The Much Too Promised Land (Miller, Aaron David)
America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace
Miller, Aaron David. The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace. Random House Publishing Group, 2008.
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Introduction: “Where did you get those shoes?”
In my blackest moments I thought about the words of the British governor of Aden who quipped that when Britannia fell beneath the waves, the British Empire would leave only two enduring monuments—the game of Association Football and the expression “fuck off.”
I figured historic Palestine was promised four times, at least, to its inhabitants:
first by a Jewish, Christian, and Muslim God
a second time by the British,
third by the United Nations General Assembly,
But this book focuses on the fourth promise. That promise was made by America. A promise that over time, through negotiation, dialogue, and compromise, the needs of Arabs and Israelis could be somehow reconciled
The embodiment of the American promise was the passage in November 1967, largely through American diplomacy, of UN Security Council Resolution 242.
its main message was clear: land for peace was possible,
years I have thought long and hard about what we did and, more important, about what we failed to do.
Kissinger and Carter, together with James Baker, for whom I did work, succeeded and in doing so became the three most consequential American figures in Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
he told Zinni he would encounter three kinds of Arabs and Israelis on his mission: the righteous, the collectors of arguments, and the problem solvers.
Most of the Arabs and Israelis I worked with had all three characteristics rolled into one.
Part One AMERICA’S PROMISE CHALLENGED
Chapter One A Negotiator’s Tale
October 18, 1991, Baker and Pankin, on behalf of their presidents, Bush and Gorbachev, announced that formal invitations would be sent to Israel and to the Arabs to attend a historic peace conference in Madrid.
Talmudic concept of tikkun olam, or “fixing the world.”
And I began to understand that whether by circumstance or design, Israel was an occupying power.
But until 9/ 11, most Americans my age felt no sense of impending or real threat.
The prospects of reconciling the interests of an occupied nation with those of a threatened one seemed slim to none.
made me cynical about the use of diplomacy for pretty much anything of real value.
That summer I worked ninety days straight monitoring the tortuous and deadly tangle of an Israeli-PLO war, the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut, the assassination of the newly elected Maronite president Bashir Gemayel, and the Phalangist massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
suicide attack on American Marines sleeping in barracks
To me an American policy that was designed to use Israel and the Christian militias to defeat Syria and its Muslim allies reflected bad analysis and provided few opportunities for peace.
Diplomacy, particularly Middle East diplomacy, seemed to be for dreamers, for people who didn’t understand the way the world really worked.
Afterward I accepted a position on the secretary of state’s policy planning staff,
An old government maxim has it that there’s never a bad idea or meeting if you’re somehow a part of it. Suddenly “being there” as part of a small, elite group had become extremely elating and important.
As I listened to the speeches, filled with bitterness and some hope, the gaps separating Arabs and Israelis made me shudder.
Baker called us the peace processors or, when he was in an irreverent mood, the food processors.
Rarely in the history of modern American diplomacy has such a small group of midlevel advisors worked on such an important issue over such a long period of time, with as much access to presidents and secretaries of state of both parties.
I began my career as Dr. No, a skeptic, an unbeliever really, in diplomacy and peacemaking; along the road to Madrid and in the Oslo years that followed, I underwent something of a conversion into Dr. Yes, a missionary spreading the word about the power of negotiations; and when, in the wake of the second intifada, everything we’d worked on collapsed, I fell back to something in between.
Wye River agreement. President Clinton had succeeded, against the odds, in getting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to take another step in the Oslo process.
No amount of “process,” no feel-good signing ceremonies or interim agreements, can ever mask persistent, underlying grievances, traumas, and wounds. Nor can they transform a psychology of confrontation quickly or easily.
I focused too much on the possible and not enough on the probable.
We can’t produce peace and reconciliation, but we can help to diminish conflict, defuse crises, and broker political agreements that might give Arabs and Israelis a chance to achieve these long-sought goals.
Who are you going to believe, Groucho once said, me or your lying eyes?
The primary responsibility for peacemaking rests with the Arabs and Israelis, not with the Americans.
Chapter Two Gulliver’s Troubles: A Great Power in a World of Small Ones
“For one hundred dollars, I can make you a vest, a sweater, a sport coat, and I’ll throw in a pair of pants,” he replied. Stunned, the secretary asked how the same money could buy so much more in Israel. “It’s very simple,” the old man explained. “Out here you’re not so big.”
for all their military and political muscle, great powers aren’t always so great when they get mixed up in the affairs of small tribes.
American diplomacy in the Middle East appeared to resemble baseball (a game rooted in failure), a realization that was driven home to me as I sat through yet another losing Baltimore Orioles season at Camden Yards. After all, batting .400 in a major-league season, a feat achieved only once in the game’s last seventy-five years, still means failing to hit safely six out of every ten times at bat.
In September 1996 Israel’s opening of the Hasmonean tunnel in Jerusalem triggered a major crisis.
To continue the baseball metaphor, our hitting often proved no match for their pitching.
described life at these hotels in Israel and the Arab world as “living in a microphone.”
I was always acutely aware of how isolated we were and how limited our reach could be.
When we traveled without the secretary, our ability to control our own destiny was even more limited. “Hurry up and wait” could have been the team’s motto.
This “out here you’re not so big” problem is not simply a matter of perception; it’s a reality, and it’s the first mountain that has to be climbed if America is to manage this conflict,
This region hates big ideas,
“On the north, she had a weak neighbor; on the south, another weak neighbor; on the east, fish; on the west, fish.”
(Bibi) Netanyahu, a Likud prime minister whom I’d known for many years, was about as Americanized as they came. Growing up in the United States with an American mother, Netanyahu had the best Americanized English of any Israeli I’d ever met. Madeleine Albright, who characterized Netanyahu as an Israeli Newt Gingrich, once quipped that Bibi was “so damn American” that it was sometimes tough to push back at him.
This conviction that, however well intentioned, the Americans were naïve and didn’t understand the Arabs, was shared by almost every Israeli with whom we worked.
Saeb Erekat could have been the Palestinian Bibi.
Saeb often said that he wasn’t pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, just pro-peace.
Middle East is littered with the broken illusions of great powers who believed they could impose their will on smaller ones:
In May 1974 Kissinger, as he shuttled in search of a disengagement accord between Israel and Syria, complained about “retail rug-merchanting,” particularly by Israel.
What distinguishes small nations from large ones, Milan Kundera, the Czech writer once observed, is not the number of their inhabitants; it is something deeper: “For the small nations, existence is not a self-evident certainty but always a question, a wager, a risk.”
using the Yiddish term for a small village, “in the end we’re really just a shtetl with nukes.”
“We build Jerusalem like men mounting the gallows.”
Israel may be perceived as a place of big ideas and larger-than-life personalities, but its sense of smallness and of the personal is unmistakable.
The informality, the lack of structure, and the personal character of these encounters could take place only in a small country that was bound closely together in crisis and war,
The message of the Holocaust to the Jewish tribe was unmistakable: without a state of your own, you are the scum of the earth, the inevitable prey of beasts. And the Jews having secured that state, Yad Vashem’s message to their key ally was to make sure that the state survives and prospers.
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s prime directive: it matters less what the goyim (non-Jews) say; what counts is what the Jews do.
Not until the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987–88 did Rabin realize that Israel had a Palestinian problem, one that could not be resolved by force. “They’re now on the map,” he told me shortly before Madrid, “and we may have no choice but to deal with them.”
From the Palestinian perspective, 78 percent of historic Palestine was gone, leaving a truncated 22 percent available as the area for a Palestinian state.
To make his point, Faisal told the story of the man who had received a piece of fabric for a suit but couldn’t afford a tailor. So he asked an unskilled friend to take on the task. The finished suit had one leg too long, a sleeve too short, and an ill-fitting collar. “How can I wear this suit?” he asked his friend. The answer came back readily: “Where the sleeve is too short, hold your arm in; where the pant is too long, push your leg out. To deal with the collar, just turn your neck to the right.” The man complied with these directions and walked down the street in horrible contortions. One onlooker commented to another, “Look at that poor man, how misshapen he is.” “It’s sad,” the other replied, “but you have to admit he’s got the best tailor in the world.” Faisal’s point to Baker was clear. If Palestinians act strangely, it’s only because the suit America is making for them doesn’t fit.
bringing the PLO into an open process of negotiation brought legitimacy to the enterprise, succeeded where ten rounds of Madrid-generated negotiations had failed to produce actual agreements, and opened up opportunities for Palestinians where none had existed before. For the Palestinians, the paradox of Oslo was that, while it expanded potential political opportunities, it contracted the actual political horizon, something Arafat wasn’t prepared for, although he had agreed to it. For Arafat, Oslo was a trade-off: in exchange for recognizing him as the only Palestinian partner for Israel and America, he agreed to an interim process that deferred big issues like Jerusalem and refugees, and focused on mundane matters, such as actually governing what would become the Palestinian Authority.
Arafat had done much better on the larger but less consequential world stage. As a pragmatic leader, he proved incapable of functioning on the smaller but more important one in Palestine.
small powers act; big powers react.
The short answer is that when you need the cooperation of the locals, small isn’t so small anymore.
How many “how do we leverage Syria” memos I must have written during the 1980s.
Chapter Three Israel’s Lawyers: How Domestic Politics Shapes America’s Arab-Israeli Diplomacy
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who seem to have made a career out of warning people about the power of the pro-Israeli lobby.
only point I was making was that mediators must respect the interests of both sides to reach agreements and that we were often too influenced by Israel.
Those on the pro-Israeli side argued strongly that America’s Israel advocacy derived primarily from common values.
Domestic politics, as Anthony Lake, Bill Clinton’s first national security advisor, told me, is like sex to the Victorians: “Nobody talks about it but it’s on everybody’s mind.”
It is rooted in the broadest conception of the American national interest: support for like-minded societies, that, correctly or not, are perceived by Americans to be more or less “like us.”
That case is argued powerfully every day not by one metaphorical lawyer, as I originally thought, but by at least five discrete ones.
First, a well-organized, affluent, and disproportionately politically active and influential Jewish community
Second, a sophisticated congressional lobby
Third, millions of conservative Christians
Fourth, in the wake of 9/ 11 the new threat from radical Islam
And finally, the case for Israel is made by a “Jewish lobby of one”—an Israeli prime minister whose arguments can be compelling but are not always in America’s best interest.
The U.S. Congress has not had one long-serving member with an anti-Israeli or pro-Arab agenda since Paul Findley, who served in congress from 1961 to 1982.
Without its special relationship with Israel, America would have little influence in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. That simple fact is one of the best-kept secrets of American diplomacy.
During the course of six decades of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, common values and common enemies mixed seamlessly and became mutually reinforcing.
This value affinity, the sense that “they’re more like us than the other guys,” included at least three basic historical or philosophical connections.
First was the commitment of the West, particularly the United States, to the survival of the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust.
the only democracy in the Middle East,
Finally, the contrast between Israel and its neighbors, particularly those Arab states and groups committed to terror,
Part Two AMERICA’S PROMISE KEPT
The British historian A.J.P. Taylor once said that the only lesson of history is that there are no lessons.
call them the five T’s of effective diplomacy:
each man made the Arab-Israeli issue a top priority;
each was tough enough to push back abroad and at home when Arabs and Israelis tried to push him around;
each was tenacious in his effort;
each gained enough of the trust of the leaders to do serious business;
and each had an astute sense of timing, the capacity to divine what Arabs and Israelis could actually accomplish.
Chapter Four Henry Kissinger: Strategist
here is a man who lives and breathes strategy. He has a coherent view of how the world works and what America should want from
When I asked him to identify the key to his success in the Middle East, he said simply, “We had a strategy.”
Israeli confidence had been shattered by a surprise attack for which Israel was not prepared and by a cease-fire that prevented a conclusive military victory;
The 1973 war shattered almost every assumption that Henry Kissinger had held about the global jigsaw puzzle, especially the pieces in the Middle East.
Nixon and Kissinger put heavy and continuous pressure on Meir and Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan to refrain from destroying the surrounded Egyptian Third Army.
Kissinger’s strategy, “directed and authorized by Nixon,” had three basic goals.
First and most vital, an Israeli defeat must be avoided, as such a result would validate Arab reliance on Soviet arms. By framing the goal in this manner, Kissinger could justify the refusal to sanction destruction of the Egyptian Third Army, since it would not radically change the outcome of the war.
Second, American diplomacy, especially its postwar initiatives, must not be held hostage to Israel’s needs, aside from the need to avoid defeat. In late October Kissinger told his staff that an entire Arab world that was radicalized and anti-American might be in Israel’s interest, but such a turn of events would be a disaster for American interests.
Finally, the Soviet Union must not benefit from the crisis.
Kissinger’s strategy during the 1973 war had a single overriding goal: to make a credible America the dominant player in the Middle East at war’s end.
largely symbolic but nonetheless unprecedented peace conference at Geneva in late December brought the foreign ministers of Egypt, Israel, and Jordan to the same table.
Kissinger, in interpreting one side to the other, was veritably explaining to the Israelis and the Syrians what “life was like on another planet.”
His doomsday scenario speeches were legendary, combining as they did reminders to the Arabs and Israelis of the real stakes, lessons in how cooperation produces achievement of national goals, and gloomy forecasts of the dire consequences if they failed
“you turn down an American proposal that’s not free. And that challenging America in general has consequences.”
We can’t leave the Kissinger story without mention of his thirty-four-day, two-thousand-plus-mile Israel-Syria “shuttle.”
Sadat, Arafat, and Hussein readily followed the same script: secret negotiations with the Israelis, coupled with public diplomacy to affect Israeli public opinion.
Perhaps if Kissinger had been offered more time and a compatible president to advise, he would have taken a crack at the Palestinian issue. He knew America could not avoid it forever. But it was not to be.
Chapter Five Jimmy Carter: Missionary
Carter took advantage of the opportunity Sadat handed to him, and admittedly picked the lowest-hanging fruit on the tree—an Israeli-Egyptian accord.
Carter stands out from Kissinger and Baker, not to mention from every other American president and mediator who ever dealt with the problem of the much too promised land, in that he decided, almost from the start of his presidency, to make Arab-Israeli peacemaking a personal mission.
And thirty years later he appears more committed than ever, leading election-monitoring efforts in the West Bank and Gaza and writing books with radioactive titles such as Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. That essential commitment arose from a deeper place than concern about some future conflict with the Soviet Union.
Although Carter failed in his initial appearance in the Arab-Israeli arena, alienating just about everyone in his first ten months, this period still contributed to his later success.
Given the centrality of security to Israel’s regional view, tough conservative leaders are better positioned than more moderate or liberal ones to command the political power required to reach controversial agreements and to win over a dubious public. Americans know this reality as the “Nixon to China syndrome.” The history of Arab-Israeli peacemaking really is a record more of transformed tough guys than of committed peacemakers.
As often happens when America approaches the Middle East with a poorly designed strategy—or worse, no strategy at all—the locals make other arrangements, sometimes for war, sometimes for peace.
On November 9, 1977, Anwar Sadat announced his epochal plan to visit Jerusalem.
Both Brzezinski and Quandt worried that Sadat had essentially “jumped” without a safety net;
On reflection, Jimmy Carter really had two presidencies when it came to the Arab-Israeli issue.
The first, from January to November 1977, was an impatient, noisy, and hyperactive drive to put together a peace conference for a comprehensive solution that not only failed but did so embarrassingly.
The intensity that produced failure in 1977 brought forth a stunning accomplishment in the second phase, in 1978 and 1979. Indeed, Carter’s persistence proved invaluable, for even after the Egyptian president’s extraordinary visit to Jerusalem and address to the Knesset, Begin and Sadat could not bridge the chasm on their own.
Carter still believed that “domestic politics shouldn’t be a part of the international foreign policy decision-making process.”
The 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was an accomplishment that remains unmatched by his presidential successors. Indeed, it would take another twelve years for an American president and his immensely talented secretary of state to chalk up another success in Arab-Israeli diplomacy.
Chapter Six James Baker: Negotiator
Baker had the negotiator’s mindset, a tendency to see the world of power and politics in terms of problems to be solved, managed, or deferred.
Baker was not a grand strategist, lacking Kissinger’s view of the world and Carter’s global moralism. But he recognized opportunities when he saw them,
Baker’s single contribution to Arab-Israeli diplomacy—the Madrid peace conference—was very much an exercise in low expectations and surprise diplomacy.
Madrid’s real significance was that it happened at all.
The Madrid conference was not as significant as Kissinger’s disengagement diplomacy or Carter’s Egyptian-Israeli treaty. In almost ten subsequent rounds of talks in Washington that stretched on until December 1992, it resulted in no formal agreements.
At best, Madrid was intended as a stage-setter, an investment trap to keep Arabs and Israelis at the table
The Gulf War and the ascendancy of America, combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union, had reduced Assad’s and Arafat’s room to maneuver and weakened the leverage of the Arab world’s two most difficult peace-process actors. Jordan’s King Hussein, eager to recoup American goodwill that had been lost through his fence-straddling in the U.S.-Iraq confrontation, was also more open to an American-brokered process.
The Americans wanted to keep the world’s focus against Saddam and not convert Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait into an Arab-Israeli issue.
refrain from responding to Iraq’s January 1991 SCUD attacks against Israel.
Everyone anticipated that should the Americans prevail quickly and decisively in the war, there would be a serious effort toward Arab-Israeli peace.
The Gulf War, as Richard Haass, then Bush’s Middle East point man at the NSC, recalled, “put tremendous resources in our political account, and we thought we could do something dramatic.”
Unless you have the confidence of the president or are the president, neither Arabs nor Israelis will take you seriously.
But Baker put it together. He did so with no process, no inheritance, no readymade, agreed-upon framework other than UN Security Council Resolution 242, which meant vastly different things to Assad and Shamir and failed to include even a reference to Palestinians or their issue. Baker made up much of his diplomacy as he went along.
Baker, as Tutwiler explained, was not “an empathetic guy.” He didn’t feel your pain. What he felt and intuited was your politics, your weaknesses, and how to play them.
Baker’s negotiating world was defined by redlines, deal-breakers, and dead cats.
His ability “wasn’t intellectually driven,” Eagleburger recalled, “as much as it was a physiological, psychological something.”
he drove and sustained a diplomatic process that could never have succeeded without him. After all, this was not Oslo, which was sustained by Israelis and Palestinians who were seriously invested in their own diplomacy.
Baker’s team worked well because Baker himself, as a strong secretary of state, provided the adult supervision required. He benefited from our small group discussions and was confident enough to let us argue among ourselves in front of him.
Of Baker’s four core Middle East advisors, three were American Jews.
Baker’s speech at AIPAC in May 1989, which Dan Kurtzer drafted and which all of us loved and approved, contained one line: “Now is the time to lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel.”
where you stand is always a function of where you sit.
The war was a human and environmental disaster but also began to change the political calculations of those in the region and outside, certainly when it came to possibilities for Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
The Arabs, including Egypt, had bought the administration line about postponing linkage, but not forever.
In January and February 1991 Israel had been attacked by thirty-nine Iraqi SCUD missiles. Two Israelis had died, eleven had been seriously injured. Baker believed that Shamir had made a decision not to respond
As early as October we’d been tasked by the secretary to look at options for postwar Arab-Israeli diplomacy. It was already an open secret that the president had committed himself to some kind of initiative as a way of mobilizing the Arab coalition against Saddam.
Beyond that we thought very little about the future.
First, put Shamir in a position where he couldn’t say no. This meant getting Assad and Arafat to say yes and offer Israel the first formal negotiations with Syria and the Palestinians.
Second, put together a conference that had enough symbolism for the Arabs but not too much substance for the Israelis.
And third, come up with a fix to a problem that had eluded all of his predecessors: how to get “non-PLO” Palestinians to sit at the table with Israel.
Hanan Ashrawi got it about right: “Israel got all the carrots and asked for more. We got all the sticks in the form of morbid forecasts about the consequences of saying no.”
One other piece of business had to be taken care of before Madrid, and that was the issue of U.S. loan guarantees to Israel.
Were Bush and Baker too tough on Israel? In the first year, some of their public comments were gratuitous, brought them little from the Arabs, and cost them the confidence of Israel and the American Jewish community. Planning for Madrid using tough public rhetoric, while coordinating closely with the Israelis on substance, was a fair trade-off and gave Baker the image and credibility he needed to sell his ideas to the Arabs. On balance, the Madrid conference was a great deal for the Israelis.
Still, as I sat in Madrid’s Palacio Real, the official residence of the king of Spain, as a member of the American delegation to the Madrid peace conference, I knew the president and the secretary of state had accomplished a great deal. The drama of the moment was undeniable. In the ornate and spacious Hall of Columns, at the top of one of the most spectacular staircases I’d ever seen, the Spanish had constructed an enormous T-shaped table covered in white linen beneath half a dozen dazzling crystal chandeliers.
The only other bit of pre-conference controversy was a minor tiff with the Spanish over whether to remove the enormous oil painting of Charles V killing the Moors. They moved it.
as much warmth and good feeling as a shotgun wedding.
The surreal theater that surrounded the Palestinian representation at Madrid really was surreal.
Its real significance was that it “took place,”
there would have been no Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty without it.
Part Three AMERICA’S PROMISE FRUSTRATED
Yet with all these advantages, when Bill Clinton left the White House eight years later, the Arab-Israeli peace process lay in ruins, bloodied, battered, and broken. Israel and the Palestinians had plunged into a crisis of confidence and a paroxysm of violence and terror from which they have not yet fully recovered. What happened? How was such an extraordinary set of opportunities lost?
Chapter Seven Caterer, Cash Man, and Crisis Manager, 1993–99
the Clinton administration created a small and highly centralized structure to deal with the Arab-Israeli issue, reporting directly to the secretary and the president.
our lack of balance meant that we tended to see things mainly from an Israeli perspective.
Dennis, Martin, and I brought a clear pro-Israel orientation to our peace-process planning.
During the Camp David period Dan was in Cairo as ambassador, and we should have given greater weight to his views, as well as those of Bill Burns, our ambassador to Jordan. Our entire approach would have gained considerable credibility had we simply listened to these two exemplary public servants.
Had I not been so caught up in the “being there” phenomenon, I might have tried harder to address the key flaws in our operation.
Decision-makers don’t need a cacophony of discordant voices, but they do need time to listen to different options before key actions are taken.
New strategies, Anthony Lake once told me, are greatly over-rated.
The real problem during the Clinton years was not pandering to the Jewish community or even domestic constraints: it was the change in America’s perception of its role in Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
act as a very cautious and deferential facilitator. “Rabin didn’t want a mediator,”
Rahm Emanuel, who taught Clinton the Hebrew word for balls—baytzim—said that when Rabin came up in conversation, Clinton would often say that the prime minister had “an incredible set of brass baytzim.”
For a young and inexperienced president, the chance to be associated with a solution to a very old conflict was the stuff of history. Carter recalled that meeting Sadat in April 1977 was his greatest day as president; September 13, 1993, may have been Clinton’s.
It wasn’t that I was opposed to the logic—at least on paper—of making Syria a priority.
Syrian-Israeli deal would be a long slog, at best a waste of time and at worst (and my fears came to be realized) a waste of an opportunity with the Palestinians.
Rabin understood what Barak didn’t: negotiating deals with Syria and the Palestinians together, or even in close proximity, would mean that he’d have to confront two settler constituencies and contemplate two withdrawals from territory that had huge religious, emotional, and security implications. For this reason, after the Oslo breakthrough the possibility of Israeli withdrawal from the Golan went way down.
No amount of finessing could change the fact that Assad wanted Syrian feet in the water where he claimed to have gone swimming as a boy. Barak would later insist that he could not sell any settlement that took away from Israelis the capacity to drive around the lake, which would have eliminated Syria’s sovereignty on the waterline, and ensured Israel’s water needs.
But Rabin’s analysis of the limitations of the Madrid talks (too public, too formal, too much American input) and his view that West Bankers and Gazans would not act on their own, coupled with Assad’s disappointing response to his August offer, persuaded him that a deal with the PLO was the only recourse.
It was Israeli-PLO recognition, and agreement on a negotiating process that would not only change realities on the ground but pave the way for permanent status talks within five years on issues such as Jerusalem, never before agreed to by an Israeli government.
The good news about Oslo was that the Israelis and Palestinians had done it themselves. For the next two years their negotiators solved problems.
For Palestinians, and certainly for Arafat, Oslo subordinated all the things they had wanted—statehood and self-determination—to an interim process in which they had little faith and great suspicion. For Arafat, interim phases were part of his struggle for independence, a necessary concession to gain legitimacy from the two parties,
The president had said the week before that Oslo felt “like a gift.” George Stephanopoulos recalled that “the whole peace thing fell into everyone’s lap.” Under these circumstances no one was going to ask tough questions or challenge concepts. Why spoil the party? Even with all its bumps, Oslo seemed to be working.
The problem was not bilateralism as such but the absence of any mechanism to monitor, let alone ensure, compliance.
Kennedy allegedly used to describe himself, as “an idealist without illusion.”
Rabin’s murder did not cause the collapse of the Oslo process, but it did accelerate its demise. The Palestinians and Israel would conclude three more interim accords, but removing Rabin dealt their relationship a huge blow.
Much of what we did during that period was designed to support Peres and in so doing save Arab-Israeli diplomacy.
But Peres ran a mediocre campaign. Netanyahu, the master politician, ran a better one and eked out a slight victory by sixteen thousand votes in the first direct election of an Israeli prime minister. On election night all I could think about was how we were going to save the Oslo process from extinction. But I didn’t get it. Oslo, as Israelis and Palestinians had known it, was already dead.
Gamal Helal once called in Arabic a raibooba, or political coma.
“We succeeded,” Yitzhak Molkho, Netanyahu’s personal attorney and top negotiator, recalled, because “you can swallow twenty small frogs, but you cannot swallow one big frog.”
For the first several months Netanyahu drifted, and then in September 1996 he made the situation worse by opening up an archaeological site to the public, a tunnel actually, that in Hasmonean times had run adjacent to the Western Wall.
we felt obligated to run our ideas by Israel first. This “no surprise” understanding actually went back to Kissinger, and even Baker had abided by it. But agreeing not to surprise Israel didn’t mean giving it a veto over our ideas.
The president really didn’t like Netanyahu, at least in the beginning. During their first meeting in the summer of 1996 Bibi lectured him about the Arab-Israeli issue, prompting Clinton to ask his aides when it was over, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
Baker had cooperated with Shamir, an even harder-line prime minister, but had also challenged him and pushed back hard when he believed the Israelis had crossed the line. We would never do that on any sustained level with Rabin, Netanyahu, or Barak.
Arafat and Bibi were making commitments not to each other but to us.
he was even considering a pardon of the American spy Jonathan Pollard, until George Tenet’s threat to resign stopped him.
Clinton’s performance at Wye, and the power of his personal skills, gave us a sense that if we got into a real negotiation over the big issues, the president could pull it off. Wye was very emotional.
But as Netanyahu gave way to Barak, and as interim issues gave way to big-ticket items like Jerusalem, borders, and refugees, we would soon see that personal skills, confidence, and commitment alone would not be enough to trump the complexity and power of issues seared deep into the identity, politics, and security of Israeli and Palestinian leaders—and their publics.
Chapter Eight Mr. Nice Guy: Bill Clinton and the Arabs and Israelis He Loved Too Much, 1999–2001
“I’ll make peace with Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinians,” Barak concluded. “I will have the end of conflict, totally in one go.”
A decorated war hero and commando who in April 1973, disguised as a woman, had assassinated Palestinian terrorists in Beirut, a concert pianist with an M.A. from Stanford in systems analysis, Ehud Barak saw himself elected to perform a mission: to end the Arab-Israeli conflict
If Rabin, in the words of the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, was “a cautious engineer and a precise navigator” wanting to solve discrete problems, Barak was out to explore bigger horizons and make a much bigger story. 1
“He’s a gifted, brilliant sober observer who can analyze the political and security situation better than anyone else, but he does not have the patience, ability to engage in dialogue, or understanding of people to change the situation for the better. His mind is long; his arm is short.”
Only leaders could decide these issues. At the same time the gaps separating the parties were enormous, and the political and psychological constraints on each to close them were exceptionally heavy.
Pushed by Ehud Barak and driven by his own commitment to reach a final deal, Bill Clinton was convening a presidential summit to reach a final agreement, only the second such effort in forty years of American peacemaking.
In the summer of 2000 the chances that Arafat and Barak would reach an agreement to solve or end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were pretty close to zero.
Arafat was in no hurry to make concessions that fell short of what Sadat had received on territory and what Assad had pressed for.
“We weren’t prepared for making a historic deal,”
At the same time our approach virtually eliminated any chance of success and left us poorly positioned to pick up the pieces. Without a strong American hand and strategy, the summit would be at the mercy of a hyperactive Barak and an aggressively passive Arafat.
Israeli, Palestinian, and American negotiators usually sat together and relaxed and mixed easily and effortlessly. I’d seen Israeli and Palestinian negotiators just about everywhere—first-and second-class hotels on four continents—and it was always the same. Their humanity—joking, laughing, crying, arguing, and fighting—was always on display. These people liked and respected one another, and despite the many tensions, it showed.
Barak had his own strategy and timetable: keep his cards close, avoid letting Arafat pocket any of his concessions, build pressure, and wait to see where the Palestinians were going. Arafat’s strategy was to be hyperpassive and see what was on the table but never authorize his negotiators to lay down authoritative positions. Barak would not meet directly to negotiate with Arafat in the presence of Clinton,
Samuel Goldwyn, the great Hollywood producer, once joked that a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Had we gotten Barak’s comments, taken what we thought appropriate, argued about what was not, and pushed back when the Israelis went too far, we might have preserved our integrity as a mediator. But we caved to Israeli objections. We had a substantive approach, Dennis recalls, but “Barak says no, so we back off.”
Our “let’s get it done yesterday” approach was out of touch with the issues,
The president was excited to get Barak’s offer of 90 percent at Camp David. But we never seemed to grasp that we couldn’t do this on the cheap.
worst mistake we made was “not to go to every Arab and talk about the issue of Jerusalem before Camp David.”
We couldn’t bring in the Arabs, Madeleine Albright recalls, because Barak “didn’t tell us what was going on and didn’t want them to know.”
But I can’t help thinking our behavior in blaming the Palestinians and facilitating Barak’s campaign to delegitimize Arafat as a partner was immature and counterproductive.
Indeed, the president’s presentation of his parameters on final status in December 2000 moved toward the Palestinians on every issue.
Others, including Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, say a planned intifada is nonsense. But all agree that once the tiger of Palestinian violence was out of its cage, Arafat rode it, did little to moderate it, and in fact fed it to improve his own legitimacy.
when it came to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, Bill Clinton was not the son-of-a-bitch he needed to be.
But empathy alone was not enough. Clinton lacked Kissinger’s deviousness, Carter’s missionary focus, and Baker’s unsentimental toughness.
he lacked “an intuitive toughness.”
In the five months that followed the Camp David summit, more substantive and productive work was done on final status issues than in the previous five years.
discussing the “taboo” issues, opened the floodgates on creativity and even some compromise.
Part Four AMERICA’S PROMISE ABANDONED?
Chapter Nine The Disengager: George W. Bush and the Pursuit of Arab-Israeli Peace, 2001–2007
After six years of two young and inexperienced Israeli prime ministers (Netanyahu and Barak), the Israeli public had had enough, deciding to deliver its future into the hands of the battle-hardened, courtly, and grandfatherly Sharon.
All of these nuances and complexities may have been lost on George W. Bush. But the main message wasn’t: stay away from this issue. It’s a loser.
Bush was blown away by how small and vulnerable Israel was.
The ABC syndrome (anybody or anything but Clinton) clearly impelled the administration during its first year.
The 9/ 11 attacks intensified the tendency to see the Middle East problem as a clash of values rather than as a contest of interests over occupied territory, Jerusalem, water, or settlements.
The president’s June 24, 2002, speech, in which he laid out his vision of two states, dependent on a new democratic Palestinian leadership, was not just an effort to park the problem until the Iraq file was closed; it marked the beginning of the entire reframing process.
for Bush’s first term and much of his second, managing this crisis was relegated to the back burner.
series of talented but unempowered envoys,
That American effort would produce at the end of November 2007 a conference at Annapolis,
When you’re swimming away from a shark, you don’t have to swim faster than the shark, just faster than your friend.
in the spring and summer of 2001 the administration had no good options for stopping the violence.
In essence, the message threatened that the Saudis would no longer take American interests into account unless the administration took their views on the Palestinian issue more seriously.
Not only did Bush commit himself for the first time to a “viable independent Palestinian state,” but he offered up language on Palestinian self-determination that no previous administration had ever used.
The 9/ 11 attacks permanently changed America, its role in the world, and its view of the piece of foreign policy that had consumed my career for two decades.
dropped all pretense of concern as Iraq loomed larger in its strategy.
Richard Armitage, never one to mince words, called it “lazy diplomacy.”
the White House had realized that mobilizing coalitions to fight the war against terror might be easier if the United States signaled interest in Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
Tony later described this idea to me in military lingo as the “recon pull.” See what you can develop, and we’ll follow up.
“Zinni was caught in an historic situation that couldn’t be prevented.”
Karine A may well have focused the administration on regime change in Palestine.
A suicide bomber had blown himself up at a large Passover seder in the Park Hotel in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, killing 28 Israelis and wounding 120. When I returned to the table, Zinni knew by the look on my face “that it was over.”
I was a very slow learner. It took me a while to see that we were already in a new phase of the Israeli-Palestinian problem that would be long and transformative but would not lend itself easily to the ministrations of diplomacy.
It took me about ten seconds to understand that he was in his element, automatic weapon on the table, sitting defiantly at its head in his wrinkled Che Guevara outfit. Yasser Arafat might be “under siege,” but in his own mind, as he told us, he was “undefeated.”
It was the struggle that now defined him, not its outcome.
The problem was that Powell, like Zinni, had no real authority, even had there been a chance to broker a cease-fire. His mandate, he recalls, was “to go solve it, but don’t do anything.”
route to the region Powell stopped in Madrid, where he met with what was to become the Quartet (the United States, European Union, Russia, and United Nations).
The meeting ended on a positive note, but not before Abdullah threatened to leave unless the administration promised to act on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. What Bush agreed to isn’t clear—probably, at a minimum, a pledge to prevent the Israelis from expelling or killing Arafat. As planning for Iraq intensified, the president was more receptive to doing something in order to keep his allies in line. But what?
Somehow the internal consensus (“ We really don’t care about this”) had to be reconciled with the external pressures (“ Others do”).
Tony Blair, the Europeans, the UN, and the Arab allies had been hammering the president from day one on the Arab-Israeli peace process. If a way could be found to craft a speech that people would like but at the same time shift the onus of responsibility onto others, primarily the Palestinians, to act, then the administration might have a compelling argument to make to counter the incessant calls for Washington’s engagement. In this sense, calling for a Palestinian state but challenging the Palestinians to create a new leadership to run it seemed like the perfect approach.
White House focused on transformative diplomacy, especially regime change and democratization.
if the “Arafat-Oslo land for peace framework isn’t viable, then what is?” U.S. policy was suffering from the “absence of a framework” to guide
Unlike most speeches or statements on the Arab-Israeli issue during the past twenty years, this one really was a departure in American policy;
think the president fell in love with the idea that if you could fairy-dust democracy, you could have the beginnings of the solutions of your problems, including Arab-Israel.”
“a republic if you can keep it.”
But the real push came from the Arabs, this time from another Abdullah, king of Jordan. Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s energetic foreign minister, had raised the idea of an action plan with American officials,
three-phase timeline to
end violence,
create confidence through various Israeli and Palestinian unilateral and bilateral actions,
and launch negotiations.
The administration’s lack of commitment ensured that the road map, to use Madeleine Albright’s phrase, would never be taken out of the glove box.
It remained unofficial until April 2003, when Tony Blair persuaded President Bush that it would help both of them with Iraq.
But there would be no replay of post–Desert Storm, when the president’s father and his secretary of state launched a serious diplomatic effort on the Arab-Israeli issue to exploit the opportunity of successfully pushing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
by December 2003 Ariel Sharon had transformed the stage yet again by floating a new idea—unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Still, at least two opportunities presented themselves
instead of working hard to empower Abu Mazen and push a political process, the administration allowed the situation to drift. Enamored of a unilateral withdrawal option from Gaza that would take us off the hook. Already weak and dysfunctional, Fatah would grow even weaker. Hamas would fill the vacuum.
The second missed chance was to build on Sharon’s Gaza disengagement strategy and see how it could be used to strengthen Abu Mazen (and not, as it turned out, Hamas).
Although the Gaza withdrawal went better than many had anticipated, the outcome did not. Fatah couldn’t control the streets and lost politically to Hamas
administration was weakened as well by identification with an Israeli operation that claimed a thousand Lebanese civilian lives and destroyed vast amounts of Lebanon’s infrastructure without dealing Hezbollah a mortal blow.
In March 2007 Abbas and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya formed a unity government under Saudi auspices, and Hamas became a new and permanent reality in Palestinian governance and a factor in any effort to launch Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Within a week Hamas had defeated Fatah in Gaza, occupied its military positions, and laid claim to governance of the Palestinians.
Tony Blair emerged as the Quartet’s Middle East envoy,
diplomacy was not about making deals; it was rooted in the political changes that made those deals possible.
In government, we used to say, there were three possible outcomes to just about everything: breakthrough, breakdown, and muddle through.
peace process was once again open for business.
seeking a peace treaty by the end of 2008;
Chapter Ten One More Last Chance: Is Arab-Israeli Peace Possible, and What Can America Do About It?
two battle-hardened warriors Salah al-Din the Muslim and Richard I the Lionheart, a Christian, men of God, passion, and history, had fought over the fate of this city and now must have been rolling in their graves laughing at our efforts to craft a peaceful solution for Jerusalem, a city over which so much blood had been spilled.
Jerusalem, history told us repeatedly, wasn’t for sharing. It was to be possessed in the name of God, or at least in the name of the tribe.
we were at war with history. As William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
My answers are still: “Yes, peace is possible, and America can do quite a lot about it.”
The obstacles that block progress toward the end of the conflict aren’t supernatural or metaphysical, not beyond the realm of imagining.
still one based on two states. A point may come when that solution is no longer possible, but we are not there yet.
What stands in the way of a solution is the absence of political will and leadership on both sides to understand what’s necessary to meet the other side’s needs and to take the political decisions to move forward.
driven, until the 1990s, by the triad of cold war, oil, and American support for Israel.
During the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the academic experts, pundits, and intelligence analysts sat around trying to figure out what would replace the cold war as the organizing paradigm for American foreign policy in the twenty-first century. They got the answer in September 2001.
We have used up all the “easy ones” in negotiations leading to separate peace treaties between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. The hard ones now involve Israel, Syria, and the Palestinians.
Negotiations aren’t much different from good friendships or business propositions: they work when both sides get what they need.
Israelis wielded the power of the strong, the ability to unilaterally impose and sustain facts on the ground through their preponderant military, technical, and economic advantages.
Palestinians wielded the power of the weak, the capacity to use whatever tool they could to level the playing field against the Israelis.
One of the most important lessons to emerge from the Oslo years is that ignoring bad behavior on either side dooms any chance of serious
We need to be tough with Israel, privately and publicly, on settlement activity.
The fact is that we are indispensable to a resolution of the issue precisely because of our close ties to Israel.
when we permit our special relationship to affect our thinking prejudicially in favor of Israel, or when we take Israel’s side reflexively, we can’t succeed because then we are acting as an advocate for one side over the other.
If we won’t show resolve, independence, and toughness, we’ve got no business being in the peacemaking business.
Politicians rather than statesmen or visionaries abound, lacking the historic or moral legitimacy to lead their peoples into the real promised land of a meaningful peace.
Whatever option is chosen, one thing is clear: Hamas will need to be integrated in some way. We pushed for Palestinian elections in January 2006. Hamas won fairly, and we and the Israelis, helped by the Islamist movement’s refusal to lay down its guns, didn’t accept the outcome.