Homepage

Back

Summer 2003

Archives

The process of negotiating peace in the Middle East--this is a topic that brings up a lot of passions and emotions when we talk about. There is usually nobody in the audience that doesn’t have strong opinions one way or the other, and I can almost predict the questions and will certainly make sure we have plenty of time for the questions and answers they raise key issues.

I got involved in this process indirectly. I was the commander of the U.S. Central Command, and unusual to most of our unified commands, we had a piece of the Middle East carved out of the U.S. Central Command that wasn’t part of our area of responsibility. That was Israel, Lebanon and Syria. All other major Middle Eastern countries in most of the Arab world were part of the U.S. Central Command, but this part wasn’t. In a way, it was a blessing, because as commander of the U.S. Central Command, I could focus my time really on the dual containment of Iran and Iraq and in dealing with instability issues as well as a number of other crises on the horn of Africa. We would have been hard put to have to worry about dealing with the peace process at the same time, but the peace process clearly, the effect of the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinian clearly, directly affected everything we did. I think without a doubt, it was the number one issue in this entire region. I would say that region extends from North Africa to the Philippines, from central Asia to central Africa, the greater Islamic world. You could even bring in the fact that the European Union, the UN, the Russians and others are deeply involved in this. The quartet that recently has worked with the U.S. as a part of that organization proposed the recent plan, the roadmap. So this has become a global issue, not only the most important issue in the Middle East, not only the most important issue in the greater Islamic world, but now probably the greatest single crisis issue within the entire globe that could end up affecting stability in the globe one way or another.

I was asked by Secretary of State Colin Powell to undertake a very specialized mission. The Tenant Plan that was agreed upon by both sides, the Israelis and Palestinians, could not be implemented. And Secretary Powell and President Bush felt that what was needed was kind of a role-up-your sleeves application of the Tenant Plan. They needed what was called a Tenant Work Plan. How would we make this work upon the ground? The principles of the plan had agreement, but the mechanics, the devil in the details, was the part that we could not get started. So my job was to go over there and work primarily with the security forces and others on both sides to discuss how we could implement it. We talked about exact time schedules, exact measures of what we would consider accomplishing, specific tasks, how many arrests, for what point would Israeli occupation forces move to and how would they be monitored. These sorts of things, freezing of cells and how they would be determined. So we had the job of actually trying to work out on the ground the things that would make the peace process move forward.

I want to take you back a little bit to the last administration and maybe the highpoint of Israeli/Palestinian efforts toward peace. It might have been arguably at Camp David or Taba, one of the places where it looked like we had a 95 percent agreement where Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Arafat had come together with a plan and a formula brokered and mediated by President Clinton personally that was close, and by all admissions it was close. I spoke to Arafat and, certainly to those who were there on the Israeli side, and by everybody’s account it was a very close thing, close to agreement. But didn’t quite work. I remember that moment because I was in U.S. Central Command, and I had never seen the mood and the atmosphere in the region so good, so positive and so stable. People were encouraged that we were coming close to resolving the one issue that could have this region move forward; that could do more than anything else to stabilize the region. It then fell apart. And the second Intifada began and the violence and the retaliation began what’s known as the cycle or spiral of violence, which has decreased in its intensity and has gotten worse as time went on. There was an attempt to bring it back to that point. Senator George Mitchell (D) was sent over to try to broker some sort of measure that could rebuild the confidence and get the process back on track. In sort of a short version, the Mitchell Plan was a series of political and confidence-building measures that would be accomplished, which would lead as precursor back into those final status issues. Those issues that were on the table for resolution: The status of Jerusalem, the status of the settlements, the issue of right of return and several others that were the keystone positions that were considered those final status issues that have to be resolved before you have a lasting and just peace. Now Mitchell had agreement by both sides with this plan. Both sides agreed that the Mitchell precursors would be put into place, except that despite the agreement in principle, they were never applied and the conditions of the Intifada and the retaliations got worse. The violence increased. So George Tenant, the director of the CIA and the director of Central Intelligence, was sent to try put into place another precursor plan, something that would lead into the Mitchell Plan that would resolve the security situation. And George Tenant was able to get both sides to agree to his plan. His plan involved a series of security steps by each side that would lead them into the competent building and political measures of the Mitchell Plan, which would lead into the final status issues. So we have now put another set of precursors in front of even the Mitchell Plan. Both sides agreed with Tenant’s plan, but again, it was never implemented on the ground. So Zinni is sent in to try to get the Tenant Plan to work.

What struck me when I got there is we had built ourselves a very sequential narrow path, and even after my mission, which I’ll talk about in a little bit of detail, trying to accomplish the implementation of the Tenant Plan and didn’t succeed. The next attempt in fact put another set of precursors in front--the road map. The road map put in now the obligation to restructure the Palestinian Authority as a precursor. So you have the restructuring of the Palestinian Authority before you can get to the implementation of the security measures, before you can get to the competence-building measures, before you get back to the table to the final status issues. It’s a long winded way to say somehow this process degraded into a series of precursor steps that each time made the situation worse. Each time you could implement what was agreed upon, we took another step backwards and through another obstacle that had to be overcome in front of it. We’re now faced with a situation, in my view, which has proven to be unworkable, and that is this idea of sequentialism.

The idea that the steps toward a final agreement have to be done in a narrow, step-by-step process. Several things are wrong with that concept. Although I can understand how we got there and I can understand that the path laid out, if it were able to be followed clearly, would lead to where both sides would benefit. Where the president of the United States set out the goal of the recognition of the Palestinian state and Crown Prince Abdullah brought 22 Arab nations now to say there would be recognition of the state of Israel and there could be peace agreement. To get there on too narrow path is almost impossible. It is almost impossible because it’s too easy to derail or to upset. Extremists on either side can upset this process. We’ve seen what happens as peace negotiations begin to get more intense, begin to close. You see a wave of suicide bombings. You can see an increase in the expansion of settlements, which further exacerbates the problem. Those who would not have this issue resolved, who do not believe in that path to success, can too easily upset it on both sides. We’ve found ourselves in a position now where there is no trust or confidence, no ability to move the process forward. We are in a position now where probably the best course of action is to scrap this whole idea of sequentialism.

In my mind all the issues would be put on the table again. You can’t build this ever-increasing-in- length path to peace, this ever-increasing number of obstacles or steps that have to be met before you can get to those final status negotiations. We have to get to the point where all those involved in side processes are brought under the tent. So many connections, so many deals, so many which aren’t part of the original process, are going in parallel. The political issues, the economic issues, the security issues, the issues of how we’re going to monitor this whole process, if it gets put into place has to be dealt with simultaneously. That’s a difficult thing because no one wants to commit to a political decision if it is seen as rewarding violence or terrorism. On the other side, no one wants to commit to taking actions in the street which could lead to civil war if there are no political guarantees. So you end up with this chicken-and-egg problem on each side which makes it difficult to move forward.

This whole process is fraught with a lot of other problems. Do we have the right negotiators here? Do we have the right leadership that can cut the final deal? I’m sure I’ll get questions about Sharon and Arafat in this group. I always do. --Whether there is a possibility that these two men can make peace for their own people. I want to begin by saying something that was told to me by someone whom I thought was one of the most insightful men in this whole process, Simon Peres, when I first arrived here. He told me, and I’m paraphrasing this, he said, “You’re going to meet three kinds of people in this process. You’re going to meet the righteous, and he said, don’t waste your time on them because you can’t change their minds. They see that their position is given to them by God, and so you’ll never move them and never convince them on another path, other than what they see as a total completion of what they feel is their God-given right. He said the second group you’re going to meet, you can watch on television every night. He called them the collectors of arguments, the debaters. They're interested in winning a debate. The want to score debating points. They want to argue technical points. They want to argue academic positions and principles. And he said don’t waste your time because it’s a game of debate with them, and you can see them on our media every time this issue comes up. He said the third group are where you need to concentrate your efforts. These are the people that are practical. These are the people that have to live with this solution. This is the average Israeli in Tel Aviv, the average Palestinian in Ramalah who wants something to work on the ground, who knows there needs to be compromise, who knows that you can’t get an agreement where one side wins and the other side loses. It will never last. There is going to have to be compromise on both sides and there is going to have to be cooperation in this process, there is going to have to be a willingness to live together. There is going to have to be a willingness on each side to see the other side as a just and lasting part of this peace process, and he was right. The problem becomes, even though they comprise the vast majority, do they get a voice? Do they get an opportunity? Do they get a chance to have their attitudes and feelings really thrown out into the open? Do they get overwhelmed by the violence that happens on both sides? This whole process is caught up with moral and ethical issues, and you can hear them everyday.

I have outlined a sort of Whitman’s Sampler of some of the issues I have heard. One of them was the issue of moral equivalence. Is what we do as bad as what the other guy does? Is expanding settlements as bad as suicide bombers? This issue of moral equivalence to me is an argument for the collectors of arguments, that second group. What’s the point? If it doesn’t work on the ground, what’s the point if your position is a little more moral, but you’re still doing something wrong? I don’t want to hear about the moral equivalence between armed robbery and murder. What’s the point? It’s an academic point. So the issue of moral equivalence won’t work. It may make you feel good. It may serve the purposes of the debaters, for those who want to debate, but it doesn’t work on practical solutions on the ground. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Being a little bit wrong is like being a little bit pregnant in this situation; it just doesn’t work. And you’ve got to resolve this thing and you have to make it work. If it sticks in the other guy’s craw to the point where it will not allow a lasting peace alternative on the ground, then it needs to be addressed and dealt with.

The second one that I get, and these are in no order, is this idea of terrorism and murder versus martyrdom. Don’t tell me that a suicide bomber is a martyr. A suicide bomber is a 13-18 year-old kid, man or woman who has been brainwashed into believing that there is some religious reward to killing other innocents. It’s vicious; it is beyond the pale of what civilized people should accept. We should resist ever even saying we understand it. We can’t and we shouldn’t. It should be rejected. It’s not an alternative. It doesn’t fit any concept of justification of violence and retaliation for anything. And we should not allow ourselves, neither should my Moslem friends allow themselves, to buy into this concept of acceptance for understanding. The vast majority of my friends would never conceive of wanting it to happen to their children. They don’t agree with it; they don’t condone it. But I tell them they shouldn’t even say they understand it. And don’t begin to even support it by tabbing it with titles such as “martyrs,” and to recognize that these poor people have been brainwashed into committing these acts as having done something that furthers a just and honorable and right cause. It is a mistake in concept that will never get you anywhere. It ends up clouding your cause and making it more difficult for those who would sympathize with your plight to help you and accept you.

The other issue that comes up often is birthright. Where did birthright begin? A birthright I would expand to mean history. This is my rock. This is my rock because 2,500 years ago one of my ancestors stood on it. Your ancestor only stood on it 1,500 years ago. The idea of birthright and where in the mists and fog of history where it started or who in the mists and the fog of history had the greater right or justice, is a subject that is not worth pursuing, because in the end you can’t win. If Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring of the Algonquin tribe came here today and said, “this is my land, Villanova pack up your bags and leave.” The Lenape Indians, actually the tribe who was here.) If the Lenape claim that this is their land, what is their birthright compared to the right of Villanova University which flashes a deed and is paying for this property? We can stir the waters into a great business deal. We can put [off] those who want to make a moral judgment on it. We can divide this story into two parts and work on researching this. What is the point? The point is we have peoples here who now have to live together. Arguing birthright is a wonderful point for the collectors of arguing. Arguing history is wonderful for those who want to research it and hope to prove something. Arguing religious spaces, you know, whether you were spewed up from the belly of the whale, and therefore then this piece of sand is justifiably yours or not is ridiculous to that point. Yet, these are often the arguments for the basis for right in this case.

Another argument that goes along with this is the right of return. I have the deed. Right of return falls into the challenge of backs on the ground. Backs on the ground and right of return constantly face each other. How can you sort out that unbelievable knot that is almost untieable? I have a right here. I have the deed. What I have is a deed to what now is a 10-story high-rise building where my house used to be. I refuse to accept compensation. Can I be forced to accept compensation? Can I salute the leadership that speaks for my right of return or not? Can that right of return lead to any practical solution, if you tried to enforce it? Can it even be enforced? Who should compensate? How should the compensation go? What is fair and just in all this? That’s one of the issues that‘s going to have to be dealt with in the end. Where religiously do we claim our descendants? The three great Abrahamic religions come together in Jerusalem (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). I used to get, every night, at the end of unbelievable days of negotiation with Sharon from eight in the morning to eleven at night, headaches--throbbing headaches, Arafat and everybody in between—the Christian fanatics, crazy settlers, and nutsy people who want to blow themselves up. At the end of that day, I would walk out on my balcony at the King David Hotel and I would look at this beautifully lit old city and would think about its history.

Three great religions have seen their greatest moments and their worse tragedies there. Where David cames and took this nondescript piece of ground, this smaller little rock and built the temple and founded a great religion--where the Romans destroyed it and started a Diaspora??? that ruined a civilization and caused it to suffer for millennia, where Christians saw the realization of every prophecy they believed in, where Christ came to fulfill His destiny, His greatest moment and the greatest tragedy on the cross, where Muslims believed that Mohammed the Prophet came in his dream to rise up in a golden chariot, to see the seven levels of heaven and to return, to stack block upon block wooden stakes, stone, blocks, all representing your beliefs, the culture, the history, and the religion--the very essence of a people, piled one on top of one another. Where the you’ve seen crusades, the bloodshed. Where the citizenry has seen the magnificent moments of Saladin, of David, of Christ, and where they’ve also seen worse moments in a city’s history. How do you sort that history out for today’s people who need this place, where this place is in their heart? How do we divide that baby up? What are the moral issues? Who has a greater moral right to them? Who has a greater historical right to them? What is the significance of land? You know the land isn’t very fertile. It isn’t very impressive to look at. It’s kind of a rocky scrub growth all over, but the land is important. Encroachment on the land, grabbing the land, that means something to its occupants.

--A place steeped in this much history, every piece of terrain, no matter how small, has a significance where the names ring out in your own religious beliefs and in the history of your own culture. To watch settlements form where you once lived, to watch an expansion that flies in the face of agreements,; to watch the land being consumed, the water over-tapped, and the resources overused--what is the moral right to this? What is the moral right to being occupied, to being controlled by someone else?—How does the U.S. fit into all of this?

There will be a question here today about the U.S. special relationship with Israel. The U.S. has a special relationship with the Arabs. We conduct the largest military exercise in the world in Egypt, the largest. We provide state-of-the-art military equipment to the United Arab Emirates, F-16s the same quality as our pilots fly, Apache helicopters to the Kuwaitis with the same kinds of capabilities. It doesn’t make the Israelis too happy. That relationship we have with the Israelis doesn’t make the Arabs too happy. And then, besides these two special relationships, which anger each one of them, we then stand in the middle and say we’re going to be mediators, and as mediators we will be fair and nonjudgmental. Imagine that. I’m going to have a special relationship with you, a special relationship with you and in the meantime, I’ll be impartial and judge your dispute. You know what, strangely enough, when we go full throttle on all three, it works. When we pull back on one is when it gets screwed up. When we pull back on one relationship, when we withdraw from the peace process in facilitating the mediating, that is when this place goes bonkers.

This strange, contradictory policy of three approaches, which hurts your head to think about, and how it can work, works best when we push all three. When we say we will have a special relationship with you, we will have a special relationship with you and we will mediate honestly and fairly. It doesn’t seem like it would work, but believe me, it will take us to situations when we have had it going full force, like at Camp David. Never was the situation more stable, more promising and more hopeful in the region than there. We deal with issues of responsiveness, targeted assignations; you know the rationale-- that I have to strike first pre-emptively, now a dent in our own national security strategy. With a reserve right to strike first, if the intelligence is there, to accept the so-called collateral damage with civilian casualties as a result, to prevent harm and damage that you feel as the leadership of a country that you have the right to protect. We have the moral issue of controlling resources, water and taxes by one nation over another people. We have the issue of deciding leadership in a nation. We have the issue of the removal of Arafat, in principle agreed to by one government over the elected leader of another government, and how that should work. Is he a responsible leader? Hell no! I think he does his people a terrible disservice and I don’t feel he is the kind of person that could lead his people to statehood. I don’t think he is the kind of person that could make the compromises necessary for a successful peace. I think the Palestinians deserve better; it strikes me as terrible that the choices are between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

They have to have a better alternative and if we want a better alternative, if we are promoting Mahmud Abbas (often called Abu Mazen) and Mohammed Dahlan as prime ministers, then we have an obligation to try to empower those people, to help them. They have to be seen as viable people, who can bring to their people things they need. They can bring success to their people. They can negotiate hard issues and win at that table. If they’re seen as lackeys, if they’re seen as just figureheads there for the photo opportunity at Aqabah or in the Oval Office, it won’t work. Their presence won’t be there on the streets.

For both these people, the Israelis and the Palestinians, they are traumatized. They are like America was on 9/12. Their 9/11s have been the death of 1000 cuts. It didn’t come in one blow like it did for us at the Twin Towers. It has come from a series of incidents on both sides, a series of strikes, a cumulative effect of deaths and violence - the most horrible kind to innocent people. They are shocked; they are confused; they are fearful; they are angry and so that’s the way they vote. That’s where they are coming from. That anger, confusion and fear have to be mitigated before you can move on to serious negotiations, to the kinds of things that have to be done to make something last and work. And those who would not have this work, those who advocate violence or extremism, and again on either side, do not want that confusion, fear and anger to leave them. Their acts are designed to promote it and keep it going to achieve their ends, so that neither side feels satiated through the exchange of violent acts. I spent a lot of time with the generals of the Israeli defense force who all told me, almost to a man, and currently
Lt. General Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli Army Chief of Staff, there is no military solution for this. As a matter of fact, the military acts of retaliation only make the situation worse. On the other side, where you see Palestinians who shake their head and say, “this idea of violence and killing of innocents and retaliation on their part won’t work. It won’t get us anywhere. My Arab friends tell me the same thing. It is destroying their society. It is destroying the generation that have felt that all of the political, economic and social frustrations now can only be dealt with if they can join the Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda want-to-be organizations, and sacrifice themselves. You know, this sort of hopelessness, this sort of despair that leads to the kind of desperate acts that bring a society nowhere. We see the destruction of homes, the attacks of medical facilities, and this constant back and forth. Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances have been found to contain belts of explosives. The retaliation is that no ambulance then can get through to where they are needed to help the sick and needy. Reaction, over-reaction, counter-action - it’s not even a cycle; as I said before, it’s a spiral. Each reaction makes it worse and there is spiraling down. Where do we go from here?

In my view, there has to be a serious commitment by the international community to resolve this. The Arabs have to be actively involved, not quietly involved, not wheeling their prayer beads hoping this will go away. The Europeans, the United Nations, the Russians and others have to be fully committed to this - to be providing the resources and incentives, to stand behind one plan. The President has to fully commit his office and our resources to the resolution of this. Both sides need to be made to come together, to sit down, to come up with a plan. We have to stop this business where we present plans to them to be rejected, half implemented and pushed away. They have to have a sense of ownership. We need a large delegation on the ground of serious people, diplomats, economists, people that can evaluate and measure security. We need an enhancement capability on both sides to deal with these issues. We need to better the lot of those that live in misery and squalor in places like Gaza. We need to improve the security forces of the Palestinian Authority. We need to empower those in the Palestinian Authority who are not corrupt, who are responsible. We need to put pressure on those in the Israeli government to stop the settlements, to live up to the agreements that are made. Unless there is this full international commitment, unless there is this attention from the world, unless there is a commitment of resources and people, unless there is this forcing, cajoling, incentives, pressure to bring them to the table to deal with this thing seriously - whatever it takes, how long it takes to push the countering of those extremist that would fight us off to commit to work through the acts of violence that will be sent out to disrupt us, then it will never move forward.

Recently, non-officials got together for an unofficial proposal on the settlements. The former head of Shin-Bet, the Israeli version of the FBI and Sari Nusseibeh, who comes from a great Palestinian family and who is an academic, brought two groups together of Palestinians and Israelis and some others and they came up with a peace agreement. You know what, there was nothing new in that agreement. Anybody who has studied this or looked at it can tell you what those issues are. There are about 10 issues. They go from the issue of Palestinian statehood, the recognition of the Jewish state of Israel, the status of Jerusalem, the right of return, the status of the settlements, the final orders, Israeli strategic security requirements, the issue of water and its management and distribution and control, the issue of the Golan Heights and the Shaba farms, to resolve the Syrian and Lebanese issues and then one of the biggest issues that gets little attention and that’s whether there is going to be economic independence or interdependence - and believe me it has to be interdependence on these two. You answer these questions. These are the final status issues. These are the ones where each side is going to have to give a little to get something. These are the issues that if you can broker the deal, you can resolve this problem, you can arrive at the two-state solution where everybody’s needs are met, where their securities are assured, where the international community can underwrite this and support it and promote it. You can apply all the principles of a just war theory. You can look at charges, proportionally. You can look at the issues of competent authority. You will find in this conflict that it is rich with violations, rich with issues and in many ways you can become one of the collectors of arguments and study these points for their academic value and write your magnificent paper for your class. Or, you can begin to role up sleeves and as Shimon Peres told me, “get on the ground and try to make it work.”

What impressed me most about my time over there was the desperate need of the people on both sides to end this thing. What surprised me most is the vast majority of people saw the end solution as having to be fair and just for the other side to work, not just a win for their side. And if the people, the vast majority feel and think this way, the puzzle is why can’t we make it happen on the ground? What is it or what will it take? And I am convinced that it has to be that coming together of the entire world - the leadership of the civilized world - the commitment of resources and the focus to make this happen in a concentrated way despite whatever obstacles are thrown in our path. It will not be easy, but this in-and-out, touch- and -go process won’t work. The idea of a sequential step-by- step, arduous, painful process won’t work. The idea that we have to deal with leaders that may be incapable of making the final solutions won’t work. Somehow, we’ve got to empower the people and show them the world is behind them to pull this together.