This new Fathom podcast series is called Those Who Tried: Conversations with the Peace Processors. We will seek the views of people who have been intimately involved in the Middle East peace process and, having drawn lessons from that experience, will have something interesting to say about making peace in the present conjuncture. We’re delighted to start the series with a discussion with Elliott Abrams. During the George W. Bush presidency, Elliott was Deputy National Security Adviser and an NSC staff member in the White House. He was the man who handled Israeli Palestinian affairs ‘day in and day out’ as he put it in his excellent memoir of those years Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

This interview is available in both video and podcast formats, as well as a transcript.

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Part 1: The Day After: A Plan for Gaza

Alan Johnson: Thanks for being with us today, Elliott. An organisation you are involved with has just released a report, The Day After: A Plan for Gaza. Could you start by telling us who was involved in producing the report, and what its main recommendations are?

Elliott Abrams: Happy to be inaugurating your series. The report was done by a combination of JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Vandenberg Coalition; I chair Vandenberg. We started it three plus years ago as a home for, or network of what I’d call Republican or conservative internationalism. People from the last several Republican administrations fighting isolationism. Our Advisory Board is about 125 now. It’s basically 124 Republicans and Joe Lieberman. We got together with JINSA to produce a team, mostly of people who’ve been colleagues in the George W. Bush administration. We thought most of the proposals for Gaza after the war were not sensible. For example, that Israel should govern permanently, or that the Palestinian Authority should do it, which we thought was not sensible because they are not capable of doing it. So, we did a serious project. We did about one hundred zoom interviews, two trips to Israel, and one to Saudi Arabia to talk to people who were knowledgeable about this. Saudis and Emiratis, Americans, Palestinians, Israelis, former officials, current officials, military people, intelligence people.

The basic suggestion is that there be formed what would be called an International Trust for Gaza Reconstruction. It would be formed by a number of governments. Starting with the US, Egypt, Saudis, Emiratis – countries that wish Gaza well and have some obvious role, for different reasons, in the future of Gaza. This trust would, in essence, constitute a kind of government for Gaza for the next couple of years. It would be the funnel for funding. We thought the funding should go through the Trust which could then disseminate it through the World Food Programme, UNICEF, NGOs. It would work with an advisory council of Gazans and Palestinians who live there or who live in the diaspora, and it would have to work up a plan for security.

Security is going to be messy; there’s no easy answer to it. But we thought start with several thousand Palestinian police who are there and who are not really Hamas people; they are Fatah people. You add to this, working with the clans or hamulas, which exist in Gaza. And we know that the Israelis have already begun to try doing this, working with clans, working with business groups to get food in. You add to that, we hope, governments that are willing to help. For example, if the Egyptians are building, as they are, a tent city for ten thousand people on the Gaza-Egyptian border, they should provide security for that tent city. If the Emirates are going to build a tent city for ten or twenty or thirty thousand people, they should provide security for their tent city. And finally, private military companies. We know that many NGOs and even UN agencies use private security around the world, and we talked to a number of people involved in this and think that they have a contribution to make as well when it comes to preventing looting, protecting convoys of humanitarian aid – we’ve seen recently that that’s needed in Gaza. So that’s the basic outline of the plan.

The United Nations?

AJ: Some people might say one missing element is the supranational. A lot of people are very keen for the United Nations to play a leading role in in this. You seem more focused on the multinational alliance of states with the capacity and the motivation to do the job there. Why is that? Why are you sceptical about a UN superintendency of that process?

EA: Because the UN has failed in so many ways. UNWRA is a UN agency and UNWRA we now know, if we didn’t already, is completely riddled with people from Hamas and was allowing Hamas to use its facilities as warehouses and as headquarters. UNWRA cannot be trusted. The UN as an institution is generally hostile to Israel and the Israelis don’t trust it. We thought it would be much better to have a completely independent entity created which could work with UN agencies when that was useful, but not rely on the UN as the central body here.

AJ: Just one more question about security, then I’ll ask Calev to come in. I guess the cynic, or the sceptic would say why would any nation state agree to put its forces in the front line for what could be hit and run ongoing terrorist attacks from Hamas holdouts? Also, Iran will be trying to destabilise the situation. It’s a big ask for any nation state to get involved in that. Why do you think they would?

EA: They might not. Your point is a fair one, and our thought was not to ask any state to come in and be the police or the security force, but rather to talk to states, Arab states, or anybody else who’s willing, about playing very special roles. For example, as I noted, if let’s say the Saudis are building a community, a tent city, or a refugee camp, then to police that camp. But your point is fair. They may be unwilling, which is why we thought private forces might have a role that would be less politically sensitive.

Calev Ben-Dor: Can you share your conversation with the Emiratis and the Saudis? Is there a type of kind of quid pro quo for their involvement in what is after all not really their primary interest?

EA: They’re concerned about domestic public opinion. They are not democracies, obviously, but they’re they care about their own publics, particularly the Saudis, because they have a very large public: twenty-five to thirty million Saudis. And the Palestinian cause is a popular one. So that leads them to want to do something, or be seen to be doing something, positive. Thus, we see the Emiratis involved in the newly announced American Maritime Supply project. So, I think that they’re open to thinking about this. Yes, they’re all worried about the possibility that their people might be killed. Or that they might end up in conflict with the Israelis in a particular location in Gaza. So yes, they are all concerned. But we didn’t find them saying ‘this is a terrible idea. Go away.’ The reaction was more of a ‘we’ll look at this, we’ll study this.’ Look, we’re not expecting any government, Arab or American, to say ‘Eureka! This is it.’ We wanted to introduce some of these ideas into circulation as governments put together their plans.

Part 2: The Road Map Process: Lessons for Today

CBD: Let me roll a few questions together. From late 2002 to the end of the Bush Presidency you were extremely close to the heart of what subsequently became known as the Road Map, then to Sharon’s disengagement policy – I think you were been the first American to hear about that from Sharon – and then subsequently to the Annapolis Process when Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas tried but failed to strike a peace agreement.

One of one of your main conclusions of your book Tested by Zion is that ‘without a decent, honest and competent Palestinian government, no kind of progress towards peace and prosperity for Palestinians is possible’. You advise us to ‘stop looking for a magic formula conjured up in a diplomatic salon’ and focus instead on ‘building up in the West Bank, slowly step by step, a peaceful, democratic Palestinian state’. You urge a focus on ‘institution building, on nation building, on a decent political culture, not dramatic diplomatic breakthroughs by finding a formula on words’. Is that a fair reading of your perspective? We’d be fascinated to know how you arrived at that view and what experiences of yours were formative. Also, you write that you were struck by a comment by Ehud Barak, who said that, even after decades, ‘I’m still not clear on the true position of the Palestinian leaders. The closer we get, the more they withdraw. Are they ready for painful decisions?’ After your experience as part of the Bush team, I’m wondering if you feel you are clear on ‘the true position of the Palestinian leaders’?

EA: Well, first, on the quote you read from my book, I remember Tony Blair saying to George Bush that the diplomacy isn’t going to create facts on the ground, facts on the ground are going to have to tell us what the diplomacy can and cannot do. One more quote: Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister in a speech, not a private conversation, said that Israel wasn’t created on 14 May 1948, it was announced on 14 May. It was created through decades of work by the Zionists, building institutions. And that’s what we, Palestinians, have to do, Fayyad said. He was a state builder.

The problem I think, is that there were very few such people. I think it’s probably right that Mahmoud Abbas would like a decent Palestinian state, but he’s not willing to do anything for it. For example, he’s not willing to squeeze out corruption. He thrives on and he survives on corruption; so does the whole political leadership. So, it is not right to say, ‘if they had magic wands what kind of Palestine would they create’? It is reasonable to say, what are they doing? These are not people who are eighteen. They’ve had careers as Palestinian leaders and they have done next to nothing to create a decent Palestine. There are exceptions. Fayyad is the most famous exception, and there are others. But if you look at the Fatah leadership over decades, these are the people who have named schools and plazas and roads after terrorist murderers. These are the people who’ve gotten rich through corruption. So, I think it is fair to say that Palestinian nationalism remains essentially negative, as it has been for 100 years. It was about defeating the Zionists. And after the Zionists created the state and the world recognised it, Palestinian nationalism was about destroying that state rather than building a Palestinian state that could live side by side with Israel, in peace and security. So, I think this is not an intellectual question, it’s a ‘facts on the ground’ question. What have they done with the power they’ve had? What kind of Palestine have they created with the leeway they had in the West Bank and Gaza? The story is terrible. Terrible for Palestinians.

On Salam Fayyad and Fayyadism

AJ: I think you hint in your book at some frustration on your part that the Israelis and the Americans didn’t seize that moment and give more support to Salam Fayyad. Is that so, and if so, why do you think they didn’t?

EA: It is, you’re reading it correctly. It was never anybody’s priority. I would say to Israelis or to top American officials that it is critical, this institution building, this state building, that it’s more important, much more important, than the diplomacy, than Tzipi Livni sitting with Abu Ala or Olmert with Abbas. The answer I would always get was ‘oh yeah, we’re going to do it all. We’re not going to forget about that. We’re going to do that too.’ But it was always put in second place.

Let me give a concrete example. There would be a round of negotiations coming, let’s say, of Olmert and Abbas. And people would say ‘we need something to improve the tone. Let’s release prisoners.’ And of course, the prisoners were not common thieves. The prisoners who were to be released were killers. They were terrorists. Think about that for a minute. You’re doing this, in theory, to make the negotiating session go more smoothly, but what you were doing to make that happen is to release into Palestinian society the worst people in Palestinian society. The very people who are against what you’re trying to do diplomatically. This to me was exactly what Blair warned against, putting the diplomacy over the realities in the West Bank or Gaza.

Talking to Terrorists

AJ: The Bush administration, eventually, took the decision to marginalise Arafat. If I can play devil’s advocate, you often hear the argument here in the West that you can only negotiate with the leadership that exists. People often give the example of Northern Ireland, saying it was only when we started to talk to McGuinness and Adams that we got the Good Friday Agreement and so on. Can you say why you think you were right to marginalise Arafat, and why you are right to take that attitude towards the terrorist leadership of Hamas?

EA: Well, I’d say a couple of things. The first is that in a way, we did try, precisely, to do what you say happened with respect to the IRA. The Israelis and the Americans had said no one may speak to the to the PLO. We changed it, and the Israelis changed it. What did we do with Arafat? We brought him to the White House and there was this great ceremony on the White House lawn. But who was he? It turned out that he was the man who wore a gun to the UN General Assembly. It turned out, and we learned this – and I go through this in detail in the book – that even after he’d been to the White House, he was buying weapons secretly from Iran. Arafat had his chance, and he didn’t seem to want it. He was unable to make the transition from terrorist leader to political leader. He couldn’t do it. He was not interested in building better schools. So we did try, and it failed. And the main reason it failed was Arafat.

The other reason it failed, I think, is that in the case of the IRA it was possible to cut off most of the financial and ideological support that was going to them from Washington, from Boston, from London. It was possible to isolate it, not completely, but substantially. By contrast, as long as the Islamic Republic of Iran exists, we’re not able to isolate Hamas and those terrorist forces in Palestinian society. We used to debate whether the Shia Iranians would support the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. ‘No way, that’s crazy’ people would say. Well, it turned out not to be crazy. And as long as that Iranian support continues and grows – and there’s a lot more of it now than there was twenty years ago – you’re not going to see the Palestinians make the change that the IRA made.

CBD: The thing with comparisons is they always work until they don’t. Some people might argue that the IRA came to the conclusion that the military option was not going to be successful. From your experience to what extent, the Palestinian national movement thinks today about negotiations or violence, as the most effective way to achieve liberation, whatever that may mean?

EA: I think they’re divided again. There are people like Fayyad who argue against the military approach, and Abbas himself has never promoted terrorism. He’s said many times in public he’s against it. But from the Iranian and Hamas point of view, the goal remains to destroy Israel. They don’t care how many Palestinians they kill doing it. If you look at the way Hamas has governed Gaza, those tunnels that it built at fantastic expense, tunnels that extend at greater length than the London tube, those are not for protecting Palestinians. Those are for protecting Hamas. They don’t care about Palestinians. That’s not their concern. Their concern is to destroy Israel.

How do Palestinians defeat those people? Well, one way is to try. When you name parks and schools and plazas after such people, you’re not trying. Trying also means, to the extent you can, good governance and non-corrupt governance. They aren’t really trying that either. We in the West have to take some blame here. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, it was the British who appointed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. There were other candidates. Later, the Americans went along with Arafat while Israelis brought him back from exile and handed him the West Bank and Gaza. So on two historic occasions, we have been responsible for promoting, anointing, and celebrating the worst elements of Palestinian society as the leaders. So there’s a lot of blame to go around here.

Part 3: The Annapolis Negotiations

AJ: In the course of reading your book Tested by Zion, my own view of the Annapolis negotiations changed quite substantially. I had previously spoken to people who are involved in the process as negotiators, a wonderful guy called Tal Becker being one of them. And I know for a fact from talking to Tal that there were very serious teams on both sides working till the early hours of the morning and they were closing gaps on some of the core issues. And I guess that can be true as well as the sense I got from your book, which was that – this is not your word, it’s mine – there was an element of otherworldliness about the negotiations, that there wasn’t actually a chance for a deal, but for various political reasons, the two parties were pushing on as if there were. Also, I got the sense that one of the reasons Salam Fayyad’s nation-building approach was neglected, at least to a degree, was this one-eyed focus on a diplomatic breakthrough that was perhaps never really possible. What’s your summary view of the Annapolis process now, as politicians today are hoping to restart the talks process after the war is over?

EA: I would accept the term ‘otherworldly’. I was at a couple of sessions between Tzipi Livni and Abu Ala and Saeb Erekat. Abu Ala, now deceased, but an important Palestinian negotiator, was unwilling to say that he could accept Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel; thirty-eight thousand people and twenty thousand people respectively. If you think the Israelis are going to get out of Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel, this is not a serious negotiation. I also remember a session where Livni, for political reasons, because she was running for Prime Minister, said to Abu Ala ‘if you raise Jerusalem again, I’m leaving.’ And one thing they never closed in on was Jerusalem. Now, Olmert did. He jumped the process and said ‘I have a plan.’ We’re talking now about the summer and fall of 2008. Olmert had already announced that he was leaving as Prime Minister, a combination of the effect of the Lebanon war on his popularity and then the indictments. Under Israeli law, he was then a caretaker Prime Minister who should not have made important, historic decisions. But he was doing it anyway, and he made an offer to Abu Mazen that, for example, divided Jerusalem. It really internationalised Jerusalem under a committee that included Israelis, Palestinians, Saudis, Jordanians. I remember thinking then this won’t pass his own the cabinet, and even if it were to get through the cabinet, it wouldn’t get through the Knesset. It was unreal and actually very dangerous because had his own cabinet or the Knesset rejected the offer after Abu Mazen accepted it, then the narrative would have been the Palestinians said yes to peace, and the Israelis said no to peace. Abu Mazen didn’t accept it.

All of this is being done at this wonderful diplomatic level. Meanwhile, on the ground, there is Hamas growing stronger, winning an election. There’s Abbas afraid to hold an election because he’ll lose because he’s so incredibly unpopular. And there is Olmert who’s got, at that point, maybe 20 per cent approval in the polls and has already resigned, and Israel is on its way to an election. So, what are we doing here? That was my view.

In the book I tell the story of being at the Annapolis conference which was held in a very big room with representatives of something like thirty countries. I got up at one point, left the room, and one of the important Arab foreign ministers happened to get up at the same time, and he and I stood at the edge of the room and looked back into it. And he said to me, ‘you do know what is going to come of all this?’ I said ‘tell me’, and he said ‘nothing.’ And he was right in the end.

Part 4: Is the ‘Two-State Solution’ still possible?

AJ: Recently you wrote an article in Tablet magazine with the title ‘The Two State Delusion’. On the other hand, the report that we began this discussion talking about says that you want to see a political horizon for the two-state solution, which is still the international community’s default position. Fathom has put an enormous amount of work into trying to put some life back into the two state ‘paradigm’ as we like to call it, rather than ‘solution’ (because we think the political horizon needs to be pushed off some distance if you want to be realistic about it).

Let me start off somewhere pessimistic and see what you have to say. When I interviewed Benny Begin a decade ago, he said the moment when he thought the two-state solution was impossible with the Palestinians was when he read Mahmoud Abbas tell the New York Times, after Annapolis and the Olmert offer, that the reason he wasn’t able to respond positively was because ‘the gaps were great’. Begin said to me that if the gaps were too great for Abbas after Annapolis – an offer so generous it would probably not have got through the Israeli cabinet – then it was clear that the maximum Israel could ever offer was never going to match the minimum the Palestinians could ever accept.

EA: Well, let me say first, we proposed a plan for Gaza after the war. There were ten of us on this committee, and we wanted to make it clear that if you favour the two-state solution, then you need to change the situation in Gaza and here’s how you can do it. Some of us I think genuinely favour and believe that the two-state solution is realistic. Personally, I don’t. I don’t think it’s realistic. I can explain why.

AJ: Please.

EA: First, there is the problem that nobody was talking about it on 1 October. To be pushing for it now is a victory for terrorism. But let’s go deeper. I certainly don’t think it’s plausible while the Islamic Republic of Iran is building what the Israelis called the Ring of Fire dedicated to attacking it: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen. Iran is building this ring, and they have a goal: death to Israel. To them, it’s not a slogan. It is an objective. We have seen what happened in Gaza. If you create a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the Iranians will be licking their chops. There is a border with Syria through which weapons can be passed. Right now, they’re doing it. The Jordanians try to stop it. The Israelis try to stop it. There are many more weapons in the West Bank now than there were a few years ago.

But if there were a Palestinians sovereign state, then every Israeli effort to stop it would be an act of war. Israel would be invading a sovereign state. People say it would be ‘demilitarised’. But what does that mean? First of all, the new state would need a police force. What happens when that police force says ‘we need armoured cars, we need machine guns, we need SWAT teams.’ And what happens when the new state wants an Iranian embassy? Embassies have diplomatic pouches and that doesn’t mean an envelope; a diplomatic pouch can be a truck. What’s in it? None of your business.

Let’s suppose that the Palestinians agree to some of these limitations. Who’s going to enforce them? There will immediately be a ‘stab in the back’ legend about the Palestinians who agreed to these things, just as it happened in Germany after Versailles, and just as it happened in the Rhineland. Somebody is going to have to enforce or not enforce violations. Who will it be? It’s going to be the Israelis. And when they do, the UN, the EU and everybody else will land on them for being ‘warmongers’.

That’s today. If you say we’re talking about twenty years in the future and the Islamic Republic of Iran is gone then I think that does change the Middle East. But I do wonder, in the long run, why is it essential to have a Palestinian state? Let’s go to the question of rights. How about a Kurdish state? What about Tibet? What about the Basques? Tell me why the Kurds don’t deserve a state. I think an independent Kurdistan would stand on its own feet. But think about an independent Palestine – large population, no resources, landlocked. How’s it going to survive? Won’t it really need to depend on either Jordan or Israel? So, my own view is that the fundamental decision of the British and the UN for partition was correct. It is better for Palestinians and better for Israelis. The question in my mind is what is that Palestinian entity? And it seems to me it makes much more sense for it to be in confederation with a state than to be an independent state on its own.

AJ: And for you that would be a confederation with Jordan?

EA: It would be because if you ask which makes more sense, a confederation with the Jewish Hebrew-speaking state or with a Muslim, Arab, Arabic-speaking state, the latter makes more sense.

CBD: Elliott, you write in ‘The Two-State Delusion’ article about the depressing polling in the West Bank and Gaza after 7 October, showing high levels of support for the attack. Looking forward in maybe the medium term, do you see any hope for a Palestinian leadership emerging that would be more open to peaceful coexistence?

EA: Maybe. I’d like to think the answer is yes. It will depend in part, as I say, on Iran, given all it is doing to radicalise the Palestinians. And it depends partly on us, if you will ,the West, including Israel. Who do we empower? If you go back to Oslo, we empowered Arafat. And we didn’t really make an effort – until, I would say, the middle years of the George W. Bush administration, 2003-2005 – to say ‘no, we won’t deal with thugs and thieves’. We did not insist, in a place that was living really on our foreign assistance budgets, on clean government. We did not say ‘no, you may not name a school after a woman who murdered children.’ We did not say ‘no, you may not pay salaries to murderers in Israeli prisons, and you may not pay salaries on a sliding scale that depends on how terrible their crime was.’ We just went along with all this. So, we shouldn’t be so shocked that it has a significant effect.

I fear the turn away from all that would be awfully slow. But it can be done. Look at Saudi Arabia which is, year by year, changing its textbooks. The committees and NGOs that study Saudi textbooks say, year after year, they’re squeezing out the hatred of Christians and Jews. That’s been very slow in the West Bank and hasn’t happened at all in not only in Hamas schools, but in UNWRA schools. We have an opportunity now to begin that, but it’s a generational change. Alan, you mentioned ten or twenty years. I think that’s right, because it would be really dangerous to create a Palestine now, a Palestinian state whose people have been brainwashed into deep hatred of Jews and Christians. It’s interesting to me that Borell in the EU and Blinken for the US talk about an independent, sovereign Palestine. They never add the word ‘democratic’. And I think one of the reasons is, they’re afraid. They’re afraid that if you had a free election, Hamas would win. And if that is what the Palestinians want, then why support the creation of a Palestinian state that will be militaristic and revanchist and want conflict with Israel?

AJ: In the UK, our Foreign Secretary David Cameron has been pushing pretty strongly for a two-state solution. Borell, the EU Representative you just mentioned, has been saying Israel shouldn’t have a veto. That no one should have a veto. Meanwhile the protesters in the West are not chanting for the two-state solution but for ‘Intifada! Intifada!’ and our intellectual journals, such as The London Review of Books, for instance, are places where you can find out that Abbas is a dirty sellout and Hamas is the glorious resistance. It’s hard to identify politically serious voices in the West who understand what the dangers are, were Israel to simply ‘get out’ of the West Bank. Is that lack of realism something to worry about or not?

EA: Yes it is, because it’s politics over realism. And the Israelis don’t have that luxury because they’re the ones who are the target of both Iran and the Palestinian extremism of the Hamas variety. What I hope is that this talk of two states will lead to a political horizon of Palestinian statehood, but that the immediate steps we take will be sensible. For example, if you want Palestinian statehood, I would argue one of the first things you need to do is to figure out a programme to squeeze corruption out of Palestinian politics. One of the first things you should do is to attend to the question of schools, teaching, textbooks, so that you’re building a polity that will be able to support a sensible moderate government that will try to better Palestinians rather than attacking Jews. There are things you can do with the Palestinian economy in the West Bank, and obviously rebuilding Gaza. Those are steps that should be taken whether you favour a Palestinian State in one year or in twenty-one years. Efforts to do things like ‘let’s recognise the Palestinian state now or tomorrow,’ take leave of reality and are not going to help actual living Palestinians in any way.

But the lack of realism is not universal. In the United States, the view of China and Russia has changed a lot over the last five years. The view of China as a hostile power, not a partner, has become very widespread. I think it’s growing in Europe. And the view of Russia in Europe has also changed greatly. In many ways, in both in Europe and in the US, there’s more realism about international politics. But not about the Middle East. There’s no realism about the Iranian nuclear programme. We keep getting warned about it by the head of the IAEA, Raphael Grossi. But we don’t want to do anything about it. And there is no realism about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And we see lots of demonstrations that I think are both anti-Zionist and fundamentally anti-Semitic. So, to borrow a phrase Israel is now, if you will, the Jew among nations. That is, it is becoming the target of a very widespread and deep anti-Semitism to an extent that I think has shocked Jews both in Europe and in the United States. You now see manifestations of anti-Semitism that you didn’t see even a year or two ago. So, I think we face not a general unreality in the West, but a particularly unreal view of the Middle East, one ingredient of which is a rising antisemitism. Sorry to end on a sour note like that.

CBD: So the good news is any lack of realism in the West is not applied globally. The bad news is that it happens to be directed at the place where the Jewish state is located.

EA: That’s my view.

AJ: Thanks Elliott. You have kicked off this series of interviews splendidly. Thank you very much for talking to Fathom today.

EA: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.