by Obama Barack
Given everything that was already on my plate when I became president, it would have been tempting to just do my best to manage the status quo, quash any outbreaks of renewed violence between Israeli and Palestinian factions, and otherwise leave the whole mess alone. But taking into account the broader foreign policy concerns, I decided I couldn’t go that route. Israel remained a key U.S. ally, and even with the threats reduced, it still endured terrorist attacks that jeopardized not only its citizens but also the thousands of Americans who lived or traveled there. At the same time, just about every country in the world considered Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories to be a violation of international law. As a result, our diplomats found themselves in the awkward position of having to defend Israel for actions that we ourselves opposed. U.S. officials also had to explain why it wasn’t hypocritical for us to press countries like China or Iran on their human rights records while showing little concern for the rights of Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation continued to inflame the Arab community and feed anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.
In other words, the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians made America less safe. Negotiating a workable solution between the two sides, on the other hand, stood to strengthen our security posture, weaken our enemies, and make us more credible in championing human rights around the world—all in one fell swoop.
In truth, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also weighed on me personally. Some of the earliest moral instruction I got from my mother revolved around the Holocaust, an unconscionable catastrophe that, like slavery, she explained, was rooted in the inability or unwillingness to recognize the humanity of others. Like many American kids of my generation, I’d had the story of Exodus etched in my brain. In sixth grade, I’d idealized the Israel described to me by a Jewish camp counselor who’d lived on a kibbutz—a place where everyone was equal, he said, everyone pitched in, and everyone was welcome to share in the joys and struggles of repairing the world. In high school, I’d devoured the works of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer, moved by stories of men trying to find their place in an America that didn’t welcome them. Later, studying the early civil rights movement in college, I’d been intrigued by the influence of Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber on Dr. King’s sermons and writings. I’d admired how, across issues, Jewish voters tended to be more progressive than just about any other ethnic group, and in Chicago, some of my most stalwart friends and supporters had come from the city’s Jewish community.
I believed there was an essential bond between the Black and the Jewish experiences—a common story of exile and suffering that might ultimately be redeemed by a shared thirst for justice, a deeper compassion for others, a heightened sense of community. It made me fiercely protective of the right of the Jewish people to have a state of their own, though, ironically, those same shared values also made it impossible for me to ignore the conditions under which Palestinians in the occupied territories were forced to live.
Yes, many of Arafat’s tactics had been abhorrent. Yes, Palestinian leaders had too often missed opportunities for peace; there’d been no Havel or Gandhi to mobilize a nonviolent movement with the moral force to sway Israeli public opinion. And yet none of that negated the fact that millions of Palestinians lacked self-determination and many of the basic rights that even citizens of non-democratic countries enjoyed. Generations were growing up in a starved and shrunken world from which they literally couldn’t escape, their daily lives subject to the whims of a distant, often hostile authority and the suspicions of every blank-faced, rifle-carrying soldier demanding to see their papers at each checkpoint they passed.
By the time I took office, though, most congressional Republicans had abandoned any pretense of caring about what happened to the Palestinians. Indeed, a strong majority of white evangelicals—the GOP’s most reliable voting bloc—believed that the creation and gradual expansion of Israel fulfilled God’s promise to Abraham and heralded Christ’s eventual return. On the Democratic side, even stalwart progressives were loath to look less pro-Israel than Republicans, especially since many of them were Jewish themselves or represented sizable Jewish constituencies.
Also, members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful bipartisan lobbying organization dedicated to ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel. AIPAC’s clout could be brought to bear on virtually every congressional district in the country, and just about every politician in Washington—including me—counted AIPAC members among their key supporters and donors. In the past, the organization had accommodated a spectrum of views on Middle East peace, insisting mainly that those seeking its endorsement support a continuation of U.S. aid to Israel and oppose efforts to isolate or condemn Israel via the U.N. and other international bodies. But as Israeli politics had moved to the right, so had AIPAC’s policy positions. Its staff and leaders increasingly argued that there should be “no daylight” between the U.S. and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to U.S. policy. Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as “anti-Israel” (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.
I’d been on the receiving end of some of this during my presidential campaign, as Jewish supporters reported having to beat back assertions in their synagogues and on email chains that I was insufficiently supportive of—or even hostile toward—Israel. They attributed these whisper campaigns not to any particular position I’d taken (my backing of a two-state solution and opposition to Israeli settlements were identical to the positions of the other candidates) but rather to my expressions of concern for ordinary Palestinians; my friendships with certain critics of Israeli policy, including an activist and Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi; and the fact that, as Ben bluntly put it, “You’re a Black man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan and went to Jeremiah Wright’s church.” On Election Day, I’d end up getting more than 70 percent of the Jewish vote, but as far as many AIPAC board members were concerned, I remained suspect, a man of divided loyalties: someone whose support for Israel, as one of Axe’s friends colorfully put it, wasn’t “felt in his kishkes”—“guts,” in Yiddish.
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“YOU DON’T GET progress on peace,” Rahm had warned me in 2009, “when the American president and the Israeli prime minister come from different political backgrounds.” We had been discussing the recent return of Bibi Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister, after the Likud party had managed to cobble together a right-leaning coalition government despite winning one less seat than its main opponent, the more centrist Kadima party. Rahm, who’d briefly been a civilian volunteer in the Israeli army and had sat in the front row at Bill Clinton’s Oslo negotiations, had agreed that we should try to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, if for no other reason than that it might keep the situation from getting worse. But he wasn’t optimistic—and the more time I spent with Netanyahu and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, the more I understood why.
Built like a linebacker, with a square jaw, broad features, and a gray comb-over, Netanyahu was smart, canny, tough, and a gifted communicator in both Hebrew and English. (He’d been born in Israel but spent most of his formative years in Philadelphia, and traces of that city’s accent lingered in his polished baritone.) His family had deep roots in the Zionist movement: His grandfather, a rabbi, emigrated from Poland to British-governed Palestine in 1920, while his father—a professor of history best known for his writings on the persecution of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition—became a leader in the movement’s more militant wing before Israel’s founding. Although raised in a secular household, Netanyahu inherited his father’s devotion to the defense of Israel: He’d been a member of a special forces unit in the IDF and had fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, an
d his older brother had died a hero in the legendary Entebbe raid of 1976, in which Israeli commandos rescued 102 passengers from Palestinian terrorists who had hijacked an Air France flight.
Whether Netanyahu also inherited his father’s unabashed hostility toward Arabs (“The tendency towards conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement”) was harder to say. What was certain was that he had built his entire political persona around an image of strength and the message that Jews couldn’t afford phony pieties—that they lived in a tough neighborhood and so had to be tough. This philosophy neatly aligned him with the most hawkish members of AIPAC, as well as Republican officials and wealthy American right-wingers. Netanyahu could be charming, or at least solicitous, when it served his purposes; he’d gone out of his way, for example, to meet me in a Chicago airport lounge shortly after I’d been elected to the U.S. Senate, lavishing praise on me for an inconsequential pro-Israel bill I’d supported in the Illinois state legislature. But his vision of himself as the chief defender of the Jewish people against calamity allowed him to justify almost anything that would keep him in power—and his familiarity with American politics and media gave him confidence that he could resist whatever pressure a Democratic administration like mine might try to apply.
My early discussions with Netanyahu—both over the phone and during his visits to Washington—had gone well enough, despite our very different worldviews. He was most interested in talking about Iran, which he rightly viewed as Israel’s largest security threat, and we agreed to coordinate efforts to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But when I raised the possibility of restarting peace talks with the Palestinians, he was decidedly noncommittal.
“I want to assure you, Israel wants peace,” Netanyahu said. “But a true peace has to meet Israel’s security needs.” He made it clear to me that he thought Abbas was likely unwilling or unable to do so, a point he would also stress in public.
I understood his point. If Netanyahu’s reluctance to enter into peace talks was born of Israel’s growing strength, then the reluctance of Palestinian president Abbas was born of political weakness. White-haired and mustached, mild-mannered and deliberate in his movements, Abbas had helped Arafat found the Fatah party, which later became the dominant party of the PLO, spending most of his career managing diplomatic and administrative efforts in the shadow of the more charismatic chairman. He’d been the preferred choice of both the United States and Israel to lead the Palestinians after Arafat’s death, in large part due to his unequivocal recognition of Israel and his long-standing renunciation of violence. But his innate caution and willingness to cooperate with the Israeli security apparatus (not to mention reports of corruption inside his administration) had damaged his reputation with his own people. Having already lost control of Gaza to Hamas in the 2006 legislative elections, he viewed peace talks with Israel as a risk not worth taking—at least not without some tangible concessions that would provide him political cover.
The immediate question was how to coax Netanyahu and Abbas to the negotiating table. To come up with answers, I relied on a talented group of diplomats, starting with Hillary, who was well versed on the issues and already had relationships with many of the region’s major players. To underscore the high priority I’d placed on the issue, I appointed former Senate majority leader George Mitchell as my special envoy for Middle East peace. Mitchell was a throwback—a hard-driving, pragmatic politician with a thick Maine accent who had demonstrated his peacemaking skills by negotiating the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to the decades-long conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.
We began by calling for a temporary freeze on Israel’s construction of new settlements in the West Bank, a significant sticking point between the two parties, so that negotiations might proceed in earnest. Settlement construction, once limited to small outposts of religious believers, had over time become de facto government policy, and in 2009, there were about three hundred thousand Israeli settlers living outside the country’s recognized borders. Developers, meanwhile, continued to build tidy subdivisions in and around the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the disputed, predominantly Arab section of the city that Palestinians hoped to one day make their capital. All this was done with the blessing of politicians who either shared the religious convictions of the settler movement, saw the political benefit of catering to settlers, or were simply interested in alleviating Israel’s housing crunch. For Palestinians, the explosion in settlements amounted to a slow-motion annexation of their land and stood as a symbol of the Palestinian Authority’s impotence.
We knew that Netanyahu would probably resist the idea of a freeze. The settlers had become a meaningful political force, their movement well represented within Netanyahu’s coalition government. Moreover, he would complain that the good-faith gesture we’d be asking from the Palestinians in return—that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority take concrete steps to end incitements to violence inside the West Bank—was a great deal harder to measure. But given the asymmetry in power between Israel and the Palestinians—there wasn’t much, after all, that Abbas could give the Israelis that the Israelis couldn’t already take on their own—I thought it was reasonable to ask the stronger party to take a bigger first step in the direction of peace.
As expected, Netanyahu’s initial response to our proposed settlement freeze was sharply negative, and his allies in Washington were soon publicly accusing us of weakening the U.S.-Israeli alliance. The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel and focusing on settlements when everyone knew that Palestinian violence was the main impediment to peace. One afternoon, Ben hurried in late for a meeting, looking particularly harried after having spent the better part of an hour on the phone with a highly agitated liberal Democratic congressman.
“I thought he opposes settlements,” I said.
“He does,” Ben said. “He also opposes us doing anything to actually stop settlements.”
This sort of pressure continued for much of 2009, along with questions about my kishkes. Periodically, we’d invite the leaders of Jewish organizations or members of Congress to the White House for meetings with me and my team, so that we could assure them of our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and the U.S.-Israel relationship. It wasn’t a hard argument to make; despite my difference with Netanyahu on a settlement freeze, I’d delivered on my promise to enhance U.S.-Israel cooperation across the board, working to counteract the Iranian threat and to help fund the eventual development of an “Iron Dome” defense system, which would allow Israel to shoot down Syrian-made rockets coming from Gaza or from Hezbollah positions inside Lebanon. Nevertheless, the noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister—even one who presided over a fragile coalition government—exacted a domestic political cost that simply didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.
But shortly after I delivered my Cairo speech, in early June 2009, Netanyahu cracked open the door to progress by responding with an address of his own in which he declared, for the first time, his conditional support for a two-state solution. And after months of wrangling, he and Abbas finally agreed to join me for a face-to-face discussion while they were both in town for the annual leaders’ gathering at the U.N. General Assembly at the end of September. The two men were courteous to each other (Netanyahu garrulous and physically at ease, Abbas largely expressionless, save for the occasional nod) but appeared unmoved when I urged them to take some risks for peace. Two months later, Netanyahu agreed to instit
ute a ten-month freeze on the issuance of new settlement permits in the West Bank. Pointedly he refused to extend the freeze to construction in East Jerusalem.
Any optimism I felt about Bibi’s concession was short-lived. No sooner had Netanyahu announced the temporary freeze than Abbas dismissed it as meaningless, complaining about the exclusion of East Jerusalem and the fact that construction of already-approved projects was continuing apace. He insisted that in the absence of a total freeze, he would not join any talks. Other Arab leaders quickly echoed these sentiments, spurred in part by editorializing from Al Jazeera, the Qatari-controlled media outlet that had become the dominant news source in the region, having built its popularity by fanning the flames of anger and resentment among Arabs with the same algorithmic precision that Fox News deployed so skillfully with conservative white voters in the States.
The situation only got messier in March 2010, when, just as Joe Biden was visiting Israel on a goodwill mission, the Israeli Interior Ministry announced permits for the construction of sixteen hundred new housing units in East Jerusalem. Although Netanyahu insisted that his office had nothing to do with the timing of the permits, the move reinforced perceptions among Palestinians that the freeze was a sham and the United States was in on it. I instructed Hillary to call Netanyahu and let him know I wasn’t happy, and we reiterated our suggestion that his government show more restraint on expanding settlements. His response, delivered at AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington later that month, was to declare to thunderous applause that “Jerusalem is not a settlement—it is our capital.”
The following day, Netanyahu and I sat down for a meeting at the White House. Downplaying the growing tension, I accepted the fiction that the permit announcement had been just a misunderstanding, and our discussions ran well over the allotted time. Because I had another commitment and Netanyahu still had a few items he wanted to cover, I suggested we pause and resume the conversation in an hour, arranging in the meantime for his delegation to regroup in the Roosevelt Room. He said he was happy to wait, and after that second session, we ended the evening on cordial terms, having met for more than two hours total. The next day, however, Rahm stormed into the office, saying there were media reports that I’d deliberately snubbed Netanyahu by keeping him waiting, leading to accusations that I had allowed a case of personal pique to damage the vital U.S.-Israel relationship.