Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Eager to accumulate capital in the Arab world for the imminent shuttle, we voted for this resolution. It was an evasion. No matter how artfully drafted, it made a moral distinction between the assault on an Israeli village and Israel’s retaliation. It criticized the former only by vague implication, the latter explicitly. Israel was outraged and with good reason. Yet its votaries overdid their protests. They had witnessed an unwise tactical move, not, as they clamored, a shift in our policy — but a move that heightened the sense of beleaguerment and insecurity in Israel.

  The Shuttle Begins: The Line of Separation

  THE shuttle began in a warm glow. It was the first diplomatic trip abroad on which Nancy came with me, easing the lives of everybody with her serenity and goodwill and her mellowing effect on me. What she absorbed of my strain, despite the courtesies of our hosts, is exemplified by her acquisition of two ulcers, which put her in the hospital for weeks at the end of the trip.

  I traveled with my usual team of Mideast aides: Joe Sisco, Roy Atherton, Hal Saunders, and Peter Rodman. Robert McCloskey accompanied me as adviser and senior press spokesman, along with Department press secretary Robert Anderson. Ellsworth Bunker, who had been a stalwart Ambassador in Saigon and had journeyed with me through the hostile labyrinth of the Vietnamese peace negotiations, came along on the Syrian shuttle in his capacity as American “permanent representative” to the quiescent Geneva Conference. Present throughout was a party of fourteen hardy journalists who were on my plane on all the hops between Damascus and Jerusalem and around the Middle East. Even had I sought solitude, it is unimaginable that the press would have left a Secretary of State unmonitored for days — in the end weeks — certainly not least during the Watergate paroxysms.

  The first few stages were a triumphal tour. I met Gromyko in Geneva on the weekend of April 28–29. We went through our usual shadow-boxing. The Soviet Union wanted to participate in a negotiation to which it had nothing to contribute and in which none of the parties wanted it. Gromyko continued on a course that seemed to me more humiliating than beneficial to the Soviet Union. He pressed once again for a symbolic meeting between us in Damascus; he implied strongly that he would show up there whatever my preferences. I evaded the proposal. Afterward, I notified Asad of Gromyko’s plans, adding the obvious: that I could not object to the visit of a Soviet foreign minister to the capital of a friendly country — provided his plans did not imply a meeting with me.

  I was confident to the point of cockiness. I told Gromyko that I hoped to complete the agreement by May 9 or 10. He did not dispute it. Nor did he argue over my formulation that the main problem was to obtain an Israeli withdrawal to the prewar line with perhaps a few kilometers of 1967 land added. Gromyko seemed somewhat ambivalent about where Soviet interests lay. For both Egypt and we had made the reopening of the Geneva Conference firmly dependent on the conclusion of the Syrian disengagement.

  It all wound up in a communiqué that met the first test of any successful US–Soviet colloquy on the Middle East: It was too little for the Soviets and at the borderline of being too much for Israel and Egypt (Syria expressed no opinion):

  The Minister and the Secretary exchanged views on the current status of the negotiations of a Middle East settlement and on the next phase of these negotiations. The two sides agreed to exercise their influence toward a positive outcome and to remain in close touch with each other so as to strive to coordinate their efforts for a peaceful settlement in the area. Both sides expressed themselves in favor of the resumption of the work of the Geneva Peace Conference on the Middle East at an early date.

  On Monday, April 29,1 stopped overnight in Algiers, hoping to enlist Boumedienne’s influence with Asad. I had seen him a little more than two weeks earlier when he had called on Nixon in Washington. As then, he favored a Golan disengagement even while insisting on the conventional argument that it could only be a first step toward Syrian recovery of the pre–1967 borders. He would act in support of our efforts, he said. This gave us hope that he might urge Syria toward compromise.

  Boumedienne, though thinking of himself as a radical, had little use for the Soviets. He had heard that Gromyko was coming to the Mideast. I said that I would not meet him in an Arab capital: “I won’t do it because I don’t want to leave the impression that he and we are dictating to Arab countries.” Boumedienne agreed that it would leave a poor impression and not be helpful to the Syrians. He claimed that even Asad was embarrassed at Gromyko’s insistence on meeting me in Damascus. The meeting in Geneva had been sufficient, Boumedienne thought. In reply to his query I gave him my honest appraisal of the Soviets:

  I will speak frankly with you, Mr. President. I give you first my estimate. You’ve met them; you have your own opinion. They are not very far-sighted. They are very bureaucratic, very much affected by their internal maneuvering. They are prepared to pay a very high price for appearances instead of reality. They rely on intimidation but are not willing to run great risks. Therefore, when intimidation doesn’t succeed, they pull back immediately. That is my general evaluation. . . .

  On the other hand, in case of a war, they are afraid of a Syrian defeat because that might force them to make decisions they are not prepared to make and bring them into conflicts they do not wish. So their policy is confused. They don’t really want me to succeed, but they are also afraid of my failure.

  Boumedienne had his own, similar experiences:

  The Soviets are complicated. We have long-time relations with them going back to 1963. In spite of this, I do agree their positions are always characterized by this aspect of hesitation. . . .

  For instance, Sadat was demanding weapons, emphasizing this before the October War. They sent weapons, but not in the quantities which were requested nor of the kinds that were requested. During the war, they were obliged to send Sadat the weapons he was demanding.

  But in general, they have a limit which I call the red line. They will not go beyond the red line. It is the line drawn between them and the United States.

  Boumedienne’s analysis reflected the Soviet dilemma in the Middle East. They were willing enough to fish in troubled waters but they were loath to run major risks. They wanted the fruits of success without its exertions or complexities. Their strength was not a master plan but the exploitation of the confusion of their adversary. They wanted no showdown with the United States. There was thus a limit to expansionism provided we were determined and an opportunity for coexistence if we were farsighted.

  After Algiers I did not head directly for the capitals of the two principals in the negotiation. I went instead to Alexandria to concert strategy with the Egyptian President. Sadat had pulled out all the stops. Safa Palace along the waterfront had been put at our disposal. Colorful honor guards accompanied us everywhere. We visited the excavation of a Roman amphitheater around whose periphery Egyptian lancers on horses formed a most dramatic backdrop. Sadat and Fahmy were insistent that I complete the Syrian disengagement on this shuttle. If I returned to America without it, Syria might appeal to the Security Council, restoring the Soviets to a principal role in the negotiations. After that, matters would move to an Arab summit and rapidly get out of control. Our Egyptian hosts were ebullient; they foresaw no need for any of these expedients. They promised to support any scheme that could be presented as comparable to Egypt’s, yielding Syria both the salient taken in 1973 and a few kilometers of Israel’s 1967 conquests, including the town of Quneitra. The only thing the Egyptians failed to tell me was how to get Israel to accept this proposition.

  For the next few weeks, Quneitra haunted every waking hour and probably our dreams (or rather nightmares) as well. Before the 1967 war it had been the provincial capital of the Golan region, a dusty little town of under 20,000 shopkeepers, peasants, and clerks nestling under the Golan hills. It now became for a month the focal point of Mideast diplomacy. It qualified for the role because it was situated three kilometers inside the line of the Israeli conquests in 1967 (see the maps on p
age 938 and facing). It had been heavily damaged first in the 1967 war, then in the 1973 war, and then further by Israeli bulldozers for no apparent reason after the 1973 war.

  It fulfilled all prerequisites for its symbolic role. Israelis had never settled there; the nearest Israeli settlement was on the far slope of a hill, another four kilometers to the west. However, some of the farmlands connected with the nearby Israeli settlements approached a few hundred meters from the edge of town. And various hills a few kilometers to the west of town provided vantage points (and strategic positions) that complicated the task of drawing a dividing line through this bitterly fought-over terrain. Quneitra was not a strategic asset but a prize, a trophy, a symbol for both sides, all the more contested for that; its disposition would determine the outcome of the negotiations.

  More than is usually the case depended on the stamina of the negotiator. For at that moment my ultimate recourse, the President, was approaching the climax of Watergate. On April 30 in Washington, the White House released a huge compilation of the transcripts of taped Oval Office conversations relating to Watergate. This extraordinary gesture of self-abasement was meant to show that the President had nothing to hide and that the tapes showed no wrongdoing. It was also designed to forestall even more sweeping requests for tapes from the Special Prosecutor or the House Judiciary Committee. It backfired. The blunt, hard-boiled, occasionally tawdry conversations were shocking to the public both for their content and for their crude language. Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, the Republican Minority Leader of the Senate, called them “disgusting.” The media dealt with little else. I was negotiating without an authoritative President behind me.

  I arrived on Thursday, May 2, in an Israel in turmoil. In January I had been hailed as a messenger of peace. Three months later signs spelling my name in Arabic — as if I were an Arab representative — welcomed me. Begin’s Likud Party organized street demonstrations; they blocked the street on which Golda Meir’s house was located, so we usually met in the Prime Ministerial office. The abuse came from a minority; most of Israel yearned for both peace and the physical security of territory and it could not decide between its longing and its fears. Israeli schizophrenia was well exemplified by the masseur in the King David Hotel (where I stayed with my party) who gave me a rubdown with a violence that belied his goodwill. He was praying for my success, he allowed, pounding me with apparent affection; all of Israel was counting on me. How many kilometers on the Golan was it safe to give up? I inquired if only to gain a temporary surcease. “Give up? Kilometers? On the Golan? You must be crazy!” shouted my tormentor, returning to his task with a redoubled vigor.

  Quneitra and Environs

  Our UN vote rankled deeply. It was seen as the harbinger of a possible shift in American policy; deeper still as a symptom of Israel’s moral isolation. When we turned to the negotiations, the tensions acquired a more concrete focus. Prime Minister Meir and her associates knew very well what I considered the minimum concessions needed for a successful negotiation. I had told Dayan on March 29; I had written it to Golda in April; I had said so innumerable times to Dinitz. This did not soften up my Israeli counterparts to any significant degree. Their concern was less the terms than the principle. Why should Syria, after starting a war in which it lost territory, be rewarded with a line better than the one from which it started? Golda was vehement:

  If you strangle me, I don’t know how to go to the people and explain to them that, after all, never mind, there was a war, there was another war, more dead, more wounded, but we have to give up Syrian territory. Why? Because Asad says that it is his territory. . . . I can never accept that there is no difference between the attacker and the attacked; I can’t accept that. . . . It isn’t Begin that scares us; it isn’t Sharon that scares me, but it is myself, that I can’t make peace with the idea that [we had] two wars in seven years, with the price we paid for it. Then Asad says he must get his territory back. I mean, that is chutzpah of the nth degree. How is it possible? . . . Isn’t it an encouragement for our neighbors to go on fighting when the fighting does not lose anything?

  Had Asad been present, he would have replied that Golda’s inability to conceive of the territory as Syrian was at the heart of the problem. He saw no choice except to go on fighting for territory he considered historically Syrian and felt he was making a huge concession by agreeing to even a temporary cease-fire line.

  But my role as mediator was not to repeat each side’s debating points. Israel’s long-term outlook was in truth one of almost metaphysical gravity. It had only one ally; it was alone as no other sovereign nation. It would have to bear the world’s opprobrium even when it was the victim of paramilitary attack. Its neighbors might at any point raise more demands and, as Golda never tired of insisting, the same reasoning that had led to current requests for concessions would then generate new pressures. Few nations could have stood the psychological strain. Israel’s case was better than its posture of nitpicking defiance. It touched the eternal premonition of the Jewish people that at the end of the day it would be the victim of all its environment’s frustrations.

  I had deep sympathy for Golda’s views; I understood her premonition. And yet my duty was to conduct the best policy that I could distill from sober analysis. Neither despair nor a sense of injustice could serve as a guide. My responsibility was to describe to Israel its geopolitical necessities. Israel’s heart might be heavy but it needed a clear head and cool judgment. And so my meetings in Israel were a series of presentations more appropriate to a seminar on the philosophy of international relations than a diplomatic negotiation.

  My theme was that Israel’s position was serious no matter what it did. But it was not hopeless. With discipline and conviction it could rescue a margin of maneuver. The most certain way to disaster was to maintain the status quo.

  Later on it was alleged that my negotiating tactic was to tell each party what it wanted to hear. This is a superficial way of looking at diplomacy; it was emphatically not my method. The only safe assumption in a negotiation is that one’s counterpart is of comparable intelligence. It will not be possible to trick him (or her) for any extended period; he is bound to discover the truth eventually. If he has been misled, the basis of trust has disappeared forever. And since in foreign policy one meets the same people over and over again, the loss of trust can become an insuperable handicap.

  The allegation also erroneously implied that I had fallen into one of the worst errors a negotiator can make: to assume that the nations with which he deals do not exchange ideas, particularly in the Arab world. Even the officials of states that do not have diplomatic relations monitor one another’s public statements and media and seek to penetrate one another’s decisions through intelligence means. It is not possible to keep different sets of books and retain confidence. Once lost, confidence is irretrievable — and without confidence every negotiation becomes a brutal test of strength.

  When acting as mediator, I tried to understand the real goals of the two sides as thoroughly as possible, since the formal positions often reflected domestic or bureaucratic necessities rather than conviction. I would invariably tell the goal I sought to achieve to both parties early in the process in nearly identical terms. It was as much a practical as a moral decision, because how else was I going to get them to the ultimate destination? This did not, of course, preclude my using different arguments to explain to each party why the final goal was in its interest. But that reflected reality. After all, there would never have been a controversy if the purposes of the parties were not different, and even to some extent incompatible. An agreement will emerge only if both sides can promise themselves some benefit to their own interests as they perceive them, and these benefits will differ with the interests. Only amateurs believe that it is possible to achieve unilateral advantages for one side; even if it were possible, such an agreement would never be maintained. A mediator who encouraged it would soon forfeit the trust of one of the parties and hence the pr
econdition for his effectiveness. The challenge in mediation is to find why an agreed goal can be in the common interest for different purposes.

  This is why I spent most of my time in Israel, especially in the early days of the shuttle, explaining the international environment; only in that context would the specific solutions make any sense. The following are excerpts from various presentations I made in Israel through the course of the month:

  If this negotiation fails, I think we have to assume that the dominant American role in the peace effort is at an end, if we cannot produce an acceptable solution in a disengagement scheme. . . . [T]he argument that we have made [to the Arabs] is that we promise less but at least it leads to a little progress that is better than no progress. That, in my judgment, will be at an end.

  . . . I think it is essential that the gravity of a failure of negotiation be understood in relation to what happens diplomatically, what happens militarily and what happens in the United States. (May 2)

  In America right now you have an odd combination of circumstances in that the anti-Nixonites, the Jackson people, the anti-detente people, conservatives, they can all combine. So for about six months you may get an illusion of something in America, so long as it doesn’t cost anything or risk anything. I have managed enough crises in America to know. . . . And the tough boys don’t know how to manage; all they know is how to posture, and they aren’t so tough when it is more than words. This is my nightmare. (May 4)

  Now, then the next question is: Is what we are now discussing more likely to help Israel or more likely to hurt Israel? Is a disengagement agreement better for Israel, even involving all the dangers which Rabin and Peres mentioned, or is it not? I believe that even though every consequence that was mentioned is correct, on balance it helps Israel. Because it keeps the United States in the forefront of the diplomacy, because it makes it easier to decouple things from Geneva, because it quiets down the Syrian front and continues the Egyptian line. . . .