So it was this time. I began by explaining to Ismail the strange ways of our government. We had a two-channel system, which indeed Egypt had used by contacting the White House directly. This could work only if both sides acted in a manner wholly aboveboard. If Cairo sought to manipulate us by playing off one channel against the other, it could no doubt cause us embarrassment but only at the price of guaranteeing itself a deadlock. This was the tactical problem. The deeper challenge was to establish a basis of confidence. I invited Ismail to “tell me candidly what you think and feel.” We had to find a concept before we drew up proposals:
There is no sense doing anything — drawing maps, and so on, unless we know exactly what we want to accomplish, unless we have some idea of what is doable. Otherwise we will just be buying ourselves three months of good will, and great distrust afterwards. You must have the sense that when you deal with the White House, our word counts. I would rather tell you honestly we can’t do something than to tell you something we can do and later we would not deliver. . . .
When Hafiz Ismail and I met in suburban New York, we were far from that level of confidence. Indeed, he had come less to discuss mediation — and therefore compromise — than to put forward a polite ultimatum for terms beyond our capacity to fulfill. Spelling out what he had told Nixon, Ismail now argued that a settlement had to take place during 1973; at a minimum he hoped he could achieve by September an agreement on fundamental principles (“heads of agreement”). He never clearly explained what he understood by that or what would happen if such an agreement was not reached by the deadline. Ismail rejected an interim accord — a Suez Canal disengagement — except as part of an agreed comprehensive plan that was to be implemented in stages over a brief period of time, in which case it was of course nearly irrelevant. Above all, Israel had to agree, before anything else happened, that it would return to its 1967 borders with all neighbors, with some margin for adjustment, perhaps, on the West Bank. Only on that basis would Egypt join the negotiating process, and then only to discuss security arrangements. These could include, for example, demilitarized zones, which for reasons of prestige and equity should be established on both sides of the international border; international supervisory teams could function at strategic points like Sharm el-Sheikh at the tip of the Sinai. In return, Egypt would end the state of war with Israel — but not yet establish “full peace.” It would open international waterways to Israeli ships and end hostile propaganda and the boycott of foreign companies trading with Israel; but it would not agree to full diplomatic relations or open borders. That degree of “full peace,” or “normalization,” would have to await a comprehensive settlement with all the other parties, including Syria and the Palestinians.
The same principle of total withdrawal, coupled with security measures, would have to apply to the Golan Heights. Ismail was more flexible with respect to the West Bank: There could be negotiations either with King Hussein or with some undefined group of Palestinian leaders. Egypt would accept any outcome agreeable to the parties, even along the lines of the so-called Allon Plan, which called for Israeli military outposts along the Jordan River. There were, however, two caveats: Arab control of East Jerusalem was essential and nonnegotiable. And Egypt reserved the right to express its view as to who should ultimately govern on the West Bank if Jordan negotiated a settlement — a hint of the growing influence of the PLO. This was ominous both for Hussein and for Israel. It meant that Hussein might be used to extract territory from Israel but not be able to retain it. And for Israel, negotiations with Hussein were thus becoming only the admission price to confrontation with its mortal enemy, the PLO, still committed to its destruction. The only hint of flexibility was Ismail’s statement that Egypt would not insist that the various negotiations be completed simultaneously. Cairo was prepared to work out an Israeli-Egyptian agreement as a first installment, but it would not sign it unless the Syrian and Jordanian negotiations were in train and it would not establish full peace until those negotiations were in fact completed.
This was far-reaching but one-sided and not essentially different from what had produced the deadlock. The price paid for the return to the prewar borders would be not peace but the end of belligerency, not easy to distinguish from the existing cease-fire. Formal peace would come only after the Syrians and Palestinians had settled in an extremely cloudy procedure — giving the most intractable parties a veto, in effect, over the whole process.
Hoping that further exploration might reveal prospects not apparent at first hearing, I asked clarifying questions, one of which hid a substantive suggestion: Would Egypt be prepared to separate the questions of sovereignty and security? If Israel accepted Egypt’s sovereignty to the 1967 borders, would Egypt permit some Israeli defensive positions to remain on its soil? Ismail was noncommittal, clearly not overwhelmed by an idea of which I had been prematurely proud.9 And so the talks with Hafiz Ismail ended.
They left us with little reason for optimism. The hint of a separate Egyptian-Israeli accord was so heavily qualified with unacceptable conditions that it was more compatible with a come-on to get us involved than with a serious effort to negotiate. We needed more time to determine what Sadat had in mind. Ismail and I promised to meet again after a few months.
In the meantime, we reviewed the bidding with King Hussein and Prime Minister Meir.
Hussein
TWO conversations with our longtime ally King Hussein bracketed the meeting with Ismail. The first meeting was on February 6.
The King governed one of those states whose arbitrary frontiers reflected less the results of history or the necessities of geography than the spheres of influence established by France and Britain upon the conclusion of World War I. Created as a buffer between the French mandate in Syria, the British protectorate in Iraq — both historic founts of Arab nationalism — and the British Mandate of Palestine, it was tossed into an unpromising desert as a weight in a balance conceived and manipulated by distant powers. It was a testimony to the wisdom of the only two monarchs Jordan has known — Hussein and his grandfather, Abdullah — that they managed to wrest both independence and dignity from the initial disdain of Arab nationalists and the self-confident domination of the imperial power. They did so, moreover, at a time when the nationalist movements were aimed as much at the ruling monarchies as at the European colonial countries. The Hashemite kings were forced into a precarious balancing act. They needed outside support against radical pressures, especially as these increasingly were bolstered by other Arab states and by the growing Soviet power. But they did not behave as the surrogates of foreigners. Rather they strove for, and succeeded in articulating, a form of Arab nationalism that asserted an Arab identity while affirming friendship for the West, seeking to demonstrate that Arab aspirations could be fulfilled through moderation.
The creation of the state of Israel added a new dimension of special volatility for Jordan. Its rulers were drawn into asserting Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank of the Jordan River; thus they inherited the passions of the Palestinians and a guaranteed admission to the main arena of Arab-Israeli confrontation. Though no happier about the new Jewish state than their Arab brethren, the Hashemite monarchs recognized the impossibility of destroying it and were the first to explore the possibilities of coexistence, an effort that cost King Abdullah his life to an assassin in 1951. For the next fifteen years Hussein joined his Arab colleagues in refusing to recognize Israel, always uneasily conscious that the radical forces in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq sought his downfall as surely as the destruction of Israel and perhaps as a first step toward that goal. He jealously guarded his independence while relying on Western support; in 1956 he expelled the British officers training and in some respects commanding his army. And yet when a radical wave threatened to engulf the Middle East following the revolution in Iraq in 1958, American forces landed in Lebanon and British forces entered Jordan for a few weeks.
Nearly ten years later, in 1967, Jordan was engulfed by the Six
Day War. Though Nasser had treated the kingdom with aloof disdain, Hussein carried out his high conception of the requirements of Arab solidarity and entered a war that Nasser had already lost. The result was that Jordan was driven out of the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem. Jordan’s involvement in the peace process thereafter only complicated its already precarious existence. For Hussein was caught between the passions of his Arab brethren and his own realism, for which he paid the price of several radical attempts on his life; and he was trapped in the paradox that he was the Arab leader most ready to make peace, yet of all the territories it had conquered Israel was most reluctant to relinquish the Jordanian portion, which it most intimately connected with its own traditions. Israel’s fundamental demand for direct negotiations was in fact granted by Hussein, yet it did not speed a settlement. And so Jordan remained suspended between contending forces. It made an enormous sacrifice for Arab nationalism, but it was assailed by the radicals then dominating the nationalist movement. In 1970 it was driven to suppress the Palestinian guerrillas creating a state within a state on Jordanian territory, and yet did so while retaining its Arab vocation. It had grievances against Israel but did not want to engulf the area in a new conflict that might destroy those vestiges of moderation that were the essence of Hashemite rule.
Hussein’s mastery of this challenge stamped him as a formidable personality. His legendary courtesy, which the uninitiated took for pliability, was a marvelous way to keep all the contending forces at arm’s length. He was imperiled by the intransigence of Israel, the embrace of the West, the hegemonic aspirations of Egypt, and the revolutionary fervor of Syria and Iraq. He emerged as his own man. Hussein did not take refuge in blaming America for the humiliation of 1967. He did not break relations with us, as did several other Arab states, but he maintained his insistence on a solution just to the Arab cause — even the cause of those who sought to bring him down.
On the occasion of his first visit to Washington since Egypt’s expulsion of Soviet personnel, Hussein did not share the general complacency about that event. He suspected — as it turned out correctly — that one of Sadat’s motives had been to free himself of the Soviet reluctance to support military action. At the same time, according to Hussein, the Soviet setback was likely to produce three dangerous consequences in Soviet policy. The Soviets would increase their arms aid to Egypt to protect what was left of their position in Cairo. Second, they would stake out a rigid position insisting on a comprehensive settlement so as to complicate any Egyptian temptations toward separate arrangements — this explained why Gromyko had been so hostile to an interim agreement during the fall of 1972. Third, they would continue pouring arms into Syria to prevent it from following Cairo’s example and to make it the new spearhead of Soviet policy in the area.
Hussein’s gloomy prognosis was not confined to the Arab-Israeli conflict. He also warned about Soviet ambitions in the Persian Gulf, represented by Iraq, which, heavily armed with Soviet weapons, would work against all moderate governments in the area even if the regime in Baghdad continued to have its own differences with the Soviet Union. He offered Jordanian forces to help stabilize the Arab emirates in the lower Gulf. Our bureaucracy complacently haggled over the trivial aid sums involved to support such a policy; it took a White House order to break that bureaucratic logjam.
Hussein repeated his willingness to make peace with Israel. But despite secret contacts he faced an impasse. Hussein symbolized the fate of Arab moderates. He was caught between his inability to sustain a war with Israel and his unwillingness to make common cause with the radicals. He was prepared for a diplomatic solution, even a generous one, but Israel saw no incentive for negotiations so long as Hussein stood alone. Any return of conquered territories seemed to it less secure than the status quo. And the West Bank with its historic legacy would unleash violent domestic controversy in Israel — the National Religious Party, without which the governing coalition could not rule, was adamantly opposed to the return of any part of the West Bank.
We asked Hussein to come up with a plan suitable for negotiation. He promised to review one with us when he returned to Washington in two weeks after a vacation in Florida.
The February 6 meeting with Hussein was my first direct exposure to what turned out to be a tragedy for the peace process in the Middle East: the personal distrust between Sadat and Hussein. Sadat quite simply did not like Hussein, or royalty for that matter. At this early stage of his complicated diplomacy, Sadat needed the Palestinians, or thought he did, to burnish his Arab credentials. To back a negotiation with Hussein might alienate the Arab radicals, especially Syria, whose support was essential if the military option was to be maintained. Sadat therefore dealt with Hussein at arm’s length, thus preventing the emergence of the one spokesman with whom Israel might have successfully negotiated over the West Bank. Hussein, on the other hand, was profoundly mistrustful of Egypt, fearing that Sadat’s volatility might do harm to Jordan as had Nasser’s. The pity was that these two moderate leaders failed to give each other the support that might have speeded up Middle East diplomacy; they wound up in an impasse from which the sole exit was war.
I cannot say that all these crosscurrents were as clear to me at the time as they became later. But no great subtlety was needed to discover His Majesty’s profound distrust for the Egyptian approach when he returned to Washington on February 27 and I briefed him on the meetings with Ismail. Hussein and his principal adviser, Zaid Rifai, later Prime Minister, did not see anything new in the Egyptian proposals, which had been staples of Egyptian diplomacy for years; they recommended that we draw Cairo out to bring about greater precision. But our Jordanian friends considered it crucial to keep the Soviets out of the process. We thus had had two hints of separate approaches from two Arab leaders whose mutual suspicions kept them from combining. Sadat was using the Palestinians to gain a veto over Jordanian actions, while Hussein invoked our fear of Soviet intransigence to slow down a separate peace by Egypt.
Hussein, alone among the Arab leaders at that time, was prepared to be specific about peace terms. He gave me a paper that spelled out the elements he had described to Nixon and me a few weeks earlier. Jordan would negotiate directly with Israel about the West Bank. There would be some border changes provided the Gaza Strip was given in return. If Jordanian sovereignty was restored, there could be Israeli military outposts along the Jordan River or even Israeli settlements, provided they were isolated enclaves on Jordanian territory; he could not agree to the annexation of the Jordan Valley by Israel. Wryly the King said that all these proposals had already been made directly to Israel and been rejected. What was needed was an American proposal, not another Jordanian one. Perhaps, he said, two or three years were available for the peace process before the area exploded. It was his one misassessment. Unfortunately, it was crucial, because it lulled us by confirming our existing predilection for waiting for the outcome of the Israeli election on October 30.
Golda Meir
OUR next visitor, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, did not share Hussein’s sense of urgency. At an appointment with Nixon on March 1 she proclaimed that “we never had it so good” and insisted that a stalemate was safe because the Arabs had no military option. Golda Meir was an original. Shrewd, earthy, elemental, she felt herself to be the mother of her people. To her every square inch of the territory of Israel had been nourished by the blood of her children. She had seen too much of the human character to rely on such intangible and reversible assurances as recognition of Israel’s existence. She knew only too well that recognition of their existence is where the security problem of all other nations begins, not ends.
Golda had come to Israel as a young pioneer. The idea of returning territory was almost physically painful to her. She demanded ironclad guarantees of security in return, and it was hard to imagine what guarantees she could possibly consider more secure than physical possession. She was skillful in raising issues that put us on the defensive or postponed the
need for Israel to make difficult choices. In 1973 she fought under the banner of “direct negotiations,” a demand that brought home the absurdity of the position of even the moderate Arabs who insisted that Israel relinquish its conquests but who refused to sit down at the conference table to discuss withdrawal. From us she demanded that we coordinate positions between our two countries, a reasonable-sounding proposal whose practical consequence was to give her a veto over our tactics.
In the meeting with Nixon, Mrs. Meir began a direct assault with the weapon of flattery, to which Nixon was rather vulnerable. She thanked him for “revolutionizing the world and creating for the first time hope in the hearts of people that we are approaching the end of wars.” Nixon was not about to contradict this judgment but added cautiously: “We are realistic about the dangers which still exist. Many here say that since the world is at peace we can reduce arms to spend on ghettos. But we need more [arms] until our adversaries really change.” Mrs. Meir fell in with this line of reasoning by telling Nixon that she had warned her fellow socialist Willy Brandt not to become dewy-eyed or to drop his guard. Nixon, convinced that anyone suspicious of Brandt was bound to be a kindred spirit, volunteered somewhat irrelevantly: “My rule in international affairs is: do unto others as they would do unto you.” “Plus ten percent,” I added, based on an experience with my chief extending over more than four years.
The meeting turned to practical matters. Golda had two objectives: to gain time, for the longer there was no change in the status quo, the more Israel would be comfirmed in the possession of the occupied territories; and to achieve Nixon’s approval of a new package of military aid for Israel.
Years of Upheaval Page 33