Ally

by Michael B. Oren

  “The death of Muammar Gaddafi showed that our role in protecting the Libyan people, and helping them break free from a tyrant, was the right thing to do,” Obama said. The intervention served as a “powerful reminder of how we’ve renewed American leadership in the world.” But in The New Yorker, an unnamed White House advisor characterized the president’s policy—memorably—as “leading from behind.”

  And in Syria, where a slaughter indeed took place, Obama chose not to lead at all. As in Libya, the Syrian Spring uprising was preceded by a sharp upturn in the country’s relations with the United States. After restoring diplomatic ties with Damascus, the administration proactively worked to draw dictator Bashar al-Assad out of Iran’s orbit and into a diplomatic process with Israel. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who once declared that “the road to peace is a road to Damascus,” journeyed to the city in 2009 and was followed by John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Other Congress members, mostly Democrats but also several Republicans, made the voyage and returned to tell Secretary of State Clinton that Assad was a reformer. The reaction of most Israelis echoed that of General Amos Gilad: “A reformer? Are they mad?”

  The American assessment of Assad changed abruptly in the first week of March 2011. The arrest and torture of fifteen children for spray-painting anti-Assad graffiti on a wall in the southwestern Syrian city of Daraa sparked popular demonstrations against the regime. At first peaceful, the protests swiftly turned deadly after Assad’s army dispersed them with live fire. The disturbances nevertheless spread—to Damascus and Aleppo and twenty other cities, leaving a thousand civilians dead. The Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia as a campaign for dignity, and was devolving in Egypt into a showdown between nationalists and militant Islamists, in Syria soon escalated into a civil war between an Alawite-led, Iranian-backed regime and its mostly Sunni, Saudi-supported opponents. And though violent elsewhere in the Middle East, only in Syria did the Arab Spring produce a bloodbath.

  Yet toward Syria, oddly, the administration’s policy was the most ambivalent. To be sure, the White House and the State Department regularly condemned the mass murder, arbitrary arrests, and wholesale torture taking place throughout the country. “We strongly oppose the Syrian government’s treatment of its citizens,” stated Press Secretary Jay Carney. “History is not on the side of this kind of action.” But Obama also denounced the protesters’ violence and insisted that the opposition was too disorganized to merit American aid. The president refrained from calling for Assad’s ouster and, initially at least, exempted him from sanctions placed on other Syrian officials. Unnamed administration sources repeatedly informed The Wall Street Journal that Israel wanted to preserve Assad’s rule, compelling me each time to issue a denial and clarify that, on the contrary, the fall of Iran and Hezbollah’s Syrian ally was a patent Israeli interest. One could conclude, even in 2011, that while Israel welcomed Assad’s demise as a deathly blow to Iran, the Obama administration, looking to reconcile with Tehran, was less eager to hasten his departure.

  Only later, together with the European Union, the Arab League, and the “international community”—which excluded Russia and China—did the United States ramp up sanctions on Syria and oppose its membership in the UN Human Rights Council. Not until the summer, after many thousands of deaths, did the administration determine that “Assad has lost his legitimacy,” and declared that “Assad must go.”

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  “We’re waiting for the Arab Spring to take a spring break,” a State Department expert on Arab affairs told me. I agreed: “We’re waiting for the Arab Awakening to take a nap.” Yet neither of us received a respite from the turmoil roiling the Middle East. As an historian, I could appreciate this epic moment. Not since the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 or the collapse of the Ottoman Empire near the end of World War I had the region been so irrevocably altered. “It’s 1917,” I heard Netanyahu remark. “Only there are no Europeans to oversee the Middle East.” As an Israeli, though, the Arab Spring aroused mixed emotions in me—frustration and fear, certainly, but also hope.

  The frustration stemmed from Israel’s inability to participate in the optimism-bordering-on-elation that the Arab uprisings sparked in Americans. I watched incredulously as TV commentator Fareed Zakaria praised Obama for removing Mubarak in a single week whereas Reagan and Clinton took years to oust Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto from Indonesia. “But those transitions were successful!” I hollered at the screen. I watched columnist Thomas Friedman boast of the Syrian protesters’ chant of “silmiya, silmiya”—peaceful, peaceful—and anchorman Anderson Cooper assure a panicked woman under fire in Libya that “the whole world cares right now” and would never forget her. “Silmiya, who’s he kidding?” I thought, and predicted that America would indeed forget that poor Libyan woman. I wondered how, in America’s eyes, vicious dictators like Gaddafi and Assad ever had the legitimacy to lose.

  Israel’s pessimism, in turn, was regularly attacked in the media. Dismissing Netanyahu’s “predictable warnings,” a New York Times editorial asserted that “Egypt’s Facebook-adept youth are not lining up behind the Muslim Brotherhood, itself scarcely a band of fanatics,” and that Israel should welcome “the first peace between a Jewish and an Arab democracy.” Writing in The Washington Post, veteran peace negotiator Aaron David Miller described Mubarak as the “one pharaoh that Israelis wish had stayed on the throne,” and Tom Friedman wrote that “the children of Egypt were having their liberation moment and the children of Israel decided to side with Pharaoh.” Post columnist David Ignatius pulled me aside at a diplomatic dinner and derided Israelis for “never seeing the positive side of anything” and not sharing in the Arabs’ joy. Coming from this debonair and fair-minded friend, a bestselling novelist as well as keen political analyst, David’s criticism disturbed me. But David was also a mensch, and at another reception a year later, he apologized to me, admitting, “You guys were right.”

  Being right, though, proved of little help to Israel in meeting the newfound dangers it confronted. The country’s so-called Peace Border with Egypt, unfenced and lightly patrolled, suddenly became a battlefield as terrorists, exploiting the breakdown of order in Sinai, attacked passing Israeli vehicles and fired rockets at Eilat. Islamic radicals were rallying in Cairo as well, and becoming increasingly prominent among the Syrian rebels. “Look at the Islamist banners they’re flying,” I pointed out to a roomful of ABC journalists, only to be rebuked by one of them, a Jordanian, for trying to taint the rebellion. But reports out of Syria substantiated the growing role of jihadist groups and their advances toward Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal, the Middle East’s largest.

  Most harrowingly, the Arab Spring diverted attention from Iran’s supply of rockets to terrorist organizations and its dispatch, for the first time, of warships through the Suez Canal. The ayatollahs undoubtedly took note of the NATO intervention in Libya, which gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2004, and redoubled their quest for a doomsday option. “If Gaddafi had not surrendered his centrifuges and were now surrounded in his bunker with nothing left but a button,” I asked in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “would he push it?”

  Yet, while posing many perils to Israel, the Arab Spring also created opportunities. It resulted in the removal of the deranged Gaddafi, and loosened the Syrian keystone in Iran’s strategic arc with Lebanon. Arabs everywhere were protesting, but for their own sakes, not for Palestine. They proudly waved their own flags, and did not burn Israel’s. The doctrine of linkage that cast the Israel-Palestinian conflict as the core of every Middle Eastern dispute could at last be debunked. The way was opened—theoretically, at least—for a new chapter in U.S.-Israel understanding.

  Indeed, the Arab world’s convulsion should have made American and Israeli officials cling more forcefully to their ties. In a region proffering nothing but upheaval, Israel represented stability. Alone among Middle Eastern states, it remained technologically, scientifically, and militarily robust
, fiercely democratic, and unreservedly pro-American. And for an Israel lashed by Middle Eastern storms, the United States was both beacon and anchor. The alliance had rarely appeared so vital.

  “We’ve lost the entire Middle East, so now what do we do?” I asked Dan Shapiro over lunch. I had a miserable cold and could barely get the words out without coughing. My illness, it seemed, was symptomatic of our common malaise. Together, Israel and the United States had to rethink all of their assumptions about the Middle East and together try to devise solutions. “This is the time to rebuild trust between America and Israel,” I said through sniffles. “We don’t have to agree on everything, but we can still coordinate our response.” Dan nodded, and offered me a tissue. There was nothing more to say. With history so incoherently weaving, we all had to determine the direction it was heading and which side of it was right.

  Through the Dust Darkly

  On January 5, 2011, Republican legislator John Boehner took the oath as Congress’s sixty-first Speaker of the House of Representatives. Renowned for smoking filterless Camels and retaining a year-round tan, the quiet Ohioan was also noted for crying in public. “That’s not a tan,” Obama once said, roasting him, “it’s rust.” Boehner indeed wept as he assumed America’s third-most-powerful office. But for all those tears, the moment capped the Republicans’ retaking of the House in the largest midterm election victory since the 1940s. The Tea Party, initially dismissed as insignificant by my congressional liaisons, proved to be a potent component in the GOP’s victory, which also swept most state and gubernatorial contests.

  One Democrat who nevertheless retained her seat was Gabrielle Giffords, an engaging representative from Arizona. Three days after Boehner’s swearing-in, a crazed gunman burst into a rally she was holding near Tuscon, killed six people, and wounded twelve, including Giffords. Shot point-blank in the head, she survived in part thanks to an Israeli-made high-tech bandage applied by medics on the scene. Even then her recovery required many excruciating months and would never be complete. A shattered America listened as the president, quoting from the book of Job, gleaned meaning from meaningless pain and urged divided politicians to begin a “national conversation…in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.” Commentators from both parties deemed the speech worthy of Dr. Martin Luther King.

  Keeping up with this whirlwind, analytically and emotionally, would be trying for any ambassador. As Israel’s envoy, though, I had to gauge the impact of the Republicans’ victory on vital issues such as the peace process and Tehran’s nuclear program. Though foreign-policy making is a presidential prerogative, the House could exert its influence by, for example, suspending aid to a recalcitrant Palestinian Authority or by intensifying sanctions on Iran. There were dozens of freshman congressmen to meet and new Foreign Affairs, Armed Services, and Appropriations Committee chairmen to engage. And, at the height of this hustling, there was the need to stop and grapple with tragedy. I knew Gabby Giffords, a Jewish woman firmly committed to Israel, as well as her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, who attended my high school. The Tucson shooting—perhaps more than any of the arbitrary massacres that sporadically traumatize Americans—stunned me.

  —

  The relentless march of such events raises a kind of dust that can blind even the most observant ambassador. The task is to somehow anticipate long-term trends—to see through the soot—and chart the road ahead. Squinting, as it were, in early February, I discerned the future path of the peace process. President Obama, I wrote to Netanyahu, would soon unveil a major diplomatic initiative and set out his vision of peace.

  My case, logically at least, was weak. After suffering such a stinging midterm defeat, while wrestling with the Arab Spring, why would the president risk alienating more Americans and churning up what had become—paradoxically—the Middle East’s calmest corner? What, moreover, were the chances for success? I once heard Obama say, “Mediating between Israelis and Palestinians is harder than mediating between Democrats and Republicans.” Why did he believe that this effort, more than serial failures of the previous twenty years, would prevail?

  The cable sent to Netanyahu listed several motives for the initiative. There was Obama’s need to bolster his progressive base after its electoral setback as well as to maintain the momentum he believed he had gained by smartly managing the Arab Spring. Mentioned also was the threat, frequently cited by the White House, that the Europeans would soon advance a plan much less amenable to Israel. And while the people of the Middle East were demonstrating for themselves, rather than against the Jewish State, the president still regarded a peace deal as key to the region’s stability.

  But my letter omitted two additional reasons. The first was that this most centralized of administrations had difficulty multitasking, and that once he had finished focusing on health care and change in the Arab world, the president would return to Israel-Palestine. The second reason related to Obama’s undiminished determination to achieve a peace accord. That goal, I believed, remained deeply embedded in his worldview, a kishke issue.

  Still, the exact contents of Obama’s plan remained unknowable. The two-state solution would be central, certainly, as would a resolution of the refugee and Jerusalem disputes. But the capstone would be recognition of the 1967 lines as the basis for peace. This, the president would likely say, would merely express the obvious and reiterate long-standing U.S. policy. In reality, though, America’s embrace of the 1967 lines would undermine the Terms of Reference so fastidiously forged by Hillary Clinton. That TOR talked of “the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines”—that is, not the Israeli or American goal. Endorsing those borders, even with mutually agreed land swaps, meant granting an immense concession to the Palestinians while they refused to even enter peace talks. It meant tying those talks to lines that, in broad areas in and around Jerusalem and along the Jordan Valley, no longer existed.

  Obama’s attachment to the 1967 map persisted despite the publication of secret documents—the “PaliLeaks”—from the 2008 peace talks between Abbas and Olmert. These records revealed that, in a future two-state solution, the Palestinian leader was willing to concede parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel. Yet, rather than take advantage of this information to reduce tensions with Israel, the White House continued to condemn Israeli construction in some of the very areas that Abbas offered to forgo. Ideology, it seemed to me, still took precedence over an effective U.S. strategy for peacemaking. Instead of taking Abbas to task for not negotiating and for opposing construction in neighborhoods Israel would ultimately retain, the administration rewarded him.

  On January 18, the PLO mission to Washington for the first time was allowed to display a Palestinian flag. The upgrade in the mission’s status, according to Palestinian envoy Maen Erekat, represented a significant step toward Palestinian statehood. But Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the newly appointed chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, denounced the move as a “scheme to manipulate international acceptance…of a Palestinian state while refusing to negotiate directly with Israel.” In any event, the Palestinians repaid the gesture a few days later by ignoring American objections and seeking a Security Council condemnation of Israeli settlements.

  Sometimes the only thing worse than being a false prophet is being an accurate one. Months before, I had warned administration officials that someday they would have to veto their own settlement policy in the UN. The resolution, sponsored by 130 of the organization’s 192 members, and supported by fourteen of the Security Council’s states, threatened America’s role as the honest broker in the peace process. “We believe strongly that New York is not the place to resolve the…outstanding issues between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” said Secretary Clinton. U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice worked furiously to convince the Palestinians to rescind or at least temper the resolution. The Palestinians refused and the voting date was set for Friday, February 18.

  But would the United States exerci
se its veto power? Within my glassed-in suite at the embassy, opinion was divided. Deputy Mission Chief Dan Arbell bet that the United States would not oppose the Palestinians, while Chief of Staff Lior Weintraub wagered that it would. I remained uncertain. Senior NSC and State Department officials warned me that a “no” vote would ignite anti-American violence throughout the Middle East. A million Egyptian protesters would burst out of Tahrir Square and overrun the nearby U.S. embassy. When I suggested that Arabs who could now demonstrate against their own leaders might care less about settlements, the answer I received was adamant: “It’s a fact. Americans will be massacred.”

  That certainty no doubt influenced Obama’s fifty-minute phone call with Abbas on the evening before the vote. In return for dropping the resolution, the president offered to support a Security Council “investigative mission” to the region to report on the settlements. He would renew America’s demand for a total freeze on Israeli construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And he was ready to declare his support for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps. Israel was never consulted about this conversation nor even informed. While acknowledging that Obama and Abbas had talked, the White House spokesman insisted the subject was Egypt.

  Answering the phone at the Residence that Thursday night, I could barely hold the receiver to my ear. The Prime Minister’s Office had learned of Obama’s offer to Abbas from UN sources, not the United States, and was outraged. I was instructed to immediately call congressional leaders and tell them that, by endorsing the Palestinian position on the 1967 lines, the White House had overnight altered more than forty years of American policy. Israel felt abandoned, I was to say. And that is no way to treat an ally.