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There have been many White House meetings with Jewish leaders, but I doubt if any were as intense, substantive, and had as full a complement of senior administration officials as the one in the Cabinet Room on July 6, 1977. Arrayed around the large oval shaped table were about forty presidents of major American Jewish organizations and ten local presidents from the metropolitan areas with the largest number of Jews, led by the eloquent but tart Rabbi Shindler. There were so many people that all the chairs around the cabinet table, plus the high-backed chairs behind them where senior White House staff normally sat, and even the folding chairs among them, were all full. The meeting was scheduled to be unusually long, from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m., with the president attending during the second hour. Our agenda was to open lines of communication, delineate the president’s approach, and if possible assuage the apprehensions that he was working against Israel’s interests. The principal fear was that the United States was trying to impose a plan that would force Israel back to its 1967 boundaries to create a separate state for the Palestinians on the West Bank.81
The event was tightly scripted. Mondale opened by assuring the Jewish representatives that the administration was committed to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state and expected “the Arabs to be forthcoming before Israel makes concessions.” Vance followed by giving our views on the core issues in considerable detail. Peace, he said, must be “negotiated, not dictated,” and Israel must be provided with necessary arms. Brzezinski spoke in a dramatic staccato: “We won’t deceive, betray, or compel.” As usual, he framed the matter in a geopolitical context: “We have a favorable position for peace; the Soviets are politically out of the Middle East; and we have relatively moderate Arab leaders.” But, he warned sharply, “Stalemate without movement to peace will lead to a steady deterioration,” while the Arabs were in the process of modernizing their societies and would either become more moderate or radical. Israel, he argued, had an opportunity to help create a more moderate Middle East with a peace settlement. His premise of the Arabs facing a choice was certainly correct, but whether an agreement with Israel at that time would have made them face that choice and in the process unfreeze their authoritarian political structures seems dubious, and remains one of the imponderables of history.
The Jewish leaders responded by accusing us of being too lax in our definition of peace with the Arabs. Some accused the administration of asking more of Israel than of the Arabs, and did not believe the Arabs wanted peace with Israel, in fact just the contrary. Shindler complained that while Israel was being publicly pushed, the Arabs were not being asked to commit to making peace with Israel. Mondale retorted with great conviction that the administration did not expect Israel to withdraw from the territories it acquired in the 1967 war without assurances of real peace. Brzezinski added in plain talk: “Israel needs self-enforcing security arrangements, so it doesn’t give up something without getting anything.” Shindler remained unpersuaded and complained that Israel had little room for negotiation.
At 1:25 p.m. Carter entered the crowded Cabinet Room, and everyone rose. He thanked them for coming, mentioned his New Jersey campaign speech, and reiterated that its guiding principle was the “peace and security of Israel … real peace accepted by Israel and her Arab neighbors—full diplomatic relations, open borders, free travel, and tourism.” There was almost a collective sigh of relief when Carter promised to greet Begin as a friend and, contradicting the State Department, added: “I do not question his legitimacy, and I hope to strengthen Israel’s esteem in him.” He further promised not to impose a settlement and once again drilled down on specific issues in firm language: “No one in my administration has ever drawn a map.” But in words no other president has used before or since, he described the problems of the Palestinians as “a cancer which needs to be healed. They need a home and a redress of wrongs.”
Then a bizarre thing happened: Rabbi Shindler blessed the president with the traditional Hebrew prayer for heads of state, to which the president audibly said, “Amen.” Shindler then said that Carter “was the vessel of two thousand years of Jewish history. We come here with open hearts and grateful hearts.” He recalled that as a candidate Carter had met with them and made promises, “and you have fulfilled them much more than anyone could have expected: self-respect for our nation, healing, morality as a factor of government and international relations.” He then joked, to laughter from all: “So why do we come here if we are so happy?” He answered his own question: “[Your] words are not perceived as you intended them to be. [The] world is not used to your open diplomacy, and your words are interpreted to be a blueprint to be imposed. We are nervous; this leads to a toughening of the Israeli backbone.” Almost as if he had not heard what the administration’s policy makers had just said, Shindler read out a statement by Arab leaders indicating that they expected the United States to impose a settlement on the Israelis. Others read out Carter’s statements on Israel returning to its 1967 borders, and still others pressed for Israeli coproduction agreements on fighter jets, guidance systems, and other arms.
As we approached the end of the allotted two hours, the president summarized his beliefs, again speaking candidly and earnestly: “The Arabs gain in world opinion when they can emphasize points that further their cause,” and “Jews and Israel seldom stress that the U.S. favors a full peace for Israel.” Shindler insisted that “Begin has been very forthcoming” and concluded by reporting that Begin felt that “others need to be more flexible to move forward.” If time could have been frozen after this extraordinary meeting, much of the tension in American-Israeli relations would have dissipated. But events would raise the temperature back to the boiling point.
BEGIN’S ELEGANT VISIT
On a sweltering July day in 1977, Menachem Begin arrived in Washington for his first official visit as prime minister—after stopping at New York to meet Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the charismatic leader of the spreading Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Begin had the familiar look of the Eastern European Jews of my grandparents’ generation. He was almost completely bald, wore thick glasses, and had a protruding jaw and a face with a sad look that to my eyes made it appear he was carrying the traumas of the Jewish people in Europe through the ages. Yet he bore himself with dignity and pride as the representative of the state of Israel, after his own hard journey in life. His three patient decades on the margins of Israel’s political leadership testified to his stubborn perseverance.
We had been advised by U.S. ambassador Sam Lewis to accord him a dignified welcome worthy of his office, and the arrival ceremony took place on the South Portico of the White House accompanied by trumpeted ruffles and flourishes and the two national anthems, our own and Israel’s “Hatikvah”—Hope—which I had learned in Hebrew school growing up in Atlanta. We certainly needed every bit of that in the face of a guest who was as tough as he was dignified.
Lewis also warned us that while Begin would be hard to handle, the president should not push him into a corner by laying down the law on giving back all the territory won in the Six-Day War; rather we should try to co-opt him. Lewis believed he would never agree to have the PLO participate in a Geneva conference, but might agree to a mixed delegation of West Bank Palestinians in a Jordanian delegation, and was “ready to sacrifice a lot” for peace with Egypt.82 Carter followed that advice at this point, and not Brzezinski’s get-tough stance. Each greeted the other with public praises and compliments.
At the first meeting in the Cabinet Room on the afternoon of Begin’s arrival,83 all the principal American players were seated around the Cabinet Room oval table with Carter facing Begin. At his side sat Dayan and Dinitz; then Begin’s former Irgun comrade and longtime adviser, Yechiel Kadishai, and, both surprisingly and ominously, the same Shmuel Katz of the borscht belt provocations. The president insisted that he wanted to work with Begin toward peace on the basis of the UN land-for-peace resolutions but quickly added that he had “no blueprint, no plan, and no desire to i
mpose one. I want to be a trusted intermediary.” Carter said peace meant open borders, exchanges of people, and diplomatic recognition and conceded that not all Arab states were ready to go that far, but Egypt and Jordan were—and they were Israel’s closest neighbors. When Carter invited Begin to speak his mind, the president got more than he bargained for.
Begin’s exquisite and nuanced English had more of a European flavor than a typical Israeli’s. His reputation as an orator preceded him, but I was impressed that he spoke knowledgeably without notes on a wide range of complicated topics. He did not reply directly to Carter on the goals and shape of the peace process, but instead emphasized the threats Israel faced from the PLO in southern Lebanon. He then launched into a historical tutorial unlike anything that any Israeli leader had given to a U.S. president. It was a detailed history of grievances—European discrimination against the Jews, British behavior in Palestine, generations of Arab attacks, and heroic and costly defense in Israeli wars—as if he were addressing a class of uneducated students. After independence the Jewish population “lived on a thread,” he declared, and until the decisive victory in 1967, Begin said there was “war every day, with fifteen hundred killed in skirmishes.” He pulled out a map to demonstrate his tiny country’s perilous geography: At its narrowest point, Israel was only nine miles wide and could be cut in half by a quick military thrust, placing the artillery of a Palestinian state only about twenty-five miles from Israel’s main population centers. This took the better part of thirty minutes and sorely tested Carter’s patience; he listened politely and attentively, but with a fixed expression that from long experience I recognized barely concealed his frustration.
Begin finally pivoted to the peace process and was obviously well prepared. Instead of agreeing to a multilateral Geneva peace conference dealing with all the Arab states, he announced he favored “face-to-face negotiations without preconditions … [and] no prior commitments.” He also spoke what Carter thought were the magic words: “I accept UN Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for negotiations.” To be certain there was no misunderstanding, Carter asked him to repeat it: “Will you say the two UN Resolutions are the basis for negotiations?” Begin replied: “Yes.” Carter seemed almost elated.
Later, in private, Carter persisted with his goals of a comprehensive settlement; a trade of conquered land for secure peace; full normalization by the Arab states; and linking a Palestinian homeland to Jordan rather than declaring the West Bank an independent state.84 But he would find that Begin’s definition of what was required of Israel under 242 differed dramatically from the U.S. government’s understanding that Israel must withdraw from all of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights “with minor modifications” conditioned mainly by security and not settlements. By contrast, Begin was offering only some withdrawal on some fronts.
This was and would remain a persistent source of tension between Carter and Begin, and it was at least partly rooted in the deliberate ambiguity of the UN resolution. I had suggested in preparatory memos that we could try to view Begin’s own proposal of a partial withdrawal as the movement of Israeli troops into closed military camps near the 1967 Israel border. When Carter raised the issue, he did not call for dismantling existing settlements, but aligned himself with many American Jewish leaders by bluntly telling Begin: “New settlements on the West Bank might prevent the peace conference itself, as it will foreclose negotiations in the future.” Carter’s words stand the test of time. Begin set the policy for all his Likud successors. Now, four decades later, the expansion of civilian settlements has vastly complicated the internationally favored solution of two separate states for Jews and Arabs along with continued Palestinian intransigence. The two-state solution was not even envisioned in 1977 and would bedevil Israeli politics right down to the reelection campaign of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015 and beyond.
As we continued sorting out our positions, Begin toughened the tone by calling on Shmuel Katz, who was not even a formal member of his government and had been shoehorned into the White House meeting to the surprise of the Secret Service. I blanched at the insensitivity of allowing him to be a spokesman for the prime minister of Israel. Katz launched into his own half-hour diatribe on the centrality of Judaea and Samaria to Israel. Most Palestinian Arabs, he insisted, were only recent immigrants and were hardly even thought of as Palestinian. In his view they had no long-term attachment to the land. As his authority he remarkably cited Mark Twain’s nineteenth-century account of his visit to a very sparsely inhabited Holy Land. When he said that their real homeland was Jordan—I thought that King Hussein would be less than pleased to learn that. During the more than twenty years Jordan had controlled the West Bank, the king refused to grant Jordanian citizenship to the Palestinian residents lest they upset his country’s delicate balance with the Bedouin, who were mainstays of the army that underwrote his rule. Thankfully, no one on the U.S. side tried to engage Katz in his rant. Carter was furious but listened politely and patiently.
Begin followed up in a far more elegant discourse, but in substance it was almost as uncompromising. While he promised that none of the settlements would be an obstacle to negotiations, he then threw down a potential deal breaker straight out of Jabotinsky: “We cannot prevent Jews from building on land in the original Israel of the Bible.” Carter quickly shot back: “This might prevent a Geneva conference and be an indication of bad faith to negotiate under 242. The previous Israeli government discouraged settlements.” It made me think back to how Rabin and his Labor Party felt they had been undercut by Carter’s declaration on a Palestinian homeland. Carter continued looking for compromise and said almost plaintively: “If you expressed a preference for no new settlements until we determine the attitude of the Arabs at Geneva, it would be a gracious step.”
But Begin refused to commit even to such a limited settlement freeze.85 He stood by his concept of a Geneva meeting, which would actually be a set of direct bilateral negotiations between Israel and each of its neighbors wrapped inside a proposal he called “The Framework for the Peacemaking Process.” Later, in private, he presented Carter with the secret portion of his framework. For Egypt, Israel would make a “significant withdrawal from the Sinai” in exchange for a peace treaty. For Syria, Israel would remain on the Golan Heights but would redeploy its troops along a line that would be established as the permanent boundary. As for what he called Judaea and Samaria—the West Bank of the River Jordan—as well as Gaza, Begin refused to countenance any transfer of sovereign authority because of the “historic rights of our nation to this land.” Even in private, Begin gave away nothing while repeating the mantra that everything was open for negotiations. But the fact was that within his own tight framework, there was very little room for movement.
Before he left Begin gave evidence of his high character with a generous personal touch. He invited Brzezinski to a private breakfast at Blair House, the official guesthouse across the street from the White House. At one level the two were literally poles apart, and could not have been more different. Begin, a highly formal, quintessential Eastern European Jew; Brzezinski, a sharp-edged Catholic from a country of historically virulent anti-Semitism. But their common Polish heritage created an odd bond. For this breakfast meeting Begin had something special for his guest. He had located documents in a Jerusalem archive that testified to the role of Brzezinski’s father, Tadeusz Brzezinski, in saving Jewish lives as a Polish diplomat stationed in Hitler’s Germany.86 Zbig wrote later: “I was deeply touched by this gesture of human sensitivity, especially since it came in the wake of some of the personal attacks on me and on my role [by some American Jewish leaders] in seeking to promote a peace settlement in the Middle East.”87 Although their views clashed, the two developed a grudging respect as opponents because of their shared Polish heritage.
“I MAY HAVE ONLY ONE EYE, BUT I AM NOT BLIND”
At the end of August, the redline on my phone signaled that the president was calling. He asked me
to come down to his study and expressed his concern at new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Begin’s refusal to allow any talks with the PLO. “They do not want peace,” he said of the Israelis. I questioned that, but he went on that “Assad and Sadat need results to survive,” which I felt was a misreading of Assad. He also asserted that Begin had “misled” him on their relationship with South Africa and their help with their nuclear program, which was “clear from our intelligence data.” He asked me what to do, and said Senators Byrd and Bentsen were both concerned. He did not ask me to follow up with any action, but his mounting, understandable frustration at Begin was palpable.88 Vance also reflected Carter’s unease by warning a cabinet meeting that the “Middle East was more tense, and this was exacerbated by West Bank developments [settlements] by Israel.”89
Despite Begin’s strictures against the PLO and his insistence on dealing with Arab states one by one, President Carter remained determined to move ahead with a comprehensive Middle East agreement, giving the Palestinians a voice in their own future. The next two months would prove that project a virtual impossibility, and certainly not possible through any route known to classic diplomacy. As we were to discover, only bold strokes could cut through the tangles of faith, ideology, and the bloody history of the Middle East. In the interim, the White House, the State Department, the Israeli team of Begin and Dayan, and—never to be disregarded—the American Jewish leadership, engaged in a chase after a chimera. What mattered is how this diplomatic shadow play set the stage for historic events.
Begin was already moving along his own path toward improved relations with Egypt outside Carter’s comprehensive framework. Within six weeks of assuming office he instructed the director of Israel’s secret service, the Mossad, to meet with an envoy sent by Sadat. Then, in mid-September, Dayan met in Morocco with Egypt’s deputy prime minister, Hassan al-Tuhami.90 This was one of a series of secret meetings the Israeli foreign minister had with leaders of India, Iran, Jordan, and Morocco. Then he flew to Washington for discussions about the forthcoming Geneva peace conference.
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