Before I met him, I was led to expect that I was going to run into some kind of big bully soldier. That characterization does not exactly fit. He is certainly a hard guy, who grew up in a tough environment — direct, frank, blunt, tells you right out what he wants to say to you, doesn’t try to twist words (he’s no slick politician) — but he never tried to bully me. What you see is what you get, that’s the way he is. If he couldn’t do something — make some concession he didn’t want to make — he wouldn’t weasel around the issue. He’d just say no. Unfortunately, I had the feeling that when we got down the road, when the tough concessions would be necessary, I couldn’t see him making the kind of concessions some of his predecessors had offered.
As long as I was in Israel, Sharon never stopped trying to get the read of me; or to pry judgments and opinions out of me; and I think he was very frustrated when I didn’t show him any of that. He simply couldn’t understand how anyone could not see what was obvious to him. To him, I think, you have to judge, you have to have opinions. It goes with being committed the way he’s committed.
From my angle, any judgment I expressed would close off the other side; and I couldn’t allow that to happen. Clearly every thing I said, or allegedly said, would be in the press the next day. Leaks from both sides were more like deluges. Though the two of us got along together, there was always an underlying tension between us.
Toward the end of the flight, a call came over the radio: A shooting had occurred in the small northern Israeli town of Afula. We immediately changed course and headed up there. Reports confirmed that a pair of Palestinian gunmen had opened up in the town’s marketplace, killing a pregnant Israeli woman. Several other Israelis were wounded, and the two gunmen were dead.
When we arrived overhead, we could see the security forces and medical personnel busily taking control of the scene. We hovered for a time, taking it all in, and then flew back to Jerusalem.
Later, I got a fuller account of the story — which leaves lots of unanswered questions. Earlier that day, as a good faith gesture at the start of my mission, the Israelis had taken down a checkpoint near Afula so the Palestinians could have an easier time moving about. The gunmen had obviously taken advantage of this opening to launch their terrorist attack. The big question is: Was the attack a deliberately planned provocation aimed at undermining the peace process? Or was it — as the Palestinians later claimed— simply a revenge killing? The Israeli military had recently killed a relative of the gunmen; the gunmen shot up the marketplace in retaliation.
Wherever the truth lay, this was clearly one of those violent incidents that tempted me to lose hope in the peace process. I knew I could forget about having a quiet start to my mission. My sense that this would be a roller-coaster trip from crisis to hope and back to crisis was proving right. Even though both sides had made encouraging statements about cooperating with my mission, I had to wonder how much any of that counted now that a violent event had already cast a black shadow over the first full day.
The rest of the day consisted of meetings and briefings with Prime Minister Sharon, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ben Eliezer, and Chief of the Israeli Defense Force Shaul Mofaz.[85]
This brought me up against a complicated situation: At that time, the Israeli government was a unity government, a coalition government… which means in practice that it was a divided government. Sharon was from Likud, the party which had the largest number of seats in the Knesset, while Peres and Ben Eliezer were from Labor, the chief opposition party. It was not an easy situation to handle. “Who can actually speak for Israel?” I had to ask myself.
Sharon cut through this confusion: “I’m the only one who can speak for this government,” he told me.
It was kind of strange to an American who is used to cabinet ministers who can speak for their boss. But I accepted this condition. It was their system, not ours.
The others I met with were far from unhelpful, even if somewhat marginalized by Sharon. Everyone had a lot of experience in the nitty-gritty of working with the Palestinians, and they all came through with powerful insights and solid advice.
Though Mofaz had a reputation as a tough hard-liner, he was a quiet, thoughtful man, and not immovable, nor totally unsympathetic to the Palestinians. When I met him that afternoon, he made it clear that he wanted to be cooperative, that he wanted me to succeed, and that he did not believe there was a military solution to the problem.
Later, he and I spent a lot of time together, just talking, and the two of us came to a good appreciation of our positions. I understood there was no way he would compromise on security; but within that boundary, he understood that the Israelis would have to give up some things… without — again — taking any security risks. He was aware there was never going to be a total and lasting military defeat of the Palestinians, so something had to be arranged to make the peace agreements go right. Yet he also made it clear that he did what he had to do out there in the field, even if it was hard and people got hurt.
Peres gave me valuable counsel on how my mission might proceed and on the possibilities that could develop. In these early days of my mission, he was the one person who gained my complete respect as I worked through the peace process.
I will never forget his advice:
“General Zinni,” he told me, “you’re going to find three kinds of people in this business.
“First, you’re going to find the righteous. Don’t waste your time with them. You’ll find them on both sides, and they’re always going to appeal to the righteousness of their cause.
“You’re never going to get anywhere with people like that. There’s no negotiating with righteousness. Yes, it’s their right to believe what they believe. But you’re not going to change them. They interpret facts from their religious angle, and they ignore any facts that don’t support that.
“The second group you’re going to meet,” he went on, “are the collectors of arguments, the debaters. You see them on TV with all the talking heads. They’re going to outdebate the other guy and score points. But where making real progress toward peace is concerned, these people are useless. If you want to get into the debate for academic purposes, that’s fine. But it serves no other purpose.
“The third group you’re going to meet are the ones that count. These are the ones who want to figure out a solution on the ground. These are the ones who ask themselves over and over: ‘How the hell are we going to make this ghastly situation work and get out of this terrible nightmare?’
“Focus on them,” he said, “and focus on what needs to be done, and then get it done.”
It was the best advice I got in Israel.
The other briefs were devoted to the security situation — the overriding issue, in the Israeli view. Their first order of business was to stop the terrorist suicide attacks. They were convinced that Arafat and the Palestinian Authority could stop, or at least control, most of the violent attacks, but chose not to. Or, to put this more bluntly, Arafat supported and condoned much of the violence. If the peace process was going to move forward, they made it very clear, he had to make a strategic decision to abandon violence and return to a negotiated settlement of the issues. They doubted his willingness to do this.
The Palestinian Authority couldn’t bring themselves to do that. If they did — if they confronted Hamas and Islamic Jihad, cracked down on the extremists, made arrests, confiscated weapons — there’d be blood in the streets. But if they did not confront Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Israelis weren’t about to make any of the concessions outlined in the Tenet plan (and other plans) — such as removal of checkpoints, withdrawal of security forces to previous positions, and readmission of Palestinian workers to Israel. And there was no way we’d see any progress toward a Palestinian state.
At first the Israelis took a very tough line on how the Palestinian Authority had to demonstrate their good faith: Sharon insisted on one hundred percent compliance, including at least seven days of quiet, before he would approve any talks.
If we could not even get talks started for at least a week (if we were lucky enough to have no attacks), my job was clearly going to be impossible. In time, however, the Israelis backed away from their more absolute positions; and Sharon agreed to participate in the Trilateral Committee talks that I had decided to use as the venue for the initial meetings. But their bottom line remained the same: The Palestinians had to show good faith in stopping terror attacks.
The first day ended with mixed results. On the one hand, the terrible and tragic attack at Afula had cast a
