by John Kerry
It also didn’t help that the Israelis had just made a big announcement of new Israeli housing units in East Jerusalem. These settlement announcements were a profound humiliation to Abbas. I remember him at one point describing being in his office in Ramallah and watching Israeli settlements being constructed right outside his window. This latest announcement had an especially damaging impact on his perception of how serious these negotiations were.
When I explained to Abbas what the United States was prepared to do as part of the framework, he barely reacted at all. It seemed as if the Palestinians had lost faith in the whole process.
A couple of weeks before Abbas came to Washington for a final meeting with President Obama in March 2014, Israeli negotiators argued to Martin Indyk and the team in Israel that Abbas was “running away.” They suggested we could put something on the table that leaned further toward the Palestinians than what we had been discussing with them just to test his intentions. We took that as a green light to present our more balanced framework to the Palestinians when Abbas came to town.
When he arrived, I brought Abbas and his senior negotiators to my house in Georgetown. I wanted a more private, personal setting than the State Department. So we ordered Chinese takeout and ate in the dining room. The Palestinians didn’t want us to send them a hard copy of the document because, as they explained, they would have been required to share it with the Fatah Central Committee for approval. For certain, the entire document would leak, closing down whatever political space existed. So, I read sections of the document to Abbas later that night; Martin and his team read the whole document to Saeb, which he wrote down word for word.
The next day, when President Obama met with Abbas in the Oval Office, he was clear about what was required as we neared the end of the nine-month negotiating period: “We’re running out of time. We need to hear back from you on this as soon as possible—days, not weeks.”
Over the next days, the Palestinians continued to say they were studying the proposal, but they never actually responded.
It was clear that they were unwilling to make any concessions as the negotiation period neared its end. Abbas was concerned that any compromises would expose him in front of his people. He was not convinced we could deliver Bibi, so he feared he’d face blowback for making compromises and getting nothing in return.
With the deadline for the release of the last tranche of Palestinian prisoners fast approaching, and the Israelis’ firm position that they would not release more prisoners unless there was an extension, it was hard to argue that it was a moment for expenditure of political capital. Thus we turned our attention to that immediate challenge.
The problem with the final tranche of prisoners was that Israel had saved the worst guys for last. As a result, the Israelis needed a real extension of negotiations, not just a few months, in order to accept the political pain of releasing them. In return, the Palestinians wanted additional concessions from the Israelis, especially credible limits on settlement activity, to justify continuing negotiations to their very skeptical public. For that to happen, the Israelis asked us to release the convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.
The president was deeply skeptical, but he didn’t rule out releasing Pollard—I think more because he wanted to support me and his team than because he had any confidence Bibi would follow through. He had been through this exercise with Netanyahu during the first term, when everything collapsed in the face of Bibi’s refusal to extend the soft settlement moratorium Hillary Clinton and Senator Mitchell had spent months negotiating. The president and everyone who had worked on it in the first term still bore the scars. President Obama had come to believe that Bibi was not serious about creating a Palestinian state.
I understood the president’s perspective. By that time, I shared enormous skepticism about either leader’s ability to make peace.
While it was clear to all of us by now that the conditions weren’t ripe for a comprehensive agreement, I thought we could still take consequential steps to keep the window from closing on the two-state solution. Since the effort didn’t interfere with our other priorities, it was worthwhile trying to keep the parties working, not fighting.
Pollard was nearing the end of his sentence. Still, for very understandable reasons, much of the intelligence community was against any early release. In the end, we had a delicate three-way negotiation to explore whether a deal could be reached that would extend the negotiations and secure additional benefits for the Palestinians in exchange for the release of Pollard.
We went back and forth with the Israelis as Bibi worked to line up political support for concessions he would have to make to extend the negotiations. The Palestinians were losing patience. Their politics were getting difficult. It was a make-or-break moment with Bibi. I urged him to make a credible offer in order to convince President Obama that it was worth keeping Pollard in play and convince Abbas to agree to an extension. I told Bibi point-blank, “You’re not doing this for Abbas. You’re doing it to empower us to get what you want.”
As we were working through the intricacies of the deal, Abbas abruptly informed us he was planning to officially join several international organizations in short order if we did not reach an agreement. This would have violated one of the core promises Abbas had made to the Israelis to get the negotiations started. Basically, it would mean game over.
We negotiated down to the very last minute trying to get the details of the extension and prisoner release worked out. But in the end, the Palestinians ran out of patience with the process.
Abbas stood up at a gathering of Fatah leaders and made a big public showing of signing instruments of accession, which would unilaterally advance their claim to statehood. There was no mistaking the message. Rather than waiting on a process he thought would crater on its own, Abbas was playing to the Palestinian street; he would either force Israel to give him what he needed or be the one who defied Israel with uncharacteristic flamboyance.
In the end, there was simply too much scar tissue from years of failure. Abbas didn’t believe the Israeli government was serious about comprehensive negotiations. The Israelis, for their part, were convinced Abbas was looking for a way out. Neither side felt the other was serious enough to merit their taking political heat for difficult decisions. We were caught in a round-robin of mistrust. A cumulative trail of failed expectations and absence of follow-through had broken down faith in any next step.
Near the end of April, we had four or five days left to try to find a last-minute reprieve when we heard reports that Hamas and Fatah had agreed to a national unity government. This was the final nail in the coffin.
I was deeply frustrated with the Palestinians for many reasons. They’d given their critics in Israel all the ammunition they needed: Bibi could blame the Palestinians, saying they chose the path of terror over the path of peace. I was also angry that the Palestinians never even responded to President Obama on his offer; he was the best they could have hoped for and they’d squandered his commitment to them. I was also dismayed that, for all I’d done over the years to build trust with Abbas, he’d avoided the kind of final conversation we deserved.
But I wasn’t interested in playing the blame game publicly on this.
As far as I was concerned, both sides had chosen the path of politics over the path of progress. I would forever respect that Bibi had taken the political risk of the prisoner releases, but I believed that he was a willing victim of his politics at home—which Tzipi always pointed out he himself had created. I thought he was more comfortable as the leader of his political party, Likud, vying to be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, than he was risking it all, as Rabin had and as Peres had, trying to be the one who finally made peace.
There is a set of accepted conventional slogans that get thrown around in the process. One of the biggest is that Israel says it doesn’t have a partner for peace—and the Palestinians say Israel just wants to use the peace process as cover to continue its i
nexorable takeover of the West Bank. Both sides get locked into their cynical cycle. I remember saying at one point to Martin, “I feel like I’m having a negotiation with the mayor of Jerusalem and the mayor of Ramallah.” In the end, the mistrust was so profound and the narratives of victimization ran so deep on both sides that neither could get to where their populations so desperately needed them to go.
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EVEN WITHOUT A peace process, we still had interests in avoiding a conflagration. Our commitment to Israel and our concern for the Palestinians transcended even the deep disappointment of the peace negotiations. So I entered an extended period of trying to manage this conflict. I’ve always believed that negotiations help to keep a lid on possible violence. And sure enough, soon after negotiations ended in early June 2014, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and brutally killed by Hamas operatives in the West Bank. Israel launched a full-scale incursion into the West Bank to find the kidnappers and dismantle the Hamas networks there. As this was going on, Hamas began launching rockets into Israel from Gaza, which escalated into a full-blown shooting war. Bibi’s biggest fear—and understandably so—was that Hamas operatives would burrow under the fence from Gaza in order to conduct stealth kidnappings of Israelis. This was a risk Bibi couldn’t tolerate, making some type of significant escalation inevitable. As the war spiraled, President Obama asked me to travel to the region to see if we could stop it.
The situation was dire. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians—including women and children—were being killed in the cross fire, often placed there intentionally by Hamas. The human cost to Palestinian civilians in Gaza who were stuck living under the rule of Hamas was gut-wrenching. Of course, we all understood Israel’s right to defend itself. I underscored the administration’s—the United States’—support. At the same time, we wanted to do whatever we could to end the bloodshed because too many innocent people were suffering on both sides.
Egypt was the logical country to broker an end to the war because of its relationship with Israel and control of the Gaza border crossing. The Israelis were adamant that the Egyptians be the intermediaries to help resolve this war. So my first stop was Egypt. I quickly saw that the Egyptians were working in coordination with the Israelis and shared their overriding desire to crush Hamas. They were not even dealing with the elements of Hamas with the power to bring the war to a close. We had to find somebody who had the leverage to force Hamas to stop firing the rockets. The only countries with that sort of power were Qatar, which provides a lot of funding to Hamas (including sometimes paying the salaries of civil servants in Gaza, with Israel’s acquiescence), and Turkey, which is very supportive of them politically.
After a few days in Egypt, I went to Israel. It was at the height of the war. After a Hamas rocket landed near Ben Gurion Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration had announced safety warnings and many U.S. air carriers stopped flying to Israel because the risk was too high. Bibi was furious at this decision. With our pilots and the Air Force’s consent, I instructed our plane to land at Ben Gurion Airport. I thought it was important at this moment to make a strong statement of our support for Israel.
We met with Bibi in an underground conference room together with his war cabinet. There he showed us maps identifying the tunnels from Gaza. You could feel the tension. It was one of the few times I saw Bibi very subdued, absent his normal energy and bravado. To see the leader of Israel under siege like that really touched me. I stepped up our efforts to make certain, as part of any resolution of the conflict, that Israel could deal with the tunnel problem. It was imperative. Under attack by terrorists and facing international pressure for killing civilians, Israelis clearly felt that the world had lined up against them. It was as if the worst Israeli narratives were being borne out. I saw Bibi in that moment more vulnerable than I’d ever seen him before. That made me only more determined to make sure that we got the airport open for American carriers as soon as we could. Sure enough, the next day the FAA concluded the airport was safe enough, and that hurdle was behind us.
The focus of our negotiating efforts was Bibi’s suggestion that we negotiate a “humanitarian cease-fire.” Bibi insisted that Israel couldn’t stop the campaign until it finished clearing out the tunnels. That had not yet been accomplished. A normal cease-fire requires the parties to return to the status quo ante; in a humanitarian cease-fire, the parties stay where they are to allow emergency goods to come in. We were trying to shoehorn this concept into an agreement to end the fighting while allowing Israel to finish the work of destroying the tunnels it had already reached behind the lines.
I called the Qataris and Turks and pushed them to force Hamas into accepting this humanitarian cease-fire. They committed to help and did. We eventually produced a draft document that achieved the basic objective of allowing Israel to continue to destroy the tunnels while laying the groundwork for an end to the war. It was a tough sell, but we’d basically gotten much of what Bibi most wanted. Of course, I always knew that the Israelis would have comments on the document and fully understood that there would likely be another round with the Turks and the Qataris as soon as we received Bibi’s comments. I called Bibi to arrange for him to receive the document and get back to me with necessary changes. I told him that I looked forward to talking to him about it. After nine months negotiating with his team, I knew this would take a few rounds. We expected the back-and-forth.
At my instruction, a copy of the paper was sent, clearly marked “DRAFT: CONFIDENTIAL. FOR DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY.” It was sent directly to the Israeli national security advisor’s personal email account so it could be closely held.
I then called Bibi and said, “Have you seen the document?” He said, “Yes, John, I’ve got a lot of comments on this.”
We had just started a conversation when Bibi told me he had to interrupt to attend a cabinet meeting. Two hours later, without any further conversation, without notice, we were looking at Israeli press reports that included the document itself! I was seething. I called Bibi immediately. “I sent you a private document for your comments. I got you what you asked for. Now the document is in the papers with news reports quoting senior Israeli officials saying, ‘Kerry is negotiating for Hamas.’ You knew this was a draft, Bibi. We were in the middle of negotiating it based on your input. Now I see it in the press? This is outrageous. The humanitarian cease-fire was your idea. And now you leak this document to make it sound like I’m trying to advance Hamas’s position?” Bibi mumbled something about how he didn’t leak it, that he’d get to the bottom of it and would clear it up with the press. He never did.
I was deeply troubled to see Bibi telling us one thing and telling his cabinet and eventually the press something very different. An element of personal trust had been lost.
Eventually, in early August we did get Israel and Hamas to agree to a humanitarian cease-fire set to start the following morning. Given the difficulty of communications into Gaza and the various factions acting independently, we all understood that the potential cease-fire could come apart before it officially began. Even as our team was heading over for the negotiations, an Israeli soldier was tragically ambushed and killed by Hamas, and another was thought to have been possibly kidnapped. That was the end of the line.
The war dragged on through the end of the summer. Neither side could be seen as backing down. Ending this war was not going to happen with a document or an agreement until each side felt it had achieved its objective.
The question was when both sides would see the futility of continued fighting and decide to stop. The document they wound up agreeing to was incredibly vague and did little more than end the fighting. It was far less strong for Israel than the one I had been negotiating, which included provisions for Israel’s security and the importance of seeking a long-term resolution of the crisis.
In the end, Israel did destroy the tunnels, but the cease-fire left all the core issues unresolved.
At a donors’ conference for reconstr
uction in Gaza, held in Cairo in October 2014, I described the tragic dynamic repeating itself once more. This was the third time in less than six years that together with the people of Gaza we had been forced to confront a reconstruction effort. It was the third time in less than six years that we saw war break out and Gaza left in rubble. It was the third time in less than six years that we’d had to rely on a cease-fire to halt the violence.
We were all weary of reconstruction conferences that addressed the aftermath of conflict but did nothing to prevent the next one. None of us had come there to rebuild Gaza only to think that two years later we’d be back at the same table talking about rebuilding Gaza again.
A cease-fire is not peace. Even the most durable of cease-fires is not a substitute for security for Israel and a state for Palestinians.
The March 2015 elections in Israel would not breathe new life into a peace process. We meticulously stayed away from the election. We wanted to avoid any hint of leaning one way or the other. Of course, we followed it from afar. News reports in Israel suggested it was possible Bibi could lose. I remember being in Sharm el-Sheikh for an economic development conference the Friday before the elections. Many attendees were discussing Bibi’s prospects. It was clear that Bibi’s opponent Isaac “Bougie” Herzog, who headed the center-left, Labor-based Zionist Union, was willing to lean further forward on the peace effort with the Palestinians.
Over the course of the next days, Bibi launched a full-scale effort to save his job. In effect, he cannibalized all the parties on the Right, telling right-leaning voters that a vote for any other right-wing party was a vote for Herzog and Tzipi Livni. Bibi appealed to people’s fears that “Israeli Arabs were coming out to vote in droves.” In the end, he won with a significant margin and created the most right-wing cabinet in the history of Israel, with a majority of its members opposing the two-state solution. It’s no secret that President Obama was not happy with some of Bibi’s tactics and statements disavowing the peace process and what sounded like race-baiting on the Palestinians. And he made clear that he didn’t think there was any point in getting back to negotiations that Israelis said up front weren’t going to work. There’s been much speculation about the personal relationship between Bibi and President Obama, but what I saw at times like this were genuine policy disagreements on issues of importance to both our nations.
