Let My People Know

The Incredible Inside Story of Middle East Peace—and What Lies Ahead

Aryeh Lightstone

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781641772655
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

On January 28, 2020, the Trump peace plan was unveiled at the White House. The following 11 months, concluding with the signing of the Israel-Morocco normalization agreement, comprised one of the most fascinating and impactful periods of U.S. foreign policy in a generation. The Middle East was given real respite from what had been an almost perpetual state of strife. But then, in less than 150 days, the White House's next occupant succeeded in bringing back the tragic status quo. Let My People Know will explain what the Biden administration doesn't understand about diplomacy and foreign affairs, what it must do moving forward, and what the Middle East as a whole should now attempt in order to return to the path of security and prosperity.Aryeh Lightstone had the unique privilege of being in the room for nearly every major decision and discussion involving U.S.-Middle East foreign policy. He was tasked with the most complex and sensitive component of the momentous Abraham Accords: putting them into practice—and quickly. He was on every flight to and from Israel and the other Accords nations. Further, he headed the Abraham Accord Business Summit and the Abraham Fund and served as the key contact between Israel and the Accords nations.As such, Lightstone was the bridge that spanned myriad cultures and personalities, all during a pandemic and amid extraordinary geopolitical events. He also happens to be a rabbi and an enthralling storyteller. Let My People Know will provide readers with an unvarnished account of the contours and idiosyncrasies of the Middle East—and an expert look at what lies ahead. It will be the book to which many different audiences will turn for years to learn exactly how the "deal of the century" was struck, achieving what had seemed impossible for decades.

1 “I HAVE MY CANDIDATE”

The U.S. Embassy in Israel never had a true political appoin- tee, from outside the professional foreign policy world, before President Trump nominated David Friedman to serve as his ambassador to Israel. That nomination was a shock to the system. Friedman was not a known personality in Washington, D.C., but his writings and charitable involvement left no doubt that he would be unapologetically pro-Israel. It was even more of a shock when I was appointed as his senior advisor.

There are fewer than ten politically appointed special advi- sors posted to our embassies around the world at any point in time. It takes substantial resources to train, house, and secure American personnel abroad. In the case of career foreign service professionals, this is a sunk cost, but for political appointees it is an expenditure to be carefully meted out where necessary. Political appointments are normally reserved for the highest- profile and busiest posts abroad. For the U.S. Embassy in Israel to receive two political appointees before ambassadors had been nominated to most of our major allies was unprecedented. These appointments signaled that there was going to be a new direction in Middle East policy. In fact, my embassy job would give me an inside perspective on a breakthrough in the region, culminating in the four Abraham Accords signed between September 15 and December 23, 2020.

The way I came to be appointed gave me a clue about how the soil was being tilled for a realignment of Middle East policy. On February 9, 2017, David and I were on the Accela heading from Washington back to our homes on Long Island after an exhausting day of meetings with members of Congress. Our last meeting had been with Senator Bernie Sanders, and we weren’t in great spirits when we boarded the train. As the car rocked back and forth, we talked intermittently about the day’s meetings, checked our phones, and dozed a little.

Then David mentioned his meeting with President Trump earlier that day. “The president wants me to work closely with Jared Kushner on the Mideast peace team,” he said. “It is a great honor, but I need to bring along a chief of staff I can trust, to assist me as I repair the U.S.-Israel relationship that’s been gravely injured over the past eight years. It is rare that ambassadors can hire someone to come with them, so I want to get a commitment from this person quickly.”

“Do you have a short list of candidates you want to interview?” I asked. “If so, I could be helpful setting them up.”

“I have my candidate. It’s you.”

David had been a friend and mentor for almost a decade. His wife, Tammy, was one of the very first people to welcome my wife and me to our community on Long Island when we moved there ten years earlier. During the Republican primaries of 2016, David and I had a friendly rivalry, as I favored Marco Rubio while he supported his good friend Donald Trump. After Trump’s victory, I was anxious to do everything I could to help David become the ambassador to Israel, and I offered my assistance in the confirmation process. He accepted, and I’m really not sure why, since many of his friends have relationships in the U.S. Senate similar to mine, and I spent the better part of two months traveling back and forth from Long Island to D.C. with David for his Senate confirmation and State Department onboarding. I was not-so-secretly hoping for an opportunity to work with David at the embassy, but I doubted that there was actually an appropriate position for me. When he offered me a job assisting him, I doubted that I was the right person for it.

“Thank you for this opportunity,” I said to David. “It’s extremely humbling to be considered.” I promised to discuss it with my wife, Estee, and get back to him in a day or two.

It was two days later when I went to David’s house with a pit in my stomach. I told him that serving as his advisor could be the best job in the world, but the timing wasn’t great for my family. More importantly, I suggested that he find someone better qualified for the position.

“Why aren’t you ‘qualified’?” he asked.

I explained my thinking: “You and I agree on almost everything. We are unapologetically pro-Israel. We are conservatives. We know the relationship needs to be repaired. And we both saw very clearly the foolishness of the Iran deal and the ‘peace’ processes.” I noted that David had a big challenge ahead of him and that I might only compound the difficulty. “The world already discounts you for being the son of a rabbi and an Orthodox Jew. You will be cementing their worst fears by hiring someone who is an Orthodox rabbi, and someone who wears a kippa at all times. Why don’t you hire someone else who agrees with us—there are plenty of others—and ideally, someone who is …” I hesitated before saying, “not as Jewish.”

David thought for a few moments, and then replied with words that echo in my head to this day: “I don’t know what job you think you were offered. If you think I offered a job representing the United States of America to the State of Israel in which being a rabbi and an Orthodox Jew is a disqualification, then I offered the position to the wrong person. But if you want a job representing the United States of America being proud of who you are, knowing who you are, supporting what you believe in, that is the job I am offering, and I hope it is the one you will take.”

As he spoke, I came to understand three things very distinctly.

First, I had to work for this person. His clarity of thought and purpose was infectious.

Second, being pro-Israel is not a bug in the system of being American. It is a feature of our national character.

Third, if you want to represent the greatest country in history and do it successfully, you’d better start acting the part. That means being bold, clear, and unapologetic, as I knew that David Friedman would be. He demanded the same from his entire team, especially me.

That is how I became an eyewitness to some of America’s greatest foreign policy successes in the Middle East, and, I believe, some of the most momentous in all of U.S. history. This book is to let my people, meaning all my fellow Americans, know what exactly were the big ideas that propelled these successes, and that can continue to foster peace in the Middle East and help restore our nation to its position of world leadership.

2 DENIALISM

If it weren’t so painfully awkward, it would have been hysteri- cal. In May 2021, Matthew Lee, a seasoned diplomatic corre- spondent for the Associated Press, asked President Biden’s State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, to name the agreements that had recently been signed between Israel and several Middle Eastern countries under his boss’s predecessor. In a series of back-and-forth questions, Price twisted himself into a pretzel to avoid naming the Abraham Accords. The cringe-inducing exchange reminded me of what my daughter would do when she was younger and afraid of something that was happening in front of her. She would close her eyes and simply refuse to acknowledge the reality.

The refusal to call the Abraham Accords by their name, and the broader effort to downplay their significance, can be written off to a combination of childishness and petty partisanship. But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that refusing to look reality in the face has been at the heart of U.S. policy in the Middle East for 68 of the past 72 years.

The denialism perhaps reached its height of delusionality—and dangerousness—during Barack Obama’s presidency, in two key policy choices. One was his dogged pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran, culminating in an agreement that in the best case would allow Iran to have legal nuclear capability within fifteen years, and in the worst case, or as I perceive it the reality, allow it the cash to strengthen its autocratic regime and increase its malign activities throughout the region while giving it the veneer of a legitimate state actor. The second choice was placing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the center of Middle East policy, essentially saying it was the root cause of many if not all the challenges plaguing the Middle East, and holding that the wider region cannot move forward until it is resolved in an “evenhanded” way. President Obama’s secretary of state during his second term, John Kerry, summed up the administration’s policy stance in 2016 when he said, “There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world.” In other words, there was no chance of normalization between Israel and Arab countries until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved in a way that was satisfactory to the Palestinians. For emphasis, Kerry added, “No, no, no,” echoing the infamous Three No’s that entered the world’s political lexicon in 1967.

In the wake of their defeat in the Six-Day War, the Arab League met in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and issued a set of resolutions, most notably including: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.” This resolution became not only the basis of the Palestinian negotiating strategy, but also a principle affirmed through the decades even by U.S. leadership. The persistent hold of the Three No’s explains why the Middle East has been a constant source of challenge for the United States, and why we haven’t been able to unlock the boundless possibility of the region.

The words of a diplomat matter a lot, and Kerry, as the United States of America’s chief diplomat, chose to reinforce Arab inflexibility on the conditions for progress and peace at the expense of our democratic ally, the State of Israel. If the policy is essentially to take the position of those who do not really want peaceful coexistence, it will not lead to peace. Promoting this wrongheaded policy made the United States weaker in the region and around the world. On the other hand, adopting policies that are better aligned with our values and interests will make us more respected and stronger.

The Three No’s have allowed the Palestinians to exercise veto power over progress in the region and even over U.S. policy and law, particularly the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which was passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in 1995. This law required the president to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv, and establish the residency of the U.S. ambassador to Israel in Jerusalem. According to the Constitution, however, foreign policy is primarily the president’s responsibility. So Congress made those provisions a trigger to release certain funds to the State Department, and included a waiver provision whereby the president could choose not to follow the law if it was deemed contrary to national security interests.

After the Jerusalem Embassy Act became law, every major presidential candidate promised to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Every six months, year after year—until December 2017—every president signed the waiver and took no steps to fulfill the law. Poll after poll consistently showed that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the embassy would be widely welcomed. Yet it took twenty-two years for the law to be put into effect because of the de facto Palestinian veto and the refusal to acknowledge Israel as a legitimate state.

3 COVID DIPLOMACY

To the rest of the world, it may have appeared that the Abra- ham Accords came about suddenly, with one crucial deci- sion. The truth is that the Accords, like every major world event, were the culmination of many smaller, unnoticed developments. One that I saw up close was the willingness of Arab states to lend assistance to Israel during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

In the early days of Covid-19, the U.S. State Department carried out one of the biggest repatriation efforts in history. Under the leadership of Mike Pompeo, it facilitated the return of at least a million U.S. citizens in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, bringing Americans home from every country and territory on earth, including some with which we have no diplomatic relations. Israel reached out to us for help in its own repatriation challenge. Israelis travel more than most people, sometimes making it into countries with which their government has no diplomatic relations. In normal times, this should be discouraged. In a pandemic, it could be deadly. The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office called my boss, Ambassador Friedman, and asked if we could help repatriate hundreds of Israelis from countries that had less than ideal relations, if any, with Israel, but did have relations with the United States. The ambassador asked me to liaise with Secretary Pompeo’s team, and we went to work.

It is not remarkable that we helped Israelis. That is what friends do. What’s remarkable is that countries with which Israel had no relations did not hesitate to help when we asked. They removed every piece of red tape to allow Israelis to return home. Prior to every phone call I was prepared for diplomatic battle, but it never happened. The calls were pleasant, even friendly. They did not ask why those Israelis were in the country or how they had gotten there. They simply recognized a government’s obligation to take care of its citizens in times of crisis, and acted accordingly. I was amazed, but I shouldn’t have been.

The Covid-19 crisis also presented me with a striking example of the Palestinian leadership’s denialism and h...