Date: Wed, May 7, 2008 at 10:52 AM
Subject: Aaron Miller: AMERICA'S ELUSIVE SEARCH FOR ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE
{Personal aside: In the late 1970s my wife Delia (then a newly minted historian) and Aaron Miller (experienced historian soon to become INR's top Middle East analyst) were once colleagues in the Historians Office of the Bureau of Public Affairs at State before she departed to join the World Bank staff.}
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Over 50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation
www.fpri.org
E-Notes
Distributed Exclusively via Fax & Email
AMERICA'S ELUSIVE SEARCH FOR ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE
by Aaron David Miller
May 6, 2008
Aaron David Miller is a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington,
D.C.; his latest book is The Much Too Promised Land:
America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Mar. 2008,
Bantam/Dell). Between 2003-06 Miller served as president of
Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young
leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills
required to advance coexistence and reconciliation. For the
previous two decades, he served at the Department of State
as an adviser to six Secretaries of State. This essay is
based on the BookTalk he gave at FPRI on April 28, 2008, at
which copies of his book were sold by Joseph Fox Bookshop,
1724 Sansom St., Philadelphia (www.foxbookshop.com), where
the book is also available.
------------------------------ ----------------------------
Over 50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation
www.fpri.org
E-Notes
Distributed Exclusively via Fax & Email
AMERICA'S ELUSIVE SEARCH FOR ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE
by Aaron David Miller
May 6, 2008
Aaron David Miller is a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington,
D.C.; his latest book is The Much Too Promised Land:
America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Mar. 2008,
Bantam/Dell). Between 2003-06 Miller served as president of
Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young
leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills
required to advance coexistence and reconciliation. For the
previous two decades, he served at the Department of State
as an adviser to six Secretaries of State. This essay is
based on the BookTalk he gave at FPRI on April 28, 2008, at
which copies of his book were sold by Joseph Fox Bookshop,
1724 Sansom St., Philadelphia (www.foxbookshop.com), where
the book is also available.
------------------------------
Upcoming FPRI Events
For other event information, including our upcoming Robert
A. Fox Lecture Series on the Middle East, featuring Rachel
Bronson on Saudi Arabia, Amb. Daniel Kurtzer on Egypt, and
Harvey Sicherman on US Policy Toward the Middle East, visit:
http://www.fpri.org/events/
For membership and partnership information, visit:
http://www.fpri.org/FPRIMembers hipPartnership.pdf
------------------------------ ----------------------------
AMERICA'S ELUSIVE SEARCH FOR ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE
by Aaron David Miller
My book The Much Too Promised Land had a very strange origin
in the sense that I really never intended to write it. I
"resigned" from the State Department in January 2003. Only
two secretaries of state in the history of the republic have
ever "resigned" over matters of principle: William Jennings
Bryan because he opposed Woodrow Wilson's policies in the
run-up to World War I and Cyrus Vance because he was
fundamentally against President Carter's abortive hostage
rescue mission in April 1980. One doesn't resign from the
Department of State easily. I left because I had concluded
rightly--and nothing has changed my mind in the past five
years--that the road to Arab-Israeli peace was going to be a
long and bumpy one. It had come time for me to take a break
after 25 years of providing varying degrees of advice, some
good, some bad, to a number of secretaries of state. I have
a new trope which is that there ought to be term limits
imposed on former advisors to presidents and secretaries,
particularly those whose advice perhaps doesn't lead to
success.
I went on to run Seeds of Peace, which brings young Arabs
and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis together, to try to
forge understanding and respect. As I watched over the past
five years, I was disturbed by the fact that America, a
country I care a great deal about, was failing. It was
failing at a time and in a part of the world that made that
failure extremely risky for our interests.
The primary threat to our national security will not come
from an ascending China, however competitive and powerful it
may be, or from an economically powerful and united Europe.
It's not even going to come from a former USSR seeking to
regain its past glory. It's going to come from an area of
the world that is divided, dysfunctional, and angry, filled
with rage and conflicts that cannot be resolved.
September 11 was the second bloodiest day in U.S. history,
surpassed only by September 17, 1862 at Antietam. So what
happens in the part of the world from which the 9/11 attacks
emanated is critical to our national interests. Our
interests there cannot be measured in terms of
administrations. While serving in government, I divided my
life in terms of administrations. That's not the right way
to calibrate time. That's not the way our friends calibrate
it, nor our adversaries. They calibrate time in terms of
generations. We need to start thinking that way, too.
Both of the Democratic presidential candidates are willfully
deluding either themselves or us if they believe that the
road out of Iraq will be quick, easy, and fixed according to
a neat time period. America has to assume responsibility for
what it does. We invaded a country roughly the size of the
state of California, with 28 million people. We ripped the
lid off it and dismantled the army and other Baath
institutions of governance. What makes us believe that
somehow we can simply turn around and exit? Some would argue
that that's the morally and ethically right thing to do. But
the question is, when the Republican or Democratic successor
to the current administration confronts the reality of this
investment trap into which this administration has put us,
from which we cannot extricate ourselves or fix the
situation, what is he or she going to do? Can we really
leave Afghanistan and Iraq as failed states?
If Iraq over time ends up being a stable democratic polity,
that would be great. But that's not really the question, is
it? The question is, what has Iraq cost us? My friend Thomas
Friedman says, you don't win the lottery if you don't buy a
ticket. Fair enough. But there are some tickets in life that
just aren't worth buying--they are too risky.
All of this prompted me to think about the reasons for both
America's success and primarily its failures in this region.
For eight years under Bill Clinton, we stumbled at Arab-
Israeli peacemaking; for eight years under President Bush we
stumbled at how to make war, at least in this part of the
world. What is it about America, the greatest power on
earth, that accounts for this situation? Why can't we seem
to get it right?
When I say "get it right," I don't mean "fix this region."
Most of the problems there are not caused by America. And
this region is not going to be "fixed" by us. The history of
this region is the history of great powers who over 1,000
years, over the sweep and arc of history, have tried to
impose their will on small tribes. Good luck! This region is
littered with the schemes, dreams, ambitions of great powers
who believed they could have their way and impose their
will. We can't for one simple reason: we don't live in the
neighborhood. However powerful we think we are, these small
tribes, these tiny powers, will always have a greater stake
in the outcome of their struggles than we ever will. Because
for us it is not an existential conflict.
In light of all this, I came to two realizations. First, we
don't pay attention to the past. A.J.P. Taylor, the great
British historian, said that the only lesson of history is
that there are no lessons. But do you want to ignore
history? If you ignore it completely, history will be a very
cruel and unforgiving teacher.
America occupied Japan for seven years, from 1945-52. How
many Americans were killed by Japanese in hostile actions
during that seven-year period? None. Japan was a defeated
nation. Despite all his imperfections, General MacArthur
understood the importance of preserving Japanese
institutions that were very controversial, including the
emperor himself. What were we thinking when we went to war
in Iraq with insufficient forces to even have a chance of
subduing an insurgency? And what did we expect would happen
in the wake of our own incapacity and the determination of
the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to settle scores?
So that was the first problem. As William Faulkner observed
in Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even
past." That is certainly how Arabs and Israelis see it; we
need to see it that way, as well.
Second, we don't read the present correctly. We don't see
the world the way it is. We want to see the world the way we
want it to be. Why? It's related to where we are. We have
attained a degree of physical security and detachment
unprecedented, unparalleled, unrivaled in history for a
great power. We have non-predatory neighbors to our north
and south, and fish to our east and west. No other great
power has ever had this kind of physical security. In my
opinion, it explains why we behave the way we do. It
explains our boundless optimism. Our political system was
the first in the world to be founded on the basis of an
idea--the primacy of the individual. We believe in
individuals' capacity to transform themselves and to change
the world around them, with all the imperfections, deficits,
and problems that America has.
I lived with this practical, we can fix anything, split-the-
difference worldview for 20 years. The eighth day of the
Camp David summit of July 2000, Jerusalem, this
extraordinarily complicated city, was to become the focus. A
piece of it: what to do about the Haram al Sharif, 35 acres,
on which sit two mosques holy to Islam. Below are the
remains of the first and second Jewish temples. Talk about
overlapping sacred space, that's what this is. Here we are
trying to convince the Israelis and Palestinians, who both
assert sovereignty, that we'll take sovereignty from them
and we'll reposit it with God. That's a logical fix--they're
holy sites, after all. Or, when they rejected that idea,
"We'll give you Palestinians sovereignty above ground, and
you Israelis sovereignty below." They rejected that as well.
Jerusalem, history teaches us, is not to be shared, it's to
be possessed. In the name of God, and the tribe. It need not
be so, but Americans need to understand the attachments of
each side to it.
Where we are also explains our naivete and our capacity to
believe that the rest of the world is like us. Twelve years
ago, my daughter and I were at a movie theater outside of
Washington, D.C. watching Sean Connery in The Rock. I
noticed several muscular men in the theater talking into
their lapels, a sure sign they were security and someone of
real importance was there. Sure enough, eight rows in front
of us were King Hussein and Queen Noor. He had on blue
jeans, a blazer, and a polo shirt. We knew each other, so we
chatted. I said later to my daughter, "Isn't this great?
It's me and you and the King of Jordan in Washington
watching Sean Connery in The Rock." As if we were all part
of the same family. We were not. When he was 12, this man
saw his grandfather Abdullah murdered. He presided for
forty-five years over one of the most fragile enterprises in
the Middle East, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and made
it work. Or Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Madeleine Albright
declared to be the Israeli Newt Gingrich. Netanyahu's high
school education in Philadelphia and his American mother
gave him a superb capacity in the American vernacular. I
remember on one trip being summoned, along with my
colleagues, to be yelled at by him. When I closed my eyes, I
heard my college tennis coach yelling at me. I didn't hear
Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, graduate of one of
Israel's elite paratrooper brigades, brother of Jonathan,
who had been killed in the rescue mission at Entebbe; son of
a prominent revisionist historian. I have nothing in common
with Benjamin Netanyahu. We don't understand what it's like
to live on a knife's edge.
So I decided to try to apply these principles to the 20-plus
years I participated in Arab-Israeli diplomacy. I did not
write this book only for the Beltway crowd and policy wonks.
I tried to make it accessible, building on anecdotes and
stories from my experience. Then I set about interviewing
everyone I could find who had participated in the earlier
diplomacy. I interviewed all of our former presidents, even
Gerald Ford before he died, with one exception: Bill
Clinton. All nine secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger
to Condoleezza Rice, national security advisors; there's a
chapter on domestic politics that seeks to answer the much
misunderstood and hijacked question, how does domestic
politics in America really influence our Arab-Israeli
policy? For that I went out and interviewed all the
evangelicals--the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, John
Hagee--a lot of sitting senators, representatives, American
Jews and Arabs. I tell the story of why America succeeds and
why it fails in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, bearing in mind one
basic fact. I borrow a line from Michael Jackson, not known
as a great philosopher. But he got it right when he said
that if you want to make a change, start with the man in the
mirror.
I could cite a thousand reasons why Yassir Arafat was the
primary obstacle, followed closely by Ehud Barak, in the
failure of Camp David. But ultimately Bill Clinton and the
rest of his advisors bear a measure of responsibility. We
need not self-flagellate in some maudlin, gratuitous way,
but we do need to identify our role in the summit's failure
and learn from it.
A few observations. First, as to objectivity, I argued with
my editor for a week about how much personal information to
include. He said, if you want people to believe you, you had
better come clean. "Tell them who you are and where you came
from, how your views changed." I concluded that there is no
objectivity. We are all sum totals of our experiences--our
political, religious, and ethnic DNA. You can't change who
you are, but you can look to see where your predispositions,
prejudices, and biases lie and set them aside in an effort
to try to understand the needs, narratives, and requirements
of both sides to a conflict. I'm from a wealthy Jewish real
estate family in Cleveland, Ohio. My grandparents were on a
first-name basis with David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. My
parents were very close to Yitzhak and Leah Rabin as well as
Menachim Begin. My story is an interesting one in terms of
an evolution in views. It's absolutely critical that some
evolution occur, some learning about both sides' needs,
because this is not a morality play that pits the forces of
goodness on one hand against the forces of darkness on the
other.
Second, there can be no bricks without straw. No matter how
much America wants Arab-Israeli peace, unless the raw
material is there, the political will and the urgency among
the Arabs and Israelis, we can try all day long without
success. Every breakthrough that has occurred in this
conflict--Egypt-Israel, Jordan-Israel, Palestinians-Israel,
came as a consequence of secret diplomacy about which the
Americans were informed afterwards. That is very
instructive.
Third, you need a brickmaker. Every successful negotiation
that has endured involved an American role at some point. In
my book, I nominate for the "Peace Process Hall of Fame"
three Americans, all of whom I interviewed: Jimmy Carter,
who during his presidency delivered something extraordinary-
-an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty--that would not have
happened without him; Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. They
were all effective brickmakers, effective because they
combined the 4 Ts of successful diplomacy: they were Tough;
they gained the Trust, to a degree, of the Arabs and
Israelis they were working with; they were incredibly
Tenacious; and they had an exquisite sense of Timing. They
knew how not to overengage (as Bill Clinton did) or
underengage or disengage (George W. Bush). Not since 1991
have we seen, in my judgment, an effective policy toward the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
Fourth, there is tremendous misunderstanding on the issue of
domestic politics, where there is a dishonest debate. Too
many American Jews want to believe that domestic politics
are irrelevant to the case for Israel; too many of Israel's
detractors in America want to believe that it's all
attributable to domestic politics. Unlike professors Walt
and Mearsheimer, I actually went out to talk to the lobby
and the lobbied. Among the conclusions I reached is that the
pro-Israeli community in America today (5.3 million American
Jews, along with millions of evangelical Christians who for
reasons of eschatology and value affinity have become
stunningly pro-Israel) has a powerful voice. It's time we
stop deluding ourselves. But it does not have a veto.
The U.S.-Israeli relationship is not some sort of mushroom
harvested in some dark closet by a handful of
conspiratorially minded Jews and evangelical Christians who
hold the American foreign policy establishment hostage. The
U.S.-Israeli relationship has inculcated itself into
American culture, psychology, politics and foreign policy.
When we maintain the special relationship, which I think is
in American interests, and not allow it to become exclusive,
it actually can serve our interests. This is both because it
is in our interests to support like-minded societies and
because our special ties with Israel give us a primary role
and ability to help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Since 1950, only 22 countries in the world have maintained
their democratic character continuously. The notion of an
emerging democracy--Kenya, for example--is a concept that
may be legitimate, but the ultimate arbiter of everything is
time. Israel is a democracy. We can argue about the West
Bank and Gaza, I'm a vocal critic of Israel's policies
there. But this is important, because supporting societies
that share our values represents the broadest conception of
what constitutes our national interests.
Fifth, regarding the Clinton years. Clinton was one of the
most empathetic, talented, brilliant presidents and
negotiators you'd ever want to meet. No one cared more or
tried to do more on this problem. But empathy alone is not
enough. Achieving the conflict-ending agreements he sought
required a toughness he and we didn't have during his
tenure.
Sixth, regarding George W. Bush. Governing is about
choosing. You come to Washington, you decide what's
important to you, you pursue it. Arab-Israeli peace wasn't
important to Bush throughout the first administration; he
had another agenda. It may still not be that important to
him. There's a chance that between now and the end of the
year something positive could happen between Omert and
Abbas, but this is really no longer primarily an American
story. My friend Larry Sommers, the former president of
Harvard University, said that in the history of the world,
nobody ever washed a rental car. You only care about what
you own. If a U.S. president doesn't invest in this or
whatever other issue he or she chooses, opponents both at
home and abroad will quickly figure this out. That will make
success impossible.
Finally, to end on an optimistic note, John F. Kennedy said
something very important. He described himself as an
idealist without illusion. That's what America needs to be.
I don't care if it's health care or the Arab-Israeli
conflict. We can't tell our young people never, we can't
mortgage the future and give in to cynicism and despair. But
as you seek to change the world, you have to do so with your
eyes open. Because the stakes now are much higher than
they've ever been before.
------------------------------ ----------------------------
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For other event information, including our upcoming Robert
A. Fox Lecture Series on the Middle East, featuring Rachel
Bronson on Saudi Arabia, Amb. Daniel Kurtzer on Egypt, and
Harvey Sicherman on US Policy Toward the Middle East, visit:
http://www.fpri.org/events/
For membership and partnership information, visit:
http://www.fpri.org/FPRIMembers
------------------------------
AMERICA'S ELUSIVE SEARCH FOR ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE
by Aaron David Miller
My book The Much Too Promised Land had a very strange origin
in the sense that I really never intended to write it. I
"resigned" from the State Department in January 2003. Only
two secretaries of state in the history of the republic have
ever "resigned" over matters of principle: William Jennings
Bryan because he opposed Woodrow Wilson's policies in the
run-up to World War I and Cyrus Vance because he was
fundamentally against President Carter's abortive hostage
rescue mission in April 1980. One doesn't resign from the
Department of State easily. I left because I had concluded
rightly--and nothing has changed my mind in the past five
years--that the road to Arab-Israeli peace was going to be a
long and bumpy one. It had come time for me to take a break
after 25 years of providing varying degrees of advice, some
good, some bad, to a number of secretaries of state. I have
a new trope which is that there ought to be term limits
imposed on former advisors to presidents and secretaries,
particularly those whose advice perhaps doesn't lead to
success.
I went on to run Seeds of Peace, which brings young Arabs
and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis together, to try to
forge understanding and respect. As I watched over the past
five years, I was disturbed by the fact that America, a
country I care a great deal about, was failing. It was
failing at a time and in a part of the world that made that
failure extremely risky for our interests.
The primary threat to our national security will not come
from an ascending China, however competitive and powerful it
may be, or from an economically powerful and united Europe.
It's not even going to come from a former USSR seeking to
regain its past glory. It's going to come from an area of
the world that is divided, dysfunctional, and angry, filled
with rage and conflicts that cannot be resolved.
September 11 was the second bloodiest day in U.S. history,
surpassed only by September 17, 1862 at Antietam. So what
happens in the part of the world from which the 9/11 attacks
emanated is critical to our national interests. Our
interests there cannot be measured in terms of
administrations. While serving in government, I divided my
life in terms of administrations. That's not the right way
to calibrate time. That's not the way our friends calibrate
it, nor our adversaries. They calibrate time in terms of
generations. We need to start thinking that way, too.
Both of the Democratic presidential candidates are willfully
deluding either themselves or us if they believe that the
road out of Iraq will be quick, easy, and fixed according to
a neat time period. America has to assume responsibility for
what it does. We invaded a country roughly the size of the
state of California, with 28 million people. We ripped the
lid off it and dismantled the army and other Baath
institutions of governance. What makes us believe that
somehow we can simply turn around and exit? Some would argue
that that's the morally and ethically right thing to do. But
the question is, when the Republican or Democratic successor
to the current administration confronts the reality of this
investment trap into which this administration has put us,
from which we cannot extricate ourselves or fix the
situation, what is he or she going to do? Can we really
leave Afghanistan and Iraq as failed states?
If Iraq over time ends up being a stable democratic polity,
that would be great. But that's not really the question, is
it? The question is, what has Iraq cost us? My friend Thomas
Friedman says, you don't win the lottery if you don't buy a
ticket. Fair enough. But there are some tickets in life that
just aren't worth buying--they are too risky.
All of this prompted me to think about the reasons for both
America's success and primarily its failures in this region.
For eight years under Bill Clinton, we stumbled at Arab-
Israeli peacemaking; for eight years under President Bush we
stumbled at how to make war, at least in this part of the
world. What is it about America, the greatest power on
earth, that accounts for this situation? Why can't we seem
to get it right?
When I say "get it right," I don't mean "fix this region."
Most of the problems there are not caused by America. And
this region is not going to be "fixed" by us. The history of
this region is the history of great powers who over 1,000
years, over the sweep and arc of history, have tried to
impose their will on small tribes. Good luck! This region is
littered with the schemes, dreams, ambitions of great powers
who believed they could have their way and impose their
will. We can't for one simple reason: we don't live in the
neighborhood. However powerful we think we are, these small
tribes, these tiny powers, will always have a greater stake
in the outcome of their struggles than we ever will. Because
for us it is not an existential conflict.
In light of all this, I came to two realizations. First, we
don't pay attention to the past. A.J.P. Taylor, the great
British historian, said that the only lesson of history is
that there are no lessons. But do you want to ignore
history? If you ignore it completely, history will be a very
cruel and unforgiving teacher.
America occupied Japan for seven years, from 1945-52. How
many Americans were killed by Japanese in hostile actions
during that seven-year period? None. Japan was a defeated
nation. Despite all his imperfections, General MacArthur
understood the importance of preserving Japanese
institutions that were very controversial, including the
emperor himself. What were we thinking when we went to war
in Iraq with insufficient forces to even have a chance of
subduing an insurgency? And what did we expect would happen
in the wake of our own incapacity and the determination of
the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to settle scores?
So that was the first problem. As William Faulkner observed
in Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even
past." That is certainly how Arabs and Israelis see it; we
need to see it that way, as well.
Second, we don't read the present correctly. We don't see
the world the way it is. We want to see the world the way we
want it to be. Why? It's related to where we are. We have
attained a degree of physical security and detachment
unprecedented, unparalleled, unrivaled in history for a
great power. We have non-predatory neighbors to our north
and south, and fish to our east and west. No other great
power has ever had this kind of physical security. In my
opinion, it explains why we behave the way we do. It
explains our boundless optimism. Our political system was
the first in the world to be founded on the basis of an
idea--the primacy of the individual. We believe in
individuals' capacity to transform themselves and to change
the world around them, with all the imperfections, deficits,
and problems that America has.
I lived with this practical, we can fix anything, split-the-
difference worldview for 20 years. The eighth day of the
Camp David summit of July 2000, Jerusalem, this
extraordinarily complicated city, was to become the focus. A
piece of it: what to do about the Haram al Sharif, 35 acres,
on which sit two mosques holy to Islam. Below are the
remains of the first and second Jewish temples. Talk about
overlapping sacred space, that's what this is. Here we are
trying to convince the Israelis and Palestinians, who both
assert sovereignty, that we'll take sovereignty from them
and we'll reposit it with God. That's a logical fix--they're
holy sites, after all. Or, when they rejected that idea,
"We'll give you Palestinians sovereignty above ground, and
you Israelis sovereignty below." They rejected that as well.
Jerusalem, history teaches us, is not to be shared, it's to
be possessed. In the name of God, and the tribe. It need not
be so, but Americans need to understand the attachments of
each side to it.
Where we are also explains our naivete and our capacity to
believe that the rest of the world is like us. Twelve years
ago, my daughter and I were at a movie theater outside of
Washington, D.C. watching Sean Connery in The Rock. I
noticed several muscular men in the theater talking into
their lapels, a sure sign they were security and someone of
real importance was there. Sure enough, eight rows in front
of us were King Hussein and Queen Noor. He had on blue
jeans, a blazer, and a polo shirt. We knew each other, so we
chatted. I said later to my daughter, "Isn't this great?
It's me and you and the King of Jordan in Washington
watching Sean Connery in The Rock." As if we were all part
of the same family. We were not. When he was 12, this man
saw his grandfather Abdullah murdered. He presided for
forty-five years over one of the most fragile enterprises in
the Middle East, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and made
it work. Or Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Madeleine Albright
declared to be the Israeli Newt Gingrich. Netanyahu's high
school education in Philadelphia and his American mother
gave him a superb capacity in the American vernacular. I
remember on one trip being summoned, along with my
colleagues, to be yelled at by him. When I closed my eyes, I
heard my college tennis coach yelling at me. I didn't hear
Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, graduate of one of
Israel's elite paratrooper brigades, brother of Jonathan,
who had been killed in the rescue mission at Entebbe; son of
a prominent revisionist historian. I have nothing in common
with Benjamin Netanyahu. We don't understand what it's like
to live on a knife's edge.
So I decided to try to apply these principles to the 20-plus
years I participated in Arab-Israeli diplomacy. I did not
write this book only for the Beltway crowd and policy wonks.
I tried to make it accessible, building on anecdotes and
stories from my experience. Then I set about interviewing
everyone I could find who had participated in the earlier
diplomacy. I interviewed all of our former presidents, even
Gerald Ford before he died, with one exception: Bill
Clinton. All nine secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger
to Condoleezza Rice, national security advisors; there's a
chapter on domestic politics that seeks to answer the much
misunderstood and hijacked question, how does domestic
politics in America really influence our Arab-Israeli
policy? For that I went out and interviewed all the
evangelicals--the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, John
Hagee--a lot of sitting senators, representatives, American
Jews and Arabs. I tell the story of why America succeeds and
why it fails in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, bearing in mind one
basic fact. I borrow a line from Michael Jackson, not known
as a great philosopher. But he got it right when he said
that if you want to make a change, start with the man in the
mirror.
I could cite a thousand reasons why Yassir Arafat was the
primary obstacle, followed closely by Ehud Barak, in the
failure of Camp David. But ultimately Bill Clinton and the
rest of his advisors bear a measure of responsibility. We
need not self-flagellate in some maudlin, gratuitous way,
but we do need to identify our role in the summit's failure
and learn from it.
A few observations. First, as to objectivity, I argued with
my editor for a week about how much personal information to
include. He said, if you want people to believe you, you had
better come clean. "Tell them who you are and where you came
from, how your views changed." I concluded that there is no
objectivity. We are all sum totals of our experiences--our
political, religious, and ethnic DNA. You can't change who
you are, but you can look to see where your predispositions,
prejudices, and biases lie and set them aside in an effort
to try to understand the needs, narratives, and requirements
of both sides to a conflict. I'm from a wealthy Jewish real
estate family in Cleveland, Ohio. My grandparents were on a
first-name basis with David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. My
parents were very close to Yitzhak and Leah Rabin as well as
Menachim Begin. My story is an interesting one in terms of
an evolution in views. It's absolutely critical that some
evolution occur, some learning about both sides' needs,
because this is not a morality play that pits the forces of
goodness on one hand against the forces of darkness on the
other.
Second, there can be no bricks without straw. No matter how
much America wants Arab-Israeli peace, unless the raw
material is there, the political will and the urgency among
the Arabs and Israelis, we can try all day long without
success. Every breakthrough that has occurred in this
conflict--Egypt-Israel, Jordan-Israel, Palestinians-Israel,
came as a consequence of secret diplomacy about which the
Americans were informed afterwards. That is very
instructive.
Third, you need a brickmaker. Every successful negotiation
that has endured involved an American role at some point. In
my book, I nominate for the "Peace Process Hall of Fame"
three Americans, all of whom I interviewed: Jimmy Carter,
who during his presidency delivered something extraordinary-
-an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty--that would not have
happened without him; Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. They
were all effective brickmakers, effective because they
combined the 4 Ts of successful diplomacy: they were Tough;
they gained the Trust, to a degree, of the Arabs and
Israelis they were working with; they were incredibly
Tenacious; and they had an exquisite sense of Timing. They
knew how not to overengage (as Bill Clinton did) or
underengage or disengage (George W. Bush). Not since 1991
have we seen, in my judgment, an effective policy toward the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
Fourth, there is tremendous misunderstanding on the issue of
domestic politics, where there is a dishonest debate. Too
many American Jews want to believe that domestic politics
are irrelevant to the case for Israel; too many of Israel's
detractors in America want to believe that it's all
attributable to domestic politics. Unlike professors Walt
and Mearsheimer, I actually went out to talk to the lobby
and the lobbied. Among the conclusions I reached is that the
pro-Israeli community in America today (5.3 million American
Jews, along with millions of evangelical Christians who for
reasons of eschatology and value affinity have become
stunningly pro-Israel) has a powerful voice. It's time we
stop deluding ourselves. But it does not have a veto.
The U.S.-Israeli relationship is not some sort of mushroom
harvested in some dark closet by a handful of
conspiratorially minded Jews and evangelical Christians who
hold the American foreign policy establishment hostage. The
U.S.-Israeli relationship has inculcated itself into
American culture, psychology, politics and foreign policy.
When we maintain the special relationship, which I think is
in American interests, and not allow it to become exclusive,
it actually can serve our interests. This is both because it
is in our interests to support like-minded societies and
because our special ties with Israel give us a primary role
and ability to help resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Since 1950, only 22 countries in the world have maintained
their democratic character continuously. The notion of an
emerging democracy--Kenya, for example--is a concept that
may be legitimate, but the ultimate arbiter of everything is
time. Israel is a democracy. We can argue about the West
Bank and Gaza, I'm a vocal critic of Israel's policies
there. But this is important, because supporting societies
that share our values represents the broadest conception of
what constitutes our national interests.
Fifth, regarding the Clinton years. Clinton was one of the
most empathetic, talented, brilliant presidents and
negotiators you'd ever want to meet. No one cared more or
tried to do more on this problem. But empathy alone is not
enough. Achieving the conflict-ending agreements he sought
required a toughness he and we didn't have during his
tenure.
Sixth, regarding George W. Bush. Governing is about
choosing. You come to Washington, you decide what's
important to you, you pursue it. Arab-Israeli peace wasn't
important to Bush throughout the first administration; he
had another agenda. It may still not be that important to
him. There's a chance that between now and the end of the
year something positive could happen between Omert and
Abbas, but this is really no longer primarily an American
story. My friend Larry Sommers, the former president of
Harvard University, said that in the history of the world,
nobody ever washed a rental car. You only care about what
you own. If a U.S. president doesn't invest in this or
whatever other issue he or she chooses, opponents both at
home and abroad will quickly figure this out. That will make
success impossible.
Finally, to end on an optimistic note, John F. Kennedy said
something very important. He described himself as an
idealist without illusion. That's what America needs to be.
I don't care if it's health care or the Arab-Israeli
conflict. We can't tell our young people never, we can't
mortgage the future and give in to cynicism and despair. But
as you seek to change the world, you have to do so with your
eyes open. Because the stakes now are much higher than
they've ever been before.
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