responsibility,” I said. “Both of our peoples have paid a heavy price. The time has come to find a way to solve this.”
In the half hour we spent together later, I could see that, physically, the Fatah leader from Karameh was not just older. He had a frailty about him. His skin seemed almost translucent in places. His hands shook slightly, with the early signs of Parkinson’s. He spoke softly. But despite this ostensibly vulnerable exterior, I could see how daunting, and frustrating, he must be a negotiating partner. Henry Kissinger has described how Mao Tse-Tung, rather than engage directly in discussion or debate, tended to wrap his remarks in parables. Without stretching the parallel too far, Arafat was like that. While I tried to engage him on how each of us might help cement the Oslo process, and ensure that the interim agreement indeed led to a full peace, he responded with stories, or off- topic remarks, which I was left to unwrap and decipher.
He began our discussion by saying that now that I was Foreign Minister, he was glad to meet me. He said that he’d heard “reports” from his intelligence people that when I was chief-of-staff, I had organized a kind of dissident band of generals who were working to torpedo the Oslo agreements. He compared this to the OAS, the military cabal in France that had opposed De Gaulle. I could only laugh. I told him I’d actually spent two months with OAS men years earlier, in Mont Louis, but that Israel was different. Even at times of the toughest of disagreements, we were a family. An “Israeli OAS” would never work, even if I had been crazy enough to contemplate such a thing. Which, I hastened to add, I was not.
There was another idiosyncrasy I encountered in Arafat. He was constantly writing notes as we spoke. I didn’t mind that. But it did strike me as slightly diluting the kind of frankness and openness I would find in most of the one-on- one meetings I went on to have with foreign leaders as Peres’s Foreign Minister. Maybe he did it just as a kind of aide-memoire. But certainly in later meetings I had with him, it did have the effect to making me choose my words more carefully. That, I believed, reduced the prospect of exploring more creatively the boundaries of each of our official positions. It also helped Arafat to argue, as he did on more than one occasion, that Rabin, or Peres, or whatever Israeli interlocutor he chose to name had promised him such and such. He always implied this was based on his written record, though he never produced any evidence to that effect. He also never seemed to have recorded anything that he had promised Israelis.
I tried, with only partial success, to engage some of the other Arab foreign
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