Where Yasir Arafat appears
42 total
…rong moral centre — is that we Israelis are now in danger of jettisoning the example of David Ben-Gurion. For Yasir Arafat’s. 14 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011485
…thes so we couldn’t be sure, were racing past us in the other direction. One of them, we were later told, was Yasir Arafat. On a motorcycle. It would be nearly three decades before the two of us actually met — shortly after the assassinatio...
…e in English that would make him so indispensable to the only Palestinian who really counted in those days -- Yasir Arafat. Erekat was a unique figure -- neither a fighter (no nom de guerre for him), nor a PLO insider, nor an organization m...
… becoming inescapably clear, a disheartened Bill Clinton said to me that he could understand, just about, why Yasir Arafat had not accepted the unprecedentedly far-reaching proposals I had presented. But what he couldn’t grasp was how the P...
…e in English that would make him so indispensable to the only Palestinian who really counted in those days -- Yasir Arafat. Erekat was a unique figure -- neither a fighter (no nom de guerre for him), nor a PLO insider, nor an organization m...
…fedayeen, called Fatah. It was led by a man that I, like almost all Israelis, had never heard of at the time: Yasir Arafat. Born in Egypt, as a 19-year-old he had fought against the establishment of Israel in the 1948 war. Although Fatah ha...
…ad made a serious, strategic decision to go for it. I’d made that choice. But I had no way of knowing whether Yasir Arafat had. 347 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011818
…and I met the next morning. My aim was to persuade him that the time had come for a make-or-break summit with Yasir Arafat. I suspected it would not be easy to convince him, and it wasn’t. But I made the argument that if we were to have any...
ortant, if less obvious, inclusion: Dan Meridor. A leading member of the Likud before he’d formed the Center Party at the last election, Dan was not just a friend. He was a man of rock-solid integrity, with a strong moral and ethical compas...
…ad made a serious, strategic decision to go for it. I’d made that choice. But I had no way of knowing whether Yasir Arafat had. 347 / BARAK / 62 I was confident of finally answering that question at the summit. Camp David was different from...
remain in office, at least until the summit was over. In a nationally televised message, I reminded the country that I’d been elected with nearly two million votes. I felt I had a responsibility, and a mandate, that went beyond party politi...
not just peace, and international recognition and endorsement for it. But normalcy: the central aim of Zionism. Jews living in a state like any other. Ever since 1967, we had been in control of the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Pa...
ernment, Labor or Likud, 345 / BARAK / 60 would agree to make them part of a Palestinian state. The second principle was that “Jerusalem will remain united.” It would not be cut into Jewish and Arab halves as had happened between 1948 and 1...
ed again, on July 4 from Camp David, I felt I had to go further. I said that, for his ears only, I was willing to give him the assurance that, assuming that Arafat was willing to move toward us on core issues, I would consider limited, symb...
of that, as I hoped and trusted he understood was 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 lawyer...
o recognized I was ready to go further than any 343 / BARAK / 58 previous Israeli leader in trying to get that peace. I knew that he would press me to tell him how far that actually was. He didn’t ask directly. But each of his ostensibly th...
sonal relationship with him. Under both Rabin and Peres, he had been a valuable liaison with the Palestinian leader. Nowm under my Premiership as well. The summit seemed to me more important than ever, but I knew that only President Clinton...
r a violent and prolonged confrontation.” A few days later, we got an even more worrying report, saying the security officers had been told to begin “intensive training.” Arafat was quoted as saying: “The Palestinian Authority is confronted...
on said he was certain Arafat would refuse to attend a summit. And even if he said yes, 341 / BARAK / 56 Clinton felt we would need a draft document with broad areas of agreement before a diplomatic “endgame” could begin. I disagreed on tha...
d gasoline in his pocket.” We had to find that out, I said. We had to establish whether we were all firefighters, and could put out the flames. Clinton and I had got to know each other well. In one-on-one conversations like this, we called...
