As I was preparing to leave Jordan for the Arab League Summit in Lebanon in March 2002, our intelligence service learned of a plot to assassinate me and the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, when we arrived in Beirut. I called Mubarak and passed on the intelligence. He agreed that the security concerns were real, and we both decided that it would be best if we did not travel to Beirut. Not wanting to offend our hosts, I let it be known that I had been struck by a severe cold and would be unable to travel.
Also missing was Yasser Arafat. True to his word, President Bush had sent Vice President Cheney to Israel to try to persuade Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to let Arafat attend the summit. This was the summit that would launch the Arab Peace Initiative, and it was, therefore, extremely important for Arafat to attend it. But Sharon was unmoved. He said that if Arafat went to Lebanon he would not be allowed to return to his headquarters in Ramallah. Arafat stayed in his compound and tried to join in via videoconference. Showing its petty side, Sharon’s government jammed the signal, and Arafat was reduced to sending a taped message.
On March 28, 2002, the twenty-two members of the Arab League formally endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative. This proposed that, in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories to the June 1967 boundaries, a just and “agreed upon” solution to the refugee problem, and the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital, Arab states would consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, enter into a peace agreement with Israel, provide security for all the states of the region, and establish normal relations with Israel.
For the first time since the start of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arab states had formally and unanimously made an offer to Israel for normal relations as a basis for ending the conflict. The Israeli response was swift and unambiguous.
On March 29, 2002, Sharon ordered Israeli troops into West Bank cities in an operation called “Defensive Shield,” the largest Israeli military operation since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israeli forces reoccupied almost all of the Palestinian self-rule areas it had redeployed from under the Oslo process. Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jenin, and Nablus were once again under Israeli occupation. A refugee camp in Jenin suffered the worst attack during a two-week siege that was supported by blanket bombardment of its neighborhoods.
The next day Israeli tanks and soldiers assaulted Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah, smashing through the walls, cutting the electricity, and leaving the Palestinian leader isolated in his second-floor office, working by candlelight. The crudeness of Israel’s handling of Arafat made even his staunchest detractors soften toward him. Because he was imprisoned for so long, up to a few weeks before his death in November 2004, and treated so badly, many became sympathetic to his plight. He essentially became a hero.
The violence continued to escalate when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket, killing two people. In April 2002, some Palestinian fighters, fleeing from Israeli soldiers who were hunting them, took refuge in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The Israeli army quickly surrounded the church and blockaded the Palestinians inside, along with some 250 priests, nuns, and other civilians. People across the world watched appalled as a sacred place of worship was surrounded by Israeli armored vehicles and snipers huddled on nearby rooftops, with their guns trained on the church.
On April 21, Israel halted its military operations and pulled out its troops from Palestinian areas but kept the siege on the Church of the Nativity and Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. The UN General Assembly convened in an emergency session on May 7 and issued a resolution that expressed grave concern at the deteriorating situation in the Palestinian territories. It demanded that Israel, as an occupying power, abide by its responsibilities under the fourth Geneva Convention. It also condemned Israel’s attacks on religious sites and its refusal to cooperate with a UN fact-finding team that was ordered by the Security Council in a resolution adopted on April 19 to investigate its attack on the Jenin refugee camp.
The siege on the Church of the Nativity lasted for over a month. What was shocking was that the Israeli government had no compunction about allowing its soldiers to open fire on this most sacred site. At one point, two Japanese tourists wandered into the middle of the armed standoff, and were saved by nearby journalists, who motioned for them to get out of the way. Eventually a peaceful solution to the standoff was negotiated, but there was little progress in the larger conflict. It was clear that Sharon had no intention of making peace. The decades-old struggle would have to wait for new leaders to emerge.
In June 2002, the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), meeting in Sudan, endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative. They decided to make every effort to win international support for its implementation. The OIC, established in 1969 at a historic summit in Rabat, with fifty-seven members, is the world’s second-largest intergovernmental organization after the United Nations. By endorsing the Arab Peace Initiative, the OIC had given the proposal the explicit backing of the entire Muslim world. Holding out the promise of normal relations with Israel with all of its members, the OIC put a fifty-seven-state solution on the table.
The OIC again reaffirmed its support for the Arab Peace Initiative the following year, at the foreign ministers’ meeting in Tehran in June 2003 and at the full OIC summit meeting of heads of state in Malaysia in October. But the Israelis showed no interest in this unprecedented opportunity.
In April 2002, in one of its most controversial decisions, Israel announced that Sharon had authorized the construction of a twenty-six-foot-high wall between Israel and the West Bank. Although the stated purpose was to prevent “terrorists” from crossing into and attacking Israel, parts of the wall were built on West Bank territory occupied by Israel in 1967, not along the 1949 armistice line. Reaching into the West Bank, in some cases up to twelve miles, the wall was constructed so that some 80 percent of the settlers in the West Bank would be on the Israeli side. Its path in some cases cut through the middle of Palestinian villages and in others trapped Palestinian towns on the Israeli side.
We, along with the whole Arab world, suspected that Israel’s real intention was to create a de facto border and, contrary to international law, to annex land occupied in war and thereby preempt final status negotiations. In December 2003, the UN General Assembly requested a ruling from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legality of the wall.
The Palestinians began to prepare their case, and in light of our historical and legal responsibility for Jerusalem, Jordan offered to assist them. Civilized nations settle disputes through the law, and we were determined to present the best case possible. We recommended to the Palestinians that they engage Professor James Crawford of Cambridge University, a recognized expert in international law, and the Jordanian team engaged the services of Sir Arthur Watts, a distinguished British lawyer who formerly had been the legal adviser to the Foreign Office.
In February 2004, assisted by our permanent representative to the United Nations, Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad, the Palestinian and Jordanian teams presented their case to the ICJ, arguing that Israel had no right to build a wall, or anything else, on territory occupied illegally in the 1967 war. On July 9, 2004, the court ruled by a majority of fourteen to one, with the dissenting vote cast by the American judge, Thomas Buergenthal, that the wall violated international law, saying, “The construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, and its associated régime, are contrary to international law.” The ruling further stated that Israel should stop violating international law and that it should pull down the existing wall and compensate Palestinians for damage caused by its construction. The Israeli government ignored the ruling, and Prime Minister Sharon ordered construction of the wall to continue.
Throughout history, from the Warsaw Ghetto to cold war Berlin, walls built to divid
e or imprison people have never proved strong enough to stand against the tide of human hope. In the end, Israel cannot gain the security it seeks by imprisoning the Palestinians in a ghetto of their own construction, or by re-creating the Berlin Wall in East Jerusalem. The security that all Israelis and Palestinians crave most, that of a normal life, can be achieved only by tearing down the barriers that separate them and learning to live in peace.
The war drums continued to beat throughout the spring and summer of 2002. I returned to the United States in the spring, and on May 8 again saw President Bush at the White House, where I continued to stress the importance of restarting the peace process. The month before, I had pointed out in a letter that we had been “instrumental in building consensus for the Saudi initiative, which had been translated into a collective Arab commitment to end the conflict with Israel, guarantee its security and establish normal relations between all Arab states and Israel.” This effort to line up the Arab world behind a plan for peace was threatened by Israeli actions. I urged Bush to work for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian cities, which they had taken almost complete control of by then, and to press for the restarting of negotiations.
But the president seemed to view Arafat as a failed leader, and kept stressing his inability to deliver on his promises. He also bemoaned the fact that Sharon, by attacking Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah and keeping him a virtual prisoner, had increased Arafat’s domestic support. “I don’t know who else can emerge,” he said. Bush said Sharon made a hero out of Arafat, who would remain on the stage. But he pointed to the need for ideas that would allow younger people to come out and lead.
I warned the president that there was a false impression of quiet in the region and that a great deal of anger was simmering under the surface. The temporary period of quiet, I said, was due to the hope generated by Powell’s visit the previous month and America’s subsequent efforts to restart the peace process, but more violence could easily erupt if there was no movement in the next few months. I restated the position that political change would depend on a political settlement with a timeline and a Palestinian state as an outcome.
The president listened but stressed his desire to avoid what he saw as the mistakes of the Clinton administration in focusing too much on the details of finding a solution to Jerusalem and forgetting about Israel’s security concerns. “I can imagine how Sharon feels when he starts his meeting with me with the news of a suicide bombing,” he said. The tragic events of 9/11 had understandably given the president greater empathy with other leaders whose people were targeted by suicide attacks. But it also obscured the administration’s grasp of Palestinian suffering. Then the president told me that he still had his eyes on Iraq.
President Bush continued to criticize Arafat, notably in a speech he gave on June 24, 2002, when he set out his policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. He began by stating his commitment to a two-state solution. “My vision is two states,” he said, “living side by side in peace and security. There is simply no way to achieve that peace until all parties fight terror. Yet at this critical moment, if all parties will break with the past and set out on a new path, we can overcome the darkness with the light of hope.” “But,” he continued, “peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror.” In return, Bush said, the United States would support a provisional state of Palestine pending negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians on borders and other issues, with a settlement envisaged in three years.
The idea of “leaders not compromised by terror,” sadly, was one that would be hard to implement—on both sides. In American eyes, the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, was compromised by terror. But in Palestinian eyes, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was equally compromised by his role in the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. In the Middle East, everyone was stunned by Bush’s comments. Arafat had represented the Palestinian people, for better or worse, since the 1970s. He had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his bold partnership with Rabin and Peres. How could the U.S. administration imagine that it could sweep him under the table? Sharon harbored an old animus against Arafat and had decided to lock him into his compound in Ramallah. But what I did not want was for the U.S. administration to take the same line.
In April, to try to revive the stalled peace process, we floated the idea of a “road map,” a set of specific actions accompanied by a timeline that could be used to measure progress by both sides. On a visit to Jordan in early June, William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, said he thought the idea of a detailed action plan with benchmarks was a good one and promised to promote it inside the U.S. government.
Many in the Bush administration, however, continued to be obsessed with Iraq. The desperate situation in Israel would be relegated to the back burner, with disastrous consequences.
Israel supported the approaching war. By constantly conjuring an imminent threat in the public’s imagination, Israeli politicians have managed to keep their citizens in a state of perpetual alarm. This approach has its risks, because it can easily be exploited by those seeking short-term political gain. That is not to say that Israel does not face real threats. But the most effective way to neutralize these threats would be to do the one right thing: negotiate a lasting peace with the Palestinians. If Israel were to do so, it would be recognized by the entire international community, and accepted by the Muslim world. Sadly, many decision-makers inside Israel are ideologically opposed to this. Others are unable to quantify, and therefore to understand, the long-term gains that peace would bring.
Since the 1960s Israel has tried to play the United States against the countries in the Middle East that it has perceived as its biggest threat. In 1967 the Israelis made the argument to the United States that they would have to strike first against Egypt because it was preparing to attack them. In the run-up to the 2003 war they encouraged the United States to launch war on Iraq. Israeli politicians tried to portray Saddam Hussein as a strategic threat to Israel’s existence. At the same time in the United States a group of neocons with administration ties played up the threat to America, fanning the flames of war. Iraqi expatriates, with personal interests in mind, joined in, feeding the government of the United States with inaccurate and exaggerated information.
On July 29, 2002, concerned that the march to war in Iraq was gaining momentum, I gave an interview to the Times of London. “Ask our friends in China, in Moscow, in England, in Paris,” I said. “Everybody will tell you that we have concerns about military actions against Iraq. The international community is united on this . . . Military action against Iraq would really open a Pandora’s box.” I criticized the neoconservative members of the Bush administration, saying they were “fixated on Iraq. . . . You can talk till you’re blue in the face and they’re not going to get it.” The United States was now irrevocably heading down the path to war.
Many leaders in the Middle East stayed away from Washington to express their displeasure with the Bush administration’s policies. But I thought it was important for me to go to Washington regularly to attempt to influence the debate and remind the Bush administration of the importance of moving forward on the establishment of a Palestinian state. I went back again at the end of July, traveling to Washington via Europe, where we discussed the rising tensions between the United States and Iraq with President Jacques Chirac of France in Paris and Prime Minister Tony Blair in London. I knew that my plain speaking would not be welcomed by some in Washington. But Jordan is an old friend of America, and we would be doing the United States no favors by hiding our concerns at such an important moment.
In preparation for my visit, I asked my foreign minister, Marwan Muasher, to prepare a draft of a proposed road map for peace that we could discuss with the president. He reported back that he and Bill Burns had made g
reat progress but that Condoleezza Rice, who was then the U.S. national security adviser, was dead set against the idea, believing it was a “nonstarter.” Rice never gave a rationale for her objections.
I told Marwan that no matter what she thought, we would present our proposal to the president. When I landed in the United States I discovered that my candor with the European press had provoked an angry reaction inside the administration. I was welcomed on arrival by a call from Condoleezza Rice, who said, “The president is very upset with your statement.”
“I’m just saying in public what I heard from Chirac and Blair,” I said. “So don’t shoot the messenger.”
The morning of August 1, 2002, I met President Bush at the White House. Our main agenda item was the peace process, particularly the concept of the road map to move the process forward and reach a two-state solution. Normally the president greeted me warmly, but this morning he was quite stiff and formal. As we walked into the Oval Office, he was drinking a Coke with plenty of ice. Crushing the ice cubes between his teeth as he spoke, he said that he was upset about my recent newspaper interview outlining the risks of war. But President Bush and I had developed a good personal relationship and he warmed up as the meeting progressed.
Giving his views on Iraq, he said that there was a huge amount of hyperventilating about Saddam. He said we were facing a historic moment and that he did not want people thirty years from now to say that President Bush and King Abdullah had the opportunity to forge a lasting peace but did not do it. “We should not be threatened by thugs,” he said.
I reiterated my opposition to war and then said, “Mr. President, if you’ve decided to go to war in Iraq just be straightforward and tell your friends.”
His reply was firm. “I haven’t made that decision yet,” he said. “When I do, you will know.” Then he said he had to deal with the Europeans, who did not understand that what was happening in Iraq was a crime against humanity. He said he would not allow it to go on any longer.
Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril Page 23
