Posted on: Tuesday, September 18, 2001

Island Voices
Camp David in plane sights?

By Norman Geschwind
Associate professor of history at Hawai'i Pacific University

We all watched with horror the collapse of the World Trade Center and also watched the replay of the videos of the two planes as they smashed into the twin towers. We saw the billowing smoke made by the third plane that plunged into the Pentagon.

But what about the fourth plane? What was its destination before it crashed in a field in Pennsylvania? It was clear the terrorists carefully planned this unprecedented hijacking of four planes on the same day.

They also must have carefully chosen their targets.

The two targets they successfully reached were central symbols of American society. The twin towers of the World Trade Center symbolized our economic power; the Pentagon is the symbol of our military power. Some suggest the original target of the third plane might have been the White House, or that the White House was the target of that fourth plane.

But maybe, as I shall argue, the original destination of the fourth plane was Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland — a place loaded with historical symbolism for the terrorists.

When I first heard that Camp David might be a target, I immediately thought of the 1979 Camp David Accord signed by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat with President Carter acting as an intermediary.

I turned to the Internet and found a copy of the speech delivered by President Carter before a joint session of Congress on the Camp David meeting on the Middle East. The date was Sept. 18, 1978. After introductory remarks, Carter reminded Congress that he "met for the last two weeks at Camp David" with the "two great leaders" of the Middle East.

That meant that on Sept. 11, 1978, the Israeli and Egyptian leaders and President Carter were still involved in the negotiating process. The day the terrorists had chosen was an anniversary of the Camp David Accord.

Many of us remember that Sadat was assassinated by his troops ostensibly for signing an agreement with the Israelis. To the terrorists, no doubt, committing such an act of conciliation was for them an act of treason. For those who planned the hijackings — if they are who we think they are — the destruction of Camp David would erase a historic symbol that represented something they deeply hated.

Recently, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who has agonized over his role in the Vietnam War for years, wrote a book describing the conversations he held in the 1990s with his surviving Vietnamese counterparts. McNamara concluded that the tragedy of Vietnam was the failure of empathy.

Empathy has been defined as the ability to enter the beliefs, feelings and attitudes alien to our own. The great philosopher of empathy, historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, once wrote that empathy requires one to grasp "the particular vision of the universe that lies at the heart of an adversary's thought."

In McNamara's words, we must make the effort to understand "the perspective on one whose outlook is radically different."

One can imagine a day many months ago when the plotters of one of the most horrific days in American history sat down and marked on a map the three symbols they would plan to destroy. The first — the twin towers of the World Trade Center — the economic symbol of American society; the second — the Pentagon — the military symbol of this country; and finally the third — Camp David — the historical symbol of the peace process and Arab-Israeli cooperation.

It is essential for all of us to attempt to enter into minds alien from our own and begin the long process of understanding that there can be radical differences in the way other people organize their reality.