Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

As the storm abated, Carter called political leaders and cabinet members to let them know that an agreement had been reached and invited them to the ceremony that evening. The White House staff began setting up the East Room for the signing, and the kitchen prepared wine and cheese for the reception afterward. Word leaked out that an agreement had been achieved. That Sunday night, as the presidential helicopters flew back to Washington, people who lived below the flight path turned on their house and yard lights, providing an eerie path of illumination that grew more intense as the aircraft entered a bright penumbra of television lights waiting on the South Lawn. The Egyptian and Israeli embassies brought their employees, who waved national flags as the three leaders disembarked. The men seemed a little startled by the delirium that awaited them. When Begin saw his wife, Aliza, he cried out, “Mama, we’ll go down in the history books!”

  THREE HAGGARD MEN SAT shoulder to shoulder at a small desk in the East Room, with the flags of their nations behind them. Sadat appeared solemn and distant. He looked into the audience for members of his delegation, but empty chairs marked the places where many of them would have been sitting. Even those who attended the ceremony were visibly worried, fearing that their participation in the agreement could cost them their lives.

  “When we arrived at Camp David the first thing we agreed upon was to ask the people of the world to pray that our negotiations would be successful,” Carter said. “Those prayers have been answered far beyond any expectations.” He described the two documents that the men would be signing. The first, called “Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” dealt with the West Bank and Gaza, “and the need to solve the Palestinian problem in all its aspects.” It envisioned a five-year transitional period, “during which the Israeli military government will be withdrawn and a self-governing authority will be elected, with full autonomy.” Israeli forces would remain in specified locations to protect Israel’s security. At the end of the five years, Palestinians would determine their own future in negotiations to resolve the final status of the West Bank and Gaza. “These negotiations will be based on all the provisions and all the principles of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, and it provides that Israel may live in peace within secure and recognized borders,” Carter said.

  “The other document is entitled ‘Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel,’ ” he continued. “It provides for the full exercise of Egyptian sovereignty over the Sinai. It calls for full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Sinai, and after an interim withdrawal—which will be accomplished very quickly—the establishment of normal, peaceful relations between the two countries, including diplomatic relations.

  “Together with accompanying letters, which we will make public tomorrow, these two Camp David agreements provide the basis for progress and peace throughout the Middle East.”

  Carter added that the Knesset would vote within the next two weeks on the issue of removing the settlements so that the final peace negotiations could begin.

  Sadat praised Carter for his courage in undertaking the summit. “Dear friend, we came to Camp David with all the goodwill and faith we possess, and we left Camp David a few minutes ago with a renewed sense of hope and inspiration,” he read in his resonant voice. “Let us pledge to make the spirit of Camp David a new chapter in the history of our nations.”

  Begin spoke without notes. “The Camp David conference should be renamed,” he said. “It was the Jimmy Carter conference.” Carter beamed. “And he worked,” Begin continued. “I think he worked harder than our forefathers did in Egypt building the pyramids.” He looked around the room with a dazed grin. “When I came here to the Camp David conference, I said perhaps, as a result of our work one day people in every corner of the world will be able to say ‘Habemus pacem,’ in the spirit of these days. Can we say so tonight? Not yet. We still have to go a road until my friend President Sadat and I sign the peace treaties. We promised each other that we shall do so within three months.” Begin turned to Sadat. “Mr. President, tonight at this celebration of this great historic occasion, let us promise that we shall do it earlier.”

  Sadat, Carter, and Begin sign the Camp David Accords at the White House, September 17, 1978.

  “Right!” Sadat said, smiling broadly.

  Immediately after the ceremony, an elated Begin told a friend, “I have just signed the greatest document in Jewish history!”

  Epilogue

  SO MANY NEGLECTED ISSUES had piled up while Carter had devoted himself to making peace in the Middle East. The shah of Iran was overthrown and replaced by a radical Shiite theocracy. Inflation was running out of control, and unemployment remained persistently high. Even Carter’s accomplishments—normalizing relations with China, advancing human rights, creating an energy policy, cutting the federal deficit, signing the Panama Canal treaties—were overshadowed by the extended turmoil of the Camp David process.

  Begin made things worse by publicly disclaiming aspects of the agreement and complaining about the pressure Carter had placed upon Israel. The prime minister “began to treat this peace we had struggled for as something banal, almost despicable,” Weizman observed. Weizman was also embarrassed by the way in which Carter was disparaged. “As far as I know, no American president has ever helped Israel as much as Jimmy Carter.”

  The morning after the signing ceremony in the White House, Begin sent Carter the letter he had demanded about stopping the construction of settlements. It was exactly the same as the letter Carter had rejected the day before. Begin immediately started making statements to Jewish audiences and on television that Israel would continue building new settlements. He told an Israeli reporter that the Israeli army would remain in the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely. On the Monday after the signing ceremony, Carter was to make a report to Congress, with Begin and Sadat seated in the balcony of the House of Representatives. Just before the speech, Carter confronted Begin about his statements and the letter concerning the settlement halt. Begin was evasive. Carter then told the Congress, “Israel has agreed, has committed themselves, that the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people will be recognized. After the signing of this framework last night, and during the negotiations concerning the establishment of Palestinian self-government, no new Israeli settlements will be established in this area.” Begin had no intention of yielding to such pressure.

  Begin returned to Israel to be greeted by a large crowd at the airport, although some members of his own party showed up carrying black umbrellas and shouting, “Munich!” in reference to Britain’s accommodation with the Nazi German government. Begin honored his commitment to bring the agreement to a vote before the Knesset. He assured the parliament that even after the five-year transitional period Israel would continue to assert its right to sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza—in other words, the autonomy talks would go nowhere. As for surrendering the Sinai settlements, he said that Israel could not have allowed the summit to fail on this one matter. “The State of Israel could not stand up in the face of this,” he said. “Not in America; not in Europe. Not before American Jewry. Not before the Jews of other lands. We could not have faced this. All blame would have befallen us.” At four in the morning, after seventeen hours of debate, the Knesset approved the agreement by a two-thirds majority, the nays coming mainly from Begin’s party. Right after that, he announced plans to “thicken” Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Carter was outraged. “Begin wanted to keep two things,” he concluded: “the peace with Egypt—and the West Bank.” Sadat threatened to withdraw from negotiations.

  A month after the Camp David summit, Sadat and Begin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.1 “Sadat deserved it,” Carter noted tersely in his diary. At that point, it had become clear to the Carter White House that Begin was actively working to defeat Carter for reelection. Moreover, Begin seemed uninterested in pursuing a signing anytime soon. The longer he delayed, the more leverage he had. He accurately gauged that Carter and Sadat both needed th
e treaty more than he did.

  In the middle of this extremely tense denouement, Carter was hit with an excruciating case of hemorrhoids. The news got into the press when he had to cancel his appointments. Carter learned on Christmas Day, 1978, that the Egyptian people were praying he would be cured of this affliction, and the following day he was—the first instance, perhaps of divine intervention since the entire peace process began.

  In a final act of desperation, Carter decided to go to the Middle East that March to try to force the two sides to resolve their differences. The professionals in the State Department were embarrassed for their president, who seemed to be taking a swan dive into who knows what. Carter and Rosalynn flew to Cairo, along with Brzezinski and the secretaries of state and defense; essentially, the entire foreign and defense policy leadership of the administration was riding on Air Force One, along with Carter’s hopes of leaving behind a historic legacy.

  Sadat welcomed them and took them on a train ride to Alexandria. They were overwhelmed by the response—“the largest and most enthusiastic crowds I have ever seen,” Carter told Sadat. He was clearly far more popular in Egypt than he was in his own country. “Perhaps we should move to Cairo,” Rosalynn remarked.

  Carter arrived in Israel on a Saturday evening just after Shabbat, as Sadat had done on that historic trip to Jerusalem only fifteen months earlier. Then, peace had seemed a simple matter, but now the world had turned over several times. Carter went directly to a private meeting with Begin, who brusquely informed him that there was no way to bring negotiations to an end anytime soon. Carter felt it was a personal attack, another way of undermining his prestige and reducing his chances of reelection. He stood up and asked if it was necessary for him to stay any longer. For the next forty-five minutes the bitterness that had developed between the two men poured out. Carter said he doubted whether Begin wanted peace at all, because he was doing everything possible to obstruct it, “with apparent relish.” Begin put his face inches away from Carter’s and said that he wanted peace as much as anything in the world; however, “the fate of a nation hangs in the balance.”

  It was nearly midnight when Carter left, convinced that Begin would do anything he could to block the treaty and avoid living up to the commitment he had made at Camp David to provide full autonomy to the Palestinians on the West Bank. Once again, he was struck by the absence of any sympathy on Begin’s part for the plight of the refugees.

  The next day, Begin took Carter to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and then to Mount Herzl to visit the graves of Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky. It was a journey into Begin’s roots. The lesson Begin drew from his life was that Jews cannot trust their security to anyone. “It was not only the Nazis and their friends who regarded the Jews as germs to be destroyed,” he writes in his memoir. “The whole world which calls itself ‘enlightened’ began to get used to the idea that perhaps the Jew is not as other human beings.… The world does not pity the slaughtered. It only respects those who fight.” This was his credo. Herzl had summoned up the vision of a Jewish state, but Jabotinsky had enlarged it and prophesied the problems it would have with its Arab inhabitants and neighbors. Begin saw himself as the natural heir of these two thinkers, the man who would manifest their visions into an impregnable Jewish state.

  After this guided tour, Carter went on his own to a service at a Baptist church. He reflected on the fact that Jerusalem had seen more wars than any city in the world, and he prayed that it would never see another one.

  On Monday, Carter addressed the Knesset, saying that the people of Israel were ready for peace, but the leaders had not shown that they had the courage to take a chance for it. When Begin got up to speak, he was subjected to whistles and shouts—Israeli democracy at its most riotous. He seemed to enjoy the hurly-burly, grinning with pleasure whenever invective was hurled at him and glancing meaningfully at Carter to make sure he appreciated what he was up against. In fact, Carter did feel closer to Begin. His own presidency wasn’t so easy, either.

  After the Knesset meeting Begin told the Americans that the talks were over. He suggested that they issue a joint communiqué saying the usual—progress made, some questions unresolved. In fact, he produced the text, which had already been prepared.

  Carter returned to the King David Hotel—the same one that Begin had blown up during the British Mandate—thoroughly exhausted and disgusted. He ordered that Air Force One be prepared for immediate departure. He didn’t want to spend a single additional night in Israel, but it was late and getting all the luggage of the presidential party together would take time. He reluctantly agreed to stay till morning. Meantime, the press who were traveling with Carter drew their conclusions. Walter Cronkite, the anchor for CBS, announced that the peace treaty had failed. Both NBC and ABC followed suit.

  That night Weizman and Dayan visited Vance and told him they were both ready to resign if Begin continued to obstruct the peace treaty. One of the sticking points was that the Israelis refused to give up the Egyptian oil. Dayan came up with a formula, in which Egypt would promise in principle to supply Israel with oil, and the U.S. would guarantee Israel’s petroleum needs for fifteen years. He urged Carter to make one last attempt.

  The next morning, Carter invited Begin to breakfast. The prime minister arrived with his wife, who ate with Rosalynn. The two men stood for a few moments looking out the window at Old Jerusalem. The blood spilled on these ancient streets had painted the city red many times over.

  There was still the matter of the Palestinians, the only serious issue remaining. Carter agreed to drop all references to Gaza, and Begin promised to treat the president’s request to improve the atmosphere on the West Bank “sympathetically.” Without actually committing himself to any specific action, Begin said he would provide the Palestinians some degree of peaceful political activity. Both men accepted the deal.

  After breakfast, as the Begins and the Carters descended to the lobby, the elevator malfunctioned, jerking to a stop six feet above the ground floor. Hundreds of reporters and diplomats were waiting in the lobby to hear the result of the breakfast meeting. After twenty minutes of fruitless efforts to restart the elevator, the door was torn off and the two couples had to climb down a ladder, “with our butts showing,” as Carter later recalled. “That’s the way we got the peace agreement.”

  ON MARCH 26, 1979, a breezy, sunny day in Washington, the flags of three nations fluttered behind an empty table. All of official Washington was gathered on the lawn. While they waited, Begin was in the Oval Office making one last request. As a gesture of friendship to Mrs. Begin, he said, he asked Carter to forgive the debt on the $3 billion in aid that the U.S. was extending to Israel. Several times he repeated the phrase “as a gesture for Mrs. Begin.” Carter looked at Brzezinski, who was present at the meeting, with a stunned look on his face, and then he simply burst out laughing.

  At two p.m., Carter, Begin, and Sadat took their places and signed the formal treaty. Palestinian protestors could be heard chanting slogans across the street. “During the past thirty years, Israel and Egypt have waged war,” Carter said in his opening statement. “But for the past sixteen months, these same two great nations have waged peace. Today we celebrate a victory—not of a bloody military campaign, but of an inspiring peace campaign.” There were still outstanding differences, he conceded. “Let history record that deep and ancient antagonism can be settled without bloodshed and without staggering waste of precious lives.” Sadat praised Carter as “the best companion and partner along the road to peace.” Each of the three men quoted Isaiah, “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

  “I have signed a treaty of peace with our great neighbor, with Egypt,” Begin said. “The heart is full and overflowing. God gave me the strength to persevere, to survive the horrors of Nazism and of the Stalinite concentration camp and some other dangers, to endure, not to waver in nor flinch from my duty, to accept abuse from foreigners and, what
is more painful, from my own people, and even from my close friends.…” He stared into empty space as the memories of his uncompromising life flooded in on him. “Therefore it is the proper place and the appropriate time to bring back to memory the song and prayer of thanksgiving I learned as a child, in the home of a father and mother that doesn’t exist anymore, because they were among the six million people—men, women, and children—who sanctified the Lord’s name with the sacred blood which reddened the rivers of Europe from the Rhine to the Danube, from the Bug to the Volga, because nobody, nobody came to their rescue, although they cried out, ‘Save us, save us’—de profundis—from the depths of the pits and agony. That is the Song of Degrees, written two millennia and five hundred years ago, when our forefathers returned from their first exile to Jerusalem and Zion.”

  At this point, Begin put on a black yarmulke and read in Hebrew from Psalms 126:

  When the Lord restored the captives of Zion, we thought we were dreaming. Then our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues sang for joy. Then it was said among the nations, “The Lord had done great things for them.” The Lord has done great things for us. Oh, how happy we were!

  Restore our captives, Lord, like the dry stream beds of the Negev. Those who sow in tears will reap with cries of joy. Those who go forth weeping, carrying sacks of seed, will return with cries of joy, carrying their bundled sheaves.

  The ceremony lasted only a few minutes. After the signing, Sadat came over to greet Ezer Weizman and his son Shaul, whose wound from an Egyptian sniper was evident. Sadat warmly embraced the young man as Weizman held Shaul’s hand. For Weizman, that was the end of the wars.

  Moshe Dayan was sitting with Vance and his wife, Gay, at the gala dinner that followed. Leontyne Price sang, and the Israeli violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman performed. Dayan detested ceremonies. The fatigue of his last great campaign was rolling in, on top of his illness, still undetected. “You look tired and bored,” Gay observed. Dayan took the opportunity to excuse himself and walk back to the hotel.