BEIRUT -- It will be something less than a miracle if U.S. President Bill Clinton does achieve the high purpose he has set himself in summoning Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Camp David: an end to conflict between Arab and Jew in Palestine. After all, it won't be the first of its kind. When U.S. President Jimmy Carter brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat together in November 1978, he did so in conditions of high risk and low expectations -- just like those that prevail today.
It will be "less" than a miracle because the same circumstances, the weakness and desperation of one of the protagonists, that rescued Camp David I from disaster may well do the same for Camp David II. Today, this is Arafat's predicament; in 1978, it was Sadat's. It took 13 days of tantrums, threatened walkouts and the resignation of his foreign minister, but in the end he caved in.
Sadat went to Camp David proclaiming his undying loyalty to the orthodoxy of the time: Egypt would never make a "separate peace," and never abandon its Arab, and above all, its Palestinian brethren. Any deal he reached would serve the larger, "comprehensive" peace to which all the others could eventually adhere. But he did abandon them and that was the capitulation.