CHAPTER 7
A Missed Opportunity
IN FEBRUARY 2001, Ariel Sharon won a landslide victory over Ehud Barak. Under Israel’s direct election law, which has since been scrapped, elections were held only for prime minister and not for the Knesset. Thus, despite Sharon’s unprecedented victory (he received 62 percent of the vote), he had to form a coalition with the same parliament that had been elected along with Barak in 1999. With a Likud faction of just nineteen members and a parliament evenly split between Right and Left, Sharon was determined to form a national unity government.
I had long believed that a government based on wide consensus would be better suited to address the enormous challenges confronting Israel. I had criticized both Netanyahu and Barak for failing to form national unity governments when they had the chance, and I was very pleased when Sharon decided to establish one.
I first heard the name Ariel Sharon as a young dissident. For many Soviet Jews, he was the legendary hero who had changed the course of the Yom Kippur War with his military daring, saving Israel from a potential catastrophe and wiping the smirks off the faces of gloating KGB agents back in the USSR. In those days, I never thought that one day I would be sitting next to him around an Israeli cabinet table. In Bibi’s government, Sharon and I developed a sentimental bond. He sat next to me and the other minister from my new immigrant party, Yuli Edelstein. When I started conversing with Yuli in Russian during one of the first government meetings, Sharon warned us to watch what we said since he understood Russian, which he had learned as a child. We also both shared a strong attachment to Jewish issues, and I was always impressed by his strong pride in his heritage. “I am first Jewish and only then Israeli,” he used to say, to the surprise of many of his Israeli-born colleagues.
Of all the ministers I have encountered over the years, Sharon is by far the most knowledgeable about Israel. When he spoke in a government meeting, you could rest assured that he had full command of the topic. Sharon is an expert on the country’s geography, defense, agriculture, history, industry, and, it seems, just about everything else. Knowing Israel like the back of his hand, he can tell you the location of every village and hamlet in the country, the name of every flower in the Negev, and the products produced in every factory in the Galilee. He loved to walk around with maps and used them as a reference to explain his plans to secure Israel’s future. But he himself didn’t need any map. It was all in his head.
Sharon cobbled together a national unity government and made Shimon Peres his foreign minister. Almost immediately, it became clear that there would be constant tension in the government. The sea change in Israeli public opinion that had occurred in the wake of the failure of Camp David and the beginning of the intifada was not reflected in Israel’s parliament, and this was especially true inside Israel’s Labor party. Most of the leading Labor ministers did not change their pro-Oslo views. They remained convinced that Arafat and the PA were the only alternatives and that nothing should be done to weaken them. Rather than meet the escalation of Palestinian terror with a firm response, they counseled restraint. According to the logic of their approach, the Palestinian terror attacks coupled with Israel’s muted response was gaining Israel the sympathy of the world, and this sympathy could be used to pressure Arafat into taking action against the terror organizations. A strong response, it was thought, would create international sympathy for the Palestinians and put no diplomatic pressure on the PA to crack down on terror.
On Friday night, June 1, 2001, a Hamas suicide bomber struck outside the Dolphinarium discoteque, killing twenty-one young Israelis, most of them teenagers, and injuring over 100 more. It was the worst suicide bombing since early 1996. After eight months of Palestinian terrorism, after scores of innocents had been murdered, after it should have been clear that Arafat was part of the problem, not the solution, the Dolphinarium attack was thought by many to have crossed the line—Israel would finally go to war to defend its people.
An emergency security cabinet meeting was called for the next day in Tel Aviv. Because of the gravity of the decisions being made and their potential impact on human life, the meeting was held on the Jewish Sabbath. I violated the Sabbath by driving to the meeting from my home in Jerusalem. It was only the second time since I had come to Israel that I had violated the Sabbath. The first time was in 1991 when I took part in Operation Solomon, an urgent airlift that brought thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel during Ethiopia’s civil war.
The cabinet meeting was tense. Most of the ministers were in favor of a sustained military assault on the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. Silvan Shalom, the finance minister at the time, argued that Arafat should be expelled from the territories. During the discussions, Peres left the room two or three times to speak to foreign leaders. When he returned the message was always the same: “The sympathy of the world is with us. Let us not squander that sympathy but use it to pressure Arafat to act against Hamas.”
Shimon Peres, unlike many Israeli politicians, is constantly bringing a global view to Israel’s situation. Separate issues are not important to him in and of themselves. They are only relevant as part of his wider understanding of international affairs. That is why his achievements have always been of historic proportions and why his failures have been as well.
Despite strong support inside the cabinet in favor of a large-scale military operation, Sharon took Peres’s advice and Israel checked its response. The terrorism, however, only got worse. In the next few weeks, there were scores of attacks, and many more suicide bombings, including the horrific explosion in a Jerusalem pizza shop that killed fifteen and wounded 130 more.
Then came 9/11. As three thousand lay dead in New York and Washington, thousands of Palestinians were dancing in the streets, reveling in the carnage. Arafat, who had done everything to indoctrinate his people in a culture of death and hatred—against Jews, against Israel, and against America—realized the potential dangers to his rule and rushed to donate blood to the victims of 9/11.
September 11 could have been a turning point for the PA. President Bush had declared that “you are either with us or with the terrorists” and that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them.” Now, many thought, the PA would have to act against the terrorists or be swept away with the other enemies of the United States. But the PA did not act. In October, the Israeli minister of tourism, Rehavam Ze’evi, was murdered by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another infamous terror group. The killers eventually took up refuge in Arafat’s own headquarters in Ramallah. In December, there was another wave of suicide attacks, and in January, a ship carrying weapons and ammunition from Iran bound for Palestinian terror groups was seized by Israeli commandos in the Red Sea. The evidence clearly pointed to Arafat and the PA, but Israel continued to act with restraint.
With each attack, the tension between keeping the national unity government intact and fighting terrorism grew stronger. The country was demanding action. The leaders of the Labor party were demanding restraint. After the Passover night bombing of the Park Hotel during the bloodiest month of terrorism in Israel’s history, the policy of restraint was finally abandoned. The people of Israel had simply had enough. Sharon heeded their call and launched Operation Defensive Shield. The forceful response that I and many thought had been postponed for far too long was finally set in motion, leading in short order to a dramatic decline in terrorism. Ironically, at the moment when peace seemed most remote, it would soon become a real possibility.

AN ECHO FROM WASHINGTON

On April 4, 2002, President Bush made a speech in the White House Rose Garden. If that speech is remembered at all today it is for Bush’s request that Israel, which had just launched Operation Defensive Shield, “halt incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas and begin the withdrawal from those cities it has recently occupied.”1 Determined that the Israeli Defense Forces complete its anti-terror mission, Israel’s government ignored the request, temporarily leading to increased tensions between Washington and Jerusalem.
As for the rest of the speech, even those who closely follow events in the Middle East will have long forgotten it, since it ostensibly broke no new ground. The president reiterated his support for a two-state solution to the conflict. Once again, he was critical of Yasser Arafat, who he said had “betrayed the hopes of the people he was supposed to lead.” And the president announced his intention to send Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region, the latest in a line of emissaries that the president had sent to the region since he was sworn into office.
But I remember that speech particularly for the following lines: “[The Palestinians] deserve a government that respects human rights and a government that focuses on their needs—education and health care—rather than feeding their resentments.”2
What must have seemed to many like an insignificant aside was a breakthrough. For years, the democratic world, including Israel, had been determined to strengthen Arafat and his Palestinian Authority, turning a blind eye to the fear society Arafat was building. Now, the U.S. president was expressing concern not only for how the Palestinians were being treated by Israel, but also for how they were being treated by their own government.
The president’s speech energized me. I had no doubt that his historic statement would be ignored if there were no follow-up. So I decided to begin working on a diplomatic plan based on helping the Palestinians establish a free society and on linking the peace process to the expansion of freedom within that society. For six years, as a minister in three different Israeli governments, I had criticized the free world’s failure to create such a linkage—in speeches, in meetings with diplomats, in op-ed pieces, and above all, inside the Cabinet. Ariel Sharon had no diplomatic plan of his own on the table so, considering what Bush had said in his speech, I thought it was high time I finally translated my ideas into a concrete plan.
About ten days after Bush’s speech, while I was still working on my plan, I was interviewed by CNN.3 At the time, Secretary Powell was visiting Israel and had met with Arafat, whom Israel was trying to isolate diplomatically. While most of the interviewer’s questions centered on whether American and Israeli policy toward Arafat were at odds, I took the opportunity to compliment President Bush for saying in his speech a week earlier that the Palestinian people deserve a government that respects human rights.
That evening, I flew to Washington to speak at a massive solidarity rally for Israel. Organized in less than a week, the rally nevertheless attracted over 100,000 people from all over the United States who came to express their support for Israel’s fight against terrorism. After the rally, I met with Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser. She said she had watched my interview the day before and pointed out that even though the president had gotten a tremendous amount of feedback from around the world following his April 4 speech, I was the only one who had drawn attention to the president’s remarks about Palestinian human rights. Rice told me she thought those remarks were extremely important and that the administration planned to develop the idea further in the weeks and months ahead.
After listening to Rice, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to discuss my plan. I knew that the idea of building a free society and the impact it could have on the region would resonate with Rice, who is an expert on the Soviet Union. Rice, an extremely sharp thinker, listened intently and expressed understanding for my overall approach. At one point, however, she mentioned that she felt the Saudis should play a role in the peace process. While my plan included a role for Jordan and Egypt, the two Arab states that had formal peace agreements with Israel, I would never have considered including the Saudis. Saudi Arabia, a fear society of the first order, not only had no peace treaty with Israel, but it was also funding terrorism against us by supporting Hamas and by giving cash payments to the families of suicide bombers. Thus, despite the overall positive impression I had from my conversation with Rice, I knew that getting the Americans to fully understand the logic of my approach would take a great deal of work. And first, I would have to convince my own prime minister of the merits of it.

A PLAN IGNORED

I returned to Israel and finished a draft proposal. It called for the establishment of an interim Palestinian Administration, which would be chosen by a coordinating body headed by the United States. The interim administration, which would not include those who were directly or indirectly responsible for terror, would be responsible for running the lives of the Palestinians in the areas under its control (only external security would remain in Israel’s hands) and would work over a transition period of at least three years to develop the Palestinians’ civil society and democratic institutions. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of political, social, and religious organization would be guaranteed and educational programs encouraging terror would be replaced by programs that promote peace. Economic assistance would be made conditional on maintaining these freedoms and changing the educational programs.
The interim Palestinian administration would also work to dismantle all the refugee camps under its control and to build a normal existence for their inhabitants. Israel, Arab countries, and international organizations would support this effort. An international fund would be established to develop Palestinian economic infrastructure. After three years, free elections would be held and the government of Israel and the elected representatives of the Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace.
When I met with the prime minister on April 24, three weeks after Bush’s speech, I presented my plan to him and explained the logic behind my approach in the following letter.
 
Honorable Prime Minister,
The Oslo agreements were based on the belief that if we transferred to Arafat control of territories in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and control over the Palestinian population who lived there, he would turn into Israel’s partner in protecting peace and security in the region. Moreover, many of Oslo’s supporters saw the establishment of a dictatorial regime in the territory under Arafat’s control as an advantage rather than a disadvantage. They worked under the assumption that freed from the constraints of democracy, Arafat would be better able to deal with the terrorists of Hamas and that he would, in parallel, also be dedicated to creating prosperity for his people and promoting peace. As time passed, these prophecies proved to be false because they completely ignored the basic difference between the interests of a dictator and the interests of a democratic leader...
[W]hen Israel and other countries in the free world were convinced that “a strong leader will bring a strong peace” and therefore saw strengthening Arafat’s power as the supreme objective, Arafat invested every dollar and shekel he received in increasing hatred toward Israel and in building an infrastructure of terror to use against it. Faced with the choice of peace and prosperity or misery and terror, Arafat always chose the latter...
Now is the time for new leaders who, unlike Arafat, will be interested in improving the lives of their own people by, among other things, forging a peaceful relationship with Israel. Still, it is impossible to ignore the fact that after nine years of sowing hatred and encouraging terrorism against Israel, it will be very difficult to find Palestinian leaders who will dare to support such a policy openly. To allow these leaders to work openly and without fear, a transition period is needed both to enable the foundations of democratic life to be established in Palestinian society and to neutralize the effects of the hateful propaganda and terrorist acts against Israel.
In our meeting, I asked the prime minister to read over the plan carefully and explained that what I was suggesting was an entirely different approach to the peace process. I explained why I was certain that we could find a broad basis of agreement with the American administration and mentioned Bush’s remark and my conversation with Condoleezza Rice as examples. As always, Sharon was charming and attentive. He told me he would look into the matter.
A few days later, my mother died at the age of 93. Her advanced years did not make the loss any less painful. She had been a voice of moral clarity throughout my life, and despite her age, confronted the KGB alongside me with remarkable determination. After my release, with the great battle against evil behind her, her fighting spirit did not diminish. She was determined to do whatever she could to help Israel’s new immigrants begin their lives in their new country and would not permit me for a single moment to rest on my laurels. Time and again, she insisted that I do everything in my power to continue to fight for the principles we both believed in.
I received a warm and compassionate phone call from Sharon in which he apologized for being unable to pay his condolences. He told me he was on his way to Washington to meet with President Bush and that he intended to use some of the elements of my plan in his discussions with him.
While I do not know what was said during Sharon’s meeting with Bush, I was not optimistic. The president, I was told, was going to give a major policy address on the Middle East sometime in June and what I had heard about that speech was far from encouraging. According to my information, Bush was planning to be very tough on Arafat, but still give the Palestinian leader one more chance to fight terrorism and become a peace partner. It sounded like the mistakes of Oslo were going to be repeated.
In June, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum at Beaver Creek, Colorado. The World Forum, sponsored by AEI, the prestigious Washington think tank, is an annual conference that brings together leaders from government, business, and academia to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. Considering that President Bush was supposed to make his policy speech on the Middle East a few days later and that many officials in his administration were attending the conference, I decided to devote my talk to the relationship between democracy and peace.
At that time, Israel was being hit by another wave of Palestinian terrorism, and as is often the case in our small country, this wave hit close to home. Two days before my speech in Beaver Creek, a suicide bomber had murdered nineteen people riding on a bus. The bombing took place a few hundred meters from my house and just a few minutes after my eldest daughter, Rachel, had left for school. My wife ran out of the house to check on her. She was not at the bus stop. She had decided to take a car pool that morning. But a dozen other families whose daughters and sons were on their way to school would not be so fortunate. The next day, another Palestinian terror attack killed seven people and injured dozens more, including my secretary, Dina. In the car ride to Beaver Creek, I received updates about another terror attack that had killed four members of a single family. In my speech, I focused on this terrorism and what it meant for Israel and the world.
Every day we are in the midst of a struggle for our survival, and every day there are new victims of the cruel terror. But we know very well that it is not a tribal war between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. We are in the midst of the first world war of the twenty-first century, waged between the world of terror and the world of democracy, between those for whom human life is held in the highest value and those for whom human life is merely an instrument to reach certain political aims. The world of democracy will win this struggle. But in order for the victory to be everlasting, it is crucial, but not sufficient, to destroy terrorism. It is imperative to expand the world our enemies are trying to destroy, to export democracy.4
I then explained why democracy was so crucial to international stability and security, why linkage had been so successful during the Cold War, and why the free world had betrayed its democratic principles at Oslo. I outlined my plan to help the Palestinians build a free society and help Israelis and Palestinians forge a lasting peace.
The next day, I met with Vice President Cheney, who was also attending the conference. I have always had an excellent relationship with Cheney and find him to be a very thoughtful and intelligent man. Even though I had discussed the link between democracy and peace with the vice president before, our meeting, initially scheduled for thirty minutes, went on for over an hour and a half. We talked about the situation in Israel and I told him how disappointed I was to hear that President Bush was planning to give Arafat another chance. “What kind of message will it send,” I asked, “if the person leading the free world in a global war on terror gives another chance to a man who has built an autonomy of terror and who is now unleashing another wave of terror attacks?” To which Cheney replied, “But I understood your government agreed with the president’s approach and that it is the Palestinians who still have a problem with the speech.”
Cheney’s statement took me by surprise, and I thought that it was important that there should be no misunderstanding. “Look,” I continued, “we have many disagreements in our government, just as you often have in yours between the State Department and the White House or between other agencies. The positions of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, as you know, are very different from those of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. As for what I am telling you now, I am not speaking on behalf of my government. I am simply giving you my personal opinion, which is that the president will be making a big mistake.” When Cheney asked me what I thought the president should speak about instead, I returned to the important link between democracy and peace, between a free society for the Palestinians and security for Israelis, ideas for which the vice president had a great deal of sympathy. I argued that the only viable partner for Israel was a Palestinian leadership devoted to improving the lives of its own people. Cheney promised he would pass along my ideas to the president.

A SPEECH IGNORED

On June 24 the president finally delivered his much-anticipated speech. Since I was traveling back from America, I did not have a chance to watch it live, but a friend in Washington who did see it told me I would not have been disappointed. When I finally read the text of the speech, it was almost too good to be true.
President Bush turned his back on Yasser Arafat’s dictatorship once and for all, calling on the Palestinians “to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror.”5
He spoke of the Palestinians’ right to live in a free society and to improve their lives, telling them that they “deserve democracy and the rule of law,” “an open society and a thriving economy,” and “a life of hope for your children.” He outlined what type of changes Palestinian leaders were expected to implement, from creating “entirely new political and economic institutions based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism” to formulating “a new constitution which separates the powers of government” to establishing a “system of reliable justice to punish those who prey on the innocent.” He pledged the full support of the United States, the international donor community, the European Union, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund for reform efforts. Crucially, President Bush seemed to link American diplomatic and economic support to the willingness of the Palestinians to embrace change within their society. Not since the days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency had the idea of linkage been embraced so forcefully.
I call upon [the Palestinians] to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts. . . . If [the Palestinians] energetically take the path of reform, the rewards can come quickly. If Palestinians embrace democracy, confront corruption and firmly reject terror, they can count on American support for the creation of a provisional state of Palestine.5
President Bush also placed the goal of helping the Palestinians build a free society into a broader context, making it clear that he believed in both the universal appeal of freedom and its power to change the world.
If liberty can blossom in the rocky soil of the West Bank and Gaza, it will inspire millions of men and women around the globe who are equally weary of poverty and oppression, equally entitled to the benefits of democratic government.... Prosperity and freedom and dignity are not just American hopes, or Western hopes. They are universal, human hopes. And even in the violence and turmoil of the Middle East, America believes those hopes have the power to transform lives and nations.
I re-read the speech, almost pinching myself. It was a beautiful expression of the principles I also believed should be the foundation of the peace process. (The parallel between the president’s words and my own ideas was so strong that a Washington Post reporter questioned whether I had become one of Bush’s speechwriters.6) In a decade full of speeches, meetings, summits, and agreements, these principles were ignored. Now they were being championed by the leader of the democratic world.
From my perspective, the president’s speech was potentially no less dramatic than when, twenty years earlier, Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an evil empire, shattering the illusions of those who believed that a fear society could be a friend and that peace could be made with tyranny. Now, Bush’s speech could finally dispel the delusions of those who believed that a fear society would fight terrorism and that peace could be made with a dictator. And Bush’s moral clarity could chart a bold, new course centered on the expansion of freedom and democracy among Palestinians.
For me personally, however, there was an important difference between the two speeches. Two decades earlier, I was confined to a prison cell on the border of Siberia. Reagan’s words and leadership strengthened my resolve and the resolve of my fellow inmates, but there was little else we could do. But in 2002 I was an Israeli minister, making decisions along with my colleagues about the very issues Bush was addressing. Now, I was in a position to act.
My experiences over the previous decade had taught me that my fellow Israelis would be reluctant to see the wisdom of Bush’s vision. Indeed, very few people in Israel thought the president had outlined a viable course to peace. To be sure, everyone realized that Bush had abandoned Arafat. But neither those on the Left nor those on the Right had much faith in the possibility of building a free society among the Palestinians. Thus, Bush’s calls for reform and his championing of Palestinian democracy were greeted by the Israeli Left with disappointment and by the Israeli Right with complacency.
After nearly two years of Palestinian terrorism, the colossal failure of Oslo had still left little impression on significant portions of the Israeli Left. This group continued to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that strengthening Arafat and negotiating with his PA was the only hope for peace. To them, a speech that abandoned Arafat and linked American diplomacy to internal Palestinian reforms was tantamount to a nail in Oslo’s coffin. Lacking faith in Palestinian democracy, most of the Israeli Left was depressed by a vision of peace that one British columnist described as “demanding that Palestine become Sweden before it can become Palestine.”7
On the Right, many opposed Bush’s support for a Palestinian state, but this support was nothing new. What was new was that the U.S. president was now making American support for a future Palestinian state conditional on Palestinian democratization and reform. Since most of the Right had little faith that the Palestinians could ever build a free society, they saw the president’s speech as precluding the possibility of a Palestinian state ever emerging. In short, the Left and Right in Israel responded to the president’s speech as they did precisely because neither had much faith in Palestinian democracy.
Yet regardless of what Israelis thought about the speech, because it had come from the U.S. president it could not be ignored. For years, I had turned to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and other papers abroad in order to espouse the principles that were now being championed from Washington. But in Israel’s Hebrew-speaking media, these ideas were never given a hearing because almost no one took them seriously.
In the days after the president’s speech, this began to change. I met with journalists and said the same thing I had been saying for a decade, only this time they listened. In newspaper, television, and radio interviews, instead of having to discuss the ins and outs of the latest political crisis, I had the opportunity to talk about the connection between democracy and peace and about the importance of linkage. I understood that the media’s sudden interest was motivated neither by a recognition of the need to reassess the false premises of Oslo nor by a new open-mindedness. It was simply a function of the need to understand the logic behind the president’s ideas. To the question, “What in the world could the president be thinking?” I was supposed to provide an answer. When I had discussed those same ideas in the past, most Israelis looked at me as if I were visiting from another planet, a cosmonaut whose quirky notions of freedom had no place in the Middle East. But now that the president had become an astronaut, I was expected to describe the view from outer space.
I saw this new willingness to listen as a rare chance to try to mobilize public support for policies that I thought were critical to Israel’s future. I met with Sharon and implored him to formulate a plan based on the June 24 speech. Whether it was my plan, his plan, or someone else’s plan did not matter. The important thing, I said, was to take advantage of the unique opportunity the president had given us.
I was concerned that even within the Bush administration there was not enough support for the president’s ideas. If it were true, as was reported, that the speech had undergone radical revisions over the course of a few weeks, then support for Bush’s new vision could evaporate just as quickly. Without follow-up, what had been a radical departure from the policies of the past could lose momentum, and conventional diplomatic thinking would return.
For the next few weeks, I tried to persuade my ministerial colleagues in Sharon’s national unity government of the need to seize the moment, but I had no takers.
I tried to address this skepticism in Israel’s leading Left-wing paper, Haaretz.
Many on the Israeli Left have largely been unmoved by Bush’s bold vision. Skeptical that the Palestinians will ever be able to build a free society, they see an American policy that is linked to Palestinian democratization as hopelessly naïve.... The source of my faith is a belief that the essence of democracy has universal appeal.... While each culture is unique and may have its own ordering of values, I do not believe that any people wants to live in a society where the fear of imprisonment is omnipresent. Today, the Palestinians live with this fear and do not yet have the opportunity to speak their minds. . . . The reforms that are necessary will not create a liberal democracy overnight. But given a genuine chance to build a free society, I have no doubt that the Palestinians will seize it. Any attempt to leap over the “democratic obstacle” that President Bush has erected reminds me of the attempt to establish a “New Middle East” by bolstering a friendly dictator. Now, as then, the only results that are to be expected are a protracted conflict and brutal terror. Instead of again making last-ditch efforts to strengthen a dictatorial regime—either under the leadership of Arafat or someone else—the Israeli left should instead join the efforts of aiding the Palestinians in building a free society, thereby helping the two peoples create a stable peace in the region.8

A ROAD MAP BACK TO OSLO

President Bush’s words hovered in the air for three months waiting for someone to bring them down to earth. Unfortunately, Israel did not seize the moment. In fairness, Israel’s government was absorbed with the fight against an unremitting Palestinian terrorism. It was also not inactive on the diplomatic front. We continued to insist on the implementation of the Mitchell and Tenet plans and on isolating Yasser Arafat. Moreover, the cult of death and violence which the PA had propagated made the prospects of a free society emerging among the Palestinians seem even more remote to Israelis than it had in the past.
I failed to persuade my colleagues in the Israeli government to start a new diplomatic process based on President Bush’s historic speech. Those who agreed with me on the need to renew diplomatic efforts remained fixated on breathing new life into Oslo, something that Prime Minister Sharon thankfully was not prepared to do. But Israel’s government presented no new plan, adopted no new policies, and didn’t even hold a discussion on how the principles articulated in the June 24 speech could be realized.
Into this vacuum stepped the U.S. State Department. As I have learned over the years, most officials in the State Department (although certainly not all) are deeply skeptical about democratic reform, preferring what they see as the stability of a dictator to the dangers of democracy. This attitude has reigned in the State Department for decades and has colored its thinking on policymaking across the globe. Whether they are counseling “engagement” of nondemocratic regimes or turning their back on the pro-democracy forces fighting them, State Department officials will consistently seek accommodation rather than confrontation. So when I discovered the State Department had developed a diplomatic plan based on Bush’s speech, I was worried. When I found out that the plan assigned a key role to a diplomatic quartet comprised of the United States, the EU, the United Nations, and Russia, I was even more concerned. Those who were responsible for turning the principles Bush had outlined on June 24 into a concrete proposal were the same forces that were vociferously opposing the president’s strategy to build a free Iraq—a strategy based on those same principles. Clearly, the other members of the quartet would only magnify the State Department’s bias against democratic reform in favor of the “stability” of a strongman.
In October, when I read an initial draft of what had been labeled “The Road Map to Peace,” my concerns proved justified. Its authors had stripped President Bush’s June 24 speech of what I thought was its historic message. What was kept was the vision of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side. But discarded was the idea that a Palestinian state would emerge as a result of real democratic change within Palestinian society. To be sure, the Road Map included all the right words—reform, democracy, constitution, transparency, and so on—but the plan itself ensured that these words would be little more than lip service.
Perhaps this was most obvious with regards to the timeline and order of events in the Road Map. As I have explained, elections in a fear society can never come at the beginning of a reform process. Invariably, such elections cannot be free because they will be held in an environment of fear and intimidation. Moreover, those elected in that type of environment will have absolutely no interest in reform. That is why the plan I proposed to the prime minister six months earlier stipulated that before elections could be held, a transition period of “at least three years” would be required. Admittedly, this was an ambitious schedule given that Palestinian society had been systematically poisoned with hatred for the last decade. Still, I believed that the process of liberalization and democratization could begin to bear fruit by then if international support efforts were truly directed at building a free society for the Palestinians.
The Palestinians are a relatively small, educated, and entrepreneurial population with decades of exposure to Israeli democracy. A peace process dedicated to strengthening them rather than their corrupt, unaccountable rulers would succeed much faster than people thought. After a few years in which a Palestinian administration—albeit one appointed by outsiders—worked to develop the Palestinians’ civil society, economy, and democratic institutions, a fear society would gradually be replaced by a free society. The Palestinians would then be able to choose their leaders in free elections. By virtue of being dependent on the people they governed, those leaders would work to improve the lives of Palestinians, and as a result would have a vested interest in peace with Israel. With these leaders, I believed, Israel could make peace.
Rather than call for elections after reforms were well under way, the Road Map wanted them “as early as possible.” In a matter of months, new leaders were to be chosen, a Palestinian state was to be established, and final status peace talks could commence. How could anyone possibly believe, I asked myself, that a poisoned Palestinian society subject to unremitting incitement by its own media and educational system could be ready to choose a new leadership in a matter of months and be ready to peaceably join the community of nations in less than a year? How could anyone believe that such a leadership would really be dedicated to reforming Palestinian society, to improving the conditions of the Palestinians, and to making peace? The Road Map was the voice of Bush but the hands of Oslo. While its language paid homage to the June 24 speech, the plan’s authors were actually searching for a new strongman who would succeed where Arafat had failed. The new Palestinian regime under an “empowered” prime minister was packaged as a government of “reform,” but the timetables and snap elections gave the game away. The Road Map was effectively calling for a quick game of musical chairs among the Palestinian leadership, turning reform efforts into a farce.
This was not my only criticism. In his June 24 speech, President Bush had brought moral clarity to the peace process by making a clear distinction between a fear society and a free society, between terror states and democratic states. But one did not have to read far into the Road Map to watch this moral clarity disappear. In Phase I of the Road Map, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority were to end “official incitement” against the other. I understood why this was needed on the Palestinian side. Arafat’s controlled media was calling for a million martyrs to redeem Jerusalem, and his educational system was denying Israel’s right to exist. But I could not understand what official incitement Israel was supposed to stop. Clearly, this clause was put in to make the plan more “evenhanded.” But by creating a moral equivalence between the sides, the Road Map was in effect whitewashing incitement against Israel.
I implored Prime Minister Sharon to reject the Road Map on the grounds that it was at odds with Bush’s June 24 speech. Others inside Sharon’s national unity government thought there was no reason to create tension with the Bush administration over a preliminary draft when the Road Map might die on its own. I was hoping there would be a debate in the government or the security cabinet on the issue, but there was none. When I asked why, I was told that there was no “official” Road Map to discuss, only a work in progress.
By not rejecting the plan, Israel allowed work on it to continue. By December 2002 things had grown much worse. At the end of the month, the Quartet was due to meet to formally adopt the plan. In mid-December, I was in Washington, where I met with officials in the White House and the State Department. Since our government had no official position on the Road Map—we still had not discussed it—I felt free to express my reservations to everyone I met. I explained that the plan was diametrically opposed to the principles Bush articulated in his June 24 speech and would result in failure because, like Oslo, it would preclude the possibility of building a free society among the Palestinians.
Sharon, who was well aware of the contents of the plan, did try to influence its final wording and remove some of its more egregious clauses. But on the eve of the Road Map’s formal adoption by the Quartet, I could not escape the impression that Sharon’s silence, if not acquiescence, was returning Israel to the mistakes of the past. With each passing day, the Road Map was increasingly becoming the Bush administration’s policy.
When Labor pulled out of the national unity government in early November, Prime Minister Sharon decided to call elections rather than form a narrow Right-wing government. The elections were scheduled for the last week in January, and the Quartet decided to postpone the presentation of the plan until after the elections.
In those elections, Sharon led the Likud party to a huge victory, winning thirty-eight seats, twice as many as the Labor party. It was Sharon’s second landslide victory in two years. My party, Yisrael Ba’aliyah, was decimated at the polls, winning only two seats, after having won seven and six seats in two previous elections. Despite our poor showing, the election debacle was a bittersweet experience for me. When our party first ran in the 1996 elections, we had pointed out that since our goal was integrating the new immigrants into Israeli society, we would know we had succeeded when our party became obsolete. The more “Israeli” the new immigrants became, the less likely they would be to feel that an immigrant party was needed to help open the doors of Israeli society. Thus, though our party had lost most of its political power, we were proud that we had achieved our raison d’etre.
Sharon invited me to serve as a minister in his second government as well, with responsibility for diaspora affairs and Jerusalem. I was interested in this position because Jerusalem and Israel’s relationship with diaspora Jewry were both very close to my heart. Moreover, with the battle for integration behind me, I thought I could contribute to the fight against anti-Semitism that had become an increasingly critical issue and which would fall under my new authority.
At the end of April, two months after Sharon formed a Center-Right government, the Palestinian Authority confirmed the nomination of Mahmud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, as prime minister, a post that had not previously existed. America had made the release of the new diplomatic plan conditional on the appointment of Abbas, one of the “reforms” that was supposed to put the peace process back on track. As promised, the Road Map was immediately released. A few days later, representatives of the Quartet met formally to endorse the plan.
At the end of May, Sharon brought the Road Map, including a fourteen-point statement clarifying Israel’s reservations with the plan, to a vote of the cabinet. Some of these reservations were points Israel had failed to get incorporated into the text of the Road Map while it was being drafted. Other reservations were included to win the support or the abstention of some of the wavering ministers.
Not surprisingly, the debate in the government split almost entirely according to who supported or opposed a Palestinian state. The former voted in favor, while the latter voted against or abstained. I voted against the Road Map not because I was opposed to a Palestinian state but because of what kind of Palestinian state I believed it would create. I shared the concerns of some other ministers that in granting the Palestinian Authority a state even before final status talks would begin, the Road Map was rewarding Palestinian terrorism. I also agreed with them that by internationalizing the conflict, the plan was undermining Israeli sovereignty. But my chief concern, which I expressed in the government, was that the Road Map had abandoned the principles of Bush’s June 24 speech. In the end, by a vote of twelve to seven, with four abstentions and fourteen reservations, the Israeli government accepted the Road Map.
A week later in Aqaba, President Bush stood between an elected Israeli prime minister and an unelected prime minister of the Palestinian Authority and proclaimed a hopeful new era. Ten years after the famous handshake on the White House lawn, it was déjà vu on the shores of the Red Sea. With Abu Mazen held up as a “moderate” leader who would fight Palestinian terrorism and make peace with Israel, it was clear to me that Oslo’s false assumptions would once again guide the peace process. Like their Oslo predecessors, those supporting the Road Map did not recognize that moderation is not a function of a leader’s disposition or promises, but rather a function of the nature of the society he or she governs. The Road Map had it precisely backwards. One can rely on a free society to create the moderate, but one cannot rely on a moderate to create a free society.
It is ironic that the same American administration that was behind the principles articulated in June 2002 wholeheartedly embraced a diplomatic plan that abandoned those principles in June 2003. For me, it was as if Ronald Reagan, one year after making his evil empire speech, would have accepted a renewed détente between the superpowers.
In hindsight, the Bush administration’s support for the Road Map seems even more shocking. In speech after speech on Iraq, Bush has stressed the relationship between freedom and peace and between democracy and security. In doing so, he has been a strong and steady voice of moral clarity in a world that mostly rejects these ideas. Equally important, during his presidency, America’s policies have largely reflected those ideas. Yet when it came to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rhetoric and the policy of his administration diverged. I am sure that President Bush does not see the Road Map as an abandonment of the principles he has consistently championed. Indeed, when he declared that “there can be no peace for either side in the Middle East unless there is freedom for both,”9 I have no doubt that he meant it. Nevertheless, the Road Map will not bring to fruition the ideas the president articulated on June 24. It will not bring genuine freedom to the Palestinians, and therefore will not bring genuine peace.

DISENGAGING FROM DEMOCRACY

In the week following the Aqaba Summit, yet another wave of Palestinian terrorism and violence hit Israel, culminating in a suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus that murdered 16 passengers.
The Road Map required the Palestinian Authority security forces to take “sustained, targeted, and effective operations” aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and to ensure the “dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.” Instead, Abu Mazen tried to negotiate a “hudna,” a temporary truce in which all the terror groups would agree to halt violence. The idea of a temporary truce was certainly not new. In fact, it is exactly how many PLO leaders, including Arafat, saw Oslo from the start.
In 1994, speaking at a mosque in Johannesburg, South Africa, Arafat said that he considered the Oslo agreement like “the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Muhammed and Koraish.”10 The agreement to which Arafat was referring was a peace treaty made in the seventh century between the founder of Islam and the Arabian tribe of Koraish. Having grown much more powerful two years after making the pact, Muhammed broke his word and destroyed the Koreish, slaughtering all its male members. In effect, Arafat saw the Oslo accord as a temporary “peace” that could be broken whenever it suited him.
But Israel’s government ignored this statement and many others like it, explaining that Arafat was just playing internal politics. He had to appear tough, Israelis were told, until he had grown strong enough to fight the rejectionists. The important thing was not to weaken him and to keep the peace process moving.
But Arafat has never repudiated terrorism. In trying to bypass the Palestinian commitment to fight terrorism by getting terror groups to hold their fire until further concessions could be wrought from Israel, Abu Mazen was trying to do with the Road Map what Arafat had done with the Oslo agreement. But after a decade of incitement, support for terrorism had become so deeply woven into the fabric of Palestinian society that the idea of a temporary hudna could not keep the terrorists at bay.
Prime Minister Sharon wisely rejected a tactical cease-fire between Palestinian terror groups and demanded that the “new” Palestinian government abide by its commitment to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure. As for the other Palestinian commitments in the Road Map, they were blocked by Arafat. Arafat was supposed to be relegated to symbolic status, but he refused to give up any of his authority, keeping control over the PA’s security forces and finances. With power over Palestinian guns and money, Arafat ensured that the Road Map’s reforms went nowhere. By September, Abu Mazen had resigned his post.
The Israeli government’s unequivocal stance on the need for Palestinian compliance no doubt contributed to solid American backing for its position. Unlike the prisoner controversy following the Wye agreement, when the Clinton administration hesitated to make good on its promise to guarantee an oral agreement, the Bush administration refused to allow the Palestinians to renege on their signed commitments. Others, however, were ready to let the Palestinians off the hook. When it became clear that the Palestinians were not prepared to fight terrorism, the “international community” grew impatient. Here too, it felt like we had returned to the days of Oslo when in spite of Palestinian noncompliance, the world pressured Israel to keep the peace process moving. Both inside and outside of Israel (and even around the cabinet table), Sharon’s government was accused of not doing enough to “strengthen” Abu Mazen. In fact, some respected voices abroad began to question the wisdom of making the Palestinian commitment to fight terrorism a condition for moving forward. It would have been better, they argued, to take steps in parallel. It all sounded familiar: Demands for compliance give way to parallel steps, which eventually give way to one-sided concessions.
At the beginning of December, statesmen from around the world flew to Switzerland to attend a signing ceremony in Geneva. The Geneva Initiative, the brainchild of Yossi Beilin, a former architect of the Oslo agreement, was supposed to have resolved all outstanding issues between Israelis and Palestinians. There was only one problem. The people who signed it represented hardly anyone but themselves. Beilin was rejected by his own Labor party and failed to enter the Knesset. On the Palestinian side, the figures involved had even less public standing. However, that did not stop former and current presidents and prime ministers from attending the ceremony. When Israel’s democratically elected government was trying to mobilize international support for the struggle against Palestinian terrorism, Beilin was doing his best to restore international legitimacy to a PA that was implicated in terror attacks and that was responsible for inciting the Palestinian population against Israel. At a time when Palestinian children were strapping on suicide belts and when PA-controlled television was inciting Palestinians against the Jews and their state, Yossi Beilin assured those attending the majestic signing ceremony that “peace is right around the corner.”11
Like the anti-war marchers in Europe in the early 1980s who were convinced that their own governments were escalating the arms race and provoking tension with a peaceful Soviet Union, Beilin told his audience in Geneva that it was Israel’s government that didn’t want peace. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter showed similar moral clarity when he praised the Geneva Initiative which “the people support” and noted that the “political leaders are the obstacles to peace.”12
A couple of weeks after the ceremony in Geneva, Prime Minister Sharon announced his intention to unilaterally disengage from the Palestinians if the PA refused to implement the Road Map. Sharon said that the purpose of his so-called disengagement plan would be to “grant Israeli citizens the maximum level of security”13 and “minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians.” Sharon said that he did not intend “to hold Israeli society hostage in the hands of the Palestinians” and made it clear that Israel would not “wait for [the Palestinians] indefinitely.”
The logic of the prime minister’s approach was understandable. He assumed that there was no Palestinian peace partner and no prospects for one on the horizon. Second, based on the experience of the last ten years, Sharon was convinced that Israel would come under increasing pressure to make large concessions despite Palestinian noncompliance. Thus, Sharon thought it would be better for Israel to act unilaterally to secure its interests while it still could. Many Israelis who had lost hope that a Palestinian peace partner would emerge, and believed that Israelis and Palestinians must separate from one another, supported Sharon’s ideas.
In April 2004, Sharon formally unveiled his disengagement plan. It called for the removal of all Israeli settlements and military installations in the Gaza Strip as well as the uprooting of four isolated settlements in the West Bank. President Bush, who saw the plan as an “historic opportunity” and who hoped to give Sharon as much political backing as possible, made unprecedented statements in support of Israel’s traditional positions, ruling out both a “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and an Israeli return to the “indefensible borders” of 1967. In the weeks before the vote, Sharon gave ministers the opportunity to discuss his ideas and to present alternatives.
I was opposed to Sharon’s disengagement plan because I did not accept the premise that there was no potential Palestinian partner and no hope for peace. Of course, the peace I envisioned was very different from what the architects of Oslo and Geneva had in mind. The peace I envisioned was one that ignored neither the nature of the society on our doorstep nor the human rights of our neighbors.
In my view, one-sided Israeli concessions would only strengthen the forces of terror and fear within Palestinian society, making it even more difficult to promote positive change and decreasing the chances of a viable partner for peace emerging in the future.
As I had done so many times over the previous decade, I tried my best to convince my fellow ministers that the road to peace is paved with freedom. But my arguments could not pierce the skepticism. “I understand that in the Soviet Union your ideas were important, but unfortunately they have no place in the Middle East,” Sharon told me, as many of my colleagues nodded in agreement.
 
 
 
Despite the skepticism, I still have not lost my faith in an Israeli-Palestinian peace anchored in freedom. The peace I believe in is based on the belief that all peoples can build free societies. It is based on the two ideas that guided my struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union: that a fear society is inherently incapable of upholding human rights and that the most reliable measure of a state’s intentions towards its neighbors is its treatment of its own citizens. And it is based on the conviction that by linking the peace process to the expansion of freedom within Palestinian society, Palestinians will be free and Israelis will be secure.
The Palestinians lived under Israeli rule for a quarter century. But after less than a decade under Arafat’s regime, their hatred toward Israel is higher than at any time in the past. Why? Because a fear society has descended on the Palestinians. Until that fear society is replaced, there will be no end to Palestinian suffering, no improvement in their condition, and no chance for peace. That fear society will surely breed terrorism and poison generation after generation of Palestinians to hate Jews and the Jewish state. It matters not if Israel signs a peace treaty with such a society or seeks to disengage from it: A fear society will always remain a danger to Israel.
Peace and security cannot be achieved, as some believe, by simply leaving the territories. That will only bring the terror closer to our cities and our families, and create a terror state on our border that will threaten Israel and the world. The only way a Palestinian state will not endanger the Jewish state is if it is a state whose leadership is dependent on the people they govern.
For ten years, and with five different prime ministers, Israel has tried various approaches to peace with the Palestinians. Rabin and Peres sought to create a “New Middle East” with a Palestinian dictatorship. Netanyahu tried to establish reciprocity. Barak jumped to final status negotiations. Sharon embraced unilateral disengagement. During this time, most of the world and many in Israel measured progress in the peace process by the percentage of territory that was handed over, by how close the Palestinians were to establishing a state, or by how close Israel was to removing settlements. Thus, according to the world’s criteria, the peace process was either speeding ahead or stuck in neutral. In contrast, I measured progress by the extent of freedom within Palestinian society. But according to my criteria, despite the efforts of Israeli governments to make peace, the peace process was going steadily in reverse because there was less freedom and more fear within Palestinian society than before Oslo began.
There is another way. History has shown us that a few years of freedom can make a world of difference. In 1944, Germany had descended into depths that are scarcely imaginable today. A few years later, West Germany, a free society once more, was building its democratic institutions and becoming a peaceful member of the free world.
The culture of death and violence that has engulfed Palestinian society can also change quickly. But the change is unlikely to happen on its own, nor will it be the product of an Israeli withdrawal or a phony peace. It will happen when the free world abandons the false assumptions that have guided diplomacy in the region for decades. It will happen when the world’s democratic leaders, especially those in the United States and Israel, embrace the principles that President Bush outlined on June 24, 2002, and ensure that those principles shape their policies. Above all, it will happen only when those democratic leaders have faith that freedom has the power to change our world—even when its seeds are planted in the rocky soil of the West Bank and the Gaza strip.