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Former U.S. ambassador to Israel critiques the Bush administration's efforts in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (2:01)
 

Full interview. (12:46)
 

Tavis: Martin Indyk served as U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Clinton and is a former assistant secretary of State for Near East affairs. He's now the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. His new book is called "Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East." Ambassador, nice to have you back on the program.

Amb. Martin Indyk: Great to be here, Tavis. Thank you for having me.

Tavis: Congrats on the book.

Indyk: Oh, thank you very much.

Tavis: My pleasure. Let me start, before I come to the text, with the trip by George Mitchell, former United States senator and now special envoy to the Middle East. Mr. Obama on day one got very serious, as you'll recall, about the Middle East crisis. He made four phone calls to the region, talked to four heads of state, announced George Mitchell, sent Mitchell overseas, and as we speak now he's wrapping up his trip. What do you make of George Mitchell and President Obama's engagement so immediately on this issue?

Indyk: Well, it's a very strong and clear signal, and it's wrapped in a number of other statements that he made during his inauguration speech - message to the Muslim world, after the appointment of Mitchell, and his first interview with Al-Arabiya, an Arab satellite TV station. So he is sending a message out hard on the heels of the Gaza crisis that he cares about the Palestinian issue and he intends to work on it from day one.

He's going to give his priority to it and his secretary of State's, and of course George Mitchell's. In other words, after a long period during the Bush administration, when George W. Bush, for his first seven years, basically didn't show any interest in this, the peace process is back.

Tavis: How much ground was lost because of that seven-year absence, essentially, of U.S. engagement on this crisis?

Indyk: I think a lot. A lot. Basically, Bill Clinton had devoted eight years of his presidency to trying to achieve an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and in the end, he failed. That's what the book is about. And George Bush looked at this situation and told me in the Oval Office when I came back with Ariel Sharon at the beginning of his administration, that there was no Nobel Peace Prize to be had here.

And he essentially walked away from it and left the Israelis and the Palestinians to have at it, which they did. And for five years the intifada raged, 3,000 Israelis and Palestinians were killed, and what it did was it destroyed the edifice of peace that Bill Clinton had, through incredibly hard work, tried to build up over the previous eight years.

Tavis: There are two follow-ups I want to jump to right quick, given the statement you've just made now, Mr. Ambassador, both regarding two presidents - one, Bill Clinton, who you referenced; the second question regarding George Bush.

Let me start with question one about Clinton. President Clinton said recently that his number one regret was that he could not get Yasser Arafat - we saw a picture a moment ago of Arafat, Ehud Barak and Clinton - Clinton's number one regret, he says, was that he couldn't get Yasser Arafat to agree to a peace plan, to a peace agreement.

You argue in the book that they weren't even close to agreeing, Barak and Yasser Arafat. Tell me about that.

Indyk: Well, the heart of the matter is how do you get Arafat to make a decision? Shimon Perez said to me at the time, "History is like a horse galloping past your window, and the true act of statesmanship is to decide whether you're going to jump on or not."

If you think about it, jumping on a galloping horse is not such an easy proposition, but that's what Arafat would have had to do. And Arafat was a survivalist, he was not a statesman, and in those circumstances at the end of the Clinton administration, he listened to those who whispered in his ear, "Wait for George W. Bush; he'll get you a better deal."

And it was obviously a major miscalculation on his part, but it was a miscalculation that was the product of the circumstances. You see, we had tried - Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak - had tried to get a Syrian deal first, and they came very close. But it was a tragedy of ships passing in the night when Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian leader, was ready, Ehud Barak was not.

Three months later when Barak was ready, al-Assad was coming to his last days. He died three months later and he had only one act left in him, which was to put his son in power. And we missed the deal, even though the essence of it was all there. The only disagreement was over 50 meters - a 50-meter strip around the northeast sector of the Sea of Galilee.

Now, once we missed that deal, that was in April of 2000, Barak and Clinton turned to Arafat and he realized he was in the catbird seat. And they were desperate to make the deal, and he basically waited until - waited them out.

They kept on making him a better offer until at the end there, right at the end of the Clinton administration, Clinton offered him - and Barak had agreed to this - a Palestinian state in 94 to 97 percent of the West Bank with territorial compensation, all of Gaza with a corridor connecting them, Palestinian sovereignty in the Arab suburbs of Jerusalem and including Palestinian sovereignty on the top of the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, and a reasonable solution for the refugees.

In other words, what Clinton has said recently, it was a deal that would have given Arafat and the Palestinians a viable Palestinian state, and he let it go because at that moment he didn't feel the pressure to make a decision and he would have had to stand up in front of his people and say, "I got you Jerusalem and I got you the West Bank and Gaza, but you refugees will have to agree to give up the right of return to Israel." Not to Palestinian, but to Israel, and he wasn't courageous enough or didn't feel the pressure enough to do it at that moment.

Tavis: Arafat aside - and I can't put him too far aside because he's so central to this conversation - but Arafat, for the moment, aside, in retrospect, was there something strategically different that President Clinton could have, should have done that would not have allowed Arafat to have seen himself, as you mentioned earlier, in the catbird seat at a certain point in this process?

Indyk: We had to get the Syrian deal, and that was the tragedy in the situation because in fact, both Assad and Barak were ready to do the deal and the timing was out. If we had gotten the Syrian deal then the whole circumstances would have changed.

If Syria had made a peace agreement with Israel, Lebanon, which Syria essentially controlled in those days, would have come very quickly afterwards, and Arafat would have been left in the situation where he had to decide whether to accept this good deal or find himself left behind because the other Arab states, if Syria makes peace - Syria's the beating heart of the pan-Arabs, as they like to describe themselves - then the rest of the Arab world has (unintelligible) to engage with Israel.

So Arafat would have found himself running to catch up, and I think that that was the key problem. So by the time we went even to Camp David, but certainly by the end of the Clinton administration, I just think that at that point Arafat wasn't ready to do the deal.

Now bear in mind there were a lot of emotional and complex issues involved in the Palestinian deal. I mentioned right of return. There was the issue of sovereignty over the holy sites in Jerusalem. Those issues would have taxed any leader to convince his people. Barak would have had a very hard time convincing his people.

But this was not a peace agreement; it was parameters, and if Arafat would have accepted it, it would have formed a baseline and the Bush administration would not have walked away from it. They would have had to - they would have wanted to - try to conclude the deal.

Tavis: I mentioned some minutes ago that there are two follow-ups I had. The first one was about Bill Clinton; we've addressed that now, and while a few minutes have passed, I have not forgotten the second one.

Indyk: (Laughs) Good for you.

Tavis: And you reminded me, since you mentioned President Bush again, at least his administration. When you said earlier in this conversation that Bush said that there's no Nobel Prize to be won here, that's a damning indictment, as I hear it, at least, that there's no Nobel Prize to be won here, and so for seven years they essentially don't do anything. In the last year they tried this sort of political Hail Mary, trying to get involved at the last minute.

Unpack, at least for me, what you made at hearing the president of the United States say there's no Nobel Prize to be won here and basically I'm going to just not involve myself, not engage myself in this. What do you make of that?

Indyk: Well for me it was a very depressing situation. I left the government and it took me a long time to come to terms with what had happened, but essentially I've devoted my life to the effort to try to make peace in the Middle East and we had tried and failed, and now the president wasn't going to pick it up.

What I make of it is that he came into office with a predisposition to anything but Clinton. They had a name for it in Washington - ABC, anything but Clinton. It's not such an unusual instinct. Fortunately, Barack Obama doesn't have it. But when we came into office with Bill Clinton, there was a feeling we weren't going to do what his father did.

We had a kind of ABB rule. It wasn't as drastic as that, but there was a real feeling at the beginning of the Bush administration that everything that Clinton had done in foreign policy was stupid and feckless and we weren't going to do that. They even, believe it or not, removed the words "peace process" from the State Department's diplomatic lexicon.

If you worked in the State Department in those days, you weren't allowed to use the words peace process. They ended up calling it the Middle East, as if that somehow would correct the problems. But there was a predisposition not to do anything.

For me it was particularly problematic because I had worked for Bush for his first six months in office. He'd asked me to stay on in Israel. And that was the first six months of Sharon's prime ministership, and Sharon had made very clear to me that he wanted Bush to engage, to get Arafat to stop the violence. Not to make the peace deal, but just to get him to stop the violence.

And Sharon was prepared to do a number of things in that regard. He sent his son - one of his first acts was to send his firstborn son, Omri, to meet with Arafat, and he said it to me. He said, "Arafat will understand that that means that I'm prepared to deal with him."

He was ready, Tavis, to have a settlements freeze, including natural growth, for six months. He said, "Provided that Arafat stops the violence." And so I reported all of this to Washington, but Bush and his people were not interested.

Tavis: I got a quick 30 seconds here. What's your primary advice for President Obama on this issue?

Indyk: Well, he's already doing what I would advise him to do, which is to engage, to make it a priority, and to work it. But I think he does understand that now it's far more difficult than it was in Clinton's time, because so much ground has been lost. So a lot of effort has to be taken into building up the capabilities on both sides to make peace.

But one thing that he can do - he's, I think, uniquely suited to this task because of his narrative, his personal narrative, because of his middle name, because of his ability to communicate - it is that he can restore the audacity of hope to both sides. Because the big problem here is that both sides have lost faith in the idea that there can ever be a solution - a two-state solution of two states living side by side - and he can lift their eyes out of the misery of their day-to-day existence to what will be a far-off horizon of peaceful settlement of this conflict.

Tavis: He's a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk. His new book is called "Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East." We've just scratched the surface; might want to dig into this one. Good to see you again. Glad to have you on.

Indyk: Nice to see you, Tavis.