Menachem Begin and Zbigniew Brzezinski playing chess on the porch at Camp David
Menachem Begin and Zbigniew Brzezinski playing chess on the porch at Camp David
MOST OF THE ISSUES on the table at Camp David were the unforeseen consequences of Israel’s overwhelming victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. Leading up to the war, many Israelis had decided that the Israel experiment was another historical trap they had fallen into. There was a sense of foreboding that led to a rush for the exits. Then the war came, and Israel defeated three Arab armies in six days. At once, the country experienced an explosive burst of Jewish immigration, especially from America. Scripture foretold an “ingathering of exiles” in the Land of Israel before redemption: “Thus says the Lord God: I will soon take the Israelites from among the nations to which they have gone and gather them from all around to bring them back to their land. I will make them one nation in the land, upon the mountains of Israel.” There was a sense that a miracle had occurred and a prophecy was fulfilled. Forces were set loose in the religious world that would prove to be difficult to contain as the fundamentalists took the floor. Formerly secular Jews were increasingly drawn into the messianic cults of the ultra-Orthodox, which spearheaded the settler movement. The seizure of the holy places was seen as the prelude to redemption, soon to be followed by the establishment of a theocratic Kingdom of Israel and the rule of Jewish law (Halakha). For Christians as well the war was full of auguries and portents. It seemed that the hand of God had reached out of the Old Testament and once again tipped the scale in favor of his Chosen People, heralding the approach of the End of Days. Surely the Messiah was soon to come.
Many Muslims came to the opposite conclusion. Radical Islam blamed the crushing defeat on the moral decay of modern, secular Arab society. Evidently, God had turned against them. The only remedy was to embrace the pure Islam embodied in the times of the Prophet, which meant a return to Islamic law, jihad, and the tribal codes of seventh-century Arabia. The loss of Jerusalem, in particular, fueled the rise of Islamic extremism and sharpened the hatred of the Jewish state. Other Muslims decried the corruption and backwardness of Arab governments, all of them—excepting fractured Lebanon—in the hands of kings, sheikhs, sultans, generals, dictators, and presidents-for-life, where the voices of democracy and modernism were effectively silenced.
Deception and delusion play a role in every conflict, but especially in the Middle East. The manner in which the Six-Day War was set in motion would place it on an irrational trajectory that its participants seemed unwilling or unable to escape. It began with Anwar Sadat, then president of the Egyptian parliament, making a stopover in Moscow on May 13, 1967, after a goodwill trip to North Korea. His plane was delayed by an hour, so he had a chance to talk with Soviet president Nikolai Podgorny and Vladimir Semyenov, the deputy foreign minister. They gave him the startling news that Israel had moved ten brigades to the Syrian border. Egypt had recently signed a mutual defense pact with Syria. “You must not be taken by surprise,” the Soviet president warned in dire tones. “The coming days will be fateful.”
He was right about that; three weeks later the map of the Middle East would be redrawn and Egypt would suffer a defeat so rapid and abject that there are few parallels in history. But he was wrong about the Israeli brigades. There was no such movement toward the Syrian border. That fact has subsequently led to abundant speculation about whether the Soviets merely lied to Sadat, perhaps in order to destroy Nasser, or were carelessly passing on misinformation from sources, such as Syria or Israel, with their own agendas, or simply were mistaken. When the Israelis learned of the false report about their troop movements, they invited the Soviets on three occasions to tour the Syrian border region to see for themselves that there were no such troop concentrations. Each time, the Soviets refused, saying that they already knew the facts. Nasser sent a trusted general to Syria to study aerial photographs; the general even surveyed the border from a private plane. “There is nothing there,” he reported to Nasser. “No massing of forces. Nothing.”
Still, Nasser felt obliged to make a show of force by sending Egyptian troops into Sinai and demanding that some of the UN peacekeepers be removed from their posts. Despite the bellicose speeches that followed, Nasser seemed to be bluffing. He didn’t expect all of the UN troops to be withdrawn, although they were. A war with Israel couldn’t have come at a worse time for Egypt; the country was already tied down in a war in Yemen, where nearly half of the Egyptian Army was involved. In addition, a third of its planes were unfit for action, as well as a fifth of its tanks. On top of this, the Egyptians had no actual battle plan and no strategy. Nasser’s gestures stopped short of pulling the trigger. Then, tired of being heckled by other Arab leaders because of his weak responses toward Israel in the past, he closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. The Israelis had long warned that this would be an act of war. “If war comes it will be total and the objective will be Israel’s destruction,” Nasser boasted. He pledged to “totally exterminate the State of Israel for all time.” Rhetoric left reason far behind as the logic of war took command. “Nasser was carried away by his own impetuosity,” Sadat observed.
Many Egyptians would look back at this moment with fury and shame. They were living inside a bubble that had been inflated by an absurdly self-confident, over-empowered military establishment; a dictator who listened only to the cries of his name in the streets; and a tamed and in any case censored press. Ignorance of the enemy’s capabilities and designs led to an exuberant feeling that history was about to bow to the Arabs at last. Egypt, haunted by its ancient grandeur, had found a new champion in Nasser; together they would unify the Arabs and lead them to a resurgent future. Destroying Israel would be only a first step.
The exhilaration in Egypt was matched by a sense of mounting panic in Israel. War loomed on two horizons—in the east, with Syria and probably Jordan as well, and in the south, with Egypt. Other Arab armies would rush into the fray if they thought there was any chance of victory. The Egyptian Air Force, fortified with new MiG fighters, dared to make a reconnaissance flight over the Israeli nuclear reactor in Dimona. The Israelis were also aware that the Egyptian Army had used chemical weapons in Yemen, and the prospect of facing gas attacks resurrected thoughts of the Nazi death camps, inflaming profound psychological wounds. Israel had one of the most potent militaries in the world, but the feeling of invulnerability alternated with a sense of weakness and victimization that was never far from reach. The days leading up to the war were fraught with talk of annihilation, an entirely different discussion than the prospect of defeat. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol faltered and stuttered during an address to the nation, sending chills through the country. The military chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, had a nervous breakdown of sorts, fretting that the country was on the brink of catastrophe for which he would be responsible. The Israelis stockpiled antidotes to poison gas and dug trenches in city parks to be used as mass graves.
It was still unclear, however, whether the Egyptian military buildup was a genuine prelude to war or a beating of drums on Nasser’s part to elicit cheers from the Arab street. America was urging both Egypt and Israel not to strike the first blow; President Lyndon Johnson promised the Israelis that the U.S. would lead an international flotilla through the Straits of Tiran and pry open the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli ships again. As it turned out, Johnson was unable to garner the support of other countries to carry out this action, and the Israelis decided they couldn’t wait for the Egyptian attack. “We must strike now and swiftly,” argued Ezer Weizman, who was Rabin’s deputy chief of staff. “We must deal the enemy a serious blow, for if we don’t, other forces will soon join him.” Israel formed an emergency cabinet, bringing Menachem Begin into the government for the first time in his career as a minister without portfolio. Dayan, who had demonstrated his military genius in the 1956 war, was made the minister of defense four days before the war was scheduled to commence.
Dayan took immediate charge of the planning, deciding to concentrate his forces entirely on the Egyptian front before turning to other adversaries. At the same time, he deliberately gave the impression that Israel was in no hurry to respond to the Egyptian threats. He was sufficiently convincing that Nasser canceled the state of emergency he had imposed on his country. On June 5, just before the war actually began, Israel decided to lie about who started it. A message, which Dayan opposed, was sent to President Lyndon Johnson saying that the Egyptians had fired on Israeli settlements and that an Egyptian squadron had been spotted headed toward Israel. Neither of these statements was true.
Dayan coolly had breakfast with his wife, then coffee with his mistress, and finally he went to his office and began the war. Shortly after seven a.m., the entire Israeli Air Force took to the air. “The whole plan rested on total surprise,” Weizman recalled. “All those planes, taking off from different airfields, flying at different speeds, would get into formation as planned and, at precisely the identical moment, they’d arrive at nine Egyptian airfields.… If the scales should tip against us, and we failed to destroy the Egyptian Air Force, only four planes were held in defense of Israel’s skies.” Within thirty minutes, more than two hundred Egyptian planes had been destroyed. The outcome of the war was effectively decided.
Israel was aided by excellent intelligence—one of its spies was Nasser’s personal masseur—and by Egyptian incompetence. The commander in chief of the Egyptian Army, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amir, who had goaded Nasser into the war, was on his way to inspect an air force base near Suez, along with all his top commanders, and he had ordered his anti-aircraft and missile forces to hold their fire for fear they would hit his plane. The skies over Egypt were wide open.
When Sadat awakened that morning, he learned from the radio that the war had started. “Well, they’ll be taught a lesson they won’t forget,” he thought, as he shaved and leisurely dressed. He didn’t arrive at the command center until eleven in the morning. Entering Field Marshal Amir’s office, Sadat found him standing in the middle of the room, his eyes wandering like an animal that has been stunned by a blow. “Good morning!” Sadat said, but Amir seemed unable to hear him. Other officers whispered that the Egyptian Air Force had been totally wiped out.
When Nasser came into the room, Amir suddenly began to talk. He had come up with the theory that it was the U.S. Air Force, not the Israelis, that had attacked. Nasser sneered at the accusation, but an idea was planted in his mind. Soon afterward, he called King Hussein of Jordan. Hussein was cowed by Nasser. Several days earlier, he had formally entered the war after Nasser lied to him, saying the battle was in Egypt’s favor. “Quickly take possession of the largest possible amount of land in order to get ahead of the UN’s cease-fire,” Nasser had advised earlier that morning. The Israelis had pleaded with King Hussein not to join the war, promising to leave Jordan alone, but once again he cast his vote with the Arabs. In a matter of minutes, he lost his air force as well. Syria had lost half of its planes already. Now, in this desolate moment, Nasser asked Hussein, “Shall we say that the United States is fighting on Israel’s side?” He was unaware that his conversation on an unscrambled line was being recorded by Israeli intelligence. “Shall we say the United States and England or only the United States?”
“The United States and England,” Hussein replied.
When Radio Cairo broadcast the lie about American involvement in the war, most of the Arab world broke diplomatic relations with the U.S., although Jordan did not. After Israel released the contents of his call with Nasser, Hussein apologized. Meantime, mobs attacked American embassies throughout the region, and Arab oil producers banned shipments to the U.S. and Great Britain.
Sadat, not sure what to do, simply went home, and stayed there for several days, going for long walks. “I was dazed and unable to locate myself in time or space,” he admitted. Meantime, he agonized over the Egyptian people, who were being told that they were winning the war. Young men on flatbed trucks roamed the city leading the chorus of cheers. “I wished I could have another heart attack,” Sadat wrote. “I wished I could pass away before these good and kind people woke up to the reality.”
Jordan had begun its misbegotten war by firing on Israeli positions in Jerusalem. Begin passionately lobbied for the immediate capture of the Old City, which had been off-limits to Jews since 1948. Dayan had not wanted to divert attention from Sinai, but the nearly instant elimination of any air threat made it easier to open another front. He ordered General Uzi Narkiss to surround the Old City in hopes it would fall without a fight.
In the early hours of the following morning, Dayan made another fateful decision. Jordan was shelling Israeli settlements from Jenin, one of the main cities on the West Bank. Dayan ordered the guns silenced. At that point, there had been no discussion of conquering and occupying the territory, but it was in the back of everyone’s mind. From the Israeli perspective, the war really had no design beyond the elimination of the Egyptian threat, but it opened up opportunities. As Dayan sat in the operations room of military headquarters, a commander radioed that his forces had surrounded Jenin. Dayan turned to look at the other officers in the room, including Weizman. “I know exactly what you want,” he said. “To take Jenin.”
“Correct!”
“So, take it!”
In that dizzying, unaccountable, almost thoughtless moment, the decision to seize the West Bank was made. Within a few days, more than a million and a half stateless Palestinians would fall under Israeli control, and the moral burden of becoming an occupying power would fall on the shoulders of the Jews.
Later that same fateful morning, Dayan announced he was going to Jerusalem. Weizman offered to fly him there in an Alouette helicopter. He flew low, so the convoys of Israeli troops could see their instantly recognizable commander. They waved to him in greeting. Weizman set the helicopter down in the parking lot of the Jerusalem convention center. The war was all around them and the smell of cordite seared the nostrils. Dayan ordered General Narkiss to provide a jeep to take them up to Mount Scopus, which looms over the Old City. Although nominally a part of Israeli territory, Mount Scopus had been a demilitarized enclave inside Jordanian Jerusalem since 1948. That war had left the city divided between the new Jewish neighborhoods and the major portion, including the Old City, which Jordan had seized and annexed. Now after nineteen years the prospect of reunifying the holy city was within grasp. “What a divine view!” Dayan declared when they reached the ridgetop. Around him were the hills of Golgotha, the Mount of Olives, Mount Zion—names that echoed in the minds of believers—and before him was the historic Old City behind its crenellated limestone walls. The Temple Mount, with the glorious Dome of the Rock, was at his feet. He was struck by the Old City’s air of calm indifference as the sounds of war exploded all around it.
Weizman broke away from the others and entered the old Hebrew University, shuttered for nearly twenty years. His uncle Moshe Weizmann had been a professor of chemistry at the university, and his laboratory was still there. The clock on the wall had stopped. Professor Weizmann’s papers were still on the desk, and his handwriting was on the blackboard. It was as if time had frozen and now that other life might just start again.
Narkiss wanted permission to take the Old City immediately. “Under no circumstances,” Dayan replied, imagining the international outrage that would follow if any religious sites were damaged. But the following day, rumors of a UN cease-fire prompted Begin to call Dayan. “We must not wait a second more,” he said.
For two thousand years, Jews had been promising themselves, “Next year in Jerusalem!” Now that dream was about to be realized. An Israeli tank blasted open one of the giant gates to the Old City, and troops of the 55th Parachute Brigade raced down the Via Dolorosa toward the Temple Mount. As soon as it was taken, Dayan entered the Old City. He ordered an Israeli flag that had been placed atop the spire of the Dome of the Rock taken down. Then he joined the delirious soldiers at the Western Wall, a remnant of the temple that was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. Many of the troops were weeping or praying. Following an ancient custom, Dayan took a small notebook from his pocket, wrote a prayer, and stuffed it into a crevice in the ancient rock face. It said, “May peace descend upon the whole House of Israel.”
“We have returned to the holiest of our sites, and will never again be separated from it,” this avowedly secular man declared. “To our Arab neighbors, Israel extends the hand of peace.” The victory was so rapid, so thorough, so mythic, that its architect still couldn’t take it all in. It would be at least a generation before the Arabs could mount another military challenge to Israel, Dayan boasted, and who could doubt him?
Afterward, in the helicopter back to General Headquarters, Dayan wrapped himself in his coat and curled up quietly in the corner, contemplating what future he had just created for his country.
HISTORY IS REPLETE with wars, conquests, and surrenders, but negotiated settlements between two ardent antagonists have been surprisingly rare. In the fifteenth century, Pope Alexander VI thoughtfully parceled out the newly discovered world between Spain and Portugal. He drew a line dividing the globe that was intended to give the continents of North and South America to Spain and everything east of that—i.e., Africa—to Portugal. It was later discovered that the bulge of Brazil strayed into the Portuguese sphere, which is why Brazilians speak Portuguese today.
Before Camp David, Hal Saunders, the assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, paid a visit to the State Department historian to ask if there were any precedents in the history of American diplomacy. The only example the historian could point to was when President Theodore Roosevelt invited emissaries from the warring countries of Russia and Japan to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1905, to resolve their differences. Like Carter, Roosevelt had hoped that they would work it out between themselves, but that proved impossible. His strenuous and imaginative diplomacy provided the breakthrough that ended the war. He became the first American to earn a Nobel Peace Prize.
At Camp David, there were no formal meetings on Saturday, so the American team spent the fifth day drafting the American proposal. The new approach sprang in part from a fortuitous meeting that Cyrus Vance had several weeks before the talks began. At the same time as the Carters were vacationing in the Grand Teton National Park, Vance rented a house in Martha’s Vineyard next to an old friend, Roger Fisher, who taught negotiation at Harvard Law School. They played a game of tennis, and afterward, Vance asked if Fisher had any ideas about how to handle the forthcoming summit. Fisher had been hoping he would ask.
Vance was already a veteran negotiator. Lyndon Johnson had chosen him as his personal envoy to settle a dispute between Greece and Turkey over the division of Cyprus. He had been involved in the early peace talks at the end of the Vietnam War, where he was forced to spend much of his time debating the shape of the negotiating table. Both philosophically and morally, he was closer than anyone else in the Carter administration to the president; but Vance was handicapped by a growing suspicion on Carter’s part that he couldn’t conclude an agreement.
Both Fisher and Vance had fought in the Second World War, losing many friends in that conflict. At Harvard Law School, Fisher put together ideas about how countries could resolve disputes diplomatically rather than through the constant resort to arms. Over cocktails, when Vance asked him if he had any suggestions for the summit, Fisher was able to produce a draft of a book he had just written, titled International Mediation, a Working Guide: Ideas for the Practitioner.1 Still in his tennis duds, Vance sat in a lawn chair on Fisher’s terrace and looked it over.
The main idea that Vance took with him was what Fisher called the “one-text procedure.” The concept was simple: the arbitrator in a dispute creates a document and then asks each side for its response. Matters that are not contested are counted as agreed upon. Those that are disputed are then addressed in a way that continually narrows the differences. When each side finally concurs on the language, that issue is also marked off. The key, all along, is that the arbitrator controls the document. Whenever the contending parties hit a stalemate, the arbitrator proposes new language. In this methodical manner, Fisher believed, disputes that would otherwise lead to bloodshed, economic ruin, and centuries of enmity could be sanded down by patient negotiation. He was seeking a cure for war.
Carter had his own method of negotiation, which he had first developed during his years on the Sumter County school board, when he had to deal with labor disputes. He would outline in advance what he thought would constitute a fair settlement and then try to bend each side toward his position. When he was governor, rural Hancock County, which had a history of racial violence, became the first county in Georgia in which blacks held all the top offices. That spurred panic among white citizens, who still constituted the majority of the city of Sparta, the county seat. The white mayor ordered machine guns for the city police officers, which led the black-controlled county government to order thirty machine guns in response. An arms race began between the two branches of government that could lead to a kind of civil war. Instead of occupying the county with state policemen or calling out the National Guard, Carter studied the complaints on each side and then composed a list of compromises. He sent a special assistant, Cloyd Hall, to interview both sides and make a presentation to the community. On October 1, 1971, Hall called him, and said, “Governor, I’ve got a birthday present for you.” It was a truckload of machine guns.
Now, at Camp David, both Vance and Carter had the chance to put their experience to the test.
Harold Saunders, the assistant secretary of state, had spent all Friday night into Saturday morning writing what would be the first of twenty-three drafts of an American proposal. Carter listed about thirty items that he called “Necessary Elements of Agreement.” They included:
An end to war.
Permanent peace.
Unrestricted passage of Israeli ships through Suez Canal and Gulf of Aqaba.
Secure and recognized borders.
Diplomatic recognition and an exchange of ambassadors.
Phased Israeli withdrawal from Sinai and demilitarization of the peninsula.
An end to blockades and boycotts.
Abolition of the Israeli military government in the occupied territories.
Full autonomy for the Palestinians.
Determination of the final status of the West Bank and Gaza within five years, based on UN Resolution 242.
Withdrawal of the Israeli military into specified security locations.
A prompt and just settlement of the refugee problem.
Definition of the final status of Jerusalem.
An end to Israeli settlements in Sinai.
No new Israeli settlements or expansion of existing ones in the occupied territories until all negotiations are complete.
Formal signing of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt within three months.
Putting all of this on paper caused the American team to focus on what was really important or realistic to achieve at the summit. When Carter met with his team that afternoon, he made several changes in the proposal. For the time being, he decided to omit the demands to end Israeli settlements because Begin would focus on that issue exclusively. He amended the clause concerning “secure and recognized borders” to say that the borders might incorporate “minor modifications” that differed from the 1967 armistice lines. He also deleted a provision that linked the implementation of a treaty between Egypt and Israel to the creation of a self-governing authority on the West Bank and in Gaza. Inevitably, he began thinking of two separate agreements. This would lead to what many critics consider to be the failure of Camp David to achieve a comprehensive peace, while others believe that it allowed the summit to achieve anything at all.
“The president was very frank in saying that we should try to get an Egyptian-Israeli agreement started and concluded,” William Quandt, who was part of Brzezinski’s staff on the National Security Council, wrote in a memo that day. “If there are any delays in negotiation of the West Bank/Gaza agreement, that is somebody else’s problem. [Carter] said that he hoped both agreements could move in parallel, but it was clear that the Egyptian-Israeli one took priority, and if nothing happened in the West Bank for ten years he would not really care very much.”
Gaza was usually lumped with the West Bank as a single issue, but in fact each side regarded it as a distinct concern. It was physically separated from the West Bank, complicating the design for any future Palestinian entity; it was also home to the densest concentration of Arab refugees in the Middle East. Members of the Israeli delegation privately urged Sadat to take it back under Egyptian dominion, but he didn’t want it, and Begin was aghast that Gaza was even on the table, insisting that it was part of the historic Land of Israel.
THE ISRAELIS WERE BEGINNING to chafe at the confinement. Begin was calling Camp David “a concentration camp de luxe.” They joked about digging an escape tunnel. “It all reminded me of the World War II films about submarines,” Weizman recalled. “Here we were, in the enclosed, claustrophobic atmosphere of Camp David, with Captain Jimmy Carter at the periscope.” He compared the expected American proposals to depth charges slowly descending upon the Israelis, as they held their collective breath and hoped the bombs would not sink them.
That morning, Weizman set off on his bicycle to conduct his own private negotiation. He was often at odds with his prime minister and appeared to the other delegates to be inappropriately close to the Egyptian president. After Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, Weizman was the only member of the Israeli cabinet who subsequently developed a friendship with him. Whenever Sadat had something he wanted to discuss with the Israelis, it was Weizman he summoned. Carter observed that Weizman was regarded within his own delegation as an adversary or even an enemy.
Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel happened to be on another long walk with Sadat. Like Begin, the Egyptian president was complaining that Camp David was beginning to remind him of prison.
“What makes things even gloomier is the fact that our intramural colleagues are, of all people, Begin and Dayan, with whom we have to deal!” Kamel said.
“We are dealing with the lowest and meanest of enemies,” Sadat agreed, as he led Kamel on his rapid pace through the forest footpaths. “The Jews even tormented their Prophet Moses, and exasperated God!” He added, “I pity poor Carter in his dealings with Begin, with his stilted mentality.”
Just then, Weizman approached on his bicycle. Kamel dreaded seeing him, believing that Sadat’s obvious affection for Weizman colored his thinking. No doubt Sadat had talked himself into believing that he was using Weizman as a means of gathering intelligence on the Israelis’ positions, but Kamel feared it was the other way round, offering the amiable but ambitious Israeli defense minister unfettered access to the mind of the president of Egypt. Sadat had already had one private meeting with Weizman and had given no report to his delegation about what transpired. Kamel shuddered when Weizman asked if he could pay another visit later that afternoon. “Of course,” Sadat replied, “it’s always a pleasure to talk to you.”
A few hours later, however, when Weizman arrived at his cabin, Sadat seemed impatient and distracted. The constant fights with his delegation were extracting a toll on his mood.
“I get the feeling that a lot of things aren’t moving for psychological reasons, not practical ones,” Weizman observed.
“Of course,” Sadat replied. “I’m sure it’s ninety percent a psychological problem.”
“I suggest you talk to Dayan,” Weizman said, bringing up a name that evoked strong feelings in Sadat. “He heard you repeat that you do not trust him because he’s a liar.”
“This is true,” Sadat agreed. “He’s a lying man.”
Weizman urged him to set his personal feelings about Dayan aside. “He has influence over Begin,” he advised. Weizman then probed to see if there was any room for maneuver in Sadat’s positions. “There is no argument about the Sinai being your country,” he said. “But a lot of things have happened in the course of thirty years. You must understand the mentality of our people. On the one hand, they never believed that an Arab leader—certainly not the leader of the largest and strongest Arab nation—would come to Jerusalem. But the Israelis are still convinced that any error is liable to bring a disaster upon them.” For that reason, the settlements needed to stay in place.
“How can I show my face before the other Arab states if that is the price I pay for peace?” Sadat protested. Even if he agreed to such an arrangement, he said, it would breed new problems in the future. He had already told Begin that he would agree to a phased withdrawal from the peninsula. “I told him other things that he did not understand before. Full recognition? Yes! International waterway in the Tiran Straits? Yes!”
“And the airfields?” Weizman asked hopefully.
“They have to be evacuated within two years!”
Weizman observed that Sadat did not mention full diplomatic and commercial relations, something that Sadat had agreed to in previous conversations between the two men.
“I know I spoke to you about it,” Sadat conceded, “and I can tell you that I want it. But Begin said in the Knesset: ‘I will not give anything without getting something in return.’ I will behave the same way.”
“What do you want to achieve here?” the frustrated Weizman asked.
“I want to reach agreement on a framework,” Sadat assured him.
Weizman left the meeting feeling that Sadat was not inclined to make any major concessions, but at least he didn’t want the talks to break down. The Egyptian proposal was obviously not Sadat’s final word. “He may have climbed too far up on his high horse, in which case he would need an American ladder to help him down,” Weizman concluded. On his way back to his cabin, he hummed a snatch of the Israeli national anthem, “Our hope is not yet lost!”
WHILE WEIZMAN AND SADAT were conferring, other members of the Egyptian delegation sat around, killing time and chatting about the movies that they had been watching. They noted who was coming out of Begin’s cabin and speculated on what might have been said. There was little else to do until the Americans produced their document. Idleness was a part of their forced confinement. Finally, the mysterious Tohamy arrived. Except for the heads of state, Tohamy was the only person at Camp David with his own cabin, which made his status all the more inscrutable. No one knew what he did all day here in the woods, but as soon as Tohamy arrived the other delegates perked up. “He could hardly cross the threshold of the bungalow before all the weariness, gloom and anxiety disappeared like magic, to be replaced by joy, liveliness and jest,” Kamel recalled. “And we were all ears!”
Tohamy interpreted their dreams and recounted miraculous tales of his adventures: for instance, how he had been poisoned on a visit to another Arab state, then retreated to his room and bolted the door, touching neither food nor water for three days as he treated himself with a poison antidote that he happened to always carry with him. He provided a fanciful report that Dayan had just now agreed to restore Jerusalem to the Arabs. Turning to address Kamel, he burst out, “Jerusalem has been put in trust with you, brother Mohamed; beware of renouncing it!” Everyone recognized that as a delusion, but it was nice to hear.
When Kamel fretted that he was supposed to meet with his Israeli counterpart, Dayan, Tohamy told him that all he had to do was tighten his right fist, fix Dayan with a firm gaze, and then suddenly open his hand and shout, “Tohamy!”
Tohamy’s attention often turned to the gaunt, patrician figure of Boutros Boutros-Ghali. A figure from the ancien régime, Boutros-Ghali had been born in a hundred-room mansion in Cairo and educated at the Sorbonne, where he took a degree in law. His grandfather, Boutros Ghali, after whom he was named, was the first—and only—Coptic Christian prime minister of Egypt. (In 1910, a Muslim fanatic shot him after he had negotiated an extension on the Suez Canal concession for the British, on terms more favorable to the Egyptians.) Given his talents and the trust Sadat placed in him, Boutros-Ghali should have been made the foreign secretary instead of Kamel. But Boutros-Ghali was not only a Christian; he had compounded his political difficulties by marrying a Jew. High office in Egypt would never be his. (He later became secretary-general of the United Nations.)
Tohamy fixed on the idea that Boutros-Ghali must convert to Islam—here, at Camp David, where it would take on greater symbolic importance. The others in the cabin jokingly offered to take bets on whether Boutros-Ghali would see the light. Later, however, some of them privately begged him to keep talking to Tohamy in order to distract him from the negotiations. Boutros-Ghali agreed. As it happened, he had studied Islamic law and was well versed in the doctrines and teachings of most important Muslim scholars. For the rest of the summit, the two men spent many hours walking through the autumnal forest, discussing fine points of Islamic scholarship as Tohamy continually urged him to accept the true faith. “I felt strange about this, but it was important to draw him away from the others,” Boutros-Ghali later confessed. “I was the decoy.”
IN THE EVENING, a tense crowd of onlookers gathered on the porch of Begin’s cabin to watch the Israeli leader play chess with Zbigniew Brzezinski. It was a highly charged match: two Polish expatriates facing one another, each with a reputation for ruthless strategic brilliance. Begin identified Brzezinski with the Polish feudal lords who had made life so miserable for the Jews back in Brisk. Brzezinski’s Catholic father had been a Polish diplomat to Germany during the rise of the Nazi Party and then to the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, so the associations were really stark.
Brzezinski was blond and athletic, with steepled eyebrows that gave an immediate impression of intellectual disdain. He was a political innovator, constantly injecting fresh ideas into the discussion. No obstacle seemed insurmountable to his agile mind. Carter appreciated the fact that when all solutions to a problem appeared blocked, Brzezinski could offer five or six fresh alternatives. But at Camp David, perhaps because of the cloud of suspicion that hung over Brzezinski in the Israeli imagination, he was less prominent in the meetings than Vance. The Israelis noticed that Brzezinski chafed at riding in the backseat.
Although he was usually hyperaware of the political currents flowing through powerful personalities, Brzezinski once had been totally surprised by Begin. In one of his first trips to Washington to talk to Carter, the new Israeli leader invited Brzezinski to breakfast at Blair House. Thinking it was a private affair, Brzezinski was surprised to be greeted by reporters and television cameras. Begin appeared, holding a dossier in his hands. He explained to the press that the folder contained information about Brzezinski’s father, Tadeusz, helping Jews to escape Germany while he was ambassador. Begin’s public praise of his father brought Brzezinski nearly to tears. Despite this emotional moment, Begin still privately condemned Brzezinski as “ocher Israel”—a hater of Israel. They were such different men, divided by their common background—“Poles apart!” Yechiel Kadishai cracked.
As the match started, Begin announced that this was the first time he had played chess since September 1940, when he was arrested by the Soviet police because of his Zionist activities. On that fateful day, he had been playing chess with his friend Dr. Israel Scheib. Aliza had calmly invited the detectives to join them for tea. They thanked her but said they were in a hurry, although they allowed Begin to polish his shoes. As he was leaving, he told Aliza, “Don’t forget to tell Scheib that I concede that last chess game to him. He was leading, anyway, when they interrupted us.”
For a man who hadn’t touched a chessboard in nearly four decades, Begin played surprisingly well. Observing the match, Dayan compared the scene to combat. In the first game, Brzezinski recklessly attacked and lost his queen. Begin was also an aggressive player, but more systematic and deliberate. Brzezinski adjusted his strategy and won the second game, but he fell behind in the third. By now, word had spread all over the camp about the match. At one point, Begin’s wife appeared and seemed so pleased. “Menachem just loves to play chess!” she exclaimed, confirming Brzezinski’s growing suspicion.
Hamilton Jordan sidled up to one of the Israelis in the audience. “Do me a favor and make sure Begin wins,” he remarked. “Otherwise Zbig will be unbearable.”
Begin did win, three games to one. Later, a lawyer with the Israeli delegation decided that Brzezinski had lost the match on purpose, as part of a larger strategy: “He thought it would put Begin in a good mood, so he would give up the West Bank,” said Meir Rosenne. “It did get him in a good mood, and he became more extremist than ever.”
THAT NIGHT, Mohamed Kamel and Boutros Boutros-Ghali once again lay in their bunks, talking until late at night as Kamel poured out new worries. Kamel chided his roommate for talking to the Israelis, especially to the gregarious Weizman. “Did we not agree not to speak to those people?” he demanded. Boutros-Ghali said that negotiating was more than sitting around a table. “It is also a dialogue away from the table.” He tried to calm down the agitated foreign minister. But Kamel was too overwrought to be reasonable. He was humiliated because he had lost control of his delegation. He was also losing control of himself; his passions and his anxieties were running away with him. What did Sadat really want? Kamel wondered aloud. The Egyptian president was so secretive and unpredictable he might say anything! The future of the nation was on the line. Who knows what he might have already pledged without consulting his advisers? But Sadat had burrowed into his cabin and rarely came out, even for meals. Americans visited him—even Israelis did!—but rarely members of his own delegation. He never went to the movies or the pool hall, emerging only to pray in the theater or go for his daily constitutional. The ordinary intelligence one might pick up from such an informal interchange was maddeningly unavailable.
Kamel was particularly worried that Sadat was trying to preserve the legacy of his trip to Jerusalem. A failure at Camp David would make it seem as if that overture had been nothing more than a historic blunder. Boutros-Ghali agreed that Sadat might cut a deal just to save face. They would have to find a way to reassure Sadat that when the talks broke down, there would be other pathways to peace. Finally, Kamel cried, “I cannot go on. My nerves are about to explode.”
1 Many of the ideas Fisher developed in International Mediation were reflected in a later best-selling book, Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, which Fisher wrote with William Ury and, in the second edition, Bruce Patton. Fisher went on to found the Harvard Negotiation Project.