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/ 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

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