FLIGHT INTO EGYPT A Personal Report

...Some of the causes are rooted in history...

...Beating swords into plowshares might do for a start...

...At the same time, leadership — in the sense of executive and organizing ability rather than charisma — has consistently proved inadequate, not for lack of native endowment or intelligence but simply because the socio-economic and political structure of an emerging country such as Egypt offers few opportunities for developing necessary skills, making decisions, and testing independent judgment...

...funds and observers without prior assurance of congressional approval...

...And the hard-nosed realists in either country are not the ones who put their faith in missiles but are, on the contrary, those working to get rid of them altogether...

...Despite the vital importance of future industrial development, jobs must be provided right now...

...Egypt is different, and always has been...

...The building is itself a monument of sorts — to neglect, to poverty, to lack of incentive, money and imagination, to the heartbreaking waste of every kind of resource in a complex struggle...

...In this post-Freudian age, ambivalence is contraband...

...The ride from the airport leads past coyly camouflaged missile sites through a flat, arid landscape temporarily reclaimed from the desert...

...Abruptly, without warning, the highway ends in a tangle of downtown traffic — trucks moving at the speed of camels, air poisoned with the sweet new scent of Araby, buses packed to bursting, and streetcars garlanded with clusters of people clinging to the sides and to each other...

...But then, so do most of their more prosperous compatriots, who contrive to be amiable, outgoing, and melancholy all at once...

...But Cairo International has cracked the mold, spilled over into frank hysteria and given up on the jet age...

...they succumbed in due course to the Egyptians' mil-lenial intimacy with death as a way of life...

...And the descendants of those who paid for it still swarm around the ancient monuments, haggard, white-sheeted figures that descend like flies upon the gaping tourists and make it quite impossible to stop for more than a few seconds...

...it would certainly qualify as a miracle without precedent in recorded history...

...The art of the Egyptians, more than that of most ancients, evokes profoundly subjective responses...

...Ten million by 1980, in a city that even in colonial days had trouble accommodating its one million inhabitants...

...This," said an Egyptian who still considers himself a Nasserite, with reservations, "is what defeated Nasser...

...If ein breirah (there is no alternative) means anything at all in the present context, it is that Israel and Egypt alike face the choice between a common future and no future...

...If you need to be loved, don't travel...

...But it is here, in these musty corners far more than in the colossal monuments of Giza, Thebes or Karnak, that it can be seen both at its most sublime and at its most disturbingly grotesque...

...These potential losses, coupled with unrelenting pressure on Sadat from anti-Israel fanatics both within and without, would seem to relegate peace between Israel and Egypt to the category of Utopian dreams — another job waiting for the Messiah...

...This at a moment when the specter of Israel dominates every facet of life in Egypt...

...Thus the price of cotton, Egypt's chief export, dropped from $2.50 a pound in 1973 to $.40 in 1974...

...With a flawless sense of timing, he took advantage of converging interests...

...What other commitments were made in private will emerge in due time and at inappropriate moments...

...The truly miraculous aspect of the future he has seen is not that it doesn't work but that it has not already ended in a complete and irrevocable collapse...

...But what it does to the lives of the people caught up in it is infinitely more devastating...

...Instead, he merely hits the passport with his stamp and waves me on, contemptuous, to cope with Egypt, paranoia, and whatever else ails me...

...The museum itself, like so many buildings throughout North Africa reflects the aberrant tastes of French provincial pastry cooks posing as architects...

...His Moses was indeed an Egyptian...

...The balance of payments deficit for 1975 alone is now estimated at $3 billion, or close to one-third of the gross national product...

...client...

...Locks them, in fact, into a choice between peace and mutual annihilation...

...both are too busy chopping away at the trees to give much thought to the forest and the monsters that inhabit it...

...Both views tell more about the state of the nation than about the stature of Kissinger — a brash and bright operator whose solid common sense shone among the dimwitted epigones of the Nixon-Agnew team with the dazzling luminosity of sheer genius...

...I remember another German Jew — Simon van Gelder, great-uncle of Heinrich Heine...

...The site of this dramatic discovery, once a Christian church dedicated to St...

...The sight of the pyramids in their timeless indifference so unnerves her that she loses her composure and her French...

...Egypt's economy is a self-destructing disaster...

...A worldwide network of waiting rooms for those in flight...

...As in so many other aspects, the 1973 war proved a turning point of sorts...

...Among Jews, in particular, it has lately become fashionable to denounce Henry Kissinger as a Machiavellian manipulator bent on betraying his own people...

...but even its most hopeful defenders no longer expect miracles...

...There is much to be depressed about...

...And this belief, as well as the compulsion to confess it when he did, was Freud's way of being Jewish...

...This is the City of Tomorrow," says a quietly subversive lawyer, quoting Nasser...

...The lack of water, sewers or electricity poses problems...

...Whether, in fact, it will ultimately prove more of an asset than a liability remains to be seen...

...At about midpoint, a roadblock of house the dead, laid out in regular urban patterns of streets and squares...

...But in trying, single-handed, to fill the leadership vacuum by expanding his ego, in due course he became the captive of his own charisma...

...This, of course, is the crux of the problem...

...Time and again Asian peasants, Egyptian fellahin, or South American campe-sinos have stunned friend and foe alike by the ease and speed with which they were able to master Western technology, from basic machinery to the most sophisticated weapons and electronics systems...

...No room at the inn...

...The effects of this explosive growth are the more malignant for being concentrated in urban centers rather than spread over the country as a whole...

...Having bungled the revolution, he also bungled the war and ended up as the opiate of the people...

...For it takes no idealistic vision at all to grasp the practical implications of an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty...

...True, Cairo, until the end of World War II, used to be one of the most pleasant and comfortable places in the world — provided one could afford to live in one of those self-contained, idyllic enclaves of privilege as remote from the masses as any Pharaonic court...

...Moments later we sit on an apron in the Cairo airport...

...It is his one word of English, and he wields it like a poisoned dagger...

...Myth serves a function and creates its own incontrovertible reality...

...The cops make about $30 a month...

...At the start of his meteoric career, he impressed most foreign observers — Israelis included — as a man of dignity, integrity, and intelligence...

...but then, large sections of the City sorts has been set up where, by way of a security check, two morose policemen shake down each cab driver for 10 piasters...

...Most airports are alike — terminal diseases, discreetly quarantined behind glass walls...

...Tt represents the other face of Egypt — massive, monstrous, monumental...

...The army, which provides about the only leadership training of any consequence, also absorbs and corrupts the bulk of potential future leaders and thus merely aggravates the situation...

...But one would like to hope that the small opening they cleared will actually come to represent what they allege it to be — a first step toward peace...

...But the lure of a debased currency is at least equally compelling...

...From 2.5 million at the time of the Napoleonic invasion, Egypt's population grew to 14 million by the end of World War II...

...executives gathering at the Hilton bar voice cautious optimism for the future...

...I have seen the future, and you can have it...

...Michael, became a synagogue in 653 and remained in continuous use until the end of the 19th century...

...It is geared to wide-screen spectaculars — the Chinese capers, detente with the Soviet Union, peace in Vietnam — whose public relations value far exceeds any substantive achievements...

...Few tools or implements are in evidence that would not have seemed familiar to a peasant around the time of the Exodus...

...Not so the eager enthusiasm of many corporate executives, who have thus far found the challenges far greater than the opportunities...

...But accommodations still lag hopelessly behind the needs generated by a dual invasion from abroad...

...For the first time in recorded history, the Jewish presence in Egypt has...

...Triumph by virtue of sheer numbers...

...And Egypt in 1952 was overripe for revolutionary changes, all of them aborted by a colonel who was essentially incompetent and conservative to boot...

...Like Sadat, he is a Realpolitik man un-trammeled by lofty principles or ideological blinders...

...It is a holy cause, the only one that can spasmodically unite the Arab world, after a fashion, from the feudal rulers all the way to the ultra-radical absolutists...

...Which, whether or not they care to admit it, happen to coincide in many fundamental points...

...Buy a dog...

...Along with straightforward assistance at the government level — costly, but cheap at whatever price if it can buy peace or at least nonwar — it included grandiose visions of joint U.S.-Egyptian oil exploitation in the Sinai desert, large-scale capital investments, and ambitious industrial projects designed to blast the Egyptian economy out of its catatonic trance...

...Agriculture remains confined to more or less the same narrow strip along the Nile that was under cultivation in Pharaonic times, and the Aswan Dam has — at best — not helped matters...

...Hotel rooms have been in critically short supply since World War II...

...The legal rate for a first class hotel room in Cairo, despite inflation, still comes to only about half of what similar accommodations would cost in Tel Aviv...

...Paid for in blood...

...As early as the 16th century, detailed descriptions of the then already fast-growing necropolis mentioned the miraculous weekly resurrection of the dead and their silent presence at the Friday prayers...

...It is open only a few hours a day...

...The Gateway to Africa is just another urban disaster area, a triumph of the people over the inhuman idea of order...

...Average income about $200 a year — not enough to live on, enough not to die, more than enough to hate pale strangers passing through their midst in the wake of carts piled high with possessions...

...And given the amount of average incomes, these hard-currency imports will have to be sold at a fraction of their cost if they are to serve their purpose...

...The first has to do with the Egyptians' desperate need for instant returns...

...any Western notion of a cemetery is hopelessly irrelevant in describing this vast, centuries-old accretion of mosques, mausoleums, monuments and tombs, elaborate one- and two-story structures to of the Living are equally short on these amenities...

...As everywhere in Egypt, they stand and wait, vast crowds in shifting patterns like the tides, packing halls, clogging passageways, blocking exits...

...Among the countless problems, two recurrent ones stand out...

...The pyramids enshrine not only the nightmares of the Pharaohs, but our own as well...

...The City of the Dead, as Cairenes call it, aptly enough...

...For all that, the Egyptian Museum alone is worth the trip...

...and Soviet tutelage and are willing to risk acting in their own best interest...

...And the fact that Nasser himself would never have suspected it characterizes one of Sadat's major assets — a shrewd awareness of reality unobstructed by principles or self-deception...

...commitment began to emerge...

...For while military adventures unquestionably account for many of her current difficulties, Egypt's fundamental problems far transcend this single cause...

...But plowshares alone will no longer do the job, and more efficient machinery is rare, if not altogether nonexistent, in most of the poorer villages...

...And this very urgency militates against the sort of stability and long-range planning that would attract foreign investors...

...Thanks to the fellahin, the cops, the squatters in the City of the Dead, and millions more like them willing to put up with a standard of living barely above subsistence levels — or unwilling to revolt — Egypt at this point is a travel bargain for foreigners...

...It has precipitated the emergence of modern Arab nationalism and lent it whatever core and substance it may have...

...Sadat had no trouble deciding in favor of free enterprise...

...Sadat's carefully stage-managed dissociation from the Soviets powerfully stimulated the greed and imagination of Western investors, and there is ample reason to believe that the era of reassessment had its inception in the board rooms of U.S...

...If the housing problem in Cairo drives natives by the thousands into the cemeteries, it also makes life difficult for strangers in transit...

...Nefertiti, at the window next to me, is home for the first time after 20 years of gilded exile in Paris...

...This is not to impute vision to either man...

...But the distance between those two seems much shorter than the gap that separates Freud's world from our own...

...It is now 37 million, and population experts project an increase np to 80 million by the end of the century...

...In the two years since, the U.S...

...In the past quarter of a century, Israel has become far more than just the enemy...

...The drastic cut in defense spending alone would dramatically improve the economic climate in both countries...

...There has never been a time when Jews and Egyptians were not involved with one another...

...While dutifully paying lip service to the embalmed slogans of his charismatic predecessor, he proceeded to extricate Egypt from a rat's nest of near-fatal entanglements and quietly dismantled most of the projects and programs that marked Nasser's more irrational intrusions into the contiguous spheres of politics and economics...

...The enclaves have largely vanished, the resident players — native and foreign — have gone elsewhere to play, but the masses are worse off than ever...

...Their lethargy has probably a lot more to do with malnutrition than with national character or child-rearing practices in the Nile delta, but they tend to avoid confrontations and open threats...

...Moreover, in the U.S...

...Calcutta on the Nile...

...Freud lives...

...The realistic pursuit of peace, on the other hand, is dangerous and full of pitfalls...

...The other problem, common throughout the Middle East, is lack of managerial talent...

...But crammed into its dingy halls is a collection of the most awe-inspiring treasures ever assembled...

...most of the exhibits are unlabeled, poorly displayed, and the lighting in some areas is so inadequate that guides provide flashlights...

...Neither Israel nor Egypt will ever be able to pursue its own best interests, where-ever these may lead, so long as both are firmly tied to pipelines stretching across the seas and stuffed with Hawks, SAMS, Pershings and other phantoms...

...The Jewish state, as seen from Cairo, looms as omnipotent and menacing as the conspiracy of the Elders of Zion, and no mere facts will make a difference, or ever have...

...It is clear that Egypt cannot afford war...

...There is no doubt that his nimble wit and native shrewdness, amplified by the prolonged exercise of almost unrestrained power, still make him far and away the most effective member of Ford's cabinet — which is not nearly as much of a compliment as it ought to be...

...Several new hotels, whose construction had been held up for years, have since been completed...

...He left two monuments emblematic of his reign: the Cairo Tower, a hideous white elephant of a skyscraper, and the huge statue of Ramses II, trundled down from Memphis and erected in front of the Cairo railroad station...

...Nasser's successor is a man of an entirely different cast...

...Secretary of State he found a man whose pragmatic opportunism and flair for improvisation matched his own...

...It was inadequate when it first opened back in 1900, and little has been done for it since the death, in 1916, of its first director, the eminent Egyptologist Gaston Mas-pero...

...There still are neutral places in the world, bland spaces on the map, to which one brings nothing more complicated than a change of underwear, and from which one departs days or weeks later, unchanged, having collected postcards and souvenirs...

...The latest Israeli-Egyptian agreement even in its published version commits not only U.S...

...And whatever the rhetoric in Cairo and Jerusalem, their enmity today links Egypt and Israel more closely than ever in a common fate...

...Today both are almost judenrein, though each still has a synagogue and a few hundred Jews...

...At the time of Nasser's death, few would have given his lackluster successor more than a few months in office...

...Sadat's political — if not physical — survival hinges on immediate improvement in the economic situation...

...But even a partial success may at long last make independence a reality for both countries...

...We've been here before, time and again...

...But though tangible results remain elusive, U.S...

...prestige but also U.S...

...Given the world balance of power, Egypt faced the choice between becoming a Soviet satellite or a U.S...

...Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of armored vehicles, deployed in the Sinai desert, contribute nothing toward feeding a population that can once again be expected to more than double in the next 25 years — for the second time since 1950...

...Beyond the barrier, chaos...

...It seems doubtful...

...It didn't help, to be sure...

...And it is also here that the human presence makes itself most keenly felt — the tragic awareness of time, the desperate effort to transcend mortality in a ritualized alliance with death, and most of all, over and over again, the glimpses of tenderness, of simple affection displayed with infinite grace...

...The Jewish communities of Cairo and Alexandria go back to the very beginnings of these cities themselves...

...Just beyond the Suez junction, the dream vision of a Moslem city floats out of the morning mists, its turrets, domes and wispy minarets outlined against the pink horizon...

...A glimpse of life in an Egyptian village suffices to explain why these slums, inhuman as they are, continue to exert so fatally magnetic an attraction upon the rural population...

...Most conspicuously in evidence are the tourists, pouring in from all over the world in record numbers, being herded from pillar to pyramid in their air-conditioned buses, crowding trains and planes to Luxor and Aswan...

...But it may not be easy to convince Egyptians that they can afford peace...

...A substantial part of the resulting deficit was covered by short term, high interest loans on which Egypt is currently paying $300 million a day for debt service and interest alone...

...Freud, who never went to look at the Egypt of his day so as not to spoil his vision of the Ancient Kingdom, saw himself as Moses and took Moses to have been an Egyptian...

...And dropping out of the anti-Israel front would mean an end to Saudi subsidies — meager though they be — and to the far more substantial benefits accrued from playing one superpower against the other...

...Growth on this scale and at this rate boggles the imagination...

...The discrepancy between population growth and the most basic facilities is no longer perceived as an urban crisis but rather as an endless personal challenge...

...And the frenzied succession of guided and misguided tours descending upon Giza and Karnak owes less to the enigmatic charms of the Sphinx than to the entrepreneurial spirit of travel agents and tour operators...

...The miracle is now an everyday occurrence as several hundred thousand squatters — the dead-in-life — have taken up permanent residence in this necrop-olitan suburb...

...But above all, both countries stand to gain a degree of genuine autonomy they have never yet known throughout the decades of their nominal independence...

...With the American rescue of the Egyptian Third Army, and successive Kissinger missions in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war, the full scope of U.S...

...Right in back of the Hilton is the Egyptian Museum...

...But reality, as Freud took such pains Ernst Pawel contributes articles and reviews to The New York TIMES and MIDSTREAM He is the author of several novels, including IN THE ABSENCE OF MAGIC to rediscover for our dubious benefit, is only quite tenuously related to fact...

...Welcome," says the porter, having cleared a path, snared a cab, and dumped the baggage...

...Almost equally conspicuous but vastly more significant is the massive presence of foreign businessmen, chiefly Americans, attracted by the smell of oil and by the city's location at the edge of the provocatively demi-virginal Afro-Asian market...

...So much so that Giza comes as an anticlimax...

...Which is why numerous roadblocks along all major arteries now protect the capital from Zionist terrorists...

...The government is importing $1.5 billion worth of basic foods — wheat, sugar, tea — not so much to improve the lot of the masses as simply to keep them alive...

...For if war is too important to leave to the generals — offhand I can think of nothing that isn't — revolution is certainly too important to leave to the colonels...

...Though clearly unable to provide for the basic needs of her growing population, Egypt since 1967 has spent a total of about $25 billion on military hardware and lost once again as much in arms, equipment, and canal tolls...

...Others are the result of worldwide trends, devastating in their impact on the marginal nonprofit economies of underdeveloped and overpopulated countries...

...And while, in the short run, the loss of subsidies would present Egypt with very real problems, the stabilization incident to ending a state of war of almost 30 years' duration is bound to more than offset these losses in the long run...

...But sheer insanity in the cloak of politics — or politics as a virulent form of insanity — plays a far from negligible role...

...Such as it is, life is being lived — a tribute to individual tenacity and a collective flair for improvisation not yet properly appreciated in the West, despite Sadat's dazzling demonstration of their survival value...

...If Cairo's population in the past three decades increased six times over, what will it be in the year 2000...

...And miracles are what it takes...

...They seem oddly drained, not only of energy but of anger...

...Freud's Egyptian Moses has his counterpart in Ikhnaton the Jew — both equally improbable, indefensible, and yet marvelously plausible regardless of the truth...

...for all intents and purposes, come to an end...

...The facts may contradict him...

...corporate and financial institutions long before President Ford saw fit to unveil it as a feature of his foreign policy...

...Few, if any, museums in the world contain as hauntingly glorious and tragic a record of a civilization, in the truest sense of the word, as the drab and depressing structure off Liberation Square in the heart of downtown Cairo...

...The fat, sweating customs officer, fish-eyed behind his ominous dark glasses, would arrest me if he found it in my suitcase...

...Some much-photographed model housing was constructed under Nasser, but the amounts spent on such elementary needs as housing, streets, water, transportation, sanitation, in the past three decades are insignificant...

...But ultimately what defeated Nasser was Nasser himself — the crippling limitations of a professional soldier propelled by luck, righteous indignation and personal magnetism into a position for which he was singularly ill-equipped...

...Onehalf the population earns less than $500 a year, and 2.5 million Egyptians somehow manage to survive on annual incomes of less than $200...

...The mystery of a mummified civilization provides powerful incentives — Londoners queued up for six hours to see the Tutankhamen exhibit at the British Museum...

...FLIGHT INTO EGYPT A Personal Report Ernst Pawel Coming in at an angle from Crete, we cross the shoreline just east of Alexandria, low enough for the plane to cast a giant shadow on the chalk-white sands...

...Depressed, in fact...

...A sullen crowd, menacing, and yet pitiful for all that, rather curiously unaggressive when compared to Neapolitan beggars or Manhattan panhandlers...

...The Moslem conquerors, too, were changed by Egypt...

...And at the purely practical level, it has — thanks to greed, private enterprise and Soviet tactics — transformed the entire Middle East into an arsenal of super-sophisticated weaponry and obviated the need for social reform, technological progress, and political development...

...Egyptian farmers may have mastered the technology of the SAM missile, but their farming methods — like their mud dwellings — don't differ materially from those used in biblical times...

...The political climate, the economic situation, and the constant threat of war provided scant inducement to invest in tourist facilities...

...Even disregarding strategic and political considerations, the arms race in the Middle East for economic reasons alone cannot continue indefinitely without escalating to the nuclear level — if indeed it has not done so already...

...So does Moses...

...The reach for the divine that inevitably turns into mere antihuman pomposity...

...For Jews, especially...

...This is not to deny Nasser a measure of potential greatness, tragically unrealized...

...He also, along the way, ruthlessly eliminated any potential rivals and internal enemies he could lay his hands on, while consolidating his power base among the more influential segments of Egyptian society, notably the army...

...In fact, however, there is no viable alternative...

...The ultimate scope and significance of these agreements will, however, depend not on lingering charm or personal promises but purely on the extent to which both Egypt and Israel are prepared to emancipate themselves from U.S...

...Cabbies, if they hustle, can make up to five times that much...

...Though he wrote about his find, it took another century before the true significance of the Cairo Genizah and its priceless treasures came to be recognized...

...Not long ago, he was considered presidential timber, and thought was given to amending the Constitution in his favor...

...Most are charmed by their Egyptian contacts — understandably so...

...A nuclear deterrence game, given the number of players and their conspicuous lack of rationality, offers neither hope nor conceivable rewards...

...In fact, the most striking — and most depressing — aspect of the Egyptian scene is the all-pervasive air of depression, as endemic a plague as the ubiquitous trachoma...

...Egyptians can be charming indeed, and charm goes a long way toward making life bearable when the phones don't work and the power fails...

...Kissinger's brand of diplomacy, in the last analysis, owes less to Metter-nich than to chutzpah...

...In the five years since, "Nasser's poodle" has emerged as the most effective politician, if not quite leader, of the Arab world, and his personal style has introduced a significant new element into Middle Eastern politics...

...commitment has remained unshaken...

...Eight, going on nine million...

...In 1750 he visited Cairo and came upon a hoard of what seemed to him valuable ancient manuscripts in an old synagogue...

...But the slums of Cairo represent only one aspect of these lopsided priorities...

...Al Qahirah, the Triumphant One, capital of the Arab world, where more than eight million persons live in a state of suspended animation...