Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (29 page)

On January 31, after the State of the Union address in which Bush described Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” I headed to the State Department for a meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell. I wanted to stress the importance to the entire region of setting the peace process back on track, and to get a better understanding of the administration’s new focus on Iraq. In February of the previous year, Powell had visited Jordan as part of a wider trip to the Middle East, and I had met him at the airport. Typically, this is a practice reserved for visiting heads of state, but I had known him for many years and considered him a good friend. We spoke about Iraq and the stalemated peace process in a long meeting at Raghadan Palace. I was preparing to take him back to the airport when, having taken a liking to my new Mercedes S500 sedan, he asked if he could drive instead. He drove us both to the airport, surprisingly sticking to the speed limit the whole way. Powell was heading to the West Bank for a meeting with Chairman Arafat, and as we got out he pointed to his security detail and said, “I wanted to drive it to Ramallah, but they said no.”

When I saw Powell in January, he raised the
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incident and said that it was unfortunate, because up until then things had been improving a bit. Even Sharon had said as much. But the capture of the ship and its cargo of weapons had undercut U.S. efforts—Powell’s envoy, General Anthony Zinni, had been shuttling between the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate a cease-fire—and made it difficult to move forward. He insisted that there would have to be relative quiet, and that Arafat would need to say something about the ship for the U.S. domestic audience.

I told Powell that the United States needed to send a message of hope to the Palestinians. It had to reinforce their belief that peaceful negotiations would lead to statehood, and to reach out and help those who had been hurt by the intifada and had lost their jobs because of the closures. I also said that the United States needed to be more transparent about what exactly Arafat would have to do to relieve the situation. I suggested that a plan detailing the obligations of both Palestinians and Israelis would help achieve this. Then we started to discuss the only subject anybody in Washington wanted to talk about: Iraq. Ever the diplomat, Powell sought to soften the impact of the president’s State of the Union address, saying that if Iraq abandoned its support for terrorism and its weapons of mass destruction program, then the United States would change its attitude.

The next day I met with President Bush in the Oval Office. I raised the one topic that was then and is now to my mind the most important issue for America in the region—the peace process. I told him that all too often it was relegated to a sideshow, but it was in fact the central issue. Solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I said, would remove a rallying cry for the likes of Al Qaeda and make other Arab leaders more supportive of America’s goals in the region.

But Bush was in no mood to talk about the peace process. He quickly revealed his frustration with recent developments. He said that Arafat had “led us down a path and then reneged.” He insisted that Arafat had to do a better job in controlling extremists; otherwise, the United States would not spend political capital trying to resolve the conflict. “We can’t be hypocrites on terror,” he said, and then he made it clear that he felt Arafat was siding with terrorist organizations. As I had feared, he began to elide his own struggle to tackle Al Qaeda with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

I defended Arafat, saying that he was a national symbol for the Palestinians, and warned Bush that he would slip away if he felt cornered. I described the situation in the region as two old warriors fighting each other while their peoples suffered, and said that the United States should formulate its demands of Arafat in a way that would be understood by Palestinian people. We kept getting bogged down by problems relating to the leaders on both sides, I said, while the majority of Israelis and Palestinians wanted to improve the situation.

The president said he would look into the idea and discuss it with Sharon. He emphasized that the United States would tell Sharon on his upcoming visit to Washington that if he went overboard it would undermine America’s ability to fight terror. Bush also mentioned that he had told Sharon he would have a real problem if the Israelis killed Arafat.

I asked Bush for his help in convincing the Israelis to let Arafat leave his compound in Ramallah, where he had been kept under “house arrest” by the Israeli military since December 2001, so that he could attend the Arab League Summit in Beirut in March, noting that preventing Arafat from attending would only energize the radicals. Bush promised to raise the issue with Sharon, and then we moved on to a discussion of Arafat’s role in the larger peace process. Again Bush said, “We can’t be hypocrites on terror.” He repeated his claim that Arafat was siding with terrorist organizations, and then he said, “Maybe there is someone better?” He said he was not suggesting overthrow but pointing out that there was a need to think over time about who could best replace Arafat and lead the Palestinians to a better future.

I was alarmed by this turn in the conversation. I said that there was no alternative to Arafat. He had become a symbol of the Palestinian people, and the more pressure Israel put on him the more support his people would give him. Israel had also “cantonized” the Palestinians, leading to a fragmentation of political authority in the West Bank and Gaza. I added that Sharon had a very short-term view, and that while it did not mean we could not eventually be partners in peace, we definitely disagreed with his methods.

At this point Bush steered our discussion to Iraq. Taking a harsher line than Powell had done, the president criticized the Iraqi regime, saying, “Saddam needs to be taken to task.”

“You are going to create a major problem in the Middle East,” I said, slowly and deliberately. “The problem is not with the United States removing Saddam—but what happens next?” But Bush remained adamant in his position.

I returned to Jordan the next day. In subsequent conversations with fellow Arab leaders, including President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, I learned that they had had very similar discussions with members of the Bush administration. “What happens the day after you remove Saddam?” they had asked. The inability of the administration to give a concrete answer left us all very uncomfortable.

It had become clear that America would no longer take the lead in pressing for a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. But American disengagement from the peace process would almost certainly kill any hope of progress. So we continued to pressure for the resumption of negotiations, and this time around with a collective Arab peace initiative that we believed would encourage a more active U.S. role in the peace process.

 

In the last years of his reign, my father developed a new approach to the Israeli-Palestinian problem—one that would include all Arab states and commit them to collective peace with Israel in return for Israel’s total withdrawal from all occupied Arab land. Under such an approach—wider than the Madrid process and designed to win international support—all twenty-two members of the Arab League would offer a collective peace to Israel, backed by security guarantees, provided that Israel agree to meet specific requirements. These included the establishment of a Palestinian state, agreement on the status of Jerusalem and the rights of Palestinian refugees, returning the Golan Heights to Syria, and ending the occupation of Lebanese territories. My father wanted to set out what the generic concept of “land for peace” would mean in practical terms, and to eliminate some of the political maneuvering that had taken place between different Arab countries. Unfortunately, his proposal did not gain momentum and stalled with his death. On becoming king, I took the opportunity to revive my father’s plan and asked our government, in concert with the Egyptians, to discuss it with Saudi Arabia. Eventually the Saudis developed the idea into what first came to be known as Crown Prince Abdullah’s initiative and later became the Arab Peace Initiative, after Saudi Arabia presented it to the Arab League, which adopted it at its summit in Beirut in 2002.

As I was preparing to leave Jordan for the Arab League Summit in Lebanon in March 2002, our intelligence service learned of a plot to assassinate me and the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, when we arrived in Beirut. I called Mubarak and passed on the intelligence. He agreed that the security concerns were real, and we both decided that it would be best if we did not travel to Beirut. Not wanting to offend our hosts, I let it be known that I had been struck by a severe cold and would be unable to travel.

Also missing was Yasser Arafat. True to his word, President Bush had sent Vice President Cheney to Israel to try to persuade Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to let Arafat attend the summit. This was the summit that would launch the Arab Peace Initiative, and it was, therefore, extremely important for Arafat to attend it. But Sharon was unmoved. He said that if Arafat went to Lebanon he would not be allowed to return to his headquarters in Ramallah. Arafat stayed in his compound and tried to join in via videoconference. Showing its petty side, Sharon’s government jammed the signal, and Arafat was reduced to sending a taped message.

On March 28, 2002, the twenty-two members of the Arab League formally endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative. This proposed that, in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories to the June 1967 boundaries, a just and “agreed upon” solution to the refugee problem, and the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital, Arab states would consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, enter into a peace agreement with Israel, provide security for all the states of the region, and establish normal relations with Israel.

For the first time since the start of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arab states had formally and unanimously made an offer to Israel for normal relations as a basis for ending the conflict. The Israeli response was swift and unambiguous.

On March 29, 2002, Sharon ordered Israeli troops into West Bank cities in an operation called “Defensive Shield,” the largest Israeli military operation since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israeli forces reoccupied almost all of the Palestinian self-rule areas it had redeployed from under the Oslo process. Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jenin, and Nablus were once again under Israeli occupation. A refugee camp in Jenin suffered the worst attack during a two-week siege that was supported by blanket bombardment of its neighborhoods.

The next day Israeli tanks and soldiers assaulted Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah, smashing through the walls, cutting the electricity, and leaving the Palestinian leader isolated in his second-floor office, working by candlelight. The crudeness of Israel’s handling of Arafat made even his staunchest detractors soften toward him. Because he was imprisoned for so long, up to a few weeks before his death in November 2004, and treated so badly, many became sympathetic to his plight. He essentially became a hero.

The violence continued to escalate when a Palestinian suicide bomber blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket, killing two people. In April 2002, some Palestinian fighters, fleeing from Israeli soldiers who were hunting them, took refuge in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The Israeli army quickly surrounded the church and blockaded the Palestinians inside, along with some 250 priests, nuns, and other civilians. People across the world watched appalled as a sacred place of worship was surrounded by Israeli armored vehicles and snipers huddled on nearby rooftops, with their guns trained on the church.

On April 21, Israel halted its military operations and pulled out its troops from Palestinian areas but kept the siege on the Church of the Nativity and Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. The UN General Assembly convened in an emergency session on May 7 and issued a resolution that expressed grave concern at the deteriorating situation in the Palestinian territories. It demanded that Israel, as an occupying power, abide by its responsibilities under the fourth Geneva Convention. It also condemned Israel’s attacks on religious sites and its refusal to cooperate with a UN fact-finding team that was ordered by the Security Council in a resolution adopted on April 19 to investigate its attack on the Jenin refugee camp.

The siege on the Church of the Nativity lasted for over a month. What was shocking was that the Israeli government had no compunction about allowing its soldiers to open fire on this most sacred site. At one point, two Japanese tourists wandered into the middle of the armed standoff, and were saved by nearby journalists, who motioned for them to get out of the way. Eventually a peaceful solution to the standoff was negotiated, but there was little progress in the larger conflict. It was clear that Sharon had no intention of making peace. The decades-old struggle would have to wait for new leaders to emerge.

In June 2002, the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), meeting in Sudan, endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative. They decided to make every effort to win international support for its implementation. The OIC, established in 1969 at a historic summit in Rabat, with fifty-seven members, is the world’s second-largest intergovernmental organization after the United Nations. By endorsing the Arab Peace Initiative, the OIC had given the proposal the explicit backing of the entire Muslim world. Holding out the promise of normal relations with Israel with all of its members, the OIC put a fifty-seven-state solution on the table.

The OIC again reaffirmed its support for the Arab Peace Initiative the following year, at the foreign ministers’ meeting in Tehran in June 2003 and at the full OIC summit meeting of heads of state in Malaysia in October. But the Israelis showed no interest in this unprecedented opportunity.

In April 2002, in one of its most controversial decisions, Israel announced that Sharon had authorized the construction of a twenty-six-foot-high wall between Israel and the West Bank. Although the stated purpose was to prevent “terrorists” from crossing into and attacking Israel, parts of the wall were built on West Bank territory occupied by Israel in 1967, not along the 1949 armistice line. Reaching into the West Bank, in some cases up to twelve miles, the wall was constructed so that some 80 percent of the settlers in the West Bank would be on the Israeli side. Its path in some cases cut through the middle of Palestinian villages and in others trapped Palestinian towns on the Israeli side.