Where Arafat appears
208 total
…me sign of diplomatic progress between us and the Palestinians, he could see no way of holding a summit. With Arafat due to see him in Washington in a couple of weeks, he said that I first had to give the Palestinian leader something: the t...
…th of us back to the starkly different reality of our conflict with the Palestinians. Only two weeks earlier, Arafat’s own police force, with weapons we had given them, had opened fire as I was trying to get Knesset approval for returning t...
…favored, only that it was essential that we made the decision now if we could, however difficult or reluctant Arafat was as a negotiating partner. If we waited, we’d end up having to deal with Islamists: Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Oded Eran,...
…ready to join in their efforts to try. About ten days into the new intifada, I attended a crisis meeting with Arafat, mediated by Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross, at the US ambassador’s residence Paris. It was nominally under the aegis o...
…deliberate campaign, waged with guns and grenades, by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Fatah offshoot Tanzim, and Arafat’s own police force. The media had changed, too, in the 13 years since the first intifada, with the rise of twenty-four-seve...
Arafat’s team now set about happily asking questions and
had approached Dennis Ross with a new proposal: that we ask Arafat to
only to be told Arafat was “not a target
there was equally little sign of diplomatic engagement by Arafat.
n I had become Foreign Minister under Shimon Peres. But in the intervening years, Arafat was rarely off of my radar. By the early 1970s, he and his fighters had been expelled by King Hussein’s army from Jordan and were re-based in Lebanon....
Jordan River from the West Bank, from which a fledgling group called Fatah, under the command of Arafat, had been staging a series of raids. In one of their most recent attacks, they’d planted land mines, one of which destroyed an Israeli s...
… 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...
…the chief negotiator at that moment, the connection between [then Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin and President Arafat made everyone around them, including myself, feel that peace was possible. There was significant progress in all tracks unt...
ys after an especially gruesome Palestinian terror attack. Even with Arafat now more than a thousand miles away in Tunis, much of Rabin’s focus was taken up in responding to, or trying to preempt, Palestinian terrorism. The issue was especi...
…g in October 1985. It came a couple of days after an especially gruesome Palestinian terror attack. Even with Arafat now more than a thousand miles away in Tunis, much of Rabin’s focus was taken up in responding to, or trying to preempt, Pa...
…Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. But precisely because we had been ready to offer so much, only for Arafat to reject it all, even as a basis for talks on a final deal, I could sense how gutted my key negotiators were feeling. Stil...
…nny, a former Mossad chief — had just been through dozens of hours of intricately detailed talks with each of Arafat’s top negotiators at Camp David, not to mention the dozens of other meetings before we had even got there. Now they had to...
…e their say.” Certainly Peter Polycarpou’s depiction of Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian finance minister sent by Arafat to make peace, admirably captures the conflicting emotions of enduring the pain of exile while seeking to wreak terrible ve...
…Carlos’s palatial estates, and, for me, a first opportunity to meet not only Arab foreign ministers but Yasir Arafat. My first, brief encounter with Arafat began a bit embarrassingly. I’d arrived a few minutes early for the conference dinne...
…Carlos’s palatial estates, and, for me, a first opportunity to meet not only Arab foreign ministers but Yasir Arafat. My first, brief encounter with Arafat began a bit embarrassingly. I’d arrived a few minutes early for
