President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  How could two such opposing conclusions have emerged from the same meeting? All those around the table were exhausted after wrestling with the same problems for almost two weeks. The Saturday-night meeting lasted six hours nonstop, into the early hours of Sunday, the thirteenth and final day. The discussions moved back and forth from one disputed point to another. It is not hard to see how one deadline might also have overlapped the other, and that when Begin talked as he did of “the whole process,” he and Carter could have misread each other.

  The most plausible explanation came from the two diplomats at Camp David with the deepest experience of the close-quarters bargaining, which was rooted in both the bargaining mentality of the Arab souk and Begin’s tough negotiating style. State’s Hal Saunders called it a “a classic case of that human situation … because they were all working from two different mental frameworks.”11 Ambassador Lewis agreed that the misunderstanding arose in part because everyone was worn out “and they were not careful enough. They’re very human about this issue.” Carter’s “dreadful mistake,” said Lewis, was made when Begin’s letter arrived the next day and the president did not confront him directly, but left Saunders with the impossible task of sorting it out.12

  Israel’s West Bank settlements became the third rail of Middle East diplomacy. It is possible that Carter could have resolved the dispute if he had been elected to a second term, but he was not. Ronald Reagan did not engage himself in the Middle East. But the festering sore of the settlements persisted in various forms through all the American attempts to broker an agreement, including in the Obama administration, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to a ten-month freeze, but that did not bring the Palestinians to the table to discuss the very same issues that Carter had confronted three decades before.

  RISING FURY AT BEGIN

  Despite the misunderstandings—and perhaps because of them—the president did not rest on his laurels. He still gets little credit for his efforts to organize Arab support for Sadat’s role in making peace with Israel. With no rest after the marathon negotiations, Vance was dispatched by Carter to sell the Accords to the Arab nations, starting with Jordan’s King Hussein, disdained by Sadat as the “dwarf king in Amman.”13 Hussein was insulted at not having been invited to Camp David and focused on the ambiguous language in the published agreements, posing nineteen written questions, to which Vance replied in detail and in writing. All that accomplished was to anger Begin, who declared that the United States had no right to give authoritative interpretations of matters that had already been carefully negotiated at Camp David. Zbig told me it was a “big mistake” for Vance to give such specific answers, while at the same time saying that “Begin will end the special relationship with the U.S. the way he is going,” and that the administration would never accept only a “separate peace” between Israel and Egypt.14

  Begin suspected that Carter’s goal of an autonomous West Bank was just a smokescreen for an independent Palestine. While that was most likely a distant goal if it came with solid security guarantees for Israel, Carter also realized it was impossible and said so repeatedly. But Begin’s speeches and his unbending interpretation of Israel’s claims on the West Bank were threatening the accords and deeply irritating Carter.15 Carter called Begin to urge him not to be abusive toward the Saudis while he was trying to enlist their support.16 Criticism arose outside normal diplomatic circles, as Doug Fraser, the president of the UAW, snapped: “Begin needs to keep his mouth shut.”17

  At Carter’s first breakfast with the Democratic congressional leadership after Camp David on September 28, the president summed up the situation. He described Hussein as “timid, non-committal, and not willing to help”; the Saudis as more constructive (in ways I never saw); and Syria’s Assad as “more moderate than his statements.” In my marginal note I wrote: “He always puts a better twist on Assad than deserved.”18 Carter wanted to move quickly to the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty and then focus on the West Bank.

  After the Camp David success, we were jumping right back into the same political frying pan. Just two days before, Mondale had showed me Carter’s draft of what he called a “wildly provocative speech on the Palestinians.” I was stunned. To rally Arab support and encourage Palestinian participation in the peace process, the president was going to suggest Palestinian national passports, when there was no Palestinian nation to endorse the Palestinians’ right to emigrate to other countries. Further, he was going to support participation in elections about their future by all Palestinians living in the West Bank and abroad, which could include members of the PLO. Mondale told me it exceeded even Sadat’s demands on behalf of the Palestinians and of course would be anathema to Israel. “It will be a disaster,” Mondale said.19

  Thus ensued a titanic battle, with Vance arguing that the proposals were essential to obtain support from moderate Arab leaders, despite the opposition of Brzezinski and even Saunders, Vance’s own Middle East chief. At one point David Aaron, Brzezinski’s deputy and formerly Mondale’s foreign-policy adviser in the Senate, had a White House car drive him to the magnificent, sprawling Georgetown home of the Democratic grandee Averell Harriman, where he interrupted a dinner party for Mondale. The vice president exploded when he saw Vance’s latest uncompromising draft. I wrote in the margins of my notes on the series of meetings: “Vance was very pro-Arab. Vance was impossible on this issue. Vance felt this was needed to get Arab countries on board of Camp David. V.P. always helpful with Israel; stayed right on top of it. Did much more than recognized.”20

  In the end we managed to bury the speech on the eve of the Knesset debate to ratify the Camp David Accords. Had Carter gone ahead with it, the Israeli parliament would most likely have voted down his greatest diplomatic achievement. But Vance would not let up. Mondale told me before a dinner at his residence that Vance and the State Department were recommending “subtle contacts with the PLO,” and that he found that beyond belief. “This would be the end after we’ve promised not to contact them, and after Carter called them Nazis,” Mondale said, promising to advise Carter to stop State’s initiative. Mondale did, and the president shut it down.21

  But Carter’s fury at Begin did not abate. When Mondale suggested to Carter at the start of November that he ought to see Begin, the president got angry.22 He also told the cabinet that while Sadat wanted more food assistance for his hungry people, he did “not want payoffs, but the Israelis do” for the Camp David agreement.23

  Then, a week later, while I was in his study discussing domestic spending, I realized that what Carter really wanted was to talk about Israel. The Israelis were asking for our financial help to move their military installations out of the Egyptian Sinai and build a new air base on their side of the desert, with roads and other infrastructure to support it. (At Camp David they had only talked about the new air base itself.) “I don’t want to be held up on paying for Israeli withdrawal,” Carter said, adding that Begin had told him that he needed “to placate his right-wing friends.”24 The money was originally to have been in the form of a long-term government loan with a subsidized rate of interest, but Begin now asked for a combination of grants and loans. When I looked at the price tag, I gulped: $3.3 billion at a time when Carter was trying to trim our own social programs to help balance the budget, over the objections of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. No wonder he exploded. I had never before seen him hit the table furiously with his fist—as he did at a cabinet-level budget meeting in November warning his appointees against making any commitments to Israel. He had already told me—and I told Ambassador Dinitz—that he would not allow Israel to “buy peace” and he believed Jerusalem was “raising new demands to extort money from the United States.”25 For Carter this was extraordinarily harsh language.

  The next day I met with the president and outlined a financing mechanism I had discussed with Dinitz. But, most important, I implored Carter not to jeopardize his historic achievement over an amount of money that was tiny rela
tive to the overall scope of the budget, and even smaller in the perspective of history. He had calmed down and realized that he would have to live with a distasteful link between the money and Israel signing the treaty.26 Eventually we worked out a deal: The United States paid the cost of the Army Corps of Engineers building the world-class Ramon Air Force Base in the Israeli Negev.27

  Dinitz realized that Carter’s attitude toward Israel was heavily influenced by dealing with Begin. He turned reflective and delivered an astounding statement for a diplomat: “President Carter must understand that Israel is bigger than Menachem Begin, who can make you puke with his rhetoric. I would like to take away [Carter’s] anger at Israel. He is dealing with an ally.” It is not surprising that Dinitz, who had been nurtured in the Labor Party by Golda Meir, soon completed his long tenure in Washington and left government service.28

  But Dinitz had put his finger on the fundamental cause of Carter’s ambivalent relationship with Begin. On the one hand the prime minister drove everyone to distraction with his inflexibility and legalistic hairsplitting. At the same time, there was a grudging admiration for his negotiating style, which was to wait for the absolute last second to compromise—but never to budge from his core beliefs. These were rooted in Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza, a central tenet of the Likud Party to this day. It is one reason, together with the Palestinians’ refusal to yield what they regard as their right to return to the Jewish state of Israel, and their refusal to negotiate defensible Israeli borders in the West Bank, that a division of the territory into two states is so difficult to achieve.

  By mid-November 1978 the glow from Camp David had faded, and the prospects for a treaty were beginning to look desperate. Sadat was ready to abandon his quest for peace if Israel would not agree to elections in the West Bank; he knew that would mean not regaining the Sinai and told Carter he was ready to accept that.29 This reflected the increased isolation Sadat was facing in the Arab world over what looked like a bilateral agreement with Israel that left nothing tangible for the Palestinians.

  Partly because of the stalled talks on Palestinian autonomy, the atmosphere could hardly have been worse when formal work on the language of the treaty began early in October. The president welcomed the Egyptian and Israeli delegations with a brief pep talk urging them to finish within the three-month period set at Camp David. They then went across Pennsylvania Avenue to Blair House to work there, and a few blocks away at the Madison Hotel, which the delegates dubbed “Camp Madison.” With the Israeli side led by Weizman and Dayan, tightening the nuts and bolts of the treaty structure actually went well. The two ministers wanted it signed quickly, and within a few weeks they brought their draft agreements on such matters as withdrawal dates and modalities to the Israeli cabinet for approval. Sadat had fewer problems agreeing to the treaty language because he had the powerful support of his armed forces and the public, both tired of war.

  Meanwhile Begin began to backpedal. He was furious at Dayan for proceeding without his approval and made sure the cabinet voted down the draft treaty. Dayan threatened to resign but was dissuaded. All this left Sadat feeling betrayed because he had been promised a speedy negotiation. Even worse, at Carter’s suggestion Sadat had agreed to exchange ambassadors as a goodwill gesture to Begin. He quickly withdrew the offer. Finally, on October 23, with Carter’s personal intervention, a tentative agreement was reached on the major issues. Then Begin threw another curve ball—this one from a direction that would become all too familiar to the procession of American and other mediators trying to broker peace in the years to come: He announced plans to expand settlements in the West Bank, advancing the rationale that he had agreed at Camp David to refrain temporarily from building new settlements, but not to limit the growth of existing ones.30

  WHICH TREATY TAKES PRECEDENCE?

  Also impeding progress was a conundrum of the type that only lawyers enjoy, but that was vital to both Israel and Egypt. Under the Arab League Defense Pact, Egypt would automatically be thrown into a nominal state of war if any other member of the league was also at war with Israel. (Technically Syria still was, but more realistically, if Israel and Syria got into a conflict in the Golan Heights, would Egypt be required to aid Syria against Israel?) Now that Egypt wanted to make peace with Israel, Meir Rosenne, the Foreign Ministry’s meticulous legal adviser, demanded a provision stipulating that the peace treaty with Egypt would prevail over any others. For Egypt, such an explicit clause would be an unnecessary irritant in the Arab world, and Sadat already had enough of those. Dayan was inclined to override Rosenne: Like Sadat or any other military man, he was trained to grasp the essentials of a fraught situation. Rosenne let it be known that he was ready to resign because “I only have my professional reputation to defend.”31

  Dayan then told Rosenne that he needed support from a non-Israeli lawyer, so they consulted Yale’s Eugene Rostow, previously a State Department official and a distinguished conservative legal scholar who had helped draft UN Resolution 242. Rostow flatly told them that if the treaty with Israel did not supersede Egypt’s agreements with its Arab friends, “you don’t have peace; you have the illusion of peace.” This opinion traveled fast.

  On a Friday shortly afterward, Dayan, Barak, and Rosenne received a call from the White House summoning them at 7:00 p.m. They were ushered into Carter’s private quarters, where they found the president of the United States in jeans, his feet on the table. He asked the State Department’s legal adviser, Herbert Hansel, if any precedents existed, but Hansel had found none. Rosenne said he had found no fewer than eight treaties signed by the United States that overrode earlier ones in case of a conflict. Carter testily said: “Mr. Rosenne, you are wasting my time.” Rosenne retorted: “Mr. President, I’m sorry to waste your time, but for us it’s a vital problem.” Dayan cut in sharply: “Meir, you’re speaking to the president of the United States.” Rosenne said he realized that, but even Rostow supported his position. Carter cut him off: “Mr. Rosenne, go and negotiate your treaty with Eugene Rostow.”32 In the end Israel succeeded in inserting Rosenne’s clause into the treaty with Egypt.

  “STU, WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT ISRAEL?”

  As the three-month period for negotiating the treaty came and went in mid-December, Carter needed to break the deadlock. Although the White House and especially the State Department were tied up with secret negotiations to normalize relations with China and preparing to conclude an arms-limitation treaty with the Soviets, the president nevertheless instructed Vance to undertake shuttle diplomacy between Cairo and Jerusalem.

  At this point I again got involved. I told Dinitz we were effectively abandoning any tight linkage between the treaty and Palestinian autonomy, to concentrate on obtaining Egypt’s agreement. Carter now decided that to break the logjam, it would be Vance’s turn to use Camp David, where the secretary of state met with his counterparts, Dayan and Egypt’s Mustafa Khalil, on a bleak February day. They called it Camp David II, but the magic had evaporated. After four days Begin remained the underlying problem; he refused to delegate any authority to Dayan, who pressed him to join them and urgently wrap up the treaty. Begin refused and castigated his foreign minister for giving away too much. Carter caustically noted that “Khalil is authorized to act, but Dayan will have to go back and report to Begin and the cabinet.” He lamented: “For months now the Israelis have refused to negotiate on any reasonable basis. It’s hard to understand their motivation.”33

  Carter then invited Begin to Camp David, but at first he refused. Carter was so angry that he declared at a cabinet meeting he was ready to wash his hands of the negotiations and blame Israel. “It is nauseating to see the insignificance of the issues dividing them,” he said, citing minor issues like the timing of the exchange of ambassadors. Domestically, he admitted: “We’ve done nothing but lose politically.”34 He was confident that once an agreement was signed, the moderate Arabs would agree. I noted in my legal pad that he “always overestimated Arabs.”

  In
a desperate attempt to break the impasse, he wrote identical letters to Sadat and Begin, proposing specific compromises and promising explicitly that the United States would serve as guarantor of the treaty.35 At the end of February 1979, the president met with his top staff members in the Oval Office. At one point he addressed me plaintively: “Stu, what can I do about Israel?”36 I had no ready answer but promised to relay our consternation to the new Israeli ambassador, Ephraim Evron.

  He had arrived just after New Year’s Day, and we soon met. I had urged him to develop a personal relationship with Brzezinski, who I felt had the president’s ear on the peace process. In a cable to Jerusalem I saw years later, Evron said that I thought “Brzezinski was ready to turn a new page in the relations with us, after I [Evron] have entered into office.”37 “Eppie,” as we affectionately called him, quickly endeared himself to Carter, Mondale, Brzezinski, and me. He lacked Dinitz’s sharp elbows, knew how to listen, and was determined to improve relations—not just between Israel and the United States in general, but Begin and Carter in particular.

  My appeal paid off; Begin arrived on March 1 for a summit meeting he would rather have avoided. Carter found him “moody and sullen” but willing to pursue an agreement despite what he called “Sadat’s irresponsible demands,” but only after telling the president he had “suffered personally from the Camp David concessions he had made.”38