The peace that forgot Palestine

A MASTERWORK of even-handed, evocative and edifying reportage, “Thirteen Days in September” – about the 1978 Camp David Peace Accord – is a wonderful demonstration of how a top-notch chronicler can forge diamonds from coal.

Not to demean Lawrence Wright’s choice of subject matter, but the Middle East is, after all, still mired in turmoil, despite every US president since Jimmy Carter’s qualified “triumph” in ’78 trying to resolve the conflict for good. As long as Israel’s leaders maintain a hard-line stance on the Palestinian homeland (even when they’re at odds with majority public opinion in their own country), all such efforts will continue to be in vain.

The Camp David Accord strikes some observers as a success – “There has not been a single violation of the terms of the agreement,” notes Wright, who’s on the staff at The New Yorker magazine. But its innate flaws, its built-in obsolescence, ensured that its promise of wholesale peace in the region would never bear fruit. 

Rather than Egypt, Israeli has had continuous conflict with other Arab nations whose leaders loathed the signing of the pact by Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. Sadat paid for his signature with his life.

The optimism that surrounded the event soon evaporated, despite the two sharing the Nobel peace prize. And Carter’s resultant surge in popularity failed to carry him to a second term in the White House, certainly not in the face of the Iran hostage-rescue debacle and the Ronald Reagan juggernaut.

Revisiting the Camp David negotiations nearly half a century later thus seems a frosty pursuit. Yet Wright compresses the astounding wealth of facts and anecdotes he has amassed into a stunning gem of a story that becomes more enthralling by the page. Each day of the talks at the wooded presidential retreat a short helicopter flight from Washington is of compelling interest and each day Wright digs deeper into the personalities and psychology involved. 

Along the way, the history of the Middle East unfolds, from biblical times to the War of Attrition to the assassination of Sadat to the incessant encroachment of Israeli settlements that continues today. The reader gains a far better understanding of the complexity of the situation in the ravaged Holy Land and at the same time a better appreciation of Carter’s attempt in 1978 to simplify it, at least to the point where a more permanent resolution might be glimpsed. 

Carter has ever since been regarded by critics as wildly naive and by admirers as heroically courageous. Wright stays clear of both extremes while examining their arguments, though his resolve as an |unbiased “reporter” is regularly tested by Begin’s icy stubbornness during the talks. 

In the course of the book, in perfectly positioned sidebars to the daily diary tracking the formal and informal discussions, Wright paints remarkable portraits of Carter, Begin and Sadat, and offers shorter but no less fascinating biographies of the others at the camp. 

These included Carter’s men – the brainy tactician National Security Adviser Brzezinski and the compassionate Secretary of State Vance. 

There was Israeli Defence Minister Ezer Weizman, whose air force gutted the Egyptian army in the Six Day War but who came to trust the Arabs and was ready to compromise. Much later he served as the country’s president. Moshe Dayan was present too, still the charismatic living legend but now less a military hero following the shock of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. 

In the Egyptian delegation were Boutros Boutros-Ghali, future head of the United Nations, as an adviser, and the boastful and eccentric Deputy Prime Minister Hassan el-Tohamy, who “openly spoke of having conversations with dead saints and genies” but was shrewd and influential in the negotiations.

We’re also treated to a charming aside about Carter’s courtship of and marriage to his activist wife Rosalynn, who was at Camp David keeping her impatient husband on an even keel, and to an interesting history of Camp David itself, still functioning today as the calming counterpoint to pressure-cooker Washington.

But the book’s focus never roams far from the three principals, so extraordinary in their apposite characters, so audacious their self-appointed mission. “Their personal prestige was on the line. There was no guarantee of even partial success,” Wright points out.

“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 ... Begin arrived expecting it to last two or three days at most and to end with no more than a promise for future talks ... Begin’s main goal was to avoid the blame for failure.”

From the week of talks – that until the last minute did indeed seemed doomed to fail – emerged a species of success. Egypt regained the Sinai Peninsula, with its oil fields, and Israel could get on with colonising its other occupied territories without fear of reprisal from Cairo, the entire Palestinian question having been all but ignored in the truce.

There lies the rub. “In signing the treaty, 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.”

 

Thirteen Days in September: The 

Dramatic Story of the Struggle for Peace

By Lawrence Wright

Published by Vintage, 2014

Available at Asia Books, Bt550

 

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey