The Secretary

by Kim Ghattas

  In Lebanon, the war continued until that day in October 1990 when Syria imposed its peace on us. The tanks were retired and the snipers went home. But Lebanon was still a troubled country in a difficult neighborhood where the stakes for America remained high, and peacetime brought its share of crises. As a journalist, my stories were about our power plants being bombed by Israel, Hezbollah kidnapping Israeli soldiers, Syria imposing presidents on us, politicians and journalists getting blown up; and with each crisis, journalists, friends, and family waited to hear what Washington had to say or what it was planning to do about the situation. As ever, interpretation of any statement depended on your political leanings: you were either looking for a sign that help was on its way or looking for a clue about America’s nefarious designs. More often than not, the news anchor, speaking in Arabic, would start the evening news bulletin with “The spokesperson for the American foreign ministry today said the situation in Lebanon was…”

  Now I was living in Washington, and I knew the current spokesperson, P. J. Crowley. A jovial man with the gift of gab, probably due to his Irish ancestry, P. J. was a retired air force colonel who had served in the Clinton administration. Sharing a drink with him and other journalists in Washington, at the beginning of my time in the United States, I still wondered what he knew that I didn’t. I knew that America had changed, that the world had changed. China was looking more and more like a rival to the United States, Turkey was vying for a regional role, Brazil was becoming a superpower in Latin America, and Moscow was slowly recovering from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Yet people’s vision of America as omnipotent remained.

  Were we stuck in the past, holding on to the image of America as a superpower because it was simply what we knew? What was twenty-first-century American power made of, anyway? Was it smart? Or would it end up being more of the same, just better than the last eight years? Lebanon wasn’t the only country in the Middle East that hung on Washington’s every word looking for a clue about its intentions and about the future.

  4

  NO NATURAL GROWTH

  A few weeks before the trip to Beirut, Clinton had faced a crowded, chaotic room full of hostile Arab journalists and a smattering of equally skeptical American and European reporters. She had just pledged $300 million in aid for the Palestinians during an international conference in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Cast Lead, the Israel military assault against the Gaza Strip which had ended just as Obama was inaugurated, had killed up to 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children, and left an already bleak economy in ruins. The Israeli army had pounded the territory to stop rocket fire into Israel and was keeping the strip under blockade. The Arab journalists didn’t care so much about the aid: America had made many promises before, but life as a Palestinian under Israeli occupation was still miserable. The money was just a Band-Aid.

  The journalists had a very simple question for Clinton: Would an independent Palestinian state come into existence within a year?

  This was Hillary’s first foray into the decades-old conflict as secretary of state, but she had a long history with the region, as did her husband, who had tried until his last minute in office to get the Palestinians and the Israelis to make peace. Overall, Arabs did not trust America when it came to resolving conflict. They accused the United States of siding with Israel, always and without reservations. They were not wrong, but they were not entirely right either. The conflict was about so much more than land and elicited deep emotions, unrealistic hopes, and bursts of anger on all sides. American officials expressed empathy with Israel more often, leaving Palestinians living under the humiliation of occupation feeling like lesser humans, but Arabs still pleaded with the United States to help broker peace, perhaps precisely because they knew no one else could deliver Israel to the negotiating table. There were still fond memories in the region of Bill Clinton, of his rare ability to empathize with Palestinians and his desperate efforts to broker peace. Discussing the conflict with Arab leaders, including Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, Hillary referenced the long days and nights her husband had spent working for peace. Then she reached out to her skeptical audience. A viable Palestinian state was the goal.

  “You all know that this is a very difficult and complex set of issues. You also know that I personally am very committed to this. And I know that it can be done. I believe that with all my heart. I feel passionately about this. This is something that is in my heart, not just in my portfolio,” said the secretary.

  In 1998, as First Lady, Hillary spoke to a group of young Palestinians, Israelis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Americans, who were holding an unprecedented joint youth summit in Switzerland. She spelled out exactly how she thought the outcome of peace talks should look: the Palestinians should have their own state. She was ahead of White House policy. No American official had mentioned a Palestinian state yet, though some had been thinking it and the Palestinians had been calling for it. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, Palestinians had lived either as refugees in neighboring states or under occupation in two separate pieces of territory: the Gaza Strip, in the Mediterranean, and inland, on the border with Jordan, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The two territories had first been annexed by Egypt and Jordan in 1948 but then captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War. Tens of thousands of Palestinians also became Israeli citizens and today make up 20 percent of the country’s population. American presidents who labored for peace between Israel and the Palestinians had so far never spelled out in detail what the outcome should look like. But Hillary had said it aloud; it seemed obvious to her.

  The Israeli prime minister was apoplectic—the country’s leadership openly opposed the idea of a Palestinian state and was unable yet to envisage giving the Palestinians anything more than an amorphous nationlet made up of cantons with little or no geographical connection between them. The White House quickly put out a disclaimer, saying Hillary’s statement was not official U.S. policy. As a U.S. senator from New York, Hillary was less public about her views on Palestinian hardship and more in tune with the many Jewish voters in her constituency. Now, as a secretary of state, she told the Arab journalists before her that Palestinian children deserved a better future and that Palestinian parents had the right to expect such a future for their children. She promised that the Obama administration was going to work hard for peace and for a Palestinian state.

  “You will see the amount of effort that the United States puts into this. I wish it could happen tomorrow. I wish it could happen certainly by the end of this year. But I will not give up. We will make progress.”

  Arab journalists, most of them Egyptians, were taken aback by her show of emotion. During the eight years of the Bush administration, there had been little or no empathy. Emoting wasn’t Condoleezza Rice’s strong suit, and it was never part of her talking points. Suddenly the room erupted into applause. American officials standing along the wall listening were stunned, especially those who were steeped in Middle East affairs and protected themselves from the vagaries of the warring parties with layers of cynicism. Journalists never applauded at the end of a press conference, and in the Arab world no one ever cheered for American officials. The applause wasn’t just the result of Hillary’s ability to charm when she spoke from the heart; it was a reflection of the deep yearning, both in the room and in the region, for renewed hope about an intractable conflict, a reflection of the inexplicable continued desire among Arabs to see America take their side—preferably unconditionally. Despite their wariness about the United States, the Arabs in the region had welcomed President Obama’s election, and so far they liked what they were hearing.

  * * *

  On his second day in office, Obama had declared that seeking a solution to the sixty-year-long conflict between Arabs and Israelis was in America’s national security interest. From Washington to Ramallah, ears perked up. American presidents rarely tackled Middle East peace at the start of their administrations. Even more striking was the new langu
age. For the past forty years, every American president had tried to broker peace: peace would be good for the people of the region and pulling it off would make everyone look good. Only two presidents had succeeded in bringing Arabs and Israeli leaders together for a handshake on the White House lawn: Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. The others tried their best to produce the same photo opportunity. But to seek peace because it was a matter of national security for the United States, as Obama had said, elevated this to an essential and urgent goal.

  Obama’s first phone call to a foreign leader on January 21 was to the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas—an unprecedented, symbolic, and powerful gesture. Because 78 percent of American Jews had voted for Obama, he felt strong, convinced that his persona alone could deliver a breakthrough. Looking at the region, he saw elements he could build on.

  Just before Obama’s election, the Israeli military onslaught against the Palestinian territory of Gaza had deepened the political divide between Palestinians and further weakened Abbas. Since 2007, Abbas had ruled over only part of the Palestinian territories, the West Bank. Hamas, the Sunni Islamist political party and armed militant group listed as a terror group by the United States, ruled over Gaza. Wars often create diplomatic momentum: they focus everybody’s minds on the need to find a solution. Obama saw an opportunity. There were also signs that an agreement could be within reach. The Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, from the centrist Kadima Party, had been negotiating on and off for two years with Abbas, both with the help of the United States and also alone. They had been making real progress on all the issues, from the borders of a future Palestinian state to the status of Jerusalem, which both Israelis and Palestinians claimed as their capital. Olmert claimed they were “very close”7 to a deal. But progress was stalled when the Israeli leader faced corruption charges; he was on his way out and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, also from Kadima, was running for office. She was in a dead heat race with the leader of the right-wing Likud Party. At the State Department, many officials were secretly rooting for Kadima. On February 10, Livni and her party won the greatest number of seats but she had such a narrow majority, she struggled to form a coalition. The Likud party leader, the other contender for power, was more successful in wooing small parties, and at the end of March he became the prime minister. Benjamin Netanyahu was back, and that wasn’t part of anyone’s plan.

  Netanyahu, or Bibi, as he was known, was the Israeli prime minister who had reacted with such fury to Hillary’s statement about a Palestinian state back in 1998. He had also driven Bill crazy. After a lecture from Netanyahu about the Arab-Israeli conflict during one of their first meetings in 1996, President Clinton had exploded. “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”8

  Then secretary of state Madeleine Albright had described Bibi as “pugnacious, partisan and very smooth,” a man who could be both “disarming and somewhat disingenuous”9 and constantly played games in the negotiations. He had spent years in the United States, had studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he used his familiarity with America both to make friends and to game the system, pitting Congress against the president.

  The contrast with his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin was stark. Rabin had been assassinated by a right-wing Israeli in 1995 because of concessions he made for peace. President Clinton and Rabin had been great friends. The Israeli statesman had shaken hands with then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn and signed a peace treaty with Jordan. Mostly, he was a man who stuck to his words and acted on them. Bibi constantly reneged on his promises. Rahm Emanuel, one of President Clinton’s senior advisors, said little in public but watched with dismay as Bibi frustrated Clinton’s efforts to reach a lasting deal. Now Rahm was back in power too, this time as Obama’s chief of staff.

  Bibi probably did not have the best of memories from the Clinton administration. When his government coalition had collapsed at the end of 1998, early elections were called, and in Washington top administration officials were hoping that Bibi’s opponent, Labor leader Ehud Barak, would win. The Israeli press speculated that Clinton was actively trying to bring about Bibi’s defeat, a narrative that was fed by the presence in Israel of a handful of Democratic political strategists who were close to Clinton and helped Barak on the path to victory.

  Two years after Hillary’s 1998 off-script comment, Bill Clinton himself called for a Palestinian state and the position became official U.S. policy. But the details, Washington insisted again, would have to be decided by Israel and the Palestinians: the borders of the state, the status of Palestinian refugees, security agreements. But once again Bibi was dragging his feet—he could not even utter the words “Palestinian state.” He and previous Israeli leaders had tried to alter the contours of the territory that they occupied in Israel’s favor. They built more and more settlements for Israelis on land that would make up the future Palestinian state and erected a barrier separating Israel from the West Bank. Supporters of the barrier argued that it was essential to protect Israelis from Palestinian militant attacks. But already, Palestinian territory was not contiguous; the Gaza Strip was separated from the West Bank by Israel proper—land that Palestinians were not allowed on without Israeli permission. Palestinians complained they were negotiating about how to split a pizza while the Israelis were busy eating it.

  Bibi and his right-wing maximalist views threatened Obama’s hopes for Middle East peace. Emanuel advised Obama to be tough on Netanyahu and show him, immediately, who the superpower was. Senator George Mitchell, Obama’s new Middle East peace envoy, had tackled this all before too. At the end of the Clinton administration, when peace failed and violence erupted, he had been tasked with finding a way forward for the parties. One of the items on the long list of recommendations was a settlement freeze. Obama appointed Mitchell at the behest of Hillary, who, although she could speak with passion about a Palestinian state, was wary of associating herself too closely too soon with the thankless task of Mideast peace. Mitchell, a seventy-six-year-old man with a calm demeanor, had negotiated peace in Northern Ireland and believed in details and small steps. He brought the settlement issue to the front again. Although he was not formally in charge of the Mideast file, Emanuel was keen to show Bibi who was boss, and he actively pushed for the freeze to top the agenda. When Netanyahu came for his first meeting at the White House on May 18, President Obama established his position.

  “Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward,” Obama said. “That’s a difficult issue. I recognize that. But it’s an important one, and it has to be addressed.”

  In public, Bibi said he was willing to consider refraining from new construction, but if a school needed a new playground, if a building was still under construction, if a family needed an extension to their house—all that construction had to continue. Daily life had to grow, he insisted, it was natural. There were more than 300,000 settlers living in the Israeli occupied territory of the West Bank in between Palestinian towns and, even though settlements were illegal under international law, they kept growing. Like a game of rope pulling, Palestinians and Arabs had felt America leaning toward them. Israel was now pulling hard on the other side, and tension was settling in.

  On May 27, Clinton met with the Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit at the State Department. She was asked what she thought of Bibi’s offer to continue building what was already under way but not allow any new construction.

  “The president was very clear when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here. He wants to see a stop to settlements,” said Clinton. Then, with the sleeve of her electric-blue pantsuit going back and forth for emphasis, she continued with a faint indignant smile, detailing exactly what she believed Obama had meant.

  “Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions. We think it is in the best interests of the effort that we are engaged in that settlement expansion cease. That is our position.”

  Standing next to her, Ab
oul Gheit, one hand in his pocket, smiled smugly. He knew the Obama administration wanted to push for a stop in settlement construction, and he didn’t necessarily agree. He thought it was a short-term tactic when what was needed was a comprehensive long-term strategy—ideally America should put a detailed plan on the table and get to the finish line quickly. But he liked Clinton’s firm tone of voice. This was a strong, powerful, and very public statement, and it boded well for tough negotiations with the Israelis.

  Finally, the Palestinians thought. Finally, the United States has seen the light and was showing Israel who was boss. Clinton’s firmness was beyond just a general call for a stop in settlement activity. No natural growth meant drop all your cinder blocks, immobilize your cranes, park your trucks. The Palestinian president and his advisors adopted it as their new mantra. They certainly couldn’t ask less than what Washington was setting as a standard. America had spoken, it was the will of the American president, and all they had to do now was wait for the Israelis to comply. They would get their house in order, continue fixing up the economy, and build state institutions, and America would make peace talks happen. The radical group Hamas was more cynical. Words, all words, they said. Nothing will change.

  In Washington, analysts and activists were coming forward with suggestions about how the administration should punish Bibi if he didn’t halt settlement construction: link elements of aid to a stop in settlement construction, announce a review of the strategic relationship between the two countries, or even boycott a settlement products. Obama’s and Clinton’s statements were taken as a sign that the administration was ready to go to the mat with Bibi. Previous presidents, like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush, had gone that route with Israeli leaders—if America stood its ground, it could pay off.