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cabinet meeting the day before, by reviving an idea I’d supported under Rabin: to
build a security fence all along the edge of the West Bank, with a series of
controlled crossing points for people and goods. Yitzhak had said no at the time,
because he was worried it would be seen as a de facto border and undermine the
idea of building coexistence. My view then, and even more so now, was that we
would never get to the point of negotiating a final peace with the Palestinians
unless we could stop at least most of the terror attacks before they happened. Peres,
too, had been worried about “undermining coexistence.” But now, he and the rest
of the cabinet were so shaken by the carnage Hamas had left that they approved the
idea of a security barrier.

At our kirya meeting, hours after the latest bomb had exploded less than a mile
away, Peres recognized we had to go further. Under Oslo, we had begun giving the
Palestinians control over internal security in Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
Since the new Hamas attacks, Arafat had been saying the right things. After the
first bomb in Jerusalem, he’d phoned Shimon to offer condolences, telling
reporters afterward that this was “a terrorist operation. I condemn it completely. It
is not only against civilians, but against the whole peace process.” Yet when it
came to action, we saw no sign that he was willing, ready, or perhaps able to crack
down on the Islamist terror attacks. So Peres now announced that, if necessary in
order to detain known terrorists, we would for the first time send Israeli troops
back into areas where control had been handed back. If Arafat didn’t act, we
would.

On the political front, Peres did get some good news: President Clinton, anxious
to preserve the progress he’d worked so closely with Yitzhak to achieve, organized
an unprecedented show of international condemnation of the terror attacks. With
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, he co-chaired a “Summit of Peacemakers” in Sharm al-
Sheikh with the participation not just of an equally concerned King Hussein, and of
course Arafat, but leaders of Arab states from North Africa to Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf. The only significant holdout was Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. He objected
because he said the conference was too focused on Israel. As Foreign Minister, I
accompanied Shimon to the summit. A single day’s meeting was never going to
end terror. But it was unprecedented in the breadth of Arab engagement in an
initiative that, as Assad had anticipated, didn’t just condemn terror in general. It
specifically denounced the attacks being launched inside Israel.

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