Sadat's Gift
Morrison, Micah
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 20, NO. 11 / NOVEMBER 1987 Micah Morrison SADAT'S GIFT A decade later, measuring the change. n a November evening a decade ago, Anwar Sadat boarded a plane in Egypt...
...Menachem Begin is in seclusion, his triumph with Egypt thwarted by the tragedy of Lebanon...
...Sadat watched in dismay as Jimmy Carter busily planned for an international conference on the Arab-Israel dispute, a forum that would return the Soviets to a major role in the Middle East, set up a situation in which the more moderately inclined Arab governments would come under enormous pressure to make no concessions, and supply Israel's new conservative premier with a plausible excuse for rejecting peace talks...
...One amendment would add a new dimension to the argument over what constitutes an unfair trade practice—the issue of worldwide supply and demand...
...The psychological impact of a leading Arab nation, arguably the leading Arab nation, making peace with Israel has altered the terms of the debate...
...T he Beltway crowd should not despair over a right-wing Israeli electoral victory in these circumstances...
...The elections in Israel might be a test of public attitudes toward such negotiations, or toward dealing with the issue in one way or another...
...Morocco, geographically peripheral yet Islamic and Arab, welcomed Shimon Peres to its shores...
...Other Arabs have sought openings in the walls of stalemate and mistrust...
...Jimmy Carter, who played an invaluable role in holding the negotiations together once he realized that he would not get an international conference, has taken up a life of carpentry...
...Hafez Assad remains in power in Syria...
...Jordan's King Hussein recently has engaged in a number of "secret" meetings with Israeli emissaries...
...That constituency is a key to the Arab-Israel dilemma...
...Taken together, the potential impact of these amendments is sublimely ridiculous...
...But Washington can take a number of steps at present to help bolster moderate trends and lay the groundwork for the future...
...If a Palestinian slate showed some degree of independence from the PLO (and managed to remain in the land of the living), it might introduce a new counterweight to extremist blocs in Arafat's umbrella organization, radical initiatives from Arab states, and the "we-have-nobody-to-deal-with" lobby in Jerusalem...
...The Egyptian president knew the importance of the right sequence of events, timing, and the dramatic gesture...
...In terms of domestic Israeli politics, Peres apparently is positioning himself as "the peace candidate" for the 1988 elections...
...Since when does the capacity to produce an item—even excess capacity—assure that the item is readily available to consumers all over the world...
...In addition, a promising sequence of events may be falling into place...
...The Shamir half of the government, run from the prime minister's office and holding a slight edge, sticks to the Camp David approach of direct negotiations and generally takes a pessimistic view of peace talks...
...From the U.S.'s own point of view, 1989 and 1990 is the time a new administration in Washington can act with the most independence, without worrying about an upcoming election...
...So Sadat brought his message straight to Jerusalem...
...On another level, the U.S...
...In the Middle East, as we have learned on countless occasions, things can go wrong in unexpectedly nasty ways...
...Finally, we see the amendments as clearly discriminatory...
...Under a "rotation" deal worked out after the deadlocked 1984 elections, the center-left Peres shares power with the center-right Yitzhak Shamir, who in 1977 was a Begin lieutenant...
...Certainly price is a factor, and transportation costs, as just one example, help determine price...
...were the target of such legislation elsewhere, America could be barred from producing new domestic reserves...
...Any artificial restraint on the market could only create shortages and price fluctuations—and these are hardly a laughing matter...
...That means that the time may be right in 1989 for a push toward regional negotiations between Israel, an independent Palestinian slate (if such a thing can be brought to life), and Jordan, or between Israel and some sort of non-PLO Palestinian-Jordanian delegation...
...According to some reports, the king is thinking about stacking his rubber-stamp parliament with West Bankers, to bolster his claim of representing both banks of the Jordan River...
...cast a protective eye over independent Palestinian voices...
...It can pressure King Hussein to enter into direct negotiations with Israel...
...And a few of the Indians have become chiefs: Hosni Mubarak, Sadat's veep at the time, now governs an Egypt beset by economic difficulties and decay...
...Generations of enmity and intractable geo-strategic realities will not be undone in a U.S.presidential term or two...
...Who can tell whether surpluses are temporary or permanent...
...It can devote more energy to helping halt Egypt's economic decline...
...In Jerusalem and Cairo, it was a moment of hope...
...and Israel will conduct elections in late 1988...
...Sadat in Jerusalem is still a signpost in the landscape of the Micah Morrison, former Israel correspondent of The American Spectator, is deputy director of the Committee for the Free World and editor of its monthly publication Contentions...
...The other amendment zeros in on agricultural products, minerals and chemicals, and seeks to apply a similar supply-demand test as a criterion for loans by multilateral lending agencies...
...If the U.S...
...If capacity were the proper yardstick, there would be no hunger in Africa, because there's plenty of worldwide grain capacity these days...
...But two amendments in the Senate trade bill—itself a largely protectionist document—are so illogical as to go beyond folly into an area that can only be defined as absurdity...
...n a November evening a decade ago, Anwar Sadat boarded a plane in Egypt and flew into history...
...The Soviets have benefited from Washington's disarray...
...Now that, we submit, is patently an absurd position for any oil-importing country, including the U.S...
...The fact that the peace treaty with Egypt has held for nearly a decade is one of those signs...
...Unmarked Israeli goods and services, as well as the less tangible coinage of free-flowing ideas in a democratic society, blend into the Arab states via the West Bank's "open bridges" with Jordan and by other avenues...
...It's absurd to use capacity as a determining element...
...Shimon Peres, then the Israeli opposition leader, now runs half the government...
...At the same time, Moscow is making soothing noises to moderates such as Jordan and Egypt, the nervous Kuwaitis, and the theocratic revolutionaries of Iran...
...Of course, the issue of the Palestinians and the occupied territories remains a grave dilemma, a knife pointed at the heart of Israeli democracy...
...Perhaps Arabs and Israelis could make a life together, build a region of peace and prosperity...
...One way might be to create a treaty proposal for a constitutional system binding a demilitarized Palestinian area into an Israel-Palestine-Jordan confederation, a system that somehow wraps the peoples of the region into a working union, yet leaves the final decision on a Palestinian state to a generation of Arabs and Israelis that have not spent their lives wandering in the wilderness of an armed strife...
...rr en years after Sadat's visit to 1 Jerusalem, how much has changed...
...It was a move of unimagined boldness, a leap of historical faith...
...And how can developing countries handle their debt load if they aren't allowed to enter the economic arena...
...Are they the result of the overhang from a recent cyclical turndown in a particular industry...
...One group has applied to Jerusalem for permission to open new schools in the territories...
...But Palestinian political involvement could lead to a demand for full political rights, a demand Israeli democracy would find most difficult to ignore...
...World trade and American trade policies are serious matters...
...These and other moves would be impossible without tacit Israeli cooperation...
...The peace is "cold," true, but Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian military recognize its value...
...The "sheer quantity of the feuding Arab participants," Pipes notes, "acts to prolong the conflict and prohibits a lasting peace...
...But perhaps the most important lesson for the peaceniks this past decade has been, simply, ten long years: peace doesn't leap, it crawls...
...Won't our trading partners laugh the U.S...
...The Peres half of the government, run from the foreign ministry, pushes hard for an international conference...
...What is his legacy...
...Developing countries, by definition, are the last to install production capacity for basic commodities...
...With a divided Israel, an Egypt distracted by internal problems, and a PLO recently reunited with its radical offshoots, the outlook for peace is not on the surface promising...
...For example: • There's currently excess worldwide capacity to produce oil and natural gas, and the surplus is expected to remain a fact of life well into the future...
...In our view the best regulator of capacity is the marketplace...
...With the war in Lebanon over and the economy on a steady keel, Israel might soon be ready to turn its attention to its greatest challenge...
...As to the superpowers, the Soviet Union, frozen out of much of the action in the region in the 1970s, is now moving with intelligence and circumspection...
...The peace treaty between Israel and the most powerful Arab state on its borders, achieved after sixteen months of tough negotiations, is intact...
...Perhaps the past did not have to be prelude to generations of endless war...
...Does the U.S...
...While regional moderate and pro-West elements—Egypt, Jordan, Palestinians disillusioned with the PLO—appear to Laughable trade measures We have argued long and loudly in this space that protectionism, in the long run, is economic folly...
...Much capacity to manufacture any product might well be obsolete and inefficient, and require great doses of capital to modernize (just ask domestic steelmakers about that...
...Yet, other countries might be kept from building modern plants by the amendments, while, presumably, the U.S...
...It continues to aid radicals of many stripes—including Syrians, Libyans, and various PLO factions—but the financial leash is a tight one, and the clients know it...
...S the bad news is that ten years k ...3 after the Egyptian nation recognized Israel's right to exist, the end to the Arab-Israel dispute remains out of sight...
...We suggest that there might be a hypocrisy factor at work here...
...King Hussein is also seeking to build support for his own agenda by strengthening pro-Jordan groups on the West Bank...
...The last thing America needs is economic funny business...
...And the Palestinians of the territories, after twenty years of empty rhetoric, have begun to look at the PLO with more than a little skepticism...
...By 1975, Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy had helped secure a single step away from war with the completion of an Egyptian-Israeli disengagement accord on the Sinai Peninsula, in which the two governments agreed that the disputes between them would be resolved not "by military force but by peaceful means...
...It can support Jordanian efforts to build influence on the West Bank...
...Exposure of the PLO's vast wealth could lead to the greater disenchantment of their most important constituency, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza...
...Others have weathered the decade: Yasser Arafat still runs the multi-billion dollar conglomerate known as the PLO...
...By early 1977, however, events were taking a turn for the worse...
...Syria remains a wild card: Assad has his hands full with internal economic problems, a militarily draining occupation of Lebanon, and the politically costly support of non-Arab Iran in its war against Arab Iraq...
...For while the U.S...
...King Hussein continues to rule Jordan...
...Arab-Israel conflict, but the region it occupies is a lonely one, the road to which it points—direct negotiations, hard bargaining from positions of strength and security, mutual concessions—is one that few Middle Eastern leaders seem willing to travel down...
...Yet there are some promising signs on the horizon...
...But if Washington is to address Palestinian desires, Israeli fears, and regional animositiesin a manner not marked by confusion and erratic policy shifts, it should take a page from Sadat's book and meld long-term vision with short-term pragmatism...
...An international effort, spearheaded by the U.S., to pinpoint PLO businesses and money-laundering operations might shake up Chairman Arafat and the fat cats at the top of the terror empire...
...Senate have the right to shut them out of the industrialization process because others have installed plant and equipment before them...
...Under that amendment, if there is surplus worldwide capacity to produce a commodity—or if somebody's crystal ball says there will be a future surplus—governments that encourage the production of those commodities could trigger retaliation by the U.S...
...And the Israelis have become more weary of war and uneasy about the continuing occupation...
...It is hard to recall the euphoria Sadat's visit caused...
...But Arab attitudes toward Israel have changed a little...
...can help Palestinian moderates by hitting the PLO where it really hurts—in their bank accounts...
...We seriously urge the Senators and Representatives who will soon meet in conference to write a final bill which eliminates blatant protectionist measures...
...Sadat's dramatic flight to Jerusalem jolted into motion a process that inched up to a peace treaty and then, apparently, stalled...
...The U.S...
...Even so, these amendments would seek to bar countries like Great Britain, Canada, West Germany, and Brazil from encouraging the search for any more oil and gas...
...What the king does with his parliament will provide a clue to his intentions...
...All this is a most optimistic assessment...
...Many Arab states have come implicitly—if not explicitly—to accept Israel's right to exist in the region...
...And, as Daniel Pipes forcefully demonstrated in the July issue of Commentary, it is inter-Arab rivalries, not Arab-Israel arguments, that shape Arab positions on the issue of the Palestinians and peace with Israel...
...It was, after all, the right that delivered the peace treaty with Egypt, and strong conservative leadership would help reassure a nation about to gamble with its security...
...Mobil® ©1987 Mobil Corporation THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 15 be in a period of cautious consolidation, it seems certain that both the U.S...
...It must seek to do today only what realistically can be done today, while guarding against a slide tomorrow into war...
...For the first time some Palestinian intellectuals are suggesting that an Arab slate be formed to run in the Jerusalem municipal elections in 1988...
...Will new capacity be needed during the next upturn...
...In the territories, there are small signs that the Palestinians may be changing their attitudes toward dealing with Israel...
...Sadat and Moshe Dayan—Israel's foreign minister during the negotiations—aredead...
...could go ahead and build...
...Up to now, the Palestinians have refused to become involved in Israeli politics, viewing such involvement as an acceptance of Israeli rule and legitimacy...
...should combine creativity with patience and set about exploring ways to overcome the fears and hatreds built up over generations...
...delegates right out of the GATT negotiating rooms if these amendments become law...
...and work to keep the PLO from expandingits power in Amman, Cairo, and elsewhere...
...Although Jordan is trying to build support on the West Bank, and the Israelis are not standing in the way of this effort, most Palestinians in the territories are keen in their loyalty to Arafat, the man who, in their view, put the Palestinian cause on the international map...
...Recent reports indicate, however, that the people behind the municipal slate idea have backed off in the face of local protests and orders from PLO bosses abroad...
...provided keen attention and a guiding hand during the Egypt-Israel initiative begun in 1977, in 1987 it is merely trying to keep a hand in 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 the game without getting it shot off...
...But too many aspects of the House and Senate trade bills lend themselves to parody and burlesque...
...Ten years later, some of the lead players are gone from the stage...
...Another is planning to lobby publicly for the idea of a confederation between the West Bank and Jordan as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute...
...Four years earlier, in 1973, Sadat had shaken Israeli confidence and restored a measure of nationalist pride in Egypt by waging the battles known in the West as the Yom Kippur War...
...Most of the surplus capacity happens to be in the OPEC countries...
...Still, an interesting trial balloon has gone up...
Vol. 20 • November 1987 • No. 11
