Tested by Zion (10 page)

On Monday, June 24, Bush stood in the Rose Garden, flanked not only by Powell but also by Rice and Rumsfeld – a sign perhaps of the battles that lay behind the speech but also that the days of Powell's predominance in Middle East policy were numbered. The speech never mentioned Arafat by name, but the key passages were direct:

My vision is two states, living side by side, in peace and security. There is simply no way to achieve that peace until all parties fight terror.

Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born.

I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror.

I call upon them 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 Palestinian people meet these goals, they will be able to reach agreement with Israel and Egypt and Jordan on security and other arrangements for independence.

And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state, whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East.

A Palestinian state will never be created by terror. It will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism.

Today the elected Palestinian legislature has no authority and power is concentrated in the hands of an unaccountable few.

Today, the Palestinian people lack effective courts of law and have no means to defend and vindicate their rights.

Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing terrorism.

This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.

This will require an externally supervised effort to rebuild and reform the Palestinian security services. The security system must have clear lines of authority and accountability and a unified chain of command.

America is pursuing this reform along with key regional states. The world is prepared to help, yet ultimately these steps toward statehood depend on the Palestinian people and their leaders. If they 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.

With intensive effort by all of us, agreement could be reached within three years from now. And I and my country will actively lead toward that goal.
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In this speech, Bush was offering Palestinians both more and less. Previously, his support for Palestinian statehood had seemed more like a one-liner than a key policy objective, and here it was being given substance and a timetable, and turned into a direct pledge. But previously that support had seemed unqualified, and here the offer was being made conditional. Get rid of Arafat, abandon terror, start building a democracy, and then – but only then – the United States will support creation of a state – and even then, a state “whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional” until there was a wider peace agreement in the region. Bush was describing a sequence: stop terrorism first, build decent Palestinian institutions, and then the United States would support a “provisional” state.

“The Arabists in the State Department were appalled” by Bush's remarks, Condi Rice reports in her memoir.
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Within hours, a memo was circulating at the State Department's Near East Bureau suggesting that an immediate meeting with Arafat was needed to fix the damage done by the president's speech. Yet the president had done more than just broken with Arafat: He had also abandoned the approach to Arafat and
to peacemaking that his own father, at the Madrid talks in 1991, and Bill Clinton at the Camp David negotiations, had embodied. Their goal had been to create a Palestinian state
without regard to what was within its borders
. That the state would be a dictatorship and a kleptocracy run by Yasser Arafat had been ignored; he was a “partner for peace” and his “flaws” or “idiosyncrasies” might be ignored as well. To Bush, this approach was immoral; it would replace Israeli occupation with another typical Arab tyranny. He wanted something better: As in Iraq and, later, Lebanon, he wanted a democratic, peaceful Palestine, and he wanted it not only because that would make Israel safer but also because Palestinians deserved it. The
nature
of the Palestinian state was now a greater priority than its territory.

Bush's thinking was now clear, and he recognized and described the moral realities on both sides. It was simply false that Israel was equally at fault for the violence and for the inability to achieve peace: Israel had sought a peace partner for years but instead had found in Arafat a terrorist. Israel had the right of any state to defend itself against such terror. For any progress toward peace, Arafat had to go – and Bush would clearly say so. But whatever the crimes of the Palestinian leadership, the Palestinian
people
also had moral claims – to an end to the occupation and the right to self-government. Bush would also say this clearly, in demanding Palestinian statehood as the objective.

Having delivered the speech and outlined an entirely new American approach, Bush jumped into Air Force One and left for the G-8 Summit in Canada. There he was viewed as the skunk at the picnic; as Hadley recalled, “He goes to the G-8 and he tells everybody, ‘I’m not going to deal with Arafat anymore. He's a failed leader corrupted by terror.’ And of course everybody is appalled.”
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Breaking with Arafat was considered outrageous and unthinkable. As the
Washington Post
reported, “Most of the leaders of the Group of Eight…issued statements distancing themselves from Bush's insistence that Yasser Arafat…be replaced before serious peace negotiations with Israel can begin.” Even Bush's closest ally, Tony Blair, said, “It is for the Palestinians to elect their own leaders.”
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The BBC reported that “[t]he UK has refused to back US President George W. Bush's demand for the removal of Yasser Arafat as the price for a future Palestinian state.…Several UK newspapers say the issue could mark the first serious rift between the two leaders since September 11.”
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Palestinian reactions were predictably sour, defending Arafat and their right to choose their own leaders and noting that Bush had not actually outlined any plan for moving forward. It did seem that peace negotiations were now indefinitely postponed, while the Palestinians addressed – or failed to address –
the political and security reforms Bush required of them. Conversely, the Israelis were delighted, and Sharon was amazed. Weissglas later explained, only partly in jest, that for Sharon, the world was divided into Jews and all the rest – and all the rest wanted to kill the Jews, some softly, some less softly. Sharon could hardly believe the change in the American attitude toward Israel and toward him personally. In 1991, when Sharon had visited the United States as minister of housing, not a single U.S. official would meet with him formally; he was not invited to one U.S. government office. Through the intervention of friends, HUD Secretary Jack Kemp finally agreed to see Sharon in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying. Now, he had visited the White House, he had been called “a man of peace” by the American president, and finally the United States was ending its romance with Arafat and adopting Sharon's own view of the PLO leader. When for the first time he heard an American president talk about the need to get rid of Arafat, Sharon could not believe his ears, Weissglas reminisced years later. The demand for an end to terrorism was the key: What Bush was doing, in Sharon's eyes, was to insist that the swamp of terrorism be drained before a political process could begin. Weissglas recalled that for the first time the principle was accepted that before we enter the negotiating room, the pistols have to be left outside.
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Various drafts of the speech had been shared with the Israelis, and the final draft was sent to them an hour before it was to be delivered. Even then Sharon was nervous, and told his staff, “Who guaranteed that they will stick to the script?” When Bush appeared on Israeli TV, he was impossible for Sharon to understand because of the clash of Bush's voice and the loud Hebrew voiceover. But immediately after Bush completed his remarks, one of Sharon's sharpest critics in the Israeli media, Karen Neubach, told viewers that Sharon had won a huge victory: Bush was practically repeating Sharon's campaign slogans. Then Sharon really believed what had happened. Weissglas recalled, “Immediately his expression changed into ‘I told you so.’ He became the proprietor of the project.”
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For Sharon, the only member of the Israeli delegation at Camp David who had refused to shake hands with Arafat, the American rejection of the PLO leader must have been a sweet moment.

And there was more in Israel's favor occurring during that last week of June. American demands that Israel leave the West Bank and Gaza were softened: Israel should leave “as conditions permitted” and security progress was achieved. Regarding Israel's attacks on Palestinian terrorists, there were no more cries about the “cycle of violence.” The White House expressed regret about any innocent Palestinian casualties, but the bottom line was that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Now, finally, 17 months into his presidency and 9 months after 9/11, Bush had elaborated a Middle East policy. It had been obvious from January 20, 2001, that renewed negotiations were impossible: The Camp David and Taba talks
had collapsed, and Arafat was leading a campaign of terrorism. The critical task was to reduce the level of violence. Clinton's experience – and, indeed, his advice – had taught Bush and his advisors that deep personal involvement in negotiations with Arafat would lead nowhere. So in the early months, Powell had made the usual statements and continued the usual approaches embodied by Tenet's security work, the Mitchell Report
, and his own visits to the region. When the violence continued and the Saudis intervened, Bush had pledged to support Palestinian statehood and had said so publicly. But 9/11 and the advent of the war on terror had put both Palestinian terrorism and Israel's struggle against it into a new light, so Bush had had to figure out how he could square that circle. Doing so took the administration nine months, and now Bush believed he had it right. The real obstacles to peace negotiations and the building of a decent Palestinian state were the terrorism and corruption that were the trademarks of Arafat, who had to be sidelined. Once he was gone, in fact once the process of marginalizing him had begun, Palestinian reforms could take hold and diplomacy could play its traditional role. The road to a Middle East peace deal would be open and, in Palestine, an Arab democracy would arise, one that could be a model for the entire Arab world.

That was the theory. But in his speech, Bush had not explained how to move down that road. Would the United States sit back and wait until Palestinians moved against Arafat? Or would we take the lead in pressing for reforms in the Palestinian Authority, which actually governed the West Bank and Gaza, and in keeping up the pressure against Arafat? What role would other nations – the Arabs and the Europeans, above all – play in this drama? Bush believed he now had the right formula and in his speech had said, “I’ve asked Secretary Powell to work intensively with Middle Eastern and international leaders to realize the vision of a Palestinian state, focusing them on a comprehensive plan to support Palestinian reform and institution-building.” Was this the beginning of something new for Powell or the return to more of the travel that had dispirited Powell and achieved so little in the winter and spring of 2002? Had Bush's speech been a prelude to “parking” the Palestinian issue until the administration had dealt with Iraq, or was it the beginning of a new period of intensive diplomacy?