Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show The Best Primer I’ve Heard on Israeli-Palestinian Peace Efforts About this episode It is too early to talk about a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. With the trauma of Oct. 7 still fresh for the Israeli public and with the ongoing devastation in Gaza, any talk of conflict-ending solutions is cruel fantasy.
But it wasn’t always. Peace efforts in the Middle East have been tried over and over again. It is not a history without breakthroughs. There was a time when a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt would have been unthinkable. But that agreement lives alongside a long list of collapsed negotiations. Why?
I wanted to have someone on the show who could help me read this checkered history. Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” Few people have been as intimately involved in the many Middle East peace processes as Miller. He’s a decades-long veteran of the State Department who has touched peace negotiations under the Reagan, the Clinton and both Bush administrations. His book is the best I’ve read on the peace processes and what went wrong.
In this conversation, we explore the frustrating, uneven history of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, Miller’s hard-won insights about the reality of peace negotiations and the idiosyncratic personalities who have most influenced the prospects for peace in the Middle East.
Book Recommendations:
The Peace Puzzle by Daniel C. Kurtzer, Scott B. Lasensky, William B. Quandt, Steven L. Spiegel and Shibley Telhami
Arabs and Israelis by Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki
The Missing Peace by Dennis Ross
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Rollin Hu. Mixing by Jeff Geld, with Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero. Archival clips from A. P. Archive, CBS, C-SPAN and NBC.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:24 Ezra Klein? I've gone back and forth on whether to do an episode on why the Israeli Palestinian peace process has failed and failed and failed. My worry is that immersing in past failure can become just a way to justify present actions, or worse, justify present refusal to keep trying. Peace processes don't work until they do. Israelis and Palestinians, and for that matter, Americans, are trapped in arguments over their past. Sometimes it's the ability to forget, not the ability to remember, that is necessary to forge a future. But I can see in the conversations I'm having and the emails I'm getting that what did or didn't happen in this or that negotiation, it really lingers in people's minds.
1:06 Ezra Klein? So I wanted to at least try and do an episode tracing the shape of the successes and there have been some, and failures until now. My guest today is Aaron David Miller. Miller was a negotiator and an advisor on the American side in the many Middle East peace processes the United States attempted to host, to influence, to manage from 1985 to 2003. So he worked on this under Ronald Reagan, under George H.W. Bush, under Bill Clinton, under George W. Bush. He's now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he's the author of the book The Much Too Promised Land, which is, I think, the best single-volume history I've read of the various peace efforts. One thing this conversation helped clarify for me.
1:49 Ezra Klein? We talk about deals in terms of compromises and concessions, as if there is some perfect formula out there that if only we discovered it, it could end the conflict. But deals are first and foremost about dealmakers who can deliver, who have the desire to deliver, who have the political support among their own constituents to deliver. One thing I can tell you, having looked at this, is there are no end of ideas out there for what an Israeli Palestinian peace agreement could look like. There are standard ideas, there are weird ideas, there are ambitious ideas, there are modest ideas, but what we don't have, what we perhaps have never had on both sides at the same time, are political leaders who want a deal and who can make and sell a deal and who can enforce it once it is inked.
2:35 Ezra Klein? I don't think the work of the next generation is necessarily coming up with a new framework for a deal. It is building and supporting the political leaders and political movements that could actually do a deal. As always, my email, [email protected] .
2:56 Ezra Klein? Aaron David Miller, welcome to the show.
2:58 Speaker 01 Ezra, it's a pleasure to be here.
3:00 Ezra Klein? You write that only three American leaders really belong in the Israeli Arab Peace Hall of Fame: Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, and James Baker. And so I want to go through them in turn. What did Henry Kissinger achieve and why did he achieve it?
3:17 Speaker 01 All three of them, and Kissinger, I think, understood this better than anyone else, that breakthroughs in this conflict or diplomacy in general are usually an interaction between opportunity and human agency. Kissinger understood that when, in fact, the region manifested itself in large amounts of pain, it created a sense of urgency, which, if married to gain, could. There's nothing inevitable about this. Nobody ever lost money betting against Arab Israeli peace. Kissinger understood in the wake of the October Yom Kippur War and the trauma that
3:56 Speaker 01 the Israelis suffered, 2,800 dead, thousands of Egyptians and Syrians dead, that there was opportunity here. Kissinger had the deviousness, the sense of strategy, that if he embarked on a journey and stuck with it, he might actually lay the basis and the groundwork for what became an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
4:23 Speaker 02 We in the United States can be proud of the role that our government has played, and particularly the role that has been played by Secretary Kissinger and his colleagues. This, I would say, is the first significant step toward a permanent peace in the Mideast.
4:43 Speaker 01 And it was a combination of a sense of opportunity, married to what every good negotiator must have, and that is the capacity to act, slam shut the notebooks, threaten to walk out of the room with respect to both sides. And Kissinger would be the first of these three who wrestled with the Israelis, actually sided in the spring of 1975, when he felt the Israeli government was balking over the terms of the second disengagement agreement with Egypt. He actually called for a reassessment of US policy, summoning of our ambassadors in the region back to Washington.
5:28 Speaker 01 It was theater, but it seemed to help press the Israelis to accept the terms of disengagement agreement. So it was a combination of ample amounts of honey to gain Israel's confidence, with ample amounts of vinegar, pressure at various times in order to push both the Israelis and the Egyptians closer to an agreement.
5:52 Ezra Klein? One thing that struck me about the story you tell about Kissinger was a sense of respect between the Americans and, in this case, also one of the Arab leaders, which is Sadat of Egypt. Kissinger stops the Israelis from destroying a major part of the Egyptian military when they have it encircled. And there is, in this period, a, I don't want to call it an equality, but... There is a deeper sense of negotiating between equals in the region than there will be later when the negotiations take up with the Palestinians. I'm curious for your reflections on how that might have mattered here.
6:30 Speaker 01 I think it mattered greatly. The fact is, when you're dealing with established states, which have institutions, which have structure, the issues become much more tractable than in the case of a situation in which you have a non-state actor, namely Palestinian national movement, without much structure, without much discipline, pursuing violence and terror alongside of negotiations. It becomes much harder. And the sort of existential issues were absent in Israeli-Egyptian peace processes, which I think turned it, in many respects, into a real estate deal, which it is certainly
7:12 Speaker 01 not when it comes to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yes, real estate is a component, but it is much more than that.
7:20 Ezra Klein? I think it's a good place to move to Jimmy Carter. So tell me a bit about his commitment to the issue and what he achieves and what his orientation is on it.
7:29 Speaker 01 You know, when I interviewed Carter for this book, he said, I think it was at the age of three, that he became interested in the biblical proposition and in Israel. I mean, Carter was a rare, the rare American leader, the only one frankly, who was not pushed into piss-making by the urgency or the exigencies of a situation. He chased after it. It was Carter's single-mindedness, his focus, and the moral and ethical sort of frame that he attached to resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict that enabled him to create the sort
8:14 Speaker 01 of intensity of effort that was required, both at the first Camp David in September of 1978, and then against the advice of his advisers, to embark on a spring trip early in 1979 to ironite the last remaining details of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.
8:34 Speaker 03 When we first arrived at Camp David...
8:39 Speaker 03 The first thing upon which we agreed was to ask the people of the world to pray that our negotiations would be successful. Those prayers have been answered, far beyond any expectations.
8:58 Speaker 01 That sense of morality, of course, has followed Carter throughout his career and has made him a extremely controversial former American president, willing to weigh in quite aggressively on foreign policy generally, but on the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular. There are a lot of detractors of Jimmy Carter, and it brought home to me the sense that if you're going to be a serious peacemaker, and Kissinger and Carter were serious peacemakers, each accomplished something quite different. Kissinger had to be disengaged from agreements, Carter an actual Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Nobody's going to plant a tree in your honor.
9:42 Speaker 01 You are going to end up riling and fighting with Israelis and, by extension, the American Jewish community.
9:52 Ezra Klein? Well, he does get a Nobel Peace Prize.
9:53 Speaker 01 He does.
9:54 Ezra Klein? It's something.
9:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, and he deserves it. But to this day, I interviewed Carter for my book on the presidents. To this day, I don't think he fully understands why the Jewish, American Jewish community was so unforgiving of him, given his efforts.
10:11 Ezra Klein? Well, isn't one answer to this, and this becomes, I think, important as we move through the story, but isn't one answer that Carter, in terms of his relationships, in terms of his identification with the players in the conflict, is very close with Sadat? He does not find Menachem Begin, the Israeli leader, nearly as congenial. They do not have as deep of a relationship. From then on, I think it's fair to say you exclusively have presidents for whom the Israeli side is far more compelling than anyone on the Palestinian side, anyone on the Arab side. But for Jimmy Carter, he's willing to play much more hardball because he does not naturally feel the sense of identification, not with, he does, he does
10:55 Ezra Klein? with the land of Israel, with Jerusalem, with the religious conflict here, but, but with the leadership of Israel itself. He talks about meeting Sadat as the best day of his presidency. He is very angry oftentimes at, at the Israeli leadership. I mean, there is something distinctive about Carter, which also makes the fact that he is the one who makes the biggest step towards Israel's security, a little bit ironic.
11:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, one qualification, Carter made it clear to me, and I think I write about it in the book, that he believed Begin came the farthest distance. And he understood that for Begin, this was a huge stretch, in many respects, a much more unnatural stretch than it was for Sadat. But you're quite right, Ezra, about the changing nature of Israel's Arab interlocutors, with one exception, and that was the heroic figure of King Hussein, who, like Sadat, understood the huge value of public diplomacy in an effort to reach
12:03 Speaker 01 out and capture the hearts and minds of Israelis.
12:07 Ezra Klein? Let me try to pull out two pieces of texture on this moment. One is that for almost the entirety of Camp David, Begin and Sadat are not talking to each other face to face. You have Jimmy Carter shuttling between different rooms they're sitting in because he thinks if, if they're brought together, it'll blow up the negotiations and that his sort of, he's got to move back and forth. I just think that's a very striking detail, that they're not sitting at a table. And also, at the same time, there's no centralized Palestinian voice there. There's no Yasser Arafat sitting in the third room.
12:44 Ezra Klein? So it's just this very different era when the conflict is understood is between Arab countries, Egypt and Syria and Jordan and Israel. And sure, there's a Palestinian problem. There's this people caught in the middle, but they've not yet even been invited into negotiations over their own fate.
13:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's no doubt about that. And I think Sadat concluded that the only way he could regain sovereignty over all of Egypt, plus the dismantling of all Jewish settlements in Sinai, would be to do a separate deal. And Carter wrestled with this because I think he understood the importance of engaging the organizational embodiment of Palestinian nationalism. That's what the PLO was in those days. Carter understood this, but wasn't prepared and couldn't bring the PLO into the negotiations. And frankly, had he tried, I suspect that Begin would not have been able to make the concessions and decisions
13:45 Speaker 01 that he was able to make on Sinai. Palestinians became a real issue in the negotiations during the first Bush administration.
13:54 Ezra Klein? So let's talk then briefly about the first Bush administration and what they achieved under Bush 41 and James Baker, whose style in the book, listening to your travels with him, you really delight in James Baker. And I also think what he achieved here is a little fuzzier and harder to know from the outside. So what does James Baker get done? And why is he the one who can get it done?
14:19 Speaker 01 You know, Baker and Bush, because the two go together. Example of a situation in which the President of the United States empowered the Secretary of the United States. I don't think even, no matter how close Tony Blinken is to President Biden, the relationship between Bush and Baker, even though Bush is older, was an organic one.
14:47 Speaker 01 You know, Bush helped Baker through the death of his first wife. And the two of them were as close as any American president and secretary of state could have been. I remember I was in Baker's office once, and he was on the phone with somebody. And the conversation went something like this, you know, if you don't give me what I need, I'm not going. I just can't go. I mean, I need that authority. Now, I don't think that there have been any secretaries of state that can have that kind of conversation with a president. And I think that relationship was critically important to Baker's success.
15:29 Speaker 01 But Baker was the best negotiator that I had ever worked for. Baker was not necessarily a strategist. He was a brilliant tactician. He was a great actor, and we saw him act on any number of occasions. I worked for a half a dozen secretaries of state. I traveled with a half a dozen. I liked them all, and they all had their strengths. But when we landed, whether it was Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, wherever, you got off that plane, you got into a meeting, you saw Baker's interlocutors sitting on the edge of their chairs, wondering what he was going to ask them for.
16:13 Speaker 01 Could they measure up? That sort of toughness was, in essence, derivative of the fact that he knew that the White House had his back. And that was not always the case with secretaries of state and their presidents or the National Security Council. I remember once in Jerusalem with Powell. He had been undercut, and the White House pushed back on a statement that he had made. And he came out of the meeting, and he looked at me, and he took his fist, and he stuck it in my stomach. And Powell was great. He deployed these Yiddishisms every now and then. He grew up in the Bronx around Jews, and he said, Aaron, they got me in the Kishkes.
16:58 Speaker 01 And I thought to myself, this would never have happened. Working for Baker, there was a Vulcan mind meld between the president and the secretary. And that, more than anything else, I think, highlighted and reinforced Baker's tremendous diplomatic skills. In the Arab-Israeli issue, it took a while to get Baker interested in this. He'd say, "I'm not touring around. Don't ask me to go out there. We gotta have something to do." He did a lot of telephone diplomacy, so it took nine trips to get to Madrid.
17:33 Speaker 04 We come here to Madrid as realists. We don't expect peace to be negotiated in a day, or a week, or a month, or even a year. It will take time. And both the Secretary of State, Jim Baker, and I will play an active role in helping the process succeed.
17:53 Speaker 01 He got the Israelis to sit down with it, Israeli-Jordanian delegation. He got Palestinian representation at Madrid. PLO, no. West Bankers and Gazans, yes. You saw the beginnings of Israeli-Syrian negotiations during that period, and you saw the roots of what would be described as the multilateral negotiations. Israel and a number of regional parties discussing issues like security, water, the environment. And when you step back and look at Madrid, the real significance, in every decade of the last half-century, the last century, there has been a major Arab-Israeli war. Forty-eight, fifty-six, sixty-seven, eighty-two.
18:36 Speaker 01 The nineties came and went without a major Arab-Israeli confrontation. And I'm persuaded that that decade was warless, in large part because of the notion that Baker fabricated at Madrid. Baker eliminated the excuse that the Arabs and the Israelis had used for years as to why there couldn't be an agreement, because there was nobody at the other end of the table to talk to. Baker would create a figurative table.
19:10 Speaker 01 Which I think lasted for most of the decade.
19:15 Ezra Klein? But what's so interesting to me about that is that even at that table, I mean, we're here in the 90s already. It's the first time you have Palestinians at that table. That's the 90s. It's not the Palestinians we will end up thinking of as on the other side of the table. It's not the PLO. That even quite recently, what was happening at the table, the construction of a partner to negotiate with was very unformed. And even the presence of a Palestinian authority, to use that in a colloquial term, not in terms of the official PA, that's new. I mean, the 90s are not that long ago. And even under Baker and Bush, you don't have the group speaking that you eventually
20:00 Ezra Klein? will. I mean, you have this great story in the book of talking with Yitzhak Rabin and him sort of walking through why there's nobody to negotiate with on the Palestinian side and clearly beginning to work himself towards the question of if he's going to negotiate with Yasser Arafat and the PLO. But to people who think it's always been, you know, this Israeli Palestinian negotiation, it's really very recent.
20:24 Speaker 01 It's a fascinating point because it speaks to the structural problems on the Palestinian side. Also, obviously, the psychological difficulties of bringing a more authentic representation of Palestinian nationalism into the negotiations. That story, Ezra, was a story that I told when Rabin had come for his first meeting with Bill Clinton in the spring of 93. And we met at the Washington Hilton. I'll never forget it. And despite the non-smoking sign, Rabin is sitting there chain-smoking and having an analytical discussion with us about how to deal with a Palestinian issue.
21:07 Speaker 01 And by his body language, it was absolutely clear to all of us that he had come to the conclusion that the only way to deal with this was not through Jordan or the West Bank or Gaza. He had to engage the organizational embodiment of Palestinian nationalism.
21:52 Ezra Klein? Oslo is such an important accord. I mean, there's been all this talk about the 30th anniversary of Oslo and why did it fail? And it still is the framework that gets talked about and pulled. What do the Oslo Accords say or do that makes them such an important framework for so many decades?
22:10 Speaker 01 Most of what is known as the Oslo Accords lie bloodied, battered, and broken somewhere. But there are two important elements which have endured. One is the mutual recognition package that brought Israel for the first time into a direct acknowledgement, recognition, and negotiation with the organizational embodiment of Palestinian nationalism, the PLO. That relationship, the capacity of both sides to look one another in the eye and to sit
22:51 Speaker 01 with one another as authentic, genuine expressions of the needs of both sides, is critically important. Second is the reality that Oslo brought the Palestinian issue from the Palestinian diaspora into the center of Palestinian life in part of historic Palestine, the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
23:29 Speaker 01 And in doing so, it forced Palestinians to begin the torturous process of creating self-governance and Palestinian institutions under extremely difficult circumstances, to say the least. But again, it's real and it's authentic. In that sense, Oslo succeeded, I think.
23:55 Speaker 01 In at least defining the nature of the problem.
24:00 Ezra Klein? One thing that struck me, there is, to me, the most indelible image of the entire US-Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
24:10 Speaker 05 It was nothing short of breathtaking. Two veteran warriors of Middle East battlefields, joining a young American president in the first step toward peace. And at Arafat's instigation, a handshake between two men who had been bitter enemies for decades.
24:24 Ezra Klein? Rabin and Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn. Bill Clinton is next to them, beaming thrilled. And what is so ironic about that image is that America had almost nothing to do with it. So can you tell me what is happening in that image?
24:42 Speaker 01 By the spring of 93, it was clear that there was an Oslo channel. We were being briefed up to a point, not about Israeli-PLO reconciliation, mutual recognition, which became part of the Oslo Accords. But we knew there was a channel, and we even had some sense that it could have been a decision-making channel. And I remember, I was on vacation with my family in the west coast of Florida. I got a call from the State Department Ops Center, saying, "You better come home quickly. Secretary is going to go out to California, where he's going to meet the Israeli Foreign Minister and Norwegian Foreign Minister."
25:25 Speaker 01 And rushed back to Washington, and what unfolded then was quite remarkable. A request by Perez that the United States host what would then become the signing ceremony. And Perez initially said, "Why don't you, why don't you assume credit and responsibility?"
25:47 Ezra Klein? Just for listeners, who is Perez?
25:49 Speaker 01 Shimon Perez, who was then Foreign Minister, under Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister. "Why don't you assume credit for this?" And Christopher, at his credit, decent human, said, "Absolutely not." But they asked the administration if they would host the signing ceremony. And that event, on a cloudless, hot Washington day, September 13, 1993, was etched in my mind, watching those three.
26:21 Speaker 01 A beaming Clinton, a very pleased Arafat, and a quite uncomfortable Rabin. The prime minister was to some degree shy. I thought that I was in a galaxy far, far away. And I reached the conclusion, galactic misjudgment, that the Israeli Palestinian peace process, negotiations, had reached a point of no return. And there was no going back. And caught up in that moment, I couldn't understand fully that unlike Madrid, unlike
27:02 Speaker 01 the disengagement agreements, unlike the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, we were embarking on an enterprise so complicated, so fraught with political risk and existential risk for those who participated in it, that this would end up with twists and turns, cruel, hopeful twists and turns along the way. On reflection now, I think I understand where the analytical problem was. And that's this, that the issues on the table, borders, security, Jerusalem, refugees,
27:44 Speaker 01 what the Israelis wanted, recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jews, and the end of all conflict and claims, those six issues were unbelievably complicated and would prove to be impervious to Israeli-Palestinian agreement and clearly impervious to American mediation. We were able to be effective brokers of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. We were an effective broker of the process to Madrid. When it came to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, there was at least one complicating factor. That was our greatest asset and our greatest liability, which was the extraordinarily
28:28 Speaker 01 close relationship that we had with the state of Israel. Because of our close identification with Israel, because of the domestic politics...
28:40 Speaker 01 We could not manage to play that role. We tried, and this is a disagreement that I've had with my colleagues. I wrote an op ed in '05 in the Washington Post titled "Israel's Lawyer." I had resurrected that term out of Kissinger's memoirs for Baker. He loved it. He kept saying, "Don't make me Israel's lawyer. I ain't going to be Israel's lawyer." I admitted in that op ed that I know a lawyer when I see one, and far too often during the Clinton administration, myself included, far too often, we acted as Israel's lawyer when, in fact, our client was not Israel or the Palestinians.
29:25 Speaker 01 It was an agreement. That's who our client was, what our client was. Whether or not that was the determinative factor, Ezra, in not being able to reach an agreement, maybe it was the degree of difficulty of the issues themselves. And that is not a position that is uniformly agreed between me and many of my colleagues who participated in this process. But it is my view that because of the nature of our special relationship, it was extremely difficult for any American president or a secretary of state to play the kind of role that would have been necessary in order to reach an agreement.
30:10 Ezra Klein? What comes next in a lot of people's minds is Camp David. And I think the Israeli narrative, and probably the dominant American narrative, is it a Camp David of an Israeli leader, Ehud Barak, who's willing to offer a serious deal? Bill Clinton is there. He's putting his power, his prestige, his time into negotiating this. And Arafat basically just walks away at the end. And more than he walks away, the second Intifada begins, which really marks the end of the peace process in important ways. But before we get to that, what was offered at Camp David? How do the narratives of the various sides differ? And do you think any of those offers could have been accepted and sold to the respective constituencies?
30:56 Speaker 01 The Camp David summit was, in my judgment, even though I argued for it at the time, ill-advised, ill-conceived, and ill-managed. And as a consequence, we ended up in a situation where a 14-day summit ran us, not the other way around. And let me make it clear. Ehud Barak went farther at Camp David than any Israeli prime minister had ever gone. There's no question about it. Arafat came to Camp David to survive.
31:36 Speaker 01 He warned the president and Madeleine Albright that a summit that was not properly prepared would not succeed. Worried constantly, although assured by Bill Clinton that he would not be blamed, he came to Camp David, determined to defend Palestinian positions, what I call "the narrative," with very little sense of, A, either making a counteroffer to the ideas on the table, or, number two, to put forward a Palestinian proposal of his own.
32:19 Speaker 01 What Barak was prepared to accept at Camp David was this: Israel would be allowed to annex 9% of the West Bank, and in exchange, Palestine would have sovereignty over roughly 1% of pre-1967 Israel, but with no indication of where that 1% would be.
32:47 Speaker 01 On the very highly sensitive issue of refugees, the proposal only spoke of a satisfactory solution to the problem. Even on Jerusalem, where most of the detail was provided, there were a lot of gaps. So, no Palestinian leader, I'll repeat it, no Palestinian leader could have accepted that proposal and survived. Remember what Arafat's models were. Sadat, 100% of Sinai, and the dismantling of all Jewish settlements. And Barak is offering Arafat 91%
33:29 Speaker 01 and a 1% territory which would have been taken out of Israel proper, but not defined where it was or what it would be. Arafat could not have accepted this. The notion, and I've said this a million times to anybody who will listen, the notion that we were this close, thumb and first finger, a quarter of an inch, a sixteenth of an inch apart. The notion that we were that close at Camp David and that Arafat walked away is simply wrong.
34:08 Speaker 01 We were this close, and I extended my arms out as far as I possibly could. That was not Arafat's transgression. It was that he wouldn't counter, nor would he offer a proposal that diverged at all from the Palestinian narrative, which was 100% of the West Bank. Control over everything in East Jerusalem and some solution to the refugee problem that would have not just included the return of Palestinians to a Palestinian state,
34:53 Speaker 01 but to Israel proper. And I think that, in many respects, is a much more valid criticism of Arafat's behavior at the summit than basically to say that he walked away from a formal proposal that could have led to a conflict ending agreement.
35:19 Ezra Klein? We've discussed the way Arafat's elevation in international negotiations to leader of the Palestinians, sole voice for the Palestinian people is very recent at this point. I mean, the PLO was, is, an important organization. But until the handshake in 93 on the White House lawn, who you call when you are calling to make a deal with Palestinians was much less settled. And when I read your book and when I read other histories of this, that strikes me as still a big part of the problem, which is to say that Arafat, it sounds like, and you can tell me if you think this is true or false, didn't really have the authority to make the deal. He could not himself. He did not have the power, the control over Palestinian society,
36:04 Ezra Klein? the institutions, to make a counteroffer, sell it and enforce it. But for all that he wants to be the negotiator, he is aware of his own politics and he does not have the authority to make the kinds of offers Barak doesn't, which is to say, in a way, that the ground wasn't ready for this. When Israelis say they did not have a partner for peace, that they are right. And Barak's view that you could kind of have a big deal settlement was, at this point, and maybe still, we'll talk about that, wrong.
36:40 Speaker 01 Look, if Arafat couldn't do this deal, or any deal, with the moral authority that he had and with legitimacy that he had, even presiding over a fractious Palestinian national movement, then I not entirely persuaded any Palestinian leader.
37:04 Speaker 01 Could do this deal. But again, remember Ezra, we were at the beginning of a process. This was to date, the only negotiation where you had an empowered American president, willing to do whatever he could do, six months before he left office. An Israeli, risk-ready Israeli prime minister, who put things on the table that we had never heard before, and that surprised most of us. And a Palestinian leader, who had authority, stature, and who was viewed by most of the
37:47 Speaker 01 international community, as the primary address for negotiations with Palestinians. The critique on Arafat, and after spending hundreds and hundreds of hours with him, I'm not sure we really fully understood who he was. People would say, what do you mean, you didn't understand who he was? You should have grasped this from the beginning, that he presided over a pseudo-revolutionary
38:25 Speaker 01 movement, he was the munadal, the struggler, and that he didn't have the capacity to make the transition, because he lived in a world, in a political world, for decades, that was so unlike any of his counterparts. And that we really never understood, or maybe we didn't want to understand, because in essence, he was the address, and he had delivered during the early phases of the Oslo process, and even Rabin, who was no fan, to say the least, of Yasser Arafat.
39:14 Speaker 01 Respected that Arafat had made some very tough decisions. The last time I saw him officially was in March of 2002. And the Israelis had surrounded his mukatha in his conference room, where he had met many times before. Windows blacked out, doors barricaded. The only light in the room was candlelight. And there he was, in this darkened candlelit room, with his forbidding black machine pistol on the table in full view, talking about martyrdom.
39:57 Speaker 01 And how it was critically important that if necessary, he would die in the defense of Palestine. That was my last official image of Yasser Arafat. And I left that meeting wondering whether or not, based on who he was and his life story, did he have the capacity to deliver? And now, on reflection, looking back, with the Palestinian national movement looking like, literally like Noah's ark, I mean, they're two of everything. Two statelets, two constitutions, two sets of security services, two sets of patrons,
40:41 Speaker 01 Hamasistan, for at least for the moment, and Abbas presiding over 40% of the West Bank, 18th year of a four-year term. I wondered, if you can't do the deal with Arafat and you can't do the deal without him, what does that say about Palestinian leadership going forward?
41:09 Ezra Klein? To me, even having read accounts on both sides, it always does feel like the tell is the absence of Palestinian counteroffer. And I think this is very important to Israelis and the way they think of their role in the conflict. Yes, you know, many of them agree the occupation is bad. It's immoral. It's deforming Israeli society. It's terrible for the Palestinians. But they say, we have no partner for peace. So we tried and we've tried a number of times. There's a later offer from Omer and there's no partner because nobody ever comes back. As hard as the issues is, even with a maximalist position, nobody ever comes back from the Palestinian side and says, here's my unreasonable thing that you certainly won't agree to.
41:53 Ezra Klein? But at least here, I'm putting it out in writing. And maybe it's because of Yasser Arafat's background and life history, or maybe it's because they don't have the domestic political capital at home to survive that because Hamas will then take advantage of the failure, whatever it is. I think that the story you tell here is balanced as the way you try to tell it is. It does affirm to me the Israeli story, which is that there has never been a partner. There's never been a counteroffer. There's never been somebody on the Palestinian side willing to say, this is what we would accept, even if it's not what you would accept, and then work from there to where you'd have to go. I mean, what am I getting wrong here?
42:37 Speaker 01 Well, we could elaborate a little, but there's no question that if you took a look at your trajectory of offers from Camp David to the Clinton parameters, to the Taba negotiations, to the Ehud-Omer Abbas negotiations, in which Omer offers 6.5% to be annexed and then offers the Palestinians 5.9% of territory to offset that. And then you move on to that, to the Kerry proposals of 2013, 2014. There's no doubt that that trajectory validates invited a man or woman from Mars
43:21 Speaker 01 down to observe this situation. And the conclusion would be, whatever the asymmetry of power, however just the Palestinian claim that we have to settle for only 22%, when in fact, we wanted all of historic Palestine. So any departure from that 22%, we won't accept. But the reality is, there was no counter offer, either at Camp David, the Clinton parameters, Abbas never responded to Ulmer, and he left the Kerry proposals 2013, 2014 on the table.
44:01 Speaker 01 There's no question that even the most ardent critic of Israel's occupation of the West Bank would have to acknowledge that in effect, when you make the perfect the enemy of the good, you get neither the perfect nor the good. So I guess I would argue that on balance, had there been a counter offer, or had the Palestinians put a proposal on the table and pressed the Israelis, maybe the outcome would have been different.
44:38 Ezra Klein? Let me ask you something, because I'm just some guy with a podcast, read in history books. But you have had for decades, deep contact and relationships with Yasser Arafat, with many on the Palestinian negotiating teams. Surely you've said to them, where's your counter offer? If only for your own PR, why are you not coming back here with something? And they don't want to be seen, and they reject being seen as the ones who collapsed these negotiations. They don't want to be seen by the international community to be unwilling to negotiate. What do they say to you?
45:16 Speaker 01 The Palestinian negotiators that we dealt with actually were quite intrigued and interested in alternative proposals. There was a lot of internecine conflict between the negotiators, and Arafat played on that, playing one against the other. But I think those Palestinians who understood the chairman...
45:40 Speaker 01 Actually, were prepared to be much more flexible. And had it been left to the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating team during those years, the odds of reaching an agreement, I think, would have been much higher. But they were captives of a system. And there was no way, given the way that system was structured, that you could have seen any serious challenge. No one could have gone to Arafat and said, "Look, boss, you can't continue to behave this way. Not a chance."
46:18 Speaker 01 And I think that was a huge factor in trying to understand and intuit why Arafat was simply not, he could not be moved from the 22% solution, which was a near-perfect narrative, which would have required the Israelis to make significant compromises on core issues while leaving the Palestinian position more or less intact. There are those who believe that there was Palestinian flexibility at Camp David. They were prepared to agree to swaps, for example.
46:58 Speaker 01 The Israelis wanted 4% or 5% to be annexed in order to deal with the demographic and security realities, including incorporating settlements and settlement blocks in Israel proper. Palestinians were prepared to accept swaps. But I don't see how you could have come closer than what Ehud Olmert offered them, which was virtually adding everything up to 100%. It was part of Arafat, it was part of the structure of the negotiations, it was part the mistrust and absence of confidence, it was part the failure of the interim process, which turned everything into a negotiation.
47:42 Speaker 01 Palestinians were put on probation. But in the end, what is leadership?
47:48 Ezra Klein? You often hear this question, is the problem here 1967 or is it 1948? Is the problem for the negotiations for Palestinians, at least within the negotiation, are they willing to take a deal that is about the territory Israel gained, West Bank and Gaza in 67? Or is the problem the founding of the State of Israel? And as such, that there is no resolution?
48:14 Speaker 01 Well, clearly, in the case of Hamas, which is the organizational embodiment of an idea, which is the elimination of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state, that is clearly the case. Do I believe that it is conceivable, possible, that a Palestinian leader could emerge that would agree to a deal based on the Clinton parameters and any other adjustments that would meet both Israeli and Palestinian needs and requirements? Do I believe that this process could only occur through a negotiation?
48:55 Speaker 01 And that, in essence, what the last month has demonstrated with a terrifying ferocity, it has shattered, in my judgment, any illusion that anyone has ever had, that Israelis and Palestinians could somehow coexist peacefully in either a one-state reality, which is what we have now, or some sort of bi-national state where Israelis and Palestinians live happily ever after, under one roof? No.
49:33 Speaker 01 The only solution to this conflict is separation through negotiation. There must be a way to address the proximity problem, which is what separates this negotiation from Israel's relationships with Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, the Abraham Accords for sure.
49:59 Speaker 01 Separation through negotiation. I think it was Twain who said that proximity breeds contempt and children. But for sure, it's going to continue to breed terror and violence.
50:37 Ezra Klein? Let me take the Israeli perspective on this for a moment. And there's a lot in the last 10 or 15 years of Israeli politics I am profoundly critical of and disgusted by. But I think if you're an Israeli hearing this, there is nobody to have that negotiation with. You're not going to have it with Hamas. As you say, they're an embodiment of the idea that Israel must be destroyed. Abbas has functionally no support. He's unbelievably unpopular from everything we can tell. Even if you could make a deal with Abbas, there's no reason to think Hamas would abide by it. There are other players like Islam Jihad and other even more extreme players circling. So when you talk about negotiations, I mean, if you couldn't have a negotiation in the
51:19 Ezra Klein? end with Arafat for whatever reason, the situation seems dramatically worse now. And so the idea that there is any pathway here, that it's negotiation, seems almost like a category error, that nobody has a control over the situation on the Palestinian side, the support, nobody speaks with enough authority that there is a deal to be made. And so I think you talk often in the book about the way Israelis often see Americans as naive about Palestinians, about Arabs, that we're over here and we like to put things in our frameworks of negotiations and diplomacy and liberal democracy.
52:02 Ezra Klein? And we've got a great scene where Rabin just waves his hand and says, "You don't understand the Arabs." You talk about a flight with Netanyahu where he says, "You can afford to give the Arabs the benefit of the doubt from the safety and security of Washington. Out here in our neighborhood, we can't and won't." And for them, like even if you had more moderate, more open-minded leadership than Netanyahu, there's nobody on the other side of the table that's fake. It's a Washington construction.
52:30 Speaker 01 I don't think anybody in their right mind could argue with that assessment.
52:37 Speaker 01 I mean, we began this conversation with trying to answer the question as to why we haven't had an Israeli-Palestinian conflict-ending agreement. In my judgment, the sun, the moon, and the stars were never aligned, and they are certainly not aligned now, because what you need, you do not have. But I don't and will not surrender to the forces of hopelessness and despair to basically argue that it simply cannot be. You need at least four things.
53:20 Speaker 01 Number one, you need leaders on both sides who are masters of their politics, not prisoners of their ideologies. You do not have that. Number two, you need a sense of real ownership. The profound piece of philosophy that in the history of the world, nobody ever washes a rental car is critically important, because people care about what they own, and there's no ownership. Every breakthrough, everyone without exception, was preceded by or conducted without the presence of the United States. And you do not have that sense that Israelis
54:04 Speaker 01 and the Palestinians have to do this because it makes sense for them. Number three, you need effective mediation. If not from the US, then by another party that is prepared to apply ample amounts of honey and assurance and a lot of vinegar and pressure when's necessary. And finally, you're going to need an organizing framework in which both sides can see the outlines of where this is headed, an end state. We don't have any of those things.
54:43 Ezra Klein? One thing I think a Palestinian might say here is it might be the case that Israel has not had a partner able to deliver on a peace deal. But it's also the case that Israel has not been strengthening the position of the kinds of partners who might be able to deliver on a peace deal. They didn't spend the last 10 or 15 years making Abbas look better, making his relative moderation deliver for Palestinians. Instead, they've actively undermined him. They made him a security subcontractor, but at the same time, they let settlers run wild, building settlements and functionally annexing parts of the West Bank. There's been a lot of violence there.
55:27 Ezra Klein? That whatever was true 15 years ago, doesn't at this point, Israel also bear some responsibility for acting in a way that you could argue strengthened Hamas? I mean, Netanyahu has talked about trying to keep the two sides divided, and certainly not acting in a way that made it look to Palestinians like their more moderate leadership could actually deliver for them.
55:49 Speaker 01 Well, I think that's 100% correct. I think the Israeli strategy, certainly the strategy of Mr. Netanyahu, was what I call the three-state solution. He was perfectly comfortable with Abbas in control of 40% of the West Bank, while the Israelis control 60% in Area C, in which the Palestinians have no political, civilian, or military security control, and Hamasistan in Gaza, and the state of Israel. As long as the Palestinians cannot claim a monopoly on the forces of violence within
56:26 Speaker 01 their society, and they cannot, which is the ultimate element of credibility and legitimacy of a state, then there was no way, without one gun, one authority, one negotiating position, that the Palestinian national movement could ever present itself as a credible
56:49 Speaker 01 Legitimate interlocutor. And as a consequence, that was just fine with an Israeli government that was far more interested in what I call the 22-state solution to the Israeli, Arab-Israeli conflict, 22 members of the Arab League, than it was in the two-state solution. So, yes. And everything that the government has done with respect to delegitimizing the Palestinian Authority, creating a situation through expanded settlement activity, land confiscation, certainly in the last 10 months, where the government guidelines basically articulated
57:30 Speaker 01 an unbreakable link between Israel and the term they used, Judea and Samaria. So there's no question about it.
57:39 Ezra Klein? Let's say we are somewhere in the future, not super far in the future, but Netanyahu has fallen because he is widely loathed in Israel right now. Benny Gantz is now prime minister. Let's say Joe Biden is still president. And Gantz and Biden are sitting down and they're thinking about, number one on your list there, that you actually need leaders on both sides who are masters of their craft. And I'm not saying Biden and Gantz are necessarily those leaders on the American or Israeli sides, but that one precursor to anything ever being possible is a stronger Palestinian leadership,
58:22 Ezra Klein? a leadership that has proven through success or something else that it is worthwhile for the Palestinian people and so has developed support in a way that the current Palestinian Authority or Hamas has not. What do you do? Is that in their power at all? I mean, in some ways, it's a ridiculous question. The Palestinians don't want Israel's help in creating a leadership. But if you're going to try to create conditions for something like that to emerge, if that was your goal for the next 10 years, just in 10 years to have somebody to negotiate with, what do you do? What would you advise them to do?
58:57 Speaker 01 Are leaders born, or do they emerge in response to crisis and/or opportunity? Where did Volodymyr Zelensky come from? How do you produce a De Klerk and a Mandela? Nobody believed apartheid would end the way it did. Nobody. And yet it ended largely because of Mandela and De Klerk. That kind of leadership existed, certainly in the Arab-Israeli context, with a Begin and a Sadat, and even Arafat in his initial incarnation. But they're all gone now. And legitimizing Palestinian leadership certainly requires elections.
59:40 Speaker 01 But even then, can you have elections that make any sense and produce leaders when you have this perverse dance between the occupier and the occupied?
59:52 Ezra Klein? I mean, elections are how you got Hamas.
59:55 Speaker 01 Yes, that's right. And you haven't had legislative elections or presidential elections, certainly not presidential elections since 2005. But you're going to need new leadership. And where does that come from? Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five lifetime sentences in an Israeli jail. October 6, the Arab Barometer, in conjunction with Khalil Shikaki's polling organization, took a poll, this was the day before October 7, and asked 790 respondents who they would vote for for president. 12% said Abbas.
1:00:37 Speaker 01 24% said Ismail Haniya, political leader of Hamas. 33, 4% said Marwan Barghouti. I can't answer that question, Israel. And in not answering it, or not being able to answer it, and not being able to see the emergence of a Palestinian leader who has both the street cred, the legitimacy, and the authority, I don't see it happening.
1:01:09 Ezra Klein? Should Israel release Barghouti?
1:01:14 Speaker 01 It's been considered numerous times by the Israelis. And I don't know, in view of what's happened over the last four months, whether any act that Palestinians or Israelis can take in the short term, that would create a different sort of environment. I mean, you're going to be dealing with two traumatized communities, and there will be a political reckoning on each side. Israel has an institutional set of arrangements that will allow that political reckoning to have some sense of structure. People will resign. There may be another election or a new government constituted in place.
1:01:56 Speaker 01 But the course correction is not going to be toward a center-left government. More likely, it's going to be toward a center-right government. And on the Palestinian side, what does the future hold for them? If Hamas survives, even if residual elements survive to create an insurgency in Gaza, over time, Palestinian national movement will remain, as I mentioned it before, like Noah's ark. Abbas is 88. At some point, he'll pass from the scene. Maybe there'll be a collegial leadership that'll emerge, several individuals.
1:02:38 Speaker 01 It is my contention, and this is why I tend to, at least on this piece, I tend toward hopelessness and despair on this issue, is because of the absence of leadership. I don't see how Israelis and Palestinians even manage this process without leaders of such stature, who are admired with authority to make the kinds of decisions required. If I was depressed before this conversation began, I'm thoroughly depressed now, because the clarity of what's coming seems to me to be so inescapable.
1:03:24 Ezra Klein? I want to go back to something about the leadership, which is my colleague Tom Friedman, who has forgotten more about Israel and Palestine than I will ever know, recently put out a column where he said, "It's time for a Biden plan that at least put something down on paper, make it public, and force different players on different sides to show where they are: Abbas, Netanyahu, Gantz, whoever you want to think about as a possible decision maker here." Do you think that would be productive?
1:03:58 Speaker 01 I love Tom, and we talk and argue about this stuff all the time. Look, a Biden plan might improve American credibility. It would certainly put the US on record as proposing at least where we stood. But a plan without a pathway to actualize it becomes just another sort of rhetorical, it's a substitute for a peace conference, which we actually don't need. And failure costs. So do I think for American
1:04:42 Speaker 01 interests, it would be important to put something out, both as a recognition that the United States still believes in a diplomatic process and an end state that could, if Israelis and Palestinians were prepared to rise to the challenge, moderate or perhaps one day end the conflict? Yeah, I think that's fine. But it comes along with a huge responsibility, and that is to actually do things to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer to a point where, in fact, they could accept such a plan.
1:05:28 Ezra Klein? Well, let me end on that question because we have just knocked down or mired in complexity lots of things different people can maybe do. Who could do what in your view? What would be moves? Be they by a boss, by other players in the Palestinian set of regimes, by Israelis, by Gantz, by Netanyahu, by Biden, by Blinken, by Saudi Arabia, by Europeans?
1:05:56 Ezra Klein? Who can do what? What is an actual lever? Somebody with power in this could pull that would be productive?
1:06:04 Speaker 01 You're talking about something that could actually be done in the moment now?
1:06:10 Ezra Klein? Yes, not for not, I mean, or in the coming months. I'm not talking about a plan. I'm not somebody, I keep saying this on the show, I do not believe in solutions here right now. I think we are in a way pre-solutionary space. I think talk of two-state deals is ridiculous. But there is better and there is worse. There are actions, there's increments. You can always do something. What should somebody do?
1:06:35 Speaker 01 Well, for openers, I would argue that the current Israeli government, for their own interests, ought to do everything they possibly can to ensure that you don't have settlers engaging in vigilantism and forcing Palestinians off of their land, harassing and even killing them. And the Biden administration has pressed the Israelis, but it still continues. I mean, I think the numbers are at least over 1,000, maybe more Palestinians have literally been forced off of their land. And while we have this conversation,
1:07:18 Speaker 01 elements of the Israeli government, particularly Bezalel Smotrich, are busy at work trying to continue to pursue literally under the cover of this distraction in Gaza, a policy toward the West Bank, which is annexationist in everything but name. That process continues.
1:07:42 Speaker 01 But I can't give you an RX or a prescription. Mahabharata is capable of doing almost nothing right now, in large part because he's perceived to have done nothing in order to alleviate Palestinian suffering in Gaza and can't even protect his own constituents in the West Bank. So I mean, I wish I could answer that question. I can't.
1:08:13 Ezra Klein? I appreciate that honesty. We're not a show that tries to peddle on false hope. I think that's a place to end. So always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
1:08:27 Speaker 01 The Peace Puzzle by Daniel Kurtser et al., Arabs and Israelis: Conflict in the Middle East by Feldman, Shikaki, Said, and The Missing Peace by Dennis Ross.
1:08:45 Ezra Klein? Aaron David Miller, thank you very much. This episode of the Ezra Klontz Show was produced by Emma Boghaw, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Roland Hoop. Mixing by Jeff Geld with Afim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Kristin Lynn. Original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Samulski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.
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