#timeline #History

Taking Friends for Granted: The Carter Administration, Jordan, and the Camp David Accords, 1977–1980

Key takeaways

content: "@ashtonTakingFriendsGranted2017" -file:@ashtonTakingFriendsGranted2017

Reading notes

• the other framework document, for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, proved to be stillborn.

• Jordan was referred to fourteen times in section A of the document dealing with the central question of transitional arrangements for the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, compared to only nine references to Egypt, one of the actual signatories of the document.

• These fundamental obligations would have impinged on Jordanian sovereignty had the framework document been enacted.

• role of relations with Jordan is curiously underdeveloped in the historiography of the Carter administration’s Middle East policy

• William B. Quandt, in his seminal study, Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics, is one of the few historians to consider Jordan before and after Camp David. His verdict on the administration’s approach is highly critical: “Carter,” he wrote, “basically seemed to share Sadat’s view that the reaction of the other Arabs did not much matter. They would simply have to accept the new facts. This was a serious misjudgment.”

• Jeremy Pressman represents Hussein as a key proponent of what he terms the most negative assessment of Camp David: that it was “an American-Israeli conspiracy to prevent Palestinian self-determination and ensure Israeli control of the West Bank.” Pressman cites Hussein’s comments that Camp David was a “fig leaf,” which provided “sugarcoating” for the Begin Plan, amounting to permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank

• Much of Pressman’s subsequent analysis is devoted to challenging this claim by showing that the Carter administration sincerely sought Palestinian self-determination, an end to Israeli settlement-building, and Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories.

• Although Hussein was wrong to suggest a formal American-Israeli conspiracy over the Camp David accords, he was right that they exposed the shallowness of Carter’s commitment to a comprehensive peace in the region

• While Sadat presented his decision as a defense of Palestinian national rights, Hussein saw it as an opportunistic maneuver on Sadat’s part designed to enhance his credentials as Nasser’s successor. The roots of the tensions that would emerge between the two men over the Camp David process were thus already apparent.1

• The Egyptian-Israeli deal brokered by Carter at Camp David did have the positive effect of opening the way to a peace treaty between those two countries. But it also had pernicious consequences.