Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  My speech helped cool some of the tensions, at least in the room, but the relationship between Netanyahu and President Obama continued to deteriorate. Later that afternoon I met with Bibi for more than an hour at his hotel. He told me he planned to come out swinging in his speech to the conference that evening, and he was as good as his word. “Jerusalem is not a settlement—it is our capital,” he declared defiantly. (We had never referred to Jerusalem as a settlement; our argument was that the city’s final status should be determined by good-faith negotiations, and building new homes for Israelis in Palestinian neighborhoods would not be helpful to that end.) The next day Netanyahu had a charged meeting with the President at the White House. At one point during the discussion, the President reportedly left him waiting in the Roosevelt Room for about an hour while he took care of other matters. It was an unusual move, but one that effectively telegraphed his displeasure. One positive outcome of this mini-crisis was that the Israelis got a lot better about warning us before any new, potentially controversial housing projects were announced, and they became much more sensitive about East Jerusalem. At least while the ten-month moratorium remained in place, there was little if any additional construction there.

  As if the tensions over settlements weren’t enough, things went from bad to worse at the end of May. Israeli commandos raided a flotilla of ships from Turkey carrying pro-Palestinian activists trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Nine Turkish citizens were killed, including one American with dual citizenship. I received an urgent call from Ehud Barak while I was marching in the Chappaqua Memorial Day parade, one of my favorite annual traditions in our small town. “We’re not happy with the results, but we had to make tough choices. We couldn’t avoid it,” Ehud explained. “There will be unforeseen repercussions,” I warned him.

  Turkey had long been one of Israel’s only partners in the region, but in the wake of this debacle, I had to convince the enraged Turks not to take serious actions against Israel in response. The day after the raid Foreign Minister Davutoğlu came to see me, and we talked for more than two hours. He was highly emotional and threatened that Turkey might declare war on Israel. “Psychologically, this attack is like 9/11 for Turkey,” he said, demanding an Israeli apology and compensation for the victims. “How can you not care?” he asked me. “One of them was an American citizen!” I did care—quite a lot—but my first priority was to calm him down and put aside all this talk of war and consequences. Afterward I advised President Obama to call Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan as well. Then I relayed the Turkish concerns and demands to Netanyahu. He said he wanted to patch things up with Turkey but refused to apologize publicly. (My efforts to convince Bibi to apologize to Turkey seesawed back and forth for the remainder of my tenure. On several occasions he told me he would finally do it, only to be stopped by other members of his center-right coalition. I even enlisted Henry Kissinger to make the strategic case to him in August 2011. Finally, in March 2013, with a reelected President Obama at his side during a visit to Jerusalem, Bibi called Erdoğan to apologize for “operational mistakes” and to express regret for the unintentional loss of life that resulted. The Turks and Israelis are still working to rebuild the trust lost in this incident.)

  Back to the summer of 2010. With the ten-month settlement freeze winding down, we faced the urgency of getting the parties back to the negotiating table. Mitchell and I enlisted Jordan and Egypt to pressure the Palestinians to relent on their preconditions. President Obama met with Abbas in June and announced a major new aid package for the West Bank and Gaza. Finally, in August, Abbas agreed to attend direct negotiations in Washington about all the core issues of the conflict, so long as the settlement moratorium remained in place. If it expired as planned at the end of September, he would walk away again. An exasperated George Mitchell asked Abbas, “How is it that something which you described as worse than useless eight months ago has now become indispensable?” We all understood that Abbas had to manage his own difficult politics, both with his own people and with the Arab states, but it was frustrating nonetheless.

  There was no way we were going to resolve all the core issues in a single month—Mitchell optimistically suggested a one-year deadline for the talks—but we hoped that we could build enough momentum either to convince Netanyahu to extend the freeze or persuade Abbas to keep negotiating without it. If we could make enough progress on the question of final borders for the two states, then that would significantly ease the settlement issue because it would be clear to everyone which areas would ultimately stay with Israel and which would go to the Palestinians. It wasn’t going to be as simple as just returning to the 1967 lines. The heavy growth of settlements along the border had made that a nonstarter. Land swaps could carve out the settlement blocks and provide Palestinians with a roughly equal amount of land elsewhere. But, as always, the devil would be in the details.

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  On the first day of September, President Obama welcomed Netanyahu and Abbas to the White House, along with King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt. He hosted a small working dinner in the Old Family Dining Room. Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, and I joined the group. Blair served as a Special Envoy for the Quartet, which was established in 2002 by the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia to coordinate diplomatic efforts on behalf of Middle East peace. The seven of us gathered around the dining-room table beneath an elegant crystal chandelier in the bright yellow room that was largely unchanged from the days when I used to host private meals there as First Lady. Bibi and Abbas sat next to each other, flanked by me and Blair, across from President Obama, Mubarak, and the King.

  President Obama set the tone in remarks before dinner, reminding the leaders, “Each of you are the heirs of peacemakers who dared greatly—Begin and Sadat, Rabin and King Hussein—statesmen who saw the world as it was but also imagined the world as it should be. It is the shoulders of our predecessors upon which we stand. It is their work that we carry on. Now, like each of them, we must ask, do we have the wisdom and the courage to walk the path of peace?”

  The atmosphere was warm, despite the many difficult months that had led up to this moment, but still cautious. Everyone was aware of the time pressure we faced, and no one wanted to appear ungracious at President Obama’s dinner table, yet their fundamental disagreements were not easy to hide.

  The next day the drama moved to the State Department. I convened the leaders and their negotiating teams in the ornate Benjamin Franklin Room on the eighth floor. It was time to roll up our sleeves and see what we could accomplish. “By being here today, you each have taken an important step toward freeing your peoples from the shackles of a history we cannot change, and moving toward a future of peace and dignity that only you can create,” I told Netanyahu and Abbas. “The core issues at the center of these negotiations—territory, security, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, and others—will get no easier if we wait. Nor will they resolve themselves. . . . This is a time for bold leadership and a time for statesmen who have the courage to make difficult decisions.” Sitting on either side of me, Netanyahu and Abbas sounded ready to accept the challenge.

  Bibi invoked the biblical story of Isaac (father of the Jews) and Ishmael (father of the Arabs), the two sons of Abraham who, despite their differences, came together to bury their father. “I can only pray, and I know that millions around the world, millions of Israelis and millions of Palestinians and many other millions around the world, pray that the pain that we have experienced—you and us—in the last hundred years of conflict will unite us not only in a moment of peace around a table of peace here in Washington, but will enable us to leave from here and to forge a durable, lasting peace for generations.”

  Abbas reminisced about the famous handshake in 1993 between Rabin and Arafat and spoke of reaching “a peace that will end the conflict, that will meet all the demands, and start a new era between the Israeli and the Palestinian p
eople.” The gaps we had to overcome were substantial and time was running short, but at least everyone was saying the right things.

  After a long afternoon of formal negotiations, I invited the two leaders to my office on the seventh floor. Senator Mitchell and I talked with them for a while, and then we left them alone. They sat in two high-backed chairs in front of the fireplace and agreed to meet again face-to-face in two weeks. We hadn’t made much substantive progress, but I was encouraged by both their words and their body language. It was a moment of optimism and ambition that, sadly, would not be matched by action.

  Two weeks later we reconvened in Sharm el-Sheikh, a sun-soaked Egyptian resort town on the Red Sea. (One of the ironies of international diplomacy is that we often travel to places like Sharm or Bali or Hawaii but then have no time at all to enjoy them, or even venture outside the formal conference rooms. I sometimes felt like Tantalus, the hungry wretch of Greek mythology doomed to stare at delicious fruit and refreshing water for all eternity but never able to taste it.) This time our host was President Mubarak, who, despite being an autocrat at home, was a steadfast proponent of the two-state solution and peace in the Middle East. Because Egypt shared borders with Gaza and Israel, and was the first Arab country to sign a peace agreement with Israel, back in 1979, its role was crucial. Mubarak had a close relationship with Abbas and helped get the Palestinians to the table in the first place. Now I hoped he could help keep them there.

  Mubarak and I began the day by meeting separately with the Israelis and the Palestinians. Then we brought Netanyahu and Abbas together, and they talked for an hour and forty minutes. Both sides reaffirmed their intention to participate in good faith and with seriousness of purpose. Then we started drilling down on some of the core issues of the conflict. It was slow going—there was a lot of positioning, posturing, and taking the measure of the other side—but it felt good to finally be talking about the heart of the matter. After more than twenty months of false starts, we were engaging with the key questions that held out the promise of ending the conflict once and for all. After a lunch for all of us, we decided to meet again, and Netanyahu delayed his departure so we could keep talking.

  The next day the conversation continued at Netanyahu’s home in Jerusalem, where he displayed the Palestinian flag as a sign of respect to Abbas. Beit Aghion, the Prime Minister’s official residence, was built by a wealthy merchant in the 1930s and served as a hospital for fighters in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It sits on a quiet, partially closed-off street in the well-to-do neighborhood of Rehavia. Outside, its façade is covered with Jerusalem limestone, like the Western Wall and much of the Old City. Inside it is surprisingly cozy. The four of us—Netanyahu, Abbas, Mitchell, and I—crammed into the Prime Minister’s personal study for intense discussions. In the back of everyone’s mind was the approaching deadline; the settlement freeze would expire and the talks would collapse in less than two weeks if we didn’t find a way forward. The ticking of this clock was deafening.

  Among other tough questions, our discussion focused on how long the Israeli military would maintain a presence in the Jordan Valley, which would become the border between Jordan and a future Palestinian state. Mitchell and I offered suggestions about how to reconcile the continuing needs of Israeli security with Palestinian sovereignty. Netanyahu insisted that Israeli troops remain along the border for many decades without a fixed date for withdrawal so future decisions could be based on conditions on the ground. At one point Abbas said that he could live with an Israeli military deployment in the Jordan Valley for a few years beyond the establishment of a new state, but no longer and it had to be a set period of time, not an open-ended stay. Despite the obvious disagreement, I thought that was a potentially significant opening; if the conversation was about years, not decades or months, then perhaps the right mix of international security support and advanced border protection tactics and technologies could bridge the gap, if we could keep the talks going.

  They debated back and forth as the hours went by. Outside, the American press corps grew restless, and many of the journalists decamped to a nearby hotel bar. Inside, I was frustrated that we weren’t making the kind of progress I knew would be needed to survive the end of the settlement freeze. But Mitchell, the veteran of the interminable Northern Ireland negotiations, offered some helpful perspective. “The negotiations there lasted for twenty-two months,” he observed. “And it was many, many months into the process before there was a single, serious, substantive discussion on the major issues that separated the parties.” Here we were already deep into the most difficult and sensitive issues of the conflict.

  After the meeting finally broke up, nearly three hours later, I stayed behind to talk to Netanyahu alone. Surely he didn’t want to be responsible for halting these talks now that they were under way and delving into the core issues. Could he agree to a brief extension of the moratorium to allow us to press ahead and see what could be achieved? The Prime Minister shook his head. He had given ten months, and the Palestinians had wasted nine of them. He was ready to keep talking, but the settlement freeze would end on schedule.

  That night in Jerusalem was the last time Netanyahu and Abbas would sit and talk face-to-face. As of this writing, despite intensive efforts between the parties in 2013 and 2014, there has not yet been another session between the two leaders.

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  Over the following weeks we launched a full-court press to persuade Bibi to reconsider extending the freeze. Much of the action played out in New York, where everyone had gathered once again for the UN General Assembly. The year before, President Obama had hosted the first direct meeting between Netanyahu and Abbas. Now we were fighting to forestall total collapse of the negotiations. There were long nights at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, strategizing with President Obama and our team and then working with the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Arabs to try to find a solution. I met with Abbas twice, had a private meeting with Ehud Barak, had breakfast with a group of Arab Foreign Ministers, and spoke with Bibi by phone, each time making the case that walking away from the talks, settlement freeze or no, would only set back the aspirations of the Palestinian people.

  In his speech to the General Assembly, President Obama called for the moratorium to be extended, and he urged both sides to stay at the table and keep talking: “Now is the time for the parties to help each other overcome this obstacle. Now is the time to build the trust—and provide the time—for substantial progress to be made. Now is the time for this opportunity to be seized, so that it does not slip away.”

  After the initial stonewalling, it appeared that Netanyahu was willing to discuss the idea of an extension, but only if we met an ever-expanding list of demands that included providing new state-of-the-art fighter planes. For his part, Abbas insisted that Israel had to “choose between peace and the continuation of settlements.”

  On the night before the deadline, I reminded Ehud Barak that “the collapse of the moratorium would be a disaster for Israel and the United States.” Also for the Palestinians, he replied. Barak did everything he could to help me work out a compromise, but he was never able to bring Netanyahu or the rest of the Israeli Cabinet along.

  The deadline came and went. Direct negotiations were over, for now. But my work wasn’t. I thought it was crucial that we not allow the collapse of talks to lead to a collapse of public confidence—or to violence, as had happened in the past. Over the final months of 2010, I threw myself into efforts to keep both sides from doing anything provocative and to explore whether we could close some of the gaps revealed in our negotiating sessions through proximity talks and creative diplomatic proposals. “I’m increasingly worried about the way ahead,” I told Netanyahu in a call in early October. “We’re trying very hard to keep things on track and avoid any precipitous collapse. You know how disappointed we are we couldn’t avoid an end to the moratorium.” I urged him to show restraint when approving new construction or talking about future plans.
Reckless talk would only inflame a tense situation. Bibi promised to be judicious, but warned me against allowing the Palestinians to “play brinksmanship.”

  Abbas, always worried about his precarious standing with the divided Palestinian public and his Arab patrons, was searching for a way to restore his credibility, which took a hit with the end of the settlement freeze. One idea he was considering was to go to the United Nations and ask for statehood. That would be an end-run around negotiations and put the United States in a difficult position. We would feel obligated to veto the issue in the Security Council, but a vote might expose how isolated Israel had become. “I know you’re fed up, Mr. President, and I’m sure you wonder if what we are trying to do now will lead anywhere,” I told Abbas. “I would not be calling you if I didn’t think what we are doing had a chance of succeeding for us as partners. We are working tirelessly and as you have said yourself, there is no alternative path to peace, but through negotiations.” He was in a corner and didn’t know how to get out of it, but this was a predicament of his and our own making.

  In my calls and meetings with the leaders, I probed to see if we could narrow the gaps on territory and borders enough to move beyond the settlement issue. I told Netanyahu in mid-October, “The question is, assuming your needs on security are met: What could you offer Abu Mazen on borders? I need to know this with some specificity because the Palestinians know the ballpark.” Netanyahu responded, “What concerns me is not Abu Mazen’s territorial demands, but his understanding and acceptance of my security needs. . . . I’m a realist. I know what’s needed to close the deal.” Our call went on like this for an hour and twenty minutes.