No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

4 THE MIDDLE EAST

THE MIDDLE EAST WAS the exception to the sense of normalcy that spring. The low-intensity war between Palestinians and Israelis dominated our security agenda. The explosion in the region predated us. In 2000 the Clinton administration had convened the two sides at Camp David in a dramatic effort to solve the decades-old conflict. Ehud Barak, a former general who had become the leader of the Labor Party and was now Israel’s prime minister, wanted a deal badly. The record is sketchy to this day, but he was apparently ready to withdraw from almost all of the West Bank and all of Gaza, permit a certain number of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, and find a solution for Jerusalem that would cede, in some fashion, Israeli sovereignty over parts of the Holy City. It is easy to forget how far out on a limb Barak was at Camp David. After all, in 2000 there was no consensus in Israel that there should even be a Palestinian state.

In the summer before the failure of Camp David, I witnessed firsthand the ferment in Israel. I’d been invited to lecture at Tel Aviv University by my good friend Shai Feldman and took my first trip to the Holy Land in July of that year. For me it was literally a religious experience, visiting the Sea of Galilee and the Mount of the Beatitudes and walking where Christ had walked. But since it was well known by that time that I was advising George W. Bush, the visit took on a distinctly political character. I met with Barak and several of his ministers and discussed their efforts to make peace.

The air in Israel was thick with expectation that Camp David might succeed in ending the conflict with the Palestinians. I can well remember sitting with friends from the university in the courtyard of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on a warm summer evening as they discussed how the Jewish state of Israel would develop in conditions of peace with the Palestinians. So much of Israel’s young history had been defined by wars with the Arabs. “What would life be like without that conflict?” they asked.

On another occasion I sat with members of Israel’s burgeoning high-tech community, drawing on my own experiences in Silicon Valley to engage them about Israel’s economic future in the absence of permanent conflict. It was a time of uncertainty and questioning but, without a doubt, a time of optimistic anticipation.

Then I went to see Ariel Sharon, the leader of the conservative Likud Party, and his advisors, who were preparing to challenge Barak in upcoming elections. The encounter made it crystal clear that not all Israelis were willing to end the conflict on the basis of a deal like Camp David.

I met Sharon in the tiny offices of Likud, located on the top floor of a miserably hot building in Tel Aviv. I was immediately struck by the fact that he was as wide as he was tall. He had a slightly lazy eye and thick features, and he spoke in heavily accented English. Over the years I came to understand that Sharon was one of the few people who spoke English better than he understood it. This often led to misunderstandings and Sharon’s tendency to repeat phrases over and over, whether they were connected to the conversation or not. But at the time I was impressed with what I took to be his fluency in English.

I also knew Sharon’s reputation as an uncompromising defender of Israel and the terrible history of his role in the attack on Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, where many innocent Palestinians died during the war with Lebanon in 1982. He was the Israeli leader whom Arabs (and many liberal Israelis and Americans) hated most. Nothing in that first meeting suggested that his uncompromising hard-liner reputation was undeserved, but I was a bit drawn to him nonetheless. He seemed to embody the Israeli experience because, in truth, without toughness, perseverance, and even ruthlessness, Israel would have ceased to exist in a neighborhood bent on its destruction.

When the conversation turned to Governor Bush, Sharon spoke warmly of him. George W. Bush had visited Israel two years before with several other American governors. Sharon had been his personal guide by helicopter of the West Bank and Gaza. Sharon’s emphasis on the fragility of Israel’s security situation had made a major and lasting impression on George W. Bush. The governor’s sympathy for Israel’s plight had an equally important impact on Sharon.

The meeting I had with him was taken up with Sharon’s presentation of “maps” that essentially laid claim to all of the territory of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. It was very clear that he would not support dividing the land and creating a Palestinian state, and I remember thinking that Barak would have a tough adversary to overcome if he succeeded in getting a deal with the Palestinians.

Sharon was especially anxious for me to meet his close advisor, a woman near my age, Tzipi Livni. She too exuded toughness and an uncompromising view of Israel’s right to exist on the totality of its biblical lands. Sharon proudly noted that she was a child of the Irgun, the armed Israeli militia that had helped drive the British out of the Middle East after World War II. Her mother had been a “freedom fighter” who had spent time in a British jail. Her father had been an operational commander of Irgun at the time of the famous bombing of the British headquarters in the King David Hotel in 1946. Needless to say, the entire meeting was in stark contrast to my encounters with the intellectuals of the Israeli Left with whom I spent most of my time during that trip.

Throughout the summer and fall, the Clinton administration feverishly pursued an agreement, but Camp David failed. Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat maintained until his death that the deal was not a good one and that he had told the Clinton administration that he would have been “a dead man” for accepting it. Barak returned home to vicious criticism and certain defeat in the elections.

On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon decided to visit the Temple Mount, thereby asserting Israeli sovereignty over the holiest of Jewish places. Since the Six-Day War, the Israeli government had essentially barred practicing Jews from visiting the area. Both the Dome of the Rock (also known as Qubbat al-Sakhra) and Al-Aqsa Mosque are on the Temple Mount. The Dome of the Rock, from which the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven on a winged horse, is one of the holiest places of Islam. Some Jews, in turn, believe that it was built in the seventh century to defile the site of the ruins of the first and second temples of ancient Israel.

I had seen those places up close the summer before. As I walked through Jerusalem, I reflected that the world’s great religions don’t come together in the Holy City; they clash there, with Israeli soldiers securing the Dome of the Rock on top of the Temple Mount near the wailing wall—the Dome of the Rock having been built in a way to demonstrate dominion over the whole of the Old City—and various Christian sects squabbling about space in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I found Jerusalem enchanting but disturbing, a place where man’s desire to use God for dominance over other human beings was very much on display.

In any case, Yasir Arafat, perhaps to cover his failings at Camp David, used Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount as a pretext and essentially condoned a return to the violence that the Palestinians had renounced in the Oslo Accords of 1993. The “second intifada” began with a rapid succession of attacks on Israelis: an Islamic Jihad suicide bomb attack on October 26; a car bombing on November 2; a school bus bombing on November 20; a car bombing on November 22; a suicide bombing on December 22; a car bombing on January 1; and the kidnapping and shooting of two Israelis in Tulkarm in the West Bank on January 23. Not surprisingly, Ariel Sharon defeated Ehud Barak for the position of prime minister on February 6, 2001. Sharon called for complete Israeli control of a unified Jerusalem and no negotiation until the Palestinians ceased their violence. A few days later, on February 14, Israel imposed a complete blockade on the Palestinian territories in response to the killing of eight soldiers and a civilian by a Palestinian bus driver.

It became fashionable during the Bush team’s eight years in office to say that we did not come to power committed to the peace process and that we should have pursued the understandings at Camp David. It simply flies in the face of reality to believe that there was any room for negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis in 2001 or for some time afterward. Yasir Arafat had demonstrated that he would not or could not make peace. Ariel Sharon came to power to defeat the Palestinian resistance, not to negotiate.

That was the situation we inherited. I do not blame the Clinton administration for trying, but later, when we tried to reinvigorate the peace process, Arabs, Palestinians, and Israelis alike communicated the same message: don’t let Camp David happen again!

WHEN WE took office, our goal was simply to calm the region. Still, a subtle split began to emerge within the administration. The President was determined that we would support Israel’s right to defend itself. He believed that the constant attacks on Israeli civilians were intolerable for any democratic leader. He and I were both sympathetic to Sharon’s view that peace with the Palestinians could not be achieved as long as their leadership wished to keep one foot in terrorism and the other in corruption.

The President and I began to discuss a different approach to the conflict, one that relied much more on fundamental change among Palestinians as the key to peace. Israel could not be expected to accept a deal while under attack or to agree to the establishment of a terrorist-led state next door. Though we remained committed to a peace process, we wanted to focus much more on what the nature of the Palestinian state would be. The President was disgusted with Yasir Arafat, whom he saw, accurately, as a terrorist and a crook.

The State Department had a much more traditional view that the United States would need to be even-handed in order to bring peace. Israel was occupying Palestinian lands and building settlements, and even in the face of violence, the peace process needed to be pursued. Yasir Arafat was, with all his failings, the leader of the Palestinian people and the key to any future peace.

Throughout the summer, it fell to Colin Powell to quell the fires burning in the Middle East. Each day he faced the press and the Arabs who wanted the United States to rein in Israel. Every day Ari Fleischer would come by my office and discuss press guidance. After a while he would say, “I know. Terrorism must stop. Israel has a right to defend itself, and we urge restraint so that innocent people don’t die.”

“Right,” I would answer.

In the midst of the maelstrom, Colin decided to accept an invitation to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most pro-Israeli of the many interest groups, on March 19. The press billed the address as the first statement of U.S. policy on the Middle East. Though the speech essentially said nothing controversial or new, it was welcomed internationally since at least it affirmed our commitment to the peace process. We had decided to associate ourselves with the Mitchell Plan, named for former Senator George Mitchell, who’d been appointed in the last days of the Clinton administration to address the exploding violence. The Mitchell Plan called for a step-by-step set of commitments that each side would take, culminating in the restarting of peace negotiations.

But neither side was ready for even those modest interventions. When, on March 28, a Hamas suicide bomber killed two teenagers at a school bus stop, Sharon acted. Israeli helicopter gunships attacked Gaza and Ramallah (the governmental center of the Palestinian Authority). The gunship attack led to a wave of reprisals and counterattacks. To add fuel to the fire, the Israeli Housing Ministry announced plans to build more than seven hundred new homes for Jewish settlers near Qalqilya and Jerusalem. Such announcements were a constant problem throughout our years in office. Sometimes they were made despite the fact that construction was not to begin for years. Often they were a reiteration of old commitments in order to satisfy some coalition constituency at a particular point in time. But they were always disruptive and provocative, reminding the world of Israel’s controversial settlement activity. And in the context of the violence of 2001, the announcement was even more toxic. Palestinians and Israelis were at war.

Those early events would shape our Middle East policy fundamentally, but in the spring and summer of 2001, I just wanted to avoid all-out conflagration in the region. The differences in the administration between the decidedly pro-Israel bent of the White House and the State Department’s more traditional pro-Arab view percolated beneath the surface.

I know that Colin believed that we should resolve the differences in the administration and get the President to chart a course for our Middle East policy. I was sympathetic to him because he was on the front line every day. State and the White House were not on the same page, and everyone in the region—and in Washington—knew it. But I did not think that it was the time to try and resolve underlying tensions in the administration about the issue. I talked to the President every day, and I knew where he stood. The constant violence against Israeli civilians and Arafat’s prevarication and unwillingness to break with terrorism led the President to tilt toward Tel Aviv. I think I convinced Colin that any attempt to chart a new course in 2001 was likely to result in an outcome that would be so pro-Israeli as to inflame an already bad situation.

So throughout the summer we struggled with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as we would for the next eight years. But for the most part, the spring was relatively calm. My life in Washington settled into a busy but predictable pattern. My Aunt Gee and my friend Louis Olave helped me move into my permanent home in the Watergate complex and I found occasions to enjoy Washington. On Sundays I would get into my car and drive to visit my friend Mary Bush or go to the shopping center, usually the Galleria in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In the days before 9/11 I was driven to work, so I always looked forward to getting into my car and heading out on my own on the weekends.

Most of all, I enjoyed living next door to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I often took in concerts with friends, such as fellow White House staffer Harriet Miers and my adopted family, Steve and Ann Hadley and their daughters, Kate and Caroline.

On Good Friday of that first year, I joined the Hadleys for a performance of the Brahms German Requiem. Afterward, I walked home alone. The weather was warm, almost balmy. There was no security detail. Just me. I remember thinking how lucky I was to live next door to the Kennedy Center and that I would be able to enjoy many calm nights like this. After September 11, 2001, there would never be another one.