Chapter Forty-one

CAMP DAVID

Two potent ideas drove the foreign policy of Clinton’s final year in office. The first was Clinton’s notion of the unique power of the American presidency as peacemaker on a troubled planet. Over the course of two terms, he had seen the effect of this power firsthand in several places. Bosnia was an example. Northern Ireland was another. Here Clinton and his special envoy, former senator George Mitchell, had helped broker the so-called Good Friday accord, which established a path (though imperfectly followed in the years since) for ending four decades of sectarian violence between Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists. From these experiences and others, Clinton had developed a general theory of peacemaking.

The theory was built on several assumptions. Most important was that crafting peace agreements was fundamentally a task of public persuasion for which politicians like himself were well suited. People needed to be coaxed, prodded, and flattered into making an existential choice in favor of hope for the future over grievances rooted in the past. Usually, the only way this could happen was for the outside world to convey legitimacy on leaders who—since they had emerged amid war—invariably had bloody pasts, shrouded in moral ambiguity and even criminality. This is what Clinton had done for Gerry Adams, the leader of Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein, the political arm of the terrorism-sponsoring Irish Republican Army. By this logic, such legitimacy gave leaders the influence and moral authority they needed to push their own publics to make difficult decisions for peace. Common folk needed to support leaders who made concessions to enemies they loathed, and who were willing to yield some historic claims on property or cherished principles as the only practical way to make good on other claims. Clinton had found this revelation wonderfully liberating: Most difficult international problems were in essential ways really problems of domestic politics, a subject he knew plenty about. He also believed that the United States, personified by the president, could play a crucial role in helping world leaders surmount their domestic problems. America’s superpower status, as he conceived it, was partly about military and economic might but often just as much about psychology. People were flattered to have the attention of the world’s most powerful leader, so long as that attention was respectful and not overbearing. Clinton was superb at conveying such respect. In conversations with foreign leaders, no matter how small the country, he always let the other leader speak first and at length about his problems, before Clinton made any pronouncements on U.S. policy.

These general notions about peacemaking were focused most urgently on a specific conflict: the long and seemingly endless clash between Israelis and Palestinians. Clinton did not believe it was endless. This was the second idea driving his foreign policy as his last year came to be measured in months and weeks: It was his belief that he personally had a rendezvous with destiny in helping bring peace to this defining conflict of the Middle East. Through the years, Clinton came to feel an intimate connection with the problems of this land. Part of it was his affection for Yitzhak Rabin, the old man who had sacrificed his life in pursuit of peace. Clinton believed Rabin could have achieved his goal if he had not been assassinated by one of his own countrymen, a right-wing fanatic opposed to the peace the prime minister was trying to deliver. Of the assassin, Clinton told Sandy Berger, “That young man sure knew what he was doing.”

Clinton had been present at Rabin’s seminal moment, when he shook hands with his mortal enemy, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, on the South Lawn of the White House in September 1993 during the signing of the so-called Oslo peace agreement. Clinton had helped stage-manage the handshake, but he did not have much to do with the actual agreement. It had been negotiated in secret directly by Israelis and Palestinians, without American auspices. The promise of 1993, however, had not come to fruition. The Oslo agreement had placed its faith in incrementalism. Israelis and Palestinians, with their warring claims to the same land, would each take a series of limited and concrete steps toward resolving their disputes, each move serving as a “confidence-building measure” toward eventual resolution of the wider conflict. This resolution would involve statehood for the nation-less Palestinian people, in exchange for acknowledging Israel’s right to peaceful and permanent existence. The problem was that these proposed gradual steps, far from building confidence, further inflamed mistrust and resentment. The plan for reconciliation envisioned under Oslo was far beyond schedule, and a deadline was looming. Arafat had declared that he would unilaterally proclaim statehood for his Palestinian Authority by September 2000. This would provoke a thunderous response in Israel; Clinton realistically feared the two sides were headed for a new wave of violence. Amid this fear, there was in the Israeli and U.S. governments alike new sympathy for a different solution to the Palestinian problem. Instead of contemplating incremental steps, the aim of negotiations should be more ambitious: “final status.” This meant trying to resolve the outstanding claims and reach a permanent settlement in one bold swoop.

The new prime minister of Israel, the Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, supported this. And the idea had obvious appeal to Clinton. In the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he had called searching for Middle East peace part of “my personal journey of atonement.” It was not solely a quest for glory and redemption, but it was partly such a quest that inspired Clinton to put his full weight behind a final push for peace. If such a push worked—ending one of the world’s most remorseless conflicts, one with a loud echo across the Muslim world—he would be due all the glory he wanted.

It was in this spirit that Clinton invited Arafat, Barak, and their negotiating team to cloister themselves away for days at Camp David, the rustic presidential retreat sixty miles from the White House, deep in the woods of the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. Such a summit, among these particular players, was almost by definition fraught with risk. Most gatherings of foreign leaders are planned carefully in advance, with at least some concrete agreement already decided upon in order to give leaders a guaranteed success to announce. There was no such guarantee here. Indeed, a few months earlier, an effort to craft a peace agreement between Israelis and Syrians under U.S. auspices at Shepherdstown, West Virginia, had fallen flat. But the dramatic possibilities of a fluid, unscripted gathering at Camp David appealed to Clinton. Moreover, the risks of doing nothing—and drifting toward the September deadline—seemed larger than the risk of a failed summit. Over the July 4 weekend, Clinton summoned his own foreign policy team to Camp David.

He turned to Berger. “We have no choice, right?”

Berger, warning that the conflict “is heading toward an explosion,” replied, “I think that’s right.”

Invitations went out to both sides to join Clinton back at the camp in a week.

The summit opened on July 11. It was scheduled to end no later than nine days later, when Clinton needed to leave for Japan and a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, a group near to his heart and which he had elevated to head-of-state status. There were three issues at the core of a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. One was the borders of Israel and a new Palestinian state. Israel had expanded its territory in the 1967 war, and any settlement would shrink the country. But this would not be back to its original size, since Israeli settlers had already built homes outside the original boundaries, and the political right in Israel was determined to protect the claims of these settlers. The second was the right of return for Palestinian refugees who wanted to resettle in old homesteads. This right had to be strictly limited, since a large influx of Palestinians would undermine both Israel’s security and its essential identity as a Jewish state. Most sensitive of all was Jerusalem, home to the holy Old City, capital of Israel, and the place where Palestinians were determined to establish their own capital. Historically, this had been an issue on which both sides had been unmovable in asserting claims that were mutually exclusive. There was a lengthy roster of other issues—security guarantees, control of airspace, the division of municipal services—but these three were the ones on which the Camp David drama would pivot. They touched basic nerves of identity and day-to-day existence in ways that were virtually impossible for most Americans, in an established nation in which mortal foes did not live within shooting distance of each other, to conceive.

Camp David was fundamentally a story about three leaders and what they were willing and unwilling to do in the name of peace.

Arafat, who had spent decades as the face of Palestinian grievance and aspiration as head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in earlier years had been an outcast on the world stage because of the PLO’s terrorist tactics. But over time he had come to enjoy legitimacy and even an aura of celebrity, particularly with European publics sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. He was now head of an autonomous “authority” that governed the stateless Palestinians. After the Olso agreement, Arafat was even awarded a Nobel Peace Prize—rather prematurely, as it turned out. His emergence in the international mainstream was given the full imprimatur of the Clinton administration. He had been to the Clinton White House more than any other foreign leader. This attention reflected Clinton’s belief that Arafat was in a basic way on the level: that he was the genuine leader of his people, and had the capacity to move them toward peace. In some moods, Arafat had a bluff charm. But as Clinton had learned, and would have occasion to relearn, Arafat’s brand of leadership thrived in ambiguity, in which the unsettled nature of the conflict and Palestinian grievances were his greatest source of power. The possibility of black-and-white decisions—in which Palestinians would let go of grievance—was frightening to him. Arafat had not been enthusiastic about going to Camp David, as he let the Americans know beforehand. He did not trust what he regarded as Barak’s record of falling through on earlier commitments, and he believed the time was not right for a comprehensive deal. The summit could end in failure, embarrassing everyone, he warned. But, feeling under pressure from the Americans and with no real choice, he was here.

Barak, on the surface of things, was the kind of leader to whom Clinton should have been drawn. Like Rabin, he was a military man and an Israeli hero. He was a former military chief of staff. Once, on a mission for the army special forces, he had donned a dress and wig and slipped into Beirut to assess Palestinian movements. And, like Rabin, he seemed ready to place a historic wager that his country’s security could be better protected through reconciliation than more conflict, a judgment Clinton deeply respected. Barak, moreover, had won election over a man Clinton disliked, the conservative Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. To top it off, Barak’s political consultants were none other than James Carville, Stan Greenberg, and Robert Shrum, all intimates of the Clinton circle. These points of similarity, however, were clouded by a lack of personal warmth between the two men. Barak could be an exasperating and inscrutable man, as would be on vivid display in the days ahead.

Finally, there was Clinton himself. His negotiating style reflected his personality. He had an addiction to detail that was quite useful in the Camp David setting. He pored over detailed maps of Jerusalem, trying to gain a block-by-block understanding of the potential solutions. His own team had long since learned his strengths and weaknesses in moderating peace talks. One weakness was to win vague or preliminary agreements from one side and oversell them to the other side, presenting tentative movements as dramatic breakthroughs, which only led to disappointment later. Dennis Ross, the Mideast envoy, later wrote that he learned not to brief Clinton too early on the critical bottom lines and trade-offs for each side: Clinton would want to rush in with his ideas, instead of letting negotiations mature and build a natural momentum. But the president’s weaknesses, in Ross’s view, were amply offset by his strengths. Foremost among them was a superb ability to articulate the issues in ways that highlighted the advantages of peace and sympathized with the pain involved in the sacrifices.

The mood at Camp David was shadowed in ways large and small by the sense of time running short. Clinton was taking advantage of a last chance to enjoy a presidential lifestyle he loved. Chelsea Clinton, on summer break from Stanford, was present for much of the negotiations. This was their last chance to soak up the splendid Camp David setting together, and for her to be a witness to history in the making with her father. There were numerous all-nighters, but Clinton plainly did not mind. And even during the long down times, when negotiations paused while the teams went into private huddles, Clinton did not try to rest. Instead, he played nonstop cards with his press secretary, Joe Lockhart, or personal aide Doug Band, the last of his presidential “butt boys.”

Given Arafat’s ambivalence at launching final status talks, Ross urged Clinton to lift the Palestinian’s sights. The president rose to the challenge with a meditation on history, telling Arafat how eager he was to be present when the flag was raised for the first time on a new state of Palestine.

But inspiration soon gave way to a desultory mood, which pervaded Camp David for the next several days. Both sides were doing nothing productive, but Barak’s position was perhaps more infuriating. The Israeli prime minister had pressed hard for the negotiations, but now that he had them he was showing no initiative or flexibility. To the contrary, he told U.S. negotiators that he did not expect anything to happen for days—pressure needed to build up on Arafat, Barak reasoned, to get him to show flexibility. The Americans were galled. Stalling as strategy was hardly calculated to please his American host, who wanted the parties to respond to the obvious urgency of the calendar. Barak’s approach, the White House team believed, was characteristic of his aloofness and even arrogance.

The summit dragged on inconclusively, Clinton’s frustration growing. The Palestinians were the first to feel his lash. On the fifth day at Camp David, Clinton was meeting jointly with the two negotiating teams under Arafat and Barak, while the top leaders remained in their cabins. In a discussion of the borders between Israel and a new Palestinian state, one of Arafat’s negotiators, Abu Ala, began a recitation of historical grievances over the 1967 war, rather than responding to Clinton’s urging to make realistic proposals on a new map. While the Palestinian lectured, Clinton’s face grew red. Sensing an explosion, Ross quickly suggested a break, but it was too late. The explosion came.

Clinton reminded Abu Ala about the political risks he had taken in hosting a summit. What the Palestinians were doing now was a waste of his time and everyone else’s. This, Clinton shouted, was an “outrageous approach.” Then he stalked out of the cabin.

This outburst was startling. Clinton threw fits of temper all the time back at the White House, in the company of his own staff. But rarely did he show that side with others, least of all in a diplomatic setting. Was this authentic anger or a performance? The different reactions of his own team reflected how opaque the president’s own thinking could be even to close subordinates. Clinton’s anger, believed Ross, “was always genuine, not done for effect.” Berger, who knew Clinton far more intimately, believed that “he used anger in a very calculated way.”

There would be occasion for more of that anger later in the day, this time for Barak. You pressed for this summit, Clinton reminded the prime minister, but the truth was he was not doing anything to make it a success.

This would change, but not before Barak’s mood got worse. The next evening, day six, Barak sent Clinton a note that reflected his grim outlook. Arafat was manipulating the process, he said, trying to draw Israel out to show its bottom line, then pocketing any gains while giving nothing in return. He would never do such a thing unless he felt the Americans were behind him. “I do not intend to allow the Israeli state to fall apart physically or morally,” he wrote. “There is no power in the world that can force on us collective national suicide.” This was chilling stuff—the words, Ross believed, of a leader who was feeling cornered.

The breakthrough came on day eight. Barak asked to see Clinton alone. The president was ebullient when the meeting adjourned, but would not say why in front of the larger team. He cleared everyone out except for Berger, Ross, Chief of Staff John Podesta, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. “I finally have his bottom line,” Clinton said with delight. Indeed he did have it. After giving nothing away for days, Barak had finally come through in an instant with more concessions than most Israelis had ever contemplated. On borders, Barak would give back the West Bank territory it had seized in 1967, except for a relatively small 9 percent annexation, which in turn would be compensated with a land swap in nearby Palestinian areas in Gaza City. On Jerusalem, Barak had agreed to give the Palestinians sovereignty over the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City, as well as several other neighborhoods. On the other questions, including right of return for refugees, Israel’s needs were met in ways that fell entirely within what had been the reasonable expectations before the summit. An international presence would help maintain security.

The immediate question—how did Barak go this far?—was immediately overtaken by another: How would Arafat react? Could he take yes for an answer? The feeling, widely though not universally shared on the American team, was that the moment of final decision had arrived. If Arafat would not take this, he would not take anything. The Palestinian went to Clinton’s headquarters at Aspen Lodge. The two of them were alone in the living room. Clinton’s team strained to keep abreast of the meeting by listening at a kitchen door or watching the body language from outside through the windows.

Berger recalled seeing his boss, a large man, give the diminutive Arafat “the full Lyndon Johnson treatment”—towering over the object of his persuasion, hands cupping the shoulder, fingers jabbing the chest. Clinton raised his voice again, this time not so much in anger as pleading: “This is the best deal you’re gonna get. For God’s sake, don’t turn this down. It’ll never get better.”

Arafat saw things differently. He came back with questions and requests for meetings. Only the next morning did he come out and say no. The summit continued for five more days, a full two weeks in total. There were more heroics to keep the process alive. At one point, the summit seemed over as Clinton prepared to leave for Japan. The bags of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were packed, and the cars were lined up for a motorcade. Then, at the last moment, the two sides agreed to stay until Clinton flew back from Japan. But when he flew back, the answer was still no.

Clinton bluntly told Arafat that if the summit failed, he would tell the world that it was because the Palestinians would not negotiate in good faith. Arafat was shocked and told Albright, “I can’t lose my friend Clinton.” Berger saw a man trapped somewhere between panic and paralysis.

The summit at Camp David had seemed at the time achingly close to a historic breakthrough. The implications of Arafat’s intransigence, however, soon began to take shape. Perhaps they had not been close at all, many of the Americans would conclude. Arafat had spent his life in opposition, defined by struggle. He might not have wished ever to be a conventional leader, worried about administrative tasks like schools and water quality. In all likelihood, there was no result he would have accepted at Camp David other than an abject Israeli capitulation. This possibility was too cheerless to contemplate. As the summit broke down, the Americans turned the focus to somehow keeping the peace process alive. Clinton gave a pep talk to Barak that was revealing of how Clinton saw himself. “You are smarter than me and you are experienced in war and I am not,” the American said. “But I am more experienced than you in politics and there are several things I have learned. The most important is don’t corner your adversaries and don’t corner yourself; always leave yourself a way out. Don’t lock yourself into a losing option.”

The unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood that the Americans feared did not come, but a new outbreak of violence did. Clinton and his aides would keep their efforts to strike a peace accord alive for another six months. Ross had once told Clinton that Arafat would wait until five minutes before midnight to make a deal. Clinton related this conversation to Arafat with an observation: “I am afraid your clock is broken. It’s already midnight.”

But Arafat might have been less the leader of his people than Clinton had first supposed. What looked to Americans like an excellent deal would be regarded by many Palestinians as ignoble retreat. Arafat protested, “You’re asking me to sign my death warrant.”