‘Hopes and Dreams’ Unfulfilled : Decade After Camp David: No War, but a ‘Cold Peace’

Today a new dawn is emerging from the darkness of the past. A new chapter is being opened in the history of coexistence among nations. --Anwar Sadat, 1979

Anwar Sadat, the late Egyptian leader, spoke those lofty words exactly 10 years ago today as he stood on the White House lawn with President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin after signing the first, and as yet only, treaty of peace between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors.

A dream was not so much fulfilled on that blustery March day, full of sunshine and the first scents of spring, as it was born.

“We have hopes and dreams and prayers,” said Carter, referring to the then-current expectation that other Arabs eventually would be obliged to accept the scenario for a peace settlement outlined in the Camp David accords signed six months earlier.

Today, after a full decade of peace, Israelis and Arabs alike would seem to agree that Sadat spoke prematurely, that Carter’s hopes were misplaced. The peace treaty has proven amazingly durable, withstanding the shocks of such major events as Sadat’s assassination by Muslim extremists in 1981, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and, for the last 15 months, the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But if the peace treaty has fulfilled its main purpose, which was to prevent the outbreak of another Arab-Israeli war, it has also plainly failed to live up to its promise, to the expectations of those who signed it.

To the disappointment of the Israelis, peace has not led to full normalization of relations, to the mundane and routine kinds of human intercourse in culture, commerce and tourism that institutionalize confidence and cement ties more binding than the clauses of any agreement.

“We still regard the Egyptians less as friends than as an enemy with whom we have an agreement not to shoot,” an Israeli journalist said recently.

To the disappointment of the Egyptians, peace has not led to a wider settlement, to a solution for the plight of the Palestinians shot and killed almost daily now in confrontations with Israeli troops in the occupied territories.

“No one wants to return to a state of war, so peace is stable in that sense,” said Ali Hillal Dessouki, a prominent Egyptian political scientist. “But the Israelis must also realize that they will never win the heart of Egypt until they reach a modus vivendi with the Palestinians.”

The Camp David accords, brokered in the tranquil foothills of Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, were supposed to prepare the way for that modus vivendi by setting up a framework for autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But the talks on Palestinian autonomy, outlined in the first part of the accords, broke down soon after they started and the “new dawn” Sadat envisioned that day on the White House lawn turned instead into a long night of Egyptian isolation from the rest of the Arab world.

“Camp David had two components,” Butros Butros Ghali, Egypt’s deputy foreign minister, recalled recently. “One was peace between Egypt and Israel, and the other was a solution to the Palestinian problem. We have been successful with the first, but failed completely with the second.”

That this half-success has kept the Arabs and Israel from fighting another full-scale war is no small achievement. But Camp David’s other half-failure has also had a deleterious impact: It has led in the Arab world to a prolonged and anxious interregnum in which regional conflicts became internalized--and vented in places like Lebanon--while pan-Arabism, unable to survive without Egypt, gave way to Islamic fundamentalism as a populist vehicle for protest.

“Camp David, in the end, became a way of rescheduling the Palestinian problem,” said Mohammed Sid Ahmed, an Egyptian journalist and leftist intellectual. “It also discredited pan-Arabism and created a vacuum that Islamicism has since filled.”

Illusion on Both Sides

The first casualty of war, it is often said, is truth. One of the early casualties of the “cold peace,” as Butros Ghali describes the Egyptian-Israeli relationship, has been what in retrospect seems to have been the illusion that both sides wove into the fabric of their dreams on that momentous day in March, 10 years ago.

On the Israeli side, the illusion was that peace with Egypt could be taken out of context, that it could stand alone and grow into true friendship without any real effort to implement the other half of the Camp David accords, calling for a settlement of the Palestinian question.

On the Egyptian side, the major illusion was that the other Arabs would be lost without Egypt and would in due course have no choice but to fall in line behind the path that Sadat, who believed deeply in the wisdom of his own decisions, had mapped out for them. If they were not yet ready to make peace, Egypt would make it for them and reap their heartfelt, if belated, thanks later.

‘Too Far, Too Fast’

“Sadat went too far, too fast with Camp David,” Sid Ahmed said. “He believed he was the only relevant Arab leader, and he thought he could become more important to the Americans than the Israelis were. This was his dream, and eventually it killed him.”

Sadat, who developed a deep mutual friendship with Carter, sold the Egyptian people another illusion as well.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a political scientist with the American University in Cairo, recalled that after the Camp David negotiations Sadat went on television and promised that, with peace and the American aid that would flow from it, all of Egypt’s deeply rooted economic problems would be solved almost overnight.

“He promised everyone they would have a car and a villa within two years. Once, on television, he actually held up the blueprints of what the villas were going to look like,” Ibrahim said.

Unable to Live Up to Promise

Needless to say, neither the peace agreement nor the $2.3 billion a year in U.S. aid that has flowed into Egypt since Camp David has been able to live up to such an extravagant promise.

On the contrary, while U.S. and other Western aid programs have undeniably helped to keep Egypt afloat, they have in some ways also deepened the contradictions that exist in its society by encouraging corruption, promoting the ostentation of a few and fanning the fires of Islamic fundamentalism spreading in part as a backlash to sudden Westernization.

The infitah , or open door, through which all the economic benefits of peace were expected to flow, in Sadat’s vision, became instead a symbol of corruption, of waste and, ultimately, of misunderstanding and mistrust between Americans and Egyptians.

“U.S. aid and Egyptian corruption have been like a pas de deux ,” said a senior diplomat and former spokesman for Sadat. “With no experience in this field, Egyptians at first failed to distinguish the difference between free enterprise and looting.”

‘Problems of Our Own Making’

Most educated Egyptians, added Ahmed Baha Eddin, a respected newspaper columnist, “realized of course that most of these problems were of our own making.”

But to ordinary people, he added, the dawn of the “American era” in Egypt coincided with inflation, shortages and a visibly widening divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Although Egyptian-American relations have since become largely steadier, a residual unease persists because of what Dessouki says has been the failure of both countries to wean their relationship from its Camp David context.

“We have failed until now to establish a purely bilateral relationship,” he said. “What we still have is a triangle . . . in which Israel, for the Americans, always takes priority.”

Economic Reliance

For Egypt, the humiliation of being stuck on the short side of this unequal triangle has been compounded by its deepening economic reliance on the United States.

Fearing social upheaval and unwilling to meet the pace for economic reforms demanded by Western donors, Egypt is facing a severe credit squeeze. It continues to struggle with the difficulties of servicing a $44-billion debt and of meeting the demands of a population of 54 million that is growing by nearly 3% a year.

Thus, it came as something of a shock here when the United States--which in the past has supported Cairo in fights with the International Monetary Fund--showed its own impatience with the pace of Egyptian reforms by withholding a $230-million cash aid payment to Egypt earlier this month.

Offended Egyptian officials responded by stressing in wounded tones that they are already implementing the IMF reforms at what they consider an imprudent pace and would not court disaster by going any faster.

Riled by Subject of IMF

Indeed, few things seem to rile President Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s normally placid and plodding successor, more than the subject of the IMF, which he has on more than one occasion described as a “quack doctor” trying to cure a patient with a lethal dose of medicine.

Partly because it sees no immediate way out of the economic dilemma it faces, Egypt has looked toward reconciliation with the Arab world and progress in the peace process as indispensable ways to prove that it still counts for something in the world.

Fortunately for Mubarak, there has been some progress on both fronts over the last year.

With the exception of radicals like Syria and Libya, most Arab states that all but excommunicated Egypt when the peace treaty was signed have now restored relations. Earlier this month, in a ceremony that the official media pumped up as a major victory for Mubarak, Egypt took back its title to Taba, a tiny Red Sea beach resort that is the last of the Sinai territory to be returned by Israel under the terms of the Camp David accords.

Finally on Talking Terms

The bigger Middle East peace process is also still alive, thanks to Egyptian diplomacy, at least in small measure. The Palestine Liberation Organization has now recognized Israel’s right to exist and is finally on talking terms with the United States--although where that dialogue will lead is still a subject of anxious speculation.

When he goes to Washington next month, Mubarak will argue that the time is indeed ripe for another major U.S. initiative in the Middle East--one that will pressure Israel to reciprocate the concessions made by the PLO over the last few months. Much as U.S. officials will press him on Egypt’s debt-service obligations, Mubarak will argue that the debt incurred to the Palestinians at Camp David must now also be paid.

It is not clear how persuasive he will be. But it is certain that, when he poses for pictures on the White House lawn, possibly close to the spot where his predecessor stood 10 years ago, he will be there as someone who is no longer breaking Arab ranks but leading them.

FOR TWO NEIGHBORS, A DECADE OF PEACE Ten y ears after Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty, the map of Israel and surrounding territory: Jordanian West Bank, Syrian Golan Heights and Egypt-administered Gaza Strip, all seized in 1967, remain occupied by Israel.

Status of Jerusalem was not addressed in 1979 treaty and remains in dispute. Its Arab eastern sector, captured from Jordan in 1967, contains sites holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians.

Strategic Sinai, site of bloody desert fighting in 1956, 1967 and 1973, was captured from Egypt during Six-Day War of 1967. Under 1979 Camp David Treaty, most of it was returned to Egypt in stages through 1982, with last tiny parcel--Taba, on the Gulf of Aqaba--

yielded earlier this month.