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May/June 2008—Book Reviews
The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace |
Tales from the Diplomatic Trenches
David K. Shipler
One gloomy day in January 1997, an experienced negotiator from the State Department, Aaron David Miller, found himself crawling around with a tape measure on a street in Hebron, figuring how to create a boundary between Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the seething West Bank city. Only Americans could implement this aspect of the Oslo accords, apparently; neither side trusted the other to measure the width of a road.
The incident became a famous metaphor at the time, illustrating the desperate suspicions that had frustrated American "peace processors" for decades, and Miller now tells the story as a bit of self-deprecating comedy. "I felt small and ridiculous," he writes, "certainly as a representative of the world's only superpower."
He also draws a larger lesson about enforced humility, a salutary introduction to this intriguing journey through the diplomatic labyrinth: "Once out in their neighborhood, powerful America was not so powerful. Regardless of what we wanted, the locals had timetables, agendas, and interests of their own....When you're in a small world, you tend to become small, and when you're in the conflict-ridden world in which Israelis and Palestinians live, you tend to take on the concern for minutiae and the obsessiveness that can define that world." And that's just the way Israelis and Palestinians wanted the United States to be, he concluded—big and small at the same time.
There is nothing quite so unvarnished as a middle-level official's hindsight. There is no reputation to defend, no ego to flatter, no imagined place in history to secure. Someone perceptive and honest, as I've known Miller to be in occasional conversations over the years, can provide a candid account from inside. And that is where this book has value: less in the replowing of familiar ground from the fertile Kissinger and Carter negotiations, before Miller's time, than in the intimate, self-critical insights from his inconclusive work on the Middle East for six secretaries of state, beginning in the Reagan administration and progressing all the way through Bush I, Clinton and the early years of Bush II.
Miller's tenure spanned a period of rising and falling diplomatic efforts whose achievements looked significant at the moment, only to shrink as they receded into the rubble of combat. Agreements, like superpowers, can be swallowed by the unending run of enmity. So Miller allows a question to reverberate in a low rumble underneath his narrative: How should the United States comport itself? Should it let the two sides fight it out by disengaging in the model of George W. Bush? Or should it wade into the weeds of detailed bargaining in the model of Jimmy Carter, who succeeded, and Bill Clinton, who did not? Should Israel be pushed or pampered, the Palestinians pressured or wooed, the levers of raw power applied or just kept in obvious reserve, the president advised to commit his political capital or "subcontract" the diplomacy to the likes of George Mitchell or George Tenet?
Miller has his own ideas, many generated by the errors he acknowledges having helped commit in nearly 20 years of trying for peace. But he gives readers room to contemplate facts that are quite uncomfortable to anyone supporting vigorous American participation: Sometimes, when the United States gets intensely involved, the parties negotiate more with the Americans than with each other, setting up an unhealthy dynamic. And major progress has been made behind Washington's back: the first Egyptian-Israeli breakthrough in secret talks between Moshe Dayan and Hassan Tuhaimi; the Oslo accords of 1993, hammered out by Israeli and P.L.O. officials meeting without Americans; and the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, worked out clandestinely by the two countries on their own.
Still, the policy of deliberate neglect, adopted by Bush II as an antidote to everything Clintonesque, has denied Israel and the Palestinians sufficient help to pull themselves out of a nosedive. Miller calls Bush "the Disengager," and skewers him with a telling anecdote: In 2004, the President arrived for a photo with nearly 200 Israelis and Arab teenagers who had spent three weeks at a camp in Maine run by Seeds of Peace, which Miller led after leaving government. Having reached across the chasm of distrust, the youngsters represented hopeful elements of the next generation, and when Miller asked Bush if he'd "offer a word or two of encouragement to these remarkable young leaders," Bush replied, "Gotta go, gotta go," strode away, then stopped and called back over his shoulder before disappearing, "Gotta implement that road map, gotta do it."
As a Jew who studied Hebrew and Arabic in Jerusalem during the Yom Kippur War, Miller has deep roots of caring, which have informed his professional life and made him far too sophisticated for reflex actions. He urges Washington to advocate for both sides, criticizing Clinton (and himself) for damaging post-Oslo opportunities by tilting too hard toward Israel. He brings unusual balance to assessing the impact of American Jewish organizations and Christian evangelicals.
He dutifully interviews key figures, with mixed results. Sometimes they triangulate events nicely, testing and amplifying Miller's own experience, but not always. We get propaganda lines from Malcolm Hoenlien and biblical banalities from Pat Robertson. We get pompous self-congratulations from Henry Kissinger even as Miller writes admiringly of his canny negotiation of disengagement agreements. We get a petty refusal from Bill Clinton to be interviewed at all after a Miller op-ed piece labeling his administration "Israel's lawyer." Jimmy Carter, however, offers generous help in recounting his insistent brokering of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, and Secretary of State James Baker in discussing the unsentimental maneuvering that brought many Arabs for the first time to the table with Israel, at the Madrid Conference.
Miller is best in writing about the diplomacy he knows firsthand. The early chapters are afflicted by tedious patches, but they're worth weathering to reach the later, compelling discussions of his own work, especially the series of missteps following Oslo.
He blames himself as much as anyone else. Under Clinton, he admits, the Office of the Special Middle East Coordinator, headed by Dennis Ross with Miller as deputy, was insular, improperly supervised, and imbued with such a "pro-Israel orientation" that "not a single senior-level official involved with the negotiations was willing or able to present, let alone fight for, the Arab or Palestinian perspective." As the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza grew by 46 percent during the Rabin years, "None of us ever gave much thought to challenging the prime minister," he observes. "I don't recall a single tough, honest conversation in which we said to the Israelis, Look, settlements may not violate the letter of Oslo, but they're wreaking havoc with its spirit and compromising the logic of a gradual process of building trust and confidence."
That reluctance to confront Israel contrasted with the earlier readiness to do so under Bush I and Baker, whose "four key peace-process advisors were also American Jews," Miller writes, "but the secretary provided the necessary checks and balances to ensure that policy remained fair."
Paradoxically, the Clinton administration didn't lean hard enough on the Palestinians, either. "We failed to press [Yassir] Arafat sufficiently" on the corruption, cronyism, incitement, and terrorism over which he presided as the Palestinian Authority, created by the Oslo accords, took over parts of the West Bank and Gaza, Miller says. Of course, the Palestinian leader was not the easiest interlocutor. At his first meeting with Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Arafat "was on one of his more outrageous rants, literally screaming" at Christopher, who later told Ross, "I never want to deal with him again."
Miller's account raises the question of whether, with American skill, Arafat could have been induced to lead his people to accommodation, particularly on two elements of deep dispute. First, during the post-Oslo 1990s, Palestinians increasingly trumpeted their "right of return" to villages inside Israel, vacated in 1948. Second, prominent Palestinians, including Muslim clerics, derided Jewish ties to Jerusalem by claiming that the Temple had never stood in the city. At the core of the clashing historical narratives, these are among the rawest nerves of the conflict; Miller reduces them to the shorthand of "Jerusalem" and "refugees" without mining their meaning inside minds—where peace must eventually be made. What if he and his colleagues had brought them to the front burner instead of always deferring them?
Indeed, an unprecedented, unannounced proposal for sharing Jerusalem was carried to Camp David in 2000 by Prime Minister Ehud Barak. But without first giving it to the U.S., he precluded Clinton from seeking advanced authorization in the Arab world for Arafat to negotiate something less than full Muslim sovereignty, Miller observes. Even if Arafat had been so inclined, he had no such power without an Arab consensus, and he naturally refused. Camp David failed.
It failed also, Miller believes, because the administration had wasted time chasing an elusive agreement with Syria, letting the Palestinian conflict drift until Barak and Clinton had entered the twilight of their respective times in office. "We were never honest with ourselves or with the Israelis about what it would take to close a deal" with Syria, Miller writes: President Hafez al-Assad had "to do a Sadat" by visiting Jerusalem and meeting Israeli leaders, and Israel had to withdraw from Golan to the 1967 line. "Otherwise, we should have said to both sides, don't waste our time. But we never even threatened to walk away, even though both sides needed us more than we needed them."
Most of all, though, the sides need each other. They will continue living in the same neighborhood with or without American mistakes, whether or not all the diplomacy is tough, wise, and perfectly balanced. The question is what kind of life they will have together.
More than a decade after Miller wielded his tape measure, the street in Hebron "is closed and has become a pedestrian mall for the Israelis," he says. The facades of Palestinian shops, restored with U.S. funds, "are now covered with anti-Arab graffiti."
David K. Shipler was Jerusalem Bureau Chief of The New York Times from 1979 to 1984 and won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. His most recent book is The Working Poor: Invisible in America.
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