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