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Clinton felt we would need a draft document with broad areas of agreement before a diplomatic “endgame” could begin. I disagreed on that. I argued that if we tried to produce such a document, there would never be a summit. In fact, we’d never get a draft document worth anything. “Neither side is going to commit itself on issues like borders, refugees, or Jerusalem,” I said, pointing out that even in our back-channel talks, the only forum in which there had been a hint of progress, those issues had barely been touched.

He did accept that “pre-negotiation” would never crack the main issues. But he still said that before he could contemplate a summit, he would need Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross to talk in detail with us and the Palestinians. “There had to be a firm basis to work on,” he said. Even then,m he said, he was almost sure Arafat would resist the idea of a summit. And on that last point, he proved right. I spoke to the President by phone after Arafat’s trip to Washington. “He thinks you’re trying to trap him into a summit, and that when it fails, I’ll blame him,” he told me.

The very next day, the stakes increased dramatically. For months, military intelligence had been warning of the potential for violence if we couldn’t find a long-term political resolution of the Palestinian conflict. But the report which landed on my desk on June 16, 2000 was more specific. It said Arafat had called in his security people and said: “My strategic understanding is that Israel is not interested in reaching a deal. Therefore, we are preparing ourselves for a violent and prolonged confrontation.” A few days later, we got an even more worrying report, saying the security officers had been told to begin “intensive training.” Arafat was quoted as saying: “The Palestinian Authority is confronted by a strong and dangerous Israel, headed by a Prime Minister who is not interested in real peace. The proof of that is that when he was Chief of Staff, he was the only senior officer to oppose the Oslo Agreement.” I summoned my security team: Mofaz as chief of staff; the heads of military intelligence, Mossad and the Shin Bet. I told them that Arafat was wrong. My inalterable “red line” would always be Israel’s national and security interests. But as long as those were protected, I wasn’t just interested in reaching an agreement with the Palestinians. I was determined to do everything possible to try to get one. But I also said that we had to make sure we were fully prepared for responding to “Palestinian violence and, at some stage, full-blown terror.”

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