From January 21 to January 27 at Taba in Egypt, Barak and Arafat tried one last time to come to terms. But Barak was slipping daily in the polls, and after a fraught and contested election, a new president had just been inaugurated in the United States and no one knew what approach he would take. Talks soon ended and violence escalated. In Israel, commentators began to pronounce the Oslo peace process well and truly dead.
In the months that followed, controversy raged over the question of who bore responsibility for the collapse of the peace negotiations. In this debate the sticking points in the negotiations and the failure of the sides to agree were conflated with the consequences of Sharon’s provocative visit to Al Haram Al Sharif. Some blamed Yasser Arafat for the ensuing violence as well as for the negotiations’ collapse, saying that he had orchestrated the violence in order to win more Israeli concessions. Others suggested that the Americans had sided with Barak and had not pressed him for sufficient concessions. Some pointed out that not enough preparation had gone into Camp David and that what was offered to the Palestinians fell short of what they deserved or wanted. But the truth is that in the seven long years since the signing of the Oslo Accords, too many promises had been broken and trust had frayed. Palestinians knew that Ehud Barak would soon be voted out of office and doubted his ability to deliver given the weakening state of his government. It was a tragic and costly failure.
Chapter 18
Seeking Peace, Getting War
During the Clinton administration, Iraq and America exchanged many violent words and a few missiles but stopped short of outright war. But in January 2001, as the administration of George W. Bush came into office, that dynamic began to change. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Elliott Abrams, and Richard Perle had long harbored ambitions to take down Saddam Hussein and finish the job that Bush’s father, in their eyes, had begun. Many of these neocons began to take up strategic positions in the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department. They had the access; now all they lacked was the opportunity. All too soon, one would present itself.
The Bush administration showed little or no interest in building on the work of the Clinton administration. The day after Bush came into office, on January 21, 2001, the Israelis and Palestinians met at Taba in Egypt to try to follow on from the previous year’s negotiation at Camp David and, with the assistance of Clinton’s last-minute proposals (the Clinton Parameters), to bridge their final differences. But the talks soon broke down. After Taba, the revolving door in Israel began to spin again.
Ehud Barak was defeated in March by the Likud Party, led by Ariel Sharon. By electing Sharon, the Israeli public was sending a clear message. As his actions would soon demonstrate, Sharon had little interest in peace.
As dusk fell on the evening of May 18, 2001, Israeli F-16 fighters took off from their bases, heading for the West Bank and Gaza. Some of their bombs struck at the Palestinian security headquarters in Nablus, flattening the complex and killing eight people. Others hit targets in Ramallah and the Gaza Strip, killing eleven people and wounding many more. It was the first time since the 1967 war that Israel had attacked the Palestinians with fighter jets, and the strikes brought international condemnation. An unrepentant Ariel Sharon said in an interview with an Israeli newspaper, “We will do everything necessary and use everything we have to protect Israeli citizens.”
The Israeli attack was the culmination of a week of escalating violence. On May 14, five Palestinian police officers were killed by Israeli soldiers. Four days later, on the morning of May 18, Hamas sent a suicide bomber to attack a shopping mall in the coastal resort town of Netanya, killing five shoppers and wounding around a hundred more. Later that evening the Israelis deployed their warplanes and bombs. Each side seemed to be trying to outdo the other in atrocities. Every human life is sacred, and I believe it is simply wrong to target innocent civilians, whether using suicide bombers or F-16 jets.
U.S. vice president Dick Cheney appealed for calm in a television interview a few days later, saying, “I think they should stop, both sides should stop and think about where they are headed here, and recognize that down this road lies disaster.” But neither side was listening.
Later that year, on September 8, 2001, I sent a letter to President Bush urging him to speak out on the Palestinian problem, and I was quickly invited to travel to the United States and discuss my plan with him. On September 11, 2001, I was flying across the Atlantic on a private plane, on my way to the Baker Institute in Texas to give a speech before going on to meet President Bush in Washington. I had taken a sleeping pill, so I was knocked out when my brother Ali came and shook me awake, saying, “We have a major problem. Something has happened in the States.” We had received reports from the BBC that an airplane had crashed into the twin towers in New York, but as we had no access to television, we could not fully comprehend the horror and destruction of the attack.
Back in Jordan, Rania was glued to CNN, watching the devastating events unfold minute by minute. She managed to get a call through to the onboard telephone and urged me to turn the plane around and go back to Britain. But I had been raised to support close allies in times of crisis and told her I would stick to my plan. “We’re going to continue to the United States,” I said. “I want to show solidarity with my friends.”
“Abdullah, you don’t understand what’s happened,” she said. “They’re not going to be interested in looking after you.”
While we were talking, the pilot had contacted U.S. air traffic control and obtained clearance for our plane to land in America. But as we approached Labrador, Canada, I made the decision to turn back. In the cockpit we managed to catch a BBC broadcast that was reporting on the attack and I started to realize the magnitude of what had happened. Several hours later we landed back in the UK, at Brize Norton Air Base in Oxfordshire, about sixty-five miles west of London. While the crew was refueling, I walked across the tarmac in the dark and headed for the passenger lounge. As I went through the main doors, I saw the awful images of the two airplanes crashing into the twin towers. I was shocked by such naked aggression against civilians. Then I thought, “Oh my God. All hell will break loose if this has been done by an Islamist group.”
My next thought was, “How can Jordan help?” I found a secure telephone and began to place calls to the United States. President Bush was very busy at that point, but I managed to get through to George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. “George,” I said, “whatever we can do, Jordan is behind the United States.” He confirmed my fear that Al Qaeda was behind the attack and mentioned that there might be forthcoming operations in Afghanistan.
Then I called General Tommy Franks, who was commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and would be in charge of any military operations covering the Middle East. Tommy was someone I had known for many years, going back to my Special Operations days. I said, “We’re committed to helping you.”
When I got back to Jordan, I gathered my senior military officers and told them that I was determined to help in the fight against these madmen. My officers were ready for Jordan to join in the fight; they had been battling militant extremists in Jordan for years, so they well knew the harm they could do.
When the United States and its allies went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, we sent a field hospital and Special Forces detachment to Mazar-e-Sharif in the north. After 9/11, the first priority of the United States was to go after its enemies.
From that point on, the Israelis would do their best to link their fight against Arafat and the Palestinians to what the Americans were now calling the “global war on terror.” I noticed this disturbing development early on and feared what might happen if they succeeded.
Early in the morning of January 3, 2002, a battered blue ship moved through the calm waters of the Red Sea, rounded the Horn of Africa, and headed north along the coast of Saudi Arabia. The 4,000-ton freighter Karine A had stopped in Dubai to pick up a cargo of matt
resses, sunglasses, and sandals. The captain of the ship, a former senior officer in the Palestinian naval police, had made an earlier stop at an island off the Iranian coast. At dawn, the quiet of the ocean was broken by the sound of Israeli army helicopters heading toward the ship, accompanied by Israeli naval vessels. Israeli commandos seized control of the vessel, subdued her crew, and diverted the Karine A to the southern Israeli port of Eilat. Beneath the flip-flops and bedding, the Israelis found boxes of Kalashnikov rifles, Katyusha rockets, and plastic explosives.
The seizure of the Karine A further damaged the already reeling peace process. Yasser Arafat had been under siege at his Ramallah headquarters for nearly a month, his authority severely undermined by Israel’s high-handed actions. Sharon’s government had ordered the killing of several leaders of Hamas in targeted assassinations and the intifada was growing more violent daily as Palestinians began to despair. Eight years after the signing of the Oslo agreement, little had changed for the Palestinians, as subsequent Israeli prime ministers had reneged on its promises and prescriptions. Sharon periodically closed off access to Israel and sealed off Gaza and parts of the West Bank, making it impossible for Palestinians with jobs in Israel to go to work.
On January 7, Sharon held a press conference in Eilat next to the captured ship. He displayed the seized weapons and called Arafat a “bitter enemy,” claiming that he had bought deadly weapons from Iran with the intention of smuggling them into the West Bank and Gaza Strip and launching further attacks against Israel. President Bush could have used his influence to calm the situation, but his attention was focused elsewhere, and he seemed to have no desire to rein in Sharon. His administration appeared to have decided to stand aside and watch as the peace process sputtered and died.
On January 31, after the State of the Union address in which Bush described Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” I headed to the State Department for a meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell. I wanted to stress the importance to the entire region of setting the peace process back on track, and to get a better understanding of the administration’s new focus on Iraq. In February of the previous year, Powell had visited Jordan as part of a wider trip to the Middle East, and I had met him at the airport. Typically, this is a practice reserved for visiting heads of state, but I had known him for many years and considered him a good friend. We spoke about Iraq and the stalemated peace process in a long meeting at Raghadan Palace. I was preparing to take him back to the airport when, having taken a liking to my new Mercedes S500 sedan, he asked if he could drive instead. He drove us both to the airport, surprisingly sticking to the speed limit the whole way. Powell was heading to the West Bank for a meeting with Chairman Arafat, and as we got out he pointed to his security detail and said, “I wanted to drive it to Ramallah, but they said no.”
When I saw Powell in January, he raised the Karine A incident and said that it was unfortunate, because up until then things had been improving a bit. Even Sharon had said as much. But the capture of the ship and its cargo of weapons had undercut U.S. efforts—Powell’s envoy, General Anthony Zinni, had been shuttling between the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate a cease-fire—and made it difficult to move forward. He insisted that there would have to be relative quiet, and that Arafat would need to say something about the ship for the U.S. domestic audience.
I told Powell that the United States needed to send a message of hope to the Palestinians. It had to reinforce their belief that peaceful negotiations would lead to statehood, and to reach out and help those who had been hurt by the intifada and had lost their jobs because of the closures. I also said that the United States needed to be more transparent about what exactly Arafat would have to do to relieve the situation. I suggested that a plan detailing the obligations of both Palestinians and Israelis would help achieve this. Then we started to discuss the only subject anybody in Washington wanted to talk about: Iraq. Ever the diplomat, Powell sought to soften the impact of the president’s State of the Union address, saying that if Iraq abandoned its support for terrorism and its weapons of mass destruction program, then the United States would change its attitude.
The next day I met with President Bush in the Oval Office. I raised the one topic that was then and is now to my mind the most important issue for America in the region—the peace process. I told him that all too often it was relegated to a sideshow, but it was in fact the central issue. Solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I said, would remove a rallying cry for the likes of Al Qaeda and make other Arab leaders more supportive of America’s goals in the region.
But Bush was in no mood to talk about the peace process. He quickly revealed his frustration with recent developments. He said that Arafat had “led us down a path and then reneged.” He insisted that Arafat had to do a better job in controlling extremists; otherwise, the United States would not spend political capital trying to resolve the conflict. “We can’t be hypocrites on terror,” he said, and then he made it clear that he felt Arafat was siding with terrorist organizations. As I had feared, he began to elide his own struggle to tackle Al Qaeda with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
I defended Arafat, saying that he was a national symbol for the Palestinians, and warned Bush that he would slip away if he felt cornered. I described the situation in the region as two old warriors fighting each other while their peoples suffered, and said that the United States should formulate its demands of Arafat in a way that would be understood by Palestinian people. We kept getting bogged down by problems relating to the leaders on both sides, I said, while the majority of Israelis and Palestinians wanted to improve the situation.
The president said he would look into the idea and discuss it with Sharon. He emphasized that the United States would tell Sharon on his upcoming visit to Washington that if he went overboard it would undermine America’s ability to fight terror. Bush also mentioned that he had told Sharon he would have a real problem if the Israelis killed Arafat.
I asked Bush for his help in convincing the Israelis to let Arafat leave his compound in Ramallah, where he had been kept under “house arrest” by the Israeli military since December 2001, so that he could attend the Arab League Summit in Beirut in March, noting that preventing Arafat from attending would only energize the radicals. Bush promised to raise the issue with Sharon, and then we moved on to a discussion of Arafat’s role in the larger peace process. Again Bush said, “We can’t be hypocrites on terror.” He repeated his claim that Arafat was siding with terrorist organizations, and then he said, “Maybe there is someone better?” He said he was not suggesting overthrow but pointing out that there was a need to think over time about who could best replace Arafat and lead the Palestinians to a better future.
I was alarmed by this turn in the conversation. I said that there was no alternative to Arafat. He had become a symbol of the Palestinian people, and the more pressure Israel put on him the more support his people would give him. Israel had also “cantonized” the Palestinians, leading to a fragmentation of political authority in the West Bank and Gaza. I added that Sharon had a very short-term view, and that while it did not mean we could not eventually be partners in peace, we definitely disagreed with his methods.
At this point Bush steered our discussion to Iraq. Taking a harsher line than Powell had done, the president criticized the Iraqi regime, saying, “Saddam needs to be taken to task.”
“You are going to create a major problem in the Middle East,” I said, slowly and deliberately. “The problem is not with the United States removing Saddam—but what happens next?” But Bush remained adamant in his position.
I returned to Jordan the next day. In subsequent conversations with fellow Arab leaders, including President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, I learned that they had had very similar discussions with members of the Bush administration. “What happens the day after you remove Saddam?” they had asked. The inability of the administration to give a concrete answer left u
s all very uncomfortable.
It had become clear that America would no longer take the lead in pressing for a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. But American disengagement from the peace process would almost certainly kill any hope of progress. So we continued to pressure for the resumption of negotiations, and this time around with a collective Arab peace initiative that we believed would encourage a more active U.S. role in the peace process.
In the last years of his reign, my father developed a new approach to the Israeli-Palestinian problem—one that would include all Arab states and commit them to collective peace with Israel in return for Israel’s total withdrawal from all occupied Arab land. Under such an approach—wider than the Madrid process and designed to win international support—all twenty-two members of the Arab League would offer a collective peace to Israel, backed by security guarantees, provided that Israel agree to meet specific requirements. These included the establishment of a Palestinian state, agreement on the status of Jerusalem and the rights of Palestinian refugees, returning the Golan Heights to Syria, and ending the occupation of Lebanese territories. My father wanted to set out what the generic concept of “land for peace” would mean in practical terms, and to eliminate some of the political maneuvering that had taken place between different Arab countries. Unfortunately, his proposal did not gain momentum and stalled with his death. On becoming king, I took the opportunity to revive my father’s plan and asked our government, in concert with the Egyptians, to discuss it with Saudi Arabia. Eventually the Saudis developed the idea into what first came to be known as Crown Prince Abdullah’s initiative and later became the Arab Peace Initiative, after Saudi Arabia presented it to the Arab League, which adopted it at its summit in Beirut in 2002.
Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril Page 22
