Camp David Accords Fail: Timeline idea thread

In my international relations class we've been spending a good deal of time on the Israeli-Arab conflict. In particular the Camp David Accords. I am curious what everyone thinks would happen, short and long term, if the Camp David Accords had failed.

I think a few things would occur,
. Another Arab-Israeli war sometime in the early 80's
. Israel would put more effort into keeping Iran an ally, even if it means covert operations to assassinate anti-Shah protest leaders, including the Ayatollah.
. If the above occurs, and prevents the Iranian hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter has a much better chance of winning the 1980 election.

I'm considering writing a timeline with this PoD. What do you guys think? I'm still doing more research into the politics of Israel and the surrounding Middle Eastern Nations.
 
I remember reading that Syria sort of gave up on trying to match Israel's military after the 1973 war, and started focusing on supporting the PLO and other organizations like that instead. I can't find much on that right now, but if that were the case, a weakened Syria would probably not want to pick a fight with Israel. And Sadat was more pragmatic than most of the middle east leaders. He wouldn't want a war if it could be avoided. But at some point, if Israel is still in the Sinai by lets say 1988, then yes, war is a real possibility.

Needless to say I will be following this with great interest!
 
Awfully short timeframe to work from

The camp david talks concluded OTL in september 1978, that revolution was already underway in Iran at that point. Assassinating Khomeini doesn't fix the general breakdown in support for the Shah, or the revolutionary conditions. In essence Khomeini was like Lenin, coming in to take advantage of something that was happening already.

The Shah himself assassinated lots of opposition leaders and it didn't keep him in power. His government was widely hated at this point. the best result could be if Shapour Bakhtiar's reformist provisional government keeps power, but Israeli weakening of the islamists could just as easily see the Tudeh take over, they were pretty powerful in the national front until the islamists purged them, and the Soviets are right there to help.

You could get a islamo-communist Persia, instead of an islamic one, maybe. Either way, the shah is going, and whatever succeeds him will not particularly friendly to Israel. Best hope would be coldly neutral.
 
I remember reading that Syria sort of gave up on trying to match Israel's military after the 1973 war, and started focusing on supporting the PLO and other organizations like that instead. I can't find much on that right now, but if that were the case, a weakened Syria would probably not want to pick a fight with Israel. And Sadat was more pragmatic than most of the middle east leaders. He wouldn't want a war if it could be avoided. But at some point, if Israel is still in the Sinai by lets say 1988, then yes, war is a real possibility.

Needless to say I will be following this with great interest!

I haven't read much on Syria, but I bet if Egypt were to go to war again sometime in the 80's they would manage to drag Syria along with them.

What might happen to Sadat after a failed Camp David? Would he still be assassinated for even attempting a peace treaty with Israel?

Awfully short timeframe to work from

The camp david talks concluded OTL in september 1978, that revolution was already underway in Iran at that point. Assassinating Khomeini doesn't fix the general breakdown in support for the Shah, or the revolutionary conditions. In essence Khomeini was like Lenin, coming in to take advantage of something that was happening already.

The Shah himself assassinated lots of opposition leaders and it didn't keep him in power. His government was widely hated at this point. the best result could be if Shapour Bakhtiar's reformist provisional government keeps power, but Israeli weakening of the islamists could just as easily see the Tudeh take over, they were pretty powerful in the national front until the islamists purged them, and the Soviets are right there to help.

You could get a islamo-communist Persia, instead of an islamic one, maybe. Either way, the shah is going, and whatever succeeds him will not particularly friendly to Israel. Best hope would be coldly neutral.

Until the Camp David Accords Israel pursued a Periphery Strategy in its foreign policy. It wanted to ally with as many non-Arab Muslim nations as it could. That's why it had fairly good relations with Turkey and Iran. I can imagine that with out Egypt becoming friendly to Israel, the Israelis would see a greater need to keep Iran friendly, whether under the Shah or not. So how was the relationship between Israel and the post-shah, pre-Ayatollah regime?
 

Cook

Banned
Another Arab-Israeli war sometime in the early 80's
I remember reading that Syria sort of gave up on trying to match Israel's military after the 1973 war, and started focusing on supporting the PLO and other organizations like that instead.
Syria and Israel have fought a war since 1973; The 1982 Lebanese War saw Israeli and Syrian ground forces clash as well as them fighting the largest air battle since the Second World War. Doubtless it Egypt were still in a state of war with Israel in 1982, the pressure on the Egyptian leadership to open a second front against Israel would have been impossible to resist.

Significantly, without the peace accords there would not have been a realignment of Egyptian foreign policy away from the Soviet Union and towards the United States, that would mean a weaker Egyptian economy and a much weaker Egyptian armed forces.

Israel would put more effort into keeping Iran an ally...
In the late 1970s Arab Nationalism was seen as the threat to Israel, not anything as nebulous as a Pan-Islamic identity; given the extreme speed of the Shah’s fall, combined with the truly unprecedented extent of change in attitude that the Islamic Revolution brought to Iran, the Israeli’s would have had to be, quite literally, clairvoyant to have anticipated this sufficiently early enough to have done anything about it. Not that there was anything the Israeli’s could have done about it anyway; the Islamic Revolution was that rarest of all things in the twentieth century: a real people’s revolution.
. If the above occurs, and prevents the Iranian hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter has a much better chance of winning the 1980 election.
Carter had other things going against him politically than the hostage crisis (and as said above, there is little possibility of avoiding the Islamic Revolution). A far more likely scenario would be that Carter’s is discredited early when his first big foray into foreign policy, the Camp David talks, go nowhere; ie. no Nobel Prize for you, Jimmy.
 
Top