by Glen Johnson
Likewise, the secretary worked to convince the Palestinians they stood to benefit from the talks.
First, he and Vice President Biden convened a meeting on April 29, 2013, at Blair House for members of the Arab League, the principal organizing group for twenty-two Arab members in the Middle East, including the Palestinians.
The two US officials got the Arab leaders to agree to a subtle but substantive shift: while saying they wanted the Israelis to withdraw to their territory before the June 1967 war, they could accept “comparable,” mutually agreed, and “minor” land swaps with the Palestinians.152
That not only signaled pan-Arabic support for a potential Palestinian concession, but also the breadth of gain the Israelis could achieve should they reach an agreement with the Authority.
“The Arab League delegation expresses its thanks and for the President Obama and for yourself, Mr. Secretary, for your efforts and your commitment for the peace, and also endorses President Mahmoud Abbas’ effort for the peace,” said Qatari prime minister Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani, who spoke for the group.153
Second, the secretary tried to show the Palestinians the economic benefits they stood to reap from reaching a peace settlement with the Israelis.
He spent time during the first months of the negotiations working with former British prime minister Tony Blair and a personal friend, billionaire investor Tim Collins, arranging a $4 billion proposal for West Bank economic development they said would cut the unemployment rate—then 21 percent—by nearly two-thirds.
The secretary outlined the plan in May 2013 during a speech at a World Economic Forum meeting held at a Dead Sea resort in Jordan. Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, sat side by side in the front row as the secretary spoke.
“I just ask you to imagine the benefits from a new, open market next door, a new wave of foreign investment that could flow into both Israel and Palestine—and Jordan, and all of them share it,” Kerry said. “The effect that could echo throughout the region, and if we prove that this can work here, that can become a model for what can work in other places that are facing similar confrontations.”154
He highlighted the benefits from tourism alone if the region were freed from the specter of violence.
“Imagine a welcoming part of the world that boasts the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and more of the world’s other great sites that have drawn tourists and religious pilgrims for centuries,” he said.155
Nonetheless, Kerry also gave the first public hints he was encountering difficulties.
“Negotiations can’t succeed if you don’t negotiate,” he said, without calling out either side. “We are reaching a critical point where tough decisions have to be made. And I just ask all of you to keep your eyes focused on what can really be done here.”156
Before achieving any of that, however, the secretary had to reach an even more fundamental accord. He had to get the two sides to simply agree on a formal negotiation. That meant he spent from April 2013 to July 2013 negotiating just to begin direct negotiations.
That challenge reminded me of his comment about doing acrobatics in that Israeli fighter jet: “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.’”
The secretary hoped to achieve this goal through a controversial confidence-building mechanism. In June 2013, he asked the Israelis to agree to release a group of Palestinians imprisoned before the Oslo Accords. In exchange, he asked the Palestinians to forgo seeking any further membership in UN organizations.
This facet of the negotiations peaked about a month later.
In July 2013, President Abbas called a meeting with senior Palestinian leaders and asked for their approval to resume negotiations with Israel. They initially balked, so Saeb Arakat and another negotiator, Palestinian intelligence chief Majid Faraj, suggested President Abbas shift his demand.
They said that instead of promising to forgo the UN memberships, the Palestinians would directly agree to negotiations with Israel if it agreed to release 104 pre-Oslo Palestinian prisoners.
President Abbas also asked the secretary to give him a letter declaring any talks between the two parties would be based on the prewar 1967 borders between Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The following day, Secretary Kerry relayed the offer to Prime Minister Netanyahu. The prime minister, leading a volatile governing coalition, was nervous about the prospect of releasing prisoners—in some cases convicted murderers—for nothing more from the Palestinians than the promise to return to the negotiating table.
He later called back the secretary and said he’d accept the offer, but with two major conditions. First, he wouldn’t release the prisoners all at once, but in four groups of twenty-six. He wanted to space them out to prevent President Abbas from winning the prisoners’ release and then quitting the talks once they were home in the West Bank.
Second, the prime minister told Kerry his government would have to approve some new housing settlements—roughly two thousand in total—to preserve his governing coalition. The United States was officially opposed to further settlement activity—a position the secretary reiterated was unchanged. Ever the politician, though, Kerry said he understood the pressures Prime Minister Netanyahu faced.
After hanging up with the prime minister and speaking with President Obama, the secretary delivered a statement to reporters assembled at the airport in Amman. Despite the considerable time he had devoted to the talks, including a helicopter flight just hours earlier between Amman and Ramallah for one final consultation with President Abbas, he was anxious to fly home to Massachusetts to visit his wife. She’d been hospitalized two weeks earlier after suffering a seizure.
“I am pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming direct final status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” the secretary said, declaring it “a significant and welcome step forward.”
He added: “The agreement is still in the process of being formalized, so we are absolutely not going to talk about any of the elements now. . . . The parties have agreed that I will be the only one making further comments about this. If everything goes as expected, Saeb Arakat and Tzipi Livni, Minister Livni, and Yitzhak Molcho will be joining me in Washington to begin initial talks within the next week or so, and a further announcement will be made by all of us at that time.”157
Even with Secretary Kerry’s caveats and cautious wording, his announcement surprised many of the Palestinian leaders Abbas had met with the prior evening.
Some said the secretary also misunderstood key details of the prime minister’s two conditions, although one negotiator said the two had engaged in a bit of “constructive ambiguity.”158
First, while Prime Minister Netanyahu outlined the need to announce two thousand more housing units in the West Bank, he never committed that would be it forever.
More important, at least from the perspective of propelling the future talks, the prime minister had committed to releasing only 80 of the 104 prisoners. The final group—which included Israeli Arabs coveted by the Palestinians—would be released only after a separate future vote of the Israeli Cabinet, since those prisoners would have the right to remain in Israel because of their citizenship.
That erected another, higher hurdle for them to clear before their freedom.
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PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU SHOWED his political skill and clout by winning the Israeli Cabinet’s approval for the initial prisoner releases on July 28, 2013. The twenty-two members voted 13–7, with two abstentions.
The following day, Secretary Kerry sent President Abbas the letter he requested.
“In response to your question regarding our position on the issue o
f borders, this letter is to confirm that the position set forth by President Obama in his May 2011 speeches, that Palestine’s borders with Israel should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, still represents our position,” it said. “As negotiations begin, I reiterate our commitment to this position. As you confirmed, this letter is and will remain private and confidential between you and me.”159
Kerry also appeared in the State Department Briefing Room to formally announce Martin Indyk as his lead negotiator:
Ambassador Indyk is realistic. He understands that Israeli-Palestinian peace will not come easily and it will not happen overnight. But he also understands that there is now a path forward and we must follow that path with urgency. He understands that to ensure that lives are not needlessly lost, we have to ensure that opportunities are not needlessly lost. And he shares my belief that if the leaders on both sides continue to show strong leadership and a willingness to make those tough choices and a willingness to reasonably compromise, then peace is possible.160
That evening, the negotiators shared an Iftar dinner, the meal eaten by Muslims after sundown during the holy month of Ramadan.
The table, quite literally, was set for the negotiations.
On July 30, 2013, the teams from Israel and the Palestinian Authority gathered in the Monroe Room on the eighth floor of the State Department and sat down across from one another for their first formal negotiating session.
I cracked open a set of sliding mahogany doors, poked in my camera lens, and snapped a photo of Livni and Molcho sitting side by side, with their backs to the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool. Arakat and his partner, Muhammed Shtayyeh, sat next to each other across from the Israelis. The four spoke alone, for several hours, until Kerry popped in to check on them.
The rawness of the Palestinians’ feelings, as telegraphed by Susan Rice’s exasperated comment about them “never seeing the big f—ing picture,” had been telegraphed by President Abbas the day before. He said in Cairo, “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli—civilian or soldier—on our lands.”161
After the first formal negotiating session, Arakat was equally tart as he, Kerry, and Livni delivered what were supposed to be perfunctory opening comments to the media.
Arakat repeated himself and mentioned Palestinian independence three times in a six-sentence statement—the first two sentences of which had been consumed thanking the secretary and Livni for their presence.
“Palestinians have suffered enough, and no one benefits more from the success of this endeavor more than Palestinians,” Arakat said. “I am delighted that all final status issues are on the table and will be resolved without any exceptions, and it’s time for the Palestinian people to have an independent, sovereign state of their own. It’s time for the Palestinian people to have an independent, sovereign state of their own. It’s time for the Palestinians to live in peace, freedom, and dignity within their own independent, sovereign state.”162
Livni, the former Israeli Justice minister, didn’t take the bait, showing the comportment Kerry hoped would prevail amid the trials to come. Standing beside Kerry and Arakat under the Great Seal of the United States in the Ben Franklin Room, Livni sought to elevate a political transaction into something transcendent.
“I hope that our meeting today and the negotiations that we have re-launched today will cause, I hope, a spark of hope, even if small, to emerge out of cynicism and pessimism that is so often heard. It is our task to work together so that we can transform that spark of hope into something real and lasting,” she said.163
Then, in a poetic twist, Livni added, “I believe that history is not made by cynics. It is made by realists who are not afraid to dream. And let us be these people.”164
Afterward, the talks plodded along weekly in Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan.
Tony Blair, who’d been working on the problem as special envoy for the Quartet—the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia—once told one of our staffers that both sides “have to know that there is something remorseless and relentless about it, that the process is not going away.”165
Nonetheless, every seeming bit of momentum was broken by intervening factors.
Before a negotiating session in Jerusalem, the two sides got into an argument when the Israelis brought along a camera crew to film their handshake. Shtayyeh refused to participate, and then Molcho complained when Arakat suggested the handshakes be limited to just him and Livni.166
The first “tranche” of twenty-six prisoners was then released on August 13, 2013. But less than two weeks later, Israeli undercover forces killed three Palestinians following a raid on a Ramallah refugee camp.167 Then three Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks, followed by the death of four more Palestinians.
Around the same time, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was accused of using chemical weapons against his own countrymen to quell antigovernment protests. President Obama tasked Secretary Kerry with building the case for a retaliatory military strike, shifting his attention to a more time-sensitive matter and consuming much of his diplomatic bandwidth for nearly a month.
We ultimately went to Geneva to negotiate an agreement with the Russians under which Syria rid itself of all of its chemical weapons.
Bouncing between the two subjects highlighted the type of high-stakes juggling that became routine for us.
In mid-September, after wrapping up the Syria chemical weapons negotiation in Geneva with Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, we traveled directly from Switzerland to Israel so Kerry could reengage directly with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
A week later, the secretary spoke before the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, a donor group for the Palestinians, during UN week in New York City. He met again with Netanyahu in Washington at the end of the month, and then he invited the Israeli leader to Villa Taverna in Rome for a stocktaking session in October 2013.
The Palestinians had been complaining intermittently about Israeli settlement activity and a lack of overall progress in the talks. They wanted the United States to be more active in the talks, not merely facilitate them.
The Israelis complained about the violence and accused the Palestinians of leaking information about the supposedly secret talks. That prompted the prime minister to tell his cabinet that Jerusalem would not be divided and Palestinians also would not have a right of return in any final settlement.168
Those comments left Secretary Kerry frustrated. During our daily senior staff meeting in late October 2013, he expressed his exasperation with Prime Minister Netanyahu, but said he didn’t want to blow up the process.
“If he wants to fight, I will lay out what he’s refused to do,” the secretary told us. “The problem is, it doesn’t take us anywhere.”169
A day later, on October 29, 2013, the process got a boost when the Israelis released the second group of Palestinian prisoners.
Secretary Kerry could come off sounding either endlessly optimistic or hopelessly naive as each permutation of the negotiations went on. And as shown by the ambiguity about the terms surrounding the fourth prisoner release, sometimes he focused more on the endgame than the practical challenges to achieving it.
Nonetheless, the talks wouldn’t have even started if he hadn’t used his creativity and drive to reach the separate agreements for the prisoner release and the pledge not to seek UN recognition.
Then, as the two sides faltered in reaching a deal on their own, the Palestinians called for him to be more involved. Prime Minister Netanyahu was always much more circumspect, but Kerry kept seeing opportunity on the horizon.
“We’re going to get a process today. We’re. Going. To. Get. A. Process. Today,” he told us in early November 2013, while waiting in his suite before yet another meeting with the prime minister.
Over the next month, though, the Palestinians walked out of the talks, the Israeli negotiators announced there wouldn’t be a Palestinian state based on the
1967 borders, and the Israelis unveiled new settlement activity. Some members of the Israeli Knesset also began supporting a bill to annex the Jordan River Valley to block the security plan being developed by General Allen, which the secretary had recently outlined for Israeli officials.
Kerry was so confident in General Allen’s security work he’d leveled a challenge to Prime Minister Netanyahu: get a group of your most experienced commandos and have them try to penetrate the system devised by Allen. If they can do it, he said, we will go back to the drawing board.170
The prime minister never took him up on his offer.
While the Israelis kept their word and released the third tranche of prisoners on December 30, 2013, it was clear any chance to reach a final-status agreement was over and the next best hope was the framework providing a roadmap for a future deal.
Kerry, ever optimistic, argued that achieving a framework wasn’t futile because when it was signed, the Palestinians would know that Israel had agreed to their having a state and the Israelis would know the Palestinians had agreed to measures ensuring their security.
It would be easier to negotiate a final treaty of several hundred pages, he argued, if both sides were clear on the endgame.
The ultimate undoing, though, was tied to the release of that fourth and final group of Palestinian prisoners.
Secretary Kerry cut short his 2013 Christmas break and summoned us all back to Washington so we could head to Israel immediately to start the new year. We took off from Boston on New Year’s Day and landed in Tel Aviv on January 2, 2014.
The secretary met in succession with the prime minister and his new foreign minister, Avigdor Liberman, as well as the negotiations skeptic, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. We made several trips to Ramallah to speak with President Abbas and Saeb Arakat, and Kerry had a private dinner with Prime Minister Netanyahu at his residence in Jerusalem.
Before they began eating, I watched as the prime minister showed Kerry his personal office. They looked at his book collection and photos of his family and a picture of Bibi Netanyahu as a young soldier.