Authors: Elliott Abrams
Olmert was worried about Annapolis, fearing both unduly high expectations and pressure on Israel to make further concessions. On September 18, the president called him, at Condi's request, to soften him up. People are desperate for peace, the president said, and you won the election because you presented a vision of how to get there. Let's make an effort to get Palestinian buy-in, and if we really cannot get it, you can try your unilateral route while I am still president. Olmert replied that he was ready to do a lot, more than anyone before him, but let's not at this stage build inflated expectations. What we hope for may not come true.
The Palestinians were equally worried. At one session, Abbas had told the president that he wanted any agreements reached with Olmert kept secret. That was impossible, but his motivation was clear: He was unwilling to make compromises that would be unpopular and that Hamas could attack. Fayyad and
others with whom we spoke were also worried about building unreasonable expectations, and they were urging that we deemphasize the meeting, saying it was just the start of a long process. There was simply no enthusiasm for Annapolis on either side, I told Hadley at the end of September, but we are not listening – not just to the Israelis but not even to the Palestinians.
Abbas and
Olmert met on October 1, and we were told by both sides that they had a good and candid discussion. (The Israelis reported through me, and the Palestinians through Walles or Welch: As had been true for decades, the State Department was closer to the Arabs and the White House to the Israelis.) They told their staffs to try and draft a joint statement for Annapolis. The tension was clear, not between the two men but rather between the need for some meat in the statement while avoiding details that could arouse criticism and opposition. The staffs did indeed meet in the following weeks to work on terminology that appeared specific enough – but not too specific. What they all wanted out of Annapolis was, it seemed, to avoid damage.
We meanwhile decided that Hadley and I would return to the region. There was plenty to discuss with both sides, from the beginning of Gen. Dayton's practical training efforts, to the West Bank economy, the PA's role in Gaza, Fatah reform, the Abbas-Olmert meetings, to where we were on the Roadmap, Olmert's political situation, Syria and al-Kibar – the list was long. But in our preparatory meetings, held not coincidentally in Condi's conference room at State, there had been only one subject: Annapolis. Period. I told Hadley this was a mistake. The whole purpose of our trip had changed. We were not going there to have deep discussions of the sort we had had with Sharon but instead to pressure the Israelis for concessions. We were asking them to release 1,500 more Palestinian prisoners, to allow Egypt to place soldiers near the Gaza border despite the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty terms that forbade that, and to stop settlement construction. They were also being told that we insisted on using the term “comprehensive peace” to describe the goal at Annapolis
(a term that included peace with Syria) when we knew they wanted to discuss only Israeli-Palestinian matters; we were also asking for a timetable for negotiations. Meanwhile, zero was being asked of the Palestinians: no political reform, no additional action against terrorism. Moreover, we were asking nothing of the Arab states except the great honor of accepting our invitation to Annapolis. They were not being asked to provide additional funds for the PA or to close off all arms smuggling into Gaza. So every meeting with the Palestinians was nice and friendly, and every meeting with the Israelis was testy and difficult. It was all Annapolis now – and the road to Annapolis was to be paved with Israeli concessions.
In late October, Hadley and I made our visit. President Abbas told us he had had six meetings with Olmert and
had begun to discuss final status issues with him. There are six issues, he said: Jerusalem, borders, security, refugees, the economy, and water. I do not say we reached agreement on any of them, he told us, but we discussed them. What I want in Annapolis is to launch final status negotiations, and our goal is a final status agreement while Bush is still in office, he continued. So we'll start at Annapolis, try to reach an agreement, and then I would present it to a referendum or to the Palestine National Council – the PLO's “legislative” body.
My objections notwithstanding, Hadley asked the Israelis for steps that he said would help make Annapolis succeed: the release of thousands of prisoners, a settlement construction freeze for a while, and some changes in the route of the security fence. Foreign Minister Livni pushed back: We will enter the negotiating game with the Palestinians after Annapolis, so why take these political risks now to get small gains at Annapolis?
Olmert was unhappy with our pressure as well. Look, he said, I want an agreement while Bush is president and I have told him that. Under your pressure I changed the Roadmap by accepting the idea of a political horizon, so we agreed to discuss Phases II and III even though we are still in Phase I. OK – but I do not want to find myself like an idiot with the Palestinians pressuring to put more and more things into effect immediately. They are going to be saying “The final picture is known, so why not do it now?” I have to avoid that and I am going to resist it, he told us. Implementation according to the sequencing of the Roadmap is more important now because we are talking about Phases II and III. You are going to tell me that we will not get anyone better than Abu Mazen, said Olmert, and I know it, but he is capable of delivering nothing now. He is weak. I am not going into this with false illusions. I am ready to take risks, including political risks, but I do not want to go to Annapolis as Barak went to Camp David, Olmert concluded.
In fact, the political ground had moved under Ehud Barak's feet while he negotiated at Camp David in 2000. As rumors of the concessions he was proposing circulated back in Israel, political allies deserted him and his poll ratings plummeted. And Olmert was not starting from a base of firm popularity; since Lebanon, his own ratings had been dismal.
I will say at Annapolis that we are ready to launch negotiations to continue until all issues are resolved, Olmert told us. We will talk until we have agreement on all issues; implementation will be subject to the phases and sequence of the Roadmap unless that is changed in the agreement. We can say we will have “continuous negotiations” but no timetables. Listen, Olmert concluded, I would like to do this with Abu Mazen, Fayyad, and Bush. You don't need to pressure me for that.
I thought Olmert had gone very far, and farther than I had initially anticipated. He had agreed to discuss the later phases of the Roadmap, including all final status issues, even though the Palestinians had not dismantled terrorist groups and indeed one of them was now in control of Gaza and had a majority in the PLC. He was agreeing to a larger “meeting” than we had initially discussed, one that was morphing into a huge international conference. He had, to my surprise, agreed to say we were “launching” final status negotiations at Annapolis. I knew he must have seen some personal political advantage to all of this, but he was nevertheless acting for the State of Israel and coming very far. It did not seem to me that our response should be to pocket all of this and demand more and more. I took this view not because of some deep personal anguish about the political risk to Olmert, because I got along fine with Livni and
it would have made little difference to me personally if he had resigned one day and she had become prime minister the next. My problem was that I thought all our efforts and all the concessions we were demanding were aimed in the wrong direction – toward a successful conference rather than pragmatic movement toward building a Palestinian state. Condi believed the conference was a critical step in that direction; I believed the conference mania was a mistake. It would fill a vacuum after the Hamas coup in Gaza, as she believed, but it would teach that despite that coup there was hope for peace negotiations. I was sure, however, that the negotiations could not succeed and was worried that their collapse would leave us worse off.
I was not worried about violence, about a new intifada, if Annapolis led nowhere. The intifada had not sprung up spontaneously from the souls of Palestinians in 2000 and 2001. It was the creation of Yasser Arafat and his cronies. Now there was a Palestinian leadership that did not espouse violence and would try to prevent it. What worried me was losing the momentum we could build in the West Bank by playing all our cards with the Israelis in ways irrelevant to most Palestinians and to a real start to building the institutions they would need for statehood.
The best example of what I was afraid of came very soon, in the run-up to Annapolis. The Israelis sent a delegation to Washington to work out final details, and Condi hosted a dinner at a restaurant in the Watergate on November 14. It was two weeks to Annapolis, and it was her birthday. She wore
a gorgeous red dress and was going off to a birthday party in her honor after our early meal. Hadley and I and David Welch joined her, and the Israeli side included “T and T”; Ambassador Sallai Meridor; Gen. Ido Nehustan, who was head of planning at the IDF and later head of Israel's air force; and Livni's top aide, the director general of the Foreign Ministry, Aaron Abramowitz. A career civil servant, Aaron had been Livni's top aide when she was minister of justice as well and was a careful, thoughtful, highly competent professional. Most of the talk was about settlements, and Condi pressed the Israelis to announce soon that there would be an absolute construction freeze during the negotiations that would commence after Annapolis. This will help set the mood for Annapolis, she said. The Israelis pushed back and were determined to stick to the previous understanding: build up and in, but not out. As Livni had told us, they wanted to save any concessions for bargaining with the Palestinians when negotiations began, not to give them away to create a better mood for this conference.
Having failed on settlements, Condi then turned to another idea: The Israelis should return the bodies of Palestinians who had been killed by the IDF and buried in Israel. This was presented as a concession to the PA, but I could not imagine how it would help Abbas. These were likely to be the bodies of either criminals or terrorists, many from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. How did their return help the PA, Fatah, or Abbas himself? Who had even suggested this, I wondered, for I had never heard Abbas demand it.
Finally, Condi pressed for the release of 1,500 Palestinian prisoners. This would really help establish the right tone in advance of Annapolis. Turbo replied that that was impossible. It is not impossible, said Condi; you have around ten thousand Palestinians under detention. She and David Welch then started proposing who might be released. Release those with short sentences. Release the youngest. Release the oldest. Finally, Condi suggested releasing those who had been in jail longest. To this demand, Aaron Abramowitz responded. Look, he said, we do not have the death penalty in Israel, except for Nazi war criminals. So those who have been in jail the longest are murderers, and in fact murderers who committed aggravated acts – like murdering children or murdering with extreme cruelty. What is the moral basis for this demand that we release such people?
As I now recall it, a dead silence around the table followed. Not long after this exchange, Condi left for her party, telling Tourgeman as she departed that “you ruined my birthday.” This small, private dinner was emblematic to me, both of Condi's deteriorated relationship with the Israelis and of the role Annapolis played in it. The concessions for which she had pushed made no sense to the Israelis and were refused; the only impact they had was to chill relations further. I thought it a squandered opportunity because we might instead have pushed the Israelis hard for moves that would be felt by average Palestinians and would improve their lives quickly. Remove this checkpoint or that road barrier, or allow Israeli Arabs to shop in the West Bank and perk up its commercial sector, for example. These actions were finally taken by Israel, under Prime Minister Netanyahu in 2009. They would not have been
impossible in 2007 and 2008, had we focused on such practical acts and put the symbolic moves aside – and put aside the idea that our main goal was a successful conference.
On November 27, just after Thanksgiving, the Annapolis Conference
took place in a spectacular setting at the U.S. Naval Academy. The very word “conference” annoyed the Israelis, for they had repeatedly been promised it would be a “meeting.” In the end, invitees included the UN, EU, World Bank
, IMF, Arab League, and about 40 countries. Using the term “meeting” or “conference” was a small difference, to be sure, but symbolized for the Israelis the ways in which U.S. policy was drifting away from them. The events at the conference itself were an anticlimax; the fact of everyone coming together to celebrate this launching of peace negotiations was the real news. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud sat in the room when Olmert spoke; much was made of this as a great breakthrough. Olmert, Abbas, and the president made very good speeches. At the halfway point during the day, I got up to wander around for a moment. An Arab foreign minister came over to say hello, bored with listening to speeches all day. As we shook hands, he told me this was a beautiful place and a very well-organized conference. I agreed. But you know nothing will come of this, don't you, he said with a thin smile. I smiled back, because I agreed. I did not see how the negotiations being launched that day could possibly lead to a final status agreement in the year we had left in office.
The more significant events took place off stage, in the meetings the president held with Abbas and
Olmert. The day before the conference, on November 26, he met with both men and their delegations separately at the White House. At Annapolis he met them again, together, and then we repeated the separate meetings the day after.
At the White House on November 26, we began with Olmert. After the pleasantries, the president tried to reassure Olmert and
the Israelis. The real issue is whether this whole thing is an exercise in futility or can work, and that's up to you and the Palestinians. After all, he reminded Olmert, if you had not convinced me that a Palestinian state is possible, we would not be here. I am not here to force you and the Palestinians to do something. I won't cram it down your throat. I understand your concern that this is just a big trap, but I think we have an opportunity that will enhance Israel's security.