The U.S. Congress picked up the theme of cooperation and sealed the deal made at Camp David by passing the 1979 Foreign Assistance Bill.  The sentiment of Congress was expressed as follows:

The Congress declares and finds that the United States can and should play a constructive role in securing a just and durable peace in the Middle East by facilitating increased understanding between the Arab countries and Israel and by assisting the countries on [sic] the region in their efforts to achieve economic progress and political stability, which are the essential foundations of peace. It is the sense of the Congress that the United States assistance programs in the Middle East should be designed to promote mutual respect and security among the countries in the region and to foster a climate conducive to increased economic development, thereby contributing to a community of free, secure, and prospering countries in the Middle East.[12]

Strong opposition in the Middle East to the treaty caused considerable worry among its supporters about its long-term durability.  Despite the stated purpose of the Foreign Assistance Act to “promote mutual respect and security,” the distinctively different funding mechanisms to Israel and Egypt did little to advance this objective.  Moreover, there were no mechanisms built into the Accords that would actually operationalize cooperation. These obstacles had to be overcome before the “peace dividend” could be realized.

Enter Congressman Waxman

At the time of the framing of the 1979 Foreign Assistance Bill, Representative Henry Waxman of California served on the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East.  Rep. Waxman had a strong interest in Israel and was eager to do whatever was needed to assure the success of the treaty.  Looking back, he recently remarked, “I wanted the U.S. to help break down psychological barriers between Egyptians and Israelis so they could form personal relationships and bolster the peace process.”[13] Mr. Waxman therefore added an amendment to the 1979 Foreign Assistance Bill that set aside $5 million for activities to promote Arab-Israeli cooperation. In the belief that science and technology would be beneficial, the amendment read as follows:

It is the sense of the Congress that, in order to continue to build the structure of peace in the Middle East, the United States should finance and where appropriate participate in, cooperative projects of a scientific and technological nature involving Israel and Egypt and other Middle East countries wishing to participate.  These cooperative projects should include projects in the fields of agriculture, health, energy, the environment, education, water resources, and the social sciences.[14]

Rep. Waxman recently explained:  “I believed such work could help develop professional relationships and friendships that could enhance peace and understanding regardless of political developments…  I felt that scientists were in a unique position to set aside political and ideological views while pursuing research to benefit the entire region.  The academic arena was deliberately the focus of the program to reduce any government involvement that could inject political interference.”  Mainly due to his efforts, the Middle East Regional Cooperation (MERC) was launched in 1979 and has been funded annually ever since at the level of five to seven million dollars.  For the next quarter of a century, almost without exception, the MERC program involved three participants: Israel, Egypt and the United States.   During that period, MERC’s projects have almost exclusively been in the hard sciences with only marginal inclusion of social science or educational activity.

The Project Agenda

In the beginning, the projects were opportunities for the Egyptians to address applied technological issues, demonstrated by a list of the first projects funded by MERC: arid lands agriculture, adapting marine technology to solve the erosion problems caused by the Aswan damn, studying common vector-borne diseases such as Rift Valley Fever (a kind of malaria) that shortened life expectancy in Egypt to 51 years (as opposed to 71 in Israel), and creating fish pond projects and goat breeding projects similar to those underway in Israel. But there was an imbalance built-in right from the beginning.  Egyptians looked at each project as a means of improving Egyptian scientific and technological capacity, while Israeli and American scientists were eager to expand their research into unchartered areas that offered opportunities for publication. In Israel and Egypt, the major actors were academic institutions having close links to the appropriate line agencies such as the Ministries of Agriculture or Health; on the American side, it was an even mix of academic institutions, government agencies and NGOs.  Many of the early projects were large, requiring multi-year funding that quickly used up the annual appropriation of $5 million.

Limiting Contact

At the same time as the George Washington University study, USAID carried out a second study using in-house staff to examine whether social science research should be added to the project menu.[15] It concluded that the socio-political implications of carrying out social research were sensitive and should be studied carefully by a joint commission made up of representatives of the principal signatories. However, no such commission was ever formed. In the first fifteen years of MERC, only one major social science project was launched. “Images in Conflict,” undertaken ten years before Oslo, included Palestinian social scientists along with their Egyptian and Israeli counterparts. This collaborative and comparative research assessed viewpoints of the “other” by surveying more than 2,000 participants in Palestine, Egypt, and Israel in focused group discussions. In an anticipated second phase, researchers from each of the three communities would come together to analyze the findings and make them public.  However, there was little support within USAID to continue to fund this project after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.   Rather, strong sentiment held that the water, health and agriculture projects should take precedence over social science in the competition for limited funding. So the second phase was never funded and the “Images in Conflict” project was closed down. [16]

Only a tiny fraction of MERC funding went to projects that could be labeled as not strictly science and technology.  According to the Congressional Research Office, MERC provided a small grant to the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information in 2003 to draft a series of policy papers on Palestinian textbook reform.[17] And it provided some supplemental funding for a Mediterranean youth conference held in Spain in 1985 in which there were participants from all over the Mediterranean from Spain to Turkey and included youth from Israel, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine.[18] Together the sum total of MERC funding for these projects came to less than $1.5 million, about .01% of all MERC funding.  But these projects were the exception that proved the rule.  An overview of all MERC projects funded in its first twenty years shows a very limited record of people-to-people exchanges.  The final report of a seven-year-long project to combat infectious diseases offers insight into the typical level of interaction among the participants.  As the final report indicates, scientific activities were conducted “largely independently from one another, with very little evidence of true interdependent collaboration among the different research groups…. Cooperation among the Egyptian and Israeli participants was largely confined to joint attendance at meetings and limited exchange of samples.”[19]

Furthermore, there was practically no public knowledge of these collaborative activities, with little media attention and none of the usual public ceremonies marking inception or completion.  A “Wastewater Re-use Project” that grew out of an earlier “Marine Technology Project” reported results that were somewhat more upbeat.   After almost twenty-five years of implementation involving many of the same Israeli and Egyptian actors, the final report describes the relationship among its core members thusly:  “This group consists of approximately ten Israelis and Egyptians who periodically visit each other’s countries, remain in contact by telephone and fax, and meet at professional meetings and conferences.”[20]

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