I was really sorry to hear of the death, a few days ago, of the veteran Israeli defense-affairs correspondent Ze’ev Schiff. Schiff was a smart, well-connected, and extremely canny individual. He was also a real gentleman.
I had known Ze’ev since the mid-1980s. We had many, many long conversations about defense affairs. Often we disagreed. But that did not interfere with the high regard and friendship in which I held him or the serious consideration that he always gave to me and my work.
In 1991, when I was working at a Washington DC-based conflict-resolution organization called Search for Common Ground, helping them set up their first project in the Middle East, Ze’ev was one of the first people I invited to join the project; and he was immediately eager to do so. I had already, sometime before that, introduced him to Ziad Abu Amr, the serious Palestinian political scientist and public intellectual who was the Foreign Minister in the Palestinians’ recent unity government (and prior to that, Culture Minister in the government that Mahmoud Abbas headed as PM, back in 2003.) Ze’ev and Ziad proved to be two very important pillars of the project as it became launched.
In spring 1993, I felt obliged to leave SCG because of a serious breach of trust committed against me and the integrity of our project by the organization’s president. (This, in an organization in which trust-building was the essence of our work…) After my resignation was announced, Ze’ev was almost immediately on the phone to me, pleading with me to stay in the project. To my regret, I did not feel able to.
Anyway, I kept in as good touch with Ze’ev as both of our busy schedules would allow, and would certainly always call him whenever I was in Israel. When I was there in early 2004, I really needed to get Gaza, because I was doing some pro-bono consulting with a US-based aid organization that was active there. The Israeli military maintained– then, almost as much as now– iron controls on all entry of persons into Gaza, and they wouldn’t give me permission to go. Ze’ev was extraordinarily generous and persistent in calling all the relevant military people on my behalf. (But even then, it didn’t work.)
When I went back to Israel and Palestine in February 2006, I spent a couple of hours one morning having coffee with Ze’ev, in one of the malls in the fairly luxurious strip of developments north of Tel Aviv. One of the nice things about Ze’ev was that he would often introduce me to some of the extremely interesting people he knew who would happen to be passing by. (Israel is, after all, a fairly small place.) In 1998, I remember, he introduced me in the lobby of the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv to Fouad Ben Eliezer, now a lynchpin of Olmert’s government and always a solid rock of the Israeli center-right. In 2006, Ze’ev introduced me to a guy who had been a key Mossad hit-squad organizer back in 1973.
Anyway, on that occasion, I told Ze’ev I was once again planning to visit Gaza. Indeed, since this time I had an Israeli “foreign press” pass, I knew I’d have a better chance of getting in, which I did. “Send my regards to Ziad,” Ze’ev said. Then he leaned forward… You have to remember this was in the weeks immediately following Hamas’s victory in the January elections. It was before Hamas had formed their government. They were still eager to have it be as broad a national unity government as possible. The American and Israeli government were agitating hard against that: from that point, it was already very evident that they really, seriously, wanted the Hamas-led political order in the PA government to fail. Ziad, who had always been a key bridging personality between Abu Mazen and Hamas, was widely rumored to be in the running to be named Foreign Minister in the Hamas-led government…
So Ze’ev, who has always been extremely well connected with the Israeli authorities, leaned forward to me over the open-air table at the coffee-shop and said, “Tell Ziad not to do it! Tell him, if he does, he will face the most serious consequences.”
Later, in a phone conversation we had while I was on my way to Gaza, Ze’ev repreated that warning, in even more urgent terms.
It was my clear understanding that this was the transmission of (or very well informed reporting of) a death threat from the Israeli authorities. Ze’ev Schiff was not a person prone to exaggeration.
Personally, I felt uncomfortable at the prospect of being party to the continued transmission of this threat. I figured if the Israeli authorities really wanted to communicate a serious death threat to Ziad Abu Amr at any time, they had hundreds of ways to do so and were not reliant on me to do so. On the other hand, I figured Ziad deserved to at least know about it. So yes, I did raise it in a conversation I had with him.
(In the end, some combination of threats and and inducements were successful at keeping Ziad and all other independent Palestinian politicians of note out of the Hamas-led government at that point.)
But back to Ze’ev Schiff. No doubt about it, for the last few decades of his life he was very much more than “just” a reporter of the Israeli defense scene. He was a canny behind-the-scenes player in Israeli politics. Among the community of Israelis whom I encountered and worked with in various portions of the “track-two” diplomatic scene, he was definitely not a dove-ish visionary. He was a hard-nosed realist. But as such, he was very interested in testing out the intentions and views of the “other side”; and he worked hard to build relationships of mutual respect with Palestinians and other Arabs on a professional and collegial basis so that all of them could jointly explore the various options for their peoples’ futures. And yes, actually, to do this does require a degree of vision, self-confidence, and empathy that all too often seems lacking in strategic “thinkers” who imagine that all problems can be solved by force and by trying to delegitimize dissenting voices and views and exclude them from the discussion.
I should also note that, in a field in which the contributions of women are far too often either ignored, expropriated by guys, or otherwise sidelined, I always felt that Ze’ev took my work seriously, and valued my views on strategic and regional issues.
So for a large number of reasons I shall miss Ze’ev Schiff. I think Israel and the region will be diminished and just a bit less stable in the absence of his hard-nosed realism, his decades’ worth of experience of regional defense matters, and his gut understanding of the fact that Israelis really do need to build decent, respectful relationships with their Arab neighbors– even those they disagree with– if they are to have a stable and assured future in the region
I send my deep condolences to his wife, Sarah, and their children and grandchildren. I’m sure they will all miss him much more than any of us outsiders.