Ever since Sadat gambled and lost with Israel, Egypt has been on the back foot, reactive and often wrongheaded on the Arab-Israeli conflict, writes Hassan Nafaa* Could Egypt have avoided getting involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict? The question, of course, is purely hypothetical. But as elusive as the answer might be, it is worth contemplating as part determining where Egypt is headed by following the path that President Anwar El-Sadat opened 29 years ago when he decided to go to Jerusalem and deliver a speech before the Israeli Knesset. Sadat's decision seemed to mark a complete break with Egypt's previous approach to handling the conflict with Israel. The assumption at the time was that this new course of action would yield two possible outcomes; either a comprehensive settlement accepted by all concerned parties and leading to a totally new pattern of regional relations that would take us from a state of war to a state of peace and cooperation, or a separate settlement with Egypt alone, in accordance with which Egypt would be obliged to sit on the sidelines of an ongoing conflict between the Arabs and Israel. Neither of these outcomes transpired. A comprehensive solution still seems an unattainable dream and Egypt's removal from military equations has not transformed it into a party whose neutrality Israel can always count on. Indeed, Egypt found itself in a very awkward position. It had no choice but to pursue the mirage of a comprehensive settlement, at the same time lacking the bargaining strengths and leverage to reach it, while simultaneously having to maintain a front of neutrality the consequences of which it could not sustain. Egypt, the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel, proved unable to convince other Arab countries to follow suit down that highly dubious path and it proved incapable of restraining Israel or of persuading Israel to adopt a policy that would encourage Arab governments to reassess and modify their approach to the conflict. How did Egypt ever end up in this hopeless predicament? About this time 29 years ago, when Sadat emerged from the airplane that had just landed on an airstrip in Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, which had thronged news crews from around the world and where hundreds of television cameras were trained on the Egyptian president as he stepped down onto the tarmac; it was a scene from another world. Indeed, former US President Jimmy Carter compared it to the first man landing on the moon. No one at that time could have ever imagined, not even in their wildest dreams or nightmares, that the leader of the most powerful Arab state could have concocted such a way as this to resolve one of the most complex and intractable international conflicts in modern times. Although some in Egypt and even elsewhere in the world believed at the time -- indeed, still believe -- that Sadat's visit to Jerusalem was not just correct but a stroke of genius. Their opinion does not withstand the test of factual reality. Following the Egyptian victory in the October 1973 War, Sadat felt it was now his right to establish for himself a new basis of legitimacy that would set his rule and regime apart from those of Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Nor could anyone really deny that to the man who had masterminded the historic crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973, thereby scoring a military achievement that Nasser, himself, had never succeeded in realising. However, to Sadat, asserting this right meant taking the entirely opposite course of his predecessor. Accordingly, Sadat constructed a policy founded on two convictions, which Henry Kissinger helped ingrain during his first visit to Egypt in the wake of the October War. The first conviction was that the US would lend its weight behind a comprehensive solution, to which, Sadat believed, Washington held 99 of the 100 keys. The second was that the US was ready to table a comprehensive regional development programme similar to the Marshall Plan that helped Europe get back on its feet and withstand Soviet pressure following World War II. Sadat did not entertain a moment's doubt that the US was both willing and able to realise the two highest aspirations of the peoples of the region; peace and economic development. Therefore, on the strength of these convictions, the Egyptian president accepted the US as the one and only broker in the Arab- Israeli conflict and, simultaneously, decided to promote as strong as possible an alliance with the Americans. He then proceeded to institute various political and economic reforms, such as the consumerist open-door policy and political plurality in parliament, which he felt were necessary to compliment and shore up his new phase of political legitimacy. Remarkably, too, Sadat was also convinced that he held considerable concrete leverage that would enable him to influence the course of the negotiating process. As it transpired, his bargaining chips consisted almost entirely of unilateral concessions to be offered by Egypt in the hope of luring his new ally to perform the role he had set his hopes on. At the time of the Watergate scandal, Sadat thought he could help his dear friend Richard Nixon out of trouble by adopting a more flexible stance on the disengagement agreements or by inviting Nixon over to Egypt and arranging a massive popular reception for the American "peacemaker". When this gesture failed to rescue Nixon from his inevitable fate, Sadat tried the same tactics with Ford, whom he hoped to lure into devoting equal attention to the Middle East. Therefore, in 1976 Sadat announced to the People's Assembly that he had withdrawn from the Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union (a treaty that Sadat had personally promoted in 1971 in the context of his power struggle with Ali Sabri). But just as Sadat was loathe to exact a political price from the US in 1972 in exchange for kicking Soviet experts out of Egypt, so too was he unable to bring himself to tell America to come up with the political goods in exchange for abrogating that treaty with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the peace process that Kissinger had inaugurated succumbed to a deep slumber only to expire in its sleep by the time the Republican administration now headed by Ford handed the White House over to Carter's Democratic administration. Only days before Carter took office in Washington in January 1977, the bread riots broke out in Egypt, sending a warning signal that Sadat simply failed to hear. If he had, he might have been encouraged to revise the assumptions on which he had based his new policy orientation, for by now it was patently clear that the step-by- step approach had brought the peace process to a dead end, that the open-door policy and restricted political plurality had gravely exacerbated social tensions, and that even as his regime was on the point of imploding from within, pressures were mounting from abroad, especially following the fall of the Israeli Labour Party and the arrival of Begin, heading the Likud, to power in Israel in 1977. On the other hand, Sadat was a gambler at heart, and he refused to admit to failure and, therefore, was not inclined to re-examining the decisions that had brought Egypt to the predicament it then faced. Instead of contemplating withdrawing quietly from the political field, he preferred to charge ever forward. This is how he ended up in Jerusalem. Yet, regardless of his motives for embarking on this adventure, he certainly would not have been taken unaware by Israeli intransigence, which displayed itself in Begin's cool response to his initiative. Having already dispatched his advisor and prime minister, Hassan El-Tahami, to a meeting with Moshe Dayan that had been brokered by King Hassan II of Morocco, Sadat would have been fully apprised of Israel's absolute refusal to return to pre-June 1967 borders and to so much as talk to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), let alone to permit the creation of a Palestinian state, even if the PLO recognised UN Resolution 242. He would, therefore, have known that the only possible outcome of his peace initiative would be a separate treaty with Israel. Moreover, before setting off to Jerusalem, Sadat took care to pay courtesy calls to Damascus and Riyadh. In Damascus, president Hafez Al-Assad asked him whether he had received any guarantees that Israel would respond to his initiative. Sadat responded that he had not, but that he was still confident that his visit would succeed in promoting his objectives. It was not long before it became clear that his confidence was founded on illusions. In Jerusalem, Sadat came across as strong and resolute. He voiced the collective Arab position on the Arab-Israeli conflict, he proclaimed that he would never enter a separate peace treaty and, later, he invited the front line countries and the PLO to attend the Mina House conference, signalling his determination to abide by the principle of a comprehensive peace. However, he was the first to know that his declarations were either tailored for domestic consumption or ploys to strengthen his bartering position so as to secure the most favourable conditions possible in negotiations over a separate peace treaty, which he knew he had no other alternative but to conclude. Despite the fact that hundreds of documents on this visit and the Camp David talks confirm this truth, there are still people who maintain that the Arabs could have regained all their occupied territories and that the Palestinians could have founded an independent state within pre-1967 boundaries if only they had responded positively to Sadat's invitation to attend the Mina House conference. One only has to recall that the head of the Israeli delegation had refused so much as to enter the conference hall until the Palestinian flag -- or what he referred to as a strange flag that he could not recognise -- was removed. Certainly, too, Sadat knew very well in advance that the Arabs would spurn his invitation and that he would then be able to shift responsibility away from himself by way of that rejection and justify entering into a separate peace treaty. In stating this, I am by no means mounting a defence of other Arab governments, whose records are far from lacking disastrous mistakes of their own. However, I am certain that whatever these mistakes were, they are not responsible for the failure of a comprehensive settlement, which Israel has steadfastly obstructed. It might not be fair to cast the full brunt of the blame on Sadat alone for the calamitous consequences of his visit to Israel and his conclusion of a separate peace. Had there not been people far more foolish than he, the Arab world would not have disintegrated to the degree it has and it would have been possible to contain the fallout from Sadat's adventure. However, there can be no doubt that this adventure severely weakened Egypt and the Arab world, giving much greater scope to Israeli pugnacity. Suffice it to say that Israeli settlement construction in the occupied territories increased umpteen-fold since the peace treaty with Egypt and that by signing this treaty Egypt effectively gave the green light to all others outside the conflict to end the boycott against Israel and normalise relations with it. I easily understand why Egypt needed a long truce. It needed time to catch its breath, set its house in order and build up important sources of strength. If that had happened, it would have worked to introduce an element of deterrence in the equations of the Middle East conflict. Then, maybe, the brutality that Israel metes out daily against defenceless Palestinians could have been kept in check; maybe the likes of Lieberman, famed for calling for the destruction of the High Dam and for the mass transfer of Palestinian residents of Israel, would never have reached key positions of government; and, maybe, an effective halt could have been brought to the Israeli drive to seclude the Palestinians in isolated Bantustans. However, regretfully, after 30 years of "peace" with Israel, Egypt not only seems less capable of protecting itself against the likes of Lieberman and less able to influence its regional environment, but it also seems trapped on that treadmill of chasing after a mirage called "a comprehensive settlement." * The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.
