Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  Kamel was particularly worried that Sadat was trying to preserve the legacy of his trip to Jerusalem. A failure at Camp David would make it seem as if that overture had been nothing more than a historic blunder. Boutros-Ghali agreed that Sadat might cut a deal just to save face. They would have to find a way to reassure Sadat that when the talks broke down, there would be other pathways to peace. Finally, Kamel cried, “I cannot go on. My nerves are about to explode.”

  1 Many of the ideas Fisher developed in International Mediation were reflected in a later best-selling book, Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, which Fisher wrote with William Ury and, in the second edition, Bruce Patton. Fisher went on to found the Harvard Negotiation Project.

  Day Six

  Hassan el-Tohamy, Ezer Weizman, Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter, Amy Carter, Menachem Begin, and Moshe Dayan at Gettysburg

  BEGIN AWAKENED on Sunday morning in a panic. The Americans planned to submit their proposal later that afternoon, and of course the Egyptians had already presented their intransigent document. So far Israel had not responded in kind. The man who had come to Camp David thinking he had the least to lose now realized he had created a trap for himself. He had nothing new to offer. He had no strategy. The Israeli team had arrived without background materials or alternative proposals and practically no preparation. Convinced that the conference was about to break apart, Begin now wanted something to show that the Israelis had at least made an effort.

  At five a.m. he awakened Kadishai and dictated an improvised draft of an Israeli proposal. As much as he tried to cast it in positive terms, the paper was essentially a rejection of everything on the table: no to an end to Sinai settlements; no to withdrawal from Sinai airfields; no to any abridgment of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria; and no, no, no to any division of Jerusalem. These were principles for him, not mere positions; compromise and defeat were one and the same. He genuinely wanted peace but his main obstacle was himself and his own history.

  When Dayan, Weizman, and Aharon Barak, Begin’s main lawyer, appeared at seven thirty that morning, Begin read his draft aloud. Dayan diplomatically suggested that they should wait until the Americans submitted their own report before showing the document to anyone else. There was no way to disguise the uncompromising mind behind the Israeli proposal.

  CARTER RECOGNIZED that the delegations were beginning to feel imprisoned at Camp David, so he proposed an outing to the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park that morning after church services. He stipulated that there would be no negotiations during the excursion; it was merely a chance for the delegates to catch their breath and get a change of scenery. Of course, the choice of destination was no accident.

  Begin appointed four of his delegation to stay behind and work on the Israeli document, which was no longer intended to be the basis of a discussion. It was a summary of Begin’s non-negotiable positions. Begin told Barak to sit down and write the reasons why the meeting failed, “and then we will go home.” Barak and the others packed their belongings and called El Al—the Israeli national airline—to prepare for their departure.

  THE SERMON THAT MORNING at Camp David’s Hickory Lodge was taken from I Samuel 17:47, the story of David and Goliath. Goliath was the mighty warrior of the Philistines, their own Samson. The Bible describes him as being “six cubits and a span” tall—about nine feet nine inches. Goliath was clad in a coat of mail and a brass helmet, nearly invulnerable to the arrows and spears of the Israelites. David was a shepherd boy, armed only with a slingshot and five smooth stones taken from the river. But in single combat he slew the giant, then drew Goliath’s sword from his sheath and cut off his head, scattering the Philistine army in awe and terror. The point that Chaplain Cecil Reed wanted to make is that when God chooses a particular person to do a job, he will enable him to do it.

  The David and Goliath story is one of the most resonant biblical tales in modern Israel. Moshe Dayan wrote that the symbolic meaning of little Israel in the vast Arab world was perfectly expressed by the David-Goliath duel. David told Goliath, “You come against me with sword and spear and scimitar, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel whom you have insulted.” For Dayan, the moral of the story is: “The Arabs come to us with sword, dagger and spear, while we seek to live with them in peace, side by side, on terms of equality. We come to them in the name of the Lord God of Israel.”

  As a longtime Sunday school teacher, Carter drew his own lesson from the David and Goliath story. Even when David became king, the Israelites were never able to firmly defeat their eternal enemy, nor could they under David’s successor, Solomon, during Israel’s supposed Golden Age. Despite that legendary combat in the Valley of Elah, the Israelites and the Philistines had to continue suffering each other’s presence.

  Although it’s usually assumed that the Palestinians are the same people as the Philistines, there’s an opposing theory, which is that they are actually Jews. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, its second president, were notable advocates of this line of thinking. In 1918, when the two men were living in New York, they wrote a book, titled Eretz Israel in the Past and Present. They noted that, although the Jewish community had undergone catastrophic diasporas in its history, there was a pattern of unbroken Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. They proposed that the current inhabitants of Palestine were not Arab migrants but the descendants of Jewish peasants who had been forcibly converted to Christianity or Islam. Ben-Zvi in particular became obsessed with the historical intermingling of Jews with other peoples and what he thought was the loss of their Jewish identity over time. He used to wander in the Arab villages, among his “long-forgotten brethren,” and he was struck by the resemblance of Arab place-names to Hebrew ones, and the similarity of religious practices. He and Ben-Gurion entertained the hope that the revelation of their shared ethnic origin would make it easier for the two peoples to unite as one. Archeological finds and genetic studies would eventually bear out their theory.1 The Israelites and the Palestinian Arabs both emerged from Canaanite culture. The David and Goliath story actually anticipates later scientific findings. In a Talmudic account, David reminds Goliath that their mothers were sisters, so they are actually first cousins. The intermingling of the tribes in ancient times was no doubt a fact as well as a fancy.

  CARTER HOPED THAT, by taking the two leaders to Gettysburg, the men would be reminded of the fateful consequences of a failure at Camp David. The American Civil War was also a fratricidal struggle over land and sovereignty. The Deep South that Jimmy and Rosalynn had grown up in was still shadowed by the bitterness of defeat and the economic deprivation that war leaves in its wake.

  Rosalynn Carter and Aliza Begin rode in the presidential limousine along with the three leaders. Carter carefully stationed himself between Begin and Sadat, who stared out opposite windows at the lush Pennsylvania farmland. Carter knew that each of them had spent time in prison, so he broke the tension by asking Sadat if he had read much while in confinement. Sadat said that for the first year and a half he had nothing at all to read, and when he was finally allowed to have books, he was so desperate that he read everything he could get his hands on. That initial prison experience, after he was arrested for collaborating with the Nazi spies, was in the Aliens’ Jail, which was operated by the British. Sadat requested books in English, and the warden provided a collection of short stories as well as a random book on local government in rural Britain, which made a deep impression on the future president. Sadat was soon transferred to a different prison, where the brother of one of the Nazi spies taught him German. At another prison, a converted villa, he was so bored he began breeding rabbits in an open hallway, which became a handsome source of revenue. The rabbits soon overran the place, until they were all wiped out by an infectious disease.

  His next spell in prison was during his trial with Mohamed Kamel in the political assassinations case. Sadat had always yearned
to be an actor, and finding himself in confinement once more, with ample time on his hands, he wrote a play in which he played the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, whose exploits became the basis of “A Thousand and One Nights.” The performance did not go well. “The audience began shouting at me, ‘stop all this nonsense,’ ” Sadat later admitted. “So I stopped.”

  Eventually, he was transferred to the grim Cairo Central Prison and locked in solitary, in Cell 54. It was completely bare except for a mat on the floor, a filthy blanket, and a retinue of bugs crawling across the walls. Cut off from the outside world, with no radio or newspapers, he considered the course of his life. One of his first realizations was that he was unhappy in his marriage, so he resolved to get a divorce. When he was finally given access to reading material, he taught himself French.

  During this period, he stumbled upon an article in the popular magazine Reader’s Digest by an American psychologist, which helped him deal with “certain nervous troubles” that plagued him. The author proposed that the disasters that befall a person are determined by fate and cannot be avoided. God sends trouble just as he does good times; it is a divine way of teaching his creatures how to play the roles for which he created them. Unlike the menacing God that Sadat had been taught to fear in his village religious school, he learned from the Reader’s Digest article that God is just and loving. Some traumas might be so great as to make a person feel as if all avenues are blocked and that life itself is a prison with a perpetually locked door. The key that unlocks the prison door is faith.

  Sadat felt liberated by this news. “My relations with the entire universe began to be reshaped, and love became the fountainhead of all my actions and feelings,” he later wrote. “Armed with faith and perfect peace of mind, I have never been shaken by the turbulent events, both private and public, through which I have lived.” He would say that the last eight months he spent in prison were the happiest period of his life. But when he finally became president, he had the old prison torn down. He was given a pickax and had the honor of striking the first blow. “The bricks were sodden and easy to break,” he recalled. Cockroaches spilled out of the hole he created. After that ceremonial blow, he couldn’t stop himself. “I still raised my pickax and hit at the wall, determined and tense, as though I could demolish it all myself.” Altogether he had spent five years of his life in various prisons.

  Begin said that prison had also been a “university” to him. When he was arrested in the middle of his chess game in Vilna, he grabbed a couple of books for what he guessed would be an extended stay. He selected the Bible and an English biography of Disraeli. Those would be taken away from him at the dreaded Lukishki Prison, which loomed over the center of the city. Thousands of Jews were sent there; few would ever leave. Begin’s cell mates also included generals and high-ranking Polish officials. They passed the time telling jokes and avoiding open talk about politics.

  Begin was interrogated, night after night, and forbidden to sleep during the daytime. After several days of this, most prisoners would sign anything just to be allowed to sleep without interruption. Begin, however, actually seemed to relish the interrogation, which turned into a debate, wearing down his Soviet interrogator, whom he was instructed to call “Citizen-Judge,” with his legalistic hairsplitting. Begin recalled one evening’s exchange when the interrogator tried to make the point that Zionism was another form of imperialism:

  “Citizen-Judge, we were not in favor of a colonial regime,” I said; “we demanded a colonization regime and those are two different conceptions entirely.”

  “What is the difference? Are you trying to influence me by playing on words?”

  “No, it is not a play on words. A colonial regime means the rule of a foreign people over a country that is not theirs, and we are returning to our own country.… The British want a colonial regime, while what we want is, in fact, anti-colonial.”

  “Talmudism! Colonial, colonization, it’s one and the same thing. You simply want to deprive the Arab farmers of their land.”

  Although Begin never experienced a mystical conversion in prison like Sadat, he was a humble witness to the power of faith. A young Polish corporal was placed in Begin’s cell. He was uneducated, and gradually Begin took him on as a student, giving him lessons in history and languages. The corporal was an atheist, and he took pleasure in relating stories about the hypocrisy of the Catholic priests who violated their vows of chastity. One morning, Begin was astonished to see the corporal sink to his knees in prayer. “I can testify that the revived faith of the corporal helped him, as his imprisonment continued, to overcome the melancholy which is the portion of every prisoner,” Begin wrote. “It is a fact—and I saw it with my own eyes—that man in his downfall has nothing to lean on, nothing to solace him, except faith.”

  While in prison, Begin received a handkerchief from Aliza, smuggled through a friend, with the letters “OLA” embroidered on it. At first, Begin thought it might be a misspelling of Ala, her nickname, but a fellow prisoner suggested it was actually the Hebrew word olah, which means immigration to Israel. Aliza was letting him know where to find her if he ever saw freedom again.

  Eventually, Begin was convicted, without trial, of being “an element dangerous to society.” His interrogator directed him to sign a confession that he was “guilty of having been the chairman of the Betar organization”—the Jewish paramilitary group. Begin said he would sign the document if the Citizen-Judge struck the word “guilty.”

  “Are you at it again? … You said you were the chairman of the Betar in Poland and that is what I wrote.”

  “Yes, but I am not guilty.”

  “Ah! Ah! You are guilty all right!”

  Finally, the Citizen-Judge scratched out the offending word and Begin signed his confession. As Begin was led back to his cell, the interrogator yelled, “I never want to see you again!”

  Begin was sent to a gulag in Siberia, which made him long for the misery of Lukishki. However, he was there only for three months. He would later claim that he spent two years in confinement, but altogether, his prison experience lasted a single year, from September 1940 to September 1941. While he was on his way to Siberia, Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, and soon all the Polish prisoners were released to fight the Nazi allies in the Middle East. The Polish army initially turned Begin down because of his weak heart and poor eyesight, but relented on appeal. The largely Jewish unit he joined was sent to the Middle East in 1942. That’s how Begin reunited with Aliza. He never saw action, but soon after he arrived in Palestine he was made the head of Irgun, which was stocked with former Betar members. The Polish army gave him a year’s leave and never bothered to call him back to service.

  Perhaps if he hadn’t been arrested, Begin would have been killed in the Holocaust, like other members of his family. Events carried him along in a powerful tide. Other people might feel helpless in the swell of history, but Begin had the sense of being swept along by destiny, just like Sadat.

  In the presidential limousine, the two men seemed to enjoy talking about their time behind bars. By the time they entered the gates of Gettysburg, both Sadat and Begin were in high spirits.

  CARTER HAD BRUSHED UP on the history of Gettysburg. He had received a briefing from the historian Shelby Foote a few months earlier, so the park ranger had little to add to Carter’s narration. It was here in these green, rolling hills that Confederate General Robert E. Lee intended to take the fratricidal war to the North, only to be blocked by the Army of the Potomac under Major General Joseph Hooker. More than fifty thousand men fell in the first three days of July 1863. Although the war lasted another two years, the Confederate cause was doomed at Gettysburg.

  Like Carter, who had studied the battle at Annapolis, the other military men on the excursion were quite familiar with the hallowed names where the blood-drenched battle took place: the Peach Orchard, Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top. They examined the breastworks and admired the mortars and cannons with keen professional interes
t, remarking how modern the armaments of the time seemed by comparison with the state of medicine in its ability to treat the wounds inflicted by such awful instruments of destruction.

  “Moshe, you’ve been avoiding me,” Tohamy said as they traipsed through the battlefield. “Are you angry with me?”

  “I certainly am,” Dayan replied. Before the summit, Tohamy had given an interview in which he said that Dayan had reneged on promises made about Sinai and Jerusalem.

  “Are you the anti-Christ?” Tohamy asked.

  Rosalynn noticed Begin standing off by himself, isolated even from his own delegation. Perhaps the somber sight of the battlefield had made him reflective. He had said nothing about the plans that were being made at that very moment to leave Camp David.

  One of the monuments on Cemetery Ridge marks the “High Water Mark of the Rebellion.” Here the Irishmen of the 69th Pennsylvania withstood an intensive Confederate artillery barrage, followed by one of the most disastrous infantry assaults in military history, known as Pickett’s Charge. Twelve thousand five hundred men, many of them farm boys from Georgia, marched across a thousand yards of open terrain, under withering fire from the Yankees. Half the soldiers on both sides fell. The Union line wavered at one point, but reinforcements pushed back the Southern assault. It was relentless, savage combat, cannons giving way to grapeshot, musket fire giving way to bayonets; and finally the Irishmen of the 69th stood their ground with their fists. The defeated Confederates withdrew to Virginia under cover of rain and darkness. Carter proudly added that, even under these conditions, the rebels were without panic and unbroken in spirit.