"SADAT, CARTER, BEGIN: AN UNEQUALLY SIDED TRIANGLE"

Prof. KENNETH STEIN

Taken from The Camp David Process (Jerusalem: Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, 2002), pp. 32-42

There are several caveats to my presentation. There is a tendency amongst those of us who deal with important politicians and with political leaders who dominate their time period. It is a hazard of ours to create a myth about how important they were and about how few mistakes they made. We tend to overstate their successes. We tend to forget their shortcomings. We tend to view their time on this planet as being extra special, because we served them or worked with them. But they are human beings; they do make mistakes; and sometimes, they even acknowledge that they make mistakes. We, as historians who work for these people, sometimes fail to do so.

That's the number one caveat. So when I speak about Sadat, Carter and Begin I am not here to create idolatry for any one of the three of them. I am here as a person who saw the three of them through the eyes of a former U.S. president, as an American historian who also interviewed many people on the Israeli scene, the Egyptian scene, the Palestinian scene, the Syrian scene.

The second point that I'd really like to make to you is not only on what I say about Sadat, Carter and Begin and their relationship, but to think also about. Arafat, Barak and Clinton and their relationship. Think about the personalities; think about their characteristics; think about whether there is any kind of analogy that is worth making. Could, in fact, people make history or does history make men or women? Could in fact, Ronald Reagan have conducted Camp David in 1978? Could in fact, someone like Hosni Mubarak, have gone to Jerusalem? Could in fact, someone like Yitzhak Shamir embrace Hosni Mubarak with Ronald Reagan to create the triangular relationship? Was this just a unique time when three people got together when the constellations of history just happened to be at that eclipse that comes every three hundred years. My argument in my book (Heroic Diplomacy) is that this happened to be just one of those very special moments. It might not be duplicated. Whether it was the rightness of the moment or whether it was the individuals, what we do know about the four people about whom I wrote about, Kissinger, Sadat, Carter and Be-in, is that they all had vision. They all understood how to connect tactics with strategy. They all were very good politicians. They all understood their domestic constituencies, and yet, they were willing to break with tradition in order to reach beyond that particular moment. All of them, all of them twisted the truth. They did it for their own reasons; they did it consistently; and they did it for a purpose. To say that any one of the four of them was a saint is to create a myth.

Let me turn for a moment to Sadat, move over to Begin, talk about Carter next, and then speak about their relationships. Camp David would not have happened if there had not been Anwar Sadat, because the trip to Jerusalem wouldn't have happened. Anwar Sadat was singly most important for the breakthrough that took place between 1973 and 1979. I put more stock in Anwar Sadat's vision, boldness and courage, than I do in any of the other leaders. That is after working for fifteen years with President Jimmy Carter. It is not meant in any way to negate the importance played by Begin or Carter. Sadat possessed one unalterable objective. He didn't have fossilized ideologies. He was a strong patriot, who had a capacity for enduring his goal, and that single goal was the return of Sinai. He was going to accomplish that no matter what it took. He was never willing to share all his information with all of his advisors. He was never hesitant to take a bold initiative. He was for many Arabs, Israelis and Americans, coming after Nasser, a strange breed, a political oxymoron. Nasser was embedded in absolute ideology. How could it be possible that an Arab, let alone an Egyptian, would seek to make an agreement with Israel? Sadat was a tactician; he was a strategist. His method for managing Israel for his Arab peers, his economy, the superpowers was in some sort of continuous formulation. He wasn't wedded to a particular ideology. Therefore, it was extraordinarily difficult for Americans or for Israelis to put their ideological arms around him. Dayan always asked the question: "Can we trust him?" Israelis were never sure. Americans weren't sure. No one was sure about Sadat. That's what made him unique.

Sadat disliked paper work. As much as Begin was the man who understood every word and had a legalistic mind, Sadat disliked the detail. Sadat selectively used words when he wanted to make policy, but he didn't pay particular care to them as much as someone like Menachem Begin might have or as Jimmy Carter did. Sadat was always willing to throw out a whole series of ideas at once to see what would be reaped, what would be caught, who would receive it. He collated responses. Sometimes he acted on them; sometimes he didn't. He never believed what his advisors said, and yet, he always gave his advisors enough leash that they could fight between themselves. If anyone has any notion of what the discussion was or the relationship was between Simcha Dinitz and Abba Eban here in '73, '74 and knows the crustiness - and that's probably a polite term to describe that relationship - the relationship between Ashraf Gorbal and Ismail Fachmi was extraordinarily rough. It was as difficult as it was between Brzezinsky and Vance. Sadat knew that there was this tension between Gorbal and Fachmi. He used that tension to keep himself above the fray. Let Fachmi take care of inter-Arab affairs, let Gorbal be my representative in Washington. I'll manage the Arab portfolio, I'll manage the Israeli portfolio. He did it willingly. He understood his bureaucracy, he understood the tension. It was to his advantage, and he succeeded at it.

Sadat's meetings with foreign leaders were very interesting. He loved one-on-one sessions. He didn't like to have his ministers included. He caused inevitable embarrassment to his ministers when he told them something that had happened at a previous meeting. When Kissinger met Sadat for the first time in November '73, they talked privately without advisors. This was a terribly important meeting on November 1973. Henry Kissinger came out of this meeting, and said, we have established a notion of somehow reaching a staged disengagement between Israeli and Arab forces. Where did the idea of staged withdrawal come from? Was it Henry's idea that he brought out of this November 6th meeting where he had two and a half hours with Sadat alone? No, it wasn't. It was an idea that Sadat sent to Washington with Fahmi a week before. He presented it to Kissinger, and Kissinger heard it from Fahmi. Where did Kissinger get to believe that Fahmi could bring this idea of disengagement and it would have Israeli appeal? Because Aharon Yariv spoke to General Gamassy on October 29th and 30th at the Kilometer 101 talks, and Mrs. Meir had already said that staged withdrawal was a fine idea. So, we have built an entire history based on a notion that "stage to step-by-step" is a Henry Kissinger notion. Wrong, wrong. It comes out of Sadat's dictation of a memo to Fachmi that he brings to Washington, shares with Meir and at the same time shares between Yariv and Gamassy at Kilometer 101. This is Sadat. It is typical of Sadat. He didn't need to take the credit for staged withdrawal. He wanted to give Kissinger the ability to save the Third Army. He wanted Kissinger to have center stage. Let him have it. What was Sadat's goal? Harness America; return Sinai; and if he had to sign an agreement with Israel in the process, he would do it.

As I try to emphasize to my students and emphasized in the book, Sadat did not want peace with Israel. He needed an agreement with Israel, because he wanted to change Egypt's direction. He wanted Sinai back. That's why the ambivalence was always there. That's why you would always ask the question: can you trust them? Because, deep down, he didn't have it in his kishkes to want peace with Israel. If that is the precedent that is set in the Israeli-Egyptian relationship, why should any other Arab leader who comes to Israel and negotiates with Israel want anything more?

Sadat was an actor who believed in grand gestures, and he expected others to be equally dramatic. He met with Begin at Ismaliya in December of 1977 and expected Begin to say, yes, I withdraw fully from Sinai, not a problem, and all the settlements will go. Instead, Begin offered him autonomy. Herman Eilts, the U.S. Ambassador who was in Cairo at the time, took notes. Sadat said something to the effect of. "what is this guy doing? He is a merchant. He is peddling me notions. I just recognized his existence, and now, he is going to give the Palestinians a little of this and a little of that." That kind of crustiness that be-an to evolve in the Begin-Sadat relationship was then relayed to Washington. Because it was relayed to Washington, Washington began to understand, and here I mean the Carter administration that reacted late to Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and reacted late to changing or shifting from the Geneva concept of a comprehensive peace. Then, the Carter administration began to understand: "maybe we have to intervene ourselves and become part of this diplomatic process."

One of the advantages of Sadat as a leader of Egypt was that he was a man in a hurry. He was impatient. He wanted results. He kept his eye on the objective, and he essentially made Kissinger and Carter his ambassador to Israel. Given the cold war at the time, the United States did not want to lose Anwar Sadat. There was no cold war going on in July of 2000. What was the motive of the Americans in 2000 as compared to '78. Anwar Sadat's turn to the United States, perhaps, was the single greatest victory for the United States in the cold war. It came voluntarily. It came because he wanted to, and the US took advantage of it. Coming after Vietnam, Henry Kissinger wanted it and needed it. Jimmy Carter wanted it and needed it.

Let me move on to a discussion of Menachem Begin. Sadat and Begin had a similarity in the sense that they both followed or they both lived in the shadow of very strong political leaders. Sadat lived in the shadow of Nasser, Begin, of course, always lived in the shadow of Ben Gurion. For Begin, the PLO was an anathema. He always believed its goal was to destroy the State of Israel. He was consumed with Jewish history. He was defensive about anyone who wanted to impugn Israeli legitimacy and as Yechiel Kadishai (Begin's personal assistant) told me on more than one occasion, he only asked one question. The bottom line for him was: Is it good or bad for the Jewish people. Begin ultimately made an agreement with the Egyptians, which was truly remarkable for Menachem Begin. He actually signed a document that spoke about legitimate rights. It was an ideological compromise that he made. Some people say he was forced. Some people say Jimmy Carter twisted his arm. I don't think so. I think he did it because he knew what was important for the State of Israel and knew what was important for the Jewish people. He possessed an extraordinarily analytical mind with a phenomenal memory. Often, I have heard Jimmy Carter speak to my classes. I have heard him speak on Camp David. I have heard him talk about it. I have heard him read about it. The one point he consistently makes is that he never met a political leader that was smarter than Menachem Begin, never. Therein was Jimmy Carter's problem, because Begin immersed himself in every detail. He paid meticulous, if not excessive, attention to specifics. He read cables before he went to Washington in July of '77 on his first trip to visit Carter. He read all the minutes of the meeting that Rabin had with Carter previously. When he delivered his response to Sadat, he did it virtually off the top of his head. Begin, Judea and Samaria, are almost synonymous. They were not occupied lands. They were liberated territories. He rejected any territorial compromise, and for Begin, retaining Judea and Samaria was not a sophisticated negotiation ploy. He had an ideology, and he was not going to bend on that ideology. His ideologies were red lines. Other Israeli politicians have had ideologies that have been pink. They change color. For Begin, retaining Judea and Samaria was his closing position. They are the heart of biblical Israel. They were a part of his fiber. When he spoke about the territories, there was a reverent unshakable attachment. Judea and Samaria were inextricably connected to the renaissance of Zionism and the geography of modem Israel. He carried ideology with him; he took it with him to Camp David; and he came home with it.

Begin thought that once Carter understood that the Land of Israel had been liberated, he would understand. If Carter could sit down and listen to Begin rationally describe why the Jewish people possess Judea and Samaria, Carter had to understand it. There was a righteousness in Begin's logic: If you sit and listen to me, I can persuade you, because I can prove to you why it is important to us. I know why it is important to us. But it wasn't Carter's willingness to listen that was so important. It was Begin's ability to pronounce what he wanted. Just because Carter listened to these 45-minute renditions of Zionist history didn't mean that Carter accepted it.

Begin and Sadat had a lot in common. What we found out is that often times, it couldn't work without an intermediary. I am not privy to the private letters that were exchanged between them or the phone calls. But we do know that they met approximately ten times in the period from 1977 until Sadat's death in 1981. Each was a fiercely committed nationalist. Each was a proud founding contributor to their country's modem struggle for independence. Each believed in the importance of land and a portion of land as a part of their historical identity, and neither was going to compromise. In a certain sense, that's where ]3egin and Sadat were similar. They understood that a piece of territory could not be compromised. For Begin, it was Judea and Samaria. For Sadat, it was Sinai. Begin was willing to say: Sinai for a peace treaty, because it is in the long term interests of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. If anyone believes that Menachem Begin didn't understand that he had to ultimately make a concession about settlements or that he ultimately would have to return virtually all of Sinai - I am leaving Taba out for a moment - if anyone believes that Begin didn't understand that before he came to office, then people do not understand Begin's mind. Begin understood what was necessary and what had to be done. Begin was a very bright politician and a very great statesman. If people believe that only at Camp David during those seventeen days did he decide to make the compromise about settlements in Sinai, I think they are forgetting that Menachem Begin didn't all of a sudden wake up as a politician in early September 1978.

Begin was a man of words, a man of terminology. He was a man of uncompromising attitudes. I think that if you look at their relationship, you understand that both of them were individuals who wanted to create their own legitimacy in time because of where they had come in their respective country's history. They could reach an understanding with one another, because they had a specific imperative. They had an incentive. They had a specific incentive. That specific incentive overlapped with the assistance of the former peanut farmer and former Governor of the State of Georgia, Jimmy Carter.

When Carter came to the presidency, he had little knowledge of the Middle East. He had taken a trip here in May of '73. He had met Golda Meir. He went to some of the holy sites. He visited some kibbutzim. He went to the Golan Heights. He had a biblical knowledge from his Christian tradition. Sadat was not terribly pleased with Carter's election, but he did indicate to Herman Eilts at one point: Maybe I can trust him, because Carter has a sentimentality about religion. There was also a commonality between Begin, Sadat and Carter: their religiosity. There was a foundation there that underpinned their relationship. Carter, in preparing for the presidency, brought people down to Plains to interview, to provide background material, to learn about Latin America and arms control, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. So when Carter took office in 1977, his knowledge of the Middle East was not that great. I would argue that U.S. Presidents-elect who are former governors - such as FDR, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy

Carter, Bill Clinton, and George Bush - when they become president, on the way to becoming president, they have a longer leaning curve. It takes them longer to learn about foreign affairs than do the senators and congressmen who have been in Washington and participated in committees that deal with foreign affairs and that deal with large lobbying groups. That's just historically accurate. Carter was unique, because he was like Begin. Every word mattered. But he was unique in the sense that also he was like Sadat in that time mattered. Having worked with him for fifteen or eighteen years, I know that Jimmy Carter does not like to waste time. No grass -rows under his feet. You want something done, he figures it can be resolved, and it can be done completely. President Jimmy Carter never believed that a problem could not be solved. He has an engineer's mentality, which believes that if you go at something directly, forcefully, continuously, you will solve the problem. Forget political idiom. Forget the historical idiom of the Jews. Forget Arab hatred of Israel. Forget Nasser. You can reach a solution, because reasonable people can come to a conclusion, and it can be done even in a comprehensive manner. What did Jimmy Carter try to do? He tried to resurrect the Geneva Conference, the whole notion of a comprehensive peace in a comprehensive manner by bringing in the Soviet Union, the two conveners of the 1973 conference. The notion of a comprehensive peace achieved in a comprehensive manner actually pushed Anwar Sadat to go to Jerusalem, because the focus was no longer on Egypt. The focus was on the Palestinian participation and the United Arab delegation. We can't live on the myth that the U.S.-Soviet declaration drove Sadat to Jerusalem. That's just not the case. Rather, the case was that Jimmy Carter was focused on everything else including the Soviet relationship, including PLO representation, and including how to bring in Hafez ElAssad and Syria. As Sadat had done all along - by going into the '73 war, by forcing out the Soviets a year earlier - he was going to do what was necessary to change the status quo, to move things along with Israel. Sadat wasn't going to wait.

Now to be sure, the American administration was taken by surprise. There was no doubt about it. Sadat surprised the Americans, the State Department and the ambassadors when he announced: "I'll even go to their house". Then of course, the Americans became the mailmen. Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, Herman Eilts, Sam Lewis, all played a role in sort of making things right for the visit in November.

There is no doubt that Jimmy Carter was appreciated by Middle Eastern leaders. Dayan and King Hussein were impressed with Carter's involvement and knowledge of the issues. Dayan remarked in his memoirs that Carter was the center figure and the man who made the decisions. He showed great knowledge of the matters as compared to the knowledge shown by other Americans. He knew the various formulations and where the difficulties lay. He also knew more about the Arab-Israeli problem than any prior U.S. president. These were almost the identical words of King Hussein when I interviewed him as well. At Camp David, Carter personally wrote and rewrote several drafts of the Egyptian-Israeli Agreement. But let me point out to you that Jimmy Carter's advantage was that he had great staff workers. In the nine months prior to Camp David, Alfred Appleton, the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, had developed nine major points of agreement between the Israelis and the Egyptians, not only to issues relating to the relationship between Egypt and Israel, but also on the details, or at least some of the outlines of what autonomy would look like.

Hal Saunders, who worked for Atherton, outlined those plans in a memo to Jimmy Carter prior to Camp David. When Carter came to Camp David and invited Begin and Sadat - invited them actually in August - but when they came to Camp David, Carter had a general framework on which the Israelis and the Egyptians had agreed previously on a whole series of issues. There was a pre-negotiation. There was pre-negotiation before the Americans were even involved. And not just with Dayan's meeting with Touhami in Morocco. There were meetings with the head of the Mossad in Morocco back in 1977.

There were private discussions that went on through a wide variety of sources including Romania and the Shah of Iran. To think that Camp David somehow was just the place where the negotiations began is wrong. It began much earlier. It began with Sadat's autonomy ideas and with a whole series of notions that were floated back and forth by American mediation. Begin and Sadat, when they got to Camp David, they basically knew what their red lines were. I am not sure they knew that they were in agreement. I am not sure that they wanted to disappoint the American president, but I am reasonably certain they knew what would be best for them if they left Camp David and what would be best for their countries when they were at Camp David.

Finally, a word about Carter's relationship with Sadat and Carter's relationship with Begin. President Carter comes every year to my classes on the Arab- Israeli conflict and talks for an hour and a half about Camp David, which is an extraordinary experience for the students. Over and over, he says: My basic problem was that I trusted Sadat too much and didn't trust Begin enough. When Sadat met Carter for the first time in April of 1977, he pushed Sadat to say out loud to Carter: Yes, I will be willing to establish diplomatic relations; yes, I will be willing to give up this notion that I used to say that peace will not come in my lifetime. The Americans who were there at that meeting with Carter and Sadat couldn't believe that Jimmy Carter was pressing the Egyptian president to say yes, I will, if I have to sign a treaty with Israel. That was in April. And Sadat then made that public in a journal interview. He said, if I have to, if I get back Sinai, that is something I will do, as long as Israel considers withdrawal from all the other territories as well. Carter on numerous occasions said to me, both privately and publicly that Sadat put faith in me (Carter) to protect Egypt's interests. No matter what I did, he felt that I would never lie to him. He felt that if I told him something that the Israelis said that the United States would do, he could depend on it. It wasn't something that he had to build or orchestrate. It was a kind of an intimate sharing of trust. When somebody puts explicit faith in you, you are just not going to betray them. I felt the same way about him. So I thought that, after that meeting, as far as Egypt and Israel were concerned, I had a card to play in my pocket named Anwar Sadat. When the time came that I really needed some help, I could depend on him, which was acting on the duality of pressures that were interconnected. I could depend on Sadat. He was working under the pressures of the Arab world, but he was also working under the pressures of what needed for Egypt. Carter said that Sadat saw himself as a bold leader who would make history. He saw Carter as the eager ally, who never refused him. Can you imagine Begin saying that to Jimmy Carter? Probably not. Probably not at all. Begin was much more independent, much more unwilling to put the future of the Jewish people or the future of Israel into the hands of the Americans. But Sadat wanted to do it, because he wanted to befriend the United States, American technology, American foreign aid, etc.

Eliyahu Ben Elissar, may he rest in peace, the Director-General of Menachem Begin's office, remarked when I interviewed him that Begin, of course, did not like the Palestinian homeland statement. None of us liked it. We resented it. In fact, we hated it. Begin considered it a major shift in U.S. policy. At the time, Begin was privy to Israeli intelligence estimates, which suggested very rough times ahead in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. This was just prior to the July 1977 visit, by which time, Begin understood that Jimmy Carter was not Henry Kissinger. He was not a man who was going to keep private diplomacy. Jimmy Carter said everything out loud. He said it in public and shocked people. He stood up in Clinton Massachusetts in March of 1977 and said, I believe the Palestinians should have a homeland. It wasn't in the prepared text. It was part of an answer to a student's question. Immediately, when he got finished, he called Brzezinsky on the phone and said, I don't want anyone correcting what I said. I don't want anyone going on TV. I don't want anyone going on the media saying I didn't mean what I said. It sent shock waves through Israel. Palestinian homeland, analogy to a homeland of the Jewish people, the Balfour Declaration. Did Carter know what he was saying? Because any time an American puts a comma in the wrong place, Israelis hiccup. Because words matter. They matter dramatically. When you talk about the term, "a specific, withdrawal" in the Camp David accords, actually when you look at the English, it says "withdrawal". It doesn't say "a specific withdrawal". That's in the Hebrew translation, nesigah mesuyemet. Now, how come it doesn't just say "withdrawal"? The answer is that each side is willing at a certain point to emphasize what it wanted to emphasize. Okay, this wasn't a French document. We are not arguing about territories, the territories, territories. But the point of it is that Begin, Sadat and Carter, if they had to, adjusted reality to meet their own domestic and political needs.

Let me conclude with this comment and statement. Camp David of 1978 was an agreement in which both sides agreed to disagree. The bad feeling Israelis had for Egyptians and the Egyptians had for the Israelis was not resolved in the middle of 1978. That transcended Camp David. That bad feeling still remained and was evident at Blair House. It was evident right through the negotiations for the peace treaty. It was evident after the peace treaty.

The Egyptian-Israeli relationship as crafted through Camp David, and crafted by the peace treaty, established certain parameters of behavior. Those parameters of behavior were not necessarily the ones that Israel would have preferred to have between it as a nation state and a neighbor that signed a treaty. Israel would have preferred to have a relationship like the U.S. has with Canada or the United States has with Mexico. But the Americans were not engaged in a moment of saying to Sadat, you've got to turn down the media. You've got to stop putting those cartoons in the paper that have a star on his chest. Americans were not interested in turning down the incitement. We didn't even think about it. Our priority was just to bring Sadat closer, to find the foreign aid assistance and keep him on the American line. So we didn't focus on the environment of peace or the environment of non-war, if I can be so bold as to call it that. Weren't the Camp David accords nothing more than a disengagement agreement or framework for another disengagement agreement? Those of you who pay obeisance or idealize or think that Menachem Begin did this most important thing in his life would have to disagree with me. You'd have to say, no, Ken, it's much more than a disengagement agreement. It was a major compromise in Begin's ideology. But in the span of things, from Henry Kissinger's disengagement in January of '74 to the Syrian disengagement in '74, to the Egyptian-Israeli disengagement in '75, through Camp David, through the peace treaty, aren't we all looking at a process of asking the question: What does Israel do with the territories it gained in '67, and what does it get in return if it returns those territories, or should it return those territories? Israelis who were farsighted and far-thinking understood in 1967. They understood that these territories were going to come back to be the negotiating chips if Israel were to preserve its identity within the pre-'67 borders. We are still in the middle of that process. That is the legacy of Camp David One.

Prof. KENNETH STEIN, William E. Schatten Professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History and Israeli Studies and Director of Middle East Research Program and Institute for the Study of Modern Israel, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Author of Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace.