Ziv Rubinovitz and Gerald Steinberg provide an incisive summary of their larger work on Menachem Begin for Fathom in June 2019. Reprinted with permission of the authors.
In this two-part Whiteboard video series, we explore the transition from the 1978 Camp David Accords to the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty signed at the White House on March 26, 1979.
March 26, 2019 From 1967 forward, Arab-Israeli negotiations began in earnest. First under the Nixon and Ford administrations, then under the Carter administration, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime ministers implemented the political trade-offs…
March 25, 2019 Kenneth Stein, the founding president of the Center for Israel Education, has taught Middle Eastern history and politics at Emory for 43 years. He spent more than half that time serving as…
Emory Professor of Contemporary and Middle Eastern History, Political Science, and Israeli Studies and Center for Israel Education President Kenneth W. Stein applies decades of document-based research, interviews and scholarship, including new insights gleaned from the study of detailed minutes in the Israel State Archives, to examine the Camp David Accords 40 years after Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin signed the agreement Sept. 17, 1978, that concluded 13 days of negotiations led by President Jimmy Carter.
Our second animated white board video covers in detail what took place during the thirteen days of negotiations at Camp David in September 2018. The video begins with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s priority on getting back the Sinai Peninsula which Egypt lost to Israel in the June 1967 War and the origins of direct negotiations between Israel and Egypt following Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in November 1977.
In this animated white board video, we explore Jimmy Carter’s efforts at achieving peace in the Middle East.
Forty years ago this month, President Jimmy Carter convened the Camp David summit between Israeli and Egyptian leaders to push Arab-Israeli negotiations forward in an unprecedented and intensive manner.
Many recollections remain from the Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973. The war set in motion a diplomatic process that eventually culminated in the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty.
Many in the Arab world and amongst Palestinian leaders believe that, for the sake of evenhandedness and justice, the U.S. government, a longtime supporter of Israel’s security and existence, should have openly endorsed and urged others to vote for the proposition of Palestinian state recognition at the United Nations. Criticism of the U.S. failing to do so has been harsh, but it is also without perspective or historical context. What is forgotten is the persistent, even aggressive, perhaps unprecedented role that Washington has played in pushing for Palestinian rights, self-determination and, most recently, for Palestinian statehood.
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.
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.
This regional map shows Israel and its neighbors after the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, completed in 1982, and the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in August 2005.
Perspective provides valuable insights in evaluating contemporary diplomacy. Though neither the Palestinian-Israeli-U.S. summit of July 2000 nor the Egyptian-Israeli-U.S. summit of September 1978 ended discussions between Israel and its Arab adversaries, there were more differences than similarities between the two intense and highly charged meetings.
Spring/Summer 1997 Kenneth W. Stein, “Continuity and Change in Egyptian-Israeli Relations, 1973-97,” Israel Affairs, Spring/Summer 1997, Vol. 3, Nos. 3 and 4, pp. 296-320 For 25 years, tension, mistrust, and strain have characterized Egyptian-Israeli relations….
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.
From 1970 to 1984, Khaddam served as Syria’s foreign minister, and later he was Syria’s decision-maker for actions in Lebanon. He recounts Syrian anger toward Egyptian President Sadat’s slow but continual bilateral engagement and recognition of Israel. He recalls how Syrian President Assad, after a four-hour meeting, refused Henry Kissinger’s invitation to attend the 1973 Geneva peace conference, not wanting to sanction the closeness Sadat was establishing with Israel and with Washington. These were the same reasons why Syria refused President Carter’s invitation to attend a similar Middle East peace conference in 1977. Khaddam says, “We were shocked by Sadat’s actions.”
Mustafa Khalil served as the primary Egyptian negotiator in tying up the Egyptian-Israeli treaty with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan between September 1978 and March 1979. Though most of the talks took place in Washington, the final excruciating details were negotiated in difficult exchanges in Jerusalem between Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin in the week before the March 26, 1979, treaty signing.
For years, Naftali Lau-Lavie worked closely with Moshe Dayan. His remarks here focus on Dayan as Menachem Begin’s foreign minister (1977-1979). He provides sumptuous detail on Dayan’s thinking and interactions with the Carter administration as it tried to force a Palestinian/PLO state on Israel in seeking a comprehensive Middle East peace.
Serving as director general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1976-1977, Avineri recounts Romanian overtures to Rabin for a visit to gauge interest in another agreement with Egypt. He estimates that Rabin and Begin both took strategic considerations in hand in negotiating; he is highly critical of Carter’s political naivete.
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.
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.
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.
As a longtime confidant of Menachem Begin involved in the Herut party, Eliyahu Ben-Elissar was Israel’s first ambassador to Egypt. He was a staunch supporter of keeping the area of the West Bank — Judea and Samaria — under Israeli control. Later he became Israel’s ambassador to France and then the United States.
