Tested by Zion (3 page)

The Saudis and Arafat did think just that, as Bruce Riedel recalled:

Arafat had a different view which was that Bush II was going to be a replay of Bush I, and that he had gotten a good deal but he was going to get a
better
deal. And he looked at Powell, he looked at Bush, he assumed the father would have a role: “What's the hurry? Since Camp David they've been moving closer and closer. Now I’m [Arafat] going to get the best deal of them all.” I also have a strong suspicion that the dean of the diplomatic corps in Washington, Prince Bandar, probably encouraged this belief: “I know the Bushies, I’ve been with them for a quarter-century, they'll want to do this even more than Clinton, don't be in any hurry.” If so, [it was] a disastrous calculation by Arafat.
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It is even likely that this “disastrous calculation” about Bush's views played a role in the firing of the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki, by the kingdom's
de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdallah at the end of August 2001 (after twenty-five years in that position) and in the great tension that developed later in 2001 between the Saudi and American governments.

The initial Arab belief that Bush would be closer to their views than to those of the Israelis was shared in Jerusalem. There were few lines of communication to Israel, and there was no clear message coming from the new team in Washington. Shalom Tourgeman, then the deputy to Sharon's new diplomatic advisor Danny Ayalon, described the situation: “It was in the middle of the intifada; the Bush administration didn't know how to cope with it. They didn't prepare their policy yet. Most of the people were new on both sides. And there weren't any deep contacts yet with the administration. And we felt the perception that the administration is in a way continuing the previous administrations.”
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The quick Powell visit to see the newly elected Sharon and
to meet with Yasser Arafat did nothing to dampen Israeli fears or Palestinian expectations about the Bush administration.

Yet if those who expected a “tilt” toward the Arab states were wrong about Bush, they were even more wrong about Cheney. The vice president had no strong ties to the Jewish community from his days as a Wyoming congressman, secretary of defense, or businessman in Dallas; in fact, his work in the private sector had substantially been in the Arab world. It was not surprising that Arab envoys should expect him to be a reliable ally, but Cheney turned out to be a staunch and reliable supporter of Israel's security during his eight years as vice president. In his memoir, he sums up his attitude, writing that he “did not believe, as many argued, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the linchpin of every other American policy in the Middle East” and that it “would have been wrong to push the Israelis to make concessions to a Palestinian Authority (PA) controlled by Yasser Arafat.”
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Those views marked him as one of the most pro-Israel officials in the Bush administration.

Sharon was elected prime minister on February 6, 2001, formed a government in early March, and flew to Washington two weeks later. According to Tourgeman, Sharon was “very concerned; he was very worried about the Bush administration policy because in the perception in Israel, the Bush administration was the continuation of Bush the father, and this is after a very friendly administration of Clinton. I remember the preparation meetings to the visit where many experts told Sharon, ‘Look, you are going now for four years of clashes with this administration.’”
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Sharon's March 20 visit was ill prepared by his new team and went poorly, as Tourgeman recalled:

We came to Washington, without real joint preparations, no real prior discussion on the agendas. The meeting and visit were not good also because everything was leaked to the press, including all the misunderstandings. These are the days of the intifada, many explosions in the streets of Israel, almost on a daily basis…and we fought terror
without real understanding of the Americans at that period. The contacts were about how to prevent misunderstandings between us and the administration, and Sharon was concerned; he was concerned.
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Initially, Sharon did not seem to trust his own official team and used as his key contact with the U.S. government a personal friend, the Israeli-American businessman Arie Genger. Genger met with Powell and
Rice repeatedly over the first 18 months Sharon and
Bush were in office, until Sharon gained confidence in Danny Ayalon, whom he sent to Washington as his ambassador in 2002, and brought in Dov “Dubi” Weissglas as his chief of staff and chief “handler” of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

But that came later. In late June 2001, Sharon returned to Washington to speak to the huge annual convention of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
, then and now the most significant pro-Israel lobbying organization. Once again the visit failed to establish a solid relationship between Sharon and Bush or between the two governments. In addition to Israeli suspicions about Powell, whom they saw as a representative of the classic State Department sympathy for Arab views, Sharon did not trust the new national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice. Sharon's military secretary, Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, described Sharon's first impressions this way:

He was very concerned about the attitude of Condoleezza Rice. She was very, very tough with him at the first meetings. I believe that he didn't understand deeply the relations between Condoleezza and Bush. And one of the famous stories that I got was about the fact that in a pre-meeting – she met Sharon before he met the president – she asked him, “Let's see what we're going to talk about.” And Sharon said, “I want to talk about releasing [convicted spy Jonathan] Pollard.” And Condoleezza told him, “You're not going to raise this issue in the meeting.” So he wasn't aware of their relations and he decided to raise it to President Bush. And Condoleezza shot him down immediately in the meeting, in the middle of the meeting. So he became aware after this meeting about the importance of coordinating with Condoleezza, but I believe for a long time he was suspicious about her attitude toward us. And he felt that between him and President Bush, he can manage it quite well. But he thought that Condoleezza is hurting the relations.
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At this meeting, the Israelis mistook Rice's assertion of control over their White House visit for an underlying hostility to Israel; later, they came to view Rice as an important counterbalance to Powell and the State Department.

It was after this visit that Rice decided to address the problem of communication with Israel herself rather than to leave it to the State Department diplomats. This was the first harbinger of her takeover of the Arab-Israel account, which started gradually in 2002 and was fully in place by 2003. Right after the Sharon visit, she initiated a channel to Danny Ayalon, which both allowed for candid conversations between these two top staff members and also permitted the quiet, confidential passing of messages between Sharon and Bush. This was the first direct channel between the Prime Minister's Office and the White House.

How was the relationship between Sharon and Bush faring? By the time Sharon's career was ended by a massive stroke in January 2006, a mythology had developed about his personal relations with President Bush. According to this storyline, which at times both sides favored, the two had formed a deep personal friendship when Bush, as governor of Texas, visited Israel in 1998. Sharon, then a government minister, had given Bush a helicopter tour of Israel, impressing him with the small size and great vulnerability of the country. Bush had emerged with a deeper understanding of Israel's security needs, as well as with an intimate friendship with Sharon.

The story is not false, but it is exaggerated. No great intimacy was achieved in the 1998 meeting; it lasted but a few hours, most of them spent in a helicopter where headphones made normal conversation impossible. However, Bush did come to understand Sharon's role in building the West Bank settlements, and that came to matter. Bush's chief speechwriter Michael Gerson explained:

The president would talk about the first time he met Ariel Sharon, and how they went on the helicopter tour. And he was very impressed by that trip. He recalls Sharon lining his finger up like this with one of the settlements, and saying, “I built that.” He cites that as one of the reasons why, when Sharon was willing to give up settlements, that impressed him.…Sharon was so proud of his achievements but he saw the reality. I think that's one reason he kind of respected Sharon.
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Some moments in the early meetings in 2001, according to Danny Ayalon, suggest how each side made a real effort to bridge gaps and create a partnership. The Israeli team worked on ways for Sharon

to give a very vivid kind of impression for Bush so he could relate to terrorism. So, Sharon rehearsed it a couple of times before, and he said, “Mr. President, what would happen if you were governor of Texas and Texas would receive rockets coming out of Mexico? I’m sure, Mr. President, that in one hour there wouldn't be Mexico.” And Bush said “Why an hour? Fifteen minutes!” So, this is when Sharon really began to like the guy.
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On the other side, Bush offered advice to Sharon:

Toward the end of the meeting, he took Sharon to the side and he told him, “I don't want you to have a problem with the Catholics; you don't want them to be on your back.” What was the problem? A mosque that was being built in Nazareth. For political reasons some [Israeli] officials gave the Muslims the right to build the mosque just in front of the Church of the Annunciation. Big fiasco – it was crazy and we had to undo it, but nobody wanted to deal with it. And even when we took office, you know, it was a headache for us, but it wasn't something that took all our energies. Anyway, he took Sharon aside and he said, “Listen. There are 70 million Catholics here and there are a billion around the world. You don't want to make them an enemy.” And he told Sharon about the story of this church. Sharon knew vaguely about it. Bush said, “You have to solve it.” And Sharon said, “OK, Mr. President, we'll solve it.” And then he came home, he formed a committee, and we made sure we fixed it.…[T]hese, I think, were the seeds for relations of trust and I would say almost affection later on.
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Such efforts show the desire for better communications and more trust, but achieving that was difficult – more for reasons of style than of substance. As Ayalon described it,

I think the – how should I say – the style, mental, age difference, whatever, was very obvious at that time. Although they had met before, during the campaign when Sharon took him on this famous helicopter ride, and they started this meeting by Sharon saying, “You know, I never thought next time I would meet you, you would be in the White House.” And he [Bush] said, “I never thought you'd be the prime minister.” It was a good rapport, but [it was] extinguished very quickly because Sharon was already hard of hearing, and I’m not sure he
really
was able to completely understand the Texan drawl of the President.…Phone calls between the two were very few and they weren't very good.
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Condi Rice's summary is the most apt: “You know how it was to talk to Sharon. I always said he's one of the few people I know who spoke English better than he understood it.”
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Sharon often spoke in formulas, using word patterns in English with which he was comfortable, to describe his positions on key questions. His hearing and his imperfect command of English meant that he missed some of the nuances; indeed, sometimes he missed the point of questions being put to him. His English was a barrier to effective communication, not a means to achieve it. Sometimes, he would realize that something important was escaping him and would turn to an aide and ask “Ma?” the Hebrew for “What?” Few aides would intervene and interrupt Sharon when he was conversing freely, but Dubi Weissglas often did, to be sure that Sharon understood fully what he was being asked. Weissglas, however, was not around for these early meetings in 2001, when relations between Sharon and
the United States government were fragile and often difficult.

On March 26, 2001, shortly after Sharon's first visit, the Bush administration cast its first veto of a Middle East resolution in the United Nations Security Council. The resolution would have established an “observer force” to protect Palestinians from Israeli forces, and all the European nations in the Council abstained because of the resolution's imbalance: Palestinian terrorists were killing Israelis, but the UN was proposing to offer protection only to Palestinians and failing to condemn their terrorist actions. This U.S. veto must have reassured the Israelis, but other signals were mixed and confused both the Arabs and them. On April 30, the Mitchell Report
was released and endorsed by the Bush administration; among other things, it called for a dead halt to Israeli construction activity in the settlements. CIA Director George Tenet continued the work he had begun in the Clinton days on security matters. It was clear that the Bush administration's main focus was security – lowering the level of violence and fostering some form of security cooperation between Israel and the PA – and that the new team believed no other forms of diplomatic progress were possible until the security situation improved. “Clinton inherited from Bush Sr. a young, promising peace process and bequeathed to Bush Jr. an Israeli-Palestinian war and a total collapse of the hopes that flourished in the
1990s,” one of Israel's leading columnists wrote. “Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that the Republicans had no hopes, or illusions, that a comprehensive peace and an end to the conflict were just around the corner.”
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Still, it was not clear who was in charge of Bush policy or how the administration proposed to move forward. “Stop the violence” was hardly a Middle East policy.