HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011846.jpg

/ BARAK / 89 question of Jerusalem — than any Israeli leader in the search for peace. Even before I'd left for Camp David, the defections from our coalition meant we’d been left with only 42 seats in the Knesset, nineteen short of a majority. Amid the first, sketchy media reports that we were even talking about sharing control of parts of Jerusalem with the Palestinians, there was a chorus of denunciation from right- wing politicians back home. Bibi Netanyahu had largely kept out of the public eye since his resignation after the election. Now, he issued a statement accusing me of having “broken all the red lines held by all Israeli governments.” During the President’s final push to save the prospects for a summit agreement, Bibi called a news conference. He said he was determined to prevent what he called an impending disintegration of Israeli society. “What we hear from most of the reports out of Camp David does not answer our hopes,” he said. It hadn’t answered my hopes either. But I had gone into the summit with my eyes open. Frustrated though I was by the way the summit had ended, I had no regrets about going as far as I had in trying to reach, at the minimum, a framework agreement. In that sense, it is true the summit had failed. But when I’d urged President Clinton to convene it, I made the argument that if genuine peace was ever going to be possible, we at least had to know whether Arafat was interested in, or capable of, playing his part. That question had, for now, been answered. At least as importantly for Israel, the President of the United States and almost the entire international community recognized we’d done everything realistically possible to reach an accommodation. Diplomatically, the ball was in the Palestinians’ court. There was a final achievement as well — little noticed or remarked upon in the days immediately after Camp David, but hugely significant. A taboo had been broken. For the first time, all Israelis recognized what their political leaders, both Labor and Likud, had long known: a formal, final peace with the Palestinians, if and when it came, would require us not just to withdraw from the great majority of the West Bank, but to find a formula for sharing power in Jerusalem. Many Israelis still believed that was a price too high, and not just Likudniks. A couple of weeks after the summit, Leah Rabin told an Israeli newspaper that her late husband would be “turning in his grave” if he’d known the concessions I’d been ready to consider on Jerusalem. I found the remarks hurtful, but I understood them. In a way, they drove home the point I’d made to Clinton during the summit: a@// Israelis had a deep, emotional attachment to our historic capital. “Yitzhak would never have agreed to compromise on the Old City and the Temple Mount,” Leah said, 375 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011846