Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  During a four-hour meeting the next morning with Sadat at his Giza residence, we went over a hill-by-hill analysis of the line of separation between Israeli and Syrian forces. I told Sadat about the Israeli concessions on Mount Hermon in the north and in the Rafid area in the south that I had not yet presented in Damascus. But Israel’s defense line around Quneitra would be difficult to change, I said. The idea of an Israeli civilian presence in the western outskirts of an unsettled city, however, I judged was not a serious proposal.

  Sadat felt that we were close to our objective. Asad needed Quneitra to symbolize a tangible gain and to maintain equal standing with Egypt. Enough had been achieved to make a settlement possible. Asad enjoyed haggling too much to forgo any prospect of it, Sadat said, but I should move rapidly from now on. Sadat repeated his warning of the previous week: If the negotiations failed, an Arab summit meeting heavily influenced by radicals would convene and make decisions binding on all participants, including Egypt. The peace process would be endangered. The Soviet role would grow. Sooner or later there would be another explosion. Sadat said that he was prepared to support our position publicly, especially if we obtained some more breathing space for Quneitra. If necessary, he would send his War Minister, Marshal Ahmed Ismail Ali, or his Chief of Staff, General Gamasy, to Damascus to recommend to Asad that it was now time to settle. I should let him know when these visits would be most effective.

  It was comforting to have Saudi goodwill and Egyptian support. But as I flew toward Israel on Friday, May 10, I knew that I should not count too heavily on this under stress. Not that our Arab friends were insincere. But if there were a final rupture, the issue would be dealt with emotionally, not analytically, and the leaders would then perhaps be swept along by sentiments difficult to foresee or to contain. Indeed, a few days later, Asad cautioned me not to take his Arab brethren’s moderate statements too seriously. If instead of disengagement he insisted on reclaiming all his territory, none of them would be able to stand aside.

  That was one aspect of our dilemma. The other was that Israel did not want these negotiations to set a precedent for further demands on the Golan; it was afraid that generous concessions created an appetite for still more. In this deadlock I would have to keep Asad from launching himself into a holy war and Israel from turning the negotiations into a test of manhood.

  I was in effect alone. Nixon read my daily reports carefully; in many ways they were his remaining psychological purchase on the Presidency. He never wavered in his support. But the publication of the tapes had ushered in the terminal phase of his Presidency. The Chicago Tribune, hitherto a stalwart supporter, on May 9 came out for impeachment or resignation. House Minority Leader John Rhodes made a hint along similar lines; Vice President Gerald Ford warned of “a crisis in confidence” produced by Watergate and welcomed a “cleansing process” that would uphold the law and establish the truth.

  Nixon was willing to take an active part in the negotiations. He wrote a number of strong, even threatening, letters to Israeli leaders backing my various compromise proposals. But they had only a marginal impact since the Israeli cabinet was too familiar with his weakened condition to believe that he could risk a showdown. (In this they were wrong. Nixon was never more formidable than when wounded.) At any rate, on May 10 it was senseless to ask for further changes in the Israeli position until I had shown the other concessions on Mount Hermon and at Rafid to Asad on May 12 and until Asad had had an opportunity to react to the reports he was certain to receive from Riyadh and Cairo.

  I had even conceived a scheme worthy of the Levantine practices of the area: I planned to present Israel’s additional changes in the northern and southern portions of the line, which I had held back on the last visit, as responses to Sadat’s and Faisal’s appeals. Asad probably would not have believed that it happened quite that way, but I had seen myths thrive in the area based on much less evidence. Israeli politics, regrettably, do not lend themselves to filigreed work. By the time I returned to Jerusalem from Cairo on May 10, the Israeli position was in all the newspapers; it had leaked from the Knesset Foreign Affairs Committee to which Dayan had presented it. What I intended to offer in Damascus as “new” Israeli concessions would now appear — as I complained to the Israeli negotiating team — as if “Sadat and Faisal cooperated with me to sell Asad a lousy deal.” Consequently, the sessions with the Israeli negotiating team were less serene than they might have been; no change was made in the conclusion that we would postpone new decisions until after my next visit to Damascus.

  May 11 was Ellsworth Bunker’s eightieth birthday. He had defended American honor and interests nobly and unselfishly in Saigon for five years during the most searing period of the Vietnam war. He had served in the face of public calumny, governmental hesitations, and ungrateful allies, reporting the facts as he saw them, living strictly by the maxims of duty and service that had inspired his career. Bunker had come to diplomacy relatively late in life; he had nothing to prove to himself; he knew that when the passions were spent, the country would be left and that we would be judged not by how well we registered the emotions of the moment but by how steadfastly we upheld the principles of the United States. A lanky, taciturn New Englander, he would have been embarrassed at such grandiloquent interpretations. He did better; he incarnated them. I gave him controversial assignments like the Panama negotiations because he was unafraid of defending his beliefs; critics could challenge his conclusions, but it was impossible to question his patriotism or integrity. And he had an instinct for fundamentals. I had appointed him our representative to the Geneva talks because I wanted an emissary of high prestige who would not bridle at the irrelevance to which our strategy condemned that forum. I valued his presence on these Mideast trips. He was a steadying influence; his observations were acute. He withstood the exhausting thirty-four-day ordeal as well as, if not better than, staffers fifty years younger.

  Now in the midst of the tensions, discouragements, and beginning doubts of the shuttle, he united us all at a surprise party that Ambassador Keating gave him at the King David Hotel. Israeli and American negotiators and staff met in a rare display of unanimity to pay tribute to our colleague. I proposed a toast, to the effect that Bunker represented what was best and most permanent in America; he epitomized “where we stand as a people and a society.” So sensitive was our domestic situation that some of the press reported it as a Watergate comment — an implied contrast with Nixon. It was not — at least not on the conscious level. Rather, it was an attempt to give us all courage for the exertion still ahead and to remind ourselves that we were, with all our frustrations, privileged to be on such a mission of hope and peace. Soon enough, the shuttle reclaimed us, for next morning, Sunday, May 12, we headed back to Damascus.

  The visits to each capital had by now become stylized. I would arrive by plane with my frazzled aides and the wild-eyed press contingent. In Damascus, Khaddam would greet me at the airport, slightly ill at ease with a fate that brought him into such frequent contact with the representative of imperialist America, sardonic, yet invariably with words of appreciation for my efforts. During the fast motorcade from the airport he would assure me of Syria’s eagerness for an agreement and for better relations with the United States. He would convey a mood, but no specifics. He did not mind hearing my impressions about Israel but he was not anxious for details. These as well as any policy pronouncements he reserved for his President (or perhaps as a loyal Baathist he did not wish to assume the responsibility for negotiating with Israel). After a brief stop at the guest house, we would assemble in Asad’s conference room for an hour of banter before my report, whereupon Asad’s affability would turn to icy sarcasm at the thought that Israel was bargaining with what he considered “his” territory. Often, he would call in his key associates to make me go through the entire exposition again. Afterward, I had to say something to the press — usually a brief statement at Damascus airport conveying an attitude, supplemented by a background briefing o
n the plane back to Israel. Invariably, Asad insisted that my comments be upbeat; he did not want to foreclose his options by fostering pessimism.

  At Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport, Abba Eban, urbane, witty, cordial, would be waiting. Simcha Dinitz would be there, eager, joking, anxious. They felt no compulsion to save my report for their Prime Minister. Nor would they risk enhancing my self-confidence by excessive praise. Without wasting a moment, Eban and Dinitz would press me on the hour’s drive to Jerusalem for a detailed account of what had occurred in Damascus — grading me, so to speak, on how well I had fulfilled their expectations, which were rarely modest. I would then have to repeat the performance with the Israeli negotiating team, followed at crucial moments by a yet larger group. The basic Israeli theme was not the merit of individual proposals — fundamentally, they did not like the entire concept — but the iniquity of the Syrians, their total unreliability, and the near-certainty of another war. The Syrian reaction was ominous in its controlled fury; the Israelis’, desperate in its sense of vulnerability. Syrian negotiators, with their armies pushed back into the environs of their capital, exuded the sense that history was on their side; militarily predominant Israel acted as if one wrong step would spell its destruction. And so there was in the negotiation a curious reversal between victor and defeated, with the stronger asking for guarantees and the weaker demanding territorial advance. Syria commanded respect in its self-discipline; Israel, compassion in its foreboding.

  Damascus did not vary the script on May 12. Khaddam greeted me with “thank God for your safe return.” He said he was very desirous of an agreement. To give Asad something to think about in the half hour set aside for me to freshen up at the guest house, I asked Khaddam to look at the proposals I was bringing, not simply in terms of a kilometer here and there but of this fundamental reality:

  The problem is to meet needs on both sides and start a process. The fact of a retreat on the Syrian front is more significant psychologically in Israel than the Suez withdrawal. An important difference: The Syrian army will actually be going forward; the Egyptian army went backwards under the agreement.

  I knew that a favorable comparison with the Egyptian agreement would do much for Syrian self-respect.

  It was far from enough to gain Asad’s assent, however. During the course of our five-hour meeting beginning at 1:30 P.M., we were joined by Minister of Defense General Mustafa Tlas and Air Force Chief of Staff General Najd Jamil, as well as by Shihabi and Khaddam. The discussion was about the Israeli proposals I had brought a few days earlier. Asad said that he could not send civilians back to Quneitra so long as the Israelis held all surrounding hills and indeed still reserved part of the town for the United Nations, to separate Syrians from Israelis working in fields at the edge of town. He proposed that Israel withdraw one and a half kilometers to the far side of the western hills and draw a straight line south from there so the city would not seem encircled. I had been over this ground many times with the Israeli negotiating team. I knew that in Israeli thinking, security had become identified with the range of hills adjoining Quneitra, but I was convinced, too, that some adjustments were still possible and that the proposed Israeli lines around Quneitra did, in fact, look more like a humiliation than an achievement for the Arabs.

  We were, I thought, reaching the limit of what was compatible with a serious mediation. It was absurd to stake America’s credibility over the sort of retail rug-merchanting now going on. After all, if the talks broke down, Syria stood to lose the resulting war; Israel would forfeit the opportunity for peace. We had saved Israel from total isolation and shown Syria a way to regain without risk the pocket Israel had conquered. So I decided that the time had come to bring matters to a head. I would ask both sides for their final positions on the line of separation and recess the negotiation if the gap could not be bridged. In other words, I was using the heaviest sanction available to me: the fact that both sides knew they would not by themselves be able to break the deadlock resulting from the end of our mediation.

  The suggestion that Israel reconsider its position evoked an explosion from Golda. “He can’t have what he wants,” she stormed on Monday, May 13. “He is not entitled to everything he wants.” Considering Asad’s starting point, there was no danger that he would get anything close to what he wanted. I replied with some heat:

  It was always understood, indeed it was always believed by us that it was desired by you, that the war would end with some form of direct negotiations. We have managed to cushion the impact of these negotiations on Israel, and we have the issue narrowed down to such considerations that we are now being constantly put in the position of defending Asad when we are talking about half a kilometer at a line a kilometer from the old dividing line, when you could easily be in an international forum where every day you get beaten [up] on the ’67 line, where every day the U.S. will be asked to take a position on the ’67 line. . . . In the process, we broke the oil embargo, we made the Russians ridiculous in the Middle East. Now if you had to face all of this, under Russian pressure, with the oil embargo on, you wouldn’t be talking about the Druze village in the northern sector. You would be talking about a hell of a lot worse things.

  I warned the negotiating team, as I had the day before warned Asad, not to become obsessed with marginal changes. The real issue was

  whether you are willing to run the risk of liquidation of the whole strategy that has pretty well insulated you from the total impact of the consequences of the war, after the war, or whether we are going to pursue a different strategy.

  My presentation proved no more conclusive to the Israelis than to Asad. Precariously poised governments tend to have little margin for the long-range. All my arguments were in effect judgments about the future; the domestic penalty for taking my advice was immediate, the benefits speculative. After three sessions, the Israeli negotiating team finally agreed to a modest concession, which I had suspected was its fallback position all along: that Syria could take over civilian control in all of Quneitra and that Syrian civilians could return there.

  However, the Israeli cabinet still insisted that the land surrounding Quneitra on three sides remain Israeli, including all the hills; that Israeli forces remain in control to the edge of the city to protect Israeli settlers cultivating their fields; and that barbed wire close off all streets. If that was Israel’s final offer, we had reached a dead end.

  As a last desperate maneuver, I informed Sadat that now was the critical moment to send an emissary to Damascus. General Gamasy left immediately to confer with Asad.

  Asad’s reaction on Tuesday, May 14, when I visited, was as I had predicted. He saw no way of repopulating Quneitra under these circumstances and no utility in acquiring Quneitra unless he could do that. He made a counterproposal: to divide the hills west of Quneitra between Israel (on the western slopes) and Syria (on the eastern slopes), with the ridge under UN control. Amazingly, Asad said he would not challenge the existence of Israeli settlements in the disengagement process; what he wanted was breathing room for his own settlements. Given Syrian passions about who owned the Golan Heights, this was an extraordinary concession, showing how eager — despite his protestations to the contrary — Asad was to liquidate the Israeli salient in front of Damascus.

  I had originally planned to break off the talks after this round. On the evening of May 14 — the seventeenth day of the shuttle — a major subject of my conversation with Golda was the manner of recessing the negotiations. Two things changed my mind. First, Asad had asked me to make one more effort. Gamasy returned to Egypt from Damascus reporting Asad’s serious commitment to a successful outcome and the Syrian media were still expressing optimism.

  Finally, on the morning of May 15, we awoke to news of a staggering event: a Palestinian terrorist attack on the northern Israeli town of Ma’alot. The guerrillas began with the murders of three members of one family; they then seized the Ma’alot school and took four teachers and more than ninety schoolchildren hostage whi
le demanding the release of twenty fedayeen in Israeli prisons. They designated the ambassadors of France and Romania as intermediaries.

  An unearthly silence settled over Jerusalem. Israel’s premonition of living in a hostile and friendless world determined on the nation’s destruction was fulfilling itself. Israeli children were in mortal danger even while peace negotiations were going on. And yet in its crisis, Israel was calm and composed. The prospect of relatively minor withdrawal from territory never historically part of Palestine had evoked nearly hysterical demonstrations in the streets and outraged passion in the cabinet. Yet now that its deeply ingrained nightmare seemed to be coming true, Israel behaved with the stoic endurance that went far to explain how the Jewish people have survived the trials of millennia. The demonstrators who had dogged my footsteps disappeared; the cabinet went into businesslike session. The leaders who had seized on any action that could be twisted into an example of Arab duplicity forbore from using the calamity as an example of what they had been talking about.

  On the contrary, Golda sent Simcha Dinitz to my suite at the King David Hotel to explain apologetically that the cabinet grappling with the Ma’alot crisis could not keep the day’s appointment with me. This surely went without saying. But she who had bitterly fought every concession asked Dinitz to reaffirm her deep commitment to the success of the negotiations. She knew that I was frustrated by the endless Talmudic quibbling by which the Syrian recovery of Quneitra was being established in increments of 100 meters. Perhaps Dinitz could explain why the concern over the hills around Quneitra was not simply a psychological aberration. Golda’s gesture of thinking of peace while she was anguishing about the fate of the children was more meaningful to me than all the rhetoric of the previous weeks.