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should, offer in search of a true peace with the Palestinians. I was the one who would be blamed by the inevitable critics, whether for going too far or not far enough, or simply for the fact the deal had eluded us. I knew the drill: the same thing had happened when I had come tantalizingly close to finalizing a peace deal with Syria’s then-dying dictator, Hafez al-Assad, a few months earlier. Yet these three dedicated men – Gili, who was by training a lawyer; Shlomo, an academic; and Danny, a former Mossad chief – had just been through dozens of hours of intricately detailed talks with each of Arafat’s top negotiators at Camp David, not to mention the dozens of other meetings before we had even got there. Now they had to accept that, even with the lid of the pressure cooker bolted down tight, we had fallen short of getting the peace agreement which each of us knew had been within touching distance.

I don’t think that even they could be described as depressed. On our side, after all, we knew we had given ground on every issue we possibly could, without facing full-scale political rebellion at home. We had proposed an Israeli pullout from nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza. A support mechanism for helping compensate tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the serial Arab-Israeli conflicts of the past half-century. And most painfully and controversially – my rivals and critics back home were already accusing me of “treachery” – we had agreed to let President Clinton present a proposal for the Palestinians to get sovereignty over the Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem as well as “custodial sovereignty” over the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque complex perched above the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.

But precisely because we had been ready to offer so much, only for Arafat to reject it all, even as a basis for talks on a final deal, I could sense how gutted my key negotiators were feeling.

Still, I’m sure none of them was surprised when my own old operational instincts kicked in. In my statement to journalists, I had been careful to say that Arafat was not ready at this time to make the historic compromises needed for peace. But before parting with President Clinton and Secretary Albright, I’d been more forthright. It was clear, without my saying so, that the chances of our getting a peace agreement on Clinton’s watch were now pretty much over. He had barely five months left in office. Yet my deeper fear was that with Arafat having brushed aside an offer that went far further than any other Israeli had proposed – far further than the Americans, themselves, had expected from Israel – the prospects for peace would be set back for years. Perhaps, I said, for two decades.

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