HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028241.jpg

/ BARAK / 107 determined to focus on the end goal: initially, at least, a framework agreement, and over time a final political resolution of our conflict. Ever since the outbreak of the Palestinians’ first intifada, I believed this was as much in Israel’s own interest as theirs. Yet when I entered office, we had no way of knowing whether Arafat wanted two states living side-by-side in peace. I felt it was my duty to find out, and, if the answer was yes, to put a peace agreement in place. I felt the same about way about Syria and Hafez al-Assad. When I left office, I believed I had achieved the most important goals of my premiership. We were out of Lebanon. Though we couldn’t achieve the peace agreements I had hoped for, it was not for lack of trying. Along the way, Israel had demonstrated to the world that it was able and willing to consider painful compromises, and that it was the Arab leaders who, at least for now, were unequal to the challenge of making peace. If I’d been able to retain the backing of the voters who made me Prime Minister in 1999, we might even have moved ahead on unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians, dramatically altering the trajectory of our relationship. Yet even without that, Camp David did delineate the terms of any future peace arrangement. When and if conditions allowed a resumption of serious negotiating efforts, the shape, and indeed most of the details, of a final peace between our peoples were now clear. I was on holiday in the summer of 2001 when Clinton phoned me. 7he New Times had run a piece on how and why the summit, and the subsequent negotiations through the end of the year, ended in failure. When I later read the article, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Deborah Sontag, I found it a meandering mix of opinions garnered from an assortment of Americans, Europeans, Israelis and Palestinians, including Arafat himself, with the overall conclusion that Clinton and I had not offered as generous a deal as was assumed and that it was somehow unfair to suggest the Palestinians deserved blame for rejecting it. There had been several other articles in various publications along the same lines. I didn’t see much point at this stage in setting the record straight. To the extent the content of the Times piece bothered me, it was a simple, but important, error of fact. Quoting Arafat himself, Sontag wrote that during the back- patio discussion I had with him at the dinner in Kochav Yair shortly before the new intifada, he’d “implored me to block Mr Sharon’s plans” to visit the Temple Mount. Arafat didn’t raise the issue at all, and presumably knew that we had consulted his West Bank security chief to ensure it happened quickly, avoided the 393 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028241