HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011826.jpg

/ BARAK / 69 municipal functions and daily life would be divided between Israel and the Palestinians under a peace agreement. When I convened our negotiators in my cabin to take stock of the logjam, I was getting more and more skeptical of finding a way to get to actual negotiation on the “hard decisions” I assumed both sides knew we’d have to make. I told our team we could not play that game. Until there was at least some movement from Arafat, I didn’t want them suggesting any Israeli concessions. We’d obviously get nothing in return. The summit would fail. Despite my repeated insistence both to the Americans and Palestinians that, without an agreement, any Israeli suggestions would be null and void, that didn’t mean they would simply be forgotten. The result is that we’d actually be in a worse situation than before Camp David. Politically, I’d find myself in much the same position as President Assad, after the leak of the American draft from Shepherdstown: apparently ready to consider giving Arafat the great majority of the West Bank, without the slightest sign Arafat was ready for a full and final peace. But that wasn’t my main concern. It was that anything that we put on the table here would handcuff future Israeli governments if and when an “end of conflict” agreement became possible. Still, when Dennis Ross learned from my negotiators what I’d decided, he was frustrated and upset. He came to see me on Saturday morning — day-five of what was looking increasingly like a stillborn summit. “This summit was your idea,” he said, reminding me that the President had agreed to it over the reservations of a lot his own aides. He told me that at a minimum, I had to help give it a chance: by giving him my true negotiating “red lines.” Either that, or give my negotiators more leeway to explore compromises. I did not want to make Dennis’s job any more difficult than it already was. And I told him I was still ready to engage fully if we ever got to the real substance of a possible deal. “But I can’t do what you’ve asked me,” I replied. “Not when Arafat is simply holding firm and not showing a willingness even to Jook for compromises.” Fortunately for my relationship with the President — though not for the prospects of an agreement — Clinton had considerably more sympathy with my position after his next meeting with both sets of negotiators that afternoon. It was a return encounter with Abu Ala’a on territory and borders. Shlomo Ben-Ami now produced a map of the West Bank with our proposed breakdown into the areas that would be controlled by a Palestinian state, the part Israel would retain to accommodate the major settlements, and territory which we suggested would go to 355 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011826