Tested by Zion (32 page)

We could not take that approach because it would make a mockery of our support for free elections throughout the region. What the Palestinians did not fully grasp, I thought, was how much a postponement or cancellation of the election would undermine their own demand for statehood. The appeal of the Palestinian position was that Palestinians wished to move from living under occupation to living in freedom. Freedom had to mean more than getting the IDF out; the president was using Palestine, like Iraq and Lebanon, as an example of how democracy might be coming to the Arab world. A Palestine that would be ruled by Arafat's cronies forever, without elections or democracy, was hardly what President Bush was aiming for and would win little sympathy in the United States. But a free election was an indication that Palestinians were capable of and entitled to self-rule.

A large group met in Rice's conference room in December to discuss these issues, and the consensus was strong: How could we call off Palestinian elections, just days after the successful parliamentary elections in Iraq (on December 15)? Millions had gone to the polls there, despite the violence, and proudly held up their purple fingers (marked with dye to prevent voting more than once) to television cameras. Now an election would be canceled because we weren't sure of the outcome? Rob Danin, who had gone over to State with Condi when we
decided I would not do so, was the sole dissenter, arguing for making Hamas pay a price for participation. Postpone briefly, he said, and extract something from them for allowing them to run. But the president had a clear view, and Secretary Rice reflected and asserted it: hold the elections. My own view, expressed at the meeting, was to go ahead; there was no reason to think Fatah would be in any better shape six months later. The Quartet did issue, on December 28, a “Statement on Upcoming Palestinian Elections,” which “call[ed] on all participants to renounce violence, recognize Israel's right to exist, and disarm” and said the PA cabinet “should include no member who has not committed to the principles of Israel's right to exist in peace and security and an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism.”
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The assumption was that Fatah would win a plurality in the PLC and would then create and lead a governing coalition, and in this statement, the Quartet was trying to establish some rules for its formation. We did not anticipate that Fatah would lose: We were hearing that from Dahlan but not from Abbas – and not from the Israelis. Their view was that the Hamas vote was increasing, but no Israeli official, not even the intelligence officials, suggested that Hamas would win. The leading Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki, said the same: His final poll, taken December 29–31, 2005, predicted that Fatah would win 43% of the vote and Hamas only 25%; 19% said they were undecided. (The previous poll in December had 50% of the vote for Fatah versus 32% for Hamas, with 9% undecided, so it appeared that Fatah was losing ground but Hamas was not gaining any.) This was the consensus view: that Hamas would make a good showing but Fatah would win. The BBC, for example, reported that “the Islamist militant group is making a strong challenge to President Abbas’ Fatah movement, and polls suggest it could win up to a third of the vote.”
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In the leadership ranks, Abbas and others may have been more worried – but they did not tell us this.

Tourgeman recounted the final weeks:

I remember a stormy discussion with Saeb [Erekat] in Jerusalem where he told us, “Don't interfere. Don't interfere with our internal business. We want the Hamas to participate, we will beat the hell out of them, and we will win.” It started changing when Hamas decided they would participate; when they decided to participate, it was like a snowball because people then had something to choose. And then you started to see the rise of the support to Hamas in the Palestinian streets from 20–25 to 30%. And then 40, with 40 to Abu Mazen.…[A]nd Abu Mazen understood he was in a problem. And then he wanted to postpone the elections; he didn't know how. He knew that if he will go to the public and say, “I postpone the elections,” he will be criticized. He couldn't do it because the U.S. administration said that they insisted on elections. And we saw that he's trying to put the blame on Israel. How did he try to put the blame on Israel? He hoped that Israel will not allow the elections in Jerusalem and that will be an excuse for him to postpone the elections. Abu Mazen approached us and said. “Don't allow the elections in Jerusalem.” We analyzed it and said, “Look, it's your business to have the elections or not. If you have the elections, we will help you conduct them in the most proper way – in the same way that it was conducted in January 2005 including in
Jerusalem.” The message to us was very clear: “Postpone the elections. We cannot do it. The Americans will not allow it, so do it by not allowing the elections in Jerusalem.”
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The Israelis refused, and Abbas never came to us with this request – rightly so, for he would have been rebuffed.

On December 14, Dubi Weissglas came to Washington and explained where Sharon thought things stood. Sharon continues to be popular, and Gaza went more smoothly than people anticipated. He has correctly judged that most Israelis want some kind of deal with the Palestinians – the Israelis do not like them or trust them, but they want a deal. Sharon wants to move forward; he wants to set the final borders. He sees a window of three more years, the time he and President Bush overlap, to bring about a more stable situation. He would prefer a signed agreement, under the Roadmap, and will try to get it throughout 2006. Only a signed, final agreement justifies the pain of pulling back, provides real compensation. He is not sure if Abu Mazen is strong enough to sign anything. If that fails, he will look to unilateral moves in 2007 and 2008. He thinks he's the only person who can do it.

Four days later, Sharon gave us all a scare when he suffered a mild stroke. He lost consciousness, but only very briefly. He was hospitalized for only two days. When he emerged, President Bush called him. I will rest for a few days and then get back to work, he told the president. The president told him to be careful: We need you healthy; don't work too hard. Keep rational hours! Watch what you eat. I want to see a slimmer Sharon! We need your leadership and your courage to get to peace. Sharon replied that the two of them could accomplish many things; I have no doubt I can move forward, he said, as long as the terror stops; Israel will not cooperate with terror. That was the last time they spoke.

On January 4, 2006, at his ranch, Sharon suffered a massive stroke from which he never recovered. His death was expected, and we in Washington laid plans for the funeral; the president intended to go. I wrote a eulogy for the president to read at the funeral and kept it with me over the next few months so it would be handy when Sharon died. But he outlasted Bush's term in office, lying in a hospital in Jerusalem in what the doctors called a persistent vegetative state for nearly five years before being moved back to his ranch in late 2010.

Did the pressure of disengagement that summer and fall, and of leaving Likud to create a new party, lead to the stroke? Not according to General Kaplinsky. In the fall of 2005, he told me, Sharon

was in his best shape. And he felt on top of the world. He would tell you about the visit in the United Nations, when the entire world stood in line in order to meet him – and you know Sharon was along his career almost isolated in most of the countries. Second, he was in his best situation under pressure. He could be tired sometimes, he would be upset sometimes, but when something happened and he has to – when he was
under pressure, that was his best condition. Suddenly you'd find you met another Ariel Sharon: cool, easy, sense of humor, the ability [to] hear a lot of different opinions and maneuver between them, think three steps ahead. Only when he was under pressure.
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That was not a medical opinion, of course, and the doctors have long argued about whether Sharon's second stroke was inevitable or caused by the treatment he received after his first. I was actually on my way to Israel when the second stroke hit. I was at Dulles Airport in Washington and had checked my bags when news came from the White House. I called Tourgeman to see how serious this was: Was it a mild stroke like the first one? His choked voice told me all I needed to know. I went home.

For me the loss was official but also personal. I had formed a warm relationship with Sharon, and he trusted me. Sometimes when I spoke with Weissglas over the phone, Sharon could be heard asking in Hebrew “Who is that?” and, hearing it was me, would take the phone to say hello and drive home some points that were on his mind, that he thought the president needed to hear right away. Twice he invited me and my family, when on vacation in Israel, to his ranch for a Shabbat lunch, and we have photos of Sharon with all our children. He had formed a working relationship with Secretary Rice, Steve Hadley, and the president, and I believed he meant to do what Dubi told us: to use this time as prime minister to change the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He had begun with the withdrawal from Gaza, but he had meant it when he said this would not be “Gaza only.” What exactly did he intend?

We will never know. Giladi believed he intended to pull back from 42% of the West Bank, roughly the areas that under the Oslo Accords were designated Areas A and B (Area A was in theory under Palestinian security control and administration, and Area B was under Israeli military control but PA administration). Rice too was confident that he would do more after Gaza: “Oh, absolutely,” she later said.
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Kaplinsky agreed: “I believe that he planned to do more; that's what
I
felt. He was very practical, you know? Most of the people in Israel don't understand how pragmatic and practical he was. His solution was completely different than ‘give them the West Bank.’ He believed that we have to keep control of some key points in the West Bank…for example, the Jordan Valley.”
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Weissglas shared the view that Sharon would have built on expected success in Gaza. There were no plans, but there were thoughts, he told me in a later conversation. The thoughts were of similar but not identical movements in the West Bank, trying slowly to disengage from small, isolated, and remote settlements. The next step was to copy the same compensation law that had been used for Gaza and apply it to Judea and Samaria but with one difference: to apply it without a deadline. For several years, he explained, anybody who wanted would be able to take his money and go west; the goal was to see if there was somehow a way to move the settlements and the settlers westbound, and to see if security conditions allowed the military as well to redeploy on a strip east of the security fence. It would not, he acknowledged, have constituted
a political solution or reached a legal definition of disengagement. But, he concluded, when we thought “what next?,” the idea was to start to shrink, push westward, continue and complete the fence, and end up with this strip east of the fence, whose dimensions of course would change as the terrain – topography – required, to have the military there, and to start tempting the settlers from small isolated settlements to move.
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On the Palestinian side, there were fears of exactly this approach, which might lead to a very long-term interim phase. Ghaith al-Omari, an advisor to Abbas, summarized this concern:

It was a Palestinian understanding – and fear. And fear because of two things. One thing is when he completely left Gaza, it was very clear that the next step is going to be a partial withdrawal from the West Bank, and this might become the de facto Palestinian state in half the West Bank. So that was the first grounds of fear. The second grounds, which was more political: it was very clear that once he withdrew unilaterally from Gaza, Hamas took the credit for that. Partly because of the nature of unilateralism, which some of us were warning of before it happened, and partly because of miserable political mismanagement from the Fatah side.…You know, this is the lack of strategic thinking. You are saying, “No, no, no,” until they came to reality, and suddenly in the last month there was very intensive cooperation, and security, and greenhouses, and Condi coming for the Access and Movement and all of that. They had no story to tell. The Fatah crowd had no political story to tell, nor did they try. There were some half-baked attempts to talk about the economic dividend of that, but Hamas had a very vibrant campaign: “Three years of resistance beat ten years of negotiations.” They had it all set. They took the credit for it and there was a sense that if we move in that direction in the West Bank, we're going to have a similar political outcome.
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That was not the view in Washington. Just before Sharon's stroke, we saw hope and change. Bush had been handed a disaster by President Clinton: All negotiations had failed and had produced an intifada. The levels of violence were awful. The Bush administration had worked to get those levels down in 2001 and then after 9/11 had developed a firm policy. The United States would support a Palestinian state as a key American goal, if and when change in the Palestinian leadership gave promise of producing a peaceful and democratic Palestine. This was a bold and widely criticized decision by the president, who had characteristically cut right to the heart of the problem. It was time for the Israelis to pull back and for the Palestinians to govern themselves, but that was simply impossible while the PA was led by a corrupt, despotic terrorist.

If that seems obvious now, it was far from obvious in most government palaces and foreign ministries in 2002. But Bush's view – requiring the marginalization of Arafat – steadily attracted international support and was enshrined in the Roadmap. By June 2003, after the Sharm and Aqaba summits, we had Arab and European backing. Arafat had been forced to allow creation of the prime ministerial position, and it had been filled by Mahmoud Abbas. At Aqaba, he and Sharon shook hands and talked of the way forward: an end to the militarization of the conflict and of terror, peace negotiations, Palestinian self-government, and an end to the Israeli occupation. By the end
of that summer, these hopes were dashed by Arafat, who reasserted himself as the sole Palestinian leader. Negotiations were, then, impossible, so by the end of 2003 Sharon seized the initiative: He would get out of Gaza and four small (token, in the best sense) settlements in the West Bank. Then, we believed, he would begin to pull back farther in the West Bank. After Arafat's death, the Gaza withdrawal went forward successfully, and what seemed to lie ahead was either a new effort at negotiations or that Israeli pullback. Either way, the situation would be transformed. A situation that had been unchanged since the 1967 war had begun to change, with Gaza, and Bush would be able to leave office in 2009 with significant changes as well in the West Bank. The policy we were following was working, despite all the efforts to derail it. That was the way it looked to us as 2006 began, when Arik Sharon suffered his second stroke and his role in Israel's wars and its politics came to an end.