Two Estranged Friends on Their Fight for Mideast Peace. ‘We Were a Bit Naïve.'
It's hard to remember now, as Gazans eat grass to try to survive a siege, and as Israelis emboldened by the trauma of Oct. 7 seem poised to annex the West Bank, but there was a time when peace in the Middle East felt possible.
In 2003, I moved to Washington to cover foreign policy and fell in with a group of friends — human rights lawyers, policy wonks and aides on Capitol Hill — who were pushing for a two-state solution. It had been 10 years since Israelis and Palestinians started down that path with an interim peace deal in Oslo. Palestinian frustrations had boiled over into the second intifada. But there was still a sense that a deal was possible. Two of our friends seemed to be living proof of that.
Daniel Levy, the gregarious son of a British lord, and Ghaith al-Omari, a quiet Jordanian lawyer, were well known around town for having sat on opposite sides of a round of peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians in Taba, Egypt, in 2001. They had forged a friendship that became a symbol in Washington of the potential for peace. I once attended a dinner party where the host introduced them by announcing: 'If there is ever peace in the Middle East, it will be because of these two.'
Recently, I wondered what those two old friends thought now about their attempt to help broker a deal. Had peace really been possible? Or had we been dreaming? Most of all, I wondered if they were still friends. So I called them up. I learned that their relationship had waxed and waned over the years, like the peace process itself. Then it took an unexpected turn.
During the talks in Taba, Mr. Levy was an adviser to Yossi Beilin, the most dovish member of the Israeli negotiating team. Mr. Omari was an adviser to Yasir Abed Rabbo, the most dovish member of the Palestinian team. They got closer to a permanent deal than any previously, but stopped because of Israeli elections and did not resume. Still, Mr. Levy and Mr. Omari did not give up.
Mr. Levy helped arrange for Mr. Omari and other peace negotiators to go together to South Africa and learn from the negotiators who had reached the deal that ended apartheid. Mr. Omari was impressed by Mr. Levy's generosity, and how he 'seemed to know everyone on earth.' 'He approached every disagreement as a challenge to overcome,' he told me during a recent interview.
The admiration was mutual. Mr. Omari was 'whip-smart' and fun, Mr. Levy told me. He had the ability to look at the conflict dispassionately, perhaps because he was from Jordan, one step removed. They started meeting up for drinks at Mr. Omari's home in Jerusalem. They began to think of each other as friends.
Then, in 2002, at the behest of their bosses, they holed up in an empty chalet in Switzerland and hammered out an unofficial blueprint for a permanent peace. That effort, known as the Geneva Initiative, aimed to preserve the progress that had been made at Taba. To get the support of Israelis, they proposed that Israel keep a small military presence in the newly created Palestinian state for a limited period of time. To get Palestinian backing, they detailed a formula for compensating Palestinian refugees who had been displaced in 1948, when Israel was established.
In the end, they produced a hefty document that had the support of senior Palestine Liberation Organization officials, some Israeli opposition leaders, mayors and retired members of Israel's security establishment. Even a couple of leaders of an ultra-Orthodox party attended a ceremony marking the document's completion.
The plan made such a splash that Ariel Sharon, who had been elected prime minister of Israel in 2001, reportedly cited it as one reason he felt compelled to propose an initiative of his own: withdrawal from Gaza. Mr. Sharon struck a deal with Washington, agreeing to pull out of Gaza in exchange for a promise that Israel could keep some large settlement blocs in the West Bank, his top aide Dov Weissglas told the newspaper Haaretz. The aim, he said, was to stop the peace process and 'prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.'
Still, Mr. Levy and Mr. Omari pressed on. They brought the Geneva Initiative to the attention of the highest echelons of the U.S. government and to ordinary Americans alike. Eventually they both moved to Washington, living a few doors down from one another.
'What was unique about them was that they were willing to challenge their own side,' recalled Rebecca Abou-Chedid, who then worked on staff at the Arab American Institute and once took the two men to Iowa to talk to American voters. Mr. Levy never shied away from acknowledging the failures of the Israelis, and Mr. Omari did not mince words about the Palestinian Authority's missteps.
But the very traits that made them good peace negotiators — the ability to admit fault and see things from the other's point of view — made them outliers in their own communities. As the years went by, Hamas took over Gaza and the far-right came to power in Israel. The peace camp shrank and splintered. Mr. Levy and Mr. Omari dealt with the failure of their life's work differently. And in a sense, they switched sides.
'We learned very different lessons,' Mr. Omari told me.
From the vantage point of middle age, Mr. Levy, now the London-based president of the U.S./Middle East Project, a think tank, has come to believe that Israel was never going to allow a Palestinian state. The Oslo Accords front-loaded the things that Israel wanted — greater international recognition and the creation of a Palestinian Authority that was obliged to do Israel's bidding and crack down on militants, he said. But the things Palestinians wanted — statehood, an end to the occupation and a halt to the confiscation of their land — were postponed indefinitely, contingent on a final deal that never came.
Without a timetable for statehood, the Palestinian Authority lost all legitimacy and became a 'subcontractor for Israeli oppression,' Mr. Levy told me. 'That's what we were creating: a Palestinian collaborator class.'
He has little patience for those who cling to a two-state solution as a substitute for confronting the unbearable situation in the West Bank and Gaza today, which he considers to be a genocide. He blames himself for ever believing in it.
'A more mature me would have understood Oslo,' he said.
The only hope Mr. Levy sees now is in the new generation of activists who see Oslo for the expired, failed agreement that it is. They must find a new way to struggle against inequality inside a one-state reality, he said, adding that Palestinians must be allowed to choose their own structures to replace the discredited Palestinian Authority.
Mr. Omari sees things differently. 'We were a bit naïve,' he told me recently in his office at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, another think tank. 'But I don't think we were completely naïve.' Oslo could have worked, he said. Geneva could have worked. He hasn't given up on a two-state solution. But he acknowledges that after the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel's relentless reprisals, it will take time before Israelis and Palestinians can sit down to talk peace, and even longer to process the damage that has been done.
He is also haunted by his own failures, and the failures of the Palestinian leaders he once worked for. 'It was our failure that Hamas took over Gaza,' he said, citing corruption and poor governance. 'You can never build a paradise under occupation, but you could build something better.'
He worries now that the world will simply move on. Despite the ongoing horror unfolding in both Gaza and the West Bank, the plight of Palestinians is slipping off the front pages. The 'total victory' that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is promising over Hamas spells subjugation, annexation and possibly mass expulsion. In a world where big powers no longer even pay lip service to international law, Mr. Netanyahu just might get away with it. Plenty of other peoples who deserved their own state never got one, Mr. Omari said.
The hope Mr. Omari sees is in those brief moments when he and Mr. Levy felt so tantalizingly close to a deal. It's worth remembering that feeling, he told me, even if just to mourn it.
The last time Mr. Omari met Mr. Levy, several years ago, they embraced as old friends. They chatted about their wives and kids. Then the conversation turned to politics. Mr. Levy voiced his frustration about Mr. Omari's continued willingness to cooperate with people who advance Israel's agenda.
They haven't spoken since, but their mutual affection remains.
'For all the disagreements on policy, I would still be super happy to see him,' Mr. Omari said. Mr. Levy told me, 'I never want to have cross words with him.'
Their unwillingness to disparage one another struck me. That remnant of friendship and shared humanity is all that's left of our dreams of peace. That's what I'm going to hold on to.
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