Window Seat on the World

by Glen Johnson

  Another time came in March 2013, when we got late word the C-32 we were supposed to fly on to Israel had broken down. The only plane available for Secretary Kerry was a C-37, the Air Force version of Gulfstream V business jet.

  Taking the smaller plane forced sharp cuts in the passenger manifest, leaving some of us scrambling for commercial flights.

  Jason Meininger, the secretary’s senior aide and probably second only to me in terms of staff miles traveled, told me the news in a State Department hallway. We rushed to the luggage-drop area, reclaimed bags that had been headed to Andrews Air Force Base, and caught a cab to Dulles International Airport in suburban Virginia.

  When we got to the ticket counter, we learned we’d been assigned business class seats for a Lufthansa flight connecting to Tel Aviv through Frankfurt.

  State Department employees have to fly coach unless a trip exceeds fourteen hours and the employee has to report to work upon landing. That’s a very high bar to clear, since so few trips around the world are that long. We chuckled later when we learned the European Union allowed its employees to fly business class on flights exceeding four hours.

  That’s pretty much any place outside continental Europe.

  On this particular day, Meininger and I apparently made the cut because of the last-minute booking, the length of our overnight flight to Israel, and the necessity to work when we arrived.

  Little did we know having that sleeper seat on a Boeing 747 would be the most comfortable part of what turned out to be a year-plus of dealings with leaders in the Jewish homeland.

  John Kerry’s engagement in the Middle East peace process was grueling and exasperating, thanks to obstacle after obstacle raised by Israeli leaders, and frustration prompting Palestinian leaders to balk at serious talks about a deal.

  It consumed much of our first year at the State Department. It also was the focus of the secretary’s last major policy speech before he wrapped up his tenure in 2017.

  Middle East peace wasn’t the Great White Whale of our diplomatic efforts, because we set our sights on many other achievements after our initial attempts at reaching a settlement, but it remained an elusive target throughout our time in the government.

  “In the end, I believe the negotiations did not fail because the gaps were too wide, but because the level of trust was too low,” Kerry said in that last policy speech. “Both sides were concerned that any concessions would not be reciprocated and would come at too great a political cost. And the deep public skepticism only made it more difficult for them to be able to take risks.”123

  _________

  WE SCRAMBLED FOR THAT commercial flight in March 2013 because we had to join Barack Obama on his first visit to Israel as president. He’d been criticized by some Israelis and American Jews for not making the trip during his first four years in office, but the Israeli government was partly to blame for the lingering angst.

  Feelings were raw because many in the Obama Administration felt Israeli prime minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu supported Mitt Romney when the Republican challenged the Democratic president for reelection in 2012. The prime minister’s hawkish foreign policy was more attuned to Republican politics.

  When I covered Mitt Romney while he served as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, he told us several times about how he began his fabulously successful business career working at the Boston Consulting Group alongside another upstart, Bibi Netanyahu.124

  Despite that personal and political backdrop, Prime Minister Netanyahu was smiling when President Obama stepped off Air Force One in Tel Aviv about noon on March 20, 2013. He conveyed a sense of camaraderie by mimicking his guest after the president took off his suit jacket and draped it over his shoulder.

  Prime Minister Netanyahu matched him as the two walked across the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport to inspect an Iron Dome missile defense system.

  Later, during a joint news conference, the prime minister noted the two had met ten times while holding their respective offices. “I want to thank you for the investment you have made in our relationship and in strengthening the friendship and alliance between our two countries,” Netanyahu said to the president. “It is deeply, deeply appreciated.”125

  Both the president and prime minister reiterated their shared commitment to resuming peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. They’d been the subject of much effort by American presidents almost since Israel’s founding in 1948, when the United States became the first nation to recognize Israel—eleven minutes into its existence.126

  “Israel remains fully committed to peace and to the solution of two states for two peoples. We extend our hand in peace and in friendship to the Palestinian people,” the prime minister said.

  Looking at the president, he added: “I hope that your visit, along with the visit of Secretary of State Kerry, will help us turn a page in our relations with the Palestinians. Let us sit down at the negotiating table. Let us put aside all preconditions. Let us work together to achieve the historic compromise that will end our conflict once and for all.”

  President Obama replied, “A central element of a lasting peace must be a strong and secure Jewish state, where Israel’s security concerns are met, alongside a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.”127

  He withheld further comment until the following day, when he delivered a speech to the Israeli people before an audience in Jerusalem filled with young people.

  “I believe that Israel is rooted not just in history and tradition but also in a simple and profound idea: the idea that people deserve to be free in a land of their own,” the president said his speech. “So long as there is a United States of America, ‘Ah-tem lo lah-vahd.’ You are not alone.”128

  The line prompted cheers and applause from the audience.

  The president also tried to make a practical case for seeking peace with the Palestinians:

  Given the frustration in the international community about this conflict, Israel needs to reverse an undertow of isolation. And given the march of technology, the only way to truly protect the Israeli people over the long term is through the absence of war, because no wall is high enough and no Iron Dome is strong enough or perfect enough to stop every enemy that is intent on doing so from inflicting harm.129

  Wading into more sensitive territory, he added: “The Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, their right to justice must also be recognized. And put yourself in their shoes: Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.”130

  The rest of the president’s visit, including his trip to the Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, a basilica built over a cave thought to be where Jesus was born, went off without a problem.

  He flew on for meetings in Amman, Jordan, before making a tourist stop to see the pink cliffs and sandstone tombs and temples at the ancient city of Petra.

  Secretary Kerry was waiting for President Obama at the airport in Amman when his helicopter returned from Jordan’s southwestern desert. Kerry was joined by a jeans-clad Jordanian king Abdullah II. The president spoke with both men, and had an aside with the secretary before climbing the steps to Air Force One to fly back to Washington.

  The planeside exchange—coming during just our second trip abroad—represented an informal handoff between the president and his top cabinet officer. Responsibility for the Middle East peace process was being transferred from the White House to the State Department.

  With the full backing of President Obama, John Kerry had his shot at a set of issues that had frustrated previous presidents and secretaries of State.

  He wasted no time getting down to work. Kerry left the airport even before the president took off and drove across Amman to meet with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

  The pace was emblematic of fourteen months of intense diplomatic efforts that would take us to Israel nine times, the West Bank
eight times, and for meetings with Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas in the United States, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and—secretly—King Abdullah’s walled vacation home overlooking the Red Sea in Aqaba, Jordan.

  _________

  JOHN KERRY WASN’T THE first secretary of State to attempt to negotiate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. His effort wasn’t even the first—or second—during the Obama administration: President Obama made an attempt at the outset of his first term, bringing the two parties together at the White House in September 2010 for direct negotiations, but they imploded three months later.

  They couldn’t be revived during a second attempt in May 2011.

  More famously, Secretary of State James A. Baker III made eight trips to the region from March to October 1991 as he took his own stab at brokering peace on behalf of then president George H. W. Bush.

  By 2013, the White House was willing to take another shot because both the president and prime minister had been recently reelected. President Obama had no more election campaigns and could take a second-term political risk. The prime minister, meanwhile, was seen as having the political strength and smarts to win approval for a deal not only within the full Knesset but with the fellow conservatives in his governing coalition.

  Two politicians had the cover to make a deal. The question was whether both had the incentive.

  The standoff between the Israelis and Palestinians is rooted in history, some of it the most ancient and emotional in the world’s own story.

  Many Jews trace the beginning of their nation to the kingdoms of David and Solomon, in the biblical times of 950 BC. In the late nineteenth century, Austrian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl popularized Jewish nationalism and the belief that Jews persecuted in Europe should emigrate southeast to what was then British-controlled Palestine.131

  Arabs who already lived in the area saw the immigration as a form of colonialism, and they fought with the arriving Jews. When the Brits couldn’t stop the fighting, the United Nations voted in 1947 to split the area into Jewish and Arab/Palestinian zones. The two roughly coincided with today’s maps showing the West Bank—between Israel and Jordan—and the Gaza Strip—a notch of southwestern land along the Mediterranean Sea extending to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.132

  Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria—all Arab nations surrounding Israel—opposed the vote, perceiving it as a method for driving Palestinians from their rightful land. They ended up fighting a war that Israel won in 1948, prompting it to declare its independence.

  While the UN partition had promised Jews 56 percent of British Palestine, they ended up holding 77 percent. They also gained their own state, while the Palestinians were split between the West Bank, controlled by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip, controlled by Egypt.133

  The 1948 war also uprooted 700,000 Palestinians, creating a refugee crisis continuing today. Now some 7 million people can claim refugee status, either having been left homeless themselves or by being descendants of the displaced.134

  The disparity was exacerbated in 1967 when Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan engaged in the Six-Day War. In less than a week, the Israelis beat the Arab nations and took possession of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.135

  Kerry and his predecessors tried to resolve the dispute arising from Israel’s occupation of that added territory, its practice of allowing Jews to build settlements spreading Israeli influence in an area the Palestinians claim, and the Palestinians’ sporadic calls for a violent response.

  In many ways, this particular secretary had the street credit to play matchmaker. During almost three decades in the US Senate, Kerry compiled a nearly 100 percent pro-Israel voting record. He also had visited Israel many times, and regularly expressed his appreciation for a country wedged into a tight space surrounded by real or potential adversaries.

  He often recalled his first trip to Israel in 1986 with Anti-Defamation League New England director Leonard Zakim. The group climbed to the summit of Masada and waited for the echo after yelling out, “Am Yisrael Chai!”—“the people of Israel live!”

  He talked about visiting Sderot and seeing the remains of Katousha rockets fired at Israeli children. And he told the story of once skipping out of an official lunch to hop in a jet trainer with an Israeli Air Force flying ace who let the then senator (and pilot) take the controls.

  The joy ride turned serious when the Israeli delivered a stern message over the intercom.

  “Senator, you are about to go over Egypt. Turn,” the secretary remembered in a June 2013 speech to the American Jewish Committee Global Forum.

  That prompted him to quip: “I saw the sky below me—above me and the Earth below, and it was really weird. And I thought to myself, ‘Wow, finally I am seeing the Middle East clearly: upside down.’”136

  The story always prompted laughter and knowing nods from his audience.

  On a more personal level, the secretary noted his brother, Cam, had married a Jewish woman and converted to the faith three decades earlier. He himself had learned during the 2004 presidential campaign their family had Jewish roots and lost members in the Holocaust.

  All that prompted Kerry to repeatedly declare “I take a back seat to no one” when it comes to defending Israel or its right to exist.

  From the Palestinian perspective, Kerry could be seen as an honest broker not only because he urged Israel to make peace, but because he did so with empathy for the Palestinian Authority’s position.

  “We must recognize the Palestinians’ fundamental aspirations—to live in peace in their own state with its own clear borders—that has to be our mission as well,” the secretary said in that speech to the American Jewish Congress. “Palestinians also deserve to see their daily lives grow and the benefits of economic growth and development.”137

  He added:

  Whenever you think about this challenge and how hard it is, think about what will happen if it doesn’t work. We will find ourselves in a negative spiral of responses and counter-responses that could literally slam the door on a two-state solution, having already agreed, I think, that there isn’t a one-state one. And the insidious campaign to de-legitimize Israel will only gain steam.

    Israel will be left to choose between being a Jewish state or a democratic state, but it will not be able to fulfill the founders’ visions of being both at once.138

  Kerry argued the Israelis risked living in “permanent conflict” with the Palestinians, confronted first with civil disobedience, next with a civil rights movement, and then the possibility of a third Intifada—a Palestinian uprising—and Palestinian factions committed to violence.

  The Israelis were especially concerned the Palestinians would go to the United Nations and seek to join more UN organizations. A Palestinian Authority legitimized at the UN could claim territorial rights, sue for them in the International Court of Justice, and accuse Israel within the International Criminal Court of war crimes stemming from its occupation.139

  To the advantage of both sides, the secretary also was willing to risk his personal and political capital to reach an agreement. Even before beginning his service as secretary of State, he labeled the Israel-Palestinian dispute as one of the “frozen conflicts” worth resolving.

  He included the similarly long-running and draining disputes between Greece and Turkey over the disposition of Cyprus—the Mediterranean island-nation off each of their coasts—and the two-decade old disagreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the future of Nagorno-Karabakh.

  Part of that region lies in Azerbaijan but is controlled by ethnic Armenians, and the two countries fought for control over it until a cease-fire in 1994.140

  “There are some where I think they’re difficult, but you can see how you could get there if people made a certain set of decisions,” the secretary said in September 2016 during remarks to The Atlantic and Aspen Institute.141

  In addition to factors favoring
one side or another, both the Palestinians and Israelis stood to benefit because John Kerry had a number of personal traits conducive to the tedium of long and complicated negotiations.

  First, he had energy belying his age. He was sixty-nine when he began his term, but he still biked and kite-surfed. He also loved to take brisk walks to reinvigorate himself.

  Meanwhile, he had the patience to sit for hours with both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas and hear each man’s complaints. He was willing to fly to the Middle East or drive to the West Bank to hash out problems face-to-face, whether it was day, night, weekend, or holiday. And he was a copious note-taker, carefully chronicling each side’s issues and then dutifully relaying them to his staff for action or to the other side for resolution.

  Israeli president Shimon Peres lauded him in April 2013 when the secretary visited just before his first one-on-one meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu after that handoff from President Obama.

  “There is a new wind of peace blowing through the Middle East,” said President Peres, one of Israel’s remaining Founding Fathers and a former prime minister, foreign minister, and defense minister. “President Obama’s re-election and his successful visit to the region. Your appointment as secretary of State, total dedication to the cause of peace, and faultless record in tackling complex international affairs. The new government formed here in Israel. All these elements have combined to create a new sense of optimism, a belief that peace is possible. And peace is possible.”142

  There were five major issues that had to be resolved in the peace talks: Israeli security, West Bank borders and Jewish settlements, control over Jerusalem, the so-called right of return for Palestinians wanting to come back to the land they lost in 1947 and 1968, and an end to the conflict and all claims emanating from it.

  Given geography, Israel had to feel it could ensure its own security. This was particularly important to the east, where the West Bank and the Jordan River Valley are located. The Israelis were concerned that if they pulled back their defense forces, they’d be subject to ground attack or provide a staging area for fresh rocket attacks.