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Night Flight
They say that you can read a person’s feelings on his face. But if so, either
I’m a very good actor – the opposite of what anyone who has worked closely
with me would tell you – or the journalists clustered in front of me weren’t very
good face-readers. They said that I looked defeated. Distressed. Depressed.
Yet as I delivered my brief final statement outside an olive-green cabin at
Camp David, the American presidential retreat in the forested Catoctin hills
north of Washington, I felt none of those things.
Yes, I was disappointed. I realised that what had happened over the last 14
days, or more crucially what had not happened, was bound to have serious
consequences, both for me personally, as Prime Minister of Israel, and for my
country.
But I had been a politician, at that point, for all of five years. By far most of
my life, I had spent in uniform. As a teenager, small and slight and not even
shaving yet, I was one of the founding core of a unit called Sayeret Matkal,
Israel’s equivalent of America’s Delta Force, or Britain’s SAS. It may be that
the way I thought and acted, the way I dealt with danger or with crises, came
from someplace inside me. Even as a young kid, I was always quiet, serious,
contemplative. But my 13 years as a part of Israel’s main special-forces unit,
especially once I became its commander, etched those qualities more deeply.
And they added new ones: a sense that you could never plan a mission too
carefully or prepare too assiduously; an understanding that what you thought,
and certainly what you said, mattered a lot less than what you did. And above
all the realisation that, when one of our nighttime commando operations was
over, whether it had succeeded or failed, you had to take a step back. Evaluate
things accurately, coolly, without illusions. Then, in the light of how the
situation had changed, you had to decide how best to move forward.
That approach, to the occasional frustration of the politicians and diplomats
working alongside me during this critical stage of Israel’s history, had guided
me from the moment I became Prime Minister. In my very first discussions with
President Clinton a year earlier – a long weekend, beginning at the White House
and moving on to Camp David – I had mapped out at great length, in great
detail, every one of the steps I knew we would have to take to confront the
central issue facing Israel: the need for peace.
1
In choosing to return, now, to Camp David for two weeks of summit talks, I
knew the risks. Of all the moments of truth in my life – and in the life of my
country – few, if any, would carry higher stakes. Success would mean not just
one more stutter-step away from our century-long conflict with the Palestinians.
It would signal a real, final peace: in treaty-speak, end of conflict. Whatever the
complexities of putting an agreement into practice, given all the suffering and
bloodshed endured by both sides, we would have crossed a point of no return.
There would be two states, for two peoples.
And if we failed? I knew, if only from months of increasingly stark
intelligence reports, that an explosion of Palestinian violence – not just with
stones or bottles this time, but with guns and explosives – would be only a
matter of time.
I knew something else as well. This would be a moment of truth not just for
me. Or for Bill Clinton, a man who understood our conflict more deeply, and
was more determined to help us end it, than any other president before him. It
was a moment of truth for the leader of the Palestinians, Yasir Arafat.
The Oslo Accords of 1993, groundbreaking though they were, had created a
peace process, not peace. Over the past few years, that process had been
lurching from crisis to crisis. Political support for negotiations was fraying. And
yet the core issues of our conflict had not been resolved. In fact, they had hardly
been talked about. The reason for this was no secret. For both sides, these
questions lay at the heart of everything we’d been saying for years, to the world
and to ourselves, about the roots of the conflict and the minimum terms we
could accept in order to end it. At issue were rival claims on security, final
borders, Israeli settlements, Palestinian refugees, and the future of ancient city
of Jerusalem. None of these could be resolved without painful, and politically
perilous, compromises.
Entering the summit, despite the pressures ahead, I was confident that I, with
my team of aides and negotiators, would do our part to make such a final peace
agreement possible. Nor did I doubt that President Clinton, whom I had come to
view not just as a diplomatic partner but a friend, would rise to the occasion.
But as for Arafat? There was simply no way of knowing.
That was why I had pressed President Clinton so hard to convene the
summit. That was why, despite the misgivings of some of his closest advisers,
he had taken the plunge. We both knew that the so-called “final-status issues” –
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the substance of any real peace – could not simply be put off forever.
Untangling them was getting harder, not easier. And we realised that only in an
environment like Camp David – a “pressure cooker” was how I described it to
Clinton, and to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – would we ever
discover whether a peace deal could in fact be done.
Now, we knew.
* * *
Israel’s equivalent of Air Force One, perhaps in a nod to our country’s
pioneering early years, was an almost prehistoric Boeing 707. It was waiting on
the runway at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to ferry me and the
rest of our negotiating team back home.
It contained a low-rent equivalent of the American version’s presidential
cabin, and a few 1960s-vintage first-class seats, but consisted mostly of two
long lines of coach seats, three abreast, separated by an almost tightrope-narrow
aisle. I dare say I was alone in finding an odd sense of comfort in boarding the
plane. This museum piece of an aircraft was part of my past. It was the same
model of 707 for which I, with a couple of other young soldiers and engineers,
had come up with what we dubbed the “submarine door” system outside the
cockpit – to protect El Al pilots from future attacks after one of its planes had
been hijacked to Algiers in the summer of 1968. It was also the same kind of
plane – a Sabena flight, hijacked to Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport – which I
stormed, before sunrise, four years later with a force of nearly two dozen
Matkal commandos. The shooting was over within 90 seconds. One of my men
– a junior officer named Bibi Netanyahu – was wounded. By one of our own
bullets. But we managed to kill two of the heavily armed hijackers, capture the
others, and free all 90 passengers unharmed.
Still, even I had to accept, it was no fun to fly on.
As we banked eastward after takeoff and headed out over the Atlantic, the
mood on board was sober. Huddling with the inner core of my negotiating team
– my policy co-ordinator Gilad Sher, security aide Danny Yatom and Foreign
Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami – I could see that the way the summit ended had hit
them hard. It was probably true, as all three often reminded me, that the greatest
pressure fell on me. I was the one who ultimately decided what we could, or
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should, offer in search of a true peace with the Palestinians. I was the one who
would be blamed by the inevitable critics, whether for going too far or not far
enough, or simply for the fact the deal had eluded us. I knew the drill: the same
thing had happened when I had come tantalizingly close to finalizing a peace
deal with Syria’s then-dying dictator, Hafez al-Assad, a few months earlier. Yet
these three dedicated men – Gili, who was by training a lawyer; Shlomo, an
academic; and Danny, a former Mossad chief – had just been through dozens of
hours of intricately detailed talks with each of Arafat’s top negotiators at Camp
David, not to mention the dozens of other meetings before we had even got
there. Now they had to accept that, even with the lid of the pressure cooker
bolted down tight, we had fallen short of getting the peace agreement which
each of us knew had been within touching distance.
I don’t think that even they could be described as depressed. On our side,
after all, we knew we had given ground on every issue we possibly could,
without facing full-scale political rebellion at home. We had proposed an Israeli
pullout from nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza. A support mechanism for
helping compensate tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the serial
Arab-Israeli conflicts of the past half-century. And most painfully and
controversially – my rivals and critics back home were already accusing me of
“treachery” – we had agreed to let President Clinton present a proposal for the
Palestinians to get sovereignty over the Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem as
well as “custodial sovereignty” over the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque complex
perched above the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.
But precisely because we had been ready to offer so much, only for Arafat to
reject it all, even as a basis for talks on a final deal, I could sense how gutted my
key negotiators were feeling.
Still, I’m sure none of them was surprised when my own old operational
instincts kicked in. In my statement to journalists, I had been careful to say that
Arafat was not ready at this time to make the historic compromises needed for
peace. But before parting with President Clinton and Secretary Albright, I’d
been more forthright. It was clear, without my saying so, that the chances of our
getting a peace agreement on Clinton’s watch were now pretty much over. He
had barely five months left in office. Yet my deeper fear was that with Arafat
having brushed aside an offer that went far further than any other Israeli had
proposed – far further than the Americans, themselves, had expected from Israel
– the prospects for peace would be set back for years. Perhaps, I said, for two
decades.
4
The challenge now, I told my exhausted team, was to make sure we were
prepared for this new reality. Part of the spadework was already in place. Much
as I’d hoped that Arafat and I could turn a new page in Middle East history, I
had directed our army chief-of-staff, nine months before the summit, to draw up
contingency plans for the likelihood of an unprecedentedly deadly eruption of
Palestinian violence if we were to fail.
Now, I felt we had to go even further, and to prepare a proactive alternative
to the negotiated deal we’d been unable to secure. I proposed considering a
unilateral Israeli pullout from the West Bank and Gaza. The territorial terms
would, necessarily, be less far-reaching than the proposal Arafat had rejected.
But I felt we should still withdraw from the great majority of the land we had
captured in 1967, still leaving the Palestinians an area which the outside world
would recognize as wholly sufficient for them to establish a viable, successful
state.
And crucially, this would finally give Israel, our country, a delineated, final
border with the territory captured in the Six-Day War.
Gili, clearly uneasy about accepting the idea that the chances for a negotiated
peace were definitively gone, left to try to get some sleep on the long flight
ahead. Danny and Shlomo Ben-Ami as well. Within an hour or so, the plane
was full of irregularly slumped bodies, the silence broken only by the drone of
the 707’s engines and the occasional sound of snoring.
I sat, wide awake, in one of the seats at the front.
My sleeping habits were another inheritance from Sayeret Matkal. During
those years, nearly everything of significance which I did had happened after
sundown. The commando operations were, of course, set for darkness whenever
possible. The element of surprise could mean the difference between success
and failure, indeed life and death. But all of my planning, all my thinking,
tended to happen at night as well. The quiet, and the lack of distractions, helped
to discipline my mind. I found that it helped to free my mind as well, sometimes
only to discover that it went off in unexpected directions.
It did so now. Perhaps even I was still reluctant to accept that Camp David
meant that the opportunity for a transformative deal with Arafat was finished.
Yet whatever the reason, I began thinking back to the first time that my path and
his had crossed. It was in the spring of 1968, nearly a year after Israel had
defeated the armies of our three main Arab enemies – Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
Israeli forces were advancing on a Jordanian town called Karameh, across the
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Jordan River from the West Bank, from which a fledgling group called Fatah,
under the command of Arafat, had been staging a series of raids. In one of their
most recent attacks, they’d planted land mines, one of which destroyed an
Israeli schoolbus, killing the driver and one of the teachers and injuring nearly a
dozen children. The so-called Battle of Karameh was our single most significant
operation since the 1967 war. In pure military terms, it succeeded. But at a
price: more than two dozen Israeli soldiers dead. It also had a major political
impact. It caused shock among many Israelis, still wrapped in a sense of
invincibility from the Six-Day War, as well as a feeling in the Arab world,
actively encouraged by Arafat and his comrades, that compared to the great
armies Israel had defeated in 1967, Fatah had at least shown fight. Fatah had
drawn blood.
I had just turned 26 years old. I was finishing my studies in math, physics
and economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and had joined my
Sayeret Matkal comrades the night before the assault. It was a huge operation:
ten battalions, including crack infantry units. Our own role was relatively minor.
We were to seal the southern entrance to the town. But it proved a tough slog
just to get there. Our vehicles got bogged down in mud. By the time we arrived,
Fatah fighters, although many were in civilian clothes so we couldn’t be sure,
were racing past us in the other direction. One of them, we were later told, was
Yasir Arafat. On a motorcycle.
It would be nearly three decades before the two of us actually met – shortly
after the assassination of my longtime comrade and friend Yitzhak Rabin, when
I had become Foreign Minister under Shimon Peres. But in the intervening
years, Arafat was rarely off of my radar. By the early 1970s, he and his fighters
had been expelled by King Hussein’s army from Jordan and were re-based in
Lebanon. Arafat was becoming a significant figure on the Arab and world
political stage, and an increasingly uncomfortable thorn in Israel’s side. I was
head of Sayeret Matkal by then. Over a period of months, I drew up a carefully
constructed plan – a raid by helicopter into a Fatah-dominated area in
southeastern Lebanon, during one of Arafat’s intermittent, morale-boosting
visits from Beirut – to assassinate him. My immediate superior, the army’s head
of operations, was all for our doing it. But the chief of military intelligence said
no. Arafat, he insisted when we met to discuss the plan, was no longer the lean,
mean fighter we had encountered in Karameh. “He’s fat. He’s a politician. He is
not a target.”
6
A decade later, the idea would suddenly resurface. In my first meeting, as a
newly promoted Major General, with our then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon,
Sharon turned to me and the army’s Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, and said: “Tell
me. Why the hell is Arafat still alive?” He looked first at Raful, then at me, and
added: “When I was 20 years younger than you are, I never waited for someone
like Ben-Gurion or Dayan to ask me to plan an operation. I would plan it! Then
I’d take it to them and say, you’re the politicians, you decide, but if you say yes,
we’ll do it.” I smiled, telling him that I’d done exactly that, a decade earlier,
only to have one of his mates in the top brass say no. Sharon now said yes. But
the plan was overtaken: by his ill-fated plan to launch a full-scale invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, targeting not just Arafat, but with the aim of crushing the
PLO militarily once and for all.
I finally met Arafat face-to-face at the end of 1995. Although the Oslo peace
process had dramatically changed things, it was clear that the real prize – real
peace – was still far away. We were in Barcelona, for a Euro-Mediterranean
meeting under the auspices of King Juan Carlos, aimed at trying to re-invigorate
negotiations. The ceremonial centrepiece of the event was a dinner at one of the
royal palaces, and it was arranged for me and Arafat to meet for a few minutes
beforehand. I arrived first. I found myself in a breathtakingly opulent, but
otherwise empty, room. Empty, that is, except for a dark-brown Steinway piano.
From childhood, I have loved music. And while I am never likely to threaten the
career of anyone in the New York Philharmonic, I have, over the years,
developed some ability, and drawn huge enjoyment, as a classical pianist. I
pulled back the red-velvet bench and began to play. With my back to the
doorway, I was unaware that Arafat had arrived, and that he was soon standing
only a few feet away, watching as I played one of my favourite pieces, a Chopin
waltz. My old commando antennae must have been blunted. I may not have
become “fat”. But, undeniably, I was now a politician.
When I finally realised Arafat was behind me, I turned, embarrassed, stood
up, and grasped his hand. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I must say I
have spent many years watching you – by other means.” He smiled. We stood
talking for about 10 minutes. My hope was to establish simple, human contact;
to signal respect; to begin to create the conditions not to try to kill Arafat, but to
make peace with him. “We carry a great responsibility,” I said. “Both of our
peoples have paid a heavy price, and the time has come to find a way to solve
this.”
7
I sensed, at the time, at least the start of some connection. I suspected that
Arafat viewed me, as he had Rabin before me, as a “fellow fighter”. But if so, I
now wondered whether that might have been part of the problem in his ever
truly understanding my mission at Camp David. My motivations. Or my mind.
Even in Israel, my reputation as a soldier has sometimes been as much a
burden as an advantage. A whole body of stories has followed me from my 36
years in uniform – a career which, after Sayeret Matkal, led me up the military
ladder until I was head of operations, intelligence, and eventually of the entire
army as Chief of Staff. By the time I left the military, I was the single most
decorated soldier in our country’s history. Some of the stories were actually
true: that when we burst onto the hijacked Sabena airliner, for instance, we were
dressed as a maintenance crew; or that, in leading an assassination raid in Beirut
against the PLO group that had murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich
Olympics, I was disguised as a woman. Not the most attractive young lady,
perhaps, though I did, painfully, pluck my eyelashes, and, with the help of four
pairs of standard-issue Israeli Army socks, develop quite a comely bosom. I
rejected the idea of wearing a long dress, in favour of stylishly flared trousers. I
was going on a commando operation, after all, not a prom date. But I did wear
heels. So yes, a woman, of sorts.
Yet some of the stories were just plain myth. I had given up counting the
times I’d heard about my alleged prowess in recording the fastest-ever time on
the most gruelling of the Israeli army’s obstacle courses. In fact, I was a lot
more like Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin.
The main misunderstanding, however, went deeper. The assumption
appeared to be that my military achievements, especially in Sayeret Matkal,
were down to a mix of brute force and raw courage. Courage, of course, was a
requirement: the willingness to take risks, if the rewards for success, or the costs
of inaction, were great enough. Few of the operations I fought in or commanded
were without the real danger of not coming back alive. But whatever success I’d
had as a soldier, particularly in Matkal, was not only, nor even mainly, about
biceps. It was about brains. The ability to make decisions. To withstand the
pressure of often having to make the most crucial decisions within a matter of
seconds. It was, above all, about thinking and analyzing – and always, always,
looking and planning ahead.
And as our plane droned onward towards Israel, I knew that I would now
need all of those qualities more than ever.
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* * *
This book is only in part the story of my life – a life that, from my
beginnings as a kibbutz boy in pre-state Palestine, has been intimately entwined
with the infancy and adolescence and, now, the increasingly troubled middle
age of the State of Israel.
Still less is it only a record of its, or my, achievements, although they are
inevitably a part of the story.
In setting out to write it, I was also determined to document, from the inside,
the critical setbacks as well. Mistakes. Misjudgements. Missed opportunities.
And the lessons that we can, and must, be prepared to learn from them.
No less so than I when I was planning a hijack rescue or a cross-border
commando operation in Sayeret Matkal, I remain convinced that Israel’s
security, Israel’s very identity, can be safeguarded only by evaluating
dispassionately the situation in our country and the world. And by looking
ahead.
Even when I was a soldier, I never stopped thinking this way, especially
when, first as military intelligence chief and especially as Chief of Staff, I knew,
in detail, every one of the security threats that faced Israel and was part of
discussions and decisions to try to confront them. I still vividly remember as
Chief of Staff, every Friday before the arrival of the Jewish Sabbath, sitting
with Rabin, who was then Israel’s Defence Minister. Our offices were along the
same hallway of the kirya, the ministry’s headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv.
Rabin had a very low table in his office, with two chairs. We would sit across
from each other, each with a ready supply of coffee and Yitzhak smoking an
apparently endless supply of cigarettes, and we would just talk. Politics.
Strategy. Israel. The PLO. The surrounding Arab states. And the wider world.
Many years before I became Prime Minister, I gave a lecture at a memorial
meeting for an Israeli academic. Not many people were there. I doubt even they
remember it. But I do, because what I said has, sadly, become more prophetic
than even I could have imagined. I talked about the imperative for peace as part
of Israel’s security. There was a “window,” I said. We were militarily strong. In
regional terms, we were a superpower. But politically, resolving the conflict
with our Arab enemies would almost certainly become more difficult with time.
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Iraq, perhaps Iran and other Middle Eastern states, might get nuclear weapons.
A violent form of fundamentalist Islam could, over time, erode existing Arab
and Muslim states, threatening Israel of course, but also the stability of our
neighbourhood and of the world. In those circumstances, even if an Israeli
government was strong enough, wise enough, forward-looking enough to
pursue avenues for negotiated peace with its immediate neighbours, getting the
popular support required would be all but impossible.
The window is still there. But it is only barely open.
I fear that I was right, as well, in predicting that our failure to secure a final
peace agreement with the Palestinians at Camp David might set back
peacemaking not just for a few months, but for many years. I have persisted in
trying, very hard, to make that particular prediction prove wrong. That was why,
despite intense pressure from my own political allies not to do so, I decided to
return to government in 2007 as Defence Minister. I remained in that role for
six years: mostly in the current, right-wing Likud government of my onetime
Sayeret Matkal charge, Bibi Netanyahu.
Much of what I say in this book about war and peace, security and Israel’s
future challenges, will make uncomfortable reading for Bibi. But very little of it
will surprise him, or his own Likud rivals further to the right, like Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman and the Economy Minister, Naftali Bennett. I have
said almost all of it to them behind closed doors in the past few years, more than
once. When I finally decided to leave the political arena last year, it was largely
because I realized that they were guided by other imperatives. In the case of
Bibi, the most gifted politician with whom I’ve worked except for Clinton, the
priority was to stay in power. For Avigdor and Naftali, it was to supplant Bibi,
when the opportunity was ripe, as Likud leader and as Prime Minister. And
much too often – as with their hugely ill-advised recent proposal to amend
Israel’s basic law to define it explicitly as a Jewish state, and deny “national
rights” to non-Jews – the three of them have ended up competing for party
political points rather than weighing the serious future implications for the
country.
Peacemaking, as I discovered first-hand, requires taking risks. Statesmanship
requires risks. Politics, especially if defined simply as staying in power, is
almost always about the avoidance of risk.
10
The problem for Israel, no matter who or what party is in government, is that
there are risks everywhere one looks, and they show every sign of getting more,
not less, serious.
The “Arab Spring” has morphed into an Islamic winter. National frontiers
that were put in place by British and French diplomats after the fall of the
Ottoman Empire are vanishing. Centuries-old conflicts between tribes and rival
religious communities have reignited. The old Cold War system of nations has
given way to a world without a single geopolitical centre of gravity. Perhaps
most seriously, Iran seems determined to get nuclear weapons, and, in my view,
may succeed in doing so.
Where Israel is concerned, relations with our indisputably most important
ally, the United States, are more strained than at any time in decades.
Diplomatic ties with Europe, our single largest trading partner, have been
growing steadily worse. And the only real certainty is that anyone who tells you
that they know absolutely where things are heading next is lying. Just ask Hosni
Mubarak, who, despite having nearly half-a-million soldiers and security
operatives at his disposal, was utterly blindsided, and very soon toppled and
imprisoned, by an uprising that began with a sudden show of popular anger in
Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Internally as well, Israel faces dangers. Chief among them is the alarming
erosion of the standards of civil discourse, amid the increasingly shrill, often
hateful, divisions between left and right, secular and religious, rich and poor
and, most seriously of all, Jews and Arabs. While we remain economically
successful, the fruits of our wealth are being ever more unevenly shared, and the
prospects for continued growth constrained by the lack of any visible prospect
of long-term peace.
Bibi Netanyahu, of course, knows all of this. Indeed, he has repeatedly
spoken of the multiple threats Israel faces, not only in somber terms, but at
times almost apocalyptically.
That works, politically. Politicians, not just in Israel but everywhere, know
that it is a lot easier to win elections on fear than on hope.
Yet my own prescription – learned, as this book recounts, from years on the
battlefield, then reinforced by my years in government – is that Israel must
resist being guided by either of those alternatives. Not fear, certainly. But
neither by simple, untempered hope. Though the stakes have become much
higher since my night flight back from Camp David nearly 15 years ago, our
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need remains what I tried to impress on my negotiators then: realism. A
meticulously informed, utterly unvarnished, understanding of the threats we
face, of each altered situation after every success or a failure, and an ability to
set aside the background noise and political pressures and chart a way forward.
So what is that way? It begins with the mindset. On more than one occasion
in the past few years, after Prime Minister Netanyahu had warned our country
of a nuclear Iran or the spread of Al Qaeda-style hatred and violence, as if
prophesying the coming of Armageddon, I would say to him: “Stop talking like
that. You’re not delivering a sermon in a synagogue. You’re Prime Minister.”
Having been privileged to live my own life along with the entire modern history
of our country, I went further. Zionism, the founding architecture of Israel, was
rooted in finding a way to supplant not just the life, but the way of thinking,
which hard-pressed Jewish communities had internalised over centuries in the
diaspora: in Hebrew, the galut. We would instead take control of our own
destiny, building and developing and securing our own country.
Now, I told Bibi, he was back in the mindset of the galut. Yes, al-Qaeda, and
more recently Islamic State, were real dangers. The prospect of a nuclear Iran
was even more so. “But the implication of the way you speak, not just to Barack
Obama or David Cameron, but to Israelis, is that these are existential threats.
What do you imagine? That if, God forbid, we wake up and Iran is a nuclear
power, we’ll pack up and go back to the shtetls of Europe?”
Of course not. Israel, as my public life has taught me more than most,
remains strong militarily. We are, still, fully capable of turning back any of the
undeniable threats on our doorstep. Keeping that strength, developing it and
modernizng it, are obviously critically important. But as Israel’s founding Prime
Minister, David Ben-Gurion, used to say, the success of Zionism, and of the
Israeli state, required two things: strength and “righteousness.” He didn’t mean
the word in purely religious terms. He meant that Israel, if it were to retain
international backing and internal cohesion, must be guided by a core of moral
assumptions as well.
That, in itself, would be reason enough to pursue every possible opportunity
for “end of conflict” with our neighbours. And, at home, to protect and reinforce
our commitment to Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state. But
Israel’s simple self-interest – its hope for prosperity, social cohesion, and
growth in future – makes this nothing short of imperative.
12
Bibi is right about one thing. The negotiating challenges have become more
difficult since Arafat’s refusal of our offer at Camp David. Arafat is no longer
alive. Palestinian politics have become ever more fragmented and messy, not
least as a result of the Hamas takeover of Gaza.
But Churchill once said that the difference between a pessimist and an
optimist was that the pessimist always saw difficulties in every opportunity. The
optimist saw opportunities in the difficulties.
I, of all people, do not look at such opportunities without hard-headed
analysis, even a dose of scepticism. But the opportunities are undeniably there,
and never has Israel risked paying a higher price for failing to see and at least to
try to act on them.
The first port of call should still be the Palestinians. I have repeatedly asked
Bibi, and the right-wing rivals that seem often to loom large in his political
calculations: “If you’re so sure you don’t have a negotiating partner in the
Palestinians, who not at least try? Seriously. What do you have to lose?”
But beyond this, there is a whole range of relatively moderate countries –
and, as Sunni states, strongly anti-Iranian countries – which share with Israel a
real, practical interest in putting in place a new political arrangement in the
Middle East. So does the United States, Russia, even China. Each, in their own
ways, is threatened by a terror threat that will require international action, and
many years, finally to defeat.
A Saudi “peace plan”, for instance, has been on the table for years. Formally
endorsed by the Arab League, it proposes a swap: Israeli withdrawal for full and
final peace and Arab recognition. Successive Israeli governments have
dismissed it out of hand, arguing that the withdrawal which the Saudi proposal
demanded – every inch of territory, back to the borders before the Six-Day War
– would be not only politically unacceptable, but practically impossible.
In the final days of the Camp David summit, as our failure was becoming
inescapably clear, a disheartened Bill Clinton said to me that he could
understand, just about, why Yasir Arafat had not accepted the unprecedentedly
far-reaching proposals I had presented. But what he couldn’t grasp was how the
Palestinian leader could say no even to accepting them as a basis for the hard,
further work which we all knew a final peace agreement would entail. Wasn’t
Arafat capable of looking beyond the political risks, of understanding the
greater risks of inaction. Of seeing the rewards? Of looking ahead?
13
My fear – not just on issues like the Saudi peace plan, but in charting our
place in a dramatically changed world, and safeguarding our twin Jewish and
democratic identities at home, pairing our physical strength with an equally
strong moral centre – is that we Israelis are now in danger of jettisoning the
example of David Ben-Gurion. For Yasir Arafat’s.
14
Chapter One
I am an Israeli, but also a Palestinian. I was born in February 1942 in Britishruled
Palestine on a fledgling kibbutz: a cluster of wood-and-tarpaper huts amid
a few orange groves and vegetable fields and chicken coops. It was just across
the road from an Arab village named Wadi Khawaret, which disappeared, with
the establishment of the State of Israel, when I was six years old.
As Prime Minister half-a-century later, during my stubborn yet ultimately
fruitless drive to secure a final peace treaty with Yasir Arafat, there were media
suggestions that my childhood years gave me a personal understanding of the
pasts of both our peoples, Jews and Arabs, in the land which each of us saw as
our own. But that is in some ways misleading. Yes, I did know first-hand that
we were not alone in our ancestral homeland. At no point in my childhood was I
ever taught to hate the Arabs. I never did, even when, in my years defending the
security of Israel, I had to fight, and defeat, them. But my conviction that they,
too, needed the opportunity to establish a state came only later, after my many
years in uniform, and especially when, as deputy chief-of-staff under Yitzhak
Rabin, we were faced with the explosion of violence in the West Bank and Gaza
that became known as the first intifada. And while my determination as Prime
Minister to find a negotiated resolution to our conflict was in part based on a
recognition of the Palestinian Arabs’ national aspirations, the main impulse was
my belief that such a compromise was profoundly in the interest of Israel: the
Jewish state whose birth I witnessed, whose existence I had spent decades
defending on the battlefield and which I was ultimately elected to lead.
Zionism, the political platform for the establishment of a Jewish state,
emerged in the late 1800s in response to a brutal reality. And that, too, was a