Tested by Zion (25 page)

Second, Hadley argued that Middle East policy is always, in every administration, ultimately made at the White House. I should stay close to the president, he said; that is where the policy comes from. If I wanted to have influence on policy making, I was already in the right place. Finally, he offered a sweetener: a promotion, from senior director for the Near East and North Africa, to deputy national security advisor. I would oversee both the Democracy, Human
Rights, and International Organizations directorate I had initially headed, as well as the Near East directorate, and be given a new title, which I needed to invent, that stressed the president's democracy initiatives. My wife and I tried out a dozen variations and settled on deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, which was both too long and too ambiguous. In the end, it did not matter: In diplomatic shorthand, I was the White House Middle East guy. Whether Hadley had been right that Middle East policy was always made in the White House was another matter, as time would teach me, because Rice was not Powell. As one biographer of Rice later wrote, “when Rice became secretary of state, the Israeli portfolio followed her back to Foggy Bottom.”
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Her relationship with the president was uniquely close and her influence uniquely powerful. Moreover, she was not opposed at the NSC by a power-hungry rival; in Hadley she had a former deputy who understood that she was and would remain the president's top foreign policy advisor. Even in discussions in November and December, as Condi prepared for her confirmation hearings, it was plain that the Middle East “peace process” would be a focus for her.

But in November 2004 there were not yet significant policy differences inside the Bush administration: We all favored the course the president had been taking since his June 2002 speech. As my own key NSC colleague on Israeli-Palestinian matters at that time, Rob Danin, and I put it in a memo to Condi on November 8, it was clear that any final status negotiations in the near future would fail. Instead, this was a ground game: Step by step, new Palestinian leadership must emerge, and it must take power over the security forces. With Arafat in charge, this would be a long and trying process, but there were no quick fixes.

Our expectations changed on November 11, when Yasser Arafat died in a military hospital in Paris. He was buried in Ramallah after a chaotic funeral, and Mahmoud Abbas was quickly chosen to head the PLO. In accordance with the PA's “Basic Law,” elections were to be held within 60 days for a new president of the Palestinian Authority. If an internal battle had been expected among Palestinians, it did not materialize; it was made clear very soon that Abbas would also be the candidate for president of the PA, replacing Arafat there as well.

Bush's immediate public reaction, one we thought through carefully, was not to shed crocodile tears for Arafat but to look forward. Blair was back at the White House on November 12, the first visit of a foreign leader since the president's reelection, and Bush used their scheduled press appearance to emphasize the positive. “I think it is fair to say that I believe we've got a great chance to establish a Palestinian state,” the president said. “And I intend to use the next four years to spend the capital of the United States on such a state.…We seek a democratic, independent and viable state for the Palestinian people.…We are committed to the security of Israel as a Jewish state.…I look forward to working with the Palestinian leadership that is committed to fighting terror and committed to the cause of democratic reform.”
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Arafat had been the barrier to real reform, we thought, and his removal from the scene now opened the path forward. No longer would he be there to block the creation of more unified and professional security forces, to steal or divert aid funds (and a global search for the funds would soon be underway), or to prevent democratic institutions from developing. In December, Steve Hadley and I once again visited Jerusalem and found that Sharon shared this view. He told us he would see Abbas right after the Palestinian elections and
that he was optimistic: With Arafat gone, he would have someone with whom to talk.

Why did the Palestinians decide to hold an election? The Basic Law was, after all, not the U.S. Constitution, and it was ignored whenever that was
convenient. An advisor to Abbas explained that it was not obvious that there
had
to be an election:

I believed that Abu Mazen could have governed easily without an election. It was a time of political instability and you could have easily packaged an unelected president – especially if it's the PLO chairman and all of that kind of thing. Abu Mazen insisted on it; he knew very well that he needed that election.…He needed it for legitimacy purposes. He needed it in the long term. His position will be more assailable without an election. It will empower him and he was going to win anyway.
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Given the later complaints about the PLC election in 2006, it is worth recalling that, all along, Palestinian leaders like Qurie and Abbas had favored elections; they had even insisted on them as a means of legitimating their leadership. With Arafat – the charismatic, recognized leader – now gone, they concluded that elections were critical.

We had been working closely with Abbas for two years, and he still struck us all as a nice man; the question was whether he would provide the leadership needed to combat Palestinian terrorist groups and Islamist extremists. Reasonably pious and apparently moderate in his religious and political views, Abbas was not a hero. Arafat had not shown any courage on the one occasion when it mattered most – at Camp David; he had refused to accept compromises with the Israelis that he knew would bring vicious criticism from Hamas and others. Would Abbas do any better? Would he actually sign a final status agreement that, even in versions viewed as favorable to the Palestinian cause (such as the Geneva Initiative), required giving up the “right of return,” dividing Jerusalem, and accepting that many Israeli settlements would stay forever? These were questions for later because no such talks were then before us. But these were the questions we asked ourselves repeatedly during Bush's second term, as we met dozens of times with Abbas.

What is striking in retrospect is that we never considered deviating from the path we were then on: backing Sharon's disengagement plan. Literally no one at the White House suggested that we take a different path. Nor was it raised, it seems, in Jerusalem. As recounted by Eival Giladi, “We announced the disengagement before Arafat passed away and we don't even reconsider should we do it, should we do it as planned, should we do it in the same time frame. We move on.”
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That may now appear strange: After all, disengagement had been the product of Arafat's obduracy. Progress toward realizing the June 24 vision and movement on the Roadmap had been made impossible by Arafat's refusal to reform. Abbas himself had resigned in protest when Arafat made it clear that the prime minister's post was, to him, a source of danger that would never be allowed any power. Sharon had decided to move unilaterally only after it was clear that negotiations – which he had begun by meeting with Abbas in the summer of 2002 – were dead. So, why not now go back to June
24 and the Roadmap? Why not leap directly to final status negotiations with
Abbas?

There were several reasons not to do so. Abbas was newly on top and had spent his life playing second (sometimes third or fourth) fiddle to Arafat. How likely was it that he would wish to jump instantly into final status talks? He certainly never proposed it to us; no PA official suggested that it was time to stop disengagement and go immediately to final status negotiations. We noted that Abbas had been chosen as leader of the PLO immediately and as the candidate for the PA presidency but had not managed to seize the reins at Fatah: there, Farouk Qaddoumi became and remained chairman. Qaddoumi was an unreconstructed hardliner, promoting the armed struggle and waging an endless campaign against Abbas, and Abbas's inability to do much about this rival suggested the limitations on his own power. Moreover, there was now momentum behind the disengagement plan: Sharon was winning, battle by battle, vote by vote. To abandon that plan seemed like folly: Instead of achieving, in 2005, the removal of Israeli settlements in Gaza and of the IDF there, and having territory the PA could then govern by itself, we would probably have nothing but endless and likely unsuccessful negotiations. So it seemed better to everyone to continue on the path toward disengagement. Sallai Meridor recalled Sharon's struggles to implement disengagement and the impact of Arafat's death:

In the middle Arafat dies. Sharon doesn't decide, maybe was not even asked to consider to stop from moving onward on the decision that was taken based on the existence of Arafat and no other alternative. And because he's already on the way and the concern is he will never be able to get there if any side wind now is interfering with his movement. So regardless, notwithstanding the fact that Arafat is not – the reason to go this way does not exist anymore, everybody supports the movement.
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So no one viewed Arafat's death as a reason to abandon disengagement. But in fact the death of Arafat was a huge event for President Bush and
the way in which he, and Washington more generally
, perceived the Palestinian leadership. Arafat was a man on the wrong side of the war on terror, an enemy of democracy and good governance and therefore of the president's repeated calls for reform in the Arab world and for the advance of democracy, and a famously corrupt leader who had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars of aid donations. With his death, perceptions of the Palestinians were transformed. As the president had said to Abbas and
Qurie in the summer of 2002, they could become a model for the Arab world of good government and progress. He would soon place them with the Iraqis and Afghans – who had elected Karzai as president on October 9, 2004 – as tomorrow's democracies. (And soon, Lebanon would be added; after the murder of Rafik Hariri in February 2005, free elections were held for the first time in 30 years without the presence of Syrian troops.) It is not so much that the Palestinians were now seen solely through rose-colored
glasses, as that their failings were transformed into additional reasons to help them. At worst they were sad sacks, unable to perform efficiently; there were few Fayyads. But this shortcoming only suggested that we should give them more help, more financing, and more encouragement. Now, it seemed, they were on our side too, working for a moderate, democratic state that would take its place in the Middle East we hoped would emerge. When they failed, we reacted with regret, not with anger; they were not betraying the cause but merely exposing their own sad weaknesses – the results less of moral failings than of the local pathologies President Bush had discussed in his NED speech and elsewhere. They had suffered from decades under Arafat, seen more as his victims than as his colleagues and abettors. They had been the victims as well, in this view, of Western prejudices that assumed Arabs were uninterested in or incapable of democratic governance. Now all this would change.

Perversely, the “balance of sympathy” that had tilted toward Israel while Arafat ruled was further tilted toward the Palestinians by the great reduction in terrorist attacks. The vicious bus bombings and other suicide attacks had elicited sympathy everywhere for Israel and for the steps it took to defend itself. Even those who criticized specific Israeli responses admitted that any government would act to save its citizens from such relentless assaults. But after Arafat's passing (and presumably not coincidentally) and given Sharon's great success in crushing the intifada, the toll was far lower. From 220 deaths at the hands of terrorists in 2002, Israel experienced a 90% drop by 2005: In that year, 22 citizens were killed by terror, and the number dropped again to 15 in 2006.
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The sympathy Israelis had won as victims of violence dissipated.

On January 9, 2005, Abbas was elected president of the PA, running as the Fatah candidate, with 62% of the vote. It was on the surface a good election: There was free campaigning and other candidates criticized Abbas. It seemed that the ballots were counted accurately. Turnout was also about 62%, lower than some had predicted, but Hamas and many Palestinians living in East Jerusalem had boycotted the election. We did not think so at the time, but it is fair to wonder whether the inability to gather that other 40% of the vote so soon after Arafat's death suggested more profound weaknesses in Fatah, which later became obvious. In Washington and in the EU, we also played down the departure of the head of the independent Central Election Commission, who along with several dozen members of his staff resigned in protest right after the election. Fatah had illegally pressured the Commission to extend voting by two hours and allow some unregistered voters to cast ballots, both efforts designed to achieve a larger turnout and a greater victory margin for Abbas.

In his State of the Union speech on February 2, 2005, the president emphasized the centrality of democracy in U.S. foreign policy – and displayed the new attitude toward the Palestinians:

We've declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.…And because democracies respect their own people
and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace. That advance has great momentum in our time, shown by women voting in Afghanistan, and Palestinians choosing a new direction, and the people of Ukraine asserting their democratic rights and electing a president. We are witnessing landmark events in the history of liberty. And in the coming years, we will add to that story.

The beginnings of reform and democracy in the Palestinian territories are now showing the power of freedom to break old patterns of violence and failure. Tomorrow morning, Secretary of State Rice departs on a trip that will take her to Israel and the West Bank for meetings with Prime Minister Sharon and
President Abbas. She will discuss with them how we and our friends can help the Palestinian people end terror and build the institutions of a peaceful, independent, democratic state. To promote this democracy, I will ask Congress for $350 million to support Palestinian political, economic and security reforms.
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So Arafat's death had led to a request that, in addition to the $150 million in funds we had been giving to help Palestinians – through agencies of the United Nations, for example – Congress grant $200 million more in a supplemental appropriation. These were big numbers, but the president had large ambitions. Combine Sharon's tenacity and his disengagement plan with new Palestinian leadership, and real progress seemed possible. Despite a significant terrorist attack in Gaza on January 13 and a threat by Sharon not to meet with the new Palestinian leadership until it acted against terrorist groups, in fact Sharon and Abbas did meet on February 8 – at Sharm el Sheik, in a session jointly hosted by King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak. It was the first such Israeli-Palestinian “summit” in years. Abbas and
Sharon declared an end to violence (though obviously Abbas did not control the Palestinian terrorist groups) and looked forward to future negotiations under the Roadmap. Egypt and Jordan immediately announced they would send their ambassadors back to Israel, after a four-year absence. The mood in the region was upbeat. The United States invited both Abbas and Sharon to visit Washington. Perhaps disengagement would indeed shock the system, as we had always hoped, and provide real momentum to keep it going: disengagement, good PA governance of Gaza as a model for a future Palestinian state, and a return to negotiations. Things were again looking up.

We believed progress was now possible. Condi Rice had visited London in late January, for the first time as secretary of state, and had told the British that the follow-on to the Gaza withdrawal should be final status talks. She was committed; we'll go all out, she said. Both the Gaza withdrawal (in the summer) and the Palestinian parliamentary elections (July 15) were scheduled. In another trip, Rice met with Sharon on February 6, and he repeated that he thought there might be a real opportunity now, with Arafat gone. He complained about Israeli politics, telling her again that the left cannot get anything done and the right is against getting anything done – but he would persevere. His political troubles had been striking: He had lost two no-confidence votes in November, and in the fall of 2004, 10 cabinet ministers had either resigned
or been fired.
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Sharon complained as well that Abbas and
his security forces were still doing nothing against terrorism. Rice told him we had decided to find a U.S. general to serve as security coordinator, with the task of pushing the Palestinians into greater action and greater reform. The next day she met with the new Palestinian leadership, or perhaps the more apt description is the “newly promoted” leadership – for there were no new faces. This was the Arafat crew without Arafat. Only in Fayyad did we see a real commitment to change.