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seemed to me we might finally be on a path to substantive negotiations. There was obviously not going to be a deal at this round of talks, but I agreed with President Clinton that when they ended, he could phone Assad and tell him that I had confirmed Rabin’s “pocket deposit.”

Yet by the time we left for home, the prospects suddenly looked much worse – for the reason I’d feared from the moment we arrived. There were two major leaks. The first came in an Arabic-language newspaper in London. Given the thrust of the story, it had presumably come from the Syrians. But it was more annoying than truly damaging. The second leak, however, was in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which published the entire US negotiating paper. This was unwelcome for us, since it confirmed we were ready to go far in return for peace. But for the Syrians, the fact the final-border section was still a work-in-progress, with the parentheses to prove it, created the impression that they’d decided to negotiate the details of a full peace without first nailing down the return of the Golan Heights. Assad’s image as a strongman, implacably tough on Israel, had been built and burnished over his three decades in power. The embarrassment of being seen as amenable to talking about a Syrian embassy in Israel without an agreement on the Golan struck me as a potentially fatal blow to the prospects for a deal, since it dramatically narrowed the scope for the flexibility needed by both sides to negotiate. I can’t say I was surprised when Clinton phoned me when we got back to Israel to say that Assad had refused to send Al-Sharaa back, as planned, for a further round of talks in 10 days’ time.

I didn’t give up, however, and neither did President Clinton. In February, at the Americans’ request, I sat down with Danny Yatom and US Ambassador Martin Indyk in Jerusalem to draw up a “bottom line” proposal on a withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Since I’d already empowered Clinton to reaffirm the “pocket deposit”, I saw no reason not to do this. If only because of Assad’s failing health, I believed it was the only way we could know whether an agreement was possible. We worked on a large satellite map of the Golan and the valley below, and drew our proposed border in red. We marked out a strip of several hundred meters on the far side of the Sea of Galilee. It included, or came near to, a handful of Syrian villages that had been there before 1967. But we were careful to adjust the line to exclude any area where buildings had stood. We compensated – with slightly more territory – by bending the border westward to give the Syrians part of the slope overlooking the lake, in what was now Israel. We also included the hot springs at

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