Who Won at Camp David?
Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics.
by William B. Quandt.
Brookings Institution. 420 pp. $32.95.
Sadat and Begin: The Domestic Politics of Peacemaking.
by Melvin R. Friedlander.
West-view Press. 338 pp. $25.00.
In September 1978, at the presidential retreat of Camp David in the mountains of western Maryland, the leaders of Egypt, Israel, and the United States concluded the framework agreement that led, in March 1979, to the first peace treaty between the Jewish state and an Arab nation. The Camp David accords, signed by President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and witnessed by President Jimmy Carter, also provided a framework for negotiating the final disposition of the West Bank (a.k.a. Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza Strip. But those negotiations, which would have involved Jordan and Palestinian representatives from the territories, have not yet come to pass. Even the interim negotiations involving Egypt have stalled.
William Quandt, then on the National Security Council staff and now at the Brookings Institution, was a direct participant in the Camp David process and in the discussions leading up to the peace treaty. He not only had access to the relevant U.S. documents but drafted many of them. His book thus supplies an (unclassified) negotiating record of Camp David and is of palpable historical importance.
Melvin Friedlander, then a member of the defense intelligence community and now a professor at George Mason University, covers the same topics as Quandt but devotes more space to the internal political forces which drove Sadat and Begin toward Camp David w hile also limiting their freedom to act. Both men are portrayed as superb politicians; Sadat, in Friedlander’s view, was especially adept at balancing off competing forces within Egyptian society.
Quandt writes well; in his telling, even the dry details of negotiations become interesting. And there are inside stories to hold the reader’s attention: these include Quandt’s rendition of Jimmy Carter’s initial view of the Middle East in terms of his civil-rights experience in Georgia, with the Palestinian Arabs taking the place of the blacks, and of the secret understanding between Carter and Sadat, which did not work, to force concessions from Begin. Other miscalculations by Carter retailed by Quandt include his cool treatment of then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during a 1977 Washington visit—which ended up helping the election effort of opposition leader Begin—and his attempt, which backfired, to drive a wedge between an “intransigent” Begin and American Jews. Much to Carter’s chagrin, Begin quickly learned how to appeal to the Congress and thus in effect influence U.S. policy over the President’s head. Finally, there was the well-publicized misunderstanding at Camp David between Begin and Carter concerning a “freeze” on Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Quandt, for one, does not share Begin’s interpretation that the freeze was to last only three months. (Friedlander, however, cites others who do.) In any case, this misunderstanding did much to sour relations between Carter and Begin.
Quandt does not deal with an even deeper level of misunderstanding in the Carter administration: the one concerning the world oil situation. Carter’s belief that the 1973 price increase was the result of the Yom Kippur War, and his concern that an energy crisis was imminent, affected not only his domestic policies but his view of the Middle East. Influenced by dubious economic studies, he accepted as an article of faith that an oil shortage would overwhelm the world by 1983 unless the Arab-Israel conflict, and especially the Palestinian problem, were settled. In this connection it is especially ironic to recall that Camp David and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty were followed not by a drop in the price of oil but by the explosion of 1979, triggered by the fall of the Shah—and that the subsequent collapse of oil prices beginning in March 1983 coincided with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. So much for the correlation between the Arab-Israel conflict and oil prices.
_____________
Friedlander’S revealing book fills in the political background that propelled Sadat and Begin toward their eventual peace treaty. In his reading, the role played by Carter in bringing this odd couple together, though vital, was completely inadvertent. Indeed, Begin owed his election victory in 1977 in part to the backlash created within Israel by Carter’s espousal of the idea of a Palestinian homeland, together with his hints that he would negotiate with the PLO. But it was the joint U.S.-USSR communique of October 1977, holding out the unwanted prospect of an international conference in Geneva on the Middle East, that greatly strengthened Begin’s position within Israel’s political system. A centrist party, led by Yigael Yadin, now joined his coalition and enabled Begin to balance those of his supporters on the Right who opposed major territorial concessions.
As for Sadat, he had his own reasons for opposing the involvement either of the Soviets or of the radical Arabs in a settlement. His true and major objective (as Begin, unlike Carter, recognized early on) was to regain the Sinai territory, including its considerable oil resources, for Egypt. For this, he had to deal directly with Israel.
Sadat’s concern for the Palestinian Arabs was not very great; he only wanted to establish a precedent for them and avoid too much Arab criticism, without having to give up the fruits of a peace treaty for Egypt. Sadat’s advisers, however, were mostly hawks, much worried about Egypt’s Arab connections and insistent on tangible results for the Palestinians. Sadat reportedly “froze out” his Vice President Hosni Mubarak from Camp David and went to great lengths to neutralize him. By contrast, Israeli ministers, notably Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, were less hawkish than Begin, and in the end persuaded him to make major concessions, such as dismantling the Sinai settlements.
_____________
Who won at Camp David? Quandt believes that Begin got the best of the others because he could not be moved. (The epithet “intransigent” appears frequently in Quandt’s book.) Carter, according to this view, was thus forced to exact concessions from Sadat, who had to show tangible results from an initiative that had exposed him to Arab (and Egyptian) criticism. Yet Sadat too got what he was after: the return of the Sinai. Only Carter, who had invested his personal prestige in the peace process, failed to get what he really wanted: a comprehensive settlement, the holy grail of traditional U.S. Middle East policy.
But what, we may ask today, did Israel really gain? Recognition by the most important Arab state, but not a real peace with normal neighborly relations. True, as Friedlander points out, the treaty was to have precedence for Egypt over treaties between it and Arab states, and Egypt did keep the promise made by Prime Minister Khalil that in case of an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Egypt would condemn but not go to war. But many Israelis now have grave doubts about the quality and stability of relations with Egypt. The withdrawal of Egypt’s ambassador in 1982, the ongoing virulent attacks on Israel in the Egyptian press, the assassinations of Israeli personnel in Cairo, and especially the 1985 killing of seven Israeli tourists in the Sinai, when Egyptian authorities let four children bleed to death while their parents watched helplessly—these have all affected the Israeli public. One result is that there is little enthusiasm for further such treaties with other Arab states.
Egypt, on the other hand, has done very well, gaining tangible assets plus substantial and continuing U.S. aid. By now, moreover, Egypt has mostly reestablished its credentials within the Arab world.
For the United States the peace treaty proved to be an expensive undertaking. We agreed to make good Israel’s economic losses from the agreement—actually, we have provided only a small fraction—and we have been generously supporting Egypt, currently at the rate of $2.5 billion per year. There was a brief hope that in return the U.S. could lease from Egypt the Sinai air bases built by Israel, but that opportunity was lost at Camp David—reportedly because the Pentagon then was considering the possibility of bases in Saudi Arabia. How different the strategic situation looks today!
_____________
Did Camp David and the Egypt-Israel treaty set a precedent? In particular, does Israel’s complete withdrawal from Sinai foretell a similar eventual withdrawal from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem? Begin certainly believed that he had satisfied at least the letter of UN Resolution 242 (“territories for peace”) by returning the Sinai, which was the bulk of the land captured in 1967. This, however, was hardly the U.S. view at Camp David; on that point Quandt and Friedlander agree completely. Significantly, Sadat may have set a precedent of a different kind by declining to press a claim for the Gaza Strip, territory of the Palestinian Mandate that Egypt had occupied from 1948 to 1967. This omission may in the future weaken the claim of Jordan to the West Bank, unilaterally annexed by the Jordanians shortly after its capture in 1948. Then, too, King Hussein may feel that he can do no less than Sadat, who recovered 100 percent of the territory he sought. But this very maximalism, impracticable in the case of the West Bank, may hinder the possibility of achieving a lesser goal.
In short, it very much remains to be seen whether, and how, the Camp David accords will affect the eventual status of the West Bank territories and their Arab inhabitants.
_____________
