Memoir Reflection on Camp David Summit and Israeli-Palestinian Peace Efforts

In choosing to return, now, to Camp David for two weeks of summit talks, I knew the risks. Of all the moments of truth in my life — and in the life of my country — few, if any, would carry higher stakes. Success would mean not just one more stutter-step away from our century-long conflict with the Palestinians. It would signal a real, final peace: in treaty-speak, end of conflict. Whatever the complexities of putting an agreement into practice, given all the suffering and bloodshed endured by both sides, we would have crossed a point of no return. There would be two states, for two peoples. And if we failed? I knew, if only from months of increasingly stark intelligence reports, that an explosion of Palestinian violence — not just with stones or bottles this time, but with guns and explosives — would be only a matter of time. I knew something else as well. This would be a moment of truth not just for me. Or for Bill Clinton, a man who understood our conflict more deeply, and was more determined to help us end it, than any other president before him. It was a moment of truth for the leader of the Palestinians, Yasir Arafat. The Oslo Accords of 1993, groundbreaking though they were, had created a peace process, not peace. Over the past few years, that process had been lurching from crisis to crisis. Political support for negotiations was fraying. And yet the core issues of our conflict had not been resolved. In fact, they had hardly been talked about. The reason for this was no secret. For both sides, these questions lay at the heart of everything we’d been saying for years, to the world and to ourselves, about the roots of the conflict and the minimum terms we could accept in order to end it. At issue were rival claims on security, final borders, Israeli settlements, Palestinian refugees, and the future of ancient city of Jerusalem. None of these could be resolved without painful, and politically perilous, compromises. Entering the summit, despite the pressures ahead, I was confident that I, with my team of aides and negotiators, would do our part to make such a final peace agreement possible. Nor did I doubt that President Clinton, whom I had come to view not just as a diplomatic partner but a friend, would rise to the occasion. But as for Arafat? There was simply no way of knowing. That was why I had pressed President Clinton so hard to convene the summit. That was why, despite the misgivings of some of his closest advisers, he had taken the plunge. We both knew that the so-called “final-status issues” — 2 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011473