Word: baraker
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Yasser Arafat had ordered his Challenger executive jet revved up to take him home. Ehud Barak told aides to begin drafting a statement he would deliver by himself to give his spin on why the summit had collapsed. Bill Clinton was mulling some type of communiqu? to be issued by the three men that would try to put the best face on a diplomatic disaster...
...weeks of almost nonstop negotiations at Camp David have been grueling for Clinton, Arafat and Barak. For nine days, Clinton cajoled and pleaded with the two leaders. But progress had been so slow that he was ready to give up and fly to Okinawa, where he was already late for the G-8 summit. For seven months, Albright and her Mideast team had been shuttling to the region to persuade the two sides to move closer on the three critical issues that would have to be settled at a summit: the borders of a new Palestinian state, the number...
...Camp David, the hang-up boiled down to Jerusalem. Arafat demanded that the Palestinians have sovereignty over East Jerusalem, but Barak was willing to give him no more than authority over municipal services in that section of the city with Israel retaining overall sovereignty. The two sides also hadn't settled on the new borders and the return of Palestinian refugees, but the negotiators believed those gaps could be bridged once they decided the fate of Jerusalem. But neither man was budging; the talks had hit a brick wall...
...Barak and Arafat, who had been frosty with each other in their dealings the past seven months, had each begun complaining to Clinton that the other man wasn't negotiating seriously. Both had threatened at different times to walk out. At one point last Wednesday afternoon, Barak aides told the Israeli reporters traveling with him to be ready to take off in his plane by 8 p.m. Frustrated, Clinton decided to pack up too - and signaled to both men that he wasn't bluffing. By 10 p.m. Wednesday, he had his motorcade assembled outside his Camp David cabin to take...
...Although negotiations are continuing, the parties look increasingly unlikely to achieve a comprehensive deal that concludes the peace process and caps President Clinton's foreign policy legacy. While the Palestinians can afford to leave the talks with incremental gains, all of Barak's offers are contingent - we give you most of the West Bank; you recognize Jerusalem as ours - and the Israeli leader can't afford to make any concessions now without a comprehensive agreement. For the White House, all that remains may be an exercise in damage control...