Israel's national archive has just released protocols of momentous discussions held during the two-day visit to Israel by then-President Jimmy Carter in March 1979. Carter traveled to Israel to lend the authority and prestige of the presidency to clearing the last significant obstacles to the realization of a historic treaty of peace between Egypt and Israel, which was signed soon thereafter on March 26, 1979.
The documents' release comes only days before the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama. The two events, separated by 34 years almost to the day, share a only a superficial similarity. Carter's assessment that an Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement was a vital interest to all parties, his determination to succeed despite all obstacles and his willingness to engage, confront and resolve obstacles that reluctant leaders placed in his path offer not only an instructive contrast to the upcoming Obama visit to Israel, but also an instructive example of presidential leadership that the current US president may want to emulate.
The United States was a latecomer to the process of rapprochement between Egypt and Israel. In the aftermath of the October 1973 war, Washington was wedded to a stale diplomatic process centered upon superpower collaboration at a Geneva conference. Egypt's then-president Anwar Sadat had other ideas: a separate, bilateral engagement between Israel and Egypt that would establish Egyptian leadership over the process and win for Egypt both an Israeli retreat from the occupied Sinai peninsula and a secure strategic economic and security alliance with the United States.
In the months following Sadat's dramatic visit to Israel in November 1977, the Carter administration embraced the process created by Sadat and then-prime minister Menachem Begin and Israel's foreign minister Moshe Dayan. In two weeks of grueling negotiations at Camp David in September 1978, Carter oversaw the birth of a framework that still remains almost four decades later. This is Washington's strategic keystone in the region, and a core interest of Israel and Egypt alike that weathered not only Sadat's assassination, the downfall of his successor and the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood, but also a relentless Israeli settlement program aimed at preventing Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank.
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