The Palestinian flag has three horizontal stripes, black, white, and green, with a red triangle jutting out from the hoist. From the time of the Six Day War in 1967 until the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, it was banned in the Palestinian territories by the Israeli government. It was seen by some as an emblem of terrorism, resistance, and the intifada, the violent uprising against Israeli rule that rocked the Palestinian territories in the late 1980s. Even seventeen years after Oslo, the flag remained a controversial and inflammatory symbol among some conservative Israelis. So it was a surprise to arrive in mid-September 2010 at the official residence in Jerusalem of Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud Party, and find the black, white, green, and red colors of the Palestinians hanging next to the familiar blue and white flag of Israel.
Flying the Palestinian flag, which Bibi had criticized when his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, had done it some years before, was a conciliatory gesture from the Prime Minister to his other guest that day, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “I’m glad you came to my house,” Bibi said, as he greeted Abbas. The Palestinian President stopped in the entryway to sign the Prime Minister’s guest book: “Today I returned to this house after a long absence, to continue the talks and negotiations, hoping to reach an eternal peace in the entire region and especially peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.”
The exchange of kind words could not paper over the pressure we all felt that day. As we sat down in Netanyahu’s small private study and began to talk, a deadline hung over our heads. In less than two weeks a ten-month moratorium on the construction of new Israeli settlements in the West Bank would expire. Unless we could reach an agreement to extend the freeze, Abbas had pledged to withdraw from the direct negotiations we had only just begun—and Netanyahu was holding firmly to his position that ten months was more than enough. It had taken nearly two years of difficult diplomacy to get these two leaders to agree to negotiate face-to-face on resolving a conflict that had plagued the Middle East for decades. They were finally grappling with core issues that had eluded all previous efforts at peacemaking, including the borders of a future Palestinian state; security arrangements for Israel; refugees; and the status of Jerusalem, a city both sides claimed as their capital. Now it looked like they might walk away from the table at a crucial moment, and I was far from confident that we would find a way out of the impasse.
I visited Israel for the first time in December 1981 on a church trip to the Holy Land with Bill. While my parents babysat for Chelsea back in Little Rock, we spent more than ten days exploring the Galilee, Masada, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and the ancient streets of Jerusalem’s Old City. We prayed at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Christians believe Jesus was buried and resurrected. We also paid our respects at some of the holiest sites for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, including the Western Wall, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Dome of the Rock. I loved Jerusalem. Even amid all the history and traditions, it was a city pulsing with life and energy. And I deeply admired the talent and tenacity of the Israeli people. They had made the desert bloom and built a thriving democracy in a region full of adversaries and autocrats.
When we left the city and visited Jericho, in the West Bank, I got my first glimpse of life under occupation for Palestinians, who were denied the dignity and self-determination that Americans take for granted. Bill and I both came home from that trip feeling a strong personal bond to the Holy Land and its peoples, and over the years we held on to the hope that one day Israelis and Palestinians might resolve their conflict and live in peace.
Over the next thirty years I would return to Israel again and again, making friends and getting to know and work with some of Israel’s great leaders. As First Lady I developed a close friendship with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his wife, Leah, although I don’t think Yitzhak ever forgave me for banishing him to the cold air of the White House balcony when he wanted to smoke. (After Rabin accused me of endangering the peace process with this policy I finally relented and said, “Well, if it will further the effort toward peace, I will rescind the rule, but only as it applies to you!”) The signing of the Oslo Accords by Rabin and Arafat, accompanied by their famous handshake on the South Lawn of the White House, made September 13, 1993, one of the best days of Bill’s presidency. Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995, was one of the worst. I will never forget sitting with Leah and listening to their granddaughter Noa’s heartrending eulogy at his funeral in Israel.
Nor will I forget the Israeli victims of terrorism I met over the years. I’ve held their hands in hospital rooms and listened to doctors describe how much shrapnel was left in a leg, arm, or head. I visited a bombed-out pizzeria in Jerusalem in February 2002 during some of the darkest days of the second intifada, in which a few thousand Palestinians and about a thousand Israelis were killed between 2000 and 2005. And I’ve walked along the security fence near Gilo and talked to families who knew a rocket could fall on their home at any moment. These experiences will always be with me.
Here’s just one story of an Israeli who touched my life. In 2002, I met Yochai Porat. He was only twenty-six but already a senior medic with MDA, Israel’s emergency medical service. He oversaw a program to train foreign volunteers as first responders in Israel. I attended the program’s graduation ceremonies and remember the pride in his face as yet another group of young people set off to save lives. Yochai was also a reservist with the Israel Defense Forces. A week after we met, he was killed by a sniper near a roadblock, along with other soldiers and civilians. MDA renamed its overseas volunteer program in his memory. When I visited again in 2005, I met with Yochai’s family, who spoke passionately about how important it was to continue supporting the MDA and its mission. I went home and began a campaign to convince the International Red Cross to admit MDA as a full voting member after half a century of exclusion. In 2006, they agreed.
I am not alone in feeling so personally invested in Israel’s security and success. Many Americans admire Israel as a homeland for a people long oppressed and a democracy that has had to defend itself at every turn. In Israel’s story we see our own, and the story of all people who struggle for freedom and the right to chart their own destinies. That’s why President Harry Truman waited only eleven minutes to recognize the new nation of Israel in 1948. Israel is more than a country—it’s a dream nurtured for generations and made real by men and women who refused to bow to the toughest of odds. It’s also a thriving economy that’s a model for how innovation, entrepreneurship, and democracy can deliver prosperity even in unforgiving circumstances.
I was also an early voice calling publicly for Palestinian statehood. During satellite remarks to the Seeds of Peace Middle East Youth Summit in 1998, I told the young Israelis and Palestinians that a Palestinian state would “be in the long-term interest of the Middle East.” My comments received considerable media attention, coming two years before Bill, near the end of his presidency, proposed statehood in a plan Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted but Arafat didn’t, and three years before the Bush Administration made statehood official U.S. policy.
The Obama Administration came into office during a perilous time in the Middle East. Throughout December 2008, militants from the Palestinian extremist group Hamas fired rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, which it had controlled since forcing out its rival Palestinian faction, Fatah, in 2007. In early January 2009, the Israeli military invaded Gaza to stop the rocket attacks. In the final weeks of the Bush Administration, Israeli troops battled Hamas gunmen in the streets of densely populated areas. “Operation Cast Lead” was deemed a military victory for Israel—Hamas suffered heavy casualties and lost much of its stockpile of rockets and other weapons—but it was also a public relations disaster. More than one thousand Palestinians died, and Israel faced widespread international condemnation. On January 17, just days before President Obama’s inauguration, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced a cease-fire beginning at midnight, if Hamas and another radical group in Gaza, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, stopped firing rockets. The next day the militants agreed. The fighting stopped, but Israel maintained a virtual siege around Gaza, closing the borders to most traffic and commerce. Hamas, using secret smuggling tunnels that went under the border with Egypt, immediately began rebuilding its arsenal. Two days later President Obama took the oath of office in Washington.
With the crisis in Gaza dominating world attention, my first call to a foreign leader as Secretary of State was to Olmert. We immediately turned to how to preserve the fragile cease-fire and protect Israel from further rocket fire, as well as address the severe humanitarian needs inside Gaza. We also talked about restarting negotiations that could end the broader conflict with the Palestinians and deliver a comprehensive peace to Israel and the region. I told the Prime Minister that President Obama and I would announce former Senator George Mitchell as a new Special Envoy for Middle East Peace later that day. Olmert called Mitchell “a good man” and expressed his hope that we could work together on all the areas we discussed.
At the start of March, I joined representatives from other international donor countries at a conference in Egypt to raise humanitarian aid for needy Palestinian families in Gaza. It was a step toward helping traumatized Palestinians and Israelis put the latest violence behind them. Whatever you thought of the tangled politics of the Middle East, it was impossible to ignore the human suffering, especially the children. Palestinian and Israeli children have the same right as children everywhere in the world to a safe childhood with a good education, health care, and the chance to build a bright future. And parents in Gaza and the West Bank share the same aspirations as parents in Tel Aviv and Haifa for a good job, a secure home, and better opportunities for their kids. Understanding that is a vital starting point for bridging the gaps that divide the region and providing the foundation for lasting peace. When I made this point at the conference in Egypt, members of the normally hostile Arab media broke into applause.
In Jerusalem I had the pleasure of seeing my old friend President Shimon Peres, a lion of the Israeli left who had helped build the new state’s defense, negotiated Oslo, and carried forward the cause of peace after Rabin’s assassination. As President, Peres had a largely ceremonial role, but he served as the moral conscience of the Israeli people. He still believed passionately in the need for a two-state solution, but he recognized how hard it would be to achieve. “We don’t take it lightly, the burden that is now lying on your shoulders,” he told me. “But I think they are strong, and you will find in us a real and sincere partner in the double purpose to prevent and stop terror and achieve peace for all of the people in the Middle East.”
I also consulted with Olmert and his smart, tough Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a former Mossad agent, on defusing tensions in Gaza and strengthening the cease-fire. With sporadic rocket and mortar attacks continuing, it seemed that full-fledged conflict could flare up again at any time. I also wanted to reassure Israel that the Obama Administration was fully committed to Israel’s security and its future as a Jewish state. “No nation should be expected to sit idly by and allow rockets to assault its people and its territories,” I said. For years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States had been committed to helping Israel maintain a “qualitative military edge” over every competitor in the region. President Obama and I wanted to take it to the next level. Right away, we got to work expanding security cooperation and investing in key joint defense projects, including Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system to help protect Israeli cities and homes from rockets.
Olmert and Livni were determined to move toward a comprehensive peace in the region and a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, despite the many disappointments over decades of halting negotiations. But they were soon on their way out of power. Olmert had announced his resignation under a cloud of corruption charges, mostly stemming from his earlier service as Mayor of Jerusalem. Livni assumed the leadership of their Kadima Party and ran in new elections against Netanyahu and Likud. Kadima actually won one more seat in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, than Likud (twenty-eight seats for Kadima, compared to twenty-seven for Likud), but Livni couldn’t put together a viable majority coalition among the fractious smaller parties that held the balance of power. So Netanyahu was given a chance to form a government.
I talked to Livni about the idea of a unity government between Kadima and Likud that might be more open to pursuing peace with the Palestinians. But she was dead set against it. “No, I’m not going into his government,” she told me. So Netanyahu put together a majority coalition of smaller parties and, at the end of March 2009, returned to the Prime Minister’s office he had occupied from 1996 to 1999.
I had known Netanyahu for years. He is a complicated figure. He spent his formative years living in the United States, studied at both Harvard and MIT, and even worked briefly at the Boston Consulting Group with Mitt Romney in 1976. Netanyahu has been deeply skeptical of the Oslo framework of trading land for peace and a two-state solution that would give the Palestinians a country of their own in territory occupied by Israel since 1967. He is also understandably fixated on the threat to Israel from Iran, especially the possibility of Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons. Netanyahu’s hawkish views were shaped by his own experience in the Israel Defense Forces, especially during the Yom Kippur War of 1973; the memory of his brother Yonatan, a highly respected commando killed leading the Entebbe raid of 1976; and the influence of his father, Benzion, an ultranationalist historian who had favored a Jewish state encompassing all of the West Bank and Gaza since before the birth of the State of Israel. The elder Netanyahu held fast to that position until he died in 2012 at age 102.
In August 2008, after the end of my Presidential campaign, Netanyahu came to see me in my Senate office on Third Avenue in New York. After a decade in the political wilderness following his defeat in the 1999 elections, Bibi had climbed his way back up to the top of Likud and was now poised to retake the Prime Minister’s office. Sitting in my conference room above Midtown Manhattan, he was philosophical about his twists of fortune. He told me that after being voted out, he received some advice from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady herself: “Always expect the unexpected.” Now he was giving me the same advice. A few months later, when President-elect Obama first said the words “Secretary of State” to me, I thought back to what Bibi had predicted.
Later we would both look back on that conversation as a new beginning in our relationship. Despite our policy differences, Netanyahu and I worked together as partners and friends. We argued frequently, often during phone calls that would go on for over an hour, sometimes two. But even when we disagreed, we maintained an unshakeable commitment to the alliance between our countries. I learned that Bibi would fight if he felt he was being cornered, but if you connected with him as a friend, there was a chance you could get something done together.
With the region still reeling from the Gaza conflict, and a skeptic back at the helm in Israel, the prospects for reaching a comprehensive peace agreement seemed daunting, to say the least.
There had been nearly a decade of terror, arising from the second intifada, which started in September 2000. About a thousand Israelis were killed and eight thousand wounded in terrorist attacks from September 2000 to February 2005. Three times as many Palestinians were killed and thousands more were injured in the same period. Israel began constructing a long security fence to physically separate Israel from the West Bank. As a result of these protective measures, the Israeli government reported a sharp decline in suicide attacks, from more than fifty in 2002 to none in 2009. That was, of course, a great source of relief for Israelis. But it also lessened the pressure on them to seek even greater security through a comprehensive peace agreement.
On top of that, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank continued to grow, and most of them were adamantly opposed to giving up any land or closing any settlements in what they called “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name for the land on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Some settlers who moved to these outposts across the 1967 “Green Line” were simply trying to avoid a housing crunch in expensive Israeli cities, but others were motivated by religious zeal and a belief that the West Bank had been promised to Jews by God. Settlers were the political base of Netanyahu’s main coalition partner, the Yisrael Beiteinu Party, led by Avigdor Lieberman, a Russian émigré who became Foreign Minister in the new government. Lieberman viewed negotiating concessions as a sign of weakness and had a long history of opposition to the Oslo peace process. Bibi and Lieberman also believed that Iran’s nuclear program was a bigger and more urgent threat to Israel’s long-term security than the Palestinian conflict. All of this contributed to a reluctance among Israel’s leaders to make the hard choices necessary to achieve a lasting peace.
After visiting with both the outgoing and the incoming Israeli leadership in Jerusalem in early March 2009, I crossed into the West Bank and headed to Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Under previous agreements, the PA administered parts of the Palestinian territories and maintained its own security forces. I visited a classroom where Palestinian students were learning English through a U.S.-sponsored program. They happened to be studying Women’s History Month and learning about Sally Ride, America’s first woman astronaut. The students, especially the girls, were captivated by her story. When I asked for a single word to describe Sally and her accomplishments, one student responded, “Hopeful.” It was encouraging to find such a positive attitude among young people growing up under such difficult circumstances. I doubted one would hear the same sentiment in Gaza. For me, that summed up the divergence of fortunes between the two Palestinian territories.
For nearly twenty years two factions, Fatah and Hamas, have vied for influence among the Palestinian people. When Arafat was alive, his Fatah party was ascendant and his personal stature was enough to largely keep the peace between the two. But after he died in 2004, the schism burst into open conflict. To those disillusioned by a peace process that had failed to deliver much concrete progress, Hamas peddled the false hope that a Palestinian state could somehow be achieved through violence and uncompromising resistance. By contrast, Arafat’s successor as head of Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), maintained a platform of nonviolence and urged his people to keep pushing for a negotiated political solution to the conflict, while building up the economy and institutions of a future Palestinian state.
In early 2006, Hamas won legislative elections in the Palestinian territories that had been pushed by the Bush Administration over objections by some members of Fatah and the Israelis. The upset victory led to a new crisis with Israel and a violent power struggle with Fatah.
After the election results came in, I released a statement from my Senate office condemning Hamas and stressing, “Until and unless Hamas renounces violence and terror, and abandons its position calling for the destruction of Israel, I don’t believe the United States should recognize Hamas, nor should any nation in the world.” The outcome was a reminder that genuine democracy is about more than winning an election, and that if the United States pushes for elections, we have a responsibility to help educate people, and parties, about the process. Fatah had lost several seats because it ran two candidates in districts when Hamas fielded only one. It was a costly mistake. The next year Hamas led a coup in Gaza against the authority of Abbas, who continued to serve as President despite his party’s losses in the legislative elections. With Fatah still in control in the West Bank, the Palestinian people were split between two competing power centers and two very different visions for the future.
This division made the prospects of resuming peace talks more remote and increased Israeli reluctance. However, as a result of this unusual arrangement, both sides were able to test their approach to governing. The results could be seen every day in Palestinian streets and neighborhoods. In Gaza, Hamas presided over a crumbling enclave of terror and despair. It stockpiled rockets while people fell deeper into poverty. Unemployment ran to nearly 40 percent, and was even higher among young people. Hamas impeded international assistance and the work of humanitarian NGOs and did little to promote sustainable economic growth. Instead Hamas sought to distract Palestinians from its failure to govern effectively by stoking new tensions with Israel and inciting popular anger.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, an able technocrat, produced very different results in a relatively short period of time. They got to work addressing a history of corruption and building transparent and accountable institutions. The United States and other international partners, especially Jordan, helped improve the effectiveness and reliability of PA security forces, which was a key priority for Israel. Reforms began to increase public confidence in the courts, and in 2009 they handled 67 percent more cases than in 2008. Tax revenues were finally being collected. The PA began building schools and hospitals and training teachers and medical staffs. It even started work on a national health insurance program. More responsible fiscal policies, support from the international community—including hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the United States, the PA’s largest bilateral donor—and improving security and the rule of law led to significant economic growth. Despite ongoing economic challenges, more Palestinians in the West Bank were finding jobs, starting businesses, and reversing the economic stagnation that followed the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000. The number of new business licenses issued in the West Bank in the fourth quarter of 2009 was 50 percent higher than in the same period in 2008, as Palestinians opened everything from venture capital funds to hardware stores and luxury hotels. Unemployment in the West Bank fell to less than half the rate in Gaza.
Even with this progress, there was much more work to do. Too many people remained frustrated and out of work. Anti-Israeli incitement and violence were still problems, and we hoped to see greater reforms to crack down on corruption, instill a culture of peace and tolerance among Palestinians, and reduce dependence on foreign assistance. But it was becoming easier to envision an independent Palestine able to govern itself, uphold its responsibilities, and ensure security for its citizens and its neighbors. The World Bank reported in September 2010 that if the Palestinian Authority maintained its momentum in building institutions and delivering public services, it would be “well-positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future.”
I saw the progress firsthand on visits to the West Bank in 2009 and 2010. Well-equipped Palestinian security officers, many of them trained with U.S. and Jordanian assistance, lined the road. Driving into Ramallah, I could see new apartment buildings and office towers rising from the hills. But as I looked at the faces of the men and women who came out of their shops and homes, it was impossible to forget the painful history of a people who have never had a state of their own. Economic and institutional progress is important, indeed necessary, but it is not sufficient. The legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people will never be satisfied until there is a two-state solution that ensures dignity, justice, and security for all Palestinians and Israelis.
I will always believe that in late 2000 and early 2001, Arafat made a terrible mistake in refusing to join Prime Minister Barak in accepting the “Clinton Parameters,” which would have given the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem. Now we were trying again with President Abbas. He had worked long and hard to realize the dreams of his people. He understood those dreams could be achieved only through nonviolence and negotiation. And he believed an independent Palestine living side by side with Israel in peace and security was both possible and necessary. I sometimes thought that while Arafat had the circumstances required to make peace but not the will, Abbas may have had the will but not the circumstances, though at some of our more frustrating moments, I wondered about his will, too.
Coaxing the Israelis and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table was not going to be easy. There was no great mystery about what a final peace deal might look like and the compromises that would have to be struck; the challenge was mobilizing the political will on both sides to make the choices and sacrifices necessary to accept those compromises and make peace. Our diplomatic efforts had to focus on building trust and confidence on both sides, helping the leaders carve out political space to negotiate with each other, and making a persuasive case that the status quo was unsustainable for everyone.
I was convinced that was true. For the Palestinians, decades of resistance, terrorism, and uprisings had not produced an independent state, and more of the same was not going to do anything to advance their legitimate aspirations. Negotiations offered the only credible path to that goal, and waiting just meant prolonging the occupation and suffering on both sides.
For the Israelis, the case was harder because the status quo was less obviously and immediately problematic. The economy was booming, improved security measures had dramatically reduced the threat of terrorism, and many Israelis felt that their country had tried to make peace and received nothing in return but heartbreak and violence. In their eyes, Israel had offered generous deals to Arafat and Abbas, and the Palestinians had walked away. Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza (without a negotiated peace agreement), which had turned into a terrorist enclave that lobbed rockets into southern Israel. When Israel pulled back from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah and other militant groups, with Iranian and Syrian support, used the territory as a base for attacking northern Israel. What reason did Israelis have to think that giving up more land would lead to actual peace?
I was sympathetic to those fears and to the threats and frustrations behind them. But as someone who cares deeply about Israel’s security and future, I thought there were compelling demographic, technological, and ideological trends that argued for making another serious attempt at a negotiated peace.
Because of higher birth rates among Palestinians and lower birth rates among Israelis, we were approaching the day when Palestinians would make up a majority of the combined population of Israel and the Palestinian territories, and most of those Palestinians would be relegated to second-class citizenship and unable to vote. As long as Israel insisted on holding on to the territories, it would become increasingly difficult and eventually impossible to maintain its status as both a democracy and a Jewish state. Sooner or later, Israelis would have to choose one or the other or let the Palestinians have a state of their own.
At the same time, the rockets flowing into the hands of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon were increasingly sophisticated and capable of reaching Israeli communities far from the borders. In April 2010, there were reports that Syria was transferring long-range Scud missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which could reach all of Israel’s major cities. In the spring of 2014, Israel intercepted a ship carrying Syrian-made M-302 surface-to-surface rockets bound for Palestinian militants in Gaza that could reach all of Israel. We would continue building up Israel’s air defenses, but the best missile defense system of all would be a just and lasting peace. And the longer the conflict dragged on, the more it would strengthen the hand of extremists and weaken moderates across the Middle East.
For all these reasons, I believed it was necessary for Israel’s long-term security to give diplomacy another chance. I had no illusions that it would be any easier to reach an agreement than it had been for previous administrations, but President Obama was ready to invest his own personal political capital, and that counted for a lot. Netanyahu, precisely because of his well-known hawkishness, had the credibility with the Israeli public to cut a deal, like Nixon’s going to China, if he were convinced it was in Israel’s security interests. Abbas was aging and there was no telling how long he could hold on to power; we couldn’t take for granted that his successor, whomever it would be, would be as committed to peace. With all his political baggage and personal limitations, Abbas might well be the last, best hope for a Palestinian partner committed to finding a diplomatic solution and determined enough to sell one to his people. Yes, there was always a danger in diving back into the quagmire of Middle East peace negotiations. Trying and failing could well discredit moderates, embolden extremists, and leave the parties more distrustful and estranged than before. But success was impossible if we didn’t try, and I was determined to do so.
The first step toward jump-starting the peace process in January 2009 was appointing George Mitchell as Special Envoy so he could try to repeat the success he had achieved with the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. The soft-spoken former Senator from Maine was always quick to point out the differences between the two conflicts, but he also drew encouragement from the fact that Northern Ireland had once been deemed as intractable as the Middle East and had been resolved through painstaking negotiations. “We had 700 days of failure and one day of success,” he often said. On the other hand, when Mitchell remarked to an audience in Jerusalem that it took eight hundred years of conflict before peace finally came to Northern Ireland, one elderly gentleman scoffed, “Such a recent argument—no wonder you settled it!”
President Obama agreed with me that Mitchell possessed the international prestige, negotiating skills, and patient temperament to take on this crucial task. I also asked Dennis Ross, who had served as Middle East Special Envoy during the 1990s, to come back to the State Department to work on Iran and regional issues. President Obama was so impressed with Ross that he soon asked him to move to the White House to advise him more closely, including on the peace process. There were sometimes tensions between Ross and Mitchell, given their overlapping responsibilities and the high stakes of the assignment, but I valued both of their perspectives and was grateful to have two such experienced foreign policy thinkers as part of our team.
Only days after his appointment, Mitchell headed out to the region for a multistop tour. The Israelis were still sorting out their new government, so Mitchell made the rounds of the Arab capitals. His mandate included working for peace not just between Israel and the Palestinians but also between Israel and all its neighbors. The basis for a comprehensive regional peace would likely be a plan proposed in 2002 by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The plan was unanimously endorsed by all Arab League members, including Syria, in March 2002. Under the Arab Peace Initiative, as it’s called, all those countries, and some Muslim-majority nations outside the region, agreed that in return for a successful peace agreement with the Palestinians, they would normalize relations with Israel, including economic, political, and security cooperation. If this could be achieved, it would have profound implications for the strategic dynamics of the Middle East. Because of their shared suspicion of Iran and their partnerships with the United States, Israel and many of the Arab states, especially the Gulf monarchies, should have been natural allies. Enmity over the Palestinian conflict prevented that. Before the 2008–2009 war in Gaza, Turkey had been trying to broker peace talks between Israel and Syria. If Syria could be pried away from its toxic alliance with Iran in exchange for progress on the Golan Heights—the territory it lost to Israel in 1967—that too would have significant strategic consequences.
In nearly every capital Mitchell heard the same thing: Israel needed to stop building settlements on land that would one day become part of a Palestinian state. Each new settlement beyond the old 1967 lines would make it harder to reach a final agreement. For decades the United States had opposed the expansion of settlements as counterproductive to peace efforts. President George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Jim Baker, considered suspending loan guarantees to Israel over the issue. President George W. Bush called for a full construction freeze in his “Roadmap for Peace.” But given Netanyahu’s political ties to the settlers, he could be expected to balk at any limitations.
After his initial consultations, Mitchell suggested that we ask all three parties—the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Arab states—to take specific constructive steps to show good faith and lay the foundation for a return to direct peace negotiations.
For the Palestinian Authority, we wanted it to do more to crack down on terrorism and reduce anti-Israeli incitement. Examples of incitement included renaming a public square in the West Bank after a terrorist who murdered Israeli civilians, whipping up conspiracy theories claiming that Israel was planning to destroy Muslim holy places, and actions that glorified and encouraged further violence. As for Hamas, its isolation would continue until it renounced violence, recognized Israel, and pledged to abide by previous signed agreements. Without those basic steps, Hamas would not get a seat at the table. We also demanded the immediate release of Gilad Shalit, a kidnapped Israeli soldier being held in Gaza.
For the Arab states, we hoped to see steps toward normalization with Israel as envisioned under the Arab Peace Initiative, including allowing overflight rights for Israeli commercial air traffic, reopening trade offices, and establishing postal routes. Netanyahu pressed me on this over dinner at the State Department in May 2009. He especially wanted to see action from Saudi Arabia, whose role as “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” would give its gestures outsized significance in the region. In June 2009, President Obama traveled to Riyadh and personally raised this issue with King Abdullah.
For the Israelis, we requested that they freeze all settlement construction in the Palestinian territories without exception. In retrospect, our early hard line on settlements didn’t work.
Israel initially refused our request, and our disagreement played out in public, becoming a highly personal standoff between President Obama and Netanyahu, with the credibility of both leaders on the line. That made it very hard for either one to climb down or compromise. The Arab states were happy to sit on the sidelines and use the dustup as an excuse for their own inaction. And Abbas, who had consistently called for a halt to settlement construction for years, now claimed it was all our idea and said that he wouldn’t come to the peace table without a moratorium on settlement construction.
The President and his advisors had debated the wisdom of making a demand for a settlement freeze. The strongest voice in favor of doing so was Rahm Emanuel’s, the White House Chief of Staff. Rahm, a former civilian volunteer with the Israel Defense Forces, had a deep personal commitment to Israel’s security. Drawing on his experiences in the Clinton Administration, he thought that the best way to deal with Netanyahu’s new coalition government was to take a strong position right out of the gate; otherwise he’d walk all over us. The President was sympathetic to that argument, and he thought insisting on a settlement freeze was both good policy and smart strategy since it would help reestablish America as an honest broker in the peace process, softening the perception that we always took the side of the Israelis. Mitchell and I worried we could be locking ourselves into a confrontation we didn’t need, that the Israelis would feel they were being asked to do more than the other parties, and that once we raised it publicly Abbas couldn’t start serious negotiations without it. A senior Israeli official once explained to me that for Israelis, the worst thing in the world is to be a freier, the Hebrew slang word for “sucker.” Israeli drivers would rather end up in the hospital than let someone cut them off on the highway, he told me. Bibi himself was once quoted as saying, “We are not freiers. We don’t give without receiving.” I feared that in this light, our demands for a settlement freeze would not be well-received. But I agreed with Rahm and the President that if we were going to revive a moribund peace process, we had to take some risks. So that spring I delivered the President’s message as forcefully as I could, then tried to contain the consequences when both sides reacted badly.
In June 2009, two important speeches reshaped the diplomatic landscape. First, in Cairo, President Obama offered an ambitious and eloquent recalibration of America’s relationship with the Islamic world. In the wide-ranging address, he reaffirmed his personal commitment to pursue a two-state solution that would meet the aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians. Before the speech the President and I made time to take a private tour of the city’s cavernous Sultan Hassan Mosque, one of the biggest in the world. We removed our shoes, and I put on a headscarf as we looked in wonder at the intricate medieval craftsmanship and listened to explanations from an Egyptian American art historian. It was a lovely, quiet moment together in the middle of all the madness of a Presidential trip and a major policy rollout. It made me smile when later that day the President said in his speech, “Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.”
Ten days later Bibi went to Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv and, while he continued to reject a settlement freeze, he endorsed the idea of the two-state solution for the first time. It seemed like a seminal turn, that Netanyahu wanted to be remembered as a leader who could take bold risks and deliver a historic deal.
Mitchell and I spent the summer and early fall working with both the Israelis and the Palestinians to break the logjam over settlements. In fairness, we shared responsibility for creating that logjam by allowing the issue to turn into a test of wills. President Obama decided that the best way to move forward was to insist that both leaders sit down with him together when they were in New York for the UN General Assembly in September. These wouldn’t be formal negotiations, but they would provide a first opportunity for the leaders to talk to each other and perhaps build some momentum toward a more substantive process. The meeting in New York was awkward; both leaders were blunt about their positions and showed little willingness to compromise, especially on the issue of settlements. “We all must take risks for peace,” President Obama told them. “It’s difficult to disentangle ourselves from history, but we must do so.”
We came out of New York with little to show for the effort. But Mitchell and I kept working on Netanyahu, and finally he agreed to a partial halt on building permits for future West Bank settlements. We still had to sort out how long the freeze would last and which areas would be covered, but this was an important start—and it was more than any previous Israeli government had been willing to do. The sticking point would be Jerusalem. East Jerusalem had been captured along with the West Bank in 1967, and Palestinians dreamed of one day establishing the capital of their future state there. The Palestinians therefore sought to halt construction in East Jerusalem. That was a nonstarter for Bibi, who refused to restrict building in any part of Jerusalem.
In early October I spoke with Ehud Barak, who was Netanyahu’s coalition partner, as well as Minister of Defense and the most important voice for peace in the government. Barak was endlessly optimistic, despite living in a region where so much seemed to go wrong. He was also one of the most decorated war heroes in a nation of war heroes. As lore has it, he even dressed in drag during a daring commando assault into Beirut in the 1980s. We got along famously. From time to time he would call me and say, “Hillary, let’s strategize,” and then launch into a whirlwind of rapid-fire ideas and arguments. He was eager to help me reach an accommodation over settlements that could move the process forward. “We’ll be ready to listen, to be sensitive and to be responsive,” he told me. The Israelis eventually agreed to a freeze on new construction in the West Bank for ten months but held firm against including Jerusalem.
I called Abbas to discuss the Israeli offer. The initial Palestinian reaction was to reject it out of hand as inadequate, “worse than useless,” but I thought this was the best deal they were going to get and we should seize the opportunity to move forward to direct negotiations. “I want to stress to you again, Mr. President, that our policy on settlement activity is and will remain unchanged,” I assured him, “and although the Israeli settlement moratorium as described to you by George Mitchell will be significant and will be an unprecedented step by any Israeli government, it will not be a substitute for Israel’s roadmap commitments.” Abbas did not take issue with my use of the word unprecedented, but he wasn’t happy about the Jerusalem exclusion or other limitations and did not agree to enter negotiations.
To show his own good faith, though, Abbas made a concession as well. He offered that the Palestinians would delay a vote at the United Nations on the controversial Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes during the 2008 war in Gaza. Abbas received swift and sharp criticism for his decision from across the Arab world, including relentless personal attacks against him on Al Jazeera, a satellite news network owned by Qatar. Abbas was beside himself and confided in me that he feared for his safety and that of his grandchildren, who had been harassed at school. I thanked him for his “very courageous and important decision,” but I could tell he was starting to waver. About a week later he reversed himself and called for a UN vote on the Goldstone Report. Later, in 2011, Richard Goldstone himself retracted some of the most inflammatory charges in the report, including that the Israeli military intentionally targeted civilians, but the damage had been done.
At the end of October 2009 I was intensely focused on getting the proposed settlement moratorium in place, in the hopes that it would clear the way for direct negotiations between the parties. I met with Abbas in Abu Dhabi and then with Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Standing next to Bibi at a late-night press conference, I described the construction freeze as “unprecedented,” just as I had said to Abbas. But this time my use of the word caused outrage in Arab countries, where people thought that I was being too generous toward an offer that was qualified, short term, and excluded East Jerusalem. It was not the first time, nor the last, that telling a hard truth would cause me trouble.
Many in the region would later look quite wistfully at that much-maligned moratorium. But the immediate imperative was to defuse the situation and refocus the region on getting to direct negotiations. Over the coming days I did damage control in Morocco and Egypt. In Cairo, I explained privately to President Hosni Mubarak and also in public that our official policy on settlements had not changed. We still opposed all construction and would have preferred a longer, comprehensive freeze. But I stood by my description of the offer “to halt all new settlement activities and to end the expropriation of land, and to issue no permits or approvals” as “unprecedented.” Because the fact of the matter is, it was.
In late November the freeze went into effect, and the clock started ticking. We had ten months to move the parties toward direct negotiations and a comprehensive peace agreement.
One by one the months slipped by. As promised, the Israelis halted new settlement construction in the West Bank, but the Palestinians held out for East Jerusalem to be included and continued to refuse to join direct negotiations, although they did agree to what were called “proximity talks,” with Mitchell shuttling back and forth between the two sides to discuss their vision for the negotiations.
In March 2010, the Israelis managed to make the Palestinian case for them with an unnecessarily provocative act. Vice President Biden was visiting Israel on a goodwill tour, reaffirming the administration’s strong support for the country’s security and trying to put the unpleasantness of our row over settlements behind us. While he was still on the ground, the Israeli Interior Ministry announced plans for 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, a move certain to inflame Palestinian sensitivities. Netanyahu said that he had nothing to do with the unfortunate timing of the announcement, but it was taken by many as a snub of the Vice President and the United States.
Biden was, characteristically, even-tempered about the whole kerfuffle. But both President Obama and Rahm were furious, and they asked me to make that clear to Bibi. In a long and heated telephone conversation, I told the Prime Minister that President Obama viewed the news about East Jerusalem “as a personal insult to him, the Vice President, and the United States.” Strong stuff for a diplomatic conversation. I didn’t enjoy playing the bad cop, but it was part of the job. “Let me assure you and the President that the timing was entirely unintentional and unfortunate,” he replied, but he refused to reverse the decision.
By coincidence, this incident occurred just before the annual conference in Washington of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent pro-Israel advocacy organization. Netanyahu was scheduled to visit D.C. and address the conference. It would be up to me to represent the administration. I went first. The big crowd gathered at the Washington Convention Center was a little wary at first. They had wanted to hear how I would address the controversy and if I’d keep up the criticism of Netanyahu. I knew I had to speak to that, but I also wanted to step back and make the broader case for why we viewed a negotiated peace agreement as crucial to Israel’s future.
I talked about my own personal devotion to Israel’s security and to the two-state solution and explained our concerns about the trends in demography, technology, and ideology. It was my most comprehensive public argument to date as Secretary about why the status quo was unsustainable and the need for peace undeniable. Then I turned to the contretemps over East Jerusalem. Our objection was not based on wounded pride, I said, or on any judgment about the final status of East Jerusalem, which would have to be decided at the negotiating table. New construction in East Jerusalem or the West Bank would undermine the mutual trust we needed to build between the parties, expose daylight between Israel and the United States that others in the region might try to exploit, and diminish America’s unique ability to play the role of honest broker. “Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don’t agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally,” I said.
My speech helped cool some of the tensions, at least in the room, but the relationship between Netanyahu and President Obama continued to deteriorate. Later that afternoon I met with Bibi for more than an hour at his hotel. He told me he planned to come out swinging in his speech to the conference that evening, and he was as good as his word. “Jerusalem is not a settlement—it is our capital,” he declared defiantly. (We had never referred to Jerusalem as a settlement; our argument was that the city’s final status should be determined by good-faith negotiations, and building new homes for Israelis in Palestinian neighborhoods would not be helpful to that end.) The next day Netanyahu had a charged meeting with the President at the White House. At one point during the discussion, the President reportedly left him waiting in the Roosevelt Room for about an hour while he took care of other matters. It was an unusual move, but one that effectively telegraphed his displeasure. One positive outcome of this mini-crisis was that the Israelis got a lot better about warning us before any new, potentially controversial housing projects were announced, and they became much more sensitive about East Jerusalem. At least while the ten-month moratorium remained in place, there was little if any additional construction there.
As if the tensions over settlements weren’t enough, things went from bad to worse at the end of May. Israeli commandos raided a flotilla of ships from Turkey carrying pro-Palestinian activists trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Nine Turkish citizens were killed, including one American with dual citizenship. I received an urgent call from Ehud Barak while I was marching in the Chappaqua Memorial Day parade, one of my favorite annual traditions in our small town. “We’re not happy with the results, but we had to make tough choices. We couldn’t avoid it,” Ehud explained. “There will be unforeseen repercussions,” I warned him.
Turkey had long been one of Israel’s only partners in the region, but in the wake of this debacle, I had to convince the enraged Turks not to take serious actions against Israel in response. The day after the raid Foreign Minister Davutoğlu came to see me, and we talked for more than two hours. He was highly emotional and threatened that Turkey might declare war on Israel. “Psychologically, this attack is like 9/11 for Turkey,” he said, demanding an Israeli apology and compensation for the victims. “How can you not care?” he asked me. “One of them was an American citizen!” I did care—quite a lot—but my first priority was to calm him down and put aside all this talk of war and consequences. Afterward I advised President Obama to call Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan as well. Then I relayed the Turkish concerns and demands to Netanyahu. He said he wanted to patch things up with Turkey but refused to apologize publicly. (My efforts to convince Bibi to apologize to Turkey seesawed back and forth for the remainder of my tenure. On several occasions he told me he would finally do it, only to be stopped by other members of his center-right coalition. I even enlisted Henry Kissinger to make the strategic case to him in August 2011. Finally, in March 2013, with a reelected President Obama at his side during a visit to Jerusalem, Bibi called Erdoğan to apologize for “operational mistakes” and to express regret for the unintentional loss of life that resulted. The Turks and Israelis are still working to rebuild the trust lost in this incident.)
Back to the summer of 2010. With the ten-month settlement freeze winding down, we faced the urgency of getting the parties back to the negotiating table. Mitchell and I enlisted Jordan and Egypt to pressure the Palestinians to relent on their preconditions. President Obama met with Abbas in June and announced a major new aid package for the West Bank and Gaza. Finally, in August, Abbas agreed to attend direct negotiations in Washington about all the core issues of the conflict, so long as the settlement moratorium remained in place. If it expired as planned at the end of September, he would walk away again. An exasperated George Mitchell asked Abbas, “How is it that something which you described as worse than useless eight months ago has now become indispensable?” We all understood that Abbas had to manage his own difficult politics, both with his own people and with the Arab states, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
There was no way we were going to resolve all the core issues in a single month—Mitchell optimistically suggested a one-year deadline for the talks—but we hoped that we could build enough momentum either to convince Netanyahu to extend the freeze or persuade Abbas to keep negotiating without it. If we could make enough progress on the question of final borders for the two states, then that would significantly ease the settlement issue because it would be clear to everyone which areas would ultimately stay with Israel and which would go to the Palestinians. It wasn’t going to be as simple as just returning to the 1967 lines. The heavy growth of settlements along the border had made that a nonstarter. Land swaps could carve out the settlement blocks and provide Palestinians with a roughly equal amount of land elsewhere. But, as always, the devil would be in the details.
On the first day of September, President Obama welcomed Netanyahu and Abbas to the White House, along with King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt. He hosted a small working dinner in the Old Family Dining Room. Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, and I joined the group. Blair served as a Special Envoy for the Quartet, which was established in 2002 by the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia to coordinate diplomatic efforts on behalf of Middle East peace. The seven of us gathered around the dining-room table beneath an elegant crystal chandelier in the bright yellow room that was largely unchanged from the days when I used to host private meals there as First Lady. Bibi and Abbas sat next to each other, flanked by me and Blair, across from President Obama, Mubarak, and the King.
President Obama set the tone in remarks before dinner, reminding the leaders, “Each of you are the heirs of peacemakers who dared greatly—Begin and Sadat, Rabin and King Hussein—statesmen who saw the world as it was but also imagined the world as it should be. It is the shoulders of our predecessors upon which we stand. It is their work that we carry on. Now, like each of them, we must ask, do we have the wisdom and the courage to walk the path of peace?”
The atmosphere was warm, despite the many difficult months that had led up to this moment, but still cautious. Everyone was aware of the time pressure we faced, and no one wanted to appear ungracious at President Obama’s dinner table, yet their fundamental disagreements were not easy to hide.
The next day the drama moved to the State Department. I convened the leaders and their negotiating teams in the ornate Benjamin Franklin Room on the eighth floor. It was time to roll up our sleeves and see what we could accomplish. “By being here today, you each have taken an important step toward freeing your peoples from the shackles of a history we cannot change, and moving toward a future of peace and dignity that only you can create,” I told Netanyahu and Abbas. “The core issues at the center of these negotiations—territory, security, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, and others—will get no easier if we wait. Nor will they resolve themselves. . . . This is a time for bold leadership and a time for statesmen who have the courage to make difficult decisions.” Sitting on either side of me, Netanyahu and Abbas sounded ready to accept the challenge.
Bibi invoked the biblical story of Isaac (father of the Jews) and Ishmael (father of the Arabs), the two sons of Abraham who, despite their differences, came together to bury their father. “I can only pray, and I know that millions around the world, millions of Israelis and millions of Palestinians and many other millions around the world, pray that the pain that we have experienced—you and us—in the last hundred years of conflict will unite us not only in a moment of peace around a table of peace here in Washington, but will enable us to leave from here and to forge a durable, lasting peace for generations.”
Abbas reminisced about the famous handshake in 1993 between Rabin and Arafat and spoke of reaching “a peace that will end the conflict, that will meet all the demands, and start a new era between the Israeli and the Palestinian people.” The gaps we had to overcome were substantial and time was running short, but at least everyone was saying the right things.
After a long afternoon of formal negotiations, I invited the two leaders to my office on the seventh floor. Senator Mitchell and I talked with them for a while, and then we left them alone. They sat in two high-backed chairs in front of the fireplace and agreed to meet again face-to-face in two weeks. We hadn’t made much substantive progress, but I was encouraged by both their words and their body language. It was a moment of optimism and ambition that, sadly, would not be matched by action.
Two weeks later we reconvened in Sharm el-Sheikh, a sun-soaked Egyptian resort town on the Red Sea. (One of the ironies of international diplomacy is that we often travel to places like Sharm or Bali or Hawaii but then have no time at all to enjoy them, or even venture outside the formal conference rooms. I sometimes felt like Tantalus, the hungry wretch of Greek mythology doomed to stare at delicious fruit and refreshing water for all eternity but never able to taste it.) This time our host was President Mubarak, who, despite being an autocrat at home, was a steadfast proponent of the two-state solution and peace in the Middle East. Because Egypt shared borders with Gaza and Israel, and was the first Arab country to sign a peace agreement with Israel, back in 1979, its role was crucial. Mubarak had a close relationship with Abbas and helped get the Palestinians to the table in the first place. Now I hoped he could help keep them there.
Mubarak and I began the day by meeting separately with the Israelis and the Palestinians. Then we brought Netanyahu and Abbas together, and they talked for an hour and forty minutes. Both sides reaffirmed their intention to participate in good faith and with seriousness of purpose. Then we started drilling down on some of the core issues of the conflict. It was slow going—there was a lot of positioning, posturing, and taking the measure of the other side—but it felt good to finally be talking about the heart of the matter. After more than twenty months of false starts, we were engaging with the key questions that held out the promise of ending the conflict once and for all. After a lunch for all of us, we decided to meet again, and Netanyahu delayed his departure so we could keep talking.
The next day the conversation continued at Netanyahu’s home in Jerusalem, where he displayed the Palestinian flag as a sign of respect to Abbas. Beit Aghion, the Prime Minister’s official residence, was built by a wealthy merchant in the 1930s and served as a hospital for fighters in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It sits on a quiet, partially closed-off street in the well-to-do neighborhood of Rehavia. Outside, its façade is covered with Jerusalem limestone, like the Western Wall and much of the Old City. Inside it is surprisingly cozy. The four of us—Netanyahu, Abbas, Mitchell, and I—crammed into the Prime Minister’s personal study for intense discussions. In the back of everyone’s mind was the approaching deadline; the settlement freeze would expire and the talks would collapse in less than two weeks if we didn’t find a way forward. The ticking of this clock was deafening.
Among other tough questions, our discussion focused on how long the Israeli military would maintain a presence in the Jordan Valley, which would become the border between Jordan and a future Palestinian state. Mitchell and I offered suggestions about how to reconcile the continuing needs of Israeli security with Palestinian sovereignty. Netanyahu insisted that Israeli troops remain along the border for many decades without a fixed date for withdrawal so future decisions could be based on conditions on the ground. At one point Abbas said that he could live with an Israeli military deployment in the Jordan Valley for a few years beyond the establishment of a new state, but no longer and it had to be a set period of time, not an open-ended stay. Despite the obvious disagreement, I thought that was a potentially significant opening; if the conversation was about years, not decades or months, then perhaps the right mix of international security support and advanced border protection tactics and technologies could bridge the gap, if we could keep the talks going.
They debated back and forth as the hours went by. Outside, the American press corps grew restless, and many of the journalists decamped to a nearby hotel bar. Inside, I was frustrated that we weren’t making the kind of progress I knew would be needed to survive the end of the settlement freeze. But Mitchell, the veteran of the interminable Northern Ireland negotiations, offered some helpful perspective. “The negotiations there lasted for twenty-two months,” he observed. “And it was many, many months into the process before there was a single, serious, substantive discussion on the major issues that separated the parties.” Here we were already deep into the most difficult and sensitive issues of the conflict.
After the meeting finally broke up, nearly three hours later, I stayed behind to talk to Netanyahu alone. Surely he didn’t want to be responsible for halting these talks now that they were under way and delving into the core issues. Could he agree to a brief extension of the moratorium to allow us to press ahead and see what could be achieved? The Prime Minister shook his head. He had given ten months, and the Palestinians had wasted nine of them. He was ready to keep talking, but the settlement freeze would end on schedule.
That night in Jerusalem was the last time Netanyahu and Abbas would sit and talk face-to-face. As of this writing, despite intensive efforts between the parties in 2013 and 2014, there has not yet been another session between the two leaders.
Over the following weeks we launched a full-court press to persuade Bibi to reconsider extending the freeze. Much of the action played out in New York, where everyone had gathered once again for the UN General Assembly. The year before, President Obama had hosted the first direct meeting between Netanyahu and Abbas. Now we were fighting to forestall total collapse of the negotiations. There were long nights at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, strategizing with President Obama and our team and then working with the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Arabs to try to find a solution. I met with Abbas twice, had a private meeting with Ehud Barak, had breakfast with a group of Arab Foreign Ministers, and spoke with Bibi by phone, each time making the case that walking away from the talks, settlement freeze or no, would only set back the aspirations of the Palestinian people.
In his speech to the General Assembly, President Obama called for the moratorium to be extended, and he urged both sides to stay at the table and keep talking: “Now is the time for the parties to help each other overcome this obstacle. Now is the time to build the trust—and provide the time—for substantial progress to be made. Now is the time for this opportunity to be seized, so that it does not slip away.”
After the initial stonewalling, it appeared that Netanyahu was willing to discuss the idea of an extension, but only if we met an ever-expanding list of demands that included providing new state-of-the-art fighter planes. For his part, Abbas insisted that Israel had to “choose between peace and the continuation of settlements.”
On the night before the deadline, I reminded Ehud Barak that “the collapse of the moratorium would be a disaster for Israel and the United States.” Also for the Palestinians, he replied. Barak did everything he could to help me work out a compromise, but he was never able to bring Netanyahu or the rest of the Israeli Cabinet along.
The deadline came and went. Direct negotiations were over, for now. But my work wasn’t. I thought it was crucial that we not allow the collapse of talks to lead to a collapse of public confidence—or to violence, as had happened in the past. Over the final months of 2010, I threw myself into efforts to keep both sides from doing anything provocative and to explore whether we could close some of the gaps revealed in our negotiating sessions through proximity talks and creative diplomatic proposals. “I’m increasingly worried about the way ahead,” I told Netanyahu in a call in early October. “We’re trying very hard to keep things on track and avoid any precipitous collapse. You know how disappointed we are we couldn’t avoid an end to the moratorium.” I urged him to show restraint when approving new construction or talking about future plans. Reckless talk would only inflame a tense situation. Bibi promised to be judicious, but warned me against allowing the Palestinians to “play brinksmanship.”
Abbas, always worried about his precarious standing with the divided Palestinian public and his Arab patrons, was searching for a way to restore his credibility, which took a hit with the end of the settlement freeze. One idea he was considering was to go to the United Nations and ask for statehood. That would be an end-run around negotiations and put the United States in a difficult position. We would feel obligated to veto the issue in the Security Council, but a vote might expose how isolated Israel had become. “I know you’re fed up, Mr. President, and I’m sure you wonder if what we are trying to do now will lead anywhere,” I told Abbas. “I would not be calling you if I didn’t think what we are doing had a chance of succeeding for us as partners. We are working tirelessly and as you have said yourself, there is no alternative path to peace, but through negotiations.” He was in a corner and didn’t know how to get out of it, but this was a predicament of his and our own making.
In my calls and meetings with the leaders, I probed to see if we could narrow the gaps on territory and borders enough to move beyond the settlement issue. I told Netanyahu in mid-October, “The question is, assuming your needs on security are met: What could you offer Abu Mazen on borders? I need to know this with some specificity because the Palestinians know the ballpark.” Netanyahu responded, “What concerns me is not Abu Mazen’s territorial demands, but his understanding and acceptance of my security needs. . . . I’m a realist. I know what’s needed to close the deal.” Our call went on like this for an hour and twenty minutes.
In November I spent eight hours with Netanyahu at the Regency Hotel in New York City. It was my longest single bilateral meeting as Secretary. We talked everything over, again and again, including the old ideas for restarting a settlement moratorium in exchange for military hardware and other security assistance. Eventually he agreed on a proposal to bring to his Cabinet that would halt construction in the West Bank (but not East Jerusalem) for ninety days. In exchange, we pledged a $3 billion security package and promised to veto any resolutions at the UN that would undercut direct negotiations between the parties.
When news of the deal became public, it caused consternation on all sides. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners were irate, and to placate them, he emphasized that construction would continue in East Jerusalem. This, in turn, set off the Palestinians. Some in the United States also raised fair questions about whether it was wise to buy a ninety-day freeze for negotiations that might well lead nowhere. I wasn’t happy either—I confided to Tony Blair that I found it to be “a nasty business”—but it felt like a sacrifice worth making.
Under all this pressure, however, the deal started to unravel almost immediately, and by the end of November it was effectively dead. In December 2010, I spoke at the Saban Forum, a conference that brings together leaders and experts from across the Middle East and the United States. I pledged that America would stay engaged and keep pressing both sides to grapple with the core issues, even if it was through a return to “proximity talks.” We would push both the Israelis and the Palestinians to lay out their positions on the toughest questions with real specificity, and then we would work to narrow the gaps, including by offering our own ideas and bridging proposals when appropriate. Since my husband put forward the “Clinton Parameters” a decade before, the United States had been reluctant to push any specific plans or even a substantive framework. “Peace cannot be imposed from outside,” was a frequent saying, and true. But now we would be more aggressive in setting the terms of the debate.
President Obama followed through on this commitment in the spring of 2011 by declaring in a speech at the State Department, “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”
Netanyahu unhelpfully chose to focus on the reference to “1967 lines” and ignore the “agreed swaps,” and another highly personal standoff between the two heads of state resulted. The Palestinians, meanwhile, escalated their plan to petition the United Nations for statehood. George Mitchell stepped down that summer, and I spent much of the rest of 2011 trying to keep the situation from deteriorating from deadlock into disaster.
It wasn’t easy. By then Hosni Mubarak, the most prominent champion for peace among the Arab states, had fallen from power in Egypt. Unrest was spreading across the region. Israelis faced a new and unpredictable strategic landscape. Some Palestinians wondered if they should be protesting in the streets like the Tunisians, Egyptians, and Libyans. The prospects for a return to serious negotiations seemed further away than ever. A window of opportunity that had opened with the inauguration of President Obama in early 2009 seemed to be closing.
Throughout those difficult days I often thought back to our long discussions in Washington, Sharm el-Sheikh, and Jerusalem. I hoped that one day the constituencies for peace among both peoples would grow so strong and loud that their leaders would be forced to compromise. In my head I heard the deep and steady voice of my slain friend Yitzhak Rabin: “The coldest peace is better than the warmest war.”