Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter, and Anwar Sadat in front of the Aspen Lodge at Camp David
Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter, and Anwar Sadat in front of the Aspen Lodge at Camp David
THE 140-ACRE PRESIDENTIAL RETREAT of Camp David lies inside Maryland’s heavily wooded Catoctin Mountain Park sixty miles north of the White House. Franklin Roosevelt, the first president to make use of it, had named it “Shangri-La.” In 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, he had sought a secret refuge, where he could sleep late, work on his stamp collection, and occasionally entertain world leaders whom he wouldn’t mind having as houseguests. Winston Churchill was one of the first in that category, arriving in the spring of 1943 to plan the Normandy invasion. The two men took time away from their somber duties to drive through the countryside and fish in a nearby mountain stream. When word of Shangri-La’s existence leaked out, there was concern that the hideaway would be vulnerable to enemy bombs, and the president was urged to transfer his retreat to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo, Cuba. Roosevelt refused. “Cuba is absolutely lousy with anarchists, murderers, etcetera and a lot of prevaricators,” he observed.
It was Dwight Eisenhower who renamed the retreat Camp David, after his grandson. He invited the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev there in September 1959 to try to reduce tensions between the superpowers. Khrushchev later wrote, “I couldn’t for the life of me find out what this Camp David was.” He worried that it might be a place “where people who were mistrusted would be kept in quarantine.” Little was accomplished at the meeting, but the press began speaking of the “spirit of Camp David.” “I don’t know what it means,” Eisenhower admitted. “It must simply mean that it looks like we can talk together without being mutually abusive.”
Carter, a tight-fisted populist, came into office with the intention of selling off the property as a budget-saving move and as an attempt to democratize the imperial image of the presidency. In his first year in office, he had already sold the presidential yacht and banned the playing of “Hail to the Chief.” He was looking for other symbolic cuts. He loathed any outward display of pomp and privilege; even as a presidential candidate, he continued to carry his own suit bag. Camp David, one of the world’s most exclusive retreats, beckoned to him as a perfect sacrificial victim, and he ordered it sold.
The director of the White House Military Office asked him if he knew what was at Camp David.
Yes, there are cabins—on the surface—the aide said. But deep underground there is a presidential bunker to be inhabited in the case of nuclear apocalypse. It’s called Orange One. Around the property several hidden elevators lead down into the subterranean facility; one of them is inside a closet in the president’s bedroom in Aspen Lodge. Eisenhower had the shelter constructed at the height of the Cold War. In 1959 he took the British prime minister Harold Macmillan on a tour of the bunker. “A sort of Presidential Command Post in the event of atomic war,” Macmillan reported in his diary. “It holds fifty of the President’s staff in one place and one hundred and fifty Defense staff in another. The fortress is underneath the innocent looking huts in which we lived, hewn out of the rock. It cost 10 million dollars.” Six miles from Camp David is a much larger underground facility—265,000 square feet—blasted out of a mountain called Raven Rock, which was meant to serve as an alternative Pentagon in case of a catastrophic attack. At the time Carter took office, the most likely cause of such an event was the conflict in the Middle East, which was always threatening to escalate out of control.
Once Carter visited Camp David, all talk about selling it came to a halt. The retreat was only thirty-five minutes by helicopter from the South Lawn of the White House, but it was a world away from Washington. It seemed to stand outside of time, peaceful and silent, except for the croaks and chirps of nature. The staff would sometimes observe the president and the first lady taking moonlit walks and holding hands. Instead of state dinners, they could enjoy casual dining with their ten-year-old daughter, Amy. Both of the Carters liked to fish—Carter had become an expert at tying his own flies—and they would try their luck at the little trout stream where Roosevelt and Churchill had come up empty. Such respites were rare and priceless.
In the weeks leading up to the summit, the staff had been frantically preparing to get the accommodations ready for the three delegations and preparing recipes to accommodate halal and kosher diets. In addition to the leaders and their top advisers, each delegation included secretarial staff, physicians, personal chefs, communications specialists, and “bullshit artists,” as Carter termed the hangers-on—more than a hundred people in total, who strained the capacity of this rustic mountain retreat. They were crammed into the dozen lodges spread around the camp, which were named after native American trees. Sadat was in Dogwood and Begin in Birch, on either side of the Carters in Aspen. The frustrated press was kept well beyond the gates. The delegates assumed that their telephone calls would be monitored, which inhibited the temptation to leak details of the talks while they were still going on.1 The setting provided for total concentration on a singular goal, without the partisan commentary that might have subverted any attempts at compromise. As far as the world outside was concerned, Camp David was a black hole.
The summit happened at an inconvenient time, politically speaking, for all of them. Egypt was still shaking from Sadat’s shift away from socialism. Under Nasser, the government provided price supports for many consumer goods and guaranteed employment to all qualified graduates of the country’s technical and professional schools—tens of thousands of them every year. These measures fed inflation, widened the budget deficit, and created a monstrous bureaucratic apparatus filled with people who had practically nothing to do except obstruct change. Sadat had reduced the subsidy on many consumer goods, setting off mass riots across the country over the price of bread. A number of policemen were killed, and Vice President Hosni Mubarak’s summer home in Alexandria was sacked and burned. Sadat then suspended the price rises and imposed a curfew, but the country was still smoldering with discontent and barely contained rage. The CIA warned Carter that, in the absence of economic improvement or tangible progress at Camp David, there was a possibility of renewed civil chaos, which could prompt a military coup. In Israel, steep inflation—exceeding 35 percent—was pushing the economy toward anarchy, growth was frozen, and defense spending was 40 percent of the GNP. A thousand Israelis per month were deserting the country, and few new Jewish immigrants arrived to replace them. “What can I do?” Begin would ask his ministers plaintively. He was losing control of his cabinet and there was rebellion in his party.
Americans already believed Carter was wasting too much time on the Middle East when there were more pressing problems at home. The country was experiencing double-digit inflation coupled with high unemployment and anemic growth—a confounding phenomenon tagged “stagflation.” As for the president’s job performance, the two dreaded lines on the graph finally crossed in the spring of 1978, with more Americans disapproving than approving of Carter’s efforts in office. It was certainly time for him to mend his image, but not by wasting his time on a fruitless quest to bring peace to people who seemed not to want it as much as he did. Carter had budgeted three days for the summit, although he was willing to stay as long as a week if he felt that success was within reach. It would be out of the question for an American president—or, indeed, for the other leaders—to be away from the responsibilities of office for longer, given their daunting domestic problems.
Carter brought one great asset to Camp David: a unified and experienced foreign policy team. Vance and Brzezinski, who were at odds on so many aspects of American foreign policy, were uncharacteristically in tune on matters relating to the Middle East, and their teams reflected that cohesion. William Quandt, who was on the National Security Council, was a veteran of Mideast diplomacy since the Nixon administration, as were Assistant Secretaries of State Alfred “Roy” Atherton and Harold Saunders. Hermann Eilts, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, and Samuel Lewis, the ambassador to Israel, were esteemed professionals who had ready access to the thinking of the leaders of those countries. Without the team Carter brought to Camp David, he could not have achieved any of his goals, and without the commitment of the chief executive, the peace process would have come to a dead end.
When the opening day of the summit finally arrived, on September 5, 1978, Carter felt like a soldier on the eve of a battle. “There was a curious fatalism about the process,” he later recalled.
ANWAR SADAT EMERGED from the helicopter with his arms wide open. He embraced Carter, then kissed Rosalynn on each cheek. Sadat and his wife, Jehan, had visited Camp David seven months earlier, a freezing weekend when the snow was knee-deep. Sadat had arrived then in a rebellious frame of mind, indicating that he was going to break off all efforts to reach a settlement with Begin. Carter had worked strenuously to keep him from taking such a drastic step. The casual setting allowed the Carters and the Sadats to get to know each other better. They even went for a snowmobile race on the helicopter lawn. Afterward, Anwar and Jehan argued over whether snowmobiles would work in the sand. By the end of the weekend, Sadat had softened his views on the peace process and agreed to let Carter continue to press for a way to resolve the impasse. Carter had been counting on the wives to provide a social bridge between the opposing personalities of Sadat and Begin. This time, however, Sadat arrived without Jehan; she was in Paris with their grandson, who was in the hospital.
The team traveling with Sadat was almost wholly opposed to the Camp David summit. Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel, his foreign minister and ostensibly his most important adviser, had only recently been placed in the job. The two men who preceded him in that position resigned in protest over Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem. An otherwise pleasant and easygoing diplomat, Kamel was dogmatic on the subject of Arab unity, although he had never actually visited another Arab country. Even talking to Israelis was an act of treason, in his opinion. Kamel’s intransigence influenced other members of the Egyptian delegation, and yet they worried about his judgment and his ability to keep his emotions in check. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose title was minister of state for foreign affairs, observed of Kamel, his superior, “His knowledge of the Arab world and the Palestinian issue had little relationship to reality.”
Sadat brought along his deputy prime minister, Hassan el-Tohamy, a former intelligence agent who also functioned as Sadat’s astrologer, court jester, and spiritual guru. Physically powerful—an accomplished boxer in the army—with a neatly trimmed beard, Tohamy was a Sufi mystic. “He has something godly in him and he can see the unknown,” Sadat marveled. Tohamy was constantly reporting prophetic dreams or conversations he had just had with angels. He carried stores of ambergris and royal jelly to fortify the resolve of the other Egyptians, and would lecture to anyone within earshot about how God intended to slaughter the Jews. “We all thought he was mad,” Boutros-Ghali recalled.
Sadat had assured his delegation that the summit was a simple affair. He would present the Egyptian proposal; the Israelis would spurn it; then Carter would step in to pressure Begin to accept the Egyptian offer. Either the Israelis would cave in, in which case Egypt would have achieved a great victory, or the summit would fail, in which case nothing was lost, but Egypt would still benefit from the closer relationship to the U.S. “What we are after is to win over world opinion,” he told his advisers. “President Carter is on our side. This will end in Begin’s downfall!”
That afternoon, Carter and Sadat spoke privately on the terrace of Aspen Lodge. Sadat told him that he was ready to conclude a comprehensive peace—“comprehensive” being a favorite term of both men—and in fact he had a plan “here in my pocket” that he intended to present. The agreement would have to provide a solution for the Palestinians and the removal of all Israelis from Sinai when it was returned to Egypt. Sadat did not want to be seen as making a separate peace with the Israelis and essentially withdrawing from the Palestinian cause. Such an action would remove Egypt from its accustomed role as the leader of the Arab world. Despite the terrible cost that continual war had imposed on his country, a peace that appeared dishonorable in the eyes of other Arabs and his own countrymen would be impossible to defend. “Israel has to withdraw from my land,” Sadat said. “Anything else, my good friend, you can do what you want to, and I’ll agree to it.” Carter was a little alarmed at what seemed to be a carte blanche to negotiate on Sadat’s behalf. He wondered if the Egyptian leader fully understood what would be asked of him, but Sadat seemed buoyant. “We can do it, Mr. President!” he exclaimed. “We can do it!”
Two hours later, Begin and his team arrived. Begin followed exactly the same ritual greeting as Sadat—an awkward embrace of Carter, then kissing Rosalynn on each cheek. The Carters were relieved that Begin’s wife, Aliza, would be arriving soon. Carter noticed that Begin was wearing a suit and tie, as if he were meeting in the Oval Office. At Camp David, Carter said, there was a spirit of informality; for instance, he preferred to wear jeans and western shirts, or even running shorts and T-shirts. He encouraged Begin to follow his example. “It will be like a resort,” he suggested. Begin was aghast. He was not a head of state, he reminded Carter; he was merely the prime minister—a rather meaningless distinction—and he intended to follow strict rules of protocol when dealing with the two presidents, no matter how they were attired.
With the help of several interfaith groups in Washington, Rosalynn had prepared a prayer for the success of the summit. Sadat had immediately agreed to the idea, but Begin insisted on reading the text and making minor modifications. “After four wars, despite vast human efforts,” the prayer finally read, “the Holy Land does not yet enjoy the blessings of peace. Conscious of the grave issues which face us, we place our trust in the God of our fathers, from whom we seek wisdom and guidance. As we meet here at Camp David, we ask people of all faiths to pray with us that peace and justice may result from these deliberations.” It was the first joint communiqué issued from the talks, and would be the last, until the summit concluded thirteen days later.
MEMBERS OF THE ISRAELI DELEGATION descended from the helicopter and walked toward the camp, elbowing their way into view of the cameras trained on Begin and Carter, “like a bunch of boy scouts on an outing,” one of them later recalled, “with everyone trying to huddle up as close as possible to the instructor in an attempt to get into the snapshot.” The team that Begin brought with him was contentious and sharply divided against each other. To the Americans, the Israeli team seemed to be composed of “prima donnas,” but the members of the delegation were also reflective of the intimate and contentious style of Israeli politics, in which the American concept of team players had little relevance. The Israelis arrived believing that the summit would last no more than a couple of days, and that no agreement would come out of it.
Aside from Begin, the most significant member of the Israeli delegation was Moshe Dayan, the legendary one-eyed Israeli warrior. As minister of defense, he received much of the credit for the lightning Israeli victory in 1967. But in 1973, Egyptian troops poured across the canal, catching the Israelis unprepared, and Dayan’s legend, along with Israel’s image of itself, shattered. He was in disgrace, blamed and reviled for the cruel shock Israel had endured. Although he told no one, he was ill, going blind, and desperately hoping for a last chance at redemption. Peace might be that chance.
In the late afternoon, the two delegations wandered around the camp in clumps, mostly avoiding each other. Everyone had been given a map of the premises and a blue Camp David windbreaker. There was a tennis court, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a billiard room, a driving range, and a theater showing movies continually. It was early fall, and the leaves were beginning to turn red and gold. The lush forest was strange to both groups. Dayan felt threatened by the trees, which he couldn’t see that well; he longed for the bright desert.
Ezer Weizman jumped on one of the many bicycles available to the guests and rode over to Begin’s cabin. On the way, he encountered Sadat, who was on his brisk daily walk, accompanied by Foreign Minister Kamel, who was struggling to keep up. Weizman and Sadat embraced. “I’m glad to see you again!” Weizman said.
Brash, irrepressible, and gregarious by nature, Weizman was part of the “Mayflower generation” of Israel. His uncle Chaim Weizmann was Israel’s first president.2 Young Ezer grew up in Haifa, a mixed city. His mother spoke fluent Arabic and endeavored to teach it to her children—with imperfect success in his case. His father was a German agronomist who became a forestry officer in the northern part of Palestine. “We were seasoned travelers in a world of open borders, not yet sealed by Arab-Jewish hatred,” Weizman later recalled. His ideal of living in harmony with his Arab neighbors was abruptly shattered in May 1948, when Egypt and other neighboring Arab armies attacked as soon as the State of Israel was declared. “As for the Egyptians, I simply couldn’t grasp what had gotten into them,” he would later write. “What interest could they have in the conflict in Palestine?”
Weizman eventually came to think of the Arabs as patient realists, who counted on their vastly greater numbers and fabulous oil wealth to give them the advantage in the long run. In the meantime, they burned with hatred and envy of Israeli success. “Imagine that you’re Arabs,” Weizman would tell his subordinates. “What do you see? The State of Israel doing a strip-tease, that’s what you see. A strip-tease! Green, flourishing, prosperous, twinkling at night with a mass of lights. And whatever the Arab eye doesn’t see, his imagination invents. Now, you know what happens to a healthy man when he watches a rousing strip-tease act …”
The formidable Israeli air force was Weizman’s creation, designed to knock the lust for conquest out of the Arab heart. “I’ve never hated the Arabs,” Weizman maintained. “But instead of building and developing and living in peace, the Jew is forced to learn to kill more Arabs in less time.” In 1967, Weizman’s planes wiped out the Egyptian Air Force in three hours, determining the outcome of that conflict from its very start. Weizman believed that the war should not end until the Israelis had taken Cairo, Amman, and Damascus. He proudly advertised himself as a “raging hawk” who advocated the immediate annexation of all the territories it had acquired in that war.
Like most of his countrymen, Weizman reveled in the total rout of the Arab armies. There were photographs in the Israeli press of Egyptian boots in the Sinai sand, left behind so the soldiers could run away faster. The Israelis laughed at their pathetic adversaries, and even pitied them—emotions that made the Arabs’ loss all the more mortifying. “It was only after my first meetings with the Egyptians that I began to grasp the mistake we had made,” Weizman later admitted. “Whenever the Egyptians referred to their humiliation in the Six-Day War, their eyes grew moist. I suddenly realized how painful the blow had been and how it had spurred them on to redoubled efforts of revenge.”
Alone among the Israelis, Weizman had forged a personal relationship with Sadat, wrought through many hours of negotiations. He always thought of the Egyptian leader as the personification of masculine elegance, perfectly groomed and exquisitely dressed, trailing a whiff of Aramis cologne. Now, at Camp David, encountering the Egyptian president in a sweaty tracksuit made him appear rather less glamorous.
“Come and see me!” Sadat said, and walked on into the gloomy forest.
THE LEADERS ATE in their cabins, but the rest of the delegations were fed in the large dining hall in Laurel Lodge. Somber Egyptians sat at their tables on the lower level, while on the upper level the Israelis chatted quietly, worried about being overheard.
Everyone in the dining hall was in casual clothes, with the exception of Hassan el-Tohamy. Like Begin, he insisted on wearing a suit and tie at all times. The other Egyptians were alternately amused and embarrassed by Tohamy but also a little cowed. Tohamy’s years in intelligence left him with the reputation of a man who had done a lot of dirty work in his time. He was an intimidating figure with his barrel chest, broad shoulders, blue eyes, and imposing silver beard. His formality made him all the more singular among the jeans and sweaters.
Tohamy was known as a kind of guru for Sadat, although no one grasped exactly what accounted for their intense relationship. He openly spoke of having conversations with genies or dead saints. When he served as the Egyptian ambassador to Austria, he suddenly stood up at a dinner party and greeted the Prophet Muhammad, as if his ghost were physically present in the room. Such outbursts on his part became legendary in the upper tier of Egyptian government; he was always spreading legends of his own prowess, casually mentioning that he had decided at the last minute not to overthrow the government of Afghanistan, for instance, or that he had just stopped a revolution in Malaysia. And yet, as the former head of Egyptian intelligence, he did have a history of intrigue. Perhaps Sadat was under the spell of Tohamy’s spiritualism, or enchanted by his stories. They had been together in the revolution, and conspirators naturally forge links that others fail to see or understand.
At that first dinner in Laurel Lodge with the Egyptians and several Americans, Tohamy boasted of his mystical powers. Through sheer force of will, he said, he had trained himself to control the forces of nature inside and outside of his body. He used to climb into the lions’ cage at the Cairo zoo, he told his amazed audience, and bring the lions to heel. Eventually, he was able to leave his body and travel outside of the physical universe. He had even devised a way to stop his heart from beating upon command.
This last comment attracted the attention of Menachem Begin’s cardiologist, who was sitting with an American doctor at a nearby table. With his enlarged audience, Tohamy related that he had once gone for a physical and the doctor who was taking his pulse suddenly turned pale. “Mr. Tohamy, your heart is not working!” the doctor had cried. “You’re dead!” Tohamy apologized, explaining that he had simply forgotten to turn his heart back on.
Hearing the story, one of the incredulous physicians at the dinner table asked Tohamy if he had been able to accomplish this astounding feat through yoga. The question infuriated Tohamy, who said that it had nothing at all to do with yoga! But he refused to divulge his secret technique.
A YEAR BEFORE Camp David, prior to Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan had met secretly with Tohamy in Morocco, at the invitation of King Hassan II, in order to broker backdoor peace talks. To keep the meeting secret, Dayan had flown from Paris to Rabat disguised as a beatnik, with a shaggy wig, mustache, and sunglasses.
He must have realized what a monstrous figure he was in the imagination of Egyptian military men such as Tohamy. No Israeli more thoroughly embodied the humiliation they had endured in 1967. Perhaps for this reason, the Moroccan king did not tell the Egyptians in advance whom Tohamy would be meeting, saying that the Israeli representative would be “a figure with status in every Arab state and at a level of responsibility.”
When Tohamy entered Hassan’s palace in Morocco, he greeted the king and embraced him, but at first he could not bring himself to look at the Israeli. “This is Dayan!” the king finally said.
“No one doubts it is Dayan,” Tohamy replied. Finally he addressed the legendary Israeli. “I did not in my life expect to meet you in a parlor. Rather I expected to meet you at any point on the field of battle, where I would kill you or you would kill me.”
Tohamy said that he brought a message from President Sadat, which he read aloud in clipped tones, outlining the terms of the Egyptian peace proposal. He repeatedly stressed the need for secrecy; even the Americans could not be told of the meeting, he said—his life depended on it. “His request for secrecy at that time was also prompted by what I can only describe as a crisis of the soul,” Dayan later wrote. “For him to be meeting an official representative of the Israeli Government to discuss peace was an emotional shock.”
Tohamy was supposed to be laying the groundwork for peace discussions between Sadat and Begin, but his mystical nature kept asserting itself. At one point Tohamy said, “Moshe, you are the false prophet of Israel. There was a prophet before you who was one-eyed, and he was a false prophet.”
“Sir, I am not that man,” Dayan replied.
When Tohamy got back to business, he stressed that Sadat was serious in his desire for peace. However, Sadat would only consent to meet with Begin and shake his hand once the Israeli prime minister had agreed to total withdrawal from the occupied territories. Guarantees could be established for Israeli security if that principle was agreed upon. That way, Sadat could have peace without surrender.
Tohamy could not refrain from mulling over past defeats. It was inconceivable to him that Egypt, with a population of forty million, together with Syria, Jordan, and other Arab states, had been defeated by Israel, with only three million inhabitants. Tohamy’s lips quivered with anger and contempt as he spoke of Nasser, reasoning that Egypt had lost the war in 1967 because Nasser had conspired with the Israelis to bring about defeat. “Otherwise, how could such a catastrophe have befallen us?” he asked Dayan. He went on to say that the economic prosperity and spiritual blossoming of the Middle East had been held back because of the endless wars, but the time was coming for the apocalyptic clash of Gog and Magog, when the sons of light would face the sons of darkness, and the Israeli people would have to choose which side they were on.
The weird encounter between Dayan and Tohamy turned out to be far more consequential than Dayan might have imagined. When Tohamy returned to Cairo, he evidently told Sadat that Begin had agreed to withdraw from the occupied territories. It was on that basis that Sadat went to Jerusalem, believing that only certain details remained to be worked out between the two sides. When he first met privately with Begin and Dayan, Sadat mentioned this secret understanding to withdraw. Dayan denied he had ever made such a commitment; his only purpose in Morocco was to gather information and then report back to Begin.
“But Tohamy said you were ready to withdraw,” Sadat protested.
“Mr. President, I did not say that,” Dayan responded.
By then, of course, Sadat was in Jerusalem and the focus of the entire world was on him. It is entirely possible that the Middle East peace process was set in motion by the misunderstanding of a madman.
IN THE EVENING, Begin went to Carter’s cabin for their first long discussion. They settled into a modest, wood-paneled study where Begin seemed to feel more at home than in the spacious living room. Carter surveyed the issues that would be covered at Camp David, explaining that he would act mainly as the arbiter, putting forward compromises when the two sides couldn’t reach agreement.
Of the three leaders, Begin was in the strongest position: he could walk away from Camp David empty-handed with little political damage. His entrenched positions were well known. Even those who strongly opposed him never doubted his principles or his refusal to make any concession that might compromise Israel’s security. He was a rock wall. But intransigence brought its own hazards. He realized that there was one thing more valuable to Sadat than peace with Israel: a robust American-Egyptian relationship, mirroring the friendship of Carter and Sadat. Egypt could foreseeably replace Israel as America’s closest ally in the Middle East, opening up new diplomatic bridges between the U.S. and the oil sheikhdoms. Meantime, Israel’s relationship with the U.S. might look more like the edgy relationship between Begin and Carter. America had provided a comfortable measure of military and economic security for Israel, providing $10 billion of aid since the 1973 war—nearly $4,000 for each Israeli citizen. If Americans came to see Begin as the main obstacle to a genuine Middle East peace treaty, his political career would be finished and Israel might find itself completely friendless in the world.
Begin’s main fear was that Carter and Sadat were conspiring against him. He had reason to be concerned. Earlier in the year, Brzezinski came up with the idea of colluding with Sadat in order to put pressure on Begin. The scheme would involve Sadat putting forward an Egyptian plan for the West Bank and Gaza, which would be realistic enough to accommodate Israel’s security needs but would also include some points that the U.S. would find unacceptable. That would allow Carter to argue with both Begin and Sadat, whereupon he would produce a “compromise” plan that Sadat had already secretly agreed to in advance. Begin would be placed in a vise. Carter could squeeze him without appearing biased against the Israeli position, bringing to bear all of the power of his office and the acknowledged vulnerability of Israel’s dependence on the United States. The Americans were counting on Sadat’s theatrical abilities to carry it off. Vance was opposed to the idea, however, and Sadat was really too impulsive to be a trustworthy conspirator. But the American team continued to believe that there would have to be some kind of stratagem in place to pressure Begin if there was to be any hope of pulling off a meaningful peace agreement. If Begin refused to budge, the American goal was to arouse enough domestic pressure against him to bring down his government, with the intention of producing a more flexible partner for peace—Ezer Weizman being the most appealing candidate to replace him.
Begin, however, had a trump card. He brought the actual text of a letter from Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford. In 1975, Ford’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had been trying to broker an agreement in which Israel would withdraw from a portion of Sinai that it had occupied in the 1973 war. During that negotiation, the U.S. made a number of pledges, including the one that Begin brought with him, in which America agreed not to produce any peace proposals without first consulting the Israelis. Little had been gained from this extraordinary commitment, but it had hung over American policy makers ever since. In effect, Ford’s pledge gave Begin a powerful veto over any peace proposal and compromised the American posture of being an impartial broker.
“Mr. Prime Minister, we must come out of this conference with an agreement,” Carter said, pointing out that if they failed, there was little chance of progress in any foreseeable future. However, here in this isolated environment, with plenty of time, sealed off from the press and protected from the din of partisanship and pressing domestic concerns, the three leaders could change history. Their subordinates didn’t have the power or authority to do so, and their successors might never have a better opportunity. Only Begin and Sadat could do it, here and now. Carter added, “The achievement of a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt is more important to me even than my political chances.”
Carter began to read from a list of points he thought the two sides agreed upon. He said that Begin’s autonomy plan for the Palestinians had been a bold step, as had his willingness to recognize Egyptian sovereignty over the entire Sinai.
Begin stopped him right there. As for Sinai, sovereignty was one thing, but the Israeli settlements there would have to remain.
Sadat would never agree to that, Carter said.
During the discussion, Begin refused to even utter the name “Palestinians.” He persisted in calling the West Bank by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, as if to underline the claim that God had given the land to his Chosen People. “Some people ridicule the Bible,” he said. “But not you, Mr. President. And not I.”
Israel’s continuing presence in Sinai and the West Bank and Gaza was in violation of international law, Carter observed; moreover, “Sadat insists that Israel accept the principle that no land be taken by force.”
“Security Council Resolution 242 does not say that,” Begin responded. “It says that land is not to be taken by war. Mr. President, the difference is significant. There are defensive wars, too. It’s not so simple.” The Six-Day War was a defensive response to hostile moves on Egypt’s part, not a surprise attack, he added. “If such a principle is accepted, the whole map of Europe would have to be changed.” He would only agree to such a formulation if the word “belligerent” was inserted before the word “war” so that Israel could justify hanging on to the occupied territories.
“The United States expects Israel to put an end to the settlements in the occupied territories,” Carter said.
“We cannot accept that!” Begin exclaimed. Perhaps he could agree to stop creating new settlements in the Sinai, he said, but not in the West Bank. “It is our absolute right.”
Not only did Begin fail to bring any new proposals, he didn’t even seem to understand the point of the summit. Yes, it was important to reach an accord with Egypt, he acknowledged, but first Israel would have to work out an agreement with the United States about how to proceed. That alone would take several months. It obviously couldn’t be accomplished at Camp David.
Carter was caught off guard by Begin’s seeming indifference to the outcome of the summit. “Sadat is impulsive,” he warned. “If there’s no progress in the negotiations, he is liable to launch a military action.”
Begin was unimpressed. Carter began to realize just how far the Israeli leader was from even the beginning of a negotiation. At eleven p.m. Carter finally called a halt to the pointless discussion. He went back to the bedroom and dejectedly reported to Rosalynn, “I don’t think he has any intention of going through with a peace treaty.”
BEGIN STROLLED BACK in the dark to his cabin, appreciating the silence. The lights in many of the other cabins were still on as the teams prepared for the first big meeting in the morning between the two delegations. There was a mild autumn chill in the air. “What a paradise on Earth!” he thought.
Members of his own team were waiting for him when he arrived at Birch Lodge. As prime minister, he had never been good at consulting his cabinet, but now he gathered his advisers around on the veranda and filled them in on his conversation with Carter. “We have a tough nut to crack,” he told them. “His name is Anwar Sadat.”
1 Carter says that, in fact, there were no taps on the phones or in the rooms. Despite this, most of the important discussions within the delegations took place outdoors. According to William Quandt, the Egyptian team brought scramblers anyway.
2 Ezer Weizman later modified the English spelling of his name.