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viewed Hafez al-Assad as a natural partner for peace. For years, he’d been a
constant, sneering presence on our northern border, denouncing not only Sadat but
any Arab leader who’d shown willingness to engage or negotiate with Israel. Amos
Oz, one of our finest writers and a cultural icon for Labor Zionists, probably put it
best. He said the Syrians seemed to think that “we will give them the Golan, and
they’ll send us a receipt by fax.” The consensus was: forget Assad. Keep the
Golan. In fact, before I left for the US, the Knesset voted on whether it supported
my attempt to negotiate an agreement with Syria. We could muster only 47 votes,
14 short of a majority. An opinion poll found only 13 percent of Israelis favored a
full withdrawal from the Golan.

The message I drew from this was not that we should give up on the chances of
a peace agreement. After all, before Begin and Sadat went to Camp David in 1978,
an almost equally tiny minority of Israelis had been in favor of withdrawing from
the Sinai. Yet once they had seen the other side of the equation – full, formal peace
with our most powerful neighbor – the opposition all but evaporated. The problem
I saw was that if we and the Syrians couldn’t find a way to insulate our
negotiations from leaks, speculation and a swirl of opposition to our efforts at
home, we’d never get to the key issues of substance.

I’d been making that point to the Americans for weeks. At first, I tried to
persuade them to hold the talks at Camp David, ensuring the same, media-free
isolation that had yielded the historic Israeli-Egypt agreement. But Dennis Ross
replied that the very association of Camp David with that breakthrough meant it
would be a non-starter for President Assad. I then suggested we consider sites
outside of the US: NATO’s Incirlik air base in Turkey, for instance, a British base
in Cyprus, an American naval ship in the Mediterranean. Even, half-jokingly, an
abandoned missile silo in South Dakota. Yet the point I was making was serious, in
fact critical, I believed, if the talks were going to have a chance.

In the end, the Americans settled on a beautiful, and undeniably remote, town in
West Virginia called Shepherdstown. But from the outset, I was worried it couldn’t
provide the kind of environment we needed. As soon as our plane landed at
Andrews Air Force base outside Washington, I got a call from the head of our
advance team. He told me the news media were already there and that reporters –
Israeli, Arab, American and European – could be seen chatting with American,
Israeli and Syrian officials in the town’s coffee shops. I knew the press would have
to publish something about potential concessions as the negotiations proceeded.

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