by Tom Clancy
Still, I couldn’t resist the temptation to close the last gap.
The plan, known as “the Zinni Bridging Proposals,” was intended to do just that — bridge the remaining gaps and differences.
I tried to make it absolutely clear that these proposals were not a make-or-break thing. “I’m putting suggestions on the table, not demands,” I told everybody concerned. “You don’t have to accept them. If you can’t, there’s no harm, no foul. This works for either side. We’ll simply take them off the table, and then go back to working things out together.”
As we were initially presenting these proposals, preparations were under way for the annual Arab Summit, to be held in Beirut starting the twenty-fifth. Two big issues were then in the air. But the first — would Sharon allow Arafat to attend? — was dominating the media and political exchanges to the detriment of the second and far more important one — Crown Prince Abdullah’s proposal to recognize the state of Israel. The proposal was to be formally presented at the summit; its acceptance would be a giant step.
We were under a great deal of time pressure. If we could conclude an agreement before the summit, Arafat would be allowed to attend, make a speech, and be in his glory; and the summit’s focus would be on Abdullah’s historic proposal and not on the problems of Yasser Arafat.
Meanwhile, the Israelis had a number of reservations to my bridging proposals, but promised to study them and get me a quick response. After they looked at them (and it didn’t take them long), they came up with thirteen objections — all of them serious. They didn’t think they’d be able to accept them. “We’re going to think about all this for a bit,” they told me, “but it looks like we can’t go for it.” I waited. They thought about it; and some of Sharon’s top advisers (including some hard-liners like Mofaz) went to the Prime Minister; the debate went on late into the night, but they finally came up with a position: “Even though we have serious objections, let’s go with Zinni. Let’s just accept his plan as is. Let’s not be the ones accused of holding back peace. Let’s move on this.”
On the twenty-sixth, the Israelis called to tell me they had accepted the proposal with no reservations. I was astonished. I had expected it would be really tough to get agreement from the Israelis, and they would take a hell of a long time to negotiate. But somehow they had found a way to accept the deal.
The Palestinians had only three reservations. Two were minor administrative matters that we dealt with easily; but the third was a showstopper: We wanted to reestablish the security situation as it was prior to the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000; and the bridge proposal had a phased approach to this goal. The determination about whether or not to move into the subsequent phases depended upon performance measures monitored by teams we proposed, which would then be approved by the Trilateral Committee. The proposal additionally called for the establishing of a senior committee of leaders from the U.S., Israel, and the Palestinian Authority who would arbitrate any disagreements arising from this process. Finally, the two committees could agree to move ahead, even if some measures had not been achieved according to the timelines outlined, as long as good faith was shown.
The Palestinians did not want to be held to measurable actions — such as monitored arrests and weapons confiscations — and this came through very clearly. Privately, some of them told me that Arafat would never order action against terrorist groups, regardless of what he told us. Without that order, no security force commander could take action.
I hoped we could work through this issue; but I was beginning to sense that Arafat never intended to carry out the actions described in the Tenet plan, which he had agreed to in principle. I believe the Palestinians hoped the Israelis would be forced to accept measurable steps that they had to execute — such as withdrawals — while they could get away with just trying to talk the extremist groups into a cease-fire.
The pressure was now on the Palestinians; but I couldn’t get them to reply.
“Okay,” I told them, “then you don’t accept the proposals. That means they’re off the table. Okay, let’s go back to the committee negotiations with no hard feelings. But let’s move on.”
“No, they’re not off the table,” they countered; they didn’t want to turn them down because of the negative reaction they anticipated. “We are not opposed to them. We just need to talk further about them.”
“We’ve got to hurry!” I said. “We’ve got to hurry! I need an answer!”
Meanwhile, the other Arabs got wind of the proposals, and they were putting a lot of pressure on Arafat to accept the bridging proposals.
All the while, the Palestinians were caught up in the question of Arafat’s trip to Beirut. Since Sharon was not inclined to let him go, they were looking at alternative means, like videoconferencing, for him to address the summit. The issue occupied their attention to the exclusion of everything else. The bridging proposals got shunted to one side.
Sharon was making a hero, a martyr, and a victim out of Arafat. The American government pressed him to let Arafat go, but the gut hatred between those two is so bad he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Of course, this enhanced Arafat’s stature on the street and played into everything that he was doing. It was a mistake. The conference started as scheduled on the twenty-fifth without Arafat. Even the teleconferencing option fell through.
Time was running out.
March 27 was Passover, and I had accepted an invitation to a Seder dinner with an Israeli family. During the meal, news came of a horrific suicide bombing at a Passover celebration in a hotel restaurant, with heavy casualties. This bombing had a tremendous effect on the people of Israel. It was their 9/11.
I knew immediately we had come to the end of our road.
Soon afterward, I talked with Ben Eliezer, the Defense Minister. “I don’t know what we’ll do,” he told me. “But we’re ready to retaliate. And if we do, we’re going to have to do something big. That will probably end peace talks for now. The only thing that can save this thing is if Arafat accepts the bridging proposals.”
I called Arafat. “You’ve got to condemn the bombing in the strongest terms,” I urged him. “And you’ve got to make a decision on the proposal. You’ve got to give us something to keep the talks alive. Otherwise, the Israeli retaliation is going to be severe.”
He hemmed and hawed, and I never received a reply on the proposal. Other Arab leaders continued to press him to accept the proposal; they knew what was coming if he did not.
The displeasure of the other Arabs presented Arafat with a problem. Since he didn’t want to get in hot water with them, he had to dump blame on somebody else (he is not inclined to accept blame himself), and blamed me (which was quite a shock) — accusing me of conspiring with the Israelis. “The bridging proposals are part of a plot to force unacceptable terms on us,” he told Arab leaders. His Palestinian leaders repeated these charges on TV.
I was incensed. I called some of the Palestinians who were making these accusations (people I thought were friends who knew better), and really unloaded on them. “Hey, it’s only business,” they answered. “We know none of this is true, but don’t take it personally. It’s just stuff that we have to say.” They really pissed me off.
My anger was somewhat lessened when I received reassuring calls from Arab friends, like Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. They did not believe the Palestinian accusations; they still trusted my honesty and appreciated my efforts. These calls greatly lifted my morale.
Now we had to wait for the Israeli attack. I knew it wouldn’t be long in coming. As I waited, a couple of lights dawned on me, really hit me hard: First, I realized that we had never been close to an agreement. Arafat was never going to rein in Hamas. Second, the Zinni bridging proposals were a terrible idea. By putting forward proposals of my own, I gave Arafat a target he could lay blame on. (The Israelis could have done the same thing.) And that’s what he did. He said the proposals were pro-Israeli (though if anything, the I
sraelis had more objections to them than the Palestinians; they were very apprehensive about agreeing to the proposals). I ended up giving them an excuse for failure that they could peddle around the Arab world. I should never have given them that excuse. Without it they would have had to sink or swim on their own.
At this point, Washington made the decision to keep me in place and not bring me home, which would have been the normal thing to do under the circumstances. It was a wise decision.
Over the next week, the Israelis unleashed a devastating attack on the Palestinians; really hammered them hard. We watched helplessly as virtually all Palestinian Authority government buildings and facilities were destroyed. Casualties mounted, and Arafat’s headquarters, the Muqatta’a, was under siege and half destroyed. There were other sieges at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Palestinian security headquarters for the West Bank. The town of Jenin was under systematic destructive attack.
For us it was a period of crisis management, dealing with desperate calls from Palestinians asking for help in handling all sorts of dramatic humanitarian situations. We tried our best to respond to each request. And we were constantly asking the Israelis to pull back from some incursion, to let help through where people were desperate, to de-conflict forces, or to provide emergency aid; but of course the Israelis were not in a very good mood to cooperate. Still, we could always find people in place and put pressure on them.
We had a lot of questions about what we were doing. Was it our job? The answer was nobody else was doing it. “Yes, we have to,” I said. “If it saves lives, we’ve gotta do it.” So we ended up becoming like a 911 emergency coordination team, and I think we did save lives.
Meanwhile, we worked for a quick end to the Israeli attacks. President Bush and many other world leaders called for restraint, an end to the attacks, and a withdrawal.
As the siege continued, it looked increasingly likely that Arafat himself might become a casualty, or if that didn’t happen, forcibly expelled from the region.
By then, Arafat’s Muqatta’a headquarters had been turned into Berlin in the spring of 1945. It was now surrounded by Israeli tanks and soldiers. Everything was blown down, the compound walls crushed, the cars in the parking lot destroyed. A pall of smoke and dust covered everything.
And nobody was talking. Sharon wanted to totally isolate Arafat. No outsider could see him. In retaliation, Arafat had refused to allow his leaders to meet with anyone until the siege was lifted or they came to see him first.
Sharon had stonewalled President Bush’s demand to end the attacks and incursions. It was therefore important for me not to sit idly by, but to keep pushing for meetings and contacts to signal our mission was not dead. I decided to break the impasse and visit Arafat, with the hope of restarting our meetings. Sharon didn’t object. So my security guys saddled up in their SWAT gear — black helmets, Kevlar, the whole deal — and off we went.
It was tense crossing the five-hundred-yard no-man’s-land between the IDF forces and the bombed-out building complex where Arafat and his security forces were barricaded. When the media heard I was going in, they came rushing out; but the Israelis shot at them and drove them off (some cameras were able to get pictures).
I walked the last yards and came to barricaded windows, the walls were blasted by tanks, Palestinian gunmen were at the doors, and I had to walk through this rubble to see Arafat.
Peace activists from the States and Europe had somehow made it in through Israeli lines. The hall- and passageways, where the activists were living, were overcrowded; there was hardly room for all of them. There was no electricity, no phone lines (and I’d noticed an IDF communications-jamming van outside to cut off calls), little water, and only sporadic food. The place smelled bad. Things were grim.
I met Arafat in a dimly lit little room; there was a semiautomatic weapon by his side. All of his aides looked like drowned rats, stressed out and beaten; but he was in his glory, upbeat and animated, more alert and fired up than I had ever seen him. The siege had brought out the fighter in him.
“I am under siege,” he announced dramatically, enjoying the hell out of the moment. This was what he lived for. This was an old revolutionary in his element.
That was okay. If he was having a great time, fine. But my aim in visiting him was to break the impasse with Sharon. Thankfully, that happened. Arafat agreed to let his people meet with me, and so I was able to keep up our contacts.
I met with some Palestinian leaders at a onetime casino in Jericho (now shut down because of the conflict). It was a somber meeting. We discussed where to go and what to do next. We made some progress. Defused some bad situations. Got some sieges lifted. Probably saved some lives but not much more.
But I knew the process was dead.
On Easter Sunday, I attended Mass with Father Peter at the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher and walked in the Garden of Gethsemane where Christ had prayed before His betrayal and crucifixion. The olive trees in there — huge, gnarled, old things — went back to the time of Christ.
All this gave a much-needed spiritual boost… though I’ve got to say that I have a pretty good idea how Christ must have felt in the garden.
Secretary Powell came to the region on the eleventh of April to try to stop the Israeli attacks. The impact of that Passover bombing had struck at the core of the Israelis’ psyche. That was when Sharon finally wrote off Arafat. There would be nothing to do with Arafat, nothing. He refused absolutely to back down from that position.
The Secretary and I met with Israeli leaders, then went out to see Arafat in his gutted compound. We worked hard to arrange a relief of the siege. The stumbling block was two men inside the compound who were wanted by the Israelis. The pair had killed the Israeli Minister of Tourism Ze’evi months before; Arafat had refused to give them up; and the Israelis were close to a decision to storm the buildings. If anything bad happened to Arafat — and it didn’t matter what, death, injury, capture, or exile — it could end up being a disaster. We worked out a deal. The pair were to be jailed in Jericho by the Palestinians, but under U.S. and U.K. monitors. We also worked with others to relieve sieges in other West Bank areas.
For the next few days, Secretary Powell, Bill Burns, and I tried to find ways to salvage our mission, but the immediate future was looking terribly grim. By the end of these meeting, I believe that Powell had also lost faith in Arafat’s will to move forward on the peace process. Soon after his return to the States, the President reached a decision that we couldn’t deal with Arafat; he was a lost cause; and the Palestinian Authority had to be re-formed. By June, the United States made that position clear. Unless the Palestinian Authority was re-formed, and somebody other than Arafat was in charge, we weren’t going to do business.
Meanwhile, one of my daughters was about to be married, and I wanted to return home for her wedding. When nobody came up with objections, I prepared to leave, promising to return if needed. I left on the fifteenth of April.
For the next year, the process went nowhere. I remained under the contract with State Department; but it was clear the administration wouldn’t call on me again.
I did meet with Israelis and Palestinians on a number of occasions, especially at IGCC sessions in Brussels and Athens in the months after my departure. Each time I was asked when I would return. I had to answer, sadly, that I doubted that I would be sent back.
On March 1, 2003, I resigned my position with the State Department. It was pointless to remain under contract and keep the title of Special Advisor to the Secretary of State knowing that I wouldn’t be called upon again. By then, concerns I had voiced about the impending Iraq war made me persona non grata with the administration.
What could we have done that was different?
For starters, there should not have been another special envoy. The expectations and media attention become a detriment to progress with a high-visibility envoy. Also, it was time to get away from personalities. We needed worker bees.
S
econd, and more broadly, what we were trying to do was take that very small match, light a very narrow fuse, and hope it burned evenly all the way along. We were trying to construct peace by taking sequential steps along a path. Everything hinged not only on the sequence but on each very fragile and vulnerable step. All the focus went on these steps — media, people, leaders. And it’s all too easy to disrupt. Too easy to break. Too easy to attack. And peace fails.
What we need to do instead is put a large delegation on the ground, with a political component, a security component, an economic component, and a monitoring component. The delegation should come from the United States, the Quad, and any others from the international community that we can interest in the process. We should light a thousand fires instead of one fuse with one match. We need to find small positive actions, tiny cooperative measures. We need to go into towns like Jericho, where there aren’t many problems, and start some projects. We also need to start some joint model projects — a joint economic project here, a security arrangement there. While we continue trying to build on the Tenet/Mitchell plans or the President’s “Roadmap to Peace” (which was put forward in June 2002 and covers much the same territory), we’ll have other things generating activity, and giving a sense of momentum or progress to build hope. This is all going to be slow, but it will also go forward on a broad front. It’ll get there in time.
Third, the Palestinian Authority must be re-formed. But those that step up to the challenge like Abu Mazen and Abu Ala’a have to be given support and clout. This can only come from tangible U.S. support for them and from serious negotiations with them by the Israeli leadership.
ACEH
My involvement with the HDC as one of their Wise Men did not cease during my time in the Middle East.