Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0385352034
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’ S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A gripping day-by-day account of the 1978 Camp David conference, when President Jimmy Carter persuaded Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to sign the first peace treaty in the modern Middle East, one which endures to this day.
With his hallmark insight into the forces at play in the Middle East and his acclaimed journalistic skill, Lawrence Wright takes us through each of the thirteen days of the Camp David conference, illuminating the issues that have made the problems of the region so intractable, as well as exploring the scriptural narratives that continue to frame the conflict. In addition to his in-depth accounts of the lives of the three leaders, Wright draws vivid portraits of other fiery personalities who were present at Camp David––including Moshe Dayan, Osama el-Baz, and Zbigniew Brzezinski––as they work furiously behind the scenes. Wright also explores the significant role played by Rosalynn Carter.
What emerges is a riveting view of the making of this unexpected and so far unprecedented peace. Wright exhibits the full extent of Carter’s persistence in pushing an agreement forward, the extraordinary way in which the participants at the conference—many of them lifelong enemies—attained it, and the profound difficulties inherent in the process and its outcome, not the least of which has been the still unsettled struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
In Thirteen Days in September, Wright gives us a resonant work of history and reportage that provides both a timely revisiting of this important diplomatic triumph and an inside look at how peace is made.
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Letter was innocuous; he wouldn’t have thought it necessary if Sadat hadn’t requested it. But with this letter, the fumes of doubt that had been gathering in the Israeli delegation exploded into a ball of rage. “We can pack our bags and go home without another word,” an indignant Begin declared. It wasn’t just Begin; the furor infected everyone in the Israeli delegation. Jerusalem touched a nerve that until now had not been fully exposed. Carter was upended by the outburst of rage. He pointed.
“utterly impossible” to persuade the Palestinian Arabs to surrender their sovereignty. “Every native population, civilized or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always,” he observed. There is not “one solitary instance of any colonization being carried out with the consent of the native population.” Because a voluntary agreement with the Arabs is an illusion, he wrote, there had to be an “iron wall” erected between the.
Self-governing authority in the West Bank short of a state. Sadat would also agree to minor modifications in the borders of the West Bank to accommodate Israel’s security needs. In Sinai, he would accept the presence of UN peacekeepers. Jerusalem could remain an undivided city. These were all points that Carter thought he could sell to Begin. For the first time Carter caught a glimpse of a possible settlement. But for now, he was the only one who knew of the existence of this secret memorandum.
Tel Aviv. Begin emerged from the underground and greeted the vessel. He was still unused to being in public, and many of his Irgun followers had never actually seen him. Some of them wept to discover their commander standing in front of them. The shipment was supposed to have arrived before the cease-fire went into effect. There was an agreement with Ben-Gurion that the Irgun would receive 20 percent of the munitions and the Israeli army would get the rest, the Israeli prime minister suddently.
On the verge of finding a path to peace, the meeting that neither man wanted would bring everything crashing down. THE ILLUSION THAT led to Israel’s greatest military setback, and was the source of Dayan’s disgrace, was the Bar-Lev Line. It was one of the great defensive fortifications in military history. Erected after the 1967 war, and stretching a hundred miles along the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, the line presented a sheer, seventy-foot-high sandy rampart facing the Egyptian troops on.