by Thomas W. Lippman
To understand why Israel and Hamas keep fighting, and why Secretary of State John Kerry was unable to forge a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, it helps to do some homework. Read Volume 8 of the State Department’s “Foreign Relations of the United States” series [...]]]>
by Thomas W. Lippman
To understand why Israel and Hamas keep fighting, and why Secretary of State John Kerry was unable to forge a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, it helps to do some homework. Read Volume 8 of the State Department’s “Foreign Relations of the United States” series for 1977-80, the years of Jimmy Carter.
It is a 1,303-page compilation of declassified documents—presidential letters, intelligence assessments, memoranda of conversation—covering the 20 months of intense Middle East diplomacy between Carter’s inauguration in January 1977 to his decision to convene the famous trilateral summit at Camp David. The principal characters are Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, but much of the heavy lifting is done by their foreign affairs ministers, Moshe Dayan of Israel, Ismail Fahmy of Egypt, and Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, along with their professional staffs.
What the documents show is that despite herculean efforts, especially by Carter himself, and huge investments of time, diplomacy failed. Sadat undertook his daring trip to Jerusalem in November 1977 and Carter summoned the other two to Camp David because only extraordinary, game-changing gambles produced any real movement on the intractable issues the negotiators faced. Suspicion ran deep, antagonisms were entrenched, and history was implacable, especially for the Israelis. Not even the combined weight of the United States and Soviet Union could bring the Israelis and Egyptians—to say nothing of the Syrians—to the comprehensive, once-and-for-all regional solution that all professed to want.
The fate of the West Bank, which Israel referred to as Judea and Samaria, defied every formula offered for resolving it, just as it does today. As for Gaza, it was a stepchild of the negotiations throughout—nobody really wanted it. And while everyone agreed that peace must be based on US Security Council Resolution 242—the “land for peace” formula adopted after the 1967 war—the negotiators spent endless hours arguing about what that resolution required.
Resolution 242, which even today provides the theoretical framework upon which negotiations between Israel and the Arabs would be based, stipulated the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and recognized “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” It also called for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” but it did not say “all territories” or even “the territories.” Israel said any withdrawal from the lands it captured in 1967 was negotiable and would not necessarily apply to all of them—the Sinai Peninsula, which belonged to Egypt, the Gaza Strip, which had been under Egyptian administration, Syria’s Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which from 1948 to 1967 had been part of Jordan. The Arabs naturally argued that since 242 declared the acquisition of territory by war inadmissible, the resolution obviously applied to all the occupied lands.
Another major stumbling block at the time was the refusal of Israel, supported by the United States, to have any dealings with anyone associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which it regarded as a group of terrorists decided to Israel’s destruction. Israel’s view was that before 1967 the West Bank belonged to Jordan, and its inhabitants were citizens of Jordan, and therefore its future would be negotiated with Jordan alone. The problem with that was that an Arab summit conference had stripped Jordan of its claim to the West Bank and declared the PLO to be the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people.
And then there was the composition of the delegations that would negotiate at Geneva. Syria’s Hafez Assad, father of the current president, fearful that Sadat would strike a separate peace with Israel and abandon the other Arabs, wanted a single, unified Arab delegation. That was unacceptable to Sadat, who understood that nothing would be accomplished if every Arab participant had a de facto veto over decisions by the others.
Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who understood that Sadat was impatient but the Israelis were not, told Carter that “the priority of Israel’s policy now seems to be to make a fairly attractive offer to Egypt in order to tempt Sadat into a separate deal. This would allow Israel to put off movement on the Syrian front and to avoid the Palestinian-West Bank issues altogether.”
He was right about Israel’s negotiating strategy. Begin’s Likud Party was elected in the spring of 1977 on a platform that called for keeping the West Bank and encouraging Jewish settlements there. The Labor Party, which had run Israel since statehood in 1948, had been somewhat more forthcoming about the possibility of territorial compromise, but Begin was a hard-line Zionist who believed in Israel’s right to all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.
In the quest for the Holy Grail of Geneva, everyone traveled extensively in an endless summer of fruitless haggling over how to proceed. These were negotiations about negotiating, arguments of stupefying legalistic tedium about who would participate, under what circumstances, and what the agenda would be. Would there be a single Arab delegation, or several? If single, would there then be “working groups” for specific country-by-country issues? What would Israel accept on the subject of Palestinian refugees? Who would speak for the Palestinians? Would Jordan participate? Would Syria? What would be the role of the Soviet Union, co-chairman of the proposed conference? Should there be agreement beforehand on a “declaration of principles?” Would the specific language of 242 be the basic reference point, or would it be somehow modified? Would Geneva be a ceremonial event, at which agreements already reached would be signed, or the forum for the hard work of negotiating? If Israel were somehow to agree to pull out of the West Bank, who should take over now that Jordan had been stripped of its claim?
Carter, who had stunned everyone in March by volunteering the view that peace would require the establishment of a “homeland” for the Palestinians, soon concluded that Israel’s positions were the biggest obstacle to peace and let his feelings show in public—stirring anger in the American Jewish community and anxiety among his political advisers. Camp David was a last-ditch, high-stakes shot at a breakthrough.
Some of the roadblocks on the path to peace were removed at Camp David and in the subsequent negotiations over the peace between Israel and Egypt, a treaty that left the Palestinian issue unresolved and was achieved only when the United States and Egypt gave up on Geneva. Other issues, such as Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the PLO, were resolved years later, at Oslo.
The Arabs argue today that one of Israel’s greatest issues, the refusal of Arab nations other than Egypt or Jordan to recognize it or accept its existence, was resolved when all members of Arab League endorsed a plan offered by Saudi Arabia to offer peace and recognition in exchange for Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines. But Israel is no more inclined to accept that formula today than it would have been in 1977; after all, Hamas and Hezbollah are not members of the Arab League and not parties to that offer, and are supported in their intransigence by Iran. Even if Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party abandoned the “Greater Israel” policy of Begin’s time, anxieties about security would still prompt Israel to demand substantial revisions in the 1967 lines, as well as demilitarization of Palestine, including Gaza. If the proposed “two-state solution” is still viable—if it ever was viable—it is hard to see how Gaza could be part of it if Israel believes Hamas workers resume digging tunnels under the border from which they could attack Israelis.
At the end of 2011, according to the Foundation for Middle East Peace, there were 328,423 Israeli settlers in the West Bank. If future negotiations about the future of Palestine are to include Gaza as well as the West Bank, it is hard to see how Gaza’s status can be resolved until the question of those West Bank settlers has been resolved as part of some overall agreement. A far-reaching deal that would end the Gaza conflict by including it as part of a Palestinian state and linking it to the West Bank by some kind of corridor—as envisioned at the time of Oslo—seems far in the future. The Gazans would live better lives if Israel were to allow them greater access to the outside world, but they will still be living in a stateless limbo.
Photo: Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat with US President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978.
]]>The CIA has just declassified a raft of documents related to President Jimmy Carter’s historic meeting at Camp David in September 1978, with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin. At least a cursory reading of the most salient documents does not reveal a lot that has not [...]]]>
The CIA has just declassified a raft of documents related to President Jimmy Carter’s historic meeting at Camp David in September 1978, with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin. At least a cursory reading of the most salient documents does not reveal a lot that has not already been reported and commented on a thousand times in the last thirty years. But taken together, they say a lot, and point to what can — and perhaps cannot — be done with the current US-brokered negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
The first thing that leaps out is how much President Carter was both in charge and deeply engaged. While some historians have faulted him for focusing too much on details during his presidency, at Camp David he proved that he could deal with both “trees” and “woods.” He could deal with minute and difficult details; but he never lost sight of the big picture, which was necessary to bring to bear the political leadership that ultimately created success. It is also evident from the documents — and was evident at the time — that Carter was supported by an immensely able, talented, knowledgeable, and experienced team, from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski at the top, to key advisors. These notably included Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders and NSC staff director for the Middle East, William Quandt. Together, they molded a successful US position.
Of course, so much credit also has to go to Egypt’s Sadat and Israel’s Begin , two very unlikely peace partners only a short time before Camp David, but both with a vision for their peoples that enabled them to take decisions that would have likely eluded lesser men. Sadat, as much as anything, wanted to get Egypt out of the business of having to confront Israel on behalf of other Arab states, to no benefit (and a lot of risk) to Egypt and its people. Begin wanted to eliminate Israel’s principal enemy from the Arab military balance, without which — Egypt — no coalition of Arab states had any chance of besting Israel in combat. And so it proved to be. In pursuing this goal, Begin gave hostages to his political enemies, including those who stoutly opposed Israel’s evacuation of Jewish settlements on the Egyptian side of the old Egyptian Israeli border, but which Begin agreed to do and then made happen.
The US had a major geopolitical stake, as well. On three previous occasions, the 1956 Suez War, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the so-called Yom Kippur War of 1973, conflict posed risks of confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union — and at least in 1973 came perilously close to becoming the second most risky moment of the Cold War after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Camp David Accords, which took Egypt out of the Arab military balance, thus not only dropped the risk of a plausible Arab military attack on Israel almost to the vanishing point, it also dropped the risk of a US-Soviet confrontation in the region virtually to zero. Everyone gained.
Since then, there have been a series of attempts to build on the Camp David Accords and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. Israel has peace with Jordan and Lebanon. It has evacuated Gaza (though this has not brought peace, for a variety of reasons). But the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians of the West Bank (and Gaza) is not all that much advanced from where the first talks began in the mid-1980s. (Note: I assumed the Arab-Israeli portfolio at the NSC after the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty was completed, and served for nearly two years as the White House representative to the so-called Autonomy talks over the Palestinian territories). Indeed, any negotiator from that time would recognize all the issues are still in play 33 years later.
That should not be surprising. Unlike the first Camp David and the resulting treaty, there is no common interest among all the parties in reaching a basic deal. Israel (at least its government) is not keen on relinquishing much of the West Bank and at least some of the Jewish settlements (that now include half a million people): this is a deeply conflicted issue in Israel, with no obvious direct security payoff. For their part, the Palestinians want gains that go beyond what any Israeli government has been willing to contemplate. Gaza, meanwhile, is isolated by Israel and the West, thus making almost impossible a united negotiating posture on the part of the Palestinians. And while the “West” is committed to a resolution of the conflict, getting there remains in the “too tough” category, especially when the only potential arbiter, a succession of US presidents since Jimmy Carter, has not seen such a resolution as being of anything like the magnitude of peace between Israel and Egypt, at least in terms of gaining security for the United States (the Soviet Union has long since disappeared).
President Bill Clinton did try, by convening Israeli and Palestinian leaders at Camp David in late 1980. But he had waited until too late in his second term, without the prospect that he would still be in power to help foster the implementation of any agreement that would be reached — a necessary requirement. Neither Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, or the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, had the political backing needed to take major “risks for peace,” and there was not a sufficient overlapping of interests. Nor did Clinton undertake the careful preparations that marked Jimmy Carter’s efforts a generation earlier, and which are revealed in the newly-declassified documents. And he did not take with him to Camp David a ”first team” of experts able to provide both the institutional memory or capacity to help work a deal. What Bill Clinton did achieve was the enunciation of a set of principles, a few days before he left office, and which can be found here. They are relatively simple as a set of compromises that could lead to a settlement — something that just about every serious negotiator over the last three decades would attest to. Simple to state but, so far, impossible to gain politically.
Now there is a third try to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave negotiations a wide berth, secretary of State John Kerry has placed this high on his agenda, as did President Obama in his address this fall to the UN General Assembly. But the chances of success are still remote, for all the reasons that have bedeviled the last three decades of effort. Further, other events in the region work against hopes for ending the conflict anytime soon. Israel is preoccupied with turmoil in Egypt (where the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty remains the cornerstone of its security and thus of its sense of confidence in the future); Iran poses a critical challenge; and the situation in Syria also provides no comfort. Together, these three crises grossly limit the capacity of the Israeli government to take risks for peace, even if it were predisposed to do so, which is far from evident. Meanwhile, there is little or no prospect of fostering a basis for serious negotiations on the Palestinian side, in major part because of the domination of Gaza by the radical group Hamas, which is ratified in power by the Israeli-Western blockade.
Further, like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama has not made the sustained commitment to move the peace process forward, given any indication that he would take the risks in US domestic politics that would be needed, or created a top-class team of advisors and — below Kerry himself — negotiators needed to increase the chances of success. Given the low probability that the talks will produce results, none of this can really be faulted.
Jimmy Carter’s legacy lives on; but neither objective circumstances, leadership of the contending parties (Israel and the Palestinians), or a strong US team argue for a repetition of success any time in the foreseeable future. The new documents show what can be done if all three factors come together. Regrettably, however, none of them now exist.
Photo: Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat with U.S. President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978.
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