An already exhausted Netanyahu worked on the political spin on the plane almost all the way back to Israel. On a positive note, at least his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ariel Sharon, would try to sell the agreement that he had helped negotiate.
As soon as his plane touched down in Tel Aviv on 25 October 1998, Netanyahu put forward his best salesman’s pitch to the gathered press. He concentrated on the three pluses for Israel: a promise of better Palestinian commitment to security; a reduction in their territorial expectations; and the deepened involvement of the United States in all parts of the peace process with the Palestinians.
Amid all the detailed analysis of the negotiations, what was most revealing was how he concluded his statement to the press. Netanyahu understood more than most on how to speak to the base, but his message was clear to the settlers and the rest of his right-wing constituency: the deal was the best we could get and no government would have represented you better than this one.
I met at Wye Plantation in a field. I came there with my wife, Sara, and I met some of the settler representatives. We sat there in chairs in the field. It was kind of a surrealistic site, a group of people sitting on chairs, in a field. I told them, and I say this now: you are the same, we are part of the same people. We love you. We are fighting this battle for you.
There is no other government that will fight for you like this. We’ve already seen that. We know what was, and you know very well there is no possibility that there will be any other government that will fight the way we did after receiving the agreement from the previous government, in order to reduce the damage and to close the holes.
These were very, very difficult negotiations. These were very, very difficult days and nights for me, and my ministers. There were radical demands by the Palestinians that we rejected, and there were demands that we made, and we didn’t agree to give them up. What we have achieved is the best that could have been achieved. We’ve done something very good and something very important for the State of Israel.1
The mention given to Sara Netanyahu was meant to help reinforce the Netanyahu family’s credentials as the keeper of the Settlers flame. The trouble for Netanyahu was most of the more vocal, radical settlers didn’t believe a word he said.
For them the Wye Memorandum, as the agreement was known, represented capitulation by a right-wing government in Israel to the political needs of President Clinton and the Palestinians. While Netanyahu had suspected that this would be the initial reaction of these groups, he hoped to be able to convince enough Israelis from the centre-right that his third way was the best way forward.
In this respect, Ariel Sharon had become an indispensable political ally for Netanyahu. As soon as he arrived back in Israel with the Prime Minister, Sharon got to work adapting a philosophical approach in his comments to the press:
A peace process is nearly as difficult as war. In a peace process, one is compelled to make concessions. Here, we are talking about relinquishing parts of our homeland, the cradle of the Jewish people. We have decided, however, despite the pain, to make every effort to achieve peace, while ensuring maximum security for the State of Israel and its citizens in every place – and let me emphasize: in every place. Bearing in mind the agreement that the government inherited, the agreement that has now been achieved is a good one.2
Sharon’s final sentence was uttered in the manner of a schoolchild trying to convince himself that something he said was true by repeating it over and over again, until he believed it. The simple truth was that the Wye Memorandum was not a good agreement. Indeed, it had achieved something almost unique in peacemaking: a bad deal for both sides in the conflict, as well as for the well-intentioned mediator.
From day one it would prove to be near-impossible to implement the deal that was meant to, as Netanyahu had put it, ‘close the holes’ in the previous agreement, but instead created new, gaping holes that proved difficult to fill.
A smart and savvy politician such as Netanyahu understood that he would not want to go to the polls highlighting his record in government with only the Wye Memorandum to show for his time in office. It looked unlikely that domestic politics would produce much that could be held up as being successful. His rainbow coalition with its diverging economic interests meant that any meaningful economic reform came a poor second to getting the annual budget passed in the Knesset.
Netanyahu’s inability to introduce major economic reforms disappointed him as much as the daily frustrations of dealing with the peace process. He had hoped that, when he was elected as Prime Minister, he would be able to use the so-called new strength of the executive to impose his plans for the economic liberalization of the economy on the cabinet.
His Likud political rival Dan Meridor had resigned as Minister of Finance after only a year in office. Netanyahu had eventually replaced him with Yaakov Neeman, a political ally of the Prime Minister, and in the final months of his government Netanyahu took over the portfolio himself. This arrangement suited Netanyahu best. He needed to be in charge of the purse strings for political reasons.
An ever-increasing problem for Netanyahu to have to contend with was the link many members of the coalition made between voting to support the Prime Minister’s policies towards the peace process and their demands for a greater slice of the national economic cake for their respective constituents.
With the perception that elections would be held earlier than scheduled, this additional pressure on Netanyahu grew by the day. To make matters worse, there was a queue of coalition members coming to the Prime Minister to ask him to make good on promises he had still not delivered on from the start of his administration.
With all the constant noise from his coalition partners, Netanyahu became trapped in the everyday battle for political survival and, with his attention on the short term, his vision for the medium and long term suffered. As he prepared himself and the Likud for the possibility of going to the country earlier than scheduled he spent an increasing amount of time addressing his political base in Israel.
This led to another disconnect with the Clinton administration in Washington which was trying to ensure that the Wye Memorandum was fully implemented, and that final status talks eventually got underway. In this regard, President Clinton misread and misunderstood Netanyahu as well as the political situation in Israel.
Within the Clinton administration the belief was that, after signing the agreement at Wye, Netanyahu would have to move towards the political centre ground in Israel. In the weeks and months that followed the deal at Wye, the Clinton administration thought that the most likely scenario in Israeli politics was that Netanyahu would confirm his move to the centre ground by establishing a national unity government with Ehud Barak and the Labour Party.
The rationale for the formation of a new broad-based government would be to deal with the difficult issues that would need to be resolved in the final status talks. At this stage, Israel (and the Palestinians) would be called upon to make difficult concessions to the other side. A broad-based Israeli coalition would stand a better chance of reaching a final deal with the Palestinians – and of getting it ratified. Netanyahu conceded that making the additional concessions would cause problems for the management of his right-wing coalition.
The Americans did not know that Netanyahu had reached out to Barak to form a national unity government prior to Wye, and that his efforts had proved unsuccessful. Ehud Barak appeared in no hurry to offer Netanyahu a political safety net that would have prolonged Netanyahu’s time in the Prime Minister’s office. Ambitious, arrogant and self-important, Barak viewed himself as the Prime-Minister-in-waiting.
The fact that around 80 per cent of Israelis initially supported the agreement that Netanyahu had reached at Wye did not derail Barak’s political ambitions. Nor did it lead to any change in his strategy of attempting to replace the government as soon as possible, by trying to advance the date of the elections. In other words, Barak didn’t want to cooperate with Netanyahu, he wanted to replace him.
Dennis Ross felt the mistake that Netanyahu made at this crucial juncture was his decision not to go on the offensive and try to sell the agreement at Wye to as many Israelis as possible; rather, to go defensive and retreat back into his right-wing shell. It was, as Ross put it:
The strategic mistake, which ultimately cost him his job . . . Bibi [Netanyahu] was in a very powerful position with the agreement . . . Bibi chose to see Wye as a problem not an asset.3
From Netanyahu’s perspective, there was a very clear problem in trying to move towards the political centre: Ehud Barak already occupied the ground. Netanyahu’s old army commander, who during the 1996 campaign had declared Netanyahu unfit for high political office, had mapped out his own political strategy which focused on occupying the centre ground in Israeli politics. It was a smart move on the part of Barak, as that was the position from where Israeli elections were won.
The Rabin II candidate, Barak, would have proved difficult for Netanyahu to dislodge from the centre. Running against the more left-wing-leaning Shimon Peres in 1996 was a much easier task for Netanyahu, whose advisors plotted a centrist approach to that campaign. Deep down, and ignoring all the commentary written about his relationship with Barak, Netanyahu felt that his best chance of defeating him came from the right.
This was a miscalculation, and even Netanyahu himself suspected it, as he attempted to hold on to power long enough to try to change the political dynamics in Israel. His trouble was that his continued management of his difficult coalition was pushing him further to the right, as he tried to please his partners. It became a catch-22 for Netanyahu, and there appeared to be no easy way out of it.
The implementation of the Wye agreement, which the Americans had hoped Netanyahu would drive through, did not go well in Israel. With Netanyahu’s credibility within his own cabinet crumbling, a number of ministers asked for clarification on the prisoner releases, and other issues from the Americans.
Natan Sharansky for one, whose support for Netanyahu in 1996 had been an important factor in his election, sought clarification about the planned arrests by the Palestinian Authority. Each of the requests made by the various members of the cabinet reflected the growing consensus that the government did not have long to live, and ministers, as a result, had one eye on the next election.
The Americans felt that Netanyahu was attempting to renegotiate parts of the agreement. Netanayahu said that he was merely seeking additional political cover. The game went on with Netanyahu drawing President Clinton more and more into the process. There was a feeling in the Prime Minister’s office that the President was, for his own reasons, more open to Netanyahu’s requests than some others in the American team.
When Netanyahu eventually brought the agreement to the cabinet for approval there was strong opposition from several ministers. As they started debating the merits of the agreement, there was a bombing in Jerusalem. The only fatalities were the bombers themselves, but it was a timely reminder of the difficulties that lay ahead. Fearing that if he continued with the meeting he would lose the vote at end of it, Netanyahu suspended the meeting.
In light of the bombing, Netanyahu called the President one more time to try and extract another concession from the Americans. The Prime Minister came straight to the point. He now needed to put out the tenders to start the construction at Har Homa. He argued that this would help him win the vote in the cabinet.
Clinton’s advisors who were listening in on the conversation made frantic gestures to the President to point-blank turn down this request. ‘We have given Bibi enough,’ said Ross, who thought the Prime Minister was still playing political games over bringing the agreement to the cabinet.4
President Clinton chose to overrule the strong advice of his team and said to Netanyahu, ‘Is this really necessary to get it through the cabinet?’ Netanyahu replied in the affirmative. The Americans thought they could just about get this by Arafat without him walking away from the process.
So, ironically, the very issue that had caused the peace process to break down, and that had led to the summit of Wye, was to go ahead after all. In retrospect, Clinton felt it a price worth paying to finally close the deal that seemed to keep reopening.
For all his efforts to shore up support for the agreement, the cabinet meeting and vote was a humiliation for Netanyahu. After the usual round of fiery, impassioned speeches in favour and against the agreement, on 11 November 1998 the Israeli cabinet approved the agreement by eight votes to four, with five abstentions. Much to the horror of the Americans, the cabinet did add new conditions to the agreement.
At the insistence of Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu agreed that he would bring each phase of the agreement back to the cabinet for its approval once again. In reality, the cabinet agreed to the Wye Memorandum, but made it clear that they would potentially withhold the implementation of each stage of it if the Palestinians did not keep their side of the bargain.
Netanyahu’s Minister of Foreign Affairs had effectively just confined another agreement to the dustbin of history. There was a double humiliation at the meeting for Netanyahu. He was forced to agree to the demands of Sharon, and the five ministers who abstained in the vote constituted all the Likud ministers who had not attended the summit at Wye.
Even with the Har Homa card to play, Netanyahu was abandoned by the right-wing he had tried so hard to keep on his side. It is always difficult to highlight an exact moment when a government starts to crumble beyond repair, but the cabinet meeting and vote represented a point of no return for the administration.
It also marked the point when even the patience of the Clinton administration started to run out on Netanyahu. Although neither man knew it at the time, it was also the beginning of the handover of the leadership of the Likud from Benjamin Netanyahu to Ariel Sharon. The right had lost its trust in Netanyahu, and was starting to turn to its old torchbearer to represent their interests.
The Americans were left, however, with little choice, given their intense involvement in mediating and framing the deal at Wye, but to send their special envoy to Israel to once again, as Dennis Ross, put it, ‘hold Bibi’s hand’.5
The Americans still appeared not to fully appreciate the extent of Netanyahu’s internal political difficulties, and the likelihood that his government would fall sooner rather than later. The Palestinians were not as slow on the uptake as the Americans, understanding that it was unlikely Netanyahu would lead Israel when the final status talks eventually got underway.
In the meantime, with the help of the votes of the opposition Labour Party, the Knesset adopted the Wye Memorandum by 75 votes in favour to 19 against, with nine abstentions, on 13 November 1998. With each stage of the agreement having to win cabinet approval before being implemented, few lawmakers felt that the agreement would be fulfilled, and fewer still thought that the Netanyahu-led government would survive.