Since the President had made a decision on the matter, there was no need for an interagency meeting. I called Colin, who quickly and happily agreed to this significant step forward in U.S. policy on the Middle East. The Vice President’s staff grumbled to Steve Hadley, but there wasn’t really much pushback.
The afternoon before leaving for New York, the President practiced his speech in the Family Theater, located in the East Wing of the White House. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had apparently come up with the idea of a family theater since the leader of the free world can hardly go to the cineplex to view the latest releases. But the theater also doubles as a rehearsal space for the President to practice with the teleprompter in the company of the chief of staff and several other key staff. Karen Hughes was in charge of the sessions, and they provided a last chance to make changes. The President hated such disruptions, especially what he called “cram-ins,” last-minute ideas that someone had failed to think of earlier in the process.
The session went smoothly in this case. Yet after hearing the speech from start to finish, some of us found that the language concerning the “State of Palestine” sounded more radical than it had seemed on the written page. Steve Hadley whispered to me that I needed to give the Israelis a heads-up. The President overheard it and said that he wasn’t going to make any changes. “No, sir,” I said. “We just don’t want them to be surprised.”
I called Danny Ayalon, Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s foreign policy advisor. It was already late in the evening in Jerusalem, but it seemed as if the Israelis never slept. They worked late into the night, making it convenient to reach them. Danny had been educated in the United States, was married to an American-born woman, and spoke perfect, nuanced English. He was a fierce defender of Israeli interests and the prerogatives of the prime minister, but he was an excellent and reasonable partner for me, and he had direct access to Sharon.
“Danny, the President is going to give a speech tomorrow,” I said. I could almost hear Danny tense up. “He is going to call for the establishment of a Palestinian state.” Now I could hear Danny breathe a sigh of relief. A U.S. President had never called forthrightly for the establishment of a Palestinian state as a matter of U.S. policy, so this was a significant departure. Yet the statement was not as radical as Danny feared; at least the President wasn’t calling for a peace conference or something like that. Then I added, “And he’s going to call it Palestine.”
“He can’t do that,” Danny protested. “Palestine is Judea and Samaria, the biblical home of the Jewish people.”
I listened calmly for a while to the history lesson and repeated, “Danny, he is going to call it Palestine.” Danny said that he needed to talk to the prime minister. I said that the President had made a decision.
When he called back, Danny asked if we could call it “New Palestine.” I replied that “New Palestine” sounded dumb and that the President wouldn’t accept any change in the language. “And Danny, don’t lobby the Hill,” I said. “It’s not going to work.” The reaction in the Israeli press after the speech was relatively muted. The President had established the creation of a Palestinian state as a goal of U.S. foreign policy. Colin would deliver a speech nine days later at the University of Louisville that reaffirmed the President’s vision and appointed General Anthony Zinni as special envoy to the Middle East. The President’s policy vision was memorialized in UN Security Council Resolution 1397 in March of the next year.
I relate this exchange in some detail because it was my first experience in the management of U.S.-Israeli relations. George W. Bush was already trusted in Israel thanks to his full-throated support of Israel’s right to defend itself against terror early in his presidency. Sharon had visited the White House twice, and the President had backed the Israeli position that final-status negotiations were premature in the face of Palestinian violence.
I too had established myself as a friend of Israel, linking our efforts in the war on terror to Israel’s struggle. “You can’t condemn al Qaeda and hug Hamas,” I’d said to the press, much to the Israelis’ delight.
Yet even with this basis of trust, every hint of a change in the status quo was met with suspicion and an attempt to haggle over every word. And disagreements with Israel were often immediately broadcast to Capitol Hill and to lobbyists such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Moreover, those groups had a direct line into the White House, particularly through the Vice President’s office. This was frequently a problem for the State Department, which was viewed as a bastion of pro-Arab sentiment. Israeli efforts to find exploitable daylight between the President and the secretary of state had complicated matters for more than one U.S. administration.
Fortunately, I developed my own close ties to the Jewish community in Washington and to the Israelis as well. Such people as Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League; Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Harold Tanner, the president of the American Jewish Committee; and Howard Kohr, the executive director of AIPAC, came to trust me and I them. Abe in particular would call occasionally and suggest that it was time to meet with the leaders of key organizations when too much distance was growing between the President and the Jewish community. It was not that the groups had a veto—far from it. But they often provided a good check on what we were doing, and in any case they needed to be kept informed and sometimes reassured. The sessions helped us get ahead of potential problems.
And whatever the problems, I reminded myself constantly that even if Israel’s leaders were sometimes a nightmare to deal with, this important ally of ours was the only democracy in the Middle East. Our relationship really was based on more than strategic interests; we were friends, and that mattered.
The President’s speech was not exactly front-page news in the Arab press. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia were so focused on the “peace process” that they seemingly failed to notice that the President of the United States had called for the establishment of a State of Palestine. Years later, the Arabs would acknowledge the importance of what the President had done. But in this initial failure to credit the President’s stance was an important lesson too: whatever you do for peace in the Middle East, it is never enough for the Arab parties.
Violence Flares Up Again
DESPITE THE HOPEFUL rhetorical support for a Palestinian state, the low-intensity war between Israelis and Palestinians continued. While our envoy Anthony Zinni tried to mediate, Hamas perpetrated a series of suicide bombings at the beginning of December 2001, killing twenty-six Israelis in twenty-four hours in Jerusalem and Haifa. In response, Israeli helicopters attacked Yasir Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah, and Sharon soon declared Arafat to be “out of play.” Hearing that, I thought it necessary to reaffirm with the Israelis the prime minister’s commitment to President Bush not to kill Arafat. We were back in crisis management mode, just trying to stem the violence and calm the region.
Then an incident in the Red Sea cemented our already dim view of Arafat’s “leadership.” I never met him, and neither did the President, but it was absolutely clear that he was not going to lead his people to peace. The President placed the blame for the failure of the Camp David negotiations on Arafat. He believed that Arafat was corrupt and unwilling to make difficult choices for peace. In January 2002 we added “committed terrorist” to the list of offenses. Arafat had ostensibly renounced terrorism in 1988 and again as part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which had recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the governing authority for the Palestinian people. But when on January 3 the Israeli navy, with tracking support from the United States, captured the Palestinian Authority’s Karine A, a freighter loaded with arms destined for Gaza, Arafat’s duplicity was exposed.
The NSC gathered a few days later to review the evidence from the incident and to discuss the ramifications for U.S. policy in the Middle East. The fact that the arms had lik
ely come from Iran was particularly troubling; the Palestinian leadership had sponsors that we could not tolerate. We began to discuss alternatives to Arafat. But we wanted to be careful, particularly with the Israelis, to make clear that we meant peaceful change—not Arafat’s assassination.
The violence continued unabated with the Israeli assassination of a leading Palestinian militant in the West Bank city of Tulkharam. Two weeks later the first female Fatah suicide attacker struck in Jerusalem, killing one person and wounding more than a hundred others, including an American man who’d been in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
It was against that backdrop that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia released his “peace initiative” after a dinner with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman reported the existence of the plan in a column on February 17, 2002. The proposal was that a unified Arab world would end its conflict with Israel in exchange for the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders (roughly the territory occupied by Israel after the 1967 war against the combined Arab armies). It was a bold proposal and could have been an important point of departure for negotiations. The Saudis would later express their disappointment that we hadn’t responded favorably to the crown prince’s efforts. But the timing could not have been worse. Sharon had been elected to defeat the intifada—not to make peace. There was no trust in Arafat as a partner, an assessment we shared.
The cycle of violence in the region was deepening when the Saudi initiative came to light. In early March Sharon responded to a series of suicide bombings by ordering military incursions into a number of Palestinian towns in Gaza and the West Bank, determined to defeat the terrorists and secure the State of Israel. Frankly, no one, most especially the President, blamed him for doing so.
Yet as the violence escalated, the pressure from our Arab allies and European friends to do something grew. The Vice President visited the Middle East on March 12 to 19, 2002, holding out the possibility of meeting with Arafat if the Palestinians agreed to fully implement the security cooperation plan drafted by George Tenet, the CIA director.
During the Clinton administration, the CIA had taken the U.S. lead on security matters in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian security forces operated in a shadowy manner. They were essentially intelligence forces that looked quite a bit like mafia bosses or perhaps street gangs. Arafat had a web of at least a dozen of these security organizations, each led by a “chief” and all loyal to him, while jockeying with and checking one another. Violence between the organizations competing for the spoils of Arafat’s corruption or control of territory was fairly common. Needless to say, it was a world in which the CIA was more capable than the State Department or the Pentagon, and the Agency sometimes succeeded in quelling the violence. But that version of security cooperation didn’t do much to democratize Palestinian institutions or root out corruption within them.
Because the Palestinians failed to fully implement the Tenet security plan, the Vice President did not meet with Arafat. When he returned to the White House and reported on his trip, our discussions turned again to how the Palestinians might find leadership that would make a two-state solution possible. We were frankly ready to tell the world that it would never happen with Arafat in power.
Then events took a radical turn. On Passover, Hamas carried out a suicide attack at the Park Hotel in Netanya, killing dozens of Israelis and wounding more than a hundred people. Even with that provocation the Israelis sent word that they would accept the Zinni security plan, based largely on Tenet’s earlier work. The Palestinians refused to do so.
Thus, when the Israelis launched Operation Defensive Shield and reoccupied all of the West Bank, we were neither surprised nor critical. The President and Colin said yet again that Israel had a right to defend itself. Ari Fleischer reiterated the statement practically every day. But the Israelis always seem to go too far. They decided to lay siege to the Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah with Arafat in it. For days CNN showed pictures of the Palestinian leader at the mercy of the Israeli forces.
When the Israelis entered Bethlehem, dozens of fleeing militants broke into the Church of the Nativity, seeking refuge. The church, which marks the place of Jesus’s birth, was damaged by errant Israeli gunfire during the ensuing siege. That prompted an angry phone call to me from the Vatican’s secretary of state. He didn’t mince words. Saying that the Holy Father himself had directed him to make the phone call, the cardinal called the incident an attack on one of the holiest shrines for Christians. I tried to protest that it had been an accident, but somehow the point seemed moot. The Arabs were threatening all manner of retaliation if the Israelis didn’t stop. We were in the midst of a full-blown Middle East crisis and a deepening split with Israel.
THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR is almost always the focal point in the management of a crisis with Israel. This is in part structural. The Israeli foreign minister is often selected as a part of domestic coalition building and sometimes lacks full authority on matters of war and peace. Moreover, because Israel believes that it exists in a state of siege (not without some justification), the prime minister and his office carry the foreign policy brief as if the country is in a perpetual state of war. And in relations with the United States, it is the prime minister, from David Ben-Gurion to Yitzhak Rabin to Benjamin Netanyahu, who “owns” the relationship with Washington. This is reinforced by the aforementioned suspicion of the State Department as “pro-Arab.”
As the violence escalated, I convened the Principals and then the NSC to consider what the President should say and when. Five days had passed since the Israeli initiation of Operation Defensive Shield, and the Arab world was roiling. We were under enormous pressure to rein in the Israelis. There were three problems with this. First, there is an assumption, particularly among the Arabs and even the Europeans, that if the United States threatens Israel with diplomatic isolation or perhaps limitations on financial or military assistance, Israel will comply immediately and completely. That, of course, isn’t true, particularly in the midst of a military operation deemed necessary for Israel’s security by its democratically elected government. What is more, what U.S. President wants to threaten the United States’ ally in this way when Israel is responding to an attack? Second, the President has to be careful because if he calls for the Israelis to stop and they do not, his credibility and that of the United States will be severely damaged. Finally, there was some sentiment within the administration, particularly on the part of the Vice President and Don Rumsfeld, that the Israelis had a right to crush the terrorists who were attacking them. The President shared this view but acknowledged Colin’s point that the inevitable carnage among innocent Palestinians was also a serious problem and that the credibility of the United States was deteriorating. We laid out the options, which ranged from doing nothing to calling for an end to the Israeli operation.
The President decided, despite significant reservations by all involved, to give a speech on April 4, 2002, urging Israel to stop settlement activity and stop Operation Defensive Shield. Even Colin worried that the Israelis might ignore the calls, further undermining U.S. credibility. The President also did what presidents do under the circumstances: he sent the secretary of state to the region even though Colin had nothing that he could deliver. The President told Colin directly that he needed him to go and spend some of his personal credibility on behalf of the administration. Colin went despite having deep reservations.
The next three weeks were exceedingly difficult and filled with tension. Powell dutifully traveled to the Middle East, meeting with Arafat in the Muqata compound (the Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah) with Israeli tanks outside. He told Arafat that he might be the last U.S. official with whom he’d meet if he didn’t rein in the terrorists. He learned too that the Israeli government had decided to build a security buffer between Israel and the West Bank from Mount Gilboa in the north to the Judean desert in the south. Though the ostensible purpose was to make it impossible for t
errorists to enter Israel, we knew that the construction of a “wall” (or “fence,” as the Israelis called it) would be read as an Israeli attempt to cement the territorial status quo and thereby prejudge the boundaries of a Palestinian state. The imagery was terrible too: an ugly barrier erected between peoples who were supposed to try to find a way to live in peace.
Colin returned from the region without any agreements. He’d tried to negotiate a document that might lay out a path to end the violence and that would result in a peace conference of some kind. But the President shared the Israelis’ allergy to any nod toward negotiations with Arafat. I tried to make the case to the President that simply pointing toward negotiations would carry little cost. He was adamant, though, and I called Colin, who was still in the region, to tell him that the draft statement he’d sent to Washington was dead on arrival. Our diplomatic efforts were failing miserably. And when, on April 18, the President answered a question by calling the Israeli prime minister “a man of peace,” I thought we’d done long-term damage to our relations in the Arab world.
Colin had been sitting next to the President when he made the comment. After the press left, he came over to me. “Do you have any idea how this plays on Arab TV?” he asked. “The Israelis are just thumbing their noses at the President. Why is he giving Sharon a pass?” The State Department went into overdrive trying to explain what the President had “meant to say.”
I fully agreed at the time that the President had made a mistake. But later I would see that the vote of confidence in Sharon had had an effect on the tough, aging Israeli. Sharon would ultimately take important and unexpected steps toward the Palestinians, whom he distrusted and whose ambitions for statehood he’d always crushed. It was not the only time that George W. Bush took a rhetorical leap forward that was both unscripted and strategically wise.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 17