Tested by Zion (46 page)

The statement put out after the trilateral meeting was anodyne:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met today, February 19. It was a useful and productive meeting. The leaders affirmed their commitment to a two-state solution, agreed that a Palestinian state cannot be born of violence and terror, and reiterated their acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Roadmap. The President and the Prime Minister discussed how to move forward on mutual obligations in the Roadmap in regard to the implementation of Phase I. The participants called for respecting the ceasefire declared in November. The President and the Prime Minister also discussed issues arising from the agreement for a Palestinian national unity government, and the position of the Quartet that any Palestinian Authority government must be committed to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including regarding the Roadmap. The President and the Prime Minister discussed their views of the diplomatic and political horizon and how it might unfold toward the two state vision of President Bush. The President and the Prime Minister agreed that they would meet together again soon. They reiterated their desire for American participation and leadership in facilitating efforts to overcome obstacles, rally regional and international support, and move forward toward peace. In that vein, Secretary Rice expects to return soon.
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No doubt Olmert had agreed to the final two sentences with gritted teeth.

We then traveled to Berlin where a Quartet meeting turned into a squabble between Rice and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. Rice explained our view: We hoped for an election in a few months that would lead to a Hamas defeat; the Palestinian people needed to choose between the vision
Hamas was presenting and the one Abbas was presenting. Once they did, and a new government was in place, peace negotiations could resume in earnest. Lavrov was not buying that approach: Russia wants the Mecca process to continue, he said; stop interfering in Palestinian politics.

A month later, during the last week of March, we were back in Jerusalem once again; Rice was now coming there every four to five weeks. In Ramallah we met with Abbas, who again defended the Mecca Agreement
as a way of stopping the bloodshed by bringing all the factions into the government. I realize it does not meet the Quartet Principles, he said, but it is still an important step forward. Rice told him she did think a political horizon was necessary but explained that Mecca and the national unity government made things far harder for Olmert. We will just keep busy, she said, being very active in our diplomacy; that was the theme of her press conference alongside Abbas as well. To me this sounded like substituting motion for progress: There was a peace process because Rice was there. We would keep coming back, keep insisting on meetings, to create the appearance that something positive was happening. In fact, we were stuck because however many meetings took place, there would be no serious negotiating with Abbas while he was in a unity government with Hamas. To the Israelis, Abbas was now entirely compromised; he was leading the Palestinians nowhere. He was neither fighting Hamas on the ground nor in elections.

Rice then met with Olmert for another sour and tense session. She pressed hard not only for Olmert and
Livni to continue talks with the Palestinians but also to allow her to participate in them. Olmert pushed back: He wanted bilateral talks, and he did not want final status negotiations. He thought the “political horizon” idea was foolish. I am ready to leave most of the West Bank and do a deal on Jerusalem, he said to Rice; why do you need more? I need to know more, more detail, she answered. Which are the major blocks, and what are the borders for each? This is just for me; I will not tell the Palestinians your positions. But we do need to structure a process; let's start the discussion to create a sense of movement and progress. Tell them what the vision looks like now, as an inducement. Help them strengthen their forces, which did not perform very well against Hamas in Gaza. Help them improve the economy, so Abbas can really argue that life is getting better. If there is no change, we have four years of Hamas.

The main argument was about the role of the United States – or, more specifically, of Rice herself. Turbo proposed very frequent Olmert-Abbas meetings to show there was a process. Meetings with Abbas are a very good idea, Rice countered, but let's see if we cannot find a way for the United States to play a role. When our talks continued the next day, Rice pushed again. We need to structure the American role so it does not supplant the bilateral path but rather can supplement it. There are issues I want to raise. Anyway, the Arabs won't trust a purely bilateral process. The American role gives it greater seriousness and prevents a final status negotiation prematurely. She proposed that they tell the press that the Israelis and Palestinians have agreed to work together and meet
every two weeks, and she would return periodically and work in parallel, to try to find a common approach to enable moving forward in the context of the Roadmap to a Palestinian state. This is not shuttle diplomacy, she told Olmert; publicly I want to say I can join your bilaterals periodically for a trilateral.

Finally, Olmert agreed. He did not seem to me to be persuaded because the Israelis were extremely dubious about Rice's approach. Tourgeman explained their concern: We are worried that we will end up negotiating with the U.S. government on final status issues. But Olmert may have concluded that he did not have the ability to resist and get into a public fight with Rice with his own popularity so low. This was late March, and he knew the final report of the commission investigating his stewardship of the Second Lebanon War was due in April – and would surely worsen his political standing. Perhaps he felt that a continuing series of sessions with Abbas and with Rice would lift his poll results or, in any event, change the subject from war to peace. Confusing his own interests with those of Israel was getting easier for him, and many of the people I spoke to in Israel – officials and former officials, journalists, academics – increasingly said they worried that Olmert was now simply looking out for Olmert.

I summarized all these discussions in a series of memos to Hadley in March and April. I saw little benefit from trilaterals where both sides talked to us rather than negotiating with each other. I did not believe any good would come from negotiations over the “political horizon” that were simply preliminary final status negotiations. I thought this idea of a shelf agreement was still wrong because it would force both sides into making politically damaging concessions without giving them the rewards of final status. The moment we crossed into specifics, it seemed to me, Abbas would be harmed, and his enemies would attack any concessions he appeared to be ready to make. I told Hadley this diplomatic process was simply becoming untethered to reality: Abbas was in a coalition with Hamas, while Olmert's own popularity was in single digits and he too was extremely weak. Yet State's NEA bureau had developed for Rice a draft timetable that has the president making a major speech on the Middle East in May and launching final status negotiations in June, thereby dragging him into a diplomatic process that may fail at high cost. And all of this activity was increasing tension and distance between us and the Israelis, despite the president's wish that we avoid it. On April 25, Sallai Meridor came in to see Hadley and
told him there was increasing “daylight” between the United States and Israel. The core of the difference between us is the risk-opportunity calculus, Meridor told us – the risk of moving fast versus the opportunity to reach a deal now. You deprecate the risk and see a great opportunity. We see the opposite: huge risks and little opportunity now.

On April 30, the Winograd Commission
on Lebanon issued its preliminary report. Its criticism of Olmert was even harsher than expected and produced in May a good deal of Kadima Party infighting. Olmert and
his team felt that Livni was jockeying to force him out and replace him. In Washington, NEA pushed on; in a May 8 meeting, David Welch told me that Secretary Rice planned
another trilateral in Jerusalem in June and was still thinking about what exact role the president should play. It seemed that June was too early to pull him in; perhaps the president could host an international meeting. We had to explore all this, and the goal is to “launch negotiations” for a final status agreement. We needed to work on a timetable and participants list. I told him I disagreed with this approach for many reasons, including this one: There was barely a functioning government of Israel right then, after the Winograd report. This grandiose international conference idea would not work.

On May 9 I spoke to a group of Jewish staffers on Capitol Hill, at the invitation of Eric Cantor, the Republican congressman from Richmond, Virginia. Cantor, already rising in the Republican leadership (and later to be House Majority Leader) and a committed Jew and supporter of very strong U.S.-Israel relations himself, chaired periodic sessions of this group. This was one of many conversations I was having in those weeks with Jewish leaders, seeking to calm them down and assure them that the president's views of Israel and the “peace process” had not changed. When they met with Israeli leaders, they were hearing about arguments and difficult meetings, and they knew relations with Israel now contained a tension that had previously been absent.

The Cantor meeting was entirely off the record, a completely meaningless phrase in Washington. The Jewish newspaper
The Forward
carried on May 11 an account of some of my “private” remarks that day and several days before:

As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice presses Israelis and Palestinians to meet a new set of policy benchmarks, the White House is reassuring Jewish groups and conservatives that the president has no plans to pressure Jerusalem. Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams told a group of Jewish communal leaders last week that the president would ensure that the process does not lead to Israel being pushed into an agreement with which it is uncomfortable. Also last week, at a regular gathering of Jewish Republicans, sources said, Abrams described President Bush as an “emergency brake” who would prevent Israel from being pressed into a deal; during the breakfast gathering, the White House official also said that a lot of what is done during Rice's frequent trips to the region is “just process” – steps needed in order to keep the Europeans and moderate Arab countries “on the team” and to make sure they feel that the United States is promoting peace in the Middle East.
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The article was largely accurate. I did not believe the president would permit relations with Israel to be driven into a path of endlessly growing tension, nor did I believe he would ever press the Israelis to do anything that risked their security. I knew that Olmert had made the president aware of tensions with Rice, and I had myself told him (and, separately, told chief of staff Josh Bolten) of the nervousness of Jewish leaders.

Rice spoke with Hadley that morning and then with me; she was angry and let us know it. This policy is the president's policy, she said, and I speak for
the president on foreign policy. She and the president were as closely linked up on it, and on all foreign policy matters, as it is possible to be. Fully linked up. Period. Elliott is not secretary of state and he knows it. Cantor called her to say the story was not entirely accurate and that I had done a good job reassuring nervous Jewish staffers to trust the president and relax; what I had done was useful to the administration, he said. The silent message was also there: Elliott has lots and lots of friends in the Republican Party and in the Jewish community, and they trust him, so leave him alone. When Rice vented at Hadley, he had asked her if she wanted me fired; it isn't clear to me what would have happened had she said “yes, absolutely,” but she did not. Our personal relations, from the four years I had worked for her at the NSC, had always remained very good, and she did also understand I was the person many conservative Republicans and Jewish leaders turned to constantly for reassurance about where our Middle East policy was heading. What I had said to the Cantor group was in fact such reassurance: Yes, the Israelis are nervous and perhaps rightly so, and so am I, but the president is the president and you can trust him.

The gap between the president's apparent views and feelings, and what Rice was doing in pressuring the Israelis, was apparent to me, as it was to many outside the administration. I could not see that the president was restraining Condi, although if he were, I would not necessarily see it anyway: Any such messages from him would be delivered to her alone. His reaction to those who claimed or even intimated that she was “freelancing” was to contradict the assertion and assure the speaker that she was not: The administration spoke with one voice, and she was his agent, faithfully expressing his views. I thought it was more complicated than that, at least after she went over to State. His faith in her was enormous though not total; she could err, and he trusted himself and his own relations with world leaders more than he trusted anyone else's. So I believed what I was telling Jewish leaders. The tension could not be denied, but if we ever got to the edge of the cliff, he would pull us – pull her – back. We were not there yet.

And as was happening with increasing frequency, my own ability to get the president to see things my way was counteracted by Olmert. It did no good for him to express nervousness about Condi, and it was counterproductive for him to express resentment or hostility. He needed to make policy arguments and to stick to them. As the months passed, I often found myself giving an opinion or analysis to the president that showed I was dubious about our policy, especially about the chances that Olmert and Abbas would reach any peace agreement, only to hear the president reply, “You may be right but Olmert thinks otherwise – and he's prime minister of Israel.” He was indeed but was increasingly a discredited and isolated prime minister without the ability to make commitments that would get through his own cabinet and the Knesset. He had one great asset now as prime minister, I thought: George W. Bush. The president still liked Olmert and viewed him as someone who could and would do a peace deal if any serious opportunity presented itself.