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/ BARAK / 55

Walking with the President in Lisbon’s spring sunshine, I tried to summon up an image that would bring both of us back to the starkly different reality of our conflict with the Palestinians. Only two weeks earlier, Arafat’s own police force, with weapons we had given them, had opened fire as I was trying to get Knesset approval for returning three villages that he wanted. After I took office, I’d ordered a full-scale intelligence review of the security situation with the Palestinians. The sobering conclusion had been delivered to me six months earlier: plans were well underway by cells in the West Bank and Gaza for armed attacks against Israeli soldiers and terror strikes inside Israel. “It’s like two families living in the same house, and it’s on fire,” I said. “All of us are rushing to put it out. But there’s this veteran firefighter who arrives on the scene – a firefighter with a Nobel Peace Prize – and we have no way of knowing whether he’s got matches and gasoline in his pocket.” We had to find that out, I said. We had to establish whether we were all firefighters, and could put out the flames.

Clinton and I had got to know each other well. In one-on-one conversations like this, we called each other by our first names, though I was careful to address him as “Mr President” when others were there. We’d been through a lot together. I had no doubt that he wanted to put out the fire every bit as much as I did. But I also realized he had emerged frustrated, and bruised, from our last joint effort at peacemaking: with Hafez al-Assad. I was the one who had been pushing the hardest for him to meet Assad in Geneva, over the objections of some of his closest aides that it was likely to go wrong. Not only were the aides right. Assad had ended up delivering an extraordinary personal rebuff to the President of the United States. Now, I was again asking President Clinton for a summit, and I knew Madeleine Albright, Dennis Ross and others would be highly sceptical. “I understand they’ll have doubts. I understand their reading of the risks,” I told President Clinton. “But I’m convinced crucial issues are at stake, which justify the risks. Let’s move forward.”

But Clinton was skeptical, too. He said that without some sign of diplomatic progress between us and the Palestinians, he could see no way of holding a summit. With Arafat due to see him in Washington in a couple of weeks, he said that I first had to give the Palestinian leader something: the three villages, a prisoner release, or perhaps unfreeze tax revenues which we’d been holding back as leverage for at least some progress on the core issues. Otherwise, Clinton said he was certain Arafat would refuse to attend a summit. And even if he said yes,

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