All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton introducing Scott McConnell from the American conservative magazine, and he's got this new piece at Mondoweiss, that's Mondoweiss.net.
The War of Ideas in the Middle East.
Of course, Philip Weiss's blog, Adam Horowitz writes over there.
A few, few people right over there, actually.
This is called The History of the Camp David Accords.
Reveal that even a sympathetic president could not stand up for the Palestinians.
Welcome to the show, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, thanks.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
It's been way too long since we've spoken.
Yeah, no, I'm happy to be back.
All right.
So a very interesting story here.
I think, I don't know, probably most of the audience, somewhat like me, was either a tiny little baby or way too young to know anything about this back at the time.
Maybe we've read a little bit of history of it, if we're lucky.
But I was wondering maybe if we could start with just the basic outline.
It's like Homer Simpson would say, right?
It's OK.
Well, I wasn't a little baby at the time, but I think I was, you know, in my mid-20s.
But I think like a lot of people, you read about the Camp David Accords and missed the real story of them, or at least part 1A of the real story.
The Camp David Accords were negotiated between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat with a lot of hand-holding by Jimmy Carter and his staff.
It was the agreement, the first agreement, between Israel and one of the Arab states.
And essentially, Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, which it had taken during the 1967 war, in return for a peace treaty with Egypt.
And the United States kind of paid for this agreement in part by increasing its military aid to Israel and giving Egypt a lot of aid.
And it's been in the news lately because it's when everybody talks about the Egyptian revolution and its consequences, the consequence that a lot of people worry about are whether Egypt is going to continue to abide by the accords.
And so I thought it was interesting to go back and read the story because, in fact, when Carter and Brzezinski and Secretary of State Vance began pushing to make progress on the Middle East, they originally did not intend to carve out a separate peace between Egypt and Israel, but were looking for a more comprehensive settlement that included particularly the beginning of a resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem and self-determination and possibly statehood for the Palestinians.
They recognized that the state of dispossession of the Palestinians, which had obviously happened when Israel was founded, was one of the core issues of the conflict and maybe the core issue.
And so they did not intend to facilitate what did happen, which was a separate peace, which means that Israel was no longer surrounded by hostile states and gave Israel a much freer military hand.
I mean, because very shortly after the accords were signed, Israel, first they formally annexed the Golan Heights with Syria, and then they invaded Lebanon with the intention of severing part of Lebanon and creating a kind of Christian mini-state in the south or something and breaking up Lebanon.
So Lebanon was no longer a threat and Lebanon would no longer support the Palestinian Liberation Organization and things like that.
So the Camp David Agreement was very important because it helped shape the subsequent 30 years of the Middle East.
So I went back and read, and I didn't read a lot about it, but I did read Brzezinski's memoir, which was published in 1982, and some secondary sources, particularly Bill Quant, who is Brzezinski's aide and is now a professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Virginia, who was Brzezinski's top Middle East aide at the time.
And he's written a very comprehensive history of American peacemaking efforts in the Middle East that has two or three chapters on Camp David, and he was intimately involved, and it's a pretty interesting story.
Well, and you know, another part of it that was interesting to me was just thinking on it and about how 1979 made the 67 War pretty much, and especially the 73 War, very recent history that they were dealing with, whereas now we look at 1967 borders, I mean, geez, that's way before I was born.
That's all these walls and roads and settlements everywhere.
This is all too late, done deal, fait accompli, and all these things, but back then it wasn't like that.
And here you have Jimmy Carter, who was determined, as you write it in here, was determined to try to do something as soon as he took office.
He had Zbigniew Brzezinski, who we know to this day is at least pretty honest about what he thinks about the continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and he doesn't like it.
He has been pushing for a Palestinian state, at least on TV, for a long time.
Here these guys were running the most powerful government in the world that Israel is completely dependent on, and arguably the two most powerful men in the world, Carter and Brzezinski, and the way you tell the story here, the Israelis were just basically acting like Netanyahu today.
Just forget it.
We will never go along with what you say.
We'll sit here and smile and nod.
We'll play it this way and we'll play it that way, and we'll waste your time this way, and we'll do everything but go along with perfectly reasonable expectations of the United States.
Well, it's true.
The internal politics on the American side were a very early show of the power that the Israel lobby had over on American domestic politics.
Carter and Brzezinski and Secretary Vance had a lot on their plate, and they didn't feel that they could devote all their time or political capital on the Middle East.
They were worried about the Soviet Union not going too much, not going too little.
Then Iran blew up in their face in early 1979 or began to blow up, at least from the American perspective.
But Brzezinski writes that a president has a lot of influence on the Middle East in terms of being able to push Israel and threaten Israel, cajole Israel, say, look, we give you all this aid, but you have to act like an ally and you have to take our opinions into consideration and consider our interests.
He can do that early in his term, but you get closer and closer to an election time, you can't do it.
And Brzezinski very succinctly says a Democratic president would have trouble with the mass media and trouble with fundraising if he got on the wrong side of the Israel lobby.
And Israel was, early in Carter's first year, they elected Menachem Begin, which was a big shock.
And I don't think Begin was that much further to the right than previous Israeli leaders.
I mean, Golda Meir from the Labor Party was just as intransigent or vicious about Palestinians as Begin was.
But Begin did claim, forthrightly and again and again, that he considered that the West Bank was Israel's conquest and Judea and Samaria and given to Israel by God and all that stuff.
And I guess you don't really quite believe that.
Well, I mean, and that makes sense, too, right?
There was a war and they conquered the territory.
But the only thing of it is that the United Nations and the treaties and all that made it illegal after World War II to do what the Nazis did and export their population to colonize states that they'd invaded, right?
It's ironic that Israel's legitimacy comes from the United Nations and the votes taken after in 1947.
But Israel is certainly in violation of core United Nations tenets, including that you're not allowed to conquer land and keep it and you're not allowed to move your population into the conquered territories.
And Israel is very distinctly and unambiguously in violation of these core tenets of international law.
Well, now you cite a few different examples and maybe you could go back over them for us.
But you seem to say in this piece that, well, I think you say outright in this piece that the power, the relative power of the Israel lobby as per, for example, the Democratic Party or something like that compared to that seems to be ever on the increase.
And I guess Republicans, too, that not much has changed or if it has, it's only gotten matters are even worse now than they were back then.
It seems to me that the Israel lobby is more powerful now than then, though it was beginning to be powerful then.
But there's increasing opposition to it.
There was virtually no opposition to it in 1976, 77, 78.
I mean, I was thinking about Carter and Brzezinski and they I mean, the number of Americans who knew anything about the history of the Middle East or Palestine or thought that you had to do something about Palestinian statelessness was pretty much limited then to Arab Americans and professional foreign affairs people.
And it didn't go much beyond that.
And I think so the Israel lobby could could have its way with with less pushback.
And I think the Israel lobby is probably I'm sure Apex budget is, you know, 10 times what it was in 1978.
But, you know, there's there's now all over, you know, on on campuses and, you know, myriad groups and the Internet and things, you know, probably 50 times more well-informed people.
So it's an ongoing contest.
Yeah, well, you know, the American people's relative influence with our government has really waned at the same time that the Israel lobbies has wax, it seems to me, you know, I don't really know what difference it makes with the American people.
Think about it.
Most Americans don't have really any idea about the West Bank and Gaza and occupied territory and settlements and this and that war from back then at all.
Most don't.
But among people who think who care about foreign affairs, probably a lot more do now than then.
And so I think that you can point to signs of progress.
Sure.
Well, now, how much power does the Israel lobby have?
You kind of mentioned in passing George Bush and James Baker running up against the power of the Israel lobby back in the late 80s, early 90s.
Could you go over that for us?
Well, George Bush, like Carter, wanted to wanted a comprehensive Middle East peace, and he had a sort of a face off with Israel's prime minister over settlement because essentially Israel had since 1977 been putting more and more of its population in the West Bank, as you mentioned.
And in an idea to, like, close off the possibility of a Palestinian state and make it increasingly impossible for any Israeli government to give back the territory.
So Bush essentially said he wanted a Palestinian state and he put limitations on American aid to Israel and cut off loan guarantees on all money that was going to be spent on settlements, which was a significant chunk of it.
And this was a sort of big political face off between Bush and the Israel lobby.
And the polls, Bush was pretty popular then.
It was after the first Iraq war.
And I think Bush, in one sense, seemed to win.
The polls showed that if the American president stood firm and explained his position, he would face a lot of hostility.
But in the Republican Party, traditional sources of funding are not New York and Hollywood and things like that.
It tends to be oil and gas and industrial interest.
So it's not like people allied with the Israel lobby could threaten to withhold writing checks and the party would suffer.
And so I think Bush, in the face of Bush, seemed to want, but then he lost the election, you know, probably because the economy wasn't very good.
But I don't think, I think Bush, the first Bush would have come to the conclusion that it was possible to stand up to the Israel lobby.
Though I've heard that he thinks that a lot of his difficulty in the election was due to hostility generated in the Israel lobby over his willingness to push back against Shamir and settlement.
So, you know, it's an ambiguous situation.
I mean, it's a struggle.
It's a battle.
It's not a foregone conclusion.
Is it too late now to have two states?
I mean, really, the IDF would have, there'd have to be a prime minister of Israel who would be willing to send the IDF to remove all the settlers from the West Bank, basically, or a great proportion of them somehow.
And that's not ever going to happen in a million years, right?
I don't, I don't think it's impossible to happen.
It looks less and less likely that it would happen.
I mean, I, look, if you, I have a friend who's, I mean, he's kind of Zionist and Jewish, so he could say stuff like this, but I'm not going to quote him by name.
But he says, you know, if you send the U.S. Air Force and they just bombed one settlement, you know, all those settlements would be, you know, back on the other side of the Green Line before the weekend was over.
Well, but that's not going to happen.
No, it's not going to happen.
But I don't think that, I mean, as far as I know, even the most Palestinians will kind of acknowledge that Israel can keep some of the territory that they've built around Jerusalem or near the Green Line.
Yeah, the Palestine papers show the PA willing to negotiate is a huge understatement.
So, I mean, I think you're talking about two or three hundred thousand people, and yeah, they could, I mean, sure, they could be bribed to leave.
I mean, it's just a question of having an Israeli government think that they have no choice but to do that if they're going to keep good relations with the United States and with Western Europe, which they need.
I mean, I think Israel is feeling a lot of heat, maybe more from Europe, but Europe is its major trading partner.
And Israel doesn't want to feel, like, isolated from the West, and it feels part of the West.
So if Israelis began to have, like, a lot of, you know, had to apply for visas when they traveled to England or France or Germany or Poland, it would make, you know, I think it would make a big difference.
All right, now, if we could go back to the late 90s there, it seemed like Bill Clinton really wanted to get something done there, and I know Dennis Ross was, you know, supposedly Bill Clinton's negotiator, but really seemed to be more like the Israelis.
But I wonder if you could talk about, you know, how hard he really tried and how badly he really was thwarted.
And then, actually, I also wanted to ask you about Colin Powell and George Bush after 9-11, because it seemed like Colin Powell said, now's our chance to create a Palestinian state, and then that was quashed really quickly.
I think that Clinton did want it, but he, I don't know how much he wanted it.
I think he wanted it for his legacy, maybe, out of real conviction.
And when his wife was going to run for New York senator, he began to want it less and less, at least.
So he was willing to, and the offers apparently coming from Israel, although it's never clear and it's never been in writing, were not as generous as, you know, we've all heard a million times that it was the most generous offer ever that Barack made to Yasser Arafat.
But it was an offer that certainly could be built around, and within, you know, so I think Clinton was fairly close, and the deal-breakers were not, but Clinton was predisposed, if things weren't going really well, to blame Arafat for the difficulties, and I think that the Israelis may have sensed that as well.
Yeah, well that narrative certainly won out at the time, that gosh darn that Yasser Arafat, he could have had it all.
Yeah, I mean, really, by that time, I mean, it had already been eight years had passed, and I think that everybody assumed when Oslo was signed that there was going to be pretty much, pretty close to a functioning Palestinian state within, you know, two or three or five or six years.
And the fact that successive Israeli governments had kind of dragged it out so long, and at the same time expanding settlements, made it seem that, you know, they were, you know, how forthcoming were they?
I mean, and the United States was, you know, the thing, this is apparent that Brzezinski was kind of thinking about seriously, and I'm sure that lots of American politicians have thought about at least quietly, is are you willing to have like a full-fledged break with the Israel lobby and sort of say, and just be openly critical of them the way, let's say, a Democratic politician, for example, is with the gun lobby?
And really say, you know, they are wrong on this, and this is why, and go to the American people.
And there's been no American president who's been willing to do this.
And so, until that happens, the Israel lobby will probably have its way.
Is that what happened to George Bush Jr. after 9-11?
Somebody came and said, no, you can't do this.
I don't know.
I think George Bush Jr. has a little bit of Christian Zionism in him, and I don't think he necessarily believed that, I mean, you know, people came to him and said, look, you've got to say something about the Palestinians.
Tony Blair would say, no, look, we won't, you know, join you in your little Iraq adventure unless you say this and this and this about Palestine, and Colin Powell was probably saying the same thing.
But I don't think he really believed it.
I think his father did, and Carter did, and Clinton may have a little bit.
And Jr. probably couldn't even find it on a map anyway.
Well...
He's one of those people who has no interest in foreign policy that we were talking about before.
All right, and now, I wanted to just very briefly, Scott, give you a chance to touch on something that you referred to in your article in so many words.
It takes a Mubarak to go along with the Camp David Accord as dictator of Egypt, and Mubarak creates, I think you said, in the dank shadows of a dictator like Mubarak, rises something like Ayman al-Zawahiri, took down those towers.
Yeah, I think that's an argument that America's paid a very specific price for their failure of Camp David, because, I mean, first, a separate piece was not popular with the Egyptian people, I mean, who felt some solidarity with the Palestinians, and so the piece was not popular in Egypt.
And Mubarak and Sadat was not popular.
Sadat had to actually argue against all his foreign affairs staffers to sign Camp David, who were all more willing to go to bat for the Palestinians than he was.
And so Mubarak inherited that regime after Sadat was assassinated, and it became an increasingly isolated regime dependent on a large amount of American aid and the army and a kind of crony capitalism, but it was not a popular regime.
And the Egyptian people, I mean, are not at this point bellicose towards Israel, but they don't want to be friendly and they don't want to forget about Palestine, and I think that's going to become pretty evident.
But yes, and so the way to keep the lid on, and Mubarak was kind of paid, and no American government cared about Egyptian democracy, and in the repressive state that Egypt was, radical Islam was one of the main places where people could organize against it, and so in a repressive state, often the most extreme views flourish.
Well, you know, if anybody takes the time to go back and look at when CNN and ABC News interviewed Osama Bin Laden and Ahmadinejad al-Zawahiri back in the 1990s, or read those original fatwas, a lot of it is about the dictatorship in Egypt and the permanent occupation of Palestine, and Lebanon for that matter.
There's just no escaping that fact.
And in fact, you know, I don't know if you've ever heard of this one, Scott, but there's a book called Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, who's a LA Times reporter, and it's a really good book.
It's basically the biography of the Hamburg cell of the ringleader pilot hijacker guys, and they would sit around watching the news about Palestine, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Sheihy and whatever, and Ramzi bin al-Sheib, and they would talk about how the Americans must pay for this.
It's crazy to think that Palestine shouldn't make Arabs angry.
I mean, certainly Jews were angry, like, say, in Europe when Jews were subject to pogroms in Russia or Syria or something like that.
And so the idea that other Arabs don't feel a natural solidarity with the Palestinians who have been occupied for 43 years after being dispossessed is really pretty fanciful, I think.
Well, and especially probably they have a lot of reason to believe that it's more like, you know, how Texans would feel South Carolina was invaded, that they're prevented from being an Arab nation-state together by us in the first place, kind of, you know?
So think how pissed off Texans would be if somebody tried to put a beachhead in South Carolina.
We'd all hop in our trucks and go and shoot them.
Well, as I recall, I mean, I think 200 years ago or 180 years ago, all of America was remembering the Alamo.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we've got to leave it there.
We've actually kept you over time.
I really appreciate your time on the show today, Scott.
Thanks, I enjoyed it.
Learned a lot.
All right, everybody, that's Scott McConnell from the American Conservative Magazine, and check out his piece at Mondo Weiss, The History of the Camp David Accords, Revealed that Even a Sympathetic President Could Not Stand Up for the Palestinians.
It's a very interesting short history of the Camp David Accords, 1979.
We'll be right back.
