The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace

Dramatis Personae

Egypt

Jordan

Syria

Saudi Arabia

Palestinians

Israelis

Middle East Overview

Israel, 1949 Armistice

Israeli Controlled Territories Post–1967 War

Gaza-Jericho Agreement

May 4, 1994

Interim Agreement

September 28, 1995

Hebron Redeployment

Wye River Memorandum

October 23, 1998

Map Reflecting Clinton Ideas

Greater Jerusalem

Golan Heights Border Area

PROLOGUE

The End

IT WAS JANUARY 2, 2001. Yasir Arafat was due at the White House in thirty minutes, and I was about to go into the Oval Office to brief the President. No matter how many times I had done this, no matter how many times Arafat had come, there was always a sense of anticipation. Each time the objective had been to advance the process, to move the ball down the field.

But it was different this time. This time we faced the moment of truth. It was too late to think in terms of process. President Clinton had seventeen days left in office. Now we had to know: Could Yasir Arafat end this conflict? Could he accept the ideas, the proposals, the President had presented ten days ago?

Already he had missed the deadline we had sought to impose on both sides for a response to the President’s ideas. As usual, Chairman Arafat had equivocated. He had questions. He sought clarification. He wanted further discussions. He hoped that I would meet with the negotiators on each side and clear up misunderstandings, and he even succeeded in getting President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to make this request to President Clinton.

All this in response to an unprecedented set of ideas that would have produced a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank; a capital for that state in Arab East Jerusalem; security arrangements that would be built around an international presence; and an unlimited right of return for Palestinian refugees to their own state, but not to Israel.

The ideas represented the culmination of an extraordinary effort to reach a final Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Thousands of miles had been covered, figuratively and literally. Thousands of hours of discussions had taken place. And, without exaggeration, thousands of arguments had been made, dissected, and examined in trying to understand what each side could and could not live with. The Clinton ideas were not about what each side wanted; they were about what each side needed.

The Clinton ideas were a first and a last. Never before had the United States put a comprehensive set of proposals on the table designed to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians—or at least shrink the differences on all the core issues to a point where a final deal could be hammered out quickly. We had come close to doing so in July five months earlier at the Camp David summit. But there, our ideas were not comprehensive—as we presented proposals neither on security arrangements nor on Palestinian refugees. Moreover, the ideas at Camp David were a mix of what Ehud Barak told us he could accept on withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and what we thought might resolve the sensitive issue of Jerusalem.

Now, while our ideas should have come as no surprise to either side, they represented our best judgment of what each side could accept in the end. We could not do better. Painful concessions were required on each side. Historic myths would have to give way to political necessity and reality on each side—with Israel giving up two core beliefs: that all of Jerusalem, including the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, would be Israeli, and that the Jordan Valley must never be surrendered. For their part, the Palestinians had to give up the myth of right of return to Israel—the animating belief of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian diaspora throughout their history.

There could be no more haggling. Discussion within the parameters of the President’s ideas was acceptable; trying to redefine these parameters was not.

That is what President Clinton had told both Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on December 23, 2000, when he presented the ideas to them. He told them if either side could not accept the ideas, they would be withdrawn and would leave with him when he left office. By December 27, he needed to know whether they were prepared to accept his ideas.

Yet here we were on January 2, 2001, having received Barak’s affirmative answer on the twenty-seventh, but still not having heard anything but evasions from Arafat. Notwithstanding Arafat’s efforts to engage us on clarifying the ideas, we had held firm and not done so. But we had also not withdrawn the President’s proposal. We had not pulled back from this process, fearing, as we had so often during the Clinton years, that to do so would trigger a crisis, or an explosion, or a serious deterioration into violence. By not pulling back, we continued to keep alive the hope that a final agreement might yet be possible by January 20.

By this time, however, I had grave doubts that an agreement remained possible. After all, Arafat was equivocating in circumstances in which there was no more time, at least for Clinton; in which he had the backing for accepting the Clinton proposal from nearly every significant Arab leader, President Mubarak of Egypt, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah of Jordan, President Ben Ali of Tunisia, and King Mohammad of Morocco; and in which Barak’s acceptance of the Clinton ideas would disappear in the near certainty of his looming electoral defeat—a defeat that might only be averted by Palestinian acceptance of the President’s ideas and the conclusion of a peace agreement. The stakes were clear and the choices stark, or so they should have been to Yasir Arafat.

This was my message to the President as I entered the Oval Office. If Arafat was posturing to try to get more, he had to be told that he was in danger of losing everything, and, I told the President, he must hear that from you … and he must have no doubts that you have taken it to the limit and this is it. He must hear from you that you worked your ass off and presented something that no other U.S. president had ever been willing to propose—namely, a balanced package designed to end the conflict that tilted toward the Palestinians on territory and Jerusalem and tilted toward the Israelis on security and refugees. You had done your best, and there was nothing more you could do. It was now time for the Chairman to decide.

In closing, I reminded the President that Arafat never made a decision before he had to. He always waited until one minute to midnight. Unfortunately, I said, it was now three in the morning, and you need an answer in this meeting: Is it yes or no? Anything else, and Arafat was telling you he could not do a final deal, and he must know that is the conclusion you will draw.

I got it, the President said.

My Journey To This Point

Preparing the President of the United States for his moment of truth with Yasir Arafat was not exactly what I had envisioned growing up in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. I grew up with a Jewish mother and Catholic stepfather in a nonreligious household. It was only after getting married and having children that I became a more observant Jew and began to attend synagogue regularly.

I came of age politically in the 1960s, energized by the civil rights movement, mobilized by the agony of the Vietnam War, and instilled with a belief in public service by President Kennedy and his brother Robert. My first serious political campaign experience was in 1968 working for Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles, first registering Hispanic and African-American voters in east and south-central L.A. and then canvassing precincts in L.A.’s predominantly Jewish district of Fairfax.

Later, I was to spend two years working for George McGovern in his campaign for the presidency. After that experience, I wanted to be less involved in politics and more capable of affecting policy. With that in mind, I returned to graduate school at UCLA determined to build an expertise in international relations. I focused most heavily on Soviet studies, arms control, and the Middle East. For three years I was the teaching assistant of Malcolm Kerr, perhaps the leading scholar on politics in the Arab world at that time. Professor Kerr opened doors for me in the Arab world, making possible a series of interviews in Egypt and Jordan in 1975 that gave me greater insight into the psychology and sense of grievance embedded in the Arab Middle East.¹

By this time I had been to Israel twice. My interest in Israel had been very much awakened by the Six-Day War in 1967; Israel’s survival seemed at stake before the war with Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, boasting of Israel’s destruction. But its stunning victory revealed Israel’s strength and the gap between Arab rhetoric and reality.

I found Israel to be dynamic, with an intellectual vibrancy and an impulse to debate every imaginable issue. I identified with its people, and my own Jewish identity became more important to me as a result. Intrinsically, I believed Israel had a right to exist and that the Jewish people needed and deserved a homeland, a place of refuge. In Israel, I saw a country that was filled with pride and vulnerability, hope and fear, and a craving for peace combined with a constant preparation for war.

In the Arab world, I saw less uniform hostility to Israel’s existence than was portrayed in its media or ours. But I also found a profound belief that a grave injustice had been done to the Palestinian people and that it must be corrected if anything was to change in the area. There was, to be sure, no more than a grudging acceptance of the reality of Israel, and even from those most ready to accept a two-state solution to the conflict—Israel and Palestine coexisting side by side—there was no real readiness to accept the legitimacy of Israel’s existence. Acknowledging Israel as a fact was one thing; having to accept its legitimacy was quite another.

For me, this meant that it might be possible to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. But it also meant that any effort at peacemaking must be premised on a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship. Israel, given its small size and vulnerability, must feel secure if it was to make concessions for peace. Could or would Israel feel safe enough to contemplate giving up territory—and inherently more defensible borders—if it questioned the U.S. commitment to its security? I doubted it. Similarly, would the Arab world even believe it had to accommodate itself to Israel’s existence if it had reason to question the staying power of the U.S. commitment to Israel? I also doubted that. When Anwar Sadat of Egypt made peace with Israel, he explained that he could have fought Israel, but he could not fight the United States. Peacemaking required that the Arabs understand that no wedge would be driven between the United States and Israel, and that Israel was not going to disappear.

This did not mean that we could never question or criticize Israeli policies. We could, and from the time I was a graduate student at UCLA I believed that Israel’s policy of building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza was wrong and misguided. Criticism was legitimate, but creating a breach in the relationship was not.

Along with believing that peace must ultimately be between the two parties and therefore must be negotiated directly by them, my approach to the peace process was shaped by the conviction that Israel must feel secure if it was to take risks for peace.

Since I was to emerge as the architect of our policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict in the first Bush administration and the lead negotiator in the Arab-Israeli peace process throughout the Clinton presidency, my assumptions were important. While some, especially in the Arab world, raised not so subtle questions about my being Jewish and its effect on my fairness as a negotiator, my faith was never an issue with Presidents Bush or Clinton. Nor was it an issue with Secretaries Baker, Christopher, and Albright—the three Secretaries of State with whom I worked most closely.

Did being Jewish create a problem for me with Palestinian or Arab negotiators and leaders?

At Camp David, Hassan Asfour, one of the Palestinian negotiators, asked me if I knew why we criticize you. I nodded, saying I did understand. But that did not satisfy Hassan. He wanted to tell me. He wanted me not to assume I knew the answer but to hear it from him. In fact, he told me what I knew: it was easier and safer to criticize me than either the President or the Secretary of State. Criticize them, and maybe America walks away. Criticize me, and it goes with the territory. Negotiators can be fair game for criticism; leaders cannot be.

But I also knew this was not the whole story. My being Jewish gave Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, a ready-made handle to explain publicly why America was not following its interests in the Middle East. One myth that permeated the Arab media—no doubt because Arab regimes mandated this—was that absent the power of the Jewish lobby or Jewish officials, America would not support Israel. In Arab eyes there had to be a reason for such support, especially when U.S. dependency on Arab oil should dictate a different posture. It was difficult for many in the Arab world ever to accept that there could be anything wrong with their cause or the way they presented it. Nor could they acknowledge the importance of Israel being a democracy and having shared values with the United States lest they have to explain their own lack of democracy. Thus bias must explain the American posture—and of course I was the visible manifestation of it.

Being Jewish, however, was also an issue with some in Israel and some in the Jewish community in the United States. There were those who felt Israel to be in such danger—and the Arabs to be so untrustworthy—that Israel should never be subject to criticism or pressure. During the Bush administration of 1989–92—especially given President Bush’s very clear pressure on the Shamir government—I received hate mail labeling me a self-hating Jew.

Much like with the public Arab criticism of me, there was a presumption: my Jewishness meant by definition that I must adopt certain positions and attitudes. With the Arab world, I must be unfairly biased. With what was primarily the right wing of the Jewish community, I should be unquestioning in my support of Israel.

In order to take some of the abuse I did, I had to believe strongly in what I was doing. Even with periodic bouts of self-doubt, I did. I was firmly convinced that what I was doing was just. Right, from the standpoint of America’s interests—because peace and stabilization in a region laden with weapons and petrochemicals was important to us. Right, from the standpoint of Israel’s interests—because Israelis would never know true security without peace. Right, from the standpoint of the Arabs, and especially the Palestinians—because reform in the Arab world and freedom and hope for the Palestinians would only come with the advent of peace.

In the Jewish tradition, there are few higher callings than to be a seeker of peace—a Rodef Shalom. My supporters in the Jewish community often described me as a Rodef Shalom, and few descriptions meant more to me.

In truth, being a seeker of peace gave me credibility with the Palestinians, the Syrians, and Jordanians—and all those I worked with to negotiate agreements on the Arab side. They got to know me in the good times and bad, in the periods of breakdown and breakthrough, and in the endless moments of arcane discussion on the minutiae of the negotiations.

I was predictable, always trying to come up with the pathway around a problem; determined to find the way out of stalemate; pressing to have each meeting advance where we were. They might not like my ideas, but they always knew I would come up with ideas. They might not like what they would hear from me, but they always knew it was what I believed and not a manipulation. They might feel I was too sympathetic to the Israeli needs, and insufficiently attuned to theirs, but they always knew I would listen to their concerns. Whether they agreed with me or whether they thought I was too demanding of them, they appreciated my commitment to peace. They saw my passion and determination. That is what mattered, not my being Jewish.

It was also that passion and determination that sustained me through the highs and lows of the effort. The breakthroughs—breaking the taboos on direct negotiations at Madrid, the handshake at the White House ending an era of mutual rejection between Israelis and Palestinians, the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, the nonpaper agreement between Israelis and Syrians on the principles of security arrangements, the Hebron agreement after two twenty-three day shuttles, the Wye River agreement between a Likud-led government and the Palestinian Authority at the end of eight days of summitry—were exhilarating. The breakthroughs were never easy, always exhausting, and nearly always the result of going to the brink of failure before succeeding.

But there were many more deflating setbacks. The acts of terror that always seemed to occur whenever we were making progress; they were not only sickening but tended to destroy whatever tentative steps forward we were taking. The assassination of the architect of the process in Israel—a body blow to those who saw Yitzhak Rabin as the one clearly credible champion of peace and security in Israel. The electoral defeat of those in Israel ready to make far-reaching concessions for peace, combined with the Palestinian resort to violence that raised a fundamental question about the premise of the peace process and Yasir Arafat’s commitment to ending the conflict.

Having labored through the highs and lows of this process in a leading position for twelve years of the Bush and Clinton terms, having seen the eruption of a Palestinian uprising (the Intifada) two months after the disappointing conclusion of an extraordinary fifteen-day summit at Camp David, and yet now having seen an Israeli government accept unprecedented concessions to end the conflict, I knew that Arafat’s visit to the White House on January 2, 2001, was our last chance. President Clinton’s term was about to end. If there was no deal now, I knew the pendulum would swing away from dealing with solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict and back to crisis management. Without a deal, the Israelis would see the violence and the rejection of the Clinton ideas as proof that they had no Palestinian partner. A new government would be elected in Israel, with a mandate not to make Barak-style concessions but to prove to the Palestinians and Arafat the futility of violence and terror.

In November, I had announced my decision to leave at the end of the Clinton term. I believed the new Bush administration would disengage from the process, presuming that it was a mistake to invest in peacemaking in the Middle East the way Clinton had. I understood that only limited agreements would now be possible, and that it would take the kind of effort I had made during the Netanyahu years even to produce very limited understandings. Personally, I was not prepared to revert to the fireman role that had me staying in the Middle East merely to keep everything together. I had become invested in a solution, and was not emotionally prepared to revert to simply trying to manage Israeli-Palestinian talks that existed largely for their own sake. Someone else could and should assume that responsibility if we were now unable to do the deal on permanent status.

We would now find out if Arafat was up to ending the conflict. He had played out the string and he would risk losing everything he had gained if he now said no. Even at Camp David, given the six months remaining in the administration and an Israeli government that he perceived was still stable, he had not believed he was out of time. Now, by any measure, there was no more time. If his purpose was to reach agreement, this was it.

Arafat’s Moment Of Truth

President Clinton knew the stakes. He had been explaining them to every Arab leader he spoke to following his presentation of the ideas on December 23. Following a plea from the Tunisians to see Arafat—a plea that the Foreign Minister Habib bin Yahya had communicated to me, stating that Arafat can only say yes in the presence of President Clinton—the President agreed to have Arafat come to the White House provided Arafat would come immediately. Arafat had agreed less than twenty hours earlier. Now, as we awaited his entry into the Oval Office, I knew the question was not whether President Clinton got it, as he had said to me, but whether Arafat got it.

As Arafat entered the Oval Office, I whispered to Secretary Albright that we would now see whether Arafat was maneuvering to respond favorably or whether he was maneuvering for the sake of avoiding a decision. She nodded, basically sharing my doubts.

We had decided that the meeting should be very small to avoid any posturing on Arafat’s part and ensure that we got down to business. Following the photo op with the press, the President asked the Chairman to limit the meeting to the leaders and a note-taker on each side. In the event that the Chairman wanted Saeb Erekat—the lead Palestinian negotiator—to join them, I would sit in as well. As it turned out, the Chairman wanted Nabil Abu Rudeina, his chief of staff, to be his note-taker and Saeb to be there for support on the details. As a result, Rob Malley, who worked on the National Security Council staff, stayed as the note-taker and I joined as well.

Arafat’s approach to the meeting was initially to play to the President’s vanity. He had often done that, but his comments had become increasingly generous and emotional. In a phone conversation with the President on December 19, perhaps with an eye to the ideas the President was shortly to present, Arafat had spoken of the blind trust in you that we have and noted that your contributions to my people and to the process will never be forgotten. He now echoed those words, and then said that the President’s ideas represented a tremendous advance for the peace process.

At this moment, I was beginning to think that Habib bin Yahya might be right. Maybe Arafat needed to be in the President’s presence in order to say yes. My hopes were raised further when Arafat told the President that he accepted [your] ideas. Then my fears materialized. He was accepting the ideas, but he had reservations. And the reservations, unfortunately, revealed his real answer.

On Jerusalem, he said when it came to the religious holy sites the Israelis could not have sovereignty over the Western Wall. Why, he asked, was the Western Wall being raised now? He knew that the Wailing Wall mattered to the Jews, nothing else. No one had ever spoken of the Western Wall before; the British, during the mandate period, had only spoken of the significance of the Wailing Wall. He could not accept the Western Wall, particularly because it ran into the Muslim Quarter. Similarly, he had basic problems with the security provisions, declaring that the Israelis could not operate in Palestinian airspace. The Arab League, he claimed, would never accept this. And on refugees, he simply rejected our formula, stating that there was a need to come up with a different, although unspecified formula.

We had developed a finely tuned package designed to conclude negotiations, not begin them. With great effort we sought to respond to the essentials of each side on each issue. Arafat was taking those parts of the package that gave the Israelis something and he was seeking to emasculate them. To balance giving the Palestinians sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif, we had a formula designed to address Israeli needs in the area below the Haram, and it spoke of the Western Wall and the Holy of Holies or the holy space of which it was a part. Arafat’s position would undo that, not to mention that his comments on the wall were factually and historically wrong. On security, his position on airspace, given the small space and the size of the Israeli air force, was simply impractical and signaled he would not countenance any of the essential parts of the security provisions. On refugees, we had presented a multipart formula that was an integral part of the whole package and Arafat was simply dismissing it, telling us, in effect, to give me more. In other words, he was prepared to take the good part of the package for him, and redo the parts that required him to give.

The President’s initial response was not strong. Rather than rebutting Arafat’s reservations or making clear that they constituted a rejection, not an acceptance, of his ideas, the President turned to me and asked, Why did we say the Western Wall instead of the Wailing Wall? In doing so, he immediately signaled the ideas were more mine than his, and that we might well be open to reconsidering them.

I responded to the President’s question, saying that we had put together a package designed to meet each side’s needs. We had addressed what the Palestinians told us they needed on the Haram. But Israel also had needs and interests and we had tried to accommodate those in a way that preserved what the Palestinians needed. Sovereignty over the Western Wall did not undercut Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram, but did meet a minimal Israeli requirement.

I then turned to Chairman Arafat and, using my hands, illustrated the purpose of the President’s proposals and the consequences of Arafat’s response. Holding my hands an inch apart, I said, Mr. Chairman, the President’s ideas shrink the gap between you and the Israelis to this small space. You want to move the side that is hard for you back. And at this point, I pulled my right hand away from my left, opening up a space of about five inches. I continued, saying, If we do that, we will lose the Israeli yes, and they will insist on backing away from the things in our package that are hard for them. I then proceeded to move my left hand away, leaving a space of almost a foot between my two hands. As you can see, if we do that we will be right back to where we started, with a gap that is too wide to bridge.

He had watched and listened carefully to what I had said. He then slowly but forcefully stated that you are the one—you are the one—who has always told me we must talk directly to the Israelis to resolve our differences. We have reservations, they have reservations, let us talk about our reservations.

I told him that was perfectly reasonable, and we would never block such a discussion, but they did not need the President’s ideas to do that. You are, I noted, trying to redefine the President’s ideas; Barak is not.

President Clinton at this point looked at Arafat and said, Dennis is right. We cannot open up the package without undoing it.

But knowing Arafat as I did, I was sure he had not gotten the message. He had heard nothing that required him to give an unmistakable answer now or know that we would desist with our efforts. At this point, I asked the President if I could have a private word with him.

We walked across the Oval Office to an area near his desk and the double-doors that opened onto the portico leading to the Rose Garden, and I said: Arafat is not getting the message. I believe you need to sit with him alone, or at most with only a note-taker, and tell him you have to have an unequivocal answer. Right now he does not think he has to give one. You should make sure Arafat does not leave here with a misunderstanding about you or your willingness to do anything more for him absent a clear and positive answer. This is better done without Saeb and me in here.

The President asked if I really thought Arafat was not getting it, to which I replied, He ain’t getting it. He nodded and went back to Arafat, telling him he wanted to have a more private and personal discussion, and Saeb and I left. In the private meeting, the President became far more blunt with Arafat. As I found out later, President Clinton did so by telling Arafat that by not responding to the ideas, he was killing Barak and the peace camp in Israel. Having said yes, Barak was now hanging out there and looking like a fool. In such a circumstance, the President told Arafat there was nothing more that we could do without a clear answer from him.

Arafat listened but did not budge. He again said he had reservations, the Israelis did as well, and they should discuss them. While the President made clear that the Israeli reservations were within the parameters and Arafat’s were outside, Arafat said the discussions should continue with our help. And that is the way the meeting ended, with the two agreeing to talk on the phone before Arafat left town in the morning.

If there had been any hope of an agreement, it was gone now. It mattered little that President Clinton focused on what Arafat was doing to Barak and not to him. Arafat was not going to say yes under any circumstances. Seeing the President had made no difference. As he had so often in his career, Arafat was seeking to have it both ways, creating the illusion of being positive by accepting the ideas, but practically rejecting them with his reservations. We were seeing a variant of what Arab leaders had always referred to as the Arafat answer: La-Na’am (no and yes in Arabic).

This was not a case of tactics or bargaining. President Clinton had put unprecedented ideas on the table. Arafat had the best deal he could ever get. He could not get more and he had hit the proverbial wall. He could not wring out one more concession or gain one more tactical advantage. We had left the realm of tactics and we now had to face a strategic reality: Arafat could not do a deal that ended the conflict. Partial deals were possible because they did not require him to adopt any irrevocable positions. But a comprehensive deal was not possible with Arafat. Too much redefinition was required. He was not up to it. He could live with a process, but not with a conclusion.

As if to prove this point, the next morning in his call with the President he was content with our declaring that he had accepted our ideas with reservations and that the two sides would continue their discussions. The President, given his eye on the upcoming Israeli elections and his understanding that should he now announce the failure of our efforts, he would be putting the nail in Barak’s electoral coffin, agreed to put a positive face on Arafat’s answer. But we all knew the reality now.

The game was over. For the foreseeable future, it would be necessary to switch gears; we would be out of the peacemaking business and back to a preoccupation with crisis prevention and the defusing of conflict. Ariel Sharon would be the new Israeli Prime Minister, the peace camp in Israel would be discredited for some time, and it would take years to get back to the point where the existential issues of this conflict, could be addressed, much less resolved.

Arafat should have known all this; he was certainly getting this message from many European and Arab leaders in the days prior to his meeting with the President. Yet he was unable to accept an independent Palestinian state that was territorially viable and had Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.

How did we get to this point? Shouldn’t we have known by then that Arafat could not do a permanent deal? Were we really as close to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian and the Arab-Israeli conflict as we thought?

Only by knowing the full story of what had transpired over the preceding decade of peace-seeking is it possible to answer these and other questions about the Arab-Israeli peacemaking process. Only by telling this story can we debunk the myths that prevent all sides from seeing reality and adjusting to it. Indeed, only by telling the story can we hope to learn the lessons from the past and make it possible to shape a different future.

Ultimately, that is why I have chosen to tell this story. I want those in (and outside) the Middle East to understand what have been the critical missing pieces that have perpetuated the conflict with all its victims and suffering. The lack of public conditioning for peace, the reluctance to acknowledge the legitimacy of the other side’s grievance and needs, the inability to confront comfortable myths, the difficulty of transforming behavior and acknowledging mistakes, the inherent challenge of getting both sides ready to move at the same time, the unwillingness to make choices, and the absence of leadership, especially among Palestinians, are all factors that have made peace difficult to achieve.

Nevertheless, I remain an optimist. The building blocks for peace were put in place in the last decade. The terms for producing peace agreements are no longer a mystery. They emerge in the following pages. Unfortunately, the psychological inhibitions that still make peace only a distant hope also emerge in the following pages. If there is one overriding lesson from the story of the peace process, it is that truth-telling is a necessity, not a luxury. All parties must face the facts of the past honestly and learn from them. All parties must face up to reality, not continue to deny what they must concede in order for peace to be possible. When they are finally ready to do so, we may no longer have to lament the pain and sorrow of the missing peace.

1

Why Israelis, Arabs, and Palestinians See the World the Way They Do

THERE IS LITTLE PROSPECT of mediating any conflict if one does not understand the historical narratives of each side. I say this not because it is important to perpetuate the historical debate or because one side can convince the other that it is wrong, but rather because both sides in any conflict must see that a third party understands why it feels the way it does, why it values what it values, why its symbols say so much about its identity.

Peacemaking in the last decade emerged from a historical context of deep-seated grievances and desire for justice on both sides. Arabs and Israelis each have a narrative that tells their story and interprets their reality, and these narratives were lurking in every discussion. To understand these narratives, one needs to know what shaped them; how they evolved; and how particular historical developments affected attitudes and beliefs. Only then can one appreciate what we had to contend with in trying to promote peacemaking.

The Israel Narrative

For the Israelis, their national movement, Zionism, is a natural response to the tragedies of Jewish history. Ever since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., Jews had been dispersed and without a homeland. Dispersal had made Jews weak and vulnerable, and led to repeated expulsions and devastations. Weakness had become a way of life. Zionism meant a cultural, psychological, and political renaissance. It meant creating a homeland for Jews that could be a safe haven. It meant creating a new man who was strong, close to the earth, able to defend himself or herself. A history of meekness and disaster would give way to strength and never again turning the other cheek.

The philosophy of Zionism began emerging in the 1860s, but it took the pogroms in Russia, the Dreyfus trial in Paris, and the emergence of leading figures like Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Ahad Ha’am, and Nahum Sokolow to transform it into a political movement with deep national yearnings. The Dreyfus trial convinced Herzl, a Hungarian Jew living and working in France as a journalist, that even in an enlightened place like France there was no refuge from anti-Semitism. It was not only that Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer who was Jewish, had been arrested on trumped-up charges of spying for Germany. It was hearing a French crowd outside the trial chant Death to the Jews that left Herzl certain that there was no hope for assimilation of Jews in their host countries: the only answer was Jewish sovereignty. For Herzl, Jews could never be secure without a state of their own.

Herzl authored a book, The Jewish State, in 1896 and founded the World Zionist Organization the following year, even while remaining largely unaware of the activities of Russians beginning to immigrate to Palestine—activities that included reintroducing Hebrew as the national language. Herzl lobbied world leaders to gain support for a Jewish state. He pressed the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, including the Sultan, to lift the restrictions they had imposed on Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine.

When Herzl died in 1904 at the age of forty-four, he left behind a legacy that put the Zionist agenda on the world stage. And others like Chaim Weizmann were continuing to have a major impact on the world outside of Palestine. From the first wave of immigration, referred to as the first aliyah (ascent) to Palestine in the 1880s, there was a split between those actually settling the undeveloped land and those representing the Zionist movement to the outside world. For those in Palestine the hardships were great, the life extremely difficult and austere, and the dangers quite real. Those trying to reclaim a Jewish land had little patience with political niceties; those trying to win favor internationally felt compelled to be patient and not overplay their hand.

The London leaders of the Zionist movement, led principally by Weizmann, made tremendous efforts to gain British endorsement of the Jewish right to Palestine. They succeeded ultimately in November 1917, when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration. While not explicitly supporting Jewish statehood, the Balfour Declaration called for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. A historic threshold had been crossed. The effect on world Jewry was electric, with over 200,000 enthusiastic Jews turning out in Odessa to welcome a visiting Zionist delegation shortly after the issuance of the declaration.

The Balfour Declaration married the symbolic with the practical. By making the Zionist dream seem like something other than a distant hope, it inspired activism. It spurred immigration, especially after the armistice ending World War I. It became a more formal promise when recognized internationally at the Paris Peace Conference and made a part of the British Mandate for Palestine after the war.

The leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuv (literally, settlement), understood and appreciated the significance of the Balfour Declaration, but as David Ben-Gurion made clear at the time, it was Jewish pioneers in Palestine, not the British, who would determine the Zionist future: "Britain has made a magnificent gesture; she has recognized our existence as a nation and has acknowledged our right to the country. But only the Hebrew people can transform this right into a tangible fact; only they, with body and soul, with their strength and capital, must build their National Home and bring about their national redemption."

Those in Palestine focused on creating facts on the ground. Those on the outside focused more on symbols of acceptance and legitimacy. Their efforts were complementary, but presaged divisions in the movement. Division and debate were constant hallmarks of the Zionist movement—both within the growing Jewish community in Palestine and between the leaders of the Yishuv and the leaders of the Zionist movement on the outside.

Every conceivable question was subject to discussion in a movement that was secularist, socialist, and egalitarian to its core. Should Arab labor be used? Could Jews develop the land and create a new ethos if they depended on Arab workers? Was it right to depend on them? Shouldn’t the Jews be completely self-reliant, both to become completely independent and to avoid any exploitation of others? Should there be cooperation with the Arabs or separation from them? Should areas bought from absentee or rich Arab landowners, so essential for gaining control of the land, be pursued without regard to Arab tenant farmers who were being displaced? Should immigration be limited to numbers the Arabs could tolerate or should there be an all-out effort to bring as many Jews to Palestine as quickly as possible? Should the Jews limit themselves only to self-defense or be prepared to preempt possible attacks by hitting first? Was it possible to reach agreement with the Arabs of Palestine, or was conflict inevitable?

While the predisposition was, in Weizmann’s words, to make Palestine as Jewish as France was French and Britain was British, the answers to these questions were not a given until violent Arab resistance to Jewish immigration and Jewish presence began to manifest itself with the deadly riots of 1920 and 1921. The 1921 riots in particular had a devastating effect, beginning as they did with brutal attacks on new Jewish immigrants in Jaffa and then spreading throughout the country over the next several days. Scores were killed, and the British were largely powerless to prevent the carnage. For the Yishuv, there were a number of lessons drawn: separation made more sense than cooperation; segregation, not commingling with the Arabs, became a new focus leading to an exodus from Jaffa and the development of Tel Aviv; acquiring large swaths of contiguous territory took on a new urgency; and self-reliance, especially with regard to defense, became an article of faith.

As would happen so often in this conflict, violence and the resulting sense of vulnerability would harden attitudes and limit choices. It led to a mind-set among the Jews of Palestine that security was not only a necessity but a way of life. The threats did not alter the resolve to build the Jewish presence; if anything, they fueled the desire to achieve a Jewish majority in Palestine—a majority that could make them more secure and ensure a state.

Arab resistance to Jewish immigration increased, but even leaders in the Arab national movement often surreptitiously sold land to the Jewish National Fund for Jewish settlement, feeding the Jewish perception that Arab hostility was being manipulated for the purposes of gaining advantage over rivals for power. But regardless of whether the hostility was being manipulated, it became far worse and the violence far more systemic in the 1930s. Beginning with the riots of 1929, which triggered a massacre of the Jews in Hebron and led to the evacuation of a Jewish community that had lived continuously in Hebron for eight hundred years, the violence reached a new level during the Arab revolt of 1936—39.

Struggle within Palestine was intensifying at the very time that the need for a haven for Jews was becoming more acute. Hitler’s rise to power threatened first Germany’s Jews and then all the Jews of Europe. The reluctance of the world to take in Jewish refugees combined with the British restriction on Jewish immigration to Palestine (the response to the Arab revolt) to make escape impossible for the vast majority of European Jewry.

The Holocaust, an unimaginable evil for the rest of the world, was an unspeakable reminder for the Jews of Palestine that the worst can happen; that weakness begets tragedy; that others can never be relied upon; and that they must have a state of their own—for themselves and the survivors. While pragmatism, facts on the ground, and creating realities on which to build reflected core beliefs that guided the mainstream leadership of the Yishuv, they took on new urgency after the Holocaust. Even prior to it—as the threat to European Jewry became more apparent and the threat from the Arabs escalated—a hardheaded approach to getting what one could took on new meaning. When the Peel Commission in 1937 responded to the Arab revolt with the recommendation of partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, David Ben-Gurion, the elected leader of the Yishuv, accepted the recommendation—even though the boundaries of the Jewish state would have made it small and seemingly untenable. As he said at the time, "A partial Jewish state is not the end but the beginning, a powerful impetus in our historic effort to redeem the land in its entirety."

Others like Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the leader of the opposition Revisionists, were far more dogmatic; they fought, especially after World War II, against surrendering any part of biblical Palestine, fearing the practical and ideological consequences of giving up any claims. However they were in the minority. Again, Ben-Gurion’s pragmatic attitude governed the Yishuv’s response to the UN partition plan that was ultimately adopted on November 29, 1947.

Once again the Jewish leadership accepted the partitioning of Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. Only now, with the British having turned the Palestine problem over to the UN to resolve, and having announced their own withdrawal in six months’ time once the partition plan was adopted, the fighting in Palestine became far worse. Much as with the response to the Peel Commission recommendations, the Arabs again rejected the partition plan and the very concept of a Jewish state.

For the Jews of Palestine, enduring Arab opposition and hostility had become a given. In response, a distinct mind-set took root: create an unmistakable reality that would leave the Arabs no choice but to accept and to adjust to that which they opposed. Here again, there was the mainstream or Labor establishment sentiment and the minority or Revisionist school of thought. While both believed that Arab rejection could only be combated by unmistakable strength and by creating immutable realities, the mainstream believed that the Arabs would accommodate themselves to the new state of Israel when it became clear to them that it could not be defeated and would never disappear. Peace was therefore possible, but not until the Arabs adjusted to Israel as a fact that could not be undone. The Revisionists were basically more pessimistic. Some felt the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state in their midst, and that, in the words of Jabotinsky, an iron wall would need to be erected to separate the Jews from their neighbors. Living under siege was an unfortunate reality, but one that could be endured.²

Unquestioned strength, creating facts, and self-reliance became part of the Israeli sociology. The Zionist view of the disasters of Jewish history put a premium on self-reliance. Israel’s early experiences as a state cemented that viewpoint. While the fighting with the Arabs of Palestine had intensified after the partition plan was approved, invasion from all of its Arab neighbors followed immediately upon the declaration of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948.

The 1948 war, what the Israelis call the War of Independence, took an extraordinarily high toll on the new State of Israel. The Jewish population in Palestine at the time was 650,000. Israel lost nearly 1 percent of its population, or more than 6,300 dead, during the 1948 war. No benefactors or allies were on the outside to come to the new state’s assistance. The United States, though recognizing the new state fourteen minutes after its declaration, provided no assistance during the conflict. (It allowed private assistance to flow to Israel, but would not provide direct military assistance for more than twenty years after Israel’s founding.)

Israel was largely on its own. The Soviets permitted Czechoslovakia to supply arms to the Yishuv in April of 1948, but otherwise the new state had no consistent or reliable source of arms supply through the course of the war. It was not only the absence of help from the outside that cemented the ethos of self-reliance. It was the relatively successful, if costly, experience in the war. As a result of the war, Israel, while unable to hold all of Jerusalem, was able to create borders that exceeded what the partition plan had called for. Once again, establishing facts on the ground created a new reality for the new state—with the Negev Desert, more extensive parts of the Galilee, and the central areas around Ramle and Lod being incorporated into Israel.

Armistice agreements ended the war, but brought Israel no recognition. The agreements set up Mixed Armistice Commissions bringing Israelis into regular contact with representatives of their neighbors for several years. With Transjordan³ and with Syria, diplomatic openings that appeared after the 1948 war closed quickly with the assassination of King Abdullah of Transjordan in 1951 and with a series of coups in Syria in 1949 and the early 1950s that removed Israel’s potential partners. Peace was not in the offing. While France became a covert supplier of arms, the Israelis understood that they could rely on no one else to come to their defense in a region in which from the mid-1950s onward they faced the unrelenting hostility of their neighbors.

Indeed, Ben-Gurion’s efforts to have the United States include Israel in its efforts to organize the Middle Eastern states into an anti-Soviet alliance in the 1950s were rebuffed. The Eisenhower administration was eager to forge an alliance in the Middle East that would, in effect, join NATO in Europe and SEATO in Asia to close the ring of containment around the Soviet Union. Knowing that Arab states would not be part of any alliance that included Israel, the Eisenhower administration rejected Israel’s request to be included either in the Baghdad Pact or in NATO. Ben-Gurion hoped to find some enduring base of support from the outside. But Israel was left largely on its own while President Eisenhower sought to organize the world into an anti-Soviet bloc.

A bitter experience with the events leading to the Six-Day War in June 1967 solidified the deeply ingrained Israeli conviction that it could never count on anyone but itself for its security and defense. Israel, under pressure from President Eisenhower, had withdrawn from the Sinai Desert in March of 1957; the Israelis had seized the Sinai Peninsula as a result of the Suez war in October—November of 1956. In collusion with the British and French—who sought to undermine Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser—the Israelis invaded the Sinai. The plan called for the British and French to interpose themselves between the combatants in order to safeguard the Suez Canal. But things went awry when the Israelis advanced too quickly and Nasser retreated before the British and French could get to the canal. Though having lost their ostensible reason for seizing the canal, they went ahead and did so anyway. Seeing this as a gross violation of international law, President Eisenhower opposed the British and French, and forced them to withdraw from the Suez Canal.

The Eisenhower administration also insisted that Israel withdraw from the Sinai, but acknowledged that the Egyptian blockade of Israel’s port on the Red Sea, Eilat, was wrong, and committed the United States to preventing any reimposition of that blockade. In addition, to preserve a buffer between Egypt and Israel in the Sinai the United Nations General Assembly mandated the deployment of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to the Sinai in the aftermath of the Israeli withdrawal. Thus, Israel withdrew, believing it had firm commitments that addressed its security concerns.

But in May 1967 these commitments proved to be hollow. Nasser, after being taunted by the Syrians and Jordanians for not doing enough to protect Syria in the face of escalating tensions and military engagements with Israel, demanded that UN Secretary-General U Thant pull the UNEF out of the Sinai. U Thant complied. Nasser moved Egyptian forces back into the Sinai. While probably not originally intending to do so, he acted to reimpose the blockade on the Israeli port of Eilat when he declared on May 22 that the Straits of Tiran were mined. In addition, he moved six Egyptian divisions to the Israeli border, threatening to inflict a final defeat on Israel once and for all.

Israel, with no strategic depth and facing six divisions on its borders, mobilized its forces. It also asked the