Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Pending Golda’s visit, I avoided detailed negotiation, but the study of Fahmy’s ideas enabled us to move very rapidly when the opportunity arose. In the meantime, my primary concern was to avoid endless guerrilla war over these issues. As I said to Fahmy:

  If I spend my capital on every point of the cease-fire, there will not be any capital left to spend on the peace negotiations. If peace negotiations do not succeed, we can take the present line or the October 22 line — it does not mean anything for there will be another war. The question is how we get ceasefire arrangements that are good enough to get us through peace negotiations over the next three to six months.

  And I warned Fahmy that the oil embargo would hamper, not spur, our peace efforts: “If the oil embargoes and curtailments are not stopped, we will have to stop our diplomatic efforts. There can be no pressure.” Fahmy was too sophisticated to imagine that regardless of pressures he could leave it all to us without making any concessions. While not yielding his position on the October 22 line, he indicated that if Israel agreed to regular nonmilitary supplies to the Third Army, Egypt would consider lifting the blockade of Bab el-Mandeb and releasing the Israeli prisoners of war. But would Israel permit any kind of supply to the trapped enemy army? Only Israel’s Prime Minister would have the answer.

  The Golda Meir who arrived in Washington on October 31 was a different person from the leader who had so confidently, even cockily, told Nixon a few months earlier: “We’ve never had it so good.” The war had devastated her; she maintained her strong leadership but she suffered with every bereaved Israeli family. And in that psychological condition, she had to guide her people into a new and largely unfamiliar international environment.

  The realization was beginning to sink in that the war had been tactically victorious but strategically inconclusive. Israel’s aura of invincibility had disappeared as well as the self-confidence that went with it. A divided people approached with confusion what a year earlier it would have celebrated as a triumph: The direct negotiations that had been the stated goal of Israeli diplomacy since 1947 were already taking place on the military level with Egypt, yet their fruits turned to ashes as the implications became evident. All the tangible concessions — above all, territory — had to be made by Israel; once made, they were irrevocable. The Arab quid pro quo was something intangible, such as diplomatic recognition or a legal state of peace, which could always be modified or even withdrawn. Hope that Israel might at last be accepted by its neighbors was dimmed by knowledge that for other countries recognition is where diplomacy begins, not ends; by doubt that any change of Arab policy would be either genuine or permanent.

  America’s involvement in the diplomacy only partially eased the difficulty. As we became the mediator, Israeli-American relations were bound to change in many subtle ways. What Israel wanted from the United States was two nearly irreconcilable courses of action: unconditional support of Israel’s negotiating position, which Israeli domestic politics usually drove toward the tactically intransigent; and influence on the Arab countries to accept the State of Israel and conclude a peace. To fulfill the first role, we would have to act in effect as Israel’s lawyer; to achieve the second objective, we would have to gain Arab confidence and a reputation for fairness. If we were serious about the peace process, we had to take Arab views seriously; on occasion we would have to dissociate from Israeli positions or actions we considered unreasonable. Several years earlier, I had told Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin that so long as the American policy was simply to frustrate Arab reliance on Soviet support, American and Israeli policies would be identical. But once Arab disillusionment was complete, and once Arab states began to turn to us in a spirit of cooperation, differences in perspective or tactics might well emerge. That moment was now approaching, at least as far as Egypt was concerned. All this produced an almost elemental fear in Israel that the United States might become so committed to a new relationship with the Arab world that its support would become less certain and Israel would lose its only friend.

  That this fear had as yet no concrete basis made it all the more nagging. By any normal standard of relations among nations, we had stood by Israel to an unprecedented degree both during the war and in its tumultuous aftermath. We had saved Israel by the airlift and by running diplomatic interference. In the week before Golda’s visit, we had prevented UN condemnation of Israeli cease-fire violations and we had faced down the Soviets in the alert. But for the first time, we had indicated that our support was not unconditional. We had drawn the line at the destruction of the Third Army trapped after that cease-fire. Our dissociation from Israel on that issue was, we thought, the gentlest imaginable in the circumstances. We did not ask for Israeli withdrawal to the October 22 line, only for the passage through Israeli lines of a convoy with humanitarian supplies. But in Israel the substance was less important than the symbolism. If our dissociation should become habit-forming, Israel was lost.

  At any other time, Golda would have coolly taken stock of the situation and decided that Israel’s security would be well preserved by elaborating a joint strategy with an American administration clearly sympathetic to Israel’s strategic concerns. But this visit began nine days after the cease-fire, a week after the Soviet threats leading to the alert. She was drained; she hid her fears behind defiance. She spoke darkly of the one supply convoy as an Egyptian “victory.”

  All this was a surrogate for Golda’s real worry, which went to the very heart of the process of peacemaking. If Israel’s negotiating positions were not sacrosanct, where then was the stopping place? If America reserved the right not to follow Jerusalem’s lead, what could Israel count on? There were answers to these questions, and we found them over the next few weeks. But at that particular moment it seemed to Golda that her country had escaped the specter of military defeat only to encounter the peril of slow diplomatic attrition. “I have left home now,” Golda said on November 1, setting the tone at the first meeting at Blair House:

  because things have reached the stage where, beyond the issues of substance, things must be made clear. . . . We need to know the plans that are being discussed. We need to know, do we get things after they’re done? After it is worked out by other parties? . . . Maybe Israel has to do everything Egypt wants. But we have to know what is being planned between the parties. Are there plans for the negotiations? We’re responsible to our people.

  The issue, of course, was not even remotely one of imposing Egyptian preferences on Israel. As we saw it, keeping the Third Army from being destroyed was the minimum prerequisite for any peace process — which no country needed more than Israel. But Golda had no confidence that we or anybody else knew how to get from here to there. And until she saw a road map, she preferred to stay where she was. She had, moreover, got hold of a real problem. The mounting demands on Israel had less to do with abstract analysis of their merits than with the pressures felt by major countries. “Suppose we start peace negotiations,” she said two days later. “What happens to us then? The Soviets won’t change, the Europeans, Japanese won’t change. Oil is still in Arab hands. How do you know it won’t just be more pressure to do more?” And if that was Israel’s destiny, why not face it at the Suez Canal rather than at some point closer to Israel’s borders?

  Golda had put a good question, permitting no theoretical answer. We sought to ease Israel’s fears of isolation. But dependence is not an easy relationship, especially dependence on a superpower. A small country’s survival in a hostile world can turn on nuances not easily grasped by faraway nations with wider margins of safety. The readiness to run risks for peace was bound to be greater in America than in Israel. And these risks involved America only indirectly; for Israel they were issues of survival. America could afford experiments; for Israel a single miscalculation could spell catastrophe.

  The problem thus boiled down to a challenge as old as international relations themselves. In an interdependent world, each nation must adjust goals and policies to some extent to th
ose of others; no country has the possibility of acting as if only its preferences mattered. For many a decade, Arab intransigence and Soviet pressure had created the illusion that Israel did not have to conduct a foreign policy, only a defense policy. But the October war and Egypt’s turn toward moderation had ended that simple state of affairs. Golda was railing not against America’s strategy but against a new, more complicated, reality:

  MEIR: We didn’t start the war, yet . . .

  KISSINGER: Madame Prime Minister, we are faced with a very tragic situation. You didn’t start the war, but you face a need for wise decisions to protect the survival of Israel. This is what you face. This is my honest judgment as a friend.

  MEIR (her voice shaking): You’re saying we have no choice.

  KISSINGER: We face the international situation that I described to you.

  MEIR: You’re saying we have to accept the judgment of the U.S. . . . We have to accept your judgment? Even on our own affairs? On what is best for us?

  KISSINGER: We all have to accept the judgment of other nations. We’re deferring to your judgment.

  Golda’s apprehension was that if she once accepted our judgment of what was best — even if we were right — this would whet the appetite for even further Israeli concessions. So she went to the other extreme and insisted that Israel need not take into account the view of any other nation — an autonomy and luxury enjoyed not even by the superpowers.

  As for us, we needed badly to work out a common approach with Israel, or else our strategy would be in tatters. If Israel was adamant, our central position in the diplomacy would disintegrate. We were able to reduce, often substantially, what the radicals and Soviets demanded, but, as I said to Golda, “we can do it only if we can show we can deliver and they can’t.” We could not, in other words, shrink the diplomatic agenda for the Middle East to nothing. If we produced no progress at all, the Arabs would have little incentive to deal with us; it would become impossible to split Egypt from the Soviets; there would be no moderate alternative to Arab radicalism. Not even the best friend of Israel could avoid the need for negotiations and concessions altogether; indeed, no true friend could encourage an intransigence that guaranteed the gradual erosion of Israel’s position, as well as another explosion.

  Golda recognized this in theory but at this early stage was not yet ready to face the implications. So she fought a tenacious rearguard action on the issue of supplies for the Third Army. She chose her battlefield cleverly — as a good strategist should — not by pleading Israel’s national interest but by warning of Soviet-American collusion. This tactic was skillfully designed to stir up powerful elements of Israel’s supporters in the United States, but it drove those of us who had gone through three weeks of crisis to a level of irritation that nearly matched our high regard for Golda.

  Nor was she on this occasion a respecter of rank. When she met with Nixon in the Oval Office, he sought to win her to a policy of negotiation:

  The problem you have to consider is whether the policy you have followed — being prepared with the Phantoms and the Skyhawks — can succeed, lacking a settlement. The question is whether a policy of only being prepared for war — although even with a peace settlement you will have to be prepared — is sufficient.

  This last war proves the overwhelming conclusion that a policy of digging in, telling us to give you the arms and you will do the fighting, can’t be the end. Your policy has to be to move as you are moving toward talks.

  Golda would have none of it. She did not propose to rest her people’s survival on assurances from neighbors fresh from launching a surprise attack. She had no category of thought that included supplying a trapped enemy army, no matter when it had been encircled.

  And she reflected her cabinet’s convictions. Indeed, in their despair and panic, Golda’s colleagues dug themselves into total immobility. To break the deadlock, I proposed that Israel accept the “principle” of the October 22 line but then offer to negotiate with Egypt over its precise location. Such a negotiation was bound to be very time-consuming; it would, in effect, shelve the issue. While the negotiations were going on, nonmilitary supplies would be sent to the Third Army through UN checkpoints on the Cairo-Suez access route. In the process we would seek to transform these discussions into a broader negotiation on disengagements of forces that would ultimately make the issue of the ceasefire line moot. At first, Golda accepted this proposal, subject to cabinet approval. The next night she was obliged to reject it because her cabinet would not go along either with accepting the principle of the October 22 line or with permitting UN checkpoints on the Cairo-Suez road. They were prepared to do no more than discuss a general disengagement of forces.

  But the Israeli concept of disengagement of forces was what had been put forward during the night of the alert: a territorial swap, with Israel pulling back to the east bank of the Canal and Egypt to the west bank, each side withdrawing ten kilometers from the Canal. There was no way Sadat would accept such a proposal. Egypt was being asked not only to relinquish all its territorial gains in the recent war but, on top of it, to vacate ten additional kilometers on the west bank where its forces had been deployed without restrictions before the war. This was certain to be rejected — as Golda herself admitted. Indeed, there was a chance that if we associated ourselves with such a scheme, Sadat might decide that American mediation was fruitless and he had no choice except to resume hostilities.

  In the event, Golda permitted one more nonmilitary convoy to proceed, prior to my visit to Cairo.

  Tempers at our daily WSAG meetings were growing short. Some of my colleagues were still urging that the trapped Third Army be resupplied by an American airlift; at one point the Defense Department even identified transport planes for such a mission. Despite my own irritation— after all, Israeli nerves were not the only ones frayed by three weeks of almost sleepless, nearly nonstop tension — I opposed this strongly. An American airlift to an Egyptian army would signal so profound a shift of American diplomatic priorities that it would undercut our own bargaining position. I urged my WSAG colleagues not to show any public displeasure with Israel, for our influence in the Middle East depended on Israel’s being perceived as a close ally difficult to move. A visible split between us would invite mounting outside pressures; it would encourage the Europeans, the Soviet Union, and the nonaligned to press for solutions much less achievable, and therefore more likely to exacerbate the problem, than the ones we were discussing. We would get no benefit from breaking a deadlock by brute force — only escalating demands to do it over and over again.

  Golda too, however difficult she was in private, understood that it was against Israel’s interests to drive matters to the breaking point. Indeed, one of her purposes was pedagogical. She wanted to teach us that an attempt to solve our problems at Israel’s expense was not free and might be painful. And she served a tactical necessity: She knew perfectly well that the issue of the Third Army would be solved one way or the other, but she did not want to saddle her cabinet with making the decision. It was too much to ask of a people so soon after a near-disaster inflicted by an attack by Arab armies. It was easier for Israel to yield to American pressure than to take on the burden of initiating generous proposals. She saw no sense in showing her hand too early. After she had heard what Sadat had to say to me, she would begin to bargain seriously. Her cabinet might overrule her when she was at Blair House; they would not hold out once she was in the chair and facing them.

  Contact with the PLO

  OF all of Israel’s nightmares, none was more elemental than the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PLO), founded in 1964. The possibility that a group claiming all of Palestine for itself might gain any legitimacy whatever was considered a basic threat to Israel’s survival. On the other hand, the imminence of negotiations increased the PLO’s ambitions for a role, and our diplomacy, about to unfold, would be more difficult in the face of its active sabotage — confronting us with a delicate problem.

>   Of course, at this point the Palestinians had not yet achieved ultimate political recognition even by the Arab states. Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967, had spoken only of a “refugee” problem; it accorded them no distinctive political role. The Middle East crisis had had its origin in Palestine, but all parties showed extraordinary ambivalence in their approach to the Palestinians. In 1973 they were still treated as refugees in the UN, as terrorists in the United States and Western Europe, as an opportunity by the Soviets, and as simultaneous inspiration and nuisance by the Arab world. After the October war, as the PLO became increasingly prominent, the ambivalence of some of its supporters mounted. It was never easy to tell how much of the Arab attitude reflected real commitment, fear of the Palestinian terrorist potential, or desire to appeal to domestic radical groups.

  As for the United States, our experiences with the PLO had not been of a nature to inspire much confidence. In 1970, Palestinian terrorists had hijacked three airplanes to Jordan and taken hundreds of passengers hostage, including scores of Americans, holding them for several weeks. Having in the past organized several attempts to assassinate Hussein, this time the PLO attempted to take over his Kingdom; in the bloody struggle of “Black September,” Hussein expelled it from Jordan. In 1972 it assumed responsibility for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games, further forfeiting American sympathy, and in March 1973 PLO supporters assassinated two American diplomats in Khartoum. The PLO was thus overtly anti-American as well as dedicated to the destruction of two important friends of the United States: Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In these circumstances, we did not have a high incentive to advance the “dialogue” with the PLO, as the fashionable phrase ran later — not because of Israeli pressures but because of our perception of the American national interest.