Camp David 25 years after

So, we’ve ridden out the 20-hour power-out that Hurricane Isabel brought us, and finally I have time to write a few quick things about the conference I went to in DC Wednesday, that marked the 25th anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David accords.
Jimmy Carter was there, presiding, and just about all the people who’d worked for him on Camp David-related things. Except Cy Vance and Roy Atherton, of course, RIP.
On the Israeli and Egyptian sides, neither Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat nor Moshe Dayan was there (RIP). But Aharon Barak–now Israel’s very distinguished Chief Justice– and Eli Rubinstein (now attorney-general) were both there in person. Mubarak’s foreign-affairs advisor Osama el-Baz participated by videolink from Cairo, where he’s been busy trying to help nail down another ceasefire in Palestine/Israel; and Boutros Boutros-Ghali sent in a (non-interactive) videotaped message from Paris.
The first thing that struck me from sitting in the audience for the day-long event was how much everyone seems these days to take the fact of Israel’s peace with Egypt totally for granted.
The CD accords of September 1978 did, however, spell out agreements between the Egyptians and Israelis on two issues: one, that the two governments would negotiate a bilateral peace agreement within three months, and two, that negotiations would start on establishment of a self-governing authority for the Palestinians.
As I mentioned here a few days ago, the Egyptians and Israelis got theirs, but that Palestinian part of the negotiation went nowhere.
So what struck me during Wednesday’s conference was the degree to which that unfinished business totally dominated the discussions…

Almost no time at all was spent, by any of the parties, examining details of the subsequent Egyptian-Israeli agreement, or commenting on aspects of Israel’s peace agreement with Egypt. At one point, I think someone said, “Well, it turned out to be a fairly cold peace; but better that kind of a peace than any kind of a war…” And then the conference moved right back into its agonizing-over-Palestine groove.
Quite appropriately too, given the current and ongoing paroxysms of violence there.
Nearly all the US participants zeroed in on two reasons for the failure of the Palestinian track. First, and most important: the Israelis’ record of continuing to build settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. (There was of course a huge and nasty disagreement immediately after the CD accords, over whether Begin had agreed to halt further settlement construction for the 3 months of the negotiations with Egypt, or for however long the negotiations with the Palestinians would take. Begin himself just stated that it had only been a 3-month commitment, and acted as though he had Carter’s agreement on that, which JC claimed he did not have. That was a big confidence-shatterer for the Palestinians and all the other Arabs…)
The second prob on the Palestinian track was identified as being the lack of clarity on who could talk for the Palestinians. Back then, Sadat sort of both did and did not claim to speak for the Palestinians. And crucially, the PLO– looking at Begin’s ability to snow Carter over the settlement-pause issue–decided not to give any of “their” Palestinians permission to take part…
These days, the issue of “who can speak for the Palestinians” continues to be clouded by the deliberate actions of Sharon and his friends in Washington who refuse to deal with the leader who whether you like him or not happened to be actually elected by the Palestinians of the occupied territories in a free and fair election back in 1996, Yasser Arafat.
And the settlement project continues. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Except that now, of course, we’re talking about 400,000-plus Israeli settlers in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) plus Gaza, whereas back then the number was probably less than 20,000.
Anyway, the Carter Center folks are going to be putting much or all of the proceedings of the recent conference up on their website. And in conjunction with the conference, they have also declassified some interesting related documents including a version of the actual original briefing-book that JC took with him to Camp David…
For me, one of the highlights was meeting Aharon Barak, a person for whom I have great admiration. I asked him a bit about the role that independent judicial investigations can play in keeping parliamentary democracies honest. (I was thinking of Lord Hutton, and of the Goldstone Commission back in the last months of the apartheid regime in South Africa.)
Barak explained to me that one of the relative strengths of the Israeli system with respect to the British and South African systems is that in Israel the government decided to hold a judicial enquiry, but then it is left to the Chief Justice to appoint its members, which gives it a lot more independent standing. In Britain, though, Lord H was appointed directly by Tony Blair. So far, though, Lord H has looked as though he’d doing a good and thorough job.