Interventions (35 page)

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer now welcomed the idea that I should send a fact-finding mission, and the Security Council backed this in resolution 1405. I turned to Martti Ahtisaari—an impeccable Finn with what the Finns call
“sisu,”
an untranslatable word combining guts and staying power. The Israelis started to get cold feet when it became evident that he would lead a team that included human rights, humanitarian, military, and police experts. Eventually, it became clear the Israelis would not allow the team in, and I had to disband it.

—

T
his kind of episode is played out with some regularity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—we saw something similar with the Goldstone report on Israel's and Hamas' conduct during the 2008–9 conflict in Gaza, which occurred after I had departed as secretary-general. There was an important difference—Richard Goldstone was commissioned by the Human Rights Council, not the secretary-general, and the Israelis refused to cooperate with him, citing the bias of the Human Rights Council mandate. But as the Jenin episode illustrated, Israel often also refuses to cooperate with a person with an entirely impartial mandate. The refusal to cooperate with a sober and experienced professional like Ahtisaari was all the more frustrating, because when the dust settled, and I reported later in the year to the General Assembly based on publicly available sources (but not visiting Jenin itself), there were serious violations by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but the most extreme claims that there had been a “massacre” turned out to be false.

In the debates over UN fact-finding following certain incidents, there are patterns that recur. When Palestinian civilians are killed in IDF operations, the Israelis say it is a good-faith mistake by an army applying high standards of restraint and care but facing the difficult task of fighting militants in densely populated cities. For their part, the Palestinians and Arabs feel that Israel uses excessive force to maintain the occupation and gets away with it. The Israelis claim they are singled out; the Palestinians claim the Israelis are let off the hook. The secretary-general must consistently and impartially uphold international humanitarian law as it applies to all parties.

There was another situation, a year earlier, in which the Israelis had real and serious grounds for complaint against the UN. In mid-2001, the Israelis gained information that UNIFIL was in possession of a videotape showing the aftermath of the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah. I did not know about the tape, nor did my most senior advisors. Indeed, when we asked, we were positively and absolutely informed by officials in DPKO and UNIFIL that there was no tape. We told the Israelis so, and even took strong exception to their allegations to the contrary.

When the Israelis stuck to their guns, we checked again—and to my dismay it turned out that a director in DPKO knew of the tape, had it in his possession, and had failed to disclose its existence to his superiors. We eventually allowed Israel to view the tape, but the whole sorry episode was a setback in our efforts to build trust with the Israelis. I appointed an independent committee to investigate, which produced a harsh report exposing serious mistakes of judgment and ethics on the matter within UNIFIL and DPKO.

This crisis in our relations occurred around the same time as the 2001 Durban Conference on Racism—a matter largely out of my hands but which Israel viewed as an Israel-bashing spectacle under UN sponsorship, a narrative that clouded the many important achievements of Durban. All this was a millstone around the neck of a UN secretary-general in trying to help mediate in the Middle East.

T
HE
R
OADMAP

By June 2002, George Bush had delivered a speech formally committing his administration to a vision of two states. Despite the wreckage of the intifada, both the Arabs (in Beirut) and the United States had now, for the first time, formally signed on not just to peace but to a clear end goal. However, apart from calling for a new Palestinian leadership not compromised by terror, Bush's speech laid out no path to the vision. I had said to Powell a year earlier: “We don't just need a cease-fire, but a timetable for economics and politics, a roadmap, and with monitoring.” Many others had similar ideas. After Bush's speech, the view quickly took hold—including with the help of the Jordanians—that we needed a roadmap to achieve it.

The roadmap was not designed to replace a negotiated agreement between the parties. Its purpose was to create the context for those negotiations by rebuilding the confidence shattered by Oslo's failure, while repairing some of Oslo's defects. It is sometimes referred to as President Bush's Roadmap. But it was genuinely a product of negotiation among the Quartet members. Five features gave rise to debate in the group.

The first and most fundamental feature was parallelism. This was my mantra, shared by the EU and the Russians: we believed we would get nowhere if all Israeli actions were contingent on the Palestinians first meeting security benchmarks, and we cited the Mitchell Report in this regard. We sensed that the State Department agreed but the White House did not. Nevertheless, with the UN team making a significant contribution, and after plenty of haggling and difficult moments, the roadmap eventually embodied this principle. In phase 1, the Palestinians were expected to act decisively against terrorism, once and for all, and reform corrupt institutions. But the Israelis also had clear obligations: to freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth, remove the so-called settlement outposts—illegal even under Israeli law—that had mushroomed all over the West Bank under Sharon, and allow the Palestinians to reopen their institutions in East Jerusalem. One obligation was not contingent on the other.

A second key concept was that the roadmap was performance-driven. While timelines were laid down for when the process should move to subsequent phases—including final status negotiations—actually doing so would be dependent on the parties performing. This was important, particularly to the Israelis, since they doubted Arafat's readiness to live up to his roadmap obligations to act against terrorism. But its logical handmaiden was monitoring—the third innovation. A structure was meant to be put in place through which the international community would closely follow each party's action or inaction on its obligations. However, this was always a heavily contested aspect of the roadmap. Despite constant pushing from the EU and the UN, the United States never consented to forming a joint, formal mechanism that could call the parties to account for their failure to act on their obligations. The United States' unwillingness to contemplate empowering a joint platform that could criticize not just the Palestinians but Israel too undid much of the potential of the roadmap.

The fourth new element was the prescription of a clear end goal for negotiations: a two-state solution that ended the 1967 occupation and ensured a real state for the Palestinians and lasting security for Israel. This goal had never been set before at the outset of negotiations. I only wished it could have been stated with far more specificity, drawing on the Clinton parameters with clear terms of reference regarding borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees. I am convinced that the more specific the international community can be on these issues, the easier it will be for the parties to converge on a negotiated outcome.

Finally, the roadmap introduced a fifth innovation—the option of agreeing on a Palestinian state with provisional borders during the process, as a way station to a permanent settlement. I was never convinced this was a good idea, and certainly the Palestinians did not think so—unless, and only unless, the details of a permanent settlement were already agreed, and this was merely a phase of implementation. Hence, it was referred to as an option. The Palestinian experience with Oslo was that the temporary tended to become permanent—mirroring, I might add, the Israeli fear that a so-called permanent solution might one day turn out merely to be temporary.

—

S
himon Peres remarked at the time that there was a light (meaning the two-state solution) but no tunnel (meaning there was no agreed way to get from the current crisis to the two-state outcome). The roadmap was meant to shine the light brighter and create the tunnel. But it only had a chance of working if all Quartet members insisted on utilizing its potential to the full and did not allow the parties to wriggle out of their commitments.

It took months to agree on the roadmap, and still months more before it was launched. Washington's rush to war in Iraq stood in stark contrast to the gentlemanly pace of U.S. engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian track, which was only deteriorating the longer it was neglected. I wanted the roadmap released and the parties discussing it already. The United States, most important of all, had proved it was simply unwilling to push forward in the manner that we were. I was frustrated and expressed so publicly in interviews in March 2003, at the lack of ambition to move on the Palestinian situation—especially given that we all seemed to share a common dream of two states but would not take the concrete steps to make it a reality.

A
N
E
MPOWERED
P
ALESTINIAN
P
RIME
M
INISTER
?

Timing was not the only issue. The United States would not present the roadmap to Arafat. They refused to deal with him or regard him as a partner. On the other hand, it was futile to try to push Arafat out or to presume we could totally ignore the legitimate Palestinian leader. So the UN proposed that Arafat should remain president but appoint an empowered prime minister to control security and finances. These were the two areas on which Arafat had lost credibility, but on which the success of the roadmap hinged. We managed to sell this idea to our Quartet partners.

Getting Arafat to agree was another matter. We first sought Arafat's agreement to the principle before discussing names—even though it was clear that the prime minister should be Mahmoud Abbas, the senior figure within the Palestinian leadership who had opposed the armed intifada from the outset. Arafat finally relented.

We strongly encouraged Arafat to appoint Abbas, not a Palestinian businessman whom he had his eye on, and not, as he joked, Lebanon's billionaire prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri (“he could bring us lots of money”)! Finally, under heavy pressure, and with the war in Iraq just starting to his east, Arafat agreed to appoint Abbas. He was sworn in on April 30, 2003, and the roadmap was formally presented to both parties. All four Quartet envoys presented it in Ramallah, but the Americans alone gave it to Sharon. Such was the reality of the game. The United States was often prepared to share management of the Palestinians but insisted on preserving its prerogatives vis-à-vis Israel.

Rather than proceeding along the roadmap, Sharon and Arafat looked for exit ramps. Arafat undermined Abbas, who did not assert his prerogatives and remained standoffish in political infighting. As Abbas achieved some early successes, Arafat's jealousy grew. Arafat refused to cede control over the security services. Abbas soon resigned, and when he did so, I could feel U.S. enthusiasm for driving forward the roadmap start to dissipate. We were still a long way from the kind of Palestinian security performance that would persuade Washington to move on the real political issues. The U.S. obsession with Arafat returned to the fore and remained until his death in late 2004.

W
EST
B
ANK
W
ALL
, G
AZA
W
ITHDRAWAL

Not to be outdone, Sharon also decided to go in a different direction. The same year that we launched the roadmap, Israeli and Palestinian civil society figures signed the Geneva Accord—a document that proves, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that an agreement is eminently achievable between sensible people of goodwill on both sides. Jerusalem
can
be shared, sensibly, as a capital of two states. It is
entirely
possible to draw a border that allows most of the Israeli settlers to stay and gives the Palestinians a contiguous and viable state that has the same territory as that occupied in 1967. Security arrangements
can
be found acceptable to both, dealing with threats old and new. Even the highly sensitive refugee question
can
be solved in a way that acknowledges their rights and suffering—including their right of return—but ensures implementation in a way that does not undermine the two-state idea itself. The conflict
can
be ended and two states for two peoples
can
exist side by side in peace.

Geneva and the roadmap put Sharon on the defensive. I sensed that he did not like this agenda and looked for an alternative. He first tried to wriggle out of the roadmap by accepting it with fourteen reservations, which struck at the heart of the concept of parallelism that we had fought so hard to incorporate. There were plenty in Washington who were quite glad to let him do so. With no serious monitoring mechanism in place, Sharon never took action to freeze West Bank settlements. Sharon busied himself with an agenda that involved completing the barrier he was building through the West Bank, withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, thickening settlements in and around Jerusalem, and founding a new political party. These were bold gambits, to be sure, and forever altered the landscape of the conflict. But they brought us no closer to peace.

The name of what Sharon was building embodied the dispute over it. The Israelis termed it a “security fence” because it helped bring to an end the spate of suicide bombings. The Palestinians regarded it as a wall, as indeed it was in the cities of Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Bethlehem where most Palestinians encountered it. I called it a barrier. In fact, the most accurate description of it would be a fence-and-wall barrier. Regardless of what it was called, its construction was clearly politically motivated since it attached large numbers of illegal Israeli settlements to Israel and cut most Palestinians off from Jerusalem and many from their own lands.