Netanyahu’s single biggest success during his first two years of office was his own survival. The catalogue of events, scandals, revolts and intrigues during this period would have proved sufficient to end most premierships. Not so Benjamin Netanyahu. He viewed his first two years in office as a qualified success. Others begged to differ on Netanyahu’s self-assessment, but he was having none of it.
His instincts told him that he had essentially put off what he dreaded most: the choice between land and peace. True, he had handed over a part of the West Bank, but the 9 per cent represented a much smaller slab of land than he had feared would be required. The situation on the ground in Hebron remained a mess, but the security arrangements to guard the tiny number of Jewish settlers had not completely broken down.
Netanyahu’s day of decision on the peace process was something that he hoped to avoid for as long as possible: at least, potentially until he was in his second term as Prime Minister. The strategy of stalling, hoping for better political conditions in the future, and putting as many facts (settlements) on the ground was nothing new. Netanyahu’s predecessor as leader of the Likud, Yitzhak Shamir had attempted to do just this in 1991 leading to arguably Israel’s biggest diplomatic crisis with the United States.
The signals from Washington in 1998 were not looking good for Netanyahu. In January 1998 details of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal were published in the Washington Post. To an extent, this brought the second term of President Clinton to a shuddering halt, as the political investigation into it came to dominate the agenda. No stranger to scandal himself, Netanyahu watched events develop in Washington as a curious bystander.
Soon after the news of President Clinton’s difficulties broke, Netanyahu was bidding farewell to Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, at Andrews Air Force Base when he surprised her by expressing concern: ‘I have been through the experience of having my personal life raked over,’ he said. He went on to ask if he should call the President to express his sympathy. Albright suggested that this gesture would be very much appreciated by the President.1
Despite their different political backgrounds and colours, Clinton impressed Netanyahu as a political operator and in his ability to withstand past scandals. Clinton’s strong emotional and political commitment to Israel, which had been a feature of his presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996, as well as his peacemaking efforts when in office, were highly commendable from Netanyahu’s perspective. Although personal relations between the two men were never genuinely warm, they did have a relatively good, if complicated, working relationship.
Initial speculation that events would distract Clinton from his attempts to increase the political pressure on Netanyahu turned out to be unfounded. In the wake of the scandal, President Clinton upped his efforts to achieve Israeli–Palestinian peace, and, later, an Israeli–Syrian agreement. As time went on, Clinton appeared to want an Israeli–Palestinian peace deal to be the legacy of a presidency that many feared would be characterized only by the scandal.
Beset by time constraints and frustrations, and fearing a potential total breakdown of the peace process, the Clinton administration decided to invite the Israelis and the Palestinians to Wye in order to try to add a memorandum to the peace agreements that would help get the process back on track. This was an ambitious and risky move by the Americans. Netanyahu had seen it coming and had already made his preparations.
The American plan was based on using a similar formula to the Camp David Summit between Israel and Egypt, which had been hosted by President Jimmy Carter. That summit was held for similar reasons to the one in Wye, namely the peace process had reached an impasse that seemed impossible to break.
In 1978, the summit led to the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt signing the peace treaty between their two countries. The formula of high stakes summit diplomacy was not without risks.
Madeleine Albright wrote about the potential dangers of a summit:
The question we faced was whether to risk the prestige of the Presidency by inviting Arafat and Netanyahu to a summit reminiscent of the 1978 meetings at Camp David that produced Egyptian-Israeli peace.
I supported the summit but with reservations . . . If we convened a summit that failed, we would look impotent, and people would blame the Secretary of State for misjudging the odds. We didn’t however, have many alternatives.2
She went on, however, to suggest that a summit was needed sooner rather than later as the situation on the ground was worsening.
For the first time since Oslo had been signed in 1993, some polls showed a majority of Palestinians so frustrated that they favoured using terror to force Israel to withdraw to 1967 borders. Israel had also uncovered evidence that the military wing of Hamas was planning a new round of attacks. So while we were talking, the clock was ticking.3
In reality, the Americans were worried about Netanyahu’s and Arafat’s ability to keep control of the increasingly volatile situation in which extremists from both sides appeared to be making daily gains. The crux of the situation was that neither Netanyahu nor Arafat wanted to be blamed for the breakdown of the peace process, but both feared the domestic fallout from reaching a deal. Neither leader wanted to be seen as having essentially given in to pressure from Washington.
For Netanyahu, the problem remained his cabinet, the coalition and the Likud. He understood that if he made concessions to the Palestinians in order to get a deal, the Labour Party would support him in the Knesset and therefore ratify the deal. He also had one eye on the next election. At the time of the preparatory stages for the summit, his coalition was already showing signs of unravelling, and it looked a fair bet that the elections might need to be brought forward from their scheduled date of 2000.
David Levy, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, resigned and left the government. He acted not over the government’s handling of the peace process, rather over the state budget. As he said in his resignation statement:
It [the budget] is not good for the country, it’s not good for the public, it’s not good for the government, and so I have no choice but to do the responsible thing – and from a moral standing the government’s policy does not promote the partnership, the promises, nor a common point of view.
There is one conclusion which is to resign from the government, and I intend today, after this meeting, to send the Prime Minister a letter of resignation, and with all due respect and manners I am no longer a member of this government.4
Levy’s resignation was important for Netanyahu for two related reasons. By resigning, this populist politician believed that elections were coming over the horizon and did not want to be associated with the economic hardship that the budget would cause to his mainly lower-income Sephardic-origin constituency.
The second important lesson for Netanyahu was that, as elections approached, other coalition partners would find reason to leave the government. Unless Netanyahu could do something to stem this tide, he would need to put together an alternative coalition, or more likely to call early elections.
Any possibility of broadening the coalition into a national unity government with the Labour Party receded in 1998. Secret negotiations that took place on several occasions between representatives of Netanyahu and Barak produced agreed policy deadlines for a unity government, but made little progress over the thorny question of the division of cabinet portfolios.
In reality, Barak and the Labour Party had few reasons for joining a unity government. Barak’s thinking was based on a number of factors, most of which centred upon the perceived weakness of Netanyahu at the time. Barak did not want to serve as number two to Netanyahu, and did not need the Labour Party to be in power to protect his position as leader. Barak concentrated his strategy on preparing for early elections, which he believed could be called sooner rather than later.5
In light of his lack of options, Netanyahu moved to essentially kill two birds with one stone. He appointed the hawkish Ariel Sharon as his Minister of Foreign Affairs. At the time, it appeared a smart choice, but Netanyahu would come to regret it as Sharon became his biggest rival in the Likud. However, the appointment of Ariel Sharon as Minister of Foreign Affairs on 3 October 1998 appeared an essentially win-win situation for Netanyahu.
The Americans noted that Netanyahu would not in all probability sign a deal without Sharon’s consent. There was another precedent here from the Camp David Summit of 1978. Before Menachem Begin agreed to sign the deal with Sadat, he had first checked if Sharon supported the decision to withdraw from the Sinai, and uproot the Jewish settlements that were based in the area. Netanyahu was essentially asking Sharon to play the same kingmaker role for a deal with the Palestinians.
Netanyahu was wily enough to know that any deal signed at Wye would involve some level of difficult compromise, and Sharon was the man to sell the deal back home to the cabinet, the coalition and the Likud. With Sharon on-board, Netanyahu’s room for manoeuvre to agree a deal increased. If no deal was struck with the Palestinians, Netanyahu could blame Sharon for obstructing or derailing a potential agreement.
For his part it was a good deal for Sharon, who had been shunned by the US and European leaders since the Lebanon War of 1982, and the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. The Kahan Commission set up by Israel to investigate events in Beirut said Sharon was indirectly, but personally, to blame for the massacres.6
The report of the Kahan Commission concluded that Sharon had made a grave mistake in failing to order ‘appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of a massacre’ at the camps. It went on to state that Sharon should have foreseen what the Phalangists would do when they entered the camps. The massacre had occurred after Bashir Gemayel, the Christian Lebanese President-elect and leader of the Phalange party, was assassinated.7
For years, Sharon had been looking for international rehabilitation, and Netanyahu’s offer of the foreign ministry was a perfect opportunity for him to build up his international credentials. At the time, the Americans found Sharon both difficult and direct. He lectured President Clinton and stuck to his articulation of the Israeli hardline position.8 If the Americans thought that Netanyahu had appointed Sharon as part of a good cop/bad cop routine, they were soon disappointed.
In the period running up to the summit, Netanyahu spent much of the time talking to his hawkish base in Israel. In attempting to reassure them, he talked of the need to forget trying to implement any further stages of the Interim Agreement that involved Israel handing over more land to the Palestinians.
His preference was if (and it was ‘if’ as far as he was concerned) Arafat could prevent new terrorist attacks, dismantle the Hamas infrastructure and stop Palestinian incitement, then he would be willing to open final status talks. He argued that the Interim Agreement with its phased pullbacks merely encouraged rejectionist groups such as Hamas to launch attacks against Israel.
During the summer of 1998, Israeli and Palestinian mediators had met secretly on several occasions to try to narrow the gaps between them on key issues. The meetings had not proved wholly successful, but they did sow the seeds of a draft outline that the Americans felt they could use at Wye. Given the high degree of mistrust between the parties, the Americans saw the summit as essentially a means to close the deal with the help of the direct mediation of President Clinton.9
The Americans chose the Wye River Conference Center in Maryland to host the summit. It was an idyllic setting that was both large enough for the participants to relax in and close enough to Washington, should the need arise to return to the capital. The conference room was big enough to host the opening session, and there were plenty of other smaller rooms for more intimate discussions. To help try to focus minds, the Americans set a three-day deadline for the summit. In retrospect, this proved to be a little overambitious.
The summit began on 15 October 1998, with Netanyahu making a point of shaking the hand of Yasser Arafat at the plenary meeting on the first day. American officials described the mood as good, as the two sides parted to meet independently with the Americans. The summit had been set up so that, while President Clinton met with Netanyahu, Secretary of State Albright met with Arafat, and vice versa. The President wasn’t at Wye for the entire time, so when he was back in Washington, Albright took command.
According to Dennis Ross, President Clinton’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, the first day had been all about psychology: ‘making each leader feel comfortable’.10 Ross wasn’t sure if this was an altogether good sign. He argued that agreements emerged from ‘high-stakes settings where each side felt uncomfortable’. He went on to warn, ‘no one made hard decisions unless they had to’.11
On the score of feeling comfortable, Ross needn’t have worried. The comfort factor rapidly disappeared as the talks on substantive issues got underway. Smiles were replaced by frowns, grimaces and shrugs. In other words, it was a return to the norm that, according to Clinton, included, ‘the posturing and pettiness that are a usual part of all such negotiations’.12
As many of the participants had feared, the talks did not progress as well and speedily as the Americans had initially hoped. Netanyahu did not want to retreat from his demands in the area of Palestinian assurance on Israeli security, and on a range of other issues.
It became apparent that Netanyahu was not moving from his rigid and specific security demands, which included the arrest of named Palestinian militants, weapons collection points and plans to stop mosques being used by the militant Palestinian groups. The Palestinian responses were vague and general in nature.
At this stage, the Americans suspected that Netanyahu was overplaying his hand a little. Every step he took and in every move he made, Netanyahu had at least one eye on the domestic political situation in Israel and the next election. He did not want to have to go to the polls with a half-baked agreement that unravelled and led to a further increase in violence in Israel.
On the Sunday, scheduled as the last day of the summit, Netanyahu had all but given up any hope of a comprehensive agreement. Therefore he suggested a partial deal to President Clinton. In essence, Netanyahu proposed that Israel withdraw from a further 13 per cent of the West Bank in exchange for complete Palestinian cooperation on security issues. The rest of the remaining issues he proposed to leave to another day, by which Netanyahu meant preferably at final status talks.
President Clinton rejected Netanyahu’s partial deal on the grounds that they had come so far, and that they were close to a more comprehensive agreement. In his heart, Clinton understood that the partial deal proposed by Netanyahu would be viewed as a failure by the outside world which was waiting on the doorstep for news of the summit. With his domestic problems increasing over the sex scandal, Clinton needed something more than a partial agreement to help lift him out of the political doldrums.
The next day, Clinton made it clear that he felt a more comprehensive deal was much closer than the parties (as well as several members of the American team) felt. He cited examples from the peace process in Northern Ireland and looked at focusing on what was already agreed. Netanyahu listened intently, but still refused to be swayed by the President’s apparent optimism.
Ariel Sharon had been hovering in the background of the negotiations, and the Americans decided it was now time to move the political bulldozer to the centre of the stage. The American thinking was that Netanyahu would accept a deal that Sharon accepted, but would say no to a deal if Sharon rejected it.13 To this extent, they were correct.
The trouble with Sharon, from an American perspective, was that he had still not been broken into the niceties of the peace process. Brash, arrogant, charismatic and populist, Sharon had boasted that he would never shake the hand of Yasser Arafat. True to his word, Sharon did not shake Arafat’s hand at Wye.14
Sharon found himself at the same dinner table as Arafat. The conversation was not of a light nature. Sharon talked at the Palestinian leader rather than to him, in the tone of a rancher to his farmhand. In between Sharon’s outbursts, President Clinton did his best to fill the silence. Sharon attacked Arafat’s claim that Palestinian farmers were broke. The dinner was not a social success and increased the tension between the delegations.
Netanyahu was much more comfortable in the company of Arafat and the other Palestinian negotiators. Prior to Wye, he had even enjoyed his favourite pastime, a post-meal Cuban cigar, with the Palestinians. Madeleine Albright recalled that Netanyahu asked Arafat if he minded if he smoked a cigar. One of the Palestinians then pulled out a box of Cohibas which they and Netanyahu enjoyed together.15
In contrast to Sharon, there was an air of sophistication about Netanyahu. His American education made him culturally more akin to a native of the east coast of the United States. Albright told Clinton that she sometimes had to remind herself that Netanyahu wasn’t in fact American. Netanyahu spoke like an American, Sharon like a veteran Israeli farmer, but neither appeared to be able to get through to Arafat and the Palestinians.
At the end of the scheduled talks, the major achievement of the hard work of the American team was that nobody had walked out. Indeed, both parties agreed to extend the talks in the hope of reaching the comprehensive deal that Clinton was aiming to achieve. The extension was only achieved after the intervention of Clinton, who would have to leave the talks to return to Washington, but would return when developments required his presence.
With the summit apparently in trouble, Clinton decided that the presence of King Hussein of Jordan would help focus the minds of the delegations. The King was being treated for cancer in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and had offered to visit the summit if Clinton felt his presence would be useful. There were obvious concerns that his health was too frail for him to be able to attend, but Queen Noor assured Clinton that the King wanted to come to the summit and contribute what he could to the negotiations.
King Hussein’s arrival on 20 October gave the summit the drama that it had hitherto lacked, in contrast to the Camp David Summit of the Begin and Sadat talks which had been packed with personal dramas and tantrums. The impact of the King’s arrival at Wye was hugely important to the chances of success in reaching an agreement.
The King’s cancer treatment had led to the loss of his white hair and beard, and he had lost a great deal of weight. Mentally, he was still very much his old straight-talking self, and he spoke with both Netanyahu and Arafat and the members of the two delegations.16
As President Clinton recalled, the two parties had still only managed to strike a deal on the security aspect of the negotiations. Clinton feared, as a result, that Netanyahu would celebrate his forty-ninth birthday by exiting what would have been regarded as a failed summit. Instead the parties eventually came to a complex understanding on the second issue at stake: getting the Palestinian Council to change the parts of its charter that still called for the destruction of Israel.17
The charter issue had become an important part of Netanyahu’s reciprocal approach to the peace process with the Palestinians. To the Israeli right it had been a glaring oversight of the previous Labour-led governments not to demand that this issue be resolved before moving forward with the peace process. Given the centrality of the issue to Netanyahu’s approach, it would have been extremely difficult to make any further concessions at the summit without a deal on the charter issue.
In order to resolve the issue, Clinton agreed to go to Gaza to address the Palestinian Council along with Arafat – asking that he delete the offending articles about Israel from the charter. Arafat would then ask for a show of support for the move, and then the changes would be made. To some extent, it was a risk for Clinton that could easily have come undone. Clinton was willing to take that risk in order to try to close the comprehensive deal that he had hoped for at the outset of the summit.
The major remaining issue to be solved was the release of the Palestinians from Israeli jails. Of all the issues this was arguably the most difficult one for Netanyahu to sell back home. His preference was that a large number of the Palestinian prisoners to be released should be criminal offenders rather than security prisoners with blood on their hands. There were also disagreements over the numbers of prisoners to be released, with Netanyahu stating no more than five hundred – and Arafat demanding a thousand.
The fact that Netanyahu, the self-proclaimed expert on anti-terrorist strategies, found himself in tense negotiations over releasing a number of prisoners with Israeli blood on their hands was evidence of his more pragmatic instincts and policies in office. The Netanyahu at Wye was almost unrecognizable from the fiery opposition candidate from the 1996 election campaign. The perceived change in Netanyahu’s outlook would come to damage his short- to medium-term political prospects.