On the Scene with John King in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt

John King

CNN.com spoke to Senior White House Correspondent John King, who accompanied President Clinton to the emergency Mideast summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Q: What was the feeling at Sharm el-Sheikh among the main participants of the summit? Were they noticeably upset or tense?

KING: It was strange how the mood changed over time. Everyone arrived here quite tense. For the key players, [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Barak and [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat, you could see they were still quite angry at each other, bitter. In Barak's case, he was saying publicly how betrayed he felt by this man he had made his partner in peace. Ands the Palestinians were saying the Israelis had used bullets and then helicopter gunships to fire on them. There was a great sense of open anger.

And for the people who brought them together -- President Clinton, [Egyptian] President [Hosni] Mubarak, [Jordan's] King Abdullah -- there was a sense that you were on the edge, that you had to grab this thing and turn it around to get the peace process back on track. Or, at a minimum, stop the killing so you could then think about putting the peace process back on track.

So everybody was anxious, but for very different reasons. The emotions of Arafat and Barak were much more raw and open. There was more anxiety and apprehension and even fear in the other leaders, a sense that if this thing was allowed to spill out of control, if we don't stop it, where will it go next?

Q: How about the supporting officials at the summit. Was there a sense that all sides were going through the motions, or was there a feeling of purpose to the meetings?

KING: Coming in, everyone had pretty modest expectations. But to say that stopping the killing is a modest expectation is a bit absurd. Yet that is what they were saying, that our expectations are very modest, we want to stop the killing.

U.S. officials think the reason moderate Arab leaders came around -- remember, Mubarak was refusing to host the summit just a few days ago -- was that they saw that people were spilling onto the streets in quite an emotional way, not only in Gaza and the West Bank, but in their countries as well. And people in the streets bring unpredictability. They run pretty organized, controlled societies; they don't want unpredictability.

President Clinton's interests are very different, in a sense, from the interests of Mubarak and Abdullah. With Clinton, there were immediate worries about the killings, but also a great sense of personal frustration. Agree or disagree with his policy, he has put a hell of a lot of time into this, more than any American president ever. And he has seen it all unravel in 18 days.

Q: What for you has been the most challenging part of covering this story?

KING: It's an incredibly complicated story. To cover it from Washington or from one of these meetings you really have to remember your own limitations. I think I understand President Clinton's perspective on this fairly well, and the Administration's from the people who work closely with him.

But having not spent a lot of time in the region, especially in the middle of all this violence, to think you can understand the anger of the Palestinian people, the fear and anger of the Israeli people, you just can't, so you can't pretend that you do.

One of the themes you hear throughout this is that perhaps the leaders got way out ahead of their own people. That in Camp David not only did they raise expectations that they were about to broker peace. And the idea that you put the most emotional and the most religious of issues on the table in Jerusalem before you had spent time building public opinion, building public support for doing what they proposed to do at Camp David. So when it collapsed, there was an incentive, if you will, for those who opposed that settlement to do everything they could to undermine the process. And the tried-and-true way in the Middle East of undermining the process is violence.

Q: What about this story has surprised you so far?

KING: It was surprising to see how openly critical the Administration was of Arafat from the moment the Camp David talks broke down and then throughout this most recent violence. President Clinton spent a lot of time trying to build himself up as the honest broker, yet it was clear he had a great sense of frustration that Arafat did not do things the president thought were necessary to bring a deal about. So the frustration with Arafat and the way they publicly aired it, so openly, was surprising.

You have to remember we try to boil down what a summit declaration is on paper, or what the leaders agreed to in a meeting. This is not just about land, this is about hate -- and hate is very difficult to understand. So the leaders can pledge to fix things, but we'll only find out if they really can when they go home.

Q: Any observations you would like to add?

KING: I think it's a remarkable political moment, in the sense that you have three weakened principals. A president of the United States who, for all the time he has invested in this, has just a little more than three months left in office. So his influence has waned somewhat. His personal credibility with these men is quite high, but his influence as president has waned because he is soon to be gone.

You have Arafat, who, many believe, now does not have the full support of the Palestinian people any more because all his promises that these interim peace agreements would bring prosperity have not, in the minds of many, proven to be true.

And then you have Barak, whose government is in complete and total collapse. He's not sure he has a coalition to go home to.

So you have these three fragile, yet pretty remarkable politicians coming together to make this deal and trying to find strength collectively that none of them probably has right now as individuals.

Two and a half months ago, the president thought he had Barak and Arafat on the verge of history. Now he has had to make a pretty remarkable and enormous compromise in saying 'I know they don't like each other, I know they don't trust each other, I just need them to work with each other and to realize that they need each other.' He's come a long way down from Camp David.

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