No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

10 THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION

MICHAEL GERSON, the President’s talented chief speechwriter, had a gift for translating the President’s compassionate conservatism into compelling prose, perhaps because he believed in it strongly himself. I loved working with him, not just because he was a wordsmith but also because he was an intellectual sounding board. In late October 2001 we met to discuss what the President would say at the upcoming opening session of the UN General Assembly, which had been postponed for two months due to the September 11 attacks. In his first address to the world since that day, the President would obviously talk about terrorism. But he also wanted to reaffirm his support for peace between Israelis and Palestinians as a pillar of a new and more stable Middle East.

The initial draft of the speech avoided the word “state,” saying instead that the Palestinians should govern themselves in line with what was at the time U.S. policy. When we showed the speech to President Bush, he asked with characteristic directness, “Does that mean they will have a state?” I answered that it did but that the United States had always treated the question of how the Palestinians would govern themselves as a final-status issue and thus a matter for negotiation.

The President had always found the indirect language of the Middle East peace process frustrating. A few days after he became President, he’d challenged me when I’d given him a carefully worded statement to deliver to the press on the South Lawn prior to boarding Marine One. “Why do I have to say it this way?”

We didn’t have time for a long historical discussion, so I just said, “Mr. President, if you change one comma, you will have changed U.S. policy in the Middle East.” He relented and read the statement as written.

But now, almost a year into his term and with significant experience in the matter, the President wanted to say what he meant and say it directly. We agreed that he would call for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The President then asked if the state would be called “Palestine.” That was even trickier because the Israelis had always imbued the name “Palestine” with deep historical meaning. They considered its use a prejudgment of the question of what parts of “Judea and Samaria,” biblical names for territories in the West Bank, could be ceded by Israel, if any. I answered that it would likely be called Palestine but did my best to explain the somewhat circular Israeli logic on the matter. The President would have none of it. He wanted to talk about the establishment of the State of Palestine and how it would live in peace and freedom alongside the State of Israel.

Since the President had made a decision on the matter, there was no need for an interagency meeting. I called Colin, who quickly and happily agreed to this significant step forward in U.S. policy on the Middle East. The Vice President’s staff grumbled to Steve Hadley, but there wasn’t really much pushback.

The afternoon before leaving for New York, the President practiced his speech in the Family Theater, located in the East Wing of the White House. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had apparently come up with the idea of a family theater since the leader of the free world can hardly go to the cineplex to view the latest releases. But the theater also doubles as a rehearsal space for the President to practice with the teleprompter in the company of the chief of staff and several other key staff. Karen Hughes was in charge of the sessions, and they provided a last chance to make changes. The President hated such disruptions, especially what he called “cram-ins,” last-minute ideas that someone had failed to think of earlier in the process.

The session went smoothly in this case. Yet after hearing the speech from start to finish, some of us found that the language concerning the “State of Palestine” sounded more radical than it had seemed on the written page. Steve Hadley whispered to me that I needed to give the Israelis a heads-up. The President overheard it and said that he wasn’t going to make any changes. “No, sir,” I said. “We just don’t want them to be surprised.”

I called Danny Ayalon, Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s foreign policy advisor. It was already late in the evening in Jerusalem, but it seemed as if the Israelis never slept. They worked late into the night, making it convenient to reach them. Danny had been educated in the United States, was married to an American-born woman, and spoke perfect, nuanced English. He was a fierce defender of Israeli interests and the prerogatives of the prime minister, but he was an excellent and reasonable partner for me, and he had direct access to Sharon.

“Danny, the President is going to give a speech tomorrow,” I said. I could almost hear Danny tense up. “He is going to call for the establishment of a Palestinian state.” Now I could hear Danny breathe a sigh of relief. A U.S. President had never called forthrightly for the establishment of a Palestinian state as a matter of U.S. policy, so this was a significant departure. Yet the statement was not as radical as Danny feared; at least the President wasn’t calling for a peace conference or something like that. Then I added, “And he’s going to call it Palestine.”

“He can’t do that,” Danny protested. “Palestine is Judea and Samaria, the biblical home of the Jewish people.”

I listened calmly for a while to the history lesson and repeated, “Danny, he is going to call it Palestine.” Danny said that he needed to talk to the prime minister. I said that the President had made a decision.

When he called back, Danny asked if we could call it “New Palestine.” I replied that “New Palestine” sounded dumb and that the President wouldn’t accept any change in the language. “And Danny, don’t lobby the Hill,” I said. “It’s not going to work.” The reaction in the Israeli press after the speech was relatively muted. The President had established the creation of a Palestinian state as a goal of U.S. foreign policy. Colin would deliver a speech nine days later at the University of Louisville that reaffirmed the President’s vision and appointed General Anthony Zinni as special envoy to the Middle East. The President’s policy vision was memorialized in UN Security Council Resolution 1397 in March of the next year.

I relate this exchange in some detail because it was my first experience in the management of U.S.-Israeli relations. George W. Bush was already trusted in Israel thanks to his full-throated support of Israel’s right to defend itself against terror early in his presidency. Sharon had visited the White House twice, and the President had backed the Israeli position that final-status negotiations were premature in the face of Palestinian violence.

I too had established myself as a friend of Israel, linking our efforts in the war on terror to Israel’s struggle. “You can’t condemn al Qaeda and hug Hamas,” I’d said to the press, much to the Israelis’ delight.

Yet even with this basis of trust, every hint of a change in the status quo was met with suspicion and an attempt to haggle over every word. And disagreements with Israel were often immediately broadcast to Capitol Hill and to lobbyists such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Moreover, those groups had a direct line into the White House, particularly through the Vice President’s office. This was frequently a problem for the State Department, which was viewed as a bastion of pro-Arab sentiment. Israeli efforts to find exploitable daylight between the President and the secretary of state had complicated matters for more than one U.S. administration.

Fortunately, I developed my own close ties to the Jewish community in Washington and to the Israelis as well. Such people as Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League; Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Harold Tanner, the president of the American Jewish Committee; and Howard Kohr, the executive director of AIPAC, came to trust me and I them. Abe in particular would call occasionally and suggest that it was time to meet with the leaders of key organizations when too much distance was growing between the President and the Jewish community. It was not that the groups had a veto—far from it. But they often provided a good check on what we were doing, and in any case they needed to be kept informed and sometimes reassured. The sessions helped us get ahead of potential problems.

And whatever the problems, I reminded myself constantly that even if Israel’s leaders were sometimes a nightmare to deal with, this important ally of ours was the only democracy in the Middle East. Our relationship really was based on more than strategic interests; we were friends, and that mattered.

The President’s speech was not exactly front-page news in the Arab press. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia were so focused on the “peace process” that they seemingly failed to notice that the President of the United States had called for the establishment of a State of Palestine. Years later, the Arabs would acknowledge the importance of what the President had done. But in this initial failure to credit the President’s stance was an important lesson too: whatever you do for peace in the Middle East, it is never enough for the Arab parties.

DESPITE THE HOPEFUL rhetorical support for a Palestinian state, the low-intensity war between Israelis and Palestinians continued. While our envoy Anthony Zinni tried to mediate, Hamas perpetrated a series of suicide bombings at the beginning of December 2001, killing twenty-six Israelis in twenty-four hours in Jerusalem and Haifa. In response, Israeli helicopters attacked Yasir Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah, and Sharon soon declared Arafat to be “out of play.” Hearing that, I thought it necessary to reaffirm with the Israelis the prime minister’s commitment to President Bush not to kill Arafat. We were back in crisis management mode, just trying to stem the violence and calm the region.

Then an incident in the Red Sea cemented our already dim view of Arafat’s “leadership.” I never met him, and neither did the President, but it was absolutely clear that he was not going to lead his people to peace. The President placed the blame for the failure of the Camp David negotiations on Arafat. He believed that Arafat was corrupt and unwilling to make difficult choices for peace. In January 2002 we added “committed terrorist” to the list of offenses. Arafat had ostensibly renounced terrorism in 1988 and again as part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which had recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the governing authority for the Palestinian people. But when on January 3 the Israeli navy, with tracking support from the United States, captured the Palestinian Authority’s Karine A, a freighter loaded with arms destined for Gaza, Arafat’s duplicity was exposed.

The NSC gathered a few days later to review the evidence from the incident and to discuss the ramifications for U.S. policy in the Middle East. The fact that the arms had likely come from Iran was particularly troubling; the Palestinian leadership had sponsors that we could not tolerate. We began to discuss alternatives to Arafat. But we wanted to be careful, particularly with the Israelis, to make clear that we meant peaceful change—not Arafat’s assassination.

The violence continued unabated with the Israeli assassination of a leading Palestinian militant in the West Bank city of Tulkharam. Two weeks later the first female Fatah suicide attacker struck in Jerusalem, killing one person and wounding more than a hundred others, including an American man who’d been in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

It was against that backdrop that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia released his “peace initiative” after a dinner with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman reported the existence of the plan in a column on February 17, 2002. The proposal was that a unified Arab world would end its conflict with Israel in exchange for the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders (roughly the territory occupied by Israel after the 1967 war against the combined Arab armies). It was a bold proposal and could have been an important point of departure for negotiations. The Saudis would later express their disappointment that we hadn’t responded favorably to the crown prince’s efforts. But the timing could not have been worse. Sharon had been elected to defeat the intifada—not to make peace. There was no trust in Arafat as a partner, an assessment we shared.

The cycle of violence in the region was deepening when the Saudi initiative came to light. In early March Sharon responded to a series of suicide bombings by ordering military incursions into a number of Palestinian towns in Gaza and the West Bank, determined to defeat the terrorists and secure the State of Israel. Frankly, no one, most especially the President, blamed him for doing so.

Yet as the violence escalated, the pressure from our Arab allies and European friends to do something grew. The Vice President visited the Middle East on March 12 to 19, 2002, holding out the possibility of meeting with Arafat if the Palestinians agreed to fully implement the security cooperation plan drafted by George Tenet, the CIA director.

During the Clinton administration, the CIA had taken the U.S. lead on security matters in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian security forces operated in a shadowy manner. They were essentially intelligence forces that looked quite a bit like mafia bosses or perhaps street gangs. Arafat had a web of at least a dozen of these security organizations, each led by a “chief” and all loyal to him, while jockeying with and checking one another. Violence between the organizations competing for the spoils of Arafat’s corruption or control of territory was fairly common. Needless to say, it was a world in which the CIA was more capable than the State Department or the Pentagon, and the Agency sometimes succeeded in quelling the violence. But that version of security cooperation didn’t do much to democratize Palestinian institutions or root out corruption within them.

Because the Palestinians failed to fully implement the Tenet security plan, the Vice President did not meet with Arafat. When he returned to the White House and reported on his trip, our discussions turned again to how the Palestinians might find leadership that would make a two-state solution possible. We were frankly ready to tell the world that it would never happen with Arafat in power.

Then events took a radical turn. On Passover, Hamas carried out a suicide attack at the Park Hotel in Netanya, killing dozens of Israelis and wounding more than a hundred people. Even with that provocation the Israelis sent word that they would accept the Zinni security plan, based largely on Tenet’s earlier work. The Palestinians refused to do so.

Thus, when the Israelis launched Operation Defensive Shield and reoccupied all of the West Bank, we were neither surprised nor critical. The President and Colin said yet again that Israel had a right to defend itself. Ari Fleischer reiterated the statement practically every day. But the Israelis always seem to go too far. They decided to lay siege to the Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah with Arafat in it. For days CNN showed pictures of the Palestinian leader at the mercy of the Israeli forces.

When the Israelis entered Bethlehem, dozens of fleeing militants broke into the Church of the Nativity, seeking refuge. The church, which marks the place of Jesus’s birth, was damaged by errant Israeli gunfire during the ensuing siege. That prompted an angry phone call to me from the Vatican’s secretary of state. He didn’t mince words. Saying that the Holy Father himself had directed him to make the phone call, the cardinal called the incident an attack on one of the holiest shrines for Christians. I tried to protest that it had been an accident, but somehow the point seemed moot. The Arabs were threatening all manner of retaliation if the Israelis didn’t stop. We were in the midst of a full-blown Middle East crisis and a deepening split with Israel.

THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR is almost always the focal point in the management of a crisis with Israel. This is in part structural. The Israeli foreign minister is often selected as a part of domestic coalition building and sometimes lacks full authority on matters of war and peace. Moreover, because Israel believes that it exists in a state of siege (not without some justification), the prime minister and his office carry the foreign policy brief as if the country is in a perpetual state of war. And in relations with the United States, it is the prime minister, from David Ben-Gurion to Yitzhak Rabin to Benjamin Netanyahu, who “owns” the relationship with Washington. This is reinforced by the aforementioned suspicion of the State Department as “pro-Arab.”

As the violence escalated, I convened the Principals and then the NSC to consider what the President should say and when. Five days had passed since the Israeli initiation of Operation Defensive Shield, and the Arab world was roiling. We were under enormous pressure to rein in the Israelis. There were three problems with this. First, there is an assumption, particularly among the Arabs and even the Europeans, that if the United States threatens Israel with diplomatic isolation or perhaps limitations on financial or military assistance, Israel will comply immediately and completely. That, of course, isn’t true, particularly in the midst of a military operation deemed necessary for Israel’s security by its democratically elected government. What is more, what U.S. President wants to threaten the United States’ ally in this way when Israel is responding to an attack? Second, the President has to be careful because if he calls for the Israelis to stop and they do not, his credibility and that of the United States will be severely damaged. Finally, there was some sentiment within the administration, particularly on the part of the Vice President and Don Rumsfeld, that the Israelis had a right to crush the terrorists who were attacking them. The President shared this view but acknowledged Colin’s point that the inevitable carnage among innocent Palestinians was also a serious problem and that the credibility of the United States was deteriorating. We laid out the options, which ranged from doing nothing to calling for an end to the Israeli operation.

The President decided, despite significant reservations by all involved, to give a speech on April 4, 2002, urging Israel to stop settlement activity and stop Operation Defensive Shield. Even Colin worried that the Israelis might ignore the calls, further undermining U.S. credibility. The President also did what presidents do under the circumstances: he sent the secretary of state to the region even though Colin had nothing that he could deliver. The President told Colin directly that he needed him to go and spend some of his personal credibility on behalf of the administration. Colin went despite having deep reservations.

The next three weeks were exceedingly difficult and filled with tension. Powell dutifully traveled to the Middle East, meeting with Arafat in the Muqata compound (the Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah) with Israeli tanks outside. He told Arafat that he might be the last U.S. official with whom he’d meet if he didn’t rein in the terrorists. He learned too that the Israeli government had decided to build a security buffer between Israel and the West Bank from Mount Gilboa in the north to the Judean desert in the south. Though the ostensible purpose was to make it impossible for terrorists to enter Israel, we knew that the construction of a “wall” (or “fence,” as the Israelis called it) would be read as an Israeli attempt to cement the territorial status quo and thereby prejudge the boundaries of a Palestinian state. The imagery was terrible too: an ugly barrier erected between peoples who were supposed to try to find a way to live in peace.

Colin returned from the region without any agreements. He’d tried to negotiate a document that might lay out a path to end the violence and that would result in a peace conference of some kind. But the President shared the Israelis’ allergy to any nod toward negotiations with Arafat. I tried to make the case to the President that simply pointing toward negotiations would carry little cost. He was adamant, though, and I called Colin, who was still in the region, to tell him that the draft statement he’d sent to Washington was dead on arrival. Our diplomatic efforts were failing miserably. And when, on April 18, the President answered a question by calling the Israeli prime minister “a man of peace,” I thought we’d done long-term damage to our relations in the Arab world.

Colin had been sitting next to the President when he made the comment. After the press left, he came over to me. “Do you have any idea how this plays on Arab TV?” he asked. “The Israelis are just thumbing their noses at the President. Why is he giving Sharon a pass?” The State Department went into overdrive trying to explain what the President had “meant to say.”

I fully agreed at the time that the President had made a mistake. But later I would see that the vote of confidence in Sharon had had an effect on the tough, aging Israeli. Sharon would ultimately take important and unexpected steps toward the Palestinians, whom he distrusted and whose ambitions for statehood he’d always crushed. It was not the only time that George W. Bush took a rhetorical leap forward that was both unscripted and strategically wise.

But on that day the problem was that the Israelis were continuing to lay waste to the West Bank and Gaza. The images of dead innocent Palestinians, Palestinian men being rounded up by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and the siege of Ramallah played over and over on television. That the Israelis were not responding to the President’s call to stop was increasingly frustrating and embarrassing. When asked on CNN on April 7, 2002, what the President had meant by “without delay” in calling for an end to the Israeli operation, I’d said, “It means now.” An Israeli governmental official responded by saying that Israel would withdraw “without delay” when they’d finished their operation. That wasn’t exactly the response we were looking for. The offensive continued.

On April 25, the President hosted Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at his ranch in Texas. During the meeting the Saudi leader asked to be left alone in the living room with his delegation. We were a bit surprised but moved to the screened porch adjacent to where they were meeting. After a few minutes, Gamal Helal, the able U.S. interpreter, rushed into the room where we were sitting. The Arabs trusted Gamal after more than ten years of his being an interpreter and advisor to secretaries of state. He’d somehow been allowed to remain with the Saudis for their confab. He told the President that the Saudis were threatening to go home immediately if the President didn’t stop the Israelis and make them withdraw that day. The President asked rhetorically, “Does it matter if they leave?”

“It would be a disaster,” I said. Colin nodded his agreement and was immediately told by the President to “go and fix it.” He couldn’t. The President, temporizing a bit, asked the Saudi leader to go for a tour of the ranch and talk about religion. As President Bush has written in his memoir, the atmosphere improved while they were riding together in his pickup truck. He and the Saudi encountered a wild turkey that Abdullah took as a sign from God and a bond of friendship between the two men. When the President related the incident that evening at dinner, I thought, Whatever works.

The momentary easing of tensions with the Saudis did not end their insistence that the United States deal with Israel. And we had been turning up the pressure, pushing the Israelis to pull back. I was calling Danny Ayalon every day, sometimes several times a day. He was clearly troubled, but the IDF had a green light to finish what it had started. I appealed to Danny to at least end the siege of the Muqata compound. “Arafat is on CNN speaking by candlelight. You’re making him look like Mother Teresa. Turn on their electricity.”

“They have electricity,” Danny retorted. “He’s just doing that to evoke sympathy.”

“That’s the point,” I said. In another call, on April 27, I told him that the President had instructed me to say that there had better be some movement within twenty-four hours or he would publicly criticize Israel and the prime minister in the harshest terms. I reminded Danny that the President had taken a risk in calling Sharon a “man of peace.” Now it was time for him to prove it.

Finally we got some movement forward. Working with the British, we were able to come to a solution with the Israelis on one part of the problem. Some terrorists had holed up along with Arafat in his compound in Ramallah. Among them were militants who had been convicted of assassinating the Israeli tourism minister a few months earlier. The Israelis wanted the militants, and the Palestinians wanted to keep them jailed but in Palestinian custody. We worked out a deal to have them transferred to British custody in the West Bank. Then the Israelis agreed to start pulling back from Palestinian cities one at a time (in fact, they had already withdrawn from a few) and to announce that they’d continue to do so as long as there were no more attacks. At last, on May 2, five weeks after it had laid siege to the Muqata compound, the IDF withdrew, permitting the smiling Arafat to emerge to a hero’s welcome. The Israelis never seemed to manage public perceptions very well.

On June 10, Sharon visited the White House for the sixth time. The President told him that the United States would insist that the Palestinian Authority would have to reform before peace negotiations. There would have to be a new PA with new leadership. That was music to Sharon’s ears and brought Israel and the United States into close alignment. I leaned over to the President and asked him to reiterate one point, however. “That doesn’t mean that you can kill Arafat,” the President said to Sharon, who nodded in agreement.

WITH THE immediate crisis receding, we returned again to the question of what to do in the Middle East. Colin and the State Department again proposed a peace conference; the President again said no, not with Arafat. The Palestinian Authority had launched a hundred-day reform plan for governance, but we had little confidence that it would actually implement it. Yet there was clearly a void. If we weren’t ready to support negotiations, what were we prepared to do?

The question bothered the President, who was turning it over in his head almost daily. I would go to the Oval Office for our morning meeting, only to have him ask questions about the Palestinians. The one that was most on his mind was why the PA could not find decent leadership. He knew many Palestinians, mostly living in the United States, and they were entrepreneurial people. He just couldn’t understand why, even under occupation, the Palestinians had not “found their Nelson Mandela,” as he put it. The President wanted to give a speech to rally Palestinians and the world behind the cause of decent governance. Already at a press conference during an EU-U.S. summit, the President had called for elections in the Palestinian territories. The idea had gone nowhere and had barely been noticed amid the calls for a peace conference.

The President had become deeply convinced that the question wasn’t whether to establish a Palestinian state; it was “What kind of Palestinian state?” He wanted to put on the agenda the right of the Palestinians to live in freedom both from Israel and from their own corrupt leaders. Ironically, one cornerstone of the administration’s Freedom Agenda would come from the search for an enduring and sustainable end to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

I called Mike Gerson, and we sat down to sketch out ideas for a presidential speech. In the address the President would call for the establishment of a provisional Palestinian state founded on democracy, institutional reform, and the renunciation of terrorism. He’d also call on Israel to cease building settlements in the occupied territories and to eventually withdraw its forces to positions held prior to September 28, 2000. Further, he’d say that the Israelis needed to take steps to restore freedom of movement in the territories to help improve the Palestinian economy. And he’d state directly that the Palestinians needed new leadership.

The speech clearance process proved to be an interagency nightmare. We dropped the idea of a provisional state, accepting State’s view that the Palestinians would reject the proposal. They wanted permanent borders, not temporary ones. The debate continued over what the President should say. But the struggle over the wording was actually masking differences concerning policy. After almost two weeks, I told the President that we had a text but recommended that he hold an NSC meeting just to make sure.

We met for a final review of the speech on June 21. The Vice President was adamant that the speech should not be given because in the middle of the intifada it would give too much credibility to the Palestinian claims. Colin was concerned that in a speech denouncing Arafat, the United States would be seen as trying to choose Palestinian leaders. The President kept saying that he wanted to speak up for the Palestinians’ rights to decent lives and decent governance. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if democracy in the Middle East sprung first from the rocky soil of the West Bank?” he asked. The discussion continued, with Colin and the Vice President coming to the same conclusion for diametrically opposed reasons.

Finally I decided to speak up and voice my own opinion, something I rarely did in an NSC meeting. Usually I spoke only to clarify points for the President or to get agreement from him on a way forward. But he was struggling to find support for what he clearly and rightly wanted to do. “Mr. President,” I started, but, noticing that my voice was quivering, I stopped and started again. “Mr. President, this is what the President of the United States does. He changes the terms of the debate, and heaven knows someone has got to do that in the Middle East.” I could tell that the President was a bit startled since I generally shared my views in private. But I was glad I’d said it.

After a little more debate he sat back in his chair. “I’m going to give the speech,” he said.

When the President makes a speech in the Rose Garden, it signals that the message is important. So, with the press gathered on the lawn facing the French doors of the Oval Office, the President delivered his speech. “I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror,” he said. “I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts.”

After he finished, we walked back into the Oval Office. He was gratified by what he’d done, and so was I. It had been a good and consequential speech but different from the expected calls for negotiations between the sides that were characteristic of the stale ideas governing policy toward the Middle East.

I decided to check in with William Burns, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs at the State Department. “How’s the reaction?” I asked. Bill is a consummate professional and not given to hyperbole, so when he said that the reaction in the Arab world was “pretty rough,” I knew what he really meant: “All hell has broken loose.”

Indeed it had. I called Colin. He was doing everything he could to calm the waters in the Arab world and to get the President’s true message out. But it was “tough,” he said and rushed away to engage in “damage control.”

We had a particular problem with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. President Bush had hosted Mubarak at Camp David on June 8 for what had been a pretty straightforward conversation about the Middle East. The aging Egyptian president considered himself an authority on the subject and, given his country’s historic peace treaty with Israel in 1979, the key to a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. Mubarak had a tendency to lecture his interlocutors about the region, and it often felt like a one-way conversation.

Nothing had been said to Mubarak about the President’s upcoming speech, let alone its content, which had yet to be determined within the administration. Still, Mubarak felt double-crossed after the speech, given the proximity of his visit to its delivery. He worried that some people might even suspect that he’d endorsed the President’s controversial call for Arafat’s dismissal. We managed to work with Mubarak from then on, but he never forgot what had happened.

The Arabists in the State Department were appalled too. One diplomat who was serving in the Middle East told a reporter at a cocktail party that he could no longer do his job thanks to “that speech.” Unfortunately the remark got back to the White House, shaking our confidence in him and adding to the perception that the professionals in the Foreign Service didn’t really back the President.

On the other hand, a previously arranged phone call with the leadership of the Jewish community that evening was just a love fest. “Thank you. Thank the President. Tell him there has never been a more important speech about the Middle East.” Well, I thought, we certainly have everyone’s attention.

The next day the President left for Kananaskis in Alberta, Canada, for a G8 summit, and as I opened my front door at five that morning, I was greeted by a screaming newspaper headline: “Bush Demands Arafat’s Ouster.” Seated in the President’s office aboard Air Force One, we reviewed the press line with Ari, who then left to face the traveling press corps. “Don’t you back off what I said,” the President had told him, aware of our diplomats’ tendency to explain yet again “what the President meant to say.”

I stayed behind, and we talked about the firestorm that was brewing. You could count on George W. Bush to stand firm even in the face of withering criticism. But our relationship of trust allowed me to probe a little deeper with him and to see how he was really feeling. For instance, in connection with bin Laden, when the President had delivered the famous retort about wanting him “dead or alive,” he’d asked me when we were alone if it had been a mistake. “The language was a little white hot for the President of the United States,” I’d said. He’d nodded his head in agreement and admitted that the First Lady agreed with me. He wouldn’t acknowledge the error publicly for some years.

But on this day he was absolutely confident that he’d done the right thing. Arafat did have to go if there were ever to be peace in the Middle East. I agreed, but we both knew that the G8 meeting was going to be rocky. The Europeans thought Arafat was the key to peace. They would take the President’s statement as a sign that he was pro-Israel to a fault. They weren’t the only ones. Apparently, the President’s mother had called him to ask how it felt to be the first Jewish President!

The first meeting when we arrived in Canada was with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, who didn’t even mention the Arafat matter. Jean Chrétien of Canada, however, was appalled by what the President had done, saying he had no “specific point of view” on whether Arafat should go. He kept his criticism within bounds but couldn’t help but lecture the President on the history of Middle East peace negotiations and the critical role that Canada had always played. The President listened politely but didn’t budge. Fortunately the evening was “downtime,” and Andy Card, Karen Hughes, and I had a relaxed dinner with him where the issue of what to do about the reaction in the Middle East was put on hold.

The next morning I went down to the gym to exercise and found myself in the company of Tony Blair, with whom the President was to meet that morning. “Well, George has stirred it up a bit,” he said with characteristic British understatement. The President came in a few minutes later and talked about the speech, explaining why he’d made it and that he had intended it as a clear indication of his dedication to Middle East peace.

Blair said that he thought he could help at the press availability after their meeting. He too thought Arafat to be a spent force. It was just that the Arabs and Europeans, who fully understood that fact, weren’t willing to challenge the orthodoxy that he was the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people. When the press asked Blair about the President’s speech, he masterfully found a way to support his friend. “I have tried as hard as anyone” to get Arafat to reform, he said, explaining that he had met with Arafat more than thirty times in recent years. “But we’ve got a situation where we have not been able to make progress, and there has been an attitude towards terrorism that is inconsistent with the notion of Israel’s security.”

The Arabs would soon settle down, and Colin successfully worked to build support for President Bush’s vision of a democratic Palestine, work for which he has never gotten enough credit. In early July the foreign ministers of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt visited President Bush to discuss how to achieve the goals set out in the President’s address. The Jordanian foreign minister made a proposal, reiterated by the king of Jordan during a visit the next month, to translate the President’s speech into a written plan with performance-based benchmarks. The proposal would eventually result in the “Road Map for Peace.” The fact is that Blair was right: the Arabs knew that Arafat would never make peace, though they would never publicly acknowledge it. Given that they themselves were authoritarians, they were also somewhat uncomfortable with the emphasis on Palestinian democracy.

But the President had broken a taboo that needed to be broken. The Israelis had loved the speech, but they would soon find that the President expected Israel to support and engage a changing Palestinian leadership. The old Israeli claim that “there was no Palestinian partner for peace” would soon lose salience too. And the United States would be able to approach the question of Middle East peace on a fundamentally different basis: that of a two-state solution in which a democratic Palestine and a democratic Israel would live side by side.