The Frailties of Diplomacy

Hardly had the Camp David accords been signed on Sept. 17, 1978, when the participants began to argue about what they had agreed to during the 13 days they had spent together at the presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. On Sept. 18, President Jimmy Carter told Congress that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had agreed to a freeze on the building of new Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip until an autonomy agreement for those territories had been negotiated--a process that could take several years. For his part, Begin insisted that the freeze applied only to...

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