As long as I was in Israel, Sharon never stopped trying to get the read of me; or to pry judgments and opinions out of me; and I think he was very frustrated when I didn’t show him any of that. He simply couldn’t understand how anyone could not see what was obvious to him. To him, I think, you have to judge, you have to have opinions. It goes with being committed the way he’s committed.
From my angle, any judgment I expressed would close off the other side; and I couldn’t allow that to happen. Clearly every thing I said, or allegedly said, would be in the press the next day. Leaks from both sides were more like deluges. Though the two of us got along together, there was always an underlying tension between us.
Toward the end of the flight, a call came over the radio: A shooting had occurred in the small northern Israeli town of Afula. We immediately changed course and headed up there. Reports confirmed that a pair of Palestinian gunmen had opened up in the town’s marketplace, killing a pregnant Israeli woman. Several other Israelis were wounded, and the two gunmen were dead.
When we arrived overhead, we could see the security forces and medical personnel busily taking control of the scene. We hovered for a time, taking it all in, and then flew back to Jerusalem.
Later, I got a fuller account of the story—which leaves lots of unanswered questions. Earlier that day, as a good faith gesture at the start of my mission, the Israelis had taken down a checkpoint near Afula so the Palestinians could have an easier time moving about. The gunmen had obviously taken advantage of this opening to launch their terrorist attack. The big question is: Was the attack a deliberately planned provocation aimed at undermining the peace process? Or was it—as the Palestinians later claimed— simply a revenge killing? The Israeli military had recently killed a relative of the gunmen; the gunmen shot up the marketplace in retaliation.
Wherever the truth lay, this was clearly one of those violent incidents that tempted me to lose hope in the peace process. I knew I could forget about having a quiet start to my mission. My sense that this would be a roller-coaster trip from crisis to hope and back to crisis was proving right. Even though both sides had made encouraging statements about cooperating with my mission, I had to wonder how much any of that counted now that a violent event had already cast a black shadow over the first full day.
THE REST of the day consisted of meetings and briefings with Prime Minister Sharon, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ben Eliezer, and Chief of the Israeli Defense Force Shaul Mofaz.85
This brought me up against a complicated situation: At that time, the Israeli government was a unity government, a coalition government . . . which means in practice that it was a divided government. Sharon was from Likud, the party which had the largest number of seats in the Knesset, while Peres and Ben Eliezer were from Labor, the chief opposition party. It was not an easy situation to handle. “Who can actually speak for Israel?” I had to ask myself.
Sharon cut through this confusion: “I’m the only one who can speak for this government,” he told me.
It was kind of strange to an American who is used to cabinet ministers who can speak for their boss. But I accepted this condition. It was their system, not ours.
The others I met with were far from unhelpful, even if somewhat marginalized by Sharon. Everyone had a lot of experience in the nitty-gritty of working with the Palestinians, and they all came through with powerful insights and solid advice.
Though Mofaz had a reputation as a tough hard-liner, he was a quiet, thoughtful man, and not immovable, nor totally unsympathetic to the Palestinians. When I met him that afternoon, he made it clear that he wanted to be cooperative, that he wanted me to succeed, and that he did not believe there was a military solution to the problem.
Later, he and I spent a lot of time together, just talking, and the two of us came to a good appreciation of our positions. I understood there was no way he would compromise on security; but within that boundary, he understood that the Israelis would have to give up some things . . . without—again—taking any security risks. He was aware there was never going to be a total and lasting military defeat of the Palestinians, so something had to be arranged to make the peace agreements go right. Yet he also made it clear that he did what he had to do out there in the field, even if it was hard and people got hurt.
PERES GAVE me valuable counsel on how my mission might proceed and on the possibilities that could develop. In these early days of my mission, he was the one person who gained my complete respect as I worked through the peace process.
I will never forget his advice:
“General Zinni,” he told me, “you’re going to find three kinds of people in this business.
“First, you’re going to find the righteous. Don’t waste your time with them. You’ll find them on both sides, and they’re always going to appeal to the righteousness of their cause.
“You’re never going to get anywhere with people like that. There’s no negotiating with righteousness. Yes, it’s their right to believe what they believe. But you’re not going to change them. They interpret facts from their religious angle, and they ignore any facts that don’t support that.
“The second group you’re going to meet,” he went on, “are the collectors of arguments, the debaters. You see them on TV with all the talking heads. They’re going to outdebate the other guy and score points. But where making real progress toward peace is concerned, these people are useless. If you want to get into the debate for academic purposes, that’s fine. But it serves no other purpose.
“The third group you’re going to meet are the ones that count. These are the ones who want to figure out a solution on the ground. These are the ones who ask themselves over and over: ‘How the hell are we going to make this ghastly situation work and get out of this terrible nightmare?’
“Focus on them,” he said, “and focus on what needs to be done, and then get it done.”
It was the best advice I got in Israel.
The other briefs were devoted to the security situation—the overriding issue, in the Israeli view. Their first order of business was to stop the terrorist suicide attacks. They were convinced that Arafat and the Palestinian Authority could stop, or at least control, most of the violent attacks, but chose not to. Or, to put this more bluntly, Arafat supported and condoned much of the violence. If the peace process was going to move forward, they made it very clear, he had to make a strategic decision to abandon violence and return to a negotiated settlement of the issues. They doubted his willingness to do this.
The Palestinian Authority couldn’t bring themselves to do that. If they did—if they confronted Hamas and Islamic Jihad, cracked down on the extremists, made arrests, confiscated weapons—there’d be blood in the streets. But if they did not confront Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Israelis weren’t about to make any of the concessions outlined in the Tenet plan (and other plans)—such as removal of checkpoints, withdrawal of security forces to previous positions, and readmission of Palestinian workers to Israel. And there was no way we’d see any progress toward a Palestinian state.
At first the Israelis took a very tough line on how the Palestinian Authority had to demonstrate their good faith: Sharon insisted on one hundred percent compliance, including at least seven days of quiet, before he would approve any talks.
If we could not even get talks started for at least a week (if we were lucky enough to have no attacks), my job was clearly going to be impossible. In time, however, the Israelis backed away from their more absolute positions; and Sharon agreed to participate in the Trilateral Committee talks that I had decided to use as the venue for the initial meetings. But their bottom line remained the same: The Palestinians had to show good faith in stopping terror attacks.
THE FIRST day ended with mixed results. On the one hand, the terrible and tragic attack at Afula had cast a dark cloud over our hopes; but we had at least gained an agreement from the Israelis to meet in the Trilateral Committee. I had met with the Israeli leaders
hip, we had connected well, and they had indicated that they would give, at least, cautious support for my mission.
I SPENT the second day with the Palestinians. Since it was the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, my meetings took place in the evening, beginning with the Iftar meal86 with Chairman Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank town of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority had one of their headquarters (called “the Muqatta’a”; their official seat of government was in Gaza).
On the way there, our consular people took me on a tour of the Israeli settlement areas in the West Bank, where, contrary to agreements, significant settlement expansion was going on. During the tour, we passed through Israeli security checkpoints and witnessed the frustrating and humiliating process Palestinians had to endure in order to travel from place to place.
In our talks the day before, the Israelis had acknowledged that these checkpoints caused problems, but they were necessary to prevent attacks (such as the Afula incident). It was obviously a difficult situation. Young soldiers who could not compromise on security subjected Palestinians to time-consuming and humiliating security procedures. I was told checkpoint stories of the birth of babies, of people dying unable to reach hospitals in time, of senior Palestinian officials held up and embarrassed, and of many other incidents that inflamed the people.
My meetings with Arafat were cordial. He has always been hospitable, and very expressive, with abundant assurances of cooperation (always echoed by the people around him).
By then, meeting with Arabs came easy to me; I was comfortable with their ways. And though I didn’t yet know these Palestinians very well, they certainly knew me. Arafat had already talked with President Mubarak, King Abdullah, and the other major Arab leaders, all of whom had advised cooperation. “They all told me that you are a guy I could trust,” Arafat explained, “who can help me do what I want to do.” He strongly stressed that, and assured me that this was marvelous. “I’m totally committed to the success of your mission,” he went on to tell me. And when I brought up the Trilateral Committee as a venue for further discussion, he went along with that as well, though he added that he wanted to open up discussions in areas other than security—a far more loaded issue than it might have seemed.
On the whole, he was always agreeable, always quick to promise cooperation, but not so quick to deliver on his promises.
It became increasingly evident to me, as Yasser Arafat and I met again and again over the next weeks and months, that this wily old revolutionary could never really bring himself to make the compromises that would lead to a lasting resolution of the conflict. He could never look at concluding a deal that risked his own place in history and his personal legacy. He saw himself as the leader who had never given an inch in compromise, and this was more important to him than concluding and implementing an agreement that caused him to make serious compromises. He’s at the point in his life where he clearly sees his own mortality, and he wants to go out as defiant. “I’m the only Arab general that’s undefeated,” he said to me at one point. “You’re not going to walk behind my funeral like with Sadat and my partner Rabin.”
I began to realize toward the end of my piece of the process that he wasn’t the guy who could bring home the bacon. He wasn’t going to take the risks for peace that Sadat, Rabin, Hussein, Begin, and Barak did. Not when his own legacy and history were at stake and he saw their fate.
Of course he knew he would have to make compromises. And Barak put on the table at Camp David a lot of compromises. The deal might not have been perfect, and he probably could have negotiated a better one; but he didn’t seem to try. He walked out.
I once asked Arafat about that. “Were you close to a deal at Camp David?”
“Oh, yes, very close.”
There are a lot of versions about what happened at Camp David or Taba. Was the deal on the table good or bad? Could it have been further negotiated? I don’t know. Still, I could never fathom why the process ended so abruptly. When you’re close or at least have a process going in the right direction, why do you cut it off?
AFTER MY talk with Arafat, I met privately with other Palestinian leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the then number two man and later Prime Minister; Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala’a), the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council and Abu Mazen’s successor as Prime Minister; and Sa’eb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority’s Chief Negotiator.
Abu Mazen had been involved in the process for a long time, did not agree with Arafat on many issues, was opposed to the Intifada, and clearly saw what had to be done on the ground pretty much the way we did. He wanted to move to negotiations. But it was clear that he didn’t have any real power; his position as number two didn’t give him much clout. He was not living as the number two guy.
The pecking order was always fuzzy after Arafat. Like every revolutionary leader, he spread out the guns and the authority; he didn’t let anybody who could challenge him have real power. Abu Mazen had stature; he openly disagreed with a lot of the steps Arafat had taken; but there was nothing behind him—no guns, no money, no popular support, no political clout. Yet he said the right things, I thought he meant them, and he had a tremendous reputation; and I thought, “Jeez, too bad this guy doesn’t have a lot more. He makes sense. He’s committed. He’s a realist.”
I had the same impression of Abu Ala’a, the Speaker of the Assembly. Abu Mazen did not last long as Prime Minister. And Abu Ala’a has not had much greater success.
Sa’eb Erekat is the mayor of Jericho—heavyset, balding, highly intelligent, easy to like. Sa’eb is constantly talking. A collector of arguments, he loves to debate (he’s on CNN all the time). He’s been in this process a long time, and by all accounts he is a very honest man. But I wonder if he hasn’t been in the process too long; maybe he’s too caught up in process. He and I got along very well, and I spent a lot of time with him and with his wonderful family at Jericho. (I enjoyed dinner at his home.)
I also got to know the security chiefs from the West Bank and Gaza, Jabril Rajoub and Mohamed Dahlan. These were practical men who could take the security steps necessary IF they were given the authority and backing from the top. Unfortunately, that would not happen.
None of these leaders had real power. Arafat called the game.
FROM THESE MEETINGS, I gathered that the Palestinians’ priority was political issues, and their chief concern: Would the Israelis really make political concessions down the road once the security issues were resolved?
I also gathered that there wasn’t much stomach from these leaders to take on the extremists who were perpetrating the horrific suicide attacks. They wanted the Israelis to “end the occupation” and move out of their areas, and then they would deal with the extremists . . . but through negotiations rather than confrontation.
According to the Tenet/Mitchell plans, taking action against the extremists was the necessary condition for progress on the later steps leading to Palestinian statehood. Failure to take action would thus violate the principles of Tenet/Mitchell that Arafat claimed to have accepted.
For the Israelis, of course, this was an unacceptable risk, not only militarily but politically. No Israeli leader wants to be seen to yield on a point of security without unbreakable guarantees.
ALL OF these roadblocks and potential roadblocks notwithstanding, by the end of the second day I was cautiously optimistic. My personal connections with both sides were good; they’d both be easy to talk to; yet I had no illusions about the probability of success. Each side viewed the problems differently. Worse, they each saw a different path to resolving them.
BILL BURNS left on the third day. I was on my own.
We held our first Trilateral Committee meeting shortly after he left. To avoid press and security problems, we held back our announcement of time and place until the last minute for this and all our later meetings.
The crews from each side were the security chiefs from the various Palestinian military forces and
their intelligence services and from the Israeli Defense Force and their intelligence representatives. These old rivals were all pros, who knew each other well and seemed to share mutual respect. I didn’t realize how well they all knew each other until they all gathered at our first meeting place. It was all hugs and kisses there, cheery jokes, questions about families, good fellowship.
And then they sat down and started screaming.
At breaks, they’d return to good fellowship.
The screaming bothered me. It’s no way to conduct a negotiation. But there seemed to be a need to vent, and I let it go for the first couple of meetings; after that, I demanded serious discussion and constructive sessions.
Even after they quieted down, results from these initial sessions were mixed. Both sides were reluctant to get serious; for every small step forward we had to suffer through hours of screaming recriminations and accusations; and I left meetings exhausted and frustrated. Yet, with a few exceptions, I came to like these negotiators. They could make it happen, I realized, if they had the support and authority from their political masters. I had to get that. Meanwhile, I needed them to do the painfully difficult work of hammering out the detailed measures that had to be accomplished on the ground.
We made a little progress—at least on one side. The Israelis eased up on their insistence on seven days without attacks and one hundred percent results. They now asked for forty-eight hours of quiet and one hundred percent effort.