Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  The Israelis were flummoxed. Did the national security advisor really give precedence to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before ending the massacres in Sudan, relieving hunger, or curing AIDS? Did he truly hold that reconciling Jews and Arabs could cease the centuries-long strife between Shiites and Sunnis or even the more modern split between Islamists and secularizers? No less puzzling for many Israelis was the administration’s tendency to view settlements as the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Reminding White House officials that the removal of all twenty-one settlements in Gaza had brought not peace to Israel but thousands of Hamas rockets proved futile.

  But on settlements, no less than on linkage, Jones remained adamant. The national security advisor is the natural point of contact for many senior Israeli officials, including our own national security advisor, Uzi Arad, and the Mossad’s illustrious chief, Meir Dagan. Both short and stocky—Arad called to mind an intellectual George Costanza and Dagan a swarthy Buddha—their physiques contrasted starkly with Jones’s, towering and fit. But the physical differences were the least conspicuous in his West Wing office. In his deceptively impassive monotone, the general informed his guests that their country’s willingness to implement a settlement freeze would determine the future of U.S.-Israel relations. “You ask and you ask,” he said. “Now we’re doing the asking.”

  Arad came away from these meetings muttering, “They have no real Middle East experience—it’s all an experiment for them,” while Dagan wore an inscrutable, rueful smile. I left the White House with a bitter pit in my gut and the conviction that Israel had to do the utmost—short of compromising its security—to avoid a public spat with Obama. Though I saw many of the administration’s assumptions as off-base, at best, we had no choice but to address them.

  George Mitchell, meanwhile, continued to shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah. With his quaint New England inflections, his quiet but compassionate demeanor, and kindly eyes, Mitchell was fiercely likable. That high-minded charisma helped elevate him to the Senate majority leadership, to the chairmanship of the Walt Disney Company, and to diplomatic success as President Clinton’s special envoy for Northern Ireland.

  Yet Mitchell’s insistence that the same trust-building strategy that enabled him to mediate between Irish Protestants and Catholics would work with Jews and Palestinians mystified his Israeli hosts. Yitzik Molcho, the wiry scion of an old Jerusalem family and a wily Levantine bargainer, was always reminding him, “This is the Middle East, George, where one-sided concessions don’t build trust. They build the demand for the next concessions.” The settlement freeze, Molcho warned, would mislead Abbas into thinking he could gain more by not negotiating and weaken Netanyahu at the outset of a process for which he would later need immense political strength. “He has to climb a high hill, George. Don’t shoot him in the knee at the bottom.”

  Meanwhile, as Mitchell traversed the Middle East, Ehud Barak became a monthly guest in Washington. Leading his Labor Party into an anomalous coalition with Likud, Barak shifted the cabinet from the right to the center-right and secured his own place as defense minister. This made my job somewhat easier, enabling me to present the government as one of the most broadly based in Israel’s history. It also pleased the Americans, who believed that Barak was more compliant than Netanyahu on peace issues.

  The Americans may have been misled and, if so, were hardly the first. Barak was a skein of incongruities. Impish with a pronounced lisp, he scarcely fit the image of Israel’s most decorated soldier, the former head of the IDF’s Sayeret Matkal commando unit, and, later, chief of staff. A Stanford-educated economist, concert pianist, and obsessive dismantler of clocks and locks, he once graphed out the peace process in terms of axes and quadrants.

  Barak was the sort of wunderkind that only Israel could have produced—and which only Israelis could quickly reject, voting him out of office after less than two years as prime minister. Nevertheless, Obama remembered that, as prime minister in 2000, Barak had offered statehood to the Palestinians in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, including half of Jerusalem. The president consequently put considerable stock in the defense minister and welcomed him—sometimes personally—in his frequent visits to the White House.

  Those visits were enjoyable and anxious occasions for me. Enjoyable because, in spite of the enmity he aroused in some Israelis, I could not resist liking Barak. Israelis are not accustomed to complimenting others and refer to flattery with the Yiddish word firgun. I’ve often thought that the exit from Ben-Gurion Airport should be graced with a sign warning, “You are now entering a firgun-free zone.” But Barak was unfailingly generous in his firgun to me and genuinely interested in my interpretations of America. I tried explaining to him that in the United States, one requests a “one-on-one” conversation and not, as in Hebrew, a “four-eyed” meeting, since “four-eyed” could be a slur for someone who wore glasses. I even jokingly wondered whether Moshe Dayan’s conversations had been “three-eyed.” He laughed and was laughing still when, entering the White House, he requested a “four-eyed” talk with General Jones.

  The contents of those “four-eyed” discussions was the source of my anxiety. For all his geniality, Barak, I knew, was a cunning politician who could reach understandings that might or might not be supported by the rest of the government. As such, I was always careful to report my assessments—to the degree I could validate them—of Barak’s conversations in Washington. Here was another ambassadorial balancing act between fulfilling my duties to the prime minister and maintaining the defense minister’s confidence and friendship.

  I also had to clean up the messes often left after Barak’s departure. He quietly cut aid deals with the Pentagon without consulting members of the House and Senate appropriations and armed services committees, whom I then had to conciliate. The administration similarly needed calming when Barak, who as defense minister had that power, authorized the building of 455 houses in the territories. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop,” insisted White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. My next job, I told my chief of staff Lior Weintraub, would be custodial, so adept had I become with a broom.

  —

  And the cleaning up continued. Absent a freeze, the settlements remained the administration’s anathema. Labeling them “illegitimate” was the White House’s way of ratcheting up pressure on Israel. Previous presidents had referred to these communities as “unhelpful” and “obstacles to peace” but refrained from questioning their legality. Foreign Minister Liberman fired back that the demand for a settlement halt merely enabled the Palestinians to boycott peace talks and to sanction Israel under the Goldstone Report. The administration urged Abbas to rescind his endorsement of Goldstone, and the Palestinian president agreed, but only in return for intensified American demands for the freeze.

  The stage seemed set for an all-out confrontation in late September at the opening of the UN General Assembly. But Barack Obama remained the world’s most revered leader—he would soon win the Nobel Prize in anticipation of his contributions to peace—and rebuffing him could still be risky. He declared that “it is past time to talk about starting negotiations,” which “must begin and begin soon.” However reluctantly, Abbas acceded to the president’s request to join him and Netanyahu for a trilateral meet at UN headquarters.

  The September 22 session was derided by the press as a mere photo op, but the three remained closeted for well over an hour. I spent the time in an adjacent room with several White House staffers—Palestinian diplomats waited separately—eager to hear of any possible resumption of talks. Photographs were indeed taken, but the question of whether Abbas would return to the table remained unanswered. Netanyahu, I felt, sincerely wanted to engage in negotiations, but other officials remained doubtful of the Palestinian leader’s sincerity and the chances for a durable peace.

  The meeting, in fact, made headlines, but little else, and the focus quickly s
hifted to Netanyahu’s and Obama’s speeches before the UN plenum. In preparation for the former, I was admitted—tentatively, at first—into the room where Ron Dermer and Gary Ginsberg, the shrewd yet good-natured Time Warner executive who volunteered his talents and time, fine-tuned Netanyahu’s address. This, I learned, abounded in Churchillian references and touched on monumental themes: the Bible, the Holocaust, Israel’s right to self-defense. Iran denied all three, the speech next emphasized, and threatened Israel with nuclear extinction. A section on peace with the Palestinians was also de rigueur, with Gary assigned to add “music” to Netanyahu’s hang-tough tone. But there was nothing controversial in the text, nothing to arouse American concerns the way the prospect of Obama’s speech unnerved the Israelis.

  Along with “no daylight,” another time-honored principle in the U.S.-Israel alliance was “no surprises.” In previous years, Israeli leaders would receive advance drafts of any American announcement that touched on their interests and were welcomed to submit their comments. That practice, too, was now jettisoned, partially because Obama kept editing his words right up to the minute of their delivery. Netanyahu, meanwhile, sat petulantly in his suite. “What’s he going to say?” he rasped at me. I tried texting Dan Shapiro, the NSC’s Middle East and North Africa advisor, whose terse reply arrived only minutes before the president spoke. “You won’t be disappointed,” it read.

  Netanyahu was not, at least not entirely. Obama devoted a large portion of his remarks to Israeli-Palestinian issues. There was poetry in his evoking “the Israeli girl in Sderot who closes her eyes in fear that a rocket will take her life in the middle of the night,” and “the Palestinian boy in Gaza who has no clean water and no country to call his own.” There was muscle in denouncing those who “fail to couple an unwavering commitment to [Israel’s] security with an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate…rights of the Palestinians.” And he called for the unconditional renewal of talks, which, within one year, would achieve peace between the “Jewish state of Israel” and a “contiguous” Palestinian state. “I’m not naïve,” he concluded, “but all of us must decide whether we are serious about peace or whether we will only lend it lip service.”

  A collective phew resounded in the prime minister’s suite. Though the president had made no distinction between the Palestinians and America’s staunchest Middle East ally, he had upheld Israel’s need for security and legitimacy and referred to it as “the Jewish state.” This, we all understood, walked back the Cairo speech in which the Holocaust—rather than the Jews’ ancient connection to their homeland—justified Israel’s existence. He had sided with Israel in rejecting any preconditions for restarting talks. And Israel could live with Obama’s reference to contiguity, meaning that the Palestinian populations of the West Bank would be joined territorially and linked to Gaza by a road. As long as no mention was made of the 1967 lines, which Israel regarded as indefensible, Netanyahu seemed pleased.

  I certainly was, and relieved. As in his reaction to the Goldstone report, Obama’s remarks surpassed my expectations. While the president’s media critics confronted me with his moral equivalency—likening the rockets fired at Sderot with Gaza’s lack of clean water—I listed the positive points of the speech. Yet the suspicion that Obama’s appearance at the UN represented a passing respite, and that the pressure on Israel would resume, nagged me. Much like the autumn leaves on Washington’s cherry trees, the ties of trust between the United States and Israel might soon be wilting.

  The word withering indeed described the October 31 meeting at Ben-Gurion Airport between Foreign Minister Liberman and the secretary of state. According to protocol, the ambassador accompanies all administration officials of cabinet rank, including, of course, the secretary of state. The plane returning me to Israel landed just minutes before Secretary Clinton’s. I dashed across the tarmac to greet Clinton and escort her to a dimly lit room where the foreign minister waited. “I do not understand why the U.S. would want to create another failed state in the Middle East that will not only harm Israel’s interests but yours,” he started in his grim, Russian-accented English. “Anybody who believes that a peace deal is possible soon is delusional.” Though momentarily taken aback, the secretary swiftly retorted that the two-state solution was and would remain the administration’s goal—“a vital interest for the United States and, we believe, for Israel.” Opposing that objective, she made clear, could lead to serious friction with the White House. Such tensions were already conspicuous between Liberman and Clinton, who would rarely meet over the next few years.

  The rapport, fortunately, was better between Clinton and Netanyahu. As during their last tête-à-tête at the State Department, this was a meeting of well-attuned minds, if not kindred hearts. “Bibi would fight if he felt he was being cornered,” she later remembered, “but if you connected with him as a friend, there was a chance you could get something done together.” In that spirit, Clinton urged Netanyahu to help build up Abbas and Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, a moderate committed to institution building. But the prime minister resisted, saying that “Abbas can best build himself up by joining peace talks.” Yet Netanyahu did agree to withhold approval for new housing projects in the settlements—a gesture that Clinton, if not entirely pleased, nevertheless described as “unprecedented.”

  Clinton’s visit completed my entrée into serious Middle East diplomacy. The American and Israeli teams together thrashed out the Terms of Reference—TOR—for the possibly renewed talks. The TOR had to square contradictory Israeli and Palestinian policies and place the United States in a viable mediating position. Each phrase, each word, was subjected to microscopic scrutiny. The result represented a mastery of statecraft—and double-speak—in which settlement blocs became “subsequent developments” and “the 1967 lines” were set as Palestinian, rather than American, parameters. The final text was virtually inscribed on my soul:

  We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.

  Gaping disagreements remained—on Jerusalem, especially—but some progress had been achieved in the U.S.-Israel talks and Netanyahu wanted to maintain the momentum. The General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, the largest gathering of the community’s most important philanthropic and educational organization, was scheduled to be held in Washington in early November. It offered an ideal opportunity for Netanyahu to address a genial crowd and a convenient excuse to meet with Obama. Only the White House claimed it knew nothing of the prime minister’s request, prompting headlines about a possible presidential snub. Once again, I went into my public “there’s no crisis” mode, all the while working furiously to arrange the summit.

  At the last moment the meeting was set and, just before dawn on November 8, Netanyahu landed at Andrews Air Force Base. Every prime ministerial visit to the United States begins with a sleep deficit for the ambassador, who must leave the Residence in the middle of the night to stand on the tarmac on time. Poor Sally had to join me for these nocturnal slogs and shiver beside me on the red carpet until the prime minister’s aircraft arrived. Israel has no Air Force One, just rented El Al planes. Each of these bears the name of an Israeli town—this one, I noticed proudly, was Dalyiat al-Carmel, a Druze village near Haifa. Netanyahu descended the ramp, embraced Sally, and laughed, saying, “I bet you didn’t know what you were getting yourself into?”

  All thought of exhaustion and the cold departed, suddenly, when the prime minister invited me to brief him in his limousine. I suggested ways of improving the relationship with Obama, of moving forward with the moratorium and restoring the principle of “no surprises.” I emphasized the power of the president’s intellect and his global stature. N
etanyahu agreed, “It’s not easy to get that job.” To help frame the coming discussion, I quizzed him, “Who was the only U.S. president with less managerial, military, financial, and foreign policy experience than the current one?” Netanyahu, though a proficient historian, looked stumped by the answer: “Abraham Lincoln.”

  Later, we arrived at the White House and, without pomp or pleasantries, Netanyahu entered the Oval Office. The rest of the prime minister’s entourage—including Ehud Barak and Yitzik Molcho—adjourned to Rahm Emanuel’s office.

  Unlike the “me walls” of Washington, which are festooned with photographs of the famous, Rahm’s room was adorned with family portraits. He duly made us feel at home, made coffee for us, and brought Barak a beer. Somehow we got onto the subject of eulogies, and I mentioned the one given by Moshe Dayan for his friend Ro’i Rotberg, killed by terrorists in 1956, that surprisingly acknowledged the Palestinians’ suffering. This brought us back to the peace process and the conversation turned prickly.

  Barak began by criticizing the administration for opposing possible interim agreements with the Palestinians and even for interfering in internal Israeli politics. Rahm snapped back, “If you’re accusing us of something, say so. We’re being frank here.” Frankly, I said, the administration had never said a positive word about the democratically elected government of Israel. Jim Jones, who was also present, tried to interject, but Rahm stopped him: “General, you should know better than to try interrupting Jews having a debate.”