Tested by Zion (23 page)

The April 14 letter was, along with Bush's speech to the Knesset in 2008, a high point in his relationship with Israel and support for its security and its future. It addressed, most significantly, the refugee and border issues. Bush began by restating his commitment to the two-state solution as presented in his speech of June 24, 2002, and to the Roadmap. He then welcomed Sharon's disengagement plan, noting that it included the West Bank as well as Gaza. Bush then continued, “The United States appreciates the risks such an undertaking represents. I therefore want to reassure you on several points.” This was, then, the reward and the incentive for Sharon.

First, Bush “reassured” Sharon that the Roadmap, including its sequence of fighting terrorism first before negotiating over final status issues, would remain U.S. policy: “[T]he United States remains committed to my vision and to its implementation as described in the roadmap. The United States will do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan.” Bush then reiterated that the Palestinians must, under the Roadmap, undertake “comprehensive and fundamental political reform that includes a strong parliamentary democracy and an empowered prime minister” and must fight terror. They “must undertake an immediate cessation of armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere, and…must act decisively against
terror, including sustained, targeted, and effective operations to stop terrorism and
dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.”

Second, Bush restated a firm pledge to support Israel's security: “The United States reiterates its steadfast commitment to Israel's security, including secure, defensible borders, and to preserve and strengthen Israel's capability to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats.” There were two key phrases in this one sentence. “Defensible borders” was a familiar code phrase for suggesting that a return to the “1967 borders” – which were in reality simply the armistice lines that existed when fighting stopped in 1949 – was not likely. “Defend itself, by itself” suggested both the continuation of American military aid and agreement with the Israeli doctrine that its defense should not depend on international forces or UN troops.

Third, Bush restated, as he had been saying almost since 9/11, that “Israel will retain its right to defend itself against terrorism, including to take actions against terrorist organizations.” He then added that Israel's coming withdrawals in Gaza and the West Bank would not change “existing arrangements regarding control of airspace, territorial waters, and land passages of the West Bank and Gaza” – meaning Israel would retain control of them.

Fourth, Bush turned to the refugee issue. Because the United States “is strongly committed to Israel's security and well-being as a Jewish state,” he explained, “[i]t seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.” Here, an American president was, for the first time, stating clearly that the “right of return” was dead. Moreover, Bush explained why: because the United States saw Israel as Israel saw itself, as a Jewish State, and we understood that the “return” of millions of Palestinian “refugees” would destroy the state's Jewish character. Bush did not exactly use normative language – he did not say that a solution for the refugee problem “must” be found in the Palestinian state – but he came so close that the meaning was the same. The neutral phrase “it seems clear” was in fact far from neutral; it meant that any fair-minded observer, any reasonable person, would have to agree.

Fifth, Bush addressed the settlement and border issues. Borders would emerge from negotiations between the parties as part of a final peace settlement. But he had this caveat:

In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.

This was another bombshell. Bush was accepting and saying that there would be no return to the 1949 lines
because
Israel would keep some of the
settlements. This was widely acknowledged and had been on the table at Camp David, but in this letter, Bush was setting it forth publicly: Israel would keep the major settlement blocks. Moreover, his use of the term “armistice lines of 1949” rather than “1967 borders” was another statement that the sacrosanct 1967 lines were not sacrosanct at all – and would go. There were qualifications: This was not normative language at all, and Bush was “merely” predictive, stating what was realistic and what was unrealistic. Moreover, he repeated that final borders could only emerge from negotiations, not be imposed by Israel. But the headline was clear: There would be no return to 1967 and Israel could keep the major settlement blocks.

Bush then reiterated the commonly expressed position about the fence: “[t]he barrier being erected by Israel should be a security rather than political barrier, should be temporary rather than permanent, and therefore not prejudice any final status issues including final borders, and its route should take into account, consistent with security needs, its impact on Palestinians not engaged in terrorist activities.” The Palestinian state, he said, must be “viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent, so that the Palestinian people can build their own future.” He pledged U.S. help to build that state and its institutions.

He concluded by describing disengagement as “a bold and historic initiative” and called it “a courageous decision which I support. As a close friend and ally, the United States intends to work closely with you to help make it a success.” Later, the Senate and House would add their own support by lopsided margins: The votes were 95 to 3 in the Senate on June 23, and 407 to 9 in the House of Representatives on June 24.

A beaming Sharon saw the April 14 letter as a great victory for his disengagement strategy. Weissglas told us that all senior ministers (including the Likud ministers) were now on board; if Bush was for it, they would go along. The Israeli press, however, adopted a mixed view: Some said he had come to Washington and now returned home in triumph because the president had said “no” to the right of return and “yes” to keeping the major blocks. Others in the press were less overwhelmed and focused on the language: Bush had not said “no right of return” and “no 1967 borders”; he had said “it seems clear” and “it is unrealistic.” Were these formulations strong enough? Would they bind future presidents? Doubts on the Israeli right ran along the same lines. Weissglas had once lectured us on the language he called “Likudish.” It was a difficult tongue, he had told us as we drafted the April 14 letter, not sensitive to subtlety, demanding absolute clarity and direct language. Perhaps the careful wording of the letter would not be enough to satisfy those who spoke “Likudish.”

Not surprisingly, Arab reactions were sour. President Bush “is the first president who has legitimized the settlements in the Palestinian territories,” Prime
Minister Qurie (Abu Ala'a) said. “We as Palestinians reject that, we cannot accept that.”
⁹
“As far as I’m concerned, Sharon and Bush can decide to cancel Ramadan,” the Muslim holy month, said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator then and now. “But that doesn't mean that Muslims will not fast.”
¹⁰
The head of the Arab League called the Bush letter “negative and very regrettable.” From all over the Arab world came similar, and often much nastier, comments.

There were similarly negative comments from Europe. President Chirac of France called the disengagement plan an “unfortunate and dangerous precedent,” and EU spokespeople stressed that matters between Israel and the Palestinians could be settled only in direct negotiations, not by Israel and the United States in speeches in Washington. Only Tony Blair, who as always had a better understanding of what President Bush was seeking, gave real support when he visited the White House on April 17. “If there is disengagement by Israel from the Gaza and from parts of the West Bank,” Blair said in a White House press conference alongside Bush, “that gives us the opportunity to help the Palestinian Authority with the economic, the political and the security measures they take and they need to take in order to get to the point where the concept of a viable Palestinian state becomes a real possibility.”
¹¹

A small crisis in relations with Jordan ensued as well because King Abdullah was visiting California when the letter was released. In preparations for that release, the American team had visited Jordan; here is how Foreign Minister Muasher later described it:

You came to Jordan…March 30, 2004. And you talked to us about the assurances you wanted to give to Sharon, which scared the hell out of us, because to us it changed a longstanding US position on the outcome of a settlement. So, we wrote a letter to President Bush on April 8 in which we made the Jordanian position clear that we do not accept this – that any changes to the border must be minor and reciprocal, etcetera.…The King was going to come to the United States. He was already on the west coast, California.
¹²

With the April 14 letter to Sharon already delivered, the Jordanians suggested that the president now write a letter to the king, in essence undoing what he had done on April 14. Then the king would come to the White House to receive it, replicating the drama with Sharon. A letter was drafted, and a version of it appears in Muasher's 2008 memoir,
The Arab Center
.

I worked hard on the language, attempting to give them whatever we could without watering down what the President had just said: an impossible task, in the end. But we were saved: the Jordanians pushed too hard and quickly ran into a stubborn Rice. She saw the advantages of giving the Arabs something, and doing so through the moderate Jordanian king, but she saw with equal clarity that the President would look weak and foolish if he appeared in any way to undermine his own statements just days later. The Jordanians made the tactical error of threatening that the king would cancel his visit to Washington if they did not get the language they demanded. This got Rice's back up immediately, for she would not permit the President to be cornered this way. So the editing
of the letter stopped, and the visit was delayed; Abdullah came a month later, in May, when tempers had cooled.

President Mubarak's temper did not cool so quickly. He had remained in the United States after his Crawford visit, and believed that the White House ceremony with Sharon and the promulgation of the April 14 letter while he was still in the United States was an embarrassment and an insult. One result was that he declined the President's invitation for the G-8 Summit meeting then just around the corner in June at Sea Island, Georgia, where the Middle East had been selected as the main topic. Given the emphasis on reform and democracy at Sea Island, Mubarak must later have regarded this as a wise decision.

Lest anyone believe the Middle East had changed overnight, on April 17, the Israelis assassinated Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, who had replaced Sheik Yassin as leader of Hamas. In Israel, Sharon spoke to the Knesset on April 22, explaining and defending the disengagement plan in its entirety. Israel would withdraw from Gaza and four small settlements in the northern West Bank, relocating “communities in areas which will clearly not be under Israeli control in any future permanent status arrangement.” He also mentioned the security fence and a new security line where the IDF would deploy, and he argued that “the U.S. President has expressed his sweeping support of the plan.” For the Palestinians, he said, “[t]he rules of the game have changed. If they do not uphold their commitments, Israel will continue to act alone.” He told the Knesset he had considered a national referendum on disengagement but had opted for a Likud vote, which reflected the party's “genuine internal conflict.”

On May 2, in an especially ugly terrorist incident, a pregnant Israeli woman and her four daughters were shot to death at close range near their home in a settlement in Gaza. Later that day, despite Bush's endorsement of the disengagement plan, Sharon lost the Likud Party vote on it. Perhaps the savage terrorist attack that day had affected the result: 193,000 Likud members voted 60/40 against the plan. They did not believe it would improve Israel's security. They did not see their vote as a repudiation of Sharon, nor of Bush, but they simply did not want to get out of Gaza in return for nothing from the Palestinians. The April 14 letter had not solved Sharon's Likud problem.

King Abdullah of Jordan did come to visit on May 4, restoring both the U.S.-Jordanian relationship and his personal relationship with the president to their normal warmth. The president was not, however, backing away from what he had said. In fact, he told the king ruefully, the international reaction was mostly the product of his own and Sharon's low popularity. This is a real opportunity, he said to the king, and people are losing sight of it; under any other circumstances, everyone would have said “hallelujah” at Israel's decision to get out of Gaza.

Two weeks later, Rice and
her team met with the Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qurie, known as Abu Ala'a, in Berlin. Qurie told her there were serious reforms under way, of which a key part was elections. The PA would ask the Quartet, he said, to choose the right timing for both presidential and PLC balloting. Rice was not buying. She sternly told Qurie that there was a chance
for a breakthrough but not if all the PA did was hold meetings. Instead, it had to act on security matters. As we had been saying for months and months, it was time to unify the security forces into just three groups and put them under the prime minister – in other words, take them away from Arafat. With Israeli withdrawal from Gaza coming, the effectiveness of the Palestinian security forces was critical. How do we achieve that?