Negotiators Make Major Strides but Stumble Over Jerusalem

When they gathered Monday night at Camp David for a final, all-out negotiating session with Israeli and Palestinian officials, President Clinton and his aides thought that a historic deal might still be within their reach.

In a desperate gambit, they had offered to postpone a decision on the destiny of Jerusalem, the toughest sticking point, and conclude a pact on issues that were easier. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians turned that idea down, officials said.

Still on the table in Aspen Cabin were ways to split the difference--giving part of Jerusalem to a new Palestinian state while maintaining Israeli sovereignty over most of the city.

“There seemed to be an openness to these ideas,” a high-ranking U.S. negotiator said. “We still thought we had a chance.”

But as the meeting dragged on toward midnight, the Palestinian negotiators hesitated, dug in their heels and finally said they didn’t believe that their leader, Yasser Arafat, was ready to take the next step.

At some point--the accounts of exhausted officials differ on exactly when--Clinton met with Arafat and warned him that he was throwing away a historic opportunity.

“The president pressed him hard,” a White House aide said. “Voices may have been raised . . . but the chairman said he didn’t think he could go any further.”

The 2-week-long summit was over. Instead of an agreement, Clinton received a starchy letter from Arafat reciting the Palestinians’ objections to a deal. A courier delivered it at 3 a.m. Tuesday.

“The letter,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, still tired, said with a sigh. “It’s hard to describe this exactly. I mean, it was, whatever, 4 in the morning or something, 3. . . . This was kind of an official way of stating it, but it was evident, unfortunately, that we weren’t going to. . . .”

Her voice trailed off.

In a sense, officials said, the final hours of Camp David II on Monday and Tuesday were a mirror of the extraordinary summit.

Israelis and Palestinians surprised each other with how close they could come to agreement on issues that were once taboo, such as the declaration of a Palestinian state and the return of Palestinian refugees. But in the end, the fragile framework collapsed over the one issue that couldn’t be finessed: sovereignty over the holy city of Jerusalem.

U.S. negotiators knew that Jerusalem would be a sticking point. Both Israelis and Palestinians have long claimed the city for themselves. The two sides had never managed to discuss Jerusalem seriously in the seven years since their 1993 Oslo peace agreement, which committed both sides to solving the problem.

So, several times, the U.S. raised the idea of a deal without Jerusalem, the Americans said. But the Israelis were skeptical, and the Palestinians were adamantly opposed.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said he offered the Palestinians sovereignty over the Arab neighborhoods on Jerusalem’s eastern edge. The deal would have kept the Old City, which contains sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, under Israeli rule, Israeli officials said.

That was further than any Israeli leader had gone before. Arafat turned it down.

The real problem, U.S. officials said, was that Israelis and Palestinians arrived at Camp David in different frames of mind.

“On the Israeli side, a conscious decision had been taken to see if this could be concluded right now,” the top U.S. negotiator said. On the Palestinian side, there was “a sense that there needed to be more caution.”

The Israelis “put themselves in a position psychologically” to make a deal, he said. “The Palestinians got into that, but only later in the discussions. . . . It took about a week before we really saw movement.”

In fact, officials said, the first week mostly showed how far apart the two sides were. The Israelis initially refused to talk about Jerusalem at all until progress was made on other issues. And Arafat reportedly warned Clinton at one point: “If I make concessions on Jerusalem, I will be killed, and you will have to talk with Sheik Yassin”--the spiritual leader of the militant Hamas organization.

“God, it’s difficult,” Clinton told the New York Daily News in his sole breach of the summit’s self-imposed gag order.

The Palestinians only began negotiating vigorously after the summit’s midpoint crisis last Wednesday, when Barak announced that he was walking out and Clinton prepared to announce that the summit had ended in failure. Both Arafat and Barak decided that they didn’t want to bear responsibility for a failure, and Clinton agreed to resume the talks after his trip over the weekend to Japan for a summit of the world’s leading industrialized nations.

When Clinton returned to Camp David on Sunday evening, the negotiators on both sides said they were ready to try to bridge the gaps.

“He had very good meetings on Sunday night,” a White House official said. “He stayed up until 5 am. . . . We had made a lot of progress on some issues--refugees, security, Jerusalem--and there was a sense that a deal might be within reach.”

Monday’s talks went well too. The delegations divided into small groups to work on individual problems. One of the meeting rooms had both a Torah and a Koran, the holy writings of Jews and Muslims.

But between Monday and Tuesday, the lines stiffened again. Officials said they aren’t sure why; one noted that Arafat had been on the telephone with his supporters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and with other Arab leaders.

“On Tuesday, it quickly became clear that things weren’t right,” the White House official said. “It was more than Jerusalem.”

The Americans had floated several versions of a partial deal, leaving out Jerusalem--or at least the Old City. But the Palestinians disliked the idea because it would have left the city in Israeli hands. The Israelis preferred an overall settlement too.

“There was no way to segment the issues,” the negotiator said. “If they were going to make a move on a particular issue, they wanted to know how it would relate to the others.”

Clinton’s final meeting with the negotiators, including Israel’s Shlomo Ben-Ami and the Palestinians’ Saeb Erekat, began about 9:30 p.m. Monday.

By about 1 a.m., Albright said, it was “evident . . . that basically there were some gaps that could not be overcome.”

Arafat’s letter a few hours later merely made the breakdown formal.

On Tuesday morning, the negotiators met again to talk about their next steps--how to restart the talks after a pause and avoid violence in the meantime.

Erekat was glum; Ben-Ami had tears in his eyes, one official said.

At 10 a.m., Clinton brought Arafat and Barak together for a last handshake.

According to a participant, Barak security advisor Danny Yatom, stressing the need for an agreement, told Arafat, “We have to do this.”

*

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang in Washington and Tracy Wilkinson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.