Asad and the others listened to my proposal. Israeli control of the hills was the sticking point. Asad still insisted that Israel move off the crests and keep only the western slopes. The United Nations should be on top and even on the eastern slopes, where he no longer insisted on a Syrian presence. If the Israelis were on top of the hills, they would be able to observe the peaceful life he hoped to start in Quneitra. He asked for UN — or even American — control there.
I replied that we were beyond argument. I could not very well begin renegotiating an American proposal in Jerusalem, and one, moreover, that had not yet been accepted there. I suggested drafting an announcement recessing the talks. Asad was a cool negotiator. Without any show of emotion, he fell in with my suggestion. We produced a statement recessing the talks and implying that they would be resumed in a few weeks’ time. It was cordial with mutual expressions of respect.
When we had completed the draft, Asad said that it pained him to end it. Could I make one more round trip? I replied that I could go no further than my own proposal:
The only effort I can make is to propose my scheme to the Israelis. I can recommend my scheme to them and I can transmit your scheme to them, but it would be clear that my recommendation stops at the limit of my scheme and beyond that it is your proposal which I tell you now is, in my judgment, going to be rejected.
Asad urged: “Please do it anyway, and come back to Damascus, and then we can recess the talks after having made one more effort.”
So the “United States proposal” amounted to an admission ticket to another round of the shuttle. We returned to Israel at 2:30 A.M. on Friday, May 17. Nancy, who had remained in Jerusalem for the last few rounds because she was not feeling well, found that one of the joys of being married to me was to be awakened in Israel in the middle of the night for an hour’s ride to the airport to meet me and then an hour’s ride to accompany me back to our hotel in Jerusalem, along with Eban and Dinitz, who would not give up their desire of being the first to be briefed.
I met with Mrs. Meir for an hour on Friday morning at her residence, and with the entire negotiating team for three hours on Friday afternoon. There was no possibility of Israel’s accepting Asad’s proposal to place the top of the hills into neutral or third-party hands. The Israeli negotiators did show flexibility, however, by agreeing to station no weapons there that could fire into Quneitra. I elaborated this into a special zone of limited armaments for the crest of the hills, with respect to which the United States would send a formal letter to Asad. None of this had yet been authorized officially by the cabinet; nor would it be until Asad accepted it.
I was convinced that Asad would not yield and the talks would have to be recessed. I drafted a statement to that effect with the Israeli negotiating team, to be published side by side with its counterpart already approved in Damascus. I was so sure that Asad would reject the proposal that I made plans to fly from Damascus to Ben-Gurion Airport for a quick farewell meeting with the Israeli negotiating team and from there to Alexandria. I would return to Washington the next day.
Thus it was that on Saturday, May 18 — the twenty-first day of my Mideast excursion — I left again for Damascus on what I thought would be the last stop on a failed shuttle.
Yigal Allon accompanied me to the airport — a low-key affair because of the Sabbath. Allon was the Israeli minister I had known the longest; he had been a student of mine at Harvard in 1957; we were good friends. He was one of the founders of the Israeli army and one of the heroes of the war of independence. He was the most warmhearted if perhaps one of the least analytical of the second generation of leaders. When not in Jerusalem, he resided at his beloved kibbutz at the foot of the Golan Heights that I had once visited in the early Sixties. Normally among the most conciliatory of the Israelis, he was passionate on the subject of the Golan. Too many of his friends had been killed by gunfire from there; his kibbutz had needed to build too many shelters against Syrian artillery for him to be hospitable to the proposition that a new relationship with Syria might emerge from a generous Israeli proposal. Unprepared to rely on Syrian goodwill, he sought tangible guarantees. Yet precisely because of his warmth and decency, he exhibited the Israeli dilemma in dramatic form. He longed for peace with an intensity and even naiveté possible only in relation to what one has never possessed. I used to chide him that for most people in most periods of history, peace had been a precarious state and not the millennial disappearance of all tension that so many Israelis envisaged. And yet he also wanted absolute security, which in practice meant reducing Israel’s neighbors to impotence or acquiring as a security belt what they considered their territory. It was a difficult, perhaps impossible, balance to strike.
Now as we drove through the Judean hills out of Jerusalem, Yigal spoke to me wistfully of his longing for peace. The tough Israeli pioneer struck the same mood as the fierce Syrian nationalist Khaddam when we raced across the plain toward Damascus. Neither knew how to give operational content to his yearning; both tended to expect me to come up with some magical formula to dissolve the impasse. On this occasion Allon did not even expect a new formula; he had participated in all the discussions; he knew we had run out the string. In extremity, the Jewish recourse is to prophetic intervention. “You will pull it out,” he told me. “I know you will be back tonight.” What a pity, I thought, that miracles seem to happen only to those who do not count on them.
Day an was waiting for me on the plane. (The Defense Ministry is in Tel Aviv, much closer to the airport.) Badly bruised by the assaults on him, he had played a role in the discussions that ranged from the sullen to the sardonic. He would not be included in the next cabinet; he suspected that he had reached the end of his public career. I was certain that in his private capacity he supported a settlement; he had, after all, opposed occupying the Golan in 1967. But in the deliberations in the cabinet room, he was determined to make a record of vigilance; he pointed out the flaws of whatever was being put forward without offering a remedy. One reason that Golda had asked me to come up with an American proposal was to avoid a conflict with Dayan over whether Israel should modify its position once again.
Once a decision had been made — and others had assumed the responsibility — Dayan was constructive, imaginative, and helpful as ever. On Friday night it had suddenly occurred to me that we did not have an accurate map for the “United States proposal.” I needed the help of Israel’s accomplished military cartographers but it also happened to be the Sabbath. Around 1:00 A.M., I called Dayan, who was at his home near Tel Aviv. By then good manners had collapsed in the general exhaustion. When I awakened him, I wasted no time on preliminaries. “Why not bring some maps of the ‘US proposal’ to my airplane in the morning?” I said. “Why not?” replied Dayan and hung up. Saturday morning he was there, with the maps under his arm. (In the event, I studied them but left them on the plane in Damascus; walking into the Presidential Palace with Israeli maps would make our proposal look like an Israeli ultimatum, defeating its purpose.)
By now, all passengers on my plane had been caught up in the strange mood composed of equal parts of exaltation, total exhaustion, and despair. Whatever their assignments — diplomats, staff, journalists, airplane crew, security personnel, communicators — they seemed all to share the sense of being part of a common enterprise. I had warned those of the Jewish faith that a few more shuttles would qualify them as Israeli citizens under the Law of Return and see them drafted into the Israeli army.
The journalist captives of my mission had taken to wearing display buttons with the legend, “Free the Kissinger 14.”IV These champions of the First Amendment, watchdogs of the public weal, thought of themselves as detached, skeptical, personally uninvolved. It is to their credit that they were not. All seemed to absorb by osmosis the hope and fear in Israel and the grudging experimentation with new departures in Syria. They knew that while success did not guarantee peace, failure would make war all but inevitable. They were glum as we boarded the plane for
what all of us thought would be the last visit to Damascus. Normally eager to visit Egypt, they did not look forward to the overnight stop in Alexandria; it would be the symbol of failure. Marvin Kalb, one of the most sensitive and scholarly of the reporters, came into my little cabin on the short hop to Damascus: “Hang in there, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “We believe in you; you can make it.” Few events in those nerve-racking weeks sustained me so much as that brief conversation.
Kalb as well as Allon gave me too much credit. The issue no longer had anything to do with my ingenuity. Whatever contribution I could make at the moment was to ensure that each side clearly understood the position of the other, to explain why an impasse threatened the real interests of both sides, and, most important of all, to keep alive the glimpse of the common humanity that strangely enough all of them had instinctively felt during the hiatus when the children were hostages.
Khaddam greeted me at the airport Saturday afternoon. Normally, he would not dream of preempting his President’s opportunity to be the first to hear a full report. This time he broke his restraint so far as to ask whether the Israelis had accepted Asad’s latest proposal. I replied that there had been some modification, though not going nearly as far as his President had proposed. Khaddam insisted that even if the talks broke up, a major effort should be made to strengthen Syrian-American relations. It depended, I said, on whether Syria would turn a recess of the talks into a superpower confrontation. Khaddam insisted on Syrian independence. Whatever happened, he said, the Golan was an issue of Syrian national interest and would not be delegated to a superpower. But he and I knew that if the shuttle failed, neither of us would be in a position to control the ultimate outcome by vainglorious pronouncements; in large degree the real purpose of the disengagement agreement was precisely that: to preserve the ability to continue to shape events.
There are many occasions in diplomacy when dedication is measured by the ability to pretend indifference when every fiber strains for getting to the point. It pleased Khaddam to entertain us at another lunch at the Orient Club with key members of the Syrian cabinet. Whether it was a show of Arab hospitality or a method of psychological warfare it was hard to tell, but certainly an outsider would not have been able to detect from the pleasant, friendly, jocular atmosphere that the afternoon was climactic. Or that anyone was in a hurry to find out what the decision would be.
At last at 4:05 P.M., President Asad received me. Even then, we did not deviate from the ritual of trading one-liners for a while. I told Asad that Vinogradov, the Soviet emissary to the dormant Geneva Conference, had asked for a meeting with our representative, Ellsworth Bunker, who had not been in Geneva in three months: Vinogradov refused to be alone in doing nothing, I quipped. Asad allowed that Vinogradov wanted someone else to share his heavy burden. We joked in this manner about a rumor that had reached me of a possible Brezhnev visit to Damascus: Asad claimed he knew of it only from the press and he showed no great eagerness for it. I gave a brief tutorial on the negotiating methods of the Vietnamese, North and South, and on Israel’s internal political crisis. The Syrians showed their concern not by any display of impatience but by cutting the irrelevant from the customary two hours to thirty minutes.
I then presented the latest refinement of the “United States proposal” in a matter-of-fact way. At this point it included the following:
• All of Quneitra would be under Syrian administration.
• A line would be drawn 200 meters west of Quneitra measured from the line of buildings on the west side of the western road. This line would be marked by a physical barrier.
• The area to the west of this line would be demilitarized. The UN would assure compliance. Israeli civilians would be permitted to cultivate the fields in this area.
• The Israeli military line would be at the eastern base of the two key hills, but no weapons would be allowed on the crest of the hills that could fire on Quneitra in a straight line. This assurance would be contained in a letter from President Nixon to President Asad.
• The line to the north and south of Quneitra would be straightened out so Quneitra would not be encircled by Israeli positions.
Asad had obviously made his decision. He did not haggle; nor did he ask for further explanations. He astounded me by accepting it:
Dr. Kissinger is expending this serious effort on behalf of the United States and many do not want his mission to succeed; and if this is not realized, the opportunities will be lost. Therefore we want to be on record with the United States that we are more positive. We want you to know who is standing in the way of peace. On this basis, we will forgo the question of the hills. . . .
We are doing this not for Israel, not out of fear of Israel — the result of war would be on our side — but because we want to leave as wide a field as possible for a just peace. A just peace must mean complete total withdrawal and restoration of Palestinian rights. We are doing this in order to create favorable circumstances for the United States’ efforts for peace. We appreciate the internal U.S. condition also. We know if this did not succeed, it would be used to upset you in the United States.
It was a proud statement that could not have been easy to make. With all my vaunted self-esteem, I did not believe for a moment that Asad was yielding to protect my personal position. Asad accepted a fraction of his original demands, from an adversary bargaining with territory historically Syrian, because a statesman ultimately must come to grips with realities. And the reality was that while the Syrians had the capacity to throw the Middle East into chaos, they could not by their own efforts recover the territory gained by Israel in the October war nor the modest improvements beyond it that I offered them. Israel’s concessions were grudging; its negotiating methods frequently maddening; but the outcome represented a Syrian gain over what a strict calculation of the existing balance of forces would have warranted. That differential was the result of the influence of the United States, which convinced Israel to make a down payment — without much conviction — on the peace process. It was a measure of Asad’s statesmanship that he was willing to face facts that every previous Syrian leader had evaded.
On the way to the airport, Khaddam and I felt the relief of having avoided what we both dreaded and yet had seen no means to prevent: “When we entered the room I was convinced the decision would be the other way.” I was telling the truth when I replied: “So was I.”
The Limitation of Forces
WE left Damascus elated. The trip to Egypt was postponed, the Israeli negotiating team was informed of our return. The King David Hotel in Jerusalem would annoy many tourists who lost their confirmed reservations to the returning American caravan. But Israel’s hospitality to us and its hopes for peace would not have it any other way. I informed Sadat, Boumedienne, Hussein, and Faisal of the apparent breakthrough, laying stress on the “United States proposal” and — certain that my message would find its way back to Damascus — praising Asad’s statesmanship.
I thought that final agreement on detail would now be relatively easy. Asad and I spoke of concluding the text by Thursday, May 23. The agreed plan was to delineate, as in the Egyptian agreement, zones of limited armaments behind the forward positions of the two sides.
I turned out to be wildly overoptimistic. There were, to begin with, the same differences between the Sinai and the Golan that had befouled the issue of the line of separation. The Sinai disengagement agreement took place relatively far from Egypt’s capital, in a desert. Even then it had been hard to convince Gamasy of the virtue of zones of limited armaments extending thirty kilometers on either side; in fact, it had taken a direct order by Sadat to do so. And General Gamasy was calmer, had a more comprehensive view, and was less emotional about Israel than any of the Syrian generals, including Asad. But if transposed, a zone of such a size would reach to the outskirts of Damascus. Even the Israelis suggested reducing the extent of the zone to twenty-five kilometers. Syria countered with the hardly magnanimous proposal of five kilometers. M
oreover, the Sinai disengagement took place in an essentially unpopulated area. In Syria, over 20,000 civilians were expected to return to the “pocket,” an undetermined number to Quneitra and Rafid. There would have to be Syrian civil administrators and Syrian police — raising a problem of verification to prevent violations of limits on numbers and weapons in the guise of internal security forces.
At the same time, precisely because of the presence of Syrian civilians, Asad strenuously resisted the idea of a UN military force. He proposed instead a slight expansion of a group of UN observers who had been stationed on the Golan to supervise the line of separation established after the 1967 war. Israel asked for organized UN military units of no fewer than 3,000 men; Asad wanted only a few hundred individual observers.
Then there was the problem of fashioning a UN buffer zone separating the two sides. In the Sinai, the UN zone took up between six and ten kilometers in the desert and, more important, it was entirely located on territory previously occupied by the Israelis. It therefore reduced by that amount the Israeli area of control. On the Golan the Israeli forces withdrew behind the prewar line in only two places and then but a few kilometers. Therefore, to create a UN buffer would require an eastward withdrawal of Syria’s prewar forward military positions — even as Syrian civil administration moved in the opposite direction into the UN zone. The line of separation in the west to which Israel was retreating had been designated the “blue line” for purposes of negotiation. On the other side of the UN buffer zone, the new line of Syrian military deployment was called the “red line” (see the final map on page 1100). As the realization sank in on Asad that the red line was in fact a retreat from the prewar line, it produced arguments as bitter and complex as the original line of separation (the blue line). Israel sought to push the red line as far into Syria as possible (they wanted it six to eight kilometers to the east of the prewar line) so that in fact the Syrian military would be further back than before the war. Painful disputes arose over Israel’s insistence that some villages heretofore behind the Syrian lines be incorporated into the UN zone, where they would not have their accustomed protection by the Syrian army.
Years of Upheaval Page 160