Results for “Arafat”

Bibi is right about one thing. The negotiating challenges have become more difficult since Arafat’s refusal of our offer at Camp David. Arafat is no longer alive. Palestinian politics have become ever more fragmented and messy, not least as a result of the Hamas takeover of Gaza....

… as Israel remained in a state of war with its Arab neighbors. For Labor and the political left, it was as if, despite Arafat’s repeated rejections of ever more forthcoming terms of peace, they still couldn’t bring themselves to believe he really meant it. By default, they were...

Yair Hirschfeld, and the historian and former Haaretz journalist Ron Pundak. Three PLO officials were there, led by Arafat’s closest economic aide, Abu Ala’a. Though both of the Israelis were friends of Yossi Beilin, a protégé of Peres and our deputy foreign minister, even Peres...

…King Juan 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 dinner and was led into an impress...

…egotiator, taking a break from the negotiations, entertains his Palestinian counterparts by giving an impersonation of Arafat as an effeminate narcissist, a portrayal I found entirely plausible from my own encounters with the PLO leader, whose vanity knew no bounds. Uri Savir,...

…d bring both 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 three villages that he wanted....

…engage with any member of the PLO. In December 1992, I flew to Tunis to meet for the first time with PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat. In that meeting in his villa, in the darkness of the early morning hours, he authorized the head of Fatah’s financial wing, Ahmed Qorei (alias Abu Ala),...

…l-Aqsa mosque complex. “But without damaging your sovereignty,” he argued, “we have to find a way to draw a picture for Arafat that includes some measure of Palestinian control in part of the city.” “Could you agree to Arafat having an office, maybe, inside the walls of the Old...

…inian architect 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 was really happening, or what...

…three days 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 being that the Palestinians n...

…inian architect 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 was really happening, or what...

…yria first: it would increase our negotiating leverage with the Palestinians. That would certainly not be lost on Yasir Arafat — one reason that I realized the importance of an early meeting with him, to convey my commitment to keeping the Oslo process alive, and, if possible, ac...

…d, after working 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 Palestinian leader. Nowm under my Prem...

…ic visits 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 wanted a state, he should retur...

…giving the Palestinians control over internal security in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Since the new Hamas attacks, Arafat had been saying the right things. After the first bomb in Jerusalem, he’d phoned Shimon to offer condolences, telling reporters afterward that this was “...