In Doha, the mood was very negative. Some Arab foreign ministers argued that there was no point in pursuing peace in view of the Israeli government’s intransigence and its continuing refusal to abide by international law. Some argued that the Arab Peace Initiative should be pulled off the table. Netanyahu had just been elected, they said, and that meant Israel would soon be even more right-wing and intransigent. Forget trying to make peace with such a government. Our foreign minister and a few others argued that even though the general mood was pessimistic, we should still try to use any window of opportunity.
At the summit my objective was to convince my fellow Arab leaders to think strategically and maintain a unified stance, to show the world once and for all who was the roadblock to peace. We all blasted Israel for its war on Gaza, but I urged my fellow heads of state to look for a ray of hope amid the general darkness. We must give Obama a chance, I argued. He had been in office for just six weeks and was already doing some good things. He had appointed George Mitchell, a former senator with a track record of success in Northern Ireland and deep familiarity with the Middle East, as his special envoy on the peace process and had deployed him to the region immediately. He was saying that Israeli settlements were illegal and should stop. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, knew the region and the issues extremely well from her time as a senator and as first lady. Everyone remembered how close President Clinton had come; we should not do what many expected from the Arabs, reject new initiatives out of hand. “Let’s show some prudence and restraint, reaffirm our commitment to the Arab Peace Initiative, and see where this current initiative is going,” I said.
In the end, this argument carried the day, and our commitment to the Arab Peace Initiative was reaffirmed. But the strong emotional reaction across the region to Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war suggested that the initiative would not survive another major assault.
I told my fellow heads of state that President Obama had called me a few days before and invited me to visit Washington. How could we use this visit to advance the cause of peace?
Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the wise and experienced foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, came over during the summit and suggested to me that we carry a message from the summit to President Obama. We invited the foreign ministers from Lebanon, Qatar, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt, as well as the secretary-general of the Arab League, to come to Jordan to work out a joint Arab position. Some of these foreign ministers had also been in contact with British foreign secretary David Miliband, who was actively involved in efforts to revive the peace process.
The ministers (other than the Syrian foreign minister, who was unable to attend) met in Amman on April 11. They discussed talking to the United States about a number of confidence-building measures between Israel and the Arab states that might be offered in the event that Israel should freeze its settlement construction in anticipation of resumed negotiations, allowing a return to the situation before the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000. Those measures would include revitalizing some of the ties that had been developed in 1994 after our peace treaty with Israel. At that time Israeli trade offices were opened in some Arab countries; there was increased movement of people and goods, and Israeli visitors were welcomed in Arab countries even in the absence of diplomatic relations. But most of that had ended abruptly in 2000 after the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations and the outbreak of the second intifada. The trade offices were closed and there was little or no interaction between Israel and Arab countries, other than Jordan and Egypt, but our relations with Israel had also suffered. What we were offering was not normalization, but measures to serve as a positive background to negotiations.
I agreed to convey this proposal to the new president.
In late April 2009, I arrived in Washington, the first Arab leader to visit the White House since the election. I met with Obama privately in the president’s dining room, a small room next to the Oval Office. The atmosphere was refreshingly relaxed. President Obama is knowledgeable about the world beyond America’s borders and balanced in his approach. A personable man, he gives the impression that you and he are old friends. He told me that he was facing many challenges in the Middle East, but before discussing them, he wanted to hear what I had to say.
I told him that I believed it was imperative to relaunch negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians as soon as possible. We would have to move forward quickly on a two-state solution, as the growing antagonism between Israel and the Palestinians was throwing the whole notion of a negotiated agreement into question. Further undermining the situation was the cancer of Israeli settlements spreading across the Occupied Territories.
I said there was an increasing pessimism among Arab leaders about the possibility of peace. Since the Gaza war, some had even urged that the Arab Peace Initiative be withdrawn. But others were still hopeful and put stock in his early engagement with the peace process. If the Israeli government were to take a bold step, I said, such as freezing settlement construction, which the Palestinians, the Arabs, and many in the international community had long demanded, then we would be prepared to return to the spirit that had existed before the second intifada and would offer some concrete confidence-building measures to help improve the environment for the resumption of peace talks.
Drawing on my past experience, I then spoke to him candidly about the new Israeli prime minister, who was scheduled to visit Washington a few weeks later. “Mr. President,” I said, “Netanyahu will come to you and he will want to talk about four things: Iran, Iran, Iran, and the claim that he has no Palestinian partner.” I said it would be a mistake to focus the conversation on Iran. The best way, in my view, to address all the major issues in the Middle East would be to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As to a Palestinian partner, I said, this partner would be greatly empowered if the Israelis would for once get serious about peace. In fact, one could argue that since Sharon’s election in 2001, the Palestinians had not had an Israeli partner for peace.
The president said he would not jump to conclusions before Netanyahu’s visit, and that he would give him the benefit of the doubt. But he added that he planned to be tough on settlements. I reminded the president that I had experience with Netanyahu and urged him not to take everything the Israeli leader promised as certain. He had reneged on many previous commitments. The president said that he would vigorously pursue a two-state solution.
Our private meeting ended not long after that and we joined our staff members for an expanded discussion. The meeting was followed by a press conference at which Obama said:
I am a strong supporter of a two-state solution.... What we want to do is to step back from the abyss; to say, as hard as it is, as difficult as it may be, the prospect of peace still exists—but it’s going to require some hard choices, it’s going to require resolution on the part of all the actors involved, and it’s going to require that we create some concrete steps that all parties can take that are evidence of that resolution. And the United States is going to deeply engage in this process to see if we can make progress.
I took heart and dared to hope that we would soon be back at the negotiating table in earnest. I said that the task at hand was to sequence events over the next two months in order to allow Israelis and Palestinians and Israelis and Arabs to sit around the table and move this process forward.
Next I headed to the State Department to meet with Secretary Clinton. We had first met many years before, under very different circumstances, and it was good to see an old friend while on official business. We talked about how to improve conditions for the Palestinians and how to create the necessary environment for a successful agreement. I said that I believed the Palestinian National Authority was a credible partner in the peace efforts and that we would work together with other Arab countries to shore up support for the government of Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, who had submitted his resignation to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to allow for the formation of a unity government with Hamas. But talks with Hamas were not getting anywhere. A few weeks after we returned from the United States, Abbas moved to form a cabinet without Hamas, and Fayyad was sworn in as prime minister on May 19. His government, which enjoyed the support of most Arab countries, would be a ready and able partner in the peace process. Fayyad is committed to peaceful negotiations as a means to solving the conflict with Israel on the basis of the two-state solution. In his first term as prime minister, which began in June 2007, after the Hamas takeover of Gaza, he won the respect of Arab and Western governments for building Palestinian institutions and ensuring good governance.
Although the region had suffered from a brutal war in Gaza in January, in many ways the prospects for peace were better than they had been in a decade. We had a new American president who had immediately begun to engage seriously with the peace process, and who intended to approach the Muslim world on the basis of mutual respect and shared interests. We had a supportive Palestinian leadership, which was ready to make sacrifices for peace. And we had the strong support of the wider Arab world, which had signaled its desire to normalize relations with Israel and fully integrate it into the region on the basis of the Arab Peace Initiative.
The one wild card was the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In his previous tenure as prime minister, he had gained a reputation as an aggressive hard-liner, unwilling to compromise. As I headed back to Amman I wondered whether the previous decade had changed him. I would have to wait and see.
On May 14, Netanyahu flew to Amman. I was not particularly optimistic about the meeting, as our previous interactions had not been productive. We began with a tête-à-tête. Netanyahu seemed a little uncomfortable, perhaps also remembering our last encounter.
“Mr. Prime Minister,” I said, hoping to break the ice, “congratulations on your election.” He smiled noncommittally and I decided to dive right in. “I know that for you the life of every Israeli is sacred,” I said, “but I believe that the best way to protect your citizens is to come to terms with the Palestinians, to make a just and enduring peace based on the establishment of a Palestinian state.” I told him my goal was to help forge a peace between Israel and the Arabs and said that Arab countries were committed to a comprehensive peace, which would allow Israel to have full, normal relations with Arab and Muslim countries, not just an exchange of embassies and icy stares. I said I strongly believed that peaceful relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors would ensure our collective security and bring economic benefits for all. I spoke of the benefits to the Israeli economy of Arab investment and the potential for Israeli investment in the Arab world.
Once Netanyahu understood that, regardless of our differences, I was trying to find common ground, he began to relax. He told me that, at fifty-nine, he was almost as old as the state of Israel. And he believed that this was the first time in his almost sixty years that he had seen Israel and the Arabs face a common threat. I had warned President Obama that Netanyahu would most likely try to focus their discussion on Iran. Now he was doing the same thing with me.
“If you want us to feel that Iran is a common threat,” I said, “we will first have to solve the problem at the heart of our region’s woes, and that is the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is what matters most to us, and it is what you can do the most to impact.” I urged him to take serious steps toward reaching peace with the Palestinians and told him he would have to stop building new settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as they were eating away at land that should be part of the future Palestinian state and threatening the viability of a two-state solution. I also stressed the need to understand the sanctity of Jerusalem to all Muslims and to halt all unilateral actions in the holy city.
Netanyahu told me that there were some things he could not say in public, because of domestic political pressures. So talking about the need for a two-state solution and a freeze on settlements would not be easy for him. But he wanted to move forward and said he understood the importance of peace.
“If you genuinely want peace,” I said, “there are some important signals you can send to the Arab world. Convince us that you are committed to making something happen in the next several months. Otherwise the support of all Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, for the Arab Peace Initiative will start to wane.”
Our meeting went much better than I had expected. Netanyahu came across as a different man from the one I had known ten years before. He did not reject everything I said out of hand. He seemed eager to make progress, but I knew that the proof of his intent would be in his actions, not his words.
After forty minutes alone, we moved into an expanded session with members of our staff. We had begun to discuss the details of the peace process when Netanyahu said that he intended to focus on the economic track.
I argued that economic opportunities could not be an alternative to political independence for the Palestinians. “What about the political track?” I pressed. “Given your history, the Arabs expect you to focus on economic and security issues at the expense of peace talks.”
Netanyahu took my comments in stride and said that perhaps he should start with the political track. But he offered no concrete indication of what he might be prepared to do.
“That would be the prudent thing to do,” I said, hoping to hammer the message home.
Once he had left, I reflected on where we stood. Netanyahu was a right-winger through and through, but I hoped we would be able to work together to bring a lasting peace to the region. We had the Arab Peace Initiative. We had an engaged U.S. president. Was it too much to hope that we might also have a pragmatic Israeli prime minister who would want to leave behind him a legacy of peace?