Palestinians control of most of Hebron, and accepted further withdrawals under the

/ BARAK / 126 Palestinians control of most of Hebron, and accepted further withdrawals under the Wye River agreement. But amid predictable protests from the right, he had promptly retreated from his Wye commitments. I knew that his default response to Obama’s call for a settlement freeze would be “no.” And it was, delivered first to the cabinet and then to the public, as soon as he got back from his talks with the President. In my repeated meetings with Bibi in the weeks that followed — both one-on- one, and within the informal group of close ministers and aides known as the Group of Eight — I tried to persuade him that, if only because of America’s key role on Iran, we needed to show some sign of engagement with Obama’s efforts. I was not entirely alone. One ally was an old friend: Dan Meridor, who had rejoined the Likud before the election. Another was more unexpected: Avigdor Lieberman. He was never going to accept a settlement freeze. Not only did his heart, and political interests, lie on the West Bank. He lived there. But like many in the party he led, he had come to Israel from the former Soviet Union, shaping a worldview that in many ways remained European, and pro-Western. He was worried about creating the impression of blanket Israeli intransigence toward a popular new American President, and isolating ourselves internationally, if we didn’t go some way towards helping to restart talks with the Palestinians. Though Bibi showed no signs of retreat on the settlement freeze, he did accept that broader point. Ten days after Obama’s Cairo speech, he publicly accepted the idea of a Palestinian state for the first time, having ruled it out as recently as the month before in his White House talks with the President. The shift was dismissed as trivial not just by the Palestinians, but by many in my own Labor party and almost everyone else on the left. I disagreed. I knew how deep, genuine and longstanding Bibi’s resistance to Palestinian statehood was. But I had another, serious concern about the “peace plan” he announced: an entirely new precondition he insisted the Palestinians must meet if peace was ever going to be possible. He said they must “clearly and unambiguously recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people.” On a whole series of levels, that made no sense to me. We hadn’t asked Egypt or Jordan to grant us explicit recognition as a Jewish state when we made peace with them. Even when Bibi himself had briefly tried to open negotiations with Damascus in his first period as Prime Minister, we’d never felt the need to ask it of the Syrians either. To the extent there was any logic in demanding it of the Palestinians, Bibi’s reasoning seemed to be that this would 412 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028260