The Negotiator

by George Mitchell

  II. In 1999 Selig appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission to evaluate the economic structure of Major League Baseball and to make recommendations to improve competitive balance in the sport. I was one of four independent commissioners; the others were Richard Levin, then the president of Yale University; Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; and George Will, the author and syndicated columnist. When the report was completed I was asked to present it at a news conference. The Report of the Independent Members of the Commissioner’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics, July 2000.

  III. The Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative was then at the center of a widely publicized investigation of the use by Major League baseball players and other athletes of illegal performance-enhancing substances.

  IV. The Lance Armstrong case broke years later and provided dramatic affirmation of this point.

  V. Latent variables, also known as hidden variables, are variables that are not directly observed but can be inferred from the presence of other variables through mathematical models. In this case steroid use, although not directly observed, could be inferred from the presence of other health-related data documented in the records of the players’ annual physical exams.

  VI. In May 2007 Jason Giambi publicly admitted that he had used steroids and that he had been wrong for doing so. This admission, which was consistent with earlier reports that he had admitted such use before the BALCO grand jury, created the possibility of discipline by the Commissioner’s Office. Instead, the Commissioner’s Office, Giambi, and the Players Association agreed that he would be interviewed by me. But they also agreed that I could not ask him to identify any other player about whom he had knowledge of illegal use.

  THE MIDDLE EAST

  We had just returned from a brief vacation and were waiting for our luggage at LaGuardia Airport when my cell phone rang. It was early January 2009. Ann Ungar, my assistant, called to tell me that someone from Hillary Clinton’s office had called. Hillary had been chosen by President-elect Obama to be secretary of state. Could I come to her home in Washington that evening? I quickly calculated how long it would take to get to our apartment, drop off Heather and our children, then return to the airport. “Tell them I’ll catch the six o’clock shuttle and be there at eight.”

  Shortly after the election in November, I’d had a brief telephone conversation with Joe Biden. We had served together in the Senate and worked closely on several major anticrime bills. I congratulated him on his election as vice president, and we discussed my work in Northern Ireland and whether I might serve in the new administration. I said I would of course be happy to consider it.

  Two months had passed and I had forgotten about the conversation, but Hillary reminded me of it when we met. She and I had worked together on President Clinton’s unsuccessful effort to reform our health care system, and she had been actively helpful to me when I was in Northern Ireland. Now she wanted to know if I would join the administration as special envoy to the Middle East.

  She was accompanied by Jim Steinberg and Jack Lew, two able and experienced men who would go on to serve as her principal deputies at the State Department. I told her that I enjoyed public service and would like to accept but that I had personal concerns. I had worked on Northern Ireland for five years, and then, in 2000 and 2001, at her husband’s request, I had chaired the International Commission on Violence in the Middle East.13 Now I had two children, eleven and eight years old, and I had to talk with Heather about the personal and financial implications of returning to public service. Hillary encouraged me to have that conversation; she also made it clear that she was considering others for the position and that whatever decision she made would require the approval of the president-elect.

  A week later, at Hillary’s request, I returned to Washington to meet with Barack Obama. I had retired from the Senate before he arrived there, but we had met briefly. While in the Senate I traveled the country to support and raise money for Democratic candidates; on two occasions, at events in Chicago, I was introduced to the young Illinois state senator. Both times the hostess of the reception told me, “This young man is very bright and is going places. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday he got elected to the U.S. Senate.” Now he had done that and more. In just a few days he would be sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States.

  We met in a low-rise government office building that had been temporarily converted into his transition office. We talked for an hour, some of it trading stories about our service in the Senate. Although our meetings in Chicago had occurred several years earlier, he recalled them; he even remembered the jokes I had told. When he asked if I would serve as his envoy to the Middle East, I told him that I would.

  Heather and I had discussed it at length. Despite the burdens it would place on her, she was, as always, fully supportive. She asked whether there was any real chance of success. At that time a bitter and destructive conflict was raging in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. Emotions were high and hostile. I had been to the region often and knew most of the leaders there. I knew the chances were very low of getting an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. But, as she had at a critical moment in Northern Ireland, Heather told me, “You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t try.”

  So when I told Obama I would serve, I made clear there were limitations: “I can’t commit to serve the full four years of your term. I spent five years working on Northern Ireland and also did an earlier tour of duty in the Middle East. I have two children who are about the same age as yours. The difference is that at my age I’m not going to see my kids become adults, have careers, get married, have families of their own, as you will. This is my time with them.”

  “I understand. How long can you commit to?”

  “I’ll commit to two years, then we’ll see where things stand.”

  “That’s fine.”

  We stood, shook hands, and I left. On the flight back to New York I thought of how lucky I’d been to reach this stage in my life. Any American who is asked by the president should be ready and willing to serve our country. But I also realized that this conflict was older, more complicated, and more difficult than Northern Ireland had been. Any realistic assessment would have to conclude that the prospects ranged from slim to none. But Heather had been right. I had to try.

  Two days after he was inaugurated, President Obama went to the State Department, where he and Secretary of State Clinton announced the appointment of two special envoys: Richard Holbrooke, an experienced diplomat, for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and me for Middle East peace. In my statement I tried to make clear both the problems in the region and the promise of peace.

  I don’t underestimate the difficulty of this assignment. The situation in the Middle East is volatile, complex, and dangerous. But the President and the Secretary of State have made it clear that danger and difficulty cannot cause the United States to turn away. To the contrary, they recognize and have said that peace and stability in the Middle East are in our national interest. They are, of course, also in the interest of the Israelis and Palestinians, of others in the region, and people throughout the world. . . . Just recently, I spoke in Jerusalem and I mentioned the 800 years [of conflict in Northern Ireland]. . . . Afterward, an elderly gentleman came up to me and he said, “Did you say 800 years?” And I said, “Yes, 800 years.” He repeated the number again—I repeated it again. He said, “Ah, such a recent argument. No wonder you settled it.” . . . This effort must be determined, persevering, and patient. It must be backed up by political capital, economic resources, and focused attention at the highest levels of our government. And it must be firmly rooted in a shared vision of a peaceful future by the people who live in the region. At the direction of the President and the Secretary of State, and in pursuit of the President’s policies, I pledge my full effort in the search for peace and stability in the Middle East.14

  The president wanted to make it clear that he was serious about dealing with this problem, s
o within days I was on a plane headed for the region. On the fourteen-hour flight I had time to reflect on the past and present of this long-standing issue.

  The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians does not exist in a vacuum. It continues—to this day—against a backdrop of resurgent violence elsewhere in the Middle East. In trying to comprehend an area where for a long time rulers and boundaries were imposed from elsewhere and where religious, tribal, and family loyalties often trump national identity, many Americans are both confused and angry. Weary after more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, many want to turn away from what seems to be an intractable and unsolvable mess. Others want to do just the opposite: to unleash more American military power in an effort to quell the seeming chaos.

  The conflicts in the Middle East are many and overlapping: Persians and Arabs; Arabs and Jews; Israelis and Palestinians; Sunni and Shiite Muslims; fundamentalists and moderates; Sunni-led governments and Sunni opposition groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. All of these conflicts are products of history. We cannot change that history, but we may be able to alter its future course. It is in our national interest to help resolve conflicts and reduce instability in the Middle East to the extent possible, especially where we can do so by means other than military force.

  In particular we should continue the active pursuit of an agreement to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. While there are many reasons to be pessimistic, successful peace negotiations could end the suffering of those war-weary peoples and could dramatically improve America’s credibility in the region and the world.

  Any such peace effort requires understanding how the conflict started. A good place to begin is not in the Middle East itself but in London and Paris, where decisions made a century ago reverberate today.

  After Britain and France suffered huge losses in the killing fields of Belgium and France in World War I, battle lines hardened and a long and destructive period of trench warfare began. From the beginning the British and French governments sought help wherever they could find it, and they saw opportunity in the Middle East. For four centuries the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey. Persuading Arabs to revolt against the Ottomans, who were allied with Germany, became an important military objective for Britain. In addition the prospect of carving up and grabbing a piece of the decaying Ottoman Empire was enticing to each of the major participants in World War I.

  In pursuit of these goals, the British high commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, in 1915 engaged in negotiations with the emir Hussein bin Ali, the Arab tribal and religious leader in the area of western Arabia that includes the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Although there is much dispute among historians about the nature and significance of these negotiations, the emir and his Arab allies thought they were getting a British commitment of support for an independent Arab nation, extending from what is now Iraq through Syria and the Arabian peninsula (with some exclusions), in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Turks.

  Beginning well before the onset of war, Zionist leaders had sought support from Britain, then still regarded as the dominant world power. The British government’s interest in the Zionists rose as its losses mounted in the war. Prime Minister David Lloyd George later testified that in his discussions with the Zionist leaders he was motivated by a desire to encourage support for Britain from the United States and Russia, both with large Jewish populations.

  The culmination of all of this came in 1917, in the form of a letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, to Baron Walter Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community in Britain. The letter expressed support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” subject to “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

  Few documents have been subjected to the microscopic analysis accorded the Balfour Declaration in the ninety-seven years since it was published. The obvious questions—What does “a national home” mean? How could this be accomplished without “prejudice [to] the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine?”—were followed by many others, some of which continue to be the subject of interpretation. The Zionists, however, believed they had received a commitment of British support for a Jewish state in Palestine.

  The apparent contradiction in the positions taken by the British government in the McMahon-Hussein negotiations and the Balfour Declaration were further complicated by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, reached in 1916 (named after the British and French diplomats who negotiated it). Under the treaty’s terms, Britain, France, and later Russia agreed to divide among themselves control of the lands of the Ottoman Empire after the war. Palestine was to be under international administration. Although the agreement itself was subsequently repudiated, in 1922 Britain and France received mandates from the League of Nations to govern most of the region.

  While Sykes and Picot and their colleagues no doubt believed they were serving their respective national interests, neither did their countries any favor. Britain especially suffered through nearly three decades of hostility, violence, and enormous expense, as both Jews and Arabs came to regard their mandate rulers as biased or incompetent or both.

  From the beginning of the mandate to its end in 1948, the British struggled unsuccessfully to contain the tensions between Arabs and Jews. As Jewish immigration to Palestine rose, Arab resentment grew, finally erupting into riots and outbreaks of violence in 1933 and, more widespread and intense, from 1936 to 1939. In response the British were militarily aggressive; there were many arrests and some executions. Politically, however, Britain made a significant gesture to the Arabs in 1939 by issuing a White Paper that renounced its commitment to a Jewish national home in Palestine and restricted immigration of Jews to the area to seventy-five thousand over five years. This, of course, angered the Jewish inhabitants, who began establishing their own political and military institutions. A militia called Haganah (Hebrew for “defense”) was created, initially to protect Jewish settlements; later it played a major role in the 1948 war.

  World War II was a turning point, not just in Europe but also in the Middle East. The Jewish community, known as the Yishuv, supported the Allies. The Arabs were split: some supported the Allies and a few thousand even fought with the British, but more supported the Axis powers, most notably the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who spent the war years in Germany. The earlier British decision to limit Jewish immigration into Palestine later resulted in the rejection of many Jews who were trying to flee the Holocaust. This generated widespread international criticism of British policy and added to discontent in Britain over the mandate.

  • • •

  At its peak the British military force in Palestine exceeded 100,000 troops—a huge expense for a country reeling from the cost and other burdens of World War II. Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom would later be elected prime minister of Israel, became the leaders of two Jewish paramilitary factions that had been organized in response to the earlier Arab uprisings. These groups began a campaign of violence to force the British to withdraw. The most publicized event was the 1946 bombing of the British military headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in which ninety-one people died. In Britain the desire to withdraw intensified, and in 1947 the British government announced that it would leave Palestine the next year and asked the United Nations General Assembly to decide what should replace the British administration there.

  On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly adopted a resolution proposing that Britain’s mandate be replaced by a plan of partition under which there would be an independent Arab state and an independent Jewish state and the city of Jerusalem would be placed under an international regime administered by the United Nations. The resolution triggered a new round of violence, resulting in thousands kil
led and many more injured. Ultimately the Jews accepted the plan, but the Arabs did not. By early 1948 the sporadic violence had coalesced into organized military operations. The Haganah became the Israel Defense Force, and the paramilitary groups were forced to disband and join the IDF. They were opposed by what came to be known as the Arab Liberation Army.

  The British gradually withdrew their forces, a process completed on May 14. On that same day David Ben-Gurion publicly proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel. Almost immediately President Harry Truman announced U.S. recognition.

  Several Arab countries then entered the fray, but their efforts were not effectively coordinated. In response to a question about why he seemed so confident, Ben-Gurion said it was because Israel had a secret weapon: “the Arabs.” By the following spring Israel had prevailed on all fronts, the fighting had wound down, and a series of armistices had been signed.

  Amid the strife, however, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left or were driven from their homes and communities, some of which were destroyed. Most ended up in refugee camps in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere. There they have remained for sixty-five years. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Arab countries emigrated or were expelled. The Palestinians’ right of return to their homes—the living Palestinians who actually left in the 1940s and their descendants—remains one of the contested issues between Israel and the Palestinians.