Many Israelis, though, no longer wanted to be saved. While some 70 percent of the public still supported the two-state solution, a greater portion had lost faith in Abbas’s ability to implement it. A majority wanted to see the Palestinians enjoy the right to self-determination, but not at the cost of denying Israelis the most fundamental right: to life. They looked around the Middle East and saw the overthrow of corrupt, nonelected Arab rulers and their replacement by Islamist radicals. Israelis saw the unraveling of the Arab states created by Westerners and wondered why the West would want to make another artificial state run by a corrupt, nonelected regime. They watched Mahmoud Abbas name public squares after suicide bombers and extol the murderers of innocent Israelis. Americans traumatized by the jihadist bombers who killed four and wounded more than 250 Bostonians during the April 15 marathon might understand why Israelis feared coming within rifle range of a state that praised terrorism and was likely to mount it.
Surprisingly, then, Kerry’s first meeting with the top Israeli leadership was upbeat. Netanyahu and his senior ministers presented a compelling plan for moving forward incrementally but swiftly with Abbas. Each phase in the process required both sides to make difficult concessions while also garnering benefits. The prime minister’s sticking point was, as always, security. Hezbollah smuggled missiles over the Syrian, not the Israeli, border, and rockets reached Hamas via Egypt, not Israel. Accordingly, Israeli forces would have to guard the eastern frontier of any future Palestinian state to prevent it from becoming another South Lebanon or Gaza. Israel could not rely on other troops to do the job—not Palestinian, not Jordanian, and not even American—only the IDF. “You are our ally,” Netanyahu passionately reminded Kerry. “We look to you to back us in safeguarding our future.”
Kerry was impressed and agreed to send U.S. military experts to assess Israel’s security needs in detail. But the Palestinians again set preconditions for resuming talks: a complete construction freeze in the territories and East Jerusalem, Israeli acceptance of the principle of the 1967 lines with swaps, and the freeing of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Kerry succeeded in convincing Abbas to settle for just one of these demands, and to let Netanyahu choose which of the three to meet. I would have preferred another moratorium, which at least would have removed West Bank construction as a constant irritant in the process. But Netanyahu saw both the freeze and the 1967 lines as predetermining the outcome of the negotiations, and selected the prisoner release. The decision proved agonizingly controversial. The murderers of hundreds of Israelis—among them a Holocaust survivor hacked to death with an ax—would once again be greeted as heroes by the Palestinians.
Kerry also laid down rules that restricted the talks to a small number of negotiators—Yitzik Molcho and Tzipi Livni on Israel’s side—who would pledge never to leak to the press. This left me with little role other than onlooker, and for the first time I was grateful. The axiom, widely attributed to Albert Einstein, defining insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” sounded apt. The Oslo formula that I described as outdated to Senator Obama’s advisors in 2008, five years and repeated failed peace attempts later, looked even more antiquated. The belief that somehow a more intensified initiative, even when launched by an energetic secretary of state, could somehow triumph where generations of mediators had stumbled, seemed unfounded at best.
Perhaps I had become jaded by the stop-and-go mediation efforts since 2009. Though still confident in the depth of Israel’s yearning for peace and its readiness to make the requisite sacrifices, I could not perceive a Palestinian leader who was yet able and willing to sign. The necessary trust—not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but between both parties and the U.S. administration—was absent. As such, Abbas was likely to pocket any concessions that Kerry pried from Israel, declare a Palestinian state unilaterally in the UN, and then sue Israel in the International Criminal Court for illegally occupying that state. Israel would continue to announce new building projects in the areas considered occupied by most of the world, and each time be censored by Washington.
“Our problem is not that the Palestinians are not a people,” I told Kerry’s advisors. “It’s that they’re not a people ready to sustain statehood. Help them follow Israel’s model of creating viable institutions first and then erecting the state on top of them.” But my counsel remained unheaded. Kerry wanted results, and rapidly. He embarked on a shuttle mission that, at least in terms of its physical demands, was impressive, but it soon encountered familiar snags. Israel’s announcement of its intention to legalize four unauthorized West Bank settlements sparked a harsh State Department response and even a caviling phone call to me from Kerry. On the Palestinian side, Salam Fayyad, the farsighted prime minister, the Texas-trained economist who pursued a nonviolent, corruption-free path to transparent institution building, was forced out of office by Abbas.
The administration, meanwhile, kept warning Israel about the dangers of international isolation and delegitimization campaigns—“on steroids,” Kerry added—if it missed this diplomatic opportunity. Again, I tried telling Kerry’s team that these statements made Israelis feel less secure and more resistant to risk-taking. The warnings about Israel’s deteriorating situation in the world nevertheless continued, along with other messages that the administration misguidedly believed would advance the talks. “People in Israel aren’t waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow there’ll be peace,” the secretary said in Jerusalem on May 23, “because there is a sense of security…accomplishment and…prosperity.” This was the same insulting “Israelis have it too good to make peace” argument that I once helped convince Hillary Clinton to drop. Regrettably, Kerry revived it.
In time, Kerry would caution Israelis about the outbreak of a Third Intifada if they failed to make peace, of facing economic boycotts and of becoming an apartheid state. Perceived as threats, these messages reinforced, rather than weakened, those most opposed to his initiative. Then, as his special Middle East envoy, the secretary named the veteran peace negotiator Martin Indyk. This, too, was counterproductive. British-born, raised in Australia, and naturalized as a citizen of the United States, where he initially worked for AIPAC, Indyk later served twice as America’s ambassador to Israel. There, and later, as the Brookings Institution’s policy director, he had a frosty relationship with Netanyahu. I respected Indyk’s diplomatic experience and tried to advise him on ways of earning Netanyahu’s trust. Still, the question hounded me: if Kerry was serious about the process, why did he seem intent on shaking Israelis’ faith in it?
Kerry nevertheless kept shuttling throughout July, and, by pure persistence, managed to register some early gains. He convinced the Arab League to endorse possible land swaps between Israel and some future Palestinian state. In 2009, when Netanyahu called for an “economic peace” fueled by foreign investment in the West Bank, the Obama administration reacted coolly. Kerry now resuscitated the policy and tried to raise $4 billion for Palestinian economic development. When, in 2011, the White House looked askance at Netanyahu’s decision to trade Corporal Gilad Shalit for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, claiming it strengthened Hamas, it now nudged him to release more than one hundred Palestinian prisoners to Abbas. The prime minister also accepted a nine-month timetable for talks, reflecting his concern that the longer the process, the broader its exposure to violent opposition.
Finally, on July 29, in the presence of Palestinian and Israeli negotiators on the State Department’s mock-colonial eighth floor, the secretary announced the start of negotiations. “Reasonable principled compromise in the name of peace means that everybody stands to gain,” he said. “A viable two-state solution is the only way this conflict can end, and there is not much time to achieve it.”
Listening as Kerry spoke, I still questioned whether the American notion of win-win could apply to the Middle East, with its preference for zero-sums, and whether a century of conflict could be resolved in thre
e-quarters of a year. My doubts about the Palestinians’ willingness to give up their dream of repatriating to Jaffa and Haifa, and their demands to resettle millions of refugees in Israel proper, persisted. Israelis, too, would be asked to make immense sacrifices and take risks that increasing numbers of them regarded as futile or worse—suicidal. As I listened to Kerry, I was unconvinced, yet also hoping against my own inner conviction that he would nevertheless prevail. If, in this one dramatic swoop, Kerry could lift Israelis and Palestinians out of our impasse, I would more than welcome him onstage.
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Behind the curtain, meanwhile, America was interacting with Iran. Despite the administration’s repeated denials that it was negotiating directly with Tehran, Israeli officials feared that such talks were indeed taking place. Israel, in fact, had the greatest interest in exhausting all possible diplomatic options—and the most to lose if those options failed. Our fear was that Washington could forge an agreement with Iran that left the latter with the ability to make a bomb quickly and quietly behind the world’s back. Israel could be permanently endangered.
One of the best safeguards against that outcome was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Holocaust denier, hater of homosexuals, and self-proclaimed nemesis of the West, Iran’s president helped strengthen global opinion that the Islamic Republic could not be trusted with military nuclear capabilities. Though the supreme leader and not the president made all the real decisions in Iran, Ahmadinejad happily collaborated in rejecting all diplomatic options—and exhausting America’s patience. Consequently, the P5+1 would ramp up the sanctions and maintain the credible military threat necessary, in Israel’s view, to convince Iran to dismantle its nuclear program entirely.
Accordingly, Israelis were anxious rather than relieved when Ahmadinejad concluded his term on June 15 and turned over the presidency to the newly elected Hassan Rouhani. Unlike his coarse, shabbily dressed predecessor, Rouhani was charismatic and refined, a Scottish-educated jurist who boasted a cleric’s distinguished turban and robe. He was also an avowed moderate committed to reducing his nation’s chronic inflation and unemployment. “Our goal is the shared interest between the two nations,” he said of Iran’s future relations with the United States. “Our goal is step-by-step creating trust between the governments and peoples.” In his interviews and articles in the American media, Rouhani specifically renounced any Iranian intention of developing nuclear weapons. He called for a new compromise with the United States based on awareness of “the interests of others and…mutual respect.”
These were almost the exact words Obama used in his first inaugural address in reaching out to the Muslim world, and that he used again in hailing the supreme leader’s fatwa—Islamic decree—issued against nuclear weaponry and the “unique opportunity to make progress with the new leadership in Tehran.” Perhaps more than any Muslim leader, Rouhani embodied the vision laid out in the Cairo speech: the authentic, democratically chosen leader ready to reconcile with the West. No wonder Obama spoke to Rouhani by phone on September 27, a day after Kerry met with his Iranian counterpart. The conversation between the two presidents represented the highest level of U.S.-Iranian contacts in more than thirty years.
And it was little mystery that Israelis were distressed. Rouhani, they reminded their American counterparts, was a product of the Islamic Revolution, one of five candidates carefully selected by the supreme leader, who still made all the real decisions in Iran. As the Iranian official responsible for negotiating with the West over the nuclear issue between 2003 and 2005, Rouhani boasted of exploiting the talks to “buy time to advance Iran’s program.” On Israel, too, he seemed to be playing a double game. After he had referred to the Jewish State as a “miserable country” and “a wound on the body of the Islamic world for years [that] should be removed,” Iranian state television claimed he was misquoted. After tweeting Rosh Hashanah greetings to Iran’s Jewish community, the president’s office denied that he even had a Twitter account.
“Ahmadinejad was a wolf in wolf’s clothing and Rouhani is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” a clearly irritated Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly, “a wolf who thinks he can pull the wool over the eyes of the international community.” The prime minister’s insistence in branding Rouhani a fraud—and, by implication—Obama a dupe, put him again at odds with the administration. While in Washington the conventional assessment was that Rouhani represented a genuinely moderate wing of the regime and should therefore be strengthened, in Israel he was merely Iran’s latest and most sophisticated feint.
Back in graduate school, I learned about taqqiya, the Shiite concept that permits believers to dissimulate their true ideas in order to advance the interests of faith. Iran had often practiced taqqiya in pursuing its nuclear program—lying about facilities, quoting antiproliferation fatwas that never existed—and so, too, might Rouhani. In time, the Iranian president would reinstitute the Holocaust denial conference started by his predecessor and authorize more executions, per capita, than in any other country.
Administration sources meanwhile continued leaking reports of IDF air strikes in Syria. One of these, a May 3 bombing of a Damascus warehouse purportedly containing yet another shipment of advanced missiles for Hezbollah, was said to have killed forty-two Syrian soldiers. Israel again withheld comment on the action, but the American leak spurred Assad to threaten counterattacks. At the embassy, I asked my staff what would impel some U.S. official to risk triggering bloodshed between Israel and Syria. Perhaps, one diplomat suggested, the White House wanted to distract Israel’s attention from efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.
The divergent views on Rouhani and the concern over the reported IDF air strikes were already chipping at the goodwill established during Obama’s visit to Israel. The erosion was accelerated by a senior Israeli intelligence officer who revealed that Assad’s forces had conducted multiple chemical attacks. The media promptly pounced on Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, with questions about whether Obama would now enforce his red line. “We know the Syrian government has the capacity to carry out chemical weapons attacks,” Carney said, struggling to equivocate. “We remain skeptical of any claim that the opposition used chemical weapons.”
Obama’s red line nevertheless resurfaced. Irrespective of their attitudes toward Israel, Americans overwhelmingly esteemed its information-gathering capability and greeted Carney’s response incredulously. When, they wanted to know, would the president stand by his mark in the sand?
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The question would be deferred for several months while America’s attention once again swerved southwest, to Egypt. In spite of his USC degree and Obama’s earnest efforts to bolster him as Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamad Morsi became indistinguishable from his predecessor, Mubarak. “The president can issue any decision or measure to protect the Revolution,” the Muslim Brotherhood government decreed. “The constitutional declaration, decisions and laws issued by the president are final and not subject to appeal.” In reaction to these draconian edicts, the deteriorating economy, and continued police brutality, protests broke out across the country.
Back in 2011, when a million demonstrators gathered in Tahrir Square, the American press covered the event round-the-clock. Just over two years later, in June 2013, when an estimated 14 million people protested in Cairo and 22 million signed a petition demanding Morsi’s ouster, that same media all but ignored Egypt. The sole focus, rather, was on the trial of George Zimmerman, an armed neighborhood watchman in Florida who shot African-American teenager Trayvon Martin. Back in 2011, Obama determined that Mubarak had to step down immediately. Now the president called for restraint and personally phoned Morsi. He urged the Egyptian leader to be responsive to the demonstrators’ wishes. “Democracy is about more than elections,” the U.S. president said; “it is also about ensuring that the voices of all Egyptians are heard.”
Morsi’s reaction was to clamp down on his opponents. Hundreds of people were kille
d in clashes between opposing factions, and innumerable women were raped. The Egyptian Army, which had stood aside while Mubarak fell and the Brotherhood purged the military’s senior ranks, now stepped in and called for immediate elections. Morsi stood fast, proclaiming, “We do not declare jihad against each other. We only wage jihad on our enemies.” The army’s response, delivered on July 3 by its commander, General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, was to arrest Morsi and three hundred of his followers
The United States nevertheless continued to back Morsi. Obama said, “I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly…to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government…and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy [sic] and his supporters.” The result was an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism throughout Egypt. Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador who so bravely helped rescue Israel’s diplomatic staff in Cairo, was branded an “ogre.” Posters of her smeared in bloodred paint bobbled over Tahrir Square, along with images of America’s president with a Brotherhood beard and the label “Obama bin Laden.”
Still, America’s position remained unchanged. The reason was democracy. In a rare show of bipartisanship reminiscent of the early days of the Arab Spring, both Republicans and Democrats, Tea Partiers and Progressives opposed what all agreed was a military coup in Egypt. The same president who, four years earlier in Cairo, declared, “No system of government can or should be imposed on one nation by any other,” now championed Bush’s “democracy agenda.” No matter how autocratic and oppressive Morsi’s rule, the mere fact that it arose from elections, and was ended by force, made it legitimate in American eyes.
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