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My own negotiating team, not to mention the Americans, assumed I would now turn my attention to the Palestinians. Arafat was pressing for us to go ahead with phase-two of the Wye redeployments. In fact, he now wanted us to add the transfer of three Arab villages on the edge of east Jerusalem: Eizaria, El-Ram and, most importantly, Abu Dis, since from there you could see the golden dome of the mosque above the Western Wall in the Old City. I understood why the villages were politically important for him. But in practical terms, I also knew I’d have to secure the support of the cabinet and the Knesset for what the Likud, and the main religious parties too, would interpret as a first step toward “handing back Jerusalem.”

For me, this underscored the problem at the heart of Oslo. We were transferring land to Arafat, yet still without any serious engagement from the Palestinians on the “permanent-status” questions, like the furture of Jerusalem, that were critical to the prospects for real peace. They were critical, in fact, even to reaching a framework agreement, or a declaration of principles, as a basis for a final treaty. I probably should have seen the crisis-ridden spring of 2000 as a harbinger of the difficulties when we finally got to that stage. I did make a first major effort to find compromise ground on the main issues. I sent Gilead Sher and Shlomo Ben-Ami to begin back-channel talks with a Palestinian team led by Abu Ala’a and Hassan Asfour, the architects of Oslo. But as I prepared to seek Knesset approval for returning the three additional villages to the Palestinians, my main Orthodox coalition partners, Shas and the National Religious Party, as well as Sharansky’s Yisrael ba’Aliyah, all threatened to walk out of the government. I did manage to keep them on board, but only by getting the Knesset vote classified as a no-confidence motion. That meant that if we lost, the government would fall and there would be new elections. That was something none of them wanted. They feared that Arik and the Likud would do better this time around, and they would end up with fewer seats.

Still, even that didn’t avert a different kind of crisis. The vote was on May 15. For the Palestinians, this was also Al-Naqba Day, the annual marking of the 1948 “catastrophe” of the founding of the State of Israel. Danny Yatom told me the night before there were intelligence reports of large protests planned for the West Bank and in Gaza. President Clinton immediately got the American consul to deliver a message to Arafat, saying that the President expected him to intervene against any sign of violence. But Arafat’s reply was that, while he’d do what he could, he

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