The peace that got away: Negotiator looks back on talks that failed

Thursday, January 29, 2009 | by dan pine

Martin Indyk calls it his “magnificent obsession.”

After 35 years of devotion to Middle East peace, America’s former negotiator and ambassador to Israel still feels the same burning desire.

Throughout Bill Clinton’s presidency, Indyk sat at the center of once-promising peace talks, nearly cementing comprehensive agreements among Israel, Syria and the Palestinians.

But it “all blew up,” as he notes of those dark days after the collapse of the Camp David accords in 2000 and the onset of the second intifada.

 

It threw Indyk into a state of depression. “I saw my life’s work, which I had been convinced was going to produce a comprehensive peace for Israel and its Arab neighbors, had appeared to achieve the opposite,” he says.

 

Indyk, 57, writes of his years in the Clinton White House and as the United States’ first Jewish ambassador to Israel in his new book, “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East.” He spoke to j. while in the Bay Area for a Jan. 26 speaking engagement at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.

The author borrowed the title from the 1869 Mark Twain classic, “The Innocents Abroad,” chronicling Twain’s journey to the Middle East.

“There’s something quintessentially naïve about America’s encounter with the Middle East,” Indyk says. “I was part of that innocence even though I had knowledge about the region. Even though Bill Clinton and George W. Bush pursued opposite approaches to the region –– one tried to achieve transformation through peacemaking, the other through war-making and democratization –– they both thought they could make the Middle East over in America’s image. They both failed.”

It wasn’t for lack of trying, at least while Indyk worked for Clinton. He devoted years to securing peace deals, both between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Israel and neighboring countries Syria and Jordan.

Dealing with outsized personalities such as the late Syrian President Hafez Assad and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat didn’t make things easier. In his book, Indyk offers an insider’s view of these figures, with Arafat emerging as one of the most intriguing, if maddening.

He excoriates Arafat for missing a historic opportunity to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians when he had the chance.

In one remarkable incident, Arafat hesitates to sign an agreement in a public ceremony in Cairo. As Indyk relates, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak whispered in the Palestinian’s ear: “Sign it, you dog!”

Though the conventional wisdom holds that Clinton brought the Israelis and Palestinians within a hair’s breadth of a comprehensive peace deal, Indyk says his team came even closer with Syria.

“The only thing separating the parties was 50 meters around the northeast sector around the Sea of Galilee,” he says. “When we failed to get that deal in 2000, it had a dramatically negative effect.”

Though he calls himself a “Clintonista,” he harbors some criticism of his former boss’s occupation with the minutia of peacemaking. “Bill Clinton became too involved,” Indyk says. “He became the desk officer for the peace process.”

But Indyk especially blasts the last president for his Middle East policies.

“If Bush had tried, I think he could have stopped the violence in the intifada,” Indyk says. “The whole edifice of peace was destroyed. In the service of an ideology that was based on lack of curiosity and a smug judgment that there was no Nobel Peace Prize to be had, his detachment ended up doing a great deal of damage.”

With the Obama administration’s Middle East team –– including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and special envoy George Mitchell –– in place, Indyk holds out hope that the parties can get back on track.

“We have a new president committing the U.S. to a sustained engagement trying to achieve comprehensive peace,” Indyk says. “When Obama made the announcement, I couldn’t help but smile, thinking the peace process was back. It was a complete sense of déjà vu, when we tried to do the same thing. The circumstances are far more difficult now.”

Indyk left government service a few months into George W. Bush’s first term. He currently serves as director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and is a senior fellow in Brookings’ Foreign Policy Studies Program.

But if the phone were to ring and a new American president were to ask him to return to the diplomatic maelstrom, he figures he wouldn’t say no.

Once Indyk finished writing his book, he asked himself, “‘What should I do: Close the chapter and write a new chapter, or should I continue?’ I concluded that I should continue in whatever way I can.”

“Innocent Abroad” by Martin Indyk (496 pages, Simon & Schuster, $28)