Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  Two hours later, Begin and his team arrived. Begin followed exactly the same ritual greeting as Sadat—an awkward embrace of Carter, then kissing Rosalynn on each cheek. The Carters were relieved that Begin’s wife, Aliza, would be arriving soon. Carter noticed that Begin was wearing a suit and tie, as if he were meeting in the Oval Office. At Camp David, Carter said, there was a spirit of informality; for instance, he preferred to wear jeans and western shirts, or even running shorts and T-shirts. He encouraged Begin to follow his example. “It will be like a resort,” he suggested. Begin was aghast. He was not a head of state, he reminded Carter; he was merely the prime minister—a rather meaningless distinction—and he intended to follow strict rules of protocol when dealing with the two presidents, no matter how they were attired.

  With the help of several interfaith groups in Washington, Rosalynn had prepared a prayer for the success of the summit. Sadat had immediately agreed to the idea, but Begin insisted on reading the text and making minor modifications. “After four wars, despite vast human efforts,” the prayer finally read, “the Holy Land does not yet enjoy the blessings of peace. Conscious of the grave issues which face us, we place our trust in the God of our fathers, from whom we seek wisdom and guidance. As we meet here at Camp David, we ask people of all faiths to pray with us that peace and justice may result from these deliberations.” It was the first joint communiqué issued from the talks, and would be the last, until the summit concluded thirteen days later.

  MEMBERS OF THE ISRAELI DELEGATION descended from the helicopter and walked toward the camp, elbowing their way into view of the cameras trained on Begin and Carter, “like a bunch of boy scouts on an outing,” one of them later recalled, “with everyone trying to huddle up as close as possible to the instructor in an attempt to get into the snapshot.” The team that Begin brought with him was contentious and sharply divided against each other. To the Americans, the Israeli team seemed to be composed of “prima donnas,” but the members of the delegation were also reflective of the intimate and contentious style of Israeli politics, in which the American concept of team players had little relevance. The Israelis arrived believing that the summit would last no more than a couple of days, and that no agreement would come out of it.

  Aside from Begin, the most significant member of the Israeli delegation was Moshe Dayan, the legendary one-eyed Israeli warrior. As minister of defense, he received much of the credit for the lightning Israeli victory in 1967. But in 1973, Egyptian troops poured across the canal, catching the Israelis unprepared, and Dayan’s legend, along with Israel’s image of itself, shattered. He was in disgrace, blamed and reviled for the cruel shock Israel had endured. Although he told no one, he was ill, going blind, and desperately hoping for a last chance at redemption. Peace might be that chance.

  In the late afternoon, the two delegations wandered around the camp in clumps, mostly avoiding each other. Everyone had been given a map of the premises and a blue Camp David windbreaker. There was a tennis court, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a billiard room, a driving range, and a theater showing movies continually. It was early fall, and the leaves were beginning to turn red and gold. The lush forest was strange to both groups. Dayan felt threatened by the trees, which he couldn’t see that well; he longed for the bright desert.

  Ezer Weizman jumped on one of the many bicycles available to the guests and rode over to Begin’s cabin. On the way, he encountered Sadat, who was on his brisk daily walk, accompanied by Foreign Minister Kamel, who was struggling to keep up. Weizman and Sadat embraced. “I’m glad to see you again!” Weizman said.

  Brash, irrepressible, and gregarious by nature, Weizman was part of the “Mayflower generation” of Israel. His uncle Chaim Weizmann was Israel’s first president.2 Young Ezer grew up in Haifa, a mixed city. His mother spoke fluent Arabic and endeavored to teach it to her children—with imperfect success in his case. His father was a German agronomist who became a forestry officer in the northern part of Palestine. “We were seasoned travelers in a world of open borders, not yet sealed by Arab-Jewish hatred,” Weizman later recalled. His ideal of living in harmony with his Arab neighbors was abruptly shattered in May 1948, when Egypt and other neighboring Arab armies attacked as soon as the State of Israel was declared. “As for the Egyptians, I simply couldn’t grasp what had gotten into them,” he would later write. “What interest could they have in the conflict in Palestine?”

  Weizman eventually came to think of the Arabs as patient realists, who counted on their vastly greater numbers and fabulous oil wealth to give them the advantage in the long run. In the meantime, they burned with hatred and envy of Israeli success. “Imagine that you’re Arabs,” Weizman would tell his subordinates. “What do you see? The State of Israel doing a strip-tease, that’s what you see. A strip-tease! Green, flourishing, prosperous, twinkling at night with a mass of lights. And whatever the Arab eye doesn’t see, his imagination invents. Now, you know what happens to a healthy man when he watches a rousing strip-tease act …”

  The formidable Israeli air force was Weizman’s creation, designed to knock the lust for conquest out of the Arab heart. “I’ve never hated the Arabs,” Weizman maintained. “But instead of building and developing and living in peace, the Jew is forced to learn to kill more Arabs in less time.” In 1967, Weizman’s planes wiped out the Egyptian Air Force in three hours, determining the outcome of that conflict from its very start. Weizman believed that the war should not end until the Israelis had taken Cairo, Amman, and Damascus. He proudly advertised himself as a “raging hawk” who advocated the immediate annexation of all the territories it had acquired in that war.

  Like most of his countrymen, Weizman reveled in the total rout of the Arab armies. There were photographs in the Israeli press of Egyptian boots in the Sinai sand, left behind so the soldiers could run away faster. The Israelis laughed at their pathetic adversaries, and even pitied them—emotions that made the Arabs’ loss all the more mortifying. “It was only after my first meetings with the Egyptians that I began to grasp the mistake we had made,” Weizman later admitted. “Whenever the Egyptians referred to their humiliation in the Six-Day War, their eyes grew moist. I suddenly realized how painful the blow had been and how it had spurred them on to redoubled efforts of revenge.”

  Alone among the Israelis, Weizman had forged a personal relationship with Sadat, wrought through many hours of negotiations. He always thought of the Egyptian leader as the personification of masculine elegance, perfectly groomed and exquisitely dressed, trailing a whiff of Aramis cologne. Now, at Camp David, encountering the Egyptian president in a sweaty tracksuit made him appear rather less glamorous.

  “Come and see me!” Sadat said, and walked on into the gloomy forest.

  THE LEADERS ATE in their cabins, but the rest of the delegations were fed in the large dining hall in Laurel Lodge. Somber Egyptians sat at their tables on the lower level, while on the upper level the Israelis chatted quietly, worried about being overheard.

  Everyone in the dining hall was in casual clothes, with the exception of Hassan el-Tohamy. Like Begin, he insisted on wearing a suit and tie at all times. The other Egyptians were alternately amused and embarrassed by Tohamy but also a little cowed. Tohamy’s years in intelligence left him with the reputation of a man who had done a lot of dirty work in his time. He was an intimidating figure with his barrel chest, broad shoulders, blue eyes, and imposing silver beard. His formality made him all the more singular among the jeans and sweaters.

  Tohamy was known as a kind of guru for Sadat, although no one grasped exactly what accounted for their intense relationship. He openly spoke of having conversations with genies or dead saints. When he served as the Egyptian ambassador to Austria, he suddenly stood up at a dinner party and greeted the Prophet Muhammad, as if his ghost were physically present in the room. Such outbursts on his part became legendary in the upper tier of Egyptian government; he was always spreading legends of his own prowess, casually mentioning that he had decid
ed at the last minute not to overthrow the government of Afghanistan, for instance, or that he had just stopped a revolution in Malaysia. And yet, as the former head of Egyptian intelligence, he did have a history of intrigue. Perhaps Sadat was under the spell of Tohamy’s spiritualism, or enchanted by his stories. They had been together in the revolution, and conspirators naturally forge links that others fail to see or understand.

  At that first dinner in Laurel Lodge with the Egyptians and several Americans, Tohamy boasted of his mystical powers. Through sheer force of will, he said, he had trained himself to control the forces of nature inside and outside of his body. He used to climb into the lions’ cage at the Cairo zoo, he told his amazed audience, and bring the lions to heel. Eventually, he was able to leave his body and travel outside of the physical universe. He had even devised a way to stop his heart from beating upon command.

  This last comment attracted the attention of Menachem Begin’s cardiologist, who was sitting with an American doctor at a nearby table. With his enlarged audience, Tohamy related that he had once gone for a physical and the doctor who was taking his pulse suddenly turned pale. “Mr. Tohamy, your heart is not working!” the doctor had cried. “You’re dead!” Tohamy apologized, explaining that he had simply forgotten to turn his heart back on.

  Hearing the story, one of the incredulous physicians at the dinner table asked Tohamy if he had been able to accomplish this astounding feat through yoga. The question infuriated Tohamy, who said that it had nothing at all to do with yoga! But he refused to divulge his secret technique.

  A YEAR BEFORE Camp David, prior to Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan had met secretly with Tohamy in Morocco, at the invitation of King Hassan II, in order to broker backdoor peace talks. To keep the meeting secret, Dayan had flown from Paris to Rabat disguised as a beatnik, with a shaggy wig, mustache, and sunglasses.

  He must have realized what a monstrous figure he was in the imagination of Egyptian military men such as Tohamy. No Israeli more thoroughly embodied the humiliation they had endured in 1967. Perhaps for this reason, the Moroccan king did not tell the Egyptians in advance whom Tohamy would be meeting, saying that the Israeli representative would be “a figure with status in every Arab state and at a level of responsibility.”

  When Tohamy entered Hassan’s palace in Morocco, he greeted the king and embraced him, but at first he could not bring himself to look at the Israeli. “This is Dayan!” the king finally said.

  “No one doubts it is Dayan,” Tohamy replied. Finally he addressed the legendary Israeli. “I did not in my life expect to meet you in a parlor. Rather I expected to meet you at any point on the field of battle, where I would kill you or you would kill me.”

  Tohamy said that he brought a message from President Sadat, which he read aloud in clipped tones, outlining the terms of the Egyptian peace proposal. He repeatedly stressed the need for secrecy; even the Americans could not be told of the meeting, he said—his life depended on it. “His request for secrecy at that time was also prompted by what I can only describe as a crisis of the soul,” Dayan later wrote. “For him to be meeting an official representative of the Israeli Government to discuss peace was an emotional shock.”

  Tohamy was supposed to be laying the groundwork for peace discussions between Sadat and Begin, but his mystical nature kept asserting itself. At one point Tohamy said, “Moshe, you are the false prophet of Israel. There was a prophet before you who was one-eyed, and he was a false prophet.”

  “Sir, I am not that man,” Dayan replied.

  When Tohamy got back to business, he stressed that Sadat was serious in his desire for peace. However, Sadat would only consent to meet with Begin and shake his hand once the Israeli prime minister had agreed to total withdrawal from the occupied territories. Guarantees could be established for Israeli security if that principle was agreed upon. That way, Sadat could have peace without surrender.

  Tohamy could not refrain from mulling over past defeats. It was inconceivable to him that Egypt, with a population of forty million, together with Syria, Jordan, and other Arab states, had been defeated by Israel, with only three million inhabitants. Tohamy’s lips quivered with anger and contempt as he spoke of Nasser, reasoning that Egypt had lost the war in 1967 because Nasser had conspired with the Israelis to bring about defeat. “Otherwise, how could such a catastrophe have befallen us?” he asked Dayan. He went on to say that the economic prosperity and spiritual blossoming of the Middle East had been held back because of the endless wars, but the time was coming for the apocalyptic clash of Gog and Magog, when the sons of light would face the sons of darkness, and the Israeli people would have to choose which side they were on.

  The weird encounter between Dayan and Tohamy turned out to be far more consequential than Dayan might have imagined. When Tohamy returned to Cairo, he evidently told Sadat that Begin had agreed to withdraw from the occupied territories. It was on that basis that Sadat went to Jerusalem, believing that only certain details remained to be worked out between the two sides. When he first met privately with Begin and Dayan, Sadat mentioned this secret understanding to withdraw. Dayan denied he had ever made such a commitment; his only purpose in Morocco was to gather information and then report back to Begin.

  “But Tohamy said you were ready to withdraw,” Sadat protested.

  “Mr. President, I did not say that,” Dayan responded.

  By then, of course, Sadat was in Jerusalem and the focus of the entire world was on him. It is entirely possible that the Middle East peace process was set in motion by the misunderstanding of a madman.

  IN THE EVENING, Begin went to Carter’s cabin for their first long discussion. They settled into a modest, wood-paneled study where Begin seemed to feel more at home than in the spacious living room. Carter surveyed the issues that would be covered at Camp David, explaining that he would act mainly as the arbiter, putting forward compromises when the two sides couldn’t reach agreement.

  Of the three leaders, Begin was in the strongest position: he could walk away from Camp David empty-handed with little political damage. His entrenched positions were well known. Even those who strongly opposed him never doubted his principles or his refusal to make any concession that might compromise Israel’s security. He was a rock wall. But intransigence brought its own hazards. He realized that there was one thing more valuable to Sadat than peace with Israel: a robust American-Egyptian relationship, mirroring the friendship of Carter and Sadat. Egypt could foreseeably replace Israel as America’s closest ally in the Middle East, opening up new diplomatic bridges between the U.S. and the oil sheikhdoms. Meantime, Israel’s relationship with the U.S. might look more like the edgy relationship between Begin and Carter. America had provided a comfortable measure of military and economic security for Israel, providing $10 billion of aid since the 1973 war—nearly $4,000 for each Israeli citizen. If Americans came to see Begin as the main obstacle to a genuine Middle East peace treaty, his political career would be finished and Israel might find itself completely friendless in the world.

  Begin’s main fear was that Carter and Sadat were conspiring against him. He had reason to be concerned. Earlier in the year, Brzezinski came up with the idea of colluding with Sadat in order to put pressure on Begin. The scheme would involve Sadat putting forward an Egyptian plan for the West Bank and Gaza, which would be realistic enough to accommodate Israel’s security needs but would also include some points that the U.S. would find unacceptable. That would allow Carter to argue with both Begin and Sadat, whereupon he would produce a “compromise” plan that Sadat had already secretly agreed to in advance. Begin would be placed in a vise. Carter could squeeze him without appearing biased against the Israeli position, bringing to bear all of the power of his office and the acknowledged vulnerability of Israel’s dependence on the United States. The Americans were counting on Sadat’s theatrical abilities to carry it off. Vance was opposed to the idea, however, and Sadat was really too impulsive to be a trustworthy conspirator
. But the American team continued to believe that there would have to be some kind of stratagem in place to pressure Begin if there was to be any hope of pulling off a meaningful peace agreement. If Begin refused to budge, the American goal was to arouse enough domestic pressure against him to bring down his government, with the intention of producing a more flexible partner for peace—Ezer Weizman being the most appealing candidate to replace him.

  Begin, however, had a trump card. He brought the actual text of a letter from Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford. In 1975, Ford’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had been trying to broker an agreement in which Israel would withdraw from a portion of Sinai that it had occupied in the 1973 war. During that negotiation, the U.S. made a number of pledges, including the one that Begin brought with him, in which America agreed not to produce any peace proposals without first consulting the Israelis. Little had been gained from this extraordinary commitment, but it had hung over American policy makers ever since. In effect, Ford’s pledge gave Begin a powerful veto over any peace proposal and compromised the American posture of being an impartial broker.

  “Mr. Prime Minister, we must come out of this conference with an agreement,” Carter said, pointing out that if they failed, there was little chance of progress in any foreseeable future. However, here in this isolated environment, with plenty of time, sealed off from the press and protected from the din of partisanship and pressing domestic concerns, the three leaders could change history. Their subordinates didn’t have the power or authority to do so, and their successors might never have a better opportunity. Only Begin and Sadat could do it, here and now. Carter added, “The achievement of a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt is more important to me even than my political chances.”