Tested by Zion (19 page)

The Geneva Initiative was a far better known effort than People's Choice, gathering support from the left in much of the world – and not surprisingly attracting criticism from the right in equal measure. Some of the criticism was detailed and programmatic: How many Palestinian refugees was Israel supposed to take, and why should it accept any blame for the refugee problem? What about dividing Jerusalem and removing Israeli sovereignty from the Old City? How could Israel trust the various international bodies and forces the Geneva Initiative would establish to treat it fairly, given the manifest biases at the UN and in much of Europe? Why would the settlement city of Ariel, with a population of 18,000, have to be abandoned?

The harsher criticism in Israel, however, was political: Who gave these private citizens the right to compromise Israeli positions? Sharon and his government saw all of this effort as pure subversion, waged by electoral losers unwilling to accept the rules of the democratic game and making common cause with the enemy. To the Israeli right, all the concessions to the Palestinians seemed rewards for terror. Moreover, entirely absent was any demand for Palestinian democracy; the state envisioned by Geneva would be run by Yasser Arafat, without the slightest need for reforms. In Washington, Powell greeted the plan in a letter to the organizers saying it was “important in helping to sustain an atmosphere of hope,”
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but Bush was less enthusiastic, calling it “productive, so long as they adhere to the principles [to] fight off terror, that there must be security, and there must be the emergence of a Palestinian state that is democratic and free.”
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Arafat was still in his sights.

The Arafat “comeback” in the fall of 2003 came at precisely the moment when Bush was beginning to publicly promote his push for democratization in the Arab world. On November 6, 2003, Bush spoke at the National Endowment for Democracy
, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the agency established by Ronald Reagan during the Cold War to fight for human rights and political freedom. Bush focused on the Middle East and lampooned generations of analysts who had said freedom was a Western conception that could not be exported beyond the Atlantic. He disagreed, saying, “It should be clear to all that Islam – the faith of one-fifth of humanity – is consistent with democratic rule.…More than half of all the Muslims in the world live in freedom under democratically constituted governments.” He then turned to the real conditions in the Arab world, describing a “freedom deficit” with dictatorships that have left “a legacy of torture, oppression, misery, and ruin.” This had to change: “The good and capable people of the Middle East all deserve responsible leadership. For too long, many people in that region have been victims and subjects – they deserve to be active citizens.” He spoke about Iraq and Afghanistan but also addressed the Palestinian situation and then U.S. policy:

For the Palestinian people, the only path to independence and dignity and progress is the path of democracy. And the Palestinian leaders who block and undermine democratic reform, and feed hatred and encourage violence are not leaders at all. They're the main obstacles to peace, and to the success of the Palestinian people.

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe – because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism
we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.

The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom – the freedom we prize – is not for us alone; it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.
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As these remarks show, Bush never bought into the idea – promoted by Tony Blair and virtually the entire State Department, including, in the second term, Secretary of State Rice – that progress toward democracy in the Middle East was closely related to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In his view, that was an excuse dictators used and behind which they hid.

These were powerful ideas, later to become the essence of Bush's Second Inaugural Address. Whatever critics and admirers made of them, it was clear to Bush that Arafat was part of the past, part of the group that had prevented progress in the Middle East. With words like these on the record, the notion of some compromise with the Palestinian leader was impossible. Arafat had to go – but he was not going, and the combined European and American efforts had not moved him aside.

Inside the NSC, we tried to figure out where to go next. In November, the UN Security Council firmly endorsed the Roadmap in Resolution 1515
, but this was a typical UN move: too little, too late. With Arafat immovable and Bush equally determined not to deal with him, a UN resolution was useless. The Roadmap was clearly stalled. Powell had met with the authors of the Geneva Initiative, although Rice had refused to do so, saying that stating what you think the outcome should look like doesn't actually get you any closer to that outcome. What are the steps to peace, she wondered. She spoke with Marwan Muasher, the Jordanian foreign minister, who agreed the central problem was that the Palestinians refused to empower a prime minister – and said there was no way to fix things until they did. This was Bush's view: After an Oval Office meeting, the president told the staff that he had spent some capital on backing Abu Mazen, but the minute that real progress had begun, he was booted out. We are in a waiting period for Palestinian leadership to stand up and say they are against terror. Bush said he fully believed the two-state solution was in Israel's interest, but he did not blame the Israelis for turning away from quick solutions that avoided the basic problems. I understand Sharon, he said; you have to sit in his chair and you would see his greatest responsibility is ensuring security.

Rice talked with Weissglas to see what the Israelis now thought. We need something to break in the region, she said; we need to shake up the dynamics.
What might it be? Is anything possible between Israel and Syria? Knowing that neither he nor Sharon would visit the United States soon, Weissglas suggested that Rice send me to see Sharon in Rome, where he would shortly be on a state visit, and we could talk it through. Rice readily agreed. Very few officials knew of the trip in either the Israeli or U.S. government – or the Italian government, for that matter. I made myself a hotel reservation on Expedia, landed on the morning of November 18, and went to my hotel for a rest and a shower. In the afternoon I walked over to Sharon's hotel, the Cavalieri Hilton, where one of his closest aides met me in the parking lot and escorted me through Italian and Israeli security up to Sharon's suite. The purpose of the trip was to discover Sharon's plans for dealing with Syria and
with the Palestinians. He had made great progress, with full American support, in crushing the intifada. Now what?

As soon as Sharon appeared, he and I and Weissglas sat down in the dining room of Sharon's suite. I anticipated getting a terrific Italian meal, presumably catered for him by the best restaurant on the premises. Instead, a Sharon staffer brought us a platter covered by slabs of meat. Sharon immediately dug in, pulling over to his side of the table a large piece of pink meat and cutting a huge slice. It sure looked like ham to me, a food I did not eat and assumed Sharon could not, either. So I asked him, “What meat, exactly, is that?” As he brandished a large forkful, he replied “Elliott, sometimes it is better not to ask.”

Sharon was, as usual, honest – and blunt. With Syria, there would be no negotiation, no matter what the Americans wanted. To start discussing the border with those murderers, he said, well, we did it before and it failed. We have to solve the Palestinian problem. We should not turn to another front and leave the Palestinian effort behind. A nation has only a certain ability to face problems. We should stick to the Palestinian issue; Israel cannot take another heavy burden on its shoulders. We cannot take it. It would be a major mistake. Don't drag Israel now into a new internal struggle. We don't trust the Palestinians and we are not sure something will happen. But we have to try and do that, he concluded.

I knew many of Israel's generals favored a negotiation with Syria, but they were not in charge. Sharon was, and the message I was to carry back to President Bush was clear: Starting a negotiation with Syria would shock Israel, and it has had enough shocks; it does not need another one right now.

Yet Sharon had a new view on the Palestinians and, for the first time, he unveiled his new approach. We might say that if it is quiet for a time we will dismantle some settlements in Gaza, Sharon told me. But this dismantlement would not be the product of a negotiation with the Palestinians, he made clear. I will take these new steps as unilateral steps, he said; I do not want to be in their hands, because they may not perform or there may be acts of terror.

Three months later, Sharon went public, suggesting he might order evacuation of some settlements in Gaza. His own Likud Party voted down the proposal in May 2004, the first step in a process that ultimately led Sharon to
split Likud and create the new Kadima Party. But this conversation in Rome was the first inkling the U.S. government had of what later came to be called “disengagement.” As Sharon reported to the Knesset later, in April 2004, “contacts between us and the U.S. Bush Administration on this issue…commenced during my visit to Rome, when I communicated to a White House representative my intention to initiate the Disengagement Plan.”
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We had once asked Weissglas, during a meeting in Rice's office, whether a withdrawal from Gaza was possible, and he had quickly said no. Clearly, Sharon had had a significant change of mind.

Sharon's military secretary, Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, told me a story showing how far Sharon moved between 2002 and 2003:

In the mid-term of my tenure over there, I believe it was the beginning or so of 2002, he called me once and he said – he asked me, “You know, the status quo is very, very bad. The situation, when it's frozen, it's very, very bad. What do you think? How we can initiate some kind of process?” And I told him, “Can I be open with you?” “Sure you can. That's why I called you.” And I told him, “Let's leave Netzarim.” You know Netzarim was a very isolated settlement in the middle of the Gaza Strip; less than a hundred families, but a battalion of soldiers was on guard over there in order to secure this less-than-one-hundred families. “Let's remove Netzarim, let's leave Netzarim. By a small step, you can initiate a process where the entire world will support you and understand that you are serious.” He almost threw me out of his office. He said, “What happened to you? What happened to you?”
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Sharon's disengagement policy answered the question the U.S. government and the Europeans were asking: After the resignation of Abbas – symbolic of the apparent collapse of all our plans for Palestinian reform, marginalizing Arafat, and then moving forward in accordance with the Roadmap – was there no way forward? Sharon and
disengagement from Gaza are so familiar now that the depth of the change may be missed, but Arik Sharon was known as the father of the settlement movement. How had he moved so far?

Sharon's team later gave their own explanations for disengagement. The turning point, said Tourgeman, was the resignation of Abbas:

After the appointment of Abu Mazen, Sharon wanted to give it a real chance. That was the idea in Aqaba. Aqaba, for Sharon, was maybe the last time that he gave a chance to the Palestinians. We wanted to see if Abu Mazen can deliver as a prime minister, and we thought that it might work well. Arafat blocked him and blocked everything that he did also in regard to Israel. And then he resigned and in August Abu Ala'a became the prime minister. Abu Ala'a presented a different policy domestically and toward Israel.…Dubi and I went to meet with Abu Ala'a a few times when he was a prime minister, and we came to the conclusion that nothing will come out.

So we felt that we are going to a period where everything will be frozen. And, during Sukkot, it was the period of the Geneva Initiative. It was Sukkot [October 11 to 18, 2003]. In that period [the Europeans were] trying to create new initiatives – Geneva – which is going back to Clinton and final status issues, and there was the letter from the officers and pilots to the prime minister.
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Dubi came to Sharon and told him, “Look, if
you don't want any of those initiatives to take over, you should find another initiative.” We had the Roadmap, we had our reservations to the Roadmap, we went through the elections in Israel, after the Roadmap was presented and the fact that Sharon went with the idea of a Palestinian state, we had Abu Mazen and the change of Palestinian leadership, we had discussions with him, very good discussions that might have been promising; Arafat blocked it. Abu Ala'a came as a prime minister and the channels to the Palestinians were blocked.