Melanie Phillips - May 13, 2009
The Spectator.co.uk
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband says that Obama’s Middle East ‘peace’ initiative offers the best prospect for peace in the region since... Jimmy Carter at Camp David.
Jimmy Carter, eh? How instructive. Carter, whose profound and disturbing animus against Israel has been revealed in all its ugly reality in recent years, was a disastrous President whose serial misjudgments paved the way for the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the baleful consequences of which are now reaching crisis point. During his term of office he consistently acted against Israel’s interests and in favour of its Arab enemies.
What Miliband is referring to is the historic agreement over which Carter presided in 1978 at Camp David between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat . This was truly a monumental milestone and the one event which has been held to redeem Carter’s disastrous presidency in the eyes of the world. But as this Wall Street Journal article records, it was a milestone reached not because of Carter but despite him:
The truth is that Mr. Carter never wanted an Egyptian-Israeli agreement, fought hard against it, and only agreed to go along with the process when it became clear that the rest of his foreign policy was in a shambles and he desperately needed to log a success... Mr. Carter and his advisers all assumed that the key to peace in the region was to make Israel pull back to its pre-1967 borders and accept the principle of Palestinian self-determination in exchange for a guarantee of Israel`s security.
Sound familiar?
After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Sadat decided that Egypt needed to start from scratch in its relationship with Israel. Sadat found natural allies in Nixon and Mr. Kissinger after throwing out his Soviet patrons in 1972. With American support, he came to a disengagement agreement with Israel in 1973, and again in 1975. The culmination of this process was Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, where he discussed a separate peace between Egypt and Israel, and forestalled Mr. Carter`s plan for a Geneva peace conference.
It was this trip -- not Camp David -- that marked the true seismic shift in Middle East relations since Israel’s founding. It came as an unwelcome surprise to the Carter foreign policy team, who still wanted their grandiose Geneva conference. In fact, for the better part of 1977, as Israel and Egypt negotiated, the White House persisted in acting as if nothing had happened. Even after Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, Mr. Carter announced that ‘a separate peace agreement between Egypt and Israel is not desirable.’
But by the autumn of 1978, the rest of Mr. Carter`s foreign policy had crumbled. He had pushed through an unpopular giveaway of the Panama Canal, allowed the Sandinistas to take power in Nicaragua as proxies of Cuba, and stood by while chaos grew in the Shah`s Iran. Desperate for some kind of foreign policy success in order to bolster his chances for re-election in 1980, Mr. Carter finally decided to elbow his way into the game by setting up a meeting between Sadat and Begin at Camp David.
The rest of the story is now the stuff of legend: For 13 days Mr. Carter acted as the go-between for the two leaders. Yet for all their bluster and intransigence in public, Begin and Sadat were more than ready for a deal once they understood that the U.S. would do whatever was necessary to stop the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, such as the PLO, from derailing a peace. An agreement was hammered out for an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, coupled with vague language about Palestinian ‘autonomy.’ The item Mr. Carter had really wanted on the agenda -- a Palestinian state -- was kept at arm`s length.
In other words, this historic peace treaty occurred only because 1) Carter was sidelined and 2) the issue of a Palestinian state was kept out of it because it was irrelevant to peace between Israel and the Egyptians. And that’s the point – the absolutely key, all-important point -- that Miliband, the British Foreign Office and the Obama administration cannot and will not grasp. As the Times reported:
[Miliband] said the most significant aspect of Mr Obama’s initiative was that he was the first US president to accept it was in America’s national interest to back Palestinian statehood. ‘Palestinian statelessness is the biggest recruiting sergeant for Islamic extremism around the world,’ said Mr Miliband.
Ah yes – Palestinian statelessness was obviously uppermost in the minds of the Islamists who blew up Mumbai; it was obviously the reason they bombed Spain to help the restoration of the caliphate and tried to do the same in France, that legendary ally of Israel; it’s obviously the driving passion of the Chechen Islamist separatists; it’s obviously the rallying cry of the Islamists in Indonesia who intend to Islamise southern Asia; it’s obviously the reason Islamists are persecuting, murdering and driving out Christians across the Third World from Sudan and Nigeria to Bethlehem.
For various reasons, however, this idiotic but deeply ideological analysis is now accepted by many non-ideological folk as axiomatic. They are all fixated by the delusion that a Palestine state is the key to peace between Israel and the Arabs. It is not. The briefest knowledge of history tells us that it is not – for the simple reason that it has been on offer repeatedly for seven (some would say nine) decades, with the Jews in agreement – indeed, in recent years offering the Palestinians more than 90 per cent of the disputed territories -- and yet the only response from the Arabs has been war.
The requirement by the Arab side is not for a Palestine state. It is for the end of the Jewish state. It is not just Hamas that declares this over and over again. It is also the supposedly ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah, who say repeatedly that they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. Yet these facts are simply ignored as if they don’t exist.
Now, King Abdullah of Jordan claims to be offering Israel the ‘prize’ of recognition by the Arab and Muslim world. Oh please. We’ve all been here before so many times. ‘Recognition’ is a weasel word which the Arabs use to mean simply recognising the literal fact of Israel’s existence rather than accepting its right to exist -- a very different matter. If the Arab rejectionist states were to say that they accepted Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and to live in peace alongside them – and show they mean it -- there would be peace tomorrow. But King Abdullah is talking about the deeply manipulative Saudi peace initiative -- appeasement for dummies -- which, through its giveaway demand for unlimited immigration of Arabs into Israel, would mean the end of the Jewish state.
Despite the feeble-minded support the Times afforded King Abdullah, as its own headline made clear he was in effect threatening Israel: ‘surrender now, or war later`. Commit national suicide – or face Iran alone. That’s some choice. And that’s the choice Obama too is giving Israel – and who can be surprised that Miliband is so enthusiastic, since as we also learn from King Abdullah,
Britain is playing a very vital pro-active role in the Obama Middle East initiative.
What is even more remarkable is that these twin icons of progressive politics, Obama and Miliband, are actually pushing the cause of racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing. For the proposed Palestine state is to have not one Jew living inside its borders. So Obama and Miliband say the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East can only be served by the creation of a racist, exclusionary state -- while beating up on the one state in the Middle East which gives full civil rights to its Arab and Muslim citizens.
The key to the ending of the war between the Arabs and Israel is that the Arabs and the wider Muslim world have to grasp that it is in their interests to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, legitimised as such under international law, and to abandon for ever their attempt to remove it from the map. That is the real message of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
But instead, the message the Arab and Muslim world is currently getting from America and Britain is that its violence and aggression have paid off and that the great prizes, not merely of Israel’s destruction but also the defeat of the free world, are now within reach. Having accepted the Arab and Muslim narrative on Israel/Palestine, and having decided that appeasement is the only way forward, Obama and Miliband are making the strongest effort since Carter to pressurise Israel to become the propitiatory sacrifice to the enemies of civilisation. And from the White House to King Abdullah via the Foreign Office and the BBC, Israel is to be blamed if it refuses to play the role.
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