Where Clinton appears
346 total
…ed. It would mean “putting my last and best offer on the table” and running the risk of leaks in Israel while Clinton was gone. He said that he had to go to the G8, but would try to put off leaving for a further day. Then, he asked me to dr...
…everal members of the team, under Shlomo Ben-Ami, to draft a paper based on our discussion. Since I knew that Clinton, and Arafat too, could do nothing of substance until I’d resolved how far to go on Jerusalem, I went to see the President....
…y.” But equally, we couldn’t and 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...
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, the career diplomat whom I’d put in charge of frustra...
ay forward, I would have to take it through with my entire negotiating team. Then, we could discuss it. It turned out to be the most open, serious, searching discussion I was a part of during all my years in public life. It began, on the te...
…rusalem would remain Israel’s undivided, sovereign capital under any eventual peace agreement. Yet when I met Clinton the next morning in Laurel Lodge, he insisted we had to find some room for flexibility. He said that, of course, Israel wo...
eave President Clinton to decide the amount of West Bank land that would go to a Palestinian state, a figure he now told me that he was assuming would end up at around 90 to 92 percent. The trade-off, he said, would be a limited, “symbolic”...
…olution depended on mutual agreement. The Europeans had been less 358 / BARAK / 73 explicit. I told President Clinton I could speak only for how I would respond if a state was indeed declared without a peace deal. “We will extend Israeli so...
…am sure the people of Israel, and the American people, will understand it when the details will be revealed.” Clinton had already left for Arafat’s cabin by the time Danny Yatom went to deliver the letter. But the President, too, was in a m...
…e I doubted that even that would matter. We were now in day-six of the summit, barely 48 hours from President Clinton’s departure for the G-8 summit, and we were negotiating only with ourselves. Knowing that the President planned to go see...
…e I doubted that even that would matter. We were now in day-six of the summit, barely 48 hours from President Clinton’s departure for the G-8 summit, and we were negotiating only with ourselves. Knowing that the President
the map, or even respond to Clinton’s suggestion that the Palestinians present a map of their own, until we did two things: accept the principle of land swaps and reduce the size of the territory we were suggesting for the settlement blocs....
…romises.” Fortunately for my relationship with the President – though not for the prospects of an agreement – Clinton had considerably more sympathy with my position after his next meeting with both sets of negotiators that afternoon. It wa...
n’t even try to find common ground on the core issue: sovereignty. Instead he used the formula Shlomo Ben-Ami had suggested, telling each side to proceed on the assumption sovereignty was decided in its favour, and to concentrate instead on...
… the border, including the provisions Israel wanted in order to retain the major settlement blocks. President Clinton agreed that made sense. He said that without talking about the substance of such issues, there wasn’t going to be a deal....
…ged for negotiating teams from both sides on borders, the refugee issue, and Jerusalem to meet with President Clinton. The Palestinians participated, but showed no sign at all of a readiness to compromise. Borders should have been the most...
…iasm, much less ebullience. After one dinner, when I’d been placed between the Palestinian leader and Chelsea Clinton, the President’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, asked me why, rather than talking to Arafat, I’d spent almost th...
nd hopeful Clinton. We did begin on a note of optimism. In my opening statement, I said: “Now is the time for us to make a peace of the brave, to find a way to live together side by side with mutual respect, and to create a better future fo...
…ht, with the full acceptance of Israel and the support of the world. I wish I could say I was optimistic when Clinton led the two of us into Laurel Lodge, the larger cabin a few hundreds downhill from Aspen, for the opening session of the s...
…ok it as a good omen that it was the same one where Nava and I had stayed during our visit with the President Clinton and Hillary right after I’d become Prime Minister. With just eight days to address the core issues of decades of conflict,...
