Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  Dreamers had grown up going to American schools, playing American sports, watching American TV, and hanging out at American malls. In some cases, their parents had never even told them they weren’t citizens; they learned of their undocumented status only when they tried to get a driver’s license or submitted an application for college financial aid. I’d had a chance to meet many Dreamers, both before and after I entered the White House. They were smart, poised, and resilient—as full of potential as my own daughters. If anything, I found the Dreamers to be less cynical about America than many of their native-born contemporaries—precisely because their circumstances had taught them not to take life in this country for granted.

  The case for allowing such young people to stay in the United States, the only country many of them had ever known, was so morally compelling that Kennedy and McCain had incorporated the DREAM Act into their 2007 immigration bill. And without the prospect of passing a more comprehensive rewrite of U.S. immigration laws in the immediate future, Harry Reid—who, in the months leading up to the midterms, had been locked in a tight reelection contest in his home state of Nevada and needed a strong Hispanic turnout to put him over the top—had promised to call the DREAM Act for a vote during the lame-duck session.

  Unfortunately, Harry made this last-minute announcement on the campaign trail without giving us, his Senate colleagues, or immigration reform groups any notice. Though not thrilled with Harry’s lack of coordination with her (“You’d think he could have picked up the phone”), Nancy Pelosi did her part, quickly pushing the legislation through the House. But in the Senate, McCain and Graham denounced Harry’s decision as a campaign stunt and said they wouldn’t vote for the DREAM Act as a stand-alone bill since it was no longer linked to increased enforcement. The five Republican senators who’d voted for the 2007 McCain-Kennedy bill and were still in office were less declarative about their intentions, but all sounded wobbly. And since we couldn’t count on every Democrat to support the bill—especially after the disastrous midterms—all of us in the White House found ourselves scrambling to drum up the sixty votes needed to overcome a filibuster during the waning days before the Senate wrapped up business for the year.

  Cecilia Muñoz, the White House director of intergovernmental affairs, was our point person on the effort. When I was a senator, she’d been the senior vice president of policy and legislative affairs at the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest Latino advocacy organization, and ever since she’d advised me on immigration and other issues. Born and raised in Michigan and the daughter of Bolivian immigrants, Cecilia was measured, modest, and—as I used to joke with her—“just plain nice,” bringing to mind everyone’s favorite young elementary or middle school teacher. She was also tough and tenacious (and a fanatical Michigan football fan). Within a matter of weeks, she and her team had launched an all-out media blitz in support of the DREAM Act, pitching stories, marshaling statistics, and enlisting practically every cabinet member and agency (including the Defense Department) to host some kind of event. Most important, Cecilia helped bring together a crew of young Dreamers who were willing to disclose their undocumented status in order to share their personal stories with undecided senators and media outlets. Several times, Cecilia and I talked about the courage of these young people, agreeing that at their age we could never have managed such pressure.

  “I just want to win so bad for them,” she told me.

  And yet, despite the countless hours we spent in meetings and on the phone, the likelihood of getting sixty votes for the DREAM Act began to look increasingly bleak. One of our best prospects was Claire McCaskill, the Democratic senator from Missouri. Claire was one of my early supporters and best friends in the Senate, a gifted politician with a razor-sharp wit, a big heart, and not an ounce of hypocrisy or pretension. But she also came from a conservative, Republican-leaning state and was a juicy target for the GOP in its effort to wrest back control of the Senate.

  “You know I want to help those kids, Mr. President,” Claire said when I reached her by phone, “but the polling in Missouri is just terrible on anything related to immigration. If I vote for this, there’s a good chance I lose my seat.”

  I knew she wasn’t wrong. And if she lost, we might lose the Senate, along with any possibility of ever getting the DREAM Act or comprehensive immigration reform or anything else passed. How was I to weigh that risk against the urgent fates of the young people I’d met—the uncertainty and fear they were forced to live with every single day, the possibility that with no notice any one of them might be rounded up in an ICE raid, detained in a cell, and shipped off to a land that was as foreign to them as it would be to me?

  Before hanging up, Claire and I made a deal to help square the circle. “If your vote’s the one that gets us to sixty,” I said, “then those kids are going to need you, Claire. But if we’re way short, there’s no point in you falling on your sword.”

  The Senate voted on the DREAM Act on a cloudy Saturday a week before Christmas, the same day it voted to repeal DADT. I watched on the small TV in the Oval Office with Pete Souza, Reggie, and Katie as the roll call appeared, tallying the votes in favor: 40, 50, 52, 55. There was a pause, the chamber in a state of suspension, a last chance for a senator to change their mind, until the gavel finally fell.

  We’d come up five votes short.

  I took the stairs up to the second floor of the West Wing and headed to Cecilia’s office, where she and her young team had been watching the vote. Most of the room was in tears, and I gave everybody hugs. I reminded them that because of their work we’d come closer to passing the DREAM Act than any previous effort; and that it would be our job to keep pushing as long as we were here, until we finally met our goal. Everyone nodded quietly, and I went back downstairs. On my desk, Katie had left a printout of the roll call. Running my fingers down the page, I noticed that Claire McCaskill had voted “yea.” I asked Katie to get Claire on the phone.

  “I thought you were a ‘no’ unless the bill was close,” I said when she picked up.

  “Damn it, Mr. President, I thought so too,” Claire said. “But when it came time to record my vote, and I started thinking about those kids who’d come by my office…” Her voice caught in her throat, thick with emotion. “I just couldn’t do it to them. I couldn’t let them think I didn’t care. Anyway,” she went on, composing herself, “looks like you’re going to have to help me raise a whole lot of money so I can beat back those Republican ads calling me soft on immigration.”

  I promised Claire I would. Even though there’d be no bill-signing ceremony for her to attend and no audience to give her a standing ovation, I believed that my friend’s quiet exercise of conscience, no less than Mike Mullen’s, was one more step toward a better country.

  Our failure to pass the DREAM Act was a bitter pill to swallow. Still, all of us in the White House took heart in the fact that we’d managed to pull off the most significant lame-duck session in modern history. In six weeks, the House and Senate had together clocked a remarkable forty-eight days in session and enacted ninety-nine laws—more than a quarter of the 111th Congress’s total legislation over two years. What’s more, the public seemed to notice the burst of congressional productivity. Axe reported a rise in both consumer confidence and my approval ratings—not because my message or policies had changed but because Washington had gotten a bunch of stuff done. It was as if, for the span of a month and a half, democracy was normal again, with the usual give-and-take between parties, the push and pull of interest groups, the mixed blessing of compromise. What more might we have accomplished, I wondered, and how much further along would the economic recovery be, had this sort of atmosphere prevailed from the start of my term?

  PART SEVEN

  ON THE HIGH WIRE

  CHAPTER 25

  IF AT THE END OF 2010, anyone had asked me where the next major Middle East crisis would most likely occur, I could have
offered them a rich menu of possibilities. There was Iraq, of course, where despite progress, it often felt as if a return to chaos was just a market bombing or militia attack away. The international sanctions we’d imposed on Iran in response to its nuclear program had started to cause some pain, and any defiance or desperation from the regime could lead to a confrontation that spun out of control. Yemen—one of the world’s true hard-luck cases—had become headquarters to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which was now the deadliest and most active chapter of the terrorist network.

  And then there were the few hundred miles of winding, contested border that separated Israel from the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

  Mine was hardly the first U.S. administration to lose sleep over those relatively thin pieces of real estate. The conflict between Arabs and Jews had been an open sore on the region for almost a century, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British, who were then occupying Palestine, committed to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs. Over the next twenty or so years, Zionist leaders mobilized a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine and organized highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements. In 1947, in the wake of World War II and in the shadow of the Holocaust’s unspeakable crimes, the United Nations approved a partition plan to establish two sovereign states, one Jewish, the other Arab, with Jerusalem—a city considered holy by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike—to be governed by an international body. Zionist leaders embraced the plan, but Arab Palestinians, as well as surrounding Arab nations that were also just emerging from colonial rule, strenuously objected. As Britain withdrew, the two sides quickly fell into war. And with Jewish militias claiming victory in 1948, the State of Israel was officially born.

  For the Jewish people, it was a dream fulfilled, a state of their own in their historic homeland after centuries of exile, religious persecution, and the more recent horrors of the Holocaust. But for the roughly seven hundred thousand Arab Palestinians who found themselves stateless and driven from their lands, the same events would be a part of what became known as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.” For the next three decades, Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbors—most significantly the Six-Day War of 1967, in which a greatly outnumbered Israeli military routed the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In the process, Israel seized control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The memory of those losses, and the humiliation that came with it, became a defining aspect of Arab nationalism, and support for the Palestinian cause a central tenet of Arab foreign policy.

  Meanwhile, Palestinians living within the occupied territories, mostly in refugee camps, found themselves governed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with their movements and economic activity severely restricted, prompting calls for armed resistance and resulting in the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Arab politicians routinely denounced Israel, often in explicitly anti-Semitic terms, and most governments in the region embraced the PLO’s chairman, Yasser Arafat, as a freedom fighter—even as his organization and its affiliates engaged in escalating and bloody terrorist attacks against unarmed civilians.

  The United States was no bystander in all this. Jewish Americans had suffered generations of discrimination in their own country, but they and other Jews emigrating from the West to Israel still shared language, customs, and appearance with their white Christian brethren, and in comparison to Arabs, they still enjoyed far more sympathy from the American public. Harry Truman had been the first foreign leader to formally recognize Israel as a sovereign state, and the American Jewish community pressed U.S. officials to assist the fledgling nation. With the world’s two Cold War superpowers vying for influence in the Middle East, the United States became Israel’s primary patron—and with that, Israel’s problems with its neighbors became America’s problems as well.

  Practically every U.S. president since then had tried to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, with varying degrees of success. The historic Camp David Accords, brokered in 1978 by Jimmy Carter, achieved a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt and returned Sinai to Egyptian control. The agreement, which yielded a Nobel Peace Prize for the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, and the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, also moved Egypt further out of the Soviet orbit and made the two countries critical U.S. security partners (as well as the largest recipients of U.S. economic and military aid in the world, by a wide margin). But it left the Palestinian issue unresolved. Fifteen years later, with the Cold War over and U.S. influence at its zenith, Bill Clinton brought Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat together for the signing of the first Oslo Accord. In it, the PLO finally recognized Israel’s right to exist, while Israel recognized the PLO as the rightful representative of the Palestinian people and agreed to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, which would have limited but meaningful governance over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

  Along with giving Jordan license to follow Egypt’s example and conclude its own peace deal with Israel, Oslo provided a framework for the eventual creation of an autonomous Palestinian state, one that, ideally, would coexist with a secure Israel that was at peace with its neighbors. But old wounds, and the lure of violence over compromise among factions on both sides, proved too much to overcome. Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli extremist in 1995. His liberal successor, Shimon Peres, served for seven months before losing a snap election to Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, whose platform had once included total annexation of the Palestinian territories. Unhappy about the Oslo Accords, harder-line organizations like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad set about undermining the credibility of Arafat and his Fatah party with Palestinians, calling for armed struggle to take back Arab lands and push Israel into the sea.

  After Netanyahu was defeated in the 1999 election, his more liberal successor, Ehud Barak, made efforts to establish a broader peace in the Middle East, including outlining a two-state solution that went further than any previous Israeli proposal. Arafat demanded more concessions, however, and talks collapsed in recrimination. Meanwhile, one day in September 2000, Likud party leader Ariel Sharon led a group of Israeli legislators on a deliberately provocative and highly publicized visit to one of Islam’s holiest sites, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was a stunt designed to assert Israel’s claim over the wider territory, one that challenged the leadership of Ehud Barak and enraged Arabs near and far. Four months later, Sharon became Israel’s next prime minister, governing throughout what became known as the Second Intifada: four years of violence between the two sides, marked by tear gas and rubber bullets directed at stone-throwing protesters; Palestinian suicide bombs detonated outside an Israeli nightclub and in buses carrying senior citizens and schoolchildren; deadly IDF retaliatory raids and the indiscriminate arrest of thousands of Palestinians; and Hamas rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli border towns, answered by U.S.-supplied Israeli Apache helicopters leveling entire neighborhoods.

  Approximately a thousand Israelis and three thousand Palestinians died during this period—including scores of children—and by the time the violence subsided, in 2005, the prospects for resolving the underlying conflict had fundamentally changed. The Bush administration’s focus on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror left it little bandwidth to worry about Middle East peace, and while Bush remained officially supportive of a two-state solution, he was reluctant to press Sharon on the issue. Publicly, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states continued to offer support to the Palestinian cause, but they were increasingly more concerned with limiting Iranian influence and rooting out extremist threats to their own regimes. The Palestinians themselves had splintered after Arafat’s death in 2004: Gaza came under the control of Hamas and soon found itself under a tightly enforced
Israeli blockade, while the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority, which continued to govern the West Bank, came to be viewed by even some of its supporters as feckless and corrupt.

  Most important, Israeli attitudes toward peace talks had hardened, in part because peace no longer seemed so crucial to ensuring the country’s safety and prosperity. The Israel of the 1960s that remained lodged in the popular imagination, with its communal kibbutz living and periodic rationing of basic supplies, had been transformed into a modern economic powerhouse. It was no longer the plucky David surrounded by hostile Goliaths; thanks to tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military aid, the Israeli armed forces were now matchless in the region. Terrorist bombings and attacks within Israel had all but ceased, due in some measure to the fact that Israel had erected a wall more than four hundred miles long between itself and the Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, punctuated with strategically placed checkpoints to control the flow of Palestinian workers in and out of Israel. Every so often, rocket fire from Gaza still endangered those living in Israeli border towns, and the presence of Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank sometimes triggered deadly skirmishes. For most residents of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, however, the Palestinians lived largely out of sight, their struggles and resentments troubling but remote.