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U.S. President Joe Biden's first request to Jack Lew to allow the president to appoint Lew as ambassador to Israel was in July 2023. In Israel, these were the peak days of protests against the judicial overhaul, but the Americans looked ahead, at the big geopolitical picture, and persisted in the quest to reach a normalization deal that would satisfy the U.S., the Sunni Muslim countries in the Middle East, and Israel.
The announcement of Lew's appointment came in early September, but two months passed between confirmation in the Senate and his departure for Tel Aviv, and in the middle Hamas carried out the surprise attack on October 7. By the time Lew landed here, in a country stricken by shock, it seemed that an agreement with Saudi Arabia was the last thing on the agenda.
His short tenure as ambassador, which ended last weekend with the change of administration in Washington, was focused mainly on the war; coordinating airlifts, defending international institutions, contacting families of hostages, and negotiating with Hamas. However, he insists that even during these 15 terrible months, he did not give up on the task of reengineering diplomatic relations in the Middle East. "So when I came here, when President Biden asked me if I would accept this post, it was in July of 2023, so we're several months before October 7. The reason he asked me and that I accepted this post was to try and get Saudi Israeli normalization done," Lew explained.
"Having the right people in the right place was going to make that more likely. I thought it was of huge strategic importance, and that was the, you know, that was the reasoning that brought me here. Originally, when I got here just three weeks into the war, it was in a very different circumstance. There hasn't been a day that I've been here that we haven't remained focused on Saudi normalization, where we have been very clear, even as we talked about the need to bring the cease-fire negotiations together. I mean, the hostage release and cease-fire could have created a window to complete Saudi normalization, and we now, obviously, in the last days, can't do it, but it is no less in the national interest of Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States to have Saudi normalization than it was in July of 2023 when I thought it was a good reason to change the same interest," he said.
I have never lived through a war day to day in the country fighting the war
"There hasn't been a day that I've been here that we haven't remained focused on Saudi normalization, where we have been very clear, even as we talked about the need to bring the cease-fire negotiations together," Lew added. "I mean, the hostage release and cease-fire could have created a window to complete Saudi normalization, and we now, obviously, in the last days, can't do it, but it is no less in the national interest of Saudi Arabia, Israel and the U.S. to have Saudi normalization than it was in July of 2023 when I thought it was a good reason to change the same interest. I think the interest is it."
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US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel will return to normalization talks
(Photo: Alex Kolomoisky, Reuters/ Clodagh Kilcoyne, Ludovic MARIN / AFP, AAREF WATAD/AFP, AP, Sarah Meyssonnier/Pool via AP)
"Now, let me tell you what's changed before October 7, I believe that there was a need to address the issue of Palestinian self-governance. I don't know exactly what the required agreement would be, but it was not like the Abraham Accords, where you could just put that issue to the side. The Saudis were very clear about that. In my understanding, I think after October 7 all of the signals have been very much consistent with that, that there has to be a credible process to address those issues. Now I don't think that that requires doing anything that would create a risk to Israel's security. Then there's that any agreement would have to be predicated on Israel accepting it. It would have to be predicated on Israel being able to defend itself and have security."
When was the moment that you realized we are going to have a hostage deal?
"I thought there was going to be a hostage deal. I felt that over the last week, 10 days, it was clear that all the parties were trying to close. And a deadline helps in all difficult decisions. I will say that there had been enough hopeful moments that I believed it when both sides had actually approved it. It's been up and down and up and down. It's taken too long, and it's going to be a hard agreement to for all parties to continue to implement. So it's going to take ongoing focus and determination to get not just through the six weeks and the release of the 33 hostages, but to engage in the negotiation over phase two and to push those difficult issues to completion."
What was your involvement in the in the diplomatic contacts? Did you only get updates or you take active role in this process?
"So I've been closely connected to the U.S. diplomatic effort for the entire time that I've been here, I don't think a day has gone by when I haven't had conversations with our team directly or through members of my staff that were working with them. Sometimes it was advice to the team, sometimes it was coordinating the meetings between our leaders and leaders in Israel, so I can't say there was just one element to it."
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The six murdered hostages including Hersh Goldberg-Polin
(Photo: REUTERS/ Florion Goga)
"It was a very long process, and I've been deeply engaged with the families of hostages, obviously the American hostage families, who are our first priority. But I can honestly say that I have not turned down meetings with any hostage families. I've met with the families of the young women soldiers. Quite a number of times I've been with families who are Israeli and not American. My feeling being here was that the things I could do directly were to make sure that the families knew we were doing everything that we could do."
"I could answer questions as directly as possible to help them understand where I saw the state of the negotiations and when they asked me to do things, if they were things that I could do. Last Saturday night, just a week ago, I was in the Hostage Square with my colleagues, the ambassadors from UK and Germany. And it was because one of the families of the young woman soldiers said the world needs to know that these hostages come from your countries as well."
Is it really the same deal that was on the table in May?
"You don't have a deal until both parties want an agreement. Hamas did not want an agreement in May, no matter what was said here, you weren't going to have an agreement. I can't speak to what decision making went into, different moves made by the government of Israel, but it certainly was described to me that there was a desire for a deal. The action sometimes made it more challenging, as I just said, in terms of the public discussion of the Philadelphi Corridor, that's different from whether or not you are willing to accept a deal."
"Fundamentally, Hamas made a decision, and I've said 1,000 times that whether we liked it or not, there wasn't going to be a deal if Hamas wouldn't accept a deal, because you couldn't unilaterally make a deal. So one can debate whether we could have moved things faster. We've never had any direct ability to influence Hamas. Hamas is influenced by the change of situation on the ground, and the war has obviously put pressure on them, the change of situation in the region, where the condition that after the very successful Israeli military operations in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, there's different reality in the region."
Do you think that Netanyahu will continue to the second stage?
"We're sitting here not even 24 hours after the government approved the agreement, I think there will be pressures in both directions. I personally believe that once hostages are released and they're reunited with their families there will be mixed emotions. We don't know exactly what condition they're in. We don't know exactly how everyone will feel when those moments come, but I think it will create a lot of pressure to give peace to the remaining families. I think if the negotiations can continue in the spirit that they've gone so far, there's a pathway here. It's a hard pathway, and it's going to require making decisions that need to be explained for the public to understand them, and that's what leadership is about."
There was no embargo
Ambassador Lew is referring, among other things, to the conflict in the background of the UN Security Council resolution from last March, which approved a call for a cease-fire during Ramadan, mentioning the hostages, but without demanding their release. The U.S. abstained, but did not veto it. This led to a rift between Washington and Jerusalem, and Netanyahu's office was quick to announce the cancellation of the Israeli delegation that was supposed to go to the U.S.
"So if you have a resolution in the UN Security Council where the U.S. goal is to keep other countries on our side, saying a cease-fire has to be connected to the release of the hostages, if you change the language to get other countries to support you. You can choose to say, the US did not change its position. That was what we said. Or you can say, the US did change their position. That's what the government here said. I think that's a strategic mistake."
"You can disagree with the language in private. You can say, I wish you wouldn't do that, but what we knew was we'd had no support in the UN if we went the other way. And subsequent to that, we've had to veto resolutions in the UN Security Council, because we can't get any other country to keep the ideas linked. So we took a change of grammar and it became daylight. I think that took a small difference and made it a daylight issue. It was not something that had to be daylight."
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Biden's show of support for Israel
(Video: Reuters)
"What was real was that the rest of the world was drifting, and we were trying to hold the rest of the world for as long as possible from drifting too far. The much discussed issue of munitions, we have provided more military support at a speed than we've ever done before. There was a different disagreement about one munition open public, the 2,000 pound bombs to describe that in public as an arms embargo, is completely exaggerated. The day that the shipment of 2,000 pound bombs did not go airplanes were delivering precision guided small diameter bombs. So it was a disagreement about an important, but a single, weapon system that for months colored the debate. Now I'm not saying there isn't a good reason."
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I want to ask something personally about things that you did here and what you are going to miss maybe Israeli food or something that was close to you.
"I just spent Shabbat with some of my dearest friends, and I have made many new friends as well. Whenever I go through a transition, the thing that I miss the most is people I've gotten to spend time with that I will miss when I move home."
What did you discover that you didn't know before you came here?
"Look, I have never lived through a war day to day in the country fighting the war. I've worked on military issues from Washington, visited for a day or two, I've learned how important resilience is for people to get through these kinds of trying times, and I actually have faith in the goodness of the people I met in everyday life to get Israel through this crisis and to better days."