Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  I called Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr to see if there was anything Egypt could do to ratchet down the tensions. “We can’t accept this,” Amr said of the Israeli air strikes. Though Mubarak had been replaced as President by Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, I hoped Egypt would remain a key intermediary and voice for peace. I appealed to Amr’s sensitivity about Egypt’s stature. “I think your role in this is very important and I urge you to do everything you can to deescalate the situation,” I said, telling him that Egypt had to talk to Hamas and urge them to cease bombing Israel. Israel was only acting in self-defense, I argued, and “there is no country on earth that can sit by and absorb rockets being fired at their people.” Amr agreed to try. “I hope both of us can do something to stop this craziness,” he said. “We need to work together in a close effort.”

  As I traveled across Australia, from Perth to Adelaide, and then to Singapore, President Obama and I stayed in close contact, coordinating the pressure we were placing on our Middle Eastern counterparts. He leaned on Morsi and consulted with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Prime Minister Erdoğan, urging all sides to push for a cease-fire. As we compared notes, we considered whether more direct engagement made sense. Should I fly to the Middle East to try to end the violence?

  Neither of us was sure my going was the wisest course. For starters, he and I had serious business to attend to in Asia. After a quick stop in Singapore, I was planning to meet President Obama in Thailand and then travel to Burma with him for a historic visit intended to bolster that country’s nascent democratic opening. Then we were to go to Cambodia for a big summit of Asian leaders that was expected to be dominated by delicate diplomacy over the South China Sea. Personal attention counts for a lot in Asia, so leaving now would come at a cost.

  That wasn’t all: The President was understandably wary of our taking on a direct mediation role in the middle of another messy conflict in the Middle East. If we tried to broker a cease-fire and failed, as seemed quite likely, it would sap America’s prestige and credibility in the region. There was even a good chance that direct U.S. engagement would set back the cause of peace by raising the profile of the conflict and prompting both sides to stiffen their negotiating positions. That was the last thing he or I wanted or America needed.

  I continued as planned with the Asia trip, spending as much time as possible on the phone with key Middle Eastern leaders and concerned European allies. On every call I argued that the best path forward would be a simultaneous cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

  The stakes were high. The Israeli Cabinet had called up seventy-five thousand reservists for a possible ground invasion of Gaza. As feared, this was shaping up as a replay of the January 2009 war, which had taken a horrendous toll on the people of Gaza and on Israel’s reputation globally. It was imperative to resolve the crisis before it became a ground war. The only good news was that the Iron Dome air defense system that we had helped build to protect Israel from rockets was working even better than expected. The Israeli military reported the Iron Dome had a success rate of more than 80 percent for all rockets it targeted. Even if that was a generous estimate, the success rate was astonishing. Still, one rocket from Gaza hitting its targets was one too many, and the Israelis were determined to go after the stockpiles and launch sites in Gaza.

  When I joined President Obama in Bangkok on November 18, I reported that my telephone diplomacy was running into a difficult reality: Neither side wanted to be seen blinking first. He was finding the same thing with his calls. This is why I kept pushing the idea of a simultaneous cease-fire, with both sides stepping back from the brink at the same time.

  “Hamas is trying to propose conditions before a cease-fire. Israel will never accept that and we have no more than forty-eight hours before Israel might launch a ground offensive, which will be devastating,” I warned Qatar’s HBJ an hour after arriving in Bangkok.

  The President and I paid a quiet private visit to the ailing King of Thailand in a Bangkok hospital and walked together around the famous Wat Pho temple, home to Thailand’s largest gold “reclining Buddha” statue, more than 150 feet long. Despite the surroundings, our conversation kept coming back to Gaza. There was no doubt in either of our minds that Israel had a right to defend itself. But we also knew that a ground invasion could be catastrophic for all concerned.

  Two days later the situation was so dire that I decided to raise again with the President the idea of my leaving Asia and flying to the Middle East to personally intervene in the conflict. It was fraught with risk, but even if we failed, the danger of an impending wider war was now too great to hold anything back. First thing that morning, I went upstairs to the President’s suite in the elegant old Raffles Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He was still in the shower, so I waited for a few minutes. As he drank his morning coffee, we talked over what to do. He remained wary. What were the chances that my going would actually stop the violence? Would it look like we were undercutting Israel? What might be the unintended consequences of putting America in the middle of this mess? We discussed all those questions and more. In the end we agreed that peace in the Middle East was a compelling national security priority; it was crucial to avoid another ground war in Gaza; and there was no substitute for American leadership.

  The President wasn’t 100 percent there yet, but he agreed that I should start getting ready to go. Huma and our traveling team began scrambling to work out the logistics of diverting from Cambodia to Israel, not exactly your typical route. It was only two days before Thanksgiving, and there was no telling how long this would take, so I encouraged anyone from the staff who needed to get home to hitch a ride back to the States with the President on Air Force One.

  Later that morning the President and I huddled one more time in a makeshift “hold room” in Phnom Penh’s massive Peace Palace conference center. In a small space cordoned off by pipes and drapes, we went over the pros and cons one more time. Jake Sullivan, Tom Donilon, and Ben Rhodes joined us for a final go-round. Donilon was nervous, having been burned too many times over the years by misadventures in the Middle East, but eventually he agreed I should go. The President listened to all the arguments and then made his decision. It was time to act. We might not succeed, but we sure were going to get caught trying.

  The President said he would call both Morsi and Bibi from Air Force One on the way back to Washington to try to make more headway before I touched down. His parting advice was familiar encouragement. Just as when we negotiated the fate of the blind human rights dissident Chen Guangcheng, the President’s message was clear: “Don’t screw up!” I wasn’t planning to.

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  On the eleven-hour flight from Cambodia to Israel, I thought long and hard about the complexities of the crisis. You couldn’t understand what was going on in Gaza without also understanding the path these rockets had taken before they were launched, winding their way from Iran through Sudan and ultimately to Hamas, and what those links meant for regional security. You also had to understand the increasingly significant role technology played. The rockets were getting more and more sophisticated, but so were Israel’s air defenses. Which would prove decisive? Then you had to consider how the conflict in Syria was creating friction between Sunni Hamas and its longtime Shiite patrons in Damascus and Tehran, at the same time that the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood was rising in Cairo and the Syrian civil war continued to unfold. What about the growing instability in the Sinai and the pressure it was putting on the new Egyptian government? Israel was heading toward elections, and Netanyahu’s coalition was far from stable. How would Israel’s domestic politics influence his stance on Gaza? All these questions and many more would be swirling as I tried to negotiate a cease-fire.

  From the plane I called German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who was in Jerusalem conducting his own consultations. “I’m sitting here in the hotel you will stay in—we just had a rocket alarm and had to leave our rooms,” he told me. �
�You can’t imagine how nervous the situation is.”

  At nearly 10 P.M. on November 20, we landed at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv and drove the thirty minutes to Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem. I went right upstairs and sat down with the Prime Minister and a small group of our aides. The Israelis told us they had already begun talks with the Egyptians, who were representing Hamas, but they were foundering on long-standing and difficult issues regarding Israel’s embargo of Gaza, freedom of movement for its people, fishing rights off the coast, and other existing tensions. Bibi and his team were very pessimistic that any deal could be reached. They said they were serious about launching a ground invasion into Gaza if nothing changed. They would give me some time, but not much. I was now on the clock.

  As the hours went by, the Prime Minister’s staff kept wheeling in carts of food, stacked high with grilled cheese sandwiches and tiny éclairs. Comfort food in the midst of high stress, though nobody was looking at his or her watch. I appreciated the fact that Bibi and his team held nothing back around me. They interrupted and contradicted one another, even the Prime Minister.

  Netanyahu was under a lot of pressure to invade. Opinion polls in Israel strongly favored such a step, especially among Bibi’s Likud base. But Israeli military commanders were warning of high numbers of casualties, and Netanyahu was also concerned about the regional consequences. How would Egypt react? Would Hezbollah begin attacking from Lebanon? He also knew that the military had achieved most of its goals within the first few hours of sustained air strikes, especially degrading Hamas’s long-range rocket capabilities, and that Iron Dome was doing a good job protecting Israeli citizens. Bibi didn’t want a ground war, but he was having trouble finding an exit ramp that would allow Israel to disengage and deescalate without making it seem as if it was backing down in the face of continued Hamas defiance, which would only invite more violence later. Meanwhile Mubarak was gone and the Israelis didn’t trust the new Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo. That made the role of the United States even more crucial. At least one Israeli official later told me that this was the hardest choice Netanyahu had faced as Prime Minister.

  I said I was going to fly to Cairo the next day, and I wanted to bring with me a document that I could present to President Morsi as the basis for final negotiations. The key, I thought, was to be sure to have a few points where the Israelis would be willing to make concessions if pressed, so Morsi could feel as if he had gotten a good deal for the Palestinians. We went round and round on the specifics without finding a formula that would work.

  We broke up the meeting after midnight, and I headed to the iconic eighty-year-old King David Hotel for a few hours of restless sleep. It seemed more likely than not that this diplomatic mission would fail and Israeli troops would enter Gaza. In the morning I drove to Ramallah to consult with Abbas. Though his influence here was limited, I didn’t want to exclude him and in any way lend legitimacy to Hamas in the inter-Palestinian power struggle. I also knew that the Palestinian Authority continued to pay salaries and stipends to thousands of people in Gaza, despite Hamas rule, so it would be helpful to have Abbas’s support for a cease-fire.

  By this time the Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah was familiar ground to me. Known as the Mukataa, it was originally built as a British fort in the 1920s and became famous in 2002, when the Israeli Army besieged the compound with Yasser Arafat and his top aides trapped inside and eventually destroyed most of it. In 2012, there were few signs of that violent history. The complex had been rebuilt and now included Arafat’s limestone mausoleum, where a Palestinian honor guard stood watch as visitors came to pay their respects.

  It had been a difficult year for Abbas. His popularity was sagging, and the economy in the West Bank was slowing. After the Israeli settlement moratorium expired in late 2010 and he pulled out of direct negotiations, Abbas had decided to petition the UN to recognize Palestine as an independent state. He had staked his career on the idea that statehood could be achieved through peaceful means—as opposed to the Hamas vision of armed struggle—and the failure of negotiations severely undercut his political position. Abbas felt he needed to find another nonviolent avenue to press forward if he was going to keep his hold on power and continue to offer a viable alternative to the extremists. A symbolic vote at the UN was unlikely to do much for the everyday life of Palestinians, but sticking it to Israel on the world stage and exposing its growing isolation would bolster Abbas at home—and, the Palestinians argued, might encourage Israel to make concessions. The problem was that going to the UN ran counter to the crucial idea that peace could be achieved only by negotiations between the parties, with compromises from both sides. Unilateral actions, whether it was a Palestinian statehood bid at the UN or Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, eroded trust and made it harder to foster those compromises.

  Throughout 2011, we unsuccessfully tried to convince Abbas to abandon his petition, while also working to make sure there would not be enough votes in the Security Council to move it forward. (We wanted to avoid having to use our veto if possible.) At the same time, I began working with the EU’s Cathy Ashton and Tony Blair on a framework for restarting direct negotiations based on terms of reference President Obama had outlined in his May 2011 speech. There was a flurry of diplomacy at the UN General Assembly in September 2011, but it was not enough to dissuade Abbas from submitting his petition and forcing the issue. Thanks to our behind-the-scenes cajoling, it went nowhere in the Security Council. All Abbas got for his troubles—besides strained relations with the United States and Israel—was membership at UNESCO, the UN cultural agency. He pledged to return in 2012 and try again.

  Now Hamas was upstaging Abbas with its headline-grabbing resistance to Israel and making him look tired and weak to his people. I think he was grateful for my visit but depressed by his situation. After a rather desultory discussion, he agreed to back my peacemaking efforts and wished me well in Cairo.

  Then it was back to Jerusalem for another discussion with Netanyahu. His advisors had called in the middle of the night and asked us to return for another meeting before leaving for Cairo. We went issue by issue, carefully calibrating how far the Israelis could bend without breaking and gaming out how things might go with the Egyptians. By the end of the meeting we had a strategy in place and I had Israeli-approved language to bring to Egypt as a basis for negotiations.

  Then I headed to the airport. While we were en route, word came of a bus bombing in Tel Aviv, the first in years. Dozens of people had been hurt. It was an ominous reminder of the urgency of my mission.

  Midafternoon on November 21, I arrived at the Presidential Palace in Cairo where I had met with Mubarak so many times before. The building and household staff were the same, but now the Muslim Brotherhood was in charge. So far Morsi had upheld the Camp David Peace Treaty with Israel, which had been a cornerstone of regional stability for decades, but how long would that last if Israel invaded Gaza again? Would he seek to reaffirm Egypt’s traditional role as mediator and peacemaker and establish himself as an international statesman? Or would he move to exploit popular anger and position himself as the one man in the Middle East who could stand up to Israel? We were about to put him to the test.

  Morsi was an unusual politician. History had thrust him from the back room to the big chair. In many ways he was in over his head, trying to learn how to govern from scratch in a very difficult setting. Morsi clearly loved the power of his new position and thrived on the dance of politics (until it later consumed him). I was relieved to see that, in the case of Gaza at least, he seemed more interested in being a dealmaker than a demagogue. We met in his office with a small group of his advisors and began going through the document I had brought from Israel’s Prime Minister, line by line.

  I encouraged Morsi to think about Egypt’s strategic role in the region and his own role in history. He spoke solid English, having earned his PhD from the University of Southern California in materials scie
nce in 1982 and taught at California State University, Northridge, until 1985. He scrutinized every phrase of the text. “What does this mean? Has this been translated right?” he asked. At one point he exclaimed, “I don’t accept this.” “But you proposed it in one of your early drafts,” I responded. “Oh, we did? OK,” he agreed. He even overruled Foreign Minister Amr at one point in the negotiations and offered a key concession.

  The proposal was brief and to the point. At an agreed-upon “zero hour,” Israel would halt all hostilities in Gaza, from land, sea, and air, and the Palestinian factions would stop rocket launches and all other attacks along the border. Egypt would act as guarantor and monitor. The tricky part was what would come next. When would the Israelis loosen restrictions at the border crossings so Palestinians could get in food and supplies? How could Israel be sure Hamas wasn’t rebuilding its rocket arsenal? We proposed that these complicated issues “be dealt with after twenty-four hours from the start of the cease-fire.” That was intentionally vague, the idea being that Egypt could facilitate substantive talks once the fighting ended. Netanyahu had given me the running room to negotiate which issues were specifically mentioned in this clause, and I needed it. Morsi pressed on a few points, and we revised the list several times, eventually settling on the following: “Opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods and refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas and procedures of implementation shall be dealt with after twenty-four hours from the start of the cease-fire.”