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determined to focus on the end goal: initially, at least, a framework agreement, and
over time a final political resolution of our conflict. Ever since the outbreak of the
Palestinians’ first intifada, I believed this was as much in Israel’s own interest as
theirs. Yet when I entered office, we had no way of knowing whether Arafat
wanted two states living side-by-side in peace. I felt it was my duty to find out,
and, if the answer was yes, to put a peace agreement in place. I felt the same about
way about Syria and Hafez al-Assad.

When I left office, I believed I had achieved the most important goals of my
premiership. We were out of Lebanon. Though we couldn’t achieve the peace
agreements I had hoped for, it was not for lack of trying. Along the way, Israel had
demonstrated to the world that it was able and willing to consider painful
compromises, and that it was the Arab leaders who, at least for now, were unequal
to the challenge of making peace. If I’d been able to retain the backing of the
voters who made me Prime Minister in 1999, we might even have moved ahead on
unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians, dramatically altering the trajectory
of our relationship. Yet even without that, Camp David did delineate the terms of
any future peace arrangement. When and if conditions allowed a resumption of
serious negotiating efforts, the shape, and indeed most of the details, of a final
peace between our peoples were now clear.

I was on holiday in the summer of 2001 when Clinton phoned me. The New
Times had run a piece on how and why the summit, and the subsequent
negotiations through the end of the year, ended in failure. When I later read the
article, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Deborah Sontag, I found it a
meandering mix of opinions garnered from an assortment of Americans,
Europeans, Israelis and Palestinians, including Arafat himself, with the overall
conclusion that Clinton and I had not offered as generous a deal as was assumed
and that it was somehow unfair to suggest the Palestinians deserved blame for
rejecting it. There had been several other articles in various publications along the
same lines. I didn’t see much point at this stage in setting the record straight. To
the extent the content of the Times piece bothered me, it was a simple, but
important, error of fact. Quoting Arafat himself, Sontag wrote that during the back-
patio discussion I had with him at the dinner in Kochav Yair shortly before the new
intifada, he’d “implored me to block Mr Sharon’s plans” to visit the Temple
Mount. Arafat didn’t raise the issue at all, and presumably knew that we had
consulted his West Bank security chief to ensure it happened quickly, avoided the

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