Where Arafat appears
208 total
…to make sure the true story of what had happened at the summit was understood. As a result, the globetrotting Arafat received an almost unanimous rebuff for the idea of a unilateral declaration of stateheood. He was told that if he really w...
…violence in the weeks immediately after the summit, there was equally little sign of diplomatic engagement by Arafat. Obviously relieved at the way Camp David had ended, he returned to Gaza to a hero’s welcome, proudly proclaiming that he h...
…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...
/ 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 t...
…e stenographer’s record of my conversation with the President before he’d left, confirming the condition that Arafat accept the “pocket” at least as a basis on which to proceed. That evening, she apologized to me for the misunderstanding, a...
I sensed, at the time, at least the start of some connection. I suspected that Arafat viewed me, as he had Rabin before me, as a “fellow fighter”. But if so, I now wondered whether that might have been part of the problem in his ever truly...
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...
…orking in the West Bank and Gaza in the late 1960s became one of the first Israelis to hold secret talks with Arafat, building up a personal relationship with him. Under both Rabin and Peres, he had been a valuable liaison with the Palestin...
/ BARAK / 98 in legal and diplomatic terms, null and void. The package Arafat had ultimately rejected had not even been presented by me. It was an American proposal. Besides, it was obvious no serious negotiations were going to happen anywa...
…ove a one-off media stunt. But that evening, Danny Yatom brought me an intelligence report with evidence that Arafat’s Palestinian Authority was planning for wide-scale violence after Friday prayers, in protest over Sharon’s visit. Danny ca...
…’s visit was to dramatize his determination to keep it that way. The target of this political theatre was not Arafat or the Palestinians. It was the Israeli public, me, and my government. In an all-perfect world, I would have liked to find...
…ieve we are left to prepare for war.” I told the President he didn’t even need to phone me after hearing from Arafat if all he offered was some clever half-reply. Only if it was serious and substantive. I also reminded him that while he’d p...
…old the President that I still believed that we were facing a “moment of truth.” But only if he could “shake” Arafat, and get him to sense the enormity of the stakes — an independent Palestinian state, versus more, and undoubtedly deadlier,...
/ BARAK / 99 By the end of November, I believed that the chances of a peace agreement with Arafat were so microscopic as to border on non-existent, and that my own prospects for retaining sufficient support to be an effective Prime Minister...
…ged me to concentrate on the Palestinians instead. President Clinton kept stressing the importance of showing Arafat at least some movement on the Oslo front. In September 1999, I took a first, significant step in that direction. I agreed t...
that if and when Arafat demonstrated that he wanted a comprehensive peace between a new Palestinian state and the State of Israel — a definitive “end of conflict” as the international lawyers would describe it — I would place nothing, excep...
and the terrible human cost from Arafat’s choice of violence
null and void. The package Arafat had ultimately
Arafat at first simply lied. He said the
