Thirteen Days in September

  Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter, and Menachem Begin on the porch of the Aspen Lodge

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Lawrence Wright

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Maps on pages this page and this page by Mapping Specialists.

  ISBN: 978-0-385-35203-1 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-0-385-35204-8 (eBook)

  Front-of-jacket photograph: President Anwar Sadat, President Jimmy Carter, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David, September 6, 1978 (detail), by Marlon S. Trikoso. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Jacket design by Chip Kidd

  v3.1

  For Ann Close

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  DAY ONE

  DAY TWO

  DAY THREE

  DAY FOUR

  DAY FIVE

  DAY SIX

  DAY SEVEN

  DAY EIGHT

  DAY NINE

  DAY TEN

  DAY ELEVEN

  DAY TWELVE

  DAY THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments and Notes on Sources

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographic Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Author’s Note

  Three men, representing three religions, met for thirteen days at the presidential retreat of Camp David in the autumn of 1978 in order to solve a dispute that religion itself had largely caused. Beliefs built on ancient texts and legends conspired to create one of the most obdurate conflicts of modern times, one that has drowned the Middle East in a timeless blood feud, brought the superpowers of the time to the brink of nuclear war, flooded the region with refugees, and spawned terrorist movements that have created mayhem and heartbreak all over the world. This book is an account of how these three flawed men, strengthened but also encumbered by their faiths, managed to forge a partial and incomplete peace, an achievement that nonetheless stands as one of the great diplomatic triumphs of the twentieth century and one that has yet to be repeated.

  When the leaders of Egypt and Israel met at Camp David, their two countries had engaged in four wars in the previous thirty years—five, if one counts the so-called War of Attrition, which occupied the two countries between 1969 and 1970. The conflict began as part of a larger struggle for Israel’s existence, but it evolved into a tug-of-war over territory—mainly, the Sinai Peninsula—and the right of the Palestinians to return to their former homeland. Although clashes continue between Israel and its other neighbors, the Camp David agreement removed the only Arab adversary that posed a genuine military threat to the future of Israel. And yet the peace envisioned between Israel and the Palestinians was never fully implemented, which is why the turmoil in the region continues.

  The reader will observe that there are three chronologies at work in this book. The thirteen days of the Camp David summit form the architecture of this account. Beneath that is a history of the modern Middle East as seen through the eyes of the remarkable men who were present at the negotiation and in many respects made that history. At bottom are the tectonic plates of the three religions as revealed in the stories of the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran. 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.

  War seldom achieves what was expected or hoped for by its participants; even victory often breeds a future defeat. The Middle East from distant times till now is a cautionary story of the failure of war to impose a lasting and just peace. There is never a perfect time or ideal people to bring an end to bloody conflicts, and unlike the talent for war, the ability to make peace has always been rare. The goal of this book is to provide some insight into how that arduous process is accomplished, even by violent men who are prejudiced by their backgrounds, hampered by domestic politics, and blinded by their beliefs. Camp David tells us of the compromises that peace demands, and of the courage and sacrifice required of leaders whose greatest challenge is to overcome their own limitations.

  Prologue

  LATE ONE NIGHT in a rustic lodge on the edge of Jackson Lake, in the Grand Teton National Park, Jimmy Carter took a break from his vacation to open a thick briefing book compiled for him by the Central Intelligence Agency. He had spent one last glorious day, August 29, 1978, fly-fishing on the Snake River, horseback riding through the park, and picking huckleberries with his daughter, Amy, which went into an after-dinner pie. It was a brief escape from the tumult of Washington and his weakened and unpopular presidency. The briefing book contained psychological profiles of two leaders, Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel, who would be coming to America in a few days with the unlikely goal of making peace in the Middle East. The ways in which Carter would relate to these leaders—and they to each other—would determine the success or failure of this historic gamble.

  The man reading the book had entered the presidency with little experience in foreign policy. He had grown up in the rural South and served a single term as the governor of Georgia. He had never met an Arab until he sat next to one at a stock car race in Daytona. The only Jew he had known as a child was Louis Braunstein, an insurance salesman in Chattanooga, who married Carter’s aunt. Uncle Louie loved professional wrestling and could chin himself with one arm—a feat that had thrilled the young Carter. There were a few Jewish merchants in Americus, Georgia, near Carter’s hometown of Plains, and Carter always thought of them as “exalted” people, in part because of his Bible studies, which informed him that God had chosen them above all others. It wasn’t until he became governor and moved to Atlanta that Carter became familiar with the genteel but ingrained anti-Semitism of the urban South that kept Jews out of country clubs and off government boards.

  In 1973, while he was governor, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Prime Minister Golda Meir lent them an old Mercedes station wagon with a driver, and they rode through the tiny country—less than one-eighth the size of the state of Georgia. Rosalynn wept at the commercialization of the holy sites, but Jimmy told her it was just like that when Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple. They crossed into the occupied West Bank, where they got special permission to wash themselves in the River Jordan, where Jesus was baptized. The river was not much bigger than a creek in south Georgia, but it echoed in Carter’s imagination. He had studied the Bible since he was a child, and the geography of ancient Palestine was more familiar to him than that of most of the United States. He could mentally trace the journey of Abraham from the Mesopotamian city of Ur to Canaan’s sere and rocky landscape two thousand years before Christ was born. To walk the same streets where Jesus walked, to stand in the hallowed shrines, and to wade into the Jordan filled Carter with awe and a dawning sense of purpose.

  Few people knew he was secretly planning to run for president—indeed, scarcely anyone outside of Georgia had ever heard of him—but becoming familiar with Israel and its problems was essential for any aspiring national politician. Carter visit
ed several Jewish settlements in the territories that had been occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel was still dizzy with euphoria following its lightning victory over four Arab armies, which left it in control of the Golan Heights of Syria, the entire Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of Jordan, and the great prize—the Old City of Jerusalem. United Nations Resolution 242, adopted after the war ended, provided guidelines for ending the conflict, including the termination of all claims of belligerency, acknowledgment of the sovereignty of the states in the area, and respect for the residents’ right to live with secure and recognized borders free from the threat of force. It also obliged Israel to withdraw from land it had seized during the war, but the country’s leaders were in no hurry to abandon the 28,000 square miles of occupied territories, which had tripled the size of the country. The question of what to do with a million and a half Arabs living in those territories was rarely addressed, although they posed a potentially fatal demographic threat to the Jewish state, which contained 2,385,000 Jews at the time, along with 100,000 Christians and the 290,000 Arab Muslims who had not fled.

  Menachem Begin, then head of a new minority coalition called Likud, was among the most strident of those arguing for the need to hold on to the gains of the war, especially the West Bank, which he called by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria. Begin’s ideology envisioned a vastly expanded Israel; he did not even acknowledge the existence of the Kingdom of Jordan, which he believed should be conquered and folded into an exclusively Jewish nation—a dream he never entirely surrendered. 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. “Begin is a distinctly Hitleristic type,” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s revered founder and first prime minister, wrote of his lifelong political antagonist. “He is a racist who is willing to kill all the Arabs in order to gain control of the entire land of Israel.” Prominent American Jews, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, denounced Begin’s career as a terrorist chieftain. “Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them,” they wrote to The New York Times in 1948, when Begin made his first trip to the U.S. “By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and widespread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.”

  Few could have imagined, when Governor Carter was visiting the Holy Land and Begin was still on the fringe of Israeli politics, that only four years later these two outsiders would be leading their respective countries.

  Israel, as Carter experienced it then, was hopeful, prosperous, and surprisingly complacent. The only men in uniform were traffic police. Arabs from the West Bank traveled freely into Israel proper, and a crush of Jewish tourism, along with liberal investment, had raised the standard of living for Palestinians well above what they had endured under Jordanian rule. There were some troubling signs, however. Carter estimated that there were about 1,500 Jewish settlers on the West Bank and in Gaza then, but he could already see that they posed a formidable threat to peace. He and Rosalynn attended a service at a synagogue on the Sea of Galilee and were shocked that there were only two other people present. When they returned the station wagon to Golda Meir, she asked if Carter had any concerns. He knew that Meir, like all her predecessors in that office, was a secular Jew, so he hesitated before mentioning his experience in the synagogue and the general lack of interest in religion that he found in the country. He pointed out that in the Bible whenever Jews turned away from God they suffered political and military losses. Meir laughed in his face. The governor of Georgia! But that very fall, Anwar Sadat sent the Egyptian Army across the Suez Canal, catching the Israelis by surprise and waking the country from a dream of invulnerability. Meir was forced to resign the following spring. Meantime, the Carters returned to Georgia committed to helping Israel in any way they could. The governor began speaking of Meir as “an old friend,” although they had met only that one time.

  Soon after he arrived in the White House, Carter began to focus on the Middle East. Walter Mondale, his vice president, was struck by the fact that on Carter’s first day in office he announced that peace in the Middle East was a top priority. That seemed wildly naive. One after another, American presidents had waded into the fray, at great political expense and with little to show for their efforts. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had spent years under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford trying to disarm the explosive temperaments in the Middle East, warned Carter that no American president should ever become involved in a negotiation where the outcome was in doubt. Carter’s closest advisers told him that he should wait until his second term to risk any of his fragile political capital. His approval rating with the American public had reached 75 percent in his first months in office, but it had been plummeting ever since. For Carter, however, this was not entirely a political decision. He had come to believe that God wanted him to bring peace, and that somehow he would find a way to do so.

  The dangerous political calculus of this venture was baldly laid out for him in a memo written by his former campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, which was so sensitive that he typed it himself and kept the only copy in his office safe in the White House. Jews were an outsized presence in American political life, Jordan explained. “Heavy support for the Democratic Party and its candidates was founded in the immigrant tradition of the second and third generation of American Jews and reinforced by the policies of Wilson and Roosevelt,” he wrote. “Harry Truman’s role in the establishment of Israel cemented this party identification.” Although Jews were only 3 percent of the American population, they cast nearly 5 percent of the vote, with turnout close to 90 percent in most elections. In New York State, for instance, Jews and blacks made up about the same percentage of the population, but in the election that brought Carter into the White House, only 35 percent of the black community in New York cast ballots, compared with 85 percent of the Jews. “You received 94% of the black vote and 75% of the Jewish vote,” Jordan wrote. “This means that for every black vote you received in the election, you received almost two Jewish votes.” More than 60 percent of the large donors to the Democratic Party were Jewish, Jordan pointed out. Jews maintained a “strong but paranoid lobby”—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—which reflected the attitudes and goals of the government of Israel and controlled a reliable majority of votes in the U.S. Senate. Carter was a southerner with an unknown history, at least to Jewish leaders. He had made statements in public—about secure and recognized borders for Israel, the need for a Palestinian homeland—that were usually conveyed behind closed doors, which caused Jordan to worry that Jews were already lining up to take a stand against Carter: “I am sure you are familiar with Kissinger’s experience in the Spring of 1975, when the Jewish lobby circulated a letter which had the names of 76 senators which reaffirmed U.S. support for Israel in a way that completely undermined the Ford-Kissinger hope for a new and comprehensive U.S. peace initiative.” The tenor of the memo was that Carter stood to make a formidable enemy of the Jewish community if he brought pressure to bear on Israel, which he would have to do if he hoped to achieve a peace agreement. Jordan, his chief political adviser, was telling him this was a no-win situation. It was a paradox: nothing could be a greater gift to Israel than peace, and nothing was more politically dangerous for an American politician than trying to achieve it.

  Carter’s immediate goal was to restart talks at the Geneva Conference on the Middle East. The Geneva Conference had met once in 1973, under the auspices of the United Nations, the United States, and the Soviet Union; it then went into recess and disappeared into the wasteland of good intentions. In his first year in office Carter set about meeting the most prominent Arab leaders—a discouraging ritual, beset with overheated rhetoric and impractical demands. And then Anwar Sadat came to the White House. Carter was immediately tak
en by him. By comparison with the other Arab heads of state, Sadat was a “shining light” who was “extraordinarily inclined toward boldness.” At last, Carter believed, he had found a partner for peace. The president had a penchant for exaggerating personal connections, perhaps trying to disguise the fact that he was a highly controlled and remote personality who let few people get close to him; still, Carter’s aides saw that he and Sadat were genuinely smitten with each other. Soon after that first meeting, Carter began speaking of the pious Egyptian autocrat as his “dearest friend,” words rarely used by heads of state.

  Carter also met with the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, whom he found quarrelsome and pessimistic about the prospects for peace. “It was like talking to a dead fish,” he recalled. Soon after that, Rabin was driven from office by a financial scandal, and Menachem Begin was elected in the most surprising upset in Israeli history.

  Carter knew little about the new Israeli leader; nor did the CIA have much to offer. With rising alarm, Carter had watched Begin’s appearance on an American news show, during which he renounced the basis of all peace negotiations for the last decade, United Nations Resolution 242. Whenever a questioner referred to territories that Israel had occupied in the Six-Day War, Begin adamantly corrected him by saying that the territories weren’t “occupied,” they were “liberated.” On the West Bank, he said, he intended to establish a Jewish majority. When asked if his position did not place him in direct conflict with Carter’s well-known views on a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Begin responded, “President Carter knows the Bible by heart, so he knows to whom this land by right belongs.”

  THE PROFILES Carter was studying in Wyoming came from a meeting he had at the CIA a few weeks earlier. He had directed the analysts to answer a number of questions about Begin and Sadat: