Haaretz: “What he did was so outrageous,” Lauder says. “I spent months and months getting this thing together, and he says ‘only if you convince Sharon’. So I said, ‘Sharon will never agree to this. Even if it was the greatest thing in the world, he doesn’t want you to get credit.’ So why don’t you sign it and stand up for Israel? He wouldn’t do it.
“From that point on, Bibi made me promise not to talk about it. And for almost 30 years, I didn’t talk about it. I feel it’s time to say: He chose politics over peace. He put his political future before the deal. That’s where he lost me. I saw him afterward, but it was never the same. He betrayed me. That’s Bibi.”
“In my last conversation with Assad,” Lauder recalls, “he invited me to Aleppo, because he knew part of my family was from Aleppo. He said, ‘Let’s see Aleppo together.’ And I never went to Aleppo with him, because shortly after that he died. And thus ended the story… It’s been often said about the Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I would say that this would have changed history for Israel, and it was missed… I realized at the end of the day that Israel really didn’t want peace, but they wanted dominance. And I walked away from it.”…