According to the Oslo agreement, by the end of 1998 the Palestinians should have received most of the Occupied Territories, and the two sides should have entered into negotiations over final borders, security, Jerusalem, settlements, water, and refugees. But Palestinian and Jewish terror combined with the continued expansion of settlements to destroy Oslo. By October of that year, Arafat had received only a fraction of what he felt had been promised, and he was running out of patience because he couldn’t show his people that negotiating with the Israelis had brought them any closer to ending the occupation.
The Americans shared his frustration; Clinton began pressuring Bibi to complete the transfer of territory. In parallel, he instructed the CIA to boost the Palestinian security apparatus’s anti-terrorism efforts.
Netanyahu finally agreed to take part in a summit hosted by President Clinton at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland where Bibi and Arafat would finally negotiate face-to-face. On the table was Clinton’s proposal that Israel withdraw from an additional 13 percent of the West Bank.
On the eve of the Clinton-Netanyahu-Arafat summit, Bibi’s government announced plans to build twelve hundred homes near the Alei Zahav settlement, three miles inside the West Bank.
Amazingly, Jibril and his forces continued working with us. In one case we got information about an attack in the center of Israel being planned in the Nablus area by a Hamas operative close to Sheikh Yassin. A courier was on his way to Gaza to meet with Yassin in order to receive the final green light when we captured him at the Erez checkpoint.
Through various means, we already knew about the bomb maker in Nablus, and we knew the attack was planned for the following day. What we didn’t know was the exact house where we could track down the terrorists before they could act. We had a classic ticking bomb on our hands, and I expected the interrogators to pull out all the stops to extract the bomb’s location from the prisoner.
When the head of interrogation called me in my office, I told him to proceed with the interrogation as if dealing with a “ticking bomb.” Picturing a car exploding in front of a kindergarten somewhere, I would have pulled the guy’s fingernails out with my teeth if that’s what it took to keep the bomb from going off. Nothing quite so barbaric was necessary.
Within half an hour, and without prompting — the interrogator never laid a finger on him — the man confessed everything: the precise location of the explosives and the operational outline of the attack.
At once, I called Jibril and told him what we knew. We agreed that one of our people would join his team in making the arrests, and he’d then hand over the terrorists to us.
Things went as planned. But once he had the terrorists in his grips, Jibril reneged on our agreement. “I just can’t hand over Palestinians to the Israelis,” he said. “You would not have given me a Jew who had planned an attack on us.”
I was about to lay into him for going back on our agreement when he added a line that shut me up. “Ami, with us Palestinians, there is no Saison” — a French expression meaning “hunting season.” Jibril, translator of Menachem Begin, was referring to a roundup of right-wing Jewish underground fighters, duly handed over to the British, which Ben-Gurion ordered in 1944.
While he spoke, I imagined a sly grin on his face. He was right, of course. I understood and released him from the promise. He then gave us all the information he had uncovered from the terrorists and offered for our interrogators to join his in extracting more. I refused the offer — his men undertook interrogation without our legal system, our Supreme Court, and our watchdog human rights organizations such as the Public Committee Against Torture.
I also knew we couldn’t count on this cooperation forever. Jibril made it clear he was only working with me because he believed it would lead to the end of occupation. What would happen, I asked myself a thousand times, if the ranks of Palestinian police, and the two million Palestinians in cities and refugee camps, lost hope that we would ever clear out of Judea and Samaria? Would our partners turn to violence out of the fear that, if they didn’t, their outraged countrymen would flock to Hamas? Might they even join the jihad?
In May 1999, I pushed such fears from my mind as I paced nervously behind the stage set up in Tel Aviv’s public gathering place formerly known as Kings of Israel Square, renamed Rabin Square in 1995 after he was assassinated in the adjacent parking lot. On the stage stood Ehud Barak, the new prime minister whose life I was sworn to protect. My old colleague and former chief of the General Staff had just defeated Bibi in the national elections. To a throng of supporters at the rally he declared the “dawn of a new day.” Unlike Netanyahu, who saw Oslo as a disaster for the Jewish people, Barak said he believed in two states for two peoples. His election slogan, repeated a thousand times, was Anachnu po, hem sham — We are here, and they are there.
I was too busy keeping an eye out for possible Yigal Amir copycats to pay much attention to the speeches and revelry, to the people holding up champagne bottles with Ehud’s face on the label.
The crowds that evening, like the Palestinians, had faith that Barak, Israel’s most decorated soldier and a genius famously able to build a clock out of a mousetrap, would pick up where his former Labor colleague Rabin had left off. And though Netanyahu had only implemented a fraction of what he promised at the Wye River summit, Arafat, too, was confident that Barak would hand him the rest and move the political process toward a solution. Another reason to be cautiously optimistic in those days, incredibly, was Hamas. Their military wing was a mere shadow of its former self. In Gaza the Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Yassin, recently released from prison,32 said to an Israeli journalist, “We have to be realistic. We are talking about a homeland that was stolen a long time ago in 1948 and again in 1967. Let’s declare a temporary cease-fire. Let’s leave the bigger issue for future generations to decide.” In those days, he understood that that was what the “Palestinian street” wanted.
A few days after his swearing-in, I returned to the second-floor office on Balfour Street. Ehud was the third prime minister I’d served in three years and a man I’d known for years. I was accustomed to his mannerisms. Like most leaders, he enters the room chin first.
Bibi’s books on terrorism were gone, but otherwise the office looked more or less the same. I didn’t see a gift I had given Ehud four years earlier when he retired from the military and went into politics.33 It was a sextant, a model of an eighteenth-century navigational gadget that allowed captains simultaneously to see the horizon of the sea while measuring the angle of celestial objects, stars, and the sun. The device enables the captain to navigate through cascading waves while charting a course toward the final destination.
Though we had a lot to discuss, I began by asking him why he didn’t have the sextant hanging on the wall or sitting on his desk. He shrugged. I reminded Ehud what I had said when I first gave him the gift. If the marshal’s baton symbolizes military power and authority, the sextant illustrates a key aspect of wise political leadership. My point to Ehud was he would have to manage the day-to-day affairs of our country without losing sight of the “stars” — the long-term vision of the future.
I caught a flash of what might have been a smile.
Next, I presented my assessment of the security situation. Thanks to the security cooperation with the Palestinians and the Hamas archive we pulled from Awadallah’s back, we had cracked the Hamas terror network in the West Bank. A year had passed since the last Israeli civilian died in a terrorist attack; two since a mass suicide bombing. Terrorists were as motivated as ever to murder Israeli civilians, they just couldn’t get through our defenses. They were also hobbled by the drop in public support among Palestinians for terror, partly as a result in their belief in American leadership, which at Wye had succeeded in bringing the Israelis back to the negotiation table.
The new prime minister looked satisfied, and I thought back to what I had once said to Jibril: that our job was to lower the levels of violence so politicians could get on with the job of concluding a peace deal.
“There remain very serious dangers,” I continued.
“Dangers?”
“Our intelligence tells us that if Arafat and the PA can’t deliver on their promises, people on the Palestinian street will reject diplomacy and turn to violence. They’ll come to see PA security apparatus as collaborators with the occupation.” Security depended on a political horizon of hope, I explained, which Bibi never provided. Most Palestinians thought we used Oslo as a pretext to expand settlements. From Arafat’s perspective, too, he got nothing in return for all of the political capital he had spent locking up our enemies.
Ehud shifted in his chair.
“You’ll have to make it clear to the Palestinians that we’re serious this time. Quickly. Lasting security depends on establishing a relationship of trust with Arafat.”
Barak cleared his throat. “Ami,” he finally said, “you don’t understand these things” — by which I think he meant politics. He thought I was wasting my time talking about the importance of trust, of seeing our conflict through Arafat’s eyes, and paying attention to opinion polls.
Having known Barak for so long, I permitted myself to speak frankly. “Ehud, I don’t think you understand Arafat.” I described to him the Palestinian leader’s psyche as I knew it from my meetings with him, intelligence reports, journalism, and books, and I also told him what I thought would be necessary to forge a deal with him. After being burned by Bibi, he needed to see something concrete.
Barak pretended to listen, and even jotted down a few notes on a yellow office pad. “How do you suggest I build trust with Arafat?” he asked. But he sounded like he was already thinking about his next appointment.
My suggestion was a face-to-face meeting with Arafat followed by rapidly withdrawing from the territory Netanyahu had promised him at Wye.
“Something to think about,” he said. Slamming his palm on his desk, he bolted up and accompanied me to the door.
I left the office fearing that Ehud might be too fixated on the stars, blind to the rogue waves coming right at him and at Israel.
For the next seven weeks, Ehud focused on forming his government, which included a number of pro-settlement cabinet ministers. That he found no time to meet with Arafat was noticed by the Palestinians, as were things he was saying in the Hebrew press. Ehud would prefer, he said, to leapfrog over the withdrawal Bibi promised Arafat and head directly to final status negotiations. To keep his coalition together, he also bragged to the Hebrew media how his government was going to build more settlements than Bibi, more than any other prime minister before him. He began rehashing an old speech about Israel being a “modern and prosperous villa in the middle of the jungle where there was no hope for those who cannot defend themselves and no mercy for the weak.”34
“Hold on a second,” Jibril said to me. “Something doesn’t add up. Mr. Barak tells us we’re heading toward a diplomatic agreement, and then he turns around and says something else in Hebrew? Is the person standing opposite us really a Rabin, may he rest in peace, or is he just another Netanyahu?” His fear was that Barak spoke only in the language of power and didn’t believe in diplomacy.
During each meeting with Barak, I repeated the Shabak assessment that a one-on-one meeting with Arafat would dispel the mounting suspicions about Barak’s intentions. Ehud and Arafat finally arranged to meet at the Erez checkpoint in the northern Gaza Strip.
As we were finalizing the security arrangements, I asked someone from the Prime Minister’s Office what kind of gift Ehud would be bringing.
“Gift?” The man looked blindsided.
“Yes.” I reminded the man that we lived in the Middle East, where gifts are signs of respect.
“We don’t have anything to give him.”
“You’ll need to come up with something.”
It was clear that they wouldn’t. For Ehud to show up empty-handed to their first encounter, with the world’s press there to document the niggardly snub, would be like a slap in Arafat’s face. We raced helter-skelter around the Shabak office soliciting ideas, then got money from a rainy-day fund and bought a silver-plated Koran and Torah, in Arabic and Hebrew.
At Erez, Barak shook Arafat’s hand and handed him the box — he probably didn’t know what was inside. From where I was standing, I saw what looked like tears welling up in Arafat’s eyes.
Two weeks later I met Arafat in Ramallah and the tears were still there. With sincerity I couldn’t help but admire, the former terrorist praised Ehud for coming up with the right gesture: The Koran and the Torah touched the most sensitive nerves of both peoples, and the gift was a sign Barak understood this. I nodded respectfully while fearing that my old friend in fact hadn’t a clue.
The meeting at Erez was important but couldn’t replace policies and actions in the field. It was during this encounter that Barak sprung a new plan on Arafat. “Let’s stop everything and conclude a framework agreement while discussing the core issues” — borders, settlements, right of return, security. Concretely, he wanted to push off the Wye withdrawals for six months and launch into final status talks.
“Think about it,” he said.
“My mind is made up. I don’t want this. Implement Wye right away! Netanyahu already agreed.”
“Just give it some thought,” Barak countered.
Ehud headed to Washington to win Clinton over to his plan. He also pulled in Egyptian president Mubarak. With all these maneuvers, Arafat’s belief that Barak was Rabin reincarnate was fading fast. In Gaza, Dahlan threatened to quit if Arafat agreed to talks before getting the lands promised at Wye. Jibril, too, was becoming suspicious. “Ami,” he must have said a dozen times, “we are not your collaborators. We don’t put Hamas members in prison for you. We’re only doing it because our public believes that at the end of the day, we’ll have a state alongside the State of Israel. The minute we stop believing that, you can forget about cooperation.” They were risking a civil war with Hamas to hold up their end of the bargain, and Barak wouldn’t even give them the pittance Bibi had promised.
I had no response. Anyway, I reminded myself, my job wasn’t to do politics. My brief was to stop the bombings, to prevent the territories from erupting into flames, and to provide objective information and advice to the prime minister — to be a gatekeeper.
To do this I had to know the mood among the Palestinians, and reading Shikaki’s polls I sensed we were about to veer into an abyss. With the drone of cement mixers in the Occupied Territories in the background, more than ever Hamas’s refrain — that Oslo was a trick and that Zionists only respond to power and force — was getting through. My sensors Matti Steinberg and Amira Hass in her dispatches in Haaretz told me that if a second Intifada broke out, it would be a spontaneous eruption from the street, fueled by bitter disappointment at the corruption average people saw in their leaders, most of whom came with Arafat from Tunis and hadn’t faced the IDF and Shabak during the Intifada. The main reason would be loss of hope in a process that had only produced more settlements, roadblocks, and humiliation.
Behind the scenes, Barak turned his attention to getting a peace deal with Syria’s President Assad, relegating the Palestinians to the back burner. Our Shabak assessment was that this was a disastrous move. A possible peace deal with Syria would take time, whereas time was a commodity we didn’t have with the Palestinians. All the heads of the intelligence services — the Mossad and the IDF’s military intelligence — agreed with us. We met with Ehud to clarify our position, but he didn’t budge from his decision. I turned to the Americans to see if they could reason with him, but they ended up backing what would be a futile exercise. Talks with Assad went nowhere. Meanwhile Arafat felt betrayed.
It took all their finesse, coddling, and a bit of strong-arming for the Americans to reassure Arafat that Barak remained a committed partner. Eventually, with the help of Egyptian diplomats, the Americans persuaded Arafat to forgo the transfer of territories and proceed directly to a discussion of core issues. In my talks with Ehud, I kept pressing for establishing greater trust, especially after the Syria debacle. The flaws of Oslo were legion, and there was nothing sacred about the approach taken by negotiators five years earlier. There was only one problem with Barak’s approach: “If Arafat doesn’t trust you, he won’t budge from his position.” Negotiations would lead nowhere, and a new round of violence could break out.
Once again, he drummed his fingers on his desk and dismissed me.
In early September a French Jewish billionaire offered up his villa in the Israeli town of Savyon for a private dinner between Barak and Arafat. Maybe, just maybe, the two leaders, both paranoids, would warm up to each other away from the media and teams of diplomats. Maybe they’d even talk about a better future for both peoples. Maybe they’d establish a modicum of trust. Barak came with his wife, Nava. I was there with Barak’s chief of staff and a former general. Abu Mazen, Arafat’s number two, joined us around the table. Yasser Abed Rabbo, once a member of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist group and a frequent target of Flotilla 13 commandos, was there, too. No one else even knew the dinner was happening; members of the Israeli cabinet learned about it afterward.
Over Moroccan couscous and tagine, the idea was for the initial small talk to lead to a comfortable atmosphere for the two leaders to talk. Barak began by telling a joke, but Arafat just stared into space. The atmosphere was frigid — the lack of trust between the two men was palpable.
But once the food came, the light banter gave way to a frostier atmosphere. Ehud loved to eat and dove into the couscous. Arafat just picked at his food and said nothing. The only bit of warmth came at the end when Arafat planted a kiss on Nava Barak’s forehead.35 The dinner was a disaster.
The Americans intervened to at least create the appearance of movement. Arafat eventually caved to American pressure and agreed to discuss Barak’s alternative approach with the Israelis. Barak told him he was sending his chief negotiator to present some ideas. Arafat quickly put a negotiation team together headed by two ministers. Barak, though, ran into hurdles. It was a question of trust: There was no one in his government coalition or his cabinet that enjoyed his full confidence.
Struggling, Barak suggested that I head up his team. I refused at once because of the conflict of interest between my position at the Shabak and leading political negotiations. There was another reason I didn’t consider the offer, however, which was my experience with Ehud. I knew him well enough to know that he would maintain multiple channels of communication, and that he would be the only one who saw all the cards. Transparency and trust were not part of his lexicon, and not only in his dealings with the Palestinians.
Polls in Israel and Palestine continued showing hemorrhaging support for both Arafat and Barak. Arafat had nothing left to offer Palestinian society to convince them that they would eventually reach an agreement with Israel. The Shabak was receiving more reports of gun smuggling, and in September, Hamas carried out bombings inside Israel. Only the bombers were killed, but it showed that Hamas was rebuilding its network, and Israelis were scared.
The moment I realized that everything was over, and we were already counting down to a new outbreak of violence, came in November. Following months of delay while Ehud put together his negotiation team, Arafat’s team of senior ministers turned up for a meeting to hear from Barak’s appointed chief negotiator, a former ambassador to Jordan. On the Palestinian side, the expectations were high because, at long last, they would hear the prime minister’s ideas for racing ahead to final status negotiations.
For status-conscious Palestinians, sitting in a room with a diplomat and not a fellow minister was already a slap in the face. Even worse were the man’s opening remarks: “Gentlemen, I don’t have the authority to discuss the core topics.” He added that he had a mandate to discuss only a few relatively minor issues — nothing touching borders, Jerusalem, and the refugees.
“Then why are we here?” the Palestinians turned and whispered to one another. “To talk about soccer?” Based on information I received, when Arafat got a report of the meeting, he was fuming. He felt he was being played, once again.
When the American negotiating team, sensing a new crisis, asked me for my position, I held nothing back. Clinton’s envoys Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk wanted to meet every time they arrived in Israel in the context of peace talks. “Look,” I told them when we sat down in my office, “if there is no change of direction in the process in the next six months, we’re careening in the direction of a violent popular uprising, probably led by disappointed youngsters waving Palestinian flags. My best guess is that it will erupt around the settlements or the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa Mosque area in Jerusalem.”36
Ross and Indyk looked at me as if the pressures of the job had gotten to me. “No way! Arafat just promised us that he had no intention of turning to violence. The prime minister also assured us that he and Arafat can make a deal.”
“Gentlemen, my information says otherwise. Palestinian newspapers and public opinion polls tell us that Arafat no longer represents the aspirations of the Palestinian people. Try to find me a Palestinian who still sees Arafat as a leader. He’s not the guy to talk to. The explosion is going to come from the street. We think it’ll come by the end of 2000. Why? Because average Palestinians have lost confidence in Arafat just as my prime minister has lost the support of the Knesset and of his own ministers.”
“Sure, Ami.”
I looked around at these two well-meaning men working for a well-meaning president. I appreciated the Americans and knew that it was only because of their support and pressure that the peace process had survived Bibi. But I was also a sewage worker in the Middle East, and I knew from my dealings with the CIA and FBI that these people, with all their fine intentions, were lost in the complexity of the region. I didn’t take their assessments seriously because they didn’t understand we were sitting on a fault line. Some earthquakes are tremors that rattle the chandeliers; others can bring down an entire civilization.