Racing the Clock:
The Quest to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

President William J. Clinton's Remarks at
Tel Aviv University's National Tribute Dinner in honor of S. Daniel Abraham

Monday, April 19, 2004, The Waldorf-Astoria, New York City
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you Joel, and thank you friends of Tel Aviv University, my old friend Itamar, Dov, Michael, ladies and gentlemen.

I’m just sort of a fifth wheel here tonight. I’m supposed to say thank you for giving Danny the award. He is my great friend, and we’ve been friends for many years. I have a lot of friends in this room. I was touched by what Joel said, but if you knew his grandchildren – you’d give them toys too. Hillary always tells everybody I spend all day at Chappaqua rewriting history. That’s basically what I’m trying to do. So I might as well give you a dose of it tonight.

I want to say a couple of things very seriously. First of all, I’m grateful that you gave the award to Danny Abraham, and I’m grateful for the speech that he gave tonight, and I’m grateful for the work that he’s done. There are a lot of people here, starting with Sandy Berger, who were in my administration for eight years, who worked for peace in the Middle East, who were often on the receiving end of Danny’s insistent hectoring. And I loved it. I have to say, you know, before I became president, I really didn’t know whether all these kind of private efforts for peace made a difference. I didn’t. I had no way to know. I’d never been involved in the negotiations in the Middle East. It wasn’t my life. I was a governor. I knew more about worm and hooks for fish, than I did really in the fish of the Middle East.

So the first thing I want to say is: they do make a difference. And they have made a huge difference in the last three years, when, actually the intifada started in August of 2000, and then we lost the opportunity to make peace in December and January of 2001. I think – although it has been horrible off and on since then – I think it would have been much worse if it hadn’t been for people of goodwill, like Danny, and so many others, who tried to keep open the doors of communication. Who kept trying to see across the dividing line and find human beings still on the other side. So that’s the first thing I want to say. It has made a difference. It does make a difference.

The second thing I would like to say is that whether you agree with the particulars of the proposal that was presented in the survey Danny talked about or not – I think they’re pretty good particulars – but whether you agree with them or not, they make a larger point. The same point the Geneva Agreement and the other agreements that have been made by Israelis and Palestinians acting in a more private capacity make: There is a deal here. There is a peace agreement here. And everybody knows within two or three degrees what it would be. So the real question is how many young people are going to have to die before us old folks give them the future they deserve?

We’re all afraid of looking weak. I’m ashamed to say, in some of the years when I was in the White House, people would say ‘well, you know, we might, maybe you’re right, Mr. President. Maybe this is what you ought to do, but you can’t afford to look weak.’ Every now and then Sandy will say, you know. I’d get exasperated and say, ‘you know, we could always kill somebody tomorrow. Why don’t we, but we can’t bring them back to life. Why don’t we try one more time?’ And, the real problem is, as we organize ourselves to meet the day-to-day challenges of life in any endeavor, the more successful we are in meeting the challenges before us, the more likely we are to be organized and to be psychologically attuned in ways that keep us from seeing how to get from where we are to where we need to go.

When Danny was saying 76 percent of the people of Israel would support that peace agreement, I thought to myself, how many issues that I had to deal with in eight years as president, where two-thirds, 70, 75 percent of the American people were for option X, and the political process of the United States would not allow us to get to option X? And the fact that people believed in X in theory didn’t mean they would clear out all the politicians that were standing between them and option X. Because they never quite understood how the deal worked.

I say that to make this point: I believe that all of you as citizens, whether you support the current policy or not, and we have, we had today in that other meeting, as I presume we have tonight people here from Israel, from the United States, we have Palestinians, people from Arab lands, people from all points of view, I just have to say it: Everybody knows what the deal is. Everybody knows within two or three degrees what this thing would look like if we really wanted to make peace. What no one can figure out is how to get from here to there. I didn’t get that done for you. But I did do that – You got the picture now. And you can change the picture a little bit at the edges, but everybody knows what it is. So, Danny filled in the blanks one way. Geneva – they filled in another way. There are other options filled in another way. The details are not as important as getting there. And the whole world, I believe, would have a brighter prospect, if this could be done. Far beyond the millions of people who live right there in the region. This would do more to lift the fear of people all across the world of those who are different from them. It would do more to give people courage to fight in common cause against terror. It would do more to undermine the arguments being made in madrassas, in remote villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan and other places for terror than anything else. And we already know pretty much what we need to do. No one can figure out how to get from here to there.

Now, I want to just make a couple of points. I actually agree with what Danny said. It wouldn’t surprise me if Prime Minister Sharon [did] make a lasting contribution to the peace. But that depends on whether Gaza is the beginning or the end of this process. I like this Gaza move. But is it the beginning or the end? Is it something to buy time? Or is it part of a larger strategy?

Here’s what happened: When Mr. Arafat turned down the peace proposal that we made in 2000 and 2001, December and January at Taba, and then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak had taken it, the voters of Israel decided they had no partner for peace. And so they voted for the guy they thought would be the toughest. You know, if – by then we had had the intifada going on for a few months – and if you know we’re in for a long, hard fight, we might as well just, you know, get the toughest guy on our team and put him out on the field.

Then it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The problem is, if we can’t deal with the PLO, who do we deal with? So then there was this effort to have prime ministers for the PLO. And we had the two senior aides of Arafat – the people who knew better than anybody else on the face of the earth what was wrong with the PLO – Abu Mazen and Abu Ala. Then we had to decide, well, are we going to deal with them now? Or do they have to sort of put Arafat in purdah somewhere? Whatever the male equivalent of purdah is. Can we not do any business with them at all unless they can do something we knew darn good and well they could not do? Who else are we going to deal with? Not Hamas. Israel has just got rid of the second Hamas leader in a row. For reasons good and sufficient based on their terror experience, but reinforcing the fact that you cannot make peace with yourself. That is the sound of one hand clapping, as the poet said. So I agree with what my friend Danny said. And I’m not running for anything and I can say what I please. And I hope I haven’t cause the, let me say this, and I hope I haven’t cost the junior senator from New York too many votes here tonight.

But look. You know I love Israel. You know I believe the United States should always maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge so that it can defend itself. This is not about your – Israel’s security. This is about what a secure Israel is. This is about what children are going to live like when they get up in the morning. In this last intifada – hardly anybody ever talks about this with me, but I try never to give a speech unless I mention it – you’ve got over 1,900 dead Palestinians, and 900 dead Israelis, the casualty ration almost down to two-to-one. In the first intifada it was eight-to-one. There has never been any kind of violent encounter between the Israelis and the Arabs, since the beginning of the state of Israel, where the casualty ratio was that close. And they have more people, and they’re having more babies. And you have all these radicals over there saying, ‘let’s just wait. If it’s, who cares if it’s 10, or 20, or 30 years.’ It is madness. Will the United States ever let Israel down? Will we ever abandon Israel? Will we ever let anything happen to it? No. No. But the question is: what is life going to be like? You know, you can’t – what’s that old joke about the Broadway play that’s a bust? You know? I put it on, but I couldn’t make anybody come.

The most important thing Danny Abraham said up here in his whole speech, in my opinion, was that talented young people are leaving Israel. When there was peace, and people thought we were moving, talented, young people were pouring into Israel.

So, this is what I want you to think about. We can’t deal, we can’t ask Israel to deal with Hamas unless they renounce terror. The last two Palestinian prime ministers have tried to make deals with Hamas. One of them lasted, as I recall, 53 days. That’s a pretty good 53 days. When you have a peace process, you have, almost inevitably, angry people who try to take advantage of it. But if everybody’s working together, you have less death. We had one whole year in my second term where not a single solitary Israeli was killed by a terrorist act, and it's the only time in the history of the state of Israel when that is true. The only time it ever happened.

So that’s the only thing I want to ask you about. You go out of here tonight and say: I’m for this thing Prime Minister Sharon wants to do on Gaza. But it’s got to be part of a strategy that engages people. And the only people we have to dance with right now, in my opinion, are the elected representatives that we signed the agreement with years ago. I do not think we should prejudge their incapacity to do this. If we make an agreement, they don’t keep it, they don’t help fight terror, they don’t honor the agreement, fine. Walk away. But we basically have made judgments because of a very foolish decision that Yasser Arafat made in walking away from the peace agreement that I put on the table. Now, unless you’re from Israel, none of you can be, possibly, as mad at him as I am. But that is irrelevant to what the lives of the children of Israel, and the Palestinian children are going to be like.

We have to have some engagement here. This Gaza move has to be the beginning. And you have to ask yourself. You know what the deal is. It doesn’t really, almost doesn’t matter what the details are – as long as nobody’s security is compromised, and as long as nobody’s ability to practice their faith is shattered – what difference does the rest of it make compared to the benefits of peace?

The real problem is not what the peace should look like. The real problem is how to get from here to there. The real problem is the longer you live, the more good reasons you have for not doing what you know you ought to do. The real problem is that impressionable, foolish young people go out and murder and die because of the stubbornness of old people who can’t bring themselves to get from here to there. The issue is not the security of Israel. America will never permit anything to happen to the security of the state of Israel. The issue is what will life be like when the Israelis wake up every morning? In order to do that, in my opinion, we have to make a deal. And we have to deal with somebody. We cannot make a deal with ourselves. And Israel cannot make a deal with America. We don’t live there. A country is not like a home. You cannot change the neighborhood in which you live. You are stuck with your neighbors. If we are there for your security, if we are prepared to give a security guarantee for the long run, if we are prepared to bring the benefits of peace to all who embrace it, I personally believe this Gaza thing is great, but I hope it’s step one, and we’ll go on and do this. Enough people have died.

Thank you and God bless you.