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CHAPTER 1
Jimmy Carter's Vision
WITH A LARGE BLUE VELVET KIPPAH covering his head, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter rose to speak to an overflowing crowd of more than two thousand congregants at the Jewish Educational Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. It was June 1976, the summer before the national election that would bring Carter to the White House. "The land of Israel has always meant a great deal to me," Carter told his audience. "As a boy I read of the prophets and martyrs in the Bible — the same Bible we all study together."
A devout Southern Baptist, navy veteran, and successful agriculturalist, Carter was largely unfamiliar to American Jews in the Northeast. Many were skeptical of his southern roots and were wary of supporting an untested politician with no experience in the Middle East. The hostility ran deep. One Jewish campaign advisor recalled the views of his coreligionists. "You mean you are supporting that guy? I thought he was anti-Semitic."
To counter these anxieties, the Democratic Party's nominee for president chose a large Orthodox congregation to deliver one of his most important campaign speeches. "As an American," Carter told the audience, "I have admired the State of Israel and how she, like the United States, opened her doors to the homeless and the oppressed." This affirmation of a deep commitment to Israel in part reflected personal experience, as well as the steady growth of cultural and intellectual bonds between political Zionism and American liberalism since the 1940s.
Carter's speech at the synagogue came against the backdrop of tense Israeli relations with the wider Arab world. Attempts at regional peacemaking after the 1973 War had left unresolved core issues of political contention, as well as the fate of the Palestinian question. "All people of good will can agree it is time — it is far past time — for permanent peace in the Middle East," Carter told the congregants in Elizabeth that day. This peace "must be based on absolute assurance of Israel's survival and security," he assured the assembled crowd. "As President, I would never yield on that point. The survival of Israel is not just a political issue, it is a moral imperative."
The rising political star argued that only a "change of attitudes" would lead to "Arab recognition of the right of Israel to live as a Jewish State." When speaking of the Palestinians, he stuck with more humanitarian themes. "Too many human beings, denied a sense of hope for the future, are living in makeshift and crowded camps where demagogues and terrorists can feed on their despair," Carter remarked. This language was deliberate and designed to assuage the concerns of his audience. "Our constant and unwavering goal must be the survival of Israel as a Jewish State and the achievement of a just and lasting peace."
Conspicuously absent from Carter's synagogue address was a direct discussion of the Palestinians in national terms. The omission was in line with dominant U.S. policy at the time, given strong domestic American Jewish opposition to the PLO in the United States and the unwelcome claims of self-determination the organization had been making globally in the 1970s. The specter of armed Palestinian resistance had not dissipated, despite the PLO's growing commitment to diplomacy in place of military action. Carter had a national race to win, and in the view of a campaign liaison to the American Jewish community, the Elizabeth speech helped clinch the election by preventing a big loss in the New Jersey primary.
The Georgia governor's support for Israel extended well beyond political expedience. In his memoir, Keeping Faith, Carter later reflected on his 1973 visit to the country, which underscored religious attachments as well. "In my affinity for Israel, I shared the sentiment of most other Southern Baptists that the holy places we revered should be preserved and made available for visits by Christians ... I considered this homeland for the Jews to be compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God." It was a perspective that had direct bearing on his approach to political solutions in the Middle East, as Carter felt strongly that regional stability depended on continued U.S. alignment with Israel. In his view, "moral and religious beliefs made my commitment to the security of Israel unshakable."
What of Carter's early attitude toward the Arab world and Palestinians? Initially, religious blinders and limited experience in the Middle East precluded a more substantial engagement with divergent perspectives. As the president himself declared in his memoirs, "I had no strong feelings about the Arab countries. I had never visited one and knew no Arab leaders." At the same time, Carter took issue with Palestinian political disenfranchisement, growing out of his domestic orientation toward greater civil rights and equality. This was a function of his childhood in the segregated South, where racial inequality was a direct feature of his daily life. He highlighted the linkage in very forthright terms years later, writing in his memoir about "the continued deprivation of Palestinian rights" and the need for American involvement in securing these rights. "It was imperative that the United States work to obtain for these people the right to vote, the right to assemble and to debate issues that affected their lives, the right to own property without fear of its being confiscated, and the right to be free of military rule," Carter reflected. "To deny these rights was an indefensible position for a free and democratic society."
Throughout his presidential campaign, however, Carter consistently used language that avoided the endorsement of Palestinian statehood, and he continued to avoid it during his time in office. Such a position fit well in mainstream American political discourse, which did not countenance the idea of a state or sovereignty for Palestinians. After the election, closer attention to the region and the complexities of the conflict yielded startlingly original ideas that pushed the boundaries of what might be possible diplomatically, including arrangements for territory administered by Palestinians themselves. While Carter's initial framing of this issue had largely been in the context of human rights and humanitarian concerns, his evolving rhetoric signaled a willingness to engage more directly with the question of Palestinian aspirations in political terms. Over the course of Carter's first few months in office, the evolution of his thinking about the meaning of self-determination and the floating of specific ideas drew fierce opposition from both the Israeli government and domestic constituencies in the United States.
Carter's Turn
On November 2, 1976, Carter and his running mate, Minnesota senator Walter Mondale, defeated the incumbent president Gerald Ford and his running mate, Kansas senator Bob Dole. Carter's foreign policy advisors had been busy outlining priorities for the first six months of the administration even before he had won the election. Like many untested transition teams, they were ambitious and envisioned a "protracted architectural process to reform and reshape the existing international system." In the realm of the Middle East, they stressed the need to pursue a comprehensive settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict instead of Kissinger's interim agreements negotiated under Nixon and Ford. Underscoring that a new approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict was under development, Carter's advisors emphasized that this would mean "a settlement in which the Arab countries trade full normalization of relations with Israel for return of territories occupied in 1967, with such changes as may be mutually agreed, and some form of self-determination for Palestinians on the West Bank." Rather than put forward detailed American proposals or "impose" a solution from the outside, the United States would encourage negotiations by working as an external broker.
The newly appointed National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, worked closely with the president to craft this comprehensive approach. Brzezinski was a member of the political science faculty at Columbia University when he first met Carter. He also served as the executive director of the North American branch of the Trilateral Commission, a forum for government, business, and academic representatives from the United States, Europe, and Japan to discuss issues of the developed and developing world. After a 1975 speech in Japan, at which Carter had argued for utilizing a balanced approach to achieve peace in the Middle East, Brzezinski decided to become more actively involved in the campaign and quickly emerged as a top foreign policy tutor to the governor. He saw Carter as realistic and determined, sensing that he was "able to combine principle with power, the only prescription for a successful American foreign policy."
Brzezinski was a Soviet specialist, a clear indication that the Carter administration was still working in the context of a U.S.-Soviet power struggle. But the waning influence of détente, which had shaped U.S. foreign policy around the globe in the early 1970s, provided space for a new sort of American internationalism. Carter's aim was to articulate a stance abroad that was rooted in the rhetoric of human rights and that was responsive to decolonization in the developing world. This stance would often be applied unevenly, and its impact would be more rhetorical than substantive. Nevertheless, Carter's intention was to break with dominant Cold War constraints of the decade.
Even with this new emphasis, the great power rivalry of the Cold War continued to cast a shadow during the presidential transition. Not long before entering the White House, Carter met with the outgoing secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had jointly convened a meeting in December 1973 with the Soviet Union under the auspices of the United Nations intended to negotiate a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict in the wake of the 1973 War. Carter was attuned to this geopolitical rivalry, and off the record he assured Kissinger that he would try to avoid a revival of the Geneva Conference "out of concern for the role the Soviets might play there."
Two major influences shaped the development of Brzezinski's views of the Middle East. The first, as had been the case for Carter, was a trip to the region in the summer of 1976, right before the presidential election. This visit convinced Brzezinski that security for Israel would depend on formalized borders, close to the 1967 Green Line. Such a conclusion came into conflict with Israeli settlement expansion, which Brzezinski understood as extending Israeli sovereignty beyond internationally recognized borders. Brzezinski's second formative exposure to Arab-Israeli issues was his participation in a 1975 Middle East Study Group hosted by Washington's Brookings Institution. This was a think-tank gathering of leading experts who sought to articulate an alternative for the region through a collaborative effort between "pro-Israel," "pro-Arab," and non-aligned parties. According to one member of the study group, the Brookings report grew out of the realization that Kissinger's step-by-step approach to Middle East diplomacy, first articulated in the 1973 Geneva Conference, was not working.
The Brookings report called for an integrated settlement that would include security for Israel and a territorial withdrawal to the 1967 Green Line. Explicitly, it also argued for some form of Palestinian self-determination. "This might take the form either of an independent Palestinian state accepting the obligations and commitments of the peace agreements or of a Palestinian entity voluntarily federated with Jordan but exercising extensive political autonomy," the authors explained. Rather than a simple matter of human rights, the assembled experts drew a line between the need for permanent Israeli borders and the importance of framing the Palestinian question in national terms. Rita Hauser, a prominent lawyer and former fund-raiser for Richard Nixon, emphasized the importance of the Brookings study to Carter's foreign policy: "[Carter] took this report and he read it, and he campaigned on it, and he made it his Bible." In the view of another study group participant, the report stated openly "what those in government could not say about the need for a comprehensive solution that would involve the Palestinians."
Brzezinski had coauthored a 1975 article in the journal Foreign Policy that called for an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In his first official meeting with Israeli officials, the National Security Advisor got a sense of how far apart the administration's views were from leading voices in Israel. General Moshe Dayan, a prominent Israeli Labor politician and military hero who had been defense minister during the 1967 War, met with Brzezinski on January 31, 1977, to discuss the contours of a peace settlement. While Dayan spoke about interim avenues with Syria and Jordan, he felt peace with the Arab world was "far off," even if an "end to the state of war" might be possible. Dayan took the Arabs seriously in their readiness to sign peace treaties but also told Brzezinski that "Israel is not willing to pay the price." The general acknowledged this left Israel in an "awkward position" with regard to U.S. and world opinion. When it came to territorial division, Dayan was clear that the West Bank, unlike the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, posed non-security-related challenges. "Israel has every right to be there," Dayan remarked. "Any division of the area is unacceptable. ... A West Bank-Gaza state is not a solution." Dayan would soon be appointed foreign minister in the Likud government of Menachem Begin, where he would help negotiate the Camp David Accords. In January 1977, however, he made it clear that "if Israel were offered peace tied to full withdrawal, he [Dayan] would oppose peace."
Like Brzezinski, Carter's newly appointed secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, was convinced of the need to address the question of Palestinian self-determination. Vance was a graduate of Yale University and a veteran of the U.S. Navy who joined the New York law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett after completing his military service. He later transitioned into the government as general counsel of the Department of Defense and secretary of the army in the administration of John F. Kennedy, followed by a stint as the deputy secretary of defense under President Lyndon B. Johnson. In his memoir, Vance wrote explicitly of the Palestinian plight. He described how they were "ejected from their homes, embittered, radicalized, living in squalor and desperation," and argued that the Palestinian question remained the "central, unresolved human rights issue of the Middle East." Reflecting on his approach to diplomacy in the region, Vance wrote that he and Carter were convinced a lasting solution to conflict in the Middle East required "a just answer" to the Palestinian question, "one almost certainly leading to a Palestinian homeland and some form of self-determination." Vance was also mindful of the constraints inhibiting a change in U.S. policy after 1967. He pointed out that UN Security Council Resolution 242 only dealt with the Palestinians as a refugee problem, not a political group seeking self-determination. The international community was not initially focused on statehood. "It was only in 1969 and 1970 that serious attention began to focus on the Palestinian people and their aspiration for a homeland in the West Bank and Gaza."
A Palestinian Evolution
Part of the reason for the delayed engagement with the political dimensions of Palestinian self-determination was a result of an evolution within Palestinian nationalism itself. The 1967 War had revitalized the national movement, which was easily eclipsed by inter-Arab political rivalries before Israel's victory. There was a split between the PLO, created by the Arab League in 1964 as a means to defuse nationalist agitation among Palestinians, and the Fatah movement, an independent liberation movement whose founders included Yasser Arafat. Arafat was born in Cairo to parents from Gaza and Jerusalem, and he engaged in politics early on, demonstrating against British colonial rule in Egypt and then fighting in the 1948 War. While completing his engineering studies at Cairo University he became the head of the Palestinian Studies Union, drawing the attention of the secret police. He left Egypt for Kuwait in 1957, where he headed a successful construction company but remained involved in political activity through the creation of Fatah in 1959.
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Excerpted from "Preventing Palestine"
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