and to make a new push in negotiations with Syria. Deliberately following the
model Philip Gould had used in Tony Blair’s election campaign, we also
distributed nearly a million copies of a six-point policy “pledge card”. It included a
promise to hold a referendum on any peace deal we reached with Syria or the
Palestinians, as well as several domestic policy pledges, including an end to
discrimination against Russian immigrants whose Jewish religious status had been
called into question.
Yet the most widely reported promise was that I would pull out all Israeli troops
from Lebanon within a year. I realized that even among those who knew that made
sense, voices would be raised both in the Knesset and the kiyra against
withdrawing. As with the Bar-Lev Line before the 1973 War, the longer the
“security zone” was in place, the more difficult that politicians had found it to say
it was a mistake. Yet it had now been there for nearly two decades. The main
argument for keeping it – that it protected the security of northern Israel – was
undermined by the fact that thousands of Katyusha rockets had been fired over it.
And in the low-grade war we were fighting against Hizbollah inside the security
zone, around 20 Israeli soldiers had been dying each and every year. When I’d first
visited our positions in south Lebanon in the early 1980s, chatted with the troops
and asked them how they were doing, the invariable response was: we’re OK.
We’re just worried about our young kids back home. Now, those children were
manning the same outposts, facing the same danger, in a sliver of land on which
we had no claim, which we had no desire to hold, and which was, at best, of
questionable security value.
* * *
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I’d tried not to pay too much attention to newspaper polls during the campaign,
perhaps because even the “good” ones, to use Shimon’s phrase, had me with just a
narrow lead, with Yitzhik Mordechai’s 10 or 11 percent still likely to prevent
outright victory in the first round. But in the second part of May, our internal
polling showed things were moving in our direction. In mid-May, they had me
above 40 percent. A final batch of internal polls, on the Friday before election day,
had me just short of 50 percent. But I told our pollsters that under no circumstances
were they to divulge the results to anyone in the campaign team. This wasn’t just
because I wanted to guard against complacency. It was because, deep down, still I
didn’t trust the numbers.
I retreated to Kochav Yair on Friday evening. On Saturday, two days before the
election, I had a surprise visitor, someone I knew from Yitzhik Mordecai’s team.
He said he had a letter for me, with terms of a proposal under which Yitzhik would
announce an eleventh-hour withdrawal from the race. I still could not be absolutely
confident I’d win, at least in the first round. Yitzhik’s pulling out would help. But
if I did win, I wanted to start the process of assembling a coalition with a blank
slate and an open mind. Doing a deal was not the way to begin. I didn’t accept or
open the envelope. “Go back to Yitzhik,” I said. “Tell him, as he knows, that I
have a lot of respect for him. But this is a decision that he has to make on his own.”
The next day, less than 24 hours before the polls opened, all of the three other
candidates announced they were pulling out. Benny Begin and Azmi Beshara were
never going to affect the outcome. But Yitzhik’s withdrawal very possibly would.
When he spoke to reporters, he said it had been one of the most difficult decisions
he’d had to make, but that he’d concluded he wouldn’t get enough votes to reach
his “primary goal” of defeating Bibi. “The prime minister was given a chance and
he failed,” he said. “We must give Barak a chance.”
I got up early on May 17, confident we’d done everything we could to put
ourselves in a position to win, but also aware, from Shimon’s defeat, that the
smallest of details, and the narrowest of margins, might determine the outcome.
After the 1996 election, I’d learned of cases where Peres volunteers outside polling
stations in the Negev or the north of the country had left early, in order to make
sure they’d be back to Tel Aviv in time for the “moment of victory.” Now, I sent
out word that all our volunteers must stay in place until the polls had closed. After
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Nava and I voted, we attended an event for Labor supporters north of Tel Aviv,
before flying to Beersheva to spend the final hours in the Negev. I’d arranged for
Shlomo Ben-Ami to go to Kiryat Shmona in the north – emphasizing, as
throughout the campaign, our determination to broaden our support beyond
Labor’s heartland. The polls closed at 10 o’clock. I knew Bibi would be staring at
the same Channel One newscast as I was, each of us ready to put the best spin on
things, especially if there was no clear sign at this stage which one of us had won.
But the exit poll findings came as a shock: Barak, of One Israel, 58.5 percent;
Netanyahu, Likud, 41.5 percent. It was a landslide.
The full impact hit me only when I got to the fifth-floor suite in the Dan Hotel
in Tel Aviv, our election-night headquarters. My three brothers, and Nava and our
daughters, were waiting for me. Leah Rabin, too. Our eyes teared up as we
embraced. My parents were by now too frail to come. But I’d promised to phone
them, whatever happened. “We did it,” I told my father, who said mazaltov with a
depth of feeling which had become rare as his health began to fail. My mother had
always been a bit conflicted about my going into politics, despite her lifelong
belief that the issues of politics mattered, especially after Yitzhak had been cut
down and killed for following the path on which I hoped to continue. Still, I could
hear the pride, and relief, in her voice when I said: “Remember, ima. I did promise
you that if I ran, at least I’d make sure to win.”
When we’d finished speaking, Bibi called. He had conceded publicly as soon
as the exit poll was out. He had also stunned the Likud crowd by immediately
resigning as party leader. “Congratulations,” he said, sounding, more than
anything, tired. “I accept that the voters have spoken.” I thanked him for taking the
trouble to call. I said I appreciated the contribution he’d made to the country, and
that we’d meet in the next few days to discuss how best to handle the political
transition. “Thanks,” Bibi said. “And again, mazaltov.”
By the time I got off the phone with Bibi, the TV was showing pictures of tens
of thousands of people celebrating the results in the central Tel Aviv square, now
renamed in Rabin’s memory, where he had been murdered nearly four years
earlier. Before leaving to join them, I fielded a stream of calls: from friends, other
Israeli party leaders and leaders from abroad, including Tony Blair and Bill
Clinton, both of whom not only offered warm congratulations but said they looked
forward to working with me as I tried to move Israel forward and to finish the
work Yitzhak had begun.
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At the start of my brief remarks at the hotel podium before going to Rabin
Square, I had to call for quiet when I mentioned the phone call from Bibi. “No,” I
said, raising my voice to be heard above the boos, “we will not boo an incumbent
Prime Minister of Israel… A short time ago, I spoke with Prime Minister
Netanyahu and thanked him for his service to the State of Israel.” Then – with both
Leah and Shimon Peres at my side – I paid tribute to “that one special person who
had a unique role in our reaching this moment – somebody who was my
commander and guide, and the person who led me into politics: Yitzhak Rabin. I
pledged to fulfil his legacy, and complete the work he’d started. And I extended a
hand to “secular and religious, the ultra-Orthodox and the residents of the
settlements, to Israelis of Middle Eastern origin and Ashkenazi extraction, to
immigrants from Eithopia and the former Soviet Union, to the Arabs, the Druze,
the Circassians, the Bedouin. All, all of them, are part of the Israeli people.”
It was not long before sunrise when I reached the square. As the crowd shouted
and sang, I began with a line borrowed from Bob Shrum. It seemed particularly
apt: “It is the breaking of a new dawn,” I said.
But was it? As I paid tribute to Rabin – “in this place where our hearts broke” –
and dedicated myself to completing the work he’d begun, I could feel the
thousands in the square willing me on. Even in my more nuanced comments on the
talks with the Palestinians: the need to achieve peace, but at least for now by
disengaging rather than joining hands with the Palestinians, ensuring we had
military and border provisions to safeguard our security, and with the stipulation
that Jerusalem would remain our undivided capital, under Israeli sovereignty. But
some in the crowd were carrying posters saying “No to the charedim” – the strictly
Orthodox. Others were chanting, in anticipation of the negotiations needed to put
together a coalition: Rak lo Shas! Anyone but Shas! It was a reference to the
Sephardi Orthodox party, which in addition to being more nuanced and flexible
than other religious parties on the issue of peace talks, had been the big winner in
the election. It had gained seven seats and now had only two fewer than the Likud.
I did not specifically mention Shas. But I said: “I tell you here that the time has
come to end divisions. The time has come to make peace among ourselves,
whether we are traditionalists or secularists… We must not be enemies of each
other.” Paying tribute to all those in the square who had worked for our election
victory, I added: “I know it would not have been possible without your support.
But I also know it would not have been possible without the support many in the
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Likud. I appreciate that as well. And I undertake to be rosh hasmemshalah shel
kulam: Prime Minister for all Israelis.
Yet as fervently as I hoped to be able deliver on that pledge, I knew, even as I
spoke, that actually fulfilling it was going to be much, much tougher.
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Chapter Twenty
As Prime Minister, I would sometimes be criticised as emotionally buttoned up,
even stoic, and there was some truth in that. It was partly just a reflection of who I
was: a kibbutznik who’d grown up in the early years of the state, and had then
spent most of his life in the army. But while it may not have shown, I felt a churn
of emotions when I formally presented my government to the Knesset in July 1999
as Nava, our three daughters, her parents and mine looked on proudly from the
gallery. Even more so, when I entered the office of the Prime Minister. I’d been
there before: as head of military intelligence, chief of staff and a cabinet minister.
Yet to sit behind the vast wooden desk and know that the buck now truly stopped
with me – to become just the tenth person in Israel’s history to have that honor –
was very different.
What I felt most powerfully, however, wasn’t the honor. It was the
responsibility. I knew that Israel faced two deepening crises. The first was
domestic. Though Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin was now in jail, the divisiveness and
hatred of which he was a product and symbol had not gone away. Nor had other
rifts: between the privileged and disadvantaged, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and,
perhaps most of all, secular and religious. The second, more immediate challenge
was on our borders. The peace process was stalled. If we were going to revive it,
we were running against the clock. President Clinton, a key player in any hope of
turning the promise of Oslo into real peace, had only 18 months remaining in
office. In terms of Israel’s security, the timetable was even less forgiving. From my
very first intelligence briefings as Prime Minister, I was even more convinced of
what I’d been warning Bibi for months: without a political breakthrough, a new,
much more deadly intifada was only a matter of time.
That would have been reason enough to make peace efforts my first priority.
But even as I was addressing the victory rally in Rabin Square, I sensed that the
simple arithmetic of the election results would leave me no other choice. I was
entering office with the largest electoral mandate in our history. But that was
because of Israel’s new voting system, with separate ballots cast for Prime Minister
and party. That system had had precisely the opposite effect on party voting. In
previous elections, most Israelis had chosen one of the two main parties, knowing
that only they had a realistic chance of forming a government. Now they could
directly choose the Prime Minister, giving them the luxury to vote in much greater
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numbers for an array of smaller, issue-specific parties. The result: though I’d won
by a landslide, and One Israel had the largest number of Knesset seats, even with
our natural left-of-center ally, Meretz, we would have only 36 Knesset seats – well
short of the 61 needed for a majority. Even if we included a few smaller parties,
there was no choice but to bring in one of the two larger ones: the Sephardi
Orthodox Shas, with 17 seats; or Likud, which, after Bibi’s sudden resignation,
was now led by Arik Sharon, and had 19.
It wasn’t just a math problem. It had a critical policy implication. If I wanted to
tackle the domestic challenge – to reassert the values of secular-led democratic
government over increasingly assertive religious involvement in our day-to-day
politics – that would mean choosing Likud over Shas. But it would also signal the
effective end of the peace process. Even though Arik assured me privately that he
understood my determination to reopen peace efforts with Arafat and Hafez al-
Assad, I knew Arik. The path toward peace agreements, assuming they were even
possible, would be tough. Sooner or later – and certainly if we faced the need to
consider painful compromises in the negotiations – I was certain that Arik would
act as a kind of opposition from within. That was why, over the angry opposition
of Meretz leader Yossi Sarid, I decided to go with the Sephardi Orthodox party. I
realized that even Shas might walk out if the scale of any land-for-peace
concessions proved too high. But it was the least extreme of the major religious
parties on the question of peace with the Palestinians. In my conversations with the
party’s spiritual leader and guide, the 79-year-old rabbi and Talmudic scholar
Ovadia Yosef, I was struck by his intelligence, erudition and subtletly of thought –
but, above all, his commitment to the core Jewish principle of sanctifying human
life over the specifics of Oslo redeployments, where his inclination seemed to be to
trust the judgment of those with the experience and expertise to evaluate the
security implications.
To Meretz’s additional consternation, I included two smaller, right-of-center
Orthodox parties in the coalition. It was not just to make good on my pledge to be
Prime Minister for all Israelis. Knowing that I was going to put top priority on the
peace process, I wanted to avoid an undiluted left-of-centre, secular thrust to the
government. When I’d stood in front of the tens of thousands of cheering
supporters in Rabin Square after the election, I thought to myself: they think that
with Bibi gone, peace is around the corner. I wanted a coalition broad enough to
keep Meretz, and Labor ministers as well, from forgetting a crucial fact: the
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compromises that we might have to contemplate during peace negotiations were
still anathema to many other Israelis.
* * *
Syria was always my first negotiating priority, as it had been for Rabin and, for
a brief period, Bibi as well. This was not just because the shape of a final
agreement with the Syrians was clearer, to both sides, than with the Palestinians. It
was because I was determined to make good on the main specific policy pledge of
my campaign: to bring our troops home from Lebanon. No matter what the
increasingly emboldened fighters of Hizbollah said publicly, our withdrawal would
be bad news for them. It would deprive them of their “anti-occupation” rationale
for firing Katyushas into towns and settlements in northern Israel, and free us
politically to strike back hard if that proved necessary. It was clear to me that
Hizbollah would try to make the withdrawal as difficult for us as possible. But the
real power in Lebanon rested with the Syrians, who, along with Iran, were
Hizbollah’s main backers. If we could get a peace agreement with Assad, there
seemed every reason to hope he would rein in Hizbollah, and perhaps open the way
to a peace treaty with Lebanon as well.
Still, there was no way of hiding an additional attraction in getting a deal with
Syria first: it would increase our negotiating leverage with the Palestinians. That
would certainly not be lost on Yasir Arafat – one reason that I realized the
importance of an early meeting with him, to convey my commitment to keeping
the Oslo process alive, and, if possible, achieving a full and final Israeli-Palestinian
peace.
* * *
I went to see Arafat a few days after taking office. We met for well over an
hour at Erez, the main crossing point into Gaza. It was swelteringly hot inside. At
least I was in an ordinary business suit, but I couldn’t help wondering how Arafat
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was coping in his trademark military uniform. Still, the mood music going into the
meeting was encouraging. After the election, Arafat had tried to use his ties with
the ayatollahs in Iran to get them to release 13 members of the tiny Jewish
community in Shiraz who had been jailed on patently absurd accusations of spying
for the “Zionist régime.” Iran had told him no. Given its support for Hizbollah, and
its serial diatribes about destroying the State of Israel, this was hardly a surprise.
But it was a gesture nonetheless, and I told him I appreciated it. I also arrived with
a gift: a leather-bound volume with both the Hebrew Bible and Koran. I began our
meeting with what I felt I most needed him to hear: that both of us were trying to
achieve something hugely important, nothing less than a new relationship between
Israelis and Palestinians based on trust. As I would discover in the months ahead –
as Yitzhak had found as well – Arafat responded warmly to such general appeals
of principle. He replied that he viewed me as a partner, and a friend. But the key
issue of substance – the difference between how I envisaged taking Oslo forward
and what he wanted – was impossible to avoid.
I emphasized that I was committed to the further Wye River summit
redeployments Bibi which had agreed, although not implemented, as well as to a
release of Palestinian prisoners agreed at Wye. Yet then came the more difficult
part: explaining my view of how we could best move toward a full peace
agreement. I said I was convinced the prospects would be much better if we
delayed the redeployments and brought forward the start of the real negotiations:
on “permanent-status” issues like final borders, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees. In
any case, I said, I’d need a few months for a thorough assessment of the issues
involved, and to reach a settled view with my negotiating team on how to proceed.
Arafat seemed to accept the idea of a pause for reflection and planning. But he held
firm in his opposition to any further delay in the Wye redeployments. More
worryingly for the longer-term prospects of an agreement, he ignored altogether
my suggestion that we move ahead toward the permanent-status talks.
Speaking to reporters, I was careful to accentuate the positive. I said the reason
I’d come to see Arafat so soon was because of the importance I attached to his role
in “shaping peace in the Middle East.” I said I would not waver in continuing on
the path which Rabin and he and begun. And while the security of Israel would be
my paramount concern in negotiations, “I also want each Palestinian to feel
secure.” Both sides, I said, had suffered enough. The open question, however, was
whether I had done enough to persuade Arafat that his exclusive focus on
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redeployments – on only the land part of a land-for-peace deal – meant we risked
ignoring the core issues that would determine whether a full peace agreement was
achievable.
More urgently, I knew from our diplomats in the US that the Americans would
not necessarily be receptive to a further delay in moving ahead with Oslo, even if it
meant focusing on trying to make peace with Syria. That made my first visit to see
President Clinton as Prime Minister especially important.
* * *
It was billed as a “working visit” and work we did. After a gala dinner for Nava
and me in the White House, we helicoptered to the presidential retreat at Camp
David. President Clinton and I spent more than 10 hours discussing shared security
challenges in the Middle East, especially terrorist groups and states like Iran that
were backing them, and, of course, how best to move forward our efforts to
negotiate peace. These face-to-face meetings set a pattern that would last
throughout the time he and I were in office. On almost all key issues, my
preference was to deal directly with the President, something I know sometimes
frustrated other senior US negotiators like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
and Mideast envoy Dennis Ross. This was not out of any disrespect for them. It
was because the decisions on which negotiations would succeed or fail would have
to be made at the top, just as President Clinton and I would ultimately carry the
responsibility, or the blame, for errors, missteps or missed opportunities.
Our first meeting ran until three in the morning. When the President asked me
how I saw the peace process going forward, he smiled, in obviously relief, at my
answer: I wanted to move quickly. He had only a limited time left in office, and I
was determined that we not waste it. Much is often made about the personal
“chemistry” in political relationships. Too much, I think, because the core issues,
and the trade-offs of substance, are what truly matter when negotiating matters of
the weight, and long-term implications, of Middle East peace. Still, chemistry does
help when moments of tension or crisis arise, as they inevitably do. My first few
days with President Clinton laid a foundation that allowed us to work together even
when things got tough. I benefited, I’m sure, simply by not being Bibi. The
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president and his negotiating team had spent the previous few, frustrating years
trying alternately to urge, nudge and cajole him – and, of course, Arafat – toward
implementing Oslo. Clinton did finally succeed in getting the Wye River
agreement. But it, too, remained to be implemented.
Nava’s presence, and Hillary Clinton’s, contributed to an informal, familial
atmosphere. Before my first round of talks with the President, we joined Bill and
Hillary for dinner. Though I would work more closely with Hillary in later years,
when she was Secretary of State under President Obama, this was the first time I’d
had the opportunity to engage in anything more than small talk with her. She was
less naturally outgoing than her husband. Yet not only was she bright and
articulate. She was barely less informed on the ins and outs of Middle East peace
negotiations than the President. She, and Bill as well, also spoke with us about
things well beyond the diplomacy of the Middle East: science, music, and our
shared interest in history. What most struck Nava and me, however, was the way
the Clintons interacted with each other. The scandal surrounding Monica Lewinsky
was still fresh. I suppose we expected to see signs of tension. Whether they were
there, we had no way of knowing. But what the two of them did palpably have was
a deep respect for each other’s intelligence, insight and creativity in looking for
solutions where so many others saw only problems. It was impressive.
Still, there was little small talk in the long discussions I had with the President.
From the outset, I wanted him to know exactly what I hoped we could accomplish
and how, in my view, we were most likely to get there. I wasn’t trying to impose
“ground rules” on the President of the United States, something I neither would nor
could do. But I was explicit with him about my own approach the negotiations. I
assured him I was prepared to be flexible. But I said I’d be relying on two critical
assumptions. The first was that when we and the Americans agreed a position on a
specific issue, there would be no unilateral “surprises” – by which I meant, though
didn’t say, things like the unfortunate American redefinition of Yitzhak’s “pocket
deposit” assurance regarding the Golan. The second assumption, I know, may
seem overly legalistic. It was that, until and unless we reached a full and final
agreement with either Syria or the Palestinians, any Israeli negotiating ideas or
proposals would not be binding. If no agreement was reached, they would become
null and void. I wanted to avoid a situation, as had happened so often in past
negotiations, where an Israeli proposal was rejected by the Arab side but then
treated as the opening position in the expectation of further concessions in later
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talks. I did realize that, “null and void” or not, our proposals or suggestions would
not simply disappear from memory. But I felt the point of principle was essential if
Israel was going to be able to consider the kind of far-reaching concessions which
final peace deals might require.
In the end, I realized that we might simply discover that Assad, and certainly
Arafat, were not willing or ready to make peace. We might, initially at least, have
to settle for a more incremental step. “Right here in Camp David, Begin, Sadat and
Carter couldn’t complete the process,” I pointed out. “They signed a ‘framework
agreement’ and it took months of further diplomacy to reach a peace treaty. Maybe
we’ll end up doing the same.” But I told the President I was convinced that if we
didn’t try to get agreements, we’d have no way of knowing whether the will to
make peace was there on the other side. Assad, I suspected, was the more likely to
reciprocate. That was a major reason I wanted to start our efforts with him. But so
far, his true intentions had never been tested, beyond his obvious determination to
get back the Golan. Nor had Arafat’s, beyond his focus on the detail and extent of
West Bank redeployments.
President Clinton did not object to an early effort to reopen our efforts with the
Syrians. But he was worried about the effects of ignoring the already-creaking
prospects of fulfilling the promise of Oslo. If we were going to delay focusing on
that, Clinton told me, he needed to be able to assure Arafat the wait would be
worth his while. What could we give the PLO leader in return for putting off the
Wye redeployments further, he asked. And then, the real question on his mind:
“Ehud, when we get to the final redeployment and a peace deal, how much of the
West Bank are you prepared to hand back?”
I simply didn’t know at this stage. Much would depend on whether we could be
sure Arafat could or would deliver a final peace. But even if I had known, I would
have been reluctant to name a precise percentage. Though I had full trust in
President Clinton, I knew that everything he and I said would be shared with at
least a few of his closest policy aides and negotiators. Sooner or later, word would
get to Arafat. When we did begin negotiations, he’d take whatever number I gave
as a mere starting point. Still, I knew I had to signal the President that I was serious
about negotiating with Arafat when the time came. I also knew the main source of
his concern. In order to get the agreement at Wye, the President had signed on to a
provision that the dimension of the third and final redeployment phase would be
determined by Israel alone. By that stage, when we got there, Arafat would have
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control of something like 40 percent of the West Bank. That meant – at least in
theory – that Israel could limit phase-three to a mere token pullout, leaving the
Palestinians with less than half of the territory.
“I don’t know what percentage, exactly,” I replied. “But one of my cabinet
ministers thinks that a formula of 70-10-20 would work, meaning 70 percent for
the Palestinians, ten percent to allow us to retain and secure the largest of the
settlement blocs, and the rest to be worked out in further talks.” When he nodded, I
added: “Peres thinks it could end up at 80-20, and says he thinks Arafat would find
it hard to walk away from getting control of four-fifths of the West Bank. But it’s
not about the number. It’s about the area needed for the major settlements, and
whatever else is required to safeguard our security. Beyond that, we don’t need a
single inch of the West Bank, and we won’t ask for a single inch.”
I replied in much the same vein when President Clinton urged me to help kickstart
new talks with Assad by formally reaffirming Yitzhak’s “pocket deposit” on
the Golan Heights. As with the Palestinians, I was not going to cede a major
negotiating card – our only real negotiating card – before we had any indication
Assad was serious about making peace. But I did feel it was necessary to reassure
Clinton that I was serious. I told him that, if and when the Syrians showed real
signs of readiness to address our needs in a peace agreement, I would reaffirm the
“pocket deposit.”
I’d come to Washington hoping that President Clinton would be with me on the
main issues of substance. But what I needed most at this point was his support on
the procedural decisions I’d made in order to get to real peace negotiations:
engaging with Syria first, and shifting the emphasis on the Palestinian track away
from the redeployments toward the core permanent-status issues we’d have to
resolve in order to get a peace agreement. What emerged from my first meetings
with President Clinton was essentially a trade-off. He knew I would be ready to
make concessions in pursuit of genuine peace. I was confident that on the route
that I was proposing to take, he would have my back.
But what I couldn’t be sure of was whether my own government would have
my back. On paper, we had a comfortable Knesset majority: 75 out of the 120
seats. But I knew it was inherently vulnerable, both to friction between the
Orthodox parties and assertively secular MKs from Meretz and inside Labor, and
to possible defections over the concessions we might have to consider in peace
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negotiations. The first stirrings of discontent had begun even before I went to see
Clinton. On the basis of my commitment merely to try for peace, Arik Sharon had
presented a no-confidence motion in the Knesset. It was never going to pass. But
only days after I’d made him Interior Minister, Natan Sharansky let it be known he
was going to vote against us. He didn’t. He stayed away from the chamber, in
effect abstaining. But I’d been put on notice.
I did lose my first coalition partner in September: the small United Torah
Judaism party, with five Knesset seats. It wasn’t over land-for-peace. In an echo of
a similar crisis that brought down the government during Rabin’s first spell as
Prime Minister in the 1970s, it was over a violation of the Jewish Sabbath. It
turned out that Israel’s state electric company had been transporting a huge steamcondensation
machine from the manufacturing site near Haifa to a power plant in
Ashdod. The unit was the size of a small apartment. It weighed 100 tons. It
couldn’t be driven across the country without bringing weekday traffic to a
standstill. The obvious solution was to do it when road use was lightest, on
Shabbat. Precisely the same procedure had been followed – 24 times – under Bibi.
But when I asked a United Torah Judaism leader why he’d seemed happy when
Likud had waved it through, he replied: “Past sins cannot pardon future ones.” Eli
Suissa, one of the Shas ministers in the cabinet, took his side, saying: “Every hour
is good for the keeping of Shabbat.” Most other ministers agreed with me that we
should stand firm. So I did. But UTJ walked out of the government. Shas did
remain. But I was now increasingly certain that at some stage its ministers, too,
would leave.
In the midst of the Sharanksy rebellion, Haim Ramon, who was the minister in
charge of liaising with the Knesset, insisted I “punish” him for his political
grandstanding. “You should fire Sharansky. Act like a leader!” I just laughed. “The
coalition doesn’t need a leader,” I replied. “It needs therapy.” In truth, I suspected
that if we ever got near to a peace agreement with Assad or Arafat, even therapy
might not help. But that was a main reason that I’d promised a referendum on any
final peace deals. I believed that in the choice between concessions, even painful
ones, and a genuine peace deal with Syria or the Palestinians, by far most Israelis
would choose peace.
I relied on a strong, close team around me, people I knew well and who shared
my determination to stay focused on the central goal: to put Israel in a position
where its citizens could be given that choice. I made Danny Yatom, my former
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sayeret deputy, my chief of staff. The negotiating team also included Uri Saguy,
former head of military intelligence; Gilad Sher, a gifted lawyer I’d known for a
quarter of a century and who had been a company commander in my armored
brigade in the 1970s; and Amnon Lipkin, the paratroop commander at Chinese
Farm and my successor as ramatkal when I left the army. Also, Shlomo Ben-Ami,
the Moroccan-born, Oxford-educated historian and diplomat who had run against
me for the Labor leadership. Shlomo had a gift for systematic analysis and keen
judgement, especially on security issues, which I highly valued.
It did not escape the attention of Israeli commentators, or other politicians, that
almost all of them were former soldiers whom I’d known from my time in uniform.
But that observation missed a more important point: we were all members of the
“generation of 1967 and 1973.” We had been soldiers during the Six-Day War. In
the years immediately after it, like almost all Israelis, we had allowed ourselves to
believe that our victory had been so comprehensive, and so quick, that any threat
from the defeated Arab states was gone for good. We assumed that inevitably,
inexorably, they would realize they needed to sue for peace, and that there was no
particular urgency on our part to do anything more than wait. Then, on Yom
Kippur 1973, all of that had been turned on its head. We had not only learned the
lessons, of 1973. We had internalized them. Even had we not known of the danger
of a new Palestinian campaign of terror, the option of simply watching and waiting
– and assuming that our military strength, which was now even greater, could
make events around us stand still – would not have made sense to us. Besides, as I
remarked to Danny and others, to do so would run against the founding purpose of
Zionism: to establish a state where Jews would no longer be victims of events, but
would take control of their destiny and try to shape them.
* * *
Yet making peace, like making war, takes two. Much as I’d wanted to begin
with Syria, until well into the autumn of 1999 President Assad was holding firm on
his insistence that without our “deposit,” without a prior agreement that he’d get
back the Golan, there could be no substantive progress. This was particularly
frustrating because I was getting reports from our intelligence services, and
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Western envoys who had seen the Syrian president, that Assad’s many years of
health problems had left him almost skeletally frail, even at times disoriented.
Even my own negotiating team urged me to concentrate on the Palestinians
instead. President Clinton kept stressing the importance of showing Arafat at least
some movement on the Oslo front. In September 1999, I took a first, significant
step in that direction. I agreed to a timetable that would deliver the Wye
redeployments by the end of January 2000, while also committing us to negotiating
a framework agreement, on the model of the Begin-Sadat Camp David accords, on
the “permanent-status” peace issues. In early November, I joined Clinton and
Arafat for talks around an event in Oslo – a deliberate echo of the optimism with
which the peace process had begun, held on the fourth anniversary of Rabin’s
assassination. Both Leah Rabin and Peres came with me. Its centerpiece was a
memorial service, at which Leah spoke very movingly of the need for both sides to
finish the work Yitzhak had begun, a responsibility I pledged that we would do
everything in our power to fulfill. Only Arafat struck a discordant note. He paired a
tribute to Rabin with a polemic call for an end to “occupation, exile and
settlements.”
After the ceremony, he, President Clinton and I met at the American
ambassador’s residence. I was still struck by Arafat’s public comments: by his
apparent desire, or need, to play to hardliners back home in what was supposed to
be a time to remember and honor Yitzhak. I didn’t raise his remarks directly, but I
told him that each of us was approaching a moment of truth for the future of our
people. The decisions required wouldn’t be easy politically, for either of us. “But if
we don’t have the courage to make them, we’ll be burying thousands of our
people.” Worse, I said, those deaths would not advance his people’s position, or
mine, by a single inch. When future Palestinian and Israeli leaders did finally prove
equal to the challenge of making peace, they’d be looking at the same conflict,
requiring the same compromises. “The only difference will be the size of our
cemeteries.” Arafat nodded occasionally. But he said little, beyond saying that he
considered Rabin to have been a friend, and repeating his now-familiar,
nonspecific, pledge to “do what is necessary” for peace.
“The hardest part won’t be the tough decisions in negotiations,” I continued. “It
won’t be facing each other. It will be facing our own people.” We would need to
make the case openly, honestly, strongly that the peace agreement we reached was
in the interest of both Israelis and Palestinians. And in this, each of us had a
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responsibility to support the other. With President Clinton looking on, I steered
Arafat toward the window of the ambassador’s fifth-floor apartment. “Look
down,” I said. “Imagine that we each have parachutes, and we’re going to jump
together. But I have my hand on your ripcord, and you are holding mine. To land
safely we have to help each other… And if we don’t jump, many, many innocent
people who are now walking the streets of Gaza and Ramallah and Hebron, Tel
Aviv and Jerusalem, will die.” Arafat again just nodded, leaving me, and the
President, unsure whether anything I’d said had struck home.
The true test of that would come only when we got to the stage of negotiations
when the “difficult decisions” could not be evaded. Yet only weeks after I returned
from Oslo, the focus did finally shift to the Syrians. President Assad suddenly
signalled his willingness to resume talks without any preconditions – a message he
delivered first to my British Labor Party friend Michael Levy, who was visiting
Damascus as Tony Blair’s roving Mideast envoy, and then to Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright. Assad said he would send Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-
Sharaa to meet me for initial talks in Washington in December, ahead of a fullscale,
US-mediated attempt to negotiate peace at the start of the new year.
* * *
The broad terms of a potential deal had long been clear, both to us and the
Syrians. The danger was always that the process would get derailed, or never really
get started, due to domestic political opposition. Syria had a tightly state-controlled
media and an intelligence service concerned mainly with crushing any signs of
dissidence. That meant Assad’s main concern was to ensure broad support, or at
least acquiescence, from top military and party figures. In Israel, however, every
sign of a concession would risk igniting charges that we were “selling out” to
Syria. The Likud and the political right would obviously denounce the idea of
giving up the Golan Heights, even though Bibi had been ready to do just that when
he was Prime Minister. But even on the left, there was little enthusiasm for
returning the Golan. There were far fewer Israeli settlers there than on the West
Bank, not even 20,000. But most of them, far from being religiously motivated
ideologues, were Labor supporters. And almost no Israel, of any political stripe,
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viewed Hafez al-Assad as a natural partner for peace. For years, he’d been a
constant, sneering presence on our northern border, denouncing not only Sadat but
any Arab leader who’d shown willingness to engage or negotiate with Israel. Amos
Oz, one of our finest writers and a cultural icon for Labor Zionists, probably put it
best. He said the Syrians seemed to think that “we will give them the Golan, and
they’ll send us a receipt by fax.” The consensus was: forget Assad. Keep the
Golan. In fact, before I left for the US, the Knesset voted on whether it supported
my attempt to negotiate an agreement with Syria. We could muster only 47 votes,
14 short of a majority. An opinion poll found only 13 percent of Israelis favored a
full withdrawal from the Golan.
The message I drew from this was not that we should give up on the chances of
a peace agreement. After all, before Begin and Sadat went to Camp David in 1978,
an almost equally tiny minority of Israelos had been in favor of withdrawing from
the Sinai. Yet once they had seen the other side of the equation – full, formal peace
with our most powerful neighbor – the opposition all but evaporated. The problem
I saw was that if we and the Syrians couldn’t find a way to insulate our
negotiations from leaks, speculation and a swirl of opposition to our efforts at
home, we’d never get to the key issues of substance.
I’d been making that point to the Americans for weeks. At first, I tried to
persuade them to hold the talks at Camp David, ensuring the same, media-free
isolation that had yielded the historic Israeli-Egypt agreement. But Dennis Ross
replied that the very association of Camp David with that breakthrough meant it
would be a non-starter for President Assad. I then suggested we consider sites
outside of the US: NATO’s Incerlik air base in Turkey, for instance, a British base
in Cyprus, an American naval ship in the Mediterranean. Even, half-jokingly, an
abandoned missile silo in South Dakota. Yet the point I was making was serious, in
fact critical, I believed, if the talks were going to have a chance.
In the end, the Americans settled on a beautiful, and undeniably remote, town in
West Virginia called Shepherdstown. But from the outset, I was worried it couldn’t
provide the kind of environment we needed. As soon as our plane landed at
Andrews Air Force base outside Washington, I got a call from the head of our
advance team. He told me the news media were already there and that reporters –
Israeli, Arab, American and European – could be seen chatting with American,
Israeli and Syrian officials in the town’s coffee shops. I knew the press would have
to publish something about potential concessions as the negotiations proceeded.
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Whether the stories were true wouldn’t matter. They would still make the real
bargaining necessary for peace far more difficult, perhaps even impossible.
I also had doubts whether Assad was ready for real peace: embassies, open
borders, personal contact between Syrians and Israelis, and ideally an
internationally backed free-trade manufacturing area on the Golan to give Syria a
tangible stake in ensuring the peace lasted. In earlier talks, under Shimon Peres,
Syrian negotiators had at one stage brought a message from Assad. What did we
mean, he wanted to know, with all this emphasis on peace, peace, peace? Syria had
peace with El Salvador, but without any of the trappings we were insisting on.
Peace, in Assad’s mind, seemed to mean merely an absence of war. Plus, of course,
getting back the Golan.
I did, however, come ready to negotiate. Though I was still not prepared to
reconfirm Rabin’s “pocket deposit” as a mere ticket of admission, my position
remained essentially the one I had worked out with Yitzhak in formulating the
deposit: IAMNAM, “if all my needs are met.” Meaning that if Assad showed a
readiness to deal with Israel’s requirements in a peace deal, I did, of course,
recognize we would leave the Golan Heights. In addition to early-warning
facilities, we envisaged an open border with a demilitarized area on either side, as
well as guarantees that important sources of water for Israel would not be blocked
or diverted. As Assad knew, despite his presumably feigned puzzlement about
Syria’s arrangements with El Salvador, we also needed the agreement to embody a
mutual commitment to real peace: through elements like an exchange of
ambassadors and the establishment of the free-trade zone. As with the Begin-Sadat
peace, we assumed that our Golan withdrawal would come in phases, parallel to
the implementation of the other provisions of the treaty.
In our initial meetings in Shepherdstown, Foreign Minister al-Sharaa showed no
inclination even to talk about these other issues. So on the second afternoon we
were there, I suggested to President Clinton the Americans try to break the logjam
by drafting a paper of their own. It would detail all the issues in an eventual
agreement, with parenthetical references to those on which we and the Syrians still
differed. Then each side could respond with a view toward narrowing the gaps.
The President liked the idea. So did Al-Sharaa. Three days later, the President
presented the eight-page American draft. With his customary eloquence, he
emphasized the need for us to use it as a springboard for peace, not to score
political points, and each side agreed to take a couple of days to look through it. It
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seemed to me we might finally be on a path to substantive negotiations. There was
obviously not going to be a deal at this round of talks, but I agreed with President
Clinton that when they ended, he could phone Assad and tell him that I had
confirmed Rabin’s “pocket deposit.”
Yet by the time we left for home, the prospects suddenly looked much worse –
for the reason I’d feared from the moment we arrived. There were two major leaks.
The first came in an Arabic-language newspaper in London. Given the thrust of the
story, it had presumably come from the Syrians. But it was more annoying than
truly damaging. The second leak, however, was in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz,
which published the entire US negotiating paper. This was unwelcome for us, since
it confirmed we were ready to go far in return for peace. But for the Syrians, the
fact the final-border section was still a work-in-progress, with the parentheses to
prove it, created the impression that they’d decided to negotiate the details of a full
peace without first nailing down the return of the Golan Heights. Assad’s image as
a strongman, implacably tough on Israel, had been built and burnished over his
three decades in power. The embarrassment of being seen as amenable to talking
about a Syrian embassy in Israel without an agreement on the Golan struck me as a
potentially fatal blow to the prospects for a deal, since it dramatically narrowed the
scope for the flexibility needed by both sides to negotiate. I can’t say I was
surprised when Clinton phoned me when we got back to Israel to say that Assad
had refused to send Al-Sharaa back, as planned, for a further round of talks in 10
days’ time.
I didn’t give up, however, and neither did President Clinton. In February, at the
Americans’ request, I sat down with Danny Yatom and US Ambassador Martin
Indyk in Jerusalem to draw up a “bottom line” proposal on a withdrawal from the
Golan Heights. Since I’d already empowered Clinton to reaffirm the “pocket
deposit”, I saw no reason not to do this. If only because of Assad’s failing health, I
believed it was the only way we could know whether an agreement was possible.
We worked on a large satellite map of the Golan and the valley below, and drew
our proposed border in red. We marked out a strip of several hundred meters on the
far side of the Sea of Galilee. It included, or came near to, a handful of Syrian
villages that had been there before 1967. But we were careful to adjust the line to
exclude any area where buildings had stood. We compensated – with slightly more
territory – by bending the border westward to give the Syrians part of the slope
overlooking the lake, in what was now Israel. We also included the hot springs at
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al-Hama, which I knew Assad had said he considered rightfully Syrian during talks
held under Rabin.
But the details turned out not to matter. President Clinton agreed to present the
map to Assad in what we both hoped would be a step to reopening the path for
peace. The two of them met in Geneva in late March. Though the President also
came with full details of our positions on the other negotiating issues, he began by
telling Assad that I had agreed to the Syrians’ longstanding point of principle on
our future border: it would be “based on the June 4, 1967 line” before the Six-Day
War. Then, the President unfurled the map.
It was shortly after five in the afternoon in Israel when Clinton phoned me. He
sounded as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Ehud, it’s not going to work,” he
said. “The moment I started, he tuned out. He just said: ‘Do I get my land?’ I tried
to get him to listen, but he just kept repeating: ‘Do I get all my land?’ According
the President, Assad would countenance nothing less than being able to sit on the
shore of the Sea of Galilee and “dip his feet in the water.” Clinton said he’d done
his best, and that was true. “I understand the effort is over,” I replied. “Probably,
he’s too frail and ill by now.” In fact, Assad would die of leukemia barely two
months later. His immediate focus was on ensuring an uncontested succession to
his son, Bashar.
When Dennis Ross came to see me in Jerusalem, I think he expected to find me
more distraught than I felt. Of course, I was disappointed. But I told him I was
grateful that Clinton had stayed with a negotiating effort that had been frustrating
for all of us. When I became Prime Minister, I’d assured the Americans that as
long as our vital security interests were protected, I was ready to go further than
any previous Israeli leader to get peace with Syria, and with Arafat too. I might
fail, but it would not be for lack of trying. I believed that even a “failure” would
tell us something: whether the other side was truly ready for peace. With Syria, I
told Dennis, “It’s not what we hoped for. But at least now we know.”
* * *
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My own negotiating team, not to mention the Americans, assumed I would now
turn my attention to the Palestinians. Arafat was pressing for us to go ahead with
phase-two of the Wye redeployments. In fact, he now wanted us to add the transfer
of three Arab villages on the edge of east Jerusalem: Eizaria, El-Ram and, most
importantly, Abu Dis, since from there you could see the golden dome of the
mosque above the Western Wall in the Old City. I understood why the villages
were politically important for him. But in practical terms, I also knew I’d have to
secure the support of the cabinet and the Knesset for what the Likud, and the main
religious parties too, would interpret as a first step toward “handing back
Jerusalem.”
For me, this underscored the problem at the heart of Oslo. We were transferring
land to Arafat, yet still without any serious engagement from the Palestinians on
the “permanent-status” questions, like the furture of Jerusalem, that were critical to
the prospects for real peace. They were critical, in fact, even to reaching a
framework agreement, or a declaration of principles, as a basis for a final treaty. I
probably should have seen the crisis-ridden spring of 2000 as a harbinger of the
difficulties when we finally got to that stage. I did make a first major effort to find
compromise ground on the main issues. I sent Gilead Sher and Shlomo Ben-Ami to
begin back-channel talks with a Palestinian team led by Abu Ala’a and Hassan
Asfour, the architects of Oslo. But as I prepared to seek Knesset approval for
returning the three additional villages to the Palestinians, my main Orthodox
coalition partners, Shas and the National Religious Party, as well as Sharansky’s
Yisrael ba’Aliyah, all threatened to walk out of the government. I did manage to
keep them on board, but only by getting the Knesset vote classified as a noconfidence
motion. That meant that if we lost, the government would fall and there
would be new elections. That was something none of them wanted. They feared
that Arik and the Likud would do better this time around, and they would end up
with fewer seats.
Still, even that didn’t avert a different kind of crisis. The vote was on May 15.
For the Palestinians, this was also Al-Naqba Day, the annual marking of the 1948
“catastrophe” of the founding of the State of Israel. Danny Yatom told me the night
before there were intelligence reports of large protests planned for the West Bank
and in Gaza. President Clinton immediately got the American consul to deliver a
message to Arafat, saying that the President expected him to intervene against any
sign of violence. But Arafat’s reply was that, while he’d do what he could, he
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couldn’t guarantee anything. In the months ahead I would come to understand what
that meant, because it would happen again. I don’t think Arafat himself
orchestrated the violence. Maybe he couldn’t have stopped it completely. But I
have no doubt – nor did President Clinton – that he stood aside and let it happen.
Even worse – since he did have control over them – his security forces, with
arms that Israel had provided as part of Oslo, fired on our troops as they tried to
keep order. All of this, while I stood in the Knesset battling to get approval to give
him the villages. As news arrived in the chamber of gunfire just a couple of miles
away, it was not just Likud or other right-wing MKs who were furious. I certainly
was. Yet I also knew that the price of losing the vote would be the fall of the
government. We did win the vote, by a margin of eight, meaning that I now had
full authority to return the three villages. Fuming over what had happened,
however, I called President Clinton and told him I was going to delay the
handover. I was not about to return the villages under gunfire, or reward Arafat for
breaking even his existing security commitments.
That meant that prospects for serious negotiations with the Palestinians were
again on hold. But another, immutable, priority would probably have delayed any
new initiative anyway: my pledge to get our soldiers out of Lebanon within a year
of the election. I was determined to go ahead with it not just because I’d promised
Israelis to do so. It was because I knew from experience that without setting a
deadline and sticking to it, it wouldn’t happen. I had been against keeping the
security zone from the start. Over the years, many Israelis, both inside the military
and beyond, had come to accept we would be better off pulling out. It wasn’t just
the attritional loss of Israeli soldiers’ lives, but the fact that there was no obvious
point, and no obvious end, to our mission there. Especially when major tragedies
occurred – like the collision of two Israeli helicopters a couple of years earlier,
leaving scores of young soldiers dead – there was talk about a withdrawal. Yet
there was always a reason to reconsider, to put it off: a Hizbollah attack in the
security zone, accusations of weakness from right-wing politicians, or simple
caution in the kirya. The only way to get it done was to decide, and to do it.
My self-imposed deadline for the pullout was now just eight weeks away.
Hizbollah had already begun escalating pressure on our outposts in south Lebanon
with the obvious aim of making the withdrawal as difficult as possible. They were
also targeting our local surrogates, the Maronite-led South Lebanese Army militia.
I’d been meeting regularly with Shaul Mofaz, the former paratroop officer who
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was now chief of staff, to ensure we had a plan to get our troops out as quickly and
safely as possible once the order was given. But complex though the operational
issues were, that was not the most difficult part. The withdrawal had not just a
military aim, but a critical political one: to denude Hizbollah, with full
international support, of its “occupation” fig-leaf for targeting and terrorizing the
towns and villages of northern Israel. Shaul and a number of other generals in the
kirya tried to make the security argument for keeping several small hilltop outposts
just north of the border. But I insisted not a single Israeli soldier or emplacement
remain on Lebanese soil. Throughout the spring, we had been coordinating every
detail of the planned pullout with UN cartographers on the ground, to ensure that
they, too, recognized it would be a full withdrawal to the border, fulfilling the
terms of the Security Council resolution adopted after the 1982 Lebanon War.
Ordinarily, an operation on this scale would have been carried out over a period
of weeks. But when we handed over a pair of military strongholds to the South
Lebanon Army, and Hizbollah promptly moved in to take them over, it was clear
that even several days might risk chaos, and casualties, as we left. The head of the
northern command now supported an immediate withdrawal, and I agreed.
Frustratingly, we did have to hold off for a further 36 hours, in order to ensure the
UN staff on the ground could complete their verification process. But on the
afternoon of May 23, alongside Shaul Mofaz at a command post on the border, I
ordered the pullout of all Israeli troops, vehicles and other equipment within the
space of 24 hours. I then flew back to Jerusalem for an urgent meeting to secure
formal cabinet approval. The field commanders ended up getting it done in less
than 24 hours, mostly overnight, without a single Israeli casualty. For nearly two
decades, our troops had been serving and dying on a strip of land on which we had
no claim, no settlements, and for which there was no rational security need.
Finally, we were out.
As I should have anticipated, there were accusations from Hizbollah and its
allies that our UN-verified withdrawal was incomplete. At issue was a cluster of
villages where Lebanon meets Syria, known as the Sheba’a Farms. But as I knew
first-hand, they were not part of Lebanon. I’d met their Syrian inhabitants when I
helped “capture” the villages at the very end of the 1973 war on the Golan. When
Syria now publicly supported Hizbollah’s efforts to get the UN to say the area was
in fact part of Lebanon, I decided to call their bluff. Through the Americans, I
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suggested that Damascus confirm in writing that this part of the Golan was indeed
Lebanese. The Syrians never responded.
Equally predictable were the prophets of doom on the Israeli right, who said the
Lebanon withdrawal would bury northern Israel in Katyushas and in blood. The
reality was that in the half-dozen years following the pullout, the Israel-Lebanon
border was quieter than at any time since the late 1960s. The main personal impact
of the withdrawal, however, was to remind me of why I’d run for Prime Minister in
the first place. Despite the challenges, and inevitable setbacks and frustrations, of
my first year in office, I was in a position to act on what I believed to be critical
issues for my country’s future. On Lebanon, I’d succeeded, mainly because the
withdrawal was something we could do unilaterally. With Syria, I’d tried hard to
get an agreement, only to find that Assad was unwilling, unable, or perhaps too ill
to join in the search for a deal.
I still recognized, however, that no issue was more important to Israel’s future
than our conflict with the Palestinians. I knew that resolving it would be even
tougher than the talks with the Syrians. But the only way to find out whether peace
was possible was to try. So on the final day of May 2000, with the Lebanon pullout
complete, I flew to Portugal – the site of a US-European summit – to see President
Clinton.
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Chapter Twenty-One
President Clinton and I met the next morning. My aim was to persuade him that
the time had come for a make-or-break summit with Yasir Arafat.
I suspected it would not be easy to convince him, and it wasn’t. But I made the
argument that if we were to have any hope of moving Oslo forward, we now faced
a stark choice. We were three years behind the timeline for starting work on a
“permanent status” agreement, and only six months from an American election that
would choose President Clinton’s successor. We could, of course, pursue the Oslo
process along its current, meandering path. But even though Bibi had slowed it
down, that would inevitably mean Israel handing back yet more West Bank land to
Arafat – in return for familiar, but still unfulfilled and untested, verbal assurances
that he wanted peace. Each successive Israeli withdrawal reduced his incentive to
engage of the core issues like final borders, refugees, or Jerusalem. I could not in
good conscience justify that, either to myself or my country. The second option
was the summit. I realized there was no guarantee it would succeed. But it would
finally force Arafat to negotiate on the core issues – before the departure of an
American President who had a grasp of the all issues and characters involved, and
a personal commitment to converting the promise of Oslo into a genuine peace.
The obvious political risk, for both Clinton and me, was that after convening a
summit – with all the heightened expectations and pressures it would bring – we’d
fail to get an agreement. Though I’d be more directly affected, however, it was a
more straightforward choice for me. In part because I’d been in front-line politics
so briefly, but mostly because of what I’d done for the three-and-a-half decades
before then, I viewed the political risk as just one of many, and by no means the
most important. That was an obvious weakness in me as a traditional politician. I
would indeed pay a political price later on for having given too little heed, and
perhaps underestimated, the reaction in Israel to the summit and what came after it.
Yet as I tried to impress on President Clinton, there were risks in not holding a
summit as well, along with the obvious reward of a full and final peace if it
succeeded. If it failed? At least we would know a peace agreement with Arafat was
impossible. In fact, amid the diplomatic drift since Oslo, it was clear there was no
other way that we could know.
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Walking with the President in Lisbon’s spring sunshine, I tried to summon up
an image that would bring both of us back to the starkly different reality of our
conflict with the Palestinians. Only two weeks earlier, Arafat’s own police force,
with weapons we had given them, had opened fire as I was trying to get Knesset
approval for returning three villages that he wanted. After I took office, I’d ordered
a full-scale intelligence review of the security situation with the Palestinians. The
sobering conclusion had been delivered to me six months earlier: plans were well
underway by cells in the West Bank and Gaza for armed attacks against Israeli
soldiers and terror strikes inside Israel. “It’s like two families living in the same
house, and it’s on fire,” I said. “All of us are rushing to put it out. But there’s this
veteran firefighter who arrives on the scene – a firefighter with a Nobel Peace
Prize – and we have no way of knowing whether he’s got matches and gasoline in
his pocket.” We had to find that out, I said. We had to establish whether we were
all firefighters, and could put out the flames.
Clinton and I had got to know each other well. In one-on-one conversations like
this, we called each other by our first names, though I was careful to address him
as “Mr President” when others were there. We’d been through a lot together. I had
no doubt that he wanted to put out the fire every bit as much as I did. But I also
realized he had emerged frustrated, and bruised, from our last joint effort at
peacemaking: with Hafez al-Assad. I was the one who had been pushing the
hardest for him to meet Assad in Geneva, over the objections of some of his closest
aides that it was likely to go wrong. Not only were the aides right. Assad had
ended up delivering an extraordinary personal rebuff to the President of the United
States. Now, I was again asking President Clinton for a summit, and I knew
Madeleine Albright, Dennis Ross and others would be highly sceptical. “I
understand they’ll have doubts. I understand their reading of the risks,” I told
President Clinton. “But I’m convinced crucial issues are at stake, which justify the
risks. Let’s move forward.”
But Clinton was skeptical, too. He said that without some sign of diplomatic
progress between us and the Palestinians, he could see no way of holding a
summit. With Arafat due to see him in Washington in a couple of weeks, he said
that I first had to give the Palestinian leader something: the three villages, a
prisoner release, or perhaps unfreeze tax revenues which we’d been holding back
as leverage for at least some progress on the core issues. Otherwise, Clinton said
he was certain Arafat would refuse to attend a summit. And even if he said yes,
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Clinton felt we would need a draft document with broad areas of agreement before
a diplomatic “endgame” could begin. I disagreed on that. I argued that if we tried
to produce such a document, there would never be a summit. In fact, we’d never
get a draft document worth anything. “Neither side is going to commit itself on
issues like borders, refugees, or Jerusalem,” I said, pointing out that even in our
back-channel talks, the only forum in which there had been a hint of progress,
those issues had barely been touched.
He did accept that “pre-negotiation” would never crack the main issues. But he
still said that before he could contemplate a summit, he would need Madeleine
Albright and Dennis Ross to talk in detail with us and the Palestinians. “There had
to be a firm basis to work on,” he said. Even then,m he said, he was almost sure
Arafat would resist the idea of a summit. And on that last point, he proved right. I
spoke to the President by phone after Arafat’s trip to Washington. “He thinks
you’re trying to trap him into a summit, and that when it fails, I’ll blame him,” he
told me.
The very next day, the stakes increased dramatically. For months, military
intelligence had been warning of the potential for violence if we couldn’t find a
long-term political resolution of the Palestinian conflict. But the report which
landed on my desk on June 16, 2000 was more specific. It said Arafat had called in
his security people and said: “My strategic understanding is that Israel is not
interested in reaching a deal. Therefore, we are preparing ourselves for a violent
and prolonged confrontation.” A few days later, we got an even more worrying
report, saying the security officers had been told to begin “intensive training.”
Arafat was quoted as saying: “The Palestinian Authority is confronted by a strong
and dangerous Israel, headed by a Prime Minister who is not interested in real
peace. The proof of that is that when he was Chief of Staff, he was the only senior
officer to oppose the Oslo Agreement.” I summoned my security team: Mofaz as
chief of staff; the heads of military intelligence, Mossad and the Shin Bet. I told
them that Arafat was wrong. My inalterable “red line” would always be Israel’s
national and security interests. But as long as those were protected, I wasn’t just
interested in reaching an agreement with the Palestinians. I was determined to do
everything possible to try to get one. But I also said that we had to make sure we
were fully prepared for responding to “Palestinian violence and, at some stage,
full-blown terror.”
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* * *
A few days later, the “pre-endgame” around the summit began. Not in
Washington or Jerusalem or Ramallah or Gaza, but in Kochav Yair. Nava and I
still spent almost all our weekends there. We valued the quiet, or at least the
slightly quieter, time away from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Some of my oldest army
friends lived there as well: Danny Yatom, as well as Shaul Mofaz and Uzi Dayan,
who was now deputy chief of staff. Newer colleagues, too, like Yossi Ginossar, a
Shin Bet veteran who spoke fluent Arabic and, after working in the West Bank and
Gaza in the late 1960s became one of the first Israelis to hold secret talks with
Arafat, building up a personal relationship with him. Under both Rabin and Peres,
he had been a valuable liaison with the Palestinian leader. Nowm under my
Premiership as well.
The summit seemed to me more important than ever, but I knew that only
President Clinton could make it happen. Short of giving the Palestinians the whole
list of short-term rewards they wanted, including the three villages, I knew Arafat
was never going to be enthusiastic. But if Clinton was persuaded that a peace
agreement was within reach, I had confidence he would make the effort. I had
allowed Gili Sher and Shlomo Ben-Ami to go to Washington the week before for
exploratory talks with Dennis Ross. Shlomo, as I knew he’d done in the backchannel
talks with the Palestinians, had gone beyond anything that I would or
could say at this stage in order to probe the edges of where an eventual
compromise might be possible. Now Clinton had sent Dennis to Israel, with
Madeleine Albright to follow at the end of the month, and I had to assume that
their impressions would be critical to his decision on whether to bring me and
Arafat to Camp David.
We agreed to meet Dennis and his team at Danny’s house in Kochav Yair. By
the time I’d made the pleasant Shabbat-afternoon stroll from our house, a few
streets away, they were in the back garden sipping lemonade and munching on
popcorn. I’d met often with Dennis during my year as Prime Minister, and I liked
him. He was smart, knowledgeable and experienced. He’d worked under three US
Presidents: Carter, Bush Senior and now Clinton. No American diplomat had been
more indefatigably involved in the search for Middle East peace. And whatever his
occasional frustrations, he also recognized I was ready to go further than any
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previous Israeli leader in trying to get that peace.
I knew that he would press me to tell him how far that actually was. He didn’t
ask directly. But each of his ostensibly theoretical questions was aimed at
establishing whether I could give him enough for a summit to bridge the gaps on
key issues. Could I accept a “trade-off between sovereignty and time?”
Translation: could I give the Palestinians sovereignty over a larger part of the West
Bank if we signed an agreement that would phase in their control? Could I accept
the principle of land swaps? This meant giving Arafat land in areas bordering the
West Bank, or in the Negev near Gaza, to compensate, at least partially, for the
area we would keep for the major settlement blocs. What about applying my
principle of “disengagement” between Israel and the Palestinians to Jerusalem?
Meaning Arafat getting control of the predominantly Arab neighborhoods in the
east of the city.
Dennis knew my long-standing reluctance to commit to concessions until we
got to real, final negotiations with Arafat. “We’ll not reveal anything you tell us,”
he assured me. “We won’t turn what you say into opening negotiating positions for
Arafat. But if there is going to be a summit, the President wanted some answers.”
To Dennis’s frustration, however, I could give him no specifics, beyond telling
him: “You know me, Dennis. You know I’m serious about this. Of course, we will
protect our vital security and national interests. But the problem in making peace
won’t be us, on the Israeli side, as long as Arafat shows a capacity and a will for
decision.” The translation of that, as I hoped and trusted he understood was that if
and when Arafat demonstrated that he wanted a comprehensive peace between a
new Palestinian state and the State of Israel – a definitive “end of conflict” as the
international lawyers would describe it – I would place nothing, except our security
and core national interests, in the way of getting an agreement.
Madeleine Albright visited at the end of June. When she came to see me a day
after meeting Arafat, she carried a request from the Palestinian leader: two weeks
of “preparatory” talks before a summit. Again, I knew her mission was to bring
back enough progress for the President to feel a summit was worth it. But again, I
couldn’t give her what she wanted. “I know what will happen in preparatory talks,”
I said. “We’ll raise new ideas, which the Palestinians will reject, and ask for
more.” I don’t know what she told Clinton, or Arafat. But Dennis called me the
following day. He said that Arafat had agreed to attend a summit, and would leave
the date up to the President.
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When Clinton phoned me at the beginning of July, however, he still hadn’t
finally decided to hold the summit. I needed him to know that, on my side, he’d
have a truly willing partner, aware of the political risk he’d be taking. Like Dennis,
the President tried to probe my position on land swaps, and Palestinian sovereignty
for at least some Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Finally, he asked if I would
rule out those possibilities if they represented the difference between success or
failure at a summit. I did not give him a definitive “yes.” I said we could think
through those issues together. But when he phoned again, on July 4 from Camp
David, I felt I had to go further. I said that, for his ears only, I was willing to give
him the assurance that, assuming that Arafat was willing to move toward us on
core issues, I would consider limited, symbolic moves on both land swaps and
Palestinian sovereignty in part of East Jerusalem.
Clinton replied: the summit was on. It would begin at Camp David in one
week’s time, on July 11.
* * *
Two days before leaving for the US, I brought my ministers together. “We can’t
know what will happen at a summit,” I said. “But we have a responsibility to give
it a chance, and recognize the situation in which we find ourselves. If we sit idle
and don’t even try, we’ll face an eruption of violence, and never know whether we
could have avoided it. If, God forbid, we fail to reach an agreement, there will also
be violence. We will face a new reality more difficult than you can imagine. But if
we do manage the strike a deal, we are going to change the map and history of the
Middle East.” I reminded them it would be up to Israelis to say yes or no, in a
referendum, to the terms of any agreement we negotiated. “If we achieve a
breakthrough, I’m confident they will do so, by a landslide.”
I said I would hold fast to a number of principles. There would be “no return to
the 1967 lines,” meaning that we would draw a new border with the West Bank to
accommodate the largest settlement blocs. They were mostly around Jerusalem, or
just beyond the 1967 border. In practical terms, over the years they had become
part of Israel. Tens of thousands of people lived there. As the Americans and even
the Palestinian negotiators recognized, no Israeli government, Labor or Likud,
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would agree to make them part of a Palestinian state. The second principle was that
“Jerusalem will remain united.” It would not be cut into Jewish and Arab halves as
had happened between 1948 and 1967. That, I knew, might prove tougher to carry
through on. But even if I had to concede a degree of Palestinian control in parts of
east Jerusalem, I expected to be able to retain Israeli sovereignty over the city. The
third principle was that there would be “no foreign army west of the Jordan River.”
In other words, if we did hand back at least the major part of the West Bank, it
would be demilitarized and we would have security control over the Jordan Valley.
Finally, we would not “accept responsibility for the birth of the refugee problem
and its solution.” Though there could be a “right of return” into a new Palestinian
state, we would not agree to rewrite the history of the 1948 war by sanctioning the
resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians inside the State of Israel.
I think it was the very fact we were talking about a comprehensive peace
agreement that made it so hard for my Orthodox and right-of-center coalition
partners. They didn’t see the attraction of coming to final terms of peace. They
knew it would mean concessions. There would be a Palestinian state. We would
give up the great majority of Biblical Judaea and Samaria. While most of the
settlers would remain, since they lived in the major blocs, those in more isolated
settlements around the West Bank would have to be moved. They saw the prospect
of a final peace only in terms of what we were giving up. They didn’t see what we
would gain: not just peace, and international recognition and endorsement for it.
But normalcy: the central aim of Zionism. Jews living in a state like any other.
Ever since 1967, we had been in control of the daily lives of hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. That was bad for them. But it had
been bad for us too. Fifty-two years after the birth of our state, we still didn’t have
a permanent, internationally recognized border. Rather than dealing with our
economic and social issues like other states, we were beset by internal divisions
that were in no small part a result of our unresolved conflict with the Palestinians.
Shas, the National Religious Party and Sharansky’s Yisrael ba’Aliyah were all
threatening to pull out of the government because of the summit. Nothing I said
could change their minds. Sharansky was the first to declare he was leaving. A few
hours later, Shas and the NRP followed suit. If the Likud mustered the required 61
votes for the no-confidence motion it was introducing before I got on the plane to
the US, the government would fall. If the parties that had left the coalition, with a
total of 28 seats, went along with Arik Sharon, it wouldn’t be close. As if that
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wasn’t enough, David Levy, my Foreign Minister, told me he would not be joining
me at Camp David. He wasn’t resigning, at least not yet. But he knew that the final
decisions at the summit would be mine, he feared it would fail, and didn’t want to
share in the consequences.
None of this meant I wasn’t going. Even if the no-confidence vote succeeded,
the new Israeli electoral system, with its separate vote for Prime Minister, meant I
would remain in office, at least until the summit was over. In a nationally televised
message, I reminded the country that I’d been elected with nearly two million
votes. I felt I had a responsibility, and a mandate, that went beyond party politics.
“I must rise above the political arguments, and seek out all possibilities on the way
to a peace agreement that will end the conflict, and the blood, between us and our
neighbors.” I made the same points before the Knesset. I did, of course, want
parliamentary support. But I was acting on a mandate from the people of Israel. It
was they, in a referendum, who would ultimately decide on anything we might
agree. When the Knesset votes were counted, thanks to the fact two dozen MKs
abstained, both sides lost. Arik fell seven votes short of a majority. So the
government survived. But those opposed to the summit got more votes than we
did: 54 to 52.
There were several consolations as I prepared to fly out from Ben-Gurion
airport. Shas leader Eli Yishai passed me an envelope on the tarmac. Inside was a
note from Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the Shas spiritual leader whom I’d met with
privately after the election and a number of times since. He wanted to wish me
good luck. Nearly 30 reserve generals also issued a public message of support.
Perhaps most encouragingly, a newspaper poll found a majority of Israelis – 55
percent to 45 – believed I was right to go to Camp David and that I had a mandate
to make concessions in return for peace.
David Levy came over to talk before I boarded. “I doubt we’ll get an
agreement,” he said. I told him what I was telling other ministers, what I’d told
reporters and, in fact what I had told Nava. “The odds are fifty-fifty.” The reporters
took this as coy, or deliberately deceptive. So I added that it was not because I
knew something they didn’t. “It’s because there are two possible outcomes, and I
don’t know which one will happen.” The gaps of substance were bridgeable. The
question was whether both sides wanted peace, and whether each had made a
serious, strategic decision to go for it. I’d made that choice. But I had no way of
knowing whether Yasir Arafat had.
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I was confident of finally answering that question at the summit. Camp David
was different from Shepherdstown. No reporters would be there. Mobile phones
were banned. Each delegation had one landline. We’d also be operating under a
time constraint. President Clinton was due to leave for a G8 summit in Japan on
July 19. The gave us barely a week. I did wonder whether that would be enough,
even if both sides were committed to reaching a peace agreement. Yet I hoped it
would at least provide the possibility, as it had for Begin and Sadat twenty-two
years earlier, to reach a framework agreement that open the door to a final peace
treaty.
Not just the time, but the numbers were limited. We and the Palestinians could
have only a dozen members in our negotiating teams. Some of my choices were
automatic: Danny Yatom; Shlomo Ben-Ami, whom I’d made acting Foreign
Minister in Levy’s absence; Amnon Lipkin and Attorney-General Elyakim
Rubinstein; Gilead Sher and his chief negotiating aide, Gidi Grinstein. I also took
along a strong security team, including Shlomo Yanai, head of strategic planning
the kirya, and Israel Hason, a former deputy-head of Shin Bet. There was another
important, if less obvious, inclusion: Dan Meridor. A leading member of the Likud
before he’d formed the Center Party at the last election, Dan was not just a friend.
He was a man of rock-solid integrity, with a strong moral and ethical compass,
who put principle over party. He was also a lawyer, and had been Minister of
Justice under Bibi. Along with Attorney-General Rubinstein, I knew I’d have a
gifted legal team if we got to the point of considering the specifics of a peace
agreement. There was another consideration as well. Both Dan and Elyakim were
right-of-center politically. I felt I needed their voices as a kind of litmus for the
tough decisions, and concessions, I might have to consider if an agreement did
prove possible.
I was not nervous as we crossed the Atlantic, though even those who knew me
best assumed I would be. Nava had sent me off with a list of dietary instructions,
almost like a surgeon general’s warning that Camp David might prove hazardous
to my health. But I felt prepared. I’d gone to every source I could find about the
Begin-Sadat summit. I knew there would be periods of crisis and that at certain
points I’d have to allow leeway for my own team to explore possible compromises
beyond our set negotiating limits. Yet none of this altered my belief that holding
the summit was the right thing to do, nor my confidence in being able to play my
part. I did feel a huge responsibility. Decades after our conflict with the
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Palestinians had begun, seven years after Oslo, I was making an attempt, with the
participation of the President of the United States, to shape the final terms of
peace. I knew I carried the conflicting hopes and fears of Israelis with me.
And the odds really were 50-50. Either we’d come home with an agreement, to
be placed before the country in a referendum. Or we would know that, at least for
now, it was beyond reach.
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Chapter Twenty-Two
If I believed in omens, I might have turned back as soon as we got to the
summit. We reached Camp David a little before ten at night on July 10, after
helicoptering from Andrews Air Force base near Washington. When we arrived, it
was pouring with rain. The cabin assignments were also a surprise. I was given the
one that Anwar Sadat had at the first Camp David summit in 1978. Arafat got
Menachem Begin’s. Still, the cabins themselves, each named for a tree, were large
and pleasant. Mine was called Dogwood. It had a bedroom, two large sitting rooms
and a terrace. I took it as a good omen that it was the same one where Nava and I
had stayed during our visit with the President Clinton and Hillary right after I’d
become Prime Minister.
With just eight days to address the core issues of decades of conflict, we got
down to work the next morning. Clinton began by meeting Arafat, as I went
through the Americans’ strategy for the negotiations with Madeleine Albright,
Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. Then I met the President in his cabin, which was
called Aspen. He told me that while Arafat still thought I was trying to “trick him”
into an agreement, and didn’t think we’d necessarily get a deal, he did accept I was
serious about trying. My fear was still the opposite, that Arafat was not serious.
Yet my hope was that the isolated environment of Camp David, and the wide
public expectation that we would accomplish what Sadat and Begin had done there
before, would deliver the breakthrough that I believed ought to be possible. For
that to happen, I told the President, I believed it was essential that Arafat truly
understood the importance of what was at stake. Not just the cost of failure, but
what was potentially on offer: the creation of the Palestinian state he sought, with
the full acceptance of Israel and the support of the world.
I wish I could say I was optimistic when Clinton led the two of us into Laurel
Lodge, the larger cabin a few hundreds downhill from Aspen, for the opening
session of the summit. The scene at the front door – with me bustling Arafat ahead,
with the intention of allowing him to enter before me – yielded the best-known
image from the summit. Captured by the television crews allowed into the
compound for the ceremonial opening, it spawned a cottage industry of political
speculation and armchair psychoanalysis purporting to decipher what it meant.
Some said it was an encouraging sign of “chemistry” between me and Arafat, a not
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unreasonable guess, since both of us were grinning throughout. Others concluded
that because each of us was trying to nudge the other to go in first, it was a sign of
underlying conflict: neither of us wanted to allow the other the privilege of
appearing to be polite. Still others, bizarrely, said that it was an ornate Middle
Eastern power play, with the aim of demonstrating that I was ultimately in control
of proceedings. In fact, it would turn out to be a singularly apt image of what
happened in the days that followed: a reluctant Arafat, an engaged and expectant
Prime Minister of Israel, a smiling and hopeful Clinton.
We did begin on a note of optimism. In my opening statement, I said: “Now is
the time for us to make a peace of the brave, to find a way to live together side by
side with mutual respect, and to create a better future for our children.” Arafat said
he hoped that the peace Begin and Sadat had made at Camp David would prove an
auspicious example. “With the help of President Clinton, we could reach a deal
that is good for both sides.”
But it was going to take more than noble words. The details of a peace treaty, or
even a framework agreement, were going to require negotiation. Both Arafat and I
arrived fully aware of the shape of the “hard decisions” I’d referred to months
earlier when we met in Oslo. On his side, it would come down to whether he was
prepared for a comprehensive, final peace. A true “end of conflict,” with no get-out
clauses, no strings left untied, no further claims on either side. In concrete terms,
this would mean abandoning his claim for a notional hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian refugees to resettle inside the pre-1967 borders of the State of Israel.
And what were Israel’s difficult decisions? In return for the end of conflict, I
would have to deal away the maximum possible part of the West Bank, certainly
well above the 80 percent I’d quoted Shimon Peres as suggesting when I’d first
met with President Clinton. I would have to accept the idea of land swaps, if
necessary, in order to bring the overall percentage as near as possible to the
equivalent of the whole of the West Bank. I would have to be flexible on the
arrangements to ensure Israeli security oversight over the Jordan Valley. And if a
true peace was really on the table, both Arafat and I would have to consider some
form of compromise on the most emotionally and symbolically difficult issue of
all: the future governance of Jerusalem.
On the first evening, we met as an Israeli delegation to discuss our position for
the days ahead. Gili Sher and Danny Yatom helped me keep a clear overall picture
of proceedings throughout the summit. Our secure landline was operated by a Shin
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Bet technician. I assumed that, one way or another, the Americans could listen in,
but was fairly confident we were beyond the electronic earshot of the Palestinians.
I kept myself fully informed of, but at a distance from, the specific work of our
five negotiating teams. Though I could not have stayed engaged with all of them at
the same time, I also hoped the arrangement would give them an opportunity to
explore any realistic opportunity for a breakthrough and any sign of flexibility on
Arafat’s side – without committing me until there was such flexibility.
Yet for the first couple of days of the summit, there was not only no sign of
flexibility. There was little meaningful engagement. Dennis Ross and his team
drew up a paper setting out the main issues. For those on which we differed, our
positions were marked with “I” and “P”. It wasn’t until around midnight on daytwo
that the we got a first look at the American draft. The main, unhappy, surprise
was Jerusalem. This crucial issue was not marked with “I” or “P”. It said outright
that there could be two capitals, one Israeli and one Palestinian, within the city of
Jerusalem. I was not opposed to the Palestinians calling Jerusalem the capital of
their state. But even in follow-up talks after Oslo, when Yossi Beilin and Abu
Mazen had explored avenues toward a possible resolution of the Jerusalem
question, the maximum understanding was that Israel might expand the existing
city limits to accommodate the “two capital” solution. The Palestinians’ capital
would be in Abu Dis, one of the villages Arafat had asked me to hand back in May.
The way the American document was worded suggested dividing Jerusalem as it
now was: something ruled out by all Israeli politicians, of all parties, ever since
1967.
When I phoned President Clinton, he asked me to come talk. We sat on the back
terrace of his cabin, looking out incongruously on a beautifully tended golf hole
installed by Dwight Eisenhower. I told the President that after all the hours we had
spent together, I’d felt blindsided by the inclusion of a proposal on Jerusalem that
went beyond anything we’d talked about. “It was my mistake,” he replied,
obviously already aware through his negotiators of the error. He said that he’d put
pressure on his negotiators to get the document finished, and that Dennis hadn’t
had time to read it through. But it was already being fixed: the word “expanded”
would be added to the Jerusalem section. I was grateful for that, but told Clinton I
was concerned that even this “I and P” paper might have the unintended effect of
delaying any real progress. “Since it’s an American document, it gives the
Palestinians no incentive to compromise,” I said, suggesting that it might be better
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simply to withdraw the paper. Clinton’s answer encouraged, and surprised, me.
“We agree,” he said. “The paper no longer exists.” It soon turned out the
Palestinians were unhappy with it too, but for another reason. On the lookout for
validation of Arafat’s insistence that Camp David was an Israeli “trap”, they were
convinced that the paper had Israel’s fingerprints all over it. That wasn’t true. The
one change we’d insisted on was because it misrepresented our position on
Jerusalem. Still, since Dennis had added the word “expanded” to the Jerusalem
section in longhand, the Palestinians were convinced of Israel co-authorship.
In fact, three days into the summit, the mood among the Palestinians seemed
increasingly aggrieved. Not just the Americans, but some members of my own
team, were urging me to show more “personal warmth” towards Arafat. I did
always exchange greetings and pleasantries with him at mealtimes in Laurel
Lodge, but even there, I admit, that I didn’t exactly show enthusiasm, much less
ebullience. After one dinner, when I’d been placed between the Palestinian leader
and Chelsea Clinton, the President’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger,
asked me why, rather than talking to Arafat, I’d spent almost the entire time
chatting with Chelsea. My response was only half-joking: “Given the choice, who
wouldn’t?”
It wasn’t only that I believed a charm initiative would come over as contrived. I
didn’t want to risk misleading Arafat, the other Palestinians and possibly the
Americans as well, by giving them the impression I was satisfied with the progress
of the summit, or felt that we were heading towards any serious engagement and
compromise on the core issues. I had met Arafat many times before Camp David. I
had made it clear in all of those meeting that, despite differences on a range of
difficult issues, I did want a final peace agreement and that I was ready to consider
the tough decisions necessary to make it possible. At Camp David, I was not
against meeting Arafat as a matter of principle. I simply felt the time for such a
meeting, if it came, would be at the moment that we saw at least some signal of a
readiness on his part to negotiate seriously.
Still, given the strength of feeling among some of my own negotiators, I felt a
responsibility to give it a try. I told Yossi Ginossar, the former Shin Bet officer
who was closest to the Palestinian leader among the Israelis, to set up an informal
meeting. I added, to Yossi’s obvious satisfaction and surprise, that I’d be willing to
have the meeting in Arafat’s cabin if that’s what he preferred. The next afternoon, I
went there for tea and baklava. Abu Mazen, his top political adviser and the main
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Palestinian architect of Oslo, was with him, along with a more junior aide who
served the tea and sweets. At least this time, Arafat didn’t take notes as we spoke.
The mood was friendly. We talked about a whole range of issues. With ony one
exception: what was really happening, or what should happen, in the summit talks.
I found the exercise disappointing as a result. But Yossi Ginossar assured me it
would help the atmosphere, and would eventually translate into negotiating
progress. “I hope so,” I said.
It wasn’t until day-four that real talks began. The Americans arranged for
negotiating teams from both sides on borders, the refugee issue, and Jerusalem to
meet with President Clinton. The Palestinians participated, but showed no sign at
all of a readiness to compromise. Borders should have been the most
straightforward. Assuming we wanted a deal, it was about sitting down with a map
and working out how to address both sides’ arguments. But Arafat’s representative
in the meeting – the Oslo negotiator Abu Ala’a – said he wouldn’t even discuss
borders without a prior agreement to land swaps ensuring Palestinian control over
an area equivalent to 100 percent of the West Bank. Shlomo Ben-Ami did try to
find a way around this. He suggested the Palestinians assume that to be the case for
the purposes of the meeting, so that at least there could be meaningful discussion
of the border, including the provisions Israel wanted in order to retain the major
settlement blocks. President Clinton agreed that made sense. He said that without
talking about the substance of such issues, there wasn’t going to be a deal. Even
Abu Ala’a seemed receptive, according to Shlomo. But he insisted that he would
have to ask Arafat first whether it was okay.
On refugees, pretty much the same thing happened. The Americans, and I
assumed at that point even the Palestinians, knew that a peace deal would be
impossible if we agreed to hundreds of thousands of refugees entering Israel – in
effect leaving the state created in 1948 with a Jewish minority. But when President
Clinton began trying to narrow down details of a compromise resettlement package
– how many refugees would return, where they would go, and how to arrange
international financial support for them – Abu Mazen insisted that nothing could
be discussed until without a prior Israeli acceptance of the “principle of the right of
return.” On Jerusalem, according to Gilead Sher, the President didn’t even try to
find common ground on the core issue: sovereignty. Instead he used the formula
Shlomo Ben-Ami had suggested, telling each side to proceed on the assumption
sovereignty was decided in its favour, and to concentrate instead on how everyday
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municipal functions and daily life would be divided between Israel and the
Palestinians under a peace agreement.
When I convened our negotiators in my cabin to take stock of the logjam, I was
getting more and more skeptical of finding a way to get to actual negotiation on the
“hard decisions” I assumed both sides knew we’d have to make. I told our team we
could not play that game. Until there was at least some movement from Arafat, I
didn’t want them suggesting any Israeli concessions. We’d obviously get nothing
in return. The summit would fail. Despite my repeated insistence both to the
Americans and Palestinians that, without an agreement, any Israeli suggestions
would be null and void, that didn’t mean they would simply be forgotten. The
result is that we’d actually be in a worse situation than before Camp David.
Politically, I’d find myself in much the same position as President Assad, after the
leak of the American draft from Shepherdstown: apparently ready to consider
giving Arafat the great majority of the West Bank, without the slightest sign Arafat
was ready for a full and final peace. But that wasn’t my main concern. It was that
anything that we put on the table here would handcuff future Israeli governments if
and when an “end of conflict” agreement became possible.
Still, when Dennis Ross learned from my negotiators what I’d decided, he was
frustrated and upset. He came to see me on Saturday morning – day-five of what
was looking increasingly like a stillborn summit. “This summit was your idea,” he
said, reminding me that the President had agreed to it over the reservations of a lot
his own aides. He told me that at a minimum, I had to help give it a chance: by
giving him my true negotiating “red lines.” Either that, or give my negotiators
more leeway to explore compromises. I did not want to make Dennis’s job any