September 29, 2016 | No Comments
In January 2003, Bill Clinton attended the 80th birthday of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, his friend and partner in pursuit of Middle East peace during the 1990s.
Onstage at a gala celebration in Israel, a twinkly-eyed Clinton sang along with a teenage pop star to John Lennon’s homage to world peace, “Imagine.”
Clinton may have stumbled his way through Lennon’s inspiring lyrics—”You may say I’m a dreamer….”—but his heart was in it. In the closing months of his presidency, Clinton came closer than any other president to a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Associates say he has long been haunted by his inability to finish a process that Peres helped to start in the early 1990s, one that led Clinton to pronounce himself “a failure.”
Moreover, many believe that Clinton hasn’t given up his idealistic dream for peace, despite a growing global consensus that the peace broken is broken—perhaps beyond repair.
“Anybody who was around the former president over the years on this issue knows the sense of personal frustration, that this was a goal that eluded him, that it was unfinished business from his presidency,” says Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal Israel policy group that supports the peace process.
Some even assume that Clinton, who astounded Israeli and Palestinian negotiators with his granular knowledge of their conflict, has thought about throwing another harpoon at his elusive white whale should his wife become the next president.
“Would he want to get involved again? You’ve got to figure the answer is probably yes,” says a former Clinton administration official who played a role in Israel-Palestinian policy.
The future of the peace process is sure to be on Clinton’s mind when he attends his late friend’s funeral in Israel on Friday. Peres was seen as perhaps his country’s most determined advocate for a deal with Palestinians in which Israel would surrender long-occupied territory in exchange for an end to terrorist attacks.
But while sources said Clinton, should he return to the White House, might feel compelled to try his hand at the peace process again, it’s far from clear whether that would make political sense for Hillary Clinton—or whether it would be more likely to succeed in a Middle East much changed since he left office 15 years ago.
“It’s not the 1990s anymore,” said Aaron David Miller, a former peace process negotiator under Clinton and several other presidents.
But Miller acknowledged that Clinton’s work with Peres towards an elusive peace agreement that might end the cycle of violence between Israel and the Palestinians occupies a special place in his psyche.
“The sense that this was a lost opportunity weighed heavily on his mind,” Miller said.
Bill Clinton didn’t make Middle East peace a central theme of his 1992 run for the presidency. But secret talks were underway at the time between the Palestinians and the Israelis, spearheaded by Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister. In 1993, months after Clinton took office, the talks culminated in the Oslo Peace Accords, a pact signed in a White House ceremony famous for the dramatic handshake between then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yassir Arafat, as Clinton stood between the longtime mortal enemies.
The three men shared a Nobel Prize the next year, but the peace process’s momentum slowed after Rabin was assassinated in 1995 and Peres, who succeeded him as prime minister, was defeated the next year by a harder-line Benjamin Netanyahu.
But Clinton was determined to fulfill the promise of Oslo before leaving office, leveraging his enormous popularity in both Israel and among the Palestinians. He nearly did so in July 2000, when Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak came to Camp David for a two-week summit where Clinton played a remarkably hands-on role. Miller recalls the way Clinton amazed Palestinian negotiators with his encyclopedic knowledge, including the names and affiliations of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. He also personally read the parameters of a peace proposal to the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, Miller said—something no president had done before or has since.
Clinton considered the Israeli-endorsed offer “so good I couldn’t believe anyone would be foolish enough to let it go.” But Arafat rejected it. Clinton recalled his reply when the Palestinian leader thanked him for his effort and told him he was a great man.
“I am not a great man,” Clinton replied, according to his memoir. “I am a failure, and you have made me one.”
Distracted by Iraq and terrorism, George W. Bush’s administration made little headway on the peace process, President Barack Obama made two unsuccessful attempts to reach a deal. Many observers believe the so-called Oslo process, commemorated at the Clinton White House in 1993, has run its course.
Though the failure of Camp David has gnawed at Clinton for years, sources said that, whatever his emotional attachment to Peres’s legacy, Bill Clinton is shrewd enough to understand why his personal involvement won’t easily jump-start the process.
For one thing, Clinton lacks personal bonds with the current Palestinian leadership, including a new generation ready to replace Arafat’s octogenarian sucessor, Mahmoud Abbas. Nor does Clinton have a deep bond with Netanyahu, who is deeply skeptical of the Palestinians’ commitment to peace, and believes—correctly, say former officials—that Clinton sought to undermine his 1996 election.
Nor do foreign Washington policy insiders believe that Hillary Clinton intends to invest political capital in a new push for peace, at least not in the opening months of her presidency. “Nobody thinks that she is going to jump into a Middle East peace campaign anytime soon after her election,” said a former Clinton White House aide active on Israel issues.
In recent years, Bill Clinton himself has struck pessimistic notes about the peace process. In September 2011 he said that the killing of Rabin and the stroke that befell another Israeli prime minister whom Clinton believed wanted a deal with the Palestinians, Ariel Sharon, “make you wonder if God wants Middle East peace.”
He has also acknowledged demographic and social changes in Israel that, he says, have made peace harder to achieve than when he was president. In 2010 he noted that the growth of Israeli settlements could require the Palestinians to give up more than twice the land envisioned in the 2000 Israeli proposal Arafat rejected.
The first former Clinton official also noted that, amid the anarchy in Iraq and Syria, Middle East peace is not the central issue it was in the 1990s. “It’s just not as important as it used to be,” he said.
“The nice fairy tale of history doesn’t necessarily follow a direct line to a happy ending,” said Ben-Ami, who questioned whether either party is ready for serious peace talks. “Just putting the former president into that role [of a peace envoy] probably isn’t the single magical solution right now.”
Even so, multiple sources said that, with his wife in the Oval Office, Clinton likely would find it hard to resist at least testing the waters, even in the form of diplomatic visits or a high-profile address.
They agree that it’s clear Clinton the memories of his own struggle to achieve peace still resonate loudly in his mind.
While speaking at a rally on behalf of his wife in May, Clinton snapped at a protester who interrupted him with complaints about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.
“I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state,” Clinton said. “I had a deal they turned down.”
He did not say whether he has another life to give for that cause.