Ally

by Michael B. Oren

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  Of all the issues in the peace process, none was more complex and combustible than Jerusalem. The holiest city in Judaism—the third most sacred to Muslims, and revered by Christians as the place of Jesus’s passion—the city is studded with shrines. But it is also a metropolis of more than eight hundred thousand people, some 65 percent of them Jewish. The rest are mostly Palestinian Arabs who, even if not Israeli citizens, receive Israeli social, medical, and educational benefits. When secretly polled, more of these Arabs prefer life under Israeli, rather than Palestinian Authority, jurisdiction. Yet tensions can still flare behind the ancient walls of the Old City as well as in the New City, with its Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, some of them increasingly mixed. Alongside the modern buildings stand Roman, Arab, Crusader, Turkish, and British structures—monuments to the city’s successive conquerors—scarred by the two twentieth-century wars that in many ways never ended.

  The first was Israel’s War of Independence, sometimes called the 1948 War but which actually began in November 1947, when the UN partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Jerusalem belonged to neither, remaining in theory an international city. In reality, Jewish and Arab forces battled over every street.

  The conclusion of an armistice in 1949 saw the city divided. The Arab half was centered in the east, with flanges curving around the north and southwest. This was a Jordanian city, a distant second to the capital of Amman, and never considered Palestinian. Jewish Jerusalem, located in the west, contrastingly became Israel’s capital. Access to the holy places of all faiths was guaranteed on the Israeli side, while the Jordanians prohibited Jews from praying at the Western Wall and other consecrated sites.

  The second war—in 1967—began when Jordanian forces attacked the Israeli side of Jerusalem and IDF troops, in response, captured the Jordanian half and reunited the city. A month later, Israel formally annexed the Jordanian areas—unlike the newly conquered West Bank, which remained “administered”—and declared all of Jerusalem its capital. Israel subsequently launched robust construction projects beyond the 1949 armistice line, many of them designed to ensure that Jerusalem would never again be divided.

  None of this was acceptable to the United States. For the first nineteen years of Israel’s existence, Washington clung to the UN’s plan for internationalizing Jerusalem. Consequently, the United States located its embassy in Tel Aviv, and even prohibited its personnel from meeting Israeli leaders in their Jerusalem offices. America gradually lifted this ban after 1967, but still treated Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital. This policy generated numerous absurdities. The State Department maintained one consulate in West Jerusalem, serving mostly Jews, while an eastern consulate acted as a de facto legation to the Palestinians. Visitors to the East Jerusalem consulate’s website, available in English and Arabic, would not know that a single Jew lived in the city. The passports of U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem—our daughter, Lia, for one—could not list their “place of birth” as “Jerusalem, Israel” but simply, anomalously, as Jerusalem.

  Why, if the U.S.-Israel alliance was so sound, would one party in that union not respect the hallowed capital of the other? The reason was peace. Parallel to strengthening its ties with Israel, the United States after 1967 assumed the leadership of what came to be known as the peace process. The goal was a comprehensive treaty between Israel and the warring Arab states. At first this meant American mediation between Israel and Jordan to resolve all the outstanding issues between them, including Jerusalem’s status. But then, after the 1993 Oslo Accords, Washington began viewing East Jerusalem as the potential capital of a future Palestinian state. Though Congress voted to move the embassy to Jerusalem, Republican and Democratic presidents alike overrode those bills in the interests of diplomacy. They also opposed Israeli building in Jerusalem’s “Palestinian” areas, asserting that such construction “altered the character of the city” and erased the 1949 armistice line—or, as it was now called, the pre-1967 lines.

  Few Israelis, though, remembered those lines. Growing up in southern Jerusalem, my three children would be astounded to learn that the two neighborhoods adjacent to their own—Armon HaNatziv and Gilo—arose on land beyond the pre-1967 lines. Such communities accounted for more than half of the city’s Jewish population and were, by law, inseparable from the Jewish State. Contrary to widespread assumption, a prime minister has no more authority to freeze building in Jerusalem than a U.S. president has to stop construction in Chicago.

  Acknowledging this and the fact that nearly a half century of Israeli development had permanently changed the demography of the West Bank and Jerusalem, George W. Bush wrote to Ariel Sharon. Dated April 14, 2004, the letter affirmed:

  As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge through negotiations between the parties….In light of the new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it would be unrealistic to expect that the outcome of the final status negotiations will be a full…return to the armistice lines of 1949.

  Those “new realities,” both Bush and Sharon understood, referred to the cluster of West Bank Jewish towns built to thicken out Israel’s perilously narrow pre-1967 lines. Roughly 80 percent of the settlers lived in these “blocs,” which, Bush indicated, would remain Israeli even after the creation of a Palestinian state. But “new realities” also referred to the Jewish neighborhoods in formerly Jordanian Jerusalem. While the exclusively Arab areas of the city could, conceivably, form the nucleus of a Palestinian capital, Israel could count on retaining those districts it had long considered sovereign.

  The letter was a masterpiece of diplomacy. Endorsed by both houses of Congress—by then-senator Hillary Clinton and then-congressman Rahm Emanuel—it persuaded the Israeli public that ceding territory could yield concrete commitments from the United States. It safeguarded secure borders for the Jewish State. And it created diplomatic space for Israelis and Palestinians alike. The letter enabled Israeli governments to ease pressure from right-wing groups by building in those “major population centers” without precluding the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. Though they officially opposed any Israeli presence beyond the 1967 lines, Palestinian leaders understood that the areas suggested by the Bush-Sharon letter were nonnegotiable.

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  Shockingly, then, shortly after taking office, the Obama administration disavowed the letter. Denying the existence of any “informal or oral agreement” on Israeli construction in Jerusalem and the settlement blocs, the State Department further asserted that the letter “did not become part of the official position of the United States.”

  The announcement, reflecting Obama’s need to distance himself from Bush and the president’s deep aversion to settlements, profoundly impacted the peace process. Israel’s center-right coalition no longer had a safety valve for palliating its settler constituency. And no Israeli government—right or left—could lawfully halt building in the country’s capital. My children, who would have been surprised to learn that Armon HaNatziv and Gilo were once part of Jordan, were now shocked to hear that Washington considered them settlements.

  Yet refuting the Bush-Sharon letter also boxed in the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas could not be less Palestinian than Obama. Far more than achieving an historic peace, possibly winning the Nobel Prize, and guaranteeing his place in diplomatic history, Abbas wanted to remain in power and stay alive. To achieve this, the Palestinian leader could not fall afoul of West Bank popular opinion. Already impressed with Hamas and fed up with Fatah corruption, that public might react violently to a Palestinian Authority that agreed to negotiate while Israel continued building in the territories. If the president of the United States demanded a freeze in all of the West Bank and Jerusalem, so, too, must Abbas.

  America’s new policies set conditions for talks that Israel could never meet and that Palestinians could not ignore. For the first time in the history of the U.S.-Israel al
liance, the White House denied the validity of a previous presidential commitment. The dearth of trust that already plagued relations between Netanyahu and Abbas was compounded by both leaders’ lack of confidence in Washington. And Jerusalem, that most intractable and flammable of issues, was once again pushed to the fore.

  Daylight on Pennsylvania Avenue

  The Jerusalem controversy and other flashpoints in U.S.-Israel relations could not, of course, be contained in the Aquarium or addressed from behind my desk. Leaving the timeworn yet secure confines of the Israeli embassy, I met with the architects of American foreign policy on my first excursions up Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The initial stop was just south of the avenue, in Foggy Bottom, the formerly swampy district that was synonymous with the State Department. This, more than any other federal institution, had long had a reputation for opposing Zionism and Israel. My master’s thesis, “The State Department and the Jewish State,” profiled on the American diplomats who strenuously opposed any attempt to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust and labored to prevent Israel’s creation. These were “the striped pants boys,” as President Truman called them, the Ivy League dandies who he believed were anti-Semitic. My subsequent research chronicled the department’s resistance to any pro-Israel gesture by the United States prior to the 1967 war. Not until Henry Kissinger—the first Jewish secretary of state—took over the department in the early 1970s did it fully come to terms with the legitimacy of Israel and its alliance with America. Because of Kissinger or, perhaps, the changing times, the once WASPs-only club of the State Department now welcomed minorities, women, and Jews.

  These changes did not necessarily render the building entirely amenable to Israel, though. Lining its long, dull halls were the offices of the many diplomats who had served in Arab and Islamic countries, spoke their languages, and often internalized their attitudes toward Israel. Other officials interfaced with international organizations—the United Nations and the European Union—that were routinely critical of Israel. The fact that there was only one Jewish State and one people who spoke the Hebrew language meant the few careerists who specialized in Israel and understood us would always be massively outnumbered.

  For those reasons, the State Department remained somberly associated in my mind with the name Foggy Bottom. There, even the most civil conversations could quickly become bogged down in disagreements.

  Discord indeed mired my initial meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg. A Harvard-and-Yale-educated statesman, he was also a dedicated angler renowned for tying flies in his spare time. Fittingly, Steinberg’s attitude toward the Jewish State called to mind the old Israeli adage, “He loves us like a fisherman loves fish.”

  After accepting my agrèment on June 26, Steinberg invited me back to his faux-colonial seventh-floor office to complain about Israeli policies. The first of these was our failure to live up to previous commitments to the United States and dismantle unauthorized outposts in the territories. I admitted that Israel had indeed not fulfilled its pledges, but noted that removing each outpost meant permanently stationing a battalion of troops on the site to prevent the settlers from coming back. The outpost problem could only be solved within an overall peace agreement, I explained, which the Palestinians unfortunately refused to discuss. Steinberg next protested Israel’s demolition of two Arab “houses” near Jerusalem. In response, I produced the list of legal rulings that authorized the demolitions as well as aerial photographs proving that both structures were, in fact, stables.

  Boyish despite his salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Steinberg could be imperious. He regarded me unflappably as I termed the department’s Jerusalem policy as “non-implementable and prejudicial.” Under the administration’s policy, a Jew could only build his home in certain Jerusalem neighborhoods but an Arab could build anywhere—even illegally—without limit. “In America,” I said, “that’s called discrimination.”

  From Foggy Bottom, I continued up Pennsylvania to the neoclassical White House and its gray Victorian neighbor, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EOB). Both contained the offices of the National Security Council, with its experts on Israel and the Middle East. My most frequent NSC host was Dan Shapiro, senior director for the Middle East and North Africa. He occupied a cubicle with a curiously sloped ceiling that required us both to stoop. The room’s contours served as a metaphor for a region that afforded limited maneuverability to Americans and Israelis, and forced us to keep our heads down.

  When I first met Dan in Israel during the summer of 2008, I suggested that the Oslo formula, still a failure after fifteen years, might be reconsidered in favor of creative interim steps. But the administration fervidly embraced Oslo, as did Dan, an early Obama acolyte. My response was to wager that the demand for a settlement freeze would not bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table but rather drive them further away. “Why should they enter talks in which they’ll have to pay for concessions when they can get them for free without talking?” Such logic failed to impress Dan, who, the bookishness of his clipped Vandyke beard and pea-shaped glasses notwithstanding, could react temperamentally. “The dignity and credibility of the president—and his relationship with the prime minister—hinges on the freeze,” he retorted. We concurred to disagree and toasted each other with cans of Diet Mountain Dew, the soft drink reputed to have the highest legal level of caffeine.

  Elsewhere in the EOB, in an office endowed with more physical and political space, sat Dennis Ross. Having languished for several ineffectual months in the State Department, Dennis at the end of June transferred to the NSC, where he served as Special Assistant to the President on Middle East and South Asian Affairs. This put him in charge of virtually every major American conflict as well as the Israeli-Palestinian and Iranian nuclear issues.

  As was the case with Dan Shapiro, I had met Dennis before my appointment. We taught together at Georgetown and Sally knew his family from San Francisco. But in contrast to Dan, a former congressional staffer for Democrats, Dennis had more than thirty years’ experience in what he called statecraft—the title of his most recent book—and had worked for presidents of both parties. A person of process, he had helped mediate the Oslo talks and believed in a negotiated solution to Iran. He loyally followed the president’s lead in opposing all Israeli building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

  This approach should have generated some tension between us, but it never did. Perhaps because of the tenderhearted smiles he attached to even his bleakest critiques of Israeli policy, my meetings with Dennis were rewarding. He understood the fears that underlie much of Israeli policy and the fact that Netanyahu, more than any of Israel’s current leaders, had the authority to make peace. Moreover, Dennis had the guts to make that case to his colleagues.

  From No. 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue ascends to Capitol Hill. “The White House” is a metonym for the administration and its policy implementers throughout the Pentagon, the State Department, and numerous federal agencies. So, too, “the Hill” refers to the bicameral legislature, the Capitol, and the adjoining complex of office buildings serving its members and their staffs. But unlike the White House, which is accessible to a range of Israeli officials, the Hill is the ambassador’s exclusive domain. It is also the bastion of pro-Israel sentiment, reflecting the affection of a sizable American majority for the allied Jewish State.

  Climbing to the Hill once a week was, from the start, an extravaganza. Displayed before me was a kaleidoscope of personalities and viewpoints, of humor and tragedy, profanity and eloquence. Here I could reunite with John McCain, who told me that after losing the 2008 presidential election, he slept like a baby. “I dozed for two hours and woke up and cried,” he said. “Dozed for two hours, and woke up and cried.” I listened to Republican senator Lindsey Graham deconstruct Obama in lilting South Carolina tones. The soft-spoken majority leader, Harry Reid, came to our first meeting with a list of questions about my books, all of which he had read. I could di
scuss Lincoln’s war strategy with Congressman Steve Israel, a fellow Civil War buff, or talk football with massive Jon Runyan, who once played tackle for the Houston Oilers and Philadelphia Eagles. I could confer with long-standing friends Steny Hoyer and Kevin McCarthy, House whips from either side of the aisle, and establish unconventional friendships with the House Armed Services Committee chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon, a devout Mormon in cowboy boots, and progressive Democrat Keith Ellison, Congress’s first Muslim member.

  Beyond initial schmoozing, though, conversations on the Hill dealt with the often-brutal business of the Middle East and the occasionally divergent ways Israel and the United States conducted it. Here, too, the challenge was to preserve across-the-board support for Israel in the face of paralyzing congressional partisanship. And then there were the issues that cut across party lines and blindsided me.

  In our first conversation, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida caught me off guard with a letter from a constituent alleging “Israeli economic apartheid” in the territories. I quickly refuted the charge, citing Israel’s removal of dozens of Intifada-era roadblocks, the reopening of Jordan River bridges, and the consequent growth of the Palestinian economy by a record 8 percent. Introducing herself, Senator Dianne Feinstein offered me a glass of select California wine and said, “I am a peacemaker but you are a fighter.” She criticized reports of an Israeli plan to replace the Arabic name for Jerusalem, al-Quds, with the Hebrew Yerushalayim on Israeli road signs. I admitted that place-names could sometimes be controversial—southerners never refer to the Battle of Manassas as northerners prefer to, Bull Run—but assured her that even if such a plan existed, Israel’s Supreme Court would overrule it. “And,” I added, “sometimes you have to fight before making peace, like Yitzhak Rabin.” More surprising still, Senator Mitch McConnell—unlike Nelson and Feinstein, a Republican—also raised a complaint in our initial talk, about Israeli tariffs on Kentucky bourbon. I wondered, do Israelis even drink bourbon?