/ BARAK / 15 By November, even his Foreign Minister, David Levy, was making noises about quitting. He said it would be a waste of time to stay in the cabinet if it was going to bring the peace process to a halt. I warned Bibi, both in the Knesset and in a series of speeches, about the alternative on the Palestinian side if those who wanted a negotiated peace had nothing but stalemate to show for it. And lives, I insisted, were at stake. Both through closed-door sessions of the Knesset's security and foreign affairs committee, and my own contacts in military intelligence, I was convinced that the result would be a second, much more deadly, intifada. Not with Molotov cocktails, but guns, and suicide bombs. I was not out to score political points in keeping the pressure on Bibi to move forward. In fact, I announced that if Bibi did go ahead and finalize the terms for our Oslo redeployment, Labor would once again provide the extra Knesset votes needed for him to get it approved Early in 1998, he sent word that he wanted to talk. The message came through Yaakov Ne'eman, his Finance Minister and a prominent lawyer whom I knew and liked. He and I held an exploratory meeting at which he proposed talks with Bibi on the prospect of a unity government that would help move the peace process forward. I said I'd talk, with one proviso: the discussions would be genuinely secret, with no leaks. I was not prepared to engage in political gamesmanship. In May, Bibi sent an assurance of confidentiality through Ne'eman. The first of about a half-dozen meetings came a few days later at the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem. Then, we shifted venue, meeting at a Mossad-owned villa north of Tel Aviv. I brought along Bougie Herzog, a bright young lawyer, and Labor Party member, who was working in the same law firm and Ne'eman. It was by no means clear we'd agree on a unity government. To my amusement, if not altogether to my surprise, I got word that Bibi was putting out separate political feelers to Shimon Peres. But before long, it became clear there was a specific political motivation behind his approaching me. It was indeed the peace process. But it wasn't the Palestinian peace process, something Bibi still clearly wanted to avoid as much as humanly possible. It was an attempt to engage with Syria. He asked me about the talks under Rabin and Peres, and my views on the possibility of a deal with President Assad. He also wanted my assessment about whether the army could work out arrangements to safeguard the country's security if we handed back most, if not all, of the Golan Heights. If so, what kind of security arrangements, with what timeline? We met through the summer, as the 301 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028149

/ BARAK / 16 talks with the Americans on the further West Bank redeployments meandered ahead. We also discussed in detail how a unity government would work. We agreed it would be presented, like the Shamir-Peres partnership in 1984, as a cross- party response to an important challenge for the country: in this case, security and the peace process. I would be both Defense Minister and "Vice-Prime Minister" with the understanding that Bibi and I would jointly discuss all major issues before jointly agreeing to bring them to the full cabinet. But in August, the talks ended, after news of our talks finally leaked. I immediately phoned Ne'eman. I reminded him that at the outset, I'd said that would mean the discussions were over. He did call me back later in the day to say Bibi insisted that he'd had nothing to do with the leak. My guess was that the source was my old comrade from the Chinese Farm, Yitzhik Mordechai, who had presumably heard that Bibi was ready to make me Defense Minister as part of a unity government. There was, of course, already a defense minister: Yitzhik. Bibi's idea to reopen efforts to get peace with Syria didn't last either. Although I'd learn of this only a few years later, he'd approved a visit to Damascus by the American Jewish businessman Ronald Lauder to meet President Assad. The visit made it clear to Bibi what successive Israeli leaders had learned: a deal might be possible, but only if Israel was willing to commit in advance to pulling out of the Golan. Assad told Lauder to come back to him with a detailed map setting out Bibi's view on delineating the Israeli-Syrian border under a peace agreement. Though no one in the cabinet knew the initiative was underway, Bibi realized that before sending back the map Assad wanted, he would need to tell the two senior ministers directly affected: Arik Sharon, who had replaced David Levy as Foreign Minister; and Yitzhik Mordechai. Both of them said no, with Yitzhik pointing out that a signed map would inevitably become part of the negotiating record. It was a step that, in future negotiations, could not be undone. Bibi's coalition was now creaking. The Syrian option was off. David Levy had already jumped ship. Yitzhik, increasingly concerned about Bibi's delay and drift on Oslo II, seemed to be thinking of leaving as well. Right wing ministers and Knesset members were no happier: they opposed even the slightest prospect of movement on Oslo. In October, Bibi did finally try to seize the initiative. He wrapping up the redeployment details in a summit with Arafat and Clinton and Arafat in Wye River. But as soon as he got back home, he started backtracking, rather than risk facing down his right-wing critics in the cabinet. Implementation of 302 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028150

/ BARAK / 17 the deal was due to begin in early November, but he kept putting off a vote in the cabinet. When the vote came, on November 11, Bibi squeaked through by a margin of 8 to 4, but with five abstentions. That meant less than half of his ministers had voted for it. The easy part for him was Knesset ratification, since I had committed Labor to supporting Bibi on any move towards continuing the peace process. The day after the Knesset's vote, Bibi won the cabinet's clearance for actual implementation to begin. But it didn't. With hard-line ministers threatening to bring down the government if it did, Bibi again stalled. That was the turning point. I'd made it clear our parliamentary support would remain for as long as Bibi moved ahead with what had been agreed at We River. It was not intended as a blank check, or an offer to prop up a Prime Minister who now seemed to be looking for any way possible not to implement the agreement. My key ally in what came next was Haim Ramon. Despite our differences over the direction of the Peres election campaign, we had become effective parliamentary partners. He had a depth of political experience and knowledge I still lacked. While I found the details of how the Knesset operated arcane and often tiresome, Haim knew all of it instinctively. When it came to the need for discreet discussions or bargaining with other parties, not only could he draw on his personal relationships with Knesset members across the party divide. He had the additional advantage of being able to avoid the scrutiny that would follow a direct approach from me. Before Bibi had gone to Wye, Haim and I had discussed how we might move to force early elections. The peace process, and the country, were drifting. There seemed no point in waiting, if we could be confident of lining up the necessary votes among the growing number of others who were also convinced Bibi should go. After the Wye summit agreement, I put all that on hold. But now that Bibi had shifted into reverse, I told Haim to resume his efforts. In early December, he told me he had enough votes for a no-confidence motion, under his name, to dissolve the Knesset and pave the way for early elections. The axe fell on December 20. Bibi had lost the support of the right-wing, who wanted Oslo ended altogether. He had now lost me, too. I felt his approach to the peace process was leaving Israel rudderless. The way we were heading, we would not just forfeit any potential benefits from Oslo. We would be leaving a political and diplomatic vacuum at a time when a serious new explosion of Palestinian violence was becoming ever more likely. In the Knesset debate, Bibi made one final bid to 303 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028151

/ BARAK / 18 save himself: by suggesting a delay of 72 hours for talks on a "unity" government. I said that I was all for unity. But I reminded him that, time after time, we'd saved his government in order to continue the peace process. We could no longer help out a "government that is not interested in upholding the Wye agreement, but only in its political survival." The vote of no-confidence went against him by the yawning margin of 81 to 30, with nine Knesset members abstaining or staying away. A few days later, the date for the election was announced: May 17, 1999. 304 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028152

/ BARAK / 19 Chapter Nineteen A few hours before Haim Ramon introduced his no-confidence resolution, he came to see me in my office in the Knesset. He was worried. Not about the vote, but about what would come after. "Ehud, I'm sure we can topple the government," he told me. "But only you know whether we're ready - whether you're ready - to defeat Bibi in an election." "I'm ready," I said. "We are going to win." Few agreed. In fact, there had been times during my first year-and-a-half as Labor leader when I wondered if I'd be able to hang on to the job. I was in charge of a party whose grassroots were on the left. I was, by intellect and instinct, a pragmatist and a centrist. I did share Labor's vision of a socially just and democratic Israel. Especially after seeing far-right rabbis egg on the fanaticism that ultimately killed Yitzhak Rabin, I felt strongly that we needed to separate organized religion from our day-to-day politics. But I'd been raised with a deeper respect for our Jewish traditions than many on the left. Right after Yitzhak's murder, I'd gone to see Zevulun Hammer, the leader of the National Religious Party. It had been part of both Labor and Likud governments ever since 1948, though not Rabin's. The NRP, too, had been drifting steadily rightward. But it still basically subscribed the idea of a strong, democratic Israel under the rule of law. I wanted to bring the NRP back into the government under Peres, as part of the widest possible political alliance against the assassination and the campaign of hatred that had fostered it. Sadly that didn't happen, in part because of the anger against all Orthodox politicians after Rabin's murder. Yet in my readiness to engage politically with Orthodox leaders who did not reject the very idea of peace negotiations - whether in the NRP, or the increasingly influential Sephardi religious party, Shas - I was outside Labor's mainstream, and its comfort zone. On my approach to peace as well, I differed from many on the left. Though I was determined to pursue any realistic avenue to negotiations, I was convinced that security considerations had to be paramount in what we were prepared to give up or accept in negotiations. I was cautious about ceding too much too soon, in case the Palestinians or the Syrians proved either unequal to, or uninterested in, making the hard decisions required for peace. That was an approach with, like Yitzhak 305 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028153

/ BARAK / 20 before me, provoked more left-wing parties like Meretz to suggest that if I really wanted peace, I'd be ready to give away more, and more quickly. My position wasn't helped by the way I had come over in the media during my first months as Labor leader. A number of newspaper commentators wrote that while they found talking with me stimulating, I seemed to be operating in a world of my own, either unable or unwilling to give straight answers and a single, clear message. They were right about that. If asked a question, especially one which obviously involved an issus of nuance, my instinct was not to come up with a sound bite. It was, as best I could, to answer fully and accurately. The difficulties that could sometime cause hit home in an interview with a leading Israeli journalist in the spring of 1998. He asked how my life might have turned out if I'd been born and raised not as a kibbutznik, but a Palestinian. I answered: "At some stage, I would have entered one of the terror organizations and fought from there, and later would certainly have tried to influence from within the political system." I did hasten to add that I abhorred terrorists, describing their actions as "abominable... villainous." But that was lost in the political storm that followed. All I'd done was answer as honestly I could. What if I had been one of the Palestinian babies in Wadi Khawaret, but with the same mind and same impulses that had defined my life as an Israeli? I assumed that instead of becoming an Israeli soldier and politician, I would have become the closest thing to a Palestinian equivalent. Still, as even my brother-in-law, Doron Cohen, told me when he phoned a couple of hours later, it was not the most astute thing to say as a potential candidate for Prime Minister. None of this might have mattered if I'd been able to show I was bringing Labor nearer to defeating Bibi. But the only measure of progress that the media paid attention to was the opinion polls. Briefly, in late 1977, I did pull ahead, during the period leading up to Bibi's agreement to pull out of most of Hebron. But for much of 1998, I was running behind, and questions about my leadership surfaced publicly by the summer. The media commentators spoke of the need for a Labor "liftoff." Why, after a full year as leader, had I failed to deliver it? 306 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028154

/ BARAK / 21 There was a part of politics for which I was naturally suited after my life in the army: to plan an operation, prepare and execute it. An ability to get the lie of the land, assess your own and your rivals' strengths and vulnerabilities, and to win. And the "lie of the land" struck me as more encouraging than many Israeli commentators believed. When I became Labor leader, I didn't expect Bibi to fall anytime soon. But I believed it was inevitable that at some point he'd have to make tough choices about the peace process, and I doubted his coalition with the more right-wing Orthodox parties would survive. I also took encouragement from the fact that the political winds in other developed democracies seemed to be blowing in our direction. Bill Clinton had won in the United States. In Britain, which had a parliamentary system much closer to Israel's, Tony Blair, as leader of a party renamed as New Labor, had ended eighteen years of Conservative rule and swept to victory. Behind the scenes, I immediately made sure that, with financial help from Jean Frydman and other supporters, we began the practical work of learning from the experience of center-left parties in other countries. Within weeks of my election as Labor chairman, I used my acquaintance with a British Jewish businessman named Michael Levy to see what lessons our Labor party might learn from Tony Blair's. Levy had been an early supporter of Blair and persuaded the Prime Minister to welcome me through the famous black door of Number 10 Downing Street. After chatting in the front hallway, the British Prime Minister led me into the back garden to discuss how he had refashioned his party and brought it back into government. In addition to modifying or abandoning rigidly left-wing positions that most British voters had rejected, he had created a formidable campaigning team under an ally and adviser named Peter Mandelson. When I asked Blair whether it would be possible to meet Mandelson, he said he couldn't "give me Peter." But he did put me in touch with Philip Gould, the polling expert and strategist who had partnered Mandelson in designing and running the election campaign. We met at Labor headquarters in Milbank Towers so Philip could show me the "war room" - modelled, in part, on Bill Clinton's campaign operation - from which the victory had been planned and executed. It was a large, open-plan space, nothing like the warren of offices and conference rooms from which Labor in Israel operated. Pride of place went to an advanced computer system, the heart of a "rebuttal unit" which charted every statement from the Conservative Party so it could be answered, neutralized or used to adjust Labor's own campaign. I was 307 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028155

/ BARAK / 22 struck by how different the approach was from our campaign for Peres. As I filled my notebook with the details, Philip added a final bit of advice. "If you want to win, have it run by the best professionals you can find. Not politicians. They always have personal agendas. Focus is everything. Distractions and arguments and infighting can be fatal." Philip recommended one professional, in particular, to get us started: Stanley Greenberg, the pollster who had advised not only Blair's campaign, but Clinton's. Doron used his contacts in New York to put us in touch not only with Greenberg but the strategist behind the Clinton victory, James Carville, and another leading Democratic Party consultant and speechwriter, Bob Shrum. We began working with all of them well before the no-confidence vote in the Knesset. Philip had a wonderfully British understatement and reserve. Stanley, with his eyeglasses and demeanor too, came over as slightly professorial. With Bob, it didn't take long to understand why he was such a gifted speechwriter. He loved words, especially the way they could be used to inspire a connection with important campaign themes: above all with the idea of hope, and new beginnings. Carville was the human equivalent of a volcano. If he hadn't been a campaign strategist, he could have made a living as a hybrid of a cowboy and a stand-up comedian. But they all shared the easy, infectious self-confidence of people who were very good at what they did, and knew it. When I went to New York with Doron to meet Carville in Feburary 1988, my confidence as Labor leader was taking some fairly hard knocks. But from the moment he walked through our hotel-room door, it was impossible not to like him. He showed up in a T-shirt and tennis sneakers, walked straight across the room, slouched into a chair and said: "General Barak, I don't get it. You're a known public figure, with a great mind and a great military record. It's already been a year-and-a-half since Israel got Netanyahu. What have you done to go after him? Why haven't you gone on the attack?" He said it was time for me to wake up, and change tack. "Can you run through your stump speech for me," he asked, motioning me toward the center of the room like a film director. "I don't have one," I said. To which he replied briskly that I should have had one months ago. When Stanley paid a preliminary visit with Philip to Israel, they, too, urged me to sharpen my message and pay more attention to my image with the public. 308 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028156

/ BARAK / 23 Stanley was worried by polling data that suggested most Israelis saw Bibi as "strong." I argued that strength was one area where we wouldn't have to worry. "No way, in a campaign, he'll end up coming over looking stronger than me." Stanley seemed not entirely convinced. Both in "strength" and other ways, I think my background did prove an advantage. The 35 years I'd spent in the military had given me a singleminded determination to set goals, follow through and achieve them. After Haim Ramon came to my office before the no-confidence vote to ask whether I was sure I wanted to go ahead, and I answered with an unhesitating "yes," Haim had told a couple of reporters: "Barak has balls of steel." In truth, I was puzzled he'd even asked me. As when I was in uniform, it would never have occurred to me to ask him to try to line up the necessary votes if I hadn't thought it through and intended to go ahead with it. Still, my military background was not always an asset as I found my feet as party leader and prepared to take on Bibi in the election campaign. In searching for the tools, the structure, and the people I felt would give us the best chance to win, I sometimes failed to pay due attention to the party's existing apparatus and institutions. This alienated a number of established Labor politicians, eventually including Haim himself. So as the campaign approached I tried to shore up my ties with the party establishment. I drafted in Bougie Herzog to act as my regular liaison with leading figures in the party. I was careful to include a number of Labor politicians in our campaign team as well, though, as Philip Gould had recommended, I made sure they didn't actually run it. The closest equivalent to the role Haim had played in Peres's campaign went to a young businessman, PR professional and Labor supporter named Moshe Gaon. As spokeswoman, we brought in someone who, though she'd been a messenger of doom during the Tze'elim controversy that engulfed me before joining Rabin's government, had undeniable experience and ability which I valued and respected: Yitzhak's former media aide Aliza Goren. As campaign coordinator, I chose Tal Silberstein, who at the time was in charge of a citizens' group called Dor Shalem Doresh Shalom: "A Whole Generation Demands Peace." I relied on frequent, less formal input from political friends whose judgement I had learned to trust, like Eitan Haber and Giora Eini. Also playing a key role was a group of four young women, led by Orna Angel, a successful architect and a former soldier in Sayeret Matkal. She built from scratch an army of nearly 20,000 volunteers who helped 309 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028157

/ BARAK / 24 organize events and contact voters during the campaign. We outfitted our own war room in an open-plan floor of offices on the edge of Tel Aviv. Philip called it "Milbank South." As organizational head of the campaign, I chose Chagai Shalom. An industrial engineer by training, he was a reserve army general who, when I was chief of staff, had been in charge of the logistics branch of the military. I gave him Sayeret Matkal backup as well, in the person of Danny Yatom, my longtime friend and former sayeret deputy. *** But all that was process. Winning or losing would come down to how our message, our ability to forge alliances, and my own personal and political appeal, measured up against Bibi. The new system of separate elections for party and Prime Minister meant that in order to win a majority, I would need the support of voters outside Labor as well. I set out to establish a broader movement, a big tent under which a majority of Israelis could coexist politically. I realized this risked provoking anger among some Labor activists. But I wanted to convey to voters that I was reaching out beyond my core party constituency: to "soft" right-wingers nearer the political center; to the Sephardim who since 1977 had overwhelmingly voted Likud; to the growing number of Russian immigrants who had helped Bibi defeat Peres; and to those among the Orthodox who still subscribed to tolerance and moderation in the mold of the old-style National Religious Party in the first few decades of the state. Though the candidates on our Knesset election list would all be from Labor, I ran the Prime Ministerial campaign under the broader banner of Yisrael Ahat - One Israel. I envisaged it as an alliance of at least several different parties with Labor at its center. I began with Bibi's jettisoned Foreign Minister, David Levy. He was a Moroccan-born 1950s immigrant whose career had begun at the grassroots, in the northern town of Beit She'an, but who went on to become a key part of Begin's victory in 1977. The leading Sephardi figure in the Likud, he was at one point mentioned as a future leader. Many Israelis, especially on the left, now portrayed him as a figure of ridicule. But I'd always had a higher opinion of him. During the 310 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028158

/ BARAK / 25 1982 Lebanon War, with two sons fighting on the ground, he'd been a rare voice of common sense, and caution, in the Begin cabinet. I'd also seen him operate in Shamir's inner security cabinet, when I would come, as deputy chief of staff, to present military operations for approval. I remember one occasion when an air force general laid out the details of a planned helicopter-borne mission into Lebanon. I added a few remarks in summary. Raful Eitan and Arik Sharon were both ministers. Within seconds, they were peppering the general and me with questions. Why were the aircraft taking one route north instead of another? Why not closer to Mount Hermon? Shouldn't they fly lower? Levy interrupted "Gentlemen," he said, , "we are not in company commanders' course. We're in the inner cabinet of the government of Israel. We have a chief of staff and other generals and military professionals. It's their job to decide the operational details. Our job is to balance the reasons for doing an operation against the risks as presented to us." I met with him in the Knesset cafeteria before Bibi went off to the Wye River summit. Levy now headed a small breakaway faction from Likud called Gesher, Hebrew for "bridge." Without explicitly suggesting we join forces, I explained my hope to run my eventual campaign for Prime Minister in alliance with a few other parties. I told him I wanted to make my candidacy a legitimate choice for voters from the center-right, the Orthodox, as well as the Russian community. I took a napkin and drew a big umbrella to illustrate what I had in mind. He said he understood - though he did tell me to make sure I tore up the napkin. There came a point, at the end of November when it looked like my overture had failed Scampering for a way to shore up his coalition, Bibi tried to lure Levy into the fold back by offering him the Finance Ministry. But with resistance from other ministers, Bibi broke off the talks with Levy, leaving him humiliated and furious. I met with him several more times, and we brought in Gesher as our first "One Israel" partner. The second to join us, early in the new year, was a small religious party called Meimad, inspired by an openly pro-peace Orthodox rabbi named Yehuda Amital and including a former Chief Rabbi of Norway, Michael Melchior. By the end of January 1999, several months before the real campaign, I was feeling better about where we stood, in part because of a series of hits Bibi was taking from former friends and allies. The first salvo was fired by Misha Arens, who had helped engineer Bibi's move into national politics. He announced he was going to put himself forward for the Likud leadership before the election, saying 311 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028159

/ BARAK / 26 that he and others were convinced Bibi couldn't win. A couple of weeks later, Yitzhik Mordechai seemed on the verge of becoming the latest of Bibi's ministers to resign. He was openly flirting with the idea of joining a new centrist party that had been formed by Likud's Dan Meridor. Bibi struck back with a mixture of subtlety and venom. He fired Mordechai, accusing him of being driven by personal ambition. Then he offered the Defense Minister's job to Misha Arens. Yitzhik did join the Center Party, as did Amnon Lipkin, who had ended his term as chief-of-staff and, with initial opinion poll numbers suggesting he'd do well, even briefly entered the race for Prime Minister. Now, he endorsed Yitzhik Mordechai instead: a man not only with strong military credentials, but of Sephardi background and religiously observant, and a proven politician and cabinet minister. It was clear that he would be going after many of the same votes I needed to win. That situation wasn't ideal, to put it mildly. But all I could do at this stage was to put our own campaign house in order. I hoped that if we ran the campaign I expected, there wouldn't be a run-off. * ** At the start of April, the final list of candidates was set. There were five. In addition to Bibi, Yitzhik and me, Benny Begin had decided to run on the right. Also in the contest was Knesset member Azmi Beshara, the first Israeli Arab citizen to seek national office. When we chose "One Israel" as the name of our campaign alliance, it was not meant just as a catchy phrase. Though now a half-century old, the country had rarely seemed so diverse, and in many ways divided. It was not just the old fault line between Labor and Revisionist Zionism that defined our politics, or even the Ashkenazi-Sephardi gulf that had predominated since the late 1970s. There were new, younger, more assertive, more right-wing and more pro-settlement voices among the Orthodox. There was the contrast between the overwhelmingly secular, politically and socially liberal, and culturally Western Tel Aviv, with its lively cafés and restaurants, and the constellation of wealthy suburbs to the north; and smaller Israeli towns and cities in the interior, Jerusalem as well, not to mention 312 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028160

/ BARAK / 27 the settlements on the West Bank. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of Russians had also flowed into Israel. Most were Jewish in culture more than religious observance, but they were instinctively inclined to support candidates - Rabin in 1992, and Bibi the last time around - who they felt were likely to take a tough line in any peace negotiations with the Arabs. I was never going to get the backing of many West Bank settlers, or of core supporters of the Likud and parties even further to the right. But I would need to make at least some dent in Bibi's hold on the Russian voters who had supported him by a wide margin in 1996. I focused first on Yisrael Ba'Aliyah, the main Russian immigrant political party. It had been set up by the iconic Soviet-era refusenik Natan Sharansky - or, as he was then known, Anatoly Sharansky. He'd been an ally of Andrei Sakharov, an outspoken human rights advocate and, until he was finally released and allowed to leave in 1986, a political prisoner in the gulag. Though Natan's party was not going to offer a formal endorsement for any candidate, I met with him to press the case for "security and peace," the message I'd tried to advance with Shimon three years earlier, and to emphasize the need to bring unity and shared purpose back to the country. Though I think he would have been receptive anyway, it didn't hurt that he, like me, was a mathematics graduate - from Moscow's Physics and Technology Institute. He was also a chess aficionado. When I was rash enough to face him across the board, as I recall, it took him all of five minutes, and seven moves, to checkmate me. But I also made dozens of visits to Russian community groups, and met with individual families whenever I could. Often, I found myself talking to older men and women among the immigrants about the military details of the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians called World War Two. On a number of occasions, I accepted the invitation to sit down and play on a sitting-room piano. I think the first time I got a sense that any of this might be having an impact was in a quote from a Yisrael Ba'Aliyah official in an Israeli newspaper. Though still stopping short of a formal endorsement, the official was quoted as saying: "A month ago, young Russians thought Barak was a boring, left-wing socialist party leader who doesn't look good on TV and mumbles a lot... Today, they see him as a high-ranking Israeli general who knows how to play the piano. The Russian immigrants like strong, cultured people." Except for the bit about mumbling, I couldn't have wished for more. 313 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028161

/ BARAK / 28 The next key moment in the campaign involved something I did not do. This time, the Israeli television debate came earlier in the campaign, a month before the election. Bibi, Yitzhik Mordechai and I were all invited, as the three main candidates. But I told the TV people I had a conflicting personal engagement. I figured I had nothing to gain by going. To join a three-way debate risked creating the impression this was a genuine three-man race, and I still held out hope it would come down to just me and Bibi. Besides, I thought a debate between the other two would help me. Yitzhik knew Bibi well. He had served in Bibi's government. Though not a natural orator, he was always forthright, and often pugnacious, in making his points. And he couldn't stand Bibi. Unlike the 1996 debate, this time there was a knock-out blow, and Bibi was the one left on the canvas. It was a bit like Senator Lloyd Bentsen's killer riposte when Republic vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle compared himself to John F. Kennedy in their debate, a few months earlier: "Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy..." Bibi entered his television showdown with Yitzhik Mordechai with much the same strategy he'd used against Peres. He went on the offensive. He tried to portray himself as an indispensable bulwark against those, like Yitzhik or me, who he said would cosy up to Arafat and Assad and endanger Israel's security. But Yitzhik was up for the fight. He also knew that only months earlier, Bibi himself had been exploring the idea of giving up the Golan Heights to the same President Assad. He didn't actually refer to the secret mission by Ronald Lauder, or explicitly accuse Bibi of hypocrisy. But his reply - and Bibi's visible discomfort - were just as effective. Smiling sardonically, he said: "I know your outbursts, and they won't do you any good." He challenged Bibi to just "look me in the eye" and admit what he really thought about the future of the Golan. The media verdict was unanimous. Mordechai had won. Which meant I had won. Though my American and British brains' trust had little input into our day-to- day campaign, they did play a role in the thrust and strategy. I tried to drive home two things as we entered the two-week homestretch in May. My first, broad message was an echo of James Carville's central theme in the Clinton Presidential campaign: "change, versus more of the same." It had worked in the US not because it was clever, but because it resonated with large numbers of voters. I sensed from the start of the campaign that it was true of Israel as well. Different groups had different gripes, and different ideas of what they hoped I would provide as Prime 314 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028162

/ BARAK / 29 Minister. But fewer and fewer Israelis were enthusiastic about four more years of Bibi. But I also was keen to convey the substance of what my premiership would be about. Domestically, I spoke of the need to narrow gaps in education and opportunity - particularly, though not only, the continuing disadvantage of many in the Sephardi communities who had arrived in the early years of the state. I wanted to try to build bridges between the secular and religious as well. My hope was to begin to recreate the "One Israel" of my youth In terms of policy, I believed my primary job would be deliver "security and peace" - in that order. I declared my commitment to continue, and build on, Oslo and to make a new push in negotiations with Syria. Deliberately following the model Philip Gould had used in Tony Blair's election campaign, we also distributed nearly a million copies of a six-point policy "pledge card". It included a promise to hold a referendum on any peace deal we reached with Syria or the Palestinians, as well as several domestic policy pledges, including an end to discrimination against Russian immigrants whose Jewish religious status had been called into question. Yet the most widely reported promise was that I would pull out all Israeli troops from Lebanon within a year. I realized that even among those who knew that made sense, voices would be raised both in the Knesset and the kiyra against withdrawing. As with the Bar-Lev Line before the 1973 War, the longer the "security zone" was in place, the more difficult that politicians had found it to say it was a mistake. Yet it had now been there for nearly two decades. The main argument for keeping it - that it protected the security of northern Israel - was undermined by the fact that thousands of Katyusha rockets had been fired over it. And in the low-grade war we were fighting against Hizbollah inside the security zone, around 20 Israeli soldiers had been dying each and every year. When I'd first visited our positions in south Lebanon in the early 1980s, chatted with the troops and asked them how they were doing, the invariable response was: we're OK. We're just worried about our young kids back home. Now, those children were manning the same outposts, facing the same danger, in a sliver of land on which we had no claim, which we had no desire to hold, and which was, at best, of questionable security value. * 315 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028163

/ BARAK / 30 I'd tried not to pay too much attention to newspaper polls during the campaign, perhaps because even the "good" ones, to use Shimon's phrase, had me with just a narrow lead, with Yitzhik Mordechai's 10 or 11 percent still likely to prevent outright victory in the first round. But in the second part of May, our internal polling showed things were moving in our direction. In mid-May, they had me above 40 percent. A final batch of internal polls, on the Friday before election day, had me just short of 50 percent. But I told our pollsters that under no circumstances were they to divulge the results to anyone in the campaign team. This wasn't just because I wanted to guard against complacency. It was because, deep down, still I didn't trust the numbers. I retreated to Kochav Yair on Friday evening. On Saturday, two days before the election, I had a surprise visitor, someone I knew from Yitzhik Mordecai's team. He said he had a letter for me, with terms of a proposal under which Yitzhik would announce an eleventh-hour withdrawal from the race. I still could not be absolutely confident I'd win, at least in the first round. Yitzhik's pulling out would help. But if I did win, I wanted to start the process of assembling a coalition with a blank slate and an open mind. Doing a deal was not the way to begin. I didn't accept or open the envelope. "Go back to Yitzhik," I said. "Tell him, as he knows, that I have a lot of respect for him. But this is a decision that he has to make on his own." The next day, less than 24 hours before the polls opened, all of the three other candidates announced they were pulling out. Benny Begin and Azmi Beshara were never going to affect the outcome. But Yitzhik's withdrawal very possibly would. When he spoke to reporters, he said it had been one of the most difficult decisions he'd had to make, but that he'd concluded he wouldn't get enough votes to reach his "primary goal" of defeating Bibi. "The prime minister was given a chance and he failed," he said. "We must give Barak a chance." I got up early on May 17, confident we'd done everything we could to put ourselves in a position to win, but also aware, from Shimon's defeat, that the smallest of details, and the narrowest of margins, might determine the outcome. After the 1996 election, I'd learned of cases where Peres volunteers outside polling stations in the Negev or the north of the country had left early, in order to make sure they'd be back to Tel Aviv in time for the "moment of victory." Now, I sent out word that all our volunteers must stay in place until the polls had closed. After 316 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028164

/ BARAK / 31 Nava and I voted, we attended an event for Labor supporters north of Tel Aviv, before flying to Beersheva to spend the final hours in the Negev. I'd arranged for Shlomo Ben-Ami to go to Kiryat Shmona in the north - emphasizing, as throughout the campaign, our determination to broaden our support beyond Labor's heartland. The polls closed at 10 o'clock. I knew Bibi would be staring at the same Channel One newscast as I was, each of us ready to put the best spin on things, especially if there was no clear sign at this stage which one of us had won. But the exit poll findings came as a shock: Barak, of One Israel, 58.5 percent; Netanyahu, Likud, 41.5 percent. It was a landslide. The full impact hit me only when I got to the fifth-floor suite in the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv, our election-night headquarters. My three brothers, and Nava and our daughters, were waiting for me. Leah Rabin, too. Our eyes teared up as we embraced. My parents were by now too frail to come. But I'd promised to phone them, whatever happened. "We did it," I told my father, who said mazaltov with a depth of feeling which had become rare as his health began to fail. My mother had always been a bit conflicted about my going into politics, despite her lifelong belief that the issues of politics mattered, especially after Yitzhak had been cut down and killed for following the path on which I hoped to continue. Still, I could hear the pride, and relief, in her voice when I said: "Remember, ima. I did promise you that if I ran, at least I'd make sure to win." When we'd finished speaking, Bibi called. He had conceded publicly as soon as the exit poll was out. He had also stunned the Likud crowd by immediately resigning as party leader. "Congratulations," he said, sounding, more than anything, tired. "I accept that the voters have spoken." I thanked him for taking the trouble to call. I said I appreciated the contribution he'd made to the country, and that we'd meet in the next few days to discuss how best to handle the political transition. "Thanks," Bibi said. "And again, mazaltov." By the time I got off the phone with Bibi, the TV was showing pictures of tens of thousands of people celebrating the results in the central Tel Aviv square, now renamed in Rabin's memory, where he had been murdered nearly four years earlier. Before leaving to join them, I fielded a stream of calls: from friends, other Israeli party leaders and leaders from abroad, including Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, both of whom not only offered warm congratulations but said they looked forward to working with me as I tried to move Israel forward and to finish the work Yitzhak had begun. 317 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028165

/ BARAK / 32 At the start of my brief remarks at the hotel podium before going to Rabin Square, I had to call for quiet when I mentioned the phone call from Bibi. "No," I said, raising my voice to be heard above the boos, "we will not boo an incumbent Prime Minister of Israel... A short time ago, I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu and thanked him for his service to the State of Israel." Then - with both Leah and Shimon Peres at my side - I paid tribute to "that one special person who had a unique role in our reaching this moment - somebody who was my commander and guide, and the person who led me into politics: Yitzhak Rabin. I pledged to fulfil his legacy, and complete the work he'd started. And I extended a hand to "secular and religious, the ultra-Orthodox and the residents of the settlements, to Israelis of Middle Eastern origin and Ashkenazi extraction, to immigrants from Eithopia and the former Soviet Union, to the Arabs, the Druze, the Circassians, the Bedouin. All, all of them, are part of the Israeli people." It was not long before sunrise when I reached the square. As the crowd shouted and sang, I began with a line borrowed from Bob Shrum. It seemed particularly apt: "It is the breaking of a new dawn," I said But was it? As I paid tribute to Rabin - "in this place where our hearts broke" - and dedicated myself to completing the work he'd begun, I could feel the thousands in the square willing me on. Even in my more nuanced comments on the talks with the Palestinians: the need to achieve peace, but at least for now by disengaging rather than joining hands with the Palestinians, ensuring we had military and border provisions to safeguard our security, and with the stipulation that Jerusalem would remain our undivided capital, under Israeli sovereignty. But some in the crowd were carrying posters saying "No to the charedim" - the strictly Orthodox. Others were chanting, in anticipation of the negotiations needed to put together a coalition: Rak lo Shas! Anyone but Shas! It was a reference to the Sephardi Orthodox party, which in addition to being more nuanced and flexible than other religious parties on the issue of peace talks, had been the big winner in the election. It had gained seven seats and now had only two fewer than the Likud I did not specifically mention Shas. But I said: "I tell you here that the time has come to end divisions. The time has come to make peace among ourselves, whether we are traditionalists or secularists... We must not be enemies of each other." Paying tribute to all those in the square who had worked for our election victory, I added: "I know it would not have been possible without your support. But I also know it would not have been possible without the support many in the 318 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028166

/ BARAK / 33 Likud. I appreciate that as well. And I undertake to be rosh hasmemshalah shel kulam: Prime Minister for all Israelis. Yet as fervently as I hoped to be able deliver on that pledge, I knew, even as I spoke, that actually fulfilling it was going to be much, much tougher. 319 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028167

/ BARAK / 34 Chapter Twenty As Prime Minister, I would sometimes be criticised as emotionally buttoned up, even stoic, and there was some truth in that. It was partly just a reflection of who I was: a kibbutznik who'd grown up in the early years of the state, and had then spent most of his life in the army. But while it may not have shown, I felt a churn of emotions when I formally presented my government to the Knesset in July 1999 as Nava, our three daughters, her parents and mine looked on proudly from the gallery. Even more so, when I entered the office of the Prime Minister. I'd been there before: as head of military intelligence, chief of staff and a cabinet minister. Yet to sit behind the vast wooden desk and know that the buck now truly stopped with me - to become just the tenth person in Israel's history to have that honor - was very different. What I felt most powerfully, however, wasn't the honor. It was the responsibility. I knew that Israel faced two deepening crises. The first was domestic. Though Yitzhak Rabin's assassin was now in jail, the divisiveness and hatred of which he was a product and symbol had not gone away. Nor had other rifts: between the privileged and disadvantaged, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and, perhaps most of all, secular and religious. The second, more immediate challenge was on our borders. The peace process was stalled. If we were going to revive it, we were running against the clock. President Clinton, a key player in any hope of turning the promise of Oslo into real peace, had only 18 months remaining in office. In terms of Israel's security, the timetable was even less forgiving. From my very first intelligence briefings as Prime Minister, I was even more convinced of what I'd been warning Bibi for months: without a political breakthrough, a new, much more deadly intifada was only a matter of time. That would have been reason enough to make peace efforts my first priority. But even as I was addressing the victory rally in Rabin Square, I sensed that the simple arithmetic of the election results would leave me no other choice. I was entering office with the largest electoral mandate in our history. But that was because of Israel's new voting system, with separate ballots cast for Prime Minister and party. That system had had precisely the opposite effect on party voting. In previous elections, most Israelis had chosen one of the two main parties, knowing that only they had a realistic chance of forming a government. Now they could directly choose the Prime Minister, giving them the luxury to vote in much greater 320 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028168

/ BARAK / 35 numbers for an array of smaller, issue-specific parties. The result: though I'd won by a landslide, and One Israel had the largest number of Knesset seats, even with our natural left-of-center ally, Meretz, we would have only 36 Knesset seats - well short of the 61 needed for a majority. Even if we included a few smaller parties, there was no choice but to bring in one of the two larger ones: the Sephardi Orthodox Shas, with 17 seats; or Likud, which, after Bibi's sudden resignation, was now led by Arik Sharon, and had 19. It wasn't just a math problem. It had a critical policy implication. If I wanted to tackle the domestic challenge - to reassert the values of secular-led democratic government over increasingly assertive religious involvement in our day-to-day politics - that would mean choosing Likud over Shas. But it would also signal the effective end of the peace process. Even though Arik assured me privately that he understood my determination to reopen peace efforts with Arafat and Hafez al- Assad, I knew Arik. The path toward peace agreements, assuming they were even possible, would be tough. Sooner or later - and certainly if we faced the need to consider painful compromises in the negotiations - I was certain that Arik would act as a kind of opposition from within. That was why, over the angry opposition of Meretz leader Yossi Sarid, I decided to go with the Sephardi Orthodox party. I realized that even Shas might walk out if the scale of any land-for-peace concessions proved too high. But it was the least extreme of the major religious parties on the question of peace with the Palestinians. In my conversations with the party's spiritual leader and guide, the 79-year-old rabbi and Talmudic scholar Ovadia Yosef, I was struck by his intelligence, erudition and subtletly of thought - but, above all, his commitment to the core Jewish principle of sanctifying human life over the specifics of Oslo redeployments, where his inclination seemed to be to trust the judgment of those with the experience and expertise to evaluate the security implications. To Meretz's additional consternation, I included two smaller, right-of-center Orthodox parties in the coalition. It was not just to make good on my pledge to be Prime Minister for all Israelis. Knowing that I was going to put top priority on the peace process, I wanted to avoid an undiluted left-of-centre, secular thrust to the government. When I'd stood in front of the tens of thousands of cheering supporters in Rabin Square after the election, I thought to myself: they think that with Bibi gone, peace is around the corner. I wanted a coalition broad enough to keep Meretz, and Labor ministers as well, from forgetting a crucial fact: the 321 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028169

/ BARAK / 36 compromises that we might have to contemplate during peace negotiations were still anathema to many other Israelis. * ** Syria was always my first negotiating priority, as it had been for Rabin and, for a brief period, Bibi as well. This was not just because the shape of a final agreement with the Syrians was clearer, to both sides, than with the Palestinians. It was because I was determined to make good on the main specific policy pledge of my campaign: to bring our troops home from Lebanon. No matter what the increasingly emboldened fighters of Hizbollah said publicly, our withdrawal would be bad news for them. It would deprive them of their "anti-occupation" rationale for firing Katyushas into towns and settlements in northern Israel, and free us politically to strike back hard if that proved necessary. It was clear to me that Hizbollah would try to make the withdrawal as difficult for us as possible. But the real power in Lebanon rested with the Syrians, who, along with Iran, were Hizbollah's main backers. If we could get a peace agreement with Assad, there seemed every reason to hope he would rein in Hizbollah, and perhaps open the way to a peace treaty with Lebanon as well. Still, there was no way of hiding an additional attraction in getting a deal with Syria first: it would increase our negotiating leverage with the Palestinians. That would certainly not be lost on Yasir Arafat - one reason that I realized the importance of an early meeting with him, to convey my commitment to keeping the Oslo process alive, and, if possible, achieving a full and final Israeli-Palestinian peace. * I went to see Arafat a few days after taking office. We met for well over an hour at Erez, the main crossing point into Gaza. It was swelteringly hot inside. At least I was in an ordinary business suit, but I couldn't help wondering how Arafat 322 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028170

/ BARAK / 37 was coping in his trademark military uniform. Still, the mood music going into the meeting was encouraging. After the election, Arafat had tried to use his ties with the ayatollahs in Iran to get them to release 13 members of the tiny Jewish community in Shiraz who had been jailed on patently absurd accusations of spying for the "Zionist régime." Iran had told him no. Given its support for Hizbollah, and its serial diatribes about destroying the State of Israel, this was hardly a surprise. But it was a gesture nonetheless, and I told him I appreciated it. I also arrived with a gift: a leather-bound volume with both the Hebrew Bible and Koran. I began our meeting with what I felt I most needed him to hear: that both of us were trying to achieve something hugely important, nothing less than a new relationship between Israelis and Palestinians based on trust. As I would discover in the months ahead - as Yitzhak had found as well - Arafat responded warmly to such general appeals of principle. He replied that he viewed me as a partner, and a friend. But the key issue of substance - the difference between how I envisaged taking Oslo forward and what he wanted - was impossible to avoid. I emphasized that I was committed to the further Wye River summit redeployments Bibi which had agreed, although not implemented, as well as to a release of Palestinian prisoners agreed at Wye. Yet then came the more difficult part: explaining my view of how we could best move toward a full peace agreement. I said I was convinced the prospects would be much better if we delayed the redeployments and brought forward the start of the real negotiations: on "permanent-status" issues like final borders, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees. In any case, I said, I'd need a few months for a thorough assessment of the issues involved, and to reach a settled view with my negotiating team on how to proceed. Arafat seemed to accept the idea of a pause for reflection and planning. But he held firm in his opposition to any further delay in the Wye redeployments. More worryingly for the longer-term prospects of an agreement, he ignored altogether my suggestion that we move ahead toward the permanent-status talks. Speaking to reporters, I was careful to accentuate the positive. I said the reason I'd come to see Arafat so soon was because of the importance I attached to his role in "shaping peace in the Middle East." I said I would not waver in continuing on the path which Rabin and he and begun. And while the security of Israel would be my paramount concern in negotiations, "I also want each Palestinian to feel secure." Both sides, I said, had suffered enough. The open question, however, was whether I had done enough to persuade Arafat that his exclusive focus on 323 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028171

/ BARAK / 38 redeployments - on only the land part of a land-for-peace deal - meant we risked ignoring the core issues that would determine whether a full peace agreement was achievable. More urgently, I knew from our diplomats in the US that the Americans would not necessarily be receptive to a further delay in moving ahead with Oslo, even if it meant focusing on trying to make peace with Syria. That made my first visit to see President Clinton as Prime Minister especially important. It was billed as a "working visit" and work we did. After a gala dinner for Nava and me in the White House, we helicoptered to the presidential retreat at Camp David. President Clinton and I spent more than 10 hours discussing shared security challenges in the Middle East, especially terrorist groups and states like Iran that were backing them, and, of course, how best to move forward our efforts to negotiate peace. These face-to-face meetings set a pattern that would last throughout the time he and I were in office. On almost all key issues, my preference was to deal directly with the President, something I know sometimes frustrated other senior US negotiators like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Mideast envoy Dennis Ross. This was not out of any disrespect for them. It was because the decisions on which negotiations would succeed or fail would have to be made at the top, just as President Clinton and I would ultimately carry the responsibility, or the blame, for errors, missteps or missed opportunities. Our first meeting ran until three in the morning. When the President asked me how I saw the peace process going forward, he smiled, in obviously relief, at my answer: I wanted to move quickly. He had only a limited time left in office, and I was determined that we not waste it. Much is often made about the personal "chemistry" in political relationships. Too much, I think, because the core issues, and the trade-offs of substance, are what truly matter when negotiating matters of the weight, and long-term implications, of Middle East peace. Still, chemistry does help when moments of tension or crisis arise, as they inevitably do. My first few days with President Clinton laid a foundation that allowed us to work together even when things got tough. I benefited, I'm sure, simply by not being Bibi. The 324 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028172

/ BARAK / 39 president and his negotiating team had spent the previous few, frustrating years trying alternately to urge, nudge and cajole him - and, of course, Arafat - toward implementing Oslo. Clinton did finally succeed in getting the Wye River agreement. But it, too, remained to be implemented. Nava's presence, and Hillary Clinton's, contributed to an informal, familial atmosphere. Before my first round of talks with the President, we joined Bill and Hillary for dinner. Though I would work more closely with Hillary in later years, when she was Secretary of State under President Obama, this was the first time I'd had the opportunity to engage in anything more than small talk with her. She was less naturally outgoing than her husband. Yet not only was she bright and articulate. She was barely less informed on the ins and outs of Middle East peace negotiations than the President. She, and Bill as well, also spoke with us about things well beyond the diplomacy of the Middle East: science, music, and our shared interest in history. What most struck Nava and me, however, was the way the Clintons interacted with each other. The scandal surrounding Monica Lewinsky was still fresh. I suppose we expected to see signs of tension. Whether they were there, we had no way of knowing. But what the two of them did palpably have was a deep respect for each other's intelligence, insight and creativity in looking for solutions where so many others saw only problems. It was impressive. Still, there was little small talk in the long discussions I had with the President. From the outset, I wanted him to know exactly what I hoped we could accomplish and how, in my view, we were most likely to get there. I wasn't trying to impose "ground rules" on the President of the United States, something I neither would nor could do. But I was explicit with him about my own approach the negotiations. I assured him I was prepared to be flexible. But I said I'd be relying on two critical assumptions. The first was that when we and the Americans agreed a position on a specific issue, there would be no unilateral "surprises" - by which I meant, though didn't say, things like the unfortunate American redefinition of Yitzhak's "pocket deposit" assurance regarding the Golan. The second assumption, I know, may seem overly legalistic. It was that, until and unless we reached a full and final agreement with either Syria or the Palestinians, any Israeli negotiating ideas or proposals would not be binding. If no agreement was reached, they would become null and void. I wanted to avoid a situation, as had happened so often in past negotiations, where an Israeli proposal was rejected by the Arab side but then treated as the opening position in the expectation of further concessions in later 325 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028173

/ BARAK / 40 talks. I did realize that, "null and void" or not, our proposals or suggestions would not simply disappear from memory. But I felt the point of principle was essential if Israel was going to be able to consider the kind of far-reaching concessions which final peace deals might require. In the end, I realized that we might simply discover that Assad, and certainly Arafat, were not willing or ready to make peace. We might, initially at least, have to settle for a more incremental step. "Right here in Camp David, Begin, Sadat and Carter couldn't complete the process," I pointed out. "They signed a "framework agreement' and it took months of further diplomacy to reach a peace treaty. Maybe we'll end up doing the same." But I told the President I was convinced that if we didn't try to get agreements, we'd have no way of knowing whether the will to make peace was there on the other side. Assad, I suspected, was the more likely to reciprocate. That was a major reason I wanted to start our efforts with him. But so far, his true intentions had never been tested, beyond his obvious determination to get back the Golan. Nor had Arafat's, beyond his focus on the detail and extent of West Bank redeployments. President Clinton did not object to an early effort to reopen our efforts with the Syrians. But he was worried about the effects of ignoring the already-creaking prospects of fulfilling the promise of Oslo. If we were going to delay focusing on that, Clinton told me, he needed to be able to assure Arafat the wait would be worth his while. What could we give the PLO leader in return for putting off the Wye redeployments further, he asked. And then, the real question on his mind: "Ehud, when we get to the final redeployment and a peace deal, how much of the West Bank are you prepared to hand back?" I simply didn't know at this stage. Much would depend on whether we could be sure Arafat could or would deliver a final peace. But even if I had known, I would have been reluctant to name a precise percentage. Though I had full trust in President Clinton, I knew that everything he and I said would be shared with at least a few of his closest policy aides and negotiators. Sooner or later, word would get to Arafat. When we did begin negotiations, he'd take whatever number I gave as a mere starting point. Still, I knew I had to signal the President that I was serious about negotiating with Arafat when the time came. I also knew the main source of his concern. In order to get the agreement at Wye, the President had signed on to a provision that the dimension of the third and final redeployment phase would be determined by Israel alone. By that stage, when we got there, Arafat would have 326 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028174

/ BARAK / 41 control of something like 40 percent of the West Bank. That meant - at least in theory - that Israel could limit phase-three to a mere token pullout, leaving the Palestinians with less than half of the territory. "I don't know what percentage, exactly," I replied. "But one of my cabinet ministers thinks that a formula of 70-10-20 would work, meaning 70 percent for the Palestinians, ten percent to allow us to retain and secure the largest of the settlement blocs, and the rest to be worked out in further talks." When he nodded, I added: "Peres thinks it could end up at 80-20, and says he thinks Arafat would find it hard to walk away from getting control of four-fifths of the West Bank. But it's not about the number. It's about the area needed for the major settlements, and whatever else is required to safeguard our security. Beyond that, we don't need a single inch of the West Bank, and we won't ask for a single inch." I replied in much the same vein when President Clinton urged me to help kick- start new talks with Assad by formally reaffirming Yitzhak's "pocket deposit" on the Golan Heights. As with the Palestinians, I was not going to cede a major negotiating card - our only real negotiating card - before we had any indication Assad was serious about making peace. But I did feel it was necessary to reassure Clinton that I was serious. I told him that, if and when the Syrians showed real signs of readiness to address our needs in a peace agreement, I would reaffirm the "pocket deposit." I'd come to Washington hoping that President Clinton would be with me on the main issues of substance. But what I needed most at this point was his support on the procedural decisions I'd made in order to get to real peace negotiations: engaging with Syria first, and shifting the emphasis on the Palestinian track away from the redeployments toward the core permanent-status issues we'd have to resolve in order to get a peace agreement. What emerged from my first meetings with President Clinton was essentially a trade-off. He knew I would be ready to make concessions in pursuit of genuine peace. I was confident that on the route that I was proposing to take, he would have my back. But what I couldn't be sure of was whether my own government would have my back. On paper, we had a comfortable Knesset majority: 75 out of the 120 seats. But I knew it was inherently vulnerable, both to friction between the Orthodox parties and assertively secular MKs from Meretz and inside Labor, and to possible defections over the concessions we might have to consider in peace 327 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028175

/ BARAK / 42 negotiations. The first stirrings of discontent had begun even before I went to see Clinton. On the basis of my commitment merely to try for peace, Arik Sharon had presented a no-confidence motion in the Knesset. It was never going to pass. But only days after I'd made him Interior Minister, Natan Sharansky let it be known he was going to vote against us. He didn't. He stayed away from the chamber, in effect abstaining. But I'd been put on notice. I did lose my first coalition partner in September: the small United Torah Judaism party, with five Knesset seats. It wasn't over land-for-peace. In an echo of a similar crisis that brought down the government during Rabin's first spell as Prime Minister in the 1970s, it was over a violation of the Jewish Sabbath. It turned out that Israel's state electric company had been transporting a huge steam- condensation machine from the manufacturing site near Haifa to a power plant in Ashdod. The unit was the size of a small apartment. It weighed 100 tons. It couldn't be driven across the country without bringing weekday traffic to a standstill. The obvious solution was to do it when road use was lightest, on Shabbat. Precisely the same procedure had been followed - 24 times - under Bibi. But when I asked a United Torah Judaism leader why he'd seemed happy when Likud had waved it through, he replied: "Past sins cannot pardon future ones." Eli Suissa, one of the Shas ministers in the cabinet, took his side, saying: "Every hour is good for the keeping of Shabbat." Most other ministers agreed with me that we should stand firm. So I did. But UTJ walked out of the government. Shas did remain. But I was now increasingly certain that at some stage its ministers, too, would leave. In the midst of the Sharanksy rebellion, Haim Ramon, who was the minister in charge of liaising with the Knesset, insisted I "punish" him for his political grandstanding. "You should fire Sharansky. Act like a leader!" I just laughed. "The coalition doesn't need a leader," I replied. "It needs therapy." In truth, I suspected that if we ever got near to a peace agreement with Assad or Arafat, even therapy might not help. But that was a main reason that I'd promised a referendum on any final peace deals. I believed that in the choice between concessions, even painful ones, and a genuine peace deal with Syria or the Palestinians, by far most Israelis would choose peace. I relied on a strong, close team around me, people I knew well and who shared my determination to stay focused on the central goal: to put Israel in a position where its citizens could be given that choice. I made Danny Yatom, my former 328 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028176

/ BARAK / 43 sayeret deputy, my chief of staff. The negotiating team also included Uri Saguy, former head of military intelligence; Gilad Sher, a gifted lawyer I'd known for a quarter of a century and who had been a company commander in my armored brigade in the 1970s; and Amnon Lipkin, the paratroop commander at Chinese Farm and my successor as ramatkal when I left the army. Also, Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Moroccan-born, Oxford-educated historian and diplomat who had run against me for the Labor leadership. Shlomo had a gift for systematic analysis and keen judgement, especially on security issues, which I highly valued. It did not escape the attention of Israeli commentators, or other politicians, that almost all of them were former soldiers whom I'd known from my time in uniform. But that observation missed a more important point: we were all members of the "generation of 1967 and 1973." We had been soldiers during the Six-Day War. In the years immediately after it, like almost all Israelis, we had allowed ourselves to believe that our victory had been so comprehensive, and so quick, that any threat from the defeated Arab states was gone for good. We assumed that inevitably, inexorably, they would realize they needed to sue for peace, and that there was no particular urgency on our part to do anything more than wait. Then, on Yom Kippur 1973, all of that had been turned on its head. We had not only learned the lessons, of 1973. We had internalized them. Even had we not known of the danger of a new Palestinian campaign of terror, the option of simply watching and waiting - and assuming that our military strength, which was now even greater, could make events around us stand still - would not have made sense to us. Besides, as I remarked to Danny and others, to do so would run against the founding purpose of Zionism: to establish a state where Jews would no longer be victims of events, but would take control of their destiny and try to shape them. *** Yet making peace, like making war, takes two. Much as I'd wanted to begin with Syria, until well into the autumn of 1999 President Assad was holding firm on his insistence that without our "deposit," without a prior agreement that he'd get back the Golan, there could be no substantive progress. This was particularly frustrating because I was getting reports from our intelligence services, and 329 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028177

/ BARAK / 44 Western envoys who had seen the Syrian president, that Assad's many years of health problems had left him almost skeletally frail, even at times disoriented Even my own negotiating team urged me to concentrate on the Palestinians instead. President Clinton kept stressing the importance of showing Arafat at least some movement on the Oslo front. In September 1999, I took a first, significant step in that direction. I agreed to a timetable that would deliver the Wye redeployments by the end of January 2000, while also committing us to negotiating a framework agreement, on the model of the Begin-Sadat Camp David accords, on the "permanent-status" peace issues. In early November, I joined Clinton and Arafat for talks around an event in Oslo - a deliberate echo of the optimism with which the peace process had begun, held on the fourth anniversary of Rabin's assassination. Both Leah Rabin and Peres came with me. Its centerpiece was a memorial service, at which Leah spoke very movingly of the need for both sides to finish the work Yitzhak had begun, a responsibility I pledged that we would do everything in our power to fulfill. Only Arafat struck a discordant note. He paired a tribute to Rabin with a polemic call for an end to "occupation, exile and settlements." After the ceremony, he, President Clinton and I met at the American ambassador's residence. I was still struck by Arafat's public comments: by his apparent desire, or need, to play to hardliners back home in what was supposed to be a time to remember and honor Yitzhak. I didn't raise his remarks directly, but I told him that each of us was approaching a moment of truth for the future of our people. The decisions required wouldn't be easy politically, for either of us. "But if we don't have the courage to make them, we'll be burying thousands of our people." Worse, I said, those deaths would not advance his people's position, or mine, by a single inch. When future Palestinian and Israeli leaders did finally prove equal to the challenge of making peace, they'd be looking at the same conflict, requiring the same compromises. "The only difference will be the size of our cemeteries." Arafat nodded occasionally. But he said little, beyond saying that he considered Rabin to have been a friend, and repeating his now-familiar, nonspecific, pledge to "do what is necessary" for peace. "The hardest part won't be the tough decisions in negotiations," I continued. "It won't be facing each other. It will be facing our own people." We would need to make the case openly, honestly, strongly that the peace agreement we reached was in the interest of both Israelis and Palestinians. And in this, each of us had a 330 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028178

/ BARAK / 45 responsibility to support the other. With President Clinton looking on, I steered Arafat toward the window of the ambassador's fifth-floor apartment. "Look down," I said. "Imagine that we each have parachutes, and we're going to jump together. But I have my hand on your ripcord, and you are holding mine. To land safely we have to help each other... And if we don't jump, many, many innocent people who are now walking the streets of Gaza and Ramallah and Hebron, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, will die." Arafat again just nodded, leaving me, and the President, unsure whether anything I'd said had struck home. The true test of that would come only when we got to the stage of negotiations when the "difficult decisions" could not be evaded. Yet only weeks after I returned from Oslo, the focus did finally shift to the Syrians. President Assad suddenly signalled his willingness to resume talks without any preconditions - a message he delivered first to my British Labor Party friend Michael Levy, who was visiting Damascus as Tony Blair's roving Mideast envoy, and then to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Assad said he would send Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al- Sharaa to meet me for initial talks in Washington in December, ahead of a full- scale, US-mediated attempt to negotiate peace at the start of the new year. The broad terms of a potential deal had long been clear, both to us and the Syrians. The danger was always that the process would get derailed, or never really get started, due to domestic political opposition. Syria had a tightly state-controlled media and an intelligence service concerned mainly with crushing any signs of dissidence. That meant Assad's main concern was to ensure broad support, or at least acquiescence, from top military and party figures. In Israel, however, every sign of a concession would risk igniting charges that we were "selling out" to Syria. The Likud and the political right would obviously denounce the idea of giving up the Golan Heights, even though Bibi had been ready to do just that when he was Prime Minister. But even on the left, there was little enthusiasm for returning the Golan. There were far fewer Israeli settlers there than on the West Bank, not even 20,000. But most of them, far from being religiously motivated ideologues, were Labor supporters. And almost no Israel, of any political stripe, 331 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028179

/ BARAK / 46 viewed Hafez al-Assad as a natural partner for peace. For years, he'd been a constant, sneering presence on our northern border, denouncing not only Sadat but any Arab leader who'd shown willingness to engage or negotiate with Israel. Amos Oz, one of our finest writers and a cultural icon for Labor Zionists, probably put it best. He said the Syrians seemed to think that "we will give them the Golan, and they'll send us a receipt by fax." The consensus was: forget Assad. Keep the Golan. In fact, before I left for the US, the Knesset voted on whether it supported my attempt to negotiate an agreement with Syria. We could muster only 47 votes, 14 short of a majority. An opinion poll found only 13 percent of Israelis favored a full withdrawal from the Golan. The message I drew from this was not that we should give up on the chances of a peace agreement. After all, before Begin and Sadat went to Camp David in 1978, an almost equally tiny minority of Israelos had been in favor of withdrawing from the Sinai. Yet once they had seen the other side of the equation - full, formal peace with our most powerful neighbor - the opposition all but evaporated. The problem I saw was that if we and the Syrians couldn't find a way to insulate our negotiations from leaks, speculation and a swirl of opposition to our efforts at home, we'd never get to the key issues of substance. I'd been making that point to the Americans for weeks. At first, I tried to persuade them to hold the talks at Camp David, ensuring the same, media-free isolation that had yielded the historic Israeli-Egypt agreement. But Dennis Ross replied that the very association of Camp David with that breakthrough meant it would be a non-starter for President Assad. I then suggested we consider sites outside of the US: NATO's Incerlik air base in Turkey, for instance, a British base in Cyprus, an American naval ship in the Mediterranean. Even, half-jokingly, an abandoned missile silo in South Dakota. Yet the point I was making was serious, in fact critical, I believed, if the talks were going to have a chance. In the end, the Americans settled on a beautiful, and undeniably remote, town in West Virginia called Shepherdstown. But from the outset, I was worried it couldn't provide the kind of environment we needed. As soon as our plane landed at Andrews Air Force base outside Washington, I got a call from the head of our advance team. He told me the news media were already there and that reporters - Israeli, Arab, American and European - could be seen chatting with American, Israeli and Syrian officials in the town's coffee shops. I knew the press would have to publish something about potential concessions as the negotiations proceeded 332 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028180

/ BARAK / 47 Whether the stories were true wouldn't matter. They would still make the real bargaining necessary for peace far more difficult, perhaps even impossible. I also had doubts whether Assad was ready for real peace: embassies, open borders, personal contact between Syrians and Israelis, and ideally an internationally backed free-trade manufacturing area on the Golan to give Syria a tangible stake in ensuring the peace lasted. In earlier talks, under Shimon Peres, Syrian negotiators had at one stage brought a message from Assad. What did we mean, he wanted to know, with all this emphasis on peace, peace, peace? Syria had peace with El Salvador, but without any of the trappings we were insisting on. Peace, in Assad's mind, seemed to mean merely an absence of war. Plus, of course, getting back the Golan. I did, however, come ready to negotiate. Though I was still not prepared to reconfirm Rabin's "pocket deposit" as a mere ticket of admission, my position remained essentially the one I had worked out with Yitzhak in formulating the deposit: IAMNAM, "if all my needs are met." Meaning that if Assad showed a readiness to deal with Israel's requirements in a peace deal, I did, of course, recognize we would leave the Golan Heights. In addition to early-warning facilities, we envisaged an open border with a demilitarized area on either side, as well as guarantees that important sources of water for Israel would not be blocked or diverted. As Assad knew, despite his presumably feigned puzzlement about Syria's arrangements with El Salvador, we also needed the agreement to embody a mutual commitment to real peace: through elements like an exchange of ambassadors and the establishment of the free-trade zone. As with the Begin-Sadat peace, we assumed that our Golan withdrawal would come in phases, parallel to the implementation of the other provisions of the treaty. In our initial meetings in Shepherdstown, Foreign Minister al-Sharaa showed no inclination even to talk about these other issues. So on the second afternoon we were there, I suggested to President Clinton the Americans try to break the logjam by drafting a paper of their own. It would detail all the issues in an eventual agreement, with parenthetical references to those on which we and the Syrians still differed. Then each side could respond with a view toward narrowing the gaps. The President liked the idea. So did Al-Sharaa. Three days later, the President presented the eight-page American draft. With his customary eloquence, he emphasized the need for us to use it as a springboard for peace, not to score political points, and each side agreed to take a couple of days to look through it. It 333 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028181

/ BARAK / 48 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 334 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028182

/ BARAK / 49 al-Hama, which I knew Assad had said he considered rightfully Syrian during talks held under Rabin. But the details turned out not to matter. President Clinton agreed to present the map to Assad in what we both hoped would be a step to reopening the path for peace. The two of them met in Geneva in late March. Though the President also came with full details of our positions on the other negotiating issues, he began by telling Assad that I had agreed to the Syrians' longstanding point of principle on our future border: it would be "based on the June 4, 1967 line" before the Six-Day War. Then, the President unfurled the map. It was shortly after five in the afternoon in Israel when Clinton phoned me. He sounded as if he'd been punched in the stomach. "Ehud, it's not going to work," he said. "The moment I started, he tuned out. He just said: 'Do I get my land?' I tried to get him to listen, but he just kept repeating: 'Do I get all my land?' According the President, Assad would countenance nothing less than being able to sit on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and "dip his feet in the water." Clinton said he'd done his best, and that was true. "I understand the effort is over," I replied. "Probably, he's too frail and ill by now." In fact, Assad would die of leukemia barely two months later. His immediate focus was on ensuring an uncontested succession to his son, Bashar. When Dennis Ross came to see me in Jerusalem, I think he expected to find me more distraught than I felt. Of course, I was disappointed. But I told him I was grateful that Clinton had stayed with a negotiating effort that had been frustrating for all of us. When I became Prime Minister, I'd assured the Americans that as long as our vital security interests were protected, I was ready to go further than any previous Israeli leader to get peace with Syria, and with Arafat too. I might fail, but it would not be for lack of trying. I believed that even a "failure" would tell us something: whether the other side was truly ready for peace. With Syria, I told Dennis, "It's not what we hoped for. But at least now we know." 335 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028183

/ BARAK / 50 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 336 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028184

/ BARAK / 51 couldn't guarantee anything. In the months ahead I would come to understand what that meant, because it would happen again. I don't think Arafat himself orchestrated the violence. Maybe he couldn't have stopped it completely. But I have no doubt - nor did President Clinton - that he stood aside and let it happen. Even worse - since he did have control over them - his security forces, with arms that Israel had provided as part of Oslo, fired on our troops as they tried to keep order. All of this, while I stood in the Knesset battling to get approval to give him the villages. As news arrived in the chamber of gunfire just a couple of miles away, it was not just Likud or other right-wing MKs who were furious. I certainly was. Yet I also knew that the price of losing the vote would be the fall of the government. We did win the vote, by a margin of eight, meaning that I now had full authority to return the three villages. Fuming over what had happened, however, I called President Clinton and told him I was going to delay the handover. I was not about to return the villages under gunfire, or reward Arafat for breaking even his existing security commitments. That meant that prospects for serious negotiations with the Palestinians were again on hold. But another, immutable, priority would probably have delayed any new initiative anyway: my pledge to get our soldiers out of Lebanon within a year of the election. I was determined to go ahead with it not just because I'd promised Israelis to do so. It was because I knew from experience that without setting a deadline and sticking to it, it wouldn't happen. I had been against keeping the security zone from the start. Over the years, many Israelis, both inside the military and beyond, had come to accept we would be better off pulling out. It wasn't just the attritional loss of Israeli soldiers' lives, but the fact that there was no obvious point, and no obvious end, to our mission there. Especially when major tragedies occurred - like the collision of two Israeli helicopters a couple of years earlier, leaving scores of young soldiers dead - there was talk about a withdrawal. Yet there was always a reason to reconsider, to put it off: a Hizbollah attack in the security zone, accusations of weakness from right-wing politicians, or simple caution in the kirya. The only way to get it done was to decide, and to do it. My self-imposed deadline for the pullout was now just eight weeks away. Hizbollah had already begun escalating pressure on our outposts in south Lebanon with the obvious aim of making the withdrawal as difficult as possible. They were also targeting our local surrogates, the Maronite-led South Lebanese Army militia. I'd been meeting regularly with Shaul Mofaz, the former paratroop officer who 337 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028185

/ BARAK / 52 was now chief of staff, to ensure we had a plan to get our troops out as quickly and safely as possible once the order was given. But complex though the operational issues were, that was not the most difficult part. The withdrawal had not just a military aim, but a critical political one: to denude Hizbollah, with full international support, of its "occupation" fig-leaf for targeting and terrorizing the towns and villages of northern Israel. Shaul and a number of other generals in the kirya tried to make the security argument for keeping several small hilltop outposts just north of the border. But I insisted not a single Israeli soldier or emplacement remain on Lebanese soil. Throughout the spring, we had been coordinating every detail of the planned pullout with UN cartographers on the ground, to ensure that they, too, recognized it would be a full withdrawal to the border, fulfilling the terms of the Security Council resolution adopted after the 1982 Lebanon War. Ordinarily, an operation on this scale would have been carried out over a period of weeks. But when we handed over a pair of military strongholds to the South Lebanon Army, and Hizbollah promptly moved in to take them over, it was clear that even several days might risk chaos, and casualties, as we left. The head of the northern command now supported an immediate withdrawal, and I agreed Frustratingly, we did have to hold off for a further 36 hours, in order to ensure the UN staff on the ground could complete their verification process. But on the afternoon of May 23, alongside Shaul Mofaz at a command post on the border, I ordered the pullout of all Israeli troops, vehicles and other equipment within the space of 24 hours. I then flew back to Jerusalem for an urgent meeting to secure formal cabinet approval. The field commanders ended up getting it done in less than 24 hours, mostly overnight, without a single Israeli casualty. For nearly two decades, our troops had been serving and dying on a strip of land on which we had no claim, no settlements, and for which there was no rational security need Finally, we were out. As I should have anticipated, there were accusations from Hizbollah and its allies that our UN-verified withdrawal was incomplete. At issue was a cluster of villages where Lebanon meets Syria, known as the Sheba' a Farms. But as I knew first-hand, they were not part of Lebanon. I'd met their Syrian inhabitants when I helped "capture" the villages at the very end of the 1973 war on the Golan. When Syria now publicly supported Hizbollah's efforts to get the UN to say the area was in fact part of Lebanon, I decided to call their bluff. Through the Americans, I 338 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028186

/ BARAK / 53 suggested that Damascus confirm in writing that this part of the Golan was indeed Lebanese. The Syrians never responded. Equally predictable were the prophets of doom on the Israeli right, who said the Lebanon withdrawal would bury northern Israel in Katyushas and in blood. The reality was that in the half-dozen years following the pullout, the Israel-Lebanon border was quieter than at any time since the late 1960s. The main personal impact of the withdrawal, however, was to remind me of why I'd run for Prime Minister in the first place. Despite the challenges, and inevitable setbacks and frustrations, of my first year in office, I was in a position to act on what I believed to be critical issues for my country's future. On Lebanon, I'd succeeded, mainly because the withdrawal was something we could do unilaterally. With Syria, I'd tried hard to get an agreement, only to find that Assad was unwilling, unable, or perhaps too ill to join in the search for a deal. I still recognized, however, that no issue was more important to Israel's future than our conflict with the Palestinians. I knew that resolving it would be even tougher than the talks with the Syrians. But the only way to find out whether peace was possible was to try. So on the final day of May 2000, with the Lebanon pullout complete, I flew to Portugal - the site of a US-European summit - to see President Clinton. 339 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028187

/ BARAK / 54 Chapter Twenty-One President Clinton and I met the next morning. My aim was to persuade him that the time had come for a make-or-break summit with Yasir Arafat. I suspected it would not be easy to convince him, and it wasn't. But I made the argument that if we were to have any hope of moving Oslo forward, we now faced a stark choice. We were three years behind the timeline for starting work on a "permanent status" agreement, and only six months from an American election that would choose President Clinton's successor. We could, of course, pursue the Oslo process along its current, meandering path. But even though Bibi had slowed it down, that would inevitably mean Israel handing back yet more West Bank land to Arafat - in return for familiar, but still unfulfilled and untested, verbal assurances that he wanted peace. Each successive Israeli withdrawal reduced his incentive to engage of the core issues like final borders, refugees, or Jerusalem. I could not in good conscience justify that, either to myself or my country. The second option was the summit. I realized there was no guarantee it would succeed. But it would finally force Arafat to negotiate on the core issues - before the departure of an American President who had a grasp of the all issues and characters involved, and a personal commitment to converting the promise of Oslo into a genuine peace. The obvious political risk, for both Clinton and me, was that after convening a summit - with all the heightened expectations and pressures it would bring - we'd fail to get an agreement. Though I'd be more directly affected, however, it was a more straightforward choice for me. In part because I'd been in front-line politics so briefly, but mostly because of what I'd done for the three-and-a-half decades before then, I viewed the political risk as just one of many, and by no means the most important. That was an obvious weakness in me as a traditional politician. I would indeed pay a political price later on for having given too little heed, and perhaps underestimated, the reaction in Israel to the summit and what came after it. Yet as I tried to impress on President Clinton, there were risks in not holding a summit as well, along with the obvious reward of a full and final peace if it succeeded. If it failed? At least we would know a peace agreement with Arafat was impossible. In fact, amid the diplomatic drift since Oslo, it was clear there was no other way that we could know. 340 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028188

/ 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, 341 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028189

/ BARAK / 56 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." 342 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028190

/ BARAK / 57 A few days later, the "pre-endgame" around the summit began. Not in Washington or Jerusalem or Ramallah or Gaza, but in Kochav Yair. Nava and I still spent almost all our weekends there. We valued the quiet, or at least the slightly quieter, time away from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Some of my oldest army friends lived there as well: Danny Yatom, as well as Shaul Mofaz and Uzi Dayan, who was now deputy chief of staff. Newer colleagues, too, like Yossi Ginossar, a Shin Bet veteran who spoke fluent Arabic and, after working in the West Bank and Gaza in the late 1960s became one of the first Israelis to hold secret talks with Arafat, building up a personal relationship with him. Under both Rabin and Peres, he had been a valuable liaison with the Palestinian leader. Nowm under my Premiership as well. The summit seemed to me more important than ever, but I knew that only President Clinton could make it happen. Short of giving the Palestinians the whole list of short-term rewards they wanted, including the three villages, I knew Arafat was never going to be enthusiastic. But if Clinton was persuaded that a peace agreement was within reach, I had confidence he would make the effort. I had allowed Gili Sher and Shlomo Ben-Ami to go to Washington the week before for exploratory talks with Dennis Ross. Shlomo, as I knew he'd done in the back- channel talks with the Palestinians, had gone beyond anything that I would or could say at this stage in order to probe the edges of where an eventual compromise might be possible. Now Clinton had sent Dennis to Israel, with Madeleine Albright to follow at the end of the month, and I had to assume that their impressions would be critical to his decision on whether to bring me and Arafat to Camp David We agreed to meet Dennis and his team at Danny's house in Kochav Yair. By the time I'd made the pleasant Shabbat-afternoon stroll from our house, a few streets away, they were in the back garden sipping lemonade and munching on popcorn. I'd met often with Dennis during my year as Prime Minister, and I liked him. He was smart, knowledgeable and experienced. He'd worked under three US Presidents: Carter, Bush Senior and now Clinton. No American diplomat had been more indefatigably involved in the search for Middle East peace. And whatever his occasional frustrations, he also recognized I was ready to go further than any 343 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028191

/ BARAK / 58 previous Israeli leader in trying to get that peace. I knew that he would press me to tell him how far that actually was. He didn't ask directly. But each of his ostensibly theoretical questions was aimed at establishing whether I could give him enough for a summit to bridge the gaps on key issues. Could I accept a "trade-off between sovereignty and time?" Translation: could I give the Palestinians sovereignty over a larger part of the West Bank if we signed an agreement that would phase in their control? Could I accept the principle of land swaps? This meant giving Arafat land in areas bordering the West Bank, or in the Negev near Gaza, to compensate, at least partially, for the area we would keep for the major settlement blocs. What about applying my principle of "disengagement" between Israel and the Palestinians to Jerusalem? Meaning Arafat getting control of the predominantly Arab neighborhoods in the east of the city. Dennis knew my long-standing reluctance to commit to concessions until we got to real, final negotiations with Arafat. "We'll not reveal anything you tell us," he assured me. "We won't turn what you say into opening negotiating positions for Arafat. But if there is going to be a summit, the President wanted some answers." To Dennis's frustration, however, I could give him no specifics, beyond telling him: "You know me, Dennis. You know I'm serious about this. Of course, we will protect our vital security and national interests. But the problem in making peace won't be us, on the Israeli side, as long as Arafat shows a capacity and a will for decision." The translation of that, as I hoped and trusted he understood was that if and when Arafat demonstrated that he wanted a comprehensive peace between a new Palestinian state and the State of Israel - a definitive "end of conflict" as the international lawyers would describe it - I would place nothing, except our security and core national interests, in the way of getting an agreement. Madeleine Albright visited at the end of June. When she came to see me a day after meeting Arafat, she carried a request from the Palestinian leader: two weeks of "preparatory" talks before a summit. Again, I knew her mission was to bring back enough progress for the President to feel a summit was worth it. But again, I couldn't give her what she wanted. "I know what will happen in preparatory talks," I said. "We'll raise new ideas, which the Palestinians will reject, and ask for more." I don't know what she told Clinton, or Arafat. But Dennis called me the following day. He said that Arafat had agreed to attend a summit, and would leave the date up to the President. 344 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028192

/ BARAK / 59 When Clinton phoned me at the beginning of July, however, he still hadn't finally decided to hold the summit. I needed him to know that, on my side, he'd have a truly willing partner, aware of the political risk he'd be taking. Like Dennis, the President tried to probe my position on land swaps, and Palestinian sovereignty for at least some Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Finally, he asked if I would rule out those possibilities if they represented the difference between success or failure at a summit. I did not give him a definitive "yes." I said we could think through those issues together. But when he phoned again, on July 4 from Camp David, I felt I had to go further. I said that, for his ears only, I was willing to give him the assurance that, assuming that Arafat was willing to move toward us on core issues, I would consider limited, symbolic moves on both land swaps and Palestinian sovereignty in part of East Jerusalem. Clinton replied: the summit was on. It would begin at Camp David in one week's time, on July 11. *** Two days before leaving for the US, I brought my ministers together. "We can't know what will happen at a summit," I said. "But we have a responsibility to give it a chance, and recognize the situation in which we find ourselves. If we sit idle and don't even try, we'll face an eruption of violence, and never know whether we could have avoided it. If, God forbid, we fail to reach an agreement, there will also be violence. We will face a new reality more difficult than you can imagine. But if we do manage the strike a deal, we are going to change the map and history of the Middle East." I reminded them it would be up to Israelis to say yes or no, in a referendum, to the terms of any agreement we negotiated. "If we achieve a breakthrough, I'm confident they will do so, by a landslide." I said I would hold fast to a number of principles. There would be "no return to the 1967 lines," meaning that we would draw a new border with the West Bank to accommodate the largest settlement blocs. They were mostly around Jerusalem, or just beyond the 1967 border. In practical terms, over the years they had become part of Israel. Tens of thousands of people lived there. As the Americans and even the Palestinian negotiators recognized, no Israeli government, Labor or Likud, 345 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028193

/ BARAK / 60 would agree to make them part of a Palestinian state. The second principle was that "Jerusalem will remain united." It would not be cut into Jewish and Arab halves as had happened between 1948 and 1967. That, I knew, might prove tougher to carry through on. But even if I had to concede a degree of Palestinian control in parts of east Jerusalem, I expected to be able to retain Israeli sovereignty over the city. The third principle was that there would be "no foreign army west of the Jordan River." In other words, if we did hand back at least the major part of the West Bank, it would be demilitarized and we would have security control over the Jordan Valley. Finally, we would not "accept responsibility for the birth of the refugee problem and its solution." Though there could be a "right of return" into a new Palestinian state, we would not agree to rewrite the history of the 1948 war by sanctioning the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians inside the State of Israel I think it was the very fact we were talking about a comprehensive peace agreement that made it so hard for my Orthodox and right-of-center coalition partners. They didn't see the attraction of coming to final terms of peace. They knew it would mean concessions. There would be a Palestinian state. We would give up the great majority of Biblical Judaea and Samaria. While most of the settlers would remain, since they lived in the major blocs, those in more isolated settlements around the West Bank would have to be moved. They saw the prospect of a final peace only in terms of what we were giving up. They didn't see what we would gain: not just peace, and international recognition and endorsement for it. But normalcy: the central aim of Zionism. Jews living in a state like any other. Ever since 1967, we had been in control of the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. That was bad for them. But it had been bad for us too. Fifty-two years after the birth of our state, we still didn't have a permanent, internationally recognized border. Rather than dealing with our economic and social issues like other states, we were beset by internal divisions that were in no small part a result of our unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Shas, the National Religious Party and Sharansky's Yisrael ba'Aliyah were all threatening to pull out of the government because of the summit. Nothing I said could change their minds. Sharansky was the first to declare he was leaving. A few hours later, Shas and the NRP followed suit. If the Likud mustered the required 61 votes for the no-confidence motion it was introducing before I got on the plane to the US, the government would fall. If the parties that had left the coalition, with a total of 28 seats, went along with Arik Sharon, it wouldn't be close. As if that 346 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028194

/ BARAK / 61 wasn't enough, David Levy, my Foreign Minister, told me he would not be joining me at Camp David. He wasn't resigning, at least not yet. But he knew that the final decisions at the summit would be mine, he feared it would fail, and didn't want to share in the consequences. None of this meant I wasn't going. Even if the no-confidence vote succeeded, the new Israeli electoral system, with its separate vote for Prime Minister, meant I would remain in office, at least until the summit was over. In a nationally televised message, I reminded the country that I'd been elected with nearly two million votes. I felt I had a responsibility, and a mandate, that went beyond party politics. "I must rise above the political arguments, and seek out all possibilities on the way to a peace agreement that will end the conflict, and the blood, between us and our neighbors." I made the same points before the Knesset. I did, of course, want parliamentary support. But I was acting on a mandate from the people of Israel. It was they, in a referendum, who would ultimately decide on anything we might agree. When the Knesset votes were counted, thanks to the fact two dozen MKs abstained, both sides lost. Arik fell seven votes short of a majority. So the government survived. But those opposed to the summit got more votes than we did: 54 to 52. There were several consolations as I prepared to fly out from Ben-Gurion airport. Shas leader Eli Yishai passed me an envelope on the tarmac. Inside was a note from Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the Shas spiritual leader whom I'd met with privately after the election and a number of times since. He wanted to wish me good luck. Nearly 30 reserve generals also issued a public message of support. Perhaps most encouragingly, a newspaper poll found a majority of Israelis - 55 percent to 45 - believed I was right to go to Camp David and that I had a mandate to make concessions in return for peace. David Levy came over to talk before I boarded. "I doubt we'll get an agreement," he said. I told him what I was telling other ministers, what I'd told reporters and, in fact what I had told Nava. "The odds are fifty-fifty." The reporters took this as coy, or deliberately deceptive. So I added that it was not because I knew something they didn't. "It's because there are two possible outcomes, and I don't know which one will happen." The gaps of substance were bridgeable. The question was whether both sides wanted peace, and whether each had made a serious, strategic decision to go for it. I'd made that choice. But I had no way of knowing whether Yasir Arafat had. 347 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028195

/ BARAK / 62 I was confident of finally answering that question at the summit. Camp David was different from Shepherdstown. No reporters would be there. Mobile phones were banned. Each delegation had one landline. We'd also be operating under a time constraint. President Clinton was due to leave for a G8 summit in Japan on July 19. The gave us barely a week. I did wonder whether that would be enough, even if both sides were committed to reaching a peace agreement. Yet I hoped it would at least provide the possibility, as it had for Begin and Sadat twenty-two years earlier, to reach a framework agreement that open the door to a final peace treaty. Not just the time, but the numbers were limited. We and the Palestinians could have only a dozen members in our negotiating teams. Some of my choices were automatic: Danny Yatom; Shlomo Ben-Ami, whom I'd made acting Foreign Minister in Levy's absence; Amnon Lipkin and Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein; Gilead Sher and his chief negotiating aide, Gidi Grinstein. I also took along a strong security team, including Shlomo Yanai, head of strategic planning the kirya, and Israel Hason, a former deputy-head of Shin Bet. There was another important, if less obvious, inclusion: Dan Meridor. A leading member of the Likud before he'd formed the Center Party at the last election, Dan was not just a friend. He was a man of rock-solid integrity, with a strong moral and ethical compass, who put principle over party. He was also a lawyer, and had been Minister of Justice under Bibi. Along with Attorney-General Rubinstein, I knew I'd have a gifted legal team if we got to the point of considering the specifics of a peace agreement. There was another consideration as well. Both Dan and Elyakim were right-of-center politically. I felt I needed their voices as a kind of litmus for the tough decisions, and concessions, I might have to consider if an agreement did prove possible. I was not nervous as we crossed the Atlantic, though even those who knew me best assumed I would be. Nava had sent me off with a list of dietary instructions, almost like a surgeon general's warning that Camp David might prove hazardous to my health. But I felt prepared. I'd gone to every source I could find about the Begin-Sadat summit. I knew there would be periods of crisis and that at certain points I'd have to allow leeway for my own team to explore possible compromises beyond our set negotiating limits. Yet none of this altered my belief that holding the summit was the right thing to do, nor my confidence in being able to play my part. I did feel a huge responsibility. Decades after our conflict with the 348 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028196

/ BARAK / 63 Palestinians had begun, seven years after Oslo, I was making an attempt, with the participation of the President of the United States, to shape the final terms of peace. I knew I carried the conflicting hopes and fears of Israelis with me. And the odds really were 50-50. Either we'd come home with an agreement, to be placed before the country in a referendum. Or we would know that, at least for now, it was beyond reach. 349 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028197

/ BARAK / 64 Chapter Twenty-Two If I believed in omens, I might have turned back as soon as we got to the summit. We reached Camp David a little before ten at night on July 10, after helicoptering from Andrews Air Force base near Washington. When we arrived, it was pouring with rain. The cabin assignments were also a surprise. I was given the one that Anwar Sadat had at the first Camp David summit in 1978. Arafat got Menachem Begin's. Still, the cabins themselves, each named for a tree, were large and pleasant. Mine was called Dogwood. It had a bedroom, two large sitting rooms and a terrace. I took it as a good omen that it was the same one where Nava and I had stayed during our visit with the President Clinton and Hillary right after I'd become Prime Minister. With just eight days to address the core issues of decades of conflict, we got down to work the next morning. Clinton began by meeting Arafat, as I went through the Americans' strategy for the negotiations with Madeleine Albright, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. Then I met the President in his cabin, which was called Aspen. He told me that while Arafat still thought I was trying to "trick him" into an agreement, and didn't think we'd necessarily get a deal, he did accept I was serious about trying. My fear was still the opposite, that Arafat was not serious. Yet my hope was that the isolated environment of Camp David, and the wide public expectation that we would accomplish what Sadat and Begin had done there before, would deliver the breakthrough that I believed ought to be possible. For that to happen, I told the President, I believed it was essential that Arafat truly understood the importance of what was at stake. Not just the cost of failure, but what was potentially on offer: the creation of the Palestinian state he sought, with the full acceptance of Israel and the support of the world. I wish I could say I was optimistic when Clinton led the two of us into Laurel Lodge, the larger cabin a few hundreds downhill from Aspen, for the opening session of the summit. The scene at the front door - with me bustling Arafat ahead, with the intention of allowing him to enter before me - yielded the best-known image from the summit. Captured by the television crews allowed into the compound for the ceremonial opening, it spawned a cottage industry of political speculation and armchair psychoanalysis purporting to decipher what it meant. Some said it was an encouraging sign of "chemistry" between me and Arafat, a not 350 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028198

/ BARAK / 65 unreasonable guess, since both of us were grinning throughout. Others concluded that because each of us was trying to nudge the other to go in first, it was a sign of underlying conflict: neither of us wanted to allow the other the privilege of appearing to be polite. Still others, bizarrely, said that it was an ornate Middle Eastern power play, with the aim of demonstrating that I was ultimately in control of proceedings. In fact, it would turn out to be a singularly apt image of what happened in the days that followed: a reluctant Arafat, an engaged and expectant Prime Minister of Israel, a smiling and hopeful Clinton. We did begin on a note of optimism. In my opening statement, I said: "Now is the time for us to make a peace of the brave, to find a way to live together side by side with mutual respect, and to create a better future for our children." Arafat said he hoped that the peace Begin and Sadat had made at Camp David would prove an auspicious example. "With the help of President Clinton, we could reach a deal that is good for both sides." But it was going to take more than noble words. The details of a peace treaty, or even a framework agreement, were going to require negotiation. Both Arafat and I arrived fully aware of the shape of the "hard decisions" I'd referred to months earlier when we met in Oslo. On his side, it would come down to whether he was prepared for a comprehensive, final peace. A true "end of conflict," with no get-out clauses, no strings left untied, no further claims on either side. In concrete terms, this would mean abandoning his claim for a notional hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to resettle inside the pre-1967 borders of the State of Israel. And what were Israel's difficult decisions? In return for the end of conflict, I would have to deal away the maximum possible part of the West Bank, certainly well above the 80 percent I'd quoted Shimon Peres as suggesting when I'd first met with President Clinton. I would have to accept the idea of land swaps, if necessary, in order to bring the overall percentage as near as possible to the equivalent of the whole of the West Bank. I would have to be flexible on the arrangements to ensure Israeli security oversight over the Jordan Valley. And if a true peace was really on the table, both Arafat and I would have to consider some form of compromise on the most emotionally and symbolically difficult issue of all: the future governance of Jerusalem. On the first evening, we met as an Israeli delegation to discuss our position for the days ahead. Gili Sher and Danny Yatom helped me keep a clear overall picture of proceedings throughout the summit. Our secure landline was operated by a Shin 351 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028199

/ BARAK / 66 Bet technician. I assumed that, one way or another, the Americans could listen in, but was fairly confident we were beyond the electronic earshot of the Palestinians. I kept myself fully informed of, but at a distance from, the specific work of our five negotiating teams. Though I could not have stayed engaged with all of them at the same time, I also hoped the arrangement would give them an opportunity to explore any realistic opportunity for a breakthrough and any sign of flexibility on Arafat's side - without committing me until there was such flexibility. Yet for the first couple of days of the summit, there was not only no sign of flexibility. There was little meaningful engagement. Dennis Ross and his team drew up a paper setting out the main issues. For those on which we differed, our positions were marked with "I" and "P". It wasn't until around midnight on day- two that the we got a first look at the American draft. The main, unhappy, surprise was Jerusalem. This crucial issue was not marked with "I" or "P". It said outright that there could be two capitals, one Israeli and one Palestinian, within the city of Jerusalem. I was not opposed to the Palestinians calling Jerusalem the capital of their state. But even in follow-up talks after Oslo, when Yossi Beilin and Abu Mazen had explored avenues toward a possible resolution of the Jerusalem question, the maximum understanding was that Israel might expand the existing city limits to accommodate the "two capital" solution. The Palestinians' capital would be in Abu Dis, one of the villages Arafat had asked me to hand back in May. The way the American document was worded suggested dividing Jerusalem as it now was: something ruled out by all Israeli politicians, of all parties, ever since 1967. When I phoned President Clinton, he asked me to come talk. We sat on the back terrace of his cabin, looking out incongruously on a beautifully tended golf hole installed by Dwight Eisenhower. I told the President that after all the hours we had spent together, I'd felt blindsided by the inclusion of a proposal on Jerusalem that went beyond anything we'd talked about. "It was my mistake," he replied, obviously already aware through his negotiators of the error. He said that he'd put pressure on his negotiators to get the document finished, and that Dennis hadn't had time to read it through. But it was already being fixed: the word "expanded" would be added to the Jerusalem section. I was grateful for that, but told Clinton I was concerned that even this "I and P" paper might have the unintended effect of delaying any real progress. "Since it's an American document, it gives the Palestinians no incentive to compromise," I said, suggesting that it might be better 352 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028200

/ BARAK / 67 simply to withdraw the paper. Clinton's answer encouraged, and surprised, me. "We agree," he said. "The paper no longer exists." It soon turned out the Palestinians were unhappy with it too, but for another reason. On the lookout for validation of Arafat's insistence that Camp David was an Israeli "trap" , they were convinced that the paper had Israel's fingerprints all over it. That wasn't true. The one change we'd insisted on was because it misrepresented our position on Jerusalem. Still, since Dennis had added the word "expanded" to the Jerusalem section in longhand, the Palestinians were convinced of Israel co-authorship. In fact, three days into the summit, the mood among the Palestinians seemed increasingly aggrieved. Not just the Americans, but some members of my own team, were urging me to show more "personal warmth" towards Arafat. I did always exchange greetings and pleasantries with him at mealtimes in Laurel Lodge, but even there, I admit, that I didn't exactly show enthusiasm, much less ebullience. After one dinner, when I'd been placed between the Palestinian leader and Chelsea Clinton, the President's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, asked me why, rather than talking to Arafat, I'd spent almost the entire time chatting with Chelsea. My response was only half-joking: "Given the choice, who wouldn't?" It wasn't only that I believed a charm initiative would come over as contrived. I didn't want to risk misleading Arafat, the other Palestinians and possibly the Americans as well, by giving them the impression I was satisfied with the progress of the summit, or felt that we were heading towards any serious engagement and compromise on the core issues. I had met Arafat many times before Camp David. I had made it clear in all of those meeting that, despite differences on a range of difficult issues, I did want a final peace agreement and that I was ready to consider the tough decisions necessary to make it possible. At Camp David, I was not against meeting Arafat as a matter of principle. I simply felt the time for such a meeting, if it came, would be at the moment that we saw at least some signal of a readiness on his part to negotiate seriously. Still, given the strength of feeling among some of my own negotiators, I felt a responsibility to give it a try. I told Yossi Ginossar, the former Shin Bet officer who was closest to the Palestinian leader among the Israelis, to set up an informal meeting. I added, to Yossi's obvious satisfaction and surprise, that I'd be willing to have the meeting in Arafat's cabin if that's what he preferred. The next afternoon, I went there for tea and baklava. Abu Mazen, his top political adviser and the main 353 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028201

/ BARAK / 68 Palestinian architect of Oslo, was with him, along with a more junior aide who served the tea and sweets. At least this time, Arafat didn't take notes as we spoke. The mood was friendly. We talked about a whole range of issues. With ony one exception: what was really happening, or what should happen, in the summit talks. I found the exercise disappointing as a result. But Yossi Ginossar assured me it would help the atmosphere, and would eventually translate into negotiating progress. "I hope so," I said It wasn't until day-four that real talks began. The Americans arranged for negotiating teams from both sides on borders, the refugee issue, and Jerusalem to meet with President Clinton. The Palestinians participated, but showed no sign at all of a readiness to compromise. Borders should have been the most straightforward. Assuming we wanted a deal, it was about sitting down with a map and working out how to address both sides' arguments. But Arafat's representative in the meeting - the Oslo negotiator Abu Ala'a - said he wouldn't even discuss borders without a prior agreement to land swaps ensuring Palestinian control over an area equivalent to 100 percent of the West Bank. Shlomo Ben-Ami did try to find a way around this. He suggested the Palestinians assume that to be the case for the purposes of the meeting, so that at least there could be meaningful discussion of the border, including the provisions Israel wanted in order to retain the major settlement blocks. President Clinton agreed that made sense. He said that without talking about the substance of such issues, there wasn't going to be a deal. Even Abu Ala'a seemed receptive, according to Shlomo. But he insisted that he would have to ask Arafat first whether it was okay. On refugees, pretty much the same thing happened. The Americans, and I assumed at that point even the Palestinians, knew that a peace deal would be impossible if we agreed to hundreds of thousands of refugees entering Israel - in effect leaving the state created in 1948 with a Jewish minority. But when President Clinton began trying to narrow down details of a compromise resettlement package - how many refugees would return, where they would go, and how to arrange international financial support for them - Abu Mazen insisted that nothing could be discussed until without a prior Israeli acceptance of the "principle of the right of return." On Jerusalem, according to Gilead Sher, the President didn't even try to find common ground on the core issue: sovereignty. Instead he used the formula Shlomo Ben-Ami had suggested, telling each side to proceed on the assumption sovereignty was decided in its favour, and to concentrate instead on how everyday 354 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028202

/ BARAK / 69 municipal functions and daily life would be divided between Israel and the Palestinians under a peace agreement. When I convened our negotiators in my cabin to take stock of the logjam, I was getting more and more skeptical of finding a way to get to actual negotiation on the "hard decisions" I assumed both sides knew we'd have to make. I told our team we could not play that game. Until there was at least some movement from Arafat, I didn't want them suggesting any Israeli concessions. We'd obviously get nothing in return. The summit would fail. Despite my repeated insistence both to the Americans and Palestinians that, without an agreement, any Israeli suggestions would be null and void, that didn't mean they would simply be forgotten. The result is that we'd actually be in a worse situation than before Camp David. Politically, I'd find myself in much the same position as President Assad, after the leak of the American draft from Shepherdstown: apparently ready to consider giving Arafat the great majority of the West Bank, without the slightest sign Arafat was ready for a full and final peace. But that wasn't my main concern. It was that anything that we put on the table here would handcuff future Israeli governments if and when an "end of conflict" agreement became possible. Still, when Dennis Ross learned from my negotiators what I'd decided, he was frustrated and upset. He came to see me on Saturday morning - day-five of what was looking increasingly like a stillborn summit. "This summit was your idea," he said, reminding me that the President had agreed to it over the reservations of a lot his own aides. He told me that at a minimum, I had to help give it a chance: by giving him my true negotiating "red lines." Either that, or give my negotiators more leeway to explore compromises. I did not want to make Dennis's job any more difficult than it already was. And I told him I was still ready to engage fully if we ever got to the real substance of a possible deal. "But I can't do what you've asked me,' " I replied. "Not when Arafat is simply holding firm and not showing a willingness even to look for compromises." Fortunately for my relationship with the President - though not for the prospects of an agreement - Clinton had considerably more sympathy with my position after his next meeting with both sets of negotiators that afternoon. It was a return encounter with Abu Ala'a on territory and borders. Shlomo Ben-Ami now produced a map of the West Bank with our proposed breakdown into the areas that would be controlled by a Palestinian state, the part Israel would retain to accommodate the major settlements, and territory which we suggested would go to 355 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028203

/ BARAK / 70 the Palestinians after a transitional period. The part we had earmarked for Palestinian control was now a bit over 85 percent of the West Bank, more than I'd indicated to the President in our first meeting a year earlier. But while Abu Ala'a had told Clinton he would ask for Arafat's permission at least to negotiate, he clearly hadn't received it. He refused to talk about the map, or even respond to Clinton's suggestion that the Palestinians present a map of their own, until we did two things: accept the principle of land swaps and reduce the size of the territory we were suggesting for the settlement blocs. To Shlomo's, and I'm sure even more so to Abu Ala'a's, astonishment, the President exploded. He told Abu Ala'a that to refuse to provide any input or ideas was the very opposite of negotiation. It was an "Outrageous" approach. He stormed out. It was late that evening when the first move toward the "make-or-break" situation I had hoped for seemed to occur, though still with much more likelihood of break than make. The President decided the only way to make progress was to sequester a pair of negotiators from each side overnight. Their task would be to search honesty for the outlines of a possible peace agreement. They were to update Arafat and myself and then report to Clinton the next day. Then, we'd see where we were. I agreed to send Shlomo and Gili Sher, my former "back-channel" negotiators. I knew that whatever guidelines I gave them, they would probe beyond them, just as they'd done in the back-channel talks. They were negotiators. They were also smart, creative, badly wanted an agreement and, like me, believed it ought to be possible. Though I would retain the final word to approve or reject what they suggested, I knew that only in a legal sense could it be null and void. I also recognized, however, that we had to be willing to push further, both to find out for certain where the Palestinians stood and to convince the Americans we genuinely wanted an agreement. Shlomo and Gili left a little after midnight for Laurel Lodge. Marine guards were posted at the doors, with orders that neither negotiating team was to leave until morning without notifying the President's staff. Mother Nature provided a further incentive to stay inside, since it was again bucketing down with rain. The negotiators talked not just through the night, but the next morning as well. It wasn't until early afternoon that Shlomo and Gili came to my cabin to report on how they'd gone. As I'd anticipated, both of them had ventured beyond concessions that I was ready to consider, at least at a time when we weren't even near to a final peace deal. Taking the President's instructions to heart, they'd said 356 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028204

/ BARAK / 71 they were willing to consider full Palestinian sovereignty over two Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and even some form of Palestinian authority and control in the Christian and Muslim quarters inside the walls of the Old City. They had dropped our insistence on Israeli control over the Jordan Valley, suggesting that we hold on to only a small segment of the border with Jordan. They had gone beyond the share of the West Bank allocated to a Palestinian state on the map that Abu Ala'a wouldn't even look at. Now, they suggested around 90 percent. But when I asked what the Palestinian negotiators, Saeb Erekat and Mohammed Dahlan, had proposed in return, the answer was almost nothing. They had taken notes. They had asked questions. The one Palestinian proposal, from Saeb Erekat, was on Jerusalem: Palestinian sovereignty over all the city's predominantly Arab areas, and Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods. In other words, a division of the city. Even though I was concerned that Gili and Shlomo had gone so far, especially on Jerusalem, I'd reached the point where I doubted that even that would matter. We were now in day-six of the summit, barely 48 hours from President Clinton's departure for the G-8 summit, and we were negotiating only with ourselves. Knowing that the President planned to go see Arafat, I sat down and wrote him a note - emotional not just because I did it quickly, but because of how deeply let down I felt by the Palestinians' deliberate avoidance of a peace deal which, with genuine reciprocity, should have been within reach. "I took the report of Shlomo Ben-Ami and Gilead Sher of last night's discussion very badly..." it began. "This is not a negotiation. This is a manipulative attempt to pull us to a position we will never be able to accept, without the Palestinians moving one inch." I reminded President Clinton that just as he was taking political risks, I was too. "Even the positions presented by our people last night, though they are not my positions, represent an additional risk," I said. I said I doubted there would be another Israeli leader willing to engage in serious efforts for a final peace agreement with the Palestinians after what had happened here. Unless things changed dramatically, I was not prepared for us to throw out further suggestions, or consider painful concessions. "I do not intend to allow the Israeli state to fall apart, physically or morally. The State of Israel is the implementation of the dream of the Jewish people, for generation upon generation. We achieved it after enormous effort, and at the expenditure of a great deal of blood and sweat. There is no way I will preside at Camp David over the closing of 357 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028205

/ BARAK / 72 this saga." I told the President that I still believed that we were facing a "moment of truth." But only if he could "shake" Arafat, and get him to sense the enormity of the stakes - an independent Palestinian state, versus more, and undoubtedly deadlier, violence. And if it did come to armed conflict? "When the people of Israel will understand how far we were ready to go, we will have the power to stand together, unified, in such a struggle, however tough it will become, even if we will be forced to confront the entire world. There is no power in the world that can force on us collective national suicide. Peace will be achieved only if there is a willingness to negotiate on both sides. I am sure the people of Israel, and the American people, will understand it when the details will be revealed." Clinton had already left for Arafat's cabin by the time Danny Yatom went to deliver the letter. But the President, too, was in a more sober and downbeat mood by the time that meeting was over. Late that night when, having now read my note, he joined me on the balcony of Dogwood. He looked exhausted. "It was the toughest meeting I've ever had with Arafat," he said. Clinton said he had told the Palestinian leader that only one side, the Israelis, had so far been negotiating in good faith. If Arafat was not prepared to make a genuine effort to reach an agreement, then there was no choice but for all of us to go home. Now, it seemed, both the President and I were left to wait and see what, if anything, Arafat came up with in reply. "I've been through battles, and danger, in my life," I said. "But in terms of my responsibility, today, for me as well, was probably the toughest. Shlomo and Gili went beyond what I could live with. If this offer can't move him, then I believe we are left to prepare for war." I told the President he didn't even need to phone me after hearing from Arafat if all he offered was some clever half-reply. Only if it was serious and substantive. I also reminded him that while he'd promised Arafat that he would not "blame" the Palestinians if the summit failed, that had been on the basis of negotiating in good faith. I hoped that, if the summit collapsed in these circumstances, he would keep to that standard Finally, I touched on an immediate concern if the summit broke up. For months, the Palestinians had been talking about simply "declaring" a Palestinian state. The Americans had insisted neither side should resort to unilateral action in a conflict whose resolution depended on mutual agreement. The Europeans had been less 358 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028206

/ BARAK / 73 explicit. I told President Clinton I could speak only for how I would respond if a state was indeed declared without a peace deal. "We will extend Israeli sovereignty over the major settlement blocs. We will establish a security zone in the Jordan valley, and let them know that there will be a heavy price should they attack any of the outlying settlements." In other words, Palestinian unilateral action would prompt unilateral Israeli action. "And the confrontation will begin." *** Clinton seemed, if not completely revived, considerably more upbeat when he came back to see me an hour later. He told me that he had received the Palestinians' answer. The way he described it to me, Arafat had agreed to leave President Clinton to decide the amount of West Bank land that would go to a Palestinian state, a figure he now told me that he was assuming would end up at around 90 to 92 percent. The trade-off, he said, would be a limited, "symbolic" land swap. Arafat also wanted control of the Jordan Valley, but had agreed to begin negotiating on Israeli security needs there as soon as possible. Then, came Arafat's counter-conditions, which appeared to bother the President much less than they did me. Everything would be contingent on an unspecified, , "acceptable outcome on Jerusalem." And despite Clinton's emphasis that any meaningful agreement had to include a formal declaration that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was "over," Arafat was insisting that could come only after the terms of whatever we agreed were fully implemented. Still, it was at least a step forward. Clinton seemed genuinely encouraged, and I didn't want to risk closing off this first chink of light. I suggested, for instance, that we could address Arafat's reluctance about an "end of conflict" statement by providing an American guarantee that the terms of the deal would be implemented. Still, it very soon became clear that any hope of real progress rested on by far the most difficult issue: Jerusalem. Across party boundaries, even across divisions between religious and secular, nearly all Israelis viewed the city as not just our capital, but the centrepiece of the state. It had been divided after 1948. The Old City, and the site of the ancient Jewish temple, had been under Jordanian rule for 19 years when our forces recaptured it in the Six-Day War. It was under a Labor 359 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028207

/ BARAK / 74 government that the area around the temple's surviving Western Wall, left uncared for under the Jordanians, was cleared and a stone plaza put in place for worshipers - at the expense of parts of the old Moroccan Quarter. It was under Labor, too, that Israel unilaterally expanded Jerusalem's city limits to take in more than two dozen adjacent Arab villages on the West Bank. No Israeli government since then, Labor or Likud, had deviated from a shared pledge that Jerusalem would remain Israel's undivided, sovereign capital under any eventual peace agreement. Yet when I met Clinton the next morning in Laurel Lodge, he insisted we had to find some room for flexibility. He said that, of course, Israel would retain sovereignty over the Temple Mount: the site of the Western Wall and, above it, the Al-Aqsa mosque complex. "But without damaging your sovereignty," he argued, "we have to find a way to draw a picture for Arafat that includes some measure of Palestinian control in part of the city." "Could you agree to Arafat having an office, maybe, inside the walls of the Old City," he asked me. What about a form of administrative control in some of the outlying Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem? I replied that I couldn't possibly answer any of his questions until and unless it was clear that Arafat accepted our sovereignty over - and our national and religious connection with - the Temple Mount. Yet I said I understood that we would have to reach some compromise agreement on the city if we were ever going to have a chance of a peace agreement. "But it's an issue that is difficult for every Israeli," I told him. Before I could even begin to see whether there was a way forward, I would have to take it through with my entire negotiating team. Then, we could discuss it. It turned out to be the most open, serious, searching discussion I was a part of during all my years in public life. It began, on the terrace of my cabin, at two in the afternoon and went on until sundown. I introduced it by saying what each of us already knew: Jerusalem was the most emotionally charged and politically complex issue of all. Our maximum position coming into the summit had been that we would again expand the municipal boundaries of the city, as we'd done after the 1967 war, in order to accommodate two separate "city councils." One would be in Abu Dis, just to the southeast of the Old City, almost literally in the shadow of the Temple Mount. The understanding was the Palestinians would be free to rename the village, referring to it by the Arabic name for Jerusalem: Al Quds. I said that we should use that position as a starting point, and discuss how, or whether, we might go further. All I added was the need to be aware of what was at 360 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028208

/ BARAK / 75 stake. I didn't know whether peace was within reach. I was still deeply skeptical. But if it was, we had to accept that Jerusalem would be key. And if the summit failed, for whatever reason, what inevitably awaited us was "confrontation." Israel Hasson, the Shin Bet veteran, spoke first. He saw two choices. Either we could retain Israeli sovereignty over a "united Jerusalem" with functional, day-to- day autonomy for the Palestinians in their neighborhoods, or we could in effect divide the city. "Divide sovereignty." He didn't say which he favored, only that it was essential that we made the decision now if we could, however difficult or reluctant Arafat was as a negotiating partner. If we waited, we'd end up having to deal with Islamists: Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Oded Eran, the career diplomat whom I'd put in charge of frustrating, formal talks with the Palestinians in the months preceding the summit, said he was convinced that we should give the Palestinians full sovereignty over at least the "outer" Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which had become part of the city only when we'd expanded the city boundaries after 1967. He said that was in Israel's own interest. We had no historic connection to these Arab villages, and something like 130,000 Palestinian lived there. "Why should we want to annex them," he asked. It would be like accepting the "right of return" through the back door. Dan Meridor's voice, for me, was especially important. I knew he was as determined as I was to try to get a peace agreement with the Palestinians. But he was also a former Likudnik, and a native Jerusalemite. "I'm against any concessions when it comes to Israeli sovereignty," he said. "Any attempt to divide Jerusalem would be a serious blow, and not just for Jews in Israel." For centuries, Jewish communities all over the world, had looked to Jerusalem, prayed for Jerusalem. The yearly Seder meal, on Passover, ends with the Hebrew phrase: Shanah haba b'Yerushalaim. Next year, in Jerusalem. "What we decided here in Camp David," Dan said, "also affects Jews in New York. In Moscow. In Johannesburg." He urged us to focus instead on offering Arafat as attractive as possible a package of concessions on all the other issues. "Then let him decide. But even if sovereignty over Jerusalem means that the deal collapses, I'm not willing the pay that price." No voices were raised. It was the rarest of political discussions. People offered their views, and listened to others'. Amnon Lipkin pointed out that a large area of what was now came inside the boundaries of Jerusalem was not part of the city he'd known before 1967. Echoing Oded Eran, he said: "It's in our interest for as 361 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028209

/ BARAK / 76 many as possible of the Arab inhabitants to come under the authority of the Palestinians, and as few as possible under our rule." Amnon's bottom line was that we could not give up Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, which, although he was a non-observant Jew, he called "the cradle of Jewish history." But equally, we couldn't and shouldn't "run the Al-Aqsa mosque." He was also in favor of agreeing to what Clinton had asked of me: giving Arafat a base in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. His one caveat was that we should not do any of this unless it was part of a genuine, final, peace agreement with the Palestinians. Danny Yatom urged us to move beyond our emotions and look for a practical solution. "We all know how the boundaries of Jerusalem were drawn," he said, referring to the post-1967 expansion of the city. "They're not holy. It is important to get down to our real red lines." Eli Rubinstein, the attorney general, agreed. Even though he was an observant, Orthodox Jew, and more sympathetic politically to Likud than Labor, he concluded that we needed to include "as few Arabs as possible" under Israeli sovereignty, and to cede the outer villages to the Palestinians, adding: "This is a moment of truth." It was nearly five hours before I brought the discussion to a close. "This is as grave a decision as when Ben-Gurion accepted the partition plan in 1947; the declaration of the state; or the most tense moments of the Yom Kippur War," I said. "Or the decisions which Begin took in this same place." Of course, Begin hadn't even been willing to enter into discussion on Jerusalem. But we were in a different situation. If we were going to get a true end to our conflict, the question of Jerusalem had to be addressed. "We can't delay the decision. We can't avoid it. We will have to decide." My own red line was the same as Amnon Lipkin's: "sovereignty over the site of our First and Second Temples." Even shared sovereignty elsewhere within the Old City seemed to me a step too far at this stage, but I didn't rule it out as part of a full peace. "Without disengagement from the Palestinians, without an end of conflict," I reminded our negotiating team, "we're heading toward further tragedy. We can't pretend we don't see the iceberg." I asked several members of the team, under Shlomo Ben-Ami, to draft a paper based on our discussion. Since I knew that Clinton, and Arafat too, could do nothing of substance until I'd resolved how far to go on Jerusalem, I went to see the President. I told him about our session. I said that we were now crystallizing what had been said into a formal position, and I hoped to be able to return in a few hours with "the furthest point we can go." Clinton said that would be a critical 362 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028210

/ BARAK / 77 moment in the summit. If we could find common ground, he said, Israel would have achieved what had eluded it under Rabin, and even Ben-Gurion: "end of conflict, and Jerusalem recognized internationally as your capital." I told him that the discussion with my negotiators had been moving and illuminating. "I could see how much it weighed on everyone." But I added that I still did not feel anything of a similar nature, or remotely as serious, was happening on the Palestinian side. I also said that in deciding how to proceed, I couldn't ignore political realities back home. I would have to get any major change in our position concerning Jerusalem through the Knesset, even before putting a peace agreement to a referendum. "When will you get back to me with your paper?" he asked. I said I'd try by midnight. I also asked him whether he could delay going to the G8 summit in Japan, for which he was due to leave Camp David on the morning of the 19". That meant we had just one full day left. I said even if the plan was to resume our talks afterward, I couldn't move on Jerusalem right before we recessed. It would mean "putting my last and best offer on the table" and running the risk of leaks in Israel while Clinton was gone. He said that he had to go to the G8, but would try to put off leaving for a further day. Then, he asked me to draw up a list of questions for him to present to Arafat so that we could solidify our understanding of how far he was ready to go for peace. I had Shlomo get busy on the list of questions. But it took time. We reconvened around eleven at night, to discuss both the questions and the Jerusalem package. Though it retained Israeli sovereignty over the entirety of the Old City, it did give the Palestinians a greater measure of control over other areas of East Jerusalem than any Israeli government had been willing to consider in the past. Still, almost everyone in the negotiating team could live with it, assuming it became the critical element in a final peace. Dan Meridor, alone, remained firmly opposed, though Elyakim Rubinstein also had some reservations. Even Dan said he understood the importance of getting a peace agreement, if indeed it was possible, and our readiness to discuss new proposals on Jerusalem. When I left for Clinton's cabin at about 1:00 am on Wednesday, I had no idea I was about to enter the most difficult meeting - and the only real fight - I had with him during our long effort to achieve a Middle East peace. I brought Shlomo and Danny with me, which meant that Madeleine Albright, Dennis and Sandy Berger stayed as well. I sensed tension in all of them, in large part, I soon discovered, because they took exception to the more than twelve hours we had spent discussing 363 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028211

/ BARAK / 78 and refining our position on Jerusalem. I think Clinton expected a formal offer from us. Since I'd been guided by his request for a list of questions for Arafat, however, that is what we came to him with. As we'd discussed, I wanted finally to elicit some sign of whether Arafat, too, was ready to make difficult decisions. The questions were specific. "Will you accept an agreement that stipulates the following..." it began, and proceeded to outline the kind of peace we could accept and still hoped for. The points included not just Jerusalem, but areas I knew would also be sensitive for Arafat, such as the "right of return" and formal agreement to an end of conflict. We went further than before in some areas. One of the outer East Jerusalem neighborhoods would be under Palestinian sovereignty. The rest of the city would remain under Israeli sovereignty, but most of the other Arab villages would be subject to a system of Palestinian administration. The Haram al-Sharif, the mosque complex above the wall of the Jewish temple, would be under Palestinian "administrative and religious management." We also suggested "special arrangements" implying a Palestinian presence in the Old City, but again under Israeli sovereignty. The questions envisaged eventual Palestinian control in the Jordan Valley, with an Israeli security zone for 12 years, rather than our proposal in pre-summit talks for 30 years. Then, explicitly, we proposed a question to Arafat to confirm my understanding with Clinton that the "right of return" would apply not to Israel proper, but to a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. Finally, the document said: "I understand that such an agreement constitutes an end of conflict." After he read it, the President blew up. Far from the "bottom lines" he'd apparently hoped for, but which I'd never thought were expected at this stage, I seemed to be retreating from ideas Shlomo and Gili had presented in their all-night session with the Palestinians. Given the ground rules of that exercise, they'd felt able to go beyond anything we'd actually agreed, and in some areas beyond what they knew I could support. As a result, the list of questions assumed Israel would keep a little more than 11 percent of the West Bank, nearly one percent more than Shlomo had mentioned. Shlomo and Gili had also raised the possibility of up to three of the outer Jerusalem villages coming under full Palestinian sovereignty. "You keep us, and Arafat, waiting for 13 hours," Clinton fumed, his face nearly scarlet. "And you want me to present something less than you've already offered." He said he wouldn't do it. "This is not real. It's not serious." He said that he'd gone to Shepherdstown in search of what was supposed to be an endgame with the 364 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028212

/ BARAK / 79 Syrians. Then to Geneva to see Assad, , "where I felt like a wooden Indian, doing your bidding. I will not let it happen here. I will simply not do it." I tried to keep my voice steady when I replied. I explained that the issues we were addressing went to the heart of Israel's interests, its future security, its identity and definition as a nation. I had a responsibility to tread carefully. Then, my voice rising too, I came back to what I felt was the real problem. Arafat and his negotiators had been sitting and waiting for me and my team, and probably Clinton as well, to deliver more and more concessions with no sign that they were willing to move on anything. "I find that outrageous," I said. I did not expect Arafat to respond with equal concessions. After all, Israel had most of the tangible assets. "But I did expect him at least to take a small step once we had taken ten. We have not seen even this. This is the kind of behavior parents would not tolerate in their own children! We don't expect Arafat to accept this, but I do expect him to present a counter-position." Clinton remained adamant he couldn't go to Arafat with a retreat from our earlier ideas. "My negotiating team moved beyond my red lines," I told him. The overnight talks were supposed to be non-binding and assumed that both sides would make a genuine attempt to get an agreement. "I can't see any change in Arafat's pattern. We take all the risks." I said I doubted that Arafat expected to hear that we had decided to "give him Jerusalem." In any case, the Israeli public hadn't given me a mandate to do that. But I would still move in Arafat's direction, if and when I got any sign he was willing to do the same. The President's anger eased. He suggested he caucus with his negotiators and figure out what to do next. I felt bad about what had happened: not about the list of questions, or my insistence that we could not offer major concessions with no sign of reciprocity. But I did regret that it had left the Americans so frustrated, and Clinton so angry. He had invested not just huge amounts of time and brainpower, but political capital, in the search for peace. He phoned me at about 3:30 in the morning and asked me to come back. This time, I went alone. We sat on the terrace of Aspen. He said again he couldn't go to Arafat with the list we'd drawn up. But having met with his negotiators, he suggested they draft a more forthcoming list of their own - consistent with what Shlomo and Gili had proposed. I agreed, as long as they kept in mind that it had to be something I could ultimately live with, and that it be presented to Arafat as an 365 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028213

/ BARAK / 80 American proposal. I suggested the President could tell Arafat that he'd try to get me to agree to it, providing Arafat first showed a readiness to move. The American questions did go further than ours. They asked Arafat whether he would negotiate on the basis of getting Palestinian sovereignty over all the outer Jerusalem neighborhoods, as well as the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and a "custodial role" over the holy sites. But Arafat said no. He insisted on Palestinian sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the holy sites. For a few hours after Clinton's fruitless meeting with Arafat, Dennis and the American team engaged in a rescue effort, adding another carrot. They included the Christian Quarter as well, meaning Palestinian sovereignty over nearly half of the Old City, including the areas where almost all Arab residents lived. Dennis gave the proposal to Shlomo and Amnon Lipkin to bring to me, and asked two of the Palestinian negotiators to take it to Arafat. Even offering sovereignty over the Muslim Quarter went beyond anything I'd proposed. So did a lot of the other American questions. Still, I said we'd be ready to consider them in discussions with the US negotiating team - with the exception of the Christian Quarter. But that, too, turned out not to matter. Arafat did not even respond Clinton called me to say we'd reached the end of the road. There were only two options: end the summit and announce we'd tried and failed, or defer Jerusalem and try to get agreement on the rest of the issues. I asked for time to think it over, and he said he'd come see me when I was ready. I was tempted to put off Jerusalem. In the admittedly unlikely event we could get a deal on the other issues, that would undeniably be an achievement. But I couldn't help thinking that Arafat's lack of engagement on Jerusalem was yet another sign that he was not ready for the almost equally tough compromises required to resolve the other core issues. And there was no escaping the reality that without a deal on Jerusalem, no agreement we reached would truly represent an "end of conflict." Moreover, Jerusalem wasn't just a Palestinian issue. It was of fundamental interest to the whole Muslim world. If we left it unaddressed, we would be putting future Israeli governments in the position of having to negotiate on Jerusalem after we'd given back our key negotiating assets and all our leverage. I accepted now that the search of a full peace treaty, or even a framework agreement, looked all but impossible. Even Shlomo's and Gili's freelancing had produced only a series of no's from Arafat. But I felt I couldn't give up. Much as I'd been resisting it, I believed I needed to give Clinton my true bottom lines, even 366 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028214

/ BARAK / 81 with Arafat still mute and unresponsive. That was the only way we could know with certainty whether peace was possible. If it wasn't, it would also demonstrate powerfully to the Americans that we were not the party who had prevented an agreement. The President came to see me in Dogwood a little before 11 at night on the 18th less than 12 hours before he was due to take his delayed flight to the G8. I told him I'd decided to do what Rabin had done with Syria. I was going to give him a "deposit" to keep in his pocket, which he would be free to use as the basis for a further, American proposal to Arafat, assuming it was part of an agreement with a "satisfactory resolution" of the refugee issue and an explicit end-of-conflict. He could present it as something which he could tell Arafat he was confident of persuading Israel to accept. It went well beyond what I'd offered before, on all the major issues. I proposed Palestinian rule over 91 percent of the West Bank. I was ready for a Palestinian state to have sovereignty over 85 percent of the border in the Jordan Valley as well, and our security zone there would stay in place for "less than 12 years." Seven out of the nine outer Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem would come under Palestinian sovereignty. The inner neighborhoods would be under Palestinian civil authority: including planning and zoning, and law- enforcement. For the mosques on the Temple Mount, I proposed a shared custodianship to include the new state of Palestine, Morocco and the chair of the Higher Islamic Commission in Jerusalem. I also agreed to consider Palestinian sovereignty over both the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City. Clinton, arching his eyebrows and smiling, said what I'd offered was a package of genuine concessions. It was more than he had expected and, he assumed, more than the Palestinians could have hoped for. It had the makings of a potential breakthrough toward a fair and final peace. I told him I hoped so. But given Arafat's behavior so far, I had my doubts. Now, it was our turn to wait. The President invited Arafat to Aspen and, from what we heard soon afterwards, got no hint of any readiness to reciprocate. He agreed only to talk to his negotiators and get back with an answer. Overnight, the Palestinians sent messages to the Americans asking questions on each of the concessions, though still with no indication from Arafat of a response. Finally, he sent a suggestion that since Clinton was about to fly off to the G8, we take a two- week break to allow Arafat to consult with Arab leaders. To his credit, Clinton knew an escape act when he saw it. He recognized that only by confronting the 367 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028215

/ BARAK / 82 issues raised by our proposals and showing a willingness to find common ground would we have any hope of success. No recess, Clinton said. He needed a straight answer. Again, not full acceptance necessarily, but agreement to treat the proposals as a basis for negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Arafat's answer came shortly before dawn. It was "no" Clinton couldn't quite believe it. He went back to see Arafat, telling him he was making an error on the scale of 1948, when the Palestinians had rejected the partition of Palestine and the creation of an Arab state; or in 1978, when by negotiating on the basis of Sadat's Palestinian-rights framework, they would have ended up with a mere 5,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank instead of nearly 200,000. What most astonished Clinton was that Arafat was saying no even to using the package as a basis for negotiations. Still, Arafat would not budge. As Palestinian negotiators tried to salvage things by suggesting another trip by Madeleine and Dennis to the Middle East, it was clear that even the Americans were fed up. They knew that one side, at least, had been trying to get an agreement. They couldn't understand why Arafat was unwilling even to accept the "pocket" proposals as a basis for further talks. When Yossi Ginossar, our most reliable conduit, went to see Arafat, he found him sitting alone and, in Yossi's description, "paralyzed." Clinton finally decided to have one last go. When he did, Arafat not only remained unwilling. To the President's astonishment, he insisted that the ancient Jewish temple hadn't been in Jerusalem at all, but in the West Bank city of Nablus. I was getting a bite to eat in the dining room in Laurel Lodge when Madeleine showed up. She didn't bother defending Arafat. She was as frustrated as I was. Her message was that after the summit, it was important not to make things worse. A negotiating process had to be kept alive. Then, Clinton sat down with me. He delivered a similar message, but with even greater feeling. "You're smarter than I am," he joked. "You're certainly experienced in war, and I'm not. But I'm more experienced in politics, and there are a few things I've learned along the way. The most important is not to corner your adversaries, and not to corner yourself. Always leave yourself a way out. Don't lock yourself into a losing option." I could see that he was right. I also believed, as strongly now as before the summit, that Israel's own interests and its security were not served by an unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. The problem was that, in the absence of an equal commitment on Arafat's side, any continued negotiating process seemed futile. 368 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028216

/ BARAK / 83 I packed my bags. I told Danny Yatom to inform the Americans we were leaving and to get our plane ready to take us back to Israel. I let the others in our team know that we were going. A number of them, and several of the Americans as well, urged me to reconsider. But I said I saw no point in staying. What I didn't know, however, was that one of the Palestinians' original Oslo negotiators, Hassan Asfour, had approached Dennis Ross with a new proposal: that we ask Arafat to accept everything except the proposal on the holy sites as a basis for negotiation. Sovereignty over the Temple Mount would be addressed in later, international negotiations. When Dennis brought this to me, my instinct was to say no. Like so much else at the summit, it was an inherently skewed formula: it would involve major Israeli concessions on all the other main issues, without securing our absolute minimum need in Jerusalem: sovereignty over the Temple Mount. I didn't say yes. Still, with Clinton's words of advice still on my mind, I said that I'd think it over. When I met the rest of the Israeli team, almost all of them felt we should stay. The consensus was that especially if violence broke out after the summit's collapse, we didn't want to feel we'd left any stone unturned. At about 11 pm, I phoned the President and told him that we would stay until he returned from Okinawa. He was clearly pleased, and asked us to keep working in his absence. When I resisted that, saying that any substantive talks needed his involvement, we finally agreed that talks could continue in search of a formula for the holy sites. On all the other issues, only informal discussions would be held until and unless a way ahead on the Temple Mount was found. If that happened, and if Arafat finally accepted the "pocket" proposals as an agreed starting point, formal negotiations could resume. Clinton accepted this formula. He went to see Arafat and secured - or thought he had secured - his agreement as well. One of the President's great strengths was his genius for blurring the edges of potential differences in search of common ground. But when edges had to be sharpened, this could lead to confusion. Before leaving for the G8, the President neglected to mention to Arafat our explicit understanding that, with the exception of the talks on the holy sites, nothing would happen until he accepted the concessions that President Clinton and I had delivered as at least a basis for further negotiations. As a result, Arafat's team now set about happily asking questions and probing my negotiators - pushing us to go further - but with no more inclination than before to produce any concessions of their own. 369 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028217

/ BARAK / 84 When I learned what was happening, I told my negotiators they were not to hold any further formal meetings during the four days Clinton would be away. Dennis's initial response was frustration. Madeleine Albrights's was fury. They both made no secret of their view that I was needlessly stonewalling. It wasn't until a few hours later that Madeleine apparently saw the stenographer's record of my conversation with the President before he'd left, confirming the condition that Arafat accept the "pocket" at least as a basis on which to proceed. That evening, she apologized to me for the misunderstanding, and explained the mix-up to the full Palestinian and Israeli negotiating teams. I spent most of the remaining three days in my cabin or, when the rain relented, walking through the woods. The Americans appeared to think I was sulking. I wasn't. I was trying to find the least diplomatically damaging way to navigate the period until the President's return. I couldn't see showing up at Laurel at every mealtime, mingling and joking with the Americans and Palestinians, but refusing to enter into any form of negotiations. That would compound the awkwardness of the situation, and also be a direct affront to Madeleine. I liked and respected her. But I could not in good conscience help her out in her efforts to find at least some, informal, way of moving the summit along in Clinton's absence. If Arafat had failed to show even a scintilla of movement with the President in the room, I knew there was no way that he was going to do so with the Secretary of State. For the Palestinian negotiators, who were predictably in favour of her efforts, the definition of "new ideas" was whatever further movement they might cajole out of our negotiators. Still, on day-three of Clinton's absence, I got a note saying that Secretary Albright was on her way to my cabin. I didn't want the needless diplomatic difficulty involved in again telling her I could not sanction free- wheeling, and decidedly one-sided, negotiations while Arafat hadn't moved a single inch. So I made myself scarce. Fortunately, I was wearing sneakers. I told Danny to inform the Americans I was out jogging around the perimeter of the large Camp David estate, and went off to do just that. I told my own delegation I was taking time out to assess where we stood. I did continue meeting with Gili Sher and Danny Yatom. Yet for much of time, I read. I also did a lot of thinking. I considered the "pocket" concessions I'd agreed to, the uncertainties and risks I'd been prepared to run, and the need to decide how to deal with the fact that Arafat, when he had engaged at all, had said "no" 370 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028218

/ BARAK / 85 Once it was clear to the Americans there would be no talks until the President returned, however, Madeline began urging me to go see Arafat personally. The two members of our team who were the least pessimistic about Camp David's outcome, Shlomo Ben-Ami and Yossi Ginossar, also said they thought it was a good idea. It was they who'd pressed me to go see Arafat for tea and sweets earlier in the summit. But that meeting had produced not even a glimmer of negotiating flexibility from the Palestinian leader. Yossi had said at the time that it would help the atmosphere, and pay dividends later on. But that hadn't happened either. "Madam Secretary," I told Madeleine, "eating more baklava with Arafat isn't going to help. The situation is simple: he needs to answer whether he views the President's proposal as a basis for going forward." When Clinton returned, he promptly got back down to business: making one last push to see whether a peace deal was possible. He phoned me around midnight on the 24" of July, a few hours after he'd arrived. He told me he had sent an even more far-reaching package to Arafat, expanding on my proposals. Now, all of the outer Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem would come under Palestinian sovereignty, in addition to the Muslim and Christian quarters in the Old City. And Arafat would be given "custodial sovereignty" over the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount. I didn't object. Though it was further than I felt I could go, it was within the spirit of my "pocket deposit". The same ground rules still applied: these were American proposals, which the President was telling Arafat he would try to deliver if he accepted them as a basis for serious negotiations. But when Clinton phoned me back, around 3:15 in the morning, it was to tell me that Arafat had again said no. The curtain had finally come down. What remained now was to clear up the set. I did meet Arafat once more, in a joint session with President Clinton, but only for closing statements. The President and I spoke as much in sorrow and frustration as anger. Both of us said we thought an historic agreement had been within our grasp, and that far-reaching proposals had been tabled to make it possible. Arafat responded with words both of us had heard before: effusive toward Clinton, rhapsodic about his "old partner" Rabin and fulsome in his ostensible commitment to keep trying for peace. But it was just words. We knew he was not willing even to talk about the kind of compromises a real, final peace would require. The President's remarks to the media were, by the standards of post-summit diplomacy, unmistakably clear in making that point. He praised me and the Israeli 371 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028219

/ BARAK / 86 negotiating team for courage and vision. Essentially, he thanked Arafat for showing up. That was some consolation. But it didn't alter the weight of the message we were carrying home. Arafat either would not or could not make peace, at least on terms any Israel leader could accept or the people of Israel would endorse. There were only two potential deal-breakers on our side, as Arafat had known from the beginning. The first involved the "right of return." We were never going to sign a peace agreement accepting the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians within our pre-1967 borders. Demographically, that was a recipe for the inexorable end of Israel as a majority-Jewish state. It would also imply a rewriting of the history of how Israel was born: in a war, with an almost equal number of refugees either fleeing or forced to leave on both sides, after the Arab world had unanimously, and violently, rejected a UN partition that would have created a Palestinian Arab state as well. I did accept a "right of return" to the Palestinian state we had hoped to create, as part of a final peace deal, on the West Bank and in Gaza. I also supported the idea of a multi-billion-dollar international fund to compensate or resettle Palestinian refugees, and was ready to commit Israel as a party to that effort. The other critical issue was Jerusalem. I had stretched our negotiating position almost to breaking point. The "pocket" ideas Arafat ended up rejecting challenged a longstanding Israeli political taboo. In practical terms, they amounted to a breach of the assurances which I and every other Israeli Prime Minister since 1967 had given: never to re-divide Israel's capital. Had we actually got an end-of-conflict deal, I would have had to justify it to Israelis in a referendum. I think I could have done so. But one thing I could not give up was our sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the centerpiece of our history as a people and Israel's as a state. It was our connection with our past, a focus of what we had gone through, what we had achieved, and what we had left to accomplish. It was essential to who we were. Arafat never even engaged in a discussion on the "right of return". On the Temple Mount, however, he was explicit. Any peace, any basis for negotiation toward peace, had to begin by confirming Palestinian sovereignty. Besides, as he'd told the President of the United States, he had persuaded himself there never was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. When I heard about that remark, I was less shocked than Clinton. It struck me as just another way Arafat had of conveying his bottom lines. It was a bit like stories he liked to tell about visiting his aunt in Jerusalem as 372 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028220

/ BARAK / 87 a young boy and seeing religious Jews walking through the streets of the Old City. I don't know whether those stories were true. But the point was that while he had no problem with Jews in their long coats and black hats praying in the holy city, Jews exercising authority or sovereignty, or a Jewish state, was something else entirely. Camp David had made it clear it was something he was not prepared to accept. The question which I now had to confront was what to do next. 373 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028221

/ BARAK / 88 Chapter Twenty-Three It didn't fully hit me how draining our efforts had been until the morning that the summit collapsed, when President Clinton called me to come talk to him in the living room at Laurel Lodge. When I arrived, Madeleine was already there, sitting on the edge of the sofa. She greeted me with a resigned shrug and a valiant but not altogether successful effort at a smile. "We tried," Clinton said quietly as I took a seat in a wooden chair opposite his. "We gave it everything." The nominal reason for the meeting was to brief me on the communiqué the Americans were going to issue: mostly boilerplate assurances that both sides remained committed to seeking peace, but with an additional "understanding" that neither would take unilateral actions in the meantime. But mostly, Clinton wanted to reinforce his message of a few days earlier: don't "lock yourself into a losing option." Don't close the door. Don't give up. "I won't," I told him, an assurance I echoed in remarks to reporters a few hours later, when I said that while the peace process had "suffered a major blow, we should not lose hope. With goodwill on all sides, we can recuperate." But I told the President that we couldn't just ignore what had happened at Camp David. Yes, in the event Arafat suddenly had second thoughts about the potentially historic achievement he'd passed up, he would know where to find me. But until and unless that happened, I told Clinton that I assumed my "pocket" concessions would now be firmly back in his pocket. And while we couldn't erase them from memory, I said it was important both of us make it clear that, in legal and diplomatic terms, they were not going to provide Arafat a new starting point from which he could make his customary demand for more. "And I have to tell you that, given what has happened, there's no way I can justify handing him control of more land. I am not going to go ahead with the Wye redeployments in these circumstances." "You don't have to," Clinton replied. "I'll back you." Though I never discussed internal Israeli politics with any foreign leader, even the closest of allies, I didn't doubt that the President's support was partly a recognition of what awaited me once I got home. The compromises I'd been willing to consider had gone further - much further, on the politically combustible 374 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028222

/ BARAK / 89 question of Jerusalem - than any Israeli leader in the search for peace. Even before I'd left for Camp David, the defections from our coalition meant we'd been left with only 42 seats in the Knesset, nineteen short of a majority. Amid the first, sketchy media reports that we were even talking about sharing control of parts of Jerusalem with the Palestinians, there was a chorus of denunciation from right- wing politicians back home. Bibi Netanyahu had largely kept out of the public eye since his resignation after the election. Now, he issued a statement accusing me of having "broken all the red lines held by all Israeli governments." During the President's final push to save the prospects for a summit agreement, Bibi called a news conference. He said he was determined to prevent what he called an impending disintegration of Israeli society. "What we hear from most of the reports out of Camp David does not answer our hopes," he said. It hadn't answered my hopes either. But I had gone into the summit with my eyes open. Frustrated though I was by the way the summit had ended, I had no regrets about going as far as I had in trying to reach, at the minimum, a framework agreement. In that sense, it is true the summit had failed. But when I'd urged President Clinton to convene it, I made the argument that if genuine peace was ever going to be possible, we at least had to know whether Arafat was interested in, or capable of, playing his part. That question had, for now, been answered. At least as importantly for Israel, the President of the United States and almost the entire international community recognized we'd done everything realistically possible to reach an accommodation. Diplomatically, the ball was in the Palestinians' court. There was a final achievement as well - little noticed or remarked upon in the days immediately after Camp David, but hugely significant. A taboo had been broken. For the first time, all Israelis recognized what their political leaders, both Labor and Likud, had long known: a formal, final peace with the Palestinians, if and when it came, would require us not just to withdraw from the great majority of the West Bank, but to find a formula for sharing power in Jerusalem. Many Israelis still believed that was a price too high, and not just Likudniks. A couple of weeks after the summit, Leah Rabin told an Israeli newspaper that her late husband would be "turning in his grave" if he'd known the concessions I'd been ready to consider on Jerusalem. I found the remarks hurtful, but I understood them. In a way, they drove home the point I'd made to Clinton during the summit: all Israelis had a deep, emotional attachment to our historic capital. "Yitzhak would never have agreed to compromise on the Old City and the Temple Mount," Leah said, 375 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028223

/ BARAK / 90 "because for him, Jerusalem was sacred from a strictly national and historic point of view." It was for me as well. In fact, I think its religious significance probably resonated more strongly. Still, the major change from the summit was that even those Israelis who found a compromise on Jerusalem unacceptable recognized that, if they did want to negotiate a definitive end to the conflict, talking about it was unavoidable. At least for now, however, there wasn't going to be a peace deal. As our El Al 707 descended over the Mediterranean for our approach back to Ben-Gurion Airport, I faced the more immediate issue of ensuring my government survived. This was partly in case, against all odds, Arafat showed a readiness to revive the search for peace - but also because of the real prospect he would choose violence instead Since the Knesset was about to go into recess until late October, I would have a three-month window to reshape and stabilize my coalition - but only if we could weather a no-confidence motion introduced by Arik Sharon after Camp David. We did weather it, barely. Arik needed a majority of the Knesset's 120 seats to bring down the government. The vote ended in a 50-50 tie. The other 20 MKs abstained, or didn't show up. This was not because of any enthusiasm for my efforts to get an agreement at Camp David, but because of a lack of enthusiasm for an early election in which they feared losing seats. Still, that did allow me to focus on the challenge of the inevitably altered situation with Arafat after the summit's collapse. My main concern was the possibility of violence. Even before returning home, I'd phoned Shaul Mofaz and Avi Dichter, the former Sayeret Matkal officer who was now head of the Shin Bet. "Let's hope the violence doesn't come," I told them. "But if it does, make sure we are ready." Though there was no sign of violence in the weeks immediately after the summit, there was equally little sign of diplomatic engagement by Arafat. Obviously relieved at the way Camp David had ended, he returned to Gaza to a hero's welcome, proudly proclaiming that he had refused to "give up" Jerusalem. It was vintage Arafat: the "general" in his starched uniform and kefiyeh, fresh from 376 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028224

/ BARAK / 91 the diplomatic equivalent of the battlefield, triumphant against the odds. It was the role he liked and played best. His next move was to take the show on the road: to Arab, European and world capitals, pleading that he had been the "victim" of summit chicanery in which President Clinton and I had presented him with a deal no self-respecting Palestinian could accept. He was also campaigning for international support for a move, in contravention of the final Camp David communiqué, to "declare" a Palestinian state unilaterally in mid-September. I spoke personally to Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac, and also dispatched Shlomo-Ben Ami, Amnon Lipkin, Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres, who was Minister of Regional Cooperation in the coalition, on a series of diplomatic visits to make sure the true story of what had happened at the summit was understood. As a result, the globetrotting Arafat received an almost unanimous rebuff for the idea of a unilateral declaration of stateheood. He was told that if he really wanted a state, he should return to the negotiating table with Israel. By the time I went to New York in early September - joining the largest collection of world leaders ever assembled, for the UN's Millennium Summit - there seemed little chance of that happening. I met privately with a number of world leaders before delivering a brief address to the more than 150 presidents and prime ministers. I was at pains to take the high road. None of the foreign leaders I met had expressed any doubt that we'd gone much further than they had expected at Camp David, and that the onus for putting diplomacy back on track rested firmly with the Palestinians. Looking straight at Arafat from the UN podium, I said: "We are at the Rubicon, and neither of us can cross it alone." Jerusalem, "the eternal capital of Israel," was calling out for a "peace of honor, of courage and of brotherhood" - a peace recognizing that the city was also sacred to Muslims and Christians the world over. When Arafat spoke, it was almost as if the summit had never happened. "We remain committed to our national rights over East Jerusalem, capital of our state and shelter of our sacred sites, as well as our rights on the Christian and Islamic holy sites," he declared. He didn't mention Jews, beyond a bizarre reference to the 2,000 anniversary of the birth of Christ "in Bethlehem, Palestine." I couldn't resist remarking to one of the American negotiators that I'd always thought Jesus grew up as a Jewish boy, making thrice-yearly visits at festival time to the temple in Jerusalem, at a time when there was not a church, much less a mosque, in sight. 377 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028225

/ BARAK / 92 Still, in my meetings with Clinton, I assured him I was not giving up altogether on the prospects for peace. Not only did I feel that would be wrong, as long as there was a scintilla of hope. I believed that our continued diplomatic engagement might provide a counterweight to any moves by Arafat to revert to violence. It was also critical for Israel to retain the diplomatic, political and moral high ground we had earned in the eyes of the international community from the concessions we had been willing to consider. When the President suggested drafting a final American paper, based on Camp David though presumably with an even more generous proposal for the Palestinians, I agreed. I figured even Arafat might realize at some point that if he did want a negotiated peace, the time for dithering was over. Clinton would no longer be president in five months' time. Unless I could find an alternative way to retortity my coalition over the coming weeks, it was entirely possible I'd have to form a "unity" coalition with Arik and the Likud. Still, I told President Clinton I doubted the ticking clock would make a difference to the Palestinian leader. If it didn't, I believed at some point all our talk about an "end of conflict" would give way to conflict. The only question was when. Tragically, I got the answer only weeks after my return from the UN. *** At the urging of the Americans, I invited Arafat and his negotiating team to a private dinner in Kochav Yair on the 25th of September. The atmosphere was surprisingly warm, for which a lot of the credit, as well as culinary praise, has to go to Nava. "Very cordial, even congenial," Nabil Shaath told reporters after the dinner, nearly 45 minutes of which I spent talking alone with Arafat on the stone terrace out back. Each of us spoke to Clinton for about 10 minutes near the end, and the President was obviously pleased to hear us sounding upbeat about trying to narrow any differences on the forthcoming American negotiating paper. On the substance of our differences, by mutual agreement, Arafat and I didn't say much to each other. I did try to impress on him that time was getting short. His monosyllabic reply - yes - was at least better than the alternative. I chose to believe we could both now focus on trying again. 378 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028226

/ BARAK / 93 The request that had come across my desk a few days earlier need not have changed that. Even though Arik had failed, for now, to bring down the government, he was keen to make political capital from the collapse of Camp David. He now declared his intention to pay a visit to the Temple Mount. The Mount - or as it was called in Arabic, Haram al-Sharif - was part of Israel. The unsubtle point of Arik's visit was to dramatize his determination to keep it that way. The target of this political theatre was not Arafat or the Palestinians. It was the Israeli public, me, and my government. In an all-perfect world, I would have liked to find a way to block the visit. In a democracy, it wasn't that easy. The only way I could do so was on the grounds it was a threat to public order or security, a judgement in the hands of our police and security services. I duly asked for the views of Avi Dichter of the Shin Bet, and Shlomo Ben-Ami, who in addition to being interim Foreign Minister was Minister of Internal Security, in charge of the police. Both came back with the same answer: though we'd all be happier if Arik stayed down on his farm in the Negev, there was no reason to expect his visit would pose a major public-order issue, and no basis for blocking it. When Shlomo contacted Jibril Rajoub, Arafat's West Bank security commander, Rajoub asked only that two conditions be imposed, and Shlomo agreed. The first was that the visit not occur on a Friday, when the mosques would be full of worshipers; the second, that Sharon not set foot in either of the mosques on the Haram. Our chief of police informed Sharon that if he didn't accept the conditions, we'd deny him permission to go. But he agreed. When he went, for about half an hour under police escort on Thursday morning the 28th , he complied. At first, we thought it would prove a one-off media stunt. But that evening, Danny Yatom brought me an intelligence report with evidence that Arafat's Palestinian Authority was planning for wide-scale violence after Friday prayers, in protest over Sharon's visit. Danny called Dennis Ross. Madeleine Albright called Arafat, to urge him to ensure this didn't happen. But as Dennis would remark later, "Arafat didn't lift finger to stop it." The trouble began the next day, shortly after Friday prayers. It was also the eve of the Jewish New Year, and the Western Wall area was crowded. As people poured out of the mosques, a number began hurling stones, some of them the size of small boulders, onto the Jewish worshippers and police below. One knocked out the highly experienced, steady-handed commander of the Jerusalem police, which I'm sure contributed to making the confrontation that followed even worse. By the 379 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028227

/ BARAK / 94 end of the day, dozens of Israelis and Palestinians were injured. Five Palestinians lay dead. Though the media almost instantly labelled it a new "intifada", this one was very different. It was not a burst of anger, however misdirected, by stone- throwing youths convinced that a road accident in Gaza had been something more sinister. There had been no serious unrest on the day of Arik's visit. We would later learn this was a deliberate campaign, waged with guns and grenades, by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Fatah offshoot Tanzim, and Arafat's own police force. The media had changed, too, in the 13 years since the first intifada, with the rise of twenty-four-seven news broadcasters, including the Arabic-language Al Jazeera. Images of pain and suffering and fear stoked anger on both sides. None, in the first days of the violence, was more powerful, or heart-rending, than the picture of a terrified 12-year-old Palestinian boy named Mohammed al-Durrah, sheltered by his father as they took cover from the crossfire in Gaza. The facts of the incident, as best we could establish immediately afterwards, were that the Palestinian security forces had opened fire on Israeli troops near the settlement of Netzarim. Ten Palestinians, including the little boy, lost their lives when the soldiers returned fire. We later established with near certainty that the boy had in fact been killed by Palestinian gunfire. But even if we'd been able to prove that at the time, I'm sure that in the increasingly poisonous atmosphere, it would have made little difference. Nor would it have changed the next, deeply disturbing escalation: the spread of the violence into Israel itself, with unprecedentedly serious clashes between our own Arab citizens and the police in the Galilee, in Wadi Ara, in the main mixed Arab-Jewish cities, and the Negev. Beyond the political implications, the demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinian violence presented a security challenge of a different order: to the ability of the Israeli police, and by extension the government, to ensure basic law and order inside our borders. The worst of the clashes lasted barely a week. But they left thirteen Arab Israeli protestors dead, sparking demonstrations as far afield as Jaffa, as well as ugly incidents of mob violence by Israeli Jews against Arabs in some areas. President Clinton tried his best to help us halt the violence on the West Bank and in Gaza. I doubted the Americans would succeed, but was fully ready to join in their efforts to try. About ten days into the new intifada, I attended a crisis meeting with Arafat, mediated by Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross, at the US ambassador's residence Paris. It was nominally under the aegis of President 380 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028228

/ BARAK / 95 Chirac, but the understanding was that Madeleine would be in charge. Far from showing any willingness to end the violence, Arafat at first simply lied. He said the Palestinian violence was in response to an unprovoked assault by Israeli troops, and demanded an international "protection" force. There was a particularly bizarre moment when I read out the names of individual Tanzim leaders whom we had intercepted organizing the attacks. Arafat pretended he'd never heard of any of them, almost as if I was reading from a zoology textbook about species of polar bears. This was a man who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What he really deserved was an Oscar. But people were dying. Needlessly. We ended up agreeing to a US-led fact- finding commission, as well as a number of steps to separate the Palestinian attackers and Israeli units. I reaffirmed our policy of insisting that Israeli soldiers use live fire only if they felt their lives were under threat. Arafat undertook to order his security forces and Tanzim not to launch further attacks. He even phoned Gaza with what we were given to understand were explicit orders. But it was all for show, as we discovered when we were invited to the Elysée Palace to meet Chirac. The French President had clearly received advance word from Arafat about his demand for an international "protection" force, presumably with a role for the French. To my surprise and frustration, and Secretary Albright's as well, Chirac insisted that no agreement was acceptable without that happening. Then, he turned to me, demanding to know why the violence had left nearly 400 Palestinians dead, but barely two dozen Israelis, if the Palestinians were the aggressors. "Mr President," I said, "just several weeks ago we were prepared to go very far in order to put this entire conflict behind us. It is Mr Arafat who rejected the proposal, even as a basis for negotiations. Just a basis to seek peace. He then deliberately turned to terror. We are protecting ourselves, and our soldiers. Are you really saying that you'll be happy for us to sign an agreement to end it only when another 350 Israelis are killed? I'm not playing that game. Arafat started this. He has to stop it. We know he can, and we hold him responsible if that does not happen." It did not happen. We tried all we could to prevent a further deterioration. I approved moves, in co-ordination with the Palestinian police, to lower our security profile where possible. We made sure Israeli police were not visible from the mosques on the Haram al-Sharif. But after the next Friday prayers, a crowd made its way to a police post at the edge of the Old City and attacked it. In Nablus, the burial site of Joseph had long been a source of tension. Shlomo Ben-Ami reached 381 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028229

/ BARAK / 96 an agreement with the Palestinians to replace an Israeli troop cordon there with Palestinian police. But on the morning of Saturday October 7th, hours after the Palestinian police took over, a mob attacked, burned and ransacked the site. They destroyed the Torah scrolls. A few hours later, our soldiers found the body of a rabbi from a nearby settlement. He had gone to survey the damage to the synagogue. That evening, I delivered an ultimatum: "If we don't see a change in the patterns of violence in the next two days, we will regard this as a cessation by Arafat of the peace process." That did, briefly, have an effect. When Clinton reinforced my message later in the day, Dennis told me that for the first time, he sensed that Arafat realized he had to act. But again, it was not enough, nor in anything like a sustained manner. And with an appalling act of murder three days afterwards, it was too late. That outrage came in Ramallah. Two Israeli reservists took a wrong turn and ended up driving into the town. They were taken to the Palestinian police station. Hundreds of people broke in and stabbed them, gouged their eyes out and disembowled them. In a chilling image broadcast around the world, one of the murderers brandished the bloodstained palms of his hands in a gesture of triumph. Since I was Defense Minister as well, I spent the hours that followed in the kirya. We ordered attack helicopters into action for the first time, though with advance warning to local Palestinians in the areas we targeted. We destroyed the Ramallah police station, as well as a militia base near Arafat's headquarters in Gaza. But Arafat emerged to tell a cheering crowd: "Our people don't care. They don't hesitate to continue their march to Jerusalem, the capital of the Palestinian independent state." Israelis did care. It is hard to say which emotion was more powerful: disgust or fury. But if the opinion polls were to be believed, a large majority wanted us to hit back with the full force of the Israeli army. Still, my overriding aim remained to end the violence if possible, not make it worse. When Clinton asked me to join him, Arafat, King Abdullah of Jordan and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for a summit in Sharm al-Sheikh, I agreed. We worked out a series of steps to disengage. Arafat was finally supposed to order the Palestinian Authority security forces and Tanzim to cease fire, and establish no-go perimeters around our army positions. We would reopen Gaza airport and, over a period of two weeks, pull back our forces to where they had been before the violence began. But again, it didn't happen. The Palestinian attacks intensified and, as I'd made clear at the 382 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028230

/ BARAK / 97 summit, we responded. The only, brief, lull came when Arafat feared the Americans would cancel his scheduled visit to Washington to see Clinton on November 9. I was due to follow him three days later. I met Clinton and Dennis Ross over dinner in a little kitchen area attached to the Oval Office, and both seemed surprisingly upbeat. The President said he'd told Arafat the broad points that would be in the new American negotiating paper. It was Camp David-plus. Assuming all issues in a final peace were agreed, the Palestinians would now end up, after a land swap near Gaza, with a "mid-90- percent" share of the West Bank. On Jerusalem, the guiding principle would be "what is Arab will be Palestinian, and what is Jewish, Israeli." On the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, each side would have control of its own holy sites. Finally, though Palestinian refugees would be free to return in unlimited numbers to a new Palestinian state, there would be no "right of return" to pre-1967 Israel. The President told me that after he'd run all this by Arafat, he and Dennis had asked whether "in principle" these were parameters he could accept. Arafat had said yes. I assume they expected me to say the same. But I told them I couldn't give them an answer. What concerned me now was the violence. Until it was reined in, I would not be party to rewarding Arafat diplomatically. I urged the Americans to make ending the violence their focus as well, because if they didn't get tougher on Arafat's noncompliance with anything resembling a de-escalation, Israel would do SO. Since the Knesset had returned before my trip to Washington, I'd needed first to make sure my government would survive. The obvious, or at least the most mathematically secure, choice would have been a deal with Sharon. Especially since the lynching in Ramallah, there were calls from politicians on all sides for a unity coalition between Labor and Likud. Arik definitely wanted in. The main issue reamined the peace process. I didn't find Arik's specific objections to Camp David hard to deal with. As I'd said from the start, the fact that we'd failed to reach an agreement at the summit meant that any concessions I'd considered were now, 383 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028231

/ BARAK / 98 in legal and diplomatic terms, null and void. The package Arafat had ultimately rejected had not even been presented by me. It was an American proposal. Besides, it was obvious no serious negotiations were going to happen anyway for the foreseeable future. Arik, however, said he wanted not just a "full divorce" from Camp David. He insisted we formally declare an end to the entire Oslo process. I told him that was a price I was not prepared to pay for his support. Despite the failure of the summit, and the terrible human cost from Arafat's choice of violence over diplomacy, there was a wide international recognition that it was the Palestinians, not Israel, who were responsible. For us to end the Oslo process meant inviting accusations we'd never intended to reach a peace agreement in the first place, and that it was Israel that was closing the door. We would also risk forfeiting the American support we'd secured by our efforts to reach a peace deal, an asset all Israeli governments would benefit from in other circumstances and contexts in the future. Fortunately, I had an alternative to a coalition with the Likud. Alarmed at the prospect of a having Sharon in the government, the Oslo-era doves in Labor, led by Yossi Beilin, worked out a new deal with Shas. The Sephardi Orthodox party was still not prepared to rejoin the cabinet, but it did promise a "safety net" in the Knesset to ensure we would not have to worry about no-confidence votes while confronting the Palestinian violence. I knew Shas's support would waver if there was a resumption of serious peace negotiations. Still, as Clinton continued to insist we make one final attempt to get a deal, I felt we had a responsibility to play our part. I wasn't prepared to put us in the position of appearing to stoneweall his efforts, and encourage the false narrative that Israeli "intransigence" was somehow frustrating Arafat's readiness to make peace. The Palestinian campaign of violence was getting worse. An Islamic Jihad car bomb near Mahaneh Yehudah market in Jerusalem injured nearly a dozen people and left two dead. Hamas blew up a school bus in one of the Gaza settlements, killing two more people. In Hadera, halfway up the coast from Tel Aviv to Haifa, a car bomb on a main street left two people dead and more than 60 injured Palestinian snipers from near Bethlehem began opening fire on Gilo, one of the post-1967 Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem, and home to more than 30,000 people. Yet despite all this, I authorized Shlomo Ben-Ami, Gili Sher, Amnon Lipkin and Yossi Ginossar to continue talks with Palestinian negotiators on the terms of the President's last-ditch peace proposal. 384 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028232

/ BARAK / 99 By the end of November, I believed that the chances of a peace agreement with Arafat were so microscopic as to border on non-existent, and that my own prospects for retaining sufficient support to be an effective Prime Minister much beyond Clinton's departure were not much better. It was not just Arik and the Likud, but other parties on the right that were actively attempting to bring down the government. I was being squeezed politically: by opposition to the concessions, especially on Jerusalem, I'd been willing to consider in pursuit of a peace agreement, and by the ever-worsening Palestinian violence. Shlomo Ben-Ami put it best, saying that in the view of most Israelis, "Arafat's response to Camp David was not peace, it was an intifada." By the second part of November, there were five separate motions of no- confidence working their way through the Knesset. I could have quashed them all at a single stroke, since Arik, both publicly and privately, was conveying to me his continuing interest in joining a unity coalition. But I again decided against it, at this stage not so much because I expected a peace deal, but because I believed continued Israeli engagement in the peace process was essential to preventing Arafat from evading his responsibility for making a deal impossible. I could also have wrongfooted my opponents by insisting that any early election be not just for a new Prime Minister but for a new Knesset, something very few existing Knesset members were anxious to see happen. I did, in fact, do precisely that at the end of November, delaying an immediate move to try to topple the government. But I immediately regretted doing it. The game-playing side of politics was the part I least understood, and most disliked. I recognized that to bring down the Knesset along with me would be unfair to the country, not to mention my own Labor Party, which still had the largest number of parliamentary seats. In pursuing my peace efforts with Hafez al-Assad, and at Camp David, I'd insisted I was acting on the mandate I'd received in the Prime Ministerial election. If the peace efforts had failed, or if a significant part of the country felt I was wrong to have tried in the way I did, surely the responsibility for that, too, should fall on me. I remained confident I had been right to make the efforts with Arafat, with Assad, and, of course, to have followed through on my pledge to withdraw our troops from Lebanon. But believing that you are right, even if later events might bear you out, was not all that mattered in politics. You had to be able to bring the public with you. It was clear my support was ebbing away. Looking ahead to the 385 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028233

/ BARAK / 100 challenges Israel would face during Clinton's final period in office and afterwards, I knew I could not go further without seeking a fresh mandate from the country, however unlikely the prospects now seemed. Deciding to do so was a decision that was probably easier for me than for other politicians. Privileged though I felt as Prime Minister to be able to pursue what I felt deeply were Israel's national interests, the trappings of office were not that important to me. I'd gone into politics to do things, not for the photo opportunities. I did still believe it was important to see the final diplomatic push by Clinton through to its end. But I knew an early election for Prime Minister wouldn't happen overnight. It would involve a couple of months' preparation. When I called a news conference on December 9, the media, and the country, assumed that it was about the Palestinian violence and the ups and downs of the Clinton initiative, and I did talk about both. But at the end, I said: "There are those who doubt the mandate I received from the citizens of Israel. I have decided to seek a new mandate - to lead the state of Israel on the road to peace, security and a proper civic and social agenda." I said I would go see the Israeli President the following morning. "I will formally resign, and run for a special election, at the head of the Labor Party, for the Prime Ministership of Israel." The election was set for February 2001. The last act in President Clinton's attempt at a breakthrough actually came after the American election, and just a month before George W. Bush would succeed him. Since, in practical terms, any final agreement would almost certainly come under President Bush, Clinton's final negotiating paper was framed as a set of paramaters which, if agreed to by both sides, were intended to set the stage for a final deal. On December 23, Clinton presented the draft to both sides' representatives at the White House. I wasn't there. But the accounts I got from Shlomo, Gili and Dennis Ross afterwards made me feel as if I was. The president said he would read through the document and then leave the Israeli and Palestinian teams with Dennis to make sure they'd recorded each detail. He said this was no longer the starting point for further argument on the basic shape of a peace deal. This was his considered judgement of 386 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028234

/ BARAK / 101 what would constitute a fair agreement. He was presenting it on a take-it-or-leave- it basis. If either side said no, he would withdraw it, and it would not be binding on President Bush. He proceeded to lay out his proposal. It now envisaged the Palestinians ending up with between 95 and 97 percent of the West Bank. Israel's military presence in the Jordan Valley would be for a maximum of six years, after which our soldiers would be replaced by an international force. On refugees, the solution Clinton proposed would "make it clear there is no specific right of return to Israeli itself" but recognize "the aspiration of the Palestinian people to return to the area." He proposed a joint endorsement by Israel and the Palestinians of the right of refugees to return to a new Palestinian state. In Jerusalem, Arafat would have sovereignty over the entirety of the Old City except for the Jewish Quarter and, of course, the Western Wall and the "holy space of which it is a part." Finally, the President said, this would be a final peace: an end of conflict and, once implemented, an end to any further claims. He wanted replies from Israel and the Palestinians within five days. Dennis added that, while both sides could come back with reservations, if any of these fell outside the substantive limits of President Clinton's parameters, the response would be interpreted as a "no" and our search for an agreement would be over. Clinton's latest proposals went beyond even what I was willing to have him keep in his pocket at Camp David. Opposition politicians in Israel, and even a few of our cabinet ministers, promptly objected to the formula for Jerusalem. I told the critics - as I knew I'd have to argue to the country in a referendum, in the vanishingly unlikely event we actually reached an agreement - that making peace was not like making love. It was something you did with enemies. I, too, would have preferred to say no to Clinton's ideas on Jerusalem. But to reject them would have placed Israel in the position of rejecting the entire Clinton paper, something I was not prepared to do. I sent word to the President that we accepted his ideas. We did raise reservations - twenty-eight in all, about how various parts of the agreement would work on the ground. But none fell outside his parameters for a peace agreement. At first Arafat asked the Americans for more time. Then he went to Washington to see Clinton. There, he presented his "reservations". They were not just outside the Clinton parameters. They rejected two key elements. Arafat said there could be no 387 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028235

/ BARAK / 102 Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall of the ancient temple. Nor would he agree to any compromise on the "right of return." For me, that was the final answer. As one Palestinian leader remarked to me amid the still-escalating terror attacks a couple of years later, the Palestinians had "needed a Ben-Gurion, but we got an Arafat." He didn't mean Ben-Gurion the Zionist, but the statesman who at crucial moments like the partition vote in 1947, could give up his maximalist hopes and dreams in order to secure a better future for his people. Arafat felt much more comfortable, more secure, when the suicide bombers were calling the tune. Then he could whip up the crowds with promises of "marching on Jerusalem" or jet around the world telling everyone that Israel was denying his right to a state. Though I now knew an agreement was impossible, for many on the Israeli left, my ostensible allies in the forthcoming election campaign against Arik, that was hard to accept. Particularly for Yossi Sarid of Meretz, and to a certain extent Yossi Beilin too, the only explanation for our failure to get a deal had to be that we hadn't negotiated well or creatively enough. The idea that Arafat simply didn't want a two-state peace was anathema to them. So was the political platform I said that I hoped to implement if I was re-elected as Prime Minister. Maybe, at some point in the future, a negotiated peace might be possible. We had accomplished something of importance at Camp David. We'd made clear our red lines. We knew where Arafat stood. But for now, I believed we had to move on, both in order to keep the situation on the ground from getting worse and to act in Israel's own long- term political and security interests. I said we should unilaterally disengage from the West Bank and Gaza. The idea was straightforward. The Palestinians' unwillingness to accept even the final Clinton parameters, driven home with murderous ferocity by the explosion of violence since Camp David, should not be allowed to paralyze Israel politically. I proposed that we map out the area we required to retain and secure the major settlement blocs, as well as the outer East Jerusalem suburbs; a further security strip along the Jordan River; and several other strategically important 388 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028236

/ BARAK / 103 points. It would amount to retaining control over around 20 percent of the West Bank, but none of the major Arab towns or cities. Though deliberately stopping well short of share of the West Bank Arafat could have secured through a negotiated peace, it would remove Israeli troops and settlers from most of the territory. It would give the Palestinians ample room to set up a state if they so chose, and conceivably to expand its area if some future leader had more of the "Ben-Gurion" in him than Arafat. Until then, it would allow both of our peoples to get on with their lives and focus on their own political and social and economic challenges. There was a second, critically important part to what I was proposing: the construction of a physical security fence along the new "disengagement line" with the West Bank. It was the suggestion rejected under Rabin, accepted under Peres amid the Hamas bombings in the 1996 election campaign, but never followed through on. Even under the new arrangement I envisaged, Israeli troops would retain the freedom of action to respond to, or pre-empt, terror attacks with targeted operations inside the West Bank. But the physical barrier would hugely increase our ability to halt the attackers before they could strike. Yet even if I'd been able to bring those on the left of Labor behind the plan, this election campaign was going to be a lot tougher than in 1999. Since Knesset members weren't running for their seats, the Labor machine lacked its usual incentive put up posters, knock on doors, or get out the vote. Arik, however, benefited from the enthusiasm of Likudniks and other right-wing activists who saw an opportunity to retake control of Israel's political agenda. Long before election day, I realized my time as Prime Minister was up. Before the campaign began, an old friend of mine, a leading Israeli journalist, tried to talk me into withdrawing. "You're going to lose, Ehud," he said. "Why, after making all this effort for peace, after doing your best, do you want the last act to be losing to Arik?" I'd never seen the objective as just staying in office. If that had been the case, I wouldn't have put the chances of a peace deal with Syria to their final test. I wouldn't have gone to Camp David. I also would have accepted Arik's serial offers to join a unity coalition. But never in my life had I walked away from a challenge. I certainly wasn't going to retreat in the midst of Palestinian violence, and when Israel still faced key decisions on how to move on from Arafat's unreadiness to negotiate an end to our decades-old conflict. 389 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028237

/ BARAK / 104 I did regret being unable to rely on the support of two key constituencies that had helped deliver my landslide victory barely 18 months earlier: my own Labor Party and the Arab citizens of Israel. I had no trouble understanding the reasons many Israeli Arabs were abandoning me. The clashes in the Galilee at the start of the new intifada had left more than a dozen of their community dead. As an official inquiry would later conclude, there was blame on all sides. A number of Arab members of the Knesset had played a part in inciting the violence. Yet the police had been unprepared, and they had used excessive force. As I said publicly before the election, I, as Prime Minister, was ultimately responsible, and I formally apologized for what had happened. Yet the roots went deeper, to the economic and social disadvantages still faced by many Arab citizens, and the difficulty in resolving those problems calmly and collectively as long as Israel remained in a state of war with its Arab neighbors. For Labor and the political left, it was as if, despite Arafat's repeated rejections of ever more forthcoming terms of peace, they still couldn't bring themselves to believe he really meant it. By default, they were inclined to blame me for not delivering peace. I was accused of relying too much on a close circle of aides and negotiators I'd known from my time in the army, of not giving a negotiating role to Labor veterans of the Oslo negotiations like Yossi Beilin, and of being insufficiently sensitive to Arafat's needs in the negotiating process. Typical of the argument was a broadside by the journalist and historian Tom Segev, in Ha'aretz, which accused me of an "incredible arrogance" which had "led to an historic mistake. Rather than continue on the Oslo road, Barak put it into his head that he could reach a final settlement and try and impose it on the Palestinian Authority President." I did not try to "impose" anything on Arafat. I did, quite consciously, abandon the "Oslo road" because it was inexorably leading to a situation where, after the final Wye redeployments, Arafat would have control over the great majority of the West Bank without having to commit to any of the assurances that even most on the Israeli left would define as the minimum required for peace. Now, of course, we knew that was something the Palestinian leader was not prepared to do. When election day came, not that many of my critics on the left actually voted against me. Nor did the Israeli Arabs. Yet in very large numbers, they simply didn't vote. In percentage terms, Arik's victory was even more decisive than mine over Bibi. He got more than 62 percent of the vote. I received barely 37 percent. 390 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028238

/ BARAK / 105 Yet the turnout was the lowest in Israeli history. Arik received fewer votes than I had in 1999. Around half of the 1.8 million people who had supported me stayed at home. I conceded defeat after the first exit polls and said I would be stepping down as head of the Labor Party. Still, since the election had been only for Prime Minister, Labor remained the largest party in the Knesset. Mathematically, Arik might be able to cobble together the required 61-seat majority with an assortment of smaller parties. But without Labor as ballast, his government would be even more precarious than mine. When I triggered the election, he'd let it be known that if he won, he hoped to include Labor in his government, with me as his Defense Minister. Even though I'd announced I was stepping aside, he phoned me the morning after the election to make that argument again. He said Israel needed a strong government, especially to confront the escalating violence. Having a person with my background, whom he knew well and trusted, in the defense portfolio was important. I didn't say yes. Unfortunately, I failed to do what I should have done: I didn't immediately say no. When the public learned about Sharon's interest in a unity government, Labor descended into bickering. Some of my former ministers, like Yossi Beilin and Shlomo Ben-Ami, were against the idea of joining any Likud-led government. They were especially disgusted by the prospect of doing so under Arik, the architect of the 1982 Lebanon War. Most of the Labor's central committee did seem in favor of joining. But given the scale of my election defeat, many wanted do so without me. For a few days, Arik kept phoning me. I did feel that the substance of the arrangement he suggested made sense. But over that first week, I realized that, understandably, he had little interest in addressing my policy concerns. I decided to focus instead on ensuring a properly organized transition to a new Labor party leader, and publicly confirmed that I would indeed be resigning. Several weeks after Arik formed his government - including Labor, with Simon Peres as one of four deputy prime ministers - he invited me to his office. He wanted to ask my views on a specific security question. That took barely 15 minutes. But I raised another issue that I argued would have more far-reaching implications. It was the idea of building the security fence along the West Bank. I'd tried to make the case for doing so during the election campaign, and I'd lost the election. "Now I'm turning to you. When I left office, 39 Israelis had been killed in the terror attacks. Now, there are 70. When the number reaches 700, 391 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028239

/ BARAK / 106 there's no doubt you'll decide to build this fence. But to your dying day, you won't be able to look yourself in the mirror and explain why you waited for another 630 Israelis to die first." He did eventually start building it, but only in the wake of an act of terrorism which, even by the standards of this new and still-escalating intifada, was truly obscene. In March 2002, suicide bombers murdered 30 people, mostly elderly, as they were celebrating the annual Passover Seder in a hotel dining room in Netanya. Arik hit back two days later with Israel's largest military operation on the West Bank since 1967. Israeli forces retook major Palestinian towns, placed Arafat under de facto siege in his headquarters in Ramallah and imposed curfews and closures. In June, the government formally approved the security fence. Still, another year would pass before the major part of the barrier was in place, by which time some 500 Israelis had been murdered in the terror attacks. Only then did the number of casualties begin to fall. I tried to steer clear of public criticism of Arik's government. One of the lessons I'd learned as Prime Minister was how easy it was to second-guess from the outside. No Prime Minister can act exactly as he might plan or want to. The most you can do is make sure you understand and analyze the issues and follow your instincts, experience and conscience to come as near as possible to doing what you believe is right. You will inevitably make mistakes and misjudgements. I certainly did. At least some of the criticism I received was deserved. I was at times too inflexible. I tended to limit my focus to a small group of trusted aides and advisors. I was less good at schmoozing with - or, perhaps more importantly, delegating to - others in the government or the party. I suspect it's no coincidence that the man who brought me into government in the first place was often criticized for the same things. By character, instinct and experience, Rabin, too, remained less a politician than a military man. Yet towards the end of his second period as Prime Minister, he did get better at delegating to people around him, and creating an atmosphere that encouraged teamwork, even when he knew he could not accept or act on everything they might suggest. During my term as Prime Minister, I was much less good at that. But another thing Yitzhak and I shared was a determination to set ourselves specific goals and do everything we could to achieve them. I promised to get the army out of Lebanon. With the Palestinians, I arrived in office convinced that the process begun in Oslo was both a huge opportunity and a potential dead-end. I was 392 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028240

/ BARAK / 107 determined to focus on the end goal: initially, at least, a framework agreement, and over time a final political resolution of our conflict. Ever since the outbreak of the Palestinians' first intifada, I believed this was as much in Israel's own interest as theirs. Yet when I entered office, we had no way of knowing whether Arafat wanted two states living side-by-side in peace. I felt it was my duty to find out, and, if the answer was yes, to put a peace agreement in place. I felt the same about way about Syria and Hafez al-Assad. When I left office, I believed I had achieved the most important goals of my premiership. We were out of Lebanon. Though we couldn't achieve the peace agreements I had hoped for, it was not for lack of trying. Along the way, Israel had demonstrated to the world that it was able and willing to consider painful compromises, and that it was the Arab leaders who, at least for now, were unequal to the challenge of making peace. If I'd been able to retain the backing of the voters who made me Prime Minister in 1999, we might even have moved ahead on unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians, dramatically altering the trajectory of our relationship. Yet even without that, Camp David did delineate the terms of any future peace arrangement. When and if conditions allowed a resumption of serious negotiating efforts, the shape, and indeed most of the details, of a final peace between our peoples were now clear. I was on holiday in the summer of 2001 when Clinton phoned me. The New Times had run a piece on how and why the summit, and the subsequent negotiations through the end of the year, ended in failure. When I later read the article, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Deborah Sontag, I found it a meandering mix of opinions garnered from an assortment of Americans, Europeans, Israelis and Palestinians, including Arafat himself, with the overall conclusion that Clinton and I had not offered as generous a deal as was assumed and that it was somehow unfair to suggest the Palestinians deserved blame for rejecting it. There had been several other articles in various publications along the same lines. I didn't see much point at this stage in setting the record straight. To the extent the content of the Times piece bothered me, it was a simple, but important, error of fact. Quoting Arafat himself, Sontag wrote that during the back- patio discussion I had with him at the dinner in Kochav Yair shortly before the new intifada, he'd "implored me to block Mr Sharon's plans" to visit the Temple Mount. Arafat didn't raise the issue at all, and presumably knew that we had consulted his West Bank security chief to ensure it happened quickly, avoided the 393 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028241

/ BARAK / 108 mosques on the Haram, and would not become a catalyst, or in this case a pretext, for violence. Yet the revisionist history about our peace efforts left Clinton not just frustrated, but genuinely puzzled. What the hell were these people talking about, he asked me. Why were they missing the forest for the trees. "The true story of Camp David," he said, "was that for the first time in the history of the conflict, you and I, the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of the United States, placed on the table a proposal, based on Resolutions 242 and 338, very close to the Palestinian demands. And Arafat refused to accept it as a basis of negotiations, walked out of the room, and deliberately turned to terrorism." All the rest, President Clinton said, was gossip. All of it was now irrelevant, too. His parameters were off the table. Palestinian violence against Israelis was getting ever deadlier. And I was out of politics. When I delivered my final remarks to a Labor Party meeting, I was asked whether I was leaving politics for good. I replied that I would always remain a member of Labor. But I saw my role as a bit like when I'd left the army. "I'm a reserve officer," I said, adding that I hoped I would not be called back to duty any time soon. I had been Prime Minister for only 21 months. But I'd been in politics for six years, and in uniform for nearly thirty-six: in public service for more than four decades. Now, suddenly, I was a private citizen. And for a few years, I actually stayed that way. 394 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028242

/ BARAK / 109 Chapter Twenty-Four I had only a general idea of what I would do next. "Something in business" describes it best. But I sought the advice of a friend who, rather than leaving politics, had just entered it. Colin Powell was now the second President Bush's Secretary of State. "Why don't you go on the lecture circuit?" he said. The short answer was that it hadn't occurred to me that I'd be any good at it. But it proved energizing and interesting both for me and, it seemed, the audiences I spoke to. It was also lucrative. I would deliver four lectures over the span of a week and end up making twice what, until that point in my life, I had earned during a full year. I was also invited onto a number of company boards. I turned down some, in order to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. But I did get involved in an area where I believed my range of experiences might be relevant: investment decisions, and venture capital. The result was a dramatic change in lifestyle. Nava and I got to spend more time with our daughters. We vacationed overseas for the first time. We also decided to build a new home, and the place that we chose gave me my first experience of how far I was from being a "private citizen" in the eyes of the Israeli public. When it became known we were planning to move to Kfar Shmaryahu near Tel Aviv, one of the wealthiest places in Israel, all hell broke loose. How could you, I was asked. I couldn't resist joking that I just wanted to be close to our voters. Likud supporters were about as rare in Kfar Shmaryahu as panhandlers. Along with Mishmar Hasharon, it was the only place where I'd polled over 80 percent even in my loss to Sharon. Israel had changed dramatically from the kibbutz-centered pioneer society of my youth. Greater Tel Aviv, in particular, was thriving economically, and the rising crop of millionaires, whether from traditional business or in the bourgeoning technology sector, included its fair share of former kibbutznikim. Still, socially and culturally, a puritanical streak remained, a sense that there was something not quite right about people raised on a socialist ideal becoming personally well off. I accepted this. I recognized that I was not just a former kibbutznik. I had been head of the Labor Party. And Prime Minister. Still, I did feel much of the personal criticism was unfair. I had devoted more than four decades of my life to serving my country. I'd behaved with scrupulous honesty while in office, and was avoiding 395 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028243

/ BARAK / 110 any business involvement that could present a conflict of interest now that I had left. Frankly, I saw nothing wrong with earning money through honest endeavor, and using the proceeds to provide economic security for myself and my family, and to give our grandchildren a better start in life than Nava's or my own parents had been able to do. In the end, we didn't move to Kfar Shmaryahu. But that was because of an even more profound change in my life: I separated from Nava, after more than 30 years together. When we had begun plans to move, I laughed off a warning from a psychologist friend of mine that decisions like building a new house could lead to a deeper reassessment of your life. But that is at least in part what happened. There were also other changes that caused me to stop and take stock. I was no longer Prime Minister. My father had passed away soon after I left office. Professionally, I was exploring new areas and developing new interests. Nava and I had been happily married since our twenties. We had three wonderful daughters, and a first grandchild. Yet the more I thought about where we were in our lives, the more I felt our future paths were pulling us in different directions. For both of us, the separation was difficult, though it was made a bit less painful because Nava knew that it had nothing to do with another woman, or another relationship. I did imagine that I might one day meet someone else. But I was equally prepared for it not happening. I certainly didn't expect it any time soon. When it did, it began by accident. A few weeks after our separation, I was visiting the Knesset for a discussion about fixing Israel's broken electoral system. In the audience was a member of one of the civic associations pressing for reform: Nili Priell, my first, and only, serious girlfriend before I met Nava. We spoke for a few minutes afterwards. We agreed to meet again, and catch up with each other's lives, a week or so later. Both of us now had grown children. We were both on our own. There is, I assume for everyone, something impossible to replicate about a first love. Nili and I were given an unlikely second chance. That seemed to me an extraordinary gift. It still does. Yet if my personal life seemed full of new promise, the same could not be said of the country I'd served for my whole adult life, or of the political party I'd led into government. The continuing construction of the security fence along the West Bank finally did begin to reduce the sheer number of Palestinian attacks: from nearly 50 in 2002, to about half that number in 2003. But the suicide bombers who did get through - from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah's "Al-Aqsa Martyrs' 396 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028244

/ BARAK / 111 Brigade" - struck wherever they could inflict the most terror, and death: at bus stations, on buses, in shopping centers, restaurants and cafés. Over a 12-month period, beginning with a bombing of Tel Aviv's main bus station at the beginning of January 2003, they murdered 145 men, women and children. It would not be until two years' later, with the West Bank fence in place and a range of other security measures, that the attacks, and the deaths, were finally brought down dramatically. The Labor Party had finally left Arik Sharon's coalition in late 2002. But in Israel's 2003 election - reverting to the old rules again, with a single vote for party and Prime Minister - Arik and the Likud won resoundingly. They doubled their Knesset seats, to 38. Labor, now with only 19 seats, against turned to Shimon Peres, as interim party leader. I didn't miss the political limelight. But by mid-2004, with the first sign of a major change in policy toward the Palestinians, I felt I had a contribution to make. What first prompted me to dip my toes back into politics were the ever more obvious signs throughout 2004 that Arik's coalition, and his hold on the Likud, were unraveling. Part of his problem was a steady drumbeat of corruption allegations around what had become a kind of family political operation: Arik and his two sons, Omri and Gilad. But Arik also seemed to be undergoing a welcome political conversion, to the need for the more profound political "disengagement" with the Palestinians which I'd long been advocating. He had endorsed the Bush Administration's "road map" for resuming the peace process. Yet with Yasir Arafat ageing, ailing and even less inclined to consider the difficult decisions he had shirked at Camp David, Arik went one, dramatic step further. He raised the idea of unilaterally withdrawing Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza - ensuring a showdown with the rank and file of the Likud, and other parties on the right. His main Likud rival, very much back in front-line Israeli politics, was his Finance Minister: Bibi Netanyahu. Though Bibi remained on board until the last moment, he dramatically resigned for the cabinet in August 2005, a week before the Gaza withdrawal, declaring: "I am not prepared to be a partner to a move which ignores reality, and proceeds blindly toward turning the Gaza Strip into a base for Islamic terrorism which will threaten the state." To this day, Bibi, along with many Israelis across the political spectrum, draws a direct line between our pullout from Gaza, Hamas's takeover and its violent purging of Fatah's old guard there, and the periodic wars we've had to fight since 397 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028245

/ BARAK / 112 then in response to Hamas rocket fire into Israel. The moral: Arik was wrong to withdraw. But the Islamists' ascendancy was happening anyway. After all, it was Hamas attacks that provided the spearhead of the intifada of terror launched in the wake of Camp David. Arafat's own influence was also inexorably on the wane by the time he passed away, in Paris, at the end of 2004, to be succeeded by Abu Mazen. I do not know of a single senior figure in Israel with any military experience who believes that we would be more secure today if we still had thousands of soldiers and settlers inside Gaza. Surprised though I was by Arik's decision to leave, I had no doubt that the fundamental security judgment he was making - that a disengagement was in Israel's own interest - was the right one. I was encouraged, too, by his parallel announcement of a small, token withdrawal from a few small West Bank settlements. My regret at the time was that he did not go further toward the kind of major West Bank disengagement I'd been arguing for, and that even in Gaza the pullout seemed insufficiently prepared or thought out. The model, I believed, should have been our withdrawal from Lebanon - involving detailed prior consultation with, and political support from, the UN and key international allies. I also felt it was critically important to ensure that, while we would obviously need offshore patrols to prevent arms and munitions from getting in, we allowed and encouraged an environment in which the Gazan economy could function and grow after we left. None of that happened. Though we left Gaza, we effectively sealed off and blockaded one of the most densely populated, economically strapped and politically febrile strips of land on the face of the earth. Still, I did see it as an important first step toward the kind of wider disengagement that would prioritize Israel's own security interests, and political and social cohesiveness, until and unless conditions allowed a for a serious new effort for a final peace deal. I was heartened when Shimon led Labor back into Arik's coalition at the start of 2005 to ensure he'd have the support necessary to go through with the Gaza withdrawal. And while I did make a brief attempt to return as party leader later in the year, when it was clear I wasn't going to win, I threw my support behind Shimon and against the other challenger, the longtime labor- union leader Amir Peretz, who was running on a platform to take Labor out of Sharon's government. But Peretz won the leadership election. He did leave the cabinet, forcing Arik to call an early election for March 2006. And that, along with the most ambitious and 398 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028246

/ BARAK / 113 ill-fated Israeli war in Lebanon since 1982, was the reason I ultimately found myself back in the Israeli government. It began on July 12, 2006, when Hizbollah fired rockets from southern Lebanon as cover for an ambush of two Israeli Humvees on our side of the border. Two soldiers were killed, and two others abducted. A few hours later, when an Israeli armored unit crossed to look for the kidnapped soldiers, an explosive charge blew up one of our tanks, killing four of its crew members. Arik was no longer Prime Minister by then. With Bibi marshalling opposition inside the Likud to the Gaza disenagegment, he had formed a new centrist party called Kadima, along with prominent Likud moderates and buttressed by a Labor heavyweight: Shimon Peres. But before the election, Arik suffered a pair of strokes, lapsing into a coma from which he would never emerge. His notional deputy, the veteran Likud politician and former Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert, found himself as Prime Minister. Kadima did comfortably win the May election. It ended up with 29 seats, followed by Labor with 19 and leaving the Netanyahu-led Likud with only 12. Olmert formed a coalition, including Labor, which had undeniable political ballast: Shimon was one of his deputy Prime Ministers, along with Haim Ramon. The gifted lawyer, longtime Likudnik and strong backer of the Gaza plan, Tzipi Livni, was Foreign Minister. Amir Peretz, as head of Labor, was given the Defense Ministry. But without Sharon himself at the helm, the government was now about to face a military crisis with virtually no military experience around the cabinet table. Olmert called an emergency cabinet meeting on the evening of the Hizbollah attack, and just before it was due to convene, my phone rang. It was Shimon, who, though with no first-hand army experience, did at least have the political experience in war that none of Olmert's other ministers could offer. He'd been by Ben-Gurion's side during the 1956 war, had been in Golda's government in 1967, and was Defense Minister after the 1973 war, through Entebbe, until Begin's defeated Labor in the 1977 election. Despite our own battles inside Labor, Shimon and I had become closer again of late, especially after I'd supported him in his last 399 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028247

/ BARAK / 114 Labor leadership contest. "Shalom, Ehud," he said when I answered the phone and, without small talk or preliminaries, asked me: "What do you think we should do?" I said I couldn't offer specific suggestions. "It's a detail-related question, and I don't know the details." But I advised him on the process I felt would be needed to come up with the right answer when the chief-of-staff, the former air force chief Dan Halutz, briefed the cabinet. "Halutz will propose what to do. Push him," I said. "When he presents his recommended action, ask him for his assessment of what Hizbollah will do in response. When he, or the head of military intelligence, has given you the range of possibilities and told you which is the most likely, say, OK, let's assume that happens. What's our next step? How is that going to lead us to our main objectives? And what are the objectives?" Newspaper reports the next morning said that Shimon, and only Shimon, did indeed press the chief-of-staff about each further stage of the operation and about the aims that we wanted to accomplish. But Halutz finally fobbed him off by saying that once they got to the later phases, they could discuss it. From the first reports I received through my army contacts, I feared the operation would go badly. There was no doubt we could inflict damage on Hizbollah. But there were no clear answers to the questions Shimon had raised. The initial Israeli air force response had been put in place more than five years earlier, when I was Prime Minister. Codenamed "Operation Cinnamon Sticks," it was designed to take out all of the fixed Hizbollah missile sites we had been able to identify. We knew its limitations. A lot of the rockets were fired from mobile launchers. But in one exercise, the known "Hizbollah" sites were replicated in the Galilee. They were destroyed in 43 minutes. I had no doubt that part of the plan would succeed. In the early hours of July 13, it took only 34 minutes to destroy the nearly 60 launchers we had pinpointed over the previous five years. But Operation Cinnamon Sticks had been intended as a first step in a far wider assault on Hizbollah and other targets, including a number of infrastructure installations, deeper inside Lebanon. It was part of a plan for a full-scale war, if the government decided that was necessary. As the early public statements by Olmert and other ministers made clear, they did not intend to start a war, at least at the outset. They certainly didn't have a coherent plan for one. But they would soon find themselves in Israel's longest single armed conflict since 1948. When Hizbollah fired hundreds of missiles at Israeli towns and cities, our operation intensified not by plan or military logic, but improvisation. As a former Prime 400 HOUSE _OVERSIGHT_028248