1. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirsofa President (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), pp. 273–275.

2. Harold Saunders, talk on presidents at Hofstra University (15–17 November 1990), rebroadcast by C-SPAN, 24 December 1992.

3. The quote is from Jim Wooten, "The Conciliator," New York Times Magazine, 29 January 1995, p. 28. Emphasis in original. Other insights in this and

4. Quandt, Peace Process, p. 259.

5. Reich, The United States and Israel, p. 45; Brzezinski, Power and Principle, p. 91; and interview with William Quandt, 12 May 1991.

6. Wooten, "The Conciliator."

7. Interview with Harold Saunders, 13 October 1997.

8. Interview with William Quandt, 13 June 1997.

9. Asked during an interview with the Jerusalem Post in September 1977 to define what he meant by "homeland," Carter called it a "place for people to live." See Shadid, The United States and the Palestinians, p. 134.

10. Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 277.

11. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 21–22.

12. Samuel W. Lewis, "The United States and Israel: Constancy and Change," in The Middle East: Ten Years after Camp David, ed. William B. Quandt (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1988), pp. 226–227.

13. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israel Conflict, p. 316, made a similar observation, noting that Carter and his aides had difficulty understanding the "yearnings and fears" of the U.S. Jewish community. Spiegel apparently did not consider it necessary for Carter to understand Palestinian "yearnings and fears."

14. Saunders, Hofstra University talk.

15. Jimmy Carter, The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), pp. 115–129.

16. See, for instance, Shadid, The United States and the Palestinians, pp. 138–139, 141.

17. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 65–68, 74; Vance, Hard Choices, p. 35; and Lewis, "The United States and Israel," p. 228.

18. Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 51–52, and Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 18, 22, 64–65.

19. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, p. 84.

20. Interview with Quandt, 13 June 1997.

21. Zbigniew Brzezinski, François Duchêne, and Kiichi Saeki, "Peace in an International Framework," Foreign Policy, summer 1975, 3–17.

22. Toward Peace in the Middle East, Report of a Study Group (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1975). Highlights of the Brookings report conclusion are cited in Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 85–86, and in Quandt, Decade of Decisions, pp. 290–292.

23. Quandt, Peace Process, pp. 560–561, note 1, and Saunders, Hofstra University talk.

24. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, p. 77, and interview with Quandt, 12 May 1991.

25. The information on Vance in this and the following paragraph is taken from Quandt, Camp David, pp. 34–35; Vance, Hard Choices, pp. 27–29, 163–167; and interviews with Quandt, 13 June 1997, and Saunders.

26. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 34–35.

27. Janice J. Terry, "The Carter Administration and the Palestinians," in U.S. Policyon Palestinefrom Wilsonto Clinton, ed. Michael W. Suleiman(Normal, Ill.: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1995), pp. 172–173, note 8.

28. Ibid., pp. 164–165, 169–170; Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, p. 327; and Brzezinski, Power and Principle, p. 438. Some pro-Israeli historians and commentators have characterized Carter's administration as lacking any senior official who advocated Israel's position or regarded Israel as a valuable ally. See particularly Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, pp. 326–327. The view that no pro-Israeli official had any impact on policy seriously underestimates the effectiveness of the several pro-Israeli officials described.

29. Quandt, Camp David, p. 5. See pp. 6–29 for Quandt's analysis of the political constraints under which Carter operated in making Middle East policy.

30. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 51, 88, and Vance, Hard Choices, pp. 169–170.

31. Vance, Hard Choices, pp. 169–170, and Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 280–281.

32. Terry, "The Carter Administration," p. 164.

33. Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 282; Brzezinski, Powerand Principle, p. 24; and Vance, Hard Choices, pp. 174–176.

34. Vance, Hard Choices, p. 184.

35. Ibid., pp. 180–182, and Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 291.

36. Carter, Saunders, and Quandt all acknowledge being misled by Begin. Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 300; Eric Silver, Begin: The Haunted Prophet (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 181; and Quandt, Camp David, pp. 82–84.

37. Silver, Begin, p. 168.

38. Tivnan, The Lobby, pp. 107–110.

39. Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 289, 292, and Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 96–97.

40. Tivnan, The Lobby, pp. 110–112.

41. Ibid., p. 113.

42. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, p. 98.

43. Tivnan, The Lobby, pp. 118–119, 124.

44. Ibid., p. 109. Ironically, when the National Security Council staff asked the Israeli embassy for information on Begin in preparation for his first visit, the embassy sent to the White House a newly published, favorable portrait of the new prime minister entitled Terror out of Zion. See ibid., p. 115. In the late

45. Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, pp. 192–193.

46. Ibid., p. 194.

47. See The Jerusalem Post International Edition, 7 and 14 November 1987. A decade and a half after it had begun to acknowledge that Israel used "extreme physical and psychological pressures," the State Department was still, into the 1990s, shying away from using the word torture. Even Amnesty International did not use the word with regard to Israel until its 1990 report. Stanley Cohen, "Talking about Torture in Israel," Tikkun, November/December 1991, 24.

48. Suleiman, "American Public Support," p. 18.

49. Melman and Raviv, Friends in Deed, p. 215.

50. Quandt, Camp David, p. 81, and interview with Quandt, 12 May 1991.

51. Secretary of Defense Brown began a secret strategic dialogue in 1978 with his Israeli counterpart Ezer Weizman and as part of this exercise asked for assessments of the changing balance of power around the world. One official who worked on Middle East aspects was Dennis Ross, then a junior State Department official who would later become a key Middle East policymaker in the Bush and Clinton administrations. A proponent of Israel's strategic importance, Ross urged strengthened contacts between Tel Aviv and Washington but got nowhere during Carter's administration. See Melman and Raviv, Friends in Deed, p. 229.

52. Quandt, Camp David, pp. 85–87.

53. Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, pp. 212–213.

54. Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 498.

55. Kissinger himself testified before Congress immediately after concluding the Sinai II agreement, to which this and other promises to Israel were addenda, that the addenda were not binding commitments of the United States but could be altered if circumstances changed. In addition, in a report on the Panama Canal Treaty issued in 1978, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concluded that because the president has exclusive constitutional authority to negotiate with foreign entities, he may voluntarily commit himself not to negotiate but may not circumscribe the right of a successor to enter negotiations. See Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, p. 224.

56. Interview with Quandt, 13 June 1997.

57. Interview with Nicholas Veliotes, 17 March 1998. Harold Saunders, who was involved in negotiating the Sinai II agreement and its codicils, has said that U.S. negotiators deliberately diluted this pledge in order to leave a door open to "an exchange of views in case it became necessary—for example, in moving backtoa Geneva Conference—to work out understandings with the PLOabout its participation and about its negotiating position." Saunders and Albin, Sinai II, p. 84.

58. Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, p. 211.

59. Quandt, Camp David, pp. 87–91, and Vance, Hard Choices, pp. 187–

60. Quandt, Camp David, p. 101, and Vance, Hard Choices, p. 187.

61. Quandt, Camp David, p. 94, note 34.

62. Ibid., pp. 101–102.

63. Ibid.

64. Quandt has said that when Arafat responded to the compromise proposal carried by Bolling with demands the United States could not possibly meet, including a demand for a guarantee that a PLO-led independent state would result from negotiations, Brzezinski finally lost patience with the PLO. He concluded that Arafat was not being serious, and the incident caused many in the administration to view the PLO as untrustworthy. Interview with Quandt, 13 June 1997.

65. See Quandt, Camp David, pp. 104–134, for a complete review of the negotiations and preparations for Geneva in September and October 1977, including the ill-fated U.S.-Soviet joint communiqué of October 1. The joint communiqué expressed the U.S. and Soviet interest in achieving a comprehensive peace settlement, via a Geneva conference, that would resolve all issues, including assuring the "legitimate rights" of the Palestinian people, and that would incorporate all parties to the conflict, including representatives of the Palestinians. Opposition to the communiqué from Israel and Israeli supporters in the United States was so strong that the United States backed away from it within days of its issuance.

66. Shadid, The United States and the Palestinians, p. 144, and Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, p. 225.

67. Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 302.

68. Quandt, Camp David, pp. 160–161.

69. Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, pp. 59–60, 221.

70. Quandt, Camp David, pp. 95, 322.

71. Former Israeli Prime Minister Rabin told political scientist Steven Spiegel in an interview that he believed Carter would have involved the PLO in the negotiating process had it not been for the Sinai II commitment. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, p. 474, note 342.

72. Quandt, Camp David, pp. 155–156, 168.

73. Ibid., pp. 168–169, and Vance, Hard Choices, p. 199.

74. Quandt, Camp David, pp. 193–194.

75. Ibid., pp. 162, 204.

76. Ibid., p. 183, and Vance, Hard Choices, p. 209.

77. Quandt, Camp David, p. 204.

78. See ibid., chs. 10–12 and Appendixes D—I, for a summation of Camp David and its aftermath, as well as texts of the various preliminary and final agreements and of the treaty.

79. Ibid., pp. 261, 322–323.

80. Ibid., p. 265.

81. Tillman, The United States in the Middle East, pp. 216–218.

82. Ibid., p. 197, and Harold H. Saunders, "An Israeli-Palestinian Peace," Foreign Affairs, fall 1982, 117.

83. Ann Mosely Lesch, Political Perceptions of the Palestinians on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute, 1980), pp. 6–16

84. Interview with Veliotes.

85. Quandt, Camp David, p. 323.

86. This is the conclusion of Quandt in ibid., p. 323.

87. Ibid., p. 321.

88. Saunders, The Other Walls, pp. 60–62.

89. Ibid.

90. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 279–280.

91. Ibid., pp. 438–440.

92. Vance believed, as he stated in a speech to the UN shortly after the Camp David accords, that no peace agreement would be "just or secure" if it did not resolve the Palestinian issue in such a way as to assure the Palestinians "that they and their descendants can live with dignity and freedom and have the opportunity for economic fulfillment and for political expression." Cited in Quandt, Camp David, p. 289. In January 1979 Vance proposed to Carter that the United States initiate contacts with the PLO in the hope of generating momentum, but the suggestion was treated with near derision by Carter's political aides. Later in the year, Vance, who had always been one of the administration's strongest opponents of Israeli settlement construction, repeatedly urged Carter to show firmness by publicly condemning the settlements and approving reductions in economic aid each time the Israelis built a new settlement. Carter, already disengaged, would not go along and ultimately became irritated with what he characterized as Vance's "dogged" pursuit of the settlements issue. Vance had noticeably lost influence with Carter in Middle East matters when Strauss and later Linowitz assumed the negotiating portfolio. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 278, 440–441.

93. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, pp. 442–443.

94. Quandt, Peace Process, pp. 328–329, and Reich, The United States and Israel, pp. 78–79.

95. Melman and Raviv, Friends in Deed, pp. 179–180.

96. Cited in Steve Bell, "American Journalism: Practices, Constraints, and Middle East Reportage," in The American Media and the Arabs, ed. Michael C. Hudson and Ronald G. Wolfe (Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1980), p. 99.

97. John Weisman, "Blind Spot in the Middle East," TV Guide, 24 October 1981, 8.

98. Time, 14 April 1980.

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid., and Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, pp. 521, 523, 531.