Tested by Zion (53 page)

I did not think those negotiations could succeed, but the argument for trying was strong. First, what else positive was going on after the Hamas takeover of Gaza? This was the “vacuum theory,” that something hopeful needed to be provided for Israelis and Palestinians, and for the Europeans and Arab states as well: Some sign was needed that progress was possible. It was never entirely clear how optimistic the president or Olmert was, and that may well have changed over time. Neither one had an alternative to what Condi was proposing, and both ended up as enthusiastic supporters and participants in this negotiating track.

In fact, there were now to be two tracks because Olmert would be negotiating with Abbas while Livni would be meeting with Abu Ala'a and the veteran PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat. Both of these Palestinians were smart and charming in a certain cloying way, and both were extremely knowledgeable about the details of past negotiations. But there was a downside to this team. Abu Ala'a (Ahmed Qurie) stood for everything we did not like in Palestinian politics and the Palestinian state to be created, from corruption to the hopeless Fatah Party. Erekat was an inveterate leaker whose participation meant that the substance of the talks was unlikely to remain secret, and he was also famous among the Israelis for lies he had told in previous years, such as his accounts of the “Jenin Massacre” in 2002. Nevertheless, both were fully capable of negotiating seriously on all the issues that would arise, large and small. If the idea was to fill the vacuum with a real negotiation, these were the best negotiators the PLO had to offer, and both had immense networks of contacts throughout the Arab world. They and Livni aimed for a concrete agreement, not just a statement of general principles.

The second argument for trying was that the process might itself engender forward movement. As one Palestinian who had been involved in the 2003 talks at Sharm and Aqaba later described it,

I’ve always believed and I still believe that if you launch a process, it creates its own dynamic. You launch it thinking we're going to get into a shelf agreement.…[A]t worst, what it can do is create a framework for things on the ground to work, because at that point I became also a strong believer on things happening on the ground. But I also believe that once you start negotiations…neither side really would want a shelf agreement. Actually both sides realized that it might be better to go for a real agreement. My sense, and this continues to be my sense now, is: sit, negotiate, and you start covering areas of commonalities. Then, more areas of commonalities – and you both come to have a stake in the success of the process you're invested in. And in some ways, politically this is what happened for Olmert and Abu Mazen.…It was a useful event. It did create a very unexpected, in my view, period of chemistry among Palestinians and Israelis.
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So there were good arguments for trying – but there were costs for going this route. We had chosen to maximize the hoopla. We had put a gigantic spotlight on the talks at Annapolis, and Condi's nearly monthly trips kept the process very much in the news. I wondered if this was the path to progress. Given the political difficulties that compromise presented to both sides, perhaps a bit more quiet would have produced a bit more progress. The greater cost was the loss of a pragmatic focus. We were betting on the top-down approach, but I thought going bottom-up had a better chance to succeed. These negotiations might well fail – as they finally did – and leave behind zero progress or embittered relations. One great advantage of the bottom-up approach, of focusing on actual progress in building the bases of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, was that every step forward was real and permanent. Negotiations were all or nothing; in contrast, on the ground, if you did not train 1,000 new policemen, you might hit 750; if you did not remove five checkpoints, you might remove three; if you did not build 10 new schools, you would build 2 or 4 or 6. So as the talks began in late 2007 and continued until late 2008, my skepticism about them led me to champion doing more, and pressing the Arabs to do more, to assist the efforts Salam Fayyad was making to strengthen the core elements of what might someday be the Palestinian state.

While the Israelis and Palestinians now had their two tracks, we had our three generals. Gen. Dayton continued his work on building the PA security forces; Gen. Fraser was now to monitor Roadmap implementation; and we soon added Gen. Jones (later President Obama's first national security advisor) as SEMERS. That was shorthand for his odd title – Special Envoy for Middle East Regional Security; although his task was not entirely clear, it appeared to be to work on the security issues that would someday – very soon, if the ambitions of Annapolis were realized – become part of a final status agreement. A good deal of work was done by Jones's staff and it made the Israelis extremely nervous because they believed they should negotiate those issues with the
Palestinians, not the United States. They particularly objected to the idea of a “Jones Report” that might make judgments about security claims Israel was making, and they fought against any formal conclusion to Jones's work. Although they respected Jones as a former Marine commandant and NATO commander, they did not think he understood their own situation nor had any real insight into the Middle East.

Shortly after Annapolis, on December 5, 2007, it was announced that President Bush would visit the region in January – his first visit to Israel as president. The first round of new peace talks began on December 12 and nearly failed immediately. Israel had announced a plan to build several hundred new homes in the Har Homa neighborhood of Jerusalem, and that plan was immediately denounced by the PA, the EU, and Secretary Rice. As far as the Israelis were concerned, they had agreed to build no new settlements or expand settlements physically in the West Bank. And they had agreed there would be no incentives for people to move to the West Bank. But this was Jerusalem; here, they would build, and nothing on Jerusalem was included in the settlement deal we had reached with Weissglas and Sharon. Olmert did move to assert greater control over the permitting process, to be sure the Prime Minister's Office would not be caught napping as other ministries approved plans for construction in sensitive areas and announced them at sensitive moments. Despite the arguments over Har Homa, Olmert and
Abbas met on December 27 to get the ball rolling for the new year and in preparation for the Bush visit. Meanwhile, the violence continued; on December 26, there had been six rockets shot from Gaza into Israel, for example, and IDF attacks had killed six terrorists in Gaza that week.
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To me, the end of the year brought not only immense amounts of work preparing for the president's trip but also a clear sense that time had already run out for these peace negotiations
. Annapolis had taken place less than a year before the 2008 elections, when the president would officially become a lame duck. More charges against Olmert were brewing. Gaza was in the hands of Hamas, rockets were flying, and at every meeting the Israelis told us it was only a matter of time before a massive intervention into Gaza took place. The year 2008 seemed more likely to bring war than to bring peace.

The president's January trip took us to Jerusalem and then Kuwait, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and finally Saudi Arabia; we were on the road for more than a week. We began in Israel with a visit to President Shimon Peres, and President Bush clearly had a message on his mind. The squabbling and lack of progress since Annapolis made him wonder if he was wasting his time on the Middle East “peace process” during his precious final year in office. He told Peres it was not at all clear that Israel was ready to make the tough choices that peace would require. His purpose in talking to Israeli leaders, he said, was to determine if they were serious; if a deal is not possible, I have other things to do.

That same day, January 9, President Bush met with Olmert, Foreign Minister Livni, and Defense Minister Barak. First there was a thorough discussion of the refugee issue, with Livni making a forceful presentation. The president asked her if any “refugees” would be let into Israel or was her number really zero. Zero, she replied. Our goal is to end the conflict through the creation of a Palestinian state, a Palestinian homeland. Israel absorbed Jews from Europe and the Arab states; that was the raison d’être of Israel. Two states for two peoples – the creation of a Palestinian state is the solution for the Palestinians. People ask “Why not take some?,” she continued. I’ll explain why: To say yes means this conflict remains open for the future. First, how would we ever choose who comes back? The argument about which ones get to come to Israel would never end. And the delegitimization of Israel would continue. To give up part of our land, to divide the land between two peoples, provides an answer to their national aspirations. They cannot establish a Palestinian state and then say some should come to Israel. This affects the legitimacy of Israel. We cannot stop the process of their dreaming about replacing Israel unless we just stop any discussion of Palestinians coming here in the future.

The president was, it seemed to me, persuaded by Livni's argument. He then asked if she thought the conflict was between two peoples or two ideologies. He thought it was between two ideologies, one of which sustains terrorism and murder. If it is a conflict between two peoples, a solution may be impossible. Not at all, she rejoined. It is a conflict between two peoples, and that conflict can be solved. You have proposed the solution: two states for two peoples. A religious or ideological conflict will never be solved. Now Barak jumped in: We all share that vision of two states. But we are entering our 60th year and have had seven wars. We survive here not because we can quote Isaiah but because we have a gun. It is a tough neighborhood. He then turned to security matters and the conditions Israel would need to withdraw the IDF from the West Bank and allow a Palestinian state there. There are eight points, he said, and laid them out: They were both familiar and far-reaching, from demilitarization of the new state to control of the air space and the electromagnetic spectrum to control of the hills overlooking Ben Gurion Airport.

The president reviewed the list but said he could not agree right then on the eight points. Then he explained himself, giving for the only time in my experience a shorthand recapitulation of seven years of Middle East policy and answering the critics who suggested he should have marched into peace negotiations on January 20, 2001. I understand power and the use of power, he said, and I understand your security problems. I am pressing the issue now because I don't see a solution to your security problems except the two-state solution. My purpose in this visit is to look you all in the eye and see if you really want the two-state solution. Then I will figure out the proper role for the president of the United States. Why didn't I come sooner? he asked rhetorically. When I started in office, we faced the intifada. Mostly I blame Arafat for that. Then we had Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, Arafat had to be out. Then Sharon got sick two years ago. Then you had the Lebanon War. There is the European view – go and dictate a solution – but that is not my view. There is a danger that the Arabs will force Abu Mazen to negotiate with Hamas, but at this point they will not. Mecca was a naïve spontaneous reaction to the violence and it set us back. We got things back on track and did Annapolis. The question is where you want to go now: Are you serious?

He posed that question to the entire Israeli cabinet the following night at a dinner in Olmert's residence. I was reminded of a remark Dubi Weissglas had made about the one Israeli cabinet meeting Rice had attended: Dubi had acerbically noted to Condi that he was the only Israeli in the room
not
running for prime minister. Look, Israel has had no better friend than me, the president said flatly, and I recognize the existential threat: The threat to you is the same one that killed 3,000 people in the United States. I believe it helps your security to have a Palestinian state at some future time on your border, and I believe it's the only way you can be secure as a Jewish State. The goal now is to lay out a vision of a state, not to move to a state right now, but the alternatives seem to me to be a Palestinian state or Israeli occupation forever. I understand the security side too, but here is the question. From my point of view, we need
strong leaders. So the question is, to be frank, if the Olmert government doesn't survive when he does hard things, it is not worth the time. We are fixing to do a lot of hard work and make tough choices. I do not want to spend my country's capital if it's a ruse. I do not want a political game, with people lying in the weeds to throw him out of office. I need to know the ground won't shift halfway through.

What the Israelis thought of this speech was not clear to me because so much of it was in the kind of language they might not quite catch. Did they know what a ruse was or what “lying in the weeds” meant? The president spoke the same way to all audiences and interlocutors, on the stump or in the Oval Office; he did not employ a separate official vocabulary for foreign officials. But I figured they got the gist of it, which was 100% political support for
Olmert. And that seemed to me a mistake, a message the president should not have delivered. For one thing, Olmert was so unpopular and his future so uncertain that hitching the peace wagon to him was itself an error. He might be gone in weeks or months as corruption charges mounted. President Bush was immensely popular in Israel, probably more popular there in fact than in any other country on earth. If there were ever a peace deal, his support for it would mean a great deal to Israelis, but he should be supporting the two-state approach, I thought, not Ehud Olmert. That kind of intervention in Israeli politics was simply unwise. Soon there might come a point when Olmert, under the weight of the final Winograd Commission
report on Lebanon and the corruption charges, would need to resign. Israelis – in the government and out, in his Kadima Party and
the other parties in the coalition – would need to decide when that point was reached and Olmert must go. George Bush should not have intervened.

Olmert's response to the president was thoughtful and solid. I am absolutely determined to carry on, he said, because it is good for Israel. The choice we may have sooner or later is a two-state solution or one state for two peoples. I have believed all my life in a “Greater Israel” and still do, he went on, but either we share sovereignty or we share territory, and I prefer sharing territory. I am dead serious about this process. To my colleagues, he continued, you heard this man, the president of the United States, who is committed to Israel as no one else. Is it not smarter to make an agreement now, under him? It can be done in a year and a half or two years, but it is better to do it with him, so I will make every effort. In this process, we will have discussions and arguments with Condi, but we know how to deal with them. Every now and then I will call you and I will be nervous, he said to the president. But in the end we will achieve something. It does not mean a state in the near future, but we can describe what a Palestinian state means, and then can go do it over time.

That was as good a summary of the Olmert approach as I had ever heard. Of course, he had a personal agenda here too: The unspoken message was that he had a special relationship with Bush and time was running out, so he should be left in office to continue this work. It did not seem to me, looking around that dinner table, that the others were buying Olmert's appeal – at least not the personal aspect. Few of them cared at that point if he fell, and some no
doubt favored it because they saw a chance for advancing their own political interests. The president had appealed to them in essence to put politics and personality aside, but which politicians in which countries ever do that? We had achieved a moment of complete national unity after 9/11, but as we sat there in January 2008, the presidential campaign was underway and attacks on the president were vicious. Indeed, we had endured several years of such smears, and the time when politics stopped at the water's edge was clearly long gone. Similarly in Israel, complete unity could be achieved briefly during a war, but party politics and personal ambition returned quickly when the combat ended. Israel was in a sense always at war, anyway, and had been since the day it declared independence in 1948. It could not suspend politics year after year. The president's message and Olmert's might have done more good had the cabinet members been told to go ahead and pursue politics and their ambitions but to be sure they did not spoil the American effort – the Bush effort – to seek a deal with Abbas and the Palestinians.

We were still on the road, in the Gulf States, when violence in Gaza reared up again. Qassams and mortars continued to rain on Israeli towns near the Gaza border, and on January 15, the Israelis struck back again, killing about 20. On January 18, they closed all border crossings in response to further Palestinian attacks. It is worth noting the total numbers of rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza into Israel: 165 in November 2007, 213 in December, 377 in January 2008, and then 485 in February. On January 23, after we had returned home, Hamas destroyed part of a wall the Egyptians had built to separate Gaza from Sinai and tens of thousands of Palestinian rushed across. While Israel was fighting with Hamas, our own efforts to improve the PA security forces were moving forward concretely: On January 24, the first battalion of PA security officers crossed into Jordan for training. On February 12, Imad Mughniyah, a top Hizballah military commander and one of the world's bloodiest and most effective terrorist masterminds, was killed by a car bomb in Damascus that everyone attributed to Israel.

But the meetings between Israeli and Palestinian leaders continued. In February, three months after Annapolis, one thing was becoming as clear as I had feared: Our attention was focused on those meetings and far too little on the real world in the West Bank. We heard this from no less a source than Salam Fayyad, who said it to the president. During a visit on February 1, Fayyad reminded us, as he put it, that Annapolis was supposed to do two things, not just one. It relaunched negotiations, and everyone understands that. The other has been forgotten or shoved aside with the excessive preoccupation with negotiations – that is, life on the ground. We must now prepare for statehood, he said, but that critical undertaking is simply being put at the margins. Of course, I agreed fully and wondered how hearing such a comment from Fayyad, who was so widely admired in Washington, would change things.

Not much, as it turned out. But there was a bright spot: security reform. Battalions were being trained in Jordan – 500 men each, one class after another – now that Gen. Dayton had some funds at his disposal. The Ministry of the Interior was being reorganized. A security infrastructure was being created – police stations, a training college, and operational bases. Dayton was also setting up a training program for senior police officials. And this was not all theoretical; men were in the field, making the streets safer for ordinary Palestinians and less safe for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. As one account put it, after June 2007, “[a]s armed men disappeared from the streets, public order was reestablished in the main population centres. This has been lauded by virtually all, irrespective of political affiliation.…From Jenin to Hebron, Palestinians praise their security forces for ‘confronting criminals and thugs’ and enabling ‘ordinary families to walk outside after dark.’”
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That was the good news. But the PA was still living from hand to mouth, and the promised political reforms in Fatah were not happening. As to improving the Palestinian economy, many of the steps Israel could have taken were still being deferred by Barak and
largely ignored by the United States. I had learned when working for George Shultz that what counts is not only what a secretary of state asks for but also what impression is left as to his or her priorities. Shultz was always careful to put human rights at the top of his list with the Soviets, at the start of every meeting, so they could never conclude or even be permitted to hope that he did not care about that issue very much. Human rights were first on the list. But because negotiations were at the top of our list, the requests we made on West Bank matters came much later in our meetings, often hurriedly noted as a meeting rushed to a conclusion. The Israelis surely took that on board and knew what our priorities were after Annapolis. When I raised the lack of attention to practical concerns, using as ammunition Fayyad's own comments, I was of course assured that we wanted both – progress in the talks and progress on the ground. But the priorities remained fixed.

On February 20, Olmert and
Abbas met again, and both men were now paying more attention to the violence between Hamas and Israel. According to the Israelis, Abbas sought information about Israeli assessments and intensions, but did not pressure them to stop attacking Hamas. This was unsurprising; Hamas was now his enemy and Fatah's, so his concern would be civilian casualties and not slowing Israel's actions against the terrorists in Gaza. Abbas complained about construction in Jerusalem, but Olmert said he could not stop it for political reasons: His coalition would simply fall apart if he tried. Within days, the violence in Gaza intensified again: Hamas rockets killed a civilian in Israel, and an Israeli air strike killed five members of Hamas in Gaza. When Defense Minister Barak came to Washington at the end of February, he gave us a warning. Rockets with the ability to reach Ashkelon mean that 120,000 people more are now in range, and there are air-raid warnings every day. Our patience is at an end, he said, and we are going to strike back more forcefully. You must assume that we are entering a period of more violence that can easily deteriorate quickly into a major ground operation into Gaza. We have told this to Mubarak, Lavrov, Blair, Condi Rice, and other leaders. Hadley asked
if they had decided on a ground operation and if so when. No, said Barak, we are still just reacting now, but what I am telling you is that probably we will end up in a ground operation. Barak also told us its scope was unclear; this could be a one- or two-day raid or a major operation with heavy divisions.