I have tasted firsthand the nuance, complexity and intractability of the seemingly endless conflicts throughout the Middle East. The current war between Israel and Hamas is only the latest in a conflict that stretches over 2,500 years.
In 1975, two years after the Yom Kippur War, President Gerald Ford sent a bipartisan delegation of three U.S. senators and seven House members including myself to meet with Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. While Iran hadn’t been involved in the war, under the leadership of the U.S.-friendly shah, Iran was the only OPEC country to defy the oil embargo and continued to supply Israel with oil, a critical element in any settlement.
The U.S. involvement in Vietnam had just ended, with the loss of 55,000 American lives. The humiliating images of American helicopters rescuing U.S. embassy personnel from the rooftop of the embassy, as the North Vietnamese victoriously marched into Saigon, were still fresh in the minds of Americans.
The appetite among the American people for any new form of foreign engagement was low to nonexistent. Yet, we were seen as the only potential honest broker by the two sides in the Middle East conflict.
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Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was the intermediary through what became known as “shuttle diplomacy,” and had the sides talking about a negotiated settlement. He was instructed by Ford to keep Congress closely looped into the process. The War Powers Act, enacted just two years earlier, placed a check on the president’s power to commit the United States to an armed conflict without the consent of Congress.
Ford was acutely sensitive to the role of the legislative branch and the dangers of unilateral actions of the executive branch. Watergate and Vietnam were still fresh.
He was also privy to Kissinger’s Realpolitik approach in foreign policy. As a part of his negotiation with Egypt and Israel, Kissinger had included a secretive and highly controversial clause, known as Sinai II, concluded in September 1975. It committed the United States to construct an underground cable early-warning station, manned by up to 200 American civilians, in the Sinai Peninsula in order to preserve the agreement between Israel and Egypt. Ford wanted congressional approval of this. He was unwilling to go forward with an executive agreement alone.
It was our role to meet independently of the Kissinger team to assess the wisdom of proceeding with this. Our conclusion after the visits with each of the key players, which included a stop in Naples, Italy, to meet with the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Adm. Stansfield Turner, was that it was a risk worth taking given the assurances we had received.
Religion the fundamental difference
Wars throughout the centuries have been fought largely over land and not infrequently the ambitions of an egocentric leader, like Napoleon, Attila the Hun and today’s example, Vladimir Putin, who aspires to return Russia to the imperial age of Peter the Great.
The Israeli-Palestine conflict is different in a fundamental way. It will likely never have any final agreement, only periodic periods of cease-fire and temporary peace. When religion enters the picture, the conflict moves to a whole new realm that defies any lasting, permanent solution.
Jerusalem is sacred to three major religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all of which trace their roots to the Old Testament figure of Abraham. Key sites in the city hold profound significance for each faith, such as the Western Wall for Jews, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Christians, and the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque for Muslims. These faiths share common narratives and historical figures, which contributes to Jerusalem’s deep spiritual importance but also fuels historical and contemporary conflicts over the city.
The difficulty of reaching lasting peace in the current Gaza conflict is aggravated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-right coalition’s inflexibility. “There will never be a Palestinian state. This place is ours,” Netanyahu said recently during a visit to the Maale Adumim settlement in the West Bank where thousands of new housing units would be added. “We will safeguard our heritage, our land and our security.”
The tragic cost of leadership
Reflecting back on this period, it is the only time since the founding of Israel in 1948 when there were leaders of the respective countries willing to step to the fore and find enough common ground to reach an agreement. And, as would be tragically borne out in the case of all three with whom we met, at great personal cost to them personally.
Rabin and Sadat were assassinated by religious extremists who felt they were ceding too much to the other side. The shah, who was overthrown during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, died the following year while living in exile in Egypt.
The negotiations started and conducted by Kissinger, and our congressional delegation, would finally come to fruition in 1978 under President Jimmy Carter and the Camp David Accords. Both Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin would receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The accords didn’t include any provision for a Palestinian state, which sparked broad discontent throughout the Arab world, leading to Sadat’s assassination three years later.
The Palestinian state issue
Five Israeli prime ministers before Netanyahu either openly supported a two-state solution or were at least willing to include it in negotiations. In our discussion, Rabin and his cabinet were very open to a two-state solution and the need to negotiate with the Palestinians and pursue peace. Rabin was a key figure in the Oslo Accords of 1993, which laid the groundwork for such solution. As noted above, Rabin paid with his life for being seen as too willing to cede territory taken by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967.
The backstory of a Palestinian state was significantly shaped by the outcome of the Six-Day War, when Israel, responding to rising regional tensions and the mobilization of Arab forces, launched preemptive strikes against Egypt and Syria, and captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip along with the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights.
Six years later, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel to retake land lost in 1967. Though Israel pushed them back, the war reshaped regional dynamics and led to future peace talks.
As we met with the three leaders in 1975, I still remember the lasting impression made by the Shah of Iran on our group. The meetings in Egypt and Israel, which preceded our trip to Iran, were hosted by the leaders of the two countries and their respective cabinets. When our group would ask a question, it would be addressed by the particular cabinet minister under whose purview the topic fell. The shah greeted us warmly and asked his staff and cabinet members to remain outside and our accompanying staff as well. He said he wanted to personally conduct the discussion and negotiation.
The meeting lasted for six hours with him sitting at the head of a long table, not unlike a corporate board room, and he held forth on every point of contention between the parties with a command of detail like I have never witnessed on the part of a country’s leader.
His successors, under the control of the ayatollahs, have shown little appetite for the same level of engagement in finding a lasting agreement.
Alan W. Steelman is a former Republican member of Congress representing Texas’ 5th Congressional District from 1973 to 1977.