Word: barak
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Last week, at a limousine-clogged U.N. Millennium Summit on Manhattan's East Side, Bill Clinton pleaded with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to show more bend in the positions that divide them on a peace accord. The opportunity for a peace accord "is fleeting and about to pass," Clinton worried. But after rounds with both men in a regal 35th-floor suite of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, the President came up empty-handed. "I have no breakthroughs to report," Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart said after the two separate meetings...
...Barak and Arafat still don't like what they're hearing from each other in the way of proposals. And they still don't like each other...
Throughout their almost year-long negotiations, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat have tried to appear warm and friendly when the cameras are turned on them. But in private, their relationship has been tense. By the beginning of this year, Barak was fed up with Arafat's tantrums over Israeli land transfers, arguing that the outbursts blocked progress toward a comprehensive peace agreement. What's more, after every concession Israel made on land transfers or prisoner returns, Arafat ignored the gesture and produced new demands, Barak complained...
...part, Arafat felt insulted. Barak was giving him no say in what land was being transferred and, even worse, stiffing him on it in public. In early February, for example, Arafat had asked Barak at a private dinner if he would include three Jerusalem suburbs in the next round of land transfers. Barak said he'd consider it. But two days later, Arafat got his answer - from an Israeli radio station. Israeli officials had leaked to the station that Barak would not turn over the suburbs. Since it had been a personal request, Arafat had assumed...
...took State Department negotiator Dennis Ross several weeks to heal that personal rift, but it hadn't been easy. Feeling like a parent dealing with two angry children locked in their rooms, Ross abruptly left Jerusalem at one point to force Arafat and Barak to speak to each other instead of conveying messages through...