Interventions

by Kofi Annan

  The fourth new element was the prescription of a clear end goal for negotiations: a two-state solution that ended the 1967 occupation and ensured a real state for the Palestinians and lasting security for Israel. This goal had never been set before at the outset of negotiations. I only wished it could have been stated with far more specificity, drawing on the Clinton parameters with clear terms of reference regarding borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees. I am convinced that the more specific the international community can be on these issues, the easier it will be for the parties to converge on a negotiated outcome.

  Finally, the roadmap introduced a fifth innovation—the option of agreeing on a Palestinian state with provisional borders during the process, as a way station to a permanent settlement. I was never convinced this was a good idea, and certainly the Palestinians did not think so—unless, and only unless, the details of a permanent settlement were already agreed, and this was merely a phase of implementation. Hence, it was referred to as an option. The Palestinian experience with Oslo was that the temporary tended to become permanent—mirroring, I might add, the Israeli fear that a so-called permanent solution might one day turn out merely to be temporary.

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  Shimon Peres remarked at the time that there was a light (meaning the two-state solution) but no tunnel (meaning there was no agreed way to get from the current crisis to the two-state outcome). The roadmap was meant to shine the light brighter and create the tunnel. But it only had a chance of working if all Quartet members insisted on utilizing its potential to the full and did not allow the parties to wriggle out of their commitments.

  It took months to agree on the roadmap, and still months more before it was launched. Washington’s rush to war in Iraq stood in stark contrast to the gentlemanly pace of U.S. engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian track, which was only deteriorating the longer it was neglected. I wanted the roadmap released and the parties discussing it already. The United States, most important of all, had proved it was simply unwilling to push forward in the manner that we were. I was frustrated and expressed so publicly in interviews in March 2003, at the lack of ambition to move on the Palestinian situation—especially given that we all seemed to share a common dream of two states but would not take the concrete steps to make it a reality.

  AN EMPOWERED PALESTINIAN PRIME MINISTER?

  Timing was not the only issue. The United States would not present the roadmap to Arafat. They refused to deal with him or regard him as a partner. On the other hand, it was futile to try to push Arafat out or to presume we could totally ignore the legitimate Palestinian leader. So the UN proposed that Arafat should remain president but appoint an empowered prime minister to control security and finances. These were the two areas on which Arafat had lost credibility, but on which the success of the roadmap hinged. We managed to sell this idea to our Quartet partners.

  Getting Arafat to agree was another matter. We first sought Arafat’s agreement to the principle before discussing names—even though it was clear that the prime minister should be Mahmoud Abbas, the senior figure within the Palestinian leadership who had opposed the armed intifada from the outset. Arafat finally relented.

  We strongly encouraged Arafat to appoint Abbas, not a Palestinian businessman whom he had his eye on, and not, as he joked, Lebanon’s billionaire prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri (“he could bring us lots of money”)! Finally, under heavy pressure, and with the war in Iraq just starting to his east, Arafat agreed to appoint Abbas. He was sworn in on April 30, 2003, and the roadmap was formally presented to both parties. All four Quartet envoys presented it in Ramallah, but the Americans alone gave it to Sharon. Such was the reality of the game. The United States was often prepared to share management of the Palestinians but insisted on preserving its prerogatives vis-à-vis Israel.

  Rather than proceeding along the roadmap, Sharon and Arafat looked for exit ramps. Arafat undermined Abbas, who did not assert his prerogatives and remained standoffish in political infighting. As Abbas achieved some early successes, Arafat’s jealousy grew. Arafat refused to cede control over the security services. Abbas soon resigned, and when he did so, I could feel U.S. enthusiasm for driving forward the roadmap start to dissipate. We were still a long way from the kind of Palestinian security performance that would persuade Washington to move on the real political issues. The U.S. obsession with Arafat returned to the fore and remained until his death in late 2004.

  WEST BANK WALL, GAZA WITHDRAWAL

  Not to be outdone, Sharon also decided to go in a different direction. The same year that we launched the roadmap, Israeli and Palestinian civil society figures signed the Geneva Accord—a document that proves, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that an agreement is eminently achievable between sensible people of goodwill on both sides. Jerusalem can be shared, sensibly, as a capital of two states. It is entirely possible to draw a border that allows most of the Israeli settlers to stay and gives the Palestinians a contiguous and viable state that has the same territory as that occupied in 1967. Security arrangements can be found acceptable to both, dealing with threats old and new. Even the highly sensitive refugee question can be solved in a way that acknowledges their rights and suffering—including their right of return—but ensures implementation in a way that does not undermine the two-state idea itself. The conflict can be ended and two states for two peoples can exist side by side in peace.

  Geneva and the roadmap put Sharon on the defensive. I sensed that he did not like this agenda and looked for an alternative. He first tried to wriggle out of the roadmap by accepting it with fourteen reservations, which struck at the heart of the concept of parallelism that we had fought so hard to incorporate. There were plenty in Washington who were quite glad to let him do so. With no serious monitoring mechanism in place, Sharon never took action to freeze West Bank settlements. Sharon busied himself with an agenda that involved completing the barrier he was building through the West Bank, withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, thickening settlements in and around Jerusalem, and founding a new political party. These were bold gambits, to be sure, and forever altered the landscape of the conflict. But they brought us no closer to peace.

  The name of what Sharon was building embodied the dispute over it. The Israelis termed it a “security fence” because it helped bring to an end the spate of suicide bombings. The Palestinians regarded it as a wall, as indeed it was in the cities of Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Bethlehem where most Palestinians encountered it. I called it a barrier. In fact, the most accurate description of it would be a fence-and-wall barrier. Regardless of what it was called, its construction was clearly politically motivated since it attached large numbers of illegal Israeli settlements to Israel and cut most Palestinians off from Jerusalem and many from their own lands.

  The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that Sharon’s wall, as they called it, to the extent that it deviated from the 1967 line and went into occupied Palestinian territory, was illegal. The problem was not the barrier itself—Israel could build a wall along its border the same way the United States could build a fence along its border with Mexico. The problem was its route, inside Palestinian lands. The General Assembly asked me to set up a register to record the damage that the wall was causing for Palestinians. The barrier was built with both a security and a political purpose in mind. The same was true of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza.

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  When Sharon announced in December 2003 that he intended to leave Gaza, I admit I was surprised. Here was the father of the settlements promising to uproot settlers. He had famously proclaimed that “the fate of Netzarim [a settlement in Gaza] is the fate of Tel Aviv.” In explaining his change of heart, he said that the Palestinian population was growing rapidly “in incredibly cramped refugee camps, in poverty and squalor, in hot-beds of ever-increasing hatred, with no hope whatsoever on the horizon”—a powerful description of the impact of nearly forty years of occupation. Israeli
s often claim that the UN exaggerates the crisis facing the civilian population in Gaza, but perhaps Sharon’s own words will convince them. I have not been back to Gaza since, but if this was how Sharon described it in 2005, it must be worse today after years of prolonged Israeli blockade and Hamas rule.

  Sharon viewed the disengagement as a tool to rid Israel of a liability while consolidating its hold on key West Bank settlement blocs. He wanted to receive American backing for Israeli positions regarding settlements and refugees in any future negotiations, while further establishing that there was “no partner” for peace on the Palestinian side. He achieved all these tactical victories—but, strategically, the disengagement took both Israelis and Palestinians further away from a solution. It helped to introduce dynamics that made it harder and harder for the Palestinians to stay cohesive as a political unit, played into the hands of Hamas, and left Israelis dismayed at the security consequences of leaving occupied territory.

  Whatever my considerable misgivings, I decided that I could not be opposed to an Israeli withdrawal from land that did not belong to Israel. But I was equally clear that this was the “right thing, done the wrong way.” We alerted the Security Council that Gaza was descending into lawlessness, chaos, and anarchy—fair warning of what could follow in the vacuum left by an Israeli departure. By acting unilaterally, Sharon undermined the new Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who had been elected in January 2005 to replace Arafat after his death. Like Barak in Lebanon five years earlier, Sharon sent a worrying message that Israel was more prepared to leave territory when the price of conflict got too high—this time at the hands of Hamas militants—than it was to seek a peace accord with the Palestinian leadership. (Netanyahu did the same in 2011 by rebuffing calls by the moderate West Bank leadership for prisoner releases to the Palestinian Authority, yet releasing one thousand Palestinian prisoners to Hamas in exchange for an Israeli soldier held in Gaza.)

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  To mitigate these effects, and ensure that a postwithdrawal Gaza would be a viable entity, not a suffocating prison, I wanted to do everything possible to maximize Israeli-Palestinian coordination throughout the process. I also wanted to see that it led us back to the roadmap, not away from it. In the language of the day, it should be “Gaza first, not Gaza last.” This required vigorous diplomacy, including from the UN. But by the end of 2004, my envoy Terje Roed-Larsen had left Jerusalem, and in his place I appointed the veteran UN diplomat Álvaro de Soto, who arrived in May 2005. De Soto was used to delicate problems and had done impressive work in peace processes in El Salvador and Cyprus.

  Unrelated to this process, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called me to propose that the retiring head of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, should be appointed as an envoy to coordinate the Gaza disengagement. I leaped at the suggestion and urged that he be an envoy not of the United States but of the Quartet as a whole. Wolfensohn was a close friend and passionate about helping the weak and poor. He had unrivaled reach into the pockets of donors and knew the Israelis and the Palestinians well.

  Wolfensohn moved mountains to reach a fair and workable framework that would ensure security through the Gaza-Israel crossings, make sure that imports and exports would flow, and enable a proper Palestinian takeover of the greenhouses that Israel left behind in Gaza—even donating his own money for the purpose.

  At the eleventh hour, the Americans took over the process and tilted the framework toward the Israelis. I witnessed once again the unhealthy possessiveness that Washington has over the Arab-Israeli peace process, and its reluctance to share it meaningfully with others—even those working toward the same ends. Eventually, however, a new layer of complexity would be added by the decisions of the Palestinians themselves at the ballot box.

  HAMAS AND THE QUARTET

  Few issues in UN Middle East diplomacy caused more controversy than my participation in 2006 in a Quartet position that effectively isolated the newly elected Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government. The Quartet had backed Hamas’ participation in Palestinian elections when we met in my conference room in New York in September 2005. We agreed that a group participation in elections ought not, as a matter of principle, have a militia, but we decided to support President Abbas’s strategy for addressing the problem. He wanted to end the militias, and his slogan was “One Authority, One Law, One Gun.” He told us he could not disarm Hamas forcibly; instead, he wanted to approach the matter politically, with Hamas inside the parliament, bound by the laws set by the majority, and confronted with the contradictions of its own position.

  But when Hamas won the election on January 25, 2006, it became the majority—upending this strategy entirely. Hamas would now form a government and be responsible not only for public services but for the Palestinian security forces. I said publicly that we would work with a duly elected Palestinian government. However, the result was a bombshell for Washington. Rice had acknowledged in September that the Palestinians needed some room for the evolution of their political process. But with Hamas’ having won the elections, she seemed determined to close off that room entirely when we met in London five days after the election.

  Rice’s mood was not made any better when Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center had observed the elections, reported to the Quartet meeting that the vote had been admirably free and fair—and then criticized U.S. and Israeli policy. I thanked Carter and escorted him from the room so that the Quartet itself could continue discussions, and returned to a frosty glare from the secretary of state. After all, I was the one who had invited Carter to brief us in the first place.

  Hamas stood for, and had done, many abominable things in its time. Israelis regarded Hamas as their mortal enemy, and many moderate Palestinians also worried what an unreformed Hamas could mean for their own society. Yet Hamas had now decided to participate in electoral politics and, to the surprise of many, it had been entrusted by the Palestinian people with government. I believe this reflected the failure of Fatah and the peace process rather than mass Palestinian support for Islamist-dominated politics or the destruction of Israel, a goal to which Hamas was formally committed. Some thought Hamas was sending signals that it was ready to envisage a genuine transformation; others felt the movement was pursuing tactical advantages without changing its strategic objectives.

  The Americans wanted the Quartet to agree that all funding to any Hamas-led government should be withdrawn unless it committed itself to three principles: renunciation of violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous commitments and obligations. I was prepared to sign up to clear standards for Hamas, which I agreed had unacceptable positions. But I respected the vote of the Palestinian people, and I wanted to know whether the Quartet would be prepared to work with Hamas in some way if they made a move toward the principles, even if it did not fully meet them. Rice largely avoided the question. There was trouble ahead.

  I was used to differences in the Quartet, but never before had the divisions been so stark. The United States and the EU were the major donors to the Palestinian Authority and viewed Hamas as a terrorist group. Russia and the UN did not have these restrictions, and the UN had an overall humanitarian responsibility for the welfare of the Palestinians. We tried to secure Quartet agreement on a “common but differentiated” approach—those without restrictions could be the agents for dealing with Hamas as necessary, while those with restrictions could apply pressure. Rice would have none of it: “The fact is we are split and we can’t hide that,” she said in a Quartet phone call on March 28. When I proposed a Quartet meeting to further discuss the matter, she said: “I am always happy to see you all, but I am not sure there is anything further to discuss in the Quartet.”

  My immediate concern was to ensure that the Palestinian Authority remained a viable entity. De Soto and Wolfensohn prepared studies showing that if the financial plug were pulled on the Palestinian Authority, it would lead to chaos in health and education services, a
s well as a large disgruntled security sector whose salaries were not paid. The work of more than a decade of building institutions, however imperfect, could be lost.

  The Americans did not seem to mind. Indeed, Wolfensohn and de Soto each warned me that the United States’ aim was to bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas with it. The Israelis had the same view—Sharon’s advisor Dov Weisglass told my envoy that it would take “just a few days” for popular protest to force Hamas to meet international demands or fall. Still, it was obvious that donors would not transfer money to the Palestinian Authority if there were no signs of serious Hamas political evolution, particularly as regards its attitude to violence and a two-state solution.

  As I told Solana when we discussed this dilemma in an April phone call: “Something we will not be forgiven for is if we are accused of causing the fall of Hamas and a social and economic upheaval in the territories.” Fortunately, he and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who had replaced Chris Patten as the EU commissioner for external relations, agreed. They set up a temporary international mechanism to channel money into key public sector services for the Palestinians, with safeguards to prevent diversion—and it took some persuading to get the Americans to go along even with this. The EU mechanism arrested but could not ultimately prevent the decline of Palestinian institutions. I hoped that a complete collapse could be avoided if the Palestinians could agree on a unity government with a sensible political program. This required Hamas to move and donors not to insist on 100 percent satisfaction.

  Some of my advisors felt it was also vital that we have a political dialogue with Hamas to test its intentions, educate its leaders about the responsibilities of both government and the political process, directly convey the international community’s expectations, and try to encourage its further political evolution. I had no in-principle objection to this approach, consistent with UN practice everywhere. An essential part of the secretary-general’s good offices responsibilities is his prerogative to talk to all players in a given situation and to promote an inclusive approach to political dialogue.