The Dream Palace of the AmericansNovember/December 2019 27found a uniquely promising opportunity
to reach for it.
By this point, the Soviet Union was
on the brink o collapse, Iraq had been
roundly defeated in the Gul War, Iran
was still recovering from its eight-year
slugfest with Iraq, and Syria and the
Palestine Liberation Organization were
weak and broke. With all the rejectionist
spoilers o previous peace eorts hors
de combat, the road was clear to pursue
a regional settlement on U.S. terms.
The eort began with the Bush admin-
istration’s 1991 Madrid conference,
continued with the Clinton administra-
tion and the Oslo accords o 1993 and
1995, and for a few years really seemed
to be getting somewhere: a temporary
deal between Israel and the Palestinians,
an Israeli-Jordanian treaty, tantalizing
prospects o success on the Syrian track.
As so often in the 1990s, a beautiful
future seemed just around the corner.
And then things ground to a halt. In
1995, trying to derail the process, an
Israeli right-wing extremist assassinated
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Negotiations bogged down as neither
side made deep enough concessions to
satisfy the other’s concerns. And then,
in 2000, the Palestinians turned back to
violence. The second intifada’s grisly
campaign o terrorist attacks directed
against cafés, pizza parlors, discotheques,
and other civilian gathering places killed
over 1,000 Israelis and injured many
thousands more, leaving deep scars in
Israel’s national psyche. The median
Israeli voter became convinced that
ceding land to the Palestinians brought
conÁict rather than peace, and unsatis-
fying withdrawals from Lebanon in
2000 and Gaza in 2005 only reinforced
the feeling.Palestinian issue. And a close reading o
the Carter administration’s internal
documents shows that it was the Ameri-
cans, not the Egyptians, who were
obsessed with the “Framework for
Peace,” none more so than the president
himself. When Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin fought him on grant-
ing the Palestinians autonomy and
refused to commit to a freeze on Israeli
settlements in the territories, the
president became livid. Because Carter
had much grander ambitions than
Kissinger, the successful completion o
an Egyptian-Israeli settlement left him
deeply frustrated—to him it was a glass
hal empty rather than hal full. He
blamed Begin for the failure on the
Palestinian track and never forgave him.
When Begin and Sadat received the
Nobel Peace Prize, Carter wrote in his
diary, “I sent Begin and Sadat a con-
gratulatory message after they received
the Nobel Peace Prize jointly. Sadat
deserved it; Begin did not.”
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PEACE
PROCESS
The peace process languished during
the 1980s, as U.S. President Ronald
Reagan cared more about East-West
issues than Arab-Israeli ones and his
administration was divided between
the Israel-as-liability and Israel-as-asset
camps, frustrating bold initiatives. A
year after Camp David, moreover, the
Iranian Revolution upended regional
politics, shifting the geostrategic center
o gravity (along with attention and
resources) eastward to the Persian
Gulf. But the George H. W. Bush
administration came into oce favoring
the Carter administration’s goal o a
comprehensive peace, and in 1991, it