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/ BARAK / 83 I packed my bags. I told Danny Yatom to inform the Americans we were leaving and to get our plane ready to take us back to Israel. I let the others in our team know that we were going. A number of them, and several of the Americans as well, urged me to reconsider. But I said I saw no point in staying. What I didn’t know, however, was that one of the Palestinians’ original Oslo negotiators, Hassan Asfour, had approached Dennis Ross with a new proposal: that we ask Arafat to accept everything except the proposal on the holy sites as a basis for negotiation. Sovereignty over the Temple Mount would be addressed in later, international negotiations. When Dennis brought this to me, my instinct was to say no. Like so much else at the summit, it was an inherently skewed formula: it would involve major Israeli concessions on all the other main issues, without securing our absolute minimum need in Jerusalem: sovereignty over the Temple Mount. I didn’t say yes. Still, with Clinton’s words of advice still on my mind, I said that I’d think it over. When I met the rest of the Israeli team, almost all of them felt we should stay. The consensus was that especially if violence broke out after the summit’s collapse, we didn’t want to feel we’d left any stone unturned. At about 11 pm, I phoned the President and told him that we would stay until he returned from Okinawa. He was clearly pleased, and asked us to keep working in his absence. When I resisted that, saying that any substantive talks needed his involvement, we finally agreed that talks could continue in search of a formula for the holy sites. On all the other issues, only informal discussions would be held until and unless a way ahead on the Temple Mount was found. If that happened, and if Arafat finally accepted the “pocket” proposals as an agreed starting point, formal negotiations could resume. Clinton accepted this formula. He went to see Arafat and secured — or thought he had secured — his agreement as well. One of the President’s great strengths was his genius for blurring the edges of potential differences in search of common ground. But when edges had to be sharpened, this could lead to confusion. Before leaving for the G8, the President neglected to mention to Arafat our explicit understanding that, with the exception of the talks on the holy sites, nothing would happen until he accepted the concessions that President Clinton and I had delivered as at least a basis for further negotiations. As a result, Arafat’s team now set about happily asking questions and probing my negotiators — pushing us to go further — but with no more inclination than before to produce any concessions of their own. 369 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011840