SO MANY NEGLECTED ISSUES had piled up while Carter had devoted himself to making peace in the Middle East. The shah of Iran was overthrown and replaced by a radical Shiite theocracy. Inflation was running out of control, and unemployment remained persistently high. Even Carter’s accomplishments—normalizing relations with China, advancing human rights, creating an energy policy, cutting the federal deficit, signing the Panama Canal treaties—were overshadowed by the extended turmoil of the Camp David process.
Begin made things worse by publicly disclaiming aspects of the agreement and complaining about the pressure Carter had placed upon Israel. The prime minister “began to treat this peace we had struggled for as something banal, almost despicable,” Weizman observed. Weizman was also embarrassed by the way in which Carter was disparaged. “As far as I know, no American president has ever helped Israel as much as Jimmy Carter.”
The morning after the signing ceremony in the White House, Begin sent Carter the letter he had demanded about stopping the construction of settlements. It was exactly the same as the letter Carter had rejected the day before. Begin immediately started making statements to Jewish audiences and on television that Israel would continue building new settlements. He told an Israeli reporter that the Israeli army would remain in the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely. On the Monday after the signing ceremony, Carter was to make a report to Congress, with Begin and Sadat seated in the balcony of the House of Representatives. Just before the speech, Carter confronted Begin about his statements and the letter concerning the settlement halt. Begin was evasive. Carter then told the Congress, “Israel has agreed, has committed themselves, that the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people will be recognized. After the signing of this framework last night, and during the negotiations concerning the establishment of Palestinian self-government, no new Israeli settlements will be established in this area.” Begin had no intention of yielding to such pressure.
Begin returned to Israel to be greeted by a large crowd at the airport, although some members of his own party showed up carrying black umbrellas and shouting, “Munich!” in reference to Britain’s accommodation with the Nazi German government. Begin honored his commitment to bring the agreement to a vote before the Knesset. He assured the parliament that even after the five-year transitional period Israel would continue to assert its right to sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza—in other words, the autonomy talks would go nowhere. As for surrendering the Sinai settlements, he said that Israel could not have allowed the summit to fail on this one matter. “The State of Israel could not stand up in the face of this,” he said. “Not in America; not in Europe. Not before American Jewry. Not before the Jews of other lands. We could not have faced this. All blame would have befallen us.” At four in the morning, after seventeen hours of debate, the Knesset approved the agreement by a two-thirds majority, the nays coming mainly from Begin’s party. Right after that, he announced plans to “thicken” Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Carter was outraged. “Begin wanted to keep two things,” he concluded: “the peace with Egypt—and the West Bank.” Sadat threatened to withdraw from negotiations.
A month after the Camp David summit, Sadat and Begin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.1 “Sadat deserved it,” Carter noted tersely in his diary. At that point, it had become clear to the Carter White House that Begin was actively working to defeat Carter for reelection. Moreover, Begin seemed uninterested in pursuing a signing anytime soon. The longer he delayed, the more leverage he had. He accurately gauged that Carter and Sadat both needed the treaty more than he did.
In the middle of this extremely tense denouement, Carter was hit with an excruciating case of hemorrhoids. The news got into the press when he had to cancel his appointments. Carter learned on Christmas Day, 1978, that the Egyptian people were praying he would be cured of this affliction, and the following day he was—the first instance, perhaps of divine intervention since the entire peace process began.
In a final act of desperation, Carter decided to go to the Middle East that March to try to force the two sides to resolve their differences. The professionals in the State Department were embarrassed for their president, who seemed to be taking a swan dive into who knows what. Carter and Rosalynn flew to Cairo, along with Brzezinski and the secretaries of state and defense; essentially, the entire foreign and defense policy leadership of the administration was riding on Air Force One, along with Carter’s hopes of leaving behind a historic legacy.
Sadat welcomed them and took them on a train ride to Alexandria. They were overwhelmed by the response—“the largest and most enthusiastic crowds I have ever seen,” Carter told Sadat. He was clearly far more popular in Egypt than he was in his own country. “Perhaps we should move to Cairo,” Rosalynn remarked.
Carter arrived in Israel on a Saturday evening just after Shabbat, as Sadat had done on that historic trip to Jerusalem only fifteen months earlier. Then, peace had seemed a simple matter, but now the world had turned over several times. Carter went directly to a private meeting with Begin, who brusquely informed him that there was no way to bring negotiations to an end anytime soon. Carter felt it was a personal attack, another way of undermining his prestige and reducing his chances of reelection. He stood up and asked if it was necessary for him to stay any longer. For the next forty-five minutes the bitterness that had developed between the two men poured out. Carter said he doubted whether Begin wanted peace at all, because he was doing everything possible to obstruct it, “with apparent relish.” Begin put his face inches away from Carter’s and said that he wanted peace as much as anything in the world; however, “the fate of a nation hangs in the balance.”
It was nearly midnight when Carter left, convinced that Begin would do anything he could to block the treaty and avoid living up to the commitment he had made at Camp David to provide full autonomy to the Palestinians on the West Bank. Once again, he was struck by the absence of any sympathy on Begin’s part for the plight of the refugees.
The next day, Begin took Carter to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and then to Mount Herzl to visit the graves of Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky. It was a journey into Begin’s roots. The lesson Begin drew from his life was that Jews cannot trust their security to anyone. “It was not only the Nazis and their friends who regarded the Jews as germs to be destroyed,” he writes in his memoir. “The whole world which calls itself ‘enlightened’ began to get used to the idea that perhaps the Jew is not as other human beings.… The world does not pity the slaughtered. It only respects those who fight.” This was his credo. Herzl had summoned up the vision of a Jewish state, but Jabotinsky had enlarged it and prophesied the problems it would have with its Arab inhabitants and neighbors. Begin saw himself as the natural heir of these two thinkers, the man who would manifest their visions into an impregnable Jewish state.
After this guided tour, Carter went on his own to a service at a Baptist church. He reflected on the fact that Jerusalem had seen more wars than any city in the world, and he prayed that it would never see another one.
On Monday, Carter addressed the Knesset, saying that the people of Israel were ready for peace, but the leaders had not shown that they had the courage to take a chance for it. When Begin got up to speak, he was subjected to whistles and shouts—Israeli democracy at its most riotous. He seemed to enjoy the hurly-burly, grinning with pleasure whenever invective was hurled at him and glancing meaningfully at Carter to make sure he appreciated what he was up against. In fact, Carter did feel closer to Begin. His own presidency wasn’t so easy, either.
After the Knesset meeting Begin told the Americans that the talks were over. He suggested that they issue a joint communiqué saying the usual—progress made, some questions unresolved. In fact, he produced the text, which had already been prepared.
Carter returned to the King David Hotel—the same one that Begin had blown up during the British Mandate—thoroughly exhausted and disgusted. He ordered that Air Force One be prepared for immediate departure. He didn’t want to spend a single additional night in Israel, but it was late and getting all the luggage of the presidential party together would take time. He reluctantly agreed to stay till morning. Meantime, the press who were traveling with Carter drew their conclusions. Walter Cronkite, the anchor for CBS, announced that the peace treaty had failed. Both NBC and ABC followed suit.
That night Weizman and Dayan visited Vance and told him they were both ready to resign if Begin continued to obstruct the peace treaty. One of the sticking points was that the Israelis refused to give up the Egyptian oil. Dayan came up with a formula, in which Egypt would promise in principle to supply Israel with oil, and the U.S. would guarantee Israel’s petroleum needs for fifteen years. He urged Carter to make one last attempt.
The next morning, Carter invited Begin to breakfast. The prime minister arrived with his wife, who ate with Rosalynn. The two men stood for a few moments looking out the window at Old Jerusalem. The blood spilled on these ancient streets had painted the city red many times over.
There was still the matter of the Palestinians, the only serious issue remaining. Carter agreed to drop all references to Gaza, and Begin promised to treat the president’s request to improve the atmosphere on the West Bank “sympathetically.” Without actually committing himself to any specific action, Begin said he would provide the Palestinians some degree of peaceful political activity. Both men accepted the deal.
After breakfast, as the Begins and the Carters descended to the lobby, the elevator malfunctioned, jerking to a stop six feet above the ground floor. Hundreds of reporters and diplomats were waiting in the lobby to hear the result of the breakfast meeting. After twenty minutes of fruitless efforts to restart the elevator, the door was torn off and the two couples had to climb down a ladder, “with our butts showing,” as Carter later recalled. “That’s the way we got the peace agreement.”
ON MARCH 26, 1979, a breezy, sunny day in Washington, the flags of three nations fluttered behind an empty table. All of official Washington was gathered on the lawn. While they waited, Begin was in the Oval Office making one last request. As a gesture of friendship to Mrs. Begin, he said, he asked Carter to forgive the debt on the $3 billion in aid that the U.S. was extending to Israel. Several times he repeated the phrase “as a gesture for Mrs. Begin.” Carter looked at Brzezinski, who was present at the meeting, with a stunned look on his face, and then he simply burst out laughing.
At two p.m., Carter, Begin, and Sadat took their places and signed the formal treaty. Palestinian protestors could be heard chanting slogans across the street. “During the past thirty years, Israel and Egypt have waged war,” Carter said in his opening statement. “But for the past sixteen months, these same two great nations have waged peace. Today we celebrate a victory—not of a bloody military campaign, but of an inspiring peace campaign.” There were still outstanding differences, he conceded. “Let history record that deep and ancient antagonism can be settled without bloodshed and without staggering waste of precious lives.” Sadat praised Carter as “the best companion and partner along the road to peace.” Each of the three men quoted Isaiah, “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
“I have signed a treaty of peace with our great neighbor, with Egypt,” Begin said. “The heart is full and overflowing. God gave me the strength to persevere, to survive the horrors of Nazism and of the Stalinite concentration camp and some other dangers, to endure, not to waver in nor flinch from my duty, to accept abuse from foreigners and, what is more painful, from my own people, and even from my close friends.…” He stared into empty space as the memories of his uncompromising life flooded in on him. “Therefore it is the proper place and the appropriate time to bring back to memory the song and prayer of thanksgiving I learned as a child, in the home of a father and mother that doesn’t exist anymore, because they were among the six million people—men, women, and children—who sanctified the Lord’s name with the sacred blood which reddened the rivers of Europe from the Rhine to the Danube, from the Bug to the Volga, because nobody, nobody came to their rescue, although they cried out, ‘Save us, save us’—de profundis—from the depths of the pits and agony. That is the Song of Degrees, written two millennia and five hundred years ago, when our forefathers returned from their first exile to Jerusalem and Zion.”
At this point, Begin put on a black yarmulke and read in Hebrew from Psalms 126:
When the Lord restored the captives of Zion, we thought we were dreaming. Then our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues sang for joy. Then it was said among the nations, “The Lord had done great things for them.” The Lord has done great things for us. Oh, how happy we were!
Restore our captives, Lord, like the dry stream beds of the Negev. Those who sow in tears will reap with cries of joy. Those who go forth weeping, carrying sacks of seed, will return with cries of joy, carrying their bundled sheaves.
The ceremony lasted only a few minutes. After the signing, Sadat came over to greet Ezer Weizman and his son Shaul, whose wound from an Egyptian sniper was evident. Sadat warmly embraced the young man as Weizman held Shaul’s hand. For Weizman, that was the end of the wars.
Moshe Dayan was sitting with Vance and his wife, Gay, at the gala dinner that followed. Leontyne Price sang, and the Israeli violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman performed. Dayan detested ceremonies. The fatigue of his last great campaign was rolling in, on top of his illness, still undetected. “You look tired and bored,” Gay observed. Dayan took the opportunity to excuse himself and walk back to the hotel.
On the way he recalled the long debate that had taken place in the Knesset only a few days before to decide whether to agree to the treaty that Carter had put before them. Dayan was the last to speak in the debate. Typically, he shunned the high-flown rhetoric that infects conversations about peace. The treaty, he said, was not the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision of swords beaten into plowshares. It was a military treaty containing clauses for the construction of air bases and guarantees for Israel’s security. It was also a political treaty, designed to establish relations between two neighboring countries long at war. It was an honest treaty, because it did not paper over the differences between them. And it was a realistic treaty, because it allowed Egypt to reconcile itself to the idea of Israel’s existence.
TWO MONTHS LATER, Begin and Sadat met again at the town of El Arish, the administrative capital of Sinai, where the Israelis formally transferred the peninsula back to Egyptian control. The national anthems played and a bugle sounded as the Israeli flag was lowered and the Egyptian one raised in its place.
A caravan of buses arrived from either direction, leaving long trails of dust in their wake. Begin had invited wounded soldiers from each side to meet in this desert oasis in an act of reconciliation. The veterans, about 150 of them altogether, disembarked in a painful display of war’s cruel toll. Blind, lame, disfigured, they hobbled or were guided past the honor guards and military bands. They sat across from each other on opposite sides of the hall where refreshments were served. There was an awkward silence, a standoff. The stress was so great that some of the broken warriors asked orderlies to take them out of the room. Begin’s speechwriter, Yehuda Avner, was sitting next to a blind Israeli veteran who had brought his son, who was eight or nine years old. “Kach oti eilehem,” he told the child: Take me to them. The boy was scared of the wounded men across the hall, but he guided his blind father to the middle of the room. An Egyptian veteran in a wheelchair rolled himself forward and took the Israeli’s hand. A few men clapped, then the room erupted in loud applause as the others came together and embraced.
Amid cries of Shalom! Salaam! Sadat and Begin entered the room, greeting each of the disfigured veterans, asking them where they had fought and where they had been maimed. Avner noticed the child of the blind soldier, his face filled with fear and confusion. For as long as the boy could remember, he had been escorting his father, blinded by this very enemy. “Don’t be afraid, my son,” his father told him. “These Arabs are good.”
When the two leaders returned to the uncomfortable military plane that had brought them to El Arish, Begin—always fastidious about his appearance—noticed that his shoes were dusty from the sand, so he took out a handkerchief and polished them. Then he offered the handkerchief to Sadat, who politely declined.
THE EGYPTIAN GOVERNMENT built a parade ground to commemorate the 1973 war, when the country recaptured its pride by crossing the Suez Canal. Each year, on October 6, the anniversary of the start of the war, Sadat attired himself in splendid regalia and invited his top officials, foreign diplomats, and international correspondents to attend the annual celebration. In 1981, Sadat wore a field marshal’s uniform, which had just arrived a few days before from his tailor in London—jodhpurs with knee-high black boots, a cap with gold braid on the bill, and a blue-gray jacket, which he covered with the green Sash of Justice across his chest and the Star of Sinai medal at his neck. He decided not to wear his bulletproof vest.
The “Hero of the Crossing,” as he liked to be called, sat in the first row of the large marble reviewing stand next to Vice President Mubarak. A thousand others gathered to watch, including the American and Israeli ambassadors and other dignitaries. Sadat’s wife, Jehan, and their grandchildren sat in a glassed-in box high above. There was a band and fireworks. The stately Camel Corps passed by, looking like a vintage postcard. Parachutists landed on targets only a few yards from the stand. Tanks and armored personnel carriers moved in practiced precision before the dutiful spectators. As a formation of French-made Mirage jets passed overhead, performing aerobatics and trailing streams of colored smoke, one of the troop trucks in the parade slammed to a halt and several soldiers leaped to the ground carrying automatic rifles and grenades. One of them, Khalid al-Islambouli, raced toward the reviewing stand. Sadat abruptly stood up and saluted.
Perhaps he thought the young lieutenant and the others were paying tribute to him. He had brought peace to Egypt, after all. For eight years, the armed forces had been spared from combat. Egypt’s economy was still suffering, although boosted by the $2.1 billion, most of it in military aid, that the U.S. provided each year after Camp David. There was reason to imagine that Egyptians—and especially soldiers—would be grateful.
Or perhaps he saw Death coming to collect him. The treaty with Israel had set loose the furies within radical Islam. One of Sadat’s first acts as president had been to release the political prisoners that Nasser had imprisoned, most of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat had thought that this act of clemency, along with his own very conspicuous piety, would immunize him against the radicals, but they never trusted him to implement their demands—namely, the imposition of strict Islamic law and the mandatory covering of women. Sadat responded with a crackdown on student religious groups. During parliamentary elections, he banned discussion of the peace treaty; he made himself president for life and prime minister for good measure. He passed a law permitting women the right to divorce and banned the niqab—the face mask for women favored by Islamic fundamentalists—from the universities. In the summer of 1981, he jailed three thousand people, including the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brothers and many political opponents, including everyone who had publicly criticized the Camp David agreement.
Sadat ruled his people as an autocrat, as they had always been ruled. He explained to a leading Egyptian intellectual, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, that his critics misunderstood the Quran, which afforded special standing to the ruler of Egypt. When God sought to free the Children of Israel from their Egyptian bondage, he did not speak to the Egyptian people; instead, God advised Moses and Aaron to plead with the leader. “Go, both of you, to Pharaoh, for he has exceeded all bounds. Speak to him gently so that he may take heed, or show respect.” If Moses, one of the strongest prophets, was instructed to speak politely to Pharaoh, Sadat reasoned, certainly his intellectual critics should treat him with similar respect.
Egypt, however, had turned against Sadat. It wasn’t just the radicals and the intellectuals. The peace he had given his people was not embraced. Peace did not bring the complete resolution that one seeks in war. The allure of conquest and rectification still cast a spell despite the thirty years of conflict that had brought so much misery, poverty, and humiliation. Whenever Egypt was bleeding, other Arab countries egged it on to greater and greater sacrifices, but now that it was at peace, the Arab nations imposed an economic boycott and barred Egyptian planes from their airspace. The Arab League, which was founded and headquartered in Cairo, expelled Egypt and moved its offices to Tunis. Every Arab country except Oman and Sudan severed diplomatic relations. The isolation that Mohamed Kamel had envisioned was a reality. Sadat lashed out at the “cowards and dwarfs” in the Arab world who shunned him. Their criticism of his peace with Israel was no more than “the hissing of snakes,” he said. “He was saying things that may be true, but weren’t necessary,” Carter later recalled. “I tried to get him to shut up.”
Sadat responded to the furor, as usual, by turning inward, retreating from social contact. He had never cared much for food, but now he ate only soup and boiled vegetables. He often spoke of death. “It was as if he were set on some sort of divine mission that no one could interrupt,” Jehan Sadat observed.
Sadat’s assassin responded to his salute by hurling a grenade, which failed to explode, then he and the other soldiers began firing their automatic weapons into the reviewing stand. The first shot hit Sadat in the neck. Islambouli boldly walked directly to the stands and fired into Sadat’s body, emptying his magazine. For the first thirty seconds, the presidential bodyguards seemed to freeze in place. Sadat’s private secretary, Fawzi Abdel Hafez, tried to shield him with a chair, but Hafez was shot as well, absorbing more than twenty bullets (he somehow survived). By the time the shooting was over, Sadat and eleven others had been murdered. The Coptic bishop lay dead in his official robes. The Cuban ambassador was also dead. Twenty-eight people were wounded. The Belgian ambassador was shot twice. Blood cascaded down the steps of the reviewing stand. One of the assassins was killed and three others injured and then arrested. “I have killed the Pharaoh!” Islambouli crowed.
Osama el-Baz, who was seated near Sadat when the attack began, disappeared. Mubarak refused to announce the president’s death until his closest aide could be found. It was hours later that Baz was discovered, walking the streets of the suburb of Heliopolis, many miles away, in a state of shock.
The attack was supposed to have been the prelude to the takeover of the Egyptian government by the plotters, but that plan was thwarted by the dragnet that immediately followed, pulling in members of the numerous radical groups that had proliferated in the Islamist underground. A future leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was snapped up on his way to the airport. He had conspired to bomb Sadat’s funeral, where many foreign leaders would be present, among them Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin.
SADAT’S FUNERAL WAS on Saturday, five days after his assassination. Because strictly observant Jews abjure using automobiles on the Sabbath, Begin chose to walk to the event from the nearby country club where he had found quarters. He was surrounded by Israeli security men, carrying automatic weapons inside attaché cases. Cairo was fortified and on edge. The leaders of eighty nations came to pay their respects, but Arab delegations were conspicuously absent. All over the city there were sandbagged gun emplacements in hotel lobbies and on apartment balconies. The whomp-whomp of low-flying helicopters reverberated in the streets. Soldiers in battle dress stood guard in every major intersection. The hysterical displays of grief that had overtaken Cairo when Nasser died were absent, however. Instead, there was massive indifference.
Moshe Dayan was not present to say farewell to Sadat. He had resigned from the cabinet when he realized that Begin was avoiding implementing autonomy for the Palestinians. Convinced that the Israeli military occupation was destroying the moral fiber of Israel, Dayan had formed his own party, but gained only two seats in the Knesset. By then, the cancer that may have been plaguing him during Camp David had been detected. He immediately sensed that it was fatal. “I had an interesting life until the age of sixty-four,” he said with characteristic dispassion. He died six days after Sadat’s funeral.
Ezer Weizman was also absent. He, too, had quit the cabinet because of the delay in the autonomy talks and the aggressive expansion of settlements in the West Bank. After tendering his resignation, Weizman furiously ripped a peace poster off the wall of the prime minister’s office. “No one here wants peace,” he shouted. Begin felt betrayed and refused to allow Weizman to be a part of the Israeli delegation to Sadat’s funeral, although no one in Israel had been closer to Sadat.
The dignitaries gathered on the same parade ground where Sadat had been killed. The blood had been washed from the reviewing stand, but the bullet holes were still evident. Carter walked with the American delegation, which included former presidents Nixon and Ford. He, too, was now a former president. Any chance for reelection perished in the failed effort to rescue the hostages held in the American embassy in Tehran after the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Carter and Begin did not talk.
The monument to Sadat at the parade ground where he died bore the Quranic epitaph he had chosen for himself before his fateful trip to Jerusalem, in case he was assassinated by the Jews: “Do not think of those who have been killed in God’s way as dead. They are alive with their Lord, well provided for.” In the end, it was his own people who killed him.
FREE OF CONCERN about an Egyptian response, Begin aggressively expanded settlements in the West Bank, and in short order bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad and extended Israeli law to the Golan Heights. Then, in June 1982, he sent the Israeli army into Lebanon, in order to root out the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The country was home to 300,000 Palestinian refugees, who had tilted the demographic balance in a country that had once been dominated by pro-Western Maronite Christians.
Begin acknowledged that it was a “war of choice,” unlike all of Israel’s previous conflicts, but he promised that the war would bring “forty years of peace” to Israel once the job had been done. The master plan, envisioned by Ariel Sharon, was to force the Palestinians out of Lebanon into Jordan, which would effectively turn that country into a Palestinian homeland and allow Israel to absorb the West Bank. Begin promised President Ronald Reagan that Israel would not need to go farther than forty kilometers from the border.
Whatever limitations on the plan that the government had imposed were left aside as soon as Sharon moved his army into Lebanon. The Israelis conspired with a Christian warlord, Bashir Gemayel, of the Maronite Phalange party, to expel the Palestinians, defeat the Syrian forces in the country, and make Gemayel president of Lebanon. The Israeli army quickly accomplished those objectives. Yasser Arafat and the leaders of the PLO left Beirut on a ship bound for Tunisia. Gemayel became president of Lebanon that August. A month later he was blown to pieces by a Syrian bomb.
Without a Lebanese partner to clean up the PLO machinery still left in place, the Israeli army then invaded West Beirut. “Two targets in particular seemed to interest Sharon’s army,” Thomas Friedman, then a young correspondent for The New York Times in Beirut, later wrote. One was an archive of old Palestine—books, land deeds, photographs of Arab life, and maps that marked every Arab village that stood before the State of Israel was created. Friedman observed the graffiti the Israeli soldiers left behind in the room where the archives had been kept. Palestinian? What’s that? And Palestinians, fuck you.
The other targets were the two Palestinian refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila. Sharon contended that militants were still hiding there. His troops sealed off the camps and then let the Phalangists enter and take revenge for the death of their leader. Over the next three days they killed nearly everyone in the camps. The Israelis had a clear view of the slaughter from the rooftop of the Kuwaiti embassy, which they occupied. To assist the Phalangists in their work, the Israelis provided illuminating flares at night, and let them supervise their operation from the Israeli command post across the street. When the killers finally left, journalists and diplomats found among the mutilated corpses babies and toddlers who had been ripped apart and thrown into trash cans, boys who had been castrated, people who had been scalped and Christian crosses carved into their bodies. The Red Cross estimated the number of dead between eight hundred and one thousand. Other sources put the number of dead much higher, but because the Phalangists disposed of many of the bodies it is impossible to have an accurate count. Friedman saw no evidence that any of the victims strewn around the camps were PLO fighters; they had left before the camps were assaulted.
The United Nations condemned it as an act of genocide. Shamed and outraged by the massacre and the miasma of the war, 400,000 Israelis—more than 10 percent of the country’s population—went into the streets to demand an accounting. The official inquiry that eventually followed held Sharon personally responsible for the atrocity, but Begin refused to fire him. (Sharon did resign as minister of defense but remained in the cabinet without portfolio.) The world began to take a serious interest in the Palestinian cause, and Egypt once again united with the Arabs in outrage.
Begin had thought the war would last only forty-eight hours, with negligible casualties, but war makes its own calculations. According to the Lebanese government, more than thirty thousand Lebanese were killed during the Israeli invasion, most of them civilians. In the narrow ancient streets of Beirut, where much of the fighting took place, a fourth of the victims were under fifteen and a third were adults over fifty—children and grandparents. The Israeli Defense Ministry says that 1,217 Israeli soldiers died in the conflict. Even worse than the war was the legacy it left behind. Lebanon was already a dysfunctional country, but its fragile democracy was shattered and civil war reignited, destroying a society once noted for its arts, commerce, and lighthearted materialism. When Israeli forces finally began to withdraw, unilaterally, in 1985, the Syrian army that was supposed to have been defeated and expelled returned to assume its brutal management of a desolated country. The space that the PLO left in southern Lebanon was replaced by Hezbollah, which was created to oppose Israeli occupation. Israel finally completed its withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, eighteen years after the war began.
Peace had given Begin a free hand, which he overplayed. The war in Lebanon, and the death of his beloved wife, Aliza, broke him. He grew frail, and stopped dying his hair. His mood alarmed everyone who knew him. Intimates shielded him from interviews and the public. On August 28, 1983, Begin was supposed to receive the new German chancellor, Helmut Kohl. One more thing that Begin couldn’t bear was to shake hands with a German. When Kadishai came into the prime minister’s office that morning, Begin told his old friend, “Today I will quit my job.” He explained to his cabinet that he was seeking “forgiveness, absolution, and atonement. Whether it will be granted to me, I do not know.”
Afterward, Begin’s friend and cabinet secretary Dan Meridor demanded, “Menachem, why did you do it?” Begin listed his physical weakness, the lack of privacy, and the demonstrations that opponents of the war held across the street from his house around the clock. He couldn’t sleep for the noise they made. The protestors kept a sign with a running total of Israeli casualties every day. Begin couldn’t bring himself to look at it. The police had offered to sweep the protestors off the street but he insisted on their right to demonstrate.
Begin went to his apartment on Zemach Street in Jerusalem and closed the door on the world. For the next nine years he rarely ventured out, except to visit his wife’s grave. He developed a skin rash that kept him from shaving. He wore his pajamas during the day or a pair of trousers and a robe when the rare visitor was permitted to call. In the mornings, Kadishai would bring him the newspapers, as he always had, and Begin spent his time reading or listening to the radio. He had gone back underground. From his window he could see the Jerusalem Forest, and beyond that, Deir Yassin.
In 1987, on the eighth anniversary of the signing of the Camp David peace treaty, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were in Israel. Begin refused to receive them. Carter was being honored at a luncheon at the home of President Chaim Herzog, along with the Israelis who had been at Camp David. Everyone was there except for Begin. When Carter saw Kadishai, he asked once again to speak to his old partner in peace. “Okay, I’ll put you on the phone,” Kadishai said. He dialed the number and told Begin, “Mr. President Carter is here, he would like to speak to you.”
“Please give him the phone,” Begin said.
Carter said, “Hello, Mr. Begin.”
“Hello, President Carter. How’s Rosalynn?”
Then Begin abruptly said good-bye. He died in March 1992.
WHEN BEGIN RETURNED, triumphant, from Camp David, the president of Israel, Yitzhak Navon, asked him, “How did you succeed where previous prime ministers have failed?”
Begin replied, “It’s all in the timing.”
One of the lessons of Camp David is that timing had little to do with it. Yes, each side had incentives to seek peace in 1978, but those incentives were always present, even as Israel and Egypt collided in one war after another. The Yom Kippur War had shaken Israel out of its smug reverie of unchallenged dominance and changed the context, but peace had been available as an alternative to war from the beginning of the conflict in 1948. There were no insoluble issues standing between Egypt and Israel. Egypt chose to identify with the Arabs who rejected a small Jewish state, and so it gambled on war as a more definitive solution than peaceful negotiation. The Arabs lost that bet, and Israel grew larger and became an even greater threat. Each war planted the seeds for the next one. Each defeat made the Arabs more resolute, more defiant. Peace became contemptible. But in the case of Egypt and Israel, it was always a possibility. Egypt had to decide whether to act in its own interests or as the champion of a larger Arab cause. Israel had to sacrifice territory that provided a buffer against a sudden attack but also enlarged the imagined final borders of Greater Israel.
The dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians is different, and that’s why it remains unresolved, although Camp David was supposed to have brought that conflict to a permanent end. The War of Independence in 1948 expanded the territory that the new Jewish state claimed, including nearly 60 percent of the area designated for the stillborn nation of Palestine, the remainder being taken over by Jordan. Arab refugees flooded into neighboring countries, and Israel locked the door behind them. Instead of being digested by other Arab societies, the refugees became a destabilizing presence and a source of radicalism and terror that plagued the whole world. Except for Jordan, the Arab states have avoided absorbing the Palestinian refugees in order to keep the conflict alive. The numerous attempts to bring this conflict to an end have failed because of the absence of political courage on both sides to accept the sacrifices that peace would entail.
Isolation allowed the negotiators to work creatively, explore alternatives, concentrate on a single task, and take risks that might not be ventured in the public eye. Carter had thought that the cloistered environment would allow trust to develop between the two leaders that would cause them to brush aside small obstacles in order to reach the larger goal. In this, he was quite wrong. The intimacy of Camp David amplified the hostility between Begin and Sadat, which repeatedly threatened to torpedo the talks. And yet, neither man could leave without paying a terrible political price. They were trapped. As the days passed, isolation became a stronger incentive to reach a deal simply because they couldn’t stand being there any longer. Despite the shuttered environment they worked in, each of these three men knew that the bright light of history was shining on them, and that what they did or failed to do here would outweigh any other measure of their extraordinary lives.
Camp David was unusual in that it was conducted by the leaders of each country and not by subordinates. Nothing had been agreed to in advance. The risk that these men took reflected the courage that they brought to the negotiation. Their personal prestige was on the line. There was no guarantee of even partial success; indeed, it began to seem that the impending failure of the talks was only going to make things worse. But it was crucial to the success of the summit that these men had the authority to make a deal. Every concession was consequential. This alarmed the Egyptian foreign minister, Kamel, who ran out of ways to bridle Sadat. “With Carter leading the United States delegation to Camp David, the confrontation was no more between Sadat and Begin only but rather involved some sort of confrontation between Sadat and the United States President,” he wrote. “The success or failure of the Conference, in the eyes of the world, added up to success or failure for Carter.” He worried that Sadat and Begin would wind up conceding what didn’t belong to them—the rights of the Palestinians—in order to placate the American president.
There would be no peace treaty without Carter’s unswerving commitment to bring this conflict to an end. He was fueled by his religious belief that God had put him in office in part to bring peace to the Holy Land. Egypt and Israel simply could not make peace without the presence of a trusted third party; and in truth, there was no other candidate as sufficiently powerful and impartial as the United States to fill that role. And yet, until Carter, no American president had been willing to risk his prestige and perhaps his office to pursue such a distant goal.
The American team incorporated the idea of a single negotiating text, which Carter controlled. This allowed him to lock in gains and gradually pare down the points of disagreement. Carter also schooled himself in the history and geography of the region. His obsession with minutiae had become a subject of ridicule—notably, he was said to monitor which staff members signed up for the White House tennis courts—but in the case of Camp David his ability to absorb information allowed him to see past the hazards and ruses that such bare-knuckled negotiations often employ.
However, Carter came to Camp David under the spell of an illusion, seeing his role as that of a facilitator, a kind of camp counselor helping two quarreling parties understand each other better. He had thought that the leaders would discover the inherent goodness in each other and would willingly work out their differences. That illusion shattered within minutes of the first meeting of the three men. Carter floundered, stunned by the open hostility. Unable to referee the argument, he had to separate the Egyptian and the Israeli. They could not escape the history that had created them in order to see into the soul of the other. Only Carter could do that. His role had to change, which meant that he, too, had to change. He had to free himself of his Christian-inspired conception of human nature and accept a more tragic, Old Testament view of behavior. They needed him to be stronger than they were. He would have to force them to make the peace they both wanted but couldn’t achieve on their own.
The change in Carter’s role became evident on the sixth day, after the trip to Gettysburg, when Carter presented the first American draft of an agreement. He quite forcefully stated that Begin would be blamed if the talks failed. Similarly, on the eleventh day, when Sadat had ordered a helicopter to take him and his team back to Washington, Carter brought the weight of his office down hard, threatening to break off relations with Egypt and end their personal friendship. Carter made it clear to both men that if either of them deserted the process, they would have a problem with the United States—a problem neither man could afford. By taking an aggressive stance as a full partner to the negotiations, Carter allowed each side to make concessions to the U.S. that they couldn’t make to each other.
Carter was aided by a unified American delegation that never broke into factions. Vance and Brzezinski, in particular, had many territorial spats during their time in the Carter administration, but none of that was on display at Camp David. The entire delegation was focused and tireless, in the model of their leader. The Egyptian and Israeli delegations, on the other hand, were disparate examples of the societies they represented. Sadat ruled over a team that was powerless but mainly united against him. The Israeli team was divided, reflective of the diverse and contentious Israeli political system, but its members were largely more in favor of peace than their leader was. Begin may have chosen them for that quality. They helped him overcome his lifelong antipathy to making any concession at all.
Ambiguity played a double role at Camp David. Careful language was the key to making peace between Egypt and Israel, but vague phrases about negotiations with the Palestinians opened up escape clauses that Begin exploited. Carter successfully employed constructive ambiguity to overcome Begin’s horror of UN Resolution 242 by simply taking it out of the main text and placing it in the appendix, where it was still a formal part of the treaty. Similarly, in the side letter on Jerusalem, Carter invoked the policy statements of two American ambassadors without actually quoting their language. When Carter traveled to Israel to try to finish the agreement, Begin implied that he would be open-handed in dealing with Palestinian demands, but refused to be specific. The Israelis did concede that the Palestinians had “legitimate rights” and should be given “full autonomy,” but they refused to accept the term “self-determination” in connection with Palestinian rights. Vance believed that was about as much as could be hoped for. The failure to make a more explicit link between the comprehensive peace treaty, encompassing the West Bank and Gaza, with the separate peace between Israel and Egypt would essentially doom Palestinian national aspirations. “Sadat has sold Jerusalem, Palestine, and the rights of the Palestinian people for a handful of Sinai sand,” Yasser Arafat commented bitterly. (Arafat proceeded to boycott the autonomy talks, ensuring that the Palestinians would not be able to influence their future, but neither the Israelis nor the Americans wished to have them involved.) Sadat’s ambivalence on the subject of the Palestinians made it difficult for Carter to prosecute their case more forcefully, although he would come to regret the abandonment of the Palestinian cause by all parties to the agreement, including Egypt.
There was no fixed deadline at Camp David when it began; but, of course, no one expected that it would drag on for thirteen days. Begin was particularly opposed to deadlines. He was a master of pulling small matters to the surface and dwelling on them while the hour hand made its leisurely circles. By the eleventh day, a Friday, Carter decided that he could not invest more time on the summit. He asked Begin and Sadat to prepare their final suggestions, as the summit would end on Sunday no matter what the outcome. The deadline forced the delegations to concentrate on getting to a final agreement, but in the crush of negotiation on Saturday night a crucial mistake was made. Either through misunderstanding or deceit or sober second thoughts, Begin did not produce the letter on halting settlement construction that Carter thought he had agreed to. Alone among the participants at Camp David, Aharon Barak suggested that the negotiators remain until the Palestinian issue was resolved and the comprehensive peace that Carter sought had been achieved. That would have required the Israelis to commit to withdrawing from the occupied territories and permitting free elections and a Palestinian self-governing authority with real control. It seems unlikely that Begin would have committed to such steps, no matter how long he was confined on that woodsy hilltop in Maryland. Instead, he ran out the clock.
Of the three men, perhaps only Carter genuinely believed from the beginning that a peace agreement could actually be achieved. Sadat was negotiating mainly to supplant Israel as America’s best friend in the region. Peace was a highly desirable outcome, but if the talks failed because of Israeli intransigence, that would boost Egypt’s standing with the most powerful nation in the world. “This will end in Begin’s downfall!” Sadat predicted to his delegation. The Israelis really didn’t understand what they were getting into. Begin arrived at Camp David expecting it to last two or three days at most, and to end with no more than a promise for future talks. No one in the Israeli delegation imagined that they would wind up surrendering Sinai settlements and fully withdrawing from the peninsula. Begin’s main goal was to avoid the blame for failure. In the end, the only way he could do that was to allow the summit to succeed.
Sadat got back Sinai, including the oil fields, which he had not been able to do through war. Egypt did endure the shunning of its neighbors, but that didn’t last. “The Arabs cannot isolate Egypt,” Sadat observed haughtily; “they can only isolate themselves.” He was right about that. By 1984, the Arab embassies began to reopen in Cairo, although Sadat was not alive to see his prophecy come true. Begin was seen as the stronger negotiator at Camp David, but the Israelis had to surrender something valuable and tangible—land—in return for something ephemeral and reversible—peace. Israel counted as victories things that were not a part of the treaty: for instance, there was no mention of a Palestinian state or self-determination; there was no insistence on Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza; there was no agreement on Jerusalem. Begin’s fierce tactics at Camp David and beyond ensured that Israel would continue to occupy the West Bank and that the settlements would never stop. It also meant that the comprehensive peace that might have been achieved at Camp David would continue to elude Israel. The Palestinians got little except for a vague promise to respect their “legitimate rights.” In signing the treaty with Israel, Egypt severed its link to the Palestinian cause. Without a powerful Arab champion, Palestine became a mascot for Islamists and radical factions who could only do further damage to the prospects of a peaceful and just response to the misery of an abandoned people.
The unresolved issues of Camp David have not gone away, but the success of the summit is measured by its durability. Since the signing of the treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979, there has not been a single violation of the terms of the agreement. It’s impossible to calculate the value of peace until war brings it to an end.
1 Carter would win the Nobel Peace Prize on his own in 2002, for his work in human rights and social welfare. At that time, the chairman of the Nobel Prize committee admitted that Carter should have been honored previously with Begin and Sadat.