17
As I reflect on what I’ve learned along this road from Beirut to Jerusalem, I find myself drawn to a chapter in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad in which he describes the moment during his travels through the Middle East when he first beheld the River Jordan:
When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the River Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide. It is only ninety miles long, and so crooked that a man does not know which side of it he is on half the time. In going ninety miles it does not get over more than fifty miles of ground. It is not any wider than Broadway in New York. There is the Sea of Galilee and this Dead Sea—neither of them twenty miles long or thirteen wide. And yet when I was in Sunday school I thought they were sixty thousand miles in diameter.
Travel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us of the most cherished traditions of our boyhood. Well, let them go. I have already seen the Empire of King Solomon diminish to the size of Pennsylvania; I suppose I can bear the reduction of the seas and the river.
I too. After almost a decade of reporting on Arabs and Israelis, in late 1987 the Times asked me to move to Washington to become their diplomatic correspondent, covering the State Department and writing about the world at large. I jumped at the opportunity, maybe because, like Twain, the Middle East had first entered my consciousness in the wake of the Six-Day War as a grand tapestry, but the longer I stayed there, the more it seemed to become something very small.
A few weeks before we actually moved home from Jerusalem, my three-year-old daughter, Orly, asked me to take her out to lunch. Ann said she wanted to come, too, and bring along our two-month-old baby, Natalie, to make it a family outing. We decided to go to one of our favorite restaurants, the buffet at the Inter-Continental Hotel, which is located in East Jerusalem atop the Mount of Olives. Ann drove and the two girls sat in the back seat. As our little Daihatsu chugged slowly up Mount Scopus, a teenage Palestinian suddenly stepped out from behind a wall, stood in front of us, took careful aim, and threw a stone at Ann’s face. It shattered the windshield into a spiderweb, but fortunately did not penetrate the glass. Orly saw the whole thing and began screaming hysterically from the back seat. Ann was paralyzed with fear. “Keep driving,” I shouted at her, as the Palestinian youth loped away into the adjacent Arab village of el-Suwaneh.
None of us was hurt from the small shards of glass that dusted the interior of the car, just shaken. The only lasting scar from the incident seems to have been inflicted on Orly’s psyche. She still asks about the “man with the stone,” and I am afraid that as she grows older this incident will remain one of her earliest childhood memories. The Palestinian wasn’t aiming at us specifically. He had simply seen the Israeli license plates on the car and that was enough for him to throw a stone and to inflict pain, no matter who was inside.
How ironic, I thought afterward. I had seen marching armies of many nations pass through Beirut and ultramodern fighter jets clash above its skies. I had seen the battleship New Jersey fire shells as big as Chevrolets, and I had seen my own apartment house reduced to dust by a pound of the most sophisticated high explosives known to man. I had seen massacres and car bombings and heard snipers until they had almost become routine. I had dodged them all for ten years, only to get hit by a stone.
It was a rather fitting punctuation mark for my journey. I had come to the Middle East just at the close of the 1970s, when the Arabs and Israelis were being painted by themselves and the world in bold colors and extra-large sizes. They fought big battles—in the 1973 war some of the biggest tank battles in the history of modern warfare were fought in the Sinai Desert and Golan Heights. They made big profits—thanks to the rise of OPEC in the mid-1970s there was a massive influx of oil wealth to the region that made men fantastically rich and gave them new pretensions, new temptations, new glitter, and new dreams of modernization. They even made peace in a big way—three months before I first left for Beirut, in March 1979, Egypt and Israel had signed their Peace Treaty. It was Pax Americana, packaged no less on American television, where Barbara Walters and Walter Cronkite played matchmakers to Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Most of all, they thought in big ways—when I first came to Beirut, I listened to Lebanese tell me that they were the last frontier of Western civilization. A few years later I would even hear my own President, Ronald Reagan, proclaim that a premature withdrawal of the Marines from Beirut could “call into question the resolve of the West to carry out its responsibilities to help the free world defend itself.” When I got to Israel I met Jews who were convinced that the prefab homes they were setting up on barren hills in the West Bank would pave the way for universal redemption. Yes, in the 1970s this was a big story with big claims.
“Men thought they were turning a corner,” my friend Fouad Ajami remarked to me, “and guess what they met when they did? The past. In the 1970s men in this region were introduced to something new—to modernization on a very rapid scale, to large wealth and large machines, to Americanization and Westernization, to huge hotel chains and huge ideas, and, most of all, to a less tribal world. Palestinians were melting into Israelis, the Lebanese Muslims were becoming more and more like the Maronites—economically and socially—threatening their primacy. The Israelis after Camp David were becoming part of the Middle East. But many people didn’t like this new world, and were not ready to pay for it by what they would have to give up of themselves. This new world blurred identities. It threatened the boundaries between men and left them confused. So they drew back, and they changed this new world into something old. They went out with sticks and stones and drew sharp lines on the ground to distinguish themselves anew from each other. And so at the end of the 1980s the tribe returned with a vengeance; the region and its conflicts were rendered true to their original dimensions.”
Indeed, the Lebanese, having dabbled with modern democracy and Western-style political parties, slipped back into tribal wars as bloody and unrestrained as those fought between Druse and Maronite peasants in 1860. The Israelis and Palestinians completed the same circle. Their conflict had begun sixty years earlier with Jews and Arabs fighting with pistols, knives, and rocks for control of Mandatory Palestine from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. After Israel was created, though, the Palestinian–Jewish conflict was subsumed in a wider war between the state of Israel and the surrounding Arab nations. But after the 1967 war, the Arab states gradually disengaged from the battle with Israel, leaving the Palestinians to fight alone. Since Israel had occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and knit the original area of Palestine back together again, it was easy for Palestinians and Jews to start over from where they had begun—battling for control of this oft-Promised Land with the same clubs, pistols, rocks, and knives their forefathers had used a century ago.
And that is exactly how I left the Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis in late 1988—with swords drawn, standing sentry over their own primordial worlds. Faced with a choice between passion and modernity, they had chosen passion. Faced with a choice between expanding economies and the tribe, they had chosen the tribe. The marching armies had gone; the F-15s were grounded. The conflict was now reduced to men attacking each other according to identity cards and license plates, over olive trees and grazing rights. The war had come down to eye level: Israeli eyes against Palestinian eyes, Maronite eyes against Shiite eyes, looks meant to kill against looks meant to intimidate, darting glances versus blank stares, eyes begging for a little friendship meeting eyes hollow with fear. In Lebanese Arabic, when someone wants to say that he really vanquished someone else, he says, “I broke his eye.” That is what the great Middle East that had swept me away in 1967 had come down to—men breaking each other’s eyes.
Three weeks after the intifada began I went on patrol with a group of Israeli soldiers in Nablus. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Yisrael, a paratrooper, understood from the minute the Palestinian uprising began that he was in a whole new kind of war from anything he had been trained for. As we walked down a main street in the Balata refugee camp outside Nablus, he explained how personal it had all become. From one side of the road an elderly Palestinian with a lathered beard looked up from his barber chair to watch us pass. Across the street, a mother and four little children squeezed into a crack in a doorway and eyed the soldiers’ every step. At the butcher shop, the vegetable stand, and the bakery, Palestinians peered out from behind a carcass of meat or a mountain of pita bread—and just stared.
“You know,” said Colonel Yisrael, as he contemplated this scene, “a soldier wakes up in the morning here, and the sky is clear, and it is a fine day, and he just wants to smile. And we tell him, ‘Fine, go ahead and smile.’ And then he goes out onto the street, and he looks into people’s eyes. It is all in the eyes. And what he sees usually does not want to make him smile anymore.”
When I got back to the United States, I was surprised to discover how many of my new neighbors in Washington had come to share this perception that in the Middle East the past had buried the future, and possibly always will. America’s missionary zeal for peacemaking in this part of the world had vanished in the decade I was gone. The excitement of watching Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters bringing Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin together on American television had been replaced by wrenching interviews with the families of Americans held hostage in Beirut and split-screen debates between Israelis and Palestinians arguing with each other with all the politesse of two alley cats. When I would mention the Middle East to American friends, they would either shake their heads silently, shudder with fear, or just wave me off with that get-away-from-me stare normally reserved for Hare Krishna devotees trying to hand you their literature in an airport terminal.
I think this attitude that the Middle East was something frightening and untamable began to take hold of the American psyche about 1979, when the United States became the target of a relentless series of attacks emanating from this region, beginning with the taking of American embassy personnel as hostages in Tehran. Then there was the suicide bombing of the Beirut American embassy in April 1983, then the Marine headquarters bombing, then another suicide attack on the American embassy in East Beirut in 1984, then the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jetliner to Beirut and the cold-blooded murder of an American seaman on board, whose body was dumped off the plane like so much garbage. This was soon followed by the hijacking of the Achille Lauro and another dumping—this time of wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer—and then still another bombing of American servicemen, this time in a Berlin discotheque in 1986. As if all this were not enough, Americans were rudely awakened in December 1987 by another bad message: night after night of network news footage showing Israelis clubbing and shooting rock-throwing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Those scenes from Israel, I am convinced, left many Americans exclaiming, “You too, Israelis? Even you Jews have this virus? And all these years we thought you were just like us.”
America seemed to say to itself one day in 1988, Let’s wash our hands of this part of the world. In an age of 99-cent-a-gallon gasoline, who needs it anyway?
Despite all I have witnessed, I still believe such a fatalistic attitude is both naive and overly pessimistic. It is naive because we simply have too many strategic, emotional, and religious interests at stake in this area of the world to turn our backs on it entirely. It is overly pessimistic because America still has much to offer the Middle East, much that would be welcomed. Maybe it is the Minnesota boy still in me, but I refuse to pronounce this region hopeless. It’s not inviting, but it’s not hopeless. Washington can still bring Arabs and Israelis the best of America’s outlook, without being devoured by the feuds and passions that consume them.
The question is how. The answer, I believe, is by America learning to play several different diplomatic roles simultaneously. She must learn to think like an obstetrician, behave like a friend, bargain like a grocer, and fight like a real son-of-a-bitch. Let me explain.
To begin with, America should think about Arabs and Israelis the same way an obstetrician would think about a couple who came to him claiming that they had been trying to get pregnant for forty years but just couldn’t conceive most of the time. The first thing any obstetrician would do in such a case is to determine whether this couple was really trying to get pregnant, really ready to go all the way, or whether they weren’t just talking about it while they were in the doctor’s office and then going back home to sleep in separate bedrooms.
America cannot want peace either for the Lebanese or between Israelis and Arabs more than those parties want it for themselves. Arabs and Israelis each have to understand that we can only help to deliver a settlement that they produce out of their own desire and willingness to nurture something together. Otherwise, we should remain very cautious. We cannot create peace settlements for them; there is no artificial insemination in diplomacy. That is what the Marines learned in Lebanon. The Marines wanted to help the Lebanese rebuild their country, but the Lebanese had other fish to fry, other scores to settle, which came first. The same has been true for many Arabs and Israelis in recent years. Begin and Shamir wanted something more than peace with the Palestinians; they wanted Judea and Samaria, and many Israelis still do. Arafat for years wanted something more than a homeland for his people; he wanted his throne atop a united PLO, and although he has finally recognized Israel’s existence in public in order to open a dialogue with Washington, it remains to be seen whether he can speak the kinds of words that would pave the way for a settlement with Jerusalem.
Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter were lucky to have been able to deal in the Middle East at historical junctures when key parties were obviously ready to get pregnant, and that, I believe, is why both of them were so effective in delivering a measure of peace. Kissinger came along after the 1973 war, when Egypt, Israel, and Syria each desperately needed some kind of agreement that would enable them to disengage from an unbearably costly conflict. President Carter came along after Anwar Sadat had already flown to Jerusalem and openly embraced Menachem Begin.
Secretary of State George P. Shultz, in contrast, tried to be a peacemaker at a time when no one was really ready. Shultz visited the Middle East three times in early 1988 to try to coax Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians to an international conference, only to be rebuffed each time. All the parties had beckoned Shultz to come, even welcomed him, but for the wrong reasons. Shamir wanted Shultz around so he could pretend to the Israeli public that he was really trying to find a political solution to the intifada; Peres wanted Shultz around to expose Shamir as an obstacle to peace on the eve of the Israeli elections; Arafat wanted Shultz around to use as leverage against the Israelis, in the hope that Washington would squeeze Israel on the PLO’s behalf and spare him from having to make the concessions Israel would require for any kind of settlement, and King Hussein wanted Shultz around so he would have someone to blame for his inevitable decision to sit on the fence. When Shultz asked them each whether they wanted to get pregnant, they would all nod and say, “Yes, yes, of course we do.” But they all wanted to get pregnant with America—not with each other.
I don’t mean to suggest that America should set an impossibly high threshold for determining whether the parties are serious; it should be high enough that Washington is not chasing after every wink, nod, and declaration that the ball is now in its court, but not so high that we miss real calls for help, or unique historical opportunities that only last for a brief period. The way to measure how serious the parties are is the same way an obstetrician would do it—by observing what they say to each other, not what they say to us. Any party that makes a peace declaration that needs to be read eighteen times in order to be deciphered and that requires a Middle East expert to explain it is not serious enough; any party that is ready to talk only about the style of negotiations and insists on determining which of its enemies can attend—whether it should be an international conference or direct talks, whether the PLO can come or only Jordanians and West Bankers—is not serious enough. Only those parties who are ready to talk substance and peaceful intent in language a five-year-old can understand and with sincerity that can be felt in the gut are serious enough.
But even when the parties to the Middle East conflicts don’t seem ready to get pregnant, America should not just sit on its hands. It should constantly be trying to nudge the parties together by behaving like a friend.
Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi always liked to tell me that the most important thing an American friend can offer Arabs and Israelis is American optimism—exactly the kind of innocent can-do optimism that the Marines brought to Beirut. The Marines’ almost childlike belief that every problem has a solution, that people will respond to reason, and that the future can triumph over the past is a wonderful thing, Yaron would remind me. It is a trait which Americans should never be ashamed of. Even though Arabs and Israelis sometimes make fun of our naive optimism, the truth is, deep down they welcome it. They envy us our optimism, because theirs are deeply pessimistic societies, deeply scarred societies—societies hemmed in by ancient tribal and religious boundaries, where the most frequently heard political statement is “No, you can’t.”
Into this world weighed down by the past swaggers the naive American with a brief announcement: “Yes, you can.” History, he declares, is not a circular process of the past endlessly repeating itself; it is a linear process of steady improvements. “The future is open,” he says. “The past is dead. Nothing is more sacred than the here and now.” This message is crucial for Arabs and Israelis, who desperately need someone to free them from the paralyzing features of their past and to open their eyes to the opportunities of the present.
Another thing an American friend has to offer is the truth; only a real friend tells you the truth about yourself. Arabs and Israelis have a real tendency to get caught up in their private tribal worlds, in which all their fantasies and all their martyrs and all their dead ancestors begin to define the present. This is dangerous because in the world of fantasy each side believes that it can have it all and that the other side will disappear. In the Palestinian fantasy world, there are no Israelis; in the Israeli fantasy world, there are no Palestinians; in the Maronite fantasy, there are no Lebanese Muslims; in the Lebanese Muslim fantasy, there are no Maronites.
An American friend has to help jar these people out of their fantasies by constantly holding up before their eyes the mirror of reality. The Americans rarely did this with Amin Gemayel in Lebanon, and they have been weak in doing it with both Israelis and Palestinians. Now that the United States has opened a dialogue with the PLO, the Palestinians have to be told straight out to get rid of the notion that the Israelis are just modern-day Crusaders who will one day gather up their shields and swords and ride off into the sunset, or that the Americans are going to squeeze the Israelis on the Palestinians’ behalf. The Israelis are not just passing through; they are home. But Israelis have to be told the same about the Palestinians; that they are inextricably tied to their land and at home in Palestine in the very deepest sense, too. Israeli fantasies about transferring Palestinians to Jordan or getting them to acquiesce in a permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or getting them to drop the PLO as their representatives are just that—fantasies.
America, in effect, has to say to both Israelis and Palestinians, “You are two people with nothing in common—not language, not history, not culture, and not religion. I am not asking you to love each other. I don’t expect you to love each other. The sooner you live apart, the better off you will both be. But the only way you can hope to live apart and at peace is by first coming together to produce a settlement that guarantees Israelis their security and Palestinians their right to self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Nothing short of that will ever bring peace.”
But a real friend not only tells you the truth, he helps you deal with it; he walks you to school on that first day, and maybe even all year. He lets you know that there is a world out there independent of blood ties and tribal ties that can be trusted. In playing this kind of friend for both Israelis and Arabs, America can show them that facing the truth does not necessarily lead to a terrifying abyss. By being a good friend, by being patient, by being understanding, by not constantly threatening, by offering aid, America can do a great deal to coax the parties to the negotiating table and beyond.
Here again the behavior of George Shultz as Secretary of State is instructive. Shultz knew how to play the friend, at least vis-à-vis the Israelis. He understood better than any diplomat I have ever watched that when dealing with the Israelis the most effective way to pressure them is never through a head-on confrontation in public. This only gives their most recalcitrant leaders an opportunity to dig in their heels and exploit the open confrontation with Washington to look strong before their own people. In the Middle East, some politicians have made whole careers by defying Great Powers—Nasser, Khomeini, Begin, and Assad have all played this game at one time or another. They all knew that anyone who could say no to a superpower is himself a superpower.
In Israel’s case, an open confrontation only plays into the deepest fears of the Israeli public that they are alone in the world and must man the barricades. Of course, economic or diplomatic pressure should still be used at times, but it should be done subtly, indirectly, and should always be accompanied by expressions of great regret, pointing out that the “policy reassessment” or the “unfortunate delay in an arms shipment” is being done in sorrow not anger, out of affection not alienation. The audience will get the message.
Nothing would unite Israelis more than an American diplomat who came in and declared that if Jerusalem did not do X or Y tomorrow America would cut off all its aid. “For American optimism to work in the Middle East it has to be based on relationships of trust, especially with Israel,” said Ezrahi. “America is Israel’s last hope. De Gaulle betrayed us. England betrayed us. If America does the same it would be the end of Middle East diplomacy and the ultimate victory for Israeli isolationism.”
When Shultz came to Israel, played the good friend from the American Middle West, and invited Shamir for blueberry pancakes, what he was really doing was reducing Shamir to his real size—which is not very big—and preventing him from puffing himself up in a way that would make him unmanageable. At the same time, Shultz’s soothing approach also built up enormous trust in himself and in America in the eyes of the Israeli public. Unfortunately, Shultz never cashed in on that trust; he never led it anywhere, because he didn’t understand how to play the third role of an American diplomat—the grocer.
If the day should come when America is convinced that the parties are serious about peacemaking, or that conditions in the region are so hot that they have to be serious about it, then America should don the messy apron of a corner grocer in order to help the parties forge an agreement.
Why a grocer? Because the prevailing political culture in the Arab world and Israel is a merchant culture, where men have traditionally lived by trading, bargaining, and negotiating with their wits. Fouad Ajami always likes to say that there are basically two political types in Middle East history: the messiah and the merchant. The messiahs, or mahdis, as they are known in Arabic, come and go with the political seasons. One season it is Gamal Abdel Nasser selling Arab nationalism, another season it is Ayatollah Khomeini selling Islamic fundamentalism. But after a while, the messiahs always pass on, like hurricanes which, after stirring up the landscape, sooner or later move out to sea, leaving behind what was always there: the grocer, whose ancient and familiar culture does not come and go with the seasons but is rooted in the earth.
What this means is that any statesman dealing in the Middle East has to learn to look beyond the banners and the ideology and see the merchant in every man there. And when he does, he must remember that there are two things that every good Middle Eastern merchant understands. One is that you should never take no for an answer. There is always some way to make a sale if you have confidence in your merchandise. Just because a customer says no doesn’t mean he isn’t buying. You just have to sift your way through all the rhetoric and get to the heart of the deal.
The best example I ever heard of this sort of cut-the-crap-let’s-get-down-to-business approach was when Robert S. Strauss, the Texas lawyer and Democratic Party boss, who was appointed by President Carter in May 1979 to be the special Middle East envoy with responsibility for getting the stalled Camp David autonomy talks moving, came to the region. (Unfortunately, he did not stay in his job long enough to see it through.) On his first official visit to Jerusalem, Strauss—who had never had any previous diplomatic experience in the Middle East—took a helicopter tour of the entire West Bank accompanied by a group of American reporters. After the tour was over, Strauss and the reporters retired to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Naturally, the reporters were anxious to hear Strauss’s reaction to what he had seen—the settlements, the terraced hillsides, the winding furrowed valleys. As they pressed Strauss for a reaction to this ancient piece of turf, contested by Arabs and Jews, he kept parrying them with his Texas good ol’ boy drawl, saying, “Awh, I couldn’t tell you.” But the reporters were insistent: What did he think of the West Bank? “Awh, I couldn’t tell you,” Strauss repeated. Finally, though, the American envoy relented.
“Well, it’s like this,” one of the reporters quoted Strauss as saying of the West Bank. “I don’t know why one of them would want it, and why the other would even give a damn.”
The other thing every good grocer knows is that everything must have a price tag on it, otherwise you can’t do business. Therefore, any American statesman dealing with Israelis, Palestinians, or Lebanese has to attach a price tag to everything he is selling. There has to be a price for saying no—and sticking to that no—and there has to be a windfall for saying yes.
The Reagan Administration, however, consistently dealt with Israel and the Arabs without any sense of pricing or Middle Eastern–style bargaining. Despite coming to Israel three times in early 1988 to try to convince Shamir to attend an international peace conference, Secretary of State Shultz never established with Shamir a price for his saying no. So, naturally, Shamir said no. Before each Shultz trip Shamir and his aides nervously waited for the American Secretary of State to set the price, to lower the boom, but he never did.
George Shultz was a thoroughly decent, dignified, well-meaning American diplomat—and that was his problem. His straightforward behavior always reminded me of the American tourist who goes into the Arab market in Jerusalem to buy a carpet. He walks into the shop, sees a Persian carpet on the wall that he wants, and asks the shopkeeper, “How much is that carpet?” The shopkeeper just shakes his head back and forth and then says wistfully, “Oh, Mr. Shultz. Wouldn’t you know it? You picked the most expensive carpet in the store. That carpet has been in the family for two hundred years. I’m not even sure I want to sell that carpet. But for you and you only … $5,000.” Instead of running his fingers over the carpet and telling the shopkeeper that it’s a piece of junk made in Pakistan and not worth $10—which is what the merchant expects to hear—Shultz takes out his traveler’s checks and hands over the $5,000. The shopkeeper laughs all the way to the bank. To this day, Shamir is always ready to talk about what a nice guy George Shultz was. Whenever I heard Shamir praising Shultz, I was always reminded of a shopkeeper in the souk who, after separating a tourist from all his money, says, “Come back here for coffee anytime you’re in the neighborhood.” I never heard Shamir say that to Jimmy Carter or Henry Kissinger, but then neither of them paid retail.
The effective American statesman must not only know how to establish a price like a grocer but how to impose it as well. Shultz was wonderful at playing the good friend from America when dealing with the Israelis in public. When he got behind closed doors, however, when the television lights were turned off and it was just he and Shamir sitting on the couch together, that was the time for Shultz to switch from the Middle Western friend to the Middle Eastern grocer, but he never did. Shultz, I am told, was as avuncular with Shamir in private as he was in public, and that simply won’t work. In the Middle East, and particularly in Israel, there is a basic contentiousness to social and political discourse that is foreign, and perhaps distasteful, to most Americans. A friendly discussion between two Israelis sounds like four Americans having an argument.
While public confrontations in such an environment can be counterproductive, private confrontations at a very high-decibel level can be fruitful. Think for a moment about Yitzhak Shamir’s day as Prime Minister. Before someone like Shultz arrived for his meeting, Shamir had probably already taken three phone calls from Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, during which Peretz threatened to bring down the whole government and end Shamir’s political life unless the Prime Minister installed a kosher kitchen in the Ministry of Interior building by 6:00 p.m. An hour later, Shamir’s fellow Likud Party member Ariel Sharon might have stopped by just to say that he wouldn’t be voting for Shamir at the next party meeting because he wanted his job; before leaving, Sharon probably took out a tape measure and started measuring the carpet in Shamir’s office. Into this snake pit walked George Shultz, talking in his polite, restrained American manner. Shamir probably looked at Shultz as a relief from the people he had to deal with, and that is deadly for any American diplomat. In the political culture of the Middle East, people simply won’t take you seriously unless you show them that you are ready to break a little of their furniture for your ideas.
The shouting, of course, has to be credible. Henry Kissinger was famous for telling Israelis that he was breaking their furniture in the name of President Richard Nixon—probably far more often than Nixon ever realized. But Kissinger understood that a bark with no bite was just so much noise, and if there is anything Arabs and Israelis are used to, it’s noise.
Finally, if an American statesman is successful at brokering some type of Arab–Arab or Arab–Israeli settlement, then he must understand how to play one more role in order to preserve that settlement, and America’s other interests in the region, from those who would undermine them. He must also be a real son-of-a-bitch. He must understand that he is dealing with grocers who often play by their own rules, and their own rules are Hama Rules.
Consider the various attacks on American citizens and soldiers in Lebanon. Between July 19, 1982, when David Dodge, then acting president of the American University of Beirut, was kidnapped, and February 17, 1988, when Lieutenant Colonel William Higgins, who was on assignment with the United Nations, was kidnapped, seventeen American citizens were abducted in Lebanon. According to Western intelligence sources, some of the kidnappings were carried out by private families trying to secure the release of relatives in Kuwaiti jails, and others by gangs just out for lucre. The connections between these families and gangs and various Middle Eastern governments is murky at best.
However, the lion’s share of these abductions were carried out by the pro-Iranian Lebanese Shiite militia Hizbullah. Hizbullah, which calls for the formation of an Islamic republic in Lebanon, was founded in 1982 in Baalbek, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, by Sayyid Abbas al-Mussawi, Sheik Subhi al-Tufayli, and other Shiite clergymen educated in Iran. It quickly became an effective fighting force thanks to training and weaponry provided by Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran), who were dispatched to Baalbek ostensibly to fight Israel. The Revolutionary Guards, in turn, received their orders, finances, and logistical support from Tehran via the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
American and Lebanese intelligence officials have determined that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards not only have enormous influence over the Hizbullah kidnappers but have also ordered specific abductions for their own foreign policy purposes. In this division of labor, Hizbullah was responsible for getting access to the personnel files of institutions such as the American University of Beirut, in order to ascertain which faculty were American citizens, then abducting the targets and holding them for months or years. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards back in Tehran provided some funding for “hostage maintenance” and salaries for the hostage guards, while also helping to set the overall policy as to which hostages should be released or traded and for what price—most of which was dependent on Iranian interests. David Dodge was actually transferred from Beirut to Tehran and held captive there.
The Lebanese clergymen who were supposed to have been the spiritual guides of Hizbullah, such as Sheik Sayyid Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, whose pamphlets and sermons are often dissected by Middle East experts for explanations of the kidnappers’ ideological motives, were little more than a façade. “Fadlallah is just a cover,” said one Shiite militia source privy to the inner workings of the Beirut Shiite underground. “He knows little about operations. The people organizing the kidnappings are totally isolated from ideology. Ideology means nothing to them. They are professionals. It is like a play. There are the actors who recite the lines and there is the director who coordinates everything. Never confuse the actors for the director. This is business.”
The business was the business that was always there—the business of state, the business of regional influence, and the business of staying in power instead of the next guy. Beginning in 1982, as I noted earlier, the United States had thrown its weight behind one coalition in the Middle East—Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—and against another—Syria, Libya, and Iran. For this latter group, kidnapping and suicide bombings were not acts of religious fanaticism but diplomacy by other means—a cheap and effective way to push the Americans out, undermine their local allies, and gain some bargaining chips to trade for future financial and political concessions—without risking an open conventional war in which they would be at a disadvantage. America hurt them in its way, and they hurt America back in theirs.
The Iran–Contra arms-for-hostage bartering demonstrated as well as anything could have just how cynical this grocery shopping was. Colonel Oliver North thought he was dealing with Iranian “moderates” when he was really dealing with Iranian grocers; he had no idea how to bargain with the original rug merchants. He should have taken business lessons from Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. After the United States bombed Tripoli, Libya, on April 15, 1986, in retaliation for a series of Libyan-sponsored terrorist attacks, the Libyan leader got in touch with the Lebanese Shiites holding American hostage Peter Kilburn, a librarian at the American University of Beirut who was abducted on December 3, 1984. Qaddafi literally bought Kilburn from his captors, right off the shelf, so to speak, for a reported $1 million. Then, according to American intelligence sources, on April 17, 1986, Qaddafi had the sixty-one-year-old Kilburn murdered as his retaliation for the American air raid. It was a nice arm’s-length deal, which enabled Qaddafi to exact his revenge—without the obvious fingerprints which might have prompted another visit from the American Lone Ranger. Colonel North could also have learned something about bargaining from the French, who in May 1988 secured the release of three of their hostages in Beirut after agreeing to pay Tehran $330 million, plus interest, which France owed Iran from a $1 billion loan it had secured from the Shah but never fully repaid.
While ideologies such as Islamic fundamentalism and Arab nationalism may no longer play the seemingly all-pervasive roles they once did in guiding the actions of certain political elites in the Middle East, they still have an important hold on some of the young urban poor in countries such as Iran or Lebanon. These ideologies are the cheap currency, in fact, with which Middle Eastern regimes purchase the lives of the young men who actually carry out the suicide car bombings or guard the hostages or walk through the minefields. These young, urban poor are economically, socially, and psychologically vulnerable to promises of the millennium, to the intoxication of sacred religious texts or to the illusion of a quick fix. But they are nothing more than carry-out boys at the grocery store. One must always look beyond them to the real retailers of violence—the intelligence professionals of Iran, Syria, and Libya—and their subcontractors, such as the infamous Palestinian terrorist-for-hire Abu Nidal. They are the ones with whom America has real business. They are the ones who unleash the kidnappers and suicide bombers and who can call them back. We in the West who relate to these “revolutionary” countries only by reading the political banners they hold aloft are imputing to them higher ideological motives than they could ever meet. Don’t read their lips, just watch their moves. They may talk like fanatics, but they behave like grocers; they may preach martyrdom, but always for the other guy’s son.
It is in order to deal with this dimension of Middle East politics that an effective American statesman must know how to play hardball. This means being ready, if necessary, to engage in operations that directly threaten either the life or the domestic stability of the leaders of those countries which threaten America’s interests. Here the Reagan Administration deserves credit. When Reagan ordered the 2:00 a.m. bombing of Qaddafi’s tent—nearly killing the Libyan leader in his own bed—Qaddafi got the message and has barely been heard from since. Reagan’s dispatching of American warships to the Persian Gulf, ostensibly to protect the oil shipping lanes, forced Iran to divert men, attention, and resources from the Iraqi front and thereby contributed significantly to the general exhaustion of the Iranians, which ultimately led Khomeini to accept Iraq’s cease-fire offer.
You can’t come to a hockey game and expect to play by the rules of touch football; Middle East diplomacy is a contact sport.
Of course, no American statesman can be, or should be, an obstetrician, a friend, a grocer, and a son-of-a-bitch all the time. The effective statesman will be the one who knows when to play each role—when to be an obstetrician and when to be a son-of-a-bitch, how not to be such an inveterate grocer that he drives the customer away and how not to be such a good friend that his customer forgets that there is a price to be paid. That is a matter of timing and instinct—the stuff of great diplomacy that can never be taught.
I am well aware that there are enormous constraints on any American statesman who would want to play all these roles. Some of those constraints are cultural, others institutional. Nevertheless, I believe that there is a basic American consensus for both the policy approach I have outlined and for the tools. Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger demonstrated that an American statesman ready to articulate a clear, sober, and fair policy on the Middle East, and ready to devote the resources and energy needed to push it along—when the people in the region are serious—will enjoy broad support from Americans in general and Jewish Americans in particular.
After all, there has to be something more to Middle East politics than the endless feud—at least God intended there to be. Surely that is the meaning of that critical portion in the Book of Exodus when God commands Moses to liberate his people from bondage in Egypt. After receiving his assignment from the Lord, Moses asks God a simple question: What’s your name? How should I identify you to my people? God gives Moses an intriguing answer. On the one hand, He tells Moses to tell the Children of Israel that He, the Lord, is the God of their fathers, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” Some modern rabbis have interpreted this as God telling Moses, “I am the God of your past, of your memories, of your historical roots, of your ancestors, all of which I know are important to you; I was with you in your suffering and in your joy wherever you were.”
On the other hand, though, God tells Moses to tell the Children of Israel that He, the Lord, is also someone else. God says, tell the people “I will be who I will be.” The rabbis interpreted this as God saying, “Although I was with you in your past, I am also a God who invites new possibilities for the future. Your past, while essential to your identity, does not exhaust all that you can become—either as individuals or as a community. When I tell you that there is a Promised Land out there, I am telling you that the future can be different from the past, that you and your community can become something new.”
It may be that America just doesn’t have the energy anymore for liberating Arabs and Israelis from the chains of their past. If so, that is unfortunate, not only for us, but for the peoples of the Middle East as well. I have met my share of scoundrels in that part of the world, but I have met even more—many more—Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese, who are desperate for what America has to offer their region. They are men and women who are starved for alternatives and who cry out for sources of optimism. America can be the bridge builder between them. Even when America doesn’t have all the answers, it can keep asking the right questions. It can keep hope alive; it can keep the discussion alive; it can keep reminding people what the Good Lord tried to tell Moses: how exciting it is to know that tomorrow can be different from yesterday.