Interventions (33 page)

While I was seeking to lock in commitments to respect the Blue Line, almost everyone wanted to reopen one aspect or other. Barak was furious that the Lebanese had brought forth new information during the withdrawal that necessitated slight adjustments of the line. These sometimes forced him to move more military hardware than he had envisaged—sometimes more than once, and sometimes only a matter of a few meters. Meanwhile, the Lebanese complained strongly about Israeli violations. The Egyptians were worried that Israel had given a big victory to Hizbollah, while the Israelis accused
me
of having done precisely this by meeting the Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to urge him to focus on the movement's political and social role in Lebanese society and to cease armed resistance—a message I also gave in Syria and Iran. No one was fully satisfied, but the withdrawal had gone better than anyone was entitled to expect, and I felt I had emerged with all parties seeing me as credible and trustworthy.

In Israel, Yossi Beilin—a pro-peace politician and friend who was always a source of counsel and vision—had led a public movement advocating withdrawal from Lebanon. Beilin proudly presented me with a shirt printed with the words
PEACEFUL WITHDRAWAL FROM LEBANON
. He felt a major source of tension had been alleviated. I, too, felt at the time that we had come through the worst.

But I understood the Egyptian concerns, which Arafat shared. What message did it send that Israel left Lebanon after Hizbollah “resistance” but no end was in sight for the Palestinians after seven years of the peace process? The lesson was
not
that Israel should have stayed in Lebanon but, rather, that Israel should try
again
for peace with Syria, and even more important, it should move quickly and decisively for peace with the Palestinians.

I
NTO THE
A
BYSS
: C
AMP
D
AVID AND THE
S
ECOND
I
NTIFADA

Barak certainly planned to move quickly on the Palestinian track. Within weeks, he had persuaded President Clinton to host him and Arafat at Camp David, without any real preparation. The parties would be brought together to try and resolve the most sensitive problems of the conflict—borders, Jerusalem, refugees, security—issues the two leaders had never properly discussed before. Arafat, who had been left cooling his heels while Barak had showered attention first on Syria and then on Lebanon, was not keen to go to Camp David at all, as he told me in June at his office in the Makata in Ramallah. “We're not ready. In the current state it's bound to fail and we will only have one shot!” He asked me to persuade the Americans not to invite the parties to Camp David. I understood why.

A myth has developed that Camp David involved a generous Israeli offer and revealed that there was no Palestinian partner for peace. I have no doubt that Arafat could have been a more creative negotiator at Camp David, rather than simply awaiting Israeli proposals. I also know that Barak went further than any Israeli leader to date—after all, no Israeli leader had ever put a proposal forward for a Palestinian state of any kind. But Barak was not prepared to contemplate what I believe to be politically essential for any territorial deal: a Palestinian state on the equivalent of 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza before 1967—22 percent of historic Palestine—with a contiguous state territory on the West Bank, and Jerusalem properly shared. Besides, with the Arab countries excluded from the summit, there was no way Arafat would take risks on Jerusalem, as I told Madeleine Albright at the time. I admired President Clinton for trying, and for not giving up when the summit failed. But it was a mistake for the Americans to side with Barak and point the finger at Arafat for the failure of Camp David. The episode showed the limits of U.S.-only peacemaking and increased calls in the region for more players to be at the Middle East peace table.

Soon, at the end of 2000, the second Palestinian intifada broke out. The parties and historians will continue to argue over how it started—my sense at the time was that there were elements of spontaneity and provocation that sparked the violence, but there were also elements of planning as well. In any case, once the violence erupted, Arafat seemed to ride the storm rather than try to hold it back, while Barak resorted to the harshest of counterproductive measures, humiliating Arafat and using excessive force against the Palestinians. As each side crossed more and more red lines, a hurricane of violence developed that engulfed both peoples and the peace process itself. Much of the fabric of Palestinian life, already frayed by the prolonged and sometimes brutal occupation, was torn apart—and with it, much of the hope for peace on which Palestinian moderates relied. The Israeli peace camp was also left in tatters, as Israelis came to believe that there was indeed “no partner,” and turned to leaders on the right. Any modicum of trust between Israel and the Palestinians died.

—

A
lbright brought Barak and Arafat to Paris on October 4 and tried to broker a cease-fire, but she was unable to achieve one. The Israelis wanted a cease-fire pure and simple; the Palestinians wanted an international commission under UN auspices to examine the causes of the violence. Moreover, the Palestinians insisted, partly at Cairo's bidding, that a deal should be brokered in Egypt. I was in Paris at the time, and I urged the Americans to move the effort to Cairo, but they declined. I returned to New York, but as things went from bad to worse on the ground, I decided to go to Jerusalem myself.

I sensed a strong expectation in the Security Council that I should do
something,
even if I knew that the Council members could not agree on what. The Israelis did not want me involved. “The prime minister has told me in the most emotional way that Israel will prevent the UN plane from landing at Ben Gurion Airport,” Roed-Larsen told me over the phone. I decided I would go anyway—if Israel stopped the secretary-general's plane, it would be their problem. When their bluff was called, the Israelis allowed my plane to land on October 8, and I was received at a hastily put together welcome by the acting foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami.

In my ten years in office, the subsequent ten days of shuttling between Arafat and Barak were among the most improvised, uncertain, and dramatic. While I was on the ground, more than fifty Palestinians were killed, and two Israeli reservists were lynched by a mob in Ramallah. Feelings on both sides were at a fever pitch. Each side was deeply mistrustful of the other's true intentions. Both were talking the language of war.

The longer I was on the ground, and the more back-and-forth shuttling I did, the more vital it became that I not leave without a breakthrough—to do so would have sent a terrible message. I tried and failed to get the leaders to make public appeals for calm and agree to specific measures of de-escalation, and then switched to working with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Bill Clinton to persuade the parties to attend a new summit in Sharm el-Sheikh. The Americans were going to join up with the Egyptians after all.

Arafat did not want to attend the summit with his people under siege from repeated Israeli missile and artillery attacks. He even stopped taking Clinton's calls and avoided giving Mubarak an answer to his invitation. Would he say yes to me? I went to Gaza without an appointment for one last meeting with the Palestinian leader. When I finally got to see Arafat, he seemed back in Beirut: “Barak wants to put me in a corner and make me crawl on my hands and knees. Doesn't he know who Yasser Arafat is?”

I tried to speak as much to Arafat's sense of pride as to his interest—to his heart, not his brain: “Probably you're right. Barak doesn't want you in Sharm. He would be happy if you did not go. But don't give him this pleasure. It would mean he had won. Let world public opinion judge this.” I left the meeting without a firm commitment from Arafat, but I upped the pressure by telling reporters that I expected Arafat to be in Sharm.

On the helicopter flight back to Jerusalem, a paper was passed around for the team to offer odds on whether Arafat would say yes. Everyone else was doubtful, but I remember writing “100%.” I was sure he was bluffing and he would come. We heard nothing that night, and the team was on edge the following morning at the King David Hotel. I checked first with Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security advisor, and then with Mubarak: “No one called here. I had a quiet night,” Mubarak told me. Finally, Arafat came on the line.

“Do I have your answer?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I will come.”

I called Mubarak back to tell him the news. There and then he said: “You and Solana will attend” (Javier Solana, the former NATO secretary-general with whom I worked closely over Kosovo, was now the EU's high representative for foreign and security policy).

Thus I received my invitation to Sharm, underlining the UN's place at the center of Middle East diplomacy. Solana thought it was historic: “This is the first time in the history of this part of the world that the Secretary-General of the United Nations has been allowed to play a role,” he told me. “We have a long life and we need the UN.”

—

I
left the pressure-cooker atmosphere of Gaza and Jerusalem for the clear sea, sand, and sky of the Red Sea coast. But the gathering at Sharm el-Sheikh was no less tense for its placid location. Confidence was nonexistent, emotions were running high, and the proceedings were turbulent. At times the gap between the parties seemed unbridgeably wide. Bill Clinton stepped off an overnight flight and straight into action, and worked continuously over twenty-eight hours late into the night and early morning. I had helped get the parties together and worked with Clinton to handle the players at the summit, but it was Clinton who brought home a three-part deal on security cooperation, renewal of the peace process, and a fact-finding committee to inquire into the violence. His stature and negotiating ability really counted.

Barak did not want a committee at all and could only contemplate a U.S. committee; Arafat wanted a committee under UN auspices, partly to counteract U.S. exclusive ownership of the peace process as a whole. They eventually agreed that Clinton would appoint the committee in consultation with me. The arrangement was a pretty fair reflection of the power realities: the U.S. role remained central, but the UN was now at the table.

In the weeks that followed, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, and I agreed on the names for the commission. The commission chair was former U.S. senator George Mitchell, who later would become Barack Obama's envoy to the Middle East. The Mitchell Report, produced in April 2001 during the early months of the Bush administration, introduced a concept that would rightly become a pillar of peace efforts thereafter—the need for actions on
both
security (by the Palestinians)
and
settlements (by the Israelis) if violence and mistrust were to be avoided and the peace process to make real headway. The report eschewed a narrow “security only” approach, or placing the onus only on one party, which had so often in the past led simply to more frustration and regression.

We had begun to set a new basis for the peace process, but the Sharm cease-fire did not ultimately hold. It was unstitched by the actions of the parties, the provocations and violence of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and it went effectively unmonitored by the international community. There was a lot more to do if the international role was to be effective. Tony Blair told me at the time that “the intervention of some international authority of some sort” was needed to “impose an agreement”—and even wondered aloud whether I should try to do it, but without willing partner governments in a position of leverage sufficient to ensure compliance with such an attempt, there was no chance of its working.

The peace process was crumbling. Barak faced the prospect of a massive defeat at the hands of Ariel Sharon in elections slated for February 6, 2001. The measures Barak imposed on the Palestinians were severe and far exceeded anything that could be justified by security concerns. In this near-hopeless atmosphere, President Clinton offered on December 23, 2000, take-it-or-leave-it parameters for a final settlement. Barak and Arafat each gave a qualified answer to the Clinton parameters. The United States felt Barak's answer was a “Yes, provided,” while Arafat's was a “No, however.” So, in their conclusion, the United States squarely blamed Arafat.

With that, President Clinton's years of noble and committed effort ended in unhappy failure.

—

E
ven this was not the final word. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met at Taba, Egypt, in January 2001 to try to finalize a deal before the Israeli elections; on January 27, Taba concluded with the parties recording publicly that they were never closer to reaching an agreement. Despite claiming Arafat was not a partner, Barak was still hoping that a UN-EU summit might be convened to sign an agreement with Arafat, and he and I talked a lot about the idea. But as I watched Barak plummeting in the opinion polls, and saw Arafat launch a blistering attack on the Israelis at the World Economic Forum in Davos, I realized it would never fly. I leaned heavily on Arafat during a two-hour meeting and gathered more than eighty journalists for a joint midnight press conference where he made more conciliatory statements, as he did in an interview with Israeli television, but it was by now clear that no further meeting could be held.

My heart sank when Egyptian president Mubarak recounted a conversation with the recently resigned Israeli president Ezer Weizman, who had been a dovish influence throughout the 1990s. Weizman had said that Barak had failed, and he would join the majority of the country in voting for Ariel Sharon's Likud. Bill Clinton summed it up when we spoke to exchange New Year's greetings. “Labour sees the Palestinians as legitimate,” he told me. “Rabin always believed they were people. He always treated them like human beings. The other guys [that is, the Likud] don't see them as a legitimate force.” As it turned out, I had managed to win a UN seat at the peace table just as it was being upended. And with Clinton's departure, there was no U.S. president keen to reset the table in a hurry.