Camp David's Lessons

The New York Times
Wednesday April 9, 1980
Roger Fisher

With the autonomy talks on the future of the West Bank and Gaza deadlocked, and as President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt visits Washington this week and Prime Minister Menachem Begin next week, there are calls for a new Camp David summit meeting. But it was not just the summit, the mountain air, or President Carter's persuasiveness that in two weeks turned deadlock into agreement. Rather, Camp David demonstrated the remarkable effectiveness of a mediator who uses a single negotiating text. If the United States wants another success, we need both to understand the nature of today's problem and to return to that powerful method of mediation.

The current deadlock is understood by looking at the parties' choices. Mr. Sadat can do little more than he already has. It is Mr. Begin that Mr. Carter will be pressing for concessions on land, irrigation water and future Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Yet next week, or at a summit meeting, it would be useless for Mr. Begin to make major concessions to Egypt since Egypt can do nothing about the West Bank. However much Israel were to give up now, it would be asked to give up more later after King Hussein of Jordan and Palestinians had joined the negotiation.

Faced with this problem, the United States keeps pressing Hussein and Palestinian leaders to join the autonomy talks. But to join the talks would subject these Arabs to political criticism and a loss of bargaining position in exchange for nothing; to stay out is politically popular and keeps options open. Hence the deadlock.

This lack of progress - both within the autonomy talks and outside them - is a result of the current negotiating approach.

The Untied States has joined the parties in playing the standard negotiating game of trying to extract concessions, a process that tends to lock parties into their positions. This concession hunting approach, by its adversary nature and by the necessity of making commitments, seriously interferes with the first function of negotiation: the creative inventing of possible ways to reconcile differing interests. The standard approach also interferes with the second function of negotiation: decision making. A joint result requires each party to make a series of painful unilateral concessions without knowing what, if anything, will be gotten in return.

These are the problems to which the single-negotiating-text procedure used at Camp David was the answer. Rather than press Mr. Sadat and Mr. Begin to change their position (which would tend to lock them in), the United States explored their interests and then quickly produced a rough draft of the kind of operational document that the conference might produce.

That working draft was not presented as a United States proposal that anyone was expected to accept. The United States asked each of the parties not for concessions but for criticism of the draft. It is hard to make concessions; it is easy to criticize. Over the succeeding days and in light of criticism, the United States prepared some 23 versions of the text, one after another. In the end, the United States, with the help of both sides, had shaped a proposal that it was prepared to recommend as the best reconciliation of Egypt's and Israel's differing interests that it could produce under the circumstances.

On the last day of the Camp David meeting, Mr. Sadat and Mr. Begin were each faced with a single decision that he could make, knowing what he was getting in return. The political context, the isolation of Camp David, the inherent deadline of the end of the summit meeting, and the skill and persuasiveness of the President and others, all helped. But the single-negotiating text procedure was critical because it offered each party a single carefully structured choice.

The United States should not be asking Israel for one concession after another within the autonomy talks. Rather, the United States should be trying, with the help of all concerned, to improve a single negotiating text on West Bank and Gaza autonomy until it has devised a final draft that it is prepared to recommend to everybody, including Palestinians.

The single-negotiating-text procedure is available for broader use beyond interim arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza. It also avoids questions of recognition.

Whatever the outcome of the current post-Camp-David discussions, someone (if not the United States, perhaps Britain or Hussein) ought now to be traveling among Amman, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem and Riyadh, and marking up and improving a working draft that should be acceptable to all those willing to seek a genuine Arab-Israeli peace.