REFLEXIONS

Monte-Carlo has five film festivals a year. An open invitation to ennui, were it not for some exceptional work like Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace, the film that opened the Monte-Carlo TV festival this year. Channels made audiences sit up, lean forward, even – unbelievingly - sob.
In revisiting the presidency of Jimmy Carter, media denigrators never fail to overlook Carter’s brokering of the landmark 1979 peace accord between Israel and Egypt. It took Channel Productions and director Harry Hunkele to balance the record. Henkele uses actual footage to show the complex run-up to the laboured Camp David talks, which involved a cast of characters as oddly assorted as the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, the late King Hassan II of Morocco, the US billionaire Leon Charney, journalists Wolf Blitzer and more. Arranging to bring Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin together in the same space was Jimmy Carter’s first miracle. His second was actually achieving an Egyptian-Israeli peace deal against all odds. One can’t help wishing for fly-on-the-wall invisibility to view the history-making talks. Channels gives us something similar: we see Carter fight despair – as talks stall – with determination. We see a charming, urbane Anwar Sadat and an almost expressionless Begin, until Carter brings out Begin’s basic humanity by simple attention to detail.
Carter was often accused of wasting time on detail, overlooking the forest for the trees. But he, more than any other president, was aware of what a powerful component in the business of politics the human story is. When Begin asked Carter for copies of the peace accord for his five grandchildren, Carter aides put in a call to Tel Aviv to get the names of the Premier’s grandchildren so that a personal message could be written on each copy.
In the 30 years since Camp David, no US President has really tackled Middle East peace. The risks have been too great: Carter sacrificed his political career and Sadat sacrificed his life.
Can Obama do it?
Carter’s response comes at the very end of the film, ‘If President Obama undertakes this task from the beginning of his administration and takes a balanced position, with the Arabs on one side, including the Palestinians, and the Israelis on the other side, and accepts the principles that were agreed to at Camp David, as a starting point, and the two-state solution that’s evolved since then as a final goal, then we can have peace.”