Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril

by King Abdullah II

  I advised Obama to select his lead person on the Middle East peace process and stick with that person. He outlined some of his thoughts on how to move forward. It was clear that he understood the issues, and I was left with the strong impression that this was a man who spoke the language of peace. We concluded our discussion and joined the other senators and their aides for a private dinner.

  After dinner, I offered to drive Obama, whose next stop was Israel, to the airport. Driving senior guests around is something I do all the time—but his security detail was somewhat nonplussed. Being king, however, has its advantages. To Obama’s surprise, I jumped behind the wheel of a gray Mercedes sedan and invited him to take the passenger seat. We drove to the airport, followed by a convoy of other vehicles. In the half-hour drive to the airport we talked about our families and more personal topics, and got to know each other better.

  One week after the U.S. election, I traveled to New York for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on interfaith dialogue, sponsored by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. While I was there, I met with former president Bill Clinton, who urged me not to waste the next two and a half months before the inauguration and to begin to engage with the transition team immediately. This was long before Clinton’s wife, Hillary, had been identified as the next secretary of state. “You have to start moving,” he told me. Clinton, who came closer than any other American president to getting the two sides to hammer out a deal, is a man whose advice I take seriously, and I began to reach out informally to members of the incoming Obama administration.

  On November 12, while I was in the United States, I spoke by phone with Obama. I congratulated him on his recent victory and said I was looking forward to working with him on Middle Eastern issues. I said that while I understood he had a plethora of problems facing him as he launched a new administration—ranging from the global economic crisis to America’s budgetary woes and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—I hoped he would make time to quickly push forward negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.

  Our conversation left me extremely hopeful. I felt that we would have an American president who really understood that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians was the root cause of instability in the region, and that achieving a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace would be in America’s national interest. It was a stark contrast to the previous eight years, when America’s policy had all too often seemed to be to support Israel, right or wrong. But before Obama would come to office, in January 2009, the situation would deteriorate radically.

  The Egyptian-brokered cease-fire between Hamas and Israel expired in December 2008 and the two sides again exchanged blows. The cease-fire had been in jeopardy since November, when Israel killed six Hamas activists and Hamas fired rockets into Israel. Gaza had been blockaded economically by Israel since 2007—even medical supplies were severely limited—and was a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode.

  Taking advantage of the political transition period in America and the Christmas and New Year holidays, when most heads of state are vacationing, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, decided to launch an all-out attack on Gaza on December 27. A weeklong aerial bombardment was followed in early January by a full-scale invasion of Gaza by the Israeli army. A UN fact-finding commission, set up in April 2009 and headed by the eminent South African justice Richard Goldstone, reported that in three weeks of fierce fighting some fourteen hundred Palestinians were killed, including nine hundred to one thousand civilians, over six hundred of whom were women and children. The Israeli army lost ten soldiers, four to friendly fire, and Hamas rockets killed three Israeli civilians. In addition, Israeli fighters bombed the main prison and the Palestinian Legislative Council building as well as a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school in Gaza City, an action that was judged by the UN investigation to be illegal and in breach of the Geneva Conventions. The Goldstone Report, published in September 2009, concluded that the Israeli armed forces breached internationally recognized codes of military conduct by attacking a hospital in Gaza City with white phosphorus shells and carrying out deliberate attacks against civilians in Gaza, including firing a missile at a mosque during evening prayers, killing fifteen people.

  Satellite news networks broadcast images of civilian suffering in Gaza, sparking furious outrage. Across the Arab world people united in demanding a stern response to the Israeli actions. For the first time, a group of Arab countries mounted a concerted attempt to revoke the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, setting themselves against the moderates and pushing for a rejection of peace with Israel. The moderate Arab countries, including Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, among others, wondered whether Israel had managed to destroy the peace process for good.

  Qatar called for an emergency summit of the Arab League, to be held in Doha on January 16. Fearing a hidden political agenda, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other like-minded countries stayed away. Only thirteen Arab countries agreed to attend the summit. That was two countries short of the quorum required to make the meeting an official Arab League summit. In the end Qatar widened the guest list to include Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who traveled to Doha from his base in Damascus.

  Some Arab leaders declared the Arab Peace Initiative “already dead,” and called for severing all links with Israel, including the closure of Arab embassies (Egyptian and Jordanian) in Israel. But as this was not an official summit, the Arab Peace Initiative could not be formally rejected. If we thought that severing ties with Israel would help bring justice to the Palestinians or peace to the region, we would not hesitate to do so. But the opposite is true. Our treaty with Israel has meant that on many occasions the Palestinians have relied on us to represent their viewpoint and pass on messages. Now, when Gazans were in desperate need of support, the fact that Jordan had diplomatic relations with Israel allowed us to help them.

  We opposed the war on Gaza but could do nothing to stop it. We demanded that Israel halt all military operations against Gaza and strongly protested to the Israelis that they should not target civilians. We also provided a channel for relief that was used to deliver most of the Arab, European, and international relief supplies. Hundreds of tons of humanitarian and medical supplies from Jordan and the rest of the world entered Gaza by way of Jordan. We also dispatched a military field hospital—still operating in Gaza—that treated over a thousand patients a day immediately after opening. As of October 2010, 340,000 Gazans have received medical care at the hospital.

  On January 19, 2009, Arab heads of state gathered in Kuwait for what was intended to be an economic summit that would devise a response to the global financial crisis. But we could not ignore the continuing crisis in Gaza. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia voiced the concerns of many when he said, “The Arab Initiative will not remain on the table indefinitely.”

  The emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, resisted the pressure from countries calling for the Arab Peace Initiative to be scrapped, and the final communiqué confined itself to calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, immediate Israeli withdrawal, and an investigation into possible war crimes committed by the Israeli army.

  The next day, as Israeli troops at last withdrew from Gaza, around a million people gathered in Washington to watch Barack Obama being sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States. President Obama honored his campaign promise, and his first calls the following morning were to the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority.

  Typically, recent U.S. presidents have waited until the middle of their second term to take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with one eye on the present and the other on their historical legacy. But by engaging forcefully from day one, Obama seemed to be presenting the region with a rare opportunity to make progress on this most difficult and intractable of problems. We all had to wonder: Would leaders in the region be able to seize this chance?

  Developments
in Israeli politics were not encouraging. The optimistic spirit of Annapolis was long gone. The negotiations that had been launched at Annapolis in late 2007 ended in July 2008, when Olmert, following allegations of corruption, announced that he would not seek reelection as Kadima leader and that he would resign as prime minister after the party elected a successor. In September, his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, won the leadership of the Kadima Party. But Livni was unable to form a coalition. Olmert stayed on as prime minister in accordance with the law, which mandates that the incumbent remain in office until a new prime minister is sworn in. On February 10, 2009, Israelis went to the polls. Although Kadima won the most seats in the Knesset, Livni was again unable to form a coalition. So Israeli president Shimon Peres asked the Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, to attempt to form a coalition government.

  On March 16, Netanyahu signed a coalition agreement with Israel’s third largest party, Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home), a far-right nationalist party led by Avigdor Lieberman, who was offered the position of foreign minister. In a sign of the changing sentiments of the Israeli public, the historic Labor Party, home of my father’s old peace partner Yitzhak Rabin and of Ehud Barak, which had been the dominant political party from 1948 until the late 1970s, was now only the fourth largest, behind Kadima, Likud, and Yisrael Beiteinu. The return after a decade of a hard-liner who had done so much to undermine Oslo, and the inclusion of right-wing Israeli nationalists in his coalition government, did not bode well for the peace process.

  While Netanyahu was finalizing his coalition, the twenty-two members of the Arab League prepared to meet for their annual summit in Doha. Mindful of the previous attempts of some Arab countries to withdraw the Arab Peace Initiative, I knew the peaceseeking members would have to act aggressively if there were to be any chance of keeping the process alive.

  A few days before every Arab League summit, the foreign ministers come together to prepare for the full meeting of the heads of state. I instructed my foreign minister, Nasser Judeh, to ensure that everybody at the foreign ministers’ meeting understood that the new president of the United States had to be supported in his early engagement in the peace process. We should not allow ourselves to be overcome by emotion, horrendous though Israel’s war on Gaza was. Nobody would benefit from continued occupation and misery. You have to make sure, I told him, that the Arab summit comes up with a pragmatic statement that pushes for a collective effort at reviving the peace talks.

  In Doha, the mood was very negative. Some Arab foreign ministers argued that there was no point in pursuing peace in view of the Israeli government’s intransigence and its continuing refusal to abide by international law. Some argued that the Arab Peace Initiative should be pulled off the table. Netanyahu had just been elected, they said, and that meant Israel would soon be even more right-wing and intransigent. Forget trying to make peace with such a government. Our foreign minister and a few others argued that even though the general mood was pessimistic, we should still try to use any window of opportunity.

  At the summit my objective was to convince my fellow Arab leaders to think strategically and maintain a unified stance, to show the world once and for all who was the roadblock to peace. We all blasted Israel for its war on Gaza, but I urged my fellow heads of state to look for a ray of hope amid the general darkness. We must give Obama a chance, I argued. He had been in office for just six weeks and was already doing some good things. He had appointed George Mitchell, a former senator with a track record of success in Northern Ireland and deep familiarity with the Middle East, as his special envoy on the peace process and had deployed him to the region immediately. He was saying that Israeli settlements were illegal and should stop. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, knew the region and the issues extremely well from her time as a senator and as first lady. Everyone remembered how close President Clinton had come; we should not do what many expected from the Arabs, reject new initiatives out of hand. “Let’s show some prudence and restraint, reaffirm our commitment to the Arab Peace Initiative, and see where this current initiative is going,” I said.

  In the end, this argument carried the day, and our commitment to the Arab Peace Initiative was reaffirmed. But the strong emotional reaction across the region to Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war suggested that the initiative would not survive another major assault.

  I told my fellow heads of state that President Obama had called me a few days before and invited me to visit Washington. How could we use this visit to advance the cause of peace?

  Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the wise and experienced foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, came over during the summit and suggested to me that we carry a message from the summit to President Obama. We invited the foreign ministers from Lebanon, Qatar, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt, as well as the secretary-general of the Arab League, to come to Jordan to work out a joint Arab position. Some of these foreign ministers had also been in contact with British foreign secretary David Miliband, who was actively involved in efforts to revive the peace process.

  The ministers (other than the Syrian foreign minister, who was unable to attend) met in Amman on April 11. They discussed talking to the United States about a number of confidence-building measures between Israel and the Arab states that might be offered in the event that Israel should freeze its settlement construction in anticipation of resumed negotiations, allowing a return to the situation before the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000. Those measures would include revitalizing some of the ties that had been developed in 1994 after our peace treaty with Israel. At that time Israeli trade offices were opened in some Arab countries; there was increased movement of people and goods, and Israeli visitors were welcomed in Arab countries even in the absence of diplomatic relations. But most of that had ended abruptly in 2000 after the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations and the outbreak of the second intifada. The trade offices were closed and there was little or no interaction between Israel and Arab countries, other than Jordan and Egypt, but our relations with Israel had also suffered. What we were offering was not normalization, but measures to serve as a positive background to negotiations.

  I agreed to convey this proposal to the new president.

  In late April 2009, I arrived in Washington, the first Arab leader to visit the White House since the election. I met with Obama privately in the president’s dining room, a small room next to the Oval Office. The atmosphere was refreshingly relaxed. President Obama is knowledgeable about the world beyond America’s borders and balanced in his approach. A personable man, he gives the impression that you and he are old friends. He told me that he was facing many challenges in the Middle East, but before discussing them, he wanted to hear what I had to say.

  I told him that I believed it was imperative to relaunch negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians as soon as possible. We would have to move forward quickly on a two-state solution, as the growing antagonism between Israel and the Palestinians was throwing the whole notion of a negotiated agreement into question. Further undermining the situation was the cancer of Israeli settlements spreading across the Occupied Territories.

  I said there was an increasing pessimism among Arab leaders about the possibility of peace. Since the Gaza war, some had even urged that the Arab Peace Initiative be withdrawn. But others were still hopeful and put stock in his early engagement with the peace process. If the Israeli government were to take a bold step, I said, such as freezing settlement construction, which the Palestinians, the Arabs, and many in the international community had long demanded, then we would be prepared to return to the spirit that had existed before the second intifada and would offer some concrete confidence-building measures to help improve the environment for the resumption of peace talks.

  Drawing on my past experience, I then spoke to him candidly about the new Israeli prime minister, who was scheduled to visit Washington a few weeks later. “Mr. President,” I said, “Netanyahu will come to you and he will want to talk about
four things: Iran, Iran, Iran, and the claim that he has no Palestinian partner.” I said it would be a mistake to focus the conversation on Iran. The best way, in my view, to address all the major issues in the Middle East would be to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As to a Palestinian partner, I said, this partner would be greatly empowered if the Israelis would for once get serious about peace. In fact, one could argue that since Sharon’s election in 2001, the Palestinians had not had an Israeli partner for peace.

  The president said he would not jump to conclusions before Netanyahu’s visit, and that he would give him the benefit of the doubt. But he added that he planned to be tough on settlements. I reminded the president that I had experience with Netanyahu and urged him not to take everything the Israeli leader promised as certain. He had reneged on many previous commitments. The president said that he would vigorously pursue a two-state solution.

  Our private meeting ended not long after that and we joined our staff members for an expanded discussion. The meeting was followed by a press conference at which Obama said: I am a strong supporter of a two-state solution.... What we want to do is to step back from the abyss; to say, as hard as it is, as difficult as it may be, the prospect of peace still exists—but it’s going to require some hard choices, it’s going to require resolution on the part of all the actors involved, and it’s going to require that we create some concrete steps that all parties can take that are evidence of that resolution. And the United States is going to deeply engage in this process to see if we can make progress.