[W]ith all due respect, asking the United States and the Soviet Union to come into the area to guarantee the implementation of the Security Council Resolution would be an ever more grave step, a step which would not serve either the interests of your country or of world peace generally.
Having made clear that we would resist Soviet pressure in December as we had in October, Nixon’s letter reiterated what I also stressed to Fahmy — that a resumption of hostilities would destroy all the achievements of recent months: “A breakdown of the cease-fire would regrettably again force us into a situation of confrontation and that opportunity could be irretrievably destroyed.”
Our warnings — which I suspect were not all that unwelcome to Sadat for use with his hotheads — were balanced by our optimistic description of the diplomatic prospects. The objective conditions for progress were better than ever, both letters stated. Nixon’s committed the United States to a major effort once Geneva was assembled: “It is at the peace conference that the United States will be in a position to exercise our constructive influence towards peace based on Security Council Resolution 242.” And to concert a common strategy, which had almost surely been the purpose of Egyptian complaints, Nixon volunteered me for another trip through the Middle East, which would bring me to Cairo on December 13.
In reply, there was some grumbling for the record by Sadat, some more volatile expressions of exasperation from Fahmy, and some back-and-forth on whether to resume the Kilometer 101 talks and under what conditions. But time worked in favor of what we were trying to achieve. By bringing us closer to the target date of the conference (December 18) and to the Israeli elections (December 31), every exchange left less opportunity for further prolonged disputation. In the absence of other agreed-upon schemes, disengagement would have to be the first item on the agenda; the road to American mediation and the step-by-step approach was opening.
The Road to Geneva
THE prospect of a peace conference was forcing us to maneuver within a seeming contradiction. We strove to assemble a multilateral conference, but our purpose was to use it as a framework for an essentially bilateral diplomacy. Soviet cooperation was necessary to convene Geneva; afterward, we would seek to reduce its role to a minimum. The peace conference could soothe Moscow’s nerves as a prelude to a phase that would no doubt test our relations.
I had seen Dobrynin in Washington on November 17, fresh from my November around-the-world trip. His masters could not have been ecstatic about my forays to Arab capitals, much less about the six-point agreement achieved without Soviet participation or even prior knowledge. Nor was my visit to Peking the sort of exercise that calmed tempers in the Kremlin. It seemed best to turn to less contentious matters. After chatting with Dobrynin briefly and unilluminatingly about my travels, I changed the subject. We were prepared to proceed to assemble the Geneva Conference, I said. I suggested a joint US–Soviet letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who could then issue the formal invitations to the parties, which I listed as Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. (I made no reference to the Palestinians.) I told Dobrynin we would give him a draft of such a letter shortly for comment. In other words, let us not waste time on recriminations over the past but get on with the business at hand.
Nothing so warms the heart of a professional diplomat as the imminence of a major conference. It provides a testing ground for all the arcane knowledge acquired in a lifetime of study about procedures, about abstruse points of protocol, about “auspices” and “chairmanship.” All these were involved in assembling Geneva.
Four days later, on November 21, I sent Dobrynin our draft letter to Waldheim; it stated simply that the United States and the Soviet Union, having canvassed the principal parties, requested the UN Secretary-General to invite Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and Syria to a conference in Geneva beginning on December 17 or 18. The conference would be under the “co-chairmanship” of the United States and the Soviet Union. The rest dealt with technical arrangements.
Moscow’s sense of urgency was reflected in the speed of its reply, which arrived the very next day, an unprecedentedly rapid turnaround time. Dobrynin told me the proposed dates for Geneva were convenient; Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would be happy to attend. He would appreciate the maximum amount of time I could give to the conference. I promised two days and I offered to dine with Gromyko the evening before the conference opened.
One day later (November 23), Dobrynin handed me a redraft. It was highly revealing about Soviet suspicions that Geneva might prove stillborn. It added a clause our draft had ignored: that the conference would take place under the “auspices” of the United States and the Soviet Union. It stressed that the conference, opened at the foreign minister level, should then be continued by “specially appointed representatives with the ambassadorial rank.” The fact that the Soviet Union was so eager to have its special status at the conference certified and to have a commitment to some form of permanent machinery at a senior level reflected its fears — in fact quite justified — that we might seek to downgrade the conference. The trouble from Moscow’s point of view was that if all the other parties agreed with what it suspected was our strategy, no procedural gimmick could prevent our implementing it. The rank of the plenipotentiaries would be nearly irrelevant if the focus of diplomacy shifted into bilateral forums. Gromyko had analyzed his problem correctly; his difficulty was that there was no solution to it.
At the same time, the eagerness of the Soviets to convene the conference was reflected in the fact that Gromyko’s redraft fell in with our omission of any explicit mention of the Palestinians. (It confined the invitation to Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel “without prejudice to possible additional participants at a subsequent stage.”)
In the midst of these efforts to assemble a conference, one of whose principal subjects would be just how much territory Israel would relinquish, the Arab leaders felt the need for a summit meeting. In the past they had been able to reconcile their diverse points of view only by an exalted rhetoric certain to inflame passions; the Algiers summit proved no exception. The Arab foreign ministers met on November 24; the heads of government assembled from November 26 to November 28. The purposes were as varied and contradictory as the exuberant personalities that composed the conference. The two extremes of the Arab spectrum — Libya and Iraq on the radical side, Jordan on the moderate side — essentially boycotted the meeting, the radicals because they objected to any peace process, King Hussein for various reasons, among them that he feared (correctly) resolutions weighted in favor of the PLO. Egypt attended because it wanted retroactive Arab approval for its policy since the cease-fire; it was not yet sure enough of the new American connection or sufficiently confident of the peace process to go it alone. Syria sought an expression of Arab solidarity to curb Egyptian temptations for a separate peace. Saudi Arabia worked for a consensus that would avoid the need to choose between radicals and moderates. The remainder were torn between the counsels of prudence, which were on the side of Sadat, and the compulsion for the flamboyant rhetoric of Arab unity, which tilted this, like all other Arab summit meetings, in the direction of militance.
The outcome was that everyone gained a little of what he wanted. Egypt obtained conditional approval for acts already accomplished. There was at least a tepid endorsement of the peace process. But the program for it was no different from what had produced a stalemate for six years: immediate Israeli evacuation of all occupied Arab territories, including Jerusalem, and “the reestablishment of the full national rights for the Palestinian people.”1 The first condition carefully did not define “occupied Arab territories,” but since PLO leader Yasir Arafat attended and approved, the reason may have been to leave open the possibility of going even beyond the standard insistence on the 1967 borders to more far-reaching demands such as the UN partition plan of 1947. What the gathering understood by “the full national rights” of the Palestinians was no more spelled out; that they would not be satisfied by Jordanian
rule on the West Bank was underlined by the summit’s recognition of the PLO as the “sole” representative of the Palestinians.
The impact of the summit was to sour the attitudes of Israel and Jordan — targets of the Algiers meeting — toward the Geneva Conference. On December 1, Ambassador Dean Brown was told by Jordanian Prime Minister Zaid Rifai that the Algiers resolutions amounted to asking Jordan to try to negotiate with Israel for the return of the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem, assume responsibility (and eventually all the blame) for whatever territorial concessions might be necessary, and then turn over what had been achieved to the PLO. Jordan would not play such a role. However, Rifai reiterated that Jordan was willing “in principle” to attend Geneva; it took seriously our argument that if it did not appear it would risk playing into the hands of its opponents by seeming to abandon its claim to the West Bank.
Getting Israel’s agreement to go to Geneva was also made more difficult. Israel was determined to resist the demands that Algiers espoused. The Algiers summit therefore injected new tensions into a diplomacy that soon found all the parties quibbling over the draft letter of invitation. Israel demanded an explicit provision in the invitation stating that the original composition of the conference could not be expanded except by unanimity — so that the PLO would be formally barred and its later participation subject to an Israeli veto. Israel was also highly suspicious of the United Nations and did not want anything more than a ceremonial UN role. Meanwhile, after Algiers, Egypt’s Fahmy predictably went in the opposite direction, insisting on explicit reference in the letter to Palestinian participation at a later stage of the conference. He proposed the formula that “the timing of the participation of the Palestinians” would be discussed during the first stage of the conference — which implied, of course, that the fact of Palestinian participation was already settled. While he was at it, Fahmy also subjected our draft letter to other criticism. He wanted to dilute Soviet influence; hence he objected to Soviet-American “auspices” and wanted a greater UN role. Syria enveloped itself in silence.
However hairsplitting these objections, each had to be conveyed to the other parties; every proposed compromise formulation had to be marketed around the entire circuit. The conference was threatening to drown in paper. The problem was all the greater for me because I left on Saturday, December 8, for a NATO meeting in Brussels, to be followed by my excursion through the Middle East, so that after being received in Washington each revision had to be retransmitted to me wherever I was and then my reaction had to go via Washington to all the parties. The overworked communicators on my airplane performed heroically.
On December 5, we came up with a new version of the letter of invitation that attempted to enable each participant to claim that some of its views had been incorporated. By the same token, of course, each side could complain that it had not achieved all of its ends. The record shows that they were more assiduous in voicing their complaints than their satisfaction.
Our draft finessed the issue of UN auspices by language that could be interpreted as confining the United Nations to convening the conference, not running it; the Secretary-General’s participation was expressly limited to the opening phase. As for the Palestinians, we put forward the formulation that “the question” (not “the timing”) of their participation would be discussed during the first stage of the conference — implying that the issue was unresolved. To us it seemed not much of a concession, for it permitted only what each participant had the right to raise in any event: whether additional parties should join the conference. But it proved far too much for Golda, who resisted any reference to Palestinians no matter how hedged and qualified.
Then the fun started. The Soviet Union insisted on US–Soviet auspices; Egypt was equally adamant on UN auspices. The Soviet Union and Egypt maintained that the earlier phrase about “timing” of Palestinian participation was sacrosanct. Lest we become overconfident, Israel rejected UN auspices and added a new condition that even if the final text proved acceptable, it would not meet with the Syrians until they released all Israeli prisoners of war. And the proposed opening of the conference was only eleven days away.
A blizzard of telegrams from me resulted. By December 11, all the parties but one had backed off and informally accepted our December 5 draft. Israel, moving closer to elections, remained adamant. As Dayan had told me on a flying visit to Washington on December 7, “Golda cannot go into elections if there is any doubt about the Palestinians going to the conference.”
But beyond the electoral situation, Golda Meir in her elemental way had hold of a crucial point that in the passion of the moment had not been so self-evident. Our reference to Palestinians was innocuous enough, but the Arab insistence on referring to them hid a substantive, not a procedural, intent; it singled out one agenda item for special attention in a letter of invitation. For Golda therefore the issue was psychological, not technical; she knew that the peace conference was bound to escalate procedure into hateful and terrifying substance.
Once dug in, Golda was not to be budged. She remained unmoved even by a direct intervention from Nixon. On December 13 the President learned from his morning briefing of the negative attitude of the Israeli government. He appended the following note: “K, tell Eban et al. — if this demand on their part brings another war, they go it alone.” In my absence, Brent Scowcroft passed Nixon’s message to Dinitz — I suspect in slightly attenuated form. When he roused from the torpor of Watergate, Nixon’s combative instincts would come to the fore. He sent a personal letter to Golda, which concluded with the ominous warning of withdrawing American backing:
I want to say to you in all solemnity that if Israel now fails to take a favorable decision to participate in the conference on the basis of the letter that we have worked out, this will not be understood either in the United States or in the world and I will not be able to justify the support which I have consistently rendered in our mutual interests to your government.
Following her usual tactic, Golda ignored Nixon’s letter, saying she would reply personally to me in Jerusalem (she never did). As for Scowcroft, he was given the simple comment that the Prime Minister was not persuaded.
On December 13, I was heading from Europe to the Middle East. The opening of the Geneva Conference was set for five days away and there was still no agreement on the language of the invitation.
Algiers
EVERY trip to the Middle East required its own choreography. We were operating simultaneously in three dimensions: the US–Soviet relationship, the struggle for influence between Arab moderates and radicals, and the Arab-Israeli crisis. These were partly overlapping, partly autonomous. Every venture into the Middle East thus had the attributes of a three-ring circus, the principal difference being that as one entered one ring the actors in the other two would stop whatever they were doing and adjust their own actions in the light of what they saw or — more disconcertingly — what they thought they saw.
Experience had taught me that despite the oft-proclaimed Arab solidarity, the intensive inter-Arab rivalries and jealousies were an imponderable element, all the harder to predict because most of them were intensely personal. For example, as I have mentioned, my dinner remark to King Faisal in Riyadh about Sadat’s leadership of the Arab world had met with an unenthusiastic reaction (see Chapter XIII). Later I was to hear through other Arab sources that Saudi Arabia was quite sensitive on this point. We were advised not to take it for granted that King Faisal would fall into line with whatever Sadat had agreed; Saudi Arabia would insist on its own views.
I had also found that news traveled with wondrous rapidity through the Arab world, somewhat skewed at each stop, but in its total impact presenting an account that was on the mark psychologically if not factually. And since most political calculations occur in the minds of men, the psychological element is often decisive. The extraordinary volubility of Arab leaders is a device by which they fine-tune their actions and establish the moral terrain. Since key leaders rel
y on the rumor mill, often giving it more credence than direct reports, it is usually the better part of wisdom to prepare the ground by making sure that some other Arab leader has been exposed to one’s arguments. Even if they discount part of what their brother Arab tells them — an almost obligatory test of manhood — they are apt to credit secondhand information as a tribute to their status as insiders and to believe that it gives them an edge over their rivals. One must take care, however, to reserve some important piece of information for one’s principal interlocutor. Much as he appreciates indirection, he prizes exclusivity even more.
One aim of the Geneva Conference was to prevent the peace process from becoming engulfed in the polarization between radicals and moderates in the Arab world. From this point of view, Damascus was to be the crucial stop on this my second journey to the Middle East, as Cairo had been on the first. If Syria participated or even acquiesced in the Geneva Conference — and as yet we had heard not a word from it directly — and agreed to disengagement as the first agenda item, our basic strategy would be safe. Otherwise there would be a bitter struggle at each stage. There was reason for hope. Ever since the end of the war, Syria had been edging toward contact with the United States. I had had a meeting in Washington on November 2 with Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Zakariya Ismail, who was in America to attend the UN General Assembly. He had no instructions of any sort; the fact of a first visit to Washington in many years by a relatively senior Syrian official seemed to be as much as the Damascus political situation could take. In Saudi Arabia on November 8 I had been told that Syria’s President Hafez al-Asad wanted direct talks with us. Thereafter, I met on November 21 with Syria’s UN representative Haytham Kaylani, as a prelude to my visit to Damascus scheduled for December 15.
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