THE SADAT INITIATIVE
McWilliams, Wilson Carey
it doesn't much matter what the cheerleader states, such as Libya and Algeria do or say. Jordan has always been a reluctant participant in the wars, sometimes an abstainer, having learned early...
...As many observers note, Egypt's economy is desperately needy, and her military, deprived of Soviet 23 December 1977:806 spare parts and technicians, soon must be reequipped...
...Sadat is the first Arab leader to capture American imaginations and to threaten Israel's standing with the American public...
...To a Palestinian persuaded of the need to compromise, those who continue the struggle may seem unrealistic and imprudent, but they will not seem criminal...
...Most black Africans considered the government-rigged autonomy of this black region a severe blow to the aspirations for real majority rule for South Africa's 18 million blacks...
...In another, the ruin the prolonged war has brought to Egypt is merely the worst case, or one of the worst, of a great deal of the third world...
...Their fiercely negative reactions to the threat of peace have produced precisely the isolation of Egypt that is the first requisite for a separate peace...
...Although I am not yet fully informed on all aspects of the issue," Kissinger replied to his questioner...
...Negotiating with the P.L.O...
...Certainly, much needs to be done now to bring about a Geneva conference...
...Like Jefferson, contemporary Americans are well-advised to tremble when they reflect that God is just...
...It disturbed official routines and upset conventional wisdom, rousing excited expectations and boding dread...
...In fact, even successful economic modernization is no panacea...
...Addressing the Knesset, Sadat went unswervingly down the Arab hard-line and repeatedly said he was not interested in a separate peace at all...
...No one argues that the Palestinian people regard a neutralized, West Bank state as desirable in itself...
...Negotiations at Geneva will be futile without a long-term strategy for peace capable of addressing the real conflicts and dilemmas of Middle Eastern politics...
...Sadat's desire for peace is also genuine, though his proposals were the familiar demands for the return of the occupied lands and some sort of Palestinian state in return for guarantees of Israel's existence and integrity...
...and abroad who were spending the year studying at Harvard--and the question-and-answer session had been rather routine until Qoboza rose to speak...
...The example of Ireland is apposite: successive factions of the I.R.A...
...Such a transformation would be delicate and costly, and America must expect to be asked to pay a good part of the bill...
...It would, moreover, take a long time to bring about, and Israel would need better guarantees than pledges from Arab governments for her immediate security...
...The second most encouraging was that in pressing the cause of relief for the refugees, he referred to the Palestinians, not to the P.L.O...
...By accident or design, the Carter administration has played a shrewd hand in the Middle East, leaving the limelight to local leaders and applauding them when it seemed appropriate...
...It shook the Israeli government out of its public intransigence, and made some ,sort of acceptable formula for the Geneva conference seem a real possibility...
...There have just been too many deaths in the desert, too much time lost in the urgent task to make independent Egypt a self-sustaining nation...
...must be prepared to play an active role in encouraging negotiations...
...itself would not eliminate terrorism, even if the P.L.O...
...He would, in effect, forget everything before 1948, "rewriti n g . . , history," as he suggested, to make a new beginning...
...Sadat did not exaggerate when he emphasized the danger in which he has placed himself...
...But the fact that it took great bravery for Sadat to engage in ordinary diplomatic courtesies only emphasizes the risk to Israel in trusting Egypt or other Arab policies...
...They could be trusted to uphold such a peace only ff even more compelling advantages attached them to it, and such interests remain to be created...
...The United States already played a major role in Sadat's calculations...
...Bloody memories die hard...
...Peaceful, law-abiding citizens may oppose terrorists and still regard them as patriots or, at least, be unwilling to betray them to "outsiders...
...If Sadat ends up with a separate peace with Israel, he will have done so only after his open and dedicated efforts at a joint peace have been stubbornly rejected by the others...
...Sadat's view of the inviolable sanctity of the bond to one's land is curiously pragmatic...
...The most encouraging thing about the Sadat journey was the journey itself...
...Sadat's daring has provided only the opportunity for statecraft, not the thing itself...
...Winnowed to those who regard the Cause as holy and who are habituated to lawlessness, the Palestinian militants will not be inclined to accept half measures...
...With an assured peace and with Yasir Arafat's fearless fighters of children dealt out, Israel can afford to return the Sinai and to come to some accommodation on Gaza and the West Bank...
...a state which reckons history in millennia will not readily credit pledges to "let bygones be bygones" even if the Arabs--and especially the Palestinians----are persuaded to make them...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PERCY QOBOZA IN A SOUTH/IFBICAN PRISON It was at an off-the-record briefing in March 1976 that then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in reply to a question, first signaled a dramatic tilt in U.S...
...Afterward, Qoboza was dated...
...Sadat's courage certainly disposes Israelis to trust him, which is pine gain since that confidence did not exist previously...
...Well, we finally got something out of him," the black editor jubilantly told Nieman curator James C. Thompson, as Kissinger and a phalanx of aides swept out of the room...
...Last October 19, Percy Qoboza, always a voice of hope and reason in stormy South Africa, was hustled out of his office in Johannesburg and clapped into Modderbee prison...
...Syria has been fiercer than Egypt in press releases, but it is really unthinkable that Syria would try the old drive-'em-into-the-sea act by itself...
...The editor and more than 60 other blacks were caught in the government's net of oppression that day...
...He expected, and was willing to chance, the hostile Arab reaction...
...The man who so eloquently phrased the question that morning in a suite in Boston's Ritz-Carlton Hotel now sits rotting in a South African jail cell...
...The request that Israel exchange territory for promises, at best a disparity, is made evidently less persuasive by years of Arab implacability...
...Many autocrats have discovered that it is not so easy to wipe the slate clean, and the effort to do so is likely to be especially difficult in the Middle East where monuments crowd the landscape and memory rules so much of the mind...
...In one way, the fate of Arab socialism in Egypt recalls the fate of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society: Vietnam was a much more suitable accompaniment to Nixon's benign neglect...
...People and nations can be given reasons to put old animosities aside...
...But as Sadat's example teaches, peace, like war, demands dangers and discomforts, and if we are serious about peace in the Middle East, we will be willing to pay the price...
...Sadat is praised, rightly, because peace is not the easy way for Arab leaders...
...Can Israel, for example, safely abandon the occupied lands...
...Sadat argued that the bond to one's land is sacred and cannot be compromised or bartered away...
...Economic and social change may, in the long term, be Israel's best hope for security, especially if it makes Arab governments less dependent on anti-Zionism as a justification for sacrifice and an excuse for failure...
...The most that can be urged on Israel is that coming to terms with the Palestinians of whatever persuasion will reduce the level of violence, ideally to a point where it is within the competence of ordinary police acting under the rule of law...
...The Arab governments, in other words, will always have reasons to undermine a peace with Israel...
...The problems of the Middle East have been decades---if not centuries--in the making...
...Kissinger, the student of European politics and the caretaker of U.S.-Soviet d~tente, appeared not at all at home discussing the volatile South African situation...
...it was not simply hubris that led him to liken himself to Isaac...
...With even negotiations barely in the realm of possibility, such considerations may seem less than pressing...
...In 1975-76 Percy Qoboza, editor of The WorM, South Africa's largest and most influential black newspaper, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard...
...Statesmen are needed for new beginnings, but their wisdom is expressed in teachings and institutions which shape the collective life of peoples...
...But a government of "moderates" based on such support would not be enough to restrain terrorism...
...If Israel is to give up the military security afforded by the occupied territories, she will probably need a very firm and relatively permanent military guarantee from the United States...
...If that's what Sadat wants, he's smart...
...But Americans need to remember that the risks to Israel and to Sadat are not comparable...
...He counted on enough American aid and investment to justify the risk of his ddmarche...
...Apparently, Washington realizes that success for $adat will be the best argument in favor of his policy...
...Getting the lsraelis and the Arabs to Geneva, however, is hardly enough...
...Moreover, Paiestinian terrorism and guerrilla conflict will not completely disappear under any conceivable circumstances...
...Israel's existence as a collectivity has been challenged by her Arab enemies, and whatever the threat to Sadat personally, Egypt's survival is not endangered...
...at best, such a state would be a compromise made necessary by the fact of Israeli power...
...One month after the October jailings, South African police swept down on a black township near Pretoria and, in a house-to-house search with military helicopters hovering overhead, arrested 626 more blacks, including 198 schoolchildren...
...Increasingly, however, America...
...accepted a West Bank state...
...The subsequent Arab Recalcitrance, of course, has been sobering...
...If Sadat really is aiming at the separate peace he is accused of seeking, the other Arab leaders couldn't have played more neatly into his hands than they have...
...Not to be overlooked in all of this, of course, is the role of the Pentagon as an institutional Andrew Undershaft, arms merchant to the world...
...The portly black journalist asked the American Secretary of State if the U.S...
...Given the Carter administration's desire for a Geneva conference and its hesitant sympathy for the Palestinians, Sadat knew that his gesture would strengthen his claims on Washington whatever Israel's response...
...Even that limited ideal, however, presumes that Arab governments could resist the moral pressure and the political temptation to support revanchist Palestinian terrorism...
...Despite Arafat's presence in Tripoli, Syria disowned him by fighting him in Lebanon and now Sadat has followed that example...
...A great many Palestinlans, possibly a considerable majority, are eager for peace...
...They created him, after all, and are entitled now to uncreate him...
...Ireland, nemesis of the pragmatists, reminds us how much human beings will sacrifice to keep the warm familiarity of ancient hatred amid the cold uncertainties of change...
...Insisting that Israel withdraw from the territories occupied since 1967, Sadat was willing to concede Israel's 1948 boundaries and to provide non-territorial guarantees for Israel's security...
...which now seems unlikely), Begin could agree to sit down with them as a courtesy to Sadat, not because he accepted their claim to speak for the Palestinian people...
...I cannot imagine any circumstances under which we would recognize or support subsequent United Nations membership for the Transkei...
...New economic patterns and interests, new horizons and new fears make old animosities fade and new loyalties seem attractive: politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows...
...Whatever new trust there is depends on Sadat's personal virtues, a fragile foundation given human mortality and the relative "instability of Egyptian (and all Arab) politics...
...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MIDDLE EAST BREAKTHROUGH THE SHDH T INITIII TIVE President Sadat's visit to Israel was elegant politics, chivalric, passionate and eloquent, quite unlike the bureaucratized drab to which we have become accustomed...
...Israel has already given Sadat a good deal of support, but Israel might also consider a dramatic gesture of her own: she could announce that Israel trusts Sadat enough to let him select the Palestinlan represenCommonweal: 807 tatives at Geneva...
...have adjusted to the established order of things, only to leave unreconciled fragments to take up the struggle...
...Jordan has always been a reluctant participant in the wars, sometimes an abstainer, having learned early that in this case at least war does not pay...
...if it's what the others don't want, then they're dumb...
...Americans, so often blind to the burden of the past, are prone to the delusion that the future will take care of itself...
...For all his flair, Sadat is a master in the factional politics of the Middle East, and he went to Israel, as he said, only after "long thought...
...Authorities justified the massive raid 23 December 1977:808...
...The reason it must go into these non-productive, anti-productive, activities is that they are easy to understand and profoundly gratifying to the monarchical leader in ways that improved crop yields can't compete with...
...The World, voice for an estimated million blacks, was closed...
...Kissinger had agreed to meet with the Niemansml 8 journalists from the U.S...
...Imaginatively, Sadat sought to reduce fear and mistrust by offering himself as a "willing--sacrifice," and his trip demonstrated a greatness of spirit which almost forced Israel to respond positively...
...Money and effort cannot be spared for education, agriculture and small industries because it must go into spectacular but inappropriate projects, such as the Aswan Dam, or, more usually, into uniforms, super-modern weapons, war and the preparation for war...
...Moreover, movement in such negotiations toward a relatively stable peace---and distantly, the administration of such a peace--wiU require major American commitments...
...One leader, Sadat, has awakened from the dream of military grandeur...
...Whether it might have been viable or not, Arab socialism never got started because Arab war-making has taken all the time, thought, energy and money thai any Egyptian or other Arab leader in the area could scrape together...
...Even if Sadat selected the P.L.O...
...If he takes one, on the public record, it will be almost by being forced to do so by the others...
...These, of course, are remote prospects, but America, inhibited by post-Vietnam reticence, needs to be prepared before the event...
...These whites--newspaper people, intellectuals, ordinary citizem were "banned," a curious South African custom which effectively silences the voice of dissent by forbidding people to write or speak for publication and which sharply circumscribes where they may travel...
...The ease for some kind of peace, separate, unanimous or in fits and starts, is overwhelming in Egypt's statistics of population, agriculture and national product...
...Since American promises are at discount these days, we must expect Israel to ask for commitments which are both public and explicit...
...Even if Begin's government is disposed to abandon its claim to the territories won in 1967, it will remember that to Arab "rejectionists," the 1967 lands are no more hallowed than the areas Israel occupied in 1948...
...policy toward South Africa...
...Nevertheless, Sadat's venture brought peace in the Middle East from among the pieties back into the world of living hope...
...The past, as Begin reminded Sadat, is the raison d'etre of Israel...
...Sadat should not have to beg for aid and investment, and any request for military equipment should receive serious consideration even from Washington's doves...
...WILSON CAREY MCWILLIAMS (Wilson Carey McWilliams, author ot The Idea of Fraternity in America, teaches in the Political Science Department of Livingston College, Rutgers University, New lersey...
...Also quashed was a still undetermined number of white South Africans sympathetic to the goal of black majority rule...
...would recognize the Transkei when it became nominally independent of white-ruled South Africa in October 1976...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 26
