G. David Miller and Susan Gilson: Middle East Regional Cooperation: A Thirty-Year Assessment
[G. David Miller is a visiting professor in the Center for Regional Change and Adjunct Professor in the International Agriculture and Development Graduate Group in the School of Agriculture and Environment Science atUniversity of California, Davis. He teaches graduate courses in Micro-enterprise and in Project Design and Management. / Susan Gilson Miller is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Davis where she teaches courses on Mediterranean History and the History of North Africa.]
The Camp David Accords signed between Egypt and Israel in 1978 have endured despite a long period of extreme volatility in the region. In 1993, the Oslo Mutual Recognition Pact between Israel and the PLO took a further step toward overall peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Over the past three decades, the United States Government has assumed the role of guarantor and active promoter of these agreements visualized as the foundations of peace. In order to assure the smoothness of the process, it designed and managed a multi-faceted program intended to build trust and friendship between peoples on opposite sides of the conflict. The contention of this article is that the fundamental design of certain aspects of that program were flawed and their effects contrary to the goal of bringing the two sides closer together. In fact, we argue that U.S. efforts to bolster peace through programs of economic development called “regional cooperation” actually promoted many of the inequalities and hostilities they were trying to mitigate....
The Price of Peace
Camp DavidWhen Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David Peace Accords on March 26, 1979, it was expected that this landmark treaty would lead to an unprecedented “normalization” of relations, the fruits of which would include cultural exchange, trade, exchange of ambassadors, and transfer of technology. A brief overview of the architecture of U.S. assistance shows that the American peace assurance plan came in three parts. First, using some perverse logic, it provided billions of dollars of military assistance to both Israel and Egypt, which, by 2007, amounted to more than 102 billion dollars.[1] Second, two hours after the signing of the peace treaty on March 26, 1979, the United States signed a separate “memorandum of agreement” with Israel that included a pledge that it “will take such remedial measures as it deems appropriate, which may include diplomatic, economic and military measures” in Israel’s defense.[2] And finally, it promised non-military assistance to Israel that by 2007 amounted to more than fifty-three billion dollars, while it committed to Egypt delivery of the largesteconomic development package in history. By 2007, U.S. non-military aid to Egypt totaled close to forty billion dollars.[3] Each year since 1979, Israel has deposited a check into its national treasury, using a portion to purchase U.S. Treasury notes.[4] For the Egyptians, much of their economic development package was used to purchase Western science and technology in the form of American training, technical assistance and American-made goods and services.[5]
A very small part of this massive aid, hardly noticeable among all of the hundreds of American projects being launched by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Egypt, was a tiny program funded annually at a level of five to seven million dollars. Its purpose was to encourage cooperation between high-level Israeli scientists working at scores of well-funded Israeli research institutions, on the one hand, and a handful of top Egyptian research scientists struggling with very limited resources on the other. This program, known as MERC (Middle East Regional Cooperation), is the subject of our inquiry.
The assumption made by the technocrats who crafted the peace package was that the Israelis possessed a technological and scientific research capacity that their Arab neighbors were lacking. It was believed that the sharing of this knowledge would be an important contribution to the “normalization” process. Moreover, the cooperation at the scientific level would be accompanied by friendly exchanges that would open closed borders and allow Israelis and Egyptians to travel back and forth with ease. In retrospect, we see major flaws in this modest, good-faith, rapport-building initiative that led to unanticipated and disappointing consequences. The American effort to expose a small cadre of Arab academic elites to better-endowed Israeli scientific institutions was fated to achieve little in the way of trust and cooperation. Instead it accentuated a perception of technological inequality, threatened to alienate Arab academics from their own societies, and increased regional anxieties regarding Western cultural and economic hegemony....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy Journal
The Camp David Accords signed between Egypt and Israel in 1978 have endured despite a long period of extreme volatility in the region. In 1993, the Oslo Mutual Recognition Pact between Israel and the PLO took a further step toward overall peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Over the past three decades, the United States Government has assumed the role of guarantor and active promoter of these agreements visualized as the foundations of peace. In order to assure the smoothness of the process, it designed and managed a multi-faceted program intended to build trust and friendship between peoples on opposite sides of the conflict. The contention of this article is that the fundamental design of certain aspects of that program were flawed and their effects contrary to the goal of bringing the two sides closer together. In fact, we argue that U.S. efforts to bolster peace through programs of economic development called “regional cooperation” actually promoted many of the inequalities and hostilities they were trying to mitigate....
The Price of Peace
Camp DavidWhen Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David Peace Accords on March 26, 1979, it was expected that this landmark treaty would lead to an unprecedented “normalization” of relations, the fruits of which would include cultural exchange, trade, exchange of ambassadors, and transfer of technology. A brief overview of the architecture of U.S. assistance shows that the American peace assurance plan came in three parts. First, using some perverse logic, it provided billions of dollars of military assistance to both Israel and Egypt, which, by 2007, amounted to more than 102 billion dollars.[1] Second, two hours after the signing of the peace treaty on March 26, 1979, the United States signed a separate “memorandum of agreement” with Israel that included a pledge that it “will take such remedial measures as it deems appropriate, which may include diplomatic, economic and military measures” in Israel’s defense.[2] And finally, it promised non-military assistance to Israel that by 2007 amounted to more than fifty-three billion dollars, while it committed to Egypt delivery of the largesteconomic development package in history. By 2007, U.S. non-military aid to Egypt totaled close to forty billion dollars.[3] Each year since 1979, Israel has deposited a check into its national treasury, using a portion to purchase U.S. Treasury notes.[4] For the Egyptians, much of their economic development package was used to purchase Western science and technology in the form of American training, technical assistance and American-made goods and services.[5]
A very small part of this massive aid, hardly noticeable among all of the hundreds of American projects being launched by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Egypt, was a tiny program funded annually at a level of five to seven million dollars. Its purpose was to encourage cooperation between high-level Israeli scientists working at scores of well-funded Israeli research institutions, on the one hand, and a handful of top Egyptian research scientists struggling with very limited resources on the other. This program, known as MERC (Middle East Regional Cooperation), is the subject of our inquiry.
The assumption made by the technocrats who crafted the peace package was that the Israelis possessed a technological and scientific research capacity that their Arab neighbors were lacking. It was believed that the sharing of this knowledge would be an important contribution to the “normalization” process. Moreover, the cooperation at the scientific level would be accompanied by friendly exchanges that would open closed borders and allow Israelis and Egyptians to travel back and forth with ease. In retrospect, we see major flaws in this modest, good-faith, rapport-building initiative that led to unanticipated and disappointing consequences. The American effort to expose a small cadre of Arab academic elites to better-endowed Israeli scientific institutions was fated to achieve little in the way of trust and cooperation. Instead it accentuated a perception of technological inequality, threatened to alienate Arab academics from their own societies, and increased regional anxieties regarding Western cultural and economic hegemony....