My life

On the ninth day, I gave Arafat my best shot again. Again he said no. Israel had gone much further than he had, and he wouldn’t even embrace their moves as the basis for future negotiations. Again I called several Arab leaders for help. King Abdullah and President Ben Ali of Tunisia tried to encourage Arafat. They told me he was afraid to make compromises. It looked as if the talks were dead, and on disastrous terms. Both sides clearly wanted a deal, so I asked them to stay and work while I was in Okinawa. They agreed, though after I left, the Palestinians still refused to negotiate on the basis of the ideas I had advanced, saying they had already rejected them. Then the Israelis balked. That was in part my fault. Apparently I had not been as clear with Arafat as I thought I had been about what the terms of staying on should be.

I had left Madeleine and the rest of our team with a real mess. She took Arafat to her farm and Barak to the famous Civil War battlefield at nearby Gettysburg. It lightened them up, but nothing happened between them. Shlomo Ben-Ami and Amnon Shahak, himself a former general, had good talks with Mohammed Dahlan and Mohamed Rashid, but they were the most forward leaning of their respective groups; even if they agreed on everything, they probably couldn’t get their leaders on board. I returned on the thirteenth day of discussions, and we worked all night again, mostly on security issues. Then we did it again on the fourteenth day, going well past 3 a.m. before giving up when effective control over the Temple Mount and all East Jerusalem was not enough for Arafat without the word

“sovereignty.” In a last-ditch effort I offered to try to sell Barak on full sovereignty for East Jerusalem’s outer neighborhoods, limited sovereignty over the inner ones, and “custodial” sovereignty over the Haram. Again Arafat said no. I shut down the talks. It was frustrating and profoundly sad. There was little difference between the two sides on how the affairs of Jerusalem would actually be handled; it was all about who got to claim sovereignty.

I issued a statement saying I had concluded that the parties could not reach agreement at this time given the historical, religious, political, and emotional dimensions of the conflict. To give Barak some cover back home and indicate what had occurred, I said that while Arafat had made clear that he wanted to stay on the path of peace, Barak had shown “particular courage, vision, and an understanding of the historical importance of this moment.”

I said that the two delegations had shown each other a genuine respect and understanding unique in my eight years of peacemaking around the world, and for the first time had openly discussed the most sensitive matters in dispute. We now had a better idea of each side’s bottom line and I still believed we had a chance to reach an agreement before the year was out.

Arafat had wanted to continue the negotiations, and on more than one occasion had acknowledged that he was unlikely to get a future Israeli government or American team so committed to peace. It was hard to know why he had moved so little. Perhaps his team really hadn’t worked through the hard compromises; perhaps they wanted one session to see how much they could squeeze out of Israel before showing their hand. For whatever reasons, they had left Barak exposed in a precarious political situation. It was not for nothing that he was the most decorated soldier in the history of Israel. For all his brusque bullheadedness, he had taken great risks to win a more secure future for Israel. In my remarks to the press, I assured the people of Israel that he had done nothing to compromise their security and said they should be very proud of him.

Arafat was famous for waiting until the very last minute to make a decision, or “five minutes to midnight” as we used to say. I had only six months to go as President. I certainly hoped Arafat’s watch kept good time.

FIFTY-FIVE

W hile the Camp David talks were going on, positive things happened elsewhere. Charlene Barshefsky completed a sweeping trade agreement with Vietnam, and the House adopted an amendment by my longtime supporter Maxine Waters that funded a down payment on our share of the Millennium Debt Relief effort. By this time debt relief had an amazing array of supporters, led by Bono. By then Bono had become a fixture in Washington political life. He turned out to be a first-class politician, partly through the element of surprise. Larry Summers, who knew everything about economics but little about popular culture, came into the Oval Office one day and remarked that he’d just had a meeting on debt relief with “some guy named Bono—just one name—dressed in jeans, a Tshirt, and big sunglasses. He came to see me about debt relief, and he knows what he’s talking about.”