As Israel’s prime minister and minister of defense after the election, I was sometimes described as emotionally buttoned-up, even stoic, and there is some truth in that. But while it may not have shown, I felt a churn of emotions when formally presenting my government in July 1999 as Nava, our three daughters, her parents, and mine looked on proudly from the gallery of the Knesset. Even more when I entered the prime minister’s office, I was powerfully conscious of both the honor and weighty responsibility of becoming just the tenth person to hold that position. I’d been in the office before: as head of military intelligence, chief of staff, and a cabinet minister. Yet to sit behind the vast wooden desk and to know that the buck now truly stopped with me was very different.
Israel faced two deepening crises. The first was domestic. Though Rabin’s assassin was now in jail, the divisiveness and hatred of which he was a product and symbol had not gone away. Nor had other rifts: between the privileged and disadvantaged, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and, perhaps most of all, secular and religious. The second, more immediate challenge was the stalled peace process. If we were going to revive it, we were running against the clock. President Clinton, key to any hope of our redeeming Yitzhak’s legacy and turning the promise of Oslo into real peace, had only eighteen months remaining in office. In terms of Israel’s security, the timetable was even less forgiving. From my very first intelligence briefings as prime minister, I saw strong evidence of what I’d been warning Bibi about for months: without a political breakthrough, a new, much more deadly intifada was only a matter of time.
That would have been reason enough to make peace efforts my first priority. But even as I addressed the victory rally in Rabin Square, I sensed that the simple arithmetic of the election results would leave me no other choice. I was entering office with the largest electoral mandate in our history. But that was because of Israel’s new voting system, with separate ballots cast for prime minister and party. That system had exerted precisely the opposite effect on party voting. In previous elections, most Israelis had chosen one of the two main parties, knowing that only they had a realistic chance of forming a government. Now they could directly choose the prime minister, giving them the luxury to vote in much greater numbers for an array of smaller, issue-specific parties. The result: though I’d won by a landslide, and One Israel had the largest number of Knesset seats, even with our natural left-of-center ally, Meretz, we would have only thirty-six Knesset seats—well short of the sixty-one needed for a majority. Even if we included a few smaller parties, there was no choice but to bring in one of the two larger ones: the Sephardi Orthodox Shas, with seventeen seats; or Likud, which, after Bibi’s sudden resignation, was now led by Arik Sharon, and had nineteen.
It wasn’t just a math problem. It had a critical policy implication. If I wanted to tackle the domestic challenge—to reassert the values of secular-led democratic government over increasingly assertive religious involvement in our day-to-day politics—that would mean choosing Likud over Shas. But it would also signal the effective end of the peace process. Even though Arik assured me privately that he understood my determination to reopen peace efforts with Arafat and Hafez al-Assad, I knew Arik. The path toward peace agreements, assuming they were even possible, would be tough. Sooner or later, I was certain he would begin acting as a kind of opposition from within. That was why, over the angry opposition of Meretz leader Yossi Sarid, I decided to go with the Sephardi Orthodox party. I realized that even Shas might walk out if the scale of any land-for-peace concessions proved too high. But it was the least extreme of the major religious parties on the question of peace with the Palestinians. My conversations with the party’s spiritual leader and guide, the seventy-nine-year-old rabbi and Talmudic scholar Ovadia Yosef, revealed a man of intelligence, erudition, and subtlety of thought. He believed in the core Jewish principle of sanctifying human life. When it came to detailed aspects of peace negotiations, like the specifics of any Oslo redeployments, he was inclined to trust the judgment of those in government and the military with the experience to evaluate the security implications and decide the best way forward.
To Meretz’s additional consternation, I included two smaller, right-of-center Orthodox parties in the coalition. It was not just to make good on my pledge to be prime minister for all Israelis. To put top priority on the peace process, I wanted to avoid an undiluted left-of-center, secular thrust to the government. When I’d stood in front of the tens of thousands of cheering supporters in Rabin Square after the election, I thought to myself: they think that with Bibi gone, peace is around the corner. I wanted a coalition broad enough to keep Meretz, and Labor ministers as well, from forgetting a crucial fact: the compromises that we might have to contemplate during peace negotiations were still anathema to many other Israelis.
* * *
Syria was my first negotiating priority, as it had been for Rabin and, for a brief period, Bibi too. This was not just because the shape of a final agreement with the Syrians was clearer than with the Palestinians. It was also because I was determined to make good on the main specific policy pledge of my campaign: to bring our troops home from Lebanon. No matter what the increasingly emboldened fighters of Hizbollah said publicly, our withdrawal would be bad news for them. It would deprive them of their “anti-occupation” rationale for firing Katyushas into towns and settlements in northern Israel, and free us politically to strike back hard if necessary. It was clear to me that Hizbollah would try to make the withdrawal as difficult as possible. But the real power in Lebanon rested with the Syrians, who, along with Iran, were Hizbollah’s main backers. If we could get a peace agreement with Assad, there seemed every reason to hope he would rein in Hizbollah, and perhaps open the way to a peace treaty with Lebanon.
There was an additional reason for trying to get a deal with Syria first: it would increase our negotiating leverage with the Palestinians. That would certainly not be lost on Yasir Arafat, which was one reason it was important to have an early meeting with him: to convey my commitment to keeping the Oslo process alive and achieving, if possible, a full and final Israeli-Palestinian peace.
* * *
I went to see Arafat a few days after taking office. We met for well over an hour at Erez, the main crossing point into Gaza. It was swelteringly hot inside. At least I was in an ordinary business suit. I couldn’t help wondering how Arafat was coping in his trademark military uniform. Still, the political atmosphere going into the meeting was encouraging. After the election, Arafat had tried to use his ties with the ayatollahs in Iran to get them to release thirteen members of the tiny Jewish community in Shiraz who had been jailed on patently absurd accusations of spying for the “Zionist regime.” Iran had told him no, hardly a surprise given the Iranian regime’s support for Hizbollah and its serial diatribes about destroying the State of Israel. But I appreciated Arafat’s gesture nonetheless, and I told him so. I also arrived with a gift: a leather-bound volume with both the Hebrew Bible and Koran. I began our meeting with what I felt I most needed him to hear: that both of us were trying to achieve something hugely important, nothing less than a new relationship between Israelis and Palestinians based on trust. As I would discover in the months ahead—as Yitzhak had found as well—Arafat responded warmly to such general appeals of principle. He replied, as he had often said to Rabin, that he viewed me as a partner, and a friend. But the key issue of substance—the difference between how I envisaged taking Oslo forward and what he wanted—was impossible to avoid.
I emphasized that I was committed to the further Wye River summit redeployments, which Bibi hadn’t yet implemented, and to a release of Palestinian prisoners that was also agreed on at Wye. Then came the more difficult part: explaining my view of how we could best move toward a full peace agreement. I said I was convinced the prospects would be much better if we delayed the redeployments and brought forward the start of the real negotiations: on the permanent-status issues, including final borders, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees. In any case, I’d need a few months to reach a settled view with my coalition partners and our negotiating team on how to proceed. Arafat seemed to accept the idea of a pause for reflection and planning. But he held firm in his opposition to any further delay in the Wye redeployments. More worryingly for the longer-term prospects of an agreement, he ignored altogether my suggestion that we move ahead toward the permanent-status talks.
Speaking to reporters, I accentuated the positive. I said I’d come to see Arafat so soon because of the importance I attached to his role in “shaping peace in the Middle East.” I said I would not waver in continuing on the path that Rabin and he had begun. And while the security of Israel would be my paramount concern in negotiations, “I also want each Palestinian to feel secure.” Both sides, I said, had suffered enough. The open question, however, was whether I had done enough to persuade Arafat that his exclusive focus on redeployments—on only the land part of a land-for-peace deal—meant we risked ignoring the core issues that would determine whether a full peace agreement was achievable.
More urgently, I knew from our diplomats in the United States that the Americans would not necessarily be receptive to a further delay in moving ahead with Oslo, even if it meant focusing on trying to make peace with Syria. That made my first visit to see President Clinton as prime minister especially important.
* * *
It was billed as a “working visit,” and work we did. After a gala dinner for Nava and me in the White House, we left to spend the weekend at the presidential retreat in Camp David. There, President Clinton and I spent more than ten hours discussing shared security challenges in the Middle East, especially terrorist groups and states like Iran that were backing them, and, of course, how best to move forward our efforts to negotiate peace. These face-to-face meetings set a pattern that would last throughout the time he and I were in office. On almost all key issues, my preference was to deal directly with the president, something I know sometimes frustrated other senior US negotiators like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Mideast envoy Dennis Ross. This was not out of any disrespect for them, both of whom I found to be extraordinarily gifted and dedicated diplomats. It was because the decisions on which negotiations would succeed or fail would have to be made at the top, just as President Clinton and I would ultimately carry the responsibility, or the blame, for errors, missteps, or missed opportunities.
Our first meeting ran until three in the morning. When the president asked me how I saw the peace process going forward, he smiled, in obvious relief, at my answer: I wanted to move quickly. He had only a limited time left in office, and I was determined that we not waste it. Much is often made about the personal “chemistry” in political relationships. Too much, I think, because the core issues and the trade-offs of substance are what truly matter when negotiating matters of the weight, and long-term implications, of Middle East peace. Still, chemistry does help when moments of tension or crisis arise, as they inevitably do. My first few days with President Clinton laid a foundation that allowed us to work together even when things got tough. I benefited, I’m sure, simply by not being Bibi. The president and his negotiating team had spent the previous few, frustrating years trying alternately to urge, nudge, and cajole him—and Arafat—toward implementing Oslo. Clinton did finally succeed in getting the Wye River agreement. But it, too, remained to be implemented.
Nava’s presence, and Hillary Clinton’s, contributed to an informal, familial atmosphere. Before my first round of talks with the president, we joined Bill and Hillary for dinner. Though I would work more closely with Hillary in later years, when she was secretary of state under President Barack Obama, this was the first time I’d had the opportunity to engage her in anything more than small talk. She was less naturally outgoing than her husband. Yet in addition to being obviously bright and articulate, she was barely less informed on the ins and outs of Middle East peace negotiations than the president. She and Bill spoke with us about things well beyond the diplomacy of the Middle East: science, music, and our shared interest in history. What most struck Nava and me, however, was the way the Clintons interacted with each other. The scandal surrounding Monica Lewinsky was still fresh, with the president having survived an impeachment vote in the Senate only five months earlier. I suppose we expected to see signs of tension between the two of them. Whether the tension was there, we had no way of knowing. But they did obviously have a respect for each other’s intelligence, insight, and creativity in looking for solutions where so many others saw only problems. It was impressive.
At the outset of my long discussions with the president, I set out to convey in detail what I hoped we could accomplish in the months ahead and how, in my view, we were most likely to get there. I wasn’t trying to impose “ground rules” on the president of the United States, something I neither would nor could do. But I was clear with him about how I would approach the negotiations. I would be prepared to be flexible, but I would rely on two critical assumptions. First, when we and the Americans agreed to a position on a specific issue, there would be no unilateral “surprises”—by which I meant, though didn’t say, things like the unfortunate American redefinition of Yitzhak’s “pocket deposit” assurance regarding the Golan. The second assumption may seem overly legalistic: until and unless we reached a full and final agreement with either Syria or the Palestinians, any Israeli negotiating ideas or proposals would not be binding. If no agreement was reached, they would become null and void. I wanted to avoid a situation, as had happened so often in past negotiations, where an Israeli proposal was rejected by the Arab side but then treated as the opening position in the expectation of further concessions in later talks.
I realized that we might discover that Assad, and certainly Arafat, were unwilling, or unready, to make peace. Initially at least, we might have to settle for a more incremental step. “Right here in Camp David, Begin, Sadat, and Carter couldn’t complete the process,” I pointed out. “They signed a ‘framework agreement’ and it took months of further diplomacy to reach a peace treaty. Maybe we’ll end up doing the same.” But I told the president I was convinced that if we didn’t try to get agreements, we risked heading toward a new period of instability and almost certainly violence. Assad, I suspected, was the more likely to be receptive to a diplomatic initiative. That was a major reason I wanted to start our efforts with him. But so far, his true intentions had never been tested, beyond his obvious determination to get back the whole of the Golan. Nor had Arafat’s, beyond his focus on the detail and extent of West Bank redeployments.
President Clinton did not object to an early effort to reopen our efforts with the Syrians. But he was worried about the effects of ignoring the already-creaking prospects of fulfilling the promise of Oslo. If we were going to delay focusing on that, Clinton told me, he needed to be able to assure Arafat the wait would be worth his while. What could we give the PLO leader in return for putting off the Wye redeployments further? And then, the real question on his mind: “Ehud, when we get to the final redeployment and a peace deal, how much of the West Bank are you prepared to hand back?”
I simply didn’t know. Much would depend on whether we could be sure Arafat could or would deliver a final peace. But even if I had known, I would have been reluctant to name a precise percentage. Though I had full trust in President Clinton, I knew that everything he and I said would be shared with at least a few of his closest policy aides and negotiators. Sooner or later, word would get to Arafat. When we did begin negotiations, he’d take whatever number I gave as a mere starting point. Still, I knew I had to signal to the president that I was serious about negotiating with Arafat when the time came. I also knew the main source of his concern. In order to get the agreement at Wye, the president had signed on to a provision that the dimension of the third and final redeployment phase would be determined by Israel alone. By that stage, when we got there, Arafat would have control of something like 40 percent of the West Bank. That meant—at least in theory—that Israel could limit phase three to a mere token pullout, leaving the Palestinians with less than half of the territory.
“I don’t know what percentage, exactly,” I replied. “But one of my cabinet ministers thinks that a formula of 70-10-20 would work, meaning 70 percent for the Palestinians, 10 percent to allow us to retain and secure the largest of the settlement blocs, and the rest to be worked out in further talks.” When he nodded, I added: “Peres thinks it could end up at 80-20, and says he thinks Arafat would find it hard to walk away from getting control of four-fifths of the West Bank. But it’s not about the number. It’s about the area needed for the major settlement blocs, and whatever further area is required to safeguard Israel’s security. Beyond that, we don’t need a single inch of the West Bank, and we won’t ask for a single inch.”
I replied in much the same vein when President Clinton urged me to help kick-start new talks with Assad by formally reaffirming Yitzhak’s pocket deposit on the Golan Heights. As with the Palestinians, I was not going to cede a major negotiating card—our only real negotiating card—before we had any indication Assad was serious about making peace. But I did feel it was necessary to reassure Clinton that I was serious. I told him that if and when the Syrians showed real signs of readiness to address our needs in a peace agreement, I would reaffirm the pocket deposit.
I’d come to Washington hoping that President Clinton would be with me on the main issues, and especially my intention to try to engage with Syria first, and shift the emphasis with the Palestinians toward focusing on the critical permanent-status issues. What emerged from our first meetings was essentially a trade-off. He knew that I would be ready to make concessions in pursuit of genuine peace. I was confident that, on the route I was proposing to take in hope of getting there, he would have my back.
But would my own government have my back? On paper, we had a comfortable Knesset majority: 75 out of the 120 seats. But I knew it was inherently vulnerable, due both to friction between the Orthodox parties and assertively secular members of the Knesset (MKs) from Meretz and inside Labor, and to possible defections over the concessions we might have to consider in peace negotiations. The first stirrings of discontent had begun even before I went to see Clinton. On the basis of my commitment merely to try for peace, Arik Sharon had presented a no-confidence motion in the Knesset. It was never going to pass. But only days after I’d made him interior minister, Natan Sharansky let it be known he was going to vote against us. He didn’t. He stayed away from the chamber, in effect abstaining. But I’d been put on notice.
I lost my first coalition partner in September: the small United Torah Judaism party, with five Knesset seats. It wasn’t over land for peace. In an echo of a similar crisis that had brought down the government during Rabin’s first spell as prime minister in the 1970s, it was over a violation of the Jewish Sabbath. Israel’s state electric company had been transporting a huge steam-condensation machine from the manufacturing site near Haifa to a power plant in Ashdod. The unit was the size of a small apartment and weighed about one hundred tons. It couldn’t be driven across the country without bringing weekday traffic to a standstill. The obvious solution was to do it when road use was lightest, on Shabbat. Precisely the same procedure had been followed—twenty-four times—under Bibi. But when I asked a United Torah Judaism leader why he’d seemed happy when Likud had waved it through, he replied: “Past sins cannot pardon future ones.” Most other ministers agreed with me that we should stand firm. So I did. But UTJ walked out of the government.
In the midst of the Sharanksy rebellion, Haim Ramon, who was the minister in charge of liaising with the Knesset, insisted I “punish” him for his political grandstanding. “You should fire Sharansky. Act like a leader!” I just laughed. “The coalition doesn’t need a leader,” I replied. “It needs therapy.” In truth, I suspected that if we ever got near to a peace agreement with Assad or Arafat, even therapy might not help protect the coalition from splits and resignations. That was a major reason I’d promised a referendum on any final peace deals. I believed that in the balance between the need for concessions, even painful ones, and the achievement of a genuine peace deal with Syria or the Palestinians, most of the Israeli public would choose peace.
I relied on a strong, close team around me, people I knew well and who shared my determination to stay focused on the central goal: to put Israel in a position where its citizens could be given that choice. I made Danny Yatom, my former sayeret deputy, my chief of staff. The negotiating team also included Uri Saguy; Gilead Sher, a gifted lawyer I’d known for a quarter of a century and who had been a company commander in my armored brigade in the 1970s; and Amnon Lipkin. Also, Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Moroccan-born, Oxford-educated historian and diplomat who had run against me for the Labor leadership. Shlomo had a gift for systematic analysis and reasoned judgment, especially on security issues, that I highly valued.
It did not escape the attention of Israeli commentators, or other politicians, that almost all of them were former soldiers whom I’d known from my time in uniform. But that observation missed a more important point: we were all members of the “generation of 1967 and 1973.” We had been soldiers during the Six-Day War. In the years immediately after it, like almost all Israelis, we had allowed ourselves to believe that our victory had been so comprehensive, and so quick, that any threat from the defeated Arab states was gone for good. We assumed that inevitably, inexorably, they would realize they needed to sue for peace, and that there was no particular urgency on our part to do anything more than wait. Then, on Yom Kippur 1973, all of that had been turned on its head. We had not only learned the lessons of 1973, we had internalized them. Even had we not known of the danger of a new Palestinian campaign of terror, the option of simply watching and waiting—and assuming that our military strength, which was now even greater, could make events around us stand still—would not have made sense to us. Besides, as I remarked to Danny and others, to do so would run against the founding purpose of Zionism: to establish a state where Jews would no longer be victims of events, but would take control of their destiny and try to shape them.
* * *
Yet making peace, like making love, takes two. Much as I’d wanted to begin with Syria, until well into the autumn of 1999 President Assad held firm on his insistence that without our “deposit,” without a prior agreement that he’d get back the entire Golan, there could be no substantive progress. This was particularly frustrating because I was getting reports from our intelligence services, and Western envoys who had seen the Syrian president, that Assad’s many years of health problems had left him almost skeletally frail, even at times disoriented.
Even my own negotiating team urged me to concentrate on the Palestinians instead. President Clinton kept stressing the importance of showing Arafat at least some movement on the Oslo front. In September 1999, I took a first, significant step in that direction, agreeing to a timetable that would deliver the Wye redeployments by the end of January 2000, while also committing us to negotiating a framework agreement, on the model of the Begin-Sadat Camp David accords, on the permanent-status peace issues. In early November, I joined Clinton and Arafat for talks around an event in Oslo—a deliberate echo of the optimism with which the peace process had begun, held on the fourth anniversary of Rabin’s assassination. Both Leah Rabin and Peres came with me. Its centerpiece was a memorial service, at which Leah spoke very movingly of the need for both sides to finish the work Yitzhak had begun, a responsibility I pledged that we would do everything in our power to fulfill. Only Arafat struck a discordant note. He paired a tribute to Rabin with a polemic call for an end to “occupation, exile, and settlements.”
After the ceremony, he, President Clinton, and I met at the American ambassador’s residence. I was still struck by Arafat’s public comments: by his apparent desire, or need, to play to hard-liners back home in what was supposed to be a time to remember and honor Yitzhak. I didn’t raise his remarks directly, but I told him that each of us was approaching a moment of truth for the future of our people. The decisions required wouldn’t be reached in heaven, but down here on earth, by human beings. By us. “And if we don’t have the courage to make them, we’ll be burying thousands of our people, probably more Palestinians than Israelis.” Worse, I said, those deaths would not advance his people’s position or mine by a single inch. When future Palestinian and Israeli leaders did finally prove equal to the challenge of making peace, they’d be looking at the same conflict, requiring the same compromises. “The only difference will be the size of our cemeteries.” Arafat nodded occasionally. But he said little, beyond that he considered Rabin to have been a friend, and repeating his now-familiar, nonspecific pledge to “do what is necessary” for peace.
“The hardest part won’t be the tough decisions in negotiations,” I continued. “It won’t be facing each other. It will be facing our own people.” We would need to make the case openly, honestly, strongly that the peace agreement we might reach was in the interest of both Israelis and Palestinians. And in this, each of us had a responsibility to support the other. With President Clinton looking on, I steered Arafat toward the window of the ambassador’s fifth-floor apartment. “Look down,” I said. “Imagine that we each have parachutes, and we’re going to jump together. But I have my hand on your ripcord, and you are holding mine. To land safely we have to help each other … And if we don’t jump, many, many innocent people who are now walking the streets of Gaza and Ramallah and Hebron, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, will die.” Arafat again just nodded, leaving me and the president unsure whether anything I’d said had struck home.
The true test of that would come only when we got to the stage of negotiations when the “difficult decisions” could not be evaded. Yet only weeks after I returned from Oslo, the focus finally shifted to the Syrians. President Assad suddenly signaled his willingness to resume talks without any preconditions—a message he delivered first to my British Labour Party friend Michael Levy, who was visiting Damascus as Tony Blair’s roving Mideast envoy, and then to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Assad said he would send Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa to meet me for initial talks in Washington in December, ahead of a full-scale, US-mediated attempt to negotiate peace at the start of the new year.
* * *
The broad terms of a potential deal had long been clear, both to us and the Syrians. The danger was always that the process would get derailed, or never really get started, due to an inability to take key decisions, in part as a result of domestic political considerations on both sides. Syria had a tightly state-controlled media and an intelligence service dedicated mainly to crushing any signs of dissidence. That meant Assad’s main concern was to ensure broad support, or at least acquiescence, from top military and party figures. In Israel, however, every sign of a concession risked igniting charges that we were “selling out” to Syria. The Likud and the political right would denounce the idea of giving up the Golan Heights, even though Bibi had been ready to do just that when he was prime minister. But even on the left, there was little enthusiasm for returning the Golan. There were far fewer Israeli settlers there than on the West Bank, not even 20,000. But most of them, far from being religiously motivated ideologues, were Labor supporters. And almost no Israeli, of any political stripe, viewed Hafez al-Assad as a natural partner for peace. For years, he’d been a constant, sneering presence on our northern border, denouncing any Arab leader who’d shown willingness to engage or negotiate with Israel. Amos Oz, one of our finest writers and a cultural icon for Labor Zionists, probably put it best. He said the Syrians seemed to think that “we will give them the Golan, and they’ll send us a receipt by fax.” The consensus was: forget Assad, keep the Golan. Before I left for the United States, the Knesset voted on whether it supported my attempt to negotiate an agreement with Syria. We could muster only forty-seven votes, fourteen short of a majority. An opinion poll found only 13 percent of Israelis favored a full withdrawal from the Golan.
The message I drew from this was not that we should give up on the chances of a peace agreement. After all, before Begin and Sadat went to Camp David in 1978, only a small minority of Israelis had been in favor of withdrawing from the Sinai. Yet once they had seen the other side of the equation—full, formal peace with our most powerful neighbor—the opposition all but evaporated. The problem I saw was that if we and the Syrians couldn’t find a way to insulate our negotiations from leaks, speculation, and a swirl of opposition to our efforts at home, we’d never get to the key issues of substance.
I’d been making that point to the Americans for weeks. At first, I tried to persuade them to hold the talks at Camp David, ensuring the same media-free isolation that had yielded the historic Israeli-Egypt agreement. But Dennis Ross replied that the very association of Camp David with that breakthrough meant it would be a nonstarter for President Assad. I then suggested we consider sites outside the United States: NATO’s Incirlik air base in Turkey, for instance, a British base in Cyprus, an American naval ship in the Mediterranean. Even, half-jokingly, an abandoned missile silo in South Dakota. Yet my point was serious, in fact critical, if the talks were going to have a chance.
In the end, the Americans settled on a beautiful, and undeniably remote, town in West Virginia called Shepherdstown. But from the outset, I was worried it couldn’t provide the kind of environment we needed. As our plane was descending toward Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, I got a call from the head of our advance team. He told me the news media were already there and that reporters—Israeli, Arab, American, and European—could be seen chatting with American, Israeli, and Syrian officials in the town’s coffee shops. I knew the press would have to publish something about potential concessions as the negotiations proceeded. Whether the stories were true wouldn’t matter. They would still make the real bargaining necessary for peace far more difficult, perhaps even impossible, not just for us but for Assad as well.
I also had doubts whether he was ready for real peace: embassies, open borders, personal contact between Syrians and Israelis, and ideally an internationally backed free-trade manufacturing zone on the Golan to give Syria a tangible stake in ensuring the peace lasted. In earlier talks, under Shimon Peres, Syrian negotiators had at one stage brought a message from Assad. What did we mean, he wanted to know, with all this emphasis on peace, peace, peace? Syria had peace with El Salvador, but without any of the trappings we were insisting on. Peace, in Assad’s mind, seemed to mean merely an absence of war.
I did, however, come ready to negotiate. Though I was still not prepared to reconfirm Rabin’s pocket deposit as a mere ticket of admission, my position remained essentially the one I had worked out with Yitzhak in formulating the deposit: IAMNAM, “if all my needs are met.” Meaning that if Assad showed a readiness to deal with all of Israel’s requirements, I recognized that as part of a formal peace agreement we would have to give up the Golan Heights. In addition to early-warning facilities, we envisaged an open border with a demilitarized area on either side, as well as guarantees that important sources of water for Israel would not be blocked or diverted. As Assad knew, despite his presumably feigned puzzlement about Syria’s arrangements with El Salvador, we also needed the agreement to embody a mutual commitment to real peace: through elements like an exchange of ambassadors and the establishment of the free-trade zone. As with the Begin-Sadat peace, we assumed that our Golan withdrawal would come in phases, parallel to the implementation of the other provisions of the treaty.
In our initial meetings in Shepherdstown, Foreign Minister Sharaa showed no inclination even to talk about these other issues. So on the second afternoon we were there, I suggested to President Clinton the Americans try to break the logjam by addressing the negotiating issues in a draft paper of their own. It would detail all the issues in an eventual agreement, with parenthetical references to those on which we and the Syrians still differed. Then each side could respond with a view toward narrowing the gaps. The president liked the idea. So did Sharaa. Three days later, the president presented the eight-page American draft. With his customary eloquence, he emphasized the need for us to use it as a springboard for peace, not to score political points, and each side agreed to take a couple of days to look through it. It seemed to me we might finally be on a path to substantive negotiations. There was obviously not going to be a deal at this round of talks, but I agreed with President Clinton that if Sharaa engaged seriously with the points in the US paper, after this round ended, he could phone Assad and tell him I had confirmed Rabin’s pocket deposit.
Yet by the time we left for home, the prospects suddenly looked much worse—for the reason I’d feared from the moment we arrived. There were two major leaks. The first came in an Arabic-language newspaper in London. Given the thrust of the story, it had presumably come from the Syrians. But it was more annoying than truly damaging. The second leak, however, was in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which published the entire US negotiating paper. This was unwelcome for us, since it confirmed how far, in the Americans’ assessment, we were ready to go in return for peace. But for the Syrians, the fact the final-border section was still a work in progress, with the parentheses to prove it, created the impression that they’d decided to negotiate the details of a full peace without first nailing down the return of the Golan Heights. Assad’s image as a strongman, implacably tough on Israel, had been built and burnished over his three decades in power. The embarrassment of being seen as amenable to talking about a Syrian embassy in Israel without an agreement on the Golan struck me as a potentially fatal blow to the prospects for a deal, since it dramatically narrowed the scope for the flexibility needed by both sides to negotiate. I wasn’t surprised when Clinton phoned me after we got back to Israel to say that Assad had refused to send Sharaa back, as planned, for further talks in ten days’ time.
I didn’t give up, however, and neither did President Clinton. In February, at the Americans’ request, I sat down with Danny Yatom and US ambassador Martin Indyk in Jerusalem to draw up a “bottom line” proposal on a withdrawal from the Golan Heights. If only because of Assad’s failing health, I believed it was the only way we could know whether an agreement was possible. We worked on a large satellite map of the Golan and the valley below, and drew our proposed border in red. It made it clear we were prepared to consider pulling out of the entirety of the Heights, reserving only a strip of several hundred meters in the valley below, on the far side of the Sea of Galilee. This area came close to the remains of a handful of Syrian villages that had been there before 1967, but we compensated for this by bending the border slightly westward to give the Syrians part of the slope overlooking the lake, in what was now Israel. We also included the hot springs at al-Hama, which we knew Assad had insisted were part of Syria during talks held under Rabin.
But the details turned out not to matter. President Clinton agreed to present the map to Assad in what we both hoped would be a step to reopening the negotiating path for peace. The two of them met in Geneva in late March. Though the president also came with full details of our positions on the other negotiating issues, he began by telling Assad that I had agreed to the Syrians’ long-standing point of principle on our future border: it would be “based on the June 4, 1967 line” before the Six-Day War. Then, the president unfurled the map.
It was shortly after five in the afternoon in Israel when Clinton phoned me. He sounded as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Ehud, it’s not going to work,” he said. “The moment I started, he tuned out. He just said, ‘Do I get my land?’ I tried to get him to listen, but he just kept repeating: ‘Do I get all my land?’” According to the president, Assad reiterated his insistence that he would countenance nothing less than being able to sit on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and “dip his feet in the water.” Clinton said he’d done his best, and that was true. “I understand the effort is over,” I replied. “Probably, he’s too frail and ill by now.” Assad would die of leukemia barely two months later. His immediate focus was on ensuring an uncontested succession to his son, Bashar.
When Dennis Ross came to see me in Jerusalem, I think he expected to find me distraught. Of course, I was disappointed. But I told him I was grateful that Clinton had stayed with a negotiating effort that had been frustrating for all of us. When I became prime minister, I’d assured the Americans that as long as our vital security interests were protected, I was ready to go further than any previous Israeli leader to get peace with Syria, and with Arafat too. We might fail to get an agreement, but not for lack of trying. I believed even a “failure” would tell us something: whether the other side was truly ready for peace. With Syria, I told Dennis, “It’s not what we hoped for. But at least now we know.”
* * *
My own negotiating team, not to mention the Americans, assumed I would now turn my attention to the Palestinians. Arafat was pressing for us to go ahead with phase two of the Wye redeployments. In fact, he now wanted us to add the transfer of three Arab villages on the edge of east Jerusalem: Eizaria, El-Ram, and most importantly Abu Dis, since it was the seat of the Palestinians’ parliament and also afforded a view of the golden dome of the mosque above the Western Wall in the Old City. I understood why the villages were politically important for him. But in practical terms, I also knew I’d have to secure the support of the cabinet and the Knesset for what the Likud, and the main religious parties too, would interpret as a first step toward “handing back Jerusalem.”
For me, this underscored the problem at the heart of Oslo. We were transferring land to Arafat, yet still without any serious engagement from the Palestinians on the permanent-status questions, like the future of Jerusalem, critical to reaching even a framework agreement, or a declaration of principles, as a basis for a final treaty. I probably should have seen the crisis-ridden spring of 2000 as a harbinger of the difficulties we’d face when we finally got to that stage. I did make a first major effort to find compromise ground on the main issues. I sent Gilead Sher and Shlomo Ben-Ami to begin back-channel talks with a Palestinian team led by Abu Ala’a and Hassan Asfour, the Palestinian negotiators in Oslo. But as I prepared to seek Knesset approval for returning the three additional villages, my main Orthodox coalition partners—Shas and the National Religious Party, as well as Sharansky’s Yisrael Ba’Aliyah—all threatened to walk out of the government. I managed to keep them on board, but only by getting the Knesset vote classified as a no-confidence motion. That meant that if we lost, the government would fall and there would be new elections. That was something none of them wanted. They feared that Arik and the Likud would do better this time around and they would end up with fewer seats.
Still, even that didn’t avert a different kind of crisis. The vote was on May 15. For the Palestinians, this was also Al-Naqba Day, the annual marking of the 1948 “catastrophe” of the founding of the State of Israel. Danny Yatom told me the night before that there were intelligence reports of large protests planned for the West Bank and in Gaza. President Clinton immediately got the American consul to deliver a message to Arafat, saying that the president expected him to intervene against any sign of violence. But Arafat’s reply was that, while he’d do what he could, he couldn’t guarantee anything. In the months ahead I would come to understand what that meant, because it would happen again. I don’t think Arafat himself orchestrated the violence. Maybe he couldn’t have stopped it completely. But I have no doubt—nor did President Clinton—that he stood aside and let it happen.
Even worse—since he did have control over them—his security forces, with arms that Israel had agreed to as part of Oslo, fired on our troops as they tried to keep order. All of this, while I stood in the Knesset battling to get approval to give him the villages. As news arrived in the chamber of gunfire just a couple of miles away, it was not just Likud or other right-wing MKs who were furious. I certainly was. Yet I also knew that the price of losing the vote would be the fall of the government. We did win the vote, by a margin of eight, meaning that I now had full authority to return the three villages. Fuming over what had happened, however, I called President Clinton and told him I was going to delay the handover. I was not about to return the villages under gunfire, or reward Arafat for breaking even his existing security commitments.
Prospects for serious negotiations with the Palestinians were again on hold. But another, immutable, priority probably would have delayed any new initiative anyway: my pledge to get our soldiers out of Lebanon within a year of the election. I was determined to go ahead with it because I knew from experience that without setting a deadline and sticking to it, it wouldn’t happen. I’d thought it was a mistake to keep the security zone from the start. Over the years, many Israelis, both inside the military and beyond, had come to accept that we would be better off pulling out. It wasn’t just the attritional loss of Israeli soldiers’ lives, but the fact that there was no obvious point, and no obvious end, to our mission. Especially when major tragedies occurred—like the collision of two Israeli helicopters a couple of years earlier, leaving scores of young soldiers dead—there was talk about a withdrawal. Yet there was always a reason to put it off: a Hizbollah attack in the security zone, accusations of weakness from right-wing politicians, or simple caution in the kirya. The only way to get it done was to decide, and to do it.
My self-imposed deadline for the pullout was now eight weeks away. Hizbollah had already begun escalating pressure on our military positions in south Lebanon with the obvious aim of making the withdrawal as difficult as possible. They were also targeting our local surrogates, the Maronite-led South Lebanon Army militia. I’d been meeting regularly with Shaul Mofaz, the former paratroop officer who was now chief of staff, to work out a plan to get our troops out within a single night once the order was given. But complex though the operational issues were, that was not the most difficult part. The withdrawal had a critical political aim as well: to denude Hizbollah, with full international support, of its “occupation” fig leaf for targeting and terrorizing the towns and villages of northern Israel. Mofaz and a number of other generals, including the head of the northern command, were against the pullout. They argued that our withdrawal would give Hizbollah positions a direct line of fire onto Israeli border settlements. Several cabinet ministers, including Meretz leader Yossi Sarid, were also opposed, convinced that Hizbollah fire would continue, or even escalate, after we pulled out. I strongly doubted that, but in any case was convinced that a complete, internationally verified withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Lebanon represented a long-overdue end to a situation that was needlessly costing Israeli lives and hadn’t prevented periods of intense rocket attacks either. I insisted that not a single Israeli soldier or emplacement remain on Lebanese soil. Throughout the spring, we had been coordinating the details of our pullout line with UN cartographers on the ground, to ensure that they, too, recognized it would be a full withdrawal to the border, fulfilling the terms of the Security Council resolution adopted after the 1982 Lebanon War.
Ideally, we would have taken a further few weeks to gradually remove heavy military and logistics equipment ahead of the final troop withdrawal. But when we handed over a pair of military strongholds to the South Lebanon Army, and Hizbollah promptly moved in to take them over, it was clear we needed to speed things up. With the SLA showing signs of collapsing, the head of the northern command supported an immediate withdrawal, and I agreed. Frustratingly, we did have to hold off a further twenty-four hours, in order to ensure that the United Nations staff on the ground could complete their verification process, and UN headquarters in New York could confirm they were satisfied. But on the afternoon of May 23, alongside Mofaz at a command post on the border, I ordered the pullout of all Israeli troops, as well as all remaining vehicles, and other equipment as quickly as possible. I then flew back to Jerusalem for an urgent meeting to secure formal cabinet approval. The field commanders ended up getting it done in less than twenty-four hours, mostly overnight, without a single Israeli casualty.
As I should have anticipated, there were accusations from Hizbollah and its allies that our UN-verified withdrawal was incomplete. At issue was a cluster of villages where Lebanon meets Syria, known as the Sheba’a Farms. But as I knew firsthand, they were not part of Lebanon. I’d met their Syrian inhabitants when I helped us take control of the villages at the end of the 1967 war on the Golan. When Syria now publicly supported Hizbollah’s efforts to get the UN to say the area was in fact part of Lebanon, I decided to call their bluff. Through the Americans, I suggested that Damascus confirm in writing that this part of the Golan was indeed Lebanese. The Syrians never responded.
Equally predictable were the prophets of doom on the Israeli right, who said the Lebanon withdrawal would bury northern Israel in blood. The reality was that in the half dozen years following the pullout, the Israel-Lebanon border was quieter than at any time since the late 1960s. The main personal impact of the withdrawal, however, was to remind me of why I’d run for prime minister in the first place. Despite the challenges, and inevitable setbacks and frustrations, of my first year in office, I was in a position to take action on issues critical for my country’s future. On Lebanon, I’d succeeded, mainly because the withdrawal was something we could do unilaterally. With Syria, I’d tried hard to get an agreement, only to find that Assad was unwilling, unable, or perhaps too ill to join in the search for a deal.
I still recognized, however, that no issue was more important to Israel’s future than our conflict with the Palestinians. I knew that resolving it would be even tougher than the talks with the Syrians. But the only way to find out whether peace was possible was to try. So on the final day of May 2000, with the Lebanon pullout complete, I flew to Portugal—the site of a US-European summit—to see President Clinton.