Where Arafat appears
208 total
…ked me to come back. This time, I went alone. We sat on the terrace of Aspen. He said again he couldn’t go to Arafat with the list we’d drawn up. But having met with his negotiators, he suggested they draft a more forthcoming list of their...
…esponsibility to tread carefully. Then, my voice rising too, I came back to what I felt was the real problem. Arafat and his negotiators had been sitting and waiting for me and my team, and probably Clinton as well, to deliver more and more...
…gh assessment of the issues involved, and to reach a settled view with my negotiating team on how to proceed. Arafat seemed to accept the idea of a pause for reflection and planning. But he held firm in his opposition to any further delay i...
…trademark military uniform. Still, the mood music going into the meeting was encouraging. After the election, Arafat had tried to use his ties with the ayatollahs in Iran to get them to release 13 members of the tiny Jewish community in Shi...
…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,...
…ink Clinton expected a formal offer from us. Since I’d been guided by his request for a list of questions for Arafat, however, that is what we came to him with. As we’d discussed, I wanted finally to elicit some sign of whether Arafat, too,...
…itect of Oslo, was with him, along with a more junior aide who served the tea and sweets. At least this time, Arafat didn’t take notes as we spoke. The mood was friendly. We talked about a whole range of issues. With ony one exception: what...
…ee me an hour later. He told me that he had received the Palestinians’ answer. The way he described it to me, Arafat had agreed to leave President Clinton to decide the amount of West Bank land that would go to a Palestinian state, a figure...
d compromise on the core issues. I had met Arafat many times before Camp David. I had made it clear in all of those meeting that, despite differences on a range of difficult issues, I did want a final peace agreement and that I was ready to...
…urned out the Palestinians were unhappy with it too, but for another reason. On the lookout for validation of Arafat’s insistence that Camp David was an Israeli “trap”, they were convinced that the paper had Israel’s fingerprints all over i...
…you prepared to hand back?” I simply didn’t know at this stage. Much would depend on whether we could be sure Arafat could or would deliver a final peace. But even if I had known, I would have been reluctant to name a precise percentage. Th...
…nal peace deals might require. In the end, I realized that we might simply discover that Assad, and certainly Arafat, were not willing or ready to make peace. We might, initially at least, have to settle for a more incremental step. “Right...
… of violence that followed, we understood that, at a minimum, it would need to be coordinated beforehand with Arafat. As the unrest spread into the West Bank and Gaza, there were media warnings of a “new intifada, ” the difference this time...
…itect of Oslo, was with him, along with a more junior aide who served the tea and sweets. At least this time, Arafat didn’t take notes as we spoke. The mood was friendly. We talked about a whole range of issues. With ony one exception: what...
…t had the makings of a potential breakthrough toward a fair and final peace. I told him I hoped so. But given Arafat’s behavior so far, I had my doubts. Now, it was our turn to wait. The President invited Arafat to Aspen and, from what we h...
/ BARAK / 81 with Arafat still mute and unresponsive. That was the only way we could know with certainty whether peace was possible. If it wasn’t, it would also demonstrate powerfully to the Americans that we were not the party who had prev...
ssible. Though I would retain the final word to approve or reject what they suggested, I knew that only in a legal sense could it be null and void. I also recognized, however, that we had to be willing to push further, both to find out for...
…d to the President in our first meeting a year earlier. But while Abu Ala’a had told Clinton he would ask for Arafat’s permission at least to negotiate, he clearly hadn’t received it. He refused to talk about the map, or even respond to Cli...
… shouldn’t “run the Al-Aqsa mosque.” He was also in favor of agreeing to what Clinton had asked of me: giving Arafat a base in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. His one caveat was that we should not do any of this unless it was part of a...
