Interventions (32 page)

For a good portion of my tenure, I also had a healthy dialogue with Jewish leaders in America. They wanted to influence me, no doubt—but I sought to influence them, too. My best friend among them was California congressman Tom Lantos—a stout defender of human rights, the United Nations, and Israel—who had been rescued from the Holocaust by Nane's uncle, Raoul Wallenberg. Lantos was a rock of support during the Oil-for-Food crisis that we faced in the aftermath of the Iraq War. I also enjoyed ignoring diplomatic protocol by inviting Israeli ambassadors to meals at my house along with diplomats from across the Arab world—they might have been fighting each other, but I was not at war with anybody. These are precisely the kinds of contacts that are possible in a forum like the United Nations.

In later years, Nane and I attended the opening of a new wing of the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and helped persuade other world leaders to come as well. I supported the General Assembly's belated commemoration of the Holocaust in 2005 on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and its designation of January 27 as International Holocaust Memorial Day. As a result, the UN has a Holocaust outreach program—I wish more was known about it. When, in the years after 9/11, I decided to organize a series of seminars through the Department of Public Information on “Unlearning Intolerance” to promote understanding across the divides that seemed to be growing deeper in the world, I made sure the first seminar was on anti-Semitism, because, as I said in my remarks:

the United Nations emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust. And a human rights agenda that fails to address anti-Semitism denies its own history . . . When we seek justice for the Palestinians—as we must—let us firmly disavow anyone who tries to use that cause to incite hatred against Jews, in Israel or elsewhere . . . The fight against anti-Semitism must be our fight, and Jews everywhere must feel that the United Nations is their home too.

In reaching out to Israelis and to Jews, I often reminded them that UN General Assembly resolution 181 gave Israel its international birth certificate. The United Nations is mentioned no less than seven times in the declaration of Israeli independence that David Ben-Gurion himself famously read out loud in Tel Aviv.

L
EAVING WITH
L
EGITIMACY
: I
SRAEL
'
S
W
ITHDRAWAL FROM
L
EBANON IN
2000

Despite my attempts to reach out, I did not have any illusions about making progress in the peace process with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who led Israel during my first two and a half years in office. He had been an Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, and he was gracious to me—I remember him telling me in 1998 at his residence in Jerusalem that his young son thought I was a hero when I went to Baghdad to prevent war with Iraq, since he had been frightened by the gas mask drills the entire country was enduring. But when I urged him, as the stronger player, to be more magnanimous toward the Palestinians in the interest of getting to an agreement, he described me as “Arafat's lawyer.” He always seemed to focus on the tactical and expedient, not the strategic or historic.

The time for me to move came when Ehud Barak won the elections in 1999 and became prime minister. He wanted to conclude peace agreements with Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians before President Clinton left office in early 2001. Barak had serious intent, but as the subsequent eighteen months unfolded, it became clear that he lacked an understanding of what would truly be required to reach peace, both in terms of what Israel would need to offer and how Israel's politics needed to be managed.

Yet in June 1999, all this lay in the future. I asked Terje Roed-Larsen to become my envoy. As a Norwegian researcher, he had helped broker the Oslo Accords and had then been the first coordinator in the mid-1990s of the UN's work with the Palestinians in the occupied territory. Now, with the consent of the Security Council, I added a political component to his mandate—as special coordinator for the Middle East peace process. Roed-Larsen was creative, energetic, and indefatigable—and knew everyone. In a tough neighborhood, he was at one point or another blackballed by just about everyone. But he usually bounced back.

“Put your ear to the ground,” I told Roed-Larsen when I appointed him in late 1999, “and see if you can find openings.” He did and reported back that Barak intended to keep his election promise to pull Israel's troops out of Lebanon.

—

L
ebanon is one of the most complex societies in the world. Its stability is at various moments either maintained or threatened—usually both—by its intricate religious and regional variations, its particular relationship with Syria, the impact of the unresolved conflict with Israel and the presence of Palestinian refugees, and a long history of penetration by outside players. All these factors were at play with ever-shifting geometries between 1975 and 1990, when about 120,000 people were killed in Lebanon's civil war.

The war ended with the Taif Agreement, which was designed to abolish political sectarianism and disband militias. Yet Lebanon's confessional makeup remained embodied in the “unwritten” National Pact of 1943, which reserved the presidency for a Maronite, the prime ministership for a Sunni, and the parliamentary speakership for a Shiite.

Israel had occupied southern Lebanon since 1982, when it drove Arafat and the PLO out of Beirut. Hizbollah emerged as a leading Shiite Lebanese group to resist Israel's occupation, with strong backing from revolutionary Iran. Syria—which viewed Lebanon as part of its historic territory—was the de facto guarantor of the security of the country, but as a result penetrated deeply into Lebanese politics. The Israeli-Syrian conflict, while embodied in Israel's occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights, was as often as not played out in the Lebanese theater, manifested in Syria's alliance with Iran and its links with Hizbollah.

Given these realities, it was clear in 2000 that the best context for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon would be immediately
after
Israel had reached a peace with Syria. Without this, an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon would carry the danger of sending the message that Israel was fleeing Lebanon due to Hizbollah's armed campaign, empowering Hizbollah and giving Syria a possible incentive to cause mischief. With a peace deal, Syria would have had an incentive to behave differently and realign its relationship with Hizbollah.

Unfortunately, a March 2000 summit in Geneva between President Clinton and Syrian president Hafez al-Assad failed. Barak had insisted on retaining a thin strip of Golan land on the eastern shores of the Sea of Galilee for security reasons, and when Clinton conveyed Barak's offer to Assad, the aging Syrian leader turned it down flat. He insisted, as he always had, on a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines and Syrian access to the lake. Barak had not gone all the way in his peace offer. His initiative tragically failed—and with it, the chance to begin a major reorientation in the region.

—

D
ays after the Geneva failure, Barak told me that he would keep his Lebanon withdrawal pledge. But it turned out that he did not want to go all the way here, either. Under pressure from his military, he wanted to withdraw in stages and leave behind security outposts inside Lebanese territory. I told Barak and his foreign minister that if they wanted to coordinate this with me and gain international legitimacy for Israel's actions, I needed a full withdrawal—and I wanted his commitment
in writing
. After much to and fro, Barak wrote to me on April 17 confirming Israel's intention “to cooperate fully with the United Nations” and to withdraw “in full accordance with Security Council resolutions 425 and 426”—the UN resolutions calling for Israel to end its occupation of Lebanon. Egyptian foreign minister Amre Moussa later told me that my insistence on the letter had boosted Arab confidence that I would “do the right thing.” This helped give me the space to work with the Lebanese and Syrians effectively, even as I closely coordinated with the Israelis.

I knew that if the withdrawal went well, it would extricate Israel from an eighteen-year presence in southern Lebanon that had become a quagmire, and it would help Lebanon's further reemergence after the civil war. But a withdrawal that went wrong could lead to massive conflict—to say nothing of permanently discrediting me as a regional mediator. As Madeleine Albright said to me at the time, “The UN role in this is a big deal.” Since I was in the lead, I insisted that this be respected and asked her and the other big players not to send their own envoys to meddle.

—

I
srael and Lebanon had no diplomatic relations, and under international law only they could agree to the border between them. As a go-between, my job was not to set their border but to determine a line to measure whether Israel had withdrawn in accordance with resolution 425. Drawing what became known as the Blue Line required the UN team to ferret out evidence from archives around the world and was incredibly complicated.

The difficulties were immense. Consider the village of Ghajar—inhabited by Syrian Alawites, in occupied Syrian territory, but right on the border with Lebanon. After 1967 the villagers had accepted Israeli citizenship, unlike other Syrian villagers in the Golan. Yet the village's natural growth over the decades had, it turned out, taken it into Lebanese territory. The Blue Line would have to go straight
through
the village, leaving the northern residents in Lebanon and the southerners in Israeli-occupied Syria. This pleased no one, myself included. Some villagers feared their fate at the hands of Hizbollah. Barak, who remembered conquering the village in 1967, thought “cartography was trumping peace.” We secured a Lebanese undertaking that neither the army nor Hizbollah would enter the village—an arrangement that lasted until 2005, when four Hizbollah fighters were killed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) after launching an attack from the north. Ghajar remains an unresolved problem today.

But the biggest headache was the Shab'a farms. The Lebanese claimed that certain farmlands adjacent to the Lebanese village of Shab'a fell in their territory. A map dated 1966 was presented to us by Lebanese president Emile Lahoud, and it showed the farms in Lebanon. Yet it stood gloriously alone, contradicted by eighty other maps—including ten Lebanese government maps from
after
1966, all showing the farms in
Syria
(and thus within the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights). Even Lebanese banknotes suggested the farms were Syrian.

I asked my staff to check the map presented by President Lahoud. Sure enough, it was from 1966—except for the ink in the area of Shab'a, which was barely dry. We let the Lebanese know that this was a map of “questionable authenticity,” and that I would go public if I ever heard about it again.

The Shab'a farms were probably being laid as a political trip wire. Barak's move had taken Syria by surprise and was causing some angst. If Israel's occupation of Lebanon ended, how could the continuation of armed resistance on Lebanese territory be justified, whether by Hizbollah or Palestinian factions? If the Lebanese state regained control of all its territory, would it begin to raise questions about Syria's military and intelligence tutelage of the country?

In the end, we developed a simple way to draw the line between Lebanon and Syria, based on the delineated areas of operation of two UN peacekeeping missions in the area—the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) on the Golan. The Shab'a farms were in the UNDOF zone. Israel would eventually have to return the farms—but to Syria, in the context of a peace agreement with Damascus, unless Lebanon and Syria formally agreed that Shab'a was part of Lebanon. To date, they have not done so.

—

O
n May 22, 2000, I presented the proposed Blue Line in a report to the Security Council, which endorsed it, just as things were heating up on the ground. The Lebanese had no intention of allowing the occupying force to extricate itself on Israel's terms. Large crowds, including Hizbollah elements, began moving south, entering villages in the Israeli-controlled area. Barak had to rush through his departure—within a week, Israel had vacated almost all positions in Lebanon, leaving mainly at night under cover of Israeli artillery fire.

Throughout the withdrawal, I was in constant contact with both Barak, who was on the ground near the Israeli frontlines, and Lebanese president Lahoud. With Barak, I pushed to ensure full withdrawal, and he urged that UN posts be established in particular areas. I intervened with Lahoud when actions by Lebanese forces were preventing UNIFIL from carrying out patrols. The withdrawal was replete with violent incidents but never blew up into anything full scale. Both men were former generals, and we managed in the fog of withdrawal to prevent the situation from getting out of hand.

Both sides submitted a host of reservations regarding the Blue Line, particularly the Lebanese. They may not have
accepted
the Blue Line, but I secured from both a commitment to
respect
it. When I certified to the Security Council on June 16, 2000, that Israel had met the requirements of resolution 425, I called it “a happy day for Lebanon, but also for Israel—a day of hope—and a day of pride for the United Nations.” And, indeed, it was. There was genuine excitement in Lebanon that eighteen years of Israeli control in the south was over. Meanwhile, Barak told me: “Literally hundreds of thousands of Israelis, especially parents of soldiers, are breathing a collective sigh of relief. The mood is very positive.”

My certification to the Council was not without some risk, since many flashpoints remained and loose ends needed to be tied up. However, rather than awaiting the Council's formal endorsement, I visited the region to address those remaining issues. I sensed that the Council would not want to undercut me while I was in the region and would therefore support my judgment that Israel had withdrawn. The Russians took their time to come around, but after some nervous days—I had been in Cairo and Tehran without knowing I had the Council's backing—the gamble paid off. The Council endorsed my report just hours before I landed in Beirut.