Memoir excerpt on Peres, Rabin, and Golan Heights negotiations (1995‑96)

votes: one for a party list and one for a directly elected Prime Minister. This would be a personal test, an opportunity for Shimon to build on the still-tenuous achievement of Oslo and finally secure the endorsement of the Israeli people. It seemed, for a while, I might even have a role. A few days later, Peres and I met again. In Israeli elections, the campaign manager is called head of hasbarah — media and public-information planning. He told me he still didn’t know exactly when he would call the election. But he asked me to take on that role. Both Peres and I proved to be right about the Syrians. The negotiations did resume, and two rounds of talks were held at Wye River, on Maryland’s eastern shore, in December 1995 and January 1996. They did focus on the whole range of issues in an eventual peace, just as Peres had hoped, and some progress was made in identifying areas of potential agreement. But the bulldog never took its eyes of our ankle. There was no escaping the fact that without addressing the question of our withdrawal from the Golan Heights, we weren’t going to get to the next stage. So a decision had to be made. Peres, no less than Rabin, knew what the trade-off would be. Israel needed a series of ironclad security arrangements, and a genuine peace, rather than just agreement to a cessation of hostilities. Syria would demand to get back all, or at least virtually all, of the Golan. Peres now focused on clarifying, in his own mind, whether we should be willing to agree to trade the Golan for a peace treaty. Our key meeting took place in early February, in the underground bunker in the Airya. Peres asked Amnon Lipkin, as chief of staff, and our other top generals for a presentation on their view of the security arrangements required with Syria under a peace deal. They recommended that Israel insist on keeping a sizeable part of the Golan, as well as a range of demilitarization provisions which reached pretty much to the edge of Damascus. I’d been asked for my view by Rabin when I was chief-of-staff. Obviously, from a purely military standpoint, the ideal situation would be to keep the whole of the Golan Heights. No chief of staff was going to recommend pulling out. But I'd always added a rider: to withdraw as part of a peace agreement, with all its other likely benefits, was not a military question. It was a decision for the government. The relevant question for a chief of staff was whether we could ensure the security of Israel if the government decided on a withdrawal, to which I answered yes. 284 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011755