Back to Ambassadorial Speeches - Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich

Remarks by Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich to the American Jewish Committee Conference May 7, 1993

AMBASSADOR RABINOVICH: Ladies and gentlemen, it's our second encounter these past two days. Yesterday was--or last night was very moving and very emotional. We'll need to be a little more cool-headed today in analyzing some significant policy questions.

I enjoyed listening to my colleague and friend, Ambassador [Samuel] Lewis, whom I have known for 16 years. And until very recently, when he was an ambassador in policymaking, I was an academic; when I arrived in this town last summer as a negotiator, he was an academic, the head of a research institute, and it's only during the last few months that we've ben able to work really together as members of two collaborating teams towards the same end. And it's something I enjoy very much.

I have one caveat. When Sam ended his tenure at the Tel Aviv embassy, he began writing a book. And we discussed that book, and he told me about the approach he took. He said, I am going to focus on the actors, on the personalities. This book will be filled with colorful portraits of the various actors. And as he became more and more successful in portraying his colleagues, he decided not to publish the book. (Laughter.)

He may be working on another set of profiles, but as a hedge, I am keeping my own notes. (Laughter.)

I found myself in agreement with almost everything that Ambassador Lewis has told you except of course that the deportation decision was not an error of judgment on the part of the Israeli government. But we will not spend the next 15 minutes amplifying on this argument.

What I would like to do is to explain our peace policy and to address it to three phases in the evolution of this process. First, the phase that was conducted by and under the previous Israeli government from October 1991 until December of 1992. Then the period during which the present Israeli government tried to push the peace process forward in collaboration with the previous U.S. administration. And thirdly, the present chapter.

Indeed, it was a major achievement to bring together Israel and the Arab parties to the Madrid conference for what is in effect the first sustained effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. If you go back in your minds over the past 40-some years of the Arab-Israeli conflict, you would be amazed to find out that there was no sustained effort to resolve the Arab- Israeli conflict.

There was one brief effort early on, there were a number of mediation efforts, a number of partial efforts, but not a sustained comprehensive effort. We are in the midst of the first one. And the ability to bring it together and to put it in place was very impressive.

It derived, of course, from two very important developments, the end of the Cold War, the West's victory in that war, and the victory of the American-led coalition in the Gulf war. And these circumstances sufficed in order to enable the administration of Bush and Baker to put it together, but as it turned out, they did not suffice to enable the administration to go through and actually consummate even a single agreement within the framework of this effort.

And everybody carries part of the responsibility for that. The Shamir government indeed was stretched to the limit its ideological and political abilities; the Arabs had their own share in refusing to go along with certain solutions to which I'll refer in a few minutes; and the administration that spent its capital on putting the process together was not really in a position to push it forward, particularly as it was approaching the end of its political life.

Then came the interesting chapter, which began with the formation of Rabin's government, and the decision by the government to make peace the centerpiece of its policies. Yes, the government was and is likewise determined to improve relations with the United States--and we can now cross out improve, it has been; to keep it as it is--to reform the economy, and to do a better job of absorbing the immigrants.

But the centerpiece of this government's domestic politics and foreign policy is the drive to achieve peace with the Arabs and the fate of this government will to a great extent be determined by its success or failure in this endeavor.

Furthermore, the government also decided on substantive changes in its peace policy. First it decided to apply an element of territorial dimension, or to introduce the element of withdrawal into the negotiations with Syria. This was not a simple decision. The policy of the Shamir government was a policy of peace for peace. That is to say, assuming that we are giving the Arabs peace, they can expect--we can expect the same, or vice versa, saying there is no need to remunerate in our party with territory in order to obtain peace from that Arab party.

It's very appealing, and as one can read nowadays through the pens of individuals who oppose the present Israeli government's policy at home and abroad, it remains a very appealing policy, but in the opinion of this government, my own personal opinion, it's not a policy that can take us anywhere because you cannot make peace with Syria or with the Palestinians on the basis of just peace for peace. It has to be a more substantial give and take. It has to be reciprocal, there has to be give and take. Compromise needs to entail concessions and movement on both parties, but also on Israel's part. This is germane to this government's outlook and I think a sine qua non for any real progress in the peace process.

So with regard to Syria, what we told the Syrians in effect was that when they give us real peace, we would be willing to give them a withdrawal. Of course they wanted to know right on what kind of withdrawal, and they certainly wanted and still want to hear the words "full withdrawal" from us. And our position is that we have told you enough, we said something very significant, very different from what the previous government has said, or the previous Israeli government said for almost 26 years. But we will say this and no more, and now it is your task to tell us that you are giving us full peace, and to elaborate that full peace means diplomatic relations, normalization and everything that a normal peaceful relationship between two neighboring countries should include.

Secondly, you have to tell us that this is a peace that will have its own life, that yes, we are negotiating a comprehensive settlement, but that we want to know from you, the Syrians, that when we make a deal, this deal will stand regardless of whether others make the same deal; it needs to have its own life.

And thirdly, we want to hear the Syrian leadership talk to its own people and indirectly to our people, not to repeat the performance by President Sadat and board a plane and come to Jerusalem--this can only happen once, but to do something or to take a series of measures that will have public resonance and will indicate to both the Syrian public and the Israeli public that Syria has made an unequivocal decision to cross the line and make peace, and not to straddle the line and to send garbled and equivocal messages to both the Syrian and Israeli public.

If these three things happen, you can hear from us an elaboration of what we mean by withdrawal. But before they happen, we will stand firm. That already happened last summer and fall.

With regard to the Palestinians, we came with a concrete autonomy model last summer, also indicated that we will agree to have elections to the executive council that will be part of the Palestinian self-governing authority, and we were willing to agree on a specific timetable, thinking of about nine months, for autonomy to be reached.

What happened last summer was that the negotiations with the Syrians began in earnest as a result of this demarche by us. There was response from Syria and the negotiations picked up. The same did not happen with regard to the Palestinians.

And then came the winter and a four-month hiatus in the negotiations, a decline in the state of the negotiations, and a genuine fear that the whole process would be debunked. This was a result of a real gap that still separates the Arabs and us, and there's no point in trying to deny it or to minimize its significance.

Secondly, there was no U.S. administration that could actually play a role in guiding, orchestrating the process. The Bush administration had been defeated and was fading; and the Clinton administration was still not in place and certainly did not have a team and did not have a Middle East policy.

And thirdly, the attack on the peace process by the enemies of the peace process, primarily the fundamentalists, was launched and was intensified precisely because it was making some progress.

And under the impact of these three elements, the peace process almost crashed. It was given a shot in the arm, as described by Ambassador Louis, and we are back in town, have been here for two weeks, will be for another week, trying to give it another go. How does it look now? On the Syrian track, I think that both the Syrians and us have identified that a deal is in the offing. We know roughly what the shape of it is. We know that we are both interested in an agreement, in a deal. We are haggling over the terms of the deal and we, the Israelis, are haggling with the best, most experienced haggler in the Middle Eastern bazaar. In the past 20 years he has smoked out many American, Israeli, and other negotiators. We hope not to be, not to be smoked out, and we are there, fighting back, trying to explain that we are interested in an agreement, but an agreement has to be based on a compromise, and Syria has yet to demonstrate to us that it's not just interested in a deal, but that it is interested in peace, and that it understands that in order to obtain peace, one must make a compromise and one cannot expect to make peace on one's original terms.

This is roughly what we are negotiating, or bargaining with the Syrians over.

With regard to the Palestinians, as a result of a very elaborate, careful preparation that has been orchestrated by the administration, and in which we and the Palestinians participated, we have for the first time real engagement in the Palestinian-Israeli talks, and a hope that these talks may take us to a concrete result, first an autonomy agreement, and then negotiation over, over final status.

But I have to stress that we measure our success on a daily basis in the Palestinian negotiations, and on Monday we cannot be sure that there will be a negotiation on Tuesday. It has to be tendered with this degree of, of care. But the care is there, and I think that there is genuine interest on the part of Palestinians and Israelis to disengage from one another at this point.

I don't think that both societies are, are ripe for any far-reaching agreements. But the mutual will to disengage is very important and it creates a commonality of, of interest.

And in the Lebanese and Jordanian negotiations there are significant developments, but on the whole the Lebanese and the Jordanians are waiting for either the Syrians or the Palestinians, and preferably both, to make the first step so that they could move in quickly.

Where does it all take us? We are in a position, I think, where we can still hope to have concrete achievements within 1993. Concrete achievements do not mean an overall solution, do not mean peace agreements. But they would mean, first, agreements on the Syrian and Palestinian tracks, and then hopefully a spillover effect into the Lebanese and Jordanians, which would give this peace process a shot in the arm, and would indicate that there are real prospect in, in this process, to be then elaborated on in 1994, and hopefully to reach, if not comprehensive agreement, then at least important--important agreements.

Because time is not, is not unlimited. I will not get into this now, but both in terms of the region, in terms of this country, time is of the essence, and we cannot negotiate as if we had an unlimited supply of time at our disposal.

This all leaves me with a certain sense of optimism, that we are engaging in a process that will lead us to some results, and an immense degree of motivation to do my private share, and to represent our collective effort in this regard.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

Q: Mr. Ambassador, Daniel Spiegel (phonetic) from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mr. Ambassador, I'm wondering--

MODERATOR: Now that won't do. We have two ambassadors.

Q: I'm sorry. Rabinovich. Actually it's for both of them, I presume. There's one country in the Middle East we haven't heard mentioned here, who recently, unfortunately lost its president, but certainly has also a prime interest in having peace in the Middle East and that's Turkey.

And I'm wondering what role, if any, Turkey has been playing in the peace process?

AMB. RABINOVICH: Unfortunately marginal. I think Turkey ought to play a greater role in the politics of the region. But Turkey, as you know, has a split identity, likes to view itself as primarily a European power. It is now quite consumed with something that unfortunately is happening in Europe, namely Bosnia.

In the Middle East, it looks primarily at the Central Asian region, and with some ambivalence that it contemplates its role in our part of the Middle East. What Turkey can do is it can be a stabilizer once we have a more normal system, Middle Eastern system of states in which Turkey can play a role.

Turkey can also play a role in the other dimension of the peace process that we have not mentioned today, namely, the multilateral talks, in which we do not negotiate with Arab states with whom we have a dispute, but in which regional issues are discussed.

One of them, water, is primarily important with regard to Turkey. Turkey is the one country in the region that has a considerable surplus of water which it can direct southward, and which can benefit both us in the south, and both Turkey, as a country, would be selling the water.

In order to do that there has to be a political agreement that would enable a pipeline from Turkey providing water to Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia across Syrian territory.

For that to happen, we need to make progress in the bilateral talks. In order to make progress in the bilateral talks, we should flaunt this prospect or vision of what can happen once we do make peace.

And it is primarily in this fashion that Turkey can be fitted into the picture.

Q: I'm Albert Janko (phonetic) from Oklahoma City. My question is addressed to Ambassador Lewis. I tend to be confused many times when I hear reports from the United States State Department as to whether the State Department has had a double standard as it applies to the state of Israel.

Specifically, you mentioned the expulsion of some, less than 500 Palestinians from the state, and didn't think that was right. And I'm curious to know if a double standard is being applied. When other states do it, especially Arab states, no mention is made of it, or very little mention is made in the press.

Is there a double standard existing and will that continue under the new administration? (Applause.)

AMBASSADOR SAMUEL LEWIS: Just a point of fact. I didn't say it wasn't right. I said it was a mistake, and I don't think it was wise. I don't think it's-- that's not the issue.

Q: (inaudible)

AMB. LEWIS: Yeah, there are lots of double standards. The whole world is full of double standards, and the United States employs a great many of them. Absolutely.

The point of course about double standards in Israel is that Israel is a special country to the United States, there's a special interest in Israel. Otherwise why would the New York Times carry 27 times as much about Israel as it does about India?

And yet things go on in India much more heinous, and devastatingly brutal in the suppression of terrorism in Kashmir by the Indian troops than anything any Israeli IDF force could ever be accused of. It gets no attention. That's the way the world is.

People want to read about Israel because Israel is Israel, and there are lots of friends of Israel, and people interested in Israel.

So it gets attention. As far as the State Department having a double standard, we probably do. We probably--

Q: Is that right?

AMB. LEWIS: It's a fact. I don't like it, you don't like it; but the State Department's made up of human beings as is the rest of the U.S. government. And their judgments about Israel sometimes I think are harsher about Israeli mistakes than about Arab misdeeds. And I think that ultimately reflects the very special nature of the relationship between the countries as much as anything else.

But I think we ought to try to minimize it. And I do.

Q: Bob Goodkind (phonetic). My question is for both ambassadors. How do you answer those who question the wisdom of making agreements with essentially unstable dictatorial governments?

How stable can such agreements really be?

AMB. LEWIS: Well, I think it's in a way more a question for Itamar, but let me start, and you pick up.

I think that's a very perceptive and important issue. Is it worth making concessions, straining your political system to reach agreement with a government which may not be there a month later?

Sometimes it's not worth it. One of the examples actually out of Itamar's last book is a scholar. When suddenly, back in 1948 or '49, Israel had an unexpected opportunity to make an agreement with Syria, under Zaim (phonetic), a dictator, Ben-Gurion decided not to pursue it. One month alter Zaim was overthrown. Clearly he made the right decision. But in fact the Middle East is a very strange place.

There's been a whole lot more stability in the governments of all the neighbors of Israel than there has been in Israel itself, or in Western Europe. How many prime ministers have you had since Hafez al-Assad got to be prime minister, or president?

Now that doesn't mean they're equivalent; in terms of stability and predictability, just because a government is dictatorial doesn't necessarily mean it's unpredictable.

We're coming to the end of an era in the Middle East. I think the real problem is this. You have a set of leaders and regimes that have been there, all of them a long time. For various reasons some have come to accept Israel's permanence and have concluded it might just be worthwhile to try to negotiate a deal.

Those leaders will pass; you'll have a new set. It could be their successors will start from a different point of view. Now, if there is an agreement with necessary security arrangements built into it, and guarantees, and a new government comes to power in Syria, or Jordan, of Egypt for that matter-- are you better off to have an agreement in place, or not to have one?

I would argue that it it's a good agreement, one that has enforcement provisions in it, the chances of maintaining peace when a regime changes are better than the chances of negotiating peace after a regime changes.

AMB. RABINOVICH: Just a few additional points. One is it is not so much a question of stability, but the question of in case of a change of government in an undemocratic country, what likelihood do we ascribe to the possibility that the new regime will continue the policies of the previous regime, or will respect commitments made by a previous government?

There are no clear-cut answers. But you need to add to this another element which is the United States as full partner. One of the reasons that we like to have the United States as full partner is that by being full partner to the agreement, the agreement is then made also in a way with the United States.

That is to say, if the--if Hafez al-Assad makes an agreement with us, and in the course of a few years time he's no longer the president of Syria, the new president of Syria, if I can--I don't have to say he or she--I can say he. (Laughter.)

And if he contemplates, contemplates the notion of abrogating the agreement, we'll have to also contemplate the notion of coming to a confrontation with the United States that would be an underwriter in this fashion of, of the agreement. For us that's a very important safety net.

Thirdly there's a question of the time element. With Egypt, we felt reasonably secure and I think the agreement that we signed with Egypt in 1979, 14 years ago, withstood several tests, some of them very severe. And we spread the implementation over time. The implementation of withdrawal took over three years.

With others, it may have to be spread over longer periods of time, which is another hedge against a sudden or an abrupt change of government.

Finally there's the question of the alternatives. If we only want to deal with Westminster-like, Westminster-style democracies, we might as well decide that we are not going to negotiate with our neighbors. We are not going to have constitutional, parliamentary democracies around us any time soon.

So the net effect of a decision to deal only with democratic or constitutional governments is--amounts to a decision to live by the sword for quite a few years to come, which doesn't mean that we then have to take the opposite decision and rush into agreement-making with anyone under the sun around us, and not to calculate the pros and cons of an agreement.

If we feel that the days of this or that ruler around us, with whom we are negotiating are numbered, this will punctuate, punctuate our decisions.

And on the whole there'll have to be a DOZ (phonetic) which takes into account some of the permanent elements at work, and some of the particular decisions with regard to the governments that deal with us.

And thirdly, the kind of deal that we can get from a party, let's say a deal that doesn't include hedges against a unilateral abrogation may not be deemed by us a very worthwhile deal.

Q: I just wanted to say to Ambassador Lewis, those of us who have been around here for many years welcome having you back. It's good to see you again. We recall so well the many times we visited with you in Israel and you explained to us what was happening in the country and the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, and we always felt very proud of the fact that you were representing our government in Israel.

Now for the question. It won't be quite as difficult as the other ones. I'm trying to get a little better understanding of the role of the Untied States. Sometimes we talk about partnership, which we just heard, sometimes we talk about even playing field, sometimes we talk about a better relationship between the United States and Israel than exists between the U.S. and the Arab countries, sometimes we talk about the U.S. being a catalyst, an honest broker.

I mean, some of these things really seem to resist each other, and I'm just wondering how you see really the role at this point. Is it a different role than Camp David? And when the guarantee comes along that we're talking about, is there going to be an economic program attached to it, because I think unless the West Bank and unless Gaza have some financial support in economic development, I would doubt that the peace agreement is going to hold too well.

So I would just like if you would talk a little bit about that, please, Sam.

AMB. LEWIS: This business of defining the American role is kind of fun. We have now almost run through the dictionary, and I think we're going to have to start using French words pretty soon. (Laughter.)

The one that Warren Christopher insists on preferring is "intermediary." And actually, in his mind it is the role somewhat analogous to the role that Algeria played in the negotiations between Iran and the United States, which he was very centrally involved in, in getting the hostages released back in '79, '80.

It is really all of the things that you specified, at different moments, but it's all of those things taken together. What it really boils down to a party, a country, that is accepted by both sides as someone that can help bring them to agreements that they can't reach by themselves.

Now, to do that, you do a lot of different things at different moments. But I guess the sum of all the things is what's referred to in the phrase "full partnership." We're catalysts when we're prodding everybody to get back to the table. Quit stalling, quit standing on ceremony, quit worrying about ideology, you can't get anywhere if you don't start negotiating--that's being a catalyst. And that's what Christopher was saying to everybody in turn all during the hiatus period.

You're an honest broker when you have reports on a direct negotiation between them, and mind you, this whole system is based around direct negotiations in meeting rooms in which we are not present, and we don't have to be present. Different from Camp David, and something that Israel has wanted to demonstrate, and I think it's an important part of the process. But it's not sufficient because countries that have been at war so long find it really difficult to negotiate directly to the point of agreement. Too much emotion, too much history, too much ideology is still there.

So you have an impasse develop. As an honest broker, we hear from both sides what their view of what's been going on in that room is. We try to figure out, well, what can we suggest to both sides separately might make it easier the next time you get in the room? How about presenting the ideas that you just described to us differently? Maybe if you talked about the issue this way, the other side would understand it better. And there are a lot of cultural gaps still here, even though Palestinians and Israelis in particular know each other quite well, and yet they don't. They know each other, and yet they don't.

Level the playing field. I've never been quite sure what that meant, frankly. It is used. I won't try to define it because I don't use it and I don't understand it very well.

The mediation, formal mediation, or arbitration, are two concepts which both the president and the secretary have explicitly excluded from what we're up to. And those are quite clearly defined in international law, as you know, Elmer. We're not setting ourselves up as a judge to say what is right or wrong or what has to be accepted, and then impose that settlement. That's arbitration. That's not what we're doing, and we're not going to do it. And politically we couldn't do it even if we wanted to do it. So it's not a worry.

Mediation. Where a mediator presents his own formal proposals and essentially forces the parties to play off his script, that comes much closer to what we did at Camp David because we drafted the texts, we took the drafts to the Egyptians, got their reactions, we rewrote the texts, we took it to the Israelis. We were all at Camp David together, but these weren't meetings together. These were the U.S. going back and forth between separate delegations. That was really a formal mediation process within an informal system. And it came at the end of a period of a year in which we'd been running around doing a lot of informal intermediary good offices kinds of things, but the formal mediation phase really occurred only at the Camp David conference itself.

We may get back to that phase at some point, but we're certainly not in it now. And I hope it will never be necessary. Yet we know that even between Egypt and Israel, direct negotiations weren't enough. They had to have us. And so far, I think we're playing it about right. I leave it to Itamar to say what he thinks. Both sides up to this stage tell us separately that in this newly renewed negotiating phase, the U.S. is playing the role of full partner in the way they both would like to see it played, and I hope we can stick to that course.

As far as economics are concerned, there will have to be a huge economic dimension to a general peace settlement. One reason why the multilateral negotiations are so important is that clearly the U.S. taxpayer is not going to be in the mood to finance it. And I'm not revealing any secrets when I say that in getting multilateral working groups involving--on economic issues and water issues and environmental issues, which involve many European countries, the Japanese, other Arab states, it is not by chance that we're hoping that getting them involved in the negotiations in that way gives them a stake in the result, which will be reflected in the final economic arrangements. (Applause.)

AMB. RABINOVICH: I am in full agreement with Ambassador Lewis, as I said. I just want to point out that cultural differences exist not only between Israelis and Arabs, also between Americans and Middle Easterners. And sometimes the role of an Israeli ambassador here is to explain to his countrymen back home that "sure, sure," is not a positive answer. (Laughter.)

And "I can see your point" is not an endorsement.

Thank you. (Applause.)