Spirit of Camp David Lacking as Carter Hosts Mideast Conference

Former President Jimmy Carter, reminiscing about the tribulations of a Middle East peacemaker, says that for 10 of the 13 days of the 1978 Camp David conference, he made sure that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin did not even see each other. Otherwise, he said, their mutual animosity would have torpedoed the negotiations.

“When Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat arrived at Camp David and gave me their positions, I was horrified,” Carter said. “I didn’t even want Begin to see the demands that Sadat had presented.”

Eventually, of course, Begin and Sadat agreed to the formula that produced what is still the only peace treaty between Israel and an Arab nation.

Familiar Role

Carter was back in his old role of Middle East intermediary last week when he played host at a meeting of leaders from throughout the region at his presidential library here. And he found that the age-old hatreds are as intractable as ever, even though high-ranking representatives of Israel, Syria, Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization painted similar pictures of themselves as moderate and peace-loving people who have suffered through years of oppression.

This time, however, Carter, lacking the influence of an incumbent President, was unable to bring the parties together the way he did at Camp David.

In its own way, the talks were a rehearsal for the sort of international conference on the Middle East that the U.S. government has been trying, without success, to arrange for the past 2 1/2 years. All of the key players--Israel, its Arab neighbors and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council--were represented.

Participants included a senior aide to Jordan’s King Hussein and an acknowledged spokesman for the PLO. Several members of the Israeli Parliament signed up for the conference but pulled out before it started.

One of the Israelis, Dan Meridor, said he decided not to attend because he could not obtain assurances that Arab leaders would meet privately, one on one, with him and his colleagues. Israel was represented by its ambassador to the United States, Moshe Arad.

Except for Arad, there was general agreement that there should be an international conference. Arad, reflecting the split in Israel’s “national unity” government, said that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir opposes such a conference while Foreign Minister Shimon Peres favors it. However, he said, not even Peres “would come to the kind of conference that was discussed here.”

Carter asked Arad if Israel would participate if it became clear that Jordan would never negotiate directly with Israel without some sort of international framework. The Israeli ambassador replied: “This avoidance of direct negotiations is behind the fascination with an international conference.”

With the exception of the Syrian representative, who delivered an unyielding attack on Israel, Arab officials tried to present their positions in the most moderate of terms. For example, Hanna Siniora, managing editor of an Arab-language newspaper in Jerusalem and a frequent spokesman for PLO views, said that the Palestinians would never abandon their demand for a state of their own. But he said that they would accept an “almost demilitarized” status in which they would pose no threat to Israel.

Siniora, who was once nominated by the PLO and accepted by Israel as a delegate to peace talks that never got started, said the Palestinian state would need a token army “to show the flag when visitors come.” But he said that the Palestinians would not object to strict limits on their armed forces because it would be pointless to try to compete militarily with “Israel, the regional superpower.”

Adnan Abu Odeh, minister of court for Jordan’s King Hussein, said that Jordan does not question Israel’s right to exist. He said that Hussein believes he can persuade the PLO to acknowledge Israel’s legitimacy and to renounce terrorism, provided that the PLO, in turn, receives a measure of recognition from Israel and the United States.

But, Abu Odeh said, Washington failed to support Hussein’s overtures.

“The story of the peace process in the Middle East has been a story of undermining moderates and moderation,” he said. “I suppose we should be intransigent because all our moderation and flexibility is interpreted as intransigence anyway.”

Emile Sahliyeh, a Palestinian academic who once taught at Bir Zeit University on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said that it is time for the PLO to embrace moderation as the most promising means to ending the Israeli occupation.

“The PLO has made several statements about Israel’s right to exist, but those statements were always tainted by rhetoric,” said Sahliyeh, a close supporter of the PLO. “We should stop that.”

In the last analysis, the conference was just an academic exercise. Haim Shaked, a professor from Tel Aviv University, reminded participants that it is a mistake to confuse “the dynamics of a meeting like ours with the dynamics and political realities of the world outside.”