On One Thing the Two Sides Agree: An Envoy Is Wanted

The way to a new American policy [in the Middle East] goes through the envoy George Mitchell, who has failed to create a dialogue and has mainly sparked crises in the region.

On Israel’s 60th anniversary, Richard Holbrooke wrote an interesting article “Truman’s historic decision.” In this article, he delicately undermined a belief rooted among American history writers, that President Harry Truman’s decision to recognize the state of Israel upon its establishment — a decision opposed harshly by the then-Secretary of State General George Marshall — was a politically-based one: Truman did not want to vex the Jews.

Holbrooke hadn’t exactly embraced this allegation. He explained that the decision had moral grounds. “It is a decision all Americans should recognize and admire,” he wrote.

Holbrooke assisted in writing the memoirs of former Truman aide Clark Clifford. His version [of history] is in essence founded on Clifford’s testimony. Marshall did not get why Clifford, a political adviser, was entering his territory. He snapped at him and at the president in a meeting where the aide presented the reasons to recognize Israel, and then threatened to resign.

However, Clifford dinned into Holbrooke’s ears — and Holbrooke seemed to accept his point — that it had not been politics underlying his policy recommendation to the president, but a “moral recognition.” This is the week to bring to mind that article which Holbrooke wanted, and sought to be published in Hebrew as well. He talked that over with the ambassador in the United States at that time, and as of today, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, an old acquaintance of Holbrooke, who maintained a tight relationship with him. Afterward, I also had the privilege to give a hand in translating and publishing him in Israel.

In the Shadow of Old Glory

Holbrooke unexpectedly died this week on duty. Sixty-nine years old, he was a loyal and tireless soldier in the service of American foreign policy. He was one of two “special envoys” President Barack Obama appointed immediately after being elected to his position. The two who were sent to complete an impossible mission. Holbrooke had been in charge of the Afghanistan-Pakistan arena; George Mitchell got the Palestinians and us. Both of them have not really succeeded in their tasks.

Holbrooke was almost a natural candidate for the vacancy of the American secretary of state, and rumored to be taking the job had Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in 2008. The eulogies for him were magnificent, as customary in such cases, and as appropriate for someone who used to be one of the American diplomacy lions of the last decades.

But those tributes focused only on the glory of the remote good old days rather than on the achievements of the nearby past. Holbrooke had an important accomplishment a decade and a half ago: He had been a patron of the Dayton Agreement which put an end to the war in Bosnia. But what is most remembered of his last year is not a great success but one miserable quote by Vice President Joe Biden, which appeared in Bob Woodward’s book “Obama’s Wars.” Holbrooke, Biden stated, is “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.” Surely way more egoistical than George Mitchell.

But both share a common problem: The credit they have enjoyed in the last two years is more related to the attainments of the past rather than to the successes of the present. Holbrooke was an architect of the peace in Bosnia, Mitchell was an architect of the peace agreement in Northern Ireland, but as Jackson Diehl from the Washington Post wrote, “I can’t help but wonder if his memories of past glories are clouding his judgment of current events.”

Nothing New Under the Sun

A week has passed since Hillary Clinton announced, in her speech at the Saban Forum conference, the new policy of the American administration, if one could call that a “policy.” It looks like she is serious in her intentions. The objective remained similar but the tactics are different. Instead of sending the Israelis and the Palestinians to run the talks with each other, the Americans have decided to let the parties carry on the negotiations through Clinton.

Mitchell came to the region this week in order to ignite this process, but it’s already clear what is not likely to happen here — for the first time in many years, the negotiations will be conducted through a mediator not for a limited interim period or as a let-up in the full swing of the routine of face-to-face meetings, but as a brand new concept. Whether it will be successful or not, it’s hard to know at this stage, but one good thing could be said in respect to it — it is less far-fetched than the previous framework.

The conversation between Mitchell and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went very well, as the official American version of it goes. We can assume this is a message delineating the details as they are, but not picturing all the details.

Four months ago, I already wrote here that “Mitchell probably has to go. After a year and a half of wasted time, after zero achievements to his credit, on the day when building in the settlements has seemingly resumed, but not really, and the talks are again in the predictable crisis they are yet to emerge from — after all of these, it should be said frankly: Obama’s dream team for peace, chiefly speaking of Mitchell and his bunch of assistants, is not a champ team.”

The Wrong Timing for Everything

This is one of the few issues both Israelis and high-ranking Palestinians agree upon (Mahmoud Abbas’ turn to be disappointed this week), who complained that Mitchell has not notified him that the negotiations would be held on the basis of the 1967 lines). Not because Mitchell has been unsuccessful in overcoming the exigencies created by Israel and the Palestinians.

The problem of Mitchell and his crew is graver: He was the one to spark most of the crises in the region, he was the one to put a spoke in the wheels of any potentiality for advancement, he climbed onto the wrong trees and got down from the wrong trees, and did everything possible at the wrong time.

But Mitchell is still here, despite rumors about the end of his term. Here, but in another role. From the moment Clinton took on the Israeli-Palestinian case, from the moment the White House stepped aside, Mitchell has turned into a secondary player in the negotiations.

When the United States asks Netanyahu to present maps outlining the future border of Israel — and it’s going to ask — and when Netanyahu decides to submit such maps, or in the least, the guidelines for their drawing — he won’t have a choice except to decide to, or enter a renewed confrontation with the administration — he will introduce them discreetly to Clinton. Not to Mitchell.

There are elements in the United States which are positive that this is the principal advantage of the decision to shift the weight from the White House to the State Department. The official Israel has difficulties trusting Obama; it confides in Clinton more.

The Netanyahu Problem

The coming months are not going to be easy for Netanyahu in the field of statesmanship. It’s not that there have been “easy” months so far. The threat of the freeze has been indeed removed, and the discussion has supposedly switched to the relevant track, but the burden of proof, also in the next round, will be primarily on Israel. The Palestinians have already presented to Americans their plan for the future agreement with Israel. They have clarified their territorial demands (the ’67 territorial lines, with the readiness to a few exchanges of territory). And of course, these are demands at the beginning of the negotiations, not at their end, demands which an American source agreed to comment on this week that “there will still be a lot to change.”

But Israel hasn’t even laid out its opening positions yet, and now it will be requested to do so. Netanyahu’s difficulty is complicated. He fears making his position known, because his every concession turns into a Palestinian minimum standpoint. He fears leaking a conciliatory stance which would result in a crisis for his coalition. He fears clashing with the Americans which would provide an excuse for his counterparts from the Avoda Party* to leave the government. He fears advancement in the Palestinian program for achieving unilateral recognition of the state on the way and the results of such recognition.

Therefore, as far as it concerns him, confidentiality is the key to moving on. The Americans will just have to listen and swallow. Mitchell is accustomed to discreet conversations of this kind, and the Americans have repeatedly promised the prime minister: We won’t expose your perspectives to the Palestinian side, won’t disclose them prematurely to the Israeli public, won’t use them in the event that talks hit a shoal and the negotiations fail. However, they know too, that the question is not their obligation but the degree of trust Netanyahu gives to such an obligation.

And of course, the quiet talks call into being a weird situation on the political stage as well. Several of the Avoda Party chieftains have promised this week that without “making progress” in the political process, they won’t be able to stay in the government. This is a meaningful statement when the one making it knows whether there is progress or not — and can decide accordingly.

But the party stopwatch set for January (when the Avoda party convention will assemble in order to make a decision about the elections for the party leadership) and for June (when the party is supposed to pick a replacement for Ehud Barak**) does not match the political one.

Months will pass before it’s possible to understand whether and to what extent the talks, with Clinton’s mediation, are advancing, and prior to that, the Avoda Party will be unable to determine whether there is progress in the talks or not. And, to determine if — as politicians tend to do sometimes — they’re going to be “not serious,” as a close associate of Netanyahu defined it.

The question carefully examined this week was: If the talks continue to be “good,” will Clinton know how to hint to the Avoda higher-ups that this is not the time to rock the coalition? And the answer was received, too: She’ll know.

History of a Failure

Between the dead Holbrooke and Mitchell, still kicking, another American lion of diplomacy was caught this week in the eye of the storm, Henry Kissinger. There is nothing new in the anti-Semitic expressions of the former president Richard Nixon. The transcripts uncovered this week, those of February and March 1973, haven’t been worse than the others, which were revealed earlier.

“The Jews are born spies,” he said in July 1971. And more: “You can’t trust the bastards. They will turn on you.” What Nixon said is not surprising. But what has been quoted from the mouth of Kissinger, his Jewish aide, produced headlines.

Whoever didn’t pay attention, here is the quote: “If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

There have naturally been several condemnations of this, but it was way more interesting to see the justifications for the defense of Kissinger. “What I said should be viewed in the context of the time,” Kissinger explained this week without elaborating much. He’s not an anti-Semite, certainly not an enemy of the Jewish people. He’s a concerned friend — one of the personages the Jewry of America wants to be proud of — not to degrade them.

Therefore, the Anti-Defamation League was quick to rule that his outrageous taped comments should not change history’s verdict on his important contributions and ultimate legacy. And truly, it looks like they shouldn’t, for two reasons presented by the defense. One of them, is that what Kissinger said had nothing to do with “Jews.” That was a world-view, not easy to digest, but a coherent and reasoned one. He was dealing with geostrategic relations, and as an honors graduate of the school known as “realism” he sometimes refused to accept a state of affairs where American policy would be a hostage of “maybe humanitarian” considerations.

Furthermore, one should take into account the circumstances under which the things were said. In that epoch, Nixon and Kissinger were deep into the “détente” — unfreezing relations with the Soviet Union — but two American lawmakers, Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Charles Vanik, were poking sticks into the wheels of the thaw. They initiated legislation to withhold “most favored nation” economic status from the countries not allowing free emigration. A piece of legislation having its clear-cut goal to place pressure on the Soviet Union to let the Jews go.

Nixon loathed this initiative, and Kissinger was not enthusiastic about it either. He’s gone far in words in order to convey his reservations — gone too far. By the way, at the end, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, signed it. Despite the fact that Kissinger worked for him, too.

And here is the second letter of defense, the gist of which is: All in all, Kissinger was forced to ingratiate himself with President Nixon and prove his loyalty to him. For someone who wanted to influence policy, it was the only way. Thanks to Kissinger’s success with Nixon, he managed to help the Jews and Israel much more than others. For instance, by the delivery of arms at the time of the Yom Kippur War.

And here is a story for the end from the transcript of presidential tapes released about a decade ago: Nixon spoke with his aide, White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, about the Jews’ invasion into the National Security Council. “Is Tony Lake Jewish?” the president asked. Lake was Kissinger’s young assistant at that point. “I’ve always wondered about that,” his aide Haldeman responded. “He looked it.” — that is, looks Jewish — Nixon said.

Ironically, Lake wasn’t a Jew; however, 30 years later he converted to Judaism. This was shortly after he served in the role once filled by Kissinger in Bill Clinton’s White House, and a little before he served as Obama’s foreign policy adviser during the election period.

*Translator’s Note: Avoda Party is the Israeli Labor Party.

** Translator’s Note: Ehud Barak is the leader of the Avoda Party.