JERUSALEM -- This week, I had dinner with a German diplomat who had served many years in the Middle East. The topic of the conversation, of course, was the Annapolis meeting. He had his doubts. There should be a fixed date for the agreement, he argued. Dragging the talks on forever will lead to nothing. But there was a date, I reminded him, the end of 2008. Too far away, he said.
He told me that when Germany was united, the talks took exactly three months. Punkt. Then the agreement was signed. I said that this could be done only with Germans, not with Arabs and Jews. We laughed and drank some more of the excellent Yarden wine. Thank God, the Golan was not discussed at Annapolis, so the future of the superb wines grown there was not threatened, for the time being, at least.
Marks for marks
Peace should be made by leaders, he reflected, not by bureaucrats. He told me a tale of the German unification. The big issue was how many West German marks the East Germans would get for their lousy East German marks. The economists at the Finance Ministry calculated a ratio of 1:4. Yet Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided that the ratio should be 1:2. In other words, he allowed all East Germans to double their financial assets. When the bureaucrats protested, Kohl dismissed them. ''It will cost us money,'' he told them, "but we will win the hearts and minds of the people.''
This is exactly what happened, and the unification went much smoother than expected.
I replied with a story of my own. In 1994, as the spokesman of the Rabin government, I went with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to Amman for the final peace talks with the late King Hussein. There were unresolved issues, and there was some anxiety in the air.
Dealing with Iran
After dinner, the two leaders retired to a separate room. We waited for hours, until at dawn, the door opened and they approached us. In a hastily arranged press conference, Rabin said: "When we sat down last night, we decided that we were not going to come out of the room without an agreement. The rest was details.''
We drank more wine in silence, the diplomat obviously sensing my emotions over my fallen hero, Rabin.
Then I told him a story I had once heard about Ataturk, the founder of today's Turkey. Faced with the enormous task of moving a Muslim, backward society into the modern age, he decided in the 1920s to make peace with all of Turkey's neighbors. It worked, until the final talks with Iran came to a dead end, because of some hill, which the army officers on both sides claimed to be extremely important. Ataturk made a brilliant decision. He ordered his head of delegation to tell his Iranian counterparts that the shah, the father of the deposed one, should be the arbiter.
''Great move,'' said my diplomat friend appreciatively, and we drank to the wisdom of past leaders.
A toast to Olmert, Abbas
''Wait, there is more,'' I told him. The shah came to the hall where the talks had been held and was briefed by an Iranian officer on the strategic importance of that hill. Suddenly he realized that the shah wasn't looking at all at the map he had been pointing at but was rather staring directly at him. The officer stopped in embarrassment. ''Iran is going to have peace with Turkey,'' the shah scolded him, "You think that I care about this God-forsaken hill? Give it to the Turks!''
This was our fifth glass, so we couldn't continue in a coherent way. I vaguely remember him proposing a toast to Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, wishing that they stand up to the historic occasion, or something. I said I believed they would, but for some reason I needed the sixth glass, just to be sure.
This article was first published in The Miami Herald on November 30, 2007.
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The opinions expressed herein are the author's own personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of the Israel Democracy Institute.