Battle Ready (2004)

by Tom - Nf - Commanders Clancy

  As I hit the sack after a long and exhausting first day of travel and briefs, dark thoughts swirled through my mind.

  The task ahead was daunting. I knew I had a lot to learn about the situation, the personalities, the issues, but I couldn't afford to take a lot of time to get up to speed, while at the same time getting the negotiations started and a process moving. I had to hit the ground running. Aaron Miller, Bill Burns, and the others on the team were certainly available with their considerable experience, but much of the responsibility still weighed on me. Expectations were already raised, people had begun to hope again; I didn't want to see the momentum or the hope fade. Progress had to be evident right off the bat.

  I had an additional gut feeling that we were going to get heavy pressure from the terrorists and extremists, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. According to our own and Israeli intelligence, the pattern with these groups was to pick up the level of violence whenever negotiations looked like they were making progress. Inevitably, the violence would box in the mediation effort. The Israelis would retaliate against the perpetrators of the violence. The Palestinians would hit back. And everybody would break off from the negotiations--always the goal of the extremist groups. So I expected that they would come at this one with a vengeance and would hit with a lot of violent events. If I was right, it meant we would have a very limited time frame in which to make progress. How much time depended on our ability to operate through the violence . . . or, better, to prevent violent events, catch a break, and get something done before the violence overshadowed our efforts. Unless I was very off the mark, we were going to be taking a roller-coaster ride . . . whipping from crisis to hope over and over again.

  Unfortunately, I couldn't have been more right. When the violence came, it was horrific. It eventually brought an end to the negotiations.

  Hamas and Islamic Jihad are committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. Since neither of them, in my view, seriously buys the two-state solution, it's hopeless to think they will compromise. With them, it's all or nothing. That means they will simply continue to generate destructive violence to punish the Israelis and block any kind of peaceful resolution and compromise.

  Their history is interesting: When Hamas was initially organized, it was encouraged by the Israelis as a counter to the PLO. It later took a more radical turn and now gets support from Iran, Syria, and elsewhere (Iraq, for example, before the fall of Saddam Hussein). When Islamic Jihad emerged, it was even more religiously fanatic, but just as skilled in the evil arts. It has never quite had the same clout as Hamas, however. Hamas is the big player. It is much better organized, has strong tentacles in the Palestinian population (cleverly put in play by charitable organizations), and has a powerful political wing. Hamas has much better reconnaissance than Islamic Jihad's; and their attacks are far more sophisticated and achieve much greater effect, with far greater casualties. (They were responsible for the Passover bombing and all the major bus bombings--blowing up busloads of school kids, for example.) Their attacks strike right at the heart and soul of the Israelis. They really know how to jam the blade home.

  Other Palestinian extremists can probably be handled. But Hamas is another thing. It would almost certainly take a civil war in Palestine to break their back--assuming they didn't win the war.

  In talks with mediators, the Palestinians will always press for a cease-fire and a compromise with Hamas. I don't see it. It would be great if Hamas actually agreed to all that, and meant it; but it's hard to see how they'd square their objectives with a compromise.

  Even if they bought into a cease-fire, I'd be suspicious that it was just an attempt to regroup and rearm. And of course, as they went about doing that, the Israelis (whose intelligence is excellent) would find out about it and strike. The case would then be made that the Israelis had struck for no reason . . . and so on. The spiral of violence would start again.

  THE FIRST full day was scheduled for meetings with the Israelis. To begin the day, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had laid on a helicopter tour, highlighted by his personal perspective on the geography and situation on the ground. This was to be followed by a series of briefs that would last well into the evening.

  Some of my State Department advisers had reservations about this, on the grounds that the Palestinians might accuse us of letting Sharon co-opt the agenda; but I told them I could handle any attempt to manage my views. And if the Palestinians wanted to take me on a similar tour, they were welcome to invite me. I thought it was better to be open and transparent with both sides . . . and not tight-assed and overcautious.

  Sharon's tour gave me a strong sense of the land of Israel. We saw all the major sites--Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee. We flew down to look at Sharon's farm in the south. We flew up to the Golan Heights, stopped at a military position, and talked with their people.

  What was most interesting that day was Sharon's own take on all this. He was a battle-tested soldier (1967, 1973), a farmer deeply attached to his land, and an Israeli convinced of his birthright, as well as a wily politician. His running dialogue during the trip came from all of those perspectives. He stressed security issues in relation to the terrain, the way any soldier would to another soldier. But there was open joy and pride in his voice as he dwelled lovingly on the agricultural aspects of the panorama that unfolded below us. And there was a similar joy and pride as he pointed out sites of historical significance to Israelis--ruins from Roman times and earlier.

  "Look at those terraces up there in the rocks," he'd exclaim with a simple passion that was very touching. "My ancestors built those thousands of years ago!" Or: "Look at this piece of terrain. You're a military man. If we don't control that, we're vulnerable." Or: "Look at this land. It was desert. Look what Israel has done here. We have greened it. Look at the orchards. Look at the fruit we produce. Look at those beautiful cattle down there."

  These three elements--soldier, farmer, Jewish roots--really sum up the man. Everything he is flows from these. His commitment to them is passionate and total. The man is committed with his entire soul to the land he'd grown up in: "We have returned from the Diaspora. This is our land, this is our birthright, this is our history."

  Before I met him, I was led to expect that I was going to run into some kind of big bully soldier. That characterization does not exactly fit. He is certainly a hard guy, who grew up in a tough environment--direct, frank, blunt, tells you right out what he wants to say to you, doesn't try to twist words (he's no slick politician)--but he never tried to bully me. What you see is what you get, that's the way he is. If he couldn't do something--make some concession he didn't want to make--he wouldn't weasel around the issue. He'd just say no. Unfortunately, I had the feeling that when we got down the road, when the tough concessions would be necessary, I couldn't see him making the kind of concessions some of his predecessors had offered.

  As long as I was in Israel, Sharon never stopped trying to get the read of me; or to pry judgments and opinions out of me; and I think he was very frustrated when I didn't show him any of that. He simply couldn't understand how anyone could not see what was obvious to him. To him, I think, you have to judge, you have to have opinions. It goes with being committed the way he's committed.

  From my angle, any judgment I expressed would close off the other side; and I couldn't allow that to happen. Clearly every thing I said, or allegedly said, would be in the press the next day. Leaks from both sides were more like deluges. Though the two of us got along together, there was always an underlying tension between us.

  Toward the end of the flight, a call came over the radio: A shooting had occurred in the small northern Israeli town of Afula. We immediately changed course and headed up there. Reports confirmed that a pair of Palestinian gunmen had opened up in the town's marketplace, killing a pregnant Israeli woman. Several other Israelis were wounded, and the two gunmen were dead.

  When we arrived overhead, we could see the security forces and m
edical personnel busily taking control of the scene. We hovered for a time, taking it all in, and then flew back to Jerusalem.

  Later, I got a fuller account of the story--which leaves lots of unanswered questions. Earlier that day, as a good faith gesture at the start of my mission, the Israelis had taken down a checkpoint near Afula so the Palestinians could have an easier time moving about. The gunmen had obviously taken advantage of this opening to launch their terrorist attack. The big question is: Was the attack a deliberately planned provocation aimed at undermining the peace process? Or was it--as the Palestinians later claimed-- simply a revenge killing? The Israeli military had recently killed a relative of the gunmen; the gunmen shot up the marketplace in retaliation.

  Wherever the truth lay, this was clearly one of those violent incidents that tempted me to lose hope in the peace process. I knew I could forget about having a quiet start to my mission. My sense that this would be a roller-coaster trip from crisis to hope and back to crisis was proving right. Even though both sides had made encouraging statements about cooperating with my mission, I had to wonder how much any of that counted now that a violent event had already cast a black shadow over the first full day.

  THE REST of the day consisted of meetings and briefings with Prime Minister Sharon, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ben Eliezer, and Chief of the Israeli Defense Force Shaul Mofaz.85

  This brought me up against a complicated situation: At that time, the Israeli government was a unity government, a coalition government . . . which means in practice that it was a divided government. Sharon was from Likud, the party which had the largest number of seats in the Knesset, while Peres and Ben Eliezer were from Labor, the chief opposition party. It was not an easy situation to handle. "Who can actually speak for Israel?" I had to ask myself.

  Sharon cut through this confusion: "I'm the only one who can speak for this government," he told me.

  It was kind of strange to an American who is used to cabinet ministers who can speak for their boss. But I accepted this condition. It was their system, not ours.

  The others I met with were far from unhelpful, even if somewhat marginalized by Sharon. Everyone had a lot of experience in the nitty-gritty of working with the Palestinians, and they all came through with powerful insights and solid advice.

  Though Mofaz had a reputation as a tough hard-liner, he was a quiet, thoughtful man, and not immovable, nor totally unsympathetic to the Palestinians. When I met him that afternoon, he made it clear that he wanted to be cooperative, that he wanted me to succeed, and that he did not believe there was a military solution to the problem.

  Later, he and I spent a lot of time together, just talking, and the two of us came to a good appreciation of our positions. I understood there was no way he would compromise on security; but within that boundary, he understood that the Israelis would have to give up some things . . . without--again--taking any security risks. He was aware there was never going to be a total and lasting military defeat of the Palestinians, so something had to be arranged to make the peace agreements go right. Yet he also made it clear that he did what he had to do out there in the field, even if it was hard and people got hurt.

  PERES GAVE me valuable counsel on how my mission might proceed and on the possibilities that could develop. In these early days of my mission, he was the one person who gained my complete respect as I worked through the peace process.

  I will never forget his advice:

  "General Zinni," he told me, "you're going to find three kinds of people in this business.

  "First, you're going to find the righteous. Don't waste your time with them. You'll find them on both sides, and they're always going to appeal to the righteousness of their cause.

  "You're never going to get anywhere with people like that. There's no negotiating with righteousness. Yes, it's their right to believe what they believe. But you're not going to change them. They interpret facts from their religious angle, and they ignore any facts that don't support that.

  "The second group you're going to meet," he went on, "are the collectors of arguments, the debaters. You see them on TV with all the talking heads. They're going to outdebate the other guy and score points. But where making real progress toward peace is concerned, these people are useless. If you want to get into the debate for academic purposes, that's fine. But it serves no other purpose.

  "The third group you're going to meet are the ones that count. These are the ones who want to figure out a solution on the ground. These are the ones who ask themselves over and over: 'How the hell are we going to make this ghastly situation work and get out of this terrible nightmare?'

  "Focus on them," he said, "and focus on what needs to be done, and then get it done."

  It was the best advice I got in Israel.

  The other briefs were devoted to the security situation--the overriding issue, in the Israeli view. Their first order of business was to stop the terrorist suicide attacks. They were convinced that Arafat and the Palestinian Authority could stop, or at least control, most of the violent attacks, but chose not to. Or, to put this more bluntly, Arafat supported and condoned much of the violence. If the peace process was going to move forward, they made it very clear, he had to make a strategic decision to abandon violence and return to a negotiated settlement of the issues. They doubted his willingness to do this.

  The Palestinian Authority couldn't bring themselves to do that. If they did--if they confronted Hamas and Islamic Jihad, cracked down on the extremists, made arrests, confiscated weapons--there'd be blood in the streets. But if they did not confront Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Israelis weren't about to make any of the concessions outlined in the Tenet plan (and other plans)--such as removal of checkpoints, withdrawal of security forces to previous positions, and readmission of Palestinian workers to Israel. And there was no way we'd see any progress toward a Palestinian state.

  At first the Israelis took a very tough line on how the Palestinian Authority had to demonstrate their good faith: Sharon insisted on one hundred percent compliance, including at least seven days of quiet, before he would approve any talks.

  If we could not even get talks started for at least a week (if we were lucky enough to have no attacks), my job was clearly going to be impossible. In time, however, the Israelis backed away from their more absolute positions; and Sharon agreed to participate in the Trilateral Committee talks that I had decided to use as the venue for the initial meetings. But their bottom line remained the same: The Palestinians had to show good faith in stopping terror attacks.

  THE FIRST day ended with mixed results. On the one hand, the terrible and tragic attack at Afula had cast a dark cloud over our hopes; but we had at least gained an agreement from the Israelis to meet in the Trilateral Committee. I had met with the Israeli leadership, we had connected well, and they had indicated that they would give, at least, cautious support for my mission.

  I SPENT the second day with the Palestinians. Since it was the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, my meetings took place in the evening, beginning with the Iftar meal86 with Chairman Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank town of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority had one of their headquarters (called "the Muqatta'a"; their official seat of government was in Gaza).

  On the way there, our consular people took me on a tour of the Israeli settlement areas in the West Bank, where, contrary to agreements, significant settlement expansion was going on. During the tour, we passed through Israeli security checkpoints and witnessed the frustrating and humiliating process Palestinians had to endure in order to travel from place to place.

  In our talks the day before, the Israelis had acknowledged that these checkpoints caused problems, but they were necessary to prevent attacks (such as the Afula incident). It was obviously a difficult situation. Young soldiers who could not compromise on security subjected Palestinians to time-consuming and humiliating security procedures. I was told checkpoint stories of the birth of b
abies, of people dying unable to reach hospitals in time, of senior Palestinian officials held up and embarrassed, and of many other incidents that inflamed the people.

  My meetings with Arafat were cordial. He has always been hospitable, and very expressive, with abundant assurances of cooperation (always echoed by the people around him).

  By then, meeting with Arabs came easy to me; I was comfortable with their ways. And though I didn't yet know these Palestinians very well, they certainly knew me. Arafat had already talked with President Mubarak, King Abdullah, and the other major Arab leaders, all of whom had advised cooperation. "They all told me that you are a guy I could trust," Arafat explained, "who can help me do what I want to do." He strongly stressed that, and assured me that this was marvelous. "I'm totally committed to the success of your mission," he went on to tell me. And when I brought up the Trilateral Committee as a venue for further discussion, he went along with that as well, though he added that he wanted to open up discussions in areas other than security--a far more loaded issue than it might have seemed.

  On the whole, he was always agreeable, always quick to promise cooperation, but not so quick to deliver on his promises.

  It became increasingly evident to me, as Yasser Arafat and I met again and again over the next weeks and months, that this wily old revolutionary could never really bring himself to make the compromises that would lead to a lasting resolution of the conflict. He could never look at concluding a deal that risked his own place in history and his personal legacy. He saw himself as the leader who had never given an inch in compromise, and this was more important to him than concluding and implementing an agreement that caused him to make serious compromises. He's at the point in his life where he clearly sees his own mortality, and he wants to go out as defiant. "I'm the only Arab general that's undefeated," he said to me at one point. "You're not going to walk behind my funeral like with Sadat and my partner Rabin."