Tested by Zion (50 page)

More than five years ago, I became the first American President to call for the creation of a Palestinian state.…Since then, many changes have come – some hopeful, some dispiriting. Israel has taken difficult actions, including withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Palestinians have held free elections, and chosen a president committed to peace.…Confronted with the prospect of peace, extremists have responded with acts of aggression and terror. In Gaza, Hamas radicals betrayed the Palestinian people with a lawless and violent takeover.…This is a moment of clarity for all Palestinians. And now comes a moment of choice. The alternatives before the Palestinian people are stark. There is the vision of Hamas, which the world saw in Gaza – with murderers in black masks, and summary executions, and men thrown to their death from rooftops. By following this path, the Palestinian people would guarantee chaos, and suffering, and the endless perpetuation of grievance. They would surrender their future to Hamas's foreign sponsors in Syria and Iran. And they would crush the possibility of a Palestinian state. There's another option, and that's a hopeful option. It is the vision of President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad; it's the vision of their government; it's the vision of a peaceful state called Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people.…By following this path, Palestinians can reclaim their dignity and their future – and establish a state of their own.

Only the Palestinians can decide which of these courses to pursue. Yet all responsible nations have a duty to help clarify the way forward.…So in consultation with our partners in the Quartet – the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations – the United States is taking a series of steps to strengthen the forces of moderation and peace among the Palestinian people. First, we are strengthening our financial commitment. This year, we will provide the Palestinians with more than $190 million in American assistance – including funds for humanitarian relief in Gaza. Today, I announce our intention to make a direct contribution of $80 million to help Palestinians reform their security services – a vital effort they're undertaking with the guidance of American General Keith Dayton.…Second, we're strengthening our political and diplomatic commitment. Again today, President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert sat down together to discuss priorities and resolve issues. Secretary Rice and I have strongly supported these meetings, and she has worked with both parties to sketch out a “political horizon” for a Palestinian state. Now we will intensify these efforts, with the goal of increasing the confidence of all parties in a two-state solution.…Third, we're strengthening our commitment to helping build the institutions of a Palestinian state. Last month, former Prime Minister – British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed to take on a new role as Quartet representative.…

The world can do more to build the conditions for peace. So I will call together an international meeting this fall of representatives from nations that support a two-state solution, reject violence, recognize Israel's right to exist, and commit to all previous agreements between the parties. The key participants in this meeting will be the Israelis, the Palestinians, and their neighbors in the region. Secretary Rice will chair the meeting. She and her counterparts will review the progress that has been made toward building Palestinian institutions. They will look for innovative and effective ways to support further reform. And they will provide diplomatic support for the parties in their bilateral discussions and negotiations, so that we can move forward on a successful path to a Palestinian state.
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The $80 million was truly consequential; for the first time, the effort to build PA security forces would be funded. Once Congress appropriated those funds, Gen. Dayton was off and running. Additional funds followed, and finally the idea became a reality: Serious, trained PA police were hitting the streets. After 18 months without a cent, Dayton was able to move and proved that his claims and promises were absolutely reliable: He did the job and many of the doubters – not least those in the IDF and Shin Bet
– became his greatest fans.

Aside from this announcement of aid, the speech reflected the tensions and contradictions in our policy all too well. The language presented a tough challenge to the Palestinians: “This is a moment of clarity for all Palestinians. And now comes a moment of choice.” But, in fact, there was no “moment of choice” for Palestinians and no demands were placed on them; instead, we asked for concession after concession from the Israelis. The speech suggested that support for Fayyad's real-world actions would now be central in our policy, but instead we held a conference. The institution-building took a back seat. Armed with the president's endorsement, Secretary Rice and State took off; soon the “meeting” – the weaker term Israel had demanded and that the president had used – became an international conference and the attendance list expanded ultimately to 40 nations.

What did the president think of all this diplomatic activity, so reminiscent of the late Clinton administration? In his memoir the president writes, “At first I was skeptical…but I came to like the idea.”
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He thought it was worth a try, as Josh Bolten explained:

The president was always skeptical. Condi basically had to drag him into Annapolis and follow-on activities. Drag is too strong; she had the burden of proof to overcome and the president was always skeptical, though I never saw him entirely negative. I think he was realistic, probably figuring there was a one-in-three chance. But when he ran for president, he was one-in-six to become the president of the United States – by my calculation. He had a one-in-two chance of winning the Republican nomination and a one-in-three chance the Republican nominee would win the election. So he was one-in-six, but he went into that. If you're going to be in that kind of position, you take your shots. So it could easily have been one-in-three, but if you asked him he would have thought that “one-in-three, one-in-four is absolutely worth a try.” One-in-fifty, maybe not.
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Not mentioned in the July 16 speech had been reform of the Fatah Party, but that never left the president's mind. He was, after all, a politician, unlike almost everyone else dealing with Middle East peace except Tony Blair, with whom he discussed the subject often and intimately. Just before the July 16 speech, they went over once again the need to reform Fatah or get someone to start a new party; they both felt new blood and new leaders were needed but never succeeded in figuring out how to move the idea forward in Palestinian politics. Bush reflected on it again in a chat with Ban ki-Moon, Kofi Annan's
successor at the UN, the day after the speech. We need young Palestinians to get into politics, Bush said; too many of the old guys have one hand in the till while the other is shaking your hand. This was July 2007, and after the Hamas victory in January 2006, the Palestinians never again held an election while Bush was president or for years afterward. The old politicians learned a different lesson than did Bush: He saw the need for change and reform, whereas they saw the need simply to avoid putting themselves to an electoral test again.

The greater problem, I thought then and saw played out in the ensuing months both before and after the “meeting” that became the Annapolis Conference, was that we did not have our eye on the ball. Fatah might be unreformable, but the PA was not. In fact, it was being reformed before our eyes. Fayyad did not need our lessons about good governance. He had a long list of things the Israelis could do to make success more likely, but those requests were low on our list; we were focused on the conference. Because the PLO was the organization charged with negotiations with Israel
, another way of saying it is that we were focused on helping Abbas and the PLO, not Fayyad and the PA.

At the end of July, we returned to the region. In Saudi Arabia, the king used the meeting with us to complain about Abbas as well as Hamas, for they had all come to Mecca and sworn an oath not to fight each other again – and almost immediately broken the pledge. Rice defended Abbas; what was he to do when Hamas attacked? But the king blamed them equally, an attitude that helped explain his lack of enthusiasm (and cash) for the PA in future months and years. Rice palliated him by saying we hoped for real progress toward the establishment of a Palestinian state by January 2009. This, of course, went beyond what the president had said in his July 16 speech but did not surprise me. It seemed we were going Clintonian now: The great rush for a Middle East deal in the 18 months we had left was clear.

On August 1 we were in Israel again, and the meetings once again struck me as miserable. First Rice met with Barak, who cautioned wisely that despite our desire to help Abbas and Fayyad succeed against Hamas, we should recognize our limits. We cannot pretend we can decide the internal struggle for power and legitimacy among the Palestinians, he told Rice and
our party. Crossing some subtle lines would hurt them – they would seem to sit on our bayonets. Abu Mazen and Fayyad hold pens; we need people ready to kill and be killed. Dahlan had five times the number of fighters, but Hamas was ready to fight and shoot and die.

All this seemed sensible to me, but it set Rice off. Over time, I became at least as frustrated with Barak as she did because it became clear that he was thoughtful but completely indecisive about the West Bank. Whatever move we asked for, such as removing a roadblock here or a checkpoint there to allow the Palestinians additional mobility, would always be taken under careful consideration, reviewed, studied seriously – and never done. But this meeting was held just weeks after the Hamas coup and the announcement of the coming international conference, and Barak's advice seemed interesting and correct to me. Condi saw it as immobilism. This is the best Palestinian government you will have in your generation, she told Barak. Palestinian political life is radicalizing, and if you don't help these guys succeed, it will not be Hamas you are facing but Al Qaeda. The window is closing for those Palestinians who believe in the two-state solution. If there is no way out, it will radicalize. This is just what was happening under segregation in Alabama when I was growing up, she said; if the moderates cannot pull it off, the radicals will move in. So you must think bigger with this government.

Barak listened impassively and replied that you are accurate but I am afraid this is a Greek tragedy between us and the Palestinian people. They had so many opportunities and it gets worse in every round, he added. He then turned to the coming international “meeting” and said the problem is this: It can produce the appearance of a diplomatic process that will be perceived by Israelis and the
Palestinian people as unreal. The process will be happening in diplomatic salons in Europe but not on the ground. It will have no gravitas unless there are real players on the ground. Rice bridled at this criticism of the conference. It is hard to do on the ground if there is no hope of a Palestinian independent state, she rejoined. The need for permits to travel on certain roads is the kind of thing that just made me angry as a child in segregated Alabama.

This comparison was new. Never before had I heard Condi cast the Israelis as Bull Connor and the Palestinians as the civil rights movement. It was a dreadful sign of just how far she had moved away from sympathy with the Israeli position and of just how much antagonism was developing. Condi's 2010 memoir,
Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family
, describes in searing fashion the insults and the harm inflicted on her own family and their community in the years before and during the civil rights struggle, making it even clearer how her emotions about Israel were changing profoundly. And on the Israeli side, such comments elicited a sense that she simply did not understand the world of the Middle East. Olmert, years after leaving power, recalled the issue:

I once told her something which I don't think anyone ever said to her. I said to her, in four-eyes [a one-on-one meeting], I said, “Condi, you know, I think that I can understand, why you feel so much empathy for the Palestinians.” I said, “You don't understand something. You're talking to a nation whose ethos is of liquidation, of massacre, of losing millions of people in the most brutal way, and therefore, you are not aware enough, I mean, of what it means for us that after all this, we have to go to the street and see that a bus was being exploded and the bodies of tens of people are torn to pieces, spread over 200 meters in the middle of town.”
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Nor could I see how Condi was ignoring the racially mixed character of Israeli society, for everywhere we went we saw soldiers and police who were black – reminders of the rescue of Ethiopian Jews, which was ongoing. The Israelis, perhaps wisely, never raised this with the secretary, but every time we saw a baby carriage with a little black Jewish infant or encountered a few young black Israeli kids, I wondered whether Condi was not seeing what I was. At any rate, her civil rights references were a measure of the tensions between her and the Israelis in 2007 and 2008. For she was at bottom deeply sympathetic to Israel's situation and the threats it faced, and she had no illusions about the Arabs. She enjoyed visiting Israel and the Christian and Jewish religious sites there. Moreover, she was fully aware of the standing of women (and, indeed, of the role of skin color) in most Arab societies and had little tolerance for these mores: She would wear a head covering when visiting the Pope but not when visiting the king of Saudi Arabia. I did not view the comparison to segregation as an expression of her fundamental view of Israel or of the Arab-Israel conflict but rather as the product of growing frustration.

Later that same day, on August 1, we met with Olmert, and the discussion focused on the “meeting” the president had announced. I will make a statement saying that I’m ready to deal with the president of the Palestinian Authority on fundamental issues that will lead us into negotiations on the establishment of a Palestinian state soon or as soon as possible, he told us. This commitment should have improved Condi's mood because Olmert was going as far as he possibly could. Using this language – fundamental issues, Palestinian state, as soon as possible – was more than I thought the traffic in Israel could bear. Either I was wrong in judging Israeli politics, which was quite possible, or Olmert was simply ignoring politics – spurred by an ambition to make history, a dedication to peace, or the calculation that his political fate could only be rescued by a dramatic peace move.

When we returned to Washington, Condi called a meeting on August 13 to discuss the Middle East. There was a lot on the agenda – from training Palestinian police, to getting the Israelis to remove some obstacles to mobility in the West Bank, to financial support for the PA. And then there was the international “meeting.” But as I complained to Hadley in a memo the next day, the real world had not been allowed to intrude. The session had focused solely on plans for the “meeting.” Where would it be? Williamsburg? Annapolis? On exactly which dates? Could the invitation list be expanded? American diplomacy in the Middle East was now about that meeting and little else.

But there was a real world out there, as the events of September 6 reminded us: On that day, Israel bombed the al-Kibar nuclear reactor
in Syria.
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The turn of events after our final session with the president on this topic had been dramatic. On July 13, he had called Prime Minister Olmert from his desk in the Oval Office and explained his view. I have gone over this in great detail, he explained on the secure phone to the Israeli prime minister, looking at every possible scenario and its likely aftermath. We have looked at overt and covert options, and I have made a decision. We are not going to take the military path; we are instead going to the UN. Bush recounts in his memoir that he told Olmert, “I cannot justify an attack on a sovereign nation unless my intelligence agencies stand up and say it's a weapons program” and that “I had decided on the diplomatic option backed by the threat of force.”
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We will announce this approach soon, he said, and we will then launch a major diplomatic campaign, starting at the IAEA and then the UN Security Council. And, of course, a military option always remains available down the line.

I wondered how Olmert would react and believed I could predict his response: He would say wait, give me some time to think about this, to consult my team, to reflect, and I will call you tomorrow. I was quite wrong. He reacted immediately and forcefully: George, he said, this leaves me surprised and disappointed. And I cannot accept it. We told you from the first day, when Dagan came to Washington, and I’ve told you since then whenever we
discussed it, that the reactor had to go away. Israel cannot live with a Syrian nuclear reactor; we will not accept it. It would change the entire region and our national security cannot accept it. You are telling me you will not act; so, we will act. The timing is another matter, Olmert said, and we will not do anything precipitous.

This is not the account President Bush gives in his memoir, in which he writes that Prime Minister Olmert initially said, “George, I’m asking you to bomb the compound.”
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Some day transcripts of their conversation will be available, but that is not my recollection. I believe the Israelis and we studied the information we had and looked at all the options, though Dagan had made clear from the start that the Israelis believed the reactor had to be destroyed. How to destroy it was a matter of examination and debate.

After that conversation, the delay from July 13 to September 6 had been filled with Israeli military calculations – watching the weather and Syrian movements on the ground – with the aim of being sure that Israel could act before the reactor went “critical” or “hot.” We knew the Israelis would strike sooner or later. They acted, in the end, when a leak was imminent and Syria might then have gotten notice that Israel knew of the reactor. That would have given President Assad time to put civilians or nuclear fuel near the site. The Israelis did not seek nor did they get a green or red light from us; “no stoplights” had been our agreement. Nor did they announce their timing in advance; they told us as they were blowing up the site.

In the Oval Office, I had sat across the room from the president on July 13 listening to his conversation with Olmert and
had heard Olmert push back immediately. I wondered how the president would react to the Israeli action. With anger? Or more pressure? None of it. He listened calmly to Olmert and acknowledged that Israel had a right to protect its national security. After hanging up, the president said something like “that guy has guts.” It was said admiringly and the incident was over; the differences over al-Kibar would obviously not affect his relationship with Olmert or his view of Israel. So quickly did he accept the Olmert decision that I wondered then, and do still, if the president did not at some level anticipate and desire this result. He had sided with Condi and shown that she was still in charge of Middle East policy, but her “take it to the UN” plan had been blown up along with the reactor. He did not seem very regretful. What is more, he instructed us all to abandon the diplomatic plans and maintain absolute silence, ensuring that Israel could carry out its plan.

The Israeli assessment of Syria's likely reactions was correct. The Israelis believed that if they and we spoke about the strike, Assad might be forced to react to this humiliation by trying to attack Israel. If, however, we all shut up, he might do nothing – nothing at all. He might try to hide the fact that anything had happened. And with every day that passed, the possibility that he would acknowledge the event and fight back diminished. That was the Israelis’ theory, and they knew their man. We maintained silence and so did Israel – no leaks. As the weeks went by, the chances of an Israeli-Syrian confrontation grew slim
and then disappeared. Syria has never admitted that there was a reactor at the site, continuing to stonewall IAEA requests to examine it carefully. Soon after the bombing, the Syrians bulldozed the reactor site, but the only way they could be sure their lies about it were not contradicted was to prevent a full examination. When a 2008 site visit by IAEA inspectors found some uranium traces, Syria made sure never to permit a return visit.
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Two final points on the Syrian reaction to being bombed in September 2007 are worth noting. First, in May 2008, Turkish-mediated peace talks between Israel and Syria were publicly announced in Istanbul. The discussions had begun secretly in February 2007, soon after Olmert became prime minister, and obviously had continued after the Israeli strike on al-Kibar. That strike seems to have made the Syrians more, not less, desirous of talking to the Israelis because it made them afraid of Israeli power. But it also made them less afraid of American power, the second point. The Israeli strike was on September 6, and a very well-placed Arab diplomat later told us that it had left President Assad deeply worried as to what was coming next. Assad had turned Syria into the main transit route for jihadis going to Iraq to kill American soldiers. From Libya or Indonesia, Pakistan or Egypt, they would fly to Damascus International Airport and be shepherded into Iraq. Assad was afraid that on the heels of the Israeli strike would come American action to punish him for all this involvement. But just weeks later, he received his invitation to send a Syrian delegation to Annapolis, and as he told this Arab envoy, he relaxed immediately; he knew he would be OK. I had not wanted Syria invited to Annapolis because of its involvement in killing Americans in Iraq, but Condi had wanted complete Arab representation as a sign that comprehensive peace might be possible. It was only years later that I learned that Assad had instead interpreted the invitation just as I had: as a sign that the United States would not seriously threaten or punish him for what Syria was doing in Iraq.

Watching carefully to see what Syria was doing – or not doing – in reaction to the strike, we turned back to planning for the “meeting.” On September 12, I shared my doubts with Hadley. The meeting would be held almost exactly two years after the Agreement on Movement and Access. That “agreement” turned out to have little reality to it; it existed on paper only. And here we were, doing it again, I argued. This diplomacy will not work unless and until the security situation improves, yet we were concentrating not on that issue but on the location, the banners, and the program for our conference. In the background, I added, there is zero Fatah reform. In fact, there was a hilarious moment at one of our lunches in Ramallah, in the Muqata, with the Palestinian team. Someone raised Fatah reform with President Abbas and
he replied, oh yes, very important, absolutely – and then said Abu Ala'a is in charge of that, and turned to him to give a progress report. As he began to tell us how much progress was being made, I looked over at our consul general Jake Walles, and
we made a determined effort not to laugh out loud. Putting Abu Ala'a in charge of reform of Fatah was like putting Arafat in charge of an anticorruption fight. Yet on we marched toward Annapolis.