Clinton on the record, from Oslo to Camp David
By Matthew E. Berger
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
June 23 2004
WASHINGTON, June 22 (JTA) — Bill Clinton covers a range of issues
in his 957-page autobiography, “My Life.” Following are excerpts.
• On a brush with anti-Semitism in New York:
“I lived in a southern town with two synagogues and a fair number
of anti-Semites who referred to Jews as ‘Christ-killers,’ but I was
surprised to find anti-Semitism alive and well in New York. I guess
I should have been reassured to know the South didn’t have a corner
on racism or anti-Semitism, but I wasn’t.”
• Clinton discusses getting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and
Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to attend the September
1993 White House signing of the Declaration of Principles behind the
Oslo peace accord:
“I badly wanted Rabin and Arafat to attend and urged them to do
so; if they didn’t, no one in the region would believe they were
fully committed to implementing the principles, and, if they did,
a billion people across the globe would see them on television and
they would leave the White House even more committed to peace than
when they arrived.”
Arafat, however, wanted to wear a revolver:
“I balked and sent word that he couldn’t bring the gun. He was here to
make peace; the pistol would send the wrong message, and he certainly
would be safe without it.”
Clinton strove to get Arafat and Rabin to shake hands. Rabin was
reluctant:
“I told Yitzhak that if he was really committed to peace, he’d have
to shake Arafat’s hand to prove it.”
Before long, Clinton writes, “Rabin and Arafat would develop a
remarkable working relationship, a tribute to Arafat’s regard for
Rabin and the Israeli leader’s uncanny ability to understand how
Arafat’s mind worked.”
• Clinton learns of Rabin’s assassination:
“By the time he was killed, I had come to love him as I had rarely
loved another man. In the back of my mind, I suppose I always knew
he had put his life at risk, but I couldn’t imagine him gone, and I
didn’t know what I would or could do in the Middle East without him.”
Clinton discusses his decision to say “Shalom, chaver” — Hebrew for
“Goodbye, friend” — at Rabin’s funeral. The phrase since has become
famous in Israel:
“I had a number of Jewish staff members who spoke Hebrew and knew how
I felt about Rabin; I am still grateful that they gave me the phrase.
Shimon Peres later told me that chaver means more than mere friendship;
it evokes the comradeship of soul mates in common cause. Soon,
‘Shalom, chaver’ began to appear on billboards and bumper stickers
all across Israel.”
• Clinton recalls his historic December 1998 speech to the Palestinian
National Council in Gaza:
“Just before I got up to speak, almost all the delegates raised their
hands in support of removing the provision calling for the destruction
of Israel from their charter. It was the moment that made the whole
trip worthwhile. You could almost hear the sighs of relief in Israel;
perhaps Israelis and Palestinians actually could share the land and
the future after all.”
• On the Camp David summit in July 2000:
“It was frustrating and profoundly sad. There was little difference
between the two sides on how the affairs of Jerusalem would actually
be handled; it was all about who got to claim sovereignty.”
Efforts continued to reach a peace agreement that fall, as Clinton’s
term drew rapidly to a close:
“It was assumed that Palestine would get the Muslim and Christian
quarters, with Israel getting the other two. Arafat argued that
he should have a few blocks of the Armenian quarter because of the
Christian churches there. I couldn’t believe he was talking to me
about this.”
“At times Arafat seemed confused, not wholly in command of the facts.
I had felt for some time that he might not be at the top of his game
any longer, after all the years of spending the night in different
places to dodge assassins’ bullets, all the countless hours on
airplanes, all the endless hours of tension-filled talks. Perhaps he
simply couldn’t make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman.”
“Arafat never said no; he just couldn’t bring himself to say yes.
Pride goeth before the fall.”
Just before Clinton left office, he spoke with Arafat on the phone:
Arafat “thanked me for all my efforts and told me what a great man I
was. ‘Mr. Chairman, I replied, ‘I am not a great man. I am a failure,
and you have made me one.’ I warned Arafat that he was single-handedly
electing Sharon and that he would reap the whirlwind.”
“Nearly a year after I left office, Arafat said he was ready to
negotiate on the basis of the parameters I had presented. Apparently,
Arafat had thought the time to decide, five minutes to midnight,
had finally come. His watch had been broken a long time.”
• On Israel-Syria peace talks:
“Before he was killed, Yitzhak Rabin had given me a commitment
to withdraw from the Golan to the June 4, 1967 borders as long as
Israel’s concerns were satisfied. The commitment was given on the
condition that I keep it ‘in my pocket’ until it could be formally
presented to Syria in the context of a complete solution.”
At peace talks in Shepherdstown, W.Va. in January 2000, Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Barak took a go-slow strategy:
“Barak had not been in politics long, and I thought he had gotten
some very bad advice.”
• On his decision not to pardon Jonathan Pollard, a Navy intelligence
analyst and American Jew convicted of spying for Israel:
“For all the sympathy Pollard generated in Israel, he was a hard
case to push in America; he had sold our country’s secrets for money,
not conviction, and for years had not shown any remorse.”
Plus, CIA Director George Tenet objected to Pollard’s release,
threatening to resign if he were pardoned:
“I didn’t want to do it, and Tenet’s comments closed the door.”
Clinton had to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who
had demanded Pollard’s release in exchange for Israeli concessions at
the 1998 Wye River Plantation talks with the Palestinians, to agree
to the deal even without Pollard:
“I told Netanyahu that I would review the case seriously and try to
work through it with Tenet and the national security team, but that
Netanyahu was better off with a security agreement that he could
count on than he would have been with the release of Pollard.”