Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and
Pakistan, passed away on December 13 at 69. He has been hailed by several Jewish
papers as a friend of Israel, although not prominently involved in
American-Israeli relations.
Indeed, in a column in The Washington Post
two years ago, he wrote something we don’t often hear from presidential envoys
and State Department officials. Holbrooke wrote that president Harry Truman
should be admired for having recognized Israel as a state on May 14, 1948, and
that the State Department’s attempts to undermine this decision was not
something Holbrooke was proud of.
THERE ARE people whom you meet once and
know you will never forget. I met Richard Holbrooke once, in Doha, Qatar, in
April 2005 – a meeting I will never forget.
It took place at a
high-profile gettogether called the US-Islamic World Forum. Organized by the
Qatar government and the Brookings Institution, the conference was packed with
more than 150 scholars and leaders from all sides who, for two full days,
diligently discussed the needs and means for achieving democracy, reforms and
renaissance in the Muslim world. Oddly enough, there was hardly a Muslim speaker
who did not tie the implementation of such reforms to “progress toward settling
the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.”
From the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad
bin Khalifa al-Thani, to Rami Khouri, former editor of The Daily Star in
Lebanon, almost every speaker ended his or her speech with a reminder that the
Muslim world is not ready to accept reform for its own sake; reform is, in fact,
a concession to America, and will be granted if, and only if, it “resolves the
Palestinian problem.”
None of the speakers spelled out what “solution”
meant to him or her; it was probably part of an unspoken agreement to avoid
controversial issues for fear of spoiling the friendly atmosphere of renaissance
and collaboration. It was only in private conversations that I discovered
that, to most of them, the “solution” was unquestionably the same one proposed
by Helen Thomas.
Richard Holbrooke spoke at the last session of the
conference, addressing a large audience of Arab dignitaries, scholars and
pundits. After repeating the great things that America can do for the Muslim
world – in science, education, freedom, entrepreneurship and more – and after
saying all the things that a seasoned diplomat would say on occasions like this
one, he added one innocent remark that fell like a bombshell: “By now,” he said,
“two and a half generations of Arabs have been brought up on textbooks that do
not show Israel.”
The audience was stunned. I can still hear the
pin-dropping silence as he calmly went on: “Such continued denial of reality, at
the grassroots level, is a major hindrance to any peaceful settlement of the
conflict.” (I am quoting from memory.)
I watched Holbrooke’s colleagues from the
Brookings Institution to see how they reacted. Their faces were
blank.
There were a couple of Palestinian women sitting next to me, and
their faces looked like they had been caught cheating on an exam. One of them
raised her hand and started to say something about checkpoints and occupation
(“settlements” were not in fashion then), but in Holbrooke’s presence, she
sounded more like someone complaining about the video cameras that caught her
stealing.
Holbrooke answered her politely and comfortably: “Your
textbooks do not show Israel on the map, and that does not help the peace
process.”
There was no need for further elaboration. The elephant
that everyone was pretending did not exist suddenly appeared in the room. Two
days of hard deliberations, with Arabs pretending that “progress in the peace
process” doesn’t really mean the elimination of Israel, and Americans pretending
they have no reason to doubt it, had ended with a refreshing spark of
honesty.
AT THE end of the Q&A session, I walked up to Holbrooke and
told him how much I admired his presentation and the way he handled the
question. He looked at me with some astonishment and said: “This is obviously
one of the main obstacles to peace.”
He said it as if stating in public
what everyone knows to be true – even in a place like Doha – is as natural as
breathing .
This was the meeting I will never forget.
Richard
Holbrooke will be remembered in the history of the Jewish people as one of the
few State Department officials who had the courage to proclaim Truman a hero for
overruling his own State Department.
He will also be remembered for
teaching his colleagues how honesty can be an instrument, not a hindrance to
effective diplomacy.
The writer is a professor at UCLA and president of
the Daniel Pearl Foundation (danielpearl.org), named after his son. He is a coeditor of I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of
Daniel Pearl
(Jewish Lights, 2004), winner of the National Jewish Book Award.
This article was first published in The Jewish Journal.