Events Fail to Live Up to Sadat’s Initiative; Israel Quietly Marks ’77 Trip

A mid-1970s Israeli Foreign Ministry brochure about the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat asked rhetorically: “Does Sadat Really Want Peace With Israel?”

Fourteen pages later, it concluded: “Examination of Sadat’s attitude, as revealed in his statements and in those of his associates, invalidates the view that his leadership offers a prospect of settling the protracted conflict between the Arabs and Israel. . . . It appears that as a leader, he is shackled and imprisoned by a set of chauvinistic and religious concepts from which he is unable to extricate himself.”

Ten years ago today, that same Sadat stunned the world with a historic trip to Jerusalem that proved to be the first step toward what is still the only peace treaty between Israel and an Arab nation.

Bold Initiative

His visit was one of the boldest initiatives in the annals of statecraft, and it demonstrated once more the limitations of long-distance political analysis.

Commented Ezer Weizman, the man who was Israeli defense minister at the time: “The feeling that most of us were victims of (was) that, ‘Well, he’s an Arab. What do you expect? He doesn’t think like us.’ ”

Speaking at a seminar commemorating Sadat’s trip earlier this week, Weizman, who is a minister-without-portfolio in the current government, added, “We should have seen that great leadership can also happen in the Arab world.”

The seminar, sponsored by the Government Press Office, was part of a relatively low-key anniversary observance that reflects widespread ambivalence here over what is usually termed the “cold peace” between Egypt and Israel that finally evolved from Sadat’s visit.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a big thing,” conceded an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman about the commemoration. “But the same goes for Egypt.”

Early last week, Cairo’s ambassador to Israel, Mohammed Bassiouny, informed the Foreign Ministry that former Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Khalil would not be coming, as expected, because of poor health.

It was only at the last minute that, to the surprise of Israeli officials, the Egyptians reversed course and said the visit was still on. Khalil, now chairman of the Arab International Bank and No. 2 man in Egypt’s ruling party, arrived for a three-day visit late Monday and met Tuesday with both Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. He was guest of honor at a dinner hosted by Peres on Tuesday night.

A second seminar commemorating Sadat’s trip was held Tuesday at Haifa University, and another one, sponsored by the International Center for Peace in the Middle East, was held Wednesday in suburban Tel Aviv.

Still, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said, relative to the importance of the original event, the commemorations are “nothing.” Both Peres and Shamir will be out of town on the actual anniversary. Shamir, who voted against the peace treaty in 1979 and says he still objects to some of its provisions, left Tuesday night for a visit to the United States. And Peres left Wednesday on a three-country tour of Western Europe.

Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who welcomed Sadat to Israel that night of Saturday, Nov. 19, 1977, and who signed the peace with him 18 months later, remains a recluse at his Jerusalem home and has given no indication that he plans to emerge for the anniversary.

By contrast, the mood in the country when Sadat arrived 10 years ago was euphoric. Israelis who were on hand compare it with the exaltation of the founding of the state and the 1967 capture of Jerusalem’s Old City with its hallowed Western Wall, which is Judaism’s holiest site.

‘To the End of the World’

The Egyptian president had announced on Nov. 9, 1977 that he was ready “to go to the end of the world . . . to the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) itself” in search of peace. But, said Knesset member Eliyahu Ben-Elissar, who was chief of staff for Prime Minister Begin at the time of the visit and who later served as Israel’s first ambassador to Egypt, no one, “including Sadat’s closest advisers,” believed him.

It was not until early in the week of Sadat’s arrival that Israeli officials really began to take his offer seriously, the legislator said.

And Peres, in a toast Tuesday night, told Khalil that even as the Egyptian delegation walked off the plane 10 years ago, it was like a dream.

“You looked to us like people coming from the moon, from a different planet,” he recalled.

How the euphoria and hope of November, 1977 turned to the ambivalence of November, 1987 is a matter of sharp political debate here.

While the peace has grown stronger, relations between the two nations have not, reported Ben-Elissar, a member of Shamir’s rightist Likud Bloc. There is no sentiment on either side to return to military confrontation, he explained, but at the same time relations remain formal and “cool,” primarily because that’s the way Egypt wants them.

Ben-Elissar said his “greatest disappointment” is that “there is no true, daily dialogue going on between the two nations, not to mention between the two peoples.” And that is dangerous, he said, because “the substance of relations ultimately becomes the substance of peace.”

Sadat’s move was condemned through most of the Arab world, which formally evicted Egypt from the Arab League. The Egyptian leader was finally assassinated in October, 1981, by Muslim fundamentalists who saw his rapprochement with Israel as traitorous to the Arab and Islamic cause.

To Avoid Embarrassment

Officials here speculated that the reason Cairo let on last week that Khalil’s trip would be scrubbed was because of the extraordinary Arab League summit meeting then under way in Amman, Jordan. Egypt did not want to embarrass allies in the Jordanian capital who were battling diplomatically to restore its standing, in this view.

In the end, Cairo emerged from the Arab summit as a big winner. Delegates decided that it was up to individual Arab countries whether to restore full diplomatic relations with Egypt, and as a result nine have quickly done so. The result was viewed by most officials here as an exoneration of Sadat, who once said that it would not be Egypt which returned to the Arab world after its censure but the Arab world that would ultimately come back to Egypt.

Ben-Elissar agreed that the Arab summit was “a tremendous diplomatic success for Egypt” but said he was less enthusiastic about it than some others here “because I have the impression that we are paying the price.” He predicted that Egypt would continue to maintain cool ties with Israel since its priorities “haven’t changed.”

Weizman, by contrast, charged that Jerusalem is at least as much to blame as Cairo for the state of Israeli-Egyptian relations.

“One of the reasons the process has not moved the way I think it should have is that we didn’t tackle the problem” of the Palestinians, which the Egyptians had always made clear was central to their view of peace, he said.

Israel and Egypt agreed during intense, U.S.-mediated talks at Camp David in 1978 that they would negotiate, “in good faith,” the terms of Palestinian autonomy in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for a five-year transition period. The “final status” of the territories would be determined during the transition.

Ben-Elissar said that Egypt, Israel and the United States each had a different interpretation of this portion of the Camp David agreements and that “had there not been three interpretations, the treaty would never have been signed.” The Egyptians, he said, believed that five years of autonomy would be followed by creation of a Palestinian state while Israel never had any intention of granting the Palestinians anything more than administrative autonomy. Washington’s view was something in between, he added, but leaned more toward Cairo’s interpretation.

Talks Broke Down Quickly

In fact, autonomy talks quickly broke down, and Egyptian-Israeli relations were further strained by Israel’s June, 1982, invasion of Lebanon.

Weizman resigned as Begin’s defense minister in 1980, partly in protest over the Likud leader’s handling of the peace process. He is now a member of Peres’ centrist Labor Alignment, from which he delights in taking verbal pot shots at his former party.

Weizman praised Sadat as a “unique and phenomenal character” and said one of his most farsighted moves was to designate a successor while he was still alive. The successor was Egypt’s current president, Hosni Mubarak, and his continuation of Sadat’s line preserved the peace in the face of Sadat’s assassination, the Lebanon war, and all the other hurdles of the last 10 years, Weizman said.

The minister implicitly criticized both Shamir and Peres for failing to exercise the kind of leadership that Sadat did, even though the results of this month’s Arab summit suggest that the time may be ripe for a new breakthrough toward Middle East peace.

What is required now, he said, is “a leadership in Israel that will see peace as the most important thing, and see Egypt as a partner.”

If he headed the Israeli government, Weizman said, “I would pick up the telephone to Mubarak and say, ‘It’s time we met, and preferably with (Jordan’s King) Hussein.’ ”