Decision Points

a helicopter tour of the country. Sharon was a bull of a man, a seventy-year-old former tank commander who had served in all of Israel’s wars. Shortly after the chopper lifted off, he pointed to a patch of ground below. “I fought there,” he said with pride in his gruff voice. When the helicopter turned toward the West Bank, he gestured at an isolated cluster of homes. “I built that settlement,” he said.Sharon subscribed to the Greater Israel policy, which rejected territorial concessions. He knew every inch of the land, and it didn’t sound like he intended to give any of it back.
    “Here our country was only nine miles wide,” Sharon said at another point, referring to the distance between the 1967 borders and the sea. “We have driveways longer than that in Texas,” I later joked. I was struck by Israel’s vulnerability in a hostile neighborhood. Ever since President Harry Truman defied his secretary of state by recognizing Israel in 1948, America had been the Jewish state’s best friend. I came away convinced that we had a responsibility to keep the relationship strong.
    A little over two years later, I called Ariel Sharon from the Oval Office to congratulate him on his election as prime minister. “Maybe, after so many years and wars in which I have participated,” he said, “we will have peace in the region.”
    On June 1, 2001, a suicide bomber killed twenty-one Israelis at the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv. Other attacks struck Israeli buses, train stations, and shopping malls. Israeli Defense Forces targeted operations at Hamas strongholds, but innocent Palestinians—including five boys walking to school one day—were killed during the operations.
    I was appalled by the violence and loss of life on both sides. But I refused to accept the moral equivalence between Palestinian suicide attacks on innocent civilians and Israeli military actions intended to protect their people. My views came into sharper focus after 9/11. If the United States had the right to defend itself and prevent future attacks, other democracies had those rights, too.
    I spoke to Yasser Arafat three times in my first year as president. He was courteous, and I was polite in return. But I made clear we expected him to crack down on extremism. “I know these are difficult issues for you and your people,” I told him in February 2001, “but the best way to settle this and start resolving the situation is to stop the violence in the region.”
    In January 2002, the Israeli navy intercepted a ship called the
Karine A
in the Red Sea. Aboard was an arsenal of deadly weapons. The Israelis believed the ship was headed from Iran to the Palestinian city of Gaza. Arafat sent a letter pleading his innocence. “The smuggling of arms is in total contradiction of the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to the peaceprocess,” he wrote. But we and the Israelis had evidence that disproved the Palestinian leader’s claim. Arafat had lied to me. I never trusted him again. In fact, I never spoke to him again. By the spring of 2002, I had concluded that peace would not be possible with Arafat in power.

    “When will the pig leave Ramallah?” Crown Prince Abdullah ** asked me. It was April 25, 2002. Clearly the Saudi ruler was not happy with Ariel Sharon .
    Ever since President Franklin Roosevelt met with Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdul Aziz, aboard the USS
Quincy
in 1945, America’s relationship with the kingdom had been one of our most critical. The Sunni Arab nation sits on a fifth of the world’s oil and has tremendous influence among Muslims as the guardian of the holy mosques at Mecca and Medina.
    I had invited Crown Prince Abdullah—one of Abdul Aziz’s thirty-six sons—to our ranch in Crawford as a way to strengthen our personal relationship. In anticipation of the March 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut, the crown prince showed strong leadership by announcing a new peace plan. Under his vision, Israel would return territory to the Palestinians, who would create an independent state that rejected terror and recognized Israel’s right to exist. There were many details to negotiate, but the concept was one I could support.
    The evening of the Arab League summit, a Hamas suicide bomber walked into a hotel dining room filled with people celebrating Passover in the Israeli city of Netanya. “Suddenly it was hell,” one guest said. “There was the smell of smoke and dust in my mouth and a ringing in my ears.”