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negotiating team for courage and vision. Essentially, he thanked Arafat for
showing up. That was some consolation. But it didn’t alter the weight of the
message we were carrying home. Arafat either would not or could not make peace,
at least on terms any Israel leader could accept or the people of Israel would
endorse.

There were only two potential deal-breakers on our side, as Arafat had known
from the beginning. The first involved the “right of return.” We were never going
to sign a peace agreement accepting the return of hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians within our pre-1967 borders. Demographically, that was a recipe for
the inexorable end of Israel as a majority-Jewish state. It would also imply a
rewriting of the history of how Israel was born: in a war, with an almost equal
number of refugees either fleeing or forced to leave on both sides, after the Arab
world had unanimously, and violently, rejected a UN partition that would have
created a Palestinian Arab state as well. I did accept a “right of return” to the
Palestinian state we had hoped to create, as part of a final peace deal, on the West
Bank and in Gaza. I also supported the idea of a multi-billion-dollar international
fund to compensate or resettle Palestinian refugees, and was ready to commit Israel
as a party to that effort. The other critical issue was Jerusalem. I had stretched our
negotiating position almost to breaking point. The “pocket” ideas Arafat ended up
rejecting challenged a longstanding Israeli political taboo. In practical terms, they
amounted to a breach of the assurances which I and every other Israeli Prime
Minister since 1967 had given: never to re-divide Israel’s capital. Had we actually
got an end-of-conflict deal, I would have had to justify it to Israelis in a
referendum. I think I could have done so. But one thing I could not give up was our
sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the centerpiece of our history as a people and
Israel’s as a state. It was our connection with our past, a focus of what we had gone
through, what we had achieved, and what we had left to accomplish. It was
essential to who we were.

Arafat never even engaged in a discussion on the “right of return”. On the
Temple Mount, however, he was explicit. Any peace, any basis for negotiation
toward peace, had to begin by confirming Palestinian sovereignty. Besides, as he’d
told the President of the United States, he had persuaded himself there never was a
Jewish temple in Jerusalem. When I heard about that remark, I was less shocked
than Clinton. It struck me as just another way Arafat had of conveying his bottom
lines. It was a bit like stories he liked to tell about visiting his aunt in Jerusalem as

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