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/ BARAK / 64

Chapter Twenty-Two

If I believed in omens, I might have turned back as soon as we got to the summit. We reached Camp David a little before ten at night on July 10, after helicoptering from Andrews Air Force base near Washington. When we arrived, it was pouring with rain. The cabin assignments were also a surprise. I was given the one that Anwar Sadat had at the first Camp David summit in 1978. Arafat got Menachem Begin’s. Still, the cabins themselves, each named for a tree, were large and pleasant. Mine was called Dogwood. It had a bedroom, two large sitting rooms and a terrace. I took 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, we got down to work the next morning. Clinton began by meeting Arafat, as I went through the Americans’ strategy for the negotiations with Madeleine Albright, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. Then I met the President in his cabin, which was called Aspen. He told me that while Arafat still thought I was trying to “trick him” into an agreement, and didn’t think we’d necessarily get a deal, he did accept I was serious about trying. My fear was still the opposite, that Arafat was not serious. Yet my hope was that the isolated environment of Camp David, and the wide public expectation that we would accomplish what Sadat and Begin had done there before, would deliver the breakthrough that I believed ought to be possible. For that to happen, I told the President, I believed it was essential that Arafat truly understood the importance of what was at stake. Not just the cost of failure, but what was potentially on offer: the creation of the Palestinian state he sought, 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 summit. The scene at the front door – with me bustling Arafat ahead, with the intention of allowing him to enter before me – yielded the best-known image from the summit. Captured by the television crews allowed into the compound for the ceremonial opening, it spawned a cottage industry of political speculation and armchair psychoanalysis purporting to decipher what it meant. Some said it was an encouraging sign of “chemistry” between me and Arafat, a not

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