More pervasive in foreign policy is the choice of a new president’s advisers, who import their own views. Ham warned that bringing in Vance and Brzezinski would undermine the antiestablishment and anti-Washington theme of the campaign, and that is precisely what happened. These appointments were particularly crucial in shaping policy toward Israel. Far from the strongly pro-Israel and anti-Arab campaign rhetoric, they brought what they saw as a more balanced view shaped by the need to reach out to the Arab nations for a mixture of reasons. The most obvious factor was America’s dependence on Middle East oil, and another, which particularly drove Brzezinski, was the Cold War. He was convinced that resolving the dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians was central to enhancing American influence in the Arab world, to the disadvantage of Moscow, and that American influence in the Middle East would rise once this long-standing dispute was settled. As president, Carter bought into this questionable proposition.
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By the time Carter was sworn in as president on January 20, 1977, Israel’s military dominance of its Arab neighbors had been well established. So had its dependence on the United States, which had to come to Israel’s rescue with an emergency airlift to resupply its forces and a presidential hands-off warning by Nixon and Kissinger to Moscow after the surprise Arab attack on Yom Kippur in 1973. That crisis, and the Arab oil embargo that immediately followed, established wholly new conditions in the Middle East. Israel was shown to be potentially vulnerable; the Arab nations had demonstrated their economic leverage over the West; and the potential for increased Soviet influence in the region was recognized as real. Many believed that if the situation in the Middle East were to continue to disintegrate, it could lead to a direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In the preceding decade two UN resolutions had shaped American engagement in reaching a peace agreement following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967. UN Resolution 242 codified the land-for-peace formula, but couched it in characteristically ambiguous diplomatic language so it could win passage by the Security Council. The resolution acknowledged the right of “every State in the area … to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” But how would they be drawn so they would be formally recognized—especially since the resolution refused to admit Israel’s wartime conquest, which gave its citizens the space to afford at least a temporary sense of physical security for the first time in the history of the young state?
Indeed, the resolution insisted that peace required a “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” But which territories? The English version omitted the definite article, as did the Russian version, written in a language that has no definite article. To make matters more opaque, the French version grammatically read “des territoires”—taken by one side to mean “some territories” and the other “the territories,” but in any case not specifying which. Each side seized on the very ambiguity that had made passage of the resolution possible: Israel maintained that it meant Israeli troops should withdraw from some of the occupied territories, while the Arabs argued that Israel should withdraw from all of them. The United States took a mediator’s position that Israel should withdraw from most of the territories.
In the aftermath of the next Middle East war in 1973, the United States became more directly involved through a second Security Council resolution, 338, which declared a cease-fire and called for negotiations under “appropriate auspices”—understood to be the United States and the USSR—“aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.” The heightened rivalry between the two superpowers was played out at the Middle East conference that was convened, with Kissinger’s leadership, under UN Resolution 338 at Geneva in December 1973. But Syria refused to attend, and the Egyptian and Jordanian delegations would not negotiate directly with the Israeli delegation. It adjourned quickly with little progress.
Meanwhile, Soviet influence in the Middle East began to wane despite its role as an arms supplier because many Arab countries began to suspect Moscow’s potential to promote radicalism. Anwar el-Sadat, upon taking office in 1970, quickly became dissatisfied with the dominant influence of the Soviet Union. Even though he had fought against Israel with Soviet support, Sadat abruptly changed horses because he saw America as the ascending power and proceeded to expel his Soviet advisers. Saudi Arabia and Jordan joined him in seeking closer relations with Washington; geopolitics thus offered Washington the opportunity to assert leadership in the Middle East. Kissinger skillfully negotiated a series of agreements for Arab and Israeli forces to disengage from part of the Egyptian Sinai desert. When Carter took office, senior members of the new administration recognized that the United States would now have to play a leading role in brokering any peace agreement, and that they would have to move quickly when the new president’s influence was strongest. From his first days in office, Carter abandoned Kissinger’s incremental path of successive disengagements to seek sweeping, comprehensive peace agreements between Israel and all its hostile neighbors, and he revived the idea of the Geneva peace conference. It was an almost utopian program.
Why was the Middle East such a priority for President Carter?7 Initially he told me it was simply “one of the ten things that Brzezinski and I agreed to do before I was inaugurated.” Most of his advisers were not enthusiastic about his getting deeply involved in the Middle East morass, where solutions for a permanent peace had been tried and failed. But seeing growing threats to the U.S. in the region, he decided to make another try, “perhaps overly confident that I could now find answers that had eluded so many others.”8 But there was a more personal connection. Although I never detected any messianic sense, Carter’s religion clearly was a factor. As he told me, “I had taught the Bible ever since I was eighteen years old, and exactly half of all my lessons have been from the Hebrew text, and the other half from the New Testament. So I knew the history; I knew the background; and I had a strong religious motivation to try to bring peace to what I call the Holy Land.”9
He believed that God had ordained a homeland for Jews there, and in the more immediate terms of modern politics he shared the deep bond of a democratic system of government. Moreover, the timing was right—Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister, a son of the kibbutz, a veteran of Israel’s war of independence, and a victorious general in the Six-Day War. “Nobody dreamed,” Carter later mused, “that Begin would ever be elected; he was a terrorist; a former terrorist.”10
From working side by side with him for four years in the White House, I know that Carter cared deeply about Israel’s security. But unlike any president before or since, he also had sympathized with the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation of the conquered territories. His feelings were rooted in his own Christianity, which emphasizes Jesus’ concern for the poor and downtrodden, in his opposition to discrimination against black citizens in his native South, and in his firm commitment to human as well as civil rights. He never saw an incompatibility between a secure Israel and the Palestinians’ right to control their own lives.
He was hardly unaware that not a single Arab nation officially recognized the state of Israel, but he also admitted to me later that his feelings toward the Palestinians developed only after he took office. “When I became president I didn’t know anything about the Palestinians; I never talked to a Palestinian, as far as I knew.”11 But during his presidency, he increasingly took up their cause, and even more so since leaving office. He has told me that in his visits to the West Bank, he sees the Palestinians living in conditions like the blacks in the South in which he grew up, but that the Israeli military treats them worse than the white police treat blacks; he finds them not militant or violent, but “just like your mama and daddy were when you were growing up: They want their kids to go to school and maybe get a college education; of course, the college has now been closed.”12
But at that time there was no way to include Palestinians in t
he negotiations. After Israel’s 1967 conquest, the Arab League made the fateful decision to displace the Hashemite royal family of Jordan, the most moderate Arab state on Israel’s border, as the rulers of the Palestinians, and to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headed by Yāsir Arafat as their sole representative. Arafat insisted on a Palestinian state to enter negotiations about the future of the West Bank and Gaza. But even though the PLO was accorded observer status at the United Nations, it was off limits for our U.S. diplomats because of their terrorist activities and Israeli pressure.
In a secret annex to a 1975 Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement negotiated by Henry Kissinger, he bowed to Israeli demands that the United States neither recognize nor even negotiate with the PLO, unless it accepted Israel’s right to exist. Kissinger might well have brushed it aside if he felt peace was within his grasp. But in 1976 Congress nailed down the ban in a highly restrictive law: U.S. officials were forbidden to make any contact with the PLO unless it refrained from terrorism and accepted Israel’s right to exist through UN Resolution 242. Therefore one of the key protagonists was effectively sidelined, and our diplomacy was hobbled. All this created an enormous barrier to comprehensive peace negotiations.
A ROAD MAP TO PEACE
How was the administration to proceed? Brzezinski had been a member of a Middle East Study Group at the Brookings Institution, along with William Quandt, a veteran of Middle East negotiations under Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, and he knew Sadat. Carter had an important road map from Brookings—the most senior of the privately endowed think tanks in Washington. These are a uniquely American institution, stuffed with policy-oriented specialists, former officials, academics, and establishment figures waiting for their party to return to power.
Brookings leaned Democratic, and during the campaign I arranged for and accompanied Carter on a full day of briefings on energy, economic, and foreign policy. In December 1975, with the next presidential election in mind, its Middle East Study Group issued a report recommending a comprehensive settlement through negotiations at a formal conference or separate meetings. Any deal that had a chance of lasting, the study group said, would have to guarantee security for all parties, facilitate Israeli withdrawal to boundaries close to those that existed before the Six-Day War, end Arab attacks on Israel, and make progress toward normal relations and Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s sovereignty. In exchange the Palestinian territories would either become independent or voluntarily federate with Jordan as an autonomous province. As for Jerusalem, the Brookings group could not define a final political status—even today no one can do so—but it outlined a goal of unimpeded access to all the holy places with no barriers dividing the city itself.
The president-elect bought the Brookings recommendations whole and entire. They could not have been more different from the campaign positions I had help craft for him as a candidate. Gone were the campaign’s primary emphasis on Israel’s preferred position and its security needs, our opposition to Arab arms sales, and underscoring the dangers from the Arab states. Likewise, out went the domestic political considerations of Middle East policy, and in came the Brookings report, along with two of its key authors, Brzezinski and Quandt. And out I went as the campaign coordinator for all policy, to focus only on domestic issues. But I continued to be involved in Middle East policy, as an acknowledged back channel of information with the Israeli Embassy and in a defensive mode with the American Jewish community, as political difficulties arose from the president’s decisions.
Quite separately, Sadat had already realized that he would need American help to regain the Egyptian Sinai from Israel, and that meant he had to settle with Israel if he also wanted to deal directly with the United States. “It was not that he loved the Israelis,” Quandt explained to me, “but Sadat realized that he came pretty close to losing [the 1973 war]—and that the war had done what it was designed to do: It had shown that Egypt was not passive and helpless and unable to shake up events. And it triggered the oil embargo, which made people realize that the Middle East crisis was too hot to leave unattended.”13
Carter had come to the same conclusion, realizing that another Arab oil embargo could wreck the American economy and hurt his chances for reelection. But in a characteristically Carteresque stance of I’d-rather-be-right-than-reelected, he also told us that he felt so strongly about peace in the Middle East that he was willing to lose the presidency to achieve peace for Israel.14
At the very first meeting of the National Security Council in the new administration, Carter authorized Vance to visit the Middle East and revive America’s dormant diplomacy there. He was responding to signals Washington had been receiving that the Arab leaders were expecting an American approach. As an engineer by training, Carter thought in terms of comprehensive solutions to problems, even though the checks and balances of the American political system made that difficult to achieve. But he aimed high because he genuinely believed that a comprehensive settlement would ensure Israel’s security, despite the fears of the American Jewish leadership that it could be undermined by Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank.
Carter was not satisfied with an Egypt-Israel agreement alone; he wanted to forge a comprehensive peace with all the parties to the conflict, and that would not only include Egypt, but Syria, Jordan, and—critically important for Carter—the Palestinians. To do so he needed to revive the moribund 1973 Geneva conference with American and Soviet participation, which Kissinger had launched with the Soviets. This lofty goal was not as unrealistic as it might seem, because few other choices remained. Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy, with partial Israeli withdrawals from the Egyptian Sinai, had played itself out. Israel would make further withdrawals only in exchange for full recognition of Israel. Seventy-six senators—more than even a treaty-size majority—had written President Ford a sharp letter warning against using U.S. leverage to force Israel into more withdrawals.
Vance visited Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia within weeks after Carter’s inauguration. The new secretary of state also met his wily counterpart, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, to negotiate the terms of the conference. During his first six months in office, Carter personally touched base with Rabin and Begin of Israel, and likewise with Sadat, and then King Hussein and Hafez al-Assad of Syria. In principle everyone was amenable to reconvening the Geneva conference. But Arafat stood fast, without a prior guarantee of Palestinian statehood.
Vance asked Saudi Arabia to pressure Arafat. The administration used outside emissaries, such as John Maroz, president of the East-West Institute, who had close contacts with the PLO. Even Rosalynn got involved through Dr. Landrum Bolling, a personal friend and president of Earlham College, an Indiana school with Quaker roots. He was keenly interested in the possibilities of informal diplomacy and was asked to sound out Arafat: Would he accept UN Resolution 242 and recognize Israel’s right to exist? Not unless the United States would guarantee him a Palestinian state, Arafat replied. This closed off that route for the Palestinians to join the conference on their own.
Brzezinski’s views were more heavily colored by geopolitics than by the justice of either side’s claims. He emphasized quick action lest the Arabs impose another oil embargo. “Time is not on Israel’s side,” he said.15 Because the United States had more leverage with Israel than with the Arab states, he felt Israel would have to take more risks by trading off its conquered lands for a peace that would be guaranteed by the superpowers—a guarantee in which few Israelis would place much trust. Even though the PLO was listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, he believed that the Palestinians themselves would welcome a state alongside Israel to facilitate economic development through cooperation with its more advanced Israeli neighbors.
Equally problematic was his belief that the way to neutralize the Russians in the Middle East was to co-opt them into an active peacekeeping role through a joint Soviet-U.S. guarantee, backed by an international
force. The conventional wisdom of American experts on the Middle East was that the central problem of the region was the relations between Israel and the Palestinians, and by extension that normalizing them would resolve many of the region’s disputes. Brzezinski believed that, too, and articulated his framework in a major article in Foreign Policy magazine in the winter of 1975.16 History has not proved this thesis correct—simply consider the effects of the Iranian revolution of 1979—but for good or ill Carter adopted his position.
“Zbig,” as we called him, was an outspoken professor and advocate with a clear worldview. He had sharp, angular features, short-cropped hair, and high-arched brows over narrow eyes that gave him a raptor’s appearance commensurate with his hawkish views on the Soviet Union (which I shared). I deeply admired him as a man of ideas and great energy. He saw himself in the model of Kissinger, who had been his academic rival at Harvard, where he failed to earn tenure on the faculty, as Kissinger had, after getting his Ph.D. there and serving on its faculty for seven years. But he became a full professor at Columbia University, and served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in the LBJ administration. He spoke with a trace of the Polish heritage that meant so much to him.
His formative years provide insight into the perspective he brought to the Carter White House. He was a firsthand witness to the two great tragedies of twentieth-century European history, Nazism, and Communism. Zbig was born in 1928 in Warsaw, and his father, Tadeusz Brzezinski, was a Polish diplomat posted in Germany during the early years of Hitler’s rise. Zbig moved with his family to Moscow where his father served the Polish government during the time of Joseph Stalin’s great purge. The family lore is that when his family left for North America, where his father became Polish consul general in Montreal, only ten-year-old Zbigniew was at the back of the boat looking forlornly toward his fatherland.17 Zbig had little patience for the intrusion of domestic politics into foreign policy, especially by the American Jewish community. He felt the best way to achieve progress was to pressure Israel for consensus, while maintaining a genuine commitment to Israel’s security. Contrary to his undeserved reputation among many American Jewish leaders, I can attest that he was neither anti-Israel nor in any way anti-Semitic. In fact, he was proud that as a diplomat his father had saved many Jews from the Nazis before and during World War II.
President Carter Page 51