Tested by Zion (36 page)

After all, the Hamas victory had prevented the negotiations we had envisioned. After Aqaba in June 2003, it was Arafat who had prevented the expected peace negotiations between Israel and an “empowered” Palestinian prime minister. When negotiations were blocked, Sharon had moved in Gaza, unilaterally. Arafat's death and Abbas's election as president had opened the door for negotiation after Gaza disengagement, but Sharon's stroke had created a delay – and now the Hamas victory threw any chance for peace negotiations out the window once again. On April 17, there had been a terrorist attack – a suicide bombing of a falafel restaurant in central Tel Aviv that had killed 11 and injured 60 people – and Hamas, or rather someone speaking for the new Hamas-led PA government, had justified it as an act of self-defense. So once again the Israelis were proposing to make unilateral decisions, but ones that would lead in a direction we all favored. Once again, if one could not envision “peace,” one could envision President Bush leaving office with the situation on the ground transformed.

The central question, then, was what Israel planned. Gen. Giladi described his sense of the moment:

Olmert gets into the prime minister office and he's elected for one single thing and this is what we used to call the convergence. He one hundred percent adopted the concept that we take the momentum created with the disengagement and move on the West Bank.…Let's shape the future unilaterally. We put up this fence – barrier, wall, whatever people call it. We pull out of Gaza.…In the next two to three years we can incentivize people to move.…[I]if you have most of the West Bank empty of Israelis, all Gaza empty of Israelis, and arrange the connections between the two, this is exactly the second phase of the Roadmap: a Palestinian state with provisional
borders and attributes of sovereignty that we will recognize – and the language I used was “We will agree to a Palestinian state without an agreement.”…The basic element was the financial compensation package and then if you remember something called the ideological compensation package.…I said, “You know, we would like to have some people ready to move – even religious people, not just the secular people; not the extreme, but those that they will move if we can let them move into the big blocks. So they would say, “You know, it's hard, but we'll do Ma'ale Adumim, Gush Etzion…” So we discussed at that time can we change the formula of the understanding we have about no building in settlements.…The real goal was to create a semi-state actor for final status negotiation. There is no way we can negotiate with a bunch of militias.
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Like Weissglas, Giladi understood the constraints on construction in settlements but believed they would have to be lifted somewhat to make “convergence” work – if and when settlers coming from the areas beyond the fence decided to move to the major blocks. Our rule about “new construction only in already built-up areas” might have to be bent, he was arguing, if those areas could simply not accommodate the numbers of settlers who wished to move there. I advised Giladi at the time that Olmert should present this package of ideas directly to the president because I was confident he would be intrigued by them just as he had been by Sharon's proposals.

The attraction for Israel was clear: As Olmert's new chief of staff, Yoram Turbowitz, described it, “the beauty of it was really that it all depends on us.…What was appealing in the
hitkansut
and was appealing in the disengagement was that we are taking our destiny in our hands.”
¹⁴
Down the road, Olmert hoped for American and perhaps European support for recognition at the United Nations that through
hitkansut
Israel had fulfilled its obligations under Resolution 242
, passed after the 1967 war. It would have withdrawn from most but not all of the territories it had occupied in 1967 – from all of Gaza and perhaps 90% of the West Bank.

The Israelis recognized that the withdrawal from the West Bank was far more complicated than disengagement from Gaza (security and water issues alone guaranteed that) and perhaps had come to realize that greater cooperation with the Palestinians was in their own interest. Of course, they could not cooperate with the PA because of the Hamas election victory, but they could try to cooperate with President Abbas. In fact, if this cooperation worked well, it was possible to strengthen his role and his influence; in any event, the goal would be to ensure that Abbas and not Hamas got the “peace dividend,” the credit for any Israeli withdrawal.

Olmert later described the situation to me, as he saw it when he assumed power:

At that time, I was skeptical about an agreement.…I decided to spell it out in a most explicit way before the elections, which most of my advisors said was a mistake because it would lose me votes. But I said, “I want to have a mandate, a clear mandate so that if I’m elected, I can act, no one can come with complaints and tell me they didn't know what I’m going to do.” I said, “First I will try seriously and genuinely negotiations. If the negotiations will fail, then I will not hesitate to pull out on a unilateral basis.”
I think that the strategic goal is separation. Now, preferably through agreement. If it doesn't work, then pulling out unilaterally, even, is still better. Look, I think that the fact that we pulled out from Gaza completely gave us the moral power and the moral support from the world to do whatever we wanted to do in Gaza. We were never criticized, not one time, not just by you, OK, but even Europe. There was no criticism. Why? Because everyone said, “What do you want from these guys? They pulled out completely and they're being attacked on a daily basis.” So I still think that pulling out from the West Bank – from where we
want
to pull out – not from 100%.…I’m ready…if an agreement will not be signed.
¹⁵

The Bush administration did not favor Israeli unilateralism because we had seen Hamas benefit from it in Gaza. There, the lack of cooperation between Israel and the PA had prevented, or at least undermined, Abbas's ability to gain credit for the Israeli withdrawal. The West Bank was both more complicated and more consequential. Condi Rice was very dubious: “I was just always uncomfortable with the unilateral withdrawal.…In the final analysis, I didn't think it would work.”
¹⁶
Why not? For one thing, because the withdrawal would not be complete, as it had been in Gaza, it would be immensely complex. Palestinians and Israelis would still be living next to each other in many areas. There would be no negotiated security arrangements at all. There would be no arrangements regarding water. There would be endless arguments – including with the United States – about the exact lines of the withdrawal, which Israel could not specify for us.

On April 30, Olmert gained the support of Shas, a Sephardic-based religious party, giving him a majority in the Knesset. On May 4, his new government was approved, holding 67 of the 120 seats, with Kadima, Labor, Shas, and the new Pensioners Party making up the coalition. Three weeks later, Olmert came to Washington; the Oval Office meeting with the President was on May 23. At preliminary meetings with Secretary Rice, Steve Hadley, Welch, and me, he reiterated that he intended to move from Gaza disengagement to his “convergence” plan in the West Bank. This would reduce the Israeli presence to a minimum and thereby reduce Israeli-Palestinian friction. Rice told him that the president would push him to try negotiations first, so Olmert was ready for that message when it came. I prefer negotiations, he told Bush; if there is a chance for negotiations under the Roadmap, that's better. Start there, the president told him. Olmert agreed to meet with Abbas but expressed his doubts: He did not think Abbas was capable of delivering anything. Still, he agreed to try. Let's try to get it done in two years, the president said. Assume that Abbas can deliver, and you can move in a different way if he does not. Go the extra mile with him. OK, said Olmert, but the problem is they need to recognize Israel and put an end to terrorism. I will meet with him and do what I can for him. What we can't do is replace his determination to fight terrorist organizations.

The president invited Olmert for a lengthy talk on the Truman Balcony of the White House overlooking the South Lawn, joined only by Mrs. Olmert. It was a typically Bush-like gesture: courteous but also smart. He wanted to see how the Olmerts related to each other, how her presence changed the way Olmert acted or spoke, what her influence on him might be. Olmert reiterated his plan to move forward in the West Bank and told the president he was absolutely sincere about it. But it would not work without strong American support, he said, and he needed it. The president again pressed him to try negotiations first. He would support unilateral moves in the end, he said, but only if and when negotiations had been tried and had failed.

This session was significant not only in persuading both men that they had a common vision of the path ahead but also in cementing Bush's positive impression of Olmert. The president was well aware of the corruption accusations against Olmert that grew louder and louder during his tenure as prime minister, in the end destroying his political career. But he did not share the view of Olmert as a man without principles whose main goal was to feather his nest. During a conversation with Israeli journalists held nearly two years later, for example, they explained fully the widespread view of Olmert in Israel as a shifty politician, and I had always kept the president informed of Olmert's political situation. Week after week and month after month, especially if I had been to Israel on a trip, the president would greet my next appearance in the Oval Office with the question, “How's my buddy Olmert?” I pulled no punches, keeping him up to date on Olmert's political and legal travails and on his declining poll numbers. He would sometimes wince or shake his head, but he believed Olmert was sincere about seeking to move forward in the West Bank.

One other issue arose, for the first time, during that visit: the idea of some kind of big international conference on the Middle East. Condi was beginning to think about it. At that point it was not at all clear why she wanted it because Palestinian politics were still entirely unsettled, and the new Olmert government was providing a way ahead now in the West Bank. Olmert was entirely against such a conference: Whatever was done with the Palestinians would be unilateral or at best bilateral. He saw no role for Europe and the Arab states at that point. Yet Condi's intentions were serious enough for her to take Olmert aside in a one-on-one conversation, following a larger meeting we all had at Blair House where Olmert was staying. She asked Olmert about the possibility of having a big conference on the Middle East in December. Olmert reacted negatively:

And I then said, “I don't know what you need this international conference for.…I’m not going to negotiate with 20 Arab countries at the same time, there is no way that I am going to do it. I am ready to sit with Abu Mazen; until now he turned down all my attempts to meet with him. So, if he needs some kind of an international umbrella to help him get into touch with me, that's fine.” And, so she said, “OK, we'll talk about it.” But then, you know, Lebanon came, and everything's changed.
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Actually, everything changed even before the Second Lebanon War. Within six weeks, the hopes that existed after Olmert's visit to Washington were largely gone. I was increasingly coming to understand the view that David Welch and
many others in the Near East Bureau at State took. Some people there were simply anti-Israel, and the notion that there was an old “Arabist” school in NEA was certainly true. But Welch's view was different: Although he did not believe anything the Israelis said, he also did not believe anything the Arabs said or anything that was pledged and promised and predicted because he had been burned too many times. Even when people spoke in good faith, their ability to control events was suspect; predicting and even controlling the future seemed a lot more likely in Washington than in the Middle East. When people assured you of the many good things they would soon do, the biblical term “soothsayer” came more and more frequently to mind. In just six months, we had seen hopes dashed when Sharon had a stroke, raised again when Olmert pledged to move forward, dashed when Hamas won its election victory, and then raised by the prospect of movement despite Hamas, whether through unilateral Israeli movement or through negotiations over the West Bank. Now in a matter of weeks came more Israeli-Palestinian violence, a Hamas-Fatah unity government, and then war.

Among the Palestinian factions, there was “progress” toward a political agreement and a national unity government in May. Palestinian prisoners from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, the PFLP, and the DFLP who were together in Israeli jails overcame factional differences and produced on May 11 a “Document of National Accord
.” They strongly urged cooperation of all factions in a new unity government that would move toward Palestinian statehood, including “all the territories occupied in 1967” and “the right of the refugees to return.” The document also asserted the “right of the Palestinian people to resistance; adhering to the option of resistance through various means,” which appeared to include terrorism. The “use of weapons” was banned when it came to internal struggles only, and only “shedding Palestinian blood” was called “inadmissible.” On June 27, Hamas, Fatah, and other groups backed this document. Later, in August, President Abbas said the prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, would talk with Fatah leaders with the goal of creating a national unity government. But the terms of all these moves clearly did not meet the Quartet Principles; Hamas was not being required to say the magic words. We told Abbas, and leaders of Arab states, repeatedly throughout this period that nothing good could come of this effort. Our financial boycott of the Hamas-led PA government would not end and, indeed, the establishment of the unity government could come to ruin our relationship with Abbas and Fatah. It would end any prospect of negotiations with Israel.