WASHINGTON, 19 July 2004 — During host Jim Lehrer’s interview with former President Bill Clinton on PBS’s “NewsHour,” the subject of the Middle East peace talks received a careful hearing. Clinton was discussing his new memoir, My Life, when Lehrer turned to the subject.
Speaking very carefully, Clinton indicated that he has given the matter a great deal of thought in the nearly four years he has been out of office. Given the fact that polls indicate that President George W. Bush may not be re-elected in November, interest in resuming the peace process and reaching a final settlement is encouraging.
“I still think the peace agreement in ‘93 was a good one, the one we signed on the White House lawn,” Clinton said. “The process, however, turned out to be flawed because of things that the people who put it together couldn’t have foreseen.
“The idea was they would take smaller steps first and the hard steps later,” he explained, “and the hard steps meaning what to do about Jerusalem, defining the borders of the Palestinian State, confining the right of return so that it wasn’t unlimited, so that you couldn’t have unlimited numbers of Palestinians coming back to Israel and turning both Israel and the new state of Palestine in the majority Arab states in 30 years. All that was supposed to be done later.”
Clinton continued, “Before Rabin died we turned over Hebron and Jericho and other areas, the Israelis did, and I signed that. Then under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with Ariel Sharon as defense minister, we had that long session at Wye River, and they made a good agreement there.
“But what we found was that by 1998 it was death by a thousand cuts,” the he noted, “that is, because we had by then a lot more Israelis move in, the settlers to the West Bank. So both sides were just strung out. Every little decision was full of political fallout. So we decided we had to go to try a final settlement. And I asked Yasser Arafat before we went to Camp David, I said, ‘Now, are you serious about this?’”
“He said, ‘Oh yes.’ He said, ‘If we don’t make an agreement under you, we’ll have to wait five years before we get back here again...’”
“I never expected to get an agreement at Camp David...,” Clinton told Lehrer. “I was disappointed that he wasn’t somewhat more forthcoming about his positions, but I understood that. Arafat thought all he had to give was security cooperation and a declaration that the conflict was over.
“At the end of my term...,” he added, “I thought we’d start at Camp David, work like crazy, and sometime between Camp David and the day I left office we’d have a deal.
“A couple of days before I left office,” Clinton said, “Arafat called to tell me what a great man I am. And I just said, ‘No, I’m not. On this I’m a failure, and you made me a failure.’ But I said,’You are the greatest campaign manager in history, because you’ve just elected Sharon by a majority that’s huge, and you think it doesn’t matter, and you’ll see. And so we’re living with it.’”
Lehrer then asked, “Why does the Middle East mean so much to you and to every other president and every other secretary of state? What is it that you are willing to devote this kind of time and energy to?”
Replied Clinton, “Well, I think in the immediate sense it should mean a lot to every American, because if there were a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, I think a settlement with Syria would follow fairly quickly, and I think more than half of the...basis for terrorism in the world would go away.”
The former president continued, “The justification for terrorism, this sort of American-Zionist axis suppressing the poor Palestinians and being insensitive to the Muslims...I think a lot of that would just go away...I went out of my way to be the first president who showed a concern, not just for the Arab countries and the oil producers, but for the Palestinians in the street and their troubles. And I was convinced that America and the world would be safer and that terrorism would be much easier to manage as a problem if we made peace. That’s the first thing.
“Second,” Clinton went on, “we have a historic commitment to the security of the people of Israel and the State of Israel. The United Nations created and recognized Israel over 50 years ago and it’s important to us. We have a lot of Jewish-Americans here. Third, the reason it’s important to us is that Islam is one of the fastest-growing faiths within America, and America needs to show that we’re not anti-Islam. We are for people being free and having opportunity everywhere.
“We did that in Bosnia, we did that in Kosovo, we did that in numerous other places in the world,” he said, “but this is important. For all those reasons, the security of Israel, the fight against terror, our ties to the Islamic world and the Muslims in America, we have a big interest in solving this.
“We’ve never tried to occupy anybody,” Clinton claimed.
“Look at us in Iraq, we’re turning it now over to the UN. We want NATO now to come in, and that’s what we ought to do, and because we need to fix every problem...My view is that there will be problems and bad people as long as the earth exists, and since we’re moving into a completely interdependent global environment, we’re better off building a world we’d like to live in when we’re not the only military superpower. We need to build a world of shared responsibility, shared benefits, and shared commitment to our common humanity.”
“Therefore, we should cooperate whenever we can,” he argued, “but reserve the right to act alone if that’s what we have to do....It’s a different emphasis and it leads us to different places, not just Iraq is in some ways not the best example. It’s all these other things that I think have helped to alienate the world from us and that also troubles Sen. [John] Kerry...
“I believe this election should be about basically two things,” Clinton concluded. “One is that, what is our role in the world and how should we pursue it? The second is, how do we keep making a more perfect union at home?...I think there are two big questions, and I think it has to be about domestic issues as well as foreign policy ones.”
Clinton asked for a second interview with Lehrer, not only because he wanted to publicize his book but also to make sure that some of his original remarks had not been misinterpreted. But his interest in picking up after the four-year interval of the Bush administration made it clear that he also wanted to start dealing with the Middle East peace process as soon as a new Kerry administration is ready.
This augurs very well for another attempt to get the peace process not only started, but finished this time.
The former president — who, until George W. Bush came along, was considered Israel’s greatest friend in the White House — obviously is rooting for a successful ending before the world further deteriorates.
Some even suggest that, because of his extraordinary interest in the subject, Clinton might be admirably qualified to be a truly impartial negotiator.
(Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.)
