Word: netanyahu
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After a White House send-off on Thursday, Oct. 15, Netanyahu and Arafat settled in at Wye. The two men actually didn't know each other well. Nor had Arafat ever met Ariel Sharon, the hard-liner Netanyahu recently named Foreign Minister. The hulking former general showed up two days late, sweeping into dinner, right past Arafat's gesture of welcome, refusing to shake hands or even look at the man he calls a terrorist and murderer. Instead Sharon focused on some Arafat aides with whom he has held talks this year. While he never did shake Arafat's hand...
Inside the American camp, there was disagreement about how best to push the negotiations forward. Everyone was impressed by Arafat's apparent willingness to find a deal. But the Americans were split over how to handle Netanyahu. Albright, who battled with the Israeli Prime Minister last May and lost when she gave him an ultimatum about moving troops from the West Bank, was growing increasingly frustrated with Israeli stalling. Friday night, as the Israelis celebrated the Sabbath, Albright was host to a small, Arabs-only dinner. "I really understand the pain and aspirations of your people," she said...
...news Monday morning was horrific--and unhelpful. Two grenades had been tossed into an Israeli bus station at rush hour, wounding 64 people. A Hamas activist was caught at the scene. Arafat condemned the terror, but the Americans feared that if Netanyahu wanted a pretext to leave, he had found it. Instead Bibi declared a suspension of the talks (soon quietly relaxed) except on security matters, and proposed a detour--a quickie deal on troops and security, to be followed by new talks in two to four weeks...
...repetition that he started carrying around the lyrics to I Got You Babe, the song from the movie Groundhog Day--whose hero must relive the same 24 hours over and over. (Clinton tried to explain the joke to Arafat, but it didn't translate.) It was time to force Netanyahu to focus on the security problems, the President decided. Over dinner, he pushed Netanyahu to boil his security demands down to five elements...
...Tuesday, Clinton got off his helicopter with a pad that had a column for each side's needs, bunched in three categories of difficulty. He joked with the parties, "I've kept you so long, you have a right to ask me for territory." Clinton got Arafat to accept Netanyahu's five security demands, but that afternoon Bibi put forward a kitchen-sink collection of complaints. Once the core security problems were solved, it was clear to Clinton that two emotional issues were blocking progress. For the Palestinians, it was the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails...