Inside Wye Plantation

Wednesday 2:15 a.m. The phone rang. Outside, in the quiet Maryland fall night, the Wye River whispered. Benjamin Netanyahu had finally made it back to his bedroom after negotiating for a full day, the last three hours with President Bill Clinton, who had just helicoptered back to the White House. The night had been a long give-and-take over security issues; a give-and-take that seemed to be moving in the same circles the Israelis and Palestinians had traveled for months, even years. “Hello?” Netanyahu said. “Happy Birthday.” It was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, calling to congratulate the Prime Minister on his 49th. “Is that really all you called for?” said Netanyahu. A few hours later, he had another surprise: flowers from Yasser Arafat. And a call from some Palestinian delegates: “May we both have a good year,” they wished. Forty-eight hours later, after almost no sleep and two near walkouts, “Bibi” Netanyahu stood in the East Room of the White House, where he called Arafat his “partner” and signed a new pledge to work for peace.

It was, in many respects, a quiet gift: the present called the Wye River Memorandum. Its terms are modest. It provides for the return of a parcel of sparsely inhabited land in the West Bank. It firms up the details of the implementation of accords the P.L.O. and Israel had reached in 1993. Far tougher disputes remain, including the future of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees. According to the original timetable, all these must be settled by next May–when Arafat has threatened to declare a Palestinian state. But last week’s accord, fought for and won over nine tumultuous days, created new momentum toward a permanent peace, the first such movement in 19 months. What Arafat called “a big step which came late” also opened the tantalizing possibility that Netanyahu, who previously seemed to shadowbox with the peace process, had now committed himself irretrievably to work toward a final settlement. It also provided a stage for Clinton, hobbled by problems at home, to play statesman instead of defendant.

ACT I: GETTING TO KNOW YOU

After a White House send-off on Thursday, Oct. 15, Netanyahu and Arafat settled in at Wye. The two men actually didn’t know each other well. Nor had Arafat ever met Ariel Sharon, the hard-liner Netanyahu recently named Foreign Minister. The hulking former general showed up two days late, sweeping into dinner, right past Arafat’s gesture of welcome, refusing to shake hands or even look at the man he calls a terrorist and murderer. Instead Sharon focused on some Arafat aides with whom he has held talks this year. While he never did shake Arafat’s hand, an official says they “talked a lot.”

Over the weekend, bargaining was so slow that delegates escaped to a nearby outlet mall to buy men’s clothes and perfume. The 69-year-old Arafat rode a bicycle–the first time in 50 years, he told aides–around the grounds, his trademark checkered kaffiyeh flapping in the breeze, security agents following on a golf cart. It became obvious that any progress would require Clinton’s presence; neither side saw value in giving concessions to anyone of lesser rank.

Inside the American camp, there was disagreement about how best to push the negotiations forward. Everyone was impressed by Arafat’s apparent willingness to find a deal. But the Americans were split over how to handle Netanyahu. Albright, who battled with the Israeli Prime Minister last May and lost when she gave him an ultimatum about moving troops from the West Bank, was growing increasingly frustrated with Israeli stalling. Friday night, as the Israelis celebrated the Sabbath, Albright was host to a small, Arabs-only dinner. “I really understand the pain and aspirations of your people,” she said in a toast. Chief Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross was warning his colleagues not to alienate Netanyahu. With the right tactics, Ross said, there was hope for a deal.

ACT II: THE DETOUR

The news Monday morning was horrific–and unhelpful. Two grenades had been tossed into an Israeli bus station at rush hour, wounding 64 people. A Hamas activist was caught at the scene. Arafat condemned the terror, but the Americans feared that if Netanyahu wanted a pretext to leave, he had found it. Instead Bibi declared a suspension of the talks (soon quietly relaxed) except on security matters, and proposed a detour–a quickie deal on troops and security, to be followed by new talks in two to four weeks.

U.S. officials thought the mini-deal wouldn’t have enough meat, and they weren’t surprised when Arafat balked. The Americans felt they had heard enough–in fact, more than enough–to craft a full package. Sandy Berger, the President’s National Security Adviser, had heard so much repetition that he started carrying around the lyrics to I Got You Babe, the song from the movie Groundhog Day–whose hero must relive the same 24 hours over and over. (Clinton tried to explain the joke to Arafat, but it didn’t translate.) It was time to force Netanyahu to focus on the security problems, the President decided. Over dinner, he pushed Netanyahu to boil his security demands down to five elements.

The next day, Tuesday, Clinton got off his helicopter with a pad that had a column for each side’s needs, bunched in three categories of difficulty. He joked with the parties, “I’ve kept you so long, you have a right to ask me for territory.” Clinton got Arafat to accept Netanyahu’s five security demands, but that afternoon Bibi put forward a kitchen-sink collection of complaints. Once the core security problems were solved, it was clear to Clinton that two emotional issues were blocking progress. For the Palestinians, it was the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails. For the Israelis, it was revising the P.L.O. charter’s call for Israel’s destruction. That night by a fireplace, Clinton sat down with Arafat, Netanyahu and aides and told them, “I want to clearly understand where you stand on each issue.” For four hours, patiently, deliberately, he urged them to explain their position. At the end, Clinton suggested they defer everything except security for now.

On Wednesday, Netanyahu upped the ante. Briefed by Sharon, representatives of Jewish settlers, who oppose trading any land for peace, gave Netanyahu an earful. Netanyahu called American Jewish leaders to ask for backing if he abandoned Wye. “How can we make peace with an organization still calling for the liquidation of Israel?” he lectured. Members of the Israeli delegation placed their bags outside their quarters and issued a press release threatening departure. The threat was timed to make the morning papers back home (where Wye was judged so boring it no longer led the TV news). American officials figured Netanyahu was bluffing, but when Albright saw the luggage, she was furious: “You don’t give the President of the United States an ultimatum!” Netanyahu, backing down, protested that he had been asleep and hadn’t authorized any departure. (In fact, American officials said, he had given the orders to load the helicopters for the flight to Andrews Air Force Base.) The blowout wasn’t a total surprise: U.S. officials had written memos predicting at least one, probably two, Bibi meltdowns en route to a deal. At 2 a.m., the first meltdown controlled, the Americans gave both sides a draft agreement.

ACT III: THE PUSH

At 9:30 Thursday morning, Clinton climbed from his helicopter and told aides, “It’s now or never.” With agreement on the land-for-security swap in hand, the emotional issues of returning Palestinian prisoners and revising the P.L.O. charter calling for Israel’s destruction became the focus. At the end of lunch, Arafat and Netanyahu sat down without Clinton and slogged through details for two hours. When they got testy, Clinton stepped back in.

Frustrated with their intransigence, Clinton finally pulled out a trump card: a badly weakened King Hussein of Jordan, in the U.S. for treatment of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Gaunt and hairless, the King lectured the leaders and their aides. “You can’t afford for this to fail,” he said. “You owe this to your people, to your children, to future generations.” For an hour afterward, his eloquence lifted the mood. When it waned, Clinton tried his own stagecraft. Patient and receptive so far, the President stormed out of the room just after midnight, looking at no one. “That was a powerful moment,” says one of his aides. “It pushed all the leaders back on their heels.”

And they got back to work. No one slept. The Israelis agreed to a phased release of some Palestinian prisoners. The Palestinians agreed to rethink the language of their charter but couldn’t see a way to amend it. Once before, Arafat had summoned the Palestine National Council, many of whose members loathe the peace process, to change the charter. Reconvening them would be an embarrassment–and a danger. Clinton suggested a way out: he would fly to Gaza to speak to the council when it met. At dawn Friday, Arafat, Netanyahu and Clinton shook on a deal.

But Bibi wasn’t finished. The Prime Minister pulled Clinton aside and said he had just one more matter to raise: clemency for Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. intelligence analyst convicted of spying for Israel. Netanyahu said he needed the release to mollify hard-liners in his Cabinet. Simultaneously, Netanyahu’s aides tried to “create a little reality,” according to a U.S. official, by telling the press that Clinton had consented–which he hadn’t. American officials were livid. At 9 a.m., Netanyahu told Clinton he wanted to take a nap. When he awoke three hours later, having reaped the benefits of delay for domestic political consumption, Bibi was ready to sign.

As tough as Wye was, a much worse ordeal awaits: final-status talks, where the issues are harder and the parties infinitely further apart. Wye offered no proof the talks would succeed, but there were surprising hints of new life in the peace process. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners are outraged at the deal but have nowhere else to go. The Prime Minister seemed to be grasping for a big chunk of the center, whose support depends on continued progress with Arafat. Another factor, the Americans at Wye observed, was how well the next generation of Israeli and Palestinian officials got along. While the leaders sometimes screamed and raged, the younger ones, who know one another from joint service on technical committees, called one another by their first names, joked around and never raised their voices.

And Arafat seemed to hear the passionate appeal of Natan Sharansky, former Soviet prisoner of conscience, now Trade and Industry Minister, for “a public effort to recognize our needs.” At the White House ceremony, the P.L.O. leader offered a new empathy for Israelis: “We are fully committed to whatever is required from us to achieve real security and constant peace for every Israeli person and for the Israeli people…I will do everything I can so that no Israeli mother will be worried if her son or daughter is late coming home.”

–With reporting by Jay Branegan, Dean Fischer and Douglas Waller/Washington and Lisa Beyer/Jerusalem