by Kim Ghattas
Mitchell had been working hard to get the Israelis to agree to freeze settlement activity so that Abbas would sit down for talks. This was now the Palestinians’ precondition; they refused to come to the table while the Israelis were putting up “facts on the ground” on occupied territory. They brandished Hillary’s own words about “no exception, no natural growth” to justify their position. The Israelis were now suggesting to Mitchell that they could refrain from starting any new construction for only ten months, but they insisted that any work already under way would continue and had announced thousands of new constructions in the preceding weeks. The building was also part of the “natural growth,” a loophole that Israel always used to justify continued construction on settlements. Crucially, occupied East Jerusalem was excluded from the deal. The Palestinians and the Israelis both claimed the divided city as their capital but only Israel had the means to enforce construction on the contested territory. The imperfect offer of a partial freeze of construction was the best that Mitchell had been able to get so far. It wasn’t that different from what Bibi had suggested earlier in the year in his talks in Washington, but this was a somewhat firmer offer. Now Abbas had to accept this as sufficient to start talks, and Bibi had to stick to his word. Clinton was coming to play three-dimensional chess. She also had to get the Arab world to both acknowledge the Israeli gesture—never an easy feat—and support Abbas in his decision to start talks, an even more arduous task.
We landed midevening in Abu Dhabi, only half a motorcade awaiting us on the tarmac. The late notice of our arrival meant the embassy had not been able to rustle up all the cars needed to drive the whole delegation into town. Clinton and her closest aides sped off first while the rest of the delegation waited in the VIP lounge.
The second motorcade took us to our hotel, with no filing center, intermittent Internet in our rooms, and a barely operating restaurant. Lew was always the last to leave the airport. He handed over his shiny metal case with all our passports to the embassy staffer who got them stamped into the country. They then drove our luggage into town. Clinton was already well into her meeting with President Abbas.
* * *
In a large conference room with gold paneling and glittering crystal sconces, the secretary of state and her delegation sat at a table covered with white linen and a small bouquet of white and yellow lilies. Facing them, Abbas looked deflated and acted defeated.
The Palestinians were once again tangled up in a mess, partly of their own making. The Israeli military operation against Gaza in December 2008 had targeted Hamas, the radical militant Islamic group that ruled over the strip of Palestinian territories by the sea. They were Abbas’s political rivals so he had mostly stood by, not unhappy to see them get a pounding. But his credibility as a Palestinian leader had suffered. A report commissioned by the UN criticized Hamas militants for taking cover behind civilians, but it had been harsher on Israel, accusing it of using excessive force. To make up for his tarnished image, Abbas wanted a vote at the UN Human Rights Council to endorse the report. Some Palestinians also hoped it would lead to Israeli officials being tried before international courts of justice. But if Abbas pushed for the vote now, the Israelis would be furious, and any progress Mitchell had made so far would come to an abrupt end. Washington pressed Abbas to reconsider. Before doing so, the Palestinian leader sought the support of Arab countries and when they winked he asked for the vote to be postponed, just a few weeks before our visit to the UAE. He was then promptly excoriated by the Arabs for betraying the Palestinian cause. Worse, he was being lambasted by his own people. In Gaza, posters went up on the walls, with the words: “To the dumps of history, you traitor, Mahmoud Abbas.” He told Clinton that even his grandson’s schoolmates asked why his grandfather was a traitor to Palestine. Abbas was deeply hurt; he believed in the Palestinian cause and in peace, and he felt he deserved better.
Hillary was moved by his story. With her interlocutors, Hillary always reacted first as a person, as a mother. Children often came up. Her empathy was real, and it was a feeling that was sorely missing between Israelis and Palestinians. They had long ago lost the ability to understand each other’s suffering, past and present. Perhaps they’d never had it. When the new State of Israel was declared in 1948, on parts of what was then British Mandate Palestine, the Holocaust was a distant occurrence for Arabs. The Jewish push for a homeland had become both more urgent and aggressive in the wake of the Holocaust and there was little room to consider the pain this was inflicting on others, not least the creation of a quarter of a million Palestinian refugees. To this day, Palestinians often wonder why they are being made to pay for Europe’s horrors.
Under Israeli shelling in Beirut in 1982, and then again in 1992 and in 1996, I had no ability to empathize with the “other” side. There was no other side. I was being bombed. Even in my Christian school in our liberal, Westernized enclave, where Christian warlords had once been staunch allies of Israel, my history lessons barely mentioned the Holocaust. I knew vaguely that Jews had been killed in Europe during the war, but mostly the Holocaust was a vague, distant event that those around me said was being used by Jews to justify their land grab. Growing up in Beirut, I’d never met a Jewish person. Lebanon’s once thriving Jewish community had left the country in waves, either choosing to move to Israel or being pushed out by violence. Those who remained did not advertise that they were Jewish. For people who have lived all their life in the Arab Middle East, Israelis and Jews are faceless; they are the “other,” the unknown.
In my twenties, my worldview was suddenly turned upside down when I fell in love. He was European and we were together for a few years. Three of his grandparents had died in concentration camps in Europe. When I met his parents, I finally understood that the Holocaust wasn’t some distant historical event. It was real. His family still carried the trauma of its memory and lived with the emptiness the concentration camps had forced into their lives. His father liked me very much, but he was terrified of traveling to Lebanon and he never visited Beirut. For him, we were the “other.”
Hillary’s ability to empathize allowed each side to glimpse its “other,” helping to defuse tensions or bring someone around. She rarely admonished, hectored, or gave orders but laid out the arguments in favor of the course of action she supported. She appealed to Abbas to see the opportunity in the Israeli offer. Every time a house is finished, a new one will not start, she said. The Palestinian leader only saw the gaps—construction would continue, cinder blocks would be making their way into Israeli settlements in the West Bank, cranes would be lifting stone after stone into place. The imagery was terrible. He would be branded a traitor again. Clinton emphasized to Abbas that without the partial freeze in settlement construction, the situation on the ground and his position would only get worse. Every now and then, she lowered her voice, taking Abbas into her confidence. This was an opportunity; it had to be seized, she said. What was most important was to start moving forward. She appealed to his sense of pragmatism: once the talks started, progress could be made on the issues at the heart of the conflict, starting with the future borders of a Palestinian state.
Abbas said that excluding East Jerusalem from the offer was impossible; he couldn’t take that back to his people, or the region for that matter. Jerusalem was sacred. The Arabs would pounce on him. The secretary promised that the United States would work hard to ensure Israel would behave and not make any provocative announcements about new construction in Jerusalem.
Abbas couldn’t do it. The Israelis had to offer more.
The American delegation was frustrated and slightly perplexed. Everyone always overestimated America’s ability to move others. Abbas had just refused Clinton’s request that he take the Israeli offer and start negotiations. If the United States had no power to make him do something, why did he think the Americans had the power to the force the Israelis to do anything? It was true that the Palestinians were the weaker party, and the Americans often leaned on them whe
n they couldn’t make the Israelis budge, but what the Palestinians really wanted was a deus ex machina, an improbable God that would suddenly sweep in and deliver a solution without them having to do all the hard work. Yet they resented American power and didn’t want to be seen as American lackeys.
Hillary, Jake, Jeff, and George Mitchell were drained by the two-hour-long conversation with the Palestinian leader, the six-hour flight, and the busy day they’d already had in Islamabad. When they returned to their hotel rooms, on each of their beds sat a big chocolate race car, in honor of the upcoming Formula One car race. Everything in the Emirates was flashy, down to the ATM that dispensed gold bars in the hotel lobby.
On Saturday, Clinton would meet the country’s crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed, or MBZ, as our schedule referred to him. He wanted to show off his country and the example it could set for the region. He invited the secretary to lunch at Nautilus, a modern restaurant in the Yas Viceroy hotel. An elongated structure with a rounded roof, overlooking a marina with gleaming, oversized yachts, the hotel straddled the lower part of the racetrack loop that was modeled after the Monaco track. A Ferrari theme park sat just around the corner, and the whole lot was set on the man-made Yas Island. The restaurant was all white, with plastic molded furniture straight out of the The Jetsons. Dressed in a white flowing robe and headdress, MBZ sat across from Clinton in an alcove discussing everything from Iran to Lebanon, Syria, clean energy, and Gulf security. She lobbied for support for Abbas. Sitting slightly in retreat, Jake, Jeff, and the others strained to listen in to their boss’s conversation while waiters served them multiple courses of seafood.
Vrooooooooom, vroooooooooom—“and the peace process is”—vrooooooooom, vroooooooooom—“but the Palestinians should”—vroooooooooooooom.
The qualifying races ahead of the Grand Prix the following day had gotten under way, and the roar of the race cars drowned half the conversation as the vehicles looped around the track and its twenty-one twists. This modern, prosperous corner of the Middle East was attuned to the future.
Now it was time to get on a plane and travel to a land weighed down by history and conflict, to a city where the Sabbath was coming to an end and work could resume.
* * *
SAM landed in Tel Aviv at around eight in the evening, on Halloween night, and within minutes Clinton’s motorcade left the Mediterranean behind and drove inland, heading east toward Jerusalem. The convoy split in two as it entered the holy city: the press would be going ahead to the prime minister’s office to start going through extensive security checks. Wailing sirens followed the secretary’s limousine and a couple of staff vans as they headed to the David Citadel Hotel, where in a basement room Israeli cabinet ministers awaited the American delegation.
Ehud Barak, a longtime fixture of Israeli politics who had vanquished Bibi Netanyahu in the 1999 election with the help of American political strategists, was now a defense minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet. The short, ebullient man who was sometimes called Israel’s Napoleon was telling everyone that Bibi had mellowed and was willing to make a deal. Hillary and the others wanted to believe him. But American officials were also anticipating a quick change at the top—Israeli politics shifted treacherously. During Bibi’s first term in power, frustrated Clinton administration officials saw him as a “kind of speed bump that would have to be negotiated along the way until a new Israeli prime minister came along who was more serious about peace.”12
Eight months into Netanyahu’s second premiership, it was the same all over again. Any hope that Obama may have had coming into office of creating quick momentum toward serious peace talks was fading fast. Rahm Emanuel’s advice to be tough on Netanyahu wasn’t delivering any results so far. Washington would have to wait out Bibi.
“Bibi thinks he can just stick to his position and outlast us, but we’re here for four years,” one smiling official had told me that spring, soon after Bibi came to power. The official had also served in the Clinton administration. “And then we’ll likely be here for another four years.”
All the United States needed to do was coax him a bit further down the road he had already traveled to keep things moving forward. As it was so often with American officials, the strategy was hope and the timetable was hope. The Palestinians were hearing the same from Israeli politicians in the center and on the left: “Bibi will be gone soon. We’ll give you a better deal. Stick it out.”
But the Democrats who were now back in power and thought they could handle Bibi like they had in the 1990s had misread the extent to which Israel itself had changed. The world might have celebrated Obama’s election, but in Israel there was little fondness for him. He had traveled to Cairo but had not visited Jerusalem, and Israelis felt slighted. Obama had been elected with 78 percent of the Jewish vote in America, but Israel had been slowly veering to the right and it brought to power people like Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s ultraconservative, Russian-born foreign minister.
Clinton was meeting with Lieberman as well as with Barak. Lieberman lived in a settlement himself, though no one brought it up. The atmosphere was already stiflingly tense when he started complaining about Turkey, where a moderate Islamist party was in power. Hillary was developing a strong working relationship with her Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoğlu. But Lieberman warned that the Turks were Muslim extremists. Clinton reminded him that Israel’s own actions inflamed sentiments in the region.
* * *
While Clinton was sitting in a basement with the Israeli ministers, the traveling press were making their way, one by one, into the stone building housing the prime minister’s offices, through the metal detector. Apart from Pakistan and Afghanistan, there was no other country where the delegation of the American secretary of state had to go through such thorough screening. The United States may have been Israel’s top ally and biggest donor, but there was no preferential treatment here, even for senior and midlevel American officials on state business.
The wailing sirens signaled the arrival of Clinton’s motorcade sometime after ten o’clock. The press conference would take place before the talks so the Israeli media could put something on air that evening. Netanyahu walked onto the slightly elevated stage, followed by Clinton. With two microphone stands and no lectern, it was an odd setting. Bibi stood so close to the edge of the stage that he loomed over the row of chairs where the journalists were waiting to ask their questions. The blue of his tie matched the blue of the Israeli flag behind him.
“We think we should sit around that negotiating table right away,” Bibi said. “What we should do on the path to peace is to get on it and get with it.” Standing along one wall to the side, American officials cringed. They knew he didn’t mean it. It was a statement that cost him nothing and made him look like a noble, genuine peacemaker. He knew full well the Palestinians were not in a position to come straightaway to the table. He would look good, and the Palestinians would look like obstructionist fools. American officials described it as a well-honed Israeli trick. The settlement freeze before negotiations was a new demand by the Palestinians, Bibi added, and in the past they had always negotiated without it. It was true, but Abbas was politically weak, and he was clinging to the new American gospel about the settlement freeze.
Clinton kept a straight face, nodding mechanically, as she often did. As a politician, she understood the context that Bibi himself was operating in. She had just met his foreign minister, and understood that Bibi’s right-wing coalition kept him boxed in. If she gave him some credit in public for his concessions, no matter how small they were, perhaps she could coax him a bit further out. After all, he had uttered the magic words “Palestinian state” for the first time in his life merely a few months ago. Crucially, there was no American plan B if Bibi remained obstinate in his refusal to give more on settlements. So in front of the world media, Clinton tried to lock him into the promise he had made in private.
“What the prime minister has offered in specifics of a restraint on the policy
of settlements, which he has just described—no new starts, for example—is unprecedented in the context of the prior two negotiations,” she said.
It was factually correct, but making peace in the Middle East often boils down to moving a comma here or a semicolon there. If you praise the Israelis for restraint on settlement construction, you have to add, “but they should do more and the U.S. position remains that continued settlement building is illegitimate”; otherwise, the Palestinians will sulk. If you talk about the suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation, you have to say, “and the Israelis too suffer under Palestinian rocket attacks,” or else the Israelis will go bonkers. But if you praise the Israelis for offering to refrain from any new construction while building continues in projects already under way, then you’ve just backed down from your own demand to stop all settlement activity.
It was past 11:00 p.m. in Jerusalem, and 2:00 a.m. in Pakistan, where we’d been just the day before. Somewhere it was breakfast time; we had been on the move for twelve hours. Clinton knew Netanyahu would talk forever, and the meeting would be intense. She wanted to get on with it. She omitted the “but.”