Before carrying out these orders, I informed Dan Shapiro at the NSC of what I was about to do. He protested, as expected, yet I felt it important not to keep the White House in the dark. The rest of the night was spent contacting senators and congress members from both parties, all of whom seemed shocked. This resulted in a bipartisan letter to the president stating that “it should not be the practice of the U.S. to be conducting backdoor deals…that weaken the strategic interests of…one of our closest allies.” Anti-Israel organizations, meanwhile, urged the president to back the UN resolution, as did J Street. The brassy New York Democratic representative Gary Ackerman, an early J Street supporter, berated the “befuddled” group for being “so open-minded….that its brains have fallen out.”
Ironically, Abbas rejected Obama’s concessions and, for the first and only time in his presidency, the United States cast its veto in the Security Council. At pains to explain why the administration opposed the condemnation of the settlements that it had repeatedly denounced, Ambassador Rice reasoned that resolving the fundamental issues dividing Israelis and Palestinians was their job, not the UN’s. She simultaneously delivered a blistering criticism of a policy that “has undermined Israel’s security and corroded hopes for peace and stability in the region…violates Israel’s international commitments, devastates trust between the parties, and threatens the prospects for peace.” The White House was angry—more with Israel than at Abbas—and while Israel won, our victory seemed Pyrrhic.
Worse than the fracas following Biden’s visit to Israel and the tensions generated by the settlement freeze, the controversy surrounding the Security Council vote—though largely hidden from the public—was dire. This time the president kept Israeli leaders in the dark while dealing with issues vital to their national security. The prime minister had incited Congress against the White House. And I felt utterly crushed. Having set out with the goal of maintaining trust between Washington and Jerusalem, I found that objective more distant than ever.
Just how remote became clear in my conversation with Susan Rice three weeks later. I met her early in my term, when she came to the Residence for breakfast. Though Rice was reputedly prickly, I found her to be affable and patently smart, as I helped her plan a trip to Israel. I suggested that she visit Yemin Orde, a youth village on Mount Carmel named for the pro-Zionist British general Orde Wingate, whom I always admired. The village is home to a number of young Ethiopian immigrants who touched Rice emotionally, she later told me. Now, in her office opposite UN headquarters in New York, she sat brooding and peevishly tapping her forehead with her finger. “Israel must freeze all settlement activity,” she said bluntly. “Otherwise the United States will not be able to protect Israel from Palestinian actions at the UN.” My suggestion—posed in the most velveteen tone—that the American practice of allowing the Palestinians to pocket concessions deprived them of a reason not to go to the UN, was angrily rebuffed. So, too, was my speculation that Israel might have preferred a U.S. abstention on the vote rather than the American offers to Abbas. “If you don’t appreciate the fact that we defend you night and day, tell us,” Rice fumed, practically rapping her forehead. “We have other important things to do.”
—
So, apparently, did the Arabs, who went on protesting against their rulers and completely ignored the Security Council vote. Disproving the alarmists, no American embassy was touched, much less torched. The only criticism came from the Palestinian Authority, which called for a “Day of Rage” against the United States. “The time has come to spit in the faces of Americans,” boiled Ibrahim Sansour, an Arab member of the Knesset. “Obama can go to hell.”
The terrorists, meanwhile, targeted only Israelis. At 10:30 P.M. on March 11, two teenage Palestinians infiltrated the Itamar settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus. Armed with knives and a rifle, they broke into the Fogel household, slashed the throat of eleven-year-old Yoav, strangled four-year-old Elad, nearly decapitated three-month-old Hadas, and stabbed and shot their parents, Ruth and Ehud.
The Fogel family massacre horrified Americans. The White House condemned it “in the strongest possible terms,” and called on the Palestinian Authority to do likewise. But the shock was short-lived. A right-wing, religious community, Itamar was widely associated with the rising settler violence against Palestinians—the uprooting of olive trees, desecrating of mosques, and even alleged shootings. Considered illegitimate by the Obama administration and illegal by the UN, the settlements were subliminally considered fair targets by a growing body of international opinion, including progressive sectors of the United States. To Dan Arbell and Lior Weintraub at the embassy, I confided my sense that the entire settler population had become “Fogelized”—branded as occupiers who essentially had it coming to them. Increasingly, I feared, all Israelis would become “Fogelized,” deserving of the rockets fired at us.
The Fogel atrocity made a single headline in American papers and was swiftly replaced by stories about the economy’s recovery and the NFL players’ strike. Tornados whorled across southern states, inflicting more than three hundred deaths, and famed actress Elizabeth Taylor passed away. Virtually unregistered by the press was the announcement by Mahmoud Abbas of a reconciliation agreement between his al-Fatah organization and Hamas.
The decision incensed Netanyahu—Hamas terrorists had just shot an antitank missile at an Israeli school bus, killing a student—but Obama’s reaction was subdued. He merely indicated that he expected any future Palestinian unity government to advance the peace process. That reaction did not surprise me, having speculated back in 2008 that a President Obama could someday recognize a Fatah-Hamas Palestinian government. Still, the refusal to distinguish between Hamas and al-Qaeda needled me. Both were jihadist organizations sworn to kill all Jews, to crush Western civilization, and replace it with a medieval caliphate. I was disappointed and yet nothing could diminish my joy when, on the evening of May 2, my Residence phone rang once again.
—
Brooke Anderson, NSC chief of staff, said to me simply, “We got him.”
“Dead or alive?” I laconically asked.
“Dead.”
“Mazal tov.”
I hung up and turned to Sally, who was sitting nearby. “They got him,” I said, to which she likewise replied, “Mazal tov.” Somehow, we both understood Brooke’s message, but when I woke up Netanyahu’s staff—it was 3 A.M. in Israel—no one quite fathomed. “Got who?” And their reaction, when I told them, was a breathless “Wow.”
Osama bin Laden was dead. Two hours after I updated Jerusalem, President Obama appeared on national television and informed the world. “The United States has conducted an operation that killed…a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children,” he announced. “We are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to.”
And all of America rejoiced. Crowds spontaneously gathered at Ground Zero in New York, and college students, many of them wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” outside of the White House. The exultation over bin Laden’s death was another aspect of American culture that was difficult to explain to Israelis, who never celebrate their adversaries’ deaths. Yet the people of Israel, too, shared in America’s pride. “The battle against terrorism is long and relentless and resolute,” Netanyahu, congratulating Obama, declared. “This is a day of victory for justice, for freedom, and for our common civilization.” Largely unheard in all this commotion was the reaction of Hamas, which condemned bin Laden’s killing as “the continuation of the American oppression of…Muslims,” and prayed that “the soul of this Arab warrior rests in peace.”
The elimination of bin Laden was a triumph for Obama. His call to send in the SEALs was courageous—“gutsy,” Defense Secretary Gates later described it—and demonstrated the president’s willingness to make high-risk decisions. The iconic photograph of the White House Situation Room during the operation shows him seated lo
w, in a corner, leading seemingly from behind, but leading nonetheless. Around that fateful table sat twelve other individuals, all of whom I personally knew to be formidable. That team, and not just the man who led it, would firmly resist any Israeli attempt to counter an Obama peace plan.
And such a proposal, I concluded, was more imminent than ever. Bin Laden’s death had emboldened Obama—rightly, perhaps—to take on new Middle East initiatives. These would likely be unveiled in the president’s speech on the region, scheduled for May 19. Netanyahu would arrive in Washington the following day to meet with the president and then address a joint meeting of Congress, at the invitation of Speaker Boehner. I had kept the administration informed about Boehner’s offer, which the White House did not oppose, but hardly welcomed. Any presidential reference to the 1967 lines, and a prime ministerial rejection of it, could bring those tension to a head. The events of the previous months—America’s veto at the UN, the Fatah-Hamas pact—had indeed kicked up much dust. And ahead, I glimpsed only darkness.
Six Days in May
“We’re not sure that the peace process will be mentioned, but even if it is, the section will be very short,” senior White House advisors assured me on Wednesday, May 18, 2011, on the eve of Obama’s nationally televised address. Titled “U.S. Policy in Middle East and North Africa,” the text would furnish a vision of America’s future relations with a revolutionary Middle East, an epic follow-up to the historic Cairo speech two years earlier. Israel and the Palestinians were simply not the focus, the advisors said.
I wanted to believe them. Mahmoud Abbas had just published an op-ed in The New York Times announcing his intention to declare a Palestinian state unilaterally in the UN and then sue Israel in international courts for illegally occupying that state. The Palestinian leader who renounced violence now revealed that his opposition was largely tactical. Terrorism could not defeat Israel, only stain the Palestinians’ reputation and divert global attention from settlements. But a policy designed to isolate, delegitimize, and sanction Israel could bring about its downfall. Lawfare, rather than warfare, became Abbas’s weapon of choice.
Yet, in turning to the international courts, Abbas not only threatened Israel, he violated long-standing Palestinian commitments to the United States. These obligated the Palestinian Authority to seek peace only through negotiations. On the eve of February’s Security Council vote on settlements, he rejected Obama’s offer to embrace the Palestinian position on borders and forced him to veto his own policy. Why, then, would the president now concede the 1967 lines and once again reward Palestinian ill will?
That question recurred to me as I viewed the speech on my office television. My invitation to the event, held at the State Department, had been lost in the embassy’s email—fortunately—for I, alone among the ambassadors present, could not have clapped. Instead, I watched as the president praised the bin Laden operation and pledged to support Middle East democracy, and then devoted a full quarter of his remarks to the peace process. Obama reiterated his belief that the status quo was not sustainable, that the Palestinians living west of the Jordan would eventually outnumber the Jews, and that “technology will make it harder for Israel to defend itself.” He called for the resumption of talks on security and territory as well as efforts to find a “fair and just” solution to the Jerusalem and refugee issues. But then, at last, came the long-dreaded sentence: “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
The Internet headlines instantly flashed: OBAMA ENDORSES THE ’67 BORDERS. The rest of the speech, intended to be one of the most memorable of his term, was roundly ignored. The Palestinian Authority, joined by the Quartet, applauded the 1967 reference, and Republicans condemned it as “throwing Israel under the bus.” But the most vehement response came from Netanyahu. Speaking about his scheduled meeting with Obama the following day, Netanyahu said that he would “expect” the president to reaffirm that Israel would never return to the 1967 lines, that Israeli forces would remain in the Jordan Valley, and that Palestinian refugees would not be resettled in Israel. “The Palestinians…must recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, and any peace agreement with them must end all claims against Israel,” Netanyahu said expectantly. And I expected sparks.
—
I already saw fire in Netanyahu’s eyes the following dawn after his plane landed at Washington’s Dulles Airport. He paused at the top of the stairs, glaring. In place of his usual wave and smile was a grim expression that barely disguised his fury. In the two years since my appointment, I had come to know that anger well—a monumental rage capable, it sounded, of cracking a telephone receiver. But I also gained a more intimate and nuanced perspective of Netanyahu. He is one of the world’s most complex, seasoned, divisive, and hounded leaders, and perhaps its loneliest.
His résumé reads more glowingly than even the most sterling of the Obama administration’s CVs. It includes Netanyahu’s service in Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s equivalent of the Delta Force. The chances of making it into the Unit, as it is popularly known, much less completing its agonizing training, are exceedingly limited. Netanyahu not only finished the course, he became an officer. Once, during a television interview in Israel, the producer introduced himself to me as another Unit veteran. “I can’t stand Bibi,” he said. “But he was not only an exceptional officer, he was a courageous one.” Participating in numerous operations behind enemy lines, wounded in action, Netanyahu also fought in the Yom Kippur War and achieved the rank of captain.
Accepted at Yale and studying at Harvard, he graduated from MIT with an honors BA in architecture and a master’s degree in management. He became a successful analyst at the Boston Consulting Group and would remain, at heart, an economist. For a solid hour once, I listened nearly openmouthed as Netanyahu and Bill Clinton theorized about the mechanisms of markets. Next, Netanyahu became a statesman—first an eloquent deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington, and then a media-savvy ambassador to the UN. Returning to Israel in 1988, he entered politics. He distinguished himself as a foreign minister and finance minister, twice headed the government, and was now closing in on Ben-Gurion’s record as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. All that, plus Netanyahu was a published author, a superb orator in Hebrew and English, conversant in French, a serious reader, and, in his heyday, famous for his good looks. Who would not be impressed by that résumé, if not intimidated?
And yet respect and fear were far from the only emotions the prime minister evoked. “Recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous”—were just some of the adjectives that, according to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, senior White House officials attached to Netanyahu. In the left-leaning Israeli press, especially, vilifying him was close to a national pastime. “He panics quickly in the face of every lurking shadow and every insinuated threat,” carped political columnist Ben Caspit. “He plays against himself and always ends in a tie.” For Netanyahu, TV analyst Raviv Druker observed, “it’s always the world against Netanyahu.” Nahum Barnea, Israel’s equivalent of Thomas Friedman, wrote most cuttingly, “He’s not so big that he can afford to be so small.”
But the real Thomas Friedman was no less censorious. For him, Netanyahu was “annoying” and “disconnected from reality” and, most commonly, “arrogant.” No less than their Israeli counterparts, American commentators—almost all of them Jewish—were fiercely indisposed toward Netanyahu. Joe Klein, of Time, decried him as “outrageous…cynical and brazen.” For The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Netanyahu was “smug and lacking diplomatic creativity,” a firebrand who posed a risk “to the future of his own country.” In The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier described him as a “gray, muddling, reactive figure…a creature of the bunker.” When I suggested to Leon that his hatred of Bibi had become pathological, he merely shrugged and admitted, “Yes, I know, it’s pathological.”
The antagonism sparked by Netanyahu, I graduall
y noticed, resembled that traditionally triggered by the Jews. We were always the ultimate Other—communists in the view of the capitalists and capitalists in communist eyes, nationalists for the cosmopolitans and, for jingoists, the International Jew. So, too, was Netanyahu declaimed as “reckless” by White House sources and incapable of decision making by many Israelis. He was branded intransigent by The New York Times, yet Haaretz faulted him for never taking a stand. Washington insiders assailed him for being out of touch with America, and the Tel Aviv branja—the intellectual elite—snubbed him for being too American. The Israeli right lambasted him for spinelessness, the left for intractability, the Ultra-Orthodox for heresy, and the secular for pandering to rabbis. All agreed in labeling Netanyahu disingenuous, imperious, and paralyzed by paranoia—qualities not uncommon among politicians.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu remained in office, virtually unopposed. In Israel’s often cutthroat political culture, that achievement would be remarkable enough, but was even more astounding in light of Israel’s precarious political system. Unlike the U.S. president’s four-year term, an Israeli prime minister’s can be ended at any time by a no-confidence vote. The commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces is the president, but the IDF’s commander is the Israeli government, which the prime minister has to persuade to act. “Your worst day in Washington is Bibi’s best day,” Ron Dermer periodically reminded me. In contrast to Obama’s cabinet, often described as a Lincoln-like “team of rivals,” Netanyahu’s contained multiple ministers actively seeking to unseat him.
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