The first step toward jump-starting the peace process in January 2009 was appointing George Mitchell as Special Envoy so he could try to repeat the success he had achieved with the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. The soft-spoken former Senator from Maine was always quick to point out the differences between the two conflicts, but he also drew encouragement from the fact that Northern Ireland had once been deemed as intractable as the Middle East and had been resolved through painstaking negotiations. “We had 700 days of failure and one day of success,” he often said. On the other hand, when Mitchell remarked to an audience in Jerusalem that it took eight hundred years of conflict before peace finally came to Northern Ireland, one elderly gentleman scoffed, “Such a recent argument—no wonder you settled it!”
President Obama agreed with me that Mitchell possessed the international prestige, negotiating skills, and patient temperament to take on this crucial task. I also asked Dennis Ross, who had served as Middle East Special Envoy during the 1990s, to come back to the State Department to work on Iran and regional issues. President Obama was so impressed with Ross that he soon asked him to move to the White House to advise him more closely, including on the peace process. There were sometimes tensions between Ross and Mitchell, given their overlapping responsibilities and the high stakes of the assignment, but I valued both of their perspectives and was grateful to have two such experienced foreign policy thinkers as part of our team.
Only days after his appointment, Mitchell headed out to the region for a multistop tour. The Israelis were still sorting out their new government, so Mitchell made the rounds of the Arab capitals. His mandate included working for peace not just between Israel and the Palestinians but also between Israel and all its neighbors. The basis for a comprehensive regional peace would likely be a plan proposed in 2002 by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The plan was unanimously endorsed by all Arab League members, including Syria, in March 2002. Under the Arab Peace Initiative, as it’s called, all those countries, and some Muslim-majority nations outside the region, agreed that in return for a successful peace agreement with the Palestinians, they would normalize relations with Israel, including economic, political, and security cooperation. If this could be achieved, it would have profound implications for the strategic dynamics of the Middle East. Because of their shared suspicion of Iran and their partnerships with the United States, Israel and many of the Arab states, especially the Gulf monarchies, should have been natural allies. Enmity over the Palestinian conflict prevented that. Before the 2008–2009 war in Gaza, Turkey had been trying to broker peace talks between Israel and Syria. If Syria could be pried away from its toxic alliance with Iran in exchange for progress on the Golan Heights—the territory it lost to Israel in 1967—that too would have significant strategic consequences.
In nearly every capital Mitchell heard the same thing: Israel needed to stop building settlements on land that would one day become part of a Palestinian state. Each new settlement beyond the old 1967 lines would make it harder to reach a final agreement. For decades the United States had opposed the expansion of settlements as counterproductive to peace efforts. President George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Jim Baker, considered suspending loan guarantees to Israel over the issue. President George W. Bush called for a full construction freeze in his “Roadmap for Peace.” But given Netanyahu’s political ties to the settlers, he could be expected to balk at any limitations.
After his initial consultations, Mitchell suggested that we ask all three parties—the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Arab states—to take specific constructive steps to show good faith and lay the foundation for a return to direct peace negotiations.
For the Palestinian Authority, we wanted it to do more to crack down on terrorism and reduce anti-Israeli incitement. Examples of incitement included renaming a public square in the West Bank after a terrorist who murdered Israeli civilians, whipping up conspiracy theories claiming that Israel was planning to destroy Muslim holy places, and actions that glorified and encouraged further violence. As for Hamas, its isolation would continue until it renounced violence, recognized Israel, and pledged to abide by previous signed agreements. Without those basic steps, Hamas would not get a seat at the table. We also demanded the immediate release of Gilad Shalit, a kidnapped Israeli soldier being held in Gaza.
For the Arab states, we hoped to see steps toward normalization with Israel as envisioned under the Arab Peace Initiative, including allowing overflight rights for Israeli commercial air traffic, reopening trade offices, and establishing postal routes. Netanyahu pressed me on this over dinner at the State Department in May 2009. He especially wanted to see action from Saudi Arabia, whose role as “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” would give its gestures outsized significance in the region. In June 2009, President Obama traveled to Riyadh and personally raised this issue with King Abdullah.
For the Israelis, we requested that they freeze all settlement construction in the Palestinian territories without exception. In retrospect, our early hard line on settlements didn’t work.
Israel initially refused our request, and our disagreement played out in public, becoming a highly personal standoff between President Obama and Netanyahu, with the credibility of both leaders on the line. That made it very hard for either one to climb down or compromise. The Arab states were happy to sit on the sidelines and use the dustup as an excuse for their own inaction. And Abbas, who had consistently called for a halt to settlement construction for years, now claimed it was all our idea and said that he wouldn’t come to the peace table without a moratorium on settlement construction.
The President and his advisors had debated the wisdom of making a demand for a settlement freeze. The strongest voice in favor of doing so was Rahm Emanuel’s, the White House Chief of Staff. Rahm, a former civilian volunteer with the Israel Defense Forces, had a deep personal commitment to Israel’s security. Drawing on his experiences in the Clinton Administration, he thought that the best way to deal with Netanyahu’s new coalition government was to take a strong position right out of the gate; otherwise he’d walk all over us. The President was sympathetic to that argument, and he thought insisting on a settlement freeze was both good policy and smart strategy since it would help reestablish America as an honest broker in the peace process, softening the perception that we always took the side of the Israelis. Mitchell and I worried we could be locking ourselves into a confrontation we didn’t need, that the Israelis would feel they were being asked to do more than the other parties, and that once we raised it publicly Abbas couldn’t start serious negotiations without it. A senior Israeli official once explained to me that for Israelis, the worst thing in the world is to be a freier, the Hebrew slang word for “sucker.” Israeli drivers would rather end up in the hospital than let someone cut them off on the highway, he told me. Bibi himself was once quoted as saying, “We are not freiers. We don’t give without receiving.” I feared that in this light, our demands for a settlement freeze would not be well-received. But I agreed with Rahm and the President that if we were going to revive a moribund peace process, we had to take some risks. So that spring I delivered the President’s message as forcefully as I could, then tried to contain the consequences when both sides reacted badly.
In June 2009, two important speeches reshaped the diplomatic landscape. First, in Cairo, President Obama offered an ambitious and eloquent recalibration of America’s relationship with the Islamic world. In the wide-ranging address, he reaffirmed his personal commitment to pursue a two-state solution that would meet the aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians. Before the speech the President and I made time to take a private tour of the city’s cavernous Sultan Hassan Mosque, one of the biggest in the world. We removed our shoes, and I put on a headscarf as we looked in wonder at the intricate medieval craftsmanship and listened to explanations from an Egyptian American art historian. It was a lovely, quiet moment together in the middle of all the madness of a Presidential trip and
a major policy rollout. It made me smile when later that day the President said in his speech, “Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.”
Ten days later Bibi went to Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv and, while he continued to reject a settlement freeze, he endorsed the idea of the two-state solution for the first time. It seemed like a seminal turn, that Netanyahu wanted to be remembered as a leader who could take bold risks and deliver a historic deal.
Mitchell and I spent the summer and early fall working with both the Israelis and the Palestinians to break the logjam over settlements. In fairness, we shared responsibility for creating that logjam by allowing the issue to turn into a test of wills. President Obama decided that the best way to move forward was to insist that both leaders sit down with him together when they were in New York for the UN General Assembly in September. These wouldn’t be formal negotiations, but they would provide a first opportunity for the leaders to talk to each other and perhaps build some momentum toward a more substantive process. The meeting in New York was awkward; both leaders were blunt about their positions and showed little willingness to compromise, especially on the issue of settlements. “We all must take risks for peace,” President Obama told them. “It’s difficult to disentangle ourselves from history, but we must do so.”
We came out of New York with little to show for the effort. But Mitchell and I kept working on Netanyahu, and finally he agreed to a partial halt on building permits for future West Bank settlements. We still had to sort out how long the freeze would last and which areas would be covered, but this was an important start—and it was more than any previous Israeli government had been willing to do. The sticking point would be Jerusalem. East Jerusalem had been captured along with the West Bank in 1967, and Palestinians dreamed of one day establishing the capital of their future state there. The Palestinians therefore sought to halt construction in East Jerusalem. That was a nonstarter for Bibi, who refused to restrict building in any part of Jerusalem.
In early October I spoke with Ehud Barak, who was Netanyahu’s coalition partner, as well as Minister of Defense and the most important voice for peace in the government. Barak was endlessly optimistic, despite living in a region where so much seemed to go wrong. He was also one of the most decorated war heroes in a nation of war heroes. As lore has it, he even dressed in drag during a daring commando assault into Beirut in the 1980s. We got along famously. From time to time he would call me and say, “Hillary, let’s strategize,” and then launch into a whirlwind of rapid-fire ideas and arguments. He was eager to help me reach an accommodation over settlements that could move the process forward. “We’ll be ready to listen, to be sensitive and to be responsive,” he told me. The Israelis eventually agreed to a freeze on new construction in the West Bank for ten months but held firm against including Jerusalem.
I called Abbas to discuss the Israeli offer. The initial Palestinian reaction was to reject it out of hand as inadequate, “worse than useless,” but I thought this was the best deal they were going to get and we should seize the opportunity to move forward to direct negotiations. “I want to stress to you again, Mr. President, that our policy on settlement activity is and will remain unchanged,” I assured him, “and although the Israeli settlement moratorium as described to you by George Mitchell will be significant and will be an unprecedented step by any Israeli government, it will not be a substitute for Israel’s roadmap commitments.” Abbas did not take issue with my use of the word unprecedented, but he wasn’t happy about the Jerusalem exclusion or other limitations and did not agree to enter negotiations.
To show his own good faith, though, Abbas made a concession as well. He offered that the Palestinians would delay a vote at the United Nations on the controversial Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes during the 2008 war in Gaza. Abbas received swift and sharp criticism for his decision from across the Arab world, including relentless personal attacks against him on Al Jazeera, a satellite news network owned by Qatar. Abbas was beside himself and confided in me that he feared for his safety and that of his grandchildren, who had been harassed at school. I thanked him for his “very courageous and important decision,” but I could tell he was starting to waver. About a week later he reversed himself and called for a UN vote on the Goldstone Report. Later, in 2011, Richard Goldstone himself retracted some of the most inflammatory charges in the report, including that the Israeli military intentionally targeted civilians, but the damage had been done.
At the end of October 2009 I was intensely focused on getting the proposed settlement moratorium in place, in the hopes that it would clear the way for direct negotiations between the parties. I met with Abbas in Abu Dhabi and then with Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Standing next to Bibi at a late-night press conference, I described the construction freeze as “unprecedented,” just as I had said to Abbas. But this time my use of the word caused outrage in Arab countries, where people thought that I was being too generous toward an offer that was qualified, short term, and excluded East Jerusalem. It was not the first time, nor the last, that telling a hard truth would cause me trouble.
Many in the region would later look quite wistfully at that much-maligned moratorium. But the immediate imperative was to defuse the situation and refocus the region on getting to direct negotiations. Over the coming days I did damage control in Morocco and Egypt. In Cairo, I explained privately to President Hosni Mubarak and also in public that our official policy on settlements had not changed. We still opposed all construction and would have preferred a longer, comprehensive freeze. But I stood by my description of the offer “to halt all new settlement activities and to end the expropriation of land, and to issue no permits or approvals” as “unprecedented.” Because the fact of the matter is, it was.
In late November the freeze went into effect, and the clock started ticking. We had ten months to move the parties toward direct negotiations and a comprehensive peace agreement.
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One by one the months slipped by. As promised, the Israelis halted new settlement construction in the West Bank, but the Palestinians held out for East Jerusalem to be included and continued to refuse to join direct negotiations, although they did agree to what were called “proximity talks,” with Mitchell shuttling back and forth between the two sides to discuss their vision for the negotiations.
In March 2010, the Israelis managed to make the Palestinian case for them with an unnecessarily provocative act. Vice President Biden was visiting Israel on a goodwill tour, reaffirming the administration’s strong support for the country’s security and trying to put the unpleasantness of our row over settlements behind us. While he was still on the ground, the Israeli Interior Ministry announced plans for 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, a move certain to inflame Palestinian sensitivities. Netanyahu said that he had nothing to do with the unfortunate timing of the announcement, but it was taken by many as a snub of the Vice President and the United States.
Biden was, characteristically, even-tempered about the whole kerfuffle. But both President Obama and Rahm were furious, and they asked me to make that clear to Bibi. In a long and heated telephone conversation, I told the Prime Minister that President Obama viewed the news about East Jerusalem “as a personal insult to him, the Vice President, and the United States.” Strong stuff for a diplomatic conversation. I didn’t enjoy playing the bad cop, but it was part of the job. “Let me assure you and the President that the timing was entirely unintentional and unfortunate,” he replied, but he refused to reverse the decision.
By coincidence, this incident occurred just before the annual conference in Washington of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent pro-Israel advocacy organization. Netanyahu was scheduled to visit D.C. and address the conference. It would be up to me to represent the administration. I went first. The big crowd gathered at the Washin
gton Convention Center was a little wary at first. They had wanted to hear how I would address the controversy and if I’d keep up the criticism of Netanyahu. I knew I had to speak to that, but I also wanted to step back and make the broader case for why we viewed a negotiated peace agreement as crucial to Israel’s future.
I talked about my own personal devotion to Israel’s security and to the two-state solution and explained our concerns about the trends in demography, technology, and ideology. It was my most comprehensive public argument to date as Secretary about why the status quo was unsustainable and the need for peace undeniable. Then I turned to the contretemps over East Jerusalem. Our objection was not based on wounded pride, I said, or on any judgment about the final status of East Jerusalem, which would have to be decided at the negotiating table. New construction in East Jerusalem or the West Bank would undermine the mutual trust we needed to build between the parties, expose daylight between Israel and the United States that others in the region might try to exploit, and diminish America’s unique ability to play the role of honest broker. “Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don’t agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally,” I said.
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