When fine-tuning the speech, I suggested that it begin with “Shalom. Salaam. Peace.” Ron Dermer dismissed the idea, saying “he doesn’t do touchy-feely.” But Netanyahu, extemporizing, began with all three words. He looked straight at the Palestinian leader and declared, “President Abbas, you are my partner for peace. And it is up to us, with the help of our friends, to conclude the agonizing conflict between our peoples.” Solutions, not excuses, were Israel’s goal, he asserted, peace and not “a blame game where even the winners lose.” He spoke eloquently, even by Netanyahu standards. “Thousands of years ago, on these very hills where Israelis and Palestinians live today, the Jewish prophet Isaiah…envisaged a future of lasting peace. Let us today…realize that ancient vision.” Which was amazing, since the text was in Hebrew. Later, I asked him why, after Abbas spoke in his native Arabic, he opted for an off-the-cuff translation. “I saw all those cameras out there,” the prime minister replied. “I realized I was addressing the world.”
The leaders adjourned for a working dinner while their teams gathered around a long oaken table and ate, mostly in silence. The mood was stilted: Palestinians arrayed on one side, Israelis on the other, with minimal interaction between us. The historian in me was keen to see Saeb Erekat, the bullish Palestinian negotiator, my age and American-educated, who held the spotlight for twenty years without uttering—I often heard said—a single truth.
The compensation for that excruciating meal came later, when I rejoined the principals. I paid my respects to Jordan’s Abdullah, a reluctant monarch who was reputedly happier grasping the handlebars of his Harley along the Big Sur coast than he was clutching the reins of his shaky desert kingdom. I chatted with former British prime minister Tony Blair, whose son, Euan, had been my student at Yale. Tony was now the special envoy for the Quartet, the international peacemaking mechanism, and exuded an irrepressible optimism about the process. And there was Mubarak, who, when I first met him while working for the Rabin government in the early 1990s, struck me as burly and robust. Now, an illness-stricken eighty-two-year-old with hair dyed an improbable black and a face caked with makeup, he looked almost mummified.
Finally, there was Abbas. Short, round-shouldered, insalubrious-looking from his smoking habit of two packs per day, he seemed withdrawn and visibly discomfited by the festivities. American diplomacy would have to be at its pinnacle, I thought, to maneuver him into making peace. Netanyahu appeared to be doing just that, wrapping his arm around Abbas and cajoling him. A lengthy history linked the two men, and they might have seemed like old friends except for Abbas’s mirthless expression. The prime minister called me over and introduced me to the Palestinian president. I extended a warm hand and in return received a curt, begrudging grip. Then, still half-hugging him, Netanyahu wheeled Abbas in the direction of the hall where the face-to-face negotiations would ensue.
But the talks produced no progress. Abbas once again wanted to discuss borders first while Netanyahu responded that Israel could not discuss borders without knowing how those lines could be defended. Abbas claimed that he could not discuss the West Bank “pie” while Israel cut out slices for settlements. Netanyahu retorted that the Palestinian leader could not cherry-pick the core issues—settlements among them—to be decided in advance of negotiations.
“The bride and the groom don’t really want to get married,” my chief of staff, Lior Weintraub, wisecracked, “They just don’t want to disappoint the parents.” Optically, at least, Lior was right: neither Abbas nor Netanyahu wanted to be seen as opposing Obama. And their reluctance mounted as the moratorium’s September 30 termination approached.
Netanyahu believed that Obama had agreed that the moratorium was a one-time gesture to the Palestinians, and that Abbas would seize on any excuse not to negotiate. Then, suddenly and without informing Israel, Obama called for extending the moratorium. No explanation was offered us, though I suspected the motive was less strategic than ideological. Settlements, even under arrangements helpful to the peace process, were simply unacceptable to the president. “It’s a monumental historical mistake,” a dumbfounded Netanyahu told me. Abbas, who previously dismissed the freeze as insignificant, now threatened to quit the talks unless it was renewed.
So the settlement issue harnessed by the administration to drive the peace process once again derailed it. Clinton made clear that the United States could not keep the Palestinians in the talks, and prevent the European Union from ganging up on Israel, without a four-month extension. “It’ll be a shame to see a two-thousand-year project die because of four fucking months,” Rahm Emanuel cautioned me, but Netanyahu held firm. There would be no extension. And the next round of negotiations, scheduled to convene in Jerusalem on September 14, was likely to be the last.
—
That day, Dan Shapiro met Ron Dermer and me and asked, “What can we do to make this less painful for you?” We were sitting in the refreshment tent outside of the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem. Flaccidly lit and lined with somber 1950s paintings, the building resembled the Prime Minister’s Office, which Condoleezza Rice once likened to “a little run-down high school.” The only color inside came from the American and Israeli flags and their Palestinian counterpart—red, green, and black—included as a gesture to Abbas. He posed with Clinton and Netanyahu before filing into the prime minister’s cramped office for a fruitless debate about the length of Israel’s military presence in the Jordan Valley.
A more substantive discussion, perhaps, took place in that refreshment tent, where Dan suggested quid pro quos for extending the freeze. Several ideas were exchanged before the NSC official mentioned jets—specifically, the ultra-advanced F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). The aircraft were still in development but Israel planned to purchase nineteen of them, at the staggering total cost of $3 billion. “How many JSFs would it take,” Dan wondered, “to buy us several more months of moratorium?”
Netanyahu was furious that we even conducted the conversation—“You violated the first rule of negotiating,” he snapped at us: “never open a second track.” But the haggling nevertheless continued over the next two weeks as Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres held last-ditch discussions with American leaders in the United States and George Mitchell shuttled frantically around the Middle East—all, ultimately, for naught. As pressure mounted on Israel to extend the moratorium, Abbas could sit quietly and watch.
“While the rival Israeli team is playing against the American referees,” David Rothkopf pithily observed, “the Palestinian team can eat popcorn in the stands.” To this, I added a football analogy of my own. “Abbas is like a quarterback who runs down the clock and then demands overtime.” Remembering his refusal to respond to Prime Minister Olmert’s 2008 offer of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza, I still doubted whether Abbas would ever be a serious partner for peace. His goal, rather, was to quietly back Israel in fighting his rivals in Hamas while accusing Israel of war crimes in international forums. Throughout, he could count on American and European leaders to keep meeting Palestinian demands without requiring any concession in return. Israel would be increasingly isolated. Not surprisingly, when the moratorium expired on September 30, the Palestinian president immediately quit the talks.
—
While the controversy surrounding the moratorium continued, I kept a breakneck schedule of high-level meetings in New York, Washington, and Jerusalem, and High Holiday remarks at ten different synagogues. Imprudently, at the end of October, Sally and I tried to take our first vacation since entering office. Yoav, our eldest, still an American citizen and a fluent Chinese speaker, was working at the U.S. pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. He hosted us there and took us on a breathtaking tour across the China expanse, all the way to the Tibetan border. There I received a phone call from my assistant, Moriya, at the embassy. Netanyahu would meet Biden in three days, she said, in New Orleans. Puddle-jumping to Beijing, huddling over coal-burning stoves between flights, I landed in the Big Easy three days later
, at midnight, one hour before the motorcade left to meet the prime minister.
The venue was again the Jewish Federations’ General Assembly, and Biden was at his loquacious best, assuring the crowd that supporting Israel “is in our own naked self-interest” and would remain so “as long as there’s a breath in me.” The vice president played down the peace process, as did Netanyahu in his speech. But then, while returning to the hotel, I received word that Israel’s Housing Ministry had publicized a new building project beyond the 1967 lines in Jerusalem. This violated a pledge we made to inform the administration well in advance of any such announcements and the timing once again seemed designed to embarrass Biden. Tony Blinken, the vice president’s foreign policy advisor, called me and asked, “How could you do this to Israel’s best friend?” The son of a Holocaust survivor and a person of singular intelligence and warmth, Tony icily warned, “It’s your decision to build in Jerusalem, but you should know that it will have strategic implications for our relationship.”
The State Department expressed its “deep disappointment” with the announcement and Obama labeled it “unhelpful,” which prompted Netanyahu to reiterate that “Jerusalem is not a settlement. Jerusalem is our capital.” The pattern was drearily familiar, yet it did not deter Clinton from making a final effort to resume the peace talks. She offered an additional $150 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority and, on November 11, conferred with Netanyahu at New York’s Regency Hotel.
Though wan from another of her multicountry tours, the secretary seemed indefatigable as she labored through seven hours of back-and-forth with Netanyahu and our respective teams. “This is a hefty chunk of history we have to lift here,” the prime minister said. “Let’s not put it all on a few houses.” Clinton later recalled her amazement at the Israelis’ candor, our willingness to argue with one another, even with the prime minister, in front of the strictly hierarchical Americans. She remembered that cutting Hebrew slang word for sucker. “The last thing any Israeli wants is to be a freier,” she told us. “But the Palestinians don’t want to be freiers, either.”
Thereafter, the conversation quickly bogged down in a lawyerly debate between George Mitchell and Yitzik Molcho over how many housing projects could be “grandfathered”—permitted to continue—in the event of an additional freeze. The rest of us just looked on stultified until, with uncharacteristic thunder, Dan Shapiro smacked the table with both fists and shouted, “This is stupid! We all know what we want, so let’s just cut a deal!” Everyone—Netanyahu, Clinton, Mitchell, Molcho—gaped at him for a second and then numbly nodded, “okay.” I quietly slipped Dan a note: “That was your finest moment.”
We forged a text in which Israel froze settlement building for an additional ninety days and received, free of charge, twenty F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. Also, in the event that Abbas tried to obtain UN recognition of a Palestinian state, the administration pledged to cast its veto in the Security Council. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get Pollard’s release as part of the arrangement, but still left the Regency that night with a sense of breakthrough.
Israel’s select security cabinet, though, was far less enthused. Led by the highly respected Benny Begin—son of Menachem Begin—most of the eight ministers argued against selling Israel’s right to build in its homeland for any amount of jets. Netanyahu nevertheless stood by the arrangement. But then, once again bewilderingly, the White House backed out.
Various reasons were given, including Obama’s realization that the Palestinians would agree to negotiate but only about the next three-month extension. Indeed, the entire process would be about freezes rather than about core issues. Yet clearly the president was also perturbed by press reports that Israel’s cooperation could only be secured with military hardware worth billions.
The impact, for Israel, was calamitous. Editorials—apparently fanned by official sources—suggested that the F-35s had been an Israeli demand, rather than an American offer. The cover of Time magazine, sporting a flower-festooned Star of David, claimed that “Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.” I fired back in the Los Angeles Times that, while refusing to succumb to the despair of six decades of strife, most Israelis never stopped believing in the two-state solution. “For Israelis who don’t have to imagine what it’s like to live in a perpetual war zone, that vision of peace is our lifeline.”
To Netanyahu, though, I adopted a more adamant tone: “Why are you letting them beat up on you like this, calling you a blackmailer?” The prime minister consequently issued a statement explaining that the decision not to endorse the ninety-day package was Obama’s, not his, and that Israel remained ready to take steps “without precedent” to return to the talks. But his words could not change the impression of Israeli intransigence and greed.
Peace-wise, 2010 ended much as it began, with the disputes over Jerusalem and settlements highlighted and the possibility of direct talks dimmed. Former president Bill Clinton blamed the impasse on hawkish Russian Jewish immigrants to Israel, and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned that, because of its stubbornness on peace, Israel was “losing America.” Neither claim was true. Support for peace was strong among all Israelis, former Russians included. Proportionally, more Israelis backed a two-state solution than did Americans. And pro-Israel sentiment in America continued to rise.
Abbas, meanwhile, threatened to resign his post and, alternatively, to seek a Security Council condemnation of Israel’s West Bank construction. “Beware,” I admonished Dan Shapiro, “you may end up vetoing your own policy at the UN.” My warning would prove depressingly prescient, but the incident that distressed me most that season was the one I never foresaw. And it touched on two of Israel’s most fateful issues.
DNA
In the thick of the fall’s ultimately failed diplomacy, I managed to halt for about half an hour in the Residence in Washington to greet three hundred guests at our Rosh Hashanah reception and offer some upbeat remarks about the U.S.-Israel alliance. Remembering how, the previous year, a Democratic congresswoman criticized me for not mentioning the president’s name, this time I did so, repeatedly. Then, wishing everyone a joyous year, I dashed off to catch a plane for Tel Aviv and rejoin the peace effort. I arrived to learn that right-wing commentators were calling for my resignation. Israel’s ambassador, they claimed, had become a propagandist for Obama.
One of the invitees to the reception, a Democratic Party activist, had circulated an email highlighting my references to Obama and quoting me praising the president for twelve pro-Israel policies. The email went viral, enraging conservatives. But their ire was the least of my anxieties. Along with the distortions and embellishments of what I said were several references to sensitive defense matters that I would never have mentioned in public and on which the activist had clearly been briefed. Two of the claims were simply untrue and potentially harmful to Israel’s security.
The first of them was “President Obama has restored Israel’s QME.” Those three letters are arguably the most crucial in U.S.-Israel relations. They stand for Qualitative Military Edge, shorthand for one of the most far-reaching military commitments made by America—or by any power—to a foreign state in modern times.
Contrary to myth, the United States and Israel were not always linked strategically. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower scarcely supplied a bullet to Israel, and Kennedy only sold it some antiaircraft missiles. But then, in the Six-Day War, Israel defeated several Soviet-backed armies, and President Johnson suddenly saw the Jewish State as an invaluable ally. Soon American Phantom jets began replacing French Mirages in the IDF’s arsenal, and Patton tanks supplanted British Centurions. Assistance quadrupled after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, during which the United States airlifted more than fifty-five thousand tons of arms and supplies to hard-pressed Israeli troops. The change was palpable on the battlefield. In contrast to the Arabs’ Kalashnikovs, Israeli soldiers now bore M-16s. My pup tent in the paratroopers, as well as my ammunition packs and entrenching tools, were all st
enciled “U.S. Army.”
By 1990, Israel had been designated a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States and the largest recipient of its military aid. That year, I participated in the first joint exercise—code-named Juniper Cobra—which, at that stage, involved U.S. and Israeli officers playing war games around a table. In time, though, the cooperation expanded to include large-scale field exercises and advanced weapons development. Our home was always open to the grateful sailors of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, who relished their Israeli port of call.
America’s commitment to Israel’s defense climaxed in President Bush’s offer to provide the Jewish State with $30 billion of military aid over a ten-year period. Roughly 75 percent of these funds were spent in the United States, stimulating its economy and creating tens of thousands of jobs. Israel, in turn, shared its world-class intelligence and cyber-knowledge with America. Among other vital supplies, Israel produced the high-tech bandages carried by U.S. troops and the interactive helmets worn by all U.S. combat pilots.
The alliance’s path was never bump-free—an Israeli attempt to sell arms to China in 2005 infuriated the otherwise sympathetic Bush—but the relationship nevertheless intensified. A year later, Pentagon and IDF planners began drafting a formula that contained the commitment’s spirit and substance. Congress then voted that document into a law guaranteeing Israel:
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