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/ BARAK / 45 responsibility to support the other. With President Clinton looking on, I steered Arafat toward the window of the ambassador’s fifth-floor apartment. “Look down,” I said. “Imagine that we each have parachutes, and we’re going to jump together. But I have my hand on your ripcord, and you are holding mine. To land safely we have to help each other... And if we don’t jump, many, many innocent people who are now walking the streets of Gaza and Ramallah and Hebron, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, will die.” Arafat again just nodded, leaving me, and the President, unsure whether anything I’d said had struck home. The true test of that would come only when we got to the stage of negotiations when the “difficult decisions” could not be evaded. Yet only weeks after I returned from Oslo, the focus did finally shift to the Syrians. President Assad suddenly signalled his willingness to resume talks without any preconditions — a message he delivered first to my British Labor Party friend Michael Levy, who was visiting Damascus as Tony Blair’s roving Mideast envoy, and then to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Assad said he would send Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al- Sharaa to meet me for initial talks in Washington in December, ahead of a full- scale, US-mediated attempt to negotiate peace at the start of the new year. The broad terms of a potential deal had long been clear, both to us and the Syrians. The danger was always that the process would get derailed, or never really get started, due to domestic political opposition. Syria had a tightly state-controlled media and an intelligence service concerned mainly with crushing any signs of dissidence. That meant Assad’s main concern was to ensure broad support, or at least acquiescence, from top military and party figures. In Israel, however, every sign of a concession would risk igniting charges that we were “selling out” to Syria. The Likud and the political right would obviously denounce the idea of giving up the Golan Heights, even though Bibi had been ready to do just that when he was Prime Minister. But even on the left, there was little enthusiasm for returning the Golan. There were far fewer Israeli settlers there than on the West Bank, not even 20,000. But most of them, far from being religiously motivated ideologues, were Labor supporters. And almost no Israel, of any political stripe, 331 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028179