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July 19, 2000
THURMONT, Maryland (AP) - The Camp David summit was entering a make-or-break day Tuesday, with President Bill Clinton saying through a spokesman he hopes the parties will have "wrapped up their business" by the time he is to leave for Japan the following morning. Clinton's chief spokesman Joe Lockhart said Monday the president intended to keep to his scheduled departure, but nonetheless suggested that the hours leading up to it could be a cliffhanger. "You'll know that we're following through on the schedule when you see the president walk to the top of the steps (of the plane) and wave and the door close," he told reporters. Another White House spokesman amplified that later. "The schedule won't change until it changes," P.J. Crowley said late Monday. Lockhart said the leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, had a clear view of the time constraints at the week-old summit in the mountains of western Maryland. "I think that the parties understand the schedule here," he said. "They understand that they're working toward that." On Monday, Clinton met with Barak, then Arafat, then Barak again. No formal dinner with the delegations was scheduled, unlike the first five evenings of the summit. With the clock ticking down on the talks, Lockhart said, "I think the pace and intensity have both quickened." Negotiators in two parallel sets of talks - the primary ones at the Camp David presidential retreat, addressing so-called core issues, and lower-level secondary discussions in nearby Emmitsburg, Maryland - have both been keeping long hours, he said. Clinton has shuttled back and forth between the two leaders during the week of talks, bringing them together twice for three-way meetings, in addition to informal encounters at meals. Israeli officials said they knew the negotiations had reached a critical juncture.
"It is clear we are at a very historic and delicate moment," Cabinet Secretary Yitzhak Herzog told Associated Press Television News. "I guess we will know in the next 48 hours whether there is a breakthrough, and whether we can reach an agreement or not." Clinton appeared to be using the three-day summit of industrial powers in Japan as a means to prod the two sides toward compromises aimed at resolving their bitter half-century-old dispute. The main issues on the table are the borders of a future Palestinian state, the fate of several million Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem, which both sides claim as their capital. "The negotiations are very difficult and our position is clear," said Hassan Abdel Rahman, the Washington envoy of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. On the key matters, he said, "We cannot make concessions." Lockhart, though, said no one was ready to throw in the towel. "I don't think we would be here if there wasn't a chance to get this done," he said. At one point, the White House spokesman was asked, half in jest, whether Clinton might take Barak and Arafat with him to Japan so they could continue their negotiations in flight. "Thirteen and a half hours on a plane? I don't think so," he said. Clinton is due to met in Tokyo on Thursday with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori and other leaders before their Friday-Sunday summit on Okinawa. Both Barak and Arafat face political problems at home if they arrive at a compromise - or if they fail to. Barak's governing coalition collapsed on the eve of his departure for the summit, and he is likely to face early elections. Hard-liners have been staging demonstrations urging him not to make broad territorial concessions to the Palestinians. Arafat's aides said heading into the talks that it was not the right time for a summit, because gaps between the two sides needed to be narrowed first. But once he was here, top aides including Nabil Amr, the parliamentary affairs minister, said he wanted to try to make a deal. Palestinians have been frustrated by the slow pace of peacemaking since Barak's election in May 1999, and that anger has sometimes erupted into deadly street clashes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The U.S. hosts have sought to keep a veil of secrecy over the substance of summit talks. Clinton himself broke the silence to say in an interview with the New York Daily News published Monday that the talks were "so hard" that he did not know whether an accord could be reached.
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