Readers who are familiar with the Stockholm Syndrome will recall
that it refers to a hostage-taking 1973 incident in that Swedish
capital city. Over time, the hostages began to look to their
captors as friends and protectors rather than the murderous
kidnapers that they truly were.
We are seeing something similar in what I call the Camp David
Syndrome. President Obama has just announced the latest effort
toward crafting a Middle East Peace Settlement. That
grand-sounding title is Beltway-speak for “let’s lean on Israel
to gain some street cred with the Euros.” He’s chosen Hillary
Clinton as his negotiator.
In 1978, Jimmy Carter brought Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s
Menachem Begin together to his mountain top presidential retreat
in Maryland’s beautiful Catoctin Mountains. There, over days of
intense negotiation, Carter brokered what became known in
diplomatic lore as the Camp David Accords. Under those
agreements, Israel agreed to withdraw her forces from the Sinai
Peninsula that she had seized in the lightning Six-Day War of
1967, and re-captured during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That war
had been launched by Egypt’s Sadat — showing the characteristic
respect for other faiths that Muslims habitually show — the
Jewish High Holy Days of that year.
Carter hailed his achievement as something just shy of the Second
Coming. It wasn’t. Carter was led up to that mountain by growing
problems on the plain below. Americans were becoming increasingly
disenchanted with Jimmy’s fecklessness on the domestic front.
High interest rates made home ownership impossible for young
couples, long gas lines frayed nerves, and rising unemployment
made everyone edgy. But Carter felt that success on the
international scene could bring him and his embattled party some
goodwill from American voters.
It didn’t. Barely six weeks after the media hullabaloo over the
Camp David Accords, voters trooped to the polls and spanked
Carter’s party. Between 1978 and 1980, voters gave Republicans 46
seats in the House of Representatives, five more seats than the
GOP had lost in the watershed post-Watergate election of 1974.
Still, the myth persists that a Middle East peace agreement will
translate into electoral success at home. Carter proved to be a
one-trick pony. He received a sharp kick from voters in 1980.
They put the pony permanently out to pasture.
What Carter achieved at Camp David is not replicable today.
That’s because the Israelis in 1978 did not want to occupy Sinai.
They agreed that it did not materially contribute to their
security. (Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir used to joke that
the Almighty had led the Children of Abraham out of bondage in
Egypt, called them to wander for forty years, and told them to
settle on the only piece of real estate in the Middle East that
has no oil!)
So Carter’s fabled diplomacy was not really necessary to persuade
the Israelis to disgorge territory that had never been Israeli
and that they did not really want. And President Anwar Sadat had
a firm grip over Egypt, which one Egyptian diplomat described as
the only real nation in the Arab world. “The rest are just tribes
with flags,” that Arab diplomat memorably said. Besides, Sadat
needed money. And the U.S. was ready to purchase a peace.
Despite the fact that Jimmy Carter got a shellacking at the polls
in 1978 and 1980, Presidents persist in pursuing the brass ring,
or an elusive Nobel Prize, for brokering a Mideast Peace
Settlement.
Bill Clinton tried it in 2000. He was playing out an exhausted
presidency, grasping for straws. He summoned Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Barak and the “reformed” terrorist leader, Yassir
Arafat, to the U.S. He tried to arrange another Camp David
breakthrough. Barak made extraordinary concessions, even
dangerous ones. No dice. Arafat fomented a second “intifada”
against Israel. Clinton’s party lost the next Presidential
Election.
Then, there was the 2007 Annapolis Conference on Mideast Peace.
President George W. Bush chose that week after Thanksgiving to
bring a wide range of Arab and Israeli negotiators to the U.S.
Naval Academy’s historic Yard. Some of the Arab delegates refused
to enter the same doorway as the Israelis had entered. Some peace
talks. The best we can say for this effort is that it could have
been worse. It might have lasted two days instead of just one.
And Bush’s party lost the next Presidential Election.
What was considered historic about the Annapolis Conference is
that for the first time all parties agreed to a “two-state
solution.” Did the Arab delegates who attended, the ones who
refused to enter the same doorway as the Israelis, agree that
Israel would be one of those two states? Don’t ask.
What we have yet to hear is why the U.S. should want a
Palestinian state to be formed in the Mideast. When the Israelis
evacuated from Gaza and the local residents held elections, they
promptly voted in Hamas, the terrorist organization. Hamas
supporters stormed the residence of the late Yassir Arafat and
stole his Nobel “Peace” Prize. Now, there’s poetic justice.
On the West Bank, Arafat’s loyal lieutenant, Abu Abbas, maintains
a precarious perch. The U.S. is giving $900 million in aid to his
so-called Authority for allegedly humanitarian purposes. This is
where bombers use ambulances to run rockets to and from
Palestinian hospitals and where children dance in mock explosive
belts before PTA meetings in schools named for suicide bombers.
This is what we want more of? For Peace’s sake? For Pete’s sake!
I was amazed to see President Obama come on TV so soon to call
for a Mideast breakthrough. I didn’t think he was in that much
trouble on the domestic front already.
