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couldn’t guarantee anything. In the months ahead I would come to understand what
that meant, because it would happen again. I don’t think Arafat himself
orchestrated the violence. Maybe he couldn’t have stopped it completely. But I
have no doubt – nor did President Clinton – that he stood aside and let it happen.

Even worse – since he did have control over them – his security forces, with
arms that Israel had provided as part of Oslo, fired on our troops as they tried to
keep order. All of this, while I stood in the Knesset battling to get approval to give
him the villages. As news arrived in the chamber of gunfire just a couple of miles
away, it was not just Likud or other right-wing MKs who were furious. I certainly
was. Yet I also knew that the price of losing the vote would be the fall of the
government. We did win the vote, by a margin of eight, meaning that I now had
full authority to return the three villages. Fuming over what had happened,
however, I called President Clinton and told him I was going to delay the
handover. I was not about to return the villages under gunfire, or reward Arafat for
breaking even his existing security commitments.

That meant that prospects for serious negotiations with the Palestinians were
again on hold. But another, immutable, priority would probably have delayed any
new initiative anyway: my pledge to get our soldiers out of Lebanon within a year
of the election. I was determined to go ahead with it not just because I’d promised
Israelis to do so. It was because I knew from experience that without setting a
deadline and sticking to it, it wouldn’t happen. I had been against keeping the
security zone from the start. Over the years, many Israelis, both inside the military
and beyond, had come to accept we would be better off pulling out. It wasn’t just
the attritional loss of Israeli soldiers’ lives, but the fact that there was no obvious
point, and no obvious end, to our mission there. Especially when major tragedies
occurred – like the collision of two Israeli helicopters a couple of years earlier,
leaving scores of young soldiers dead – there was talk about a withdrawal. Yet
there was always a reason to reconsider, to put it off: a Hizbollah attack in the
security zone, accusations of weakness from right-wing politicians, or simple
caution in the kirya. The only way to get it done was to decide, and to do it.

My self-imposed deadline for the pullout was now just eight weeks away.
Hizbollah had already begun escalating pressure on our outposts in south Lebanon
with the obvious aim of making the withdrawal as difficult as possible. They were
also targeting our local surrogates, the Maronite-led South Lebanese Army militia.
I’d been meeting regularly with Shaul Mofaz, the former paratroop officer who

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