The Secretary (17 page)

When he left Washington, Lew was not aware of any stops between Pakistan and Morocco.
Huma, his main point of contact for planning the trips, had known that Abu Dhabi and
Jerusalem were on the itinerary but had not shared the information. The meetings with
Abbas and Netanyahu were not fully confirmed, and much depended still on whether the
Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, would be able to extract a concession or even
the promise of one from either side. Even nine months into this job, Huma still had
political campaign reflexes—she wanted the flexibility of switching gears or directions
at the last minute. If she’d told Lew about stops in the Middle East, he would have
reached out to local U.S. embassies to make preparations, and calls to hotels and
the hiring of buses for the motorcade would have given away their arrival, when the
meetings with Abbas and Netanyahu had not been scheduled yet. Expectations would have
been built up unnecessarily, and if the schedules had not aligned, or if nothing tangible
emerged from the talks, the headlines would be about Clinton’s failure as she flew
back to Washington. But the secrecy and the sudden news of our Middle East stops had
only fueled anticipation about what Clinton was going to do in the region. Perhaps
it was true that there was a deal in the works between the Palestinians and the Israelis?
Otherwise, why would Clinton suddenly fly to the region? In the Sisyphean endeavor
of American peacemaking in the Middle East, hopes seemed to spike dramatically every
time the United States announced an initiative or a senior official made a visit,
and the crash was only more painful.

Mitchell had been working hard to get the Israelis to agree to freeze settlement activity
so that Abbas would sit down for talks. This was now the Palestinians’ precondition;
they refused to come to the table while the Israelis were putting up “facts on the
ground” on occupied territory. They brandished Hillary’s own words about “no exception,
no natural growth” to justify their position. The Israelis were now suggesting to
Mitchell that they could refrain from starting any new construction for only ten months,
but they insisted that any work already under way would continue and had announced
thousands of new constructions in the preceding weeks. The building was also part
of the “natural growth,” a loophole that Israel always used to justify continued construction
on settlements. Crucially, occupied East Jerusalem was excluded from the deal. The
Palestinians and the Israelis both claimed the divided city as their capital but only
Israel had the means to enforce construction on the contested territory. The imperfect
offer of a partial freeze of construction was the best that Mitchell had been able
to get so far. It wasn’t that different from what Bibi had suggested earlier in the
year in his talks in Washington, but this was a somewhat firmer offer. Now Abbas had
to accept this as sufficient to start talks, and Bibi had to stick to his word. Clinton
was coming to play three-dimensional chess. She also had to get the Arab world to
both acknowledge the Israeli gesture—never an easy feat—and support Abbas in his decision
to start talks, an even more arduous task.

We landed midevening in Abu Dhabi, only half a motorcade awaiting us on the tarmac.
The late notice of our arrival meant the embassy had not been able to rustle up all
the cars needed to drive the whole delegation into town. Clinton and her closest aides
sped off first while the rest of the delegation waited in the VIP lounge.

The second motorcade took us to our hotel, with no filing center, intermittent Internet
in our rooms, and a barely operating restaurant. Lew was always the last to leave
the airport. He handed over his shiny metal case with all our passports to the embassy
staffer who got them stamped into the country. They then drove our luggage into town.
Clinton was already well into her meeting with President Abbas.

*   *   *

In a large conference room with gold paneling and glittering crystal sconces, the
secretary of state and her delegation sat at a table covered with white linen and
a small bouquet of white and yellow lilies. Facing them, Abbas looked deflated and
acted defeated.

The Palestinians were once again tangled up in a mess, partly of their own making.
The Israeli military operation against Gaza in December 2008 had targeted Hamas, the
radical militant Islamic group that ruled over the strip of Palestinian territories
by the sea. They were Abbas’s political rivals so he had mostly stood by, not unhappy
to see them get a pounding. But his credibility as a Palestinian leader had suffered.
A report commissioned by the UN criticized Hamas militants for taking cover behind
civilians, but it had been harsher on Israel, accusing it of using excessive force.
To make up for his tarnished image, Abbas wanted a vote at the UN Human Rights Council
to endorse the report. Some Palestinians also hoped it would lead to Israeli officials
being tried before international courts of justice. But if Abbas pushed for the vote
now, the Israelis would be furious, and any progress Mitchell had made so far would
come to an abrupt end. Washington pressed Abbas to reconsider. Before doing so, the
Palestinian leader sought the support of Arab countries and when they winked he asked
for the vote to be postponed, just a few weeks before our visit to the UAE. He was
then promptly excoriated by the Arabs for betraying the Palestinian cause. Worse,
he was being lambasted by his own people. In Gaza, posters went up on the walls, with
the words: “To the dumps of history, you traitor, Mahmoud Abbas.” He told Clinton
that even his grandson’s schoolmates asked why his grandfather was a traitor to Palestine.
Abbas was deeply hurt; he believed in the Palestinian cause and in peace, and he felt
he deserved better.

Hillary was moved by his story. With her interlocutors, Hillary always reacted first
as a person, as a mother. Children often came up. Her empathy was real, and it was
a feeling that was sorely missing between Israelis and Palestinians. They had long
ago lost the ability to understand each other’s suffering, past and present. Perhaps
they’d never had it. When the new State of Israel was declared in 1948, on parts of
what was then British Mandate Palestine, the Holocaust was a distant occurrence for
Arabs. The Jewish push for a homeland had become both more urgent and aggressive in
the wake of the Holocaust and there was little room to consider the pain this was
inflicting on others, not least the creation of a quarter of a million Palestinian
refugees. To this day, Palestinians often wonder why they are being made to pay for
Europe’s horrors.

Under Israeli shelling in Beirut in 1982, and then again in 1992 and in 1996, I had
no ability to empathize with the “other” side. There was no other side. I was being
bombed. Even in my Christian school in our liberal, Westernized enclave, where Christian
warlords had once been staunch allies of Israel, my history lessons barely mentioned
the Holocaust. I knew vaguely that Jews had been killed in Europe during the war,
but mostly the Holocaust was a vague, distant event that those around me said was
being used by Jews to justify their land grab. Growing up in Beirut, I’d never met
a Jewish person. Lebanon’s once thriving Jewish community had left the country in
waves, either choosing to move to Israel or being pushed out by violence. Those who
remained did not advertise that they were Jewish. For people who have lived all their
life in the Arab Middle East, Israelis and Jews are faceless; they are the “other,”
the unknown.

In my twenties, my worldview was suddenly turned upside down when I fell in love.
He was European and we were together for a few years. Three of his grandparents had
died in concentration camps in Europe. When I met his parents, I finally understood
that the Holocaust wasn’t some distant historical event. It was real. His family still
carried the trauma of its memory and lived with the emptiness the concentration camps
had forced into their lives. His father liked me very much, but he was terrified of
traveling to Lebanon and he never visited Beirut. For him, we were the “other.”

Hillary’s ability to empathize allowed each side to glimpse its “other,” helping to
defuse tensions or bring someone around. She rarely admonished, hectored, or gave
orders but laid out the arguments in favor of the course of action she supported.
She appealed to Abbas to see the opportunity in the Israeli offer. Every time a house
is finished, a new one will not start, she said. The Palestinian leader only saw the
gaps—construction would continue, cinder blocks would be making their way into Israeli
settlements in the West Bank, cranes would be lifting stone after stone into place.
The imagery was terrible. He would be branded a traitor again. Clinton emphasized
to Abbas that without the partial freeze in settlement construction, the situation
on the ground and his position would only get worse. Every now and then, she lowered
her voice, taking Abbas into her confidence. This was an opportunity; it had to be
seized, she said. What was most important was to start moving forward. She appealed
to his sense of pragmatism: once the talks started, progress could be made on the
issues at the heart of the conflict, starting with the future borders of a Palestinian
state.

Abbas said that excluding East Jerusalem from the offer was impossible; he couldn’t
take that back to his people, or the region for that matter. Jerusalem was sacred.
The Arabs would pounce on him. The secretary promised that the United States would
work hard to ensure Israel would behave and not make any provocative announcements
about new construction in Jerusalem.

Abbas couldn’t do it. The Israelis had to offer more.

The American delegation was frustrated and slightly perplexed. Everyone always overestimated
America’s ability to move others. Abbas had just refused Clinton’s request that he
take the Israeli offer and start negotiations. If the United States had no power to
make him do something, why did he think the Americans had the power to the force the
Israelis to do anything? It was true that the Palestinians were the weaker party,
and the Americans often leaned on them when they couldn’t make the Israelis budge,
but what the Palestinians really wanted was a deus ex machina, an improbable God that
would suddenly sweep in and deliver a solution without them having to do all the hard
work. Yet they resented American power and didn’t want to be seen as American lackeys.

Hillary, Jake, Jeff, and George Mitchell were drained by the two-hour-long conversation
with the Palestinian leader, the six-hour flight, and the busy day they’d already
had in Islamabad. When they returned to their hotel rooms, on each of their beds sat
a big chocolate race car, in honor of the upcoming Formula One car race. Everything
in the Emirates was flashy, down to the ATM that dispensed gold bars in the hotel
lobby.

On Saturday, Clinton would meet the country’s crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed, or
MBZ, as our schedule referred to him. He wanted to show off his country and the example
it could set for the region. He invited the secretary to lunch at Nautilus, a modern
restaurant in the Yas Viceroy hotel. An elongated structure with a rounded roof, overlooking
a marina with gleaming, oversized yachts, the hotel straddled the lower part of the
racetrack loop that was modeled after the Monaco track. A Ferrari theme park sat just
around the corner, and the whole lot was set on the man-made Yas Island. The restaurant
was all white, with plastic molded furniture straight out of the
The Jetsons
. Dressed in a white flowing robe and headdress, MBZ sat across from Clinton in an
alcove discussing everything from Iran to Lebanon, Syria, clean energy, and Gulf security.
She lobbied for support for Abbas. Sitting slightly in retreat, Jake, Jeff, and the
others strained to listen in to their boss’s conversation while waiters served them
multiple courses of seafood.

Vrooooooooom, vroooooooooom—“and the peace process is”—vrooooooooom, vroooooooooom—“but
the Palestinians should”—vroooooooooooooom.

The qualifying races ahead of the Grand Prix the following day had gotten under way,
and the roar of the race cars drowned half the conversation as the vehicles looped
around the track and its twenty-one twists. This modern, prosperous corner of the
Middle East was attuned to the future.

Now it was time to get on a plane and travel to a land weighed down by history and
conflict, to a city where the Sabbath was coming to an end and work could resume.

*   *   *

SAM landed in Tel Aviv at around eight in the evening, on Halloween night, and within
minutes Clinton’s motorcade left the Mediterranean behind and drove inland, heading
east toward Jerusalem. The convoy split in two as it entered the holy city: the press
would be going ahead to the prime minister’s office to start going through extensive
security checks. Wailing sirens followed the secretary’s limousine and a couple of
staff vans as they headed to the David Citadel Hotel, where in a basement room Israeli
cabinet ministers awaited the American delegation.

Ehud Barak, a longtime fixture of Israeli politics who had vanquished Bibi Netanyahu
in the 1999 election with the help of American political strategists, was now a defense
minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet. The short, ebullient man who was sometimes called
Israel’s Napoleon was telling everyone that Bibi had mellowed and was willing to make
a deal. Hillary and the others wanted to believe him. But American officials were
also anticipating a quick change at the top—Israeli politics shifted treacherously.
During Bibi’s first term in power, frustrated Clinton administration officials saw
him as a “kind of speed bump that would have to be negotiated along the way until
a new Israeli prime minister came along who was more serious about peace.”
12

Eight months into Netanyahu’s second premiership, it was the same all over again.
Any hope that Obama may have had coming into office of creating quick momentum toward
serious peace talks was fading fast. Rahm Emanuel’s advice to be tough on Netanyahu
wasn’t delivering any results so far. Washington would have to wait out Bibi.