Preventing Palestine: a Political History from Camp David to Oslo

© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Introduction “i fear for tHe sPirit of camP DaviD,” wrote its chief archi- tect, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, in a 2016 plea to outgoing president Barack Obama. Before leaving office, Carter told Obama, his administration should “grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine.” The thirty-ninth president invoked his own efforts to reach a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978, based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the aftermath of the 1967 War. This resolution, Carter underscored, formed the basis of U.S. policy toward the region and should guide a renewed commitment to ensure the viability of a “two- state solution” to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. By recogniz- ing a Palestinian state, Carter argued, Obama would clear the way for other countries and the UN Security Council to take action, “countering the one- state reality that Israel is imposing on itself and the Palestinian people.”1 “The primary foreign policy goal of my life has been to help bring peace to Israel and its neighbors,” Carter concluded. He recalled with pride his speech to a joint session of Congress in September 1978 after Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar al-Sada t had reached their agreement at Camp David. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God,” the president had said to loud applause and a standing ovation, looking at the two leaders in the balcony above. It was a moment broadcast live on television and the radio, etched into public consciousness as the high point of Carter’s time in office. [ 1 ] For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. [ 2 ] introDUction Forty years since negotiations were convened in the isolated Catoctin Mountain Park presidential retreat, Camp David still endures as a moment of rare triumph for a U.S. administration beset by domestic challenges and struggles abroad. Under Carter’s guidance, the United States acted as an effective broker to secure a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel that has persisted as the cornerstone of regional politics in the Middle East. For many observers, Camp David’s success underscores the importance of skilled American mediation and burnishes the image of judicious U.S. engagement abroad. But could such a positive interpretation be a misreading of history? Is the invocation of Camp David as a model for peacemaking to help solve the Israeli- Palestinian conflict truly appropriate? Might Carter’s great diplomatic success have helped ensure the prevention of a Palestinian state? There is in fact a competing view of Camp David that focuses on its more troubling legacy for the Middle East. From the van- tage point of Palestinian nationalists in Beirut and in the streets of other Arab capitals at the time, the 1978 summit was a formative moment of disenfranchisement. Palestinians, whose struggle for self- determination had been moving definitively from armed resis- tance to diplomatic engagement in the years prior to this deal, had high hopes for a shift in the American approach to their political fate in the late 1970s. Yet at the very moment when their demands for self- determination were under serious consideration for the first time, they found themselves shut out of an incipient peace process and consigned to the sidelines. In exchange for peace with Egypt and the return of the Sinai Peninsula negotiated at Camp David, Israel was able to exercise continued control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The bilateral peace agreement that Carter brokered between Begin and Sadat was therefore castigated as an abandonment of the Palestinian cause. Sidestepping the question of Palestinian self-de termination in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, the accords ultimately shifted negotiations to the question of possible local autonomy for Arab residents living in the occupied territories. The emergence of these subsequent “autonomy talks,” which were held between representatives of Egypt, Israel, and the United States from 1979 to 1982, were premised on a non- sovereign For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. introU D ction [ 3 ] resolution to Palestinian national aspirations. Although often ig- nored or dismissed as insignificant in accounts of this period, the autonomy discussions became the basis of limited self- rule and, eventually, the emergence of the Palestinian National Authority after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. Four decades since the signing of the Camp David Accords, the Palestinian quest for self- determination remains unfulfilled. Without an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, Palestinians continue to live as non-citizens under Israeli occupation, deprived of basic rights like the freedom of movement. They are stateless subjects under Israeli military control, suspended between limited autonomy within enclaves of self- rule and the continuing encroachment of Israeli settlements.2 This result did not appear out of the blue, nor was it inevitable. A non-s tatist outcome emerged directly from the diplomatic negotiations meant to resolve their political fate, in line with what Israeli officials intended. Camp David’s narrow outcome was not at all what President Carter had envisioned when entering office in January 1977. -Un like his predecessors, Carter sought to include the Palestinians as part of a comprehensive regional peace settlement to resolve the un answered questions of the 1967 War once and for all. He was the first U.S. president to speak openly of a Palestinian “homeland,” using the controversial term at a news conference a few months after he took office.3 But through a series of protracted diplomatic negotiations following on the heels of the Camp David Accords, which began while Carter was in the White House and continued after the administration of Ronald Reagan took over, the expansive vision that had guided the thirty- ninth president yielded a far more troubling legacy. This book traces the fate of the “Palestinian question”—the diplomatic negotiations over Palestinian self- determination— from its emergence as a central feature of a Middle East settlement under Carter in the late 1970s to the onset of the Madrid and Oslo peace process that finally brought Palestinian leaders to the negotiat- ing table in the early 1990s. It is the first study based on primary sources of how Palestinian self- determination was conceptual- ized and debated by American, Israeli, Egyptian, Palestinian, and For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. [ 4 ] introDUction transnational actors in this crucial period, predating the years tra- ditionally demarcated as formative for the negotiations of a Pales- tinian political future. A tendency to canonize Camp David—e ven by President Carter himself—has obscured the structural deficiencies enshrined by these early negotiations. While an Egyptian- Israeli settlement was indeed a significant achievement, it was reached at great and recur- ring expense. For Israel, the primary outcome of the peace treaty was the end of the traditional military rivalry with a neighboring Arab state. Concurrently, however, it also helped secure legitimacy for the extension of Israeli state sovereignty beyond the 1967 bor- ders. For the Palestinians, Camp David was a crucial moment of state prevention. It marked the first instance of post- 1948 discus- sion of their plight on a global scale, yet excluded them from the negotiations that would decide their political fate. By reassessing the negotiations that led to the summit and its consequences, this account complicates the dominant interpretation of Camp David as “heroic diplomacy.”4 The diplomacy around Camp David actually served more troubling ends. Alongside the linkage to autonomy provisions and settle ment expansion plans, it connected directly to Israel’s military invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which in turn shaped the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987. Taken together, these succes- sive developments reshaped Israel’s relations with the Palestinians as well as broader regional politics in the Middle East during the late twentieth century. Given its transnational dimension, Camp David also affected crucial domestic currents in the United States, from the resurgence of Cold War conservatism to the shifting political allegiance of American Jewry. Yet beyond essential accounts of the summit itself, the linkage between Camp David and the wider transformations of this period remain unexamined.5 In order to understand why the Palestinian question remains among the most vexing problems of international diplomacy, we must revisit the years in which the very terms of political engagement were first substantively debated by American, Israeli, British, and Arab officials. In recounting this history,Preventing Palestine demonstrates how a confluence of global and regional politics, as well as shifting local developments on the ground, has produced an For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. introU D ction [ 5 ] outcome of indefinite occupation, statelessness, and deep fragmen- tation for Palestinians.

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