It wasn’t just the two leaders whose bonhomie seemed to belie the seriousness of the issues at hand. One insider at Camp David, describing to NEWSWEEK the convivial dinners shared by negotiators most nights, said, “If a visitor from Mars walked into the room, and someone whispered in his ear that these were age-old adversaries, he’d be surprised.” Says one diplomat: “It’s all very civilized. We’re talking about people who’ve known each other for a long time.”
Good spirits only go so far, of course. For within Camp David’s meeting rooms, the old gulf of mistrust between the Palestinians and Israelis quickly reasserted itself. At one point Arafat asked his team to pack its bags when the Americans merely floated–orally and informally–some Israeli ideas, especially for dividing Jerusalem, NEWSWEEK has learned. “The idea was not so much bridging as biased,” Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi insisted. The talks are now expected to drag on far longer than planned.
It is just this sort of dissonance–public horseplay amid threats of war–that makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so tragic. For while Israelis and Palestinians interact rarely because of mistrust, when they do get together they can often behave like long-lost cousins. Many of them come from the same towns and cities, like Jerusalem, and share a certain back-slapping Levantine levity. Most of all, since the Oslo peace process began in 1993 with a pact of mutual recognition, a number of the negotiators have grown familiar with each other in secret talks. That’s in sharp contrast to the icy relations between Syrians and Israelis earlier this year at Shepherdstown, West Virginia, when talks over a peace deal broke down, or to the Egyptians and Israelis at Camp David 22 years ago, when Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat refused to speak to each other for about 10 days. (On Wednesday night, Barak and Arafat even held an impromptu one-on-one that surprised their American hosts.) Indeed, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict resembles nothing so much as a bitter fallout between brothers over what each believes is his birthright: land and legitimacy. “Fights within the family are sometimes more intense,” notes the diplomat.
Clinton, for one, hopes the intimacy of Camp David will bring out the best in both sides, a recognition that “fate decrees they have to live with each other,” says former State Department Mideast specialist Nicholas Veliotes. That’s why U.S. officials are desperate to keep the region’s toxic politics out of Camp David as long as possible. On Friday, they prevented several Palestinian opposition figures from coming up to see Arafat. (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was dispatched to meet with them nearby instead.) Yet it’s only going to get harder to keep the good humor. Sources said that last week was devoted largely to laying out long-held positions. But now that attempts to bridge them have begun, the summit will soon come down to “a last moment of truth,” says Barak adviser Michael Melchior, “when both parties know what their absolute ‘red lines’ are.” And then, all the smiles won’t be worth much.
