Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David

Remembering how much I enjoyed "The Looming Tower" , my wife recommended this book to me. When it was described to me, I worried that it might be so what boring because of the subject matter. After all, this is ostensibly about 3 men hammering out a peace treaty at Camp David. Instead, Mr. Wright turns the underlying narrative into a compelling and fascinating tale of how three men and three cultures forged a historic peace treaty, albeit an imperfect one. The day-to-day events at Cam David don't lend themselves to page-turning reading. Rather it is the way in which Wright weaves in the history of both cultures, and the wars they fought that makes this bookmark great one. Equally interesting was the study of each man's character and how history forged their belief system. Make no mistake that this book paints a rather unflattering picture of Begin, and a far more sympathetic one of Sadat. Wright emphasizes the specious biblical claims that the dark-mooded Begin makes for his expansionist ambitions. When I completed the book, I wondered if some Israelis would find the book anti-Semitic or at least unsympathetic to the Zionist cause. According to some reviews I have read, that is indeed the case. I do fault Wright for not emphasizing and the holocaust as the formative event of what Begin calls "the fighting Jew". By not emphasizing it as much as the faulted Old Testament claims, Wright gives the impression that he's more interested in undermining the Zionist cause rather than legitimizing it. Also, the book covers more of the military excesses by the IDF than the abhorrent terrorist responses by the PLO. It's pretty clear that the author simply doesn't like Begin and perhaps for legitimate reasons. However traumatized he was as a boy by the Holocaust, his actions and beliefs are unjustifiable and hypocritical to Wright. At least, that was my impression. Regardless of the underlying tone of the book as it pertains to the Zionist cause, Wright's latest work makes for fascinating and compelling reading.

Camp David has become a shorthand for the summit that President Jimmy Carter convened in September 1978 between President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel. Likewise, achieving a Camp David agreement has become synonymous with overcoming initial differences and reconciling opposing viewpoints through the sheer force of mediation and negotiation. Thirteen Days in September explains why this expression became reality. I am reviewing Lawrence Wright’s book as part of a series on diplomatic negotiations, looking for clues on how to organize international conferences (see my previous entries here and here). This book doesn’t deal with the form of the Camp David summit but with its substance: it is a kind of a Getting to Yes book, a How to Deal With Difficult People compendium, or a rewrite of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. This being say, Thirteen Days in September does not take the form of a case manual or a diplomatic textbook. It doesn’t draw general lessons, and doesn’t refer to other, Camp David-like experiences. A how to book or a self-help manual it certainly isn’t.In fact, such a how-to book on negotiations already exists, and it was directly inspired by the Camp David episode. In the run-up to the summit, Cyrus Vance, himself a trained negotiator, asked his Harvard colleague Roger Fisher if he had any suggestion on how to handle the meeting’s dynamics. Fisher produced his last book, titled International Mediation: A Working Guide for the Practitioner, which he later transformed into a bestseller on negotiation techniques, Getting to YES, co-authored with William Ury. Members of the Harvard Negotiation Project, Fisher and Ury focused on the psychology of negotiation in their method, "principled negotiation," finding acceptable solutions by determining which needs are fixed and which are flexible for negotiators. Giving such advice as “separate the people from the problem”, “focus on interests, not positions”, “invent options for mutual gain" and ”know your BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement)”, they insisted on trade-offs and mutual gains, on bargaining and win-win solutions.Negotiation theory assumes rational actors advancing their country’s national interest in an orderly fashion. But there was nothing rational about the actors at Camp David. They were full-blooded individuals, moved by passions and hatred, deeply held beliefs and sympathy. There even was a touch of insanity hanging in the air. Begin has had frequent bouts of depression and was constantly oscillating between exhilaration and despair. Sadat was unpredictable and was capable of strokes of genius as well as unmovable stubbornness. Even Carter, the cold-blooded engineer who liked to divide every problem into solvable parts, sometimes lost his temper and yelled at his guests in exasperated fashion. But perhaps the most deranged individual was the Egyptian delegate Hassan el-Tohamy, “a former intelligence agent who also functioned as Sadat’s astrologer, court jester, and spiritual guru.” According to Sadat, this Sufi mystic “had something godly in him and he could see the unknown.” He wold stand up at a dinner party and greet the Prophet Muhammad as if his ghost were physically present in the room. He constantly reported prophetic dreams or conversations he just had with angels. “We all thought he was mad,” Boutros-Ghali recalled. Worse, he would make erroneous reports to the leader, pretending an agreement to withdraw from occupied territories was at hand when in fact there was none. “It is entirely possible that the Middle East peace process was set in motion by the misunderstanding of a madman,” writes the author.Not only were there madmen in attendance: there were also terrorists at the table. As the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, or a future head of state for that matter. As the author records, both Sadat and Begin had committed terrorist acts against the British in their struggle for national independence. In the words of Wright, “they both had blood on their hands”—although it is not clear whether they themselves carried arms and planted bombs as opposed to masterminding attacks and terror acts. They had also spent long stretches in prison and in clandestinity, and were deeply schooled in the art of conspiracy. Begin, in particular, is portrayed as a political outcast who would had remained in the fringe of Israeli politics had he not been put center stage by the 1973 war launched by Sadat. “Many Israelis considered him a crank, a fascist, or just an embarrassing reminder of the terrorist underground that stained the legend of the country’s glorious struggle for independence.” Even Wright opines that “the transformation of terrorism as a primarily local phenomenon into a global one came about in large part because of the success of [Begin's] tactics. He proved that, under the right circumstances, terror works. Many years later, American forces would find a copy of Begin's memoir "The Revolt" in the library of an al-Qaeda training camp. Osama bin Laden read Begin in an attempt to understand how a terrorist transformed himself into a statesman.”The author frames the stakes raised by the threesome meeting in religious terms. Witness the opening sentence of the book: “Three men, representing three religions, met for thirteen days at the presidential retreat of Camp David in order to solve a dispute that religion itself had largely caused.” And Wright adds: “The struggle for peace at Camp David is a testament to the enduring force of religion in modern life, as seen in its ability to mold history and in the difficulty of shedding the mythologies that continue to lure societies into conflict.” But contrary to what Wright writes, these three men did not “represent” their religion in any way; nor did religion cause the Middle East quagmire—politics did. This being said, it is true that religion added a complex dimension to the negotiation at Camp David. Jimmy Carter, the Southern Baptist preacher, taught Sunday school every weekend from the age of eighteen on. As Wright reminds us, “he had studied the Bible when he was a child, and the geography of ancient Palestine was more familiar to him than that of most of the United States.” His decision to convene the summit despite the warning of his advisers and against his own political interest was religious in essence: “he had come to believe that God wanted him to bring peace” to the Middle East.” In the book, he is often caught praying, while Sadat, also a deeply religious person, is portrayed as enjoying his nightcap of whisky.As Kissinger once remarked, “great men are so rare that they take some time getting used to.” The great foreign policy expert certainly took some time getting to Sadat: his first impression of the Egyptian president had been of “a buffoon, am operatic figure.” But after the Yom Kippur war Kissinger came to recognize Nasser’s instinctive genius for the bold stroke that could change history. Sadat had stunned Egypt by disposing of Nasser’s corrupt cronies and sending them to jail; then by expelling Soviet military advisers and reversing alliance to shift toward the US. He had then stunned the world by launching the Yom Kippur war in October 1973, the first time Arab armies were capable of inflicting serious losses to the Israelis on the battlefield; then by agreeing on a ceasefire while the Great Powers were on the brink of armed confrontation. His most stunning stroke of genius was his surprise visit to Israel and his speech at the Knesset. In political linguo, the unexpected visit of a statesman that turns the tables towards peaceful coexistence is called a “Nixon in China” moment. In all rigor, one should coin the adage that it takes a Sadat to talk to the Knesset. His speech was a mastery of rightful eloquence and uncompromising prose. Witness the opening: “Let me tell you without the slightest hesitation that I have not come to you under this dome to make a request that your troops evacuate the occupied territories. Complete withdrawal from the Arab territories occupied after 1967 is a logical and undisputed necessity. Nobody should plead for that.”Nasser’s insistence on “complete withdrawal from these territories, including Arab Jerusalem,” stands in stark contrast to Begin’s uncompromising stance on the issue: “the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and Sinai are all ours,” was how is basic position could be summed up. During the discussions, he refused to even utter the name “Palestinians” for the reason that “Jews are also Palestinians.” He persisted in calling the West Bank by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, appealing to Carter’s knowledge of the Scriptures to underline the claim that “God had given the land to its Chosen People.” He turned to rhetoric to point out that the formula “legitimate rights” is a pleonasm: either a right is legitimate, or it is not a right. At the end point, the summit came down to a single issue: the evacuation of the Sinai settlements, where Begin had vowed to spend his retirement. All his arguments were justified by the goal of maintaining the security of Israel: “Sinai had been a historic concourse for attacking armies; the Golan Heights had been the dominating redoubt for Syrian artillery; the West Bank was a hideout for terrorists. Why surrender any of it?” Ignored in this reasoning, of course, were “the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” a formula Begin wouldn’t even begin to hear.I mentioned by way of introduction that Camp David has become a generic expression. But the Camp David peace talks were a very specific event, one that doesn’t lend itself to generalizations or applicable lessons. The main figures didn’t play by the rule or apply a textbook approach to negotiation. They each came to the negotiating table with their own idiosyncrasies and personal histories. Carter thought he was on a mission from God and that, once they saw each other’s soul, his two guests would agree on a workable solution, with himself cast in the role of the facilitator. That illusion shattered within minutes of the first meeting of the three men. So Carter had to change his role to that of the coercer, someone who was willing to go beyond pleading and persuading to the point of issuing credible threats. The main threat, which was used repeatedly by the three men, was to leave Camp David and let the negotiation end inconclusively. But each character knew this would entail an enormous price, on a personal basis and at the level of their nation as well. Camp David also shows that, in the words of Boutros-Ghali, negotiating was more than sitting around a table: “it was also a dialogue away from the table.” The most meaningful exchange occurred on Day Six during a visit to the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park. Here the words of Abraham Lincoln echoed in each leaders’ mind, and reminded them of the enormous price wars extracted from nations.Lawrence Wright, the author of Thirteen Days in September, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specializes in international relations and Middle East issues. He doesn’t express his opinions directly in the book, and never uses the word “I”. Some readers will try to guess his politics however, and may find him heavily biased against Menachem Begin. This negative bias may be due to the sources that he collected: memoirs, personal diaries, recollections, and interviews with key officials from the Carter administration as well as from Israel and—less so—from Egypt. Begin had few friends, even in his own camp, and his career after Camp David went downhill. Carter portrays him negatively in his diaries and in his memoirs. But in my opinion, if Wright has a bias, it may be due to his profession as a journalist and in his cultural background a an American. He adopts a can-do attitude attuned to Carter’s engineer mindset; he downplays the tragic dimension of life and the role of fate in conducting our destinies; despite his multiculturalist efforts, his misunderstanding of Islam stands in stark contrast to his familiarity with the Judeo-christian tradition; his taste for portraits and psychological analysis draws its tropes from US government’s use of profiling that was exposed to the public during the WikiLeak scandal ; and his narrative mixing three strands of time seems straight out of an American novel. In other words, this is a piece of American journalism: other chroniclers steeped in a different professional or cultural tradition may have provided a very different narrative.

"Thirteen Days in September" is a brilliantly researched account of the tense negotiations in 1978 that resulted in the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. I was only 8 at the time of this summit so have no recollection, but remember watching the news in 1981 of Anwar Sadat's assassination that led to my interest and study about the Middle East.Wright provides an objective and meticulous day by day account of the contentious negotiations between Begin, Sadat and their respective ministers while they were literally shut off from the rest of the world in rural Maryland. Wright does a great job of providing sufficient background on Begin, Sadat and the roots of the conflict between the two nations from Israel's independence in 1948 without losing focus from the 13 days at Camp David. However, the reader truly gets the essence of the personalities of Carter, Begin and Sadat through Wright's penetrating portrait of them struggling with the weight of their own decisions, the historic legacy of what they were trying to achieve and their pasts. Despite the many failures of the Carter Presidency, one has to appreciate and respect the dogged determination, conviction and passion he brought to Camp David that even in the darkest hours of doubt, he staked his legacy and those of Sadat and Begin on finding a path to peace.While there are those who will find fault that a broader framework for resolving the issue of Palestine wasn't part of Camp David, but I believe Wright accurately makes it clear from the historical record that any broader solution would have resulted in the talks collapsing without the historic peace treaty that Israel and Egypt eventually signed in 1979 as the result of Camp David.Any historian or individual that is interested in the Middle East would benefit from reading this wonderful piece of scholarship.

Excelente relato de como resolver conflitos, recomendo! - Beatiful tale about conflict resolution, from the same author of The Looming Tower.

"Thirteen Days in September" schildert die Verhandlungen, die vor 40 Jahren zum Friedensabkommen zwischen Israel und Ägypten geführt haben. Der Autor rekonstruiert anschaulich und plausibel die relevanten Personen, Themen und Gespräche. Rückblenden und Ellipsen liefern dazu Hintergrundinformationen. Das Buch ist unter zwei Aspekten sehr lesenswert: Erstens behandelt es eine der wichtigsten Verhandlungen und die zentralen Endstatusthemen einer Zweistaatenlösung für den Nahen Osten, und zweitens gibt es Einblicke in Interaktionen und Verhandlungstechnik auf Ebene von Staats- und Regierungschefs. Das Buch ist gut geschrieben und eher eine Freude als eine Pflichtlektüre. Zur Ergänzung: Die Handlung wurde in Episode 1 Staffel 6 ("N.S.F. Thurmont", 2010) der Fernsehserie "The West Wing" verfilmt.

Accessable political thriller.

This very well researched and written book is a must read for all political junkies and those who want to learn what goes on behind the scene in complex international matters. The book exposes duplicities and intricate political manoevering at the highest levels of governments. I just couldn't put it down and didn't want the book to end. Kudos to Lawrence Wright for his work!

good