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/ BARAK / 99

By the end of November, I believed that the chances of a peace agreement with Arafat were so microscopic as to border on non-existent, and that my own prospects for retaining sufficient support to be an effective Prime Minister much beyond Clinton’s departure were not much better. It was not just Arik and the Likud, but other parties on the right that were actively attempting to bring down the government. I was being squeezed politically: by opposition to the concessions, especially on Jerusalem, I’d been willing to consider in pursuit of a peace agreement, and by the ever-worsening Palestinian violence. Shlomo Ben-Ami put it best, saying that in the view of most Israelis, “Arafat’s response to Camp David was not peace, it was an intifada.”

By the second part of November, there were five separate motions of no-confidence working their way through the Knesset. I could have quashed them all at a single stroke, since Arik, both publicly and privately, was conveying to me his continuing interest in joining a unity coalition. But I again decided against it, at this stage not so much because I expected a peace deal, but because I believed continued Israeli engagement in the peace process was essential to preventing Arafat from evading his responsibility for making a deal impossible.

I could also have wrongfooted my opponents by insisting that any early election be not just for a new Prime Minister but for a new Knesset, something very few existing Knesset members were anxious to see happen. I did, in fact, do precisely that at the end of November, delaying an immediate move to try to topple the government. But I immediately regretted doing it. The game-playing side of politics was the part I least understood, and most disliked. I recognized that to bring down the Knesset along with me would be unfair to the country, not to mention my own Labor Party, which still had the largest number of parliamentary seats. In pursuing my peace efforts with Hafez al-Assad, and at Camp David, I’d insisted I was acting on the mandate I’d received in the Prime Ministerial election. If the peace efforts had failed, or if a significant part of the country felt I was wrong to have tried in the way I did, surely the responsibility for that, too, should fall on me.

I remained confident I had been right to make the efforts with Arafat, with Assad, and, of course, to have followed through on my pledge to withdraw our troops from Lebanon. But believing that you are right, even if later events might bear you out, was not all that mattered in politics. You had to be able to bring the public with you. It was clear my support was ebbing away. Looking ahead to the

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