No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

19 ANOTHER STEP TOWARD A PALESTINIAN STATE

ARIEL SHARON HAD TAKEN advantage of the defeat of Saddam Hussein and his trust in George W. Bush to make significant shifts in long-held Likud positions in Israel. In accepting the Road Map for Peace in the Middle East and speaking forcefully about the need to make “painful concessions” in 2003, the Israeli prime minister had put himself firmly on the side of a two-state solution. Still, when Dubi Weisglass, Sharon’s closest advisor, came to see me at the White House and said that the prime minister was considering a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, I was stunned.

What Sharon had in mind showed not only how far he’d come toward peace but also his shrewd political leadership. Weisglass said that the prime minister saw an opportunity to split Israeli public opinion on the contentious issue of settlements, thus isolating the minority opposed to a two-state solution. The centerpiece of Sharon’s gambit would be a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, settlers and all. The Palestinians would then have a real chance to govern themselves.

As was the case in any conversation with the Israelis, however, there was a “but.” To make this advance toward peace, Dubi said, Sharon needed to assure the public that a few of the most established settlements in the West Bank would remain intact in any future peace agreement. Clearly, to make way for a Palestinian state, settlers would have to be uprooted from the West Bank and Gaza. There was little sympathy for those occupying the scattered encampments deep in the West Bank and even less for those in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) no longer wanted to defend those isolated settlements, and Gaza, with its large, angry, and poor Palestinian population, had no future in a Jewish democratic state. But some West Bank settlements, such as Ariel, Ma’al Adumim, Modi’in Illit, and Beitar Illit, were now established Israeli cities. Weisglass said that the prime minister needed to signal that those big population blocks, about 80,000 settlers in all, would be included in Israel when the Palestinian state was created.

The prime minister had sent Dubi to see if President Bush would affirm this principle, in a word legitimizing certain settlements so that the Israelis could begin their withdrawal. Steve Hadley and I listened intently. There was a breakthrough in there somewhere, but it was fraught with dangers for U.S. policy in the Middle East. First, the President couldn’t legitimize specific settlements. Second, a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza without negotiation or at least coordination with the Palestinians might signal that the Israelis were prepared to determine the status quo on their own. In other words, even a good outcome, with Israelis leaving disputed territory, might send the wrong message. Third, we were concerned that a withdrawal from Gaza might be perceived as the end of the process, not the beginning: Gaza first was one thing; only Gaza was not acceptable. We would insist that the Gaza withdrawal be accompanied by the removal of at least some settlements in the West Bank. Eventually, the four northernmost settlements were evacuated.

Over the next month, we came to terms with the Israelis on how to move forward. Dubi and I led the negotiations. Steve Hadley and Elliott Abrams were dispatched to Israel for long sessions with the prime minister to better understand how the process could limit settlement growth and spur movement toward a Palestinian state. The outcome was a letter from President Bush to Prime Minister Sharon that acknowledged the need to accommodate “new realities on the ground,” including “already existing major Israeli population centers” in the West Bank, at the time of a negotiated settlement to the conflict.

The letter also addressed indirectly the “right of return,” stating that under any realistic solution to the issue, Palestinian refugees would be expected to live in a new homeland, the State of Palestine. The great majority of them would not “return” to their ancestral lands in Israel. That issue had been included in the letter due, in large part, to my interaction with Tzipi Livni, whom I’d met during my first trip to Israel in 2000. She was minister for immigrant absorption when she came to see me in March 2004. We talked for a long time about her personal story as a child of Israeli freedom fighters. She told me that she’d come to the conclusion that Israelis could no longer govern Palestinians and concessions were required. That would mean that there could be no “greater Israel,” she conceded. Then she spoke movingly of how hard it was for her to say it since her father’s headstone was engraved with a map of Israel incorporating all of Judea and Samaria. Ending the conflict between Arabs and Israelis was her mission in Israeli politics.

But she was worried that even after the establishment of the Palestinian state, there would be demands that Israel accept a large number of Palestinian refugees to fulfill the Arab insistence on “right of return,” as embodied in UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Israel did not accept the legitimacy of the resolution, but the rest of the world did. That could change the nature of the State of Israel, which had been founded as a state for the Jews.

I must admit that though I understood the argument intellectually, it struck me as a harsh defense of the ethnic purity of the Israeli state when Tzipi said it. It was one of those conversations that shocked my sensibilities as an American. After all, the very concept of “American” rejects ethnic or religious definitions of citizenship. Moreover, there were Arab citizens of Israel. Where did they fit in?

I took a deep breath and tried to understand, and slowly I came to see what she meant. Most of us thought of the creation of Israel in the context of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. But for most Israelis, their country’s birth had instead been the fulfillment of a long historical and religious journey to reestablish “the Jewish state.” The right of return for Palestinians was inconsistent with the conclusion of that thousands-year-old process. Despite the dissonance that it stirred in me, I suggested that the President include the line that made clear that Palestinian refugees would be expected to live in Palestine. That would allow the democratic state of Israel to be “Jewish.”

On April 14 Ariel Sharon came to the White House and stood with the President on the long red carpet of the Cross Hall, the stately corridor that leads to the East Room. The night before, I met with the prime minister for more than three hours to go over the letter and what it meant. I was especially concerned that the Israelis not say that the United States was legitimizing settlement activity. There had been some indirect references to this already in the press, and we suspected that the Israelis had been busy “backgrounding” the story that way. The prime minister said that he understood and would not betray his friend.

There were audible gasps from the press as the President read from the text, which marked a major departure in U.S. policy toward the Middle East. The line that said that all of the issues had to be “mutually agreed” was drowned out in the press by the focus on how we “legitimized” settlements and “rejected” the right of return.

After the press conference, I got into the car and headed to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where I was scheduled to give a speech. I checked in with Bill Burns, the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, at the State Department. In his preternaturally calm way, Bill relayed the turbulence that was breaking out in the Middle East in response to what had been said, just as he’d done two years earlier after the President had given his Rose Garden speech calling for Palestinian democracy and the removal of Arafat. By the time I finished at the Naval Academy and returned to the White House, there were messages from the Jordanians, Saudis, and Egyptians waiting for me. The Jordanians, in particular, argued that the President would need to give assurances to the Arabs just as he had to the Israelis.

We had a way of breaking old taboos in the agreed script concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But for all the commitment to the “peace process” over the years, it had failed to create a Palestinian state or provide decent leadership for the Palestinian people. There was still a lot to be done, but there was movement forward. The Israelis were getting ready to withdraw from Gaza, and the Palestinians would have their chance to show that they could govern themselves.

The letter to Sharon also launched a process to attack the age-old problem of Israeli settlement expansion. Dubi had suggested that we simply name the settlements that would be grandfathered in a final-status agreement. That would require finally understanding what the Israelis meant by the slippery term “natural growth.” It seemed logical that until a peace agreement was signed, there would need to be limits on the expansion of those “cities.” Steve and Elliott sought a detailed understanding of the ever-shifting Israeli arguments about building within municipal lines, within built-up areas, building horizontally, vertically, and on and on. We could never get an agreed definition for a settlement freeze based on those parameters.

We did, however, agree informally with the Israelis that they would take certain steps to limit settlement growth. First, they would end all special government subsidies to settlers. Second, there would be no new settlements, although in reality the expansion within settlements was more often the problem. Third, they would expropriate no more land for settlement construction. And fourth, they would pass what I came to call the “Google Earth test”: there would be no building outward. Though the growth of existing settlements continued to be a bone of contention between us for the next five years, there were no new settlement blocks built from 2004 to 2009, and the settler population grew at a lower annual rate than at any other time since the 1967 war. There was some confirmation that what we had done mattered when the Sharon government was accused of turning its back on settlers to appease George W. Bush.