by Glen Johnson
Then the prime minister took him across the room to show him a photo of his older brother, Jonathan.
He had the sad distinction of being the only Israeli soldier killed in the July 4, 1976, raid in Entebbe, Uganda, that freed 102 Israeli hostages held by two Palestinian airplane hijackers. The prime minister stood silently looking at Jonathan Netanyahu’s picture as the secretary peered over his shoulder.
After getting lost in his thoughts, Prime Minister Netanyahu bit the knuckle on his right index finger, said, “Huh,” and turned away, leaving Kerry behind.
It was clear the Israeli leader had not just political but personal history with the Palestinians.
On January 5, 2016, Secretary Kerry updated reporters on the talks before we flew on to Jordan and Saudi Arabia for related discussions with Arab leaders.
“This is deeply steeped in history, and each side has a narrative about their rights and their journey and the conflict itself,” he said. “In the end, all of these different core issues actually fit together like a mosaic. It’s a puzzle, and you can’t separate out one piece or another. Because what a leader might be willing to do with respect to a compromise on one particular piece is dependent on what the other leader might be willing to do with respect to a different particular piece.”171
The give-and-take elicited “strong responses,” the secretary said, including from Moshe Ya’alon, the Israeli defense minister. On January 14, 2014, the Israeli tabloid Yedioth Ahronoth quoted his infamous comment that “the only thing that can ‘save’ us is for John Kerry to win his Nobel Prize and leave us alone.”172
(Top) Departing from Jordan, a key intermediary. (Bottom) Arriving in Tel Aviv.
(Top) Saeb Arakat addressing Secretary Kerry, media in Ramallah. (Bottom) Joint news conference in Jerusalem.
(Top) Examining olive wood figurines in Bethlehem. (Bottom) Landing in West Bank.
(Top) Shabbat dinner with Shimon Peres. (Bottom) Laying a wreath at Yitzhak Rabin memorial in Tel Aviv.
(Top) Secretary Kerry and Prime Minister Netanyahu address media in Rabin Suite. (Bottom) The secretary and President Abbas in Ramallah, West Bank.
Many Israelis and American Jews leapt to Secretary Kerry’s defense, with Liberman, the new, hawkish Israeli foreign minister, labeling him a “true friend of Israel.”173
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, a longtime Middle East observer, suggested such barbs stemmed from the secretary forcing Israeli leaders to confront the hard choices embedded in a two-state solution.
“[Secretary Kerry] and President Obama are trying to build Israelis a secure off-ramp from the highway they’re hurtling down in the West Bank that only ends in some really bad places for Israel and the Jewish people,” Friedman wrote on February 12, 2014.174
Uri Dromi, a former Israeli Air Force pilot who was spokesman for the Rabin government during the Oslo talks, wrote in the Miami Herald: “Like a good surgeon, [Secretary Kerry] is telling us the truth about the operation necessary to save us from one, binational state, where Israel might either lose its democracy or its Jewish nature. We should thank him, not badmouth him.”175
Among the qualities that emerged over the course of the negotiations was John Kerry’s ability to blot out such criticism and remain focused on his goal, in this case the framework language.
While a mantra among the negotiators was that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” he moved Prime Minister Netanyahu toward supporting international compensation for both Palestinians and Israelis displaced by the 1947 War. He got the Palestinians to acknowledge there would be no comprehensive right to return, and the Israelis made a commitment to a new border based on the 1967 borders “with mutually agreed swaps.”176
The prime minister balked at a US proposal under which both sides would have their capital in Jerusalem, and he insisted Israel be proclaimed “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” a declaration to which President Abbas objected.177
The secretary invited the president and the Palestinian negotiating team to his home in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood in mid-March 2014. During the conversation, he asked whether they would agree to a delay in releasing the fourth group of prisoners.
President Abbas refused and, as The New Republic reported in a 2014 reconstruction of the negotiations, concluded the moment was a turning point in the talks.
“If the Americans can’t convince Israel to give me twenty-six prisoners, how will they ever get them to give me East Jerusalem?” the magazine reported President Abbas as thinking.178
About two weeks later, Kerry asked President Obama to approve a three-way deal he’d crafted to merely keep the talks going.
He proposed having Israel release the final group of prisoners, plus four hundred more of its choosing. He also wanted Netanyahu to halt all new settlement announcements in the West Bank. In return, the Palestinians would agree to continue the talks for another nine months.179
The United States, meanwhile, would do something to boost Prime Minister Netanyahu at home: release spy Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish American convicted of stealing Top Secret US intelligence and passing it along to Israel while he worked for the US Navy.180
Israeli leaders had tried to free Pollard since he pleaded guilty in 1987, but the US intelligence establishment vehemently objected. Then CIA director George Tenet threatened to resign when President Clinton considered pardoning him.
The fourth group of prisoners was to be released on March 29, 2014, and the day before that, Secretary Kerry joined President Obama aboard Air Force One for a flight from Rome to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That evening, he asked the president to approve the three-way Pollard deal to keep the talks alive.
The New Republic revealed the reluctant president’s response.
“I’m not doing this because I want to, John,” the magazine quoted President Obama as saying. “I’m doing this for you.”181
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EVEN WITH THE PRESIDENT’S endorsement, Secretary Kerry was left at the whim of the Israelis and the Palestinians.
It wasn’t for a lack of energy, effort, or creativity—as exemplified by what turned into the most turbulent day of our four years at the State Department.
After accompanying the president on his trip to Saudi Arabia, Kerry was slated to fly home to the United States.
We took off from Riyadh as scheduled on March 29, 2014, but as we flew northwest over Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, the secretary asked about the feasibility of returning to Israel or Jordan to try to rescue the negotiations through a series of face-to-face meetings.
It’s hard for the secretary of State to just pop up in a destination, since his aircraft has to get a diplomatic clearance, his security team has to get in place and secure a motorcade, and The Line has to dispatch Advance officers to organize accommodations and other logistics.
That meant we couldn’t just set down in the Middle East; but as the flight bore on, the State Department staff pulled off a near-impossible alternative.
The secretary was told that DS agents who’d been in the Netherlands for the visit he and President Obama had just made to The Hague could jump on a train and get to Paris in time to receive us. Meanwhile, the staff at the US embassy in Paris had good relationships with the local police, vendors, and hotels. They’d be able to get rental cars and rooms at a regular haunt—the InterContinental Paris Le Grande—and lock down travel routes for our visit.
Team Paris was about the most experienced in the State Department in dealing with us, after Kerry had paid more than a dozen visits to their city.
So, somewhere over Europe, the secretary called an audible: we were returning to the Middle East after a pit stop in Europe. The aircraft commander canceled our trip home, made our planned refueling stop in Ireland, and then reprogrammed his flight computer to fly us back to Paris.
When we landed at LeBourget Airport, a place we weren’t supposed to have been just six hours before, there was a sight to behold: the DS agents from
Holland waiting at the foot of the stairs, a motorcade of freshly rented black minivans lined across the tarmac, and the Gendarmerie sitting on motorcycles with flashing blue lights to help us get downtown. Even Christophe Laure, the general manager of the Le Grand, was standing at the curb when we pulled up to the hotel.
The Building had worked its magic.
During this unexpected visit to Paris, Kerry continued a series of phone calls to Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas to try to salvage the deal.
I captured the frustration of the situation the next morning when I snapped a photo of the then deputy chief of staff, Jon Finer, resting one hand on his forehead while using his other to hold a cellphone to his ear. He was lying on his back in a stairwell at our hotel, the railing for the stairs corkscrewing downward for three stories below him.
When I emailed the photo to Finer, I wrote in the subject line: “Death Spiral.”
But as Finer worked the phone in that stairwell, I overheard him relay a sentiment of Secretary Kerry’s while he spoke with Lowenstein and Indyk, the leaders of our negotiating team.
“I’d rather get criticized for trying too hard than giving up too easily,” Finer told them the Boss said.182
The next morning, with our flight crew fully rested, we drove back out to the plane and returned to Israel. We were supposed to meet in both Tel Aviv with Prime Minister Netanyahu and in Ramallah with President Abbas, but the talks with the prime minister dragged on until nearly midnight.
Prime Minister Netanyahu faced a series of challenges within his governing coalition, trying to maintain support from pro-settler forces opposed to a settlement freeze, while also trying to fend off conservatives who opposed the release of the fourth tranche of prisoners—let alone the four hundred more who would be part of the Pollard deal.
When the secretary came back to the David Citadel, he cut a slice from a chocolate cake that had been in the refrigerator and poured himself a frequent drink: half orange juice, half sparkling water.
“Guys, between now and tomorrow, I need a punch list of all outstanding items—and I don’t want a long punch list,” he said. “I think it’s very important to get that vote [of the Israeli Cabinet] tomorrow. We’ve got to get something cooking.”183
Little did he know it was too late.
As The New Republic later reported, President Abbas was angry the secretary had canceled his trip to Ramallah scheduled for the night of March 31, 2014. To him, it exemplified Kerry’s excessive concern for the Israeli position.
There was some truth to that, but the Israelis also had something the Palestinians wanted—the remaining prisoners. If the secretary couldn’t deliver them, there wasn’t any point talking to the Palestinians about their other demands.184
Unbeknownst to Kerry, President Abbas set a deadline of 7 p.m. on April 1, 2014, for winning the prisoners’ release. If the Israelis didn’t meet it, he’d sign the Palestinian applications for various UN memberships.185
The March 29 deadline came and went, as did additional promises for action on two more deadlines, March 30 and March 31, 2014.
We returned to the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem at 9 a.m. on April 1, 2014, and Kerry immediately vented as Prime Minister Netanyahu and Molcho, his personal lawyer, quibbled with him and the White House about the details of releasing Pollard.
“Guys, this is what you did with the framework: you’re killing it with repetition,” the secretary said, pointing to a piece of paper. “It doesn’t need to say it eighteen times. It says it once, right there.”186
The three then spun around and went into the prime minister’s personal office.
To underscore the fluidity of the situation, our staff and traveling press corps waited back at the David Citadel, sitting in their idling vans in anticipation of an imminent departure for the airport. We were due to fly back to Europe for a NATO meeting, although no one was quite sure when we’d take off.
We eventually traveled to Brussels, and the secretary was sitting in a bilat with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu when we received a bolt of news: President Abbas had made good on his threat. Before an audience at the Palestinian Authority Headquarters in Ramallah, he signed applications for membership in fifteen UN conventions and international treaties.
“I warned them,” Kerry said of the Israelis. “I gave them as stark a warning as I could have.”187
The secretary immediately called Indyk and Lowenstein on his cellphone, before trying to call Prime Minister Netanyahu.
When told Netanyahu was busy, the secretary was remarkably composed.
“Well, let’s just keep plugging along,” he said. “This could be a good pressure-cooker, steam-valve move: let (the Palestinians) feel good about themselves and then get back to it.”188
Over the next several weeks, the sides talked in an effort to get an extension, but they largely spoke past one another.
On April 23, 2014, the Palestinians took an even more controversial step that effectively killed the deal: they announced they were forming a unity government with Hamas, the terrorist organization controlling the Gaza Strip, to create a single Palestinian voice.
Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, so the Israelis pulled out of the talks with the Palestinian Authority the next day.
Things spiraled from there.
On June 12, 2014, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped while hitchhiking in the West Bank. The Israelis unleashed a furious response, arresting nearly 350 people and killing five Palestinians during the next eleven days.189
Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel. That prompted the Israeli Defense Force to launch an invasion into Gaza on July 8, 2014. During the next seven weeks, more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed and an estimated 10,000 were wounded. Some sixty-six Israeli soldiers and six civilians also died.190
Fearing the third Intifada he’d warned against, Kerry shifted from trying to negotiate a long-term peace to trying to reach an immediate cease-fire. It prompted another of those frenzied resource-burning periods during our tenure.
First, we parked in Cairo, working late into the night across several days as Kerry urged Egyptian, Turkish, and Qatari officials to try to rein in Hamas and restore the Israeli–Palestinian talks.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, however, didn’t want to halt the military operation until he dismantled a tunnel network Hamas used to move across Gaza and, on occasion, into Israel.
The talks continued as we traveled on to New Delhi for our annual Strategic Dialogue with Indian leaders. Finally, at 2:19 a.m. local time on August 1, 2014, Kerry exchanged high fives with Finer, his deputy chief of staff, after both sides ostensibly agreed to a seventy-two-hour cease-fire beginning at 8 a.m.
“Pulled it back from the brink-e-rino,” the secretary said as they celebrated the moment.191
Finer replied: “That was like giving birth to a Dodge Ram.”192
Later, addressing reporters, Secretary Kerry said: “This is not a time for congratulation and joy, or anything except a serious determination, a focus by everybody to try to figure out the road ahead. This is a respite. It’s a moment of opportunity, not an end. It’s not a solution. It’s the opportunity to find the solution.”193
The secretary’s wariness was well justified. The joy he initially felt was short-lived, as it had been throughout the peace process talks.
Hamas accused the Israelis of destroying nineteen buildings in Gaza as they blew up tunnels at 8:30 a.m.—a half hour after the cease-fire was to begin. The Israelis accused Hamas of attacking a group of Israeli soldiers. Either way, the cease-fire fizzled after little more than six hours after it was announced, and the fighting continued through a second cease-fire.
Finally, a third cease-fire stuck on August 26, 2014, but the long-term damage was done.
What started with the hope of a deal bringing peace between the Israelis and Palestinians fizzled amid new fighting among the parties. Pollard wasn’t released until he was grante
d parole in 2015; and he was kept in the United States, not handed over to the Israelis.
Kerry accepted the futility of the situation and didn’t return to Israel for more than a year, until November 24, 2015. In the intervening months, he turned his attention to negotiating a deal with Iran to control its nuclear program.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, meanwhile, focused on scuttling the Iran agreement—most conspicuously by traveling to Washington in March 2015 and addressing a Joint Session of Congress.
The leader of a foreign country was lobbying US legislators—from the podium used for the State of the Union address—against a diplomatic engagement led by a sitting president, Barack Obama.
Kerry labeled the invitation by Republican leaders, who held a majority and controlled Congress, as “treasonous.” During one phone call to Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, he told the Nevada Democrat: “I don’t think I’ve been as upset about anything since I have been secretary of State.”194
Kerry and Prime Minister Netanyahu met again in Berlin in October 2015, as violence flared between Jews and Muslims over access to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The secretary had a bad cold and was drinking cup after cup of tea loaded with honey as he tried to regain his voice. He asked Lowenstein, who’d since replaced Ambassador Indyk as the special envoy for Israeli–Palestinian negotiations, to make his case to Netanyahu for easing access to the holy site.
Expressing anew frustration he’d felt throughout the broader peace talks, the secretary said to Lowenstein: “It’s entirely driven by domestic politics. His entire goal is to stay on Balfour Street.”
That’s the road in Jerusalem where a prime minister lives.
Kerry took one more stab at revitalizing the peace process in early 2016, when he convened a secret meeting with King Abdullah II, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the king’s winter home in Aqaba, Jordan.
