Tested by Zion (31 page)

Hamas and PIJ, whatever their thoughts about the election, gave no evidence of changing their view of terrorism. Two drive-by shooting attacks on October 16 left four Israelis dead. On October 26, a suicide bombing at a falafel stand in an outdoor market in Hadera, a town 30 miles north of Tel Aviv, killed 6 and wounded 55. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. Israel hit back the following day with air strikes in the West Bank and Gaza.

Rice returned to the Middle East in November. We went first to Bahrain on November 12, for the first meeting of the Forum for the Future that had been
created at the Sea Island Summit. One American goal had been creation of the “Fund for the Future” that would promote democracy, but Arab governments refused to approve any fund that they would not control. “A U.S.-backed Mideast democracy and development summit ended in rancor,” the Associated Press reported. “A draft declaration on democratic and economic principles was scuttled after Egypt insisted on language that would have given Arab governments greater control over charitable and good-government organizations.”
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For Rice, the meeting was a failure: Despite all her work, there was no final communiqué. This was not an auspicious beginning for the trip and was later called “an astonishing rebuff” and a “public relations nightmare.”
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We flew off to Israel, where the Labor Party had chosen a new leader on November 10: Trade union leader Amir Peretz had defeated veteran Labor Party official Shimon Peres. Peretz immediately threatened to pull Labor out of the Sharon coalition, so we figured Israeli politics would be high on the agenda with Sharon. It was not. Sharon merely told us there might be elections; he said he was trying to figure out whether he would stay and fight in Likud or create his own new party.

But mostly he wanted to talk about the Palestinians. The PA security forces were not fighting terror, he said; instead of fighting Hamas, Abbas wants them in the elections. He repeated his total opposition to its inclusion. Terror is the main issue, he told Rice: I want to solve the basic problem – one does not stay forever, but I cannot do it if the terror continues. This “one does not stay forever” was a rare reference to his own mortality, or at least his longevity in the prime minister position. There cannot be progress on the Roadmap if Abu Mazen does not act against terror; tell him that, he urged Rice. He holds meetings but nothing happens. Rice urged patience: His elections are coming. He is far better than the alternatives.

Sharon was not persuaded and answered at length. There was not the slightest sign that Abu Mazen would act, he said. He is doing zero now and he will not be stronger after the elections. Allowing Hamas in the elections is a major mistake. We will not interfere in the Palestinian elections, but neither will we coordinate the elections; we want Hamas treated differently. If we find Hamas guys, we will jail them immediately. Hamas must amend their covenant and stop terror. Doing that could change my position. Once they are in the elections, the EU will see Hamas as legitimate. Allowing Hamas to play a role could bring the Roadmap to an end. How can we move forward with a now-legitimate terrorist organization in the democratic political process? The Bush effort to promote democracy is very important. I could take more risks if we were surrounded by democracies, but if democracy is used by terrorist organizations, how will it work? Will international observers escort Hamas murderers? We will not interfere in the elections but we will not help them. It is a major mistake. Terrorist organizations cannot participate in elections in
the EU; they can't under Oslo. They can't anywhere – and there is an attempt to impose it on us.

Rice argued for the position she and the Quartet had begun to take in September, telling Sharon that actually the Quartet view was not much different from his own. In some cases, she said, a group can disarm after the elections: That happened in Angola and Northern Ireland. We agree with you that they cannot be legitimized while armed. They have to disarm. But there is a fine line between your not helping those elections and actually interfering with them. Don't cross it. Hamas will lose the election; don't give them an excuse to avoid that, she concluded. Sharon remained unpersuaded. He simply did not believe Abu Mazen would be stronger after the elections if Hamas was then sitting in the parliament. There would be more meetings, and Abu Mazen would be sitting and talking with a group whose charter calls for eliminating the State of Israel and attacking Jews. He won't disarm anything, Sharon said. Then he'll lose our support, Rice rejoined. We will not deal with Hamas, not at all. And I can tell you, she said, the United States won't agree to a situation where terrorist organizations remain armed and part of the PA.

Rice's main goal in this part of the trip was to address the problems that had arisen after the Gaza withdrawal. It was now three months since the Israelis had left, but the expected advantages to the Palestinians were invisible. Palestinians could not easily move back and forth from Gaza to the West Bank, nor could they conduct normal export and import activity. Israel's disengagement had been unilateral, and though there had been a good deal of contacts between the two sides, they had never negotiated, or even much discussed, mechanisms for trade and mobility. This was turning into a bitter impasse rather than progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations, and it might affect the January PLC election. Rice wanted to address these issues; both sides realized something had to be done. Delaying her departure for her next stop, the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in Korea, she and all of us jumped into what turned out to be an all-night negotiating session to produce an agreement.

The Israelis had a team, the PA had a team, and we had ours, operating out of the David's Citadel Hotel, where we commandeered the ballroom floor. Javier Solana, the EU foreign minister, and James Wolfensohn were also in Jerusalem. The outcome of our efforts was two documents: an agreement on the operation of the Rafah crossing, and the Agreement on Movement and Access
(AMA) that presented detailed rules for operating crossing points between Israel and Gaza and the link between Gaza and the West Bank, as well as comments on the proposed Gaza seaport and airport and on movement within the West Bank. Its level of detail was considerable: For example, here is one section of the AMA:

The new and additional scanner will be installed and fully operational by December 31. At that time, the number of export trucks per day to be processed through Karni will reach 150, and 400 by end-2006. A common management system will be adopted by both parties.…The management system that has been developed for Karni should, with
suitable local variations, be adapted to the passages at Erez and Kerem Shalom.…Israel will allow the passage of convoys [between the West Bank and Gaza] to facilitate the movements of goods and persons. Specifically: Establish bus convoys by December 15; Establish truck convoys by January 15.

There being no goodwill on which to rely, we thought such detail was the only way to guarantee success; in the agreements were rules that each side could understand and follow. Rice told the PA to forget about an airport in Gaza; we had trouble guaranteeing the safety of our own airports, so how realistic was it for the Israelis to trust that the PA could operate an airport safely? On the seaport, the Agreement on Movement and Access said “construction…can commence”; the dangers were far lower.

The heart of the negotiation was about how people and goods could move safely, without adding to terrorism. How could Israel trust that arms and explosives were not moving in and out of Gaza? What inspections would be made and by whom? Who would examine Palestinians moving in and out of Gaza to stop terrorists? It is not worth elaborating further on the agreements reached because they were not implemented. Rice has been criticized for this failure: “[S]he got on a plane to Asia – and within weeks the carefully negotiated deadlines and agreements had fallen apart.”
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But Rice had taken a huge risk in diving into the negotiation as she did. Had she failed, as we nearly did, to reach any agreement, reporters would have added in the setback in Bahrain and said her trip was a terrible personal failure. Just before our arrival, on November 9, three terrorist bombings at hotels in Amman, Jordan, had killed 60 and wounded 115, so it is not hard to guess there would have been stories about how the whole region was falling apart.

Instead, Rice took the risk and banged heads. She told both sides she was absolutely determined to get a deal while she was in Jerusalem. Hour after hour, we prodded and persuaded and cajoled the Israelis and Palestinians, balancing compromises and concessions, pushing them toward an agreement. This was my first all-nighter since college. Rice departed midway through the evening, for a quick condolence and solidarity trip to Amman (less than an hour away) to see King Abdullah. We carried on in her brief absence. Toward midnight, as the sides seemed to be drifting apart, I called Weissglas. He was sitting with the entire Israeli interagency team and had me on speakerphone. After some preliminary remarks, I asked him to turn off the speakerphone. Look, I told him, Condi needs this agreement; I explained about Bahrain and the press. Tell the prime minister, I said; this is personal. This is a favor to her; she needs to have a victory here. He got the point quickly and said he'd do what he could. At least at that juncture, even with the disagreement over Hamas's possible participation in the PLC elections, relations between the Israelis and Condi were excellent. She liked Sharon and he liked her. This personal appeal would do some good, I knew.

Solana added his personal touch: He called and said he was simply available to do what we asked – a lot, nothing, a press appearance – he just wanted
to be useful. Wolfensohn was another matter; he called to say he was on the way over to the David's Citadel to join the negotiating sessions. Yikes! I called Rice on her plane and received her instructions: On no account was he to be allowed to join what were extremely delicate sessions. When he arrived, we had him seated for a while on another floor, away from the teams gathered around large tables in meeting rooms. He fumed. I was sent to meet with him, to kill time until Condi returned and dealt with him. Now he added his own personal touch. I am James D. Wolfensohn, he said, and I have never ever been treated this way in my entire life. He then gave me a brief biography: his banking career, riches, contacts, the World Bank, Quartet Special Envoy for Disengagement. And now here we were, negotiating about Gaza, and we had not called on him, had not invited him, and had not sought his advice. He would not tolerate this. I was apologetic, while wondering why he was so obtuse as to ignore the obvious fact that Condi had decided to keep him out for a reason: He had nothing to contribute, his record as envoy was dismal, and his ego kept getting in the way – as it was doing right then. When Condi returned, I updated her on this session and she said to send him up to her suite; she said she had experience dealing with teenaged boys.

By morning we had a deal; both sides agreed on the language, and Rice could depart with a triumph.
“
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spent all day and night successfully brokering an accord on Tuesday on security controls at a Gaza border crossing, suddenly elevating the Bush administration's involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a new level,” the
New York Times
reported.
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The “elevation” point was false but was a reminder of the criticism that faced Bush administration officials during and after his term: There wasn't enough involvement, Bush didn't care, didn't pay attention to this, and didn't spend enough time on it. Fixed in their minds was the Clinton ideal, of the president spending day after day at Camp David, in negotiations hour after hour. They did not seem to recall that Camp David had been a massive failure that had produced only the violence of the intifada. Later criticism of Rice because the Agreement on Movement and Access also failed suggested she should have done more, when it would have been more logical to question whether this kind of intense personal role – presidential or secretarial – produced success or highly visible disappointment.

Very shortly after we left Jerusalem, Sharon made his decision: to leave the Likud Party he had founded and to form a new party. On November 21, he announced that he was starting the Kadima Party (“kadima” means “forward” in English) and that Shimon Peres was leaving the Labor Party to join it. Sharon also called for new elections, to be held in March 2006.

The Agreement on Movement and Access began to fray soon after we left: On December 5, Palestinian Islamic Jihad perpetrated a suicide bombing in Netanya at the entrance to a shopping mall. Five people were killed and about fifty injured, and the Israelis reacted not only with air strikes and arrests but also by calling off scheduled talks with the PA over implementation of the AMA. There had been a session planned to discuss the bus convoys between
the West Bank and Gaza that were to be the initial link between the two; now it was canceled.

On holding the Palestinian election as scheduled, President Abbas remained firm throughout December. There was talk of postponement, but he was adamantly against it. He told the EU envoy Marc Otte that postponing elections “will kill me.” But Otte also found that Abbas was feeling low: He reacted to European pressure on Fatah to maintain law and order and reform its governance and finances by explaining why he could not really do anything. Dahlan, for his part, was seeking a postponement. Dahlan told the Israelis – but initially did not tell us – that he had concluded the elections would be a disaster and must be delayed. The postponement would be easy to explain, he felt: Blame everything on the lack of adequate access to the polls in Jerusalem, blame the Israelis, blame Sharon. Weissglas told us he thought the Palestinians would in the end postpone the elections. Dahlan did then turn to us, telling David Welch that Fatah needed more time to get better organized. Of course, we wondered whom Dahlan was speaking for, given what Abbas was saying to the Europeans, and we certainly placed more faith in Abbas's view. Moreover, how could a postponement be defended? The Jerusalem voting problem was fixed: The same previously acceptable method of voting in post offices was arranged, Weissglas told us. So the real story would be clear: The elections were postponed because Fatah might lose. Moreover, the elections had already been postponed from the previous summer. If they were postponed again, most people would conclude, perhaps rightly, that they would simply never be held.