Hurricane Carter (Page 3)

Carter's book recapitulates the crucial role he played as convener of the Camp David summit meeting in 1978, which resulted in the landmark peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. His description of the two fascinating protagonists, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, makes for compelling reading no matter how familiar the story's general outline.

When President Sadat met Carter at the White House not long after Carter assumed the presidency in 1977, Carter was surprised by how "well developed" Sadat's determination to work with him on peace negotiations with Israel already was. Even more surprising was a letter Carter received from Sadat following this meeting, in which he urged that the President not do anything that would interfere with Sadat's determination to negotiate directly with the Israelis--in dramatic contrast to Sadat's fellow Arab leaders, for whom any contact with Israel, however indirect, was anathema.

Equally surprising was Carter's impression of Begin when the two first met in Washington. He found Begin to be a man of far less rigid views than widely believed to be the case, and open to the ideas Carter had discussed with Sadat.

The optimism sparked by these initial encounters, which were dramatically reinforced by Sadat's precedent-shattering visit to Jerusalem--a display of extraordinary political courage for which Sadat was soon to pay with his life--was seriously undermined by his deep disillusionment with Begin's return visit to Egypt, at which time Begin insisted that Israeli settlements remain in the Sinai. Sadat saw his conversations with Begin as a fatal setback to his peace initiative and planned to publicly condemn Begin as a betrayer of the peace process in a speech he had scheduled to deliver in the United States. He was persuaded to drop that idea only after intense efforts by Carter. The Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was intended to bring about not only an end to the conflict between Israel and Egypt but a process that would grant autonomy--or "full autonomy," a term Begin oddly insisted on--to Palestinians, something the treaty did not deliver.

Under the terms of the Camp David agreement, Israel and the Egyptians established a joint committee to implement the treaty's provisions that dealt with Palestinian national rights and the creation of a self-governing Palestinian authority. Both Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman represented Israel on this committee, and both resigned when they realized that Begin was not serious about implementing those provisions. Begin replaced them with a more trustworthy member of his Cabinet, Dr. Joseph Burg, a venerable leader of the Mizrahi, the religious Zionist organization (and father of Abraham Burg, a former head of the Jewish Agency and Speaker of the Knesset).

The older Burg was a close friend of my family, and I often visited him when I was in Israel. I once saw him while he served on this joint Egyptian-Israeli committee and asked him what progress was being made. Burg, who was a marvelous raconteur, answered with a story. There is an old Jewish tale about a prince who asked a poor and simple Jew in the Pale of Settlement to teach his dog to speak and threatened to expel the Jews who lived within his princely domain if this Jew failed to do so within a year. When the Jew came home with the prince's dog and explained to his startled wife what had happened, she became hysterical. Her husband calmed her by saying that he had an entire year before the prince returned, and that by then "either the prince will die or the dog will die."

I told Burg I knew the story. "Then let me tell you the sequel," Burg said, which he had obviously made up himself. The prince returned a year later and summoned the Jew, who showed up without the dog. The prince angrily demanded that the Jew produce the dog immediately, but the Jew pleaded with the prince to allow him to explain the situation. He assured the prince that the dog had indeed learned to speak, but that once he did, the dog began telling embarrassing stories. "What kind of stories?" asked the alarmed prince. "Stories about where you regularly took him at night when you told your wife you were taking the dog for a long walk." The prince went into a panic and ordered the Jew to produce the dog immediately so that he could shoot him. "Don't worry," said the Jew. "I already did it for you, dear prince."

That, said Burg, is what has happened with the Israeli-Egyptian talks on Palestinian autonomy. We shot the dog.

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