Authors: Elliott Abrams
During the Abbas visit, the president announced that we would give $50 million in cash to the PA. This was a remarkable gesture of faith in the new, post-Arafat PA leadership because we had never given the PA budgetary support but had only given aid indirectly, through the United Nations or other groups. In theory, these funds were being given now to help them prepare for the Gaza disengagement and their coming complete control over Gaza. I had had a personal role in making this support possible. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had strong doubts about handing this cash over, and I was sent up to see and reassure him, and it worked: If I trusted that Fayyad would be sure the money was not stolen or misspent, he would go along. (It turned out that hardly any of the money was spent at all. In 2006, when events led us to demand that any unspent portions be returned, we got back more than three-quarters of the money.)
In addition to cash, the president gave Abbas some public support, reacting to Palestinian complaints that the April 14, 2004, letter to Sharon had seemed to go too far. “Changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to,” he said, and a two-state solution meant “contiguity of the West Bank” for a “state of scattered territories will not work.”
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During their private meetings, the president gave Abbas what can only be described as a pep talk. I’ll help all I can, he said, but you have to make the hard choices. I can't make them for you. I’ll do what I can but the tough decisions are yours. You can do all of this, I believe this will work, but you've got to do the hard things. Gaza was the test case: Get it right and you'll persuade the whole world, and I’ll persuade the Israelis, that you can build a peaceful democracy in Palestine. Bush also made it clear that he admired Sharon, who was driving forward against all odds and at the cost of his own party's support.
The president also told Abbas that Secretary Rice was totally committed to achieving Palestinian statehood. In fact, he said, when I asked her to be secretary of state, she told me she would only do it if I would stay focused on this issue. That was the only time I ever heard the president confirm a rumor that floated constantly at State and NSC: that Rice had put this marker down when she agreed to stay on another four years and move to the State Department. In her memoir, Condi confirms this: When the president offered her the State Department job, the only substantive policy issue she raised was the Middle East. She told the president that “we need to get an agreement and establish a Palestinian state.”
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Events certainly did not contradict this commitment: In fact, as the years of the second term went by, much to my chagrin, Hadley's Fall 2004 claim that the White House is always in charge of Middle East policy seemed increasingly disputable.
But in the spring and summer of 2005, there were two issues to watch and on those, the entire Bush team saw eye to eye: getting Gaza disengagement done
and moving to Palestinian elections. On the latter, Abbas on June 18 announced a postponement. We were not shocked by the decision, given previous discussions, nor were we alarmed by the delay. One could make a good argument that holding them in the middle of disengagement was foolish and that a delay of a few months was sensible; one could also argue that the departure of the Israelis would help Fatah, which would claim credit – and anyway would be ruling Gaza. Perhaps this all would give Fatah leaders greater confidence that they would win the elections.
Meanwhile, the date of disengagement came closer. Actual Israeli-Palestinian cooperation was very limited but not nonexistent. There was much discussion of practical issues: Would the settlement housing be destroyed or left standing? If destroyed, would the Israelis remove the rubble? What about the synagogues that would be left behind? What would become of any light industrial buildings or greenhouses? The story of the greenhouses would later come to characterize, for many Israelis and Americans, the tragic situation in Gaza. The approximately 1,000 acres of crops and greenhouses were worked on by 3,600 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians, and they earned tens of millions of dollars. The PA had decided the settlement housing should be destroyed because it could not think of any fair and politically acceptable way to allocate these homes should they be left intact. But it was not sensible to destroy the greenhouses because they provided employment and income and should be a building block of Gaza's future agro-industry. The settlers demanded compensation; why should they simply walk away from what they had built and have people they viewed as terrorists take it over, they asked. They preferred to destroy it all, unless compensation was paid. But the PA leaders told us they could not pay; it was politically impossible to “reward” the settlers this way.
Into this void stepped James D. Wolfensohn, who had left the presidency of the World Bank
at the end of March and become the Quartet's Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement. Wolfensohn raised the $14 million that was needed, contributing a half-million dollars himself and raising much of the rest from American Jews. The theory of his Quartet appointment was that Wolfensohn knew about development and could help the Palestinians turn Gaza into a productive economy, but his record at the World Bank gave few hints of this. A well-financed public relations effort had had a great deal to do with Wolfensohn's reputation; what solid advice he could offer, when not accompanied by scores of flacks and real economists, was unclear. What was clear from the outset was that he viewed this minor role, helping Gaza disengagement, as beneath him; it was simply a means of continuing his hobnobbing with world leaders despite having left the World Bank job. Wolfensohn had asked for far more: “The terms of reference originally proposed would have given Wolfensohn a writ, essentially covering the entire peace process, much wider than the narrower one that emerged,” wrote Alvaro de Soto, the UN's under secretary
general handling the Middle East peace process. Nevertheless, his appointment meant that when the Quartet Principals – Rice, Kofi Annan, EU leaders, and Russian foreign minister Lavrov – met, Wolfensohn had a reason to join them; he had a reason to be chatting on the phone with Putin or Blair or coming to see George Bush. Wolfensohn envisioned that, after the minor matter of Gaza was successfully behind him, he would be the leader of efforts at a peace deal; as de Soto put it, “Wolfensohn did little to hide his aspiration to broaden his mandate,” and it seemed to me he could see his Nobel Peace Prize glimmering in the distance.
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I had been in Washington for 30 years and had never met anyone with a larger ego.
Rice returned to the region yet again in June and met with the same Sharon I had left in April: beleaguered. The Palestinian elections were postponed, but no decision had been made on excluding Hamas, he said; they should not be allowed to field candidates. The PA leaders are doing nothing against terror. Fatah's decline is continuing. Would Gaza disengagement
go smoothly? Sharon was assembling a huge force of Israeli police and IDF troops to make sure it did, and to handle possible resistance – including possible violent resistance – by settlers and their supporters and to react if there were acts of terrorism. I will not run away under fire, he told us; the terrorists could still force us to abort all the plans. Gen. Amos Gilad, chief of planning for the IDF, told us that “we live on luck.”
Rice's message to Abbas in our subsequent meeting with him was firm: Get ready to take action. Deploy forces in Gaza right after disengagement, in serious numbers. Take control. Abbas's reply was typical: We understand fully what we are up against, but now is not the time to act. The IDF should not make things worse; we all have to wait.
There were more and more accusations in Israel, in June and July, that Sharon was holding the IDF back from acting against terrorists because he did not want to upset his disengagement plans. Condi asked me to call Abbas, which I did on July 17, to repeat what she had told him in June; I got the same answer she had. But in the course of July, we began to see some real confrontations between PA forces and Hamas, which gave hope to us and the Israelis that something better was around the corner. Perhaps when the Israelis were out of the way, the PA would assert itself in Gaza, as Dahlan had long been promising.
Rice traveled to the Mideast again in July. The greenhouse deal was being worked out, though endless complications forced it to be recast every week. The greater worry was what we heard from Dahlan this time. All of a sudden he told us he had only 2,000 men in Gaza, or at least only 2,000 reliable ones. Don't be misled by the impression we have created that the PA is strong: Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the gangs are stronger. This was not what we had been hearing from him and his colleagues for the previous months, and we wondered if finally he was telling the truth or merely understating his situation in an effort to gild the coming victory as a greater triumph. Again during this trip, there were lengthy discussions of the role of Hamas in elections and also
a return to discussion of the Philadelphi Strip. Israel had never announced its final decision: stay or leave? Weissglas told us privately that Sharon wanted to get out, to leave Gaza fully, and was weighing the pros and cons of leaving the Philadelphi Strip.
When we met with Sharon, he told us he would go through with disengagement
, even under fire. He would fire back, harshly, with artillery, but the withdrawal would happen. And he had made a decision about Philadelphi: He would leave. But, he added, Gaza would not be the first step but the last one we can take, if the PA did not then act in Gaza against Hamas and the others and reform what he called the “security/terror organizations” of the PA itself. As to Hamas's participation in the elections, he was adamant. I reject it totally, he said; we are totally against it. Why? Once they participate in elections, they won't be regarded as a terrorist organization any more. An armed terrorist group can't be part of a democratic system, he warned Rice. I’ve lost my majority, Sharon concluded, and am just maneuvering now. I am walking on eggshells, he told Rice with a smile, and I am too heavy to do that.
The following day we went down to his farm in the northern Negev – close enough to Gaza to be hit occasionally by rockets – for a late breakfast. By Israeli standards, this was a large farm, roughly 1,000 acres; by Texas standards, Bush's 1,500-acre Crawford ranch was minuscule. Sharon gave Rice a tour of the citrus and vegetable fields and showed her the flocks of sheep, and then we sat down. Sharon sat silently for a while, as he often did, eating huge amounts of food while he listened to the conversation. Several of the Israelis were criticizing the Palestinians and their leaders harshly: their actions, their political culture, their history. Eventually, Sharon jumped in and said, I am going to defend the Palestinians. After a moment of shocked silence at that development, Weissglas, who joked with Sharon as no one else could, looked across to Rice and
said, “I hear the footsteps of the Messiah.” Sharon continued, saying that I have known the Palestinians my whole life. I was raised with them here. Of all the Arabs, the Palestinians are the most talented, and they have the best sense of humor. But, he said, there are two problems: their desire to murder and their taste for Jewish blood, and their treacherous ingratitude. This comment again was met with dead silence for a moment, until Weissglas drily noted, “And remember, that is the defense.” It was an extraordinary moment because we had been discussing practical details of the Gaza withdrawal and PA takeover for most of the meal. We had been arguing about what exactly the PA security forces were doing, and not doing, and how to force them and/or help them to do more. But here was a remarkable glimpse of the layers underneath, at what Sharon really thought he was dealing with. He wanted peace, he was taking enormous political risks for peace, but it was clear as I thought about the remark over and over that to him the best that could be hoped for was an armed peace. Whatever dreams others may have had about a new Middle East, Sharon saw his work as defending Jews from people who would murder them, as they had been murdered throughout history. Now Jews had a state and they could and would defend themselves, and he would create new
lines and new separations that would, he hoped, make that perpetual task far easier.
Would the PA be able to rule Gaza; did they have the forces? Dahlan and
others now claimed they would soon have 5,000 men there and were busily organizing them. General Ward scoffed at this claim, as did the Israelis. But on August 7, a week before disengagement
was scheduled to commence, the final Israeli cabinet approval was secured. From the beginning of 2004, Sharon had faced test after test in his cabinet and the Knesset and had plowed forward; this was the last vote. The repeated voting had been designed partly to allow opponents of disengagement to remain in the cabinet while telling supporters they would resign in the end. That is what happened: the finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, resigned in protest. It was widely thought that Netanyahu would soon challenge Sharon for the leadership of Likud, where it was clear that despite Sharon's personal popularity, a majority opposed his Gaza plan.
I was back in Israel, alone this time, in August, and saw Weissglas and
Sharon. Dubi repeated previous Sharon themes: Look at what Sharon has gone through, and look at the credit he is getting: nothing. He told Israelis that the compensation for getting out was the April 14 letter, and its statements about Israel keeping the major settlement blocks. Yet every time someone moves a bulldozer, Ambassador Kurtzer condemns it. Tell him to stop, to keep quiet, or Sharon is finished. When I saw Sharon alone on August 11 a few days before the withdrawal, he looked tired and pale. That was the first time I had ever been struck by his physical condition; he looked crummy, I thought. Weissglas ushered me into the prime minister's office – small and plain in comparison to the Oval Office or the digs at the Elysée in Paris or Number 10 Downing Street in London. Sharon sat behind his desk, a wall of books in Hebrew and English behind him, facing his guests. On the wall on his right were just two photos: one of David Ben-Gurion and one of Yitzhak Rabin.