Sam Lewis was the U.S. ambassador in Israel when Menachem Begin was prime minister; his influence was most significant in keeping a taut and fraught Israeli-U.S. relationship from unravelling in the Camp David era. Lewis’ recollections and conclusions are enormously incisive.
From 1974 – 1981, Dan Pattir served as advisor on media and public affairs for Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin. Prior to working for two Prime Ministers, he Pattir worked in the Israeli media, and here he recalls in detail how Kissinger maneuvered the Geneva 1973 conference to keep the Soviets out of decision-making. Likewise he was intimate with the negotiating details and personal relationships that unfolded between Egypt and Israel in that period, especially 1977-1979 including his rendition of the September 1978 Camp David negotiations. Pattir concluded that the Carter administration, no matter how long it earnestly tried, it failed to grasp that neither Egypt nor Israel, were going to allow other Arab states or the Palestinian issue to interfere with their eagerly sought mutually beneficial bilateral agreement, before, during or after Camp David.
(November 1, 1995) Interview with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by anchorman Ehud Yaari, Kol Yisra’el party affairs correspondent Yaron Dekel, and YEDI’OT AHARONOT political correspondent Shimon Schiffer
Gideon Rafael’s contributions to Israeli diplomacy spanned four decades. His recollections are from the 1930s, the end of the 1947-1949 war, unfolding events before the June 1967 war, and his clear
criticisms of his government’s insufficient response to Sadat’s negotiating overtures to Israel prior to the 1973 War. His life long conclusion: he had hoped that diplomacy would have worked better than it actually did.
Jordanian Prime Minister Zaid Rifai lucidly explains Jordan’s role (inclusion and exclusion) in regional politics from before the 1973 October war to the late 1980s. His insights into Kissinger’s diplomacy and Arafat’s unfounded fear of being absorbed by Jordan are as worthy as they are insightful.
June 10, 1992 (Permission to publish this interview granted by Peter Rodman, June 1992) Peter Rodman, member of United States National Security Council Staff and Special Assistant to Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, August 1969…
Moshe Sasson spanned four decades in his service to Israel, from the Haganah’s Arab Department of Intelligence in the 1940s to being Israel’s Ambassador to Egypt in the 1980s. He recollects analytically and in detail his conversations with Arab leaders at Lausanne as well as personal impressions of Moshe Dayan and Anwar Sadat. A tour de force.
From 1961 until the early 1980s, Harold Saunders was a key US State Department bureaucrat, an enormously capable word-smith. He had his hand in drafting the 1974-1975 ARab-Israeli Disengagement Agreements, Camp David Accords and E-I Treaty. His memory for detail enabled consequential decision-makers to understand the historical context of events and ideas such as ‘land for peace,’ ‘territorial integrity,’ ‘legitimate rights,’ and a myriad of diplomatic promises made spanning multiple presidencies.
Nabil Shaath was a close adviser to Arafat particularly in the tumultuous 1998-1993 period when the PLO was buffeted by events and bad choices. Shaath praised Secretary Baker, President Bush and Yitzhak Rabin, and was pleased that Palestinians were participating in the Madrid Conference. He hoped for an end to the conflict with Israel in 1992, based on land for peace but held out for the right of Palestinian return for that to happen. In 2023 he is a foreign policy adviser to Mahmoud Abbas.
As a Democratic Party operative, Mark Siegel astutely helped Jimmy Carter win the 1976 election. He assisted in delegate selection and on the platform committee and kept Eugene MaCarthy’s name off the New York ballot. In the White House, as the administration’s liaison to the Jewish community, he abruptly resigned for being lied to by the administration. He explains Brzezinski/Carter disappointment with Sadat’s historic 1977 trip to Jerusalem because it channeled Arab-Israeli negotiations into a bilateral pathway. With that, the Brzezinski/Carter fear was realized. Any hope of Palestinian self-determination and Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank/Gaza Strip would be endlessly postponed in favor of Egyptian-Israeli national interests. He is frank in his descriptions of the ineptitude of those who worked in the Carter White House.
Omar Sirry provides intimate details of the diplomatic aftermath of the October 1973 War, the Kilometer 101 talks, Kissinger’s choreography of the December 1973 Middle East peace conference, and admiration for Sadat as the “modern Egyptian Pharaoh” who was not ever politically passive but took repeated initiatives for Egypt’s benefit.
Ambassador Joseph Sisco was an integral member of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s team that put together three military disengagement agreements after the October 1973 War. Sisco has high praise for Sadat’s wisdom and courage and insight in working with Kissinger to turn Egypt away from Moscow and into agreements with Israel.
In the 1970s, US State Department Ambassador Michael Sterner was privy to Sadat’s preference for step-by-step diplomacy PRIOR to the 1973 October War. He is critical of the Carter administration for being too satisfied with only a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli Agreement.
Tamir was a 35-year veteran of the Israeli army, attending all Egyptian-Israeli negotiations as a strategic planner. He stated that he thought the 1973 war could have been averted if Golda Meir had responded to Sadat’s pre-war overtures. He credits Henry Kissinger’s negotiating successes of the post-1973-war period as laying the basis for the successful 1978 and 1979 Egyptian-Israeli agreements.
From the vantage points of Amman and Damascus in the 1970s and 1980s, Patrick Theros heard the sharp political opinions deeply felt about the United States and the profound anger voiced by Arafat, Jordan’s King Hussein and Syria’s President Assad for each other.
In writing history, documents and primary texts are reliably accurate. Veracity can emerge by crosschecking sources. However, if all we have is one shard of pottery from the second temple period, we must settle for it in isolation as evidence of how the pottery was constructed, its composition, use, etc. Unless of course, we are fortunate enough to have a text that describes the pottery piece, and we have the piece of pottery as evidence. When oral recollections are used to bolster the written text, subtle shades and emphatic dimensions provide colorful detail to historical writing. Unlike written records, oral evidence provides vignettes, opinions, hues, suppositions, and sentiments almost always absent in a document.
With a keen memory to detail, Nicholas Veliotes engaged an array of American and Middle Eastern political leaders. This interview is laced with charming and enthusiastic candor as he served in American diplomatic positions from 1973 to 1986 in Tel Aviv, Washington, Amman and Cairo. He was present when sensitive U.S. policies were debated and operationalized. His assessments of Kissinger, Sadat, Meir, Nixon, King Hussein, Brzezinski, Carter, Vance and a whole panoply of Israeli officials bubble with content; the vignettes he shares about Nixon and Brzezinski are priceless. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Veliotes, along with Morris Draper, Hermann Eilts, American consuls general in Jerusalem and other U.S. officials failed in repeated attempts to secure PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s participation in the diplomatic process.
As a political activist, Rabbi Avi Weiss recollects with keen candor the incidents from 1978 to 1980 in which he personally confronted President Jimmy Carter for what he viewed as his definitive anti-Israeli comments and actions.
As the October 1973 war came to an end, Israeli and Egyptian leaders decided that respective generals from both sides should disentangle the war’s realities. Israel was keen to have her POWs returned, and Egypt did not want to see Israel clobber the Third Army, which Israel had surrounded in the second week of the war. General Yariv, who had been head of military intelligence in earlier years, recalls in detail his cordial meetings with the Egyptian chief of staff, General Mohamad al-Gamasy. Yariv’s recollections pair almost identically to the ones given by others who participated in the talks or were on the Kissinger negotiating team at the time. These negotiations came to be known as the Kilometer 101 talks; they were the first direct Israeli-Egyptian public negotiations since the late 1940s. The talks were collusively halted by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as agreed upon with Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat. What followed was the December 1973 Geneva Middle East peace conference. It was a public display and intentionally a truncated meeting with no substance discussed. Kissinger sidelined the U.S.S.R., though they were co-chairs of the conference, as the U.S. choreographed the postwar diplomacy extending over the next six years into the Carter administration. The Yariv-al-Gamasy negotiations became the basis for the January 1974 Israel-Egyptian Disengagement Agreement.
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