The motorcade pulled over to the side of the dusty highway between Ramallah and Jerusalem. Security agents scrambled out of their armored vehicles and peered down the road, back toward the heart of the West Bank. Others looked up at the sky. Israeli intelligence had just shared reports that a rocket might have been fired by Palestinian extremists in the Gaza Strip. There was no way to know for sure where it was headed. American officials in the motorcade who had been riding in a standard-issue van quickly piled into one of the several heavily armored cars that provided better protection from a blast. With everyone situated we were back on the road, headed toward Jerusalem.
In the days before Thanksgiving 2012, the Holy Land once again felt like a war zone. I left a high-level summit in Asia and flew to the Middle East on an emergency diplomatic mission to try to stop an air war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza from escalating into a much more deadly ground war. To do that I would have to broker a cease-fire between implacable and distrustful adversaries against the backdrop of a region in turmoil. After four years of frustrating diplomacy in the Middle East, this would be a crucial test of America’s leadership.
Nearly four years earlier, the Obama Administration had come into office mere days after the end of another conflict in Gaza, one also precipitated by rocket fire into Israel. In early January 2009, the Israeli military launched a ground invasion of Gaza to stop rockets being launched by militants across the border. After nearly two weeks of brutal urban fighting that left about 1,400 people dead in Gaza, Israel pulled back and resumed a de facto siege of the Palestinian enclave. For the next few years, persistent but low-level violence continued across the border. More than one hundred rockets were fired into southern Israel in both 2009 and 2010, as well as occasional mortar attacks. In some cases Israeli jets would retaliate with air strikes. This situation was far from acceptable, but by the standards of the region it was considered a relatively quiet time. But starting in 2011, as the extremists rearmed and much of the Middle East was swept by revolution, the violence escalated. Hundreds of rockets hit Israel that year. The pace accelerated in 2012. On November 11, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned about potential Israeli action against terrorist factions in Gaza after more than a hundred rockets hit southern Israel in a twenty-four-hour period, injuring three Israelis.
Since 2007, Gaza had been ruled by Hamas, the extremist Palestinian group founded in the late 1980s during the first intifada and designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. Its stated goal was not an independent state in the Palestinian territories, but the destruction of Israel altogether and the establishment of an Islamic emirate in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. For years it drew financial and military support from Iran and Syria, and, after the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, it competed with the more moderate Fatah Party of Mahmoud Abbas for leadership of the Palestinian cause. After winning legislative elections in 2006, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip from Abbas and the Palestinian Authority in 2007, and it held on to power despite the 2009 war. Hamas and its foreign backers spent their money on arms smuggling to rebuild their stocks, while Gaza’s economy continued to decline and its people continued to suffer.
Then the upheaval of the Arab Spring shook up the Middle East chessboard, and Hamas found itself navigating a changed landscape. In Syria, its traditional patron, the Alawite dictator Bashar al-Assad, engaged in a brutal crackdown against the largely Sunni population. Hamas, a Sunni organization, abandoned its headquarters in Damascus. At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist party with ties to Hamas, rose to power in postrevolutionary Egypt, across the border from Gaza. For Hamas, it was like one door opening just as another one was closing. Complicating matters further, Hamas faced growing competition at home from other extremist groups, in particular Palestinian Islamic Jihad, equally intent on fighting Israel but not burdened by any responsibility to govern Gaza or deliver results to the people.
With Israel enforcing a blockade of Gaza by sea and keeping tight control of its northern and eastern borders, the main point of resupply for Hamas came through the short southern border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Under Mubarak the Egyptians were reasonably strict about smuggling and generally worked well with Israel, although Hamas found success digging tunnels beneath the border and into Egyptian territory. After Mubarak fell and the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power in Egypt, crossing the Gaza border became easier.
At the same time, Egyptian authorities started to lose control of the Sinai Peninsula. The 23,000-square-mile desert region juts out into the Red Sea from the eastern banks of the Suez Canal. The Sinai is famous for its role in the Bible and its strategic location as a land bridge between Africa and Asia. It was invaded by Israel twice, once in 1956 during the Suez Crisis and again in 1967 during the Six Day War. Under the terms of the 1979 Camp David Accords, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt, and an international peacekeeping force including U.S. troops arrived to maintain the truce. Sinai is also home to nomadic and restive Bedouin tribes long marginalized by Cairo. These tribes took advantage of the chaos triggered by the Egyptian Revolution by asserting their autonomy and demanding more economic support from the government and greater respect from government security forces. As the Sinai descended into lawlessness, extremists with links to al Qaeda began to see it as a safe haven.
In one of my first meetings with the new Egyptian President, Mohamed Morsi, I asked, “What are you going to do to prevent al Qaeda and other extremists from destabilizing Egypt and, in particular, the Sinai?” His response was “Why would they do that? We have an Islamist government now.” Expecting solidarity from terrorists was either quite naïve or shockingly sinister. “Because you will never be pure enough,” I explained. “I don’t care what your positions are. They will come after you. And you’ll have to protect your country and your government.” He would hear none of it.
By August 2012, the threat posed by the situation in the Sinai was undeniable. One Sunday evening, a group of some thirty-five armed and masked militants attacked an Egyptian Army outpost near the border with Israel and killed sixteen soldiers as they were sitting down to eat dinner. The extremists then stole an armored vehicle and a truck, loaded it with explosives, and headed toward Israel. The truck exploded as they barreled through the border fence at the Kerem Shalom crossing. Israeli air strikes then destroyed the armored vehicle. The confrontation lasted only about fifteen minutes, but it badly shook both Egypt and Israel. After the tragedy, with U.S. support, Egypt increased efforts to fight militants in Sinai, including with the use of air power. But the area remained highly unstable.
Then, in late October, two more events occurred in quick succession that demonstrated how truly complicated and unstable the situation had become.
On October 23, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, visited Gaza at the invitation of Hamas. It was the first time a head of state had gone to the isolated enclave since Hamas took control in 2007, and both sides played up the symbolism. The Emir drove in from Egypt in a lavish motorcade of about fifty black Mercedes-Benzes and armored Toyotas, and Hamas greeted him with all the pomp and circumstance it could muster. Ismail Haniya, the Hamas Prime Minister, declared that the Qatari visit marked the end of the “political and economic siege that was imposed on Gaza” and introduced his wife in her first public appearance. For his part, the Emir pledged $400 million in development aid, more than Gaza received from all other international donors combined. He was accompanied by his wife, Sheikha Moza, and his cousin Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, or HBJ as we called him, who served as Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.
For Haniya and Hamas, this was an opportunity to get out from behind the shadow of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, recognized by the international community as the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people, and to show that their future was bright despite any estrangement from Syria and Iran. For Qatar, it was a chance to revel in a newfound regional influence and stake a claim as the Arab world’s chief backer of the Palestinian cause. For Israel, it was a source of growing concern. For the United States, which continued to view Hamas as a dangerous terrorist organization, Qatar was a conundrum that illustrated the complexity of dealing with the Middle East during this turbulent time.
Geographically Qatar looks like a small finger extending into the Persian Gulf from Saudi Arabia. At just over 4,400 square miles, it’s less than half the size of Vermont, but it is blessed with extensive reserves of oil and natural gas and, per capita, is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. There are only about a quarter of a million Qatari citizens, but many times that number of foreign workers are imported to keep the country running. Sheikh Hamad deposed his father to become Emir in 1995 and soon set about raising Qatar’s profile. Under his governance, the booming capital city of Doha came to rival Dubai and Abu Dhabi as regional hubs of trade and culture, and its satellite television network Al Jazeera became the most influential source of news in the Middle East and a platform for Qatar to influence the entire region.
Like its Gulf neighbors, Qatar had little in the way of democracy or respect for universal human rights, but it has maintained strong strategic and security ties with the United States, and it hosts a major U.S. Air Force installation. This balancing act was put to the test across the Gulf during the Arab Spring.
The Emir and HBJ maneuvered to take advantage of the regional upheaval and position Qatar as a champion of the revolutions. Their goal was to turn their small nation into a major power in the Middle East by backing the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists across the region. The other Gulf monarchies feared that such a course would invite instability at home, but the Qataris saw a chance to build influence with the new players emerging on the scene and to champion their conservative cultural views, along with distracting attention from their own lack of reform at home.
Using the soft power of Al Jazeera and their bottomless checkbook, the Emir and HBJ bankrolled Morsi in Egypt, funneled weapons to Islamist rebels in Libya and Syria, and built new ties to Hamas in Gaza. Qatari fighter jets also helped enforce the no-fly zone in Libya. Everywhere you turned in the Middle East in those days, you saw the hand of Qatar. It was an impressive diplomatic tour de force, and in some instances Qatar’s efforts aligned with our own. But other Arab nations and Israel saw Qatar’s support for Islamist forces and extremist elements as posing a growing threat. The Emir’s visit to Gaza crystallized the problem. (In 2013, with Islamists in retreat in Egypt and elsewhere, the Emir abdicated in favor of his son, and HBJ was replaced by a low-profile former Deputy Interior Minister. Relations among the Gulf states reached a nadir in March 2014, when Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE withdrew their Ambassadors from Qatar.)
Within hours of the Emir’s visit to Gaza, explosions rocked a weapons factory in Khartoum, Sudan. Sudanese officials said that four warplanes had flown in from the east and bombed the factory, killing two people. They pointed the finger squarely at Israel. It was not the first time. Over the previous four years the Sudanese had accused Israel of conducting several air strikes against targets in their country. Just that September, a shipment of rockets and munitions bound for Gaza was destroyed south of Khartoum. The Israelis declined to comment about the factory explosion, but a senior Defense Ministry official noted that Sudan “is supported by Iran, and it serves as a route for the transfer, via Egyptian territory, of Iranian weapons to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”
Sudan certainly had a checkered history with terrorism. It harbored Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s, and in 1993, the State Department designated it a state sponsor of terrorism. Sudan also maintained close ties with both Iran and Hamas. Shortly after the explosion at the weapons factory, two Iranian warships visited Port Sudan. Hamas leader Khaled Meshal visited Khartoum a few weeks later.
Taken together, all of these regional factors—rocket fire from Gaza, instability in the Sinai, Qatari power plays, Iranian meddling, smuggling from Sudan—made for an intensely combustible situation in the fall of 2012. In November, the cauldron boiled over.
On November 14, 2012, I was with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey in Perth, Australia, for annual consultations with our Australian allies in a conference center in Kings Park, overlooking the city and the Swan River. As our afternoon session was breaking up, Panetta got word that Israeli Defense Minister Barak was urgently trying to reach him. Panetta stepped into a kitchen area to take the secure call from Jerusalem. After lunch, he joined General Dempsey and me on a patio to share Barak’s report. I could tell from his face that things were about to get complicated. The Israeli military was about to launch a major air campaign against militants in Gaza. The bombing runs would start imminently.
From peaceful Perth, the prospect of another war in the Middle East felt a million miles away (actually about seven thousand), but this was deadly serious. I told Panetta and Dempsey that the Israeli response was understandable. The Hamas rockets were becoming increasingly advanced and accurate, to the point of even threatening Tel Aviv, forty miles from the border. Residents there hadn’t faced air-raid warnings since the first Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles at Israel. Every country has the right to defend itself, and no government could be expected to accept such provocation. Still any escalation in violence was going to make the situation that much harder to contain, and no one wanted to see a repeat of the all-out war that raged only four years earlier.
The first major round of air strikes killed Ahmed Jabari, a terrorist accused of planning many attacks against Israelis over the years. Over the next two days people on both sides were killed. The front page of the New York Times on November 16 was dominated by dramatic side-by-side photographs of funerals in Gaza City and Jerusalem.
According to Israel, during that week more than 1,500 rockets were fired from Gaza. Six Israelis, four civilians and two soldiers, were killed, and more than two hundred were injured. Many Israeli families were forced to evacuate their homes in southern areas near Gaza as rockets continued to rain down from the sky. Hundreds of Palestinians were reportedly killed in the air campaign the Israeli military called Operation Pillar of Defense.
I received frequent updates from Ambassador Dan Shapiro and his team at our embassy in Tel Aviv and from our experts back in Washington. Deputy Secretary Bill Burns, who had served as the Department’s top Middle East official under Colin Powell, once again gathered information for me. Bill and I agreed that there was a limited window in which diplomacy might be able to head off further escalation of the conflict.
I called Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr to see if there was anything Egypt could do to ratchet down the tensions. “We can’t accept this,” Amr said of the Israeli air strikes. Though Mubarak had been replaced as President by Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, I hoped Egypt would remain a key intermediary and voice for peace. I appealed to Amr’s sensitivity about Egypt’s stature. “I think your role in this is very important and I urge you to do everything you can to deescalate the situation,” I said, telling him that Egypt had to talk to Hamas and urge them to cease bombing Israel. Israel was only acting in self-defense, I argued, and “there is no country on earth that can sit by and absorb rockets being fired at their people.” Amr agreed to try. “I hope both of us can do something to stop this craziness,” he said. “We need to work together in a close effort.”
As I traveled across Australia, from Perth to Adelaide, and then to Singapore, President Obama and I stayed in close contact, coordinating the pressure we were placing on our Middle Eastern counterparts. He leaned on Morsi and consulted with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Prime Minister Erdoğan, urging all sides to push for a cease-fire. As we compared notes, we considered whether more direct engagement made sense. Should I fly to the Middle East to try to end the violence?
Neither of us was sure my going was the wisest course. For starters, he and I had serious business to attend to in Asia. After a quick stop in Singapore, I was planning to meet President Obama in Thailand and then travel to Burma with him for a historic visit intended to bolster that country’s nascent democratic opening. Then we were to go to Cambodia for a big summit of Asian leaders that was expected to be dominated by delicate diplomacy over the South China Sea. Personal attention counts for a lot in Asia, so leaving now would come at a cost.
That wasn’t all: The President was understandably wary of our taking on a direct mediation role in the middle of another messy conflict in the Middle East. If we tried to broker a cease-fire and failed, as seemed quite likely, it would sap America’s prestige and credibility in the region. There was even a good chance that direct U.S. engagement would set back the cause of peace by raising the profile of the conflict and prompting both sides to stiffen their negotiating positions. That was the last thing he or I wanted or America needed.
I continued as planned with the Asia trip, spending as much time as possible on the phone with key Middle Eastern leaders and concerned European allies. On every call I argued that the best path forward would be a simultaneous cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
The stakes were high. The Israeli Cabinet had called up seventy-five thousand reservists for a possible ground invasion of Gaza. As feared, this was shaping up as a replay of the January 2009 war, which had taken a horrendous toll on the people of Gaza and on Israel’s reputation globally. It was imperative to resolve the crisis before it became a ground war. The only good news was that the Iron Dome air defense system that we had helped build to protect Israel from rockets was working even better than expected. The Israeli military reported the Iron Dome had a success rate of more than 80 percent for all rockets it targeted. Even if that was a generous estimate, the success rate was astonishing. Still, one rocket from Gaza hitting its targets was one too many, and the Israelis were determined to go after the stockpiles and launch sites in Gaza.
When I joined President Obama in Bangkok on November 18, I reported that my telephone diplomacy was running into a difficult reality: Neither side wanted to be seen blinking first. He was finding the same thing with his calls. This is why I kept pushing the idea of a simultaneous cease-fire, with both sides stepping back from the brink at the same time.
“Hamas is trying to propose conditions before a cease-fire. Israel will never accept that and we have no more than forty-eight hours before Israel might launch a ground offensive, which will be devastating,” I warned Qatar’s HBJ an hour after arriving in Bangkok.
The President and I paid a quiet private visit to the ailing King of Thailand in a Bangkok hospital and walked together around the famous Wat Pho temple, home to Thailand’s largest gold “reclining Buddha” statue, more than 150 feet long. Despite the surroundings, our conversation kept coming back to Gaza. There was no doubt in either of our minds that Israel had a right to defend itself. But we also knew that a ground invasion could be catastrophic for all concerned.
Two days later the situation was so dire that I decided to raise again with the President the idea of my leaving Asia and flying to the Middle East to personally intervene in the conflict. It was fraught with risk, but even if we failed, the danger of an impending wider war was now too great to hold anything back. First thing that morning, I went upstairs to the President’s suite in the elegant old Raffles Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He was still in the shower, so I waited for a few minutes. As he drank his morning coffee, we talked over what to do. He remained wary. What were the chances that my going would actually stop the violence? Would it look like we were undercutting Israel? What might be the unintended consequences of putting America in the middle of this mess? We discussed all those questions and more. In the end we agreed that peace in the Middle East was a compelling national security priority; it was crucial to avoid another ground war in Gaza; and there was no substitute for American leadership.
The President wasn’t 100 percent there yet, but he agreed that I should start getting ready to go. Huma and our traveling team began scrambling to work out the logistics of diverting from Cambodia to Israel, not exactly your typical route. It was only two days before Thanksgiving, and there was no telling how long this would take, so I encouraged anyone from the staff who needed to get home to hitch a ride back to the States with the President on Air Force One.
Later that morning the President and I huddled one more time in a makeshift “hold room” in Phnom Penh’s massive Peace Palace conference center. In a small space cordoned off by pipes and drapes, we went over the pros and cons one more time. Jake Sullivan, Tom Donilon, and Ben Rhodes joined us for a final go-round. Donilon was nervous, having been burned too many times over the years by misadventures in the Middle East, but eventually he agreed I should go. The President listened to all the arguments and then made his decision. It was time to act. We might not succeed, but we sure were going to get caught trying.
The President said he would call both Morsi and Bibi from Air Force One on the way back to Washington to try to make more headway before I touched down. His parting advice was familiar encouragement. Just as when we negotiated the fate of the blind human rights dissident Chen Guangcheng, the President’s message was clear: “Don’t screw up!” I wasn’t planning to.
On the eleven-hour flight from Cambodia to Israel, I thought long and hard about the complexities of the crisis. You couldn’t understand what was going on in Gaza without also understanding the path these rockets had taken before they were launched, winding their way from Iran through Sudan and ultimately to Hamas, and what those links meant for regional security. You also had to understand the increasingly significant role technology played. The rockets were getting more and more sophisticated, but so were Israel’s air defenses. Which would prove decisive? Then you had to consider how the conflict in Syria was creating friction between Sunni Hamas and its longtime Shiite patrons in Damascus and Tehran, at the same time that the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood was rising in Cairo and the Syrian civil war continued to unfold. What about the growing instability in the Sinai and the pressure it was putting on the new Egyptian government? Israel was heading toward elections, and Netanyahu’s coalition was far from stable. How would Israel’s domestic politics influence his stance on Gaza? All these questions and many more would be swirling as I tried to negotiate a cease-fire.
From the plane I called German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who was in Jerusalem conducting his own consultations. “I’m sitting here in the hotel you will stay in—we just had a rocket alarm and had to leave our rooms,” he told me. “You can’t imagine how nervous the situation is.”
At nearly 10 P.M. on November 20, we landed at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv and drove the thirty minutes to Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem. I went right upstairs and sat down with the Prime Minister and a small group of our aides. The Israelis told us they had already begun talks with the Egyptians, who were representing Hamas, but they were foundering on long-standing and difficult issues regarding Israel’s embargo of Gaza, freedom of movement for its people, fishing rights off the coast, and other existing tensions. Bibi and his team were very pessimistic that any deal could be reached. They said they were serious about launching a ground invasion into Gaza if nothing changed. They would give me some time, but not much. I was now on the clock.
As the hours went by, the Prime Minister’s staff kept wheeling in carts of food, stacked high with grilled cheese sandwiches and tiny éclairs. Comfort food in the midst of high stress, though nobody was looking at his or her watch. I appreciated the fact that Bibi and his team held nothing back around me. They interrupted and contradicted one another, even the Prime Minister.
Netanyahu was under a lot of pressure to invade. Opinion polls in Israel strongly favored such a step, especially among Bibi’s Likud base. But Israeli military commanders were warning of high numbers of casualties, and Netanyahu was also concerned about the regional consequences. How would Egypt react? Would Hezbollah begin attacking from Lebanon? He also knew that the military had achieved most of its goals within the first few hours of sustained air strikes, especially degrading Hamas’s long-range rocket capabilities, and that Iron Dome was doing a good job protecting Israeli citizens. Bibi didn’t want a ground war, but he was having trouble finding an exit ramp that would allow Israel to disengage and deescalate without making it seem as if it was backing down in the face of continued Hamas defiance, which would only invite more violence later. Meanwhile Mubarak was gone and the Israelis didn’t trust the new Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo. That made the role of the United States even more crucial. At least one Israeli official later told me that this was the hardest choice Netanyahu had faced as Prime Minister.
I said I was going to fly to Cairo the next day, and I wanted to bring with me a document that I could present to President Morsi as the basis for final negotiations. The key, I thought, was to be sure to have a few points where the Israelis would be willing to make concessions if pressed, so Morsi could feel as if he had gotten a good deal for the Palestinians. We went round and round on the specifics without finding a formula that would work.
We broke up the meeting after midnight, and I headed to the iconic eighty-year-old King David Hotel for a few hours of restless sleep. It seemed more likely than not that this diplomatic mission would fail and Israeli troops would enter Gaza. In the morning I drove to Ramallah to consult with Abbas. Though his influence here was limited, I didn’t want to exclude him and in any way lend legitimacy to Hamas in the inter-Palestinian power struggle. I also knew that the Palestinian Authority continued to pay salaries and stipends to thousands of people in Gaza, despite Hamas rule, so it would be helpful to have Abbas’s support for a cease-fire.
By this time the Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah was familiar ground to me. Known as the Mukataa, it was originally built as a British fort in the 1920s and became famous in 2002, when the Israeli Army besieged the compound with Yasser Arafat and his top aides trapped inside and eventually destroyed most of it. In 2012, there were few signs of that violent history. The complex had been rebuilt and now included Arafat’s limestone mausoleum, where a Palestinian honor guard stood watch as visitors came to pay their respects.
It had been a difficult year for Abbas. His popularity was sagging, and the economy in the West Bank was slowing. After the Israeli settlement moratorium expired in late 2010 and he pulled out of direct negotiations, Abbas had decided to petition the UN to recognize Palestine as an independent state. He had staked his career on the idea that statehood could be achieved through peaceful means—as opposed to the Hamas vision of armed struggle—and the failure of negotiations severely undercut his political position. Abbas felt he needed to find another nonviolent avenue to press forward if he was going to keep his hold on power and continue to offer a viable alternative to the extremists. A symbolic vote at the UN was unlikely to do much for the everyday life of Palestinians, but sticking it to Israel on the world stage and exposing its growing isolation would bolster Abbas at home—and, the Palestinians argued, might encourage Israel to make concessions. The problem was that going to the UN ran counter to the crucial idea that peace could be achieved only by negotiations between the parties, with compromises from both sides. Unilateral actions, whether it was a Palestinian statehood bid at the UN or Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, eroded trust and made it harder to foster those compromises.
Throughout 2011, we unsuccessfully tried to convince Abbas to abandon his petition, while also working to make sure there would not be enough votes in the Security Council to move it forward. (We wanted to avoid having to use our veto if possible.) At the same time, I began working with the EU’s Cathy Ashton and Tony Blair on a framework for restarting direct negotiations based on terms of reference President Obama had outlined in his May 2011 speech. There was a flurry of diplomacy at the UN General Assembly in September 2011, but it was not enough to dissuade Abbas from submitting his petition and forcing the issue. Thanks to our behind-the-scenes cajoling, it went nowhere in the Security Council. All Abbas got for his troubles—besides strained relations with the United States and Israel—was membership at UNESCO, the UN cultural agency. He pledged to return in 2012 and try again.
Now Hamas was upstaging Abbas with its headline-grabbing resistance to Israel and making him look tired and weak to his people. I think he was grateful for my visit but depressed by his situation. After a rather desultory discussion, he agreed to back my peacemaking efforts and wished me well in Cairo.
Then it was back to Jerusalem for another discussion with Netanyahu. His advisors had called in the middle of the night and asked us to return for another meeting before leaving for Cairo. We went issue by issue, carefully calibrating how far the Israelis could bend without breaking and gaming out how things might go with the Egyptians. By the end of the meeting we had a strategy in place and I had Israeli-approved language to bring to Egypt as a basis for negotiations.
Then I headed to the airport. While we were en route, word came of a bus bombing in Tel Aviv, the first in years. Dozens of people had been hurt. It was an ominous reminder of the urgency of my mission.
Midafternoon on November 21, I arrived at the Presidential Palace in Cairo where I had met with Mubarak so many times before. The building and household staff were the same, but now the Muslim Brotherhood was in charge. So far Morsi had upheld the Camp David Peace Treaty with Israel, which had been a cornerstone of regional stability for decades, but how long would that last if Israel invaded Gaza again? Would he seek to reaffirm Egypt’s traditional role as mediator and peacemaker and establish himself as an international statesman? Or would he move to exploit popular anger and position himself as the one man in the Middle East who could stand up to Israel? We were about to put him to the test.
Morsi was an unusual politician. History had thrust him from the back room to the big chair. In many ways he was in over his head, trying to learn how to govern from scratch in a very difficult setting. Morsi clearly loved the power of his new position and thrived on the dance of politics (until it later consumed him). I was relieved to see that, in the case of Gaza at least, he seemed more interested in being a dealmaker than a demagogue. We met in his office with a small group of his advisors and began going through the document I had brought from Israel’s Prime Minister, line by line.
I encouraged Morsi to think about Egypt’s strategic role in the region and his own role in history. He spoke solid English, having earned his PhD from the University of Southern California in materials science in 1982 and taught at California State University, Northridge, until 1985. He scrutinized every phrase of the text. “What does this mean? Has this been translated right?” he asked. At one point he exclaimed, “I don’t accept this.” “But you proposed it in one of your early drafts,” I responded. “Oh, we did? OK,” he agreed. He even overruled Foreign Minister Amr at one point in the negotiations and offered a key concession.
The proposal was brief and to the point. At an agreed-upon “zero hour,” Israel would halt all hostilities in Gaza, from land, sea, and air, and the Palestinian factions would stop rocket launches and all other attacks along the border. Egypt would act as guarantor and monitor. The tricky part was what would come next. When would the Israelis loosen restrictions at the border crossings so Palestinians could get in food and supplies? How could Israel be sure Hamas wasn’t rebuilding its rocket arsenal? We proposed that these complicated issues “be dealt with after twenty-four hours from the start of the cease-fire.” That was intentionally vague, the idea being that Egypt could facilitate substantive talks once the fighting ended. Netanyahu had given me the running room to negotiate which issues were specifically mentioned in this clause, and I needed it. Morsi pressed on a few points, and we revised the list several times, eventually settling on the following: “Opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods and refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas and procedures of implementation shall be dealt with after twenty-four hours from the start of the cease-fire.”
Throughout the negotiations the Egyptians were on the phone with the leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian extremist factions in Gaza, including some who were actually sitting in the offices of the Egyptian intelligence services across town. Morsi’s team, new to governing, was tentative with the Palestinians and seemed uncomfortable twisting their arms to get a deal done. We kept reminding the Muslim Brotherhood men that they now represented a major regional power, and it was their responsibility to deliver.
I updated President Obama frequently and spoke to Netanyahu several times. He and Morsi wouldn’t speak directly to each other, so I served as the conduit for a high-stakes game of telephone negotiations, while Jake and our formidable Ambassador in Cairo, Anne Patterson, were drilling down on some of the trickier details with Morsi’s advisors.
Netanyahu was intent on gaining U.S. and Egyptian help to block new weapons shipments into Gaza. He didn’t want to end the air strikes and then find himself back in this untenable position in another year or two. When I pressed Morsi on that point, he agreed it would be in Egypt’s security interests as well. But he, in turn, wanted a commitment to reopen Gaza’s borders to humanitarian aid and other goods as soon as possible, plus greater freedom of movement for Palestinian fishing boats off the coast. Netanyahu was willing to be flexible on these points if he received assurances on the weapons and the rockets stopped. With each turn of the discussion, we inched closer and closer to an understanding.
After hours of intense negotiation we hammered out an agreement. The cease-fire would go into effect at 9 P.M. local time, just a few hours away. (It was an arbitrary time, but we needed to come up with a clear answer to the basic question “When will the violence stop?”) But before we could declare victory, there was one more piece of business to attend to. We had agreed that President Obama would call Bibi, both to personally ask him to agree to the cease-fire and to promise increased American assistance cracking down on weapons smuggling into Gaza. Was this political cover so Bibi could tell his Cabinet and his voters he had called off the invasion because Israel’s most important ally had begged him? Or did he take some personal satisfaction from making the President jump through hoops? Either way, if this was what it would take to seal the deal, we needed to get it done.
Meanwhile my team anxiously watched the clock. It was now after 6:00 in Cairo on the night before Thanksgiving. Air Force regulations about crew rest were going to kick in soon, which would mean we wouldn’t be able to take off until the next day. But if we left soon, under the wire, we might just make it back in time for people to spend the holiday with their families. Any snags, and the only turkey we’d be eating for Thanksgiving would be the Air Force’s famous turkey taco salad. Of course, this wasn’t the first holiday threatened by the crazy demands of international diplomacy, and no one on my team complained; they just wanted to get the job done.
Finally all the pieces were in place, the call was made, and we received the go-ahead from Jerusalem and Washington. Essam al-Haddad, Morsi’s national security advisor, got down on his knees to thank God. Foreign Minister Amr and I walked downstairs to a jam-packed press conference and announced that a cease-fire had been agreed to. It was absolute pandemonium in there, with emotions running high. Amr spoke of “Egypt’s historic responsibility toward the Palestinian cause” and also its “keenness to stop the bloodshed” and preserve regional stability. The new Muslim Brotherhood government would never seem as credible again as it did that day. I thanked President Morsi for his mediation and praised the agreement, but cautioned, “There is no substitute for a just and lasting peace” that “advances the security, dignity, and legitimate aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis alike.” So our work was far from over. I pledged that “in the days ahead, the United States will work with partners across the region to consolidate this progress, improve conditions for the people of Gaza, and provide security for the people of Israel.”
As our motorcade raced through the streets of Cairo that night, I wondered how long—or even if—the cease-fire would hold. The region had seen so many cycles of violence and dashed hopes. It would take only a few extremists and a rocket launcher to reignite the conflict. Both sides would have to work hard to preserve the peace. And even if they succeeded, there would be difficult talks over the coming days about all the complex issues we had deferred in the agreement. I could easily be back here soon, trying to put the pieces together again.
At 9 P.M., as scheduled, the skies above Gaza grew quiet. But in the streets below thousands of Palestinians celebrated. Hamas leaders, who had narrowly avoided another devastating Israeli invasion, declared victory. In Israel, Netanyahu adopted a somber tone and speculated that it was still “very possible” that he would be forced to launch “a much harsher military operation” if the cease-fire did not hold. Yet despite these contrasting reactions, it seemed to me that the two most important strategic outcomes of the conflict boded quite well for Israel. First, for the time being at least, Egypt remained a partner for peace, which had been in serious doubt since the fall of Mubarak. Second, the success of Iron Dome in shooting down incoming rockets had reinforced Israel’s “qualitative military edge” and exposed the futility of Hamas’s military threats.
When we got to the plane, I asked Jake if the agreement was still holding. I was only half joking. He said yes, and I settled in for the long flight home.
As it turned out, the cease-fire held better than anyone expected. In 2013, Israel enjoyed the quietest year in a decade. Later, one senior Israeli official confided to me that his government had been forty-eight hours away from launching a ground invasion of Gaza and that my diplomatic intervention was the only thing standing in the way of a much more explosive confrontation. Of course, I continue to believe that over the long run nothing will do more to secure Israel’s future as a Jewish democratic state than a comprehensive peace based on two states for two peoples.