The Frailties of Diplomacy

Hardly had the Camp David accords been signed on Sept. 17, 1978, when the participants began to argue about what they had agreed to during the 13 days they had spent together at the presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. On Sept. 18, President Jimmy Carter told Congress that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had agreed to a freeze on the building of new Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip until an autonomy agreement for those territories had been negotiated--a process that could take several years. For his part, Begin insisted that the freeze applied only to the three months that would be required to work out the final details of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

That disagreement took the bloom off the Camp David accords, made it far more difficult for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to convince other Arabs that he had not sold out the Palestinian cause, and helped catapult the peace process into the limbo in which it remains today. How did the confusion arise? In a new book, Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics, published last week by the Brookings Institution, Middle East Expert William Quandt, a staff member of the National Security Council during the Carter Administration and a participant in the Camp David talks, provides an insider's account of the flaw at the heart of Carter's greatest foreign- policy success. It is a cautionary tale about the frailties of diplomacy.

Quandt believes Carter was essentially correct in thinking that, at a crucial Sept. 16 meeting, Begin agreed the settlements freeze was to be linked to the autonomy talks. On the other hand, Quandt adds, "it is clear from most accounts that Begin did say something about a freeze for only three months, though he apparently implied that it could be extended."

The next day, as promised, Begin sent Carter a letter on the subject. To Carter's dismay, it specified that the freeze would be limited to the three months of the Egyptian-Israeli talks. Carter rechecked his notes and, convinced that the misunderstanding would be worked out, asked Begin to submit a revised version the following day--after the Camp David accords were to be signed. When the new letter arrived, it was exactly the same as the draft that Carter had rejected the previous day. "Careful, prudent negotiators would have insisted on seeing the final draft instead of relying on hope," Quandt writes. "As a result, the Americans made their most serious technical mistake."

For some weeks thereafter, Carter tried to resolve the matter with Begin, but the Israeli leader refused to budge. To make matters worse, he announced in late October that existing West Bank settlements would be "thickened," or enlarged, immediately. Quandt regards Begin as the most able of the Camp David negotiators, the one who knew best "how to play the cards in his hands" and who was "meticulous in turning words to his advantage." Although he agreed to an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, he won not only a peace with Egypt but also a "comparatively free hand for Israel in dealing with the West Bank and Gaza." Concludes Quandt: "For Begin, Sinai had been sacrificed, but Eretz Israel had been won."