Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  My visit to Jerusalem began with one of the moving occasions that ennoble public life. At 4:30 P.M. on February 27, I called on Golda in the Prime Minister’s office in the sandstone government building overlooking the western outskirts of Jerusalem. After the usual commotion with photographers, she ushered me into her small, Spartan private office where we seated ourselves in chairs around the coffee table. She was accompanied by Simcha Dinitz, I by Peter Rodman. In Israel every human life is infinitely precious. America had recently known the anguish over prisoners of war or men missing in action in Indochina. But Israel is so small as to constitute in effect one extended family (with the bitter quarrels only families can afford). And the vivid memory of centuries of persecution and attempted extermination is etched so deeply into the individual consciousness that the loss of even one person evokes premonitions of catastrophe. Like many basically sentimental peoples, Israelis sometimes cultivate a surface abrasiveness; it is because they dare not give vent to what they feel lest they be thought weak or prove unable to contain their emotions.

  For Golda the list of surviving Israeli prisoners was not a negotiating counter or a political coup; it was a record of the life or death of members of her family, names of young men that would bring joy to their loved ones and despair by omission to others. Her bearing and her careworn face showed the anticipation and then the relief that she felt, though she forced herself to address the mundane technical requirements of the moment:

  KISSINGER: Let me get to the immediate problem first. Here is the list. It is in Arabic. [I handed it over and she pored over it intently.]

  MEIR: There are 65?

  KISSINGER: Yes.

  MEIR: They are all alive?

  KISSINGER: Yes, it is guaranteed they’re all alive. Red Cross visits will start this morning. [They started March 1.] They’ll get in touch with us tomorrow.

  MEIR [agitated]: We mustn’t lose a moment. I’ve met with the families the night before last. I have had everything set in case Dr. Kissinger had the list. We will take it to Tel Aviv to translate and all the parents will know within two hours.

  KISSINGER: The Syrians don’t want Israel to be the only one making an announcement.

  MEIR: You should do it?

  KISSINGER: No, you can do it, but they don’t want you to be the only one. Here is what we propose to say.

  I handed over a brief American announcement summing up the agreed procedure:

  Secretary of State Kissinger has informed the President of the following:

  (1) The Secretary of State is authorized by the Government of Syria to transmit to the Government of Israel a list of the total number of Israeli Prisoners of War now held by the Government of Syria. There are 65 (sixty-five) names on the list.

  (2) The Government of Syria has agreed that Red Cross visits to the Israeli Prisoners of War it holds shall begin on the morning of March 1.

  (3) The Government of Israel will give its ideas on disengagement of Syrian and Israeli forces to the Secretary of State on March 1 for transmittal to the Government of Syria. The Secretary of State will personally take those ideas to Damascus.

  I continued:

  KISSINGER: You’re not bound by these words, but you should say the third paragraph in some form.

  When do you propose to speak?

  MEIR: Not until we hear the families are notified. Would you mind if Elazar comes in now and takes it?

  KISSINGER: No.

  I told Golda that I would hold up our announcement until she had made hers. As Dinitz got up to call in the Chief of Staff, he paused by the door and turned to me in a quiet voice: “It’s very exciting, Mr. Secretary.”

  Chief of Staff David Elazar was one of the truly noble men I have met, who by now knew he would become — unjustly — the sacrificial victim for Israel’s frustrations in the October war and yet bore his fate in silence and dignity. He came into the room, took the list from the Prime Minister, read it, and turned away so that I would not see that he was crying. Then he faced me and spoke hoarsely: “Dr. Kissinger, we are very grateful.” Golda and I discussed the notification of families and set a time for the announcement, which I made sure would be confirmed from the White House shortly after Golda had spoken. Then Elazar rushed out to dispatch the list to the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.

  We turned immediately to the business at hand, in which my main task was to ensure Golda’s understanding of the new procedure to which I had obtained Asad’s concurrence. I informed her that Asad had said he would break off the talks if Israel offered only a return to the October 6 line; I suspected that Israel would offer nothing better (a wildly optimistic estimate). The problem was, I said, to gain time and prevent the whole enterprise from blowing up at this sensitive juncture: “We can’t have it blow up before Pompidou goes to Russia . . . and while Gromyko is in the area. You would then get everybody into the act — everybody who is now mesmerized by success.” And I would see Faisal after my next visit in Israel. The best solution would be to keep the talks going; I would like to confirm to Asad that, whatever he thought of Israel’s proposed disengagement plan, Dayan would come to Washington in two weeks’ time for further discussion.

  Golda could be maddeningly stubborn, but not when she was handed on a silver platter an opportunity for a delay that would get her through the period of the formation of her cabinet. She accepted my proposal with alacrity. She would send Dayan or whoever was appointed defense minister.

  With that, at 6:00 P.M. we joined the negotiating teams, the veterans of the Egyptian disengagement talks that had ended in so warm a glow that one nearly forgot the many teeth-grinding sessions that had preceded it. But not quite. Seeing them all assembled gave me a sinking feeling nearly equal to my personal affection for them. Golda began by thanking me in front of her colleagues for the prisoner list. In her gruffly delicate way she paid me the highest compliment of suggesting that I had acted out of humanity, not reasons of state:

  I think without words the Secretary realizes what he has done, what it has meant for us to get this list. Maybe in some places people don’t get excited about 60 names, 65 names, but you people understand, and to us it means more than we can say, and we really — I don’t want to say “thank you” because I know you did it because you understood what this is about, but I want you to know how our people feel. You will feel it, I am sure, in the streets and everywhere. This is a great thing that you have done.

  The warmth of the opening in no way softened the fundamental Israeli position, which became clear immediately. Dayan, who acted as spokesman, summed it up in the proposition that disengagement on the Syrian front was a unilateral Israeli concession; unlike the Sinai disengagement, it brought no corresponding benefits to Israel. “We shall get absolutely nothing in return,” said Dayan, who had spearheaded the Sinai disengagement plan, had opposed occupying the Golan in 1967, but by now was already psychologically out of government and in opposition. Part of it was tough negotiating tactics. If you start out by rejecting the very concept underlying the negotiation, you can avoid pressure on substance; any small movement after that (including the very presentation of a plan) is endowed with symbolic significance for which a price can be exacted. But part of it was a reflection of the primeval Israeli hatred and fear and suspicion of all things Syrian — an exact mirror image of what I had found on the other side.

  Whether by design or instinct, the practical result was that we spent a great deal of time not on Israel’s plan for disengagement, for which I had come, but on why there should be negotiations at all — an exercise I had thought settled weeks earlier. I made a lengthy argument to the effect that disengagement on the Golan Heights was a political imperative. It was the key to a moderate political evolution in the whole region:

  What Israel gets out of the Syrian negotiation is to have a radical Arab state sign a document with Israel. It is to remove the pressures on Egypt, which really only Syria can generate. . . . It gives the moderate Arabs . . . an opportunity to legi
timize their course. And from then on every argument with the Syrians will not be a question of principle but a question of tactics. And finally, with Syria having been drawn into this negotiation, the frantic Soviet effort to get itself involved will be thwarted for at least — since we are living here in a crisis, any six month period I consider an asset.

  An additional advantage, I argued, was that it would prevent the coalescence of Soviet, European, and Japanese pressures. But the over-whelming reason was positive; it was the best, perhaps the only, route to peace:

  I have to tell you honestly: my judgment is that Egypt is genuinely willing to make peace with Israel, and that I have never discussed. It is not inconceivable to me that Sadat would be as balanced about an overall settlement, so long as the sovereignty issue can somehow be avoided, as he was in the disengagement agreement. . . .

  My Israeli interlocutors, never having met Sadat or Asad, thought this farfetched. They suspected a trick with Sadat; they were sure of it with Asad. Still, Golda accepted the rest of my arguments with far less belligerence than she had displayed in the early phases of the Egyptian negotiation, so soon after the war. This hardly meant she was prepared to strike a deal. On the other hand, she was ready — contrary to much of her cabinet — to begin the process of negotiation. Therefore she was happy enough to have her colleagues exposed to a geopolitical analysis that might overcome their resistance to entering into negotiations. Unfortunately, it was not sufficiently persuasive to tempt my Israeli interlocutors into putting forward a proposal that offered even the remotest basis for compromise. Dayan and Elazar did the briefing; what they presented turned out to be not a formal disengagement proposal but a “schematic presentation” — a coy formula probably meaning that the entire cabinet had not yet seen it and would therefore have an escape hatch should Asad inconceivably accept it.

  Fundamentally, the “schematic presentation” was similar to the complex plans or “models” over which the Kilometer 101 talks had foundered. It envisaged a UN buffer zone of a few kilometers’ width, on each side of which would be a zone ten kilometers wide of (unspecified) force limitations; a twenty-kilometer belt free of artillery; and a thirty-to-forty-kilometer belt free of surface-to-air missiles. This would require a mathematician to unravel: seven zones on the crowded Golan Heights — an area at most twenty-five kilometers deep — and extending to well behind Damascus. Even that might be manageable, or could be simplified in negotiation, provided the final line to which the Israelis withdrew had some attraction for Asad.

  That, however, proved to be the biggest stumbling block. Asad, I have said, had told me that he would not negotiate on the basis of an Israeli pullback only to the October 6 (prewar) line; he had to regain some territory beyond that, some land that Israel had captured in 1967, or he would not be able to justify the negotiation domestically. The “schematic” outline would spare him even that embarrassment: It would have moved the old Israeli line forward. Specifically, it involved only the Israeli salient newly captured in the October war divided into three parts: The easternmost section — practically the environs of Damascus — would be returned to Syria; the central portion would become a UN zone; the western part would remain under Israeli occupation, thereby permanently advancing the Israeli line east into Syria from the October 6 line. Since the arms limitation would be counted from the forward Syrian line, the practical result would be to push the Syrian air defense to behind Damascus and even the artillery into the outskirts of the capital.

  There was no point exploring these propositions. Put forward without the customary Israeli bravado — even a little sheepishly — they reflected the absence of a government rather than a considered position. The schematic presentation was so preposterous as to be actually reassuring. I was sure that it would not be maintained after a new government was formed. So there was not the intense debate that would surely have followed had I taken the plan seriously. I said briefly that in my estimate the final disengagement line would have to involve pulling back some two to four kilometers west of the prewar line and would have to return the town of Quneitra (held since 1967) to Syria. Normally, I went at least one round before putting forth my own ideas. But the Israeli plan was so impossible of achievement that I thought it best to bring my Israeli friends down to earth. I did not press the point, nor did they debate it — a basically hopeful sign.

  My much more serious difficulty was what would happen in Damascus when on March 1 I returned with the famous, long-awaited Israeli plan for the sake of which so many messages had flown back and forth across the ocean. Asad had promised me that he would send an emissary to Washington for further talks in a few weeks, but that was before he knew how preposterous the Israeli scheme was. If he was serious about his warning that he would reject the prewar line out of hand, he would surely send me packing with this offer. Our Mideast mediation would then fall apart at the worst possible moment — with Gromyko still in the area, Pompidou heading for Moscow, our allies about to launch a Euro-Arab dialogue, and the Arab oil ministers still to meet on the embargo.

  So I decided to vary the script in favor of the unexpected. The objective now was to avoid the demonstration of failure, and that could be achieved only by showing Asad no Israeli plan at all on this trip, despite the commitment that had induced Asad to release the POW list. I would argue that at this stage I preferred to sketch only broad ideas, not a plan; details would be discussed better by Syrian and Israeli emissaries when they came to Washington. I told the Israeli negotiating team:

  The position I will take [with Asad] is that we discussed the plan; that since this was the first time you ever discussed it with me, since you never had the list, it opened up so many complexities that I didn’t feel I could present it, but, on the other hand, to show your goodwill, you offered to send a senior minister to Washington in two weeks. I am sure I can get Sadat’s support for it, because Sadat cannot want this mission to blow up. Any other approach is too dangerous.

  Relieved of the anxiety of being blamed for a breakdown of the talks, incapable of adopting a formal position until a new government was in place, the Israeli negotiating team cheerfully accepted my suggestion, uncharacteristically without a single demurrer. I would play out the scenario — visit Cairo, stop in Jerusalem again to pick up the nonexistent plan, and then hope to get through an evening in Damascus without having everything unravel.

  Back to Cairo

  I WAS confident Sadat would give his support to my playing for time. He shared with us the desire to avoid a blowup, for that would force him to strike a militant pose contrary to his overall strategy and would prolong the oil embargo, which he knew would cost him dearly in anti-Arab sentiment in the United States. Nor did I think he would be impatient at the deliberateness of my scenario. If Syrian disengagement happened too easily, he ran the risk of being told he should have stalled on Sinai to achieve a joint Syrian-Egyptian agreement, or that he wasted too much time on negotiation. It would be human, too, if subconsciously at least he preferred Asad’s achievement to be slightly less than his own.

  Beyond these tactical motives, Sadat and I shared similar philosophies about the conduct of diplomacy. We were both sure that passivity is the worst posture. Inevitably, other parties step in to define the terms of reference and one’s energies are absorbed in responding to initiatives one has not designed. Gradually one loses the ability to shape events. A sense of direction is lost; one comes to define success as calamity avoided. Much better to talk from one’s own agenda, or failing this, to prevail with a procedure that husbands the maximum degree of control.

  Nourished by these reflections, I arrived in Egypt on Thursday morning, February 28, and met Sadat at the Presidential rest house at Giza. The sight of the eternal Pyramids, subtly shifting contours with the changing light, eased taut nerves. I explained to Sadat the complexities of the Israeli domestic situation, the Israeli proposal so extreme that it could not be serious, and the new procedure I proposed to adopt. The precise geography
of the Golan being somewhat hazy in his mind, he had his Chief of Staff, General Gamasy, bring in a large map which, like a jigsaw puzzle, had to be fitted together on the floor. I noted that it showed the proposed disengagement lines that Asad had handed to me on January 20 and had obviously also transmitted to Cairo. With his shrewd sense of public relations, Sadat called in the photographers for a picture of a group of senior advisers earnestly poring over situation maps — tangible proof that something serious was going on. My pleasure at the stratagem was subdued by the fear that some published photo might show the lines proposed by Syria, producing an explosion in Israel.

  When we were alone again, Sadat ordered General Gamasy to leave immediately for Damascus. He was sending Gamasy, Sadat said with a twinkle in his eye, in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the joint Arab armies, which from my knowledge of Syrian perceptions seemed to me to be rubbing salt into their wounds. Gamasy’s assignment, based on his experience as negotiator at Kilometer 101, was to educate Asad on Israeli negotiating tactics and to convince the Syrian leader that even in the absence of a formal Israeli proposal the procedure I had outlined was the one most likely to succeed.

  Sadat and I then retired to lunch alone. As during our earlier talks in Aswan, he asked for an honest assessment and, as then, I gave it to him. After the Israeli cabinet was formed, I told him, it would probably be possible with tremendous effort to induce Israel to withdraw to the October 6 line, which Asad had already declared was insufficient. With another burst of effort a few kilometers beyond that line might be conceded, to be put under Syrian civil administration as a UN-controlled area. To achieve these objectives, many weeks would be required. The Syrians with their confrontational negotiating tactics would be able to achieve nothing on their own; it would be difficult to imagine two parties less able to come to an agreement by themselves even if both of them wanted it.