by John Kerry
The president ordered a thorough review to reevaluate all our policies that were based on advancing a two-state solution.
That was a significant turning point that set us on a path for the rest of the administration. While most of our policies didn’t actually change, our fundamental view of Israel’s intentions with respect to the Palestinians did.
A key element of managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was ending the war in Gaza; another was trying to stop war from breaking out in the West Bank and, ultimately, to get the parties to take some steps on the ground that would show that there was progress toward two states. One of the primary sources of tension was around the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif compound. With Israel maintaining day-to-day security control, tensions often ran high. In October 2015, those tensions spilled over into a wave of Palestinian violence that threatened to spiral out of control.
King Abdullah had a special interest in this site because of Jordan’s historic role in administering it. The Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif is important to peoples of all three monotheistic faiths—Jews, Muslims and Christians. Of all the issues of incitement, this was the one that could trigger a holy war throughout the region. We spent three grinding days working around the clock in November trying to choreograph statements from both sides. Every word, comma and syllable was the subject of intense negotiations. It was a productive if imperfect outcome. Bibi wound up releasing his statement in English on Facebook at midnight, and King Abdullah never actually said exactly what he was supposed to say. But tensions were reduced and the amount of violence went down. Both sides saw the virtue in leaving well enough alone. In the Middle East, sometimes that’s the best you can do.
In the absence of negotiations, we turned our focus to improving the situation on the ground. I thought it was very important to push for steps that would create the conditions for resumption of direct negotiations, while creating a political horizon by starting to craft the reality of the two-state solution.
When Bibi came to Washington to meet with President Obama in November, we had a conversation in which he was very supportive of steps we had taken on the ground. I traveled to Israel to follow up with him a few days later. My argument was that if he took constructive steps to allow the Palestinians to build freely on their land, we could ward off international pressure and get the Palestinians to back off their efforts in international forums. Bibi wouldn’t budge. He told me, “I’m not going to reward these guys in the middle of a wave of attacks against my people.” We went back to Abbas, and, frankly, I had one of the worst meetings with him that I’ve ever had. He was clearly fed up, but with Israel under attack it was not the moment for me to offer him anything. At the same time, it was very disappointing to us that he wasn’t willing to take the stronger steps that we were pushing him on, including clearly condemning individual acts of violence.
We were getting nowhere with the Palestinians. We had worked very hard to create a path forward with the Israelis based on steps they had suggested they were willing to take—but now refused to take because of the violence. I could understand the perspective of both sides; at the same time, it left us nowhere to go. When we left, I told Bibi—more in sorrow than in anger—that we were at the end of the line again.
It was clear that we needed to do something significant to change the dynamic. A few days later, I addressed the annual U.S.-Israel Saban Forum at the Brookings Institution. I wanted to put the onus on those who were arguing against two states to explain how a one-state solution could ever work. And I wanted to raise awareness among everybody else that this untenable situation was going to become a permanent reality if serious steps weren’t taken soon. In fact, Israel had increasingly consolidated control over the majority of the West Bank for its own exclusive use, effectively reversing the transition to greater Palestinian civil authority that was called for by the Oslo Accords.
The challenge gets only more daunting as the number of settlers in the roughly 130 Israeli settlements east of the 1967 lines grows. When I left as secretary, the settler population in the West Bank alone, not including East Jerusalem, had increased by nearly 270,000 since Oslo, including 100,000 just since 2009. More than 90,000 settlers were living east of the separation barrier that was created by Israel itself, and the population of these distant settlements has grown by 20,000 since 2009. At the same time, thousands of Israeli settlers have set up some one hundred illegal outposts in the West Bank with the acquiescence, if not outright support, of successive Israeli governments.
Even as Israeli settlements and outposts continued to expand, Palestinian development in much of the West Bank had effectively been shut down and Palestinian structures are being demolished at historically high rates. Meanwhile, Israeli businesses make vast sums of money in the West Bank, Israeli farms flourish in the Jordan River Valley and Israeli resorts line the shores of the Dead Sea, where no Palestinian development is allowed.
I don’t think most people in Israel, and certainly elsewhere in the world, have any idea how broad and systematic this reversal of the Oslo process has become. I began asking a series of questions at Saban and beyond about the implications of this policy for Israel’s long-term security. I made the point that these trends were leading toward an irreversible one-state reality on the ground. I think this helped to spark a debate in Israel about the future of the Palestinian Authority and the two-state solution. But it did not result in the kind of broad examination of the creeping one-state reality that I wanted.
So we turned our attention to the one avenue we had left, which was the strong interest of our partners and the international community in finding a way forward. In July 2016, we put the concept of resuming the Oslo transition and specific recommendations for beginning to create a two-state reality on the ground into a report of the Middle East Quartet, a group set up to advance Middle East peace negotiations comprised the UN, the United States, the European Union and Russia. The report was tough on both sides but carefully balanced, and its recommendations gave the international community some constructive steps to point to.
Now what we were left with was the regional front. It was the last card we had to play. From my conversations with Bibi, it was clear that he maintained a keen interest in working on the regional play, which was popular with the Israeli public. I also knew that many Arab and European leaders were prepared to accept a final status agreement that addressed Israel’s key concerns, including the need to meet its legitimate security needs. That’s where we turned our attention.
To take advantage of all the work we had done during the negotiations and in getting the international community on board with our ideas for resolving the conflict, we set about drafting final status principles—internationally accepted terms of reference for direct negotiations—which had never before been established. The art was to craft language that would be specific enough to be useful and general enough to allow the parties room to negotiate, while reflecting the political sensitivities of both sides and what we could get the international community to support. Based on our two-plus years of conversations with the international community, we knew that most countries, including countries in the region, were willing to accept recognition of Israel as a Jewish state if the overall principles were balanced. We knew that we could get stronger language than ever before on Israel’s security. We also effectively made clear that the resolution of the refugee issue could not involve flooding Palestinian refugees back into Israel. We worked closely with the White House to draft the principles. We then set out to create an international consensus around them.
Key to this effort were the Saudis, who carry great weight in the Arab world. A lot of diplomacy takes place behind the scenes, and building those relationships is critical to making progress. I made several trips to Saudi Arabia and hosted countless meetings with the Gulf States, particularly with the Emiratis, who I believed were ready to change their relationship with the Israelis if they could manage the politics.
After I had g
otten the Egyptians and Jordanians to accept these final principles—Kerry Principles—and had indications from the Saudis that they were willing to endorse something along those lines, I convened a secret meeting in Aqaba in January 2016 with Bibi, King Abdullah of Jordan and Egyptian president Fattah al-Sisi. It was a remarkable moment. I had key states in the Arab world prepared to meet Israel’s core demands, including recognition as a Jewish state and resolution of its security concerns. In particular, the Jordanians and the Egyptians were ready to work directly with Israel and the Palestinians on a comprehensive security strategy in the context of a two-state solution. The Saudis and others had also signaled a willingness to take steps on the path to fulfilling the promise of the Arab Peace Initiative of normalizing relations with Israel.
All Bibi had to do was embrace these proposals. I remember sitting with him on the porch of one of the king’s spacious villas in Aqaba. If nothing else, I thought he would be impressed with how far we had moved the world in his direction on these issues. But I could tell right away from his body language that this was not actually what he wanted. Just as I was explaining all this to Bibi, a miniature drone crashed into a tree right next to the terrace where we were sitting. We both laughed a little nervously at what was such an obvious metaphor for where the conversation was headed. Bibi responded, “John, the people of Israel aren’t ready for these final status principles. I take care of Jordan’s security and Egypt’s security, not the other way around.” Then Bibi made his counterproposal. He would take small steps on the ground for the Palestinians. And in return for that, he wanted a dialogue with the Saudis and others in the Gulf on the concept of land for peace.
Aqaba was a turning point in my thinking. I realized trying to meet Bibi’s requirements wasn’t going to work because the goalposts were always moving. Consequently, I focused on convening an international meeting to endorse our final status principles, even though the Israelis and Palestinians had not yet accepted them, in order to create the basis for resumption of negotiations when the parties were ready.
At this point, there were a number of competing initiatives circulating: the Egyptians offered to convene the parties, the Russians were talking about hosting a summit and the French had their own peace conference in the works. I met with the key Arab leaders to get them to agree to publicly endorse the final status principles. All of them said they could support the principles, but they were reluctant to do so publicly because they’d get a lot of blowback. We knew we needed Arab backing to make these principles salable to the Israeli public and to give both sides political cover. It was a delicate balancing act to keep the French, Palestinians and Egyptians fully engaged. As we got closer to the U.S. election, nobody wanted to rock the boat politically so this whole endeavor was shelved until after November.
In September, I received the sad news that one of my heroes, Shimon Peres, passed away. Shimon was one of the founding fathers of Israel and had become one of the world’s great elder statesmen. I was proud to call him my friend, and I know that President Obama was as well. I began to reflect on what we had learned—and the way ahead—when I joined President Obama in Jerusalem for the state funeral.
I remembered the first time that I met Shimon in person—standing on the White House lawn for the signing of the historic Oslo Accords. And I thought about the last time, at an intimate one-on-one Shabbat dinner just a few months before he died, when we toasted to the future of Israel and to the peace that he still so passionately believed in for his people.
He summed it up simply and eloquently, as only Shimon could: “The original mandate gave the Palestinians 48 percent, now it’s down to 22 percent. I think 78 percent is enough for us.”
Then Shimon recalled a discussion he had had with F. W. de Klerk, the former South African president who had ended apartheid. De Klerk said to him that he had saved up enough money to withstand the economic sanctions against his country. They were dug in for the long haul on that. What they could never do, he said, was pay for the moral cost of apartheid. There was no amount of money equal to that task and it was eating away at the soul of his country. Shimon recounted that conversation for me and then said, “If we don’t solve this problem, I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen to my country.”
As we laid Shimon to rest that day, many of us couldn’t help but wonder if peace between the Israelis and Palestinians might also be buried along with one of its most eloquent champions.
I was determined not to let that happen. There was simply too much at stake to give in to pessimism. I also believed that the best way to honor Shimon, who never gave up, and his legacy was to keep on fighting to the end ourselves. And his passing made me only redouble my efforts to lay out an internationally accepted set of principles that would create a path to serious negotiations on a two-state solution.
We were a long way from that point. In fact, while we were there for Shimon’s funeral, the Israelis advanced the first brand-new settlement in the West Bank in over twenty years. The news of the settlement leaked out just after we left. By the time we were back home, it was all over the news. There’s no other way to spin it: to announce a brand-new settlement while the president of the United States was in Israel paying his respects to a fallen Israeli leader, and after we’d just concluded an agreement that gave Israel $38 billion in military assistance, spoke loudly about the governing coalition’s attitude toward the administration.
The Palestinians seized the news as an opportunity to circulate a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity. They knew that if they limited the language to make it consistent with decades-long U.S. policy against settlement activity, it would put us in a very difficult position.
My mind flashed back to Christmas week 2014, when I had spent all my holiday—up through Christmas Eve—making phone calls to persuade other countries to oppose a Palestinian resolution in the Security Council. My only persuasive argument had been that it would destroy the possibility of a meaningful peace process. That wouldn’t work any longer.
We all understood the political firestorm we would face if we didn’t veto the resolution. At the same time, it was incredibly difficult to imagine that we’d cast our veto to defend an Israeli policy that Israel knew the United States had always strongly opposed and believed was not in their interest or ours.
We had a decision to make.
President-elect Trump had announced he was going to appoint an ambassador to Israel who was a hard-core proponent of the settlements and an avowed opponent of the two-state solution. At the same time, the Israelis had again shown themselves to be completely disdainful of our policy by starting a process of formally legalizing outposts, which was tantamount to annexing significant portions of the West Bank. The proliferation of settler outposts is illegal under Israel’s own laws. They’re often located on Palestinian land and strategically placed in locations that make a viable Palestinian state impossible. Right-wing politicians in Israel were openly bragging that the two-state solution was dead and they intended to annex the West Bank. We could not defend in the UN Israeli actions that amounted to a massive and unprecedented acceleration of the settlement enterprise.
We had a lot of conversations with the White House focused on the settlement policy and whether to defend it in its most egregious form. There were some who argued for sucking it up because it wasn’t worth the political price. President Obama wasn’t willing to make a decision that he thought was counter to U.S. interests simply because of the politics. I remember him saying something along the lines of “If we aren’t willing to stand up for what we think is right now, what are we doing this job for?”
In the end, we did not agree with every word in the UN resolution. There were important issues that were not sufficiently addressed or even addressed at all. But we could not in good conscience veto a resolution that condemned Palestinian violence and anti-Israel incitement, reiterated the long-standing international consensus on settlements and called for the
parties to start taking constructive steps to advance the two-state solution on the ground.
Our UN ambassador, Samantha Power, cast the vote to abstain. I came back to Washington from a brief Christmas holiday with my family to face some predictable criticism.
The Israelis blasted this resolution for calling East Jerusalem occupied territory. But there was absolutely nothing new in the resolution on that issue. It was one of a long line of Security Council resolutions that included East Jerusalem as part of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, and that includes resolutions passed by the Security Council under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Every U.S. administration since 1967, along with the entire international community, has recognized East Jerusalem as among the territories that Israel occupied in the Six-Day War. The Obama administration fully respected Israel’s profound historic and religious ties to the city and to its holy sites. But the resolution in no manner prejudged the outcome of permanent status negotiations on East Jerusalem, which must, of course, reflect those historic ties and the realities on the ground.
I felt I had to rebut all these arguments.
I remember sitting with former undersecretary of state Wendy Sherman in my office with a draft of the speech I was planning to give about the resolution. Wendy and I both have strong ties to the Jewish community. She reminded me of what we both understood: “Mr. Secretary, if you give this speech, you’re going to lose some friends.” I looked out the window of my office over the Mall in Washington and said to Wendy, “I understand that. But I’ve done a number of things in my life because I thought it was the right thing, not because it was easy. And a lot of other people have done that too—all prepared to accept the consequences. I think this is the right thing to do now and I’m certainly not going to back down because there’s going to be political blowback.”