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As we drove from Jerusalem to Ramallah, Greenblatt reminded me, “Don’t say that we’re for a ‘two-state solution,’ because it means different things to different people.” It was good advice, and I decided to avoid the term until we had defined what it meant to be a state. When we arrived, we were ushered through a maze of stairways into a small room that had regal chairs arranged for a diplomatic meeting. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas entered, proceeded to the front of the room, and shook our hands. He was staffed by his top negotiators: Major General Majed Faraj, a trustworthy and insightful member of Abbas’s inner circle and head of the Palestinian Security Forces; and Saeb Erekat, a loquacious and always aggrieved diplomat who had been the lead negotiator for twenty-five years but had little to show for his efforts. As they served us tea, I glanced in the direction of the Palestinian leader. Abbas sat hunched over in his seat, looking every bit of his eighty-plus years. He smoked constantly, so every few minutes he would pull a cigarette from the table, put it in his mouth, and wait for an attendant to light it. I thought that Abbas seemed more like a king than the representative of an historically downtrodden refugee population.
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