going to delay the handover. I was not about to return the villages under gunfire, or reward Arafat for breaking even his existing security commitments. That meant that prospects for serious negotiations with the Palestinians were again on hold. But another, immutable, priority would probably have delayed any new initiative anyway: my pledge to get our soldiers out of Lebanon within a year of the election. I was determined to go ahead with it not just because I’d promised Israelis to do so. It was because I knew from experience that without setting a deadline and sticking to it, it wouldn’t happen. I had been against keeping the security zone from the start. Over the years, many Israelis, both inside the military and beyond, had come to accept we would be better off pulling out. It wasn’t just the attritional loss of Israeli soldiers’ lives, but the fact that there was no obvious point, and no obvious end, to our mission there. Especially when major tragedies occurred — like the collision of two Israeli helicopters a couple of years earlier, leaving scores of young soldiers dead — there was talk about a withdrawal. Yet there was always a reason to reconsider, to put it off: a Hizbollah attack in the security zone, accusations of weakness from right-wing politicians, or simple caution in the kirya. The only way to get it done was to decide, and to do it. My self-imposed deadline for the pullout was now just eight weeks away. Hizbollah had already begun escalating pressure on our outposts in south Lebanon with the obvious aim of making the withdrawal as difficult as possible. They were also targeting our local surrogates, the Maronite-led South Lebanese Army militia. I’d been meeting regularly with Shaul Mofaz, the former paratroop officer who 337 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011808