by Kim Ghattas
“I know you’re someone who is indefatigable,” Clinton said smiling broadly, “so even though we’re starting our meeting so late, I have no doubt that it will be intense and cover a lot of ground. And I’m very much eager to begin those discussions.”
The press conference ended, and Netanyahu and Clinton went into their meeting. In the cramped room, journalists debated furiously what had just happened. What did this mean? Had the United States given in? Had Bibi won? Was this significant? The newswire agencies started sending urgent one-line stories called snaps.
“Clinton calls Netanyahu restraint unprecedented.”
The statement had taken Hillary’s own team by surprise. Praising Bibi’s restraint hadn’t exactly been part of the script. In fact, there wasn’t a written script. Clinton was answering a question, and she had no notes in front of her. She often spoke from her gut, but the Middle East was not willing to let go of the accepted script, just like Asia hadn’t on her maiden trip. The tiniest deviation provoked panic, anger, fear, depression, and feelings of betrayal. Mitchell, the peace envoy, and Jeff, the Building’s Middle East man, knew immediately that there would be some damage control needed to calm the Arab world. But sitting inside the meeting, they were not aware of the extent of the fury that was unfurling across the region. They were too busy, with Clinton, holding their ground in front of Netanyahu.
Sitting on either side of a rectangular table laid with finger food, the Israelis and the Americans talked and talked and talked. Bibi didn’t move much. Neither did Hillary.
“We need something to hold Abbas’s hand and bring him to the table,” Clinton told Netanyahu. He didn’t budge.
“The risk of not doing anything is greater than the risk involved in compromising,” she went on. He didn’t budge.
* * *
Sitting in the press conference room, the traveling reporters wrote their stories until it was time to go. Everyone climbed into the black vans parked outside and waited some more in the parking lot. The vans started to drive but stopped just outside the gates. More waiting. Just after midnight, an e-mail arrived from Philippe:
Senator Mitchell and his party aren’t travelling on with us, so when we leave the PM’s office shortly we’re going to head back to the David Citadel hotel so the Secretary can huddle with him for a bit to discuss tonight’s series of meetings.
Clearly, this was a crisis. It was starting to dawn on everyone that the delegation might be sleeping in Jerusalem. Maybe even in these vans, because no one had booked any hotel rooms. Lew was still at the airport in Tel Aviv with the delegation’s passports and luggage. On quick stops like this, he stayed with SAM, awaiting our return and catching up on e-mails from Washington where he still had to run a whole a department of 100 people that looked after 750 top officials in the Building.
Twenty-two minutes after midnight, another e-mail from Philippe.
We’re going to fly to Marrakesh, arriving 6am. On the upside, we’ll have 1AM pancakes and hot chocolate on the plane.
On the tarmac in Tel Aviv, the air force flight attendants were digging deep into their pantry.
The black vans headed to the David Citadel Hotel. Reporters and staffers settled in the lobby and begged for some food. The restaurant was closed, but the hotel managed to put out three salads for twenty people and some rolls of bread. Everyone spread out in the deserted mezzanine café area while Clinton and Mitchell huddled.
By two in the morning, the haggard travelers were all slouched on our chairs half asleep, still hungry, some browsing the Internet to find a restaurant for dinner in Marrakesh the following day. Suddenly, a booming perky voice echoed through the marble lobby.
“Hi, guys!” Hillary was walking up the stairs to the mezzanine where everyone had been waiting. “What have you been up to? Are you ready for Morocco?” She had just spent almost five hours in back-to-back meetings with hardheaded politicians on one of the thorniest issues on the agenda of a U.S. administration, but she seemed alive with the adrenaline that kicks in during crisis mode.
* * *
We arrived in Marrakesh at six in the morning on Sunday and went straight to breakfast by the pool of our hotel—the Palmeraie Golf Palace hotel. We felt like we had been propelled from a nightmare into a mirage. Clinton was here for a Forum for the Future conference. Traveling with the secretary of state sometimes meant an incongruous combination of deprivation, luxury resort accommodations, and explosive conflicts. (Once, in Thailand for an Asian regional meeting, we’d had to traipse across a sandy beach in our heels and suits, carrying laptop bags, to reach our rooms in ninety-degree heat and 80 percent humidity.)
The morning headlines in the region’s newspapers revealed not only the damage done by Clinton’s words but also the extent of the divide between Israelis and Palestinians. The Israeli press was jubilant. The Obama administration had finally seen the light. Haaretz wrote that Clinton had “demanded” that Abbas return to talks “immediately,” and it was clear that the United States had accepted Israel’s position about restarting peace negotiations. A “deal” had also been struck to allow Israel to continue building its three thousand units. Israel had won the rope-pulling contest.
The Arab press was despondent. Why did Clinton think the restraint was a concession worthy of praise? They accused her of trying to bully Abbas into entering peace talks. They saw her statement as the result of a clear decision made in Washington to drop the demand of a settlement freeze. Obama had made the decision and sent Clinton to deliver a message. It was part of the plan, they concluded. There was no room in anyone’s reading of Hillary’s comment for a politician’s gut and an American administration feeling its way on the path to peace.
Later that afternoon, puffing on a cigar in the hotel’s café, the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, lamented the dismal state of affairs. He said he hoped Obama would not accept this “slap in the face” by Israel. “I’m really afraid that we’re about to see a failure,” Moussa said, in English, holding up his cigar for dramatic effect. “Failure is in the atmosphere all over.”
He ended the conversation by saying he still had a “reservoir of hope.” Despite the outrage, Arabs didn’t want to alienate an American president who seemed to be on their side and who spoke with empathy about their suffering. Keeping the Arabs on board was key to any progress, and Clinton wanted to make sure they wouldn’t stab Abbas in the back again.
On Monday, Philippe had news for the traveling press.
This is for Your Planning Purposes ONLY—NOT for Reporting
Want you all to know that we are considering stopping in Egypt after we leave Marrakesh tomorrow. This is by no means certain, the planning is fluid because we are trying to see if President Mubarak’s schedule allows for a visit (he’s currently not in Cairo, he’s in Sharm El Sheikh). To reiterate, this is for your planning purposes ONLY, and NOT reportable.
Mubarak, Egypt’s modern-day pharaoh, had been in power since 1981. He was Washington’s reliable ally and often hosted peace summits; his backing would be crucial. Never mind that he was a dictator; this was just how things were done in the region.
With the secretary, Jake and Jeff labored for hours over a statement that would reassure the Arabs that the United States wasn’t giving up on them. That Sunday, sitting next to the Moroccan foreign minister, Clinton read carefully from a piece of paper. Every comma, every “but,” every caveat was scripted. The American position had not changed, she insisted. The United States did not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement construction.
“I will offer positive reinforcement to the parties when I believe they are taking steps that support the objective of reaching a two-state solution. I will also push them as I have in public and private to do even more.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Lew was dealing with his own crisis, organizing another last-minute stop in yet another country—hotel rooms and motorcades could be arranged, but he couldn’t do much about lunch on the plane;
it would be a meager affair.
By now the flight attendants were rationing the food. All the meals were usually prepared on the plane and the air force crew always packed all the supplies they needed before departure, keeping perishables on dry ice or in cool storage on the plane. They rarely resupplied during the trip because they didn’t want to risk serving anything that might give passengers an upset stomach. For very long trips, the crew made arrangements in advance to resupply in countries along the way—even American bases at some of our refueling stops were not necessarily equipped to provide meals for forty people on short notice.
When they had left Washington, the crew expected two country stops and five legs total. They had prepared for the exact number of lunches, dinners, and breakfasts on our route. We were now on our way to the fifth country, and there were going to be eight legs total until Washington. And all the times had been turned upside down—the snack and dinner on the way out of Islamabad had become a dinner and a breakfast. The breakfast on the way out of Morocco had become a lunch on the way to Egypt. The rest of the meals required ingenuity and serious forward planning. We still had two seven-hour flights before we arrived home. On our six-hour flight to Cairo, we were reduced to eating a thin cheese sandwich and about five tablespoons each of canned tomato soup. There was no more wine to lull our discontent. Clinton came to the back of our plane and handed out chocolates she had gotten from her hotel in Marrakesh.
Sitting in the front cabin, Paul, the plane team line officer with no team, was delirious with fatigue. When he had heard Cairo was next, he had reconciled himself to never going home. Marrakesh was a nine-hour flight across the Atlantic to Washington. Instead we were now flying five hours east to Egypt. “It’s a good thing the earth is round,” thought Paul. “Everything is always on the way to somewhere else.”
Clinton spent a few hours speaking to President Hosni Mubarak and Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit, explaining why she believed that Bibi’s offer was worth seizing upon. But mostly she pressed them to give Abbas the backing that he so needed to make the difficult choices on the road to peace.
On our sixteen-hour journey home, and in the following weeks in Washington, I pondered the drama I had seen unfold and the disappointment it had caused. I only learned later of the details of Clinton’s conversations, but I still wondered whether one of the reasons countries and people were so often disappointed in the United States was their unrealistic expectations of what the United States should and could do. Governments everywhere that instinctively and narrowly pursued their national interest somehow expected the United States to suspend the pursuit of its own interests to please them. The Arabs wanted the United States to ditch the Israelis; the Israelis wanted the United States to bomb Iran; the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wanted Obama to wait with him for the Shiite messiah; Pakistan wanted to be given Afghanistan on a gold platter; India wanted the United States to say it could have Kashmir; Japan wanted Washington to make Beijing go away. Countries seemed to forget that the United States had different layers of overlapping interests it needed to align.
I also saw a clear dissonance between the reality of American power, whether hard, smart, or soft, and what people believed was in America’s power to achieve. The sometimes bizarrely optimistic attitudes of American officials themselves and their belief in their own ability to get things done only fed that perception. It had always been so, but now American influence was being challenged in unprecedented ways in a world spinning faster than ever before.
* * *
Weeks later, I was sitting in my dark cubicle in the Building reading an interview with Obama by Joe Klein in Time magazine when one sentence about the stalled Middle East peace talks at the very end of the page caught my eye. “If we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.”13
I was perplexed. Even as a seasoned journalist walking the corridors of power in Washington, or seeing Hillary get skewered for her comments on China, or watching Jeff in full damage-control mode in Morocco, I still struggled sometimes to accept that American officials were just human beings. But it was astounding to me that the president of the United States had not expected that a sixty-year-old conflict would be difficult to resolve and that he had not appreciated the impact his words would have on the hopes of people in the region.
Obama was not the only president who had walked into the Oval Office convinced that the authority of his position combined with the power of his own persona were enough to move heaven and earth. Sometimes they could, when all the stars aligned, but often presidents left the White House more or less frustrated.
“The people can never understand why the president does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave,” President Harry Truman had once complained. “Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”14
Around the world, people thought the same. They expected an American president to push a button and make things happen, because he wanted it, because they wanted it.
Washington’s dilemmas in the Middle East date back to a chain of decisions made by President Truman starting in 1947. After the ailing president Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, Truman, his vice president, moved into the White House. He was facing an election in November 1948 and his ratings were dismal. Meanwhile, the British Mandate over Palestine was due to expire in May 1948 and Britain was going to turn over the territory to the UN. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British had already promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, as long as nothing prejudiced the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities on the land. So, with a deadline looming, a UN plan was drawn up to partition the land into an Arab State and a Jewish state, by which Palestine would be divided between Arabs and Jews.
Truman’s secretary of state, George Marshall, was opposed to the plan. He argued that the move would endanger supplies of Arab oil and jeopardize the Marshall Plan for the recovery of post–World War II Europe. The State Department’s head of Near Eastern Affairs, Loy Henderson, Jeffrey Feltman’s early predecessor, also repeatedly argued against support for a new Jewish state. The State Department received hundreds of letters requesting that Henderson be sacked for being too pro-Arab. The White House and the State Department were at odds. During a meeting at the White House, David Niles, Truman’s political advisor, turned to Henderson, who was once again arguing against support for partition, and said: “Look here Loy, the most important thing for the United States is for the president to be re-elected.”15
Truman was annoyed by the pressure that Zionist groups were putting on him but he needed their votes. And he had been blunt about it when he explained his position about the partition plan to American ambassadors posted in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”16
After much debate, the White House endorsed the UN partition plan during a UN Security Council meeting in November 1947. Jews everywhere were elated, Arabs warned partition was war. There was still another six months before the plan would be implemented and the State Department continued to look into other options, including the possibility of a temporary UN trusteeship of Palestine. Despite the domestic politics, Truman did not say whether, come the time, he would recognize the new Jewish state resulting from the partition plan. But on May 14, 1948, the day that the Jewish state was to be declared, there was still no alternative to partition or to recognition by the United States. So Truman signed a typed-up statement recognizing the new state. He crossed out the words “Jewish state” and instead wrote “State of Israel.”
Ever since, America’s relationship with Israel has been bumpy, evolving from mere sympathy to full support with billions in military aid, often tinged
with annoyance or guilt. The two countries have clashed many times, particularly about the Israeli construction of settlements on occupied land. Some of the dynamics between the United States, Israel, and the Arabs that were established in the 1940s persist today, exacerbated by years of habit. As with family dynamics, the players struggle to find new ways to interact with one another.
In the Arab world, the impact of Jewish voters in the United States and the power of the pro-Israel lobby are often described in a sweeping statement as a conspiracy. Arabs raise their hands up in the air and accuse America of being unfair while despairing at their own powerlessness. But just like in 1948, raw politics are at work in a system susceptible to strong single-issue agendas, such as Israel, but also health care and guns. While liberal American Jews often dilute their energy to lobby for a wide range of issues from the environment to education, many right-wing Jews in the United States focus single-mindedly on shielding Israel from any criticism whatsoever, and they can lose track of the bigger picture—what does it mean not only for America’s long-term national security interest but also for Israel’s?
* * *
As I delved deeper into the fiasco of the Obama administration’s efforts at peacemaking in the Middle East in 2009, I found there was more to it still than just American politics, an overconfident president, and complex dynamics between Arabs, Israelis, and America. Human interactions between players in Washington added a whole new layer of complication.
In May, when Hillary had stood in her blue pantsuit next to the Egyptian foreign minister at the State Department, she was unconvinced by her own tough words about the settlements. She knew settlements were a problem, but she didn’t believe that making this the focus of the strategy for peace was wise. There was no plan B if Netanyahu said no. Inside the White House there was a belief that making Israel stop settlement construction was the quickest way to bring everybody to the negotiating table and then get to the finish line fast—after all, the rough outlines of a peace deal had long been known to all. This was why Obama made clear to Bibi, during their first meeting in May 2009, that a settlement freeze was imperative. Even the call for “no natural growth” wasn’t new. Mitchell himself, in his report in 2000, had specifically mentioned it as an issue. While White House advisors like Rahm Emanuel were gung ho about pushing Bibi, the public tone was still subtle and the exact way forward had yet to be decided on. But Hillary picked up on the combative mood inside the White House and combined it with her own forceful speaking to overdeliver for her boss in public with a maximalist position. She was focused on showing loyalty to the man whose advisors still doubted she was on their team. Her words tied Obama’s hands. The president didn’t want to undercut his own secretary of state, a former First Lady whose popularity matched his own and who was relentlessly campaigning for America on his behalf. After winning the election, winning Hillary over onto his team was Obama’s second most satisfying victory and he couldn’t undo that.