(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Forty years ago, Egypt and Israel made peace with each other. The deal was signed on 17. September 1978, and Birth Assistant was the then President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. Getting the Israeli leader, Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to meet for the last hectic negotiations at the US presidential office, Camp David, and even get them to sign their signatures is not without reason considered a major diplomatic breakthrough. And it is also considered to be one of Carter's biggest accomplishments over the four years in the White House.
However, the agreement can also be viewed in a different light. In addition to being a peace arrangement between the two countries, it also had as a general aim to settle the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
As you know, this second part of the agreement never came to fruition. Today, peace in that part of the Middle East seems more distant than ever, and there are many reasons. But Seth Anziska, a researcher at University College London, has now made an analysis that concludes that the peace from Camp David actually enabled both Israel, the United States and Egypt to tighten their legs for later attempts to meet the Palestinians' desire for a independent state. We already know many of the circumstances, but Anziska has re-read the entire process, and on that basis he argues that Camp David was probably Carter's stardom, but also a piece of half-done work.
Criticism of Kissinger
Jimmy Carter, who moved into the White House in January 1977. Focused on coming directly from Georgia, where in his youth he had experienced the discrimination and racism of the South States, so human rights lay deep on the new president. But he also had a strong foundation in the Baptist church, which he turned into a staunch support for Israel. He also admitted that he did not know much about the Arab world.
These elements caused his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to step up into a higher unit. He strongly opposed Henry Kissinger, who, as Foreign Minister under Presidents Nixon and Ford, had driven on his famous shuttle diplomacy. Brzezinski considered this to be too slow and uncertain, and instead focused on fixing the entire Middle East in one go. He believed that the entire Arab world would be able to recognize Israel, against Israelis withdrawing from all occupied territories. It would give the Palestinians human rights and their own state, and the Israelis would gain recognition behind safe borders.
The peace between Israelis and Palestinians seems more distant today than ever.
It was therefore natural to start in Egypt, which had an absolute leadership position in the Arab world. And Anwar Sadat was responsive. It was not long after the 1973 war against Israel that the Egyptians saw a resurrection after the 1967 defeat, so Sadat had the census. At the same time, the Egyptian economy was in crisis, so when Americans were enticed to reward negotiating with billion-dollar support, Sadat was in no doubt.
Begin was also positive. He was willing to negotiate with the entire Arab world – with the exception of the Palestinian representative, the PLO. Nonetheless, Carter hoped to reach a compromise, but in the meantime Sadat also appeared hesitant in relation to the Palestinians. According to Anziska, on several occasions, Sadat expressed his fears that a Palestinian state in the West Bank would destabilize the region.
Oslo was predictable
But Carter felt pinched. The Cold War continued to be a reality, and he feared that the Soviet Union would steer the Egyptians if the United States withdrew. So even though he had set himself greater goals, he was content with the limited agreement at Camp David – in the vain hope that the agreement's visions of a solution for the Palestinians would come true at a later date.
Begin saw the deal as a backlash and immediately stepped up settlement activities in the West Bank. The deal brought Sadat into serious disarray in the Arab world, so he responded by moving closer to the United States. And when Ronald Reagan took over the presidential post in 1981, he quickly gave American Middle Eastern politics a strong pro-Israeli turn. That same year, Sadat was assassinated and his successor, Hosni Mubarak, proved even more accommodating to American interests.
Anziska argues that Camp David was probably Carter's stardom, but also a piece of half-done work.
Thus, there was a strong entente between the three. The Iran revolution in 1979 had created a new activism in the Middle East, and the Palestinians' understandable frustrations over the lack of results following Camp David also created a new militant attitude. In Seth Anziska's view, it is a direct consequence that a Palestinian group in 1984 hijacked the cruise ship "Achille Lauro" and shocked the world by killing an elderly Jewish-American hostage in a wheelchair and throwing the body overboard. Thus, it is also a logical continuation of his analysis that the Israeli-American-Egyptian apathy that Camp David had created strongly contributed to the outbreak of the December 1987 Palestinian intifada.
By the time we reached Oslo and the new attempt for a peace agreement in 1993, the maps were thus already distributed. The intentions were good enough, but the legacy of Camp David lay in the minds of all parties, so Anziska's conclusion sounds that if Carter had not been so hopeful in his time of having his deal withdrawn and had a bit of cold water in his blood, the Middle East might have looked different today.
