Martin S. Indyk Memorial Lecture: A Conversation With President Bill Clinton

The Martin S. Indyk Memorial Lecture was established by CFR to honor Ambassador Martin S. Indyk’s legacy of public service, scholarship, and institution building, and to recognize his ideas and contributions that shaped U.S.-Middle East policy for decades. Ambassador Indyk was a CFR distinguished fellow and former U.S. ambassador to Israel. The lecture highlights critical issues in U.S. foreign policy that reflect his commitments to advancing durable pathways to peace and sustaining American diplomatic engagement.

This inaugural lecture is held in collaboration with the Clinton Global Initiative.

FROMAN: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Council. It’s great to have you here for our inaugural Martin S. Indyk Memorial Lecture. In addition to the over-packed room, please there be no fire marshals nearby, we’ve got spillover rooms, and we’ve got over 400 people online as well.

I’d like to thank Hady Amr, Nader Mousavizadeh, Haim and Cheryl Saban, George Tenet, and CFR’s own Steve Bennett for their generosity in making this lecture series possible. Martin was CFR’s Lowy distinguished fellow in U.S.-Middle East diplomacy and a longtime Council member. He was also a beloved husband, father, and grandfather. And we’re joined today by members of Martin’s family, including his wife, Gahl; his daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Charlie (sp); their children, Stella (sp) and Maisy (sp). And by Zoom, we have his son, Jacob, on as well. So thank you all for being here and joining us in honoring Martin’s memory. Martin spent—yes. (Applause.)

Martin spent his entire adult life working toward peace in the Middle East. He served in virtually every government position that was relevant to that mission, from the White House to the State Department to the embassy in Israel. And in between his public service, he was a serious scholar of the region. Not only at the Council, but at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Middle East Policy, and as the founding executive director of The Washington Institute for Near-East Policy. About thirty years ago Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization negotiator Mahmoud Abbas signed the Oslo Accords, launching the incremental process of reconciliation. And at that moment, Martin was President Clinton’s special assistant for the Middle East, witnessing what would become the closest the two sides ever came to a durable peace.

In the years that followed, he watched the promise of Oslo, beginning with Rabin’s assassination in 1995, erode. And I think it’s fair to say no one spent more time working for lasting peace among Israel, the Palestinians, and their neighbors than Martin did, until his final days. In this year of rather remarkable developments in the Middle East, Martin’s rare, trusted expertise, and respected by a wide range of Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, and Americans across the political spectrum, is missed now more than ever. When I think about Martin’s legacy two things stand out to me. One is he grounded his views of the region very much in the long history of peace diplomacy. He opens his memoir Innocent Abroad, with an aphorism from the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “If men could learn from history what lessons it could teach us.” And he knew that that still holds true now. The past has plenty to teach us. And we’ll spend some time reflecting on that during today’s conversation.

And secondly, Martin was nothing if not clear-eyed. He was pragmatic and deeply grounded in the realities of how difficult achieving lasting peace would be between Israel, the Palestinians, and the neighbors would be. From his early days as a student during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he recognized that peace required responsible, courageous leadership by all parties. And even still, he had the foresight to realize that he might not see peace in his lifetime. I’ve shared this thought from Martin before, but with time it feels still very much relevant.

In one of his last interviews, Martin sat down with Foreign Affairs editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan and reflected on his career and on the prospects for a two-state solution. And he shared the following, and I quote,
“I’ve had my Mount Nebo moment.” Mount Nebo was when Moses was shown the promised land and told by God that he would not cross into it. “And I’ve seen the promised land. And I’ve seen what it looks like. I’ve negotiated the details. I know where they will end up. There’s a lot more killing, unfortunately, but I can see it, how it will work out. And so even though I won’t cross over, I’m still confident that in the end, as all conflicts come to an end, this one will too. And its result will be a two-state solution.”

It’s my privilege to welcome today President Bill Clinton to the Council for today’s conversation on peace diplomacy in the Middle East. We’re grateful to him and to the Clinton Global Initiative for collaborating on this event in Martin’s honor. I should note that President Clinton is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and pays his dues on time. (Laughter.) It’s also a great privilege for me to welcome back to the council CFR President Emeritus Richard Haass. He’s been a prime mover in making this Martin S. Indyk Lecture possible, and an invaluable source of guidance. And I’m deeply grateful for all his support of the Council. Thank you all for joining us for today.

And with that, let me invite Dr. Haass and President Clinton to the stage. And I will turn this over to Dr. Haass. (Applause.)

CLINTON: Everybody thought that if I was to Richard’s right today, I might be safer. (Laughter.)

HAASS: It’s a first. It’s a first. Yet again, innovation at the Council. (Laughter.) Welcome, everybody. Welcome, sir.

CLINTON: Thank you.

HAASS: Thank you, Mike. Gahl, Sarah, great to have you here. Sad and wonderful that we’re doing this today. Let’s just get to it. It’s sad for all the obvious reasons. And such a good man, and for me such a close friend. Also, as it turned out, my successor at the White House. Was taken from all of us and from his family much too soon. It’s sad for this country because we lost a powerful voice when we needed it most. But it’s also wonderful that we have this chance to remember, and cherish, and look back on what Martin had to contribute to the debate. And he was an optimist. And as—you know, only Martin, in the context of October 7, could see improved prospects for a two-state solution. That is as good a definition of optimism as I can find. (Laughter.)

But it was an optimism that was grounded in realism. It reflected, more than anything, his concerns about the cost for Israelis and Palestinians alike, of drift, of not succeeding, of not realizing what he called the promised land. It was an optimism of choice, if you will, but one, in his mind, born out of necessity. It couldn’t be more appropriate that the speaker at this first lecture in Martin’s honor and memory is the gentleman, yes, to my right, the forty-second president of the United States. So I want to begin with the question about Martin. Martin always claimed, sir, that you chose him to work for you for one reason, both at the White House and then as ambassador to Israel. He said you chose him because you liked his Australian accent. (Laughter.) True?

CLINTON: That was part of it. (Laughter.) You know, we met in 1992. He was briefing me. And I really liked him, and so did just about everybody else had ever knew or worked with him. I think Heim Saban called me a couple days ago. And he said, you’re going to do this Council on Foreign Relations thing with honoring Martin? I said, yeah. He said, good. (Laughter.) But I thought he was—first of all, I was very impressed with him when he briefed me. Secondly, I was impressed with him because he actually always believed you could do better than you were doing, and that we all had an obligation to do it.

Thirdly, I liked him because he was not naive about how hard it is to do things like this. One of the things that, even after all these years, still sometimes gobsmacks me and surprises me is that so much of the discussion of politics is always about what are you going to do and how much money you’re going to spend, whether you’re a conservative wanting to eliminate taxes or regulation or you’re liberal wanting to tax more. But there’s too little discussion in domestic politics, on whatever you’re going to do and however much money you’re going to spend on it, how do you propose to do it to actually achieve the stated objectives? And, of course, that’s what diplomacy is all about. So we can talk all day about the how question, but I think this is an important citizenship question. Sooner or later we will return to some measure of sanity in American politics.

HAASS: But probably not before the end of this meeting. (Laughter.)

CLINTON: Yeah. That seems highly unlikely. (Laughter.) So, anyway, that’s what Martin was to me. He was a walking, pumping, smiling, (pal ?) guy. And it really does matter. And it matters more now than ever.

HAASS: Just to remind, you became president in January of 1993, adding me, I should say, I’ll add, to the unemployment rolls at the time. You may not know this, but Sandy Berger, who became your, what, deputy national security advisor, originally?

CLINTON: Yes, and then in my second term, my national security advisor.

HAASS: Handed Brent Scowcroft a note, he was the outgoing national security. And said, we’re comfortable with all the following people on the National Security Council staff staying, but we want the following five or six people out by 11:59 a.m. before you get inaugurated. I want you—you know, I want to thank you for making me one of the five. (Laughter.)

CLINTON: I didn’t know that. (Laughter.)

HAASS: So you came to the office. (Laughter.) It has the virtue of being true. (Laughter.) You’d spent your time not at the national scene, but in state scene. What were your thoughts about foreign policy, and what were your thoughts about the Middle East? When you thought of the job, the enormous office you were about to enter, what was your thinking?

CLINTON: Well, I always thought that foreign policy in general was under-taught and under-appreciated in American politics. Keep in mind, I committed what a lot of my high school friends thought was political suicide, because I always wanted to be in politics, by going to the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. I did it because I thought the world would grow more, and more, and more interdependent. And that it was just irresponsible to even be a governor without understanding what the foreign policy implications of what we were doing was. So I wasn’t worried about it. I just wanted to get smart people. And then, you know, I had a phenomenal amount of luck, in my eyes, just blind luck. I wound up living with Strobe Talbott in Oxford while he was translating and editing Nikita Khrushchev secret memoirs.

HAASS: I think if Strobe were here he might have said he had some luck in having you at Oxford. (Laughter.)

CLINTON: Well, I gave him a good job later. (Laughter.) But no, the luck was mine. I would get up. Here I was, this kid from Arkansas. And I had—we had two roommates. The other one some of you may have known, Frank Aller, spoke fluent Mandarin and was given to make a book Edgar Snow’s notes that he took in the case of Yan’an. So he’s writing a book on the Long March. And Strobe gets summoned by Jerry Schecter, who was later President Ford’s press person, to come to Copenhagen, as I remember. But, anyway, he to be given Khrushchev’s tape memoirs. And it was great, particularly the old technology. I’d get up every morning and make them both breakfast. That was my job. (Laughter.) I was a pretty good short order cook. And I’d make them breakfast. And Strobe would be listening Khrushchev talking to the tapes.

So the first thing he did was to type it out in Russian. Then he would try to make sure it was all accurate. Then he would try to make sure he could turn it into English that was clearly decipherable. And he brought a guy over. This is how crazy our lives are. He was from Cleveland, Strobe is. And he brought a guy over who was a Russian emigre, who became a—who was a pharmacist. But he was quite literate. And Boris Pasternak’s sister Lydia lived about three blocks from where we were living in Oxford. And she agreed to put up this guy, Yasha Agushkin (ph). And they worked on Kkhruschev’s memoirs. I just happened to be there. (Laughter.) I mean, I was so lucky.

HAASS: So let’s—about eight, nine months after you became president, the Oslo Accord came about between Israelis and Palestinians. And, quite honestly, the U.S. role was limited in bringing it about. It was something they essentially, as you know, engineered between themselves. Then you had that ceremony on the South Lawn. When Martin and I talked about it, I was there covering it for one of the—for NBC. And Martin told me that Rabin was most concerned—Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister at the time—about how he was going to handle Yasser Arafat’s penchant for kissing his opposite number. (Laughter.) And that you all rehearsed how to deal with the kiss.

CLINTON: Yeah, we did. Well, I—first, Rabin and I were talking about it beforehand. And I said, you know, they’d never really been together. And they’d fought each other for thirty years. They’d never been together. I said, you’re going to have to shake his hand. He said, why? I said, it’s, like, we’re living in a television world. One billion-plus people will watch this. You want them to believe that you’re making peace, or that you’re prepared to make a real effort. It won’t work. You can’t not shake his hand. And he said, all right, but no kissing. (Laughter.)

So we got everybody together. And Tony Lake was then my national security advisor. And Sandy was there. And then we had the whole team, you know, from State and Defense and everything. And Tony made himself exceedingly useful. He said, oh, I know how to do this. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we’ll pretend that I’m Arafat—no. You pretend you’re Arafat and I’ll be Rabin. So I reached out, shook his hand, and he took mine. And then he with his other hand, he put it in my elbow. And he said—and I said, I can’t get to you. He said, that’s it. (Laughter.) So he said, now you do it to me. And so I did it to him.

HAASS: Kind of thing you didn’t learn at the School of Foreign Service.

CLINTON: No, no. (Laughter.) So I said, you’re the key to all this because if he doesn’t kiss you, he’ll get it that he can’t kiss Rabin. So we practiced that—(laughter)—until we were blue in the face. Me and the elbow—I got a great elbow move. (Laughter.) And it worked. But it was—the thing that I found interesting, that I think had a bigger impact locally in the Middle East than was appreciated at the time, is that Rabin was very reserved. But when he started talking, it sounded like the voice of God. And he was the first Israeli leader ever to say that the children of the Palestinians deserve peace and opportunity and a chance to live with a future. It was—when Arafat spoke he was lovey-dovey with everybody, and hugging on people. But when he started talking, he sounded like he was at a local political rally, saying, look, guys, I’ll take care of all this stuff. Don’t worry about anything.

So they totally reversed roles when they spoke. And the choices they made worked in the short run for both of them. But for Rabin, they were more significant, in my opinion—he was—I don’t know if I ever loved another man more than I loved Rabin. I thought he was unbelievable. But the interesting thing is, Arafat was in awe of him. And he had a lot of subsequent—maybe we’ll talk about this—Israeli leaders who offered even more toward the creation of peace. But there was something about Rabin. And I think it was partly his military bearing and partly he just trusted him.

But I want you to think about the world we’re living in today and all the things we say about each other. A few months after this, after we had the signing, we had the first big handover of land under Oslo Accord. And Israel was preparing to turn quite a chunk of land over in the Middle East and in the West Bank. And it had—the land was in different categories which defined how much control Israel had and how much the Palestinians had. But anyway, we were doing this. And there were twenty-seven maps that had to be signed at the signing. And I was the witness. There are actually nine maps and three copies of nine maps. But, you know, it’s not—wasn’t a lot of land in the West Bank. And these maps were huge. And there were literally hundreds of designations. This is Israel. This is Palestinian authority. About all this stuff.

So we’re signing. And we’re fixing to go celebrate. And I had to step out and take a call. We were in the Cabinet Room at the White House. And I had to step out and take a call. And while I was gone Rabin came out. He said, we have a problem. And I said, what is it? He said, there’s this side road near Jericho that runs near all the Christian places in the West Bank. And Arafat says that in the negotiations we agreed to give it to him. And the map says it’s ours. So I looked at him. And I said, this is one of those issues that does not bear directly on the United States. (Laughter.) You have to fix this. You guys got to get used to working together. Might as well be now as later. And I got Arafat and Rabin. And I stuck them in that little side room by the Oval Office, the president’s private office. I think you buy campaign material there today, but anyway. (Laughter.) But, you know, it’s that little room. So—and I said, you guys, you got to get used to doing this without me around or anybody else.

So I closed the door. So five minutes later, Rabin comes out. And he said, he’s right, it’s his. It should be his. I said, we have the whole national press out here, the world press. We’re already late. And we damn sure don’t have time to remake the maps. So he said, it’s all right. He said, we’re going to sign the ones that are there, and I’ll give him the land Monday. And so here’s the most important thing, why I think in some ways this is more important than the pictures. I looked at Arafat. I said, you understand what you’re doing? You are giving up legal title. He said, yes. He said, his word is worth more than any written contract. Can you imagine a Democrat saying that about a Republican or vice versa today? (Laughter.) I mean, and he meant it. He never lost an inch of sleep. He didn’t worry about looking weak to his members. He didn’t do anything. His word is worth more than any written contract. That is what we have to have more of if we want a different set of outcomes.

HAASS: So you’re giving me a perfect segue. Just over two years later you had the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. And when you look at history, assassinations obviously happened from time to time. You’d say in many cases, as awful as it was, like, World War I would have happened even if the Archduke Ferdinand hadn’t been assassinated. But I actually think that Rabin’s assassination changed history, and not in a good way. Because I do think, for what you were getting at before, and I’m curious whether you agree with me, he was the one Israeli who I think could have—could have both appealed across to the Palestinians and the Arabs, but also he could have brought Israel with him, because he was a reluctant peacemaker. When he stood up there on the lawn and said, this isn’t easy for me.

So my view is when he was assassinated the religious zealot who killed him knew what he was doing, because I thought when you killed Yasser—when you killed Yitzhak Rabin you dramatically weakened the prospects of breakthrough. And I’m curious whether—and you were close to Rabin, you used the word “love”—whether you agree with that.

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I’ve often thought, if I had a little extra time, I’d like to write a book on this subject. That is, what political assassinations fail to achieve, the objectives didn’t fail. A lot of them—by far, the—John Wilkes Booth got a harsher reconstruction because he killed Abraham Lincoln, not an easier one. Anwar Sadat’s assassin did not succeed in destroying the peace. But this guy got what he wanted, the man who killed Rabin. And it’s interesting. I was always interested in Israeli presidents, not prime ministers, have the pardon authority. And I was always curious to see what would happen when Likud president started to get elected. When Reuven Rivlin—when President Rivlin was elected he made a big deal out of telling them to go jump in the lake. He would never pardon him, because he never apologized for what he did. And that Israel could never rest on murder as a political strategy. So but what the guy wanted, his family is still part of the settler extremist part of the Netanyahu coalition. So he got what he wanted. And I’m sure he doesn’t regret it to this day.

HAASS: I want to jump ahead a few years. July 2000, Camp David. Where then the Israeli prime minister, I think, was Ehud Barak, if I have my memory right. Still the same Yasser Arafat. And you and your team tried to negotiate a comprehensive peace, two-state solution. You came close. But at the end, it didn’t succeed. So you and I have played golf together a few times. If you had a mulligan—(laughter)—about that, about Camp David, would you have done anything different? Would you have—do you think you could have—with the benefit of hindsight—you could have done things—like, let me give you one idea, what some critics have said, that you maybe could have done more to build support for Arafat in the Arab world, because when he said if I do this they’ll kill me, I’ll be signing my death warrant. You think you could have done anything different that would have mattered?

CLINTON: I think it’s quite possible. I think I made a mistake, that all political leaders involved in these negotiations are all well served by people who are really smart and who want them to succeed. But they also want to control the process. They all think they’re smarter than whoever it is who’s in power. And they want to, you know, shape it. And all this is understandable. But I have to—I have reasons why I believe that I made a mistake, because I had an unusually good relationship with most of the Arab leaders. And I think that, you know, we sent everybody, at State, Defense, (Ross ?), they all went across the world to sell this. But I think if I had actually gone myself there was a chance that could have happened. Not because what Arafat was worried about exactly, but—let me just tell you about my personal experience. I finally wrote about it for the first time in this last book I wrote.

But when we were at Camp David, as anybody who was there with me knows, none of us thought we were going to get an agreement. And people keep writing about it as if it was a failure. It was actually pretty successful. The problem was, when we were dealing with Arafat, they didn’t have a government, they didn’t have a process, and they didn’t have anything to give but peace and security cooperation. It was worth a lot. 1998 was the first year in the history of the state of Israel when no one was killed in a terrorist act—neither Jew nor Palestinian. That was because we were working closely with the CIA, Mr. Tenet here will testify to that, and Mossad, and the Palestinians.

So what we—what I was trying to do is change the whole psychology of the Palestinian negotiators, because they were used to saying no till five minutes to midnight, because all they had to give was peace and cooperation. So they wanted to squeeze as much land and other stuff out. And I kept saying, this is not like that. You’re going to have to say yes. We’ll never get to the end unless you say yes too. So we got as close as we could. And then we just kept working. Six weeks almost to the day before I left office, Yasser Arafat came to see me, alone. So you can say I made this up if you want. (Laughter.) I mean, there were—we didn’t have any notetakers. We had nobody. Just me and him.

And I said, look, I’ve got a chance to go to North Korea and end their nuclear program and their missile program. But an American president can’t just drop in on North Korea for the first time since the end of the Korean War. I said, I have to go to South Korea, and then to the guarantors—the other guarantors of the treaty, China and Russia, who both had very different governments then. And I have to go to Japan, because there are still Japanese prisoners in North Korean prisons. So Arafat said, how long will it take? I said, if I don’t sleep, or I only sleep on the plane, twelve days at least. And in all the years we were together it was the only time he ever cried.

And you may think he was a dishonest guy, just laughing. But I’m telling you, I had been through all kinds of stuff with him. And what I found was that he emoted a lot, and BS-ed a lot, but he was careful with his word. I felt like I was bargaining for a rug and the souq in Marrakech every time I tried to get yes on anything. (Laughter.) But he was crying. And he said, you cannot do that. I said, why, because you want to take this deal and you want it to look like I’m making you do it? He said, yeah. Of course. I said, OK. I have to ask you two questions. First of all, do you think I care about your children? I’d been so moved by what Rabin said that I never gave another speech when I didn’t talk about it too. He said, oh yes. You care much more about us than the Arabs do. We’re only useful to them if they have a discontented street, and they blame Israel and America instead of their own rulers. That’s what they—we’re getting a little out of here in America right now. They’re just—they just—they’re good at, you know, passing blame off.

And so I said, OK, but you think I care about your kids? He said, way more than the Arabs. I said, OK. All you owe me is the truth. This is your responsibility, your future. You’re the leader. I can’t make you take this deal. I want to remind everybody what was in the final deal. They would have gotten a capital in East Jerusalem, control of two of the four sections of the old city, 96 percent of the West Bank beyond the ’66-’67 borders, 4 percent of Israel—which the Palestinians could choose. If they wanted more room for living, they could take it in the north of Gaza—north of Gaza. If they wanted more land for farming, they could have taken it adjacent to the West Bank. Saddam Hussein was still around then. They got—the Israelis offered them seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hour-a-day equal access to the listening post which started outside Jerusalem and went all the way up into the Golan Heights. And they offered them approval of any international force that was set up on the east as a barrier to what might happen. And direct access between the West Bank and Gaza. And an airport. And lots of other stuff. It was a hell of a deal.

So, anyway, so I said, all I ask you, just tell me the truth, are you going to do this or not? He said, if we don’t do this when you’re here it could be five, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years before you ever get another chance. Of course I’m going to do it. It is now twenty-five years and counting. So one of the biggest things you have to decide when you’re in any position of responsibility is, have you made the best deal you can, or not? All these things I just said to you, it’s inconceivable that you could get them today. Where would it come from? And the biggest challenge that today’s peacemakers is going to have, I think, is where we can define the whole—is there some way we can reimagine and what statehood is? Is there some way we can reimagine what cooperation is? Because there’s no more land. And most of it’s been given as a political strategy by Mr. Netanyahu so he can stay in power. And I don’t know what’s going to happen.

HAASS: But, for all that, do you think that history will—but, more important, should—judge Yasser Arafat harshly? Because, as you say, the deal he didn’t say yes to is not even close to being on the table anymore.

CLINTON: Oh, I think it was a crazy mistake. I think it was. But I also think that he needed more moral and other support from the other Arab states. And I think, you know, I had—the Moroccan foreign minister told me that Arafat had told him that he was going to take the deal. Prince Bandar told me that Arafat told him he was going to take the deal. And even today, after all these years, I am not absolutely sure what happened. But somebody got him. I did not believe he thought he was lying to me when he said he was going to do it.

But I think—here’s why I think I should have gone. About ten years after I left office, I was in the UAE. And I got a call from a man who later became foreign minister, and before that ambassador the U.S., but who was close to the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. And he said, you know, the king’s not feeling well. I know—I knew that because we had the same doctor in New York. (Laughter.) And he never talked about it, but Abdullah told me about it. And I liked Abdullah a lot. I thought he was way the best Saudi ruler we could have had at the time.

And he said, I want you to come and see me. He said, I’m not well and I want to give you lunch, and I want you to come see me. And I said, I’ll be there in two days. And I got in a car and drove from the UAE to Saudi Arabia across the desert. And he said, I could not die without begging your forgiveness. I said, Your Majesty, what do I have to forgive you for? When I was running for reelection you kept gasoline prices cheap. (Laughter.) When they were trying to run me out of town, you flew all the way from Saudi Arabia to sit in the Oval Office tell the world that the Congress should let me alone.

He said, yeah, that’s all true. (Laughter.) But he said, I still owe you an apology. He said, you know, kings—I’ll never forget it—that kings are not very good at reading position papers. (Laughter.) Something for diplomacy. Not very good. And he said, but I’ve been sick, as you know, and trying to recuperate. And I’ve had a lot of extra time. And I had my staff actually give me the written proposal that you made, and that Prime Minister Ehud Barak signed off on. And he said, I could not believe it. And I could not imagine anyone could walk away from it.

So when we assume things about—I should have gone. I shouldn’t have asked Madeleine Albright to do it, or George Tenet to do it, or anybody else. I should have gone to the two or three most likely pressure points, because you have no idea really how people absorb information or how they weigh it. And usually in monarchies and other authoritarian systems, people don’t directly access information somebody, you know, spins it for them. Would it have made any difference? I have no idea. But I would sleep a hell of a lot better at night if I had done it.

HAASS: Let me ask you one last question before I open it up to our members here and in Zoom-land. Don’t take this as a criticism. But the results in Northern Ireland, shall we say, were better. And in 1998, with George Mitchell as your envoy, you ended up with the Good Friday Agreement, Belfast Agreement, essentially ending three decades of The Troubles. So my question is really more, when you think about diplomacy, negotiation, the role of the United States, maybe it’s the locals. Maybe that’s the—I have my own views, but I’m asking you the questions. Why do you think you succeeded in Northern Ireland, where you didn’t in the Middle East? What do you think was the difference, if you will?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I think the two sides wanted to find a way.

HAASS: The two sides in?

CLINTON: In Northern Ireland. They really wanted to find a way to quit fighting, I think. And that was a case where the interlocutors, I thought, could—actually wound up getting in the way. It was amazing. The U.K. treated this like it was their issue alone. And if we had a special relationship, obviously, I had to do whatever they wanted. Which I thought was nutty, since we had the biggest Irish diaspora and we might—and since I would never let—knowingly let anything terrible happened to them. But, oh my God, you should—there were even articles in the British press suggesting that I did this whole thing to get even with John Major, because he had agreed to rifle through my passport files in the ’92 election to help your campaign. (Laughter.)

HAASS: He should have done a better job. (Laughter.)

CLINTON: And so a lot of our people, particularly those who lived in and around Washington, oh, they were outraged. And I said, no, no, you should be elated. They said, what do you mean? I said—

HAASS: Is this talking about when you let Gerry Adams come here with the visa?

CLINTON: Yeah. I said, I want them to spend the whole rest of the campaign looking at my passport files. (Laughter.) I said, it’s going to make it easier to win. Don’t worry about it. I don’t—by the way, just generally in politics, I think it’s contact sport. If you don’t want to get hurt, you should get in a different line of business. (Laughter.) But I do believe the rules ought to be the same for everybody. And I think when the information ecosystem breaks down then we can’t live under the same set of rules. And if you don’t, you create irresistible incentives for authoritarians to run the table. That’s basically what I think about that.

But, anyway, so on Ireland, I have always—I was very touched that they spent a lot of time in the Irish and Northern Irish press talking about how hard I worked for the Irish vote in America around this issue. And so, God, there were these great articles about where my mother’s family was from. And you might be it—and I never went to Rosslea, which is where the Cassidys, my mother’s family, were from, when I was president. And I later found out it’s because the last—it was the last place where people were still wearing their bandoleros with bullets in them. (Laughter.) And they were—they thought all this work I was doing on the peace process was not good. They wanted to keep fighting.

So anyway, that—but the leaders wanted it. Any negotiator can do great if they have good ideas and they have people who are acting in good faith, and if they have some things they can put on the table for both sides that might change people’s calculation. But in the end, when you make a peace deal, they deserve it. I read an interesting article the other day that said that—it talked about how hard it was to get lasting peace. And the article said the only two peace agreements that have been made in the last thirty years which are still held are the Irish peace and the Dayton Accords—which is much more flawed, much more fragile, but it’s still in business.

HAASS: So let’s open it up to you, our members. You know all the rules. Wait for a microphone. Let us know who you are. Keep it as short as you can. Sir. And, by the way, we want to keep the focus, if we can, on President Clinton’s time in office, basically continuing the conversation we’ve had. So if we keep it on things diplomatic that would be forever appreciated.

Q: Robert Klitzman from Columbia University.

The question I had before you just said that, if I may—(laughter)—

HAASS: I may—the germaneness rule may apply, so be careful.

Q: I’m just wondering, following what you said about that sanity will return, you think, to American politics, how might we get there? Particularly given sort of the ecosystem that you described?

CLINTON: Well, you have to change who gets elected. (Laughter.) And what they say, the mandate. It’s very interesting. If you look at the elections that occurred in November, and we look at them through very traditional eyes, you say, well, you had two moderately progressive women elected governor in New Jersey and Virginia. And you had a radical leftist elected mayor in New York. If you give up your labels and you look at what they’re advocating, you basically had three people who won elections because they were talking about things related to affordability of basic things, without which people do not feel secure, hopeful, or communitarian. So that’s what I think. I don’t think this is complicated. I think—and you haven’t—at least, the traditional media is trying, by and large, to let the story get out there.

HAASS: Yes, ma’am. Yeah. I don’t have the right glasses on, so.

Q: Hi, Richard. Suzanne, good to see you.

HAASS: Hi, Suzanne. I apologize.

Q: (Laughs.) No worries. Thank you, Mr. President.

I’m wondering, in the present moment with this kind of very tentative and yet kind of savored breakthrough in the Middle East that we saw at the beginning of October, and kind of finally a ceasefire and the return of the hostages, just given what we have to work with now do you see any prospect of kind of widening that tiny opening into something that can push in the right direction over time? And if so, what is it going to depend on? Is this kind of a matter of Trump’s ambition for the Nobel Peace Prize? Is it maybe the plate tectonics in Israeli or Palestinian politics? Where do you see that possible opening, if any?

CLINTON: Well, I think it would be easy if it weren’t for the Palestinian issue. (Laughter.) Well, no, you’re laughing, but look at what is the—what were the Abraham Accords? They were a bunch of Arab states saying, we’re a lot more interested in doing business with Israel than going to war with them. And then the Saudis, who still believe that they are responsible in some way for the people of the faith, said, however, we can’t just ignore these Palestinians. And there—I have spent a lot of time on this in my life. And I don’t know if anybody cares enough about them to hang in there. I don’t know if, basically, those, who like the Saudis, the current group, they can be lured away from this. I don’t know much of anything about that now. I’d accept that they need a fix. And they need a fix which is not so significant that it collapses the Israeli government. Or, they need a new government in Israel, which includes probably some sort of commitment that the prime minister won’t have to go to jail.

You know, I called Ehud Barak when this happened. I don’t want to betray our confidence. But I said, can’t we get an agreement that if you have a unity government that Netanyahu shouldn’t have to go to jail? He said, of course, we can. This is Israel. We let people out of prison for a living. (Laughter.) And I thought, anybody know how many in the last agreement? Anybody know how many Palestinian prisoners were released?

HAASS: Tens of thousands.

CLINTON: How many?

HAASS: I assume, tens of thousands.

CLINTON: I mean, a huge number. So I think all that is doable.

HAASS: Let’s get a question from Zoom-land. I kind of feel that members are far and away ought to have a chance.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question—

CLINTON: One thing. It’s all doable, but it doesn’t give you a Palestinian state. Go ahead.

OPERATOR: We’ll I’ll take our next question from Aaron Miller.

Q: Mr. President, thanks. It was fascinating. You worked closely with Martin at Camp David. So did I. I was just wondering, if, in fact—and your last comment was pretty sobering. If, in fact, what we worked on at Camp David is no longer possible, what should the position of the United States be when it comes to a permanent resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian problem? We’re going to need a position that’s credible, and to work toward that. Have you essentially abandoned the notion that two states, or something like it, is no longer possible?

CLINTON: No, but I think we can’t ignore the fact that, for example, it is not an accident that when Hamas attacked Israel, they attacked—partly for geographic convenience—but also they attacked the kibbutzim that had the highest percentage of people who passionately wanted a two-state solution and were willing to give it—give land. And that’s who Hamas decided to kill. And they did it partly because they have always been more about making Israel unlivable than about protecting the interests of the Palestinians. So somebody’s going to have to reimagine this. I’ve read several clever things which may have potential about, you know, how land can belong to both units, or whatever. But you need to start thinking about it because one of two things is going to happen. It’s going to—we’ll have to think of something that hasn’t been proposed yet, or we’ll have to, in the end, humiliate the Palestinians one more time, because they’re now going to be taking a tiny fraction of what I had for them—(laughs)—and they didn’t take.

And so people will say, well, how did this happen? We don’t want that. We need to get free of that. We need—in every kind of—in our personal lives and on our political lives, insofar as possible, we need to have new arguments, not old ones, or a new way of thinking about it which preserves the maximum amount of integrity and meaning for people on all sides.

HAASS: Mr. President, I’m going to take the last question, prerogatives of the chair. Which is, say something about the life of an ex-president. I’d be curious to know whether it’s more fun to be an ex-president than a president. I have personal reasons to ask about that. (Laughter.) But also, the—but also your sense of where you can make a difference, either with the issues we’re talking about today, or domestically, or both.

CLINTON: Well, I think, first of all, if you’re going to be an ex-president, the question is how old are you and what kind of health are you in? But if you feel good, I think most of us would go crazy just sitting around, or playing golf, or whatever. So I made a decision, which I probably couldn’t make today because of the difference in global politics and American politics. But I made a decision that I wanted to do something about AIDS. I want to do something about global health generally. And I wanted to promote more economic and educational opportunities in America and around the world. And I just sort of started with that. And my foundation still writes the contracts on more than half the AIDS medicine in the world today. And we just started doing something because nobody else was doing it. I just kind of fell into it.

And then once you go someplace and you start working, something else will come up. Then I had had a lot of experience in natural disasters. So presidents asked me to help after the tsunami in South Asia, and then after the earthquake in Haiti. And just one thing after another happened. So then the North Korean government said they would only release these two Korean American journalists if I’d come get them. So that was a no-brainer. But I just found that there was always something there to do if you’re willing to do it. But you have to realize you’re not the president anymore. If the president doesn’t want you to do something that involves the international arena, you have pretty much an obligation not to do it. And I think, you know, you can only have one president at a time. It’s OK to disagree with the current president, but I found it—I thought less of it was better than more of it. And it never—you know—well, I don’t want to say anything else. (Laughter.)

HAASS: Mr. President, when we thought about doing this event, a Martin Indyk Memorial Lecture, we wanted to do something that was both, you know, again, that cherished Martin’s memory, but also dug deep into the issues that he cared so passionately about. And we couldn’t have done better than we did today. So thank you, sir. (Applause.)

CLINTON: Thank you.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.